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The Passion of the Bush/Christ
Dominic Wetzel
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”
- Patti SmithWhen my mom calls to ask when I’m going to go see the latest R-rated Hollywood movie, I know something’s up. “When did you become so interested in Hollywood and popular culture?” I query suspiciously. “Oh, it’s just a really good movie,” she responds. She belongs to a deliriously Charismatic branch of Catholicism influenced by Opus Dei and various Marian visionaries—tendencies cousin to Gibson’s pre-Vatican II traditionalism.
Despite some misgivings, like increasing Gibson’s profit margin and publicity, I went to get a view for myself, bracing for the gore and anti-Semitism reported in the media, as well as the Christian guilt-tripping. On opening weekend I jogged by the Park Slope Pavilion and saw hundreds of people on Prospect circle waiting in line for the 9:30 showing. I asked a young adult in a Mexican family what people were waiting for. “The Passion of the Christ!” he responded with enthusiasm. The two earlier shows had sold out as well.
The movie was painful to watch. The first violent, slow-mo pummeling of Jesus begins just ten minutes into the film. Meanwhile, the morbid realization is pounded into us of what we just paid ten dollars to Mel Gibson to see—two full hours of voyeuristic sadism that not only tortures Jesus, but the movie’s audience as well.
We watch a body subjected to extreme cruelty, and the audience is forced to follow along. While many were able to separate themselves from the story and watch it like a slasher film, my experience, as an “ex-believer” familiar with this brand of Catholic extremism could not help but infer a more troubling reading into the movie’s intentions and effects on its target audience.
As Jesus is scourged, for instance, we watch three beefy Roman soldiers heartily laugh and limber themselves up, getting ready to give Jesus his forty lashes. Then we see them hit Jesus with enough force to break him, one by one, in slow motion, counting the red welts that open up his back, creating a pool of splattered blood around him. Next, they bring out a cat-o-nine tails, and test it against a wooden table. It catches and pulls off a fist-sized chunk of wood. Then, forty more lashes—agonistically sequenced one by one. You can do the geometry—if a cat-o-nine tails could pull a wedge of wood off a table, what would it do to a much more pliable, fleshy human body?
But Jesus lives on, reduced to a bloody pulp floating in a bloody bath. After the beating, of course, he gets his crown of thorns, carries his cross through Golgatha and gets crucified—all events rendered with the same extremity as his whipping. All the while, the film plays out the fantasy of watching the limits of the human body infinitely surpassed as he is ripped to shreds again and again, yet survives to take even more.
This movie’s anti-aesthetic and tragically appropriated depiction of the Jesus Christ story seems somehow fitting for today’s Manichean political and social context. Any shade of communalism or the social justice dimension that can be and often has been attached to interpretations of the Christ story—for instance in the early 90s liberation theology-inspired film “Mission” about the murdered Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero—is voided. From this angle, it is instructive to note where the movie begins—with the betrayal of Judas. This starting point completely removes Jesus’ message of social justice and the communal experiences of the disciples from the story.
The few flashbacks in the movie offer little development of these themes. The extended and bizarre flashback with his mother depicts an entrepreneurial Jesus-the-carpenter “inventing” the concept of the dinner table and chairs – implicitly “elevating” us from our lowly ground-dwelling existence. One almost imagines Jesus hallowedly reciting the Citibank logo “live richly” in Aramaic. Others include platitudes such as “forgive them, they know not what they do”, floated by in dreamily pastoral, misty scenes, depicting the disciples as needy, lost simpletons, whose anxious, furrowed brows and dumbly gaping mouths foreshadow all that is to come. These platitudes are dropped with no development.
The film’s audience seems comprised of two basic groups—those who have a more intense affective connection to the Christ story because of belief and/or growing up in a family or community of believers (regardless of current belief), and those who don’t believe and/or didn’t grow up believing. For the former, the film’s wider cultural implications are disturbing. The main criticism of the movie so far has been that it is anti-Semitic—which is undeniable—with Jews depicted as jealous, bloodthirsty murderers of their own (echoes of Saddam?). Meanwhile the Romans are depicted via Pontius Pilate and his wife, restrained, pained, and forced against their will by the Jews to kill Christ. As people loitered in the lobby after the movie, I couldn’t help but overhear a pre-pubescent black girl, accompanied by her three sisters and mother, repeating “see, the Jews did it!”
However, I would argue that while anti-Semitism is certainly more visible in the movie, covert anti-Islam and anti-gay themes may be stronger yet. The accumulation of violence towards Christ in the movie seems geared towards creating an accumulation of guilt to be borne by audience-members. Seeking to relieve themselves of this colossal guilt, the natural reaction of the viewer is to project it onto the contemporaneously-perceived sources of evil in the world today, which, given the current media context, would be Islamic terrorists or gays trying to undermine the “sanctity” of marriage.
In post-9/11 America, such overwhelmingly sick, sadistic and senseless images of violence cannot help but conjure up the images of 9/11 that were endlessly displayed and obsessively repeated by the media. These, of course, were embedded in our minds rather than images of the other obvious event of senseless and sadistic violence— the war on Iraq, with the dead bodies of Iraqi citizens, or the dead bodies of American soldiers blacked out by the government and media.
In the Manichean world the movie constructs, believers are unconsciously led through certain equations. Jesus died for our sins. The fresh anguishing conjured by the violent depiction of what our sins did to Jesus leads believers to desire nothing more than to distinguish themselves from other, greater sinners. Who are the greatest sinners of today? The terrorists. Who bore the brunt of terrorist violence? America. Who represents America? Bush. The sacrificial redemption of Christ for the sins of the world is then unconsciously merged with Bush’s sacrifice to save the world from evil.
The same equation applies with homos. The institution of marriage is under attack by gay terrorists. The depiction of the devil in the movie as an androgynous figure signals the threat of gender confusion that homosexuality and gay marriage represent for the religious right. Bush and his support of the constitutional amendment against gay marriage reinforces this blurring of the Christ figure into what might be best called “Bush/Christ”. The favorable depiction of the state in the movie conveniently reinforces the reasonable and just nature of our “Christian” American state as well.
And of course by titling the movie “The Passion of ‘The’ Christ”, instead of the typical “The Passion of Christ” implies that there is only one Christ, distinguishing the “true” Christian belief in Christ as God from other religions, such as Islam, where Christ is only one among other prophets—Mohammed, Abraham, etc.
For some non-believers, perhaps the movie can be laughed off and even enjoyed. But the effect on believers is troubling. For believers, every lash and tortuous blow increases the guilt and anger. These emotions may be absorbed by the audience for the moment, but will need to be projected onto someone else at some point to relieve the burden. Who will ultimately bear the brunt of this projection—homosexuals, Muslims, Jews, or “un-American” protesters? I happen to be a homo who doesn’t want to get married, but I think I should be able to (for instance, in the unlikely situation I become a born-again fag). Will I be made culpable for Christ’s death? Will anti-RNC protestors be figured as terrorist attackers of the Bush/Christ?
Reading the photograph negative in Gibson’s depiction, then, Bush/Christ sacrifices himself (and America?) to redeem us from the sins of Islamic and gay terrorists. Let’s just hope Bush gets sacrificed in November and not the world’s future (including my little brother in the army who’s likely headed for Iraq next year).
Ultimately, what was must discomfiting and tortuous about the movie was the dawning realization that the best reading of this coercive fantasy of “watching a body torn to shreds that cannot die” is that of being forced to helplessly watch our own social body torn to shreds under the Bush regime.
Dominic Wetzel is a PhD student in Sociology and a PSC Adjunct Organizer working with the Adjunct Project.
