Pretty much all the critics worth listening too have panned Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. They are all of course brilliant and in some cases (like with Stephanie Zacharek) necessary, if flatly wrong. The one that interests me the most, however, the one that is really on the right path but has reached the wrong destination, is J. Hoberman’s. He says that the Aramaic sounds like bad Elvish and describes the Romans as Orcs. He says that the film establishes itself in the realm of recent fantasy epics. I think that J. Hoberman is trying to be hateful to the film and trying to show how clever and witty he is, but his perspective is fascinating and key to understanding and enjoying The Passion of the Christ. Hoberman seems to be arguing that The Passion of the Christ is a bad fantasy epic. And well, as I see it, it may be the best fantasy epic ever made.

It is indeed a fantasy epic, though. We see this from the very beginning, in a misty, beautifully hauntingly blue Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ chastises his apostles for sleeping when he needed them to pray with him. They apologize and call him “master,” and we realize that Gibson is channeling Kurosawa, or at least Kurosawa through George Lucas. It’s a joke, one that borders on taking us out of the movie a little (Gibson was smart having this be the first scene; the only other time he puts a moment of humor in the picture is when Pilate releases a violent criminal into the fold and he grins to show us his rotten teeth. This moment is arguably a misstep). But it’s a modest joke and it’s Kurosawa’s joke. It sets the tone and tells us what kind of movie this is going to be.

Pictures like Star Wars and The Matrix are essentially, and blatantly, Christ epics, and here Gibson has cut out the middleman and actually made a film about Christ. It’s an undiluted Christ. And because it deals with a mythology that many people worldwide hold dear and that Gibson strongly believes in, the picture packs more punch than any fantasy film I have ever seen. The violence has been condemned for being graphic and exploitative, but I’m glad it’s there. The most brutal and hard-to-watch sequence in the film is easily the flogging sequence, where Jesus is tied down and beaten with a scourge, tearing off flesh and muscle and exposing his ribcage to us. We saw a similar sequence in Return of the Jedi. Remember? Only it was with blue lightning and it was the Dark Jedi Emperor Palpatine (Roman name) doing the work. I’m not trying to belittle The Passion of the Christ by comparing it to Return of the Jedi, but the fact that I have to explain that I’m not belittling it seems to prove that we don’t regard Return of the Jedi as a serious cultural work. We have seen The Passion of the Christ before, you see, but it’s been filtered through pop. It has been made easily consumable and non-threatening. And non-controversial to boot. In the Star Wars universe, nobody is alienated. Star Wars is a religion for twelve-year-olds. And so is Lord of the Rings, and the ultimately shallow Matrix films. The Matrix films are really pissing me off because nobody seems to realize that Keanu Reeves in sunglasses cannot preach about love as he is being pitched above human emotion and into realms of hyper-masculinity. But yeah, I can understand the appeal of the Matrix films, and I have myself have pledged my affection for the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films. These are rich and complex universes that invite our complete and utter immersion. And because they are accessible, because they usually have a winking sense of humor to them and values and visceral effects that won’t challenge anybody or give them anything else but a good night at the movies, they have dominated our collective mythology. And there are people who blatantly prefer the pop religion.

The Flick Filosopher MaryAnn Johanson lists Lord of the Rings: Return of the King as the best film of 2003 and The Passion of the Christ as the worst film of 2004 so far. She adopts the stance toward Lord of the Rings: Return of the King that it is “geek heaven." She mentions all the things that they took out, left in, realized, et cetera from the books, but there is a tone of self-depreciation in her voice. She’s babbling about bullshit after experiencing a mind-altering cinematic orgasm, but she is conscious about this. She is letting us know how silly she is sounding. I can’t imagine that a fan of The Passion of the Christ would write a review like that on the film. Christians don’t have a sense of humor about their Christianity (at least not that sense of humor). I think that Lord of the Rings cultists feel that they need to, and that seems to imply that they don’t hold their text in the same reverence as Christians hold theirs. Does Johanson find any spiritual sustenance in Lord of the Rings? I don’t think so. There is nothing in her review that I feel challenges my view of the film as a terrific popcorn entertainment. As more of a hobby than a way of life. She holds The Last Temptation of Christ as a counterpoint to The Passion of the Christ. She says that The Last Temptation of Christ is “Just a Movie” in a way that The Passion of the Christ is not, essentially in the sense that The Last Temptation of Christ regards Christ as a character and a human being. And yet The Last Temptation of Christ is not an entertaining movie in the way that The Passion of the Christ is. It’s a reverent one; it deals with its subject matter in a very serious tone. After a hard day of bashing good movies like Kill Bill, Monster and Identity, I’m betting that she is more likely to spin Return of the King in the DVD player than The Last Temptation of Christ. The Last Temptation of Christ places religious films where many of us are most comfortable with it being, in the untouchable nether regions of serious cinema, far away from popular film and its components, exploitation and fantasy epics. The Last Temptation of Christ is the masterpiece that nobody wants to watch.

