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katsarisThoughts on 'The Passion of the Christ' (and Christianity) - Part 1
Now, first of all I have to mention once again that I don't consider myself a Christian. In my view Jesus (though almost certainly an existing person -- many of the specifics of Christianity would be near impossible to explain otherwise), was nothing more than a man and probably the religious leader of some reformatory Jewish group, later to be deified by the people that followed him and Paul who'd never met him.
But even without belief in a story, I can still look at it and say "ooh, this part is powerful" or the converse, "this part makes no sense" or "this part is weak." Not just for Christianity, but for aspects of Buddhism or of Hinduism, or of Greek or Norse mythology or even of Aztec and Maya beliefs, one can find a core which was powerful enough to make said beliefs to flourish and repeated over a span of millenia. And one can find elements that will make me go "Okay, what lame-brain thought up of *this* bizarreness?"
Okay, rambled enough for now (more to come later :-), let's move on to the film.
In Brief:
The movie was... vaguely disappointing. To consider how some other people (e.g. Orson Scott Card) raved about it, I had expected something much more moving and meaningful. I almost teared up in a place or two, but this was the reaction of compassion about overwhelming injustice and murder as a mother has to watch her child being tortured to death. It's the *easy* way to get people attached to a movie, this unashamed victimization and pathos... (hah -- unintended linguistic pun)
But anyway, that's a sidepoint that I make only to indicate why I'm not giving more plus points for a movie that managed to make me tear up. Actual disappointments to follow.
Historicity
I'm not the historical nitpicker that other people may be -- over At the Sign of the Unhinged Mind you could find Philosopher at Large with a laundry list of historical complains, ranging from the style of the clothes, to the shape of the lamps, to the architecture of the buildings and many, many more.
Those things don't concern me really one bit. But one of Gibson's rather arrogant claims is that this film is as close to witnessing the actual events as can possibly be made -- which is, I believe, why he chose to use Aramaic and Latin in all the dialogues instead of English. Silly but I didn't mind.
But given this claim of Gibson's, there did exist two so *obviously* unhistorical details that they greatly annoyed me.
One, which is more of a nitpick: Crucifictions were a real event and we *know* in what manner they took place. So, despite unhistorical Christian art, the nails *didn't* go through the palms in a crucifiction. They went through the wrist, so that they could support the whole weight of the body using the wristbones -- they would tear right through the palm otherwise. This is why, ludicrously, Gibson (and other directors) has had to use ropes in addition to the nails, making the nails superfluous.
Greek uses the same word for both "hand" and "arm". And the gospels meant "arm", not "hand", when they were talking about Jesus's wounds.
This is annoying because Gibson missed the perfect chance to correct an obvious misconception formed by hundreds of years of ignorantly created folkart, based on flawed translations of the bible...
Second and possibly more importantly:
Pontius Pilate was a real historical figure. And one of the few things we know about him is that he *wasn't* gentle and weak. He was brutal by even Roman standards, indeed so much so that Rome eventually recalled him and forced him to retire to some distant French village.
"Philosopher at Large" spelled it out better than I can, but the point is that, holding this ruthlessness of Pilate in mind, this scene out of the New Testament (even if we took the Bible on its word, which I don't) becomes something altogether different and far more intriguing and exciting where motivations are concerned.
Pilate never shirks away from using brutality, to innocent and guilty alike -- when it's a brutality that he himself chooses. But now, handed over a popular Jewish speaker by a Jewish group, he doesn't know what game is being played -- wasn't Jesus just welcomed into Jerusalem by crowds of people? Is another opposed Jewish faction trying to use Pilate (and the Roman occupation) in order to get rid of this nuisance? He doesn't have enough knowledge of the populace in order to discern the various inter-faction conflicts. And he may be ruthless on his own initiative, but he is unwilling to be ruthless as another people' unwitting tool.
So, he himself plays a political game, first handing over the responsibility to the local Hebrew leader (Herod Antipas) and then pulling off a lovely trick where he releases a rebel (Barabbas was not a random loony murderer - he was a "zealot", an insurrectionist) but thus hands over the choice and responsibility to the ones that brought.
We don't know the full political situation, so we don't know the exact elements of this game either -- but one thing is clear: The "washing of the hands" as recorded in the gospel was not a thing that only involved a man and his own conscience. It was a very public symbolic gesture between a man and the Jewish crowds, so that if he was then attacked for this action (by a rival Jewish group perhaps) he could deny personal (and Roman) responsibility.
Now, why any of the above is important?
