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Fractured Messiah

The Challenge to Traditional Representations of Christ in the Postmodern Gospel Drama.
 
Author:
Philip R. Fagan
 
Copyright Date:
2001
 
In the ongoing discourse seeking to define the slippery realm of postmodern criticism, it is widely acknowledged that the concept itself is no longer restricted to “fringe” art or “cyberspace” sensibilities. As Jack Solomon has suggested, postmodernism has come to encompass a prevailing worldview, a philosophical orientation of sorts rooted deep in our collective subconscious. The study of postmodernism is an important undertaking, as the accelerating pace of technological advances and cultural shifts has redefined what it is to be human in the postindustrial world. To discover who we now are and how we got here, both as individuals and as a society, such critical thinking is a valuable tool for analyzing the significance and impact of the vast transformations in our culture since the 1950s. By identifying the underlying catalysts of these changes- secularization, industrialization, consumer and computer culture, the media-saturated lifestyle, etc.- and the cultural artifacts that typify this new era, the postmodern critic has presented a society that has lost its center, if not its soul. If we are powerless to stop the tide, we might at least be aware it exists and enjoy the ride (Solomon, 1998). An attempt to take stock of the collective value system or philosophy of an entire society or cultural era is hopeless to say the least; therefore cultural theory must approach its task through the discussion of particular cultural artifacts. Such texts can then be interpreted as both an expression of, and a commentary on, the culture at large (Barry, 1995, pp. 35-36). Hence, the argument that literature, visual art, film and the mass media, music, value systems, technology, politics, economics, religion, and the general orientation of life itself in the new millennium can all be said to be “postmodern” (Woods, 1999, p. 2). However, it is in the analysis of popular cultural artifacts that the argument for postmodernism, and theory in general, seems firmly grounded. Critics continue to debate whether a postmodern theory is valid and many argue that we are still entrenched in the modern era (Woods, 1999, pp.32-37). While acknowledging that postmodernism cannot be wholly separated from modernism and is in fact an extension of it, proponents of postmodern criticism point to the vast changes in our culture, lifestyle and value systems over the past fifty years to argue their case. The sense of alienation and the use of the fragmented forms, pastiche, experimentation, and self-reflexivity which characterized the works of “high modernist” writers such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in the first half of the last century have become the building blocks of postmodern criticism. Such texts possess a certain nostalgia, the longing for an idealized past which post-industrial man felt permanently cut off from (Woods, 1999, pp. 8-9). This sentiment is reinforced in the postmodern artifact as well. Additionally, modernist avant-garde tendencies, such as the surrealism of the 1920s, have been co-opted by postmodern thought and have become somewhat essential in defining it (Barry, 1995, Smith, 1998). Another modernist movement from the early 1900s, Futurism, argued that technology produced during the industrial revolution would usher out the age of religious belief and free men from the chains of outdated traditions and beliefs (Solomon, pp. 42-44). Such thinking has become a keystone in today’s postmodern discourse on the computer age. Postmodernism then takes place “alongside and even against modernism” (De Bleeckere, 1997, p. 95). It is therefore only a matter of degree, of “tone or attitude” (Barry, 1995, p.84), and the cultural era in which a given artifact is produced, that renders the particular text postmodern rather than modernist. The notions of both modernism and postmodernism are also inextricably entwined with the poststructuralist, or deconstruction, theory first articulated by Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Poststructuralism, broadly defined, argues that texts and their narratives are inherently decentred and fragmented, and that critical theory must seek to explore this disunity (Barry, 1995, pp.61-73). A disconnect, or estrangement, from traditional textual forms and interpretations is stressed; and as narrative loses its function and history is in essence invalidated, a sense of “style over substance” seems to pervade the arts and cultural artifacts in general. Deconstruction theory has continued to be a dominant form of discourse, focusing on the instability and transformation of established genres and styles. It is this deconstructive tendency that contemporary critics often explore when examining genre films produced within the postmodern culture (Altman, 1999, Benshoff, 1997; Browne, 1998; Gitlin, 1998; Craven & Maltby, 1995; Hawkins, 2000). The consensus is that while postmodernism cannot be isolated from modernism, neither can