The Passion of Mel Gibson

With all the verbiage flying over Mel Gibson's movie Lethal Weapon 5: The Cross - oops, I mean The Passion of the Christ - I thought I'd add my opinion, having put myself through the ordeal of actually seeing the film.

A few years ago, Gibson appeared in an episode of The Simpsons in which he films a remake of the Frank Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Of course, Homer gets involved and talks Gibson into not only scrapping the original filibustering finale but replacing it with a bloodbath in which Gibson's character wipes out most of Congress. I had much the same feeling while seeing The Passion.

Now, we all know how the story goes, so I'm not giving away any plot points. A good Jewish boy hangs out with his friends, runs afoul of the wrong people, and ends up getting nailed to a tree for his troubles. The question on everyone's mind is, "How does it treat the Jews?" The short answer is: not well. To fully realize how and why, we have to step back for a minute and take a look at history.

Jews have been blamed for the execution of Jesus for two millennia because of a line in Matthew in which a Jewish mob, clamoring for Jesus' death, shouts out, "let his blood be on us and our children." Christians throughout the Common Era have used that as a license to blame all Jews during all times for the death of Jesus, with hideous results. Around Easter time, priests shouted from their pulpits that Jesus' killers were still alive and living in the Jewish section of town. During the Middle Ages, Church-sponsored Passion Plays dramatized the trial and execution of Jesus, always saying that the Jews did it. Such plays, sermons and other pronouncements were all too often followed by pogrom and slaughter.

After centuries of enthusiastically stoking the fires of Jew-hatred, the Catholic Church finally turned away from that in 1965 when the Second Vatican Council (popularly known as Vatican II) changed official Church doctrine to discard the ancient charge of deicide: "What happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today...the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures."

This is where Gibson comes in. Most Catholics embraced the Vatican II reforms, but some rejected them and broke away from Rome to start the Traditionalist Catholic movement, which considers all Church teachings and pontiffs since then to be illegitimate. One can reasonably conclude that since they claim to throw out all of the Vatican II reforms, they also reject the Church's refutation of the deicide charge. This is the movement to which Gibson and his family belong. (His father, Hutton Gibson, exposed himself as a genuine cartoon character by saying the Holocaust was a hoax and that the Pope is a Jewish puppet, among other nonsense. While I don't believe in blaming the son for the sins of the father, I should point out that Mel Gibson has repeatedly refused to disclaim his father's remarks.)

Even post-Vatican II, the Catholic Church allows the production of Passion Plays, but has a series of rules for the depiction of Jews. Gibson's Passion violates every single one of them, especially: "Jews should not be portrayed as avaricious (e.g., in Temple money-changer scenes); blood thirsty (e.g., in certain depiction's of Jesus' appearances before the Temple priesthood or before Pilate); or implacable enemies of Christ (e.g., by changing the small "crowd" at the governor's palace into a teeming mob)."

Which brings us back to the film. Gibson's Passion is really just a big-screen Passion Play, with everything that implies. And yes, it is undeniably filled with the sort of classically anti-Semitic elements that turned the medieval Passion Plays into festivals of Jew-hating. While Gibson does not actually say in so many words that "the Jews did it," that and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.

Specific anti-Jewish elements in the film include:

• All the Jews have stereotypically "Jewish" appearances (dark and ugly complexions, big noses, etc) and wear prayer shawls or the functional equivalent worn over their heads at all times. The handsome Jesus and his equally attractive disciples, on the other hand, do not, setting them apart from their fellow Jews.
• Numerous and seemingly endless scenes show crowds of Jews screaming abuse at Jesus, demanding his execution and attacking him on the route to Golgotha.
• The Jewish priests clearly smirk and watch with satisfaction as Jesus is whipped and then crucified by Roman soldiers.
• The Romans are depicted as cruel oafs, but the Jews (especially the priests) are shown as crafty and manipulative.
• The Roman governor Pontius Pilate is depicted as a sensitive and thoughtful soul who is unwilling to order Jesus' death, but gives in and allows the execution to proceed after being shouted down by a Jewish mob. (The historical Pilate was notoriously cruel and more than once was recalled to Rome after particularly bloody episodes.)
• The scene in which Pilate literally washes his hands of the matter has the audio of Jews shouting out the "his blood be on us and our children" line in Aramaic, but the subtitle was deleted. It remains to be seen whether foreign distributions will do the same.

And so on and so forth. In a nutshell, the film clearly states that while it is the Romans who torture and then execute Jesus, the Jews made them do it. After all, it shows Pilate telling the Jewish mob, "It is you who want to crucify him, not I; look you to it," and then tells his aide to "do as they wish."

Gibson claims to have made the film as a faithful depiction of the Gospels, but it is filled with elements which are mentioned in the Gospels only briefly (especially scenes which are drawn out) or not at all. This begs a further side question: how faithful are the Gospels to history? Biblical scholars mostly agree that the Gospels were not eyewitness accounts written as the events happened, but were in fact written decades later - after the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. Scholars point out that the Gospels were thus written in such as way as to shift as much of the blame as possible from the Romans, whose favor the early Christians were trying to curry, to the Jews, who had already proved their disloyalty to Rome. None of this is reflected in the film.

The other big topic of conversation about the film is, of course, the violence. So as not to invite nausea, I will be considerably more concise here.

The Jesus story has appeared on the big screen before, from The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Last Temptation of Christ to Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. But none of them wallows in sadomasochistic violence and pain as does this Jesus. Blood spurts, flesh flies, whips thwack, nails squish and the really gory parts are always shown in slow motion to draw them out. The result is an almost pornographic orgy of brutality, from the scene where the Romans whip Jesus until he is literally a bloody mess (it lasts eleven minutes) to the stumbling and grisly route to Golgotha (nineteen minutes) to the final nailing, crucifixion and death (another nineteen minutes) and everything in between.

The word "passion" comes from the Latin word "passus," meaning "suffered," and Gibson wants his viewers to experience the suffering right along with the principals. The movie does not in any way depict the life of Jesus, and shows moments from it only in brief flashbacks amid the violence and gore of his execution.

Rather than celebrate life, Gibson glories in death, revels in blood, and makes it all too clear who he thinks is to blame for the execution of his Savior. His Christianity is not the one where Jesus tells his followers to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. Rather, it is filled with pain, suffering, and invective, making a cruel mockery of the notion that religion is a balm for the soul.

It has been said that any work of art is a window into the artist's soul. If The Passion of the Christ is such a window, Mel Gibson's soul is filled with an obsessive need to cast blame and a blood-spattered desire to suffer for what he sees as his religious duty. Unfortunately, he makes the rest of us suffer along with him.