Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

by Irwin, William, Gracia, Jorge J. E.

  The reason, then, for the discrepancies in people’s experiences of The Passion is that different audiences focus on different aspects of the film. Jews will naturally be sensitive to the film’s tendentious portrayal of the events leading up to Jesus being sentenced to death by crucifixion, while true believers will naturally focus on their God’s acceptance of all the suffering, humiliation, and pain that the film depicts with such intensity. These, then, are the two Passions of the Christ that form the center of our interest.

  Fiction as History

  If, as I have claimed, it is possible for audiences to see two different “films” while watching the same set of images and sounds, does this mean that I think both of these films—one a vicious anti-Semitic tract and the other a profoundly religious movie—are equally valid when treated as interpretations of The Passion as a whole? In fact, I do not. Although I understand why those whom I have called true believers might find The Passion to be a source of faith, I think that they have been manipulated by Mel Gibson, for they think that they have seen an accurate re-creation of Jesus’s apprehension, conviction, suffering, and death. In fact, what they have seen is a highly slanted version of those events, one that Biblical scholars regard as riddled with error. Why, then, can The Passion be so convincing to these viewers?

  The film relies on an important property of films that has received extensive discussion among philosophers: its basis in photography. Beginning with the French film theorist and journalist, André Bazin, film scholars have been struck by the medium’s ability to capture reality accurately. For these thinkers, photography is distinguished from all other arts by its automaticity, its ability to present us with a world that is, in some sense, not mediated by the consciousness of a human being. Once a photographer presses the shutter, the world is imprinted on his film no matter what he happens to think or desire.

  This is significant because it gives films a verisimilitude that all the other arts lack. When we look at a painting, we may be impressed by how much it looks like the object it depicts, but we remain aware that what we see depends upon the painter’s decisions about what to include and exclude. We would never dream of using a painting of someone as conclusive evidence in a trial because we realize that what is shown in a painting is crucially mediated by the beliefs and desires of its painter.

  Things are different with photographs. We believe that they give us good evidence about what happened at, say, a crime scene—so long as they have not been doctored. And, even then, we believe that the negative tells the truth. Indeed, many of our legal procedures are based upon just this belief.

  A film benefits from the verisimilitude of photography. Viewers have a tendency to trust that what they are seeing is real, even when they know it isn’t. Although analogue photography has become compromised by the advent of digital imaging, generally viewers still retain their faith in the realism of the medium.

  Film makers have sometimes used the viewers’ trust in a film’s verisimilitude to present a work of fiction as historical truth. A prime example is D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. The nation referred to in the film’s title is the Ku Klux Klan and the film attempts to vindicate the Klan as necessary for defending whites against marauding blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. To get audiences to accept his claim, Griffith made a film that was self-consciously styled to appear to be a work of authentic history.

  For example, throughout Griffith’s masterful presentation of the Civil War, he stops the action and inserts a still tableau that he presents as a copy of a famous photograph of the War, even including information about where and when it was shot, and by whom. The effect is to make audiences believe that they are seeing a completely accurate recreation of the historical epoch of the Civil War and its aftermath.

  In fact, however, The Birth’s narrative offers a highly skewed version of the historical period it portrays, relying on rumor and fabrication in the service of its ideological goal. It uses its apparent verisimilitude in re-presenting the events of the Civil War to subtly lead audiences into accepting the rest of its narrative—including its presentation of black men as sexual predators of white women—as if it were also gospel truth, so to speak.

  At the time of its release, The Birth of a Nation was subject to protests by various black organizations that were offended by its racism. Although many white viewers had trouble understanding this charge then, it is hard to imagine a viewer now who would take the film to be historically accurate. One reason is that we are no longer susceptible to Griffith’s cinematic strategies for creating the illusion of verisimilitude.

  I suggest that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ relies on a very similar cinematic strategy to that of Griffith’s racist masterpiece, and with similar results. Gibson goes to great lengths to make the film seem realistic. A central strategy is the explicit portrayal of violence, intending that the film not be seen as a romanticized portrait of Jesus’s martyrdom. This is why Gibson focuses so explicitly on many cruel events and why the film shows, in excruciating detail, the effects of violence on Jesus’s body as a repeated object of torture. Why else do we need to see Jesus’s skin literally ripped from his body and then stuck in the teeth of the torture instrument with which he was beaten?

  I can understand how true believers might wind up thinking that what they are seeing is a virtual recreation of the events of Jesus’s passion. The realism that Gibson employs in showing Jesus’s tortured body can easily lead one to assume that what one is seeing in the film’s narrative is equally realistic. But just as viewers who accepted The Birth’s racist narrative about the Klu Klux Klan were duped by that film’s realism into accepting its version of the Reconstruction Era, so too, I suggest, are viewers of The Passion who come away thinking that they have learned the truth about what took place in Jerusalem one spring so long ago.