poststructuralism stand completely apart from either theoretical form. By extension, deconstruction becomes a primary criterion of postmodern theory (Barry, 1995; Gitlin, 1998; Woods, 1999). While countless critics have used film and other forms of popular culture to argue a postmodern sensibility, they have generally restricted their discourse to texts that are rather blatantly postmodern in form, content and / or style. For example, Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot is widely agreed to be a prototype of the postmodernist loss of faith in both the sacred and material worlds (Barry, 2002; Solomon, 1998; Woods, 1999). The play’s sardonic portrayal of the boring repetition of life and the meaninglessness of language and narrative exemplifies a new worldview devoid of meaning and purpose. Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk film Blade Runner undoubtedly exemplifies the postmodern attraction to / revulsion of technology (Solomon, 1998; Hawkins, 2000; Woods, 2000); while the contemporary horror film in general has proven a genre that begs postmodern examination (Benshoff, 1997; Hawkins, 2000; Pinedo, 1997) in much the same manner as it was previously engaged for feminist rhetoric. While such studies are important, they are inherently limited in what they can tell us about a pervasive postmodern sensibility or cultural era, in a generalized sense. By focusing on texts that readily fit into the “style” or thematics of postmodern criticism, they inevitably examine the form and fashion of the artifact itself, thereby limiting an analysis of the broader cultural context in which the text is situated. Conversely, it is only by examining texts produced within the present cultural era that have not been traditionally associated with postmodern theory that any effective argument for the existence of a postmodern cultural orientation can be constructed. Defining the Postmodern Gospel Drama In the case of the “Gospel Drama”, analyzing the transformation of a particular film genre (other than postmodern “standbys” such as science fiction and horror) can provide a new perspective on postmodern discourse, as well as an extended awareness of the postmodern presence in our culture in general. The Gospel Drama is the author’s term for the corpus of films that portray the life of Christ in a dramatic fashion. Such films include From the Manger to the Cross (1912), The King of Kings (1961), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and Jesus of Nazareth (1977), among many others. Old Testament epics such as The Ten Commandments (1923, 1956) are not included in this analysis for obvious reasons. Also inappropriate for consideration here are the “alternative trajectory” Jesus-story films which subordinate the Gospel narrative and instead focus on other related characters or events (Tatum, 1997, p. 13). This tradition includes films such as Intolerance (1916), The Robe (1953) and Barrabbas (1962). The postmodern Gospel Drama, then, is a series of films that deal dramatically, and exclusively, with the life of Christ; yet comprise a break with the history of the genre in that they were produced within the postmodern cultural era and meet a variety of criteria acknowledged as denoting a postmodern mode of cinematic expression. The following analysis will focus on three films which are demonstrably postmodern in their cinematic approach to the Gospel drama: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964); Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). These films were screened and studied by the author, and a wide variety of applicable critical writings were reviewed. To position the three study films in the realm of the postmodern, a brief overview of the Gospel drama genre throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century will draw on various sources in order to define what constitutes the more traditional screen representation of Christ. The three study films are appropriate texts to consider for a number of reasons. The latter two are arguably the most controversial mainstream films ever made, continuing to polarize audiences and critics alike, thus begging further analysis due to their cultural significance alone. Historically, the three films are situated at approximate twenty-year intervals, and are thereby representative of the postmodern epoch from its earliest days to the present. Also, as postmodernism is inextricably bound up with the loss of religious faith and an assault on traditional western narrative forms, films about Christ can readily be examined from either of these closely related criteria. Lastly, as these films have provoked such polarized reactions, they provide a vehicle to analyze the political tension within postmodern rhetoric, and the unresolved discourse as to whether the theory denotes either fascism or Marxism (Barry, 1995; Gitlin, 1998; Sklar, 1994; Woods, 1999). More specifically, the films will be examined as embodying the following four widely agreed upon aspects of postmodern film criticism, which are interrelated to varying degrees: Fragmentation: non-centered, nonlinear narrative