The Passion of The Christ: Mel Gibson's Film

RonPrice · Just Reading Through Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 7

This may not turn out to be the 'final word,' but as this film settles into cinema archives "The Passion of the Christ" based on The New Testament---deserves A Second Look.-Ron Price, Tasmania

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There has been so much reaction to my first review, critique, comment on Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ’ that I felt a need to write a second statement. This statement will deal with some, but not all, of the main threads of response that I received. The responses, the postings at internet sites, of most people were responses not so much to what I wrote but, rather, responses to issues raised by the film itself--not necessarily my article in particular. There were so many responses over so many areas that they made me think, not so much about this film of Gibson's but about wider issues. Some readers may find what follows not sufficiently focused on Gibson and his film. For such readers they may be advised to discontinue reading at this point.

The first concern of many commentators, critics and casual observers alike, was the violence in the film. That seemed to be the most generalized concern, although there were many cryptic responses that gave vent in sometimes creative and often puzzling ways to various conspiracy theories, to a range of anti-Jewish or government sentiments and a host of other passionate and not-so-passionate worries. Many of the respondents' comments focussed on what they felt were Gibson's poor directing, his failure to develop the characters of the actors making Jesus, in the end, not very likeable. of course, other commentators stress just the opposite.

The literature on violence in cinema and society is burgeoning. That was a major concern more than 25 years ago when I taught media studies at what became a university in Ballarat, an old gold mining town, in Australia. So, too, is the concern with real violence in the wider society, the global society we all live in. The violent image has been extraordinarily preeminent in the visual media as is the profound concern about the culture of violence in general. There has been what one analyst called a hyperviolence in post-1960s cinema. I was only 19 when Kennedy was shot in 1963. I have lived in a society filled with real violence and hyperviolence for more than 40 years. Gibson’s film in some ways is just one of 1000s that have a violent base. Of course, in Gibson's film, the person to whom the violence was done has a special, a unique, place in the history of western civilization.

The media is now both scapegoat and cause, explanatory framework and rational for the violent society. Of course, religion and politics have been intertwined with violence since the days of universal animism in 6000 to 8000 BP. One writer whom I read over twenty years ago, Guy Murchie, wrote that we’ve had 14,400 wars in recorded history. Violence is as human, it appears, as apple pie or should I say potatoes, pasta or pumpkins?

In The Passion we are exposed to Gibson’s serious effort to represent a particular conflict, a crucial event, in the history of Christianity and its accompanying emotional sensibilities. Can we arrive at a historical account faithful to the evidence when we move from prose, from books, from scriptural text, to film? Poets like Homer(750 BC ca) and historians like Thucydides(420 BC) exaggerated and invented what they wrote to please and engage the audience. It became a convention of historians to insert made-up, but appropriate, speeches into their stories for 2000 years, until at least the sixteenth century.1 Just as poetry can enhance the power of history to convey aspects of the past so, too, can film.

But poetry and film can also be creatures of invention with little connection with the experienced world or the historical past. Film has had only a century to find its way as a medium for history. It’s future, I think, suggests some exciting possibilities. But along the way there will be many false starts. For many, Gibson's film was down that road of false starts.

No single view holds "the truth." Our eyes and ears are different than those of 2000 years ago. Small fragments are inevitably incomplete and this film contained, at best, a small fragment. There is a final unknowability, as Spielberg said in discussing the efforts of film makers to capture the lives of great men. Freud(1.1) said the same of biography in print. A movie blends fiction with true events.2 Considerable artistry, ingenuity and money went into giving "an overall impression of what it really would be like to be transported back into that time"3 of the life of Jesus of Nazereth. For millions, if not for all, Gibson achieved this effect. For millions, too, he did not.

But there remains, it seems to me, too cavalier an attitude to the evidence about lives and attitudes in the past. This evidence is all we have to go on and the imagination must work from there. The danger is that the audience is left with the false impression of "a true story." Considerable dramatic license is taken by directors. The truth status of historical films often remains unclear, obscure. In this film, the story comes from the New Testament. And the evidence in the New Testament is far from clear. It may be clear to those with a more fundamentalist theology, but it has not been clear for at least two hundred years to literally millions of students of the New Testament, liberals, agnostics, atheists, non-Christians, ex-Christians, et cetera.

History is not a closed venture, fixed and still, but open to new discovery and reinterpretation. Spectators don’t just look in at the events of history becoming in the process all-knowing. They look at and engage with the ideology of the director and make their assessments partly in terms of their own ideology, often conscious and unconscious, that they themselves espouse. It is this, among other things, that gives rise to the varied reactions to a film like Gibson’s.

