Josh, the Annointed, the Beaten into the ground
So I finally saw The Passion of the Christ last weekend. Yeah, Quentin Tarantino was put to shame by the violence in this film, which bordered on the duckin' firiculous. A friend of mine noticed that Jesus didn't receive the traditional 40 lashes, but received 32 lashes - hooray for being able to count in Latin - before the Roman punishers started the count over with a stronger, metal-tipped cat-o-nine-tails sorta whip thingy, for a grand total of 72 lashes. Now, I'm in an agnostic stage in my life, and that may have something to with this, but the massive flogging didn't mess with me the way I heard others talking about. I was disturbed by these scenes because of the sheer beating this man was receiving, not because of the specific historical icon that man happened to be - call me a Humanist. Of course, Richard Cohen over @ WaPo was disturbed for a whole other reason:There was so much blood, so much flayed skin, so much horror that almost immediately I became inured to it all. I felt as a surgeon must in the operating theater or, maybe, as the torturer feels when another "job" is brought before him. More work. Repeatedly, I found myself checking my watch.
He also throws out the F-word in his column - fascist - not in reference to Mel or anything, but in the temperament of the film. Violence is a huge part of the fascist mindset, and after reading Cohen's reaction, I have to agree: pretty fascistic. Christopher Hitchens over at Slate drops this particular F-bomb, too, and he goes into some of Mr. Gibson's less admirable (in my eyes, at least) tastes in humor:
[A]n associate of his had once told me, in lacerating detail, that an evening with Mel was one long fiesta of boring but graphic jokes about anal sex. I've since had that confirmed by other sources. And, long before he emerged as the spear-carrier for the sort of Catholicism once preached by Gen. Franco and the persecutors of Dreyfus, Mel Gibson attained a brief notoriety for his loud and crude attacks on gays. Now he's become the proud producer of a movie that relies for its effect almost entirely on sadomasochistic male narcissism. The culture of blackshirt and brownshirt pseudomasculinity, as has often been pointed out, depended on some keen shared interests. Among them were massively repressed homoerotic fantasies, a camp interest in military uniforms, an obsession with flogging and a hatred of silky and effeminate Jews. Well, I mean to say, have you seen Mel's movie?
There are a thousand other columns and blogs I could rip off to further this discourse, but I digress.
Like most have said before me, folks, this flick is not the Gospel truth, it's an Australian conservative Traditionalist Catholic's interpretation of the four Gospels, which often contradict each other. I'm not saying the whole thing is a massive lie perpetrated by anti-Semites, I'm just saying that you gotta see this for what it is: a movie. I've posed it to friends since I saw it that you will come out of it with reinforced beliefs: if you went in thinking the film would be anti-Semitic, it will be, and vice-versa; if you went in yourself being anti-Semitic, you'll come out probably an even stronger anti-Semite, but The Passion won't make you think that way; if you went in a Christian, there you go, but don't expect a tsunami of converts on the heels of James Caviezel's performance.
Now, since this has been thoroughly beaten into the ground by all sides of whatever issues have arisen out of The Passion, consider this my one, only, and final post on the topic.
posted by The AMT @ 1:10 PM
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