forms; plurality; schizophrenia; alienation; rejection of metanarrative and history; transgression of boundaries (of conventional norms; generic and high art/ low art distinctions), intertextuality. Semiotic Excess: surface over narrative, special effects, explicit sex, violence and gore. Nostalgia: a longing for past forms and styles; cultural exhaustion, hybridization, pastiche, allusion, self-reflexivity, cultural references. Body Fetishism: the fascination with and emphasis on the human body, subordinating the virtues of mind, spirit and narrative. In applying the above criteria to an analysis of the postmodern challenge to the Gospel film genre, the definitions of these terms will be defined and refined throughout this examination, drawing on a wide range of critical writings. Jesus and Genre Theory Jaroslav Pelikan’s study Jesus Through the Centuries is an in-depth examination of the various ways in which the figure of Christ has been portrayed in the popular imagination thoughout history. Pelikan explores the practice in which each age recreates Jesus in its own image, co-opting “the dominant figure in western culture” (Tatum, p.1) in order to mirror its own ideologies and value systems. While Pelikan (1985) asserts that his work has drawn on artifacts of both “high culture” and “popular culture” (pp. 6-7), his study fails to include representations of Jesus in film. This omission is odd indeed, in that the motion picture is arguably the dominant cultural force of the Twentieth Century and its influence continues unabated into the new millennium. Additionally, at the dawn of cinema Jesus quickly became a favorite subject among early filmmakers. The Gospel Drama emerged as one of the first film genres and has remained one of its most conventionally stable. This developing cinematic preoccupation with the Christ story coincided with a similar interest by scholars and historians to develop theories concerning the true nature and history of Jesus apart from theological concerns. Despite the growing secularism of the modern era with its emphasis on the individual and the historical, films about Jesus drew on centuries of church tradition rather than the scholarly research of the progressive Christology movement. Cinematic portrayals of Christ were criticized for their ultra-conservative traditional approach as early as 1927, with Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings being derided for its painterly compositions and failure to treat its subject “as cinema, as moving pictures” (Tatum, p. 7). A safe and traditional screen representation of Christ defined the Gospel drama from the beginning, arguably at the expense of the medium’s potential to address such subject matter. Like all film genres, certain conventions were almost universally applied to the Gospel Drama in order to insure identification by, and favor with, audiences. Chief among these was the practice of constructing the narrative through a “harmonizing” hybrid of the four Gospels of the New Testament- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (Tatum, p.12), a practice very much in keeping with the more traditional approaches to theology. Alternative visions such as those described above were rare indeed, and such films were equally consistent with traditional notions of Christ and unchallenging to mainstream and Christian audiences alike. The essential difference was that these works drew upon sources other than the Bible for their scripts and focused their narratives on characters other than Christ. However, the cultural shift of the 1960s led to a wide-scale trend of cinematic revisionism, and the deconstruction of traditional film genres. Critics such as Rick Altman (1999) and Maltby and Craven (1995) have written extensively about the instability of genres and how, particularly from the 1960s to the present, their iconography and motifs have been transformed to a barely recognizable state while still maintaining their generic codings and audience appeal. I would suggest that the Gospel drama, due to its subject’s special relationship to society, has only recently begun to be deconstructed to the extent in which, for example, the Western genre was overhauled in the 1960s and 70s by directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Despite the steady stream of Gospel Drama films throughout the postmodern era, the genre remained remarkably stable until the 1980s with few exceptions. One of these exceptions, and arguably the root of the generic transformation in question, is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Pasolini’s Marxist Messiah Notorious for his cinematic obsessions with violence, sex and death, Pier Paolo Pasolini seemed to embody the alienation and fragmentation that has come to define the postmodern age. An Italian poet, novelist, filmmaker, Communist, and homosexual, he considered himself both a Catholic and a mystical atheist. He had previously incurred the wrath of the Church with his segment of the film RoGoPaG, a collaboration with other great European directors of the 1960s. The Pasolini segment portrayed unseemly events amid the filming of a passion play. Despite his