Revisiting Reactions to The Passion of the Christ

Over on one of my favourite blogs, The Dunedin School, Eric Repphun has a fascinating post on the Top 11 Religiously Themed Films of the Decade. He concludes with some comments on The Passion of the Christ (dir. Mel Gibson, 2004) that recall many of the scholarly criticisms of the film made five years ago:

And the worst (and this one was easy): The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004): Gibson’s infamous film is riddled with problems. It is historically inaccurate (Jesus and Pilate conversing in Aramaic rather than Greek, nails being driven through the palms and not the wrists, etc., etc.), which is really only a problem given that the filmmakers made such a big noise about being historically accurate. It is brutally, cruelly sadistic and in its cruelty becomes deeply suspect on a theological level, given that it transforms the suffering of Jesus into an endurance test that no man (not even a white guy with digitally-altered brown eyes and a prosthetic hook nose) could have survived such torture for so long, essentially denying the messianic figure the divinity that has so long defined Christianity’s theological understanding of its own textual history. Despite removing the vaunted ‘blood libel’ from the Gospel of Matthew from the finished film (though they did shoot it), it is also rabidly anti-Semitic as well as being deeply misogynistic – Satan takes the form of a woman who we often see stalking unseen among the Jewish crowds. It makes the Roman authorities into enlightened and sympathetic humanists while at the same time transforming the occupied Semitic peoples of Jerusalem into a vacuous rabble that is violent, backwards, bloodthirsty and in need of some civilising. If this isn’t what a colleague here at Otago calls ‘a theology of empire’, and a thinly-veiled defence of the American occupation of Iraq, I don’t know what is. It is also guilty of the most grievous of all cinematic sins in that it is flat-out boring and at least an hour too long.

There are a few inaccuracies here. Pilate and Jesus converse in Latin rather than Aramaic; the nails been driven through the wrist could be accurate -- we simply don't know how Jesus was crucified. The primary source material for the idea that Jesus was crucified with nails going through the wrists is the Turin Shroud. Although it is a common motif in the publicity for Jesus films that they are "historically accurate", this claim was not part of the publicity for The Passion of the Christ. The remark that "no man (not even a white guy with digitally-altered brown eyes and a prosthetic hook nose) could have survived such torture for so long" is actually the point -- it's a story about someone being tortured to death. The same claim ("no one could have survived this") was often made in the scholarly reactions in 2004 and was one of the more puzzling reactions to the film.

The idea that the film is misogynistic because Satan is played by a woman confuses the gender of the actor with the androgyny of the character. More troubling from my perspective was the tired cliché of aligning Mary Magdalene with the Woman Taken in Adultery from John 8. The charge of "rabid anti-Semitism" is a difficult one to assess. There are profoundly troubling elements in the film and yet it is also clear that it made some effort to mitigate the anti-Semitism of its source material in Ann Emmerich's Dolorous Passion. But the "blood libel" line in fact did make it into the film; it is spoken by Caiphas in Aramaic, but there is no English subtitle.

For several of these points, see further my discussion of the scholars' reaction to the film in "The Power of The Passion of the Christ: Reactions and Overreactions to Gibson's Artistic Vision," Chapter 3 in Robert Webb and Kathleen Corley (eds.), Jesus and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History (London & New York: Continuum, 2004) and later in my extended review of Zev Garber's Mel Gibson's Passion. One day I'd like to write another article on the film because the years have actually hardened my view about the film, and made me more inclined to be critical of its shortcomings. Working on the BBC / HBO The Passion (2008; ?2010) helped me to see quite starkly how many of the problems with The Passion of the Christ could have been avoided. Nevertheless, I am still convinced that scholarly criticism of The Passion of the Christ is stronger where it avoids inaccuracy and overstatement.

Update: Eric adjusts one of the comments (that Jesus and Pilate converse in Aramaic); and Loren Rosson comments on the whole post on The Busybody.

Review of Biblical Literature latest

The latest reviews have been added to the SBL Review of Biblical Literature and include the following under the NT and related heading, with a rather lengthy one from me on a recent volume about The Passion of the Christ:

Zev Garber, ed.
Mel Gibson's Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5161
Reviewed by Mark Goodacre

Thomas J. Kraus and Tobias Nicklas, eds.
New Testament Manuscripts: Their Texts and Their World
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5537
Reviewed by Christopher Tuckett

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Cettina Militello, and Maria-Luisa Rigato
Paolo e le donne
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5785
Reviewed by Ilaria Ramelli

Stanley E. Porter, ed.
Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5482
Reviewed by Michael Labahn
Reviewed by Gert J. Steyn

John Sandys-Wunsch
What Have They Done to the Bible? A History of Modern Biblical Interpretation
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=4862
Reviewed by Jan van der Watt

Dieter Sänger and Matthias Konradt, eds.
Das Gesetz im frühen Judentum und im Neuen Testament: Festschrift für Christoph Burchard zum 75. Geburtstag
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5462
Reviewed by William R. G. Loader

Stanley H. Skreslet
Picturing Christian Witness: New Testament Images of Disciples in Mission
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5416
Reviewed by Dirk G. van der Merwe

Willard M. Swartley
Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5376
Reviewed by Joel Stephen Williams

The Fallacy of the Director as Author

I am often struck, when reading academic discussions of cinema, especially by those more accustomed to dealing with authors and texts, of something that might be called the fallacy of the director as author. This involves treating the director of a film in the same way that one would treat the author of a text, to talk about them as if they are directly responsible for every single element in the film, every look, every line, every costume, every casting decision, every lighting effect. This is not to deny that the director is, of course, the key person in the film for which s/he is responsible. But a film is at the same time always a group project, in which dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people participate. The existence of "director's cuts" of certain famous films like Bladerunner remind us that sometimes a film does not end up the way the director envisaged.