Then, too, cultural historians generally acknowledge that there is a time lag between the moment a new technology like film is invented(1895) and when a full understanding and utilization of the potential of that technology emerges. After one hundred years, I often think we have just begun to utilize the power of cinema. I wonder how long it took civilization to begin to use the wheel with dramatic effect after its invention in about 3500 BC?

The flow of images in our lives is increasingly torrential. Film images often cloud reality with pseudo-events. We are often adrift in an illusion that seems real. Peter Weir’s 1998 film "The Truman Show" illustrated what is often called ‘the cultivation effect.’ Put another way, cinema transforms the world into a spectacle. There is a mysterious energy in the swirl of shadows and light in film that is sometimes called mise en scene and it often produces a vain and empty show, a show that bears the mere semblance of reality. It is this mise en scene that captures our attention, or repels it, although often we are looking at a vapour in the desert which we dream to be water but, when we try to taste it, we find it is but illusion.

We often get moved and satisfied as much, though, by illusion as by reality. In the last decade there has seen the beginning of a demise of the cinephiliac. The love-affair with movies in western society is in decline, or so say some analysts.4 Millions of us have also developed a stimulus shield to protect ourselves from cinema’s neurological shocks. But the story has an up and a down-side. In cinema we also recover our own sensuous experience; history is disclosed to us in unique ways.

The upside of that vaporous illusion is a sense of the real. Proust referred to this as memoire involuntaire, being seized by memories, by mixtures of the past and present which flow into a strange no man’s land. What was once ignored by us in our daily lives often becomes registered with a striking, sensuous clarity because of film. Movies often grip us in a way that life does not. It is not so much the illusion of reality that movies create as the construction and organization of reality that goes on, an order and identity not found in daily life. Movies tend to be easily grasped, accessible in a way not present in daily life especially with complex aspects of history and psychology. Such cinematic experience must be countered by some voluntary memory in the service of the intellect.

The Passion was Gibson’s third movie as a director. All his movies involve a culminating spectacle where the doomed hero faces death agonies. His movies, as director, all employ the sufferings of the title character to critique the social structures imposed on them. They all present decadent societies that have lost contact with traditional patriarchal values. Gibson is a champion of conservative and vanishing social orders.5 He is also a champion of Christianity. You might not like what he does, but he has electrified and annoyed millions for both good and ill. Perhaps, in the long run, it will just be another movie from the movie mill.
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1 N.Z. Davis, Film as Historical Vision, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, p.4.
1.1 One reader of this my second review had such a vehement anti-Freud bias that half his comments were concerned with undermining my reference to Freud and anything that existed in Freud's 28 volumes of writings.
2 ibid., p.126.
3 ibid, p.127.
4. Christian Keathley, "the Cinephiliac Moment," Framework: the Journal of Cinema and Media, 2000. Attendance at movie houses was highest in the USA in 1936(or was it 37?).
5William Luhr, "Mutilating Mel: Martyrdom and Masculinity in Braveheart," Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, editor, Chistopher Sharrett, Wayne State UP, Detroit, 1999, p.229.
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Ron Price is a retired teacher, aged 60. He taught for 30 years in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools. He lives with his wife, Chris, in Tasmania. They have 3 children. He has published three books on the internet.

RonPrice · Just Reading Through Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 7

Since no one has responded in the first nine weeks that this post has been here at "Deadly Prose," let me offer a few comments, a few reflections of a personal nature on my own beliefs.-Ron Price, Australia

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“Without a revolutionary theory, “wrote Lenin, “there can be no revolutionary movement.” I have been convinced the Baha’i teachings provides both; but the revolution is spiritual, evolutionary and, like Christianity 2000 years before, slow to work itself out in the context of society. There is a repetitive aspect to both life and history that gives rise to the cyclical aspect of religion and life. Comments like the following of British novelist E.M. Forster(1879-1970) reveal the repetitive aspect of life: “Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it, one is obliged to exaggerate in the hope of justifying one’s own existence.”

While I find this statement a little over the top, to say the least, there is undoubtedly some truth to it, a truth based on the repetitious nature of life, the routine, the weariness, some of what the Romans called life's tedium vitae. It is one reason, among many, that most people would never think of writing an account of their lives and, if they did, they would find it difficult to get any readers or, more importantly, publishers to put their book on the marketplace. Of course, this may be equally true of my book. I'm sure some would have no trouble seeing my book among the more tedious reads.

If there is a tendency to exaggeration in writing, as in life, this is part of what for me is a complex and intense reaction to the Baha'i community, to my experience of it and to my life in society over this last half century. At the same time I feel George Orwell’s words on the subject of exaggeration are pertinent to what I write. Orwell, arguably the twentieth century’s most influential prose writer, once wrote: “I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting.” What Orwell also wrote regarding order and sequence in a book also applies, I like to think, to this work of mine. “I did not feel,” he wrote, “that I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another.”

