I DETEST THIS FILM ..WITH A PASSION [Christopher Hitchens on the Passion of the Christ]

The Mirror ^ | February 27, 2004 | Christopher Hitchens

[ejdrapes]

I DETEST THIS FILM ..WITH A PASSION

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.

[samtheman]

who lead Jesus to the Roman authorities?

The implication of this rhetorical question is exactly what.

[hellinahandcart]

What's a "snuff film?"

A snuff film is when one of the actors is actually murdered as part of the film. Naturally the actor doesn't know he's going to be killed.

There were lots of rumors about these films in the eighties, but I'm not sure it was ever proven that any really existed. I don't recall any arrests or trials in connection with any of them, anyway.

[Woahhs]

But we're not so quick to jump on any of those tendencies in Christianity. You say they don't exist. Bullsh1t. They exist. They are there.

And how significant are they when enemies have to scrape the walls to find them? Is it not self-evident to you the people you are refering to are such a vanishingly small minority that you insult the majority of us by giving credence to such punctilious nonsense?

[SauronOfMordor]

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).

He doesn't get it. Empire is a business. You want to collect as much tribute and taxes for Rome as you can, while minimizing the expense of keeping lots of troops around to keep the population quiet. Any governer who can't manage to keep things quiet and profitable gets the boot. If crucifying Jesus makes the local religious leaders happy and cooperative, then the path of least resistance is to crucify Jesus

[AppyPappy]

He is an atheist, however, and remains a passionate partisan of that belief.

Negative. He is a pre-Christian. True Atheists don't normally carry this much interest in Christianity. He's a Seeker.

Been there, done that.

[samtheman]

do you know why you don't hear ME condemning the statement? because I DON"T KNOW ANYONE THAT BELIEVES THAT THE JEWS SHOULD BE BLAMED FOR KILLING JESUS. honestly. i grew up in a largely catholic community attended catholic schools, as do my children today, and NO ONE BELIEVES that. our belief, and that of the Church is that Christ died for all of us. so you are asking me to condemn something that is too ridiculous to even contemplate.

Well, then I applaud your group, your friends, your church. But just because you are in good company --- and you are, you definitely are --- doesn't mean the idea isn't out there. It's not the biggest thing going in the Christian world. Support for Israel is much bigger. Much much bigger. And I've pointed that out hundreds of times in discussions in FR. I'm not a newbie here.

But the idea that "the Jews killed Jesus" is alive and well in the USA and Europe and it should be denounced. And now, because of this movie, is the time to denounce it. Loudly. Openly.

[keats5]

"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."

And the point of this article is religious intolerance?

[longtermmemmory]

too consumed with hatred to WANT to get it.

he is just silly. Laugh at his silliness and move on.

Sometimes the seeds land on the rocks.

[AppyPappy]

But the idea that "the Jews killed Jesus" is alive and well in the USA

So is the idea we never went to the moon and that people are walking around with alien implants in their body. It's a FRINGE item.

[Qwinn]

Back up. He asked a question. How about you answer it first?

See, one thing that's been going on is that a lot of the critics of the movie are claiming that Jews had -nothing- to do with Christ's death, that it's a complete fiction. That's total revisionism.

I don't think "the Jews killed Christ". I do believe Jews killed Christ, though. Just like some Romans did. I went on about 15 posts on another thread the other day pointing out the difference, and how ridiculous it is to extend guilt down generations.

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.

Qwinn

[xsmommy]

i believe you are correct about the idea being alive in Europe, but less so in the US. what percentage of people do you think believe such a thing? and how is this verifiable?

[xsmommy]

another analogy is to include blaming all whites for slavery. my grandparents all came from eastern europe, but there will be those lunatics who claim that merely being white makes one culpable for slavery. there are lunatics of every stripe. it is not the majority or even a significant MINORITY view of anyone.

[samtheman]

And how significant are they when enemies have to scrape the walls to find them? Is it not self-evident to you the people you are refering to are such a vanishingly small minority that you insult the majority of us by giving credence to such punctilious nonsense?

Don't be so thin-skinned. I'm not insulting anybody. I'm talking about the opportunity this movie --- and its publicity -- presents to us. And opportunity to demonstrate to the Islamic moderates (for example, our new friends in Iraq) how to behave towards extremists within the group. Why can't you just denounce them and be done with it? Why argue with me about the obvious?

I'm reminded of Bill O'Reilly (who supports this film, by the way, and I support him, by the way) when he's trying to get a simple admission from the ACLU that child pornography is bad. They'll argue this point and that point and another point but they won't simply say it's wrong.

I am not comparing you to the ACLU and I am not comparing this issue to child pornography (although somebody did here in a post that I found absolutely illogical) but I am saying that it seems like some people here are having a hard time just saying the idea that "the Jews killed Jesus" is wrong. Just say it's wrong.

[Qwinn]

Oh, one more thing:

Historically, do you know how many times a Jew has been killed in the United States after a passion play?

Answer: Zero.

In the light of my last post, please, explain to me how exactly the furor against the Passion and the screeches of anti-Semitism are justified unless this is an act of blood-libel against Christians.

Qwinn

[hellinahandcart]

Gibson Receives Standing Ovation on Leno

[ejo]

Hitchens and Rooney should commiserate together over that beer, scotch is too good for them!!!!

[samtheman]

i believe you are correct about the idea being alive in Europe, but less so in the US. what percentage of people do you think believe such a thing? and how is this verifiable?

I don't know. And so what? Why should it matter? The subject is certainly in the media now so now is the time to make the denunciation. Let's denounce it and be done with it and move on to other things: like defending Christianity from the commie-left... and re-electing a president who will help us do that.

[P.O.E.]

Reminds me of that scene in the movie where, after the crucifixion, the devil howls in his wilderness.

[xsmommy]

it should be denounced. And now, because of this movie, is the time to denounce it. Loudly. Openly.

where? to whom? i would gladly denounce such an idiotic statement and sentiment were i to hear it or even infer or hear it hinted at by anyone anywhere. But can't you see the folly of going around making such a loud and open pronouncement when it isn't an issue or a thought that has even crossed people's minds?

[Americathy]

As one writer that I read often said, "Both Jew and Gentile—hey, that covers all mankind, doesn't it?—lent a hand in the death of the Messiah." No Christian I know believes the Jews as a people should be blamed any more than the Italians (or the Romanians, Spanish, French etc). But the Antidefamation League wants to actually change the historical record, which is really dangerous. The facts are: The Romans killed Christ, the Jews killed Christ, we all killed Christ.