Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Ten days later, I arrived at Gibson’s Icon Productions, which is housed in an unremarkable office building on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, across from a fast-food Mexican restaurant. Nothing about the place hints of show business until the elevator opens onto an entry wall covered with large movie posters from Icon’s pictures (What Women Want , Maverick). As I announced myself to a young woman at the reception desk, the telephone rang. It was the producer Harvey Weinstein. “He’ll get back to you,” the receptionist said, and I was escorted down a winding corridor to the editing room, where Gibson sat on the far end of a sofa, facing an Avid digital editing console. A white legal pad rested on his lap, containing notes for possible editing changes he’d jotted down during his last screening of the film. Gibson’s editor, John Wright, was manipulating the images of Pontius Pilate with a mouse and a keyboard as Pilate pronounced judgment upon Jesus.

  Gibson’s story line reflects the basic Christian narrative of Christ’s Passion, as it is laid out collectively in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus of Nazareth is a Jewish carpenter in Roman-controlled Palestine, who preaches a message of love and forgiveness, with an increasingly messianic subtext. During the Passover season, he enters the Holy City of Jerusalem, where he is welcomed by adoring crowds who hail him as the long-promised Messiah, bringing deliverance and a new kingdom. But Jesus is considered dangerous by the Jewish high priests, who conspire to arrest and try him, and then deliver him to the Roman prefect Pilate for execution, on the ground of treason against Rome. Jesus knows that his fate is the Cross, and briefly wishes to avoid it (“Oh, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me”); but he also knows that God, his father, sent him into the world for the very purpose of dying, as a sacrifice for the redemption of all mankind.

  Gibson has said that his script for The Passion was the New Testament, and that the film was directed by the Holy Ghost. Movie audiences, though, will doubtless see in it the hand of the man who directed Braveheart . On one level, Gibson, who has been working on the film for more than a year, perceives the Passion as a heroic action story, and the principal quality he hoped to instill in it was the power of realism. “I wanted to bring you there,” he says, “and I wanted to be true to the Gospels. That has never been done.”

  In that regard, Gibson made two key decisions. He cast the film without brand-name movie stars, in order to avoid the illusion-puncturing celebrity recognition that afflcted the old epics. Jesus is played by James Caviezel, whose biggest prior role was in The Count of Monte Cristo, and Monica Bellucci, of The Matrix Reloaded (and rapidly becoming better known), is Mary Magdalene. Gibson also had the actors’ lines translated into Aramaic (the vernacular of ancient Palestine), Hebrew, and Latin. His purpose, he says, was not only to achieve authenticity but also to avoid the audience disconnect that might result from hearing two-thousand-year-old Biblical characters speaking perfect modern (or even King James’) English. He initially didn’t intend to have subtitles, either. “I’ve always wanted to make a Viking movie,” Gibson, who is forty-seven, explains. “You’ve got Alfred the Great in Wessex, this English king, saying, ‘All the Danes are coming up the river here, we’ve got to defend ourselves.’ And these guys hop off the boats and they’re all hairy and they’re scary and they’ve got axes, and some of them are berserkers and they’re doing flips and twirls and they just wanna rape and kill, you know? But if they start coming out with ‘I want to die with a sword in my hand’ and ‘Oh, fair maiden,’ that would be like—you know, you don’t believe them. If they come out with low, guttural German, they are frightening. They are terrifying. They’re like demons from the sea. So that’s what the language thing did for me. It took something away from you—you had to depend upon the image.”

  It is not surprising, perhaps, that in the service of realism the signal trait of The Passion is its relentless violence. When Gibson directed the Oscar-winning 1995 film Braveheart, about the folkloric Scots hero William Wallace, he reshot only one scene—and that was in order to more graphically depict the image of enemy horses impaling themselves upon sharpened wooden stakes. Violence is Gibson’s natural film language, and his Jesus is unsparingly pummeled, flayed, kicked, and otherwise smitten from first to last. After his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane by Jewish temple guards, Jesus is dragged in shackles to the high priests. By the time he arrives, he has been beaten, knocked down, and thrown off a bridge. His right eye is swollen shut. (“I didn’t want to see Jesus looking really pretty,” Gibson said. “I wanted to mess up one of his eyes, destroy it.”)

  When the Romans take over, things get worse. Gibson studied the details of Roman crucifixion, reading, among other sources, a famous clinical investigation of the practice, “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1986. That study explained why crucifixion inspired the word “excruciating”: “Scourging produced deep stripe-like lacerations and appreciable blood loss, and it probably set the stage for hypovolemic shock. . . . The major pathophysiologic effect of crucifixion was an interference with normal respiration.” Gibson seems to have relied heavily upon this study, which describes the Roman tools of punishment (“The usual instrument was a short whip . . . with several single or braided leather thongs of variable lengths, in which small iron balls or sharp pieces of sheep bones were tied at intervals”), the choreography of the infliction (“The man was stripped of his clothing, and his hands were tied to an upright post [and] the back, buttocks, and legs were flogged either by two soldiers . . . or by one who alternated positions”), and its severity (scourging “was intended to weaken the victim to a state just short of collapse or death”). All these elements are directly reflected in Gibson’s film.