Johanson calls The Passion of the Christ a “fairy story,” and she means it as an epithet. In any other of her reviews, it would be meant as a compliment. Because The Passion of the Christ puts Christianity in the context of a fairy story, she finds it reprehensible. She can only consume fairy stories when they are put in the form of a Lord of the Rings. Johanson seems to believe that great art has to be good for you. She doesn’t think Lord of the Rings is great art; otherwise, she wouldn’t take the defensive self-depreciation stance towards it. I support the canonization of Lord of the Rings up to a point, as I find myself almost as susceptible to its charms as I am to the Star Wars pictures. But yeah, I’m uncomfortable with the popularization and sanitation of our mythology and spirituality. The Lord of the Rings films and the Star Wars films (even the new ones) are substantially superior to garbage like Brother Bear, but they are certainly two sides of the same coin. Where they differ is that the former series have a sense of taste and tone. They never really preach; they just do what they do. Take it or leave it. But I think back to 2002’s Reign of Fire, which presents a post-apocalyptic society where people put on passion plays of Star Wars. Is Star Wars really going to be the religion of the future? The Passion of the Christ is a fantasy epic with a pair. Because it is about Christ, it’s able to go places that most fantasy epics are afraid to tread. Luke Skywalker needs to be scourged with blue lightning; if he was scourged with a cat-o-nine-nails, the campy Flash Gordon aspects of the picture would be destroyed and the picture would be pretentious. The Passion makes a stand to reclaim our mythology and give us “fairy stories” void of the distancing irony. There are moments where I will allow that the film lapses into camp and possibly unintentional laughs, but it is a naïve sort of camp. There is none of the modern self-consciousness that signifies safe myth.

The film’s Satan figure is one of the cinema’s coolest villains. Yes, again, The Passion of the Christ is the sort of Jesus film where we can describe the villains as cool. It’s OK. When we first see Satan, it’s in the Garden of Gethsemane and we’re coming off of the Kurosawa shot we just had. Satan is played by a woman but with a man’s voice, and we acknowledge it as a reference to the witch in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. (Aside: Satan is made to be androgynous in the film, but I will be using the feminine pronoun when referencing her.) Satan quickly but gradually becomes a creation of Gibson’s, however, when we see a maggot crawl out of her nose. The film is no longer a play on the popular mythologies of others; it becomes a Christ myth. Gibson seems to see Satan as the “God” of Decay. In addition to the maggot, there is the sequence where Judas decides to commit suicide. He is chased down by children under the possession of Satan and, exhausted, collapses. He then turns to see a rotting donkey carcass and no children in sight. He begins to cry, and it is then that he makes his decision. Satan seems to be implying that that is what is to come of all the good that he did with Christ, and that is what is to come of Christ’s legacy. They will rot away. There is a terrific sequence during the scourging where she walks in the crowd, carrying a large infant that is caressing her face. The infant turns to the camera and smiles in seeing Christ being tortured, and we realize that it is in fact a dwarf, a middle-aged man in the form of a toddler. The image seems to be a delicate parody of Raphael’s “Madonna and Child". Satan constantly makes children turn old in the film; it’s the best and most reliable of the scare tactics that Gibson uses. They are growing old before their time, decaying.

Gibson also casts a crippled retarded man (think Sloth from The Goonies) in the background when Jesus is being turned in to the Jewish high priests. It’s tasteless and possibly cruel and primitive, and thank you, Mel Gibson, for employing it. He’s using freaks for shock value, and there is a subtle Machiavellian justification for their employment. The effect is what matters; the means for reaching them are ultimately without merit. That dwarf is played by Davide Marotta, by the way, an Italian actor who got his start playing the child monsters in Dario Argento’s Phenomena and Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2. Gibson is working from the same database as Italian horror’s elite. Rock and roll!