Among other things because of the accusation of antisemetism levelled against the movie, which could have easily been combatted had Gibson gone the route described above. Had we seen Pilate as a more ruthless figure, we'd have escaped the constant imagery of the big bad Jews scaring the poor gentle Roman into submission. Had we seen Pilate contemplating the various intra-Jewish dynamics, we'd have escaped the imagery of every Jew (except the apostles and a handful other people) being unanimous in their condemnation of Jesus. And had we seen Barabbas not as a mad murderer, but as a member of a rebel group, despised by the public perhaps, but not starking mad, the idea that people might choose to free Barabbas (an opponent of secular Roman rule) rather than Jesus (an opponent of traditional religious beliefs) might be made more undestandable, and cause less feelings of contempt on the part of the audience towards the again Jewish crowd.
Not to mention that the above would have been probably far closer to historical truth, or at least to historical *consistency*: Once again, Pilate as a man shirking away from brutality is a contradition to history -- unless he had another reason for so avoiding it than just his own conscience.
Pilate was many things but a gentle-but-weak man he wasn't.
Now, moving on...
Satan
Satan was another disappointment -- Jesus crushing the serpent with his heel was nice ofcourse. But I had heard there were numerous flashbacks throughout the film, so given Satan's presence from the start of the movie, I had hoped we'd also see the scene of Jesus' temptation in the desert as another one of the connecting elements in the movie between past and present.
Instead of that we saw horrible unnecessary, meaningless, gruesome scenes with demonic-faced children and demonic-faced babies. And worms coming out of Satan's nostrils to show us that he is, duh, evil.
Excessiveness in the gruesomeness aside, I guess that I'm also partly annoyed at how much certain modern-religious people want to emphasize Satan as the face of evil incarnate -- it was even worse and out of place in the movie adaptation of the story of Jean D'arc - "The Messenger", but *ugh* it was pretty horrible here as well.
Satan is superfluous in this film and does nothing but intrude and distract from this great (and "passionate" :-) love affair between Jesus on the one hand and the whole of Humanity on the other.
And if you want an enemy for this story -- have the enemy be Sin, (or Death), not Satan. The story of the crucifiction and the resurrection is after all supposedly about how the Christ "thanato thanaton patisas" -- "through Death, Death he conquered".
---
It's once again getting late, and I'm getting tired, so the second half, which will btw also discuss an aspect or two of Christianity, will come tomorrow or the day after...
Now, first of all I have to mention once again that I don't consider myself a Christian. In my view Jesus (though almost certainly an existing person -- many of the specifics of Christianity would be near impossible to explain otherwise), was nothing more than a man and probably the religious leader of some reformatory Jewish group, later to be deified by the people that followed him and Paul who'd never met him.
But even without belief in a story, I can still look at it and say "ooh, this part is powerful" or the converse, "this part makes no sense" or "this part is weak." Not just for Christianity, but for aspects of Buddhism or of Hinduism, or of Greek or Norse mythology or even of Aztec and Maya beliefs, one can find a core which was powerful enough to make said beliefs to flourish and repeated over a span of millenia. And one can find elements that will make me go "Okay, what lame-brain thought up of *this* bizarreness?"
Okay, rambled enough for now (more to come later :-), let's move on to the film.
In Brief:
The movie was... vaguely disappointing. To consider how some other people (e.g. Orson Scott Card) raved about it, I had expected something much more moving and meaningful. I almost teared up in a place or two, but this was the reaction of compassion about overwhelming injustice and murder as a mother has to watch her child being tortured to death. It's the *easy* way to get people attached to a movie, this unashamed victimization and pathos... (hah -- unintended linguistic pun)
But anyway, that's a sidepoint that I make only to indicate why I'm not giving more plus points for a movie that managed to make me tear up. Actual disappointments to follow.
Historicity
I'm not the historical nitpicker that other people may be -- over At the Sign of the Unhinged Mind you could find Philosopher at Large with a laundry list of historical complains, ranging from the style of the clothes, to the shape of the lamps, to the architecture of the buildings and many, many more.
Those things don't concern me really one bit. But one of Gibson's rather arrogant claims is that this film is as close to witnessing the actual events as can possibly be made -- which is, I believe, why he chose to use Aramaic and Latin in all the dialogues instead of English. Silly but I didn't mind.
But given this claim of Gibson's, there did exist two so *obviously* unhistorical details that they greatly annoyed me.
One, which is more of a nitpick: Crucifictions were a real event and we *know* in what manner they took place. So, despite unhistorical Christian art, the nails *didn't* go through the palms in a crucifiction. They went through the wrist, so that they could support the whole weight of the body using the wristbones -- they would tear right through the palm otherwise. This is why, ludicrously, Gibson (and other directors) has had to use ropes in addition to the nails, making the nails superfluous.
Greek uses the same word for both "hand" and "arm". And the gospels meant "arm", not "hand", when they were talking about Jesus's wounds.
