Passion Sans Distraction

[Note: There are "spoilers" here (as if you don't know the story), but they are meant to unspoil the spoiling of other reviews.]

So anyway.

When the end credits started, I didn't know what to do. There was no point in sitting through a running list of strangers' names, but what else? Just walk out the door? Well, that's what we have to do, I guess — out to Newport's cobblestones. On with life.

The first thing to say is that I'm astonished at the inability of the movie's critics to see it as artwork. I don't know if they want a documentary or a homily, but what they get is — tada — a movie, and a great movie, at that. Once my head had been cleared with fresh air, I shook it to think how much some critics have missed. The idea first came to me when Judas was being hounded by a gang of devil children. Depending on your point of view, the guy is either being driven mad by his conscience or set upon by demons (I would say they're the same thing); that he sees children mocking him through the hills and a maggot-ridden lamb is no stretch. Consider that he rubs his lips raw, having been stunned by Jesus' admonition about the betraying kiss. (To be honest, I thought Gibson's portrayal of Judas inspired.)

Anti-Semitism. Frankly and directly, if you sit through this movie looking for evidence of anti-Semitism, you've wasted whatever price of admission you paid. It is clear that Gibson did what he could to neutralize any ethnicity-specific blame. But mostly, it seems to me, he endeavored to prevent this controversy from distracting from the message, because, as I read him, the contrast between the Jews (from among whom Jesus came) and the Romans is absolutely central — as a mechanism to highlight qualities of the latter, not the former. Andrew Sullivan, for one, complained that there were "a few actors in those scenes who look like classic hook-nosed Jews." What did he want? Blond hair and slanted eyes? The entire argument over this aspect of the film represents, to put it bluntly, the worst of identity politics, supercilious disdain for our shared humanity. And I won't let my review be polluted by it any further.

Violence. Yes, Jesus is beaten, and he bleeds copiously. But perhaps based on the hype and loose associations with Quentin Tarantino, I found it less gory than I'd expected. I mean, come on. Whenever I hear "Stuck in the Middle with You," I picture that scene in Reservoir Dogs when the gangster cuts the cop's ear off and dances around the room with it ("Hello?"); in Pulp Fiction a kid's brains are casually blown out in a car (catching in Samuel Jackson's afro, as I recall), and an entire scene is devoted to its cleaning. What culture are these critics living in?

Yeah, when the whip actually got stuck in Jesus' side, I thought it was a bit much, but that was the only moment that (for me) even came close to the warnings I'd heard. Sullivan's description of the whipping scene makes me wonder if the theater to which I went got a censored version. "Skin flying through the air"? "Chunks [torn] out of a wooden table"? Maybe I need new glasses. Having read Sullivan's assertion that "no human being could sruvive [sic] it," when I saw the scene itself, I thought of the part in C.S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy, in which Aslan claws a princes, condemning her to days in bed, and later explains that her experience had been exactly the same as a girl whom she had caused to be whipped.

Sullivan also mentions "yet another money shot" in which a crow pecks out one of the crucified criminals' eyes. Perhaps it was overdrawn, but it isn't wanton in context. A while back I caught a late-night cable creep show in which a guy is handcuffed to a corpse in the middle of the desert and a buzzard comes and plucks the living guy's eye out — literally, you see it come out. Gibson isn't anywhere near that level of gratuity. It would have been more accurate to say, in the present instance, that the crow "attacks the criminal's face."

I've frontloaded these points to get them out of the way, because all they are are distractions. Allow them to slip away just a little (which far too many people seem unwilling to do), and the "artistic message" can begin to show through. Little moments about which people complain — that to some make no sense whatsoever — come into focus. And with such astonishing ease that I'm surprised that, even having read so few reviews, I haven't seen the message.

It seems to me that Gibson has picked up on something in the Gospels that, even when I was an atheist, I've always thought was underplayed considering its relevance to our times, John 18:38: "'What is truth?' Pilate asked." As others have noted, in the movie, Pilate's truth is one of bureaucratic responsibility. But what it ought to highlight — this single moment that is certainly among the most relevant of the entire Bible for our times — is that The Passion of the Christ was created within and for viewing from our modern perch.

Sullivan (whom, if you haven't noticed, I'm using emblematically, here) catches that he is supposed to identify with Pilate, but — tellingly — he takes from that identification that Pilate is portrayed as a saint. He's not; he's our representation.

