The Passion Of Christ A La Mel Gibson
Mel Gibson is known for making outrageous comments in a calm, well-modulated tone. He once said that "being a celebrity is like having AIDS." I sometimes wonder how anyone can make such an idiotic comment. He not only ends up offending celebrities, but also people with AIDS, and most of all, celebrities with AIDS who have died.
He has since become more moderate in his statements, although many Catholics know that he belongs to an extreme wing of Catholicism that does indeed blame Jews for the crucifixion of Christ and probably believes that they, this subsect of Catholicism, are the new chosen people, the Zionism of an extreme wing of Catholicism, if I may rephrase.
In Dosteovsky's THE BROTHER'S KARAMAZOV, Ivan is making a transition from being a Christian to being a modern, practical, atheistic, socialist personality, and he has lucidreams in his waking life... he wonders, "If Christ did everything but actually kill the Romans... he is a poet or a dreamer that inspires a revolution... in another thousands years, Christians killed off many pagans, destroyed many libraries, waged wars against infidels, pagans, witches, etc... ALL IN THE NAME OF CHRIST, and then they began to kill off the Jews, again in the name of Christ. The Germans would appropriate the methods of the church in their national, racial fundamentalism... and all this was forseen by Dostoevsky, the prophet, the writer. In his notebook, he speaks of cultural cannibalism, cultural relativism in which everything is permissible and also of cultural fundamentalism in which everything is permissible but nothing is said.
There's something so fundamentally idiotic about trying to portray the life of God's incarnation on earth as truthfully as possible... if Mel Gibson is an eyewitness of God's life, what does that make him? Does it make him one of the five disciples who tell the narrative of God on earth? Mark, Luke, John, Matthew and Mel Gibson? Also, Christ's Jewishness and his angry fits, his random complaints, his impatience with his disciples, his moodswings, and his absolute inability to understand power and its mechanics except as a "sacrifice" of pleasure is something that should be stressed in the film but IT IS NOT. We often say that the prophets are inspired by God or the Holy Ghost and even by Christ. That the Holy Ghost enters one and transforms one into a spiritual being so that we can receive "Christos" as our saviour, but we also stress the humanity of Jesus, that he is human and divine simultaneously... I would say that he would almost preternaturally be schizophrenic in a human body and would have a difficult time adjusting to it.
To return to THE BROTHER'S KARAMAZOV, Ivan complains that Aloysha does nothing about evil because he thinks that God will do something, that God will answer his prayers, but Aloysha completely ignores the history of the church and its absolutist ways, its appropriation of the naked power of God as its own sole property.
Mel Gibson, as he has shown in so many of his statements, sees himself as a victim. Perhaps he is so able to sympathize with Christ's pain because he has suffered for his art so very much. I would only give one small suggestion to Mr. Gibson for I do feel that the movie deserves praise and is even serious, Spartan, condensed, and is sublimely beautiful at times. I WOULD SIMPLY SUGGEST THAT MR. GIBSON LISTEN TO THE NARRATIVES OF THE MINORITIES IN HOLLYWOOD OR ACADEMIA and the kind of suffering that they've endured for doing something so minuscule... for merely a breach of etiquette.
LISTENING, one is listening to the subtext, to what is being said behind the social vocabulary of what one hears. Listening, one learns what another person is ashamed of, feels