cultivated disbelief in God and Communistic conviction that the Church was the root of all evil, he not only dedicated his Christ film to “The Dear, Familiar Memory of Pope John XXIII”, but produced arguably the most heartfelt and eloquent Gospel Drama ever. The power of his vision lies in its break with traditional forms of representation. While remaining steadfast to generic conventions and audience expectations, he also provides a screen version of the Christ story markedly different than any before or since. Torn between nostalgia and disbelief, past and present, Pasolini offers up the screen’s first distinctly postmodern Jesus. The Gospel According to St. Matthew, as its title suggests, eschews the standard harmonizing approach to the Gospels in favor of exploring a single account of the life of Christ. “Redaction criticism”, which places an historical emphasis on the individual authors of the Bible, was very much en vogue among theologians and scholars of the 1960s (Tatum, p. 104) and surely influenced Pasolini’s approach to his screenplay. Unlike his predecessors, Pasolini completely avoids any scripted dialogue, and draws only from the single Gospel text, omitting portions as he sees fit. Cinematically, the film begs a postmodern critique. Shot in grainy black and white, it blurs the boundaries between the past and the present. While nostalgically recalling the beginnings of the Christ film genre, it is at times indistinguishable from an ancient silent film. It simultaneously references both the Italian Neo-realist sensibility and the Direct Cinema/ Cinema Verite documentary movements of Pasolini’s own time. The casting of working class non-actors also mirrors such styles, with their emphasis on the everyday, as does the “talking head” approach to the sermon on the mount (Tatum, p.107) with Jesus close-up and staring at the viewer as though being interviewed. In some scenes, the viewer is positioned at a distance watching the events unfold as a member of the crowd, or perhaps as a member of the film crew itself. Through such devices, the film longs for the Biblical / cinematic past while being self-reflexive about its own filmic era. Pasolini’s peculiar film grammar is also on flagrant display, with long takes of feature-distorting close-ups, erratic cuts and zooms and strange compositional juxtapositions that entrench the film firmly in the realm of 1960s experimental “World Cinema”. The use of music in the film provides a similar function. Working against the constraints of genre, Pasolini creates a hybrid soundtrack ranging from the traditional to the modern. A “negro spiritual” by American blues singer Odetta creates a jarring juxtaposition with the on-screen Biblical world, referencing the contemporary age instead, and blurring the boundaries of time, space and genre. Similarly, Christ cures a Leper to the strains of Leadbelly’s steel guitar. African chants and drumming provide both a contemporary sound as well as the proper ancient/exotic feel for the story, while at the same time have no tangential connection to the world of the Bible. As if to remind us that this is a nostalgic homage to the Jesus films of the past, Pasolini throws in a classicalal orchestra piece that might have accompanied the first silent Gospel dramas: Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”. The erratic, even nonsensical soundtrack defies all conventions of film language and at the same moment embraces them all. It is in essence a copy without an original. For all its simplicity of narrative, not to mention its overt familiarity, the film feels decentred and fragmented throughout, as if missing some vital unifying force. Pasolini claims divine authorship, even casting his mother as the Virgin Mary. While remaining truer to his source material than previous Gospel Dramas, Pasolini constructs a Messiah who is very much in step with his own times and communist agenda. As embodied by a Spanish college student named Enrique Irazoqui, Jesus is portrayed as an outspoken Marxist revolutionary bent on social change. He appears impatient and intense in his sermons, and Pasolini intentionally includes Jesus’ most aggressive and incendiary rants from the Book of Matthew, rendering him a political subversive. The film includes both John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ entire word-for-word condemnations of the hypocrisy of religious leaders, scenes generally downplayed or omitted in Gospel Dramas of the past (Tatum, p.110). In this way, Pasolini comments on the Roman Catholic Church of his day, rendering Jesus as a “subversive character who undercuts ecclesiasticlal authority in the modern world” (Tatum, p.112). In sharp contrast with the more traditional fair, frail and gentle representations of Christ, this Jesus is all stern black eyes, working class tough, and ready to usher in social reform. Walking on the turbulent waves of the Countercultural Revolution, the Postmodern Messiah had descended to the screen. Scorsese’s Schizophrenic Savior Reacting to the Hippie movement of the late 1960s, and perhaps to Pasolini’s groundbreaking vision, two Gospel musicals appeared