This is annoying because Gibson missed the perfect chance to correct an obvious misconception formed by hundreds of years of ignorantly created folkart, based on flawed translations of the bible...
Second and possibly more importantly:
Pontius Pilate was a real historical figure. And one of the few things we know about him is that he *wasn't* gentle and weak. He was brutal by even Roman standards, indeed so much so that Rome eventually recalled him and forced him to retire to some distant French village.
"Philosopher at Large" spelled it out better than I can, but the point is that, holding this ruthlessness of Pilate in mind, this scene out of the New Testament (even if we took the Bible on its word, which I don't) becomes something altogether different and far more intriguing and exciting where motivations are concerned.
Pilate never shirks away from using brutality, to innocent and guilty alike -- when it's a brutality that he himself chooses. But now, handed over a popular Jewish speaker by a Jewish group, he doesn't know what game is being played -- wasn't Jesus just welcomed into Jerusalem by crowds of people? Is another opposed Jewish faction trying to use Pilate (and the Roman occupation) in order to get rid of this nuisance? He doesn't have enough knowledge of the populace in order to discern the various inter-faction conflicts. And he may be ruthless on his own initiative, but he is unwilling to be ruthless as another people' unwitting tool.
So, he himself plays a political game, first handing over the responsibility to the local Hebrew leader (Herod Antipas) and then pulling off a lovely trick where he releases a rebel (Barabbas was not a random loony murderer - he was a "zealot", an insurrectionist) but thus hands over the choice and responsibility to the ones that brought.
We don't know the full political situation, so we don't know the exact elements of this game either -- but one thing is clear: The "washing of the hands" as recorded in the gospel was not a thing that only involved a man and his own conscience. It was a very public symbolic gesture between a man and the Jewish crowds, so that if he was then attacked for this action (by a rival Jewish group perhaps) he could deny personal (and Roman) responsibility.
Now, why any of the above is important?
Among other things because of the accusation of antisemetism levelled against the movie, which could have easily been combatted had Gibson gone the route described above. Had we seen Pilate as a more ruthless figure, we'd have escaped the constant imagery of the big bad Jews scaring the poor gentle Roman into submission. Had we seen Pilate contemplating the various intra-Jewish dynamics, we'd have escaped the imagery of every Jew (except the apostles and a handful other people) being unanimous in their condemnation of Jesus. And had we seen Barabbas not as a mad murderer, but as a member of a rebel group, despised by the public perhaps, but not starking mad, the idea that people might choose to free Barabbas (an opponent of secular Roman rule) rather than Jesus (an opponent of traditional religious beliefs) might be made more undestandable, and cause less feelings of contempt on the part of the audience towards the again Jewish crowd.
Not to mention that the above would have been probably far closer to historical truth, or at least to historical *consistency*: Once again, Pilate as a man shirking away from brutality is a contradition to history -- unless he had another reason for so avoiding it than just his own conscience.
Pilate was many things but a gentle-but-weak man he wasn't.
Now, moving on...
Satan
Satan was another disappointment -- Jesus crushing the serpent with his heel was nice ofcourse. But I had heard there were numerous flashbacks throughout the film, so given Satan's presence from the start of the movie, I had hoped we'd also see the scene of Jesus' temptation in the desert as another one of the connecting elements in the movie between past and present.
Instead of that we saw horrible unnecessary, meaningless, gruesome scenes with demonic-faced children and demonic-faced babies. And worms coming out of Satan's nostrils to show us that he is, duh, evil.
Excessiveness in the gruesomeness aside, I guess that I'm also partly annoyed at how much certain modern-religious people want to emphasize Satan as the face of evil incarnate -- it was even worse and out of place in the movie adaptation of the story of Jean D'arc - "The Messenger", but *ugh* it was pretty horrible here as well.
Satan is superfluous in this film and does nothing but intrude and distract from this great (and "passionate" :-) love affair between Jesus on the one hand and the whole of Humanity on the other.
And if you want an enemy for this story -- have the enemy be Sin, (or Death), not Satan. The story of the crucifiction and the resurrection is after all supposedly about how the Christ "thanato thanaton patisas" -- "through Death, Death he conquered".
---
It's once again getting late, and I'm getting tired, so the second half, which will btw also discuss an aspect or two of Christianity, will come tomorrow or the day after...
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-25 06:41 pm (UTC)Heehee. Yeah, "not having seeb a movie" does indeed make it difficult for one to comment on. :-)
I'm not sure if it has that much to do with symbolism, rather than some general fixation on Gibson's behalf upon the gruesome that he had on this film.
Anyway, your post helped remind me that it's about time I post the second part of this review that I'd been planning to write almost two weeks ago instead... :-)