Volume 20: Fall 2008

The Passion as Horror Film: St. Mel of the Cross

Richard Walsh

“I think we have gotten too used to seeing pretty crosses on the wall, and we forget what really happened…. But when you finally see it and understand what he went through, it makes you feel not only compassion, but also debt. You want to repay him for the enormity of his sacrifice.”

--Mel Gibson (cited in Wrathall, 10)

Abstract

  The precursors of The Passion’s gory torture and crucifixion are action and horror films, not the gospels or Jesus films. Given his previous work, Gibson’s use of the suffering, action hero conventions is not unexpected. The more surprising use of horror techniques likely reflects horror’s popularity and the spread of its artifice through so much of recent cinema. The Passion so effectively displays crucifixion’s gore and violence that its “hidden” providential narrative may be lost on many. Moreover, the successful spectacle also raises questions about the gospels’ own relationships to horror.

“Pretty Crosses on the Wall”

  [1] Beyond the indisputable charge of anti-Semitism,[1] the two lingering sound bites about The Passion of the Christ are (1) the disputed report that Pope John Paul II said after a viewing of The Passion that “it is as it was”; and (2) Gibson’s own claim defending the extreme gore in his film that “we have gotten too used to seeing pretty crosses on the wall …” Many critics have correctly, emphatically, and thoroughly dismantled the first sound bite.[2] The Passion is clearly something more than a replica of the actual death of Jesus of Nazareth on a Roman cross and even something more than the earliest Christian narratives about that death, the gospel passion narratives.

  [2] The gospels do not claim merely to report the historical fact of Jesus’ death. In fact, their passion narratives are remarkably laconic with respect to the details of crucifixion.[3] Instead, they provide a rich theological interpretation of the significance of Jesus’ death.[4] Read together, the gospels’ basic theological claims are (1) that Jesus’ death is providential (a divine spectacle), rather than a Roman imperial spectacle,[5] and, correspondingly, (2) that Jesus is a hero in his death, rather than a criminal.[6] The gospels achieve this transfiguration in two significant ways.[7]

  [3] First, the gospels uniformly assert that Jesus’ death was divinely predicted. In addition to the fact that the gospels specifically cite scriptures that details of the passion fulfill, the very narratives themselves often seem so much scripture exegesis (see Crossan 1995). Moreover, details of the passion are also predicted by Jesus himself.[8] As a result, the gospel passion narratives are a two-level story. On one level, various officials engineer Jesus’ death for their own designs and the death is a “typical,” if maliciously unwarranted, Roman crucifixion. On the other level, which is the gospels’ raison d’etre, Jesus’ death is a divine act, even if that hidden, divine plan is known only to the chosen few.

  [4] In this second level, God replaces Rome as the effective actor in Jesus’ crucifixion. Not incidentally, the gospels share this literary transfiguring with the Former Prophets, the Latter Prophets, and apocalyptic, all of which replace the nations’ action with God’s action.[9] Comparative religionists describe such narratives as myths or, more specifically, as theodicies, stories/interpretations squaring the experience of evil with belief in God (or a meaningful order). For the gospels, then, attributing Jesus’ death to God’s action confers meaning on the event.

  [5] Second, the gospels deny the Roman judgment that Jesus is a criminal and the Roman assertion of imperial glory by handling the shame of the cross ironically. For example, in Mark’s passion, the one mocked as king and killed as king claimant by the Romans is actually God’s king. Assuming the common dating trajectory of the canonical gospels, the gospels also increasingly assert the innocence of the one crucified (Luke) and eventually assert that the passion is an action completely under the apparent victim’s control (John). In short, the gospel Jesus is not a criminal who deserves Roman crucifixion. For the gospels, human justice has miscarried here. That, of course, is far less important than the gospel assertion that the cross is actually a divine act.

  [6] Not surprisingly, The Passion uses similar techniques to theologize the cross. In particular, the scripture title from Isa. 53 presents Jesus’ death as “for us”[10] and, as it makes the passion a fulfillment of scripture, a divine act. The memorable, opening garden scene functions similarly by conflating the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane. In particular, the Satanic snake appears nowhere in the gospels’ Gethsemane. That Gibson portrays Jesus heroically stomping that snake, not only suggests providence (a fulfillment of Gen. 3:15), but also a heroic interpretation of Jesus in his sufferings (see below). That heroic interpretation also occurs in the brief shot of the defeated Satan near the close of The Passion’s crucifixion.

  [7] Where Gibson’s The Passion obviously goes beyond the gospel passion narrative, however, is in his relentless focus on the blood and gore of Jesus’ passion. Every reviewer comments on this aspect of the film.[11] It is inescapable. It alone gave the film an R rating, and Gibson himself, as quoted in the epigraph to this essay, even deigned to explain the focus as an attempt to create a visceral experience of the death of Jesus.

