|
body and soul
I haven't yet seen The Passion of the Christ, but I've been following the responses of others to the film with some interest.
I'll confess that I feel an early affinity with writers who have criticized the film—I get the feeling that Gibson has produced the film as a zealous dogmatist, and if I were attempting to describe my own spiritual side, "dogmatic" would be unlikely to be an adjective I'd choose.
So I was receptive when I read this bit from Body and Soul:
"I have a ... memory of boys who talked about the suffering of Jesus as if it were proof of manhood. The same boys who told stories about Indian tribes that tied boys to red anthills or hung them by their nipples to see if they could take it, if they were really men. The boys who thought kamikazes were the ultimate cool ... Putting all your attention on death inevitably leads to something cruel."
Or these bits from The New Yorker's review of the film:
"[Gibson] can rightly claim that there's a strain of morbidity running through Christian iconography—one thinks of the reliquaries in Roman churches and the bloody and ravaged Christ in Northern Renaissance and German art, culminating in such works as Matthias Grunewald's 1515 'Isenheim Altarpiece,' with its thorned Christ in full torment on the Cross. But the central tradition of Italian Renaissance painting left Christ relatively unscathed; the artists emphasized not the physical suffering of the man but the sacrificial nature of his death and the astonishing mystery of his transformation into godhood—the Resurrection and the triumph over carnality ... The despair of the movie is hard to shrug off, and Gibson's timing couldn't be more unfortunate: another dose of death-haunted religious fanaticism is the last thing we need."
Or even this bit from conservative critic Andrew Sullivan:
"In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh."
But, as I thought about blogging these reviews, something began to gnaw at me. I don't necessarily believe that filmic violence is a bad thing, and when I began to feel less comfortable with these critics when I realized that some of them seemed to be leaning towards a blanket "movies these days are too violent" argument.
Now, granted, there are a whole set of valid questions that open up here that go beyond just "is movie violence good or bad?":
Is this specific movie telling this specific story served by including so much violence?
What are the effects of filmic violence on the spiritual mind?
Is filmic violence an effective evangelical tool? Is it a "fair" tool to use?
What are the cultural ramifications of creating a film that uses violence to evangelize at this particular cultural moment?
Etc etc. In trying to puzzle through some of those questions, and in trying to figure out how the reviewers thought about those questions, I began to find that the emphasis in some of these reviews on "mere flesh" didn't sit well with me. The idea that the physical body and the material world are not holy, that they are things that need to be transcended, is an old idea in religious thinking, but religious thinking also contains a parallel strand, one that teaches that divinity is in all material things, including the body. Is the Jesus story really the story of "the triumph over carnality?" Or is it trying to tell us something more sophisticated: that the essence of God is equally at home in the carnal as it is in the ineffable? I don't actually think that this is the point that Gibson's film is trying to make, but I think critics of the film need to be careful not to fall into the normal trap that discounts the spirituality inherent in the physical.
I have a related problem with Czeslaw Milosz's A Book of Luminous Things, which I re-read this winter. This anthology contains many excellent poems that stress spiritual union with all things, but the book as a whole also reveals Milosz's marked anti-technological, anti-urban stance. If you share the mystical belief that everything is interconnected, you should be able to perceive God in an integrated circuit just as easily as as you can perceive him/her/it in a lotus blossom; you should be able to perceive the divine in the mercurial turbulence of the city as easily as you can perceive it in the permanence of the mountain.
Spotted at the bookstore: God as She Who Changes.
And, finally, The Passion of the Christ blooper reel. |