Satan’s demoralizing effect is to show Christ and his disciples that they are in fact human and limited. They’re little else but meat puppets and will eventually rot away. She exists to reaffirm our greatest fears about our bodies and about our mortality, and they are fears that seem to be omnipresent in the human condition. What’s scarier, Freddy and Jason or a flesh-eating bacteria? As much as I love Freddy and Jason, yeah, it’s certainly the flesh-eating bacteria. A slow death is much worse than a quick one, a random death better than an intended one. After sitting back and taking in the scourging and crucifixion, you eventually realize that as long as Christ is bleeding, he’s good. Satan never pushes anybody’s hand in the picture. She doesn’t want to; it doesn’t interest her. She’ll stand and watch it happen, and revel in it. Her evil is purely in conveying the idea that it is all for naught. The film’s perspective towards Satan closely reflects that of The Exorcist. (William Friedkin was, by the way, one of this film’s earliest and strongest supporters.) MaryAnn Johanson pissed me off some more when she says that The Exorcist is irrational because Satan doesn’t possess the Pope or somebody important. The whole point of the picture is that Satan possesses the girl EXCLUSIVELY to destroy the weakening faith of the Father Karras character. As long as HE despairs, then Satan has won. The battle for the soul happens on an individual level. We need to stop thinking about God and the Devil in terms of enormous national entities that go to war with one another. For one, that is not very scary, and for two that is as superficial a view toward spirituality as you can get.

One of the biggest problems that I had with Arthur Dong’s “Family Fundamentals” was that it never made the connection that the gay rights community and the religious right are essentially two sides of the same coin. Both find solidarity in a shared identity, and both feel marginalized and even persecuted by mainstream society. Mainstream America is both secularized and homophobic. I hesitate to oversimplify the situation by saying that the gay and religious identities are dependent on never being accepted as the norm, that doing so would cause the subcultures to disintegrate. It’s the hypothetical curse of the minority; if you are no longer “other,” then who are you? The Christ of The Passion of the Christ is asocial and individualistic. He isn’t leading a religion, he is the religion; Christianity stands outside of institutionalism. It would probably be a stretch to call him a libertarian icon, but he stands in stark juxtaposition of the politicized groupthink of the Jewish temple leaders and the Romans.

It wasn’t until the crown of thorn sequence that I made the obvious connection between Christ and the Joan of Arc in The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Passion of Joan of Arc drew direct parallels between the French church courts and the persecutors of Christ. In both cases we have a true believer, divorced from their compromising, growingly political and cynical church or temple and being persecuted for it. The real contemporary enemy of the film isn’t as much Jews as the Catholic Church of Vatican II, of which Gibson has splintered off of. The violence in the film is disturbing and hard to watch, but electrifying. I wouldn’t call it “entertaining” exactly, but it is jolting and it seems to be designed to alienate the piddling middle-of-the-roaders. The film portrays spirituality as something extremely personal. Christ certainly encourages sharing it, but seems to greatly oppose the idea that it should in any way be restricted or controlled by committee. That said, I still can’t quite clear the film completely on charges of anti-Semitism. But I will say that it seems overly simplistic to just leave it at that. The Pharisees in the picture are, no two ways about it, the bad guys. Pontius Pilate is portrayed as wanting to protect Christ and reluctantly going along to prevent an uprising. There is a lot of anger and spite in their voices. They’re a bloodthirsty, power-hungry bunch. Most disturbing is the transformation of the little curly-headed boys into demons to chase down Judas. The scene is certainly something out of Nazi propaganda. These kids represent the kike at his most ratlike: feral and pestilent. And of course their temple is in smithereens after Christ’s resurrection.

At the same time, Christ is at his most Jewish here. Some critics seemed to see a distinct difference between Christ and his apostles and the other Jews. I didn’t. There was certainly a difference between the Romans, who looked Italian, and the Jews; but not between the Christians and the Jews. James Caviezel is darker than most screen Jesuses. Compare him with Jeffrey Hunter in King of Kings, Ted Neely in Jesus Christ Superstar, or even Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ. Blonde, blonde and blonde. In flashbacks of his childhood we see that Jesus was a little curly-headed boy also. And I don’t know what it is, but there is certainly something very Fiddler on the Roof about that table-building sequence. It has some sort of Yiddish folksy quality. This is sounding sort of silly, but it seems that if you come out of the film hating Jews, you’re really throwing away a fundamental part of who Jesus was. He’s being persecuted by his own, you see; these are his people, and directly following his crucifixion Christianity was a splintered-off Jewish sect.