in 1973. While Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar are essentially postmodern texts, combining the Christ story with the Hollywood musical, they are too firmly entrenched in the musical genre (at the expense of a dramatic interpretation) to be considered as Gospel Drama texts. Like Pasolini, John Heyman drew on only one book of the New Testament (Luke) for his 1979 film Jesus, but the choice of source text was the only exceptional aspect of a standard generic offering. Not until 1984 would a thoroughly unconventional screen portrait of Christ take to the silver screen and, amid public outcry, forever challenge the boundaries of religion and popular culture. If Pasolini’s film sought to “re-mystify” the story of Christ (Tatum, p.105), Scorsese’s concern is with “de-mystification”, a postmodern debunking of the defining master narrative of the western world. The film is indicative of both cultural exhaustion, in which the Christ film had by then been recycled to the point of obsolescence, as well as nostalgia, in which a return to the obsolete form is longed for and replicated. Furthermore, in its depiction of the struggle between the spirit and the flesh, it addresses the concept of fragmentation within the psyche of Jesus himself. The Last Temptation also epitomizes the postmodern challenge to metanarrative through its intertextuality. The film’s source, rather than the New Testament, is the controversial novel of the life of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis (1960). The author’s perspective is shaped by his own very fragmented spiritual journey, which included Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Nietzschean philosophy, Buddhism, and Marxism (Tatum, p. 161). The film’s director Martin Scorsese, famous for his brutal cinematic depictions of New York City life, once studied to become a Roman Catholic priest (Tatum, p.162) and admits to being heavily influenced by traditional Biblical films (Riley, 2003, p.38) but especially by Pasolini’s interpretation (Christie & Thompson, 1989; Marsh & Ortiz, 1997). Paul Schrader, a regular Scorsese collaborator who co-authored the script, had grown up in a strict Calvinist environment and had previously authored a book identifying a Transcendental Style in Film (1972). Considering the muddled plurality of conflicting and conflicted religious perspectives involved in its creation, The Last Temptation was destined to be a highly controversial unorthodox approach to the Gospel Drama. The schizophrenia so associated with postmodernism would manifest itself in the character of Jesus as portrayed by Willem Dafoe. Scorsese himself has commented on the psychological instability of his screen Jesus and the conflict engendered by the dissociation of the human and divine: “He is acting purely on human emotions and human psychology, so He becomes confused and troubled. I thought this neurotic- even psychotic- Jesus was not very different from the shifts of mood and psychology that you find glimpses of in the Gospels”(Christie & Thompson, pp. 116-17). This Jesus collapses in epileptic siezures; emasculates himself with torture devices; makes crosses for the Romans; can’t decide if he is being called by God or Satan; seemingly allows his mood swings to determine whether he is the God of love or of “the Sword”; and is generally at the mercy of His human impulses. As his companion Judas asks incredulously at one point, “First it’s love…then the axe…now, you have to die?” He is never sure of his status as messiah, admitting he is “a liar; I never tell the truth” and expresses the fear that “Lucifer is inside me”(Riley, pp.15-16). Throughout, the disciples struggle to understand him, as they do in the New Testament. Here, however, his puzzling parables suggest mental instability. Other characterizations that subvert the traditional Gospel narrative include Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey), who here is Christ’s childhood girlfirend, abandoned by him and now a prostitute whom he watches perform her services at one point. Both she and Jesus’ mother are heavily tattooed. Judas, portrayed by Scorsese veteran Harvey Keitel, is posited as Jesus’ best friend, co-conspirator and number one disciple, who uses Jesus for his own radical political agenda and functions as a tragic hero who is forced to betray Christ in order to fulfill the prophecy of the Old Testament. The casting of the disciples is reminiscent of Pasolini’s neo-realist approach, with tough, heavily accented New York character actors like Victor Argo and John Lurie recalling Scorsese’s own body of work and giving the proceedings a sense of “Mean Streets in Jerusalem” (Christie & Thompson, p.127). Harry Dean Stanton as the Apostle Paul, with his Southern drawl sermonizing, parodies the trend of 1980s “televangelism”, while the British accents of Pontius Pilate (David Bowie) and the Devil (Juliette Caton) are an obvious homage to traditional Gospel Drama conventions. In a perverse homage to Pasolini, who cast a beautiful young girl as the messenger angel in his Christ film, Scorsese portrays Satan, masquerading as a messenger angel, in