[Marxism] Being there with Jesus Christ and Mel Gibson - Review of "The Passion of the Christ"

["andromeda246" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Melvin P. asked me if I had seen the movie. This is what I thought - JB).
 
I've always been in two minds about Jesus Christ as the son of God. It seemed a 
contradiction. Sometimes I've felt like defending his radical expressions of 
compassionate love against unctiously sermonising christians trying make people 
obey a moral authority unquestioningly. Or against crude, stupid and trashy 
people pronouncing verities to me about human sensitivity. Then again, 
sometimes I've felt like defending the Romans against Jesus Christ, insofar as 
believers I encountered engaged in  supercilious apology for their own rotten 
schemes, or tried to insinuate a moral higher ground where they had none, with 
reference to a cult of suffering. Part of that must be in my personality. But 
part of it must be the portrayal of Jesus in the Bible. There is the Jesus who 
throws the money-changers out of the temple. Then there's the Jesus who tells 
us to render unto imperialism what belongs to it. And then there's the Dutch 
Jesus. That's not me, by the way.
 
When people shove two conflicting positions in your face to force a choice on 
your part, I tend to think there's usually a better third position which you 
really ought to be taking, because it's better than either of them. If it's 
John Kerry versus George Bush, the world must be better off with Ralph Nader. 
After all, the real conflict is between the rich and the poor. Kerry and Bush 
make it look like the conflict is between who among the rich would be best to 
tell the poor what's good for them. The poor must have reverence for the rich - 
after all, the rich didn't get to where they are just by writing film reviews, 
did they ?
 
It must have been at the start of the 1980s that I watched a comedy by Peter 
Sellers of "Pink Panther" fame called "Being there". It was (to me at least) a 
funny allegory, in which - if memory serves me - the main character is a 
gardener, a middle-aged simpleton who loves watching TV. Living his sedentary, 
mousy life in Washington DC surrounded by plants and flowers, he befriends a 
dying millionaire, and is then suddenly introduced into the sophisticated world 
of the political elite - who, because of his new friends, read a deep and 
profound political meaning into each of his modest philosophical observations 
about gardening. Whereas at first sight the gardener seems just an innocent 
village idiot, he becomes a society hit. The elite find him refreshing, because 
his disarmingly positive message forces backstabbers in the corridors of power 
to drop their masks a little and speak their mind. Just by being his modest, 
genuine self, and insisting on the simple truths of his own experience, he 
exposes the pathetic human beings behind the facade of political authority. 
 
This then has the effect of a comic populist inversion: the elite appears more 
of a dunce than he is - as I remember it, either they try to span him to their 
own bandwaggon, without success (because they don't cotton on that he doesn't 
understand their allusive political doubletalk), or else they reveal their own 
gullibility, because of their belief that, given his new connections, there 
must be some "deep political meaning" beneath his harmless sincerity. The 
simple gardener then turns presidential consultant, and in the end 
surrealistically walks away on water, leaving behind a bunch of sophisticates 
whom he has tied up in conundrums. 
 
Apart from the comic symbolism of the story itself, what makes this otherwise 
rather superficial movie great is its neat summary of basic dichotomies 
emerging in our virtualised, sexualised, postmodernised and cybernetized 
society - a society in which what you can be aware of is such a vast territory, 
that the real problem is in deciding what you should actually be focusing on to 
relativise it all. The idea of "Being There" suggests a dichotomy of 
absence/presence (participation or non-participation, inclusion or exclusion) 
with the dichotomy of pattern/randomness (significant/not meaningful, 
deliberately constructed/arbitrary behaviour) - the finish being a 
surrealistically lighthearted flourish, suggesting that ignorance is revealed 
as innocence, which offers the promise of bliss.

I had to think of "Being There" again after watching Mel Gibson's movie "The 
Passion of the Christ" the other day here in Amsterdam. Mel's movie depicts a 
scene which is a polar opposite to Peter Sellers but with similar techniques. 
Here there is no happy ending, and Mel wants to rub that into your eyeballs 
too. It seemed like a kind of a christian punk confrontation, and emotionally I 
found it sickening (at a certain point during the film when I felt dry in the 
mouth, I clocked an overpriced Cola from the machine in the hallway). The only 
"passion" you get to see in "The Passion of the Christ" is the enthusiasm with 
which the Roman soldiers beat the shit out of Jesus, who doesn't appear to be a 
great communicator. 
 
In fact, Mel's Jesus has almost nothing intelligible to say in the whole movie, 
beyond a few mumbles in garbled Latin and broken English. The point seems to be 
that this is a horror story, and Mel invites you to see and understand just how 
horrible that horror is, or at the very least, that you must be some kind of 
Jesus yourself to be watching it at all. Why else go and see a movie in 2004 
called "The Passion of the Christ" ? It must be some kind of daring cult porno, 
or else you are seeing it to understand an actor's statement about the nature 
of our times. 
 