The actual violence against Christ is by the Roman soldiers, who laugh as they rip off his skin, pound the thorns into his skull, and put the nails through his hands. While the Jewish-boys-turning-into-demons sequence seems to borrow from Nazi imagery, the portrayal of the Roman soldiers borrows from anti-Nazi imagery. It’s all remarkably similar to the Nazi atrocities that we saw in Schindler’s List, The Pianist and especially Elem Klimov’s Come and See. There isn’t really a whole lot of on-screen violence in Come and See, but it is considered to be one of the most brutal films ever made purely because of its tone. The Germans in the film are about two or three degrees away from breaking out a six-pack and the ol' pigskin during their Russkie barbeque. It goes beyond simple sadism to making genocide look like the Fourth of July. The crucifixion is made to look like a hell of a party for the Romans. This portrayal is actually pretty close to the account in the Gospels: crown of thorn sequence (Matthew 27:29), gambling for his garments (John 19:24), et cetera, and so I wouldn’t go as far as to say that The Passion of the Christ is referencing these films as much as all are working from the same well pool. I believe that both the accounts of the partying Romans and the accounts of the partying Germans are accurate portrayals of a heavily militarized world domination-bent military culture. The film’s hatred for Jews is incomplete and the hatred for Nazism is probable.

Gibson also provides us with several flashbacks and of course the Garden of Gethsemane, in addition to a scene where Pilates offers to let him go, all reminding us that Christ knew that he was going to be crucified and decided to go through with it. We also get the Sermon on the Mount, implying that the test that Gibson is offering us isn’t as much to witness the atrocities as Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek believes (although that certainly may be a secondary motivation). Rather, he wants to get us outraged and angry at the Romans and the Jews, and then forgive them. He intends to show us the worst that man can do to man (and again this is all done by humans working out of their own free agency, justified by groupthink and mob rule) and then forgive them. The message is that if Christ could forgive those who persecuted him, we should be able to forgive those very same enemies, not to mention the much more minor persecutions that we face day to day.

Gibson employs a pulp iconology into his film. This isn’t as much about theology or logic as it is about are results. Gibson seems to understand why the horror genre has produced much of our best modern cinema: it has sheer visceral impact. Christ is nailed to the cross with three nails, one in each hand and one in the feet. He doesn’t get a nail in his wrists; although that is supposed to be the more historically accurate position, as a nail through the hand won’t keep you on the cross. The arms of the crucified in the film are held up tied to the cross. The use of three nails is more in line with paintings and perceptions of Christ, as the composition is more aesthetically pleasing and Christianity has an obsession with threes: three wise men; Christ rose on the third day, and of course the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The triangle is certainly the strongest of all our polygons, and the most aesthetic of our compositions. The Passion of Christ proves itself to be the middle section of a trilogy.

There are a few superficial flaws in the picture; in particular, it really dawdles during the carrying of the cross, and by the third (?!) time that Christ collapses, it becomes sort of a joke. But the biggest and most important problem with the film is that it is just the middle section of a trilogy. It begins right in the middle of the action in the Garden of Gethsemane and ends with Christ’s resurrection (a cliffhanger that many critics have made bad jokes about instead of seeing it as an invitation). There is a whole lot more to the story to be told. I understand why Gibson used a number of flashbacks in the picture and I do find them very useful (in fact, most of the critics who disliked the film wanted much more of them), but they certainly break up the flow of the film. The Passion of the Christ has failed in being the definitive Christ film, and many looking for the definitive Christ film have been sorely disappointed, and so it seems that Gibson shouldn’t have tried so hard to stuff it all in one movie. Caviezel certainly shows us in flashbacks that he can portray Christ as the sympathetic superhero that Gibson’s perspective calls for, but yeah, all he gets is beat around because that is all the movie calls of him. The same can be said about the message that Christ has. We don’t get much of it except what we see in context with the crucifixion. We could probably say the same thing about the anti-Semitism. A prequel would better be able to explore the situation and help explain why the Pharisees hate Christ so much. Now a three-disc box set; bloody, slick, and beautiful, THAT’S the definitive Christ film.

Despite trying some three (?!) separate times to read the Bible, I admit that I never had the patience to get all the way through it. It’s much more of a text than a collection of stories. Gibson effectively adapted the gospel into movie form. He is actually telling us a story. In a way, it was probably was wise to start in the middle because now I’m actually really anxious to see what will come next and what came before. The Passion of the Christ may very well be the first Christ film that doesn’t make the phrase” “the greatest story ever told” sound like a bad tagline.