Critics take heat for their 'Passion' reviews

From the Houston Chronicle:

By contrast, Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel said The Passion is "bringing out intolerance."

In his review, Moore described Gibson as "inspired" but said The Passion's violence is like "a horror film" and its Jewish characters are "hissing caricatures." Moore said he's received about 100 e-mails so far, most of them negative.

"I have more people praying for me now than I ever thought possible," he said, "and I still have a cold somehow."

Moore said readers have mistakenly perceived his review as "attacking their religion instead of the movie. They can't seem to separate the two. This has been the worst (response) since I attacked Black Hawk Down for its pro-military spin on history."

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I am reminded of an interaction I had with one of my students a few years ago. We were working on an emotional memory exercise in the theater arts class that I teach. The exercise calls for the actor to recount an emotional episode in his or her life out loud for the rest of the class: the idea is that the actor will manage to experience the specified emotion under controlled circumstances by vividly recalling a time when he actually felt that emotion in real life. Once the actor gets the emotion going, he jumps into performing a previously learned monologue--ideally, we get to see some very honest work. Of course, I've had success and failure with this one, with varying degrees in between. But it's important to teach it because, in many ways, it represents the heart and soul of American acting, the so-called "method."

One student in particular gave me some problems. She got up in front of the class and told us about the time she had to deal with the death of her beloved uncle. She got to the end of her tale, but it was clear that she was feeling nothing. I tried to help her out by asking her some questions, prompting her to recall specific sensory details from her memory. Nothing. And she was starting to get mad at me. The more I coached her, the angrier she became. Finally, I'm like, "why are you mad at me? I'm just trying to help you out, you know, teach drama."

Her answer was concise. It was something to the effect of, "You're shitting on this painful memory of mine; you're telling me it's not good enough."

Well, there may be a good nucleus of an argument in that statement--perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, it is somehow immoral to dig into one's own psyche in this way simply for entertaining people. But I think that the real point was that she thought that I was judging her personal experience. The reality is that I was far more interested in how that memory was able to evoke emotion on stage for performance, rather than the quality or importance of the memory itself.

I reminded her that she chose this memory on her own, and was free to work with another memory, and even a more uplifting emotion if she chose, but she was unfazed. She was convinced that I was personally attacking her instead of trying to get her to be a better actor.

I'm beginning to realize that a lot of the Christians who see Gibson's movie are reacting the same way. Because of the profound attachment of their identities to the image of Christ, objectivity about The Passion as a film or as an ideological statement is dead on arrival. To these people, criticizing the film is tantamount to criticizing Jesus or God. It's like trying to argue abortion with a hard core pro-lifer or pro-choicer: emotion clouds logic.

Of course, if we had a public school system that was worth half a damn, Americans would be well trained in the field of critical analysis, and such misunderstandings would rarely happen...

...oops! Sorry, I was visiting fantasy land again.

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