The opening scenes feature the thirty-something Jesus being arrested, while 
standing in the dark among trees with his long-haired disciples - he books a 
"farewell kiss" from one of them, which gives you a clue straightaway. At the 
end of the movie, the bloodied and busted-up Lord Jesus gets to have his stiff 
left arm broken by a Roman soldier who - with obvious glee - wants to nail his 
left hand definitely to the wooden cross once and for all (his side-kicks are 
tied to the cross, one gets an eye picked out by a magpie). Almost everything 
about the Lord is broken and stuffed up by then - except the Lord's teeth, 
gored by blood, slime, froth and no doubt plaque. And, of course, he remains 
strong as ever in his innocent conviction, forgiving his torturers "because 
they don't know what they're doing". 
 
So he's still got the moral high ground there, even as he is being lifted off 
the ground on the cross. But eventually Jesus gives up the ghost, and gets his 
helicopter ride to heaven, leaving behind a snarling little SF monster, while 
his groupies philosophise about the wonder of it all, by the entrance of the 
cave. In between, the constant arbitrary beatings and brutal humiliations, 
together with the lack of any explicit explanation of motive, makes you search 
for visual clues about what Jesus has really done to deserve his fate, 
according to Mel's version. 
 
So then what's the plot ? Why exactly is Jesus not a Good Boy ? What does Mel 
really want us to understand ? The Roman soldiers appear to be in no doubt 
about it. Their cruelty is enacted with clear approval of almost all the men 
around, even although some wince at the brutality of the punishment being 
meeted out. They want to "get the lout", and now that they've got him, they 
evidently believe they are absolutely morally correct in administering their 
brutal punishment. But the precise interpretation of Jesus's guilt still 
remains unclear. With all the Latin being spoken, it's difficult to figure out 
anyway. Could it be a case of mistaken identity, a big misunderstanding ? Is 
civilisation at stake ? Point is, Mel's Jesus is really bereft of any clear 
identity or personality, and is portrayed as just some guy, one of those 
long-haired louts that cause trouble. Why does the incoherently cheering crude 
mob choose for the criminal Barabas in Pilate's elections ? Is it because his 
rotten teeth stink less ? Why exactly isn't Jesus popular ? There is no precise 
narrative here, only a sort of obviousness. Jesus is more civilised than 
Barabas, but there's Something Wrong.
 
The explanation really comes from the women who hang around Jesus like limp 
fish, and who quietly pink away a tear while the Lord is being smashed up by 
the men - they diligently clean away his blood with linen supplied by Pilate's 
wife etc., while at the same time their perfect, shiny hairdo's are never a 
millimeter out of place. This is Hollywood cliche after all, and Mel 
meticulously follows through that cliche with muted visual caricatures, the 
emphasis being on the horror of the persecution consequent upon the 
transgression of the code. His Jesus evidently passed up the bar; basically, 
his Lord Jesus is a flower-power hippy unable or unwilling to jerk off with 
women.
 
To the Romans, he is a Boy Grown Up Bad. To the women he is love without sex.  
Jesus proudly and consciously shows a woman (who is it ?) a table he has built 
with his own hands, but she just smiles somewhat condescendingly and tugs his 
belt. The scene hints that Jesus Knows What He Is Doing, but has More Important 
Things on his mind. He might say he knows the Way, but the Romans think his Way 
is Wrong. If you don't show your balls, you get them ripped off, that's the 
reality in the Empire.
 
So then Jesus is the Son of Man, but he is not a Man himself. He lacks balls 
somehow. A gentle asexual love substitutes for manly dignity acquired through 
rites of passage. Or, at the very least, he has not earnt respect as a man. 
He's then really just a lout, rather than an upstanding citizen. All the rest 
is just verbiage around the subject, impossible to follow really unless you are 
an intellectual with a degree in Latin. While Jesus slumps in agonising pain, 
there's a flashback scene which shows him thinking of that beautiful atmosphere 
when he was doing that Sermon on the Mount, preaching about how we all should 
be and blessing the people below, and this slightly surreal scene shows him as 
a Californian hippy guru, a sort of glorified Bee Gee. 
 
But the Romans believe none of it. They consider Jesus is talking about the 
next world, without having really lived in this world, really just a nuisance 
in the Roman world. From their point of view he doesn't walk the talk. Or, he 
has an irritating strength or appeal that threatens and needs to be broken down 
by the Empire.  It's cock-power and virile arts that count here, but Jesus is 
an alien in his perfection. Meanwhile, the women seem entranced in Holy Mystery 
of it all, or else seem to believe Jesus is "such a nice man". The actual 
camera work and symbolism is deceptively simple, but really it isn't - it seems 
deliberately crafted for Jesuses and Mary's in the audience peering at a Jesus 
and Mary on the screen who just don't mean much visually or auditorily, and 
perhaps never could mean much, under the circumstances. Of course you could 
read more into it, filtering the images through your own experiences.
 
