Infinite MonkeysWe've been chattering offline about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ today, and the email exchange between some of us Monkeys began to stray near blog-post territory. So I've rolled it all together and published it as the "extended entry" of this post.
In an effort to make clear who wrote what, I'm keeping with our painful but popular "worst color scheme in the history of the internet" theme. Look upon the text at your own peril.
Ben:
I saw "The Passion of the Christ" on Friday. I'm not quite sure what I think about it. I fear I may have been overexposed to the hype.
Brad:
My thoughts exactly, even after seeing it a second time.
I still laugh when I hear the box office totals. "More money than God," I think..
(Suddenly I'm writing like Jackie Mason, no? "Hey ant...")
Ben:
My mom wants to see it, so I may go again with her. It's an interesting movie, a thought-provoking movie, and a disturbing movie. But I don't think it's a great movie.
Robb:
Yeah, I think it's more "important" than "great". When I heard all of the folks calling in to Hewitt's show to talk about how profoundly they were affected by it, I did kind of ask myself, "Did we watch the same movie?"
But my pastor had a very good point a month or so ago: For whatever reason, everybody has some kind of opinion about the movie, which makes it a fantastic topic of conversation and a way to legitimately discuss THE issue of historical Christianity - the atoning death and resurrection of Christ.
Anyway, it held no big surprises for me, nor was I "affected" much by the movie. I enjoyed several small parts – my favorite being the end of the "serpent scene" in the garden of Gethsemane. But it could have been much better.
Brad:
With all of the talk about the film's gross (the money, not the brutality) it's easy to forget that it was a small production on a limited budget, by modern standards.
I hope you've read through the pdf I posted – the one by the doctor/engineer who thinks that the physical suffering in the film was still not as rough as the real thing.
Ben:
Budget wasn't what I had in mind, exactly. One can conjure many excellent low-budget films. Two things struck me about The Passion that led me to think it may not be all it's cracked up to be: the gratuitious use of slow-motion, and the peculiar use of Satan – several instances, but particularly that moment when Satan appears to Judas under the bridge.
I was most moved by Mary's reaction to her son's suffering.
I was also struck by how political the movie is. And, yeah, the Jews come off looking pretty bad in the bargain.
Robb:
I kind of liked the artistic choices he made in the use of Satan, although the scene you mention is to a certain extent the exception - a cheap scare technique that doesn't have near the potency of the other manifestations.
It's not scriptural, of course, but by and large I thought they were good attempts at displaying a non-corporeal being in a meaningful way on screen.
The biggest disappointment, which my former pastor and I shared, was that after all of the focus on Christ's physical suffering, there appeared to be very little attempt to display the (much more profound) suffering he experienced when he was "forsaken" by the father. When all of the past and future sins of the world were placed upon him and he experience the full wrath of God on our behalf. I have no idea how it could have been portrayed, and I think that the difficulty in portraying it may be why Gibson made the choice to focus so strongly on the physical suffering – it's the thing we could most readily understand and identify with.
I thought [Mary's reaction to her son's suffering] was handled very tastefully and I was also moved. I was pleasantly surprised at how he focused so strongly on the humanity of Mary and her relationship with Jesus as her son, rather than choosing to grind a
particularly Catholic axe in the portrayal.
I'm not positive what you mean by "how political the movie is" – do you mean the political motivations of the Jewish leaders as well as Pilate in crucifying him? Or more modern political points?
[The Jews in the movie came off] no worse than ... in the gospels themselves, in my opinion. This is a frustratingly delicate issue because of the historical abuse Jews have received, but Christ was a threat to the religious establishment, which happened to be Jewish. He was a Jew himself, but threatened to completely destroy both the power structure of the Jewish leaders and the way of life of those who lived in Judea at the time. But blaming future generations for what that generation did is absurd. Blaming today's Jews for Christ's death is not unlike blaming today's Germans for the Holocaust, today's Southerners for slavery, today's Russians for the atrocities of Stalin, or even today's Italians for participating in Christ's crucifixion - not to mention the persecution of so many Christians in the first few centuries.
Those Jews look pretty bad, yes, in the same way that the generation of Catholics that lived during the Crusades and Inquisition look bad, or the generation of Protestants that burned witches and executed other heretics look bad. We all have dark episodes in our collective past, and dark purposes in our individual hearts now, which is why we all need forgiveness. (kudlow)And capital gains tax cuts.(/kudlow)
Brad:
My wife pointed out that she had heard about Steven Spielberg calling The Passion "anti-semitic." She said, "Didn't he make Schindler's List? That certainly could be considered anti-German, couldn't it?"
I explained, "Well, Spielberg would counter that it's anti-Nazi, and that there are even a few Nazi party members portrayed sympathetically, as not going along with the mood and actions of the larger group. Not all Germans were Nazi's and not all Nazi's were "good Nazi's.'"
My wife replied, "Exactly. And not all of the Jews in The Passion were members of the Sanhedrin."
Well, she had me there. Obviously implied were the points that in the movie (and in Scripture, of course) not all of the Sanhedrin were portrayed as negatively as Caiphas was, and some were even good guys (Nicodemus was a member of the Sanhedrin, and Oskar Schindler was in the Nazi party). So, I'd say The Passion is an anti-Sanhedrin movie, not an anti-semitic one; as much as Schindler's List is an anti-Nazi film.
Robb:
I would guess that the main difference is that The Passion does portray the Jewish people of Jerusalem themselves as fairly malleable in the hands of the Sanhedrin.
On the other hand, there is similar portrayal of German commoners in Schindler. I think of the little kid yelling "Die Jews!" or some such. How do you distinguish a "Nazi" from a German in the movie?
In The Passion, you have the difficulty of not knowing the "affiliation" of individual Jews. "Nazi" is a convenient label - you can attach the evil to party affiliation. Gibson didn't notify us which people in the crowd were members of the Judean People's Front, and which ones were members of the People's Front of Judea.
But ultimately, both movies explore herd politics. Decent and normal people are capable of spectacular evil given the right circumstances. In all the charges of "anti-Semitism" hurled at The Passion, I have yet to hear someone articulate what about the portrayal suggested that there was something inherent in the "Jewishness" of the crowd. They were oppressed people living in rough times under the thumb of both the Romans and a corrupt and manipulative clergy.
Posted by Brad at April 12, 2004 06:13 PM | TrackBack