  Gibson has been told by friendly audiences that The Passion is several measures too violent, that seeing Jesus subjected to such protracted scenes of brutality will have a numbing effect upon audiences, detaching them from Christ’s pain. Gibson acknowledges that possibility, but then adds that the event in question “was pretty nasty.” As I watched Gibson work on his film in the editing room, I noticed that the picture had changed since I’d seen it in New York. He said that it was shorter, partly because he had trimmed some of the violent scenes (but not by much). He called the editing process “the final rewrite” of the picture, but he seemed not altogether pleased by some of the cuts he had made, including one he made before the New York screening. The antagonist in Gibson’s vision is plainly the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, played by an Italian actor who can seem a bit of a ham as he cajoles the ambivalent Pilate into executing Jesus. Finally, an exasperated Pilate relents and condemns the prisoner, but, according to the Gospel of Matthew, he first makes a show of his own guiltlessness by publicly washing his hands. In Matthew, that gesture is followed by a shout from the crowd: “His blood be on us, and on our children.” This passage, which is depicted only in Matthew, is one of the sources of the notion of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. Gibson shot the scene, but with Caiaphas alone calling the curse down. Wright, Gibson’s editor, strongly objected to including even that version. “I just think you’re asking for trouble if you leave it in,” he said. “For people who are undecided about the film, that would be the thing that turned them against it.”

  Gibson yielded, but he has had some regrets. “I wanted it in,” he says. “My brother said I was wimping out if I didn’t include it. It happened; it was said. But, man, if I included that in there, they’d be coming after me at my house, they’d come kill me.”

  He was referring to his critics, activists at such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, as well as some academics, who worry that Gibson will draw too much upon a literal reading of the Gospels, and not enough upon contemporary scholarship that seeks to distance Jews from culpability in the Crucifixion. Gibson says that some of his friends asked him whether he’s making an anti-Jewish movie; he’s heard that someone from one of
his hangouts, the Grand Havana Room, a Beverly Hills smoking club, said that he’d spit on him if he ever came in again. When he has shown the film to associates in the industry, he feels that they are looking for anti-Semitism. He says that is one of the reasons he finally decided to include subtitles in the picture, to make it clear that some of the Jews portrayed in the film are sympathetic figures. “You’ve just got to have them,” he says. “I mean, I didn’t think so, but so many people say things to me like ‘Why aren’t there more sympathetic Jews in the crowd?’ Well, they’re there! But you’ve got to really point it out to them, and subtitles can do that.” He goes on, “It’s just amazing to me how one-eyed some people are about this thing. I mean, it’s like a veil comes down and they just can’t see it. For instance, did you know that one of the priests helps take his body down from the Cross? It’s there! Nobody sees it. They can only view it from one eye.”

  It frustrates Gibson that others don’t see The Passion as he does, but it does not surprise him. It is not an accident that Gibson set the terms of The Passion the way he did, from the first scene, where Jesus stomps a snake to death, to the last, where the risen warrior is called to battle. Gibson’s fiercest detractors see in him a medieval sensibility, an accusation that he would not necessarily find objectionable. He has a Manichaean view of the world, in which all of human history is the product of great warring realms, the unseen powers of absolute good and total evil. He believes in the Devil as fully as he believes in God; that is why his career has evolved to The Passion, and it is how he accounts for the opposition that the film has aroused.

  The editing session was interrupted late in the afternoon by an urgent summons from a colleague in an office down the hall, where a television monitor was tuned to CNN. The anchor Paula Zahn was interviewing two guests on the subject of Gibson’s film and its alleged anti-Semitism. Both of the guests, the conservative film critic Michael Medved and William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, had seen the movie, and vigorously defended it. Medved said that the press, in repeating the charges against Gibson and his film, was once again showing itself to be irresponsible; Donohue said that Gibson and his project had been unfairly associated with the eccentric views of Gibson’s father, who in a New York Times column was accused of being a “Holocaust denier.” In all, it was a victory for Gibson’s side, but when the segment concluded Gibson was enraged. “That’s bullshit,” he said.

  He went on, “I don’t want to be dissing my father. He never denied the Holocaust; he just said there were fewer than six million. I don’t want them having me dissing my father. I mean, he’s my father.”

  Gibson is clearly pained by the fact that Hutton Gibson, who is eighty-five, has been dragged into the Passion controversy, not least because it presents Gibson with the unwelcome choice of distancing himself from his father—which he adamantly will not do—or suffering by association the most toxic sort of social taint.

  Hutton Gibson is a devout Catholic who, as a young seminarian, had aspirations to a missionary priesthood. When the Second World War began, he joined the service, abandoned plans for the clergy, and eventually married. The couple lived in a series of small towns in the lower Hudson Valley, where Hutton worked as a railroad brakeman until, after an injury, he went on disability. He and his wife, Ann, had eleven children, and the loss of his job posed a strain; but in 1968 Hutton, an autodidact with a ferocious literary appetite, appeared on the game show Jeopardy! and won what was then a huge pot of money—twenty-five thousand dollars. Mel, the middle child, was twelve. Hutton, flush with the prize money, moved the family to Australia.

