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Mel Gibson and the Counter-Reformation

His film will delight not only the church parties taking block bookings, but the gross-out teenage market, too

Philip Hensher
Friday 27 February 2004 01:00 GMT
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Hard not to think, when contemplating Mel Gibson's new movie about Jesus, of the conversation in the Saturday night queue at the multiplex in Peoria, Romford, or wherever.

"Oh, bugger, it's sold out. Was there anything apart from 21 Grams you felt like seeing?" "Well, there's a film about ice hockey." "No way." "Or there's a romantic comedy with Adam Sandler." "Absolutely not." "Or there's Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen." "I suppose we could, if there's nothing else." "Or my auntie Bernadette said that she really enjoyed the movie about Jesus when she went with her church ladies' group. She threw up four times."

The movie set to become your auntie Bernadette's favourite film since The Sound of Music is a most peculiar one, and has had such a curious history before its release that some day, surely, someone will make a movie about it. Mr Mel Gibson is a devout Roman Catholic, as everyone knows, of a particularly serious variety; he is, apparently, committed to the Latin Mass, against contraception, and periodically makes moral pronouncements which now seem unremarkable only in certain corners of the Vatican.

The Passion of the Christ, this new film, is Mr Gibson's most open statement of his religious belief. It is a graphic account of the last day in Jesus's life, as reported by the New Testament, and concentrates in a very bloodthirsty way on the various sufferings and tortures. Amusingly, the film in its search for historical accuracy uses dialogue only in the original languages, Latin for the Romans and Aramaic for the Jews. Mr Gibson's initial intention was to present the film without subtitles, benefiting principally all those fluent in ancient Aramaic in Romford and Peoria, but has been talked out of this extravagance, at least.

The film followed the very traditional path of all religious films. There was the usual rumour that the star of the film, James Cazievel, who plays Jesus, was struck by lightning while shooting. The film, once made, was sent as fast as UPS could manage it to the Pope, who saw it and was initially reported as saying "It is as it was." The Vatican subsequently denied he'd ever said any such thing, and even claimed that the Pope never reviews films or books.

Perhaps it was pointed out to him that this was obviously untrue, and, like many Popes and other religious leaders, he has had a useful sideline in reviewing over the years. It's just that, like his predecessor when sent a copy of Marie Stopes's new book, or the Ayatollah Khomeini asked to comment on The Satanic Verses, his reviews tend on the whole to be as dismissive as Simon Cowell. Anyway, the retraction was partly retracted, and we are now to understand that the Vatican sort of approves of it, or at any rate doesn't disapprove of it.

A new question quickly arose about the film, when the Anti-Defamation League - an American organisation which fights against perceived prejudice against Jews, said that it regarded the film as deliberately anti-Semitic. Some of the ADL's campaigns are, to say the least, eccentric, but in this case other commentators quickly said that they thought the film rather curiously slanted against the Jews, presenting the Romans by comparison as moral and anguished. Mr Gibon did not help himself much on this one. Asked whether the film might offend Jewish viewers now, he remarked only that "It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible. But when you look at the reasons Christ came, he was crucified, he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind. So that, really, anyone who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability." In other words, if the cap fits, wear it.

Where Mr Gibson might be coming from was revealed when his 85-year-old crackpot father chose his moment to share his views on the place of Jews in society. Auschwitz? "It's all - maybe not all - fiction, but most of it is." Apparently, all the Jews previously thought to have been murdered by the Third Reich - get this - went to Australia and America. To everyone's immense enjoyment, Mr Gibson senior went on to explain that Jews were now attempting to set up "one world religion and one world government", before starting on the familiar subject of international Jewish bankers, the US Federal Reserve and, oddly enough, the Vatican, too.

Now, Mel Gibson is certainly not responsible for his father's views, and is most unlikely to share them, but all the same, the film he has made does not seem like an argument designed to confound such eccentrics. The one concession made to his critics is that a line in the film referring to the belief that all Jewish people bear a curse for the murder of Jesus has not been subtitled.

Of course, you could perfectly reasonably argue that any faithful film of the New Testament is quite likely to strike a modern viewer as somewhat anti-Semitic in implication. That, in my view, is one reason why this whole project is a very bad idea. But what is more interesting about the project is the degree to which it tries to convince its audience through an insistence on blood and guts, going on about physical suffering with all the gleeful expertise a top-notch make-up artist can bring to it. Every reviewer has commented on how remarkably bloody the film is, as interested in wounds and torture as The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre. Behind the devout intentions, Mr Gibson seems to have devised a film which will delight not only the church parties taking block bookings, but the gross-out teenage market, too.

The whole business has the air of the Counter-Reformation about it. The original Counter-Reformation responded to a new-style spiritual conviction with an insistence on physical realities; on lavish splendour in churches, and, in visual art, a terrifying literalism which dwelt, in a morbid way, on the physical sufferings of martyrs. There is something very similar going on here. What has been threatening religious belief for a century now is an increasing understanding of the physical world, which starts to leave little place for mystery, and no requirement for religion. Very well: the religious argument will start to take place on the level of physical realities too; with graphic representations of extreme physical states.

Beyond this level of gross literal realism, it is hard to see where anyone can go; it is not something anyone can decently argue with. On the other hand, once in this realm of literally rendered physical pain, a monstrous degree of prurience creeps in; moral considerations about what Christianity might actually mean, if anyone ever started to practise it, start to take a back seat.

On the whole, this sinister-sounding and obscurely-motivated film might not at all be the outward expression of a confident faith; like the Counter-Reformation, it might be the sign of a set of beliefs which feel themselves very much on the back foot, and are starting to reach for some fairly extreme tactics.

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