Unbearable Passion

I have just seen Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. My hands are shaking. I’m having sweet tea and cake in a suburban mall, to get to the point where I can drive again. I feel as if I have been in an accident.

Seeing that film is like being inside the most gruesome medieval Christian painting you can think of, for hours. Before, I have looked at those things and turned away. This time I forced myself to look.

I do not recommend it to anyone.

People around me were crying. My whole body started to react. When they nailed his hands to the cross my hands were sweating; I found I was squeezing and wringing them together. As I left the theater I had difficulty walking normally – one foot was bizarrely dragging on the carpet.

I’m not good at watching violence. I was more able to do it before I had a child. Since then, it’s as if every year the screens’ pretend violence has got more real. Yesterday a friend sent news about the Bush government’s plans to reinstate the draft. My boy is 15. They will have it ready for him just in time. Young people are coming back from Iraq in coffins or alive with shattered bodies. When I was a child, I was terrified by nightmares of tales of torture and war that my parents and their friends suffered. I was convinced it would happen to me. Maybe it will happen to my son instead. I can’t bear it.

Maybe this movie’s popularity here has something to do with the death and torture visited on thousands on 9/11.

Will this movie energise Christians to turn the other cheek, or to fight?

I’m not a believer, thank God! But if I was, would I think this movie had been influenced more by Christ, or more by the devil? The latter. I feel no good will come of this. It feels like the opening of some dark box. I don’t know what will crawl out. What other films will be made, books written, cabals gathered that reach deeper into our fear and torment? The movie tells you not to strike back, even while it raises your temperature to the point where it becomes more likely that you will. I may not be able to explain why I felt that – because it was felt not thought.

Perhaps Christians can make good out of this where I cannot. What you make of it depends on what you bring to it, because it barely offers anything hopeful – just brief flashbacks of a good man preaching love, some grieving women, a good man who helps carry the cross, and a mere glimpse at the end of Jesus mysteriously walking, healed, from his tomb. The rest is torture.

Best comment: if Christ came back, this is the last movie he would want to see.

I hadn’t wanted to see it. When my openDemocracy editor suggested I review it, I said I couldn’t stomach it, how about if I reviewed the reviews instead?

The web is awash with reviews and commentary on this movie. Chris Hitchens says Gibson is probably a fascist, as obsessed with flogging and as homophobic as the blackshirts were. Andrew Sullivan, a Catholic, says it is pure pornography: “By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive – slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery.”

There are Jewish writers who fear the anti-Semitic potential of the movie, whether intended by Gibson or not.

There are evangelical Christians who say there is no way you can read the movie as blaming the Jews for Christ’s death, since it obviously says we are all to blame.

There are very sensible people who explain each side and especially each side’s fears to the other. Dennis Prager: “For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians’ Savior.” There is brilliant writing out there.

I collected 50 pages of contradictory reviews in a couple of hours’ web surfing and then I jumped in my car and went to see it.

I was afraid at the start. I wondered what I would do to distance myself. Would I look away, say it’s all ketchup, blame Gibson in lurid terms?

My defence was to ask myself questions. Why did he make it? I had read that the actor who played Jesus had Mass every morning before starting filming. I could believe it. The whole thing seems like some very weird devotional excess, understandable to people who flagellate themselves. Gibson had been far down and this kind of religion brought him back (to what?).

The sharpest web comment I found is this: “Never has a recovering drunk claiming to have been guided by the lethal hand of the Lord so fabulously manipulated the media and public opinion into embracing gruesome carnage. Well, other than George W. Bush and that thing in Iraq.”

But why is it so popular, especially among evangelical Christians who might have been expected to dislike its old Catholic emphasis on flogging, the devil, Mary? Why would anyone want to see this?

Because it portrays the worst suffering, and apparently offers hope. Here I am in the Poughkeepsie Galleria Mall, the length and height of several cathedrals, stuffed with goods. This is the characteristic public building of our time, temple to consumerism and all that. Bright, happy, positive. If problems are mentioned it is only because every one has a solution, for $39.95. But we know life is not like that. There is sickness and death, poverty, loss, divorce, depression, terrorism. Worse, there is assault on meaning. The great intellects of our time tell simple old fashioned Christians that we are descended from monkeys, God is dead, gay is OK, marijuana should be legal, the universe is billions of years old and random. We fear our children may get lost in the moral miasma, and shoot heroin. And this mall is what we offer them.

So here is a movie that shows the suffering our culture denies. This is why we have heavy-duty religion: to give us hope when faced with real suffering. Holiness found in suffering.

But I felt fear more than hope in this movie. And yet I felt that response latent within it. We are human. We are more like Mel than Christ. We read that of one US film critic who linked Mel Gibson’s father’s denial of the Holocaust with The Passion’s alleged anti-Semitism, Gibson said: “I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick... I want to kill his dog.”

Gibson doesn’t believe that non-Catholics, including his ‘saintly’ wife, will go to heaven. Will the next movie be a bloody, burning Hieronymus Bosch parade of the horrors of hell, reserved for Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, gays, and agnostics who write columns like this one? This deity Gibson worships consigns most of us, however good, to endless horror of the kind Christ only knew for a day.

This is love? This is holiness?