There are suggestions of moral limits, there are suggestions about love and 
sex, and the message is loud and clear that a man can get bashed up and 
brutally killed for doing nice things, because he's ignored the real love code 
operating. Jesus's inarticulate otherworldliness is balanced against the 
grotesque cruelty of the Romans. The unreal sadness and lack of real shock by 
the women hanging around powerlessly while Jesus gets beaten up (hinting Jesus 
has in some way contributed to his own crucifiction) is balanced with their 
show of compassionate care and their belief in Jesus's promise as human being. 
And so on, the composition is balanced out in different scenes, and then Jesus 
craps out completely. 
 
So the moral of Mel's story might then be that nobody's perfect, and should not 
pretend to be perfect. There's is a little bit of Mel's Jesus in all of us, and 
you can push things too far for your own good. But if Jesus had done something 
wrong, or was too perfect, he was also punished too brutally by the Romans, who 
lacked emotional intelligence in some sense. So really it was not fair. Heck, 
now there's a lot of people talking about Jesus again. And if they are, then 
Mel, as a catholic, has succeeded. That's clever of him, isn't it. 
 
As for myself, I walked out of the movie theatre feeling sick, and disregarded 
the blonde standing by the entrance. I had managed to watch it to the end, and 
considered it an achievement.  There was nothing uplifting about Jesus's death 
for me, Mel convinced me of that if I didn't know it already. One reviewer whom 
I had read in advance wrote: "Sitting through this film does provide at least 
one revelation: Jesus wasn't the only one who suffered." Quite. But then why 
see the movie ? As regards myself, I was thinking about my father and things 
that went wrong between us. As a matter of fact, I had stopped smoking 
cigarettes the previous day, but the next day I started smoking cigarettes 
again. So the movie had an undeniable impact, though not for the better in my 
case. 
 
Lately I have been reading in the Dutch Marxist writer Theun de Vries's 
historical account of religious heretics in the history of christianity from 
Jesus until the Reformation. He writes: "Fascinated from my youth by the trials 
and tribulations of heretics, and the apparently bizarre character of their 
heresies, I learnt on closer examination to recognise in many of them the 
revolutionary precursors of later social movements. They nearly always 
signified a protest against the pretensions of the authoritarian state, a 
"battering ram" against the walls of feudalism. They defied in many ways the 
straitjacket imposed on human conscience by the organized Christian church. 
Nothing human is alien to man as a heretic. Heretics could be alternately 
iconoclasts and zealots, libertarians or quietists. But they are always on a 
quest for the "real truth" - in the course of which, it transpires that that 
the essence of the faith they seek is nothing other than the essence of man 
himself, which is wanting to be discovered. The heretical dissenter displays a 
conviction, a self-sacrificing attitude and a heroism which, in many cases, has 
changed the course of history. A human history which I, following Hegel, 
interpret as a progression in self-awareness and, with Marx, as the "great 
portal" in which all human wills and their clashes serve to lead to us towards 
a society that is, finally, a truly humanized one. A world without heretics 
would be a world of stifling conformism." 
 
It got me thinking, is Mel Gibson a heretic in his depiction of moral obscenity 
? Yes and no. Certainly he has the gumption to make his own ideosyncratic 
statement to the public without fear of treading on religious sensitivities, 
cloning characters which reflect something about himself and the 
semi-articulate moral confusions of the American scene nowadays. At one level, 
it's a protest film about fascist emotional persecution and senseless 
suffering, and a lot of thinking certainly went into making his film. I admire 
his craft. On the other hand, the mixture of subtle and unsubtle signifiers 
does not conclude much more than the death of Jesus and the helicopter ride, 
and, insofar as you reject inhuman cruelty, you just cannot be other than on 
Jesus's side in this case. I was hoping for something more - not passion, but 
insight, something that would challenge the brain more beyond a visual 
knock-out. 
 
De Vries's history of religious heretics pointed me to the story of the erudite 
Spanish-Jewish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540). Although it is not exactly 
clear when Vives was born in Valencia, we know that he came from a family of 
Jewish cloth merchants who converted to Christianity under pressure from the 
Inquisition. After primary school, grammar school and arts courses, Vives 
studied at the University of Valencia where he experienced the clash between 
traditional catholic scholasticism and a nascent humanism which became 
subsequently inspired his own prolific writings. He went on to study Logic at 
Montaigu College in Paris in 1517, and became professor in Louvain in 1519, 
meeting with Erasmus and other intellectual luminaries. Then in 1523, he joined 
a brilliant group of humanists at the court of Henry VIII in England, lecturing 
in philosophy, theology and the classics at Oxford. Why is there no movie about 
Vives ? These days, when we are confronted once more with throwbacks to feudal 
ideologies to justify a slowly rotting social order, I think we definitely 
ought to concentrate on the better side of feudalism if the discourses are 
going feudal - that side which led to the Enlightenment. But some might prefer 
Mel Gibson's film. Or the Pink Panther.
 
Jurriaan
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