the form of a seemingly innocent girl. In addition to referencing his own work and the tradition of Christ films, Scorsese offers up an intertextual pastiche of other film genres. In order to reveal the tortured mind of the protagonist, he implements the first “first person” Jesus, utilizing voice-over narration throughout the film. This brings to mind not only Scorsese classics such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, but also the films noir of the 1940s and 50s, which the director admires and has consistently emulated in his own body of work. Several scenes seem straight out of a horror film, such as the bloody scenes of crucifixion, the raising of Lazarus, the revelation of the sacred heart, and the zombie-like “possessed” who crawl from their underground hovels in slow motion to be exorcised by Jesus. The casting of actual physical anomalies to portray those coming to Jesus be healed is reminiscent not only of horror and Pasolini’s Gospel, but in the context of The Last Temptation’s barren desert setting recalls the same use of such “actors” in Spaghetti Westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Django. The exotic musical score by Peter Gabriel recalls the African selection in Pasolini’s film, and also references the “World Beat” trend and MTV saturation of the film’s era of production. The cinematography and blocking often have the feel of a music video, as does the casting of Bowie. By incorporating such cultural references, Scorsese transfers the Biblical world into his own, just as Pasolini had done. It is very much a technical and artistic expression of its time and has a slightly dated “80s” essence upon a contemporary viewing. In keeping with the humanist approach to the story, there is a curious emphasis on the physical body of Christ, indicative of a wider trend of masculine “body fetishism” in the phallocentric “hard-body” films of the 1980s, such as the Teminator and Rambo franchises. Dafoe is often nude, or nearly nude, and is photographed in an unabashedly erotic manner. It is often unclear if he is an object of spiritual or carnal desire in his interactions with Magdalene (with whom he has had a relationship in the past and converts from prostitute to disciple), Judas (in whose arms he sleeps), and even the geriatric John the Baptist (Andre Gregory), who embraces him romantically and kisses him long on the lips at different points in the film. One wonders if much of the film’s controversy was due not so much to the portrayal of a somewhat sexualized Jesus as to the ill-defined nature of such. There is also a decidedly sadomasochistic edge to both the flagellation scene and the crucifixion, both in which Dafoe is nude. Interestingly, both Scorsese and Schrader relate the postmodern fixation with screen violence and gore, of which they are inarguably true masters, to a nostalgic longing for the vanishing cultural sense of religion, with its sacrificial slaughter and “primal instinct towards bloodletting (which) is still part of our subconscious” (Christie & Thompson, p.118). The film’s somewhat graphic, and highly controversial, depiction of sexuality is also directly related to its screen violence. Semiotic excess, literally a preponderance of signs, is used here as a term in postmodern discourse to describe the “explicit depiction” of sexual and violent acts in contemporary cultural texts (Pineda, 1997, p.18). This “pleasure in the play of surfaces” is opposed to the satisfaction traditionally induced by narrative closure (Gitlin, p.59). Semiotic excess is also somewhat synonymous with the body fetishism described above. Like The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the film’s narrative is disjointed and free-floating, with characters that disappear and reappear and only the vaguest sense of temporality. The Kazantzakis/Scorsese/Schrader approach incorporates the more dramatic moments of the four Gospels to construct an alternative book of the New Testament, “altering those elements which distinguish holy from profane” (Riley, p.41). The film presents a Christ who is unsure of his divine status and rebels against his fate. When he is crucified in the film’s third act, he is visited by an angel who informs him that God doesn’t want him to die. He comes down from the cross and, guided by the angel, lives out his human life. He marries Magdalene, works as a carpenter, has children, is widowed, marries two other women and grows old. At one point, he encounters the Apostle Paul, who is spreading the news of Christianity. Jesus confronts Paul, insisting that he never died and that the religion is therefore a lie. Paul responds that whether he died on the cross or not is irrelevant; such details don’t effect the usefulness of the Gospel story as a tonic for the masses. Finally, on his deathbed Jesus is visited by the Apostles who berate him as a traitor and reveal his guardian angel to be Lucifer. Begging God’s forgiveness, Jesus crawls back to his cross and accepts his fate. The last temptation was all in his mind as he hung dying. However, no scene of the Resurrection follows, leaving the questions it raises about the