JESUS GORE

Last Monday or Tuesday, my Southern Baptist mother called me up and asked if I wanted to join her and my Dad at a screening of Mel Gibson's Passion. Her church (my former church) had bought up all the tickets and was selling them at a cut-rate price--apparently, this sort of church buyout of movie theaters in a mad dash to see some Christ gore is happening throughout the country as my buddy Bronze Johnson has observed. I told her that I wasn't really interested, but she persisted.

"Mom, I'm just not really into ultra-violent movies, and it's not what I like about Jesus, anyway."

"But Ron," she replied, "it happened! It's right from the Bible!"

I managed to gracefully extract myself from the conversation--actually, my mom is pretty good at backing off when the time is right--then I got off the phone. She made a pretty good point, however: Passion, from much of what I've read, seems to be straight out of the Bible. Her statements reminded me of what my buddy Shane wrote in Real Art comments about my "PASSION AND GIBSON FAMILY VALUES" post:

here's the thing, though. IT'S IN THE BIBLE. as far as i can tell, he's not misrepresenting or distorting, but depicting these things as described in the bible. is it antisemetic to avoid putting a PC gloss over what the gospel says, because they don't jibe with modern political sensibilites? there is plenty of scary shit in the bible. not all of it is nice and comfortable.anyone who think's it's all the jews fault, or all Pilot's fault, or all Rome's fault, should read it again. there is plenty of mob-mentality blame to go around.

However, if I understand correctly, a lot of Gibson's bloody carpenter epic is not straight out of the Bible. Seattle journalist David Neiwert provides a short list of Scriptural inaccuracies:

-- Satan in the Garden of Gethsemane? Where does that come from? It's not in any of the Gospels. Anne Emmerich, perhaps?

-- Jewish soldiers? As far as I know, the Romans permitted no such thing. The Gospels, notably Matthew, Mark and Luke, largely describe a gang of men, some of them from the high priest's office, who arrest Jesus. John's account mentions soldiers, but the clear implication was that these were Roman soldiers supporting the arrest.

-- The excessive brutality begins a mere 15 minutes into the film, when the Jewish soldiers who arrest Jesus wrap him in chains and throw him over the side of a bridge. Again, this appears nowhere in the Gospels.

-- It continues throughout. Violence is committed upon Jesus in nearly every scene, with any number of beatings for which there is no scriptural account. The Gospels, for instance, only mention that Jesus is beaten at the end of his ordeal before the high priests; but Gibson has him beaten throughout.

-- At every possible point, Gibson ratchets up the level of violence to nearly pornographic levels. When Jesus is flogged by the Romans, they don't merely whip him with the traditional lash. They get out torture instruments that are designed to dig in and gouge out chunks of flesh, which they proceed to do. One particularly memorable shot shows the meat flying out of his ribs. Later we are treated to a view of the exposed rib bones and surrounding meat. Again, there is simply no Scriptural basis for any of this, nor really any sound historical basis for it either.

Actually, this short list goes on to be kind of long, and there is an even longer list from which he derives his digest version. The point is that Gibson stretches his artistic license a long way. Furthermore, Neiwert also shows how Gibson very consciously chooses to emphasize some elements of the Gospels over others. That is, Neiwert places Passion right smack dab in the middle of Gibson's overall ouevre or film history. The film is yet another example of Gibson's standard action and vengeance themes:

So if we're going to get any insight into the meaning of Christ from this film, it's going to derive not from all those boring sermons he preached, but from the immense sacrifice he made for all mankind. And that meaning, in this telling, becomes very simple: Bad people brutalized Jesus beyond belief, and deserve to be punished for it.

It's a revenge melodrama -- without the satisfying catharsis of revenge.

Some people have said this film marks an odd career choice for Gibson. But it actually fits in rather neatly with his ouevre -- even from the very start.

Mad Max was the classic cheesy revenge melodrama. What made Max really mad, of course, was the cold-blooded murder of his wife and child, fleeing a pack of mad-dog motorcycle gangsters. Next thing you know, biker guts and eyeballs are strewn all over the highway, and another is given the choice between sawing his arm off or getting incinerated in a large explosion. He gets the latter. In The Road Warrior, (aka Mad Max II), which put Gibson on the cinematic map, Max has settled down to mere mercenary work, but he really goes off after the bad biker gang has beaten the holy crap out of him. This was, it appears, a mere warmup for The Passion.

Revenge melodramas have the certain appeal of a simple and clear storyline arc: First, the bad guys spend the first part of the story making life difficult, if not horrendous, for the protagonist. This finally culminates in some act of real horror. The protagonist then spends the rest of the story exacting a cathartic revenge upon the perpetrators.

Revenge has been an implicit and even explicit feature in the lion's share of Gibson's films. It pops up in the third Mad Max film, the Lethal Weapon films (especially the second, with that vivid shot of his drowned girlfriend), The River and The Patriot, and probably significantly affected his decision to try his hand at Hamlet (which, as "serious" films go, has more than a passing resemblance to The Passion).

It seemed that Gibson reached a real apex in the revenge-melodrama genre with his Oscar-winning Braveheart, a depiction of the bloody and violent life of Scottish hero William Wallace.

For more of Neiwert's insightful essay, click here.

It's like this: artists cannot get across a philosophical treatise. Artists deal with essences. They must choose particular concepts, images, and themes in order to get across an overall idea. Even when dealing with similar subject matter, different artists create different art. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is not the same as Goethe's Faust. Valmont is not the same film as Dangerous Liasons. Picasso's women are not the same as Matisse's women. Sean Connery's 007 is not the same as Roger Moore's 007. Frank Miller's Batman is not the same as Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' Batman. And on and on.

The Passion of the Christ, according to all reports, does seem to present a slice of the Gospels, but it cannot help but simply be one man's artistic vision, just one artist's understanding of reality as he sees it. Unfortunately, it sounds like this particular artistic vision is closer to Frank Miller's brutal and angry Batman than to O'Neil and Adams' more approachable caped crusader. That is, Gibson's Passion sounds pretty damned negative, and this negativity seems to be at the expense of the overwhelmingly positive aspects of the Gospels that I like. Personally, I prefer to ponder Jesus' love, forgiveness, compassion for the poor and the suffering, and hope of redemption. Gibson, however, seemingly thinks that people should ponder the blood and gore. Well, whatever floats your boat.

One thing's for sure, as my mom pointed out to me: I don't really know what I'm talking about until I see the movie. All of my above analysis is really only looking at what people have written about it. So, perhaps I'm being unfair. Probably not, but just the same, I suppose I ought to see it. Ugh. I'm not really looking forward to the splattering meat...

Maybe I'll wait for the DVD.

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