Part of my instinct over the years has been to run from life, physically and imaginatively. This tendency to run simply reflects the difficulty of the experience of one Baha'i in the years 1953-2005, the difficulty of his relation to people, to institutions and to events which taken together are so much greater than himself. The whole of life often seemed like some brontisaurismus, some shapeless, structureless colossus with its flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment which seemed to simultaneously instruct and stultify. There is something about the very pervasiveness of life’s array, wrote a sociologist whose name I have now forgotten, that is essentially alienating. He could have added, too, that life is also something essentially beautiful, fascinating, et cetera, in a long list of adjectives that I might add--or readers for that matter.

Life insurance men talk about the whole of life in discussing a particular type of life insurance policy. During these four epochs in the first century(1921-2021) of the Formative Age of Baha'i history it has become possible, for the first time in history, to describe one’s whole of life with the possible exception of the first eight months for which psychologists tell us virtually all of us have no memories. My life as a moral being has its roots in a complex and very abstract world of seen and unseen connections, categories and ideas which, as I say, are greater than myself. The same imagination that perceives these categories and generalizations which describe my life also fashions ideas of local, regional, national, international and humanitarian obligation. My sympathies and moral obligations, my antipathies and withdrawals are born in this mix. They make up, along with other factors, my conscience, albeit intangible, my reality.

"Ultimately, we always tell our own story, not the story of our life, our so called biography, but the other one, which we find difficult to tell using our own names," so writes Jose Saramago, "not because it brings us excessive shame or excessive pride, but because what is great in human beings is too great to be told with words, even if there are thousands of them(words that is), as is the case of this work. What usually makes us petty and mediocre is so ordinary and commonplace that we would not be able to find anything new that would touch a chord in that noble or petty human being that the reader is." And, if indeed it did strike a chord, to string it out into a musical symphony to bring pleasure to others--now that would be a trick! I think Jose is onto something here, but it would take too long to expatiate on the implications of his remarks so I will leave him and his idea with the reader to massage in his or her mind.

However one cuts the cake, so to speak, telling one’s story is not easy. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put his finger on part of the problem when he wrote that: “it is perfectly true that life must be understood backwards. But philosophers tend to forget that it must be lived forward, and if one thinks over that proposition it becomes clear that at no particular moment can one find the necessary resting place from which to understand it backwards.” Belief to Kierkegaard was based on the view that life was quintessentially absurd. He was, of course, referring to the then typical view of Christianity: credo quia absurdum.

It is perhaps for these and other subtle, complex and difficult to define reasons that in their stories certain authors, among whom I believe I could include myself, favour a complex mix in the narrative they live and have lived, the story of their memory with its exactnesses, its weaknesses, its truths, its half-truths, even its fictions some of which they are blinded to and some they are quite conscious of, although they would not want to call them lies. Neuro-imaging is revealing much about how we remember and why we forget. One recent author ranks suggestibility as the sin with the greatest potential to wreak havoc on the accuracy of memory. Then, too, there are many ways I could tell this story and still tell it honestly; the one that has made it to the surface of the paper-text here is just one from among the many options, some of which I am conscious of and others beyond both my memory and my imagination. I try to touch a chord in what I write, the one in my own heart and mind and the many chords in those of readers in the best way I know how. In some cases, I’m sure, that chord is actually touched.

Mark Twain says to describe everything that happens each day would require a mountain of print. However much a life is enjoyed, to write about it in an engaging way is another question, another topic, another world. Although many enjoy their lives, few could write an account that would give any pleasure to readers. There are many skills in living and another set in writing about them. I'm not sure this book falls into the category of entertaining reading. It is written to satisfy my own sense and sensibility, my proclivity for analysis and my personal desire to give shape to my life, a shape that at least will exist on paper when I am finished. My tale is neither a bitter-sweet tale of a charmed and lamplit past; nor is it a narrative of loss and its lumps, its fragmentation and loneliness. It is closer to a poem, a hypothesis, a construct. I like to think of this work as part of my being and the being of readers which is a gift and part that is life’s acquisition, as something which appeals to the often latent feeling of fellowship with all of life and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together our separate solitudes, all of humanity, past, present and future.---enough of a personal comment, clearly very tangential to that first post on "The Passion of the Christ," but after nine weeks of no comment here I don't think the above is a problem for site moderators. And so it is "asta la vista," as the now governor of California(2008) was once want to say.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania Idea

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