divinity and historicity of Jesus unresolved, and the film itself an ambiguous challenge to both. Gibson’s Grindhouse Gospel Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ takes the traditional route in its harmonizing approach to the Gospel narrative, but convention stops there. The narrative also incorporates the visions of a 19th century nun (Emmerich, 1928) and draws heavily on retrograde Catholicism. In the Marian tradition, Jesus’ mother and Magdalene (Maia Morgenstern and Monica Bellucci) are foregrounded and the audience watches Jesus’ sufferings through their eyes. It is an independent “Hollywood” film that acts as a foreign film, with Hebrew and Aramaic dialogue, English subtitles, and a mostly foreign cast. It also acts as a horror film; and is considered by many critics to be one of the most violent films ever made. The splintered narrative concentrates on only the last 24 hours of Christ’s life with brief disjointed flashbacks to previous events, a film noir motif akin to Scorsese’s use of voice-over narration. The majority of the film, then, is concerned with the graphic depiction of Jesus being tortured to death. It is a curious intersection of traditional Gospel Drama, big-budget cuting edge production techniques, and 1970s grindhouse horror. One critic has called it “The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre” (Beeson, 2004), while the New York Times stated that it resembled nothing so much as hardcore sadomasochistic gay porn (Rich, 2004). Gibson has indeed taken Scorsese’s erotic objectification of Jesus’ body and mutilated it into a new form. The film takes a perverse pleasure in every drop of blood and detail of human suffering while inviting the viewer to do the same. The result is a thoroughly jarring postmodern interpretation of the Body and Blood of Christ. For obvious reasons, The Passion has proven to be the most controversial mainstream film since The Last Temptation of Christ. The ultraviolence of the work is rooted in some of the most ancient traditions of Christianity, such as the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism, and is also entrenched in film history. Some of the first known fiction films were “passion play” narratives, accounts of the last hours and crucifixion of Christ that have been performed dramatically for hundreds of years. Also long before cinema, there existed a tradition of “cross-centered devotion” in religious life dating back at least to medieval times. Paintings and other cultural artifacts depicting Christ’s wounded body and sufferings were objects of great power and worship (Armstrong, 2004; Denby, 2004). Gibson, a peerless leading man turned director and a practicing Fundamentalist Catholic, has built a career as a virtual auteur of martyrdom and masochism. His long resume as an actor, director and producer includes countless roles in which the human body (generally his) becomes the playing field for all manner of horrific acts (Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, The Man Without a Face, Braveheart, Payback). While riffing on his own (mutilated) body of work, Gibson has recaptured both cinema’s and Christianity’s bloody past in order to shape a distinctly contemporary and shocking Gospel Drama. The Passion also pays homage to the legacy of postmodern Christ films. As a subtitled foreign language film, it recalls Pasolini’s The Gospel, the most famous and revered foriegn entry in the Jesus genre. The Catholic foregrounding of the two Marys is reminiscent of Scorsese’s emphasis on Magdalene. The musical score by John Debney is not only strikingly similar to the soundtrack of The Last Temptation; Debney was in fact one of Peter Gabriel’s collaborators on the 1984 film. Gibson’s horror film approach to his subject is not restricted solely to buckets of gore. The opening sequence in the Gardem of Gethesmene seems lifted straight out of a Grimms’ fairy tale or a classic Universal monster movie. The Devil (Rosalinda Centano) is portrayed as a bald androgynous being with insects slithering into his/her nostrils. This creature later walks through the streets of Jerusalem carrying a horrifying parody of the infant Jesus, a scene that would not be out of place in the work of David Lynch. Upon his betrayal of Jesus, Judas (Luca Lionello) is frightened by a Satanic spirit in the woods, then pursued by two demons in the guise of hideously deformed children. Near the end of the film, when Jesus’ sufferings are also mercilessly at an end, the viewer is given a glimpse of Hell as a serpentine Lucifer howls in pain at Christ’s victory on the cross. Audience and critical reactions to the extreme violence of the film was so intense as to overshadow the previous controversy of Gibson’s alleged anti-semitism. In her study of the postmodern horror film, Pineda identifies such on-screen violence as the central characteristic of the genre: Gore- the explicit depiction of dismemberment, evisceration, putrefaction, and myriad other forms of boundary violations with copious amounts of blood- takes center stage…showing the spectacle of the ruined body…This difference in the approach to violence is