Schlock, Yes; Awe, No; Fascism, Probably
The flogging Mel Gibson demands.
By Christopher Hitchens
The article is pure polemic; Hitchens does not have a good thing to say about Gibson or the film. Also in Slate, this article compares Jim Caviezel's portrayal of Jesus with Ted Neely (Jesus Christ Superstar) and Willem Dafoe (Last Temptation of Christ), longing for their more human Jesuses, and suggesting that this film, like those, reflects the period of the film's production:
Ecce Homo?
The new celluloid Jesus doesn't seem real.
By Sian Gibby
. . . . Ted Neely's Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar is the angry rebel—the charismatic activist hippie. This Christ hit the screens during the Vietnam era, and thus his Jesus is preoccupied with fighting the powers-that-be, the government. He is quick to anger, bright, sharp, and in control. He answers with alacrity the questions the disciples put to him; he knows what he is doing; he's the empowered, self-aware dissident. Even in Gethsemane, he doesn't evince doubt. When he asks if the cup could pass him by, he already knows it can't and he is pissed off about it. And when he acquiesces to God's will, the anger is still there, just translated into intensity of purpose . . . . .
. . . . . This Jesus [Dafoe's] is befuddled and maybe only incidentally "right" about his mission. He is not sure of anything about himself, as Judas and Peter complain to him. "First it was love then it was the ax, and now you have to die!?" They worry privately to each other, "What if he changes his mind again?" Mary Magdalene sneers at his masculinity—mirroring the kinds of insecurity animating a time in which the men's movement in the '80s and early '90s was striving to reconnect with its manhood, after the "castrating" women's movement had done its work.
The '80s were also a hyper-realist decade, when spiritual identity was regrouping for the big booms of the '90s (the heyday of the New Age and the revival of Big Churches), and Nikos Kazantzakis' mentally-ill Jesus made sense. When this Jesus does miracles, they either don't smack of the supernatural (when Peter thinks they've run out of wine at the party and Jesus insists that there is still plenty, this could easily be Peter's boozy miscalculation); or else they seem to surprise even him. Ultimately, these miracle scenes don't mesh with the rest of the film, which largely consists of Jesus angsting. This Jesus doesn't seem divine. He is an uptight insecure mess, powerless, like the rest of us, in the crack-smoking, money-crazed "Me" era.
And now we find ourselves in a hyper-violent period, in which even little children are inured to celluloid viciousness. Enter Jim Caviezel's Jesus, who is absolutely conventional, conservative; the Jesus of a kiddie Bible, come to life. He says all the things we expect him to say (I was waiting for all the famous lines, mouthing them in the darkness like a Rocky Horror devotee: "My God, my God; why have you forsaken me?" "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do," etc.) and nothing else. We crave Neely's or Dafoe's humanness here, if only as a means of accessing, or at least understanding, this man . . . . .
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