It is a fallacy that is all the more easy to commit when one is dealing with a film like The Passion of the Christ (dir. Mel Gibson, 2004), where the director in question also financed, co-wrote and co-produced the film. But even here, it is worth remembering that Gibson is not responsible for every last element in the film. Having read almost every academic piece that has been published on The Passion of the Christ over the last three years, I am constantly amazed by how rarely Benedict Fitzgerald, who co-wrote the screenplay, is mentioned. Anyone who attended the AAR/SBL session where Fitzgerald was interviewed will have been struck by just how much he contributed to the screenplay. Indeed, he explained how he had written the initial screenplay, having been drafted in by Gibson, and how Gibson contributed revisions based on that original draft, which then went through successive versions.

Another Jesus film that is relevant is King of Kings (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1961), where the director is arguably less important than producer Samuel Bronston, who made a massive, arguably decisive contribution to this film. Indeed, accordingly Barnes Tatum calls this film "Samuel Bronston's King of Kings".

I suspect that academics used to writing about texts and authors find it much easier to conceptualize a film as if it is a single author work, but this often has a distorting effect on interpretation.

Update (Monday, 19:28): I am grateful for several useful comments. In the light of these, let me attempt to clarify my point. First, of course I am aware of auteur theory and I am not trying to say in this context that there are always and inevitably problems with conceptualizing a given director as auteur, looking for his or her distinctive style, and Gibson may be a good example of a director who has such a distinctive style that he might be treated as auteur. My point in this context, though, does not relate to that but relates rather to a specific fallacy that I think gets repeated in a lot of academic writing about film, especially where that writing is done by those who are more familiar with writing about authors of texts (using text here to mean single-authored written text). It is the fallacy, as I see it, of inadvertently discussing the director of a film as if s/he is the sole author of a single text. It can generate a failure to appreciate the extent to which a film is a collaborative effort, and can thus distort one's interpretation of it, not least by discouraging one to look at distinctive and sometimes major contributions from, for example, a casting director, a co-writer, a consultant, a cinematographer. For one thing, it can discourage one from doing research on individual members of a film crew's contributions, reading interviews and so on, in which key elements in the film might be explained.

Mel Gibson vs. Franco Zeffirelli

Thanks to David Mackinder for this excellent piece from Easterblogg:

Mel Gibson versus Franco Zeffirelli

A couple of excerpts:

In Jesus of Nazareth the Sanhedrin conducts a lengthy, reasoned debate about the meaning of prophecy, religious liberty, and the dangers of an uprising against Rome. Zeffirelli's debate is a little stilted, but depicts the Sanhedrin as containing men of conscience who were deeply divided about how they should treat Christ. At one point one of Zeffirelli's elders exclaims, "We are a people who love ideas and argument, then reject our prophets." Zeffirelli's Caiaphas is a doddering old man who dreads rebellion and is obsessed with fear that if Jesus really is the Messiah, then he will replace Caiaphas as leader. In sum, Zeffirelli presents the elders as real human beings, not cartoon villains.

The most telling point of difference between the films is the utter lack of joy in Gibson's telling. The Passion of the Christ is all torture, screaming, bleeding, and weeping. There's no sense that anything about Christ or his ministry is hopeful. Even in flashback scenes that precede the torture close-ups Gibson is so keen about, all is sad and depressing. We see a one-minute flashback to the Sermon on the Mount: Jesus preaches expressionless as if reading from the Federal Register, while the crowd looks about as happy as if they'd been forced there at gunpoint. There's a one-minute flashback to the Last Supper: Jesus drones in monotone while the expressions of disciples suggest they're all facing execution. This is either a total misreading of the Christian story, or reflects Gibson's desire to make that story one about misery rather than love. The Sermon on the Mount proclaimed a new hope for the human prospect; the Last Supper was a night of warm intimacy among friends. You'd never know from Gibson . . . .

. . . . . Mel Gibson appears not to like the joyful, hopeful, universalist message of Christianity. Fundamentalism of all faiths and denominations tends to be angry at the world, and Gibson's is at bottom an angry telling of the Jesus story--an argument that Christ's followers should be full of fury about their enemies and their mistreatment. Perhaps Gibson, a wealthy celebrity, sits around telling himself that he is being mistreated by enemies. Or perhaps Gibson simply longed to earn millions by being the first filmmaker to manage the race-to-the-bottom feat of presenting a gratuitous, exploitive version of the crucifixion. Take your pick of these unattractive alternatives, then stick to Franco Zeffirelli. . . . . .

Two minor quibbles. Zeffirelli is called "the previous big-name-director attempt at the Jesus story". I'd say Martin Scorsese qualifies for that. And I am not sure about the comment that "The Gospels also never say Jesus was beaten by the Temple guards who arrest him". Mark 14.65?