| QUOTE (Shadfox @ Feb 18 2005, 08:12 PM) | It's a bit off topic, but I was just browsing Anne Rice's http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/AB4F6UHL20U95/102-0266980-6589761?%5Fencoding=UTF8&display=public&page=2 section and to my surprise she seems to be quite fond of Christian theology studies. She left this review for The Passion:
| QUOTE | | Gibson created something of enduring magnificence. He did it with intense focus, and total commitment. The refusal of much of the intelligensia to engage in responsible dialogue about this film revealed immense hypocracy and cynicism. The violence is not a legitimate issue. Prime Time television with it crime show obsessions centered on killing children is so much more truly violent as to make public discussions of the cruelty in the Passion of the Christ ridiculous. The Passion achieves a near impossible goal: the accurate dipiction of a first century execution and an embracing vision of the moment that changed the history of the western world, as remembered by those who insist upon that event's unchanging religious significance. Whatever your beliefs, or lack of beliefs, it's worth your respect and attention. It's absurd to think children will be harmed by this movie when network television spews lurid stories of kidnapping, maiming, rape, and murder into our homes every night. The film has set a new and very high standard for religious films and identified a huge audience that hungers for spiritual content in media. |
Bleh.  |
"Bleh" it may be, Shad, but there is a lot to what she says.
The problem with "The Passion," or even the gospel story, isn't that it's violent. Our world is violent - a fact that most of us can afford to ignore because it doesn't effect us directly. And she's correct that despite the brutality in the movie, it is simply a drop in an ocean of storytelling that goes back to the dawn of human history. Life is grotesque, painful, and always ends in death. Every ancient religion, including pre-exhillic Judaism, practiced human sacrifice and the sacred kingship at one point or another. It's central to the idea of sympathetic magic - for one thing to live, another must die.
And, indeed, our stories are, to this day, full of the macabre - even children's faerie stories are exceedingly grim, particularly when read in the un-disneyfied version.
The problem with "The Passion" lies in none of these things - for if it lies in its content alone then we truly are hypocrites who applaud films like "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Matrix" and all manner of other violent entertainments, both artistic and (blegh) commercial.
The problem is that people take it seriously as life, rather than as art. Historically, it has far more problems than the ethnicity of the actors, but even that isn't enough to make it distasteful.
No, the thing that makes it morally distasteful is that it turns human sacrifice into a good thing, in and of itself. It's selling human sacrifice to an audience that largely doesn't understand the context (even the Christian audience) and can't tell the differences between the artistic flourishes and the original story or even the likely history of such executions.
She is also right that people in the broader culture are demanding more depth in their entertainments. And who can blame them? 20 years of MTV and 50 years of sitcoms will do that to a culture. The problem comes in confusing religious propaganda with genuine spirituality, and "The Passion" seems to fall somewhere in between - credally programatic and deliberately manipulative, and yet posessing a degree of the genuine self-effacement that Gibson is so good at communicating. But, more to the point, "The Passion" tells a piece of a powerful myth, but without any serious reflection on the themes it brings to the fore, and it tells only the piece of the myth that elicits a visceral reaction without providing a lot of context. This makes it an effective mirror for thoughtful people - particularly thoughtful Christians, but leaves it in the realm of a combination Chick Tract/snuff porn film for the rest of the audience (i.e. Christians who are used to a programatic response to a familar story).
Of course, there is also the interesting matter of Anne Rice talking down the popular "spewing lurid stories of kidnapping, maiming, rape, and murder" when she herself is an accomplished B&D porn, vampire porn, and snuff porn author, but then again she likely sees the written word and the broadcast image in qualitatively different categories (an intellectual distinction which I think is artificial). But she IS correct in pointing out that fretting about "what the children" are watching is something sligtly beyond ludicrous. Preoccupation with offensive content misses the point of storytelling - in fact, it subverts the cultural value of story by reducing it to a laundry list of things people might find objectionable. And the refusal of freethinkers to thoughfully engage the film DOES smack of hypocricy and cynicism, when films with far more objectionable content ("Kids," "Happiness," "Crash," "Saving Private Ryan," etc.) have won immense critical acclaim in recent years for their courage and unflinching engagement of dark and unpleasant topics - as well they should have! Shielding ourselves from our own unpleasantness only creates dishonesty and taboos - one of the roles of story in culture is to bring ourselves face to face with that which we would rather avoid. Likewise, the Crucifixion is a dark and unpleasant topic; because of its enduring cultural significance, the inherent brutality of the method of execution, and it thus shows up the heart of darkess in the human spirit.
-Lokmer
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someone I'd like to fuck. 
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