  [8] While Roman crucifixion was unspeakably brutal, the gospels, as noted above, do not focus on Jesus’ suffering. While Christian theology and art has at times—particularly, for example, in the late Middle Ages—had such a focus,[12] Gibson’s gore surprised most critics because most Jesus films before Gibson sanitized the cross’ brutality.[13]  In fact, Gibson’s wry “pretty crosses on the wall” could easily stand as a succinct depiction of most previous cinematic passion narratives. One thinks, in particular, not only of the pageant quality of the early passion play films and of passions seemingly lifted from various illustrated Bibles, but also of Stevens’ “postcard” shots of Calvary, framed by the city gates from afar in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and of Ray’s carefully shaved and coifed Jesus crucified in King of Kings. The cinematic passion is almost uniformly holy and ethereal, a sacred moment beyond human suffering.[14]

  [9] In La ricotta, Pier Paolo Pasolini witheringly mocks this cinematic tradition. His short film depicts the filming of an epic Jesus film. As one watches the director “stage” his film, the scenes of the passion become one artificial tableau after another. Perhaps, the most notable is the pyramid-like Deposition filmed in a lurid color, which falls apart as the actors fail to hold their pose because of one human foible or another. The result comically cracks the sacred façade behind which one sees “real” people filming this staged, stylized nonsense. To complete the send-up of the unrealistic cinematic passion tradition, the Marxist Pasolini adds a second story-line, focusing on the trials and death of a peasant working as a stagehand, an extra, and the Good Thief. This “real,” human story Pasolini films in black and white and in a more documentary style, which, not incidentally, anticipates Pasolini’s later, gritty, neo-realistic Gospel According to St. Matthew (see Walsh 2003, 95-120).[15] The result, climaxing with the death of this peasant, unnoticed on his cross, demythologizes the sacred, unrealistic cinematic passion.[16]

[10] Like Pasolini, Gibson rejects the pretty cinematic cross. Instead of gritty neo-realism, however, Gibson offers another epic passion, but now an epic that is a colorful spectacle of blood and gore, focusing on Jesus’ suffering in excruciating detail, offering prolonged slow-motion shots of torture, and freely adding violence to the gospel narratives. While the focus on suffering is new in Jesus film, it is not new in film.[17] As Steven Martin’s character in Grand Canyon remarks, gore—or in his words, “the viscera on the visor”—is Hollywood’s “money shot.” One does not need, then, to return to medieval Christianity to find suffering glamorized, one can find that in one film genre after another. Within this general cinematic discourse of violence, the particular conventions employed most liberally by The Passion of the Christ are those of action and horror films. The former arises from Gibson’s own cinematic expertise. The latter likely comes from the fact that religious horror has been one of the most popular venues for religious cinema of late.

Gibson’s Passionate Action Hero: The Braveheart Jesus

  [11] Like all directors, Gibson’s Jesus film is part of his overall oeuvre. For example, Sidney Olcott, the director of From the Manger to the Cross, made several previous films which he had successfully marketed has shot “on location.” After traveling to the Middle East to make more location films, he decided to make a Jesus film as an afterthought. The result is a Jesus travelogue film, opening with maps and titles identifying the Holy Land locations where many of the film’s scenes of Jesus’ life were shot. One of the most memorable scenes features the holy family before the pyramids of Giza.

  [12] Similarly, Griffith’s Intolerance shares numerous features with his earlier, infamous Birth of a Nation. Both are epic films which focus on romantic couples in order to humanize the epic scale of the films, use crosscutting to build suspense, and feature fantastic, spectacular epilogues visualizing the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth.

  [13] Later Jesus filmmakers, who had the luxury of building upon an established Jesus film tradition (building, in particular, on DeMille’s The King of Kings), still make Jesus films that resemble their other work. Thus, while one can instructively compare Ray’s King of Kings to DeMille’s film, Ray’s effort also bears comparison to his more famous Rebel Without a Cause. Both films feature strikingly youthful protagonists, characters searching for father-figures successfully and unsuccessfully, and the production of surrogate families. Again, Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told bears similarities to his Shane, particularly in the films’ iconic Western locations and in their protagonists who come from and go into some mysterious “beyond.” Even more recently, Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ clearly draws on Scorsese’s long tradition of creating “buddy films” (e.g., Mean Streets) and, accordingly, offers one of the most distinctive portrayals of the relationship of Jesus and Judas in the Jesus film tradition.[18]

  [14] In this context, Gibson is simply the first director of a Jesus film whose prior work was primarily with the passionate, death-wish hero of action films (e.g., Mad Max, Martin Ritt of Lethal Weapon, William Wallace of Braveheart, etc.) (see Walsh 2005; Vander Stichele and Pender). Accordingly, more than one critic has suggested Lethal Passion or Die Hardest as a more apropos name for Gibson’s Jesus film (see Vander Stichele and Pender). Gibson’s Jesus is a death-wish hero—like Martin Ritt in Lethal Weapon (Burnett) or John Coffey in The Green Mile—who sees death as good, because life is nothing but pain, suffering, and evil. The passionate action hero faces his death willingly. Sometimes, he avoids that death in the midst of a hail of bullets, seemingly as if by the hand of providence (e.g., Martin Ritt). On other occasions, he dies willingly. Nonetheless, by his death, he triumphs over his opponents by virtue of his heroic integrity, his courageous commitment to his cause (e.g., William Wallace).