Everything Pilate does is an attempt to avoid his fate. He sends Jesus away; he brings up a lunatic Barabbas in an attempt to trick the crowd into letting Jesus go; and then he makes a huge, dramatic show of washing his hands of the matter. It isn't the his fault, he declares, it's the Jews'. Jesus' blood is on their head, not his, he says, reaching for the towel to...

The towel? A white towel? Why yes, and thus we realize that he's wrong. Here we've a double irony with which to contend. The first is that Pilate doesn't realize that the very same towel that he uses to symbolically free himself from blame symbolically links him right back to Jesus' blood — because his wife gave Mary just such a towel, and Mary used it to sop up the blood left after the whipping. The second irony is that Sullivan interpreted Mrs. Pilate's towel-giving moment as an out-of-the-way gesture to excuse her husband, when it accomplished just the opposite.

If we keep our minds on the towels, Mrs. Pilate's concern throughout makes sense dramatically to enable the Christian soiling of the Romans' fine linen. It may go a little far, but if you're of a mind, you could further consider that the reason Jesus' blood finds its way into Pilate's symbolism is the very simple, human compassion of one woman for another.

Now, keeping this in mind, rewind a bit. Sullivan says that "the Roman torturers are obviously evil," but I saw them somewhat differently. They're base; some of them are just plain nuts. They are, in fact, the sort of characters to whom one would expect a departmentalized and regimented polity to assign the monstrous work of torture. With that minor adjustment, a subtext ought to click into place when Pilate's top guy, Abenader, comes storming in and yells (approximately, emphasis added): "Your orders were to beat him, not to scourge him to death."

What Pilate and Abenader don't see, for all their concern about Caesar's displeasure and the mob over whom they govern with contempt, is that their order and their organization cannot contain the madness in their own ranks. The representatives of Rome's dark side spilt the blood, after all, that implicates Pilate. They drag Jesus through the streets attracting attention to him, making his crucifixion seem extra significant — converting people along the way.

And that's why I was tempted to call an aspect of a review by Michael Coren, another Christian critic, obscene:

Indeed, the scene where a Roman soldier plunges his spear into Christ's side is, I am sorry, almost like something out of Monty Python. The soldier and those around him shower in the water and blood that cascades out of Yeshua's body.

But I can only feel a sort of vague sadness that Coren, for whatever reason, instinctively translated the movie into a cartoon. With his description in mind, I expected those mad torturers to prance under a tide of blood. In the actual scene, however, one soldier kneels before the gushing liquid, and he's a character that we followed all the way through the streets, increasingly taken aback by the scene unfolding around him, stopping to ask who Mary is. He, in other words, is the most fully drawn of a sketch we see increasingly throughout the cross bearing, which begins among an angry mob and ends among sympathetic witnesses.

A woman comes up to wipe Jesus' face; another woman urges Simon of Cyrene to help Jesus because he's "a holy man"; Simon goes from a plea that it doesn't concern him to active defense and support of Jesus. (He's another character whom Gibson renders masterfully, giving the audience [me, anyway] a real sense of what it means for this man to have walked with Jesus in those final steps; it happened quickly, but I think Gibson even has Simon get poked a bit by the crown of thorns.)

Gibson did make decisions that I would have advised against, some vociferously. The shot of Satan after the crucifixion seemed unnecessary, almost comical, and pulled me right out of the story. I'll definitely have to see the film again; there's so much to ponder. However, on first impression, I find myself wondering what movie some people watched and what they'd been expecting.

For your part, dear reader, watch the movie, and don't let all that nonsense that distracts us from Truth in real life cause you to miss the significance of the film — as a work of art.

ADDENDUM:
Disputations Tom beat me to expression of something regarding Pilate that I mentioned in the comments to this post and was just about to flesh out as an addendum. Now I don't have to:

I have observed, though, that portraying Pilate in this way is seen by many as tantamount to excusing him.

If, for a moment, we can set aside the history of Christian anti-Semitism, which is inextricably related to all this, I think we still have a phenomenon worth ruminating on. Presented with a man (or character, if you prefer) who, knowing the man before him is innocent, orders his execution for political reasons, some see a man all but free of guilt.

This is astonishing. It is as though they believe washing his hands actually removes Pilate's guilt. As though they believe Pilate's attempt to deny responsibility for Jesus' death actually transferred responsibility elsewhere.