one of the primary distinctions between the classical and postmodern paradigms…Narrative and character development is subordinated to…(the) detail of human carnage presented in an emotionally detached manner…What fascinates is not…the suffering of the victim but…his bodily ruination…The postmodern genre is intent on imaging the fragility of the body by transgressing its boundaries and revealing it inside out (Pineda, pp.18-19). The Passion renders the semiotic excess of The Last Temptation, and virtually any other movie, as the constraints of a more conservative era. Here, Jesus (Jim Caviezel) is chained, dragged and beaten, his body is flayed and ripped asunder until his flesh is a “patchwork quilt” of gory canals, a literal fragmented and fractured messiah. It is almost a relief to the viewer when the time arrives for him to be nailed to the cross. The Passion is indescribable in its relentless portrayal of human pain and divine sacrifice. It is still too early to tell what history will make of Mel Gibson’s bloody masterpiece. It is at once a return to the traditional representations of Christ and a final violent break with all that has come before. What is undeniable is that in presenting what he felt to be an ultraconservative Catholic approach to the Christ film genre, Gibson has instead produced the most radical postmodern Gospel Drama to date. Conclusions What is to be gained from such an analysis of this particular film genre? In what ways do the three study films interact with and contribute to contemporary culture on a wider level? First, they address and deconstruct the most basic tenets of postmodern theory itself. In positing alternate interpretations of the Christ story, these works demarcate a “full circle” in postmodern thought, embodying both its apotheosis and endgame. In adopting the defining narrative of western civilization as its subject, the postmodern text, founded on the challenge to metanarrative, historicity, and religious tradition collapses back on itself. It fulfills its potential while imploding and negating the same. Second, in the postmodern age, the cinema has essentially become the “new Church” by providing an increasingly secularized society with the religious experience once reserved for the Mass or Sunday Service (Christie & Thompson, 1996; De Bleeckere, 1997; Lyden, 2003; Marsh & Ortiz, 1997)). In viewing films such as the Gospel Drama, audiences interact with both the quasi-religious dynamic of the modern movie-going experience and with the ancient metanarrative portrayed on the screen in the same moment. The boundaries separating the traditional/ orthodox and the secular/ postmodern sites of ritual worship are in effect nullified, as pop culture merges with religion and their separate realms blur into one another. It stands to reason also that films with blatant religious imagery and narratives play a part in reifying traditional notions of belief in spite of their controversial themes or reception. In this sense, any film about the life of Christ represents a conservative backlash, a nostalgic longing for a return to a time of religious hope. Third, such texts are fertile ground for investigating the tension between the conservative and liberal ideologies that continue to occupy postmodern theorists. How does one assign an ideological reading to Pasolini’s “social problem” film, which is at once a very traditional and reverent account of the life of Christ, yet also criticizes the modern Church and reflects the director’s radical political leanings? And what of Scorsese’s controversial far-left deconstructionist Gospel, with its crazed, very human Jesus who challenges the notion of his own divinity? While deeply offensive to conservative Christians around the world, does the film in fact reinforce the power of our strongest myths and beliefs, and by its very subject matter reify traditional notions of religious fundamentalism? And can a film as sickeningly violent as Gibson’s bloodbath Gospel truly move beyond its “shock cinema” preoccupations and truly reflect a traditional conservative ideology any more so than a low budget splatter film? Furthermore, Like all texts that rely on pastiche, homage, generic convention, allusions and other cultural references, can not postmodern film in general be said to constitute a neo-conservative nostalgia? Or do such texts in fact draw on the conventions of the past in order to forge a radically progressive new form, using history only to deconstruct, debunk and destroy it? Such questions beg further examination. Finally, in challenging a society’s most ancient and valued belief systems, these films force their viewers, no matter their religious convictions, to acknowledge the Christian master narrative, the very foundation of western culture, in a new, if fractured, light. Such works demonstrate that the bleak, superficial postmodern worldview is not as decidedly free of tradition, history and religion as has often been asserted, but continues to confront its repressed longing for a sense of faith and meaning and perhaps, to lament its loss.
 
 
 
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