  [15] As many critics have noted in passing, Braveheart is the Gibson film that is most similar to The Passion of the Christ. The passion narratives of both films have five distinct stages: (1) betrayal and arrest; (2) temptation; (3) trial; (4) torture and death; and (5) posthumous victory.[19] The closest similarities—although the traitor in Braveheart does refer to himself as “Judas”—are in the films’ temptation and torture scenes.

  [16] After William Wallace’s arrest, the princess, who is Wallace’s lover, visits him in his dark cell. While she knows that he cannot escape death, she cannot bear to see him suffer gruesome torture at the hands of the British king who will do everything he can to extract an acknowledgement of his royal sovereignty from Wallace. As Wallace, the champion of Scottish freedom, heroically refuses to follow such a cowardly course, the princess offers him a drug to dull his senses. To comfort her, Wallace takes the drug, but spits it out after she leaves. Then, he kneels and prays, facing light streaming in from an open window in the upper portion of the cell, for the strength to die well. 

  [17] The Passion of the Christ begins with a remarkably similar scene. A gothic, androgynous Satan (who combines in one character Braveheart’s princess and her effeminate husband) confronts a praying Jesus in a dark garden. Like Braveheart’s princess, Satan tempts the hero to avoid suffering. Like Braveheart’s Wallace, Jesus manfully resists “feminine” assumptions about his inability to bear pain. Like Wallace, Jesus resists weakness and becomes heroic by kneeling and praying for strength to bear his death.

  [18] Moreover, Jesus displays his ultimate triumph over this ghoulish feminine figure more immediately and more dramatically than Wallace does by stomping the ghoul’s pet snake. Of course, Satan is not Jesus’ lover, so Jesus does not have to handle Satan’s feminine sensibilities as carefully as Wallace does those of his lover. As a result, Jesus is also more alone in his trials than Wallace is. As noted above, Jesus’ stomping also creates an allusion to a Christian interpretation of the enmity curse between humans and serpents, which ends the Garden of Eden story (Gen. 3:15). Accordingly, Jesus’ victory is more providential than Wallace’s is.

  [19] While Braveheart has far less supernatural elements than The Passion, it also has an eerie, dream sequence in a “garden.” In that scene, Wallace follows a hooded figure—like the hooded Satan of The Passion—through a dark wood. The figure is Wallace’s murdered wife, whom he kneels before and who sends him to his “mission” of revenge/freedom. While not a temptation scene like The Passion’s Garden, this scene like that Garden does inaugurate the hero’s suicidal mission.

  [20] Both movies use the torture scenes to reveal the hero’s steadfast integrity. In Braveheart, the King’s executioner tortures Wallace at length in brilliant sunlight as a spectacle of imperial power and in order to extract Wallace’s acknowledgment of loyalty to the King. Braveheart’s spectacle features numerous cruciform poses and slow-motion shots of Wallace’s inhuman suffering and superhuman endurance, frequently cutting to the awed faces of his followers and to his dead wife walking through the crowd. Cuts to the prince, the King’s effeminate heir, also occur. Gradually, the visuals transform the spectacle of imperial power into a spectacle of Wallace’s heroism and of the triumph of his just, victorious cause (Scottish freedom). In fact, as Wallace screams his last words—“Freedom”—the camera displays both his admiring followers and the dying, clearly defeated King. Quite dramatically, one of the last shots looks up to the cruciform Wallace and to his dying hand dropping his wife’s scarf (the token of his mission) and beyond that to a brilliant blue sky.

  [21] The Passion of the Christ offers more prolonged, bloodier torture. Moreover, The Passion never suggests that some confession of imperial sovereignty by Jesus will end or limit his tortures. This torture is not at all a spectacle of the reigning imperial power. Instead, this torture reflects a barbaric, inhuman world, invaded by the hero. Nonetheless, the visuals are similar to those in Braveheart. In particular, The Passion also features slow-motion shots of the hero’s inhuman suffering and superhuman endurance, with frequent cuts to the awed faces of his followers—particularly to the women who support him—and to an androgynous Satan walking through the jeering crowd during Jesus’ scourging. The latter shots, of course, parallel Braveheart’s cuts to the dying King and to the effeminate prince vainly opposing Wallace. The Passion also features a single, dramatic, reversal-of-perspective shot. Instead of Braveheart’s dramatic shot of the sky from below, however, The Passion offers a dramatic shot of the cross from above, from heaven, as a single raindrop—or, perhaps, a divine tear—falls to the earth.

  [22] Jesus’ passionate suffering is also victorious. After the tear falls to earth, a special-effects earthquake shakes the earth, the Temple falls, and a defeated Satan (also shot from above) shrieks in anguish in a blasted, hellish landscape. By comparison, the subsequent resurrection of Jesus, although accompanied by martial music, is anti-climactic. The fallen Temple and the shrieking Satan are The Passion’s equivalent to Braveheart’s dying King and to the ultimate victory of the Scots (in a battle led by Wallace’s Judas, Earl the Bruce). Most miraculously, Wallace (Gibson) provides the voiceover explanation of the posthumous victory scenes.

