Ray Pride

Jesus: the other white meat.

Not to be unduly irreverent about Mel Gibson's brutal, explicit 125-minute succession of graven images, "The Passion of the Christ," but what you will witness, if you choose to attend, is a movie more violent than most of those condemned as part of what certain groups refer to today as "the culture."

There have already been a variety of compelling essays and reviews about Gibson's self-financed project and self-financed distribution, but I want to fix on the same thing that he does: the violence inflicted upon his Christ.

"The Passion of the Christ," is a tract, more sophisticated, certainly, than Jack Chick's perverse evangelistic comics, yet it serves as a vessel to hold one's established beliefs, whether one is a devout Baptist or Matt Drudge or Peggy Noonan or Rush Limbaugh. (And the President has expressed a desire to see the film, it's said.)

As a movie, however, it's something else altogether. "The Passion of the Christ" is a loud, thudding lockstep depiction of torture and murder. There is little about philosophy, goodness or celebration. It's like many of Gibson's earlier roles writ large: I'm suffering here! For those who found Willem Dafoe's iconography in "Platoon" or various suffering-Christ roles by Kevin Costner and Gibson to be too little, here is a protracted representation of the iconic man himself having his flesh rent into tatters, shredding into gobs of viscera. Jets of blood and bodily fluids are dwelt upon with as much reverence as other viscous fluids are memorialized in commonplace pornography.

Anti-Semitic? Maybe to some viewers. Pornographic? Certainly.

As keenly as the work of several other artists--Clive Barker and Pier Paolo Pasolini (particularly with his "Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom")--"The Passion of the Christ" is, on the face of it, a homoerotic sadomasochistic fantasia of being stripped of One's photogenic flesh (Jim Caviezel).

We are shown the last twelve hours of the Nazarene, with elements drawn from Matthew, Mark, Luke and Mel (Forecast: Old and New Testament with a chance of intermittent Apocrypha). It should further debates about the esthetics and ethics of depicting brutality, which, by conservative estimate, include visual depictions of the act and aftermath of thirteen punches, slaps or blows to the head, thirty-four blows with canes; thirty-one lashes; a crown of thorns pressed to his temples; at least thirty-one whip lashings, two draggings through the rabble, including varieties of spitting and stoning; fifty-two blows with a cat o' nine tails with stones and hooks, including one shot of flesh ripping away and splattering camera and wielder; twelve blows to get a spike through an ankle; four blows to spike the first palm, with arterial blood jetting thickly upward; twelve blows for the second, and the puncturing by sword of Christ's side and belly, blood and fluids geysering onto the faces below. Gibson's Christ starts to resemble Barker's "Pinhead" character from the "Hellraiser" movies. There are late close-ups of Caviezel's blood-matted eye that resemble a medieval icon, or more to point, the Icon Productions logo that opens the movies Gibson produces, including this one, which opens without titles, only the name of Newmarket Films, and Icon, with a flourish of grumbly thunder.

"Jesus wept" is the shortest verse in the King James Bible; in the Book of Mel, it's "Jesus Bled." (Or maybe we're watching "Jeepers Creepers 3," considering that Satan is pictured as a stone-eyed drag queen with alopecia, like a character in one of Victor Salva's twisted fancies.) The strenuous level of violence should bear the NC-17 scarlet rating for its sustained intensity.

The Gospels are not alien to my experience. Without taking it too deep, my upbringing in the South was among fundamentalists, Southern Baptists and Pentecostals, and as a kid, I was baptized in a dark running stream. (Yep, I've heard speaking in tongues.) But the movie remains only a movie, and a literal-minded one. He died for your sins: so suffer through my movie! Some, perhaps, will find the movie as a vehicle to visualize the teachings of the Bible, which allow them to empathize more deeply with the suffering of Christ. Yet that is not what the movie accomplishes: my skin prickles still from the memory of certain preachers' way with language, with metaphor and the music of storytelling. But there are only one or two flickering instants I felt anything in this movie. A self-professed sinner, Gibson's testimony also slots his film as a study in the piety of the reformed reprobate. Gibson may be a fundamentalist in his own religion, but as a filmmaker here, he is a literalist, claiming he's evoking his own version of the story of Paul's epiphany on the road to Damascus.

Where is the glory of hope, transcendence? This is a message of death. But also a message of marketing and a knowledge of how the world works: Newmarket Films president Bob Berney has the rare opportunity to top his own work in making plain-Jane "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" into the largest "independent" movie ever. I won't be surprised if this thing crosses $100 million in a week.

"The Passion of the Christ" is playing. Conversation ensues.

(2004-02-25)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Writer-producer-director-editor Siddiq Barmak's wrenching story of a young girl's humiliation under the Taliban is the first made-in-Afghanistan film since the U.S. invasion
(2004-02-18)

The City That Smells
An olfactory journey through the city past and present
(2004-02-18)

Edifice complex
Nathaniel Kahn's beautiful "My Architect: A Son's Journey," one of this year's Oscar nominations for Best Documentary is an oddly universal journey of a near-40-year-old man attempting to capture the essence of an elusive father who died in 1974
(2004-02-18)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2004-02-18)

Tip of the Week
(2004-02-11)

Tip of the Week
(2004-02-11)

Stealing beauty
(2004-02-11)

Short Runs
(2004-02-11)

Porn by design
(2004-02-11)

Tip of the Week
(2004-02-03)

Up from the underground
(2004-02-03)

Puck'd
(2004-02-03)

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