The Passion of the Christ
Mel Gibson

Dolan Cummings

The success of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ has been widely interpreted as evidence that religion still matters, and that in America in particular, Christianity is a force to be reckoned with. But the gospel according to Mel betrays a peculiarly unsophisticated take on the key event in the Christian tradition, and casts doubt on the idea that religion is on the march.

Undoubtedly it is the American churches that have made the film a success, booking up whole cinemas and ensuring that everyone is talking about it. Without their support, publicists might have struggled to convince people to watch a whole film in two dead languages, subtitles or not. This linguistic folly seems all the more ridiculous because one of the languages (Aramaic) sounds just like Klingon.

Gibson's use of Latin, meanwhile, clearly reflects his widely publicised but hardly popular attachment to the Latin mass. The 'church Latin' used in the film certainly would not have been spoken at the time; in fact, it is more likely that the Romans in Judea would have spoken Greek anyway. But having Jesus speak a few lines in the language of the Roman Catholic Church lends bogus authority to the traditional mass that Gibson and other conservative Catholics are so keen to preserve.

More than that, Gibson's use of 'authentic' languages is clearly supposed to give the impression of a direct and unmediated rendering of the story. The attempt at naturalism is not consistent; apart from the fact that the Latin is wrong, there's the fact that even after the beating of the millennium, Christ's cries of pain reveal actor Jim Caviezel's perfectly aligned teeth. But undoubtedly, Gibson wants us to see the film not just as another movie about Jesus, but as the real thing. His implied claim that (as the Pope allegedly put it) 'it is as it was' might even be considered blasphemous.

This is not the place to discuss the relative merits of text versus film, but certainly The Passion of the Christ is a particularly direct, 'audio-visual' film, with little psychological depth or complexity of composition. The relentless violence and excessive bloodiness have been widely commented on. By the time Pontius Pilate shouts to the mob, 'Ecce homo!', there is barely a man to behold, just a bloody wreck. For all the gravity of the role, then, Caviezel can hardly have had an easier job in his career. The Passion of the Christ is little more than a religious snuff movie.

Notoriously, the film has been accused of anti-Semitism on the grounds that it seems to blame the Jews for the crucifixion, while giving the Romans an easy ride. This is unfair, because in this at least, Gibson is only following the gospels. According to the standard cod-Marxist account, the gospels blame the Jews because they were unable to criticise the Roman authorities. This may be true, but there is more to it than that.

My experience of discussing politics or just about anything else with Christians is that sooner or later the problem with 'the heart of man' always comes up. For Christians, the story of the Passion illustrates the wickedness of all human beings. Blaming the Romans would be like blaming 'the system', and letting all us sinners off the hook. It may or may not be good history, but it's definitely bad religion. Of course, by the same token (and many others), it is equally un-Christian to blame the Jews, but most Christians seem to have got Gibson's intended message loud and clear: 'I killed Christ. He died for my sins.'

Certainly that was the response of those American Christians interviewed for the Channel 4 documentary God's Lethal Weapon (shown on 28 March 2004). The film seemed to affirm them in their faith, or at least in their prejudice that human beings are bestial and unworthy. Indeed, what was shocking was that many of them came close to saying the film is 'better than the book' in getting this across. Sinner after sinner announced that for the first time they had truly felt the power of the Passion. For some, it seems, Gibson's audio-visual approach has succeeded where the mere Word of God fails.

Screenwriter Paul Schrader, whose lapsed Calvinist background gave a more cerebral religious dimension to films like Taxi Driver, and of course The Last Temptation of Christ, has noted The Passion of the Christ's lack of sophistication. 'I thought it was medieval. My guess is that Mel has a problem with the Enlightenment, because his film really does go back to the visceral cult origins of Christianity.'

That the churches have embraced such a primitive account of the Passion is hardly a sign of strength. And the fact that America's allegedly fundamentalist Protestant churches are singing the praises of a film by a dogmatic Roman Catholic certainly suggests that something fishy is going on. Religious disputes at least indicate that religion matters. The box office ecumenism of The Passion of the Christ reeks of desperation, and suggests it isn't that Americans are in thrall to Gibson's superficial version of Christianity, so much as that they are only superficially religious.

Originally published on spiked.