<< Front page Arts March 12, 2004

Pop Culture Digest

Mel Gibson’s controversial film is raking in the bucks

A film of seemingly endless controversy, receiving enough ink to fill the Sea of Reeds and enough media attention to start up a 24-hour news channel, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is one of the hottest topics in America right now. But the momentum for this film didn’t begin a few weeks ago. The film received attention from the get-go because of Mel Gibson’s celebrity — this being his first directorial project since 1995’s Academy Award winning Braveheart — and because it focuses on a man whom millions of people around the globe worship.

As production rolled along, there always seemed to be something to talk about with the film. If it wasn’t how the film was going to be only in Aramaic and Latin with subtitles, it was how Gibson said that an angel came to him in a dream and told him to make the film. If it wasn’t how Gibson belonged to a Catholic sect that didn’t acknowledge Vatican II and how his anti-Semitic dad denied the existence of the Holocaust, it was how Gibson was screening the film for every religious figure on the planet. Word of the insane amount of violence surfaced at the same time that church groups were planning to sell out theaters based solely on the information that the guy who starred in Bird on a Wire directed a film about everyone’s favorite martyr, Jesus. And then there’s the entire controversy over whether or not the film is anti-Semitic.

Now, two-and-a-half weeks since its theatrical release, The Passion has grossed over $220 million, putting it well on its way to being the highest grossing R-rated film of all time. How did a film about Jesus who, while a popular figure, has never been as big a box office draw as, say, Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts, get so big and get so much attention? The quick and dirty answer: controversy and Christians.

While Christians may be a large audience when making a movie about Christ, how do you pull in the rest of the American populace? Gibson put in $25 million of his own money and used his own independent studio, Icon Productions, to make the film, but despite his name, no distributor wanted to touch what was sure to be such a controversial film. (http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/2003-10-08)

But Newmarket Films stepped up and instead of shying away from the controversy, they created a marketing campaign around it. Instead of blowing money on trailers or posters, Newmarket made the media work for them, and, oh, did the media do work. All of the aforementioned controversy flooded print and internet media, pundits debated the film and religious leaders from all faiths were questioned about their opinion on it regardless of having seen it or not. So when the release date finally rolled around, most of America wanted to know what all the fuss was about.

After all the controversy and all the attention, I had to see The Passion (which depicts the last 12 hours of Jesus’s life) so that I could have an opinion on this phenomenon that had put the nation into a craze. And as I walked out of the film, all I could think of was, “What was the point of that movie?”

The Passion of the Christ is a bad movie. The film spends two hours showing how Jesus suffered — but all it shows is suffering. It never explains why that suffering is important or worth exploring. It’s just violence upon violence with little context whatsoever. And while that violence may be rooted in the history of Christianity, the amount of depth to which Gibson carries this bloodshed cannot exist in any religious text. Someone please show me where it says “and then we saw the bones of Jesus’ ribcage along with some of his internal organs, and it was gross,” or “and then even more chunks of Jesus’ flesh got ripped away by mean Romans” or “and then Jesus fell down in slow motion. Again.”

And while the film is almost completely violence, it puts on the veneer of a moving epic. The cinematography is grandiose. The production design is impeccable. The sets and the costumes are quite stunning and the music is equally powerful. But all of it is just a candy-coated shell. It’s just style over substance and The Passion has no substance other than, “Look. Jesus suffered. Feel moved lest you incur the Lord’s wrath.”

But The Passion is a fundamentally flawed film before factoring in the amount of gore and violence. Gibson tries to put the film in a historical context, which is why he uses Latin and Aramaic and tries to set up the events in a specific timeframe. But at the same time, Gibson is using the Gospels and some other questionable sources as the historical basis for this film. The historical accuracy of those texts is incredibly questionable and at times downright false. Nevertheless, when the viewer isn’t seeing Jesus’s incredible ability not to die of blood loss, the focus goes to the background, showing Jerusalem circa 30 C.E. as a place ruled by the impeccably outfitted Jews who ruled the land and the unfortunate Romans like Pontius Pilate who just didn’t want to step on any toes. While the film may not be intended to be anti-Semitic, it doesn’t show a balanced view of history.

Nor does it put any responsibility on the shoulders of Jesus. Throughout the film the audience gets to witness Jesus’s greatest hits, such as the “he who casts the first stone” phrase and the Last Supper. Yet in all these moments, Gibson decides that it’s not important to show why Jesus was in trouble with the Jews or how this all came to pass. In showing the highlights of Jesus’s life, why not show him turning the tables in the temple? Why leave that out?

As Passion madness looks to continue for at least the next few weeks, what does this film mean for Hollywood and for America? Well, for Hollywood it’s simple reinforcement that 90 percent of the time there is no such thing as bad publicity. It also seems to aim directly at the Christian populace as a target audience.

But while Hollywood is a place of milking a trend dry as quickly as possible, The Passion has a much stranger repercussion as a cultural phenomenon. What does it say about the country that you can go to sharethepassionofthechrist.com and buy pendants that have nails on them? What does it say that no one considers that despite being “Christian” (I put that in quotes because I don’t think that most Christians define themselves through mindless violence), the film is totally inappropriate for children and people who have heart conditions? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I will say that while religion is an incredibly sensitive subject for many people, it’s apparently not so delicate that it can’t rake in millions and millions of dollars.


 
 
   

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