Posted on 02/27/2004 3:40:31 AM PST by ejdrapes
A FEW years ago, Mel Gibson got himself into an argument after uttering a series of crude remarks that were hostile to homosexuals. Now he has made a film that principally appeals to the gay Christian sado-masochistic community: a niche market that hasn't been sufficiently exploited. If you like seeing handsome young men stripped and tied up and flayed with whips, The Passion Of The Christ is the movie for you. Some people used to go to Ben-Hur deliberately late, and just watch the chariot race while skipping the boring quasi-Biblical stuff. Alas, that isn't possible with this film. Along with the protracted torture comes a simple-minded but nonetheless bigoted version of the more questionable bits of the Gospels. It's boring all right - much of the film is excruciatingly tedious - but it also manages to be extraordinarily nasty. Gibson claims that the Holy Ghost spoke through him in the directing of this movie, and that everything in it is from the Bible. I very much doubt the first claim, and I can safely say that the second one is false. The Bible does not have an encounter between Jesus and a sort of Satanic succubus figure in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Bible does not have a raven pecking out the eye of one of the crucified thieves. The Bible does not have Judas pursued to his suicide by a horde of supernatural and sinister devil-children. Moreover, whatever the Bible may say, the Roman authorities in Jerusalem were not minor officials in a Jewish empire, compelled to obey the orders of a gang of bloodthirsty rabbis. It was Rome that was boss. Indeed, Pontius Pilate was later recalled by the Emperor Tiberius for the extreme brutality with which he treated the Jewish inhabitants (and you had to be quite cruel to get Tiberius to raise his eyebrows). YET Gibson is evidently obsessed with the Jewish question, and it shows in his film. It also shows when he's off-screen. Invited by Peggy Noonan - a sympathetic conservative interviewer - in Reader's Digest to say what he thought of the Holocaust, Gibson replied with extreme cold-ness that a lot of people were killed in the Second World War and no doubt some of them were Jews. Shit happens, in other words. He doesn't seem to grasp the point that the war was started by a political party which believed in a Jewish world conspiracy. He doesn't go as far as his father, who says that the Holocaust story is "mostly fiction" and that there were more Jews at the end of the war than there were at the beginning, but he does say that his old man has "never told me a lie". And he does say that he bases his film on the visions of the Crucifixion experienced by a 19th-century German nun, Anne-Catherine Emmerich, who believed that the Jews used the blood of Christian children in their Passover rituals. (In case you have forgotten, the setting of the film is the Jewish Passover.) Yesterday, as the movie opened, a Pentecostal church in Denver, Colorado, put up a big sign on its marquee saying: "Jews Killed The Lord Jesus." Nice going. In order to keep up this relentless propaganda pressure, Gibson employs the cheap technique of the horror movie director. Just as you think things can't get any worse, he shoves in a gruesome surprise. The flogging scene stops, and you think: "Well, that's over." And then the sadistic guards pick up a new kind of flagellating instrument, and start again. The nails go through the limbs, one by one, and then, for an extra touch, the cross is raised, turned over and dropped face-down with its victim attached, so that the nails can be flattened down on the other side. The vulg-arity and sensationalism of this would be bad enough if there wasn't a continual accompaniment of jeering, taunting Jews who want more of the same. The same cynical tactic has been applied to the marketing of the movie. Gibson is well known to be a member of a Catholic extremist group that rejects the Pope's teachings and denounces the Second Vatican Council (which, among other things, dropped the charge that all Jews were Christ-killers). He went to some trouble to spread alarm in the Jewish community, which rightly suspected that the film might revive the old religious paranoia. HE showed the film at the Vatican, and then claimed that the Pope had endorsed it - a claim that the Vatican has flatly denied, but then every little helps. Then he ran a series of screenings for right-wing fundamentalists only, and refused to show any tapes to anyone who wasn't a religious nut. (It took me ages to get around the ban and get hold of a pirated copy, and I was writing for the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair.) Having secured a huge amount of free publicity in this way, and some very lucrative advance block bookings from Christian fundamentalist groups, Gibson now talks self-pityingly about how he has risked his fortune and his career, but doesn't care if he "never works again" because he's done it all for Jesus. The clear message I get from that is that he'll be boycotted by sinister Hollywood Jews. So it's a win-win for him: big box office or celebrity martyrdom. With any luck, a bit of both. How perfectly nauseating. In a widely publicised concession, Gibson said that he'd removed the scene where the Jewish mob cries out that it wants the blood of Jesus to descend on the heads of its children's children. This very questionable episode - it is mentioned in only one of the four gospels - has in fact not been cut. Only the English subtitle has gone. (The film is spoken in Aramaic and Latin, though Roman soldiers actually spoke a dialect of Greek.) So when the film is later shown, in Russia and Poland, say, or Egypt and Syria, there will be a ready-made propaganda vehicle for those who fancy a bit of torture and murder, with a heavy dose of Jew-baiting thrown in. Gibson knows very well that this will happen, and he'll be raking it in from exactly those foreign rights to the film. So my advice is this. Do not go. Leave it to the sickoes who like this sort of thing, and don't fill the pockets of the sicko who made it.I DETEST THIS FILM ..WITH A PASSION
But you know what, samtheman? Have you heard anyone, -anyone-, utter a protest when someone blames all Christians for the Holocaust? Or all Christians for the pogroms? That happens constantly, in the major media, every single day. Over and over. THAT is just as much blood libel. And no one says a word. My rant on that other thread was about how ridiculous the notion of laying guilt on an entire group is, AND that it is -hardly- limited to the Jews. Christians get it constantly. And isn't the entire fury at Christians right now just another symptom? The people criticizing this film RIGHT NOW are acting as if the majority of Christians conducted pogroms in their youth and haven't come to grips with their guilt yet. Now you tell me, how the HELL is blaming all Christians for the pogroms of 2 centuries ago ANY different from blaming ALL Jews for killing Christ? Yet, in these rants and screams about fears that Christians are going to watch this movie and conduct another pogrom, isn't that EXACTLY what they're doing? I'll wait on an answer for that. And by the way, I'm not Christian, I'm agnostic.I was on my way out the door and read this (I have cable modem, always on line, it's great) and I had to stop to respond.
There is NO difference between blaming all Christians for pogroms and blaming THE Jews for "killing Christ". I agree with you 1000% percent (in the words of McGovern!). And I agree with you in basically everything you are saying. I'm just taking a slightly different tack here, emphasizing a slightly different aspect of all this. We are not in disagreement about any of this, except on the emphasis that I want to put --- at this point in time --- in denouncing those who say that somehow the Jewish people are somehow "guilty" for the crucifixion.
You are very right. Group guilt is stupid. I didn't own slaves, I didn't pogrom Jews and I didn't kill Christ (except in the spiritual sense that he died for my sins).
I hate group guilt, except when it's justified. The silence of Islam on terrorism is a case when it comes close to being justified. And I want to make darn sure we are not guilty --- as a group --- of the same thing. That's all. We're on the same side.
And now I really do have to go.
Given what is portrayed in the film, I don't blame Him. I wouldn't be smiling about such treatment either.
However, your argument is completely ludicrous. Jews did kill Christ. That is an historical fact. They wanted Him dead, and they made sure it happened.
No one is saying that ALL Jews killed Christ. No one is saying that today's Jews killed Him. But Jews did kill Him, make no mistake.
Come on...I've waited several minutes... Just denounce it. Why are you supporting child molestation?What the heck does child molestation have to do with any of this? Are you off your rocker? Of course it's wrong. I think child molestors should all be castrated. But what the heck does it have to do with this thread? Did you forget to put lithium in your cereal this morning?
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