  [23] While there are differences between these two passions, they are so similar that Braveheart now looks like a dress rehearsal for The Passion. One might possibly claim that Braveheart’s William Wallace is a Christ figure, but, cinematically, the more important observation is that Braveheart’s passion visuals are The Passion’s most important visual precursors, and it is the replication of that precursor that is one major factor separating The Passion from any previous Jesus film (and from the gospel passion narrative). In short, the cinematic focus on gore and violence as a means to demonstrate the hero’s fidelity to the cause comes from action films, not the gospels, which are remarkably restrained in their depiction of the details of the violence of the crucifixion (see Hengel).

  [24] As noted above, however, The Passion’s gore actually exceeds that of the typical passionate action hero and certainly that of William Wallace. The level of gore suggests the influence of another popular cinema genre, that of horror.

The Passion of the Christ as Religious Horror

  [25] The Passion’s financial success surprised many observers, largely because most filmmakers believed the day of the biblical epic had ended in the 1960s with King of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told and with the end in Hollywood of assumptions about the Christian nature of the film audience. However, Hollywood did not stop making successful religious films in the 1960s. It simply found more financially successful stories and genres. Since the 1960s, the most successful religious films have been religious horror (e.g., Rosemary’s Baby; The Exorcist).

  [26] While almost all horror films have quasi-religious features (e.g., concerns with the sublime, evil, order, etc.) (see, e.g., Beal; Kearney), critical discussions of horror often note an increased attention to the supernatural in horror films in the 1960s and 1970s (i.e., after the end of the biblical epic) (see Tudor). Critics also note a dramatic increase in the depiction of violence and gore in the same era. They also note, following the financial successes of horror, the employment of many of the conventions of horror in other films and genres. Thus, recent discussions of horror often include films like Alien, Seven, Silence of the Lambs, Saving Private Ryan, and even Schindler’s List (Hutchings, 1-33). Given its gore, one might reasonably add The Passion to such a list. In fact, one might even wonder whether The Passion’s affinity to horror is one of the reasons that this Jesus epic succeeded financially when most considered the biblical epic moribund.[20] Moreover, various reviewers have often connected The Passion with the horror genre, if only in passing and if only to derogate the film, comparing The Passion to Kill Bill, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, slasher films, snuff films, and Wes Craven nightmares. 

  [27] Apart from the level of gore, the first obvious connection between The Passion and religious horror is Judas’ demonic possession and torment. While some Jesus films, like the gospels, simply dismiss Judas as an ostracized, reviled plot functionary, others explore, with a nod to modern notions of character, Judas’ motivation for the betrayal (Walsh 2006, 43-45). By contrast, The Passion concentrates on Judas’ “just” demise. No mere suicide, that demise is a hellish, demonic punishment, visually and graphically extending trends first established in the Judas tradition by Acts and Papias (see Paffenroth).

  [28] Although the morally questionable are often the first to die and to die most gruesomely in horror films,[21] The Passion’s depiction of Judas’ “just” demonic destruction differs from several films’ depictions of the possessed. For example, in the recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the young girl suffers possession, according to the priest responsible for her, because she is innocent. In Stigmata, the possessed is an atheist and a free-living girl about town, but that is not the reason for her possession. Her possession happens simply because she comes into possession of the rosary of the “spirit” that possesses her. Moreover, when the priest investigating her case explains stigmatic attacks to her, he claims that such fates befall the intensely spiritual, not the immoral or irreligious. If there is an explanation for the fate of the possessed in the German Requiem, it also lies in the victim’s sensitivity, but it is a sensitivity that is more a naïve suggestibility than a religious precociousness.

  [29] The Exorcist, which is the blueprint for possession films, is equally vague on the reason for its victim’s possession. Many pundits claimed that The Exorcist’s Regan was possessed because she unwisely opened herself to the occult by playing with a Ouija board. These pundits also frequently cautioned young people not to do similar things and, in particular, not to see The Exorcist. While The Exorcist’s Regan does first meet Captain Howdy, her name for her possessing spirit, via the Ouija board, neither William Peter Blatty’s novel nor William Friedkin’s movie clearly identifies trafficking with the occult as the reason for Regan’s possession. Instead, Blatty’s novel has several epigraphs suggesting the overwhelming senselessness of evil. The structure of Friedkin’s film, which opens like Blatty’s novel at an Iraqi archaeological dig and ends when the head archaeologist of that dig, who is also a priest, confronts Regan’s demon, suggests that Regan is a mere pawn in a long-standing, almost Zoroastrian conflict between the forces of evil and good. 

  [30] In contrast to these possession films, Gibson’s justly possessed Judas suggests a more ordered, melodramatic world, like that in some slasher films and in some films about monstrous serial killers. Bad things do not happen to just anyone. Gibson’s Judas, like The Exorcist’s Regan in some pundits’ interpretations, “got what he deserved.”

  [31] While Judas’ destruction may satisfy a macabre justice, his possession shatters his personal world (reality) and brings him down to a dark, demonic, topsy-turvy world, to a world like that of religious horror. After the betrayal, Judas loiters under the bridge from which the temple police toss a chained Jesus, who hangs face-to-face with a tormented Judas. Suddenly—in good horror shock fashion—a screaming figure (resembling the figure in Munch’s Scream) darts out of the darkness at a terrified Judas and vanishes just as quickly.[22] The scene distorts and undoes previously established cinematic reality, a technique common, of course, in horror films, whose frightening tales and shocks invariably challenge established, secure orders. 