  Forging Bonds

  This is my proposal, then. It is not an interpretation of the film or an interrogation of its anti-Semitism or anything like that. My aim has been to understand how The Passion of the Christ can produce such different responses in different viewers, depending on their religious or ethnic affiliations. It is important that everyone who is interested in this film think about this question so that the film not result in an increasing polarization between people. Too often, when Jews feel they have been victimized, their very response to that victimization alienates others even more, bringing about increased anti-Semitism rather than a greater awareness of its perils. I have tried to explain not only why the film upsets Jews but also, and equally importantly, why some Christians find it spiritually compelling. In closing, I ask those who share that second response to consider why some of this film’s audiences might react so differently, rather than simply dismissing them or regarding them as having missed the film’s point. For, as I have argued, there are more Passions of the Christ than it might seem on a first viewing.

  SOURCES

  André Bazin. 1971. What Is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Thomas Cripps. 1977. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Thomas E. Wartenberg. 1999. Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism. Boulder: Westview.

  ———. 2001a. Film and Representation. In Ananta C. Sukla, ed., Representation and the Arts (Westport: Praeger), pp. 210–220.

  ———. 2001b. Humanizing the Beast: King Kong and the Representation of Black Male Sexuality. In Daniel Bernardi, ed., Classic Whiteness: Race and the Studio System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 157–177.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Do you think The Passion of the Christ is anti-Semitic? Why or why not?

  2. Does knowing that many people take a point of view opposed to yours affect your own view?

  3. Do you think that there can be multiple interpretations of a film? What about the possibility that these different interpretations contradict one another?
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  4. Do films deserve a special status as works of art in virtue of their basis in photography?

  5. Do you agree with the author’s contention that viewers who found the film spiritually compelling did so because of the film’s realistic portrayal of violence?

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  The Passion as a Political Weapon: Anti-Semitism and Gibson’s Use of the Gospels

  PAUL KURTZ

  The Passion of the Christ is not simply a movie but a political club; at least it is being so used against secularists by leading conservative Christians. TV pundit Bill O’Reilly clearly understands that Mel Gibson’s film is a weapon in the cultural war now being waged in America between traditional religionists and secular protagonists—such as the New York Times, Frank Rich, Andy Rooney, and the predominant “cultural elite.” Newt Gingrich chortled that the movie may be “the most important cultural event” of the century. James Dobson of Focus on the Family and a bevy of preachers herald it as “the greatest film ever made.”

  Busloads of devoted churchgoers were brought daily to view the film, which portrays the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and death of Jesus with graphic brutality. It is used to stir sympathy for Jesus, who, half naked, suffers violent sadomasochistic whippings at the hands of his persecutors; and it has engendered hostility to Jews, secularists, and separationists who have dared to question Gibson’s allegedly scripturally accurate account.

  The Passion of the Christ reinforces a reality secularists dare not overlook: more than ever before, the Bible has become a powerful political force in America. The Religious Right is pulling no punches in order to defeat secularism and, it hopes, transform the United States into a God-fearing country that salutes “one nation under God” and opposes gay marriages and the “liberal agenda.” The interjection of religion into the public square (which in fact was never empty) by powerful religious and political forces has ominous implications. James Madison, framer of the Constitution, rightfully worried about factions disrupting civil society, and religious factions can be the most fractious.

  Movies are a powerful medium. Film series including Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Trek, The Terminator, and The Matrix all draw upon fantasy; and these have proved to be highly entertaining, captivating, and huge box office hits. The Passion of the Christ, however, is more than that, for it lays down a gauntlet challenging basic democratic secular values. It also presents fantasy as fact, and for the unaware and the credulous, this is more than an exercise in poetic license; it is artistic and historical dishonesty.

  A Distorted Version of the Bible

  According to Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ is “a true and faithful rendition of the Gospels.” This is hardly the case. For there are numerous occasions when it presents material not found in the New Testament, and when it does, it distorts the Biblical account. Gibson uses poetic license with abandon. Commentators have pointed out that Gibson distorts the character of Pontius Pilate, making him seem to be a tolerant, benevolent, and fair-minded judge—when independent non-Christian historical texts indicate that he was a mean-spirited political opportunist. The film also portrays Pilate’s wife Claudia as a kind of heroine. She is sympathetic to Jesus and thinks his punishment is unjust; there is some basis for that in the Bible. But Gibson goes beyond this in his portrayal, for Claudia acts kindly to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene at one point in the film, approaching them with a gift of linen cloths. Gibson has Mary use them to wipe pools of blood from the spot where Jesus was flogged by the Romans. Nowhere are these scenes found in any of the four Gospels. Church historian Elaine Pagels has said that it is “unthinkable” that Jewish women would have sought or received any sympathy or succor from the Romans.

  Nor do the Gospels provide any support for the severe beatings inflicted on Jesus by the Jewish soldiers and guards who arrest him in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to those inflicted by the Romans. In one gruesome scene, as Jewish troops bring Jesus back to Jerusalem heavily bound, they constantly beat him and at one point, even throw him off a bridge. There is no account of this in the Gospels. It is tossed in to underscore the brutality of the captors.