  At the time, Catholics like Hutton Gibson were reeling from the doctrinal convulsions created by the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s sweeping effort, propagated over a three-year period, to modernize. Suddenly, many of the old verities, from the profound to the trivial, were gone—including fish on Friday and, most lamentably to many, the Latin Tridentine Mass. The most dramatic of Vatican II’s reform impulses was its ecumenism, which declared that all Christians, not just Roman Catholics, were members of the Body of Christ. The council’s final session, in 1965, included the declaration known as the Nostra Aetate, formally reconciling Christians and Jews and condemning the idea of Jews as “cursed by God.”

  “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ,” the document declared. “Still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new People of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

  The first Christians were, of course, Jews, and considered themselves such; however, their insistence upon the godhead Jesus was, from the Judaic perspective, theologically irreconcilable. Historic anti-Semitism, premised partly on the idea of collective Jewish guilt in the death of Christ, came with the conversion of Rome. The Church fostered such anti-Semitism for centuries (doctrinally encouraging the “curse” interpretation of the blood passage from Matthew), leading to expulsions, ghettos, and forced conversions. When, after the Reformation, official anti-Semitism became a culturally (rather than a theologically) driven policy, the Church continued to countenance it. That was the history that the reconciliation decree of Vatican II meant to redress, and it was why the current Pope, John Paul II, prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall for God’s forgiveness for “the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of Yours to suffer.”

  The council’s reforms bitterly divided the Church, reflecting, to a large degree, the divisions caused by the social movements in the contemporary secular culture. Church progressives embraced the reforms, and, as reform hardened into new orthodoxy, bureaucracies sprang up in the Church which were devoted to interfaith relations. But other Catholics were dismayed by the sudden, drastic changes, arguing that the Church’s immutability through the ages was one of its institutional strengths. Most of those Catholics, however discomfited, eventually accommodated themselves to Vatican II; still others left the Church. But some of those who were most appalled at what they saw as a cult of modernity corrupting the Church remained intensely faithful. These Traditionalists, as they called themselves, declared themselves the True Church, and defied the reforms of Vatican II, as well as the authority of the Pope who convened the council, John XXIII, and of all who have occupied St. Peter’s chair since.

  Traditionalists—the Times has put their number at a hundred thousand, but other estimates vary widely—observe the Latin Tridentine Mass (performed by a priest facing the altar, with his back to the congregants), require women to cover their heads in church, do not allow laypeople to serve the Eucharist, and do not eat meat on Fridays. Some Traditionalists, attempting to explain what they see as Vatican apostasy, have inclined toward conspiracy theories. Some blamed a Communist plot, others the old Catholic antagonist Freemasonry, and others, inevitably, saw the hand of the Jew (the Devil working in each). Hutton Gibson was one of those Catholics who felt alienated from their Church, and found their way to Traditionalism. As he grew old, he found his way to dark theories to explain the world. He told a Times reporter that the Second Vatican Council was “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews,” and that the Holocaust was a tragedy that had been hyped out of proportion, which brought leverage against such institutions as the Catholic Church.

  Mel Gibson briefly considered the priesthood himself, before he discovered acting, and, with Mad Max, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, quickly became a star. In 1980, he married Robyn Moore, an Australian dental nurse; they have seven children. Gibson says that he never doubted God, but, as his father was wrestling with the Church and his own career bloomed and took him to Hollywood, he grew distant from his faith. His acting success brought fame and more money than he had imagined possible; when he got a chance to direct, he won an Oscar.

  But in his middle thirties Gib
son slipped into a despair so enveloping that he thought he would not emerge. “You can get pretty wounded along the way, and I was kind of out there,” he says. “I got to a very desperate place. Very desperate. Kind of jump-out-of-a-window kind of desperate. And I didn’t want to hang around here, but I didn’t want to check out. The other side was kind of scary. And I don’t like heights, anyway. But when you get to that point where you don’t want to live, and you don’t want to die—it’s a desperate, horrible place to be. And I just hit my knees. And I had to use the Passion of Christ and wounds to heal my wounds. And I’ve just been meditating on it for twelve years.”

  Gibson returned to his faith with the zeal of a reformed backslider, and the faith he returned to was the faith he had known as a boy, the faith of his father. “Believe me,” he says of the rigors of Traditionalist worship, “every other brand of everything is easier than what I do.” When he was in Rome making The Passion, Gibson attended Mass every day—which was a challenge, because he had to find a priest (preferably one ordained before Vatican II) who would say the Tridentine Mass. He brought one priest from Canada, and when that one had to return home he found a French Traditionalist living in England who agreed to minister to him.

  At home in California, Gibson worshipped until recently at a Traditionalist church some distance from their house in Malibu. Then he decided that he had the means, and the motivation, to make worship a bit easier. He determined to build his own chapel, a Traditionalist church called Holy Family, in the hills near his home.