  [32] Soon, a quailing Judas hides from playing children who eerily “see” the torments afflicting Judas. Again, in good horror shock fashion, the children suddenly morph into biting, reviling demons. Then, a hand-held camera follows Judas’ whirling fall. In the next Judas scene, similar fury-like children and Satan pursue Judas outside the city walls. Screaming, Judas holds his head as if trying to keep it from coming apart. Suddenly, the demons are gone, and Judas is alone beside a maggot-ridden carcass. Unable to hold his eroding reality together, Judas takes the rope from the carcass (a demonic doubling of Christ’s sacrifice?) and hangs himself. The maggot-ridden carcass, which remains in the shot, succinctly visualizes Judas’ story.

  [33] The Passion’s second affinity with horror is Gibson’s tempting, androgynous Satan. Incidentally, that The Passion shows this monster at the beginning suggests that it will go for shock, not suspense. Here again, The Passion offers a world like those of slasher films, not like those of The Sixth Sense, Signs, or The Blair Witch Project.

  [34] Disrupting gender lines—a real horror for a patriarchal worldview—Satan is neither male nor female. Monstrously androgynous, it moves unperturbed through the demonic world of the fury-like children and through those bestial creatures that scourge Jesus so sadistically. In that scourging scene, Satan carries a monstrous child—who disturbs categories by appearing horribly aged—in a monstrous, demonic doubling of Madonna and child.

  [35] If Judas’ world is demonic, that of Satan’s is monstrous. Both are palpably dark, so that the lighting of the film’s early sequences is reminiscent of that of horror.[23] As already noted, Satan first appears ghoulishly out of the shadows in a dark, gothic garden, with a snake emerging from its body. One can just glimpse the snake’s tail in Satan’s nostril before it emerges from the robes at Satan’s feet. Satan’s final appearance is on a blasted surface unlike anything on earth (although it seems a fiery version of Calvary).[24] Clearly, Satan is monstrous evil incarnate. It belongs to the dark, the deformed, the demonic, and the ruined, to all that which opposes the good (the hero). Gibson’s depiction of Satan turns Jesus’ suffering into a struggle with monstrous evil, yet another common feature of horror films.

  [36] As Gibson’s portrayal of Judas’ possession moves away from the Jesus film tradition toward horror, his portrayal of Satan moves away from Braveheart toward horror. In particular, the tempting Satan of The Passion is, as already noted above, the horror version of Braveheart’s tempting princess. More precisely, the Satan of The Passion plays both the tempting woman and the hero’s ineffectual opponent (the King and effeminate prince). In The Passion’s Manichean world, women, flesh, and the devil belong together. The misogyny—another feature of horror films—is staggering.

  [37] The Passion’s third—and its major—affinity with horror is the film’s fascination with violence. Ebert called The Passion the most violent film he had ever seen. Stephen King, of all people, worried about the film’s effect on children. Nonetheless, The Passion’s violence is not gratuitous. It signals the world of horror. And, as in horror, The Passion’s camera concentrates on violence and the ruined body.[25] Horror uses violence both to attract audiences and to explode the audience’s normal hold on reality. If one believes his published comments, like those about “pretty crosses,” Gibson intends to shock his audience and to break the audience’s secular nonchalance. He wishes to return his audience to a more passionate (medieval) worldview, one of shock, fear, and disgust (horror emotions) if not of guilt, grief, and faith.[26] 

  [38] In its most extreme forms—and one might well locate The Passion here—horror bespeaks a culture of fear, a sense of a world gone dark and demonic, of human beings as so much meat awaiting the slaughter. As noted above, The Passion unites this horror world with the gospels’ story of providence through the film’s opening titles and the opening scene with Satan. The Passion also uses flashbacks to the same end. Flashbacks, like the gospel’s flashbacks to scripture or the flashforwards from Jesus’ prophecies, serve to create a sense of providence, of narrative. In the final analysis, it is this thin narrative about providence that separates The Passion from Death Scenes or Faces of Death or a snuff film (cf. Prince, 8).

  [39] The gore is much more obvious and obscures The Passion’s providence narrative. Of course, horror critics (and aficionados) are expert at finding hidden meanings: “For the horror cognoscenti, blood and the broken flesh screen and obscure secret truths” (Crane, 153). Crane goes on to say that in the face of the avalanche of gore in recent film—one might add The Passion to the films he discusses—this interpretative move takes some “exegetical brio.” Perhaps, one should say, “evangelistic brio.” For some viewers, of course, The Passion’s secret, evangelical truth is lost. There is only the horror, the horror.[27]

Violence, The Passion, and the Gospel’s Providential Passion

  [40] Religion, in the view of Jonathan Z. Smith, is the attempt to make sense of life, to construct a map to help one negotiate reality. Religion, then, is primarily a matter of theodicy, because religion’s map or its assertion of meaning always perches precariously alongside a chaotic reality (289-309). The attempt to create order always faces the incongruity of chaos/evil. If the chaos/evil becomes too severe, assertions of meaning come undone.