  All the Gospels say is that a large crowd sent by the priests came to the garden to arrest Jesus. There was a scuffle and Jesus told his disciples to lay down their swords. (Here as elsewhere, Jesus does not seem to be a part of his own cultural and religious Jewish milieu; both he and his followers are consistently characterized as renegades and “other” than their social environment.) Matthew 26:57 states: “Jesus was led off under arrest to the house of Caiaphas the High Priest.” Mark 14:53 reads: “Then they led Jesus away to the High Priest’s house.” Luke 22:54: “Then they arrested Him and led Him away.” John’s version in 18:12: “The troops with their commander and the Jewish police, now arrested Him and secured Him. They took Him first to Annas . . . the father-in-law of Caiaphas.”

  If Jesus’s abuse by the Jewish guards did not come from the Scriptures, from where did Gibson borrow it? From the supposed revelations of a Catholic nun and mystic, Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824). Indeed, much of The Passion is taken from Emmerich’s book first published in 1833, known in English as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. A current edition proudly asserts on its jacket that it is “the classic account of Divine Revelation that inspired” the Mel Gibson motion picture.

  Emmerich, a passionate devotee of the practice of meditating on the “sacred wounds of Jesus,” described how after Jesus was arrested, he was tightly bound, constantly struck, dragged, and made to walk with bare feet on jagged rocks. Let us focus on a bridge, which they soon reached, and which Gibson depicts in the film. Emmerich states, “I saw our Lord fall twice before He reached the bridge, and these falls were caused entirely by the barbarous manner in which the soldiers dragged Him; but when they were half over the bridge they gave full vent to their brutal inclinations, and struck Jesus with such violence that they threw Him off the bridge into the water. . . . If God had not preserved Him, He must have been killed by this fall” (Emmerich 2003, p. 71).

  I refer here to this scene only to show that Gibson went far beyond the texts of the Gospels and inserted non-Scriptural events mostly drawn from Emmerich. Remember that these are the subjective visions of a psychic-mystic rendered over 1800 years after the events they concern. I went to see the movie a second time to see if any credit line is given to the Emmerich book at the end of the film. I could find none, a glaring omission.

  A good deal of the focus of The Passion of the Christ is on the flogging (scourging) of Jesus. Two Gospels state simply that Pilate “had Jesus flogged and handed over to be crucified” (Matthew 27:26, Mark 15:15). John’s description agrees (19:1–2): “Pilate now took Jesus and had Him flogged.” Luke’s account (23:16) has Pilate saying: “I therefore propose to let Him off with a flogging.”

  What the Gospels state as a matter-of-fact and without narrative elaboration is luridly expanded by Emmerich: First they used “a species of thorny stick covered with knots and splinters. The blows from these sticks tore His flesh to pieces; his blood spouted out” (Emmerich 2003, p. 135). Then she describes the use of scourges “composed of small chains, or straps covered with iron hooks, which penetrated to the bone and tore off large pieces of flesh at every blow” (p. 135). Moreover, nowhere do the Gospels describe who watched the flogging. Emmerich states that “a Jewish mob gathered at a distance.” Gibson has the high priests watching the brutal flogging (with a feminine incarnation of Satan looking on with them). Nowhere is this described in the Bible. Gibson thus goes far beyond the New Testament account, implying that the Jews and their leaders were accomplices in the brutal beatings of Jesus.

  The New Testament account next states that the high priests and crowd in the square before Pilate called for the crucifixion of Jesus, and when given the choice, selected Barabbas to be freed rather than Jesus. This is fully depicted in Gibson’s Passion.

  The film, however, is silent about the fac
t that Jesus, his mother Mary, Peter, James, and the other disciples and supporters in the crowds were themselves Jews. In the depiction of Emmerich and Gibson, the Jews come off as the main enemies of Jesus, provoking the Romans not only to crucify him, but to torture him and inflict maximum suffering. I think the point in the film is even more anti-Jewish: it’s that Pilate tries to placate the Jews with the beatings, but they won’t be satisfied—some real blood-thirstiness here!

  Is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic? Yes, flagrantly so, in my judgment. The Passion repeats the description of the Jews portrayed in medieval art and Passion Plays, which provoked in no small measure anti-Semitic pogroms and persecutions suffered by the “Christ killers” for centuries. Much has been said about the fact that Mel Gibson’s eighty-five-year-old father Hutton Gibson is a Holocaust denier. He has been quoted as saying that Vatican II was “a Mason plot backed by the Jews.” Mel Gibson removed from the subtitles of the original version of his film the statement from Matthew (27:25–26): “The blood be on us, and on our children,” though apparently it remains in the spoken Aramaic text.

  To his credit, Pope John Paul II in 2000 made an historic apology, declaring that the Jews of today cannot be held responsible for the death of Christ. Still, The Passion debuts at a time when anti-Semitism is growing worldwide, especially in Europe and throughout the Islamic world.