Kristin Brown argued in these pages two weeks ago that seeing Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," "made me think a lot about the sacrifices of Christ. What it didn't do was make me hate Jews." "The Passion" doesn't have to make Brown "hate Jews" to be functionally anti-Semitic. What's missing from the conversation is an understanding that anti-Semitism operates most virulently on the level of imagery. The plot of Gibson's film needn't implicate Jews in Jesus's death (though it does) for the effect of this visceral film to be anti-Jewish (and anti-humanist) in a way that is deeply un-Catholic. In fact, when Brown claims, "It's a Christian movie," I have to wonder whether we saw the same film.
While it is a serious problem that "The Passion" portrays Pontius Pilate and his wife as humane intellectuals who only crucify Jesus at the ranting request of the Jewish mob, the more vexing problem is that the film's camera work aligns Jesus and the Aryan Pilate and places them in opposition to the mob. In the Temple trial scene, Jesus is bound in chains as Gibson's camera focuses in close up on his face, and Mary's, while swirling in a hallucinatory spiral around the assembled crowd. This highlights the sympathetic characters' visual and narrative isolation from the physical space of the Temple, and therefore from the only Jewish community the film identifies. This matters in a film that's so aggressively visual it scarcely needs subtitles. In context, Jesus, Mary and the disciples are part of the Jewish community repressed by Roman occupation, but here, as elsewhere, Gibson ignores context, preferring to focus on torture.
Gibson apologists call critics' focus on blood excessive, implying that "Fight Club" and "Saving Private Ryan" are as violent as "The Passion." They aren't. In both degree and kind, The Passion is the most violent film I have ever seen, and critics are right to call its style sadistic. "Saving Private Ryan" criticizes violence, "Fight Club" ironizes it -- "The Passion" celebrates it. The one thing Gibson's camera focuses on lovingly is Jesus's body being flayed in the film's centerpiece -- a ten-minute scourging scene that Gibson uses to titillate and bully his audience.
Those defending Gibson complain that Christianity is unpopular in Hollywood, religious films ignored. But serious films about Christianity are made every year, and many ("The Last Temptation of Christ," "The Exorcist," "The Apostle," "The End of the Affair") are defended by those who have criticized Gibson. What critics really mean is that a specific form of politically-conservative Christianity is not popular in Hollywood. Yet even critics who dislike Gibson's fundamentalism have treated his film seriously, with a respect rarely extended to Kevin Smith, whose "Dogma" said more theologically serious things about embodiment, violence and reconciliation than "The Passion."
Defenders of Gibson rightly note that the Second Vatican Council began the necessary work of reversing the Catholic Church's history of anti-Semitism, but this does not absolve Gibson the way they intend it to. Gibson opposes Vatican II and the liberalizing changes it brought to the Church. He is the primary financial backer of the Holy Family Chapel, a "traditionalist Catholic" church that rejects Vatican II and is actually not part of any Catholic diocese.
More importantly, "The Passion" violates the spirit and letter of "Nostra Aetate," the Vatican II document that officially repudiated anti-Semitism, including the deicide charge. "Nostra Aetate" includes specific instructions for conscientious portrayals of the Passion, explained in the Conference of Catholic Bishops' 1988 pamphlet, "Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion." "Nostra Aetate" counsels against visually isolating Jesus and his followers from "other Jews," against portraying Pontius Pilate as a pawn of Temple priests and against including Jewish stereotypes that have historically led to violence. "The Passion" does all of these things. I certainly do not advocate giving the Vatican veto power over art, but Gibson's clear violation of nearly every dictate of current Catholic teaching on Passion plays is important to recent discussions of this film. It is not enough to say that Gibson's account is purely biblical or his presentation "Catholic" -- it isn't.
I am, like Brown, a Catholic, and I do not doubt her sincerity when she says that "The Passion" made her "want to be a better Catholic." I want to be a better Catholic, too -- and in the wake of the Holocaust that means recognizing that the Passion is not just any "biblical story." It's a specific story with a long and ugly history, for which Christians of conscience have spent the forty years since Vatican II trying to atone.
Sarah Hagelin is a fourth-year graduate student in the College.
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