  [41] Horror lives in such places. More precisely, horror aesthetically explores the gap between maps and the terrain mapped, between meaning and chaos/evil. As a result, the amount of violence and horror that myth-makers can afford to show is a crucial question. The more blood and gore that one shows—as in the opening war scenes in Saving Private Ryan or in the passion of Jesus in The Passion—the more difficult it becomes to construct a meaningful map covering that violence, to assert that the evil or the death is meaningful or providential. The gospels avoided that dilemma by minimizing the details of crucifixion and maximizing the narrative of providence. Following the conventions of Hollywood action and horror, Gibson has dramatically, spectacularly reversed that process. In fact, in an important sense, The Passion’s concentration on violence is much closer to Roman imperial theology than to the gospels’ theologies of the cross.

[42] Maximizing the violence, The Passion threatens not only to obscure its own providence story but also to expose the gospel’s providential story as yet another horror story. Horror critics often observe that one could film Job as a horror story. In one such discussion, Roger Schlobin observes that commentators have transformed the story of the monstrous, divine terrorism of Job into a message of wisdom through suffering (32-34). In the light of The Passion, one might think that the evangelists treat Jesus’ passion similarly. They transform Jesus’ violent death and its culturally “natural” interpretation in light of Roman imperial theology into a new sectarian story of divine providence working in that suffering. 

  [43] But, the gospels’ replacement of Rome with God as primary actor in Jesus’ death raises horrific questions about the character of the evangelical God. This God does what Abraham did not. He kills and abuses his beloved. Surely, such a God would give Ivan Karamazov pause. Such a God is as monstrous as that in Job or as monstrous as any horror villain.  Moreover, this divine characterization creates as its corollary a sinful, cursed (see Gen. 3), or apocalyptic world—a world devoid of present meaning, a world in which death is a good, snuff the human condition, and other people demons and monsters (Walsh 2005).[28] Such a world is eerily like that of horror and that of the death-wish action hero. The spectacle of death is the price of entry to this world.[29] Recognizing that cost, one might want to restate Gibson’s enmity to “pretty crosses” more thoroughly. Maybe one should say with the character played by Julia Roberts in Flatliners, “Death is beautiful. What a bunch of crap.”

Works Cited

Bainton, Roland H. 1976. Behold the Cross: A Portrayal in Words and Pictures. New York: Harper & Row. 

Beal, Timothy K. 2002. Religion and Its Monsters. New York: Routledge.

Brown, Raymond E. 1994. The Death of the Messiah. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday.

Burnett, Fred. 2002. “The Characterization of Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon 1: An Archetypal Hero.” In Screening Scripture: Intertextual Connections between Scripture and Film, George Aichele and Richard Walsh, eds., 251-78. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International.

Burnham, Jonathan, ed. 2004. Perspectives on the Passion of the Christ: Religious Thinkers and Writers Explore the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie. New York: Miramax Books.

Camus, Albert. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Corley, Kathleen E. and Robert L. Webb, eds. 2004. Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History. New York: Continuum.

Crane, Jonathan. 2004. “Scraping Bottom: Splatter and the Herschell Gordon Lewis Oeuvre.” In Prince, 150-66.

Crossan, John Dominic. 1994. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

-----. 1995. Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

Ebert, Roger. 2004. “The Passion of the Christ.” http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2004/20/022401.html (accessed May 17, 2004).

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.

Gracia, Jorge J. E., ed. 2004. Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy: The Cross, the Questions, the Controversy. Chicago: Open Court.

Hengel, Martin.1977. Crucifixion: In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Cross. Trans. John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress.

Hutchings, Peter. 2004. The Horror Film. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Irwin, William. 2004. “Gibson’s Sublime Passion: In Defense of the Violence.” In Gracia, 51-61.

Johnston, Robert K. 2004. “The Passion as Dynamic Icon.” In Plate, 55-70.

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Plate, Brent S. ed. 2004. Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and its Critics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Schrader, Paul. 1972. Transcendental Style in Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

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Staley, Jeffrey L. and Richard Walsh. Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination: A Handbook to Jesus on DVD. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007.

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Notes

[1] Gibson and his marketing team defended The Passion against the charge of anti-Semitism by claiming that they were simply being faithful to the gospel story. The film’s well-documented additions to the gospel narratives, particularly those coming from the anti-Semitic visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, belie this claim. One could also illustrate the film’s anti-Semitism by comparing Gibson’s film to any number of earlier Jesus films, even though many of them were also charged with anti-Semitism.

[2] See, e.g., the essays in Corley and Webb, which deal both with the film’s relationship to history and to the gospel passion narratives. Scholars variously evaluate the gospel narratives’ own relationship to history. For a maximal defense of the passion narratives’ historicity, see Brown. For a far more minimalist approach, see Crossan 1995.

[3] Perhaps, the gospels do not need to report crucifixion details because everyone in the Roman Empire knew those details all too well, but Hengel has famously argued that the gospels narratives are laconic on the point because of the shame associated with crucifixion. If that is the case, the gospels’ avoidance of details is already part of the evangelical transfiguring of Jesus’ death.

[4] The gospels, of course, differ on the theological points that they wish to make. For Mark, Jesus’ death is that of the (a?) apocalyptic martyr, which ushers in the apocalyptic new age. Matthew similarly offers an obedient, righteous martyr, whose death ushers in an interim (?) before the end in which Jesus’ followers live according to his authoritative teachings. Luke’s crucified is an innocent victim, and, more importantly, the resurrection, which seems to matter far more to Luke than the passion does, quickly vindicates Luke’s Jesus. For John, the matter is not a passion at all. Instead, it is Jesus’ decisive action. John’s Jesus decides the “hour” of his passion and its end (“It is finished”). Moreover, for John, Jesus’ death is his “lifting up” and his glorification.

[5] See Foucault for a discussion of torture and capital punishment as a spectacle displaying the power of the ruler. While Foucault does not have the Roman Empire in mind, Moore has applied his insights to interpret the gospels, Paul, and Revelation. See also Pippin’s discussion of the apocalypse as a spectacle of imperial power.

[6] That Jesus is heroic means that he stands “for us,” for those who consider him heroic. Perhaps, one should not be more specific about the theological meaning of his death in the gospels than that, for the gospels do not speak uniformly on the point. See n4. Of course, that Jesus’ death is “for our sins” is the dominant Western Christian view. See Walsh 2005.

[7] Presumably, everyone in Jesus’ culture would have seen Jesus’ cross specifically and crucifixion generally as a Roman imperial spectacle (see Hengel). For the Roman Empire, crucifixion was a means of capital punishment for slaves and other non-citizens. The Empire displayed its power in the savage, tortured death of these miscreants. The spectacle, necessarily including abasing details like exposure, torture, and non-burial, visually shamed the victim in order to glorify Rome. The spectacle hallowed Rome by displaying the horrors justly awaiting any non-Roman within the Empire who dared to resist Rome. Crucifixion drew the boundaries of Roman order—holy/horror; citizen/not citizen; loyal subject/rebel; honor/shame; alive/dead—quite clearly. To be aligned with Rome, to be loyal to Rome, was to participate to the extent that one could in the sacred Pax Romana. Crucifixion eliminated internal chaos. In short, Roman imperial discourse about and with crucifixion is a theological interpretation of particular deaths, which the gospels challenge with their providential passion narratives. Not incidentally, lifting Jesus’ crucifixion out of the plethora of Roman crucifixions of the time for special consideration is already a major battle in the theological war between Roman and evangelical discourse. For an amusing reminder of this point, see the scene in which Pilate decides to add Brian’s crucifixion to the 139 already scheduled for the day in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. For a more somber reminder, see the “forest of crosses” in the prologue to Ray’s King of Kings. Other Jesus films also remind their viewers in one way or another that Jesus’ cross was one among many (e.g., in Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told, the holy family returns from Egypt to Nazareth past a multitude of crosses; and in Sykes and Krisch’s The Jesus Film, Jesus and his disciples make their way to Jerusalem past a number of Roman crosses. Except for the (traditional) criminals crucified with Jesus, Gibson’s cross, like that of the gospels, is more unique.

[8] In the Gospel of Mark, e.g., Jesus predicts his passion at least three times during his ministry, with steadily increasing details (8:31; 9:30-32; 10:34-44). After the passion narrative proper begins, Jesus predicts events with even more detail (e.g., the betrayal, denial, and flight of the disciples in 14:18-21, 27-31). As a result, Jesus not only knows all, he also seems to control all. John’s Jesus who decides the hour of his crucifixion (12:23-26; 13:1; 17:1) and its conclusion (19:30) is even more in control. 

[9] This replacement is far more important to the gospels than the replacement that recent politically correct thinking cannot avoid obsessing upon as it reads the gospels, that is, the replacement of the Romans by the Jews.

[10] This element may already go beyond the gospels. See nn4, 6. The eliding of the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane certainly goes beyond the gospels. The major concern of this essay, however, lies in Gibson’s other additions—in particular, in his focus on Jesus’ suffering. 

[11] On violence in The Passion, see the essays included in Burnham, Gracia, and Plate (particularly, those by Johnston and by Irwin). See also Walsh, 2005; and Vander Stichele and Pender.

[12] Early Christian art and iconography featured no crosses or crucifixions—the famous ass-head graffiti is probably non-Christian—until Constantine learned that he should conquer “in this sign” and ended crucifixion for Christians. Post-Constantinian crosses—like that in John—signified Christ’s victory over the world (and the pagan empire). The triumphant cross dominates Christian art until the late medieval period. See Bainton.

[13] With respect to violent passions, Zeffirelli (Jesus of Nazareth) and Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) are Gibson’s closest precursors among Jesus films. The cinematic cross is never the death of a criminal. Griffith’s Intolerance does join Jesus to one, modern “criminal”; but the movie lionizes both “criminals” as innocent victims. In Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus flirts with Zealot ideas and also deliberately “sins” in order to provoke God, but this sin is complicity with the Romans, not criminal opposition to them. One must turn to Christ-figure films to find a “criminal” Jesus. See, e.g., Zurlini, Seduto alla sua Destra; and Dumont, The Life of Jesus.  Similarly, the cinematic cross is never a place of humiliation. Thus, few filmmakers offer nude Jesuses on the cross even though historians agree that public exposure was an important element of the shameful aspects of crucifixion. Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) and Arcand (Jesus of Montreal) are notable exceptions.

[14] For a theological critique of this hallowing tradition, see Schrader. Jesus films have hallowed the passion (1) by staging it as a recognizable scene from Christian art or pageant, (2) by littering it with talismans (consider the robe in the film of the same name or the blood and the “arms of Christ” in The Passion), (3) by presenting the passion as a cinematic spectacle including various special effects (consider, e.g., the earthquakes in DeMille’s The King of Kings and Gibson’s The Passion), (4) by presenting the passion as the cinematic climax of Jesus’ heroic life, and (5) by cutting from the passion to extended and multiple close-ups of the awed faces—of foes and followers alike—who witness the uncanny cross. The last may be the most effective—and is certainly the most common—technique. It exchanges the difficulty of portraying the sacred with cinematic realism for Hollywood proficiency in filming expressive, emotional faces. Gibson’s The Passion employs all of these techniques. On such hallowing techniques in film generally, see Walsh 2003, 187-89. The hallowing tactics are now so banal that film often uses these techniques to hallow the deaths of secular heroes. They transfigure the hero’s death as his triumph (Neo in The Matrix) or as his release (John Coffey in The Green Mile).

[15] For Pasolini, the death of the peasant Stracci, while treated farcically, is closer to the death of the peasant Jesus than the crucifixions of previous Jesus epics. One might say that the epic passions package the peasant’s death for an audience in a capitalist empire. Pasolini’s St. Matthew tries to resist this consumption by making Jesus a peasant leader who dies at the hands of such an empire.

[16] Actually, the film’s director says that the “poor” peasant had to die to be noticed.

[17] In fact, violence is such a common film trope that it, too, is recognizable “artifice,” and it is already subject to parody (e.g., in Kill Bill or in various teen-age slasher films). In fact, the violence of The Passion itself is so “over the top” that one wonders if it is not already its own parody.

[18] One could easily extend this discussion to include the relationship of other director’s Jesus films to their larger body of work. See Staley and Walsh. Such an interpretation does not contend that the director is the sole creator of a film, but merely that a director’s other works are one avenue for film interpretation to consider in reflecting upon Jesus films. One could, e.g., consider camera operators (with significant payoff in Griffith’s Intolerance), scriptwriters (with Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross and Gibson’s The Passion), producers (with Ray’s King of Kings), etc.

[19] The Passion places the temptation before the betrayal and arrest.

[20] According to movieweb.com, The Passion was the top box office draw for three weeks. Dawn of the Dead, Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and Hellboy were the top draws for the next three weeks respectively. The Passion, then, returned as the top box office draw for another week, only to be displaced the following week by Kill Bill Vol. 2. Clearly, horror and violence sell.

[21] Critics often note this macabre “justice” in the selection of victims in slasher films. A perverse justice (or revenge) often motivates monstrous serial killers, a perverse, orderly world dominates the Saw series of films.

[22] Recognizing the horror conventions here, Tatum suggests that the phantom is a werewolf (213).

[23] The film’s opening visuals are replete with fears common in horror: darkness, snakes, sudden terrors, possession, demons, mental anguish leading to death, and so forth.

[24] Satan is Christ’s dark, demonic double. The (dark) double is, of course, quite common in horror. If the monster is not within, it is the hero’s alter ego.

[25] Picart and Frank have compared elements in Schindler’s List to similar elements in Psycho. Commenting in particular on the shower/death scenes, they note that Schindler’s List “falls back upon the visual rhetoric and narrative devices of classical Hollywood cinema, which glamorize the exploitation of suffering, while posing as a ‘realistic’ narrative” (206). These conventions “aestheticize the visual enjoyment of vulnerable and tortured female bodies, and render German Nazis as unproblematically and monstrously … other” (207). This focus on monstrous evil fails to account for the genesis of the Holocaust in the impersonal mechanisms of modernity (219). With minor changes, one could apply this analysis to The Passion and possibly even to the gospels.

[26] Irwin argues (rightly, if The Passion is a horror film) that the movie tries to deliver the experience of the sublime. Horror theorists often discuss horror in terms of the negative sublime. It might also be worthy of note, given Gibson’s avowed intentions with The Passion, that horror cinema faces more immediately than many other cinematic genres the problem of belief. Horror cinema, i.e., deliberately tries to seduce the audience into its world. See Carroll.

[27] Conrad’s Heart of Darkness famously contends that a dark horror lies at the heart of things and that civilization routinely pulls a façade over that horror. 

[28] No wonder, then, that The Passion offers demonically cruel soldiers and Gibson himself nails Jesus to the cross.

[29] Like Pasolini’s La ricotta, Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal and Monty Python’s Life of Brian significantly demythologize the passion narrative. Like Pasolini’s peasant, their protagonists die by “mistake.” Their scenarios do not rid the world of suffering, but, instead of an imperial horror show, they manage to display the human face of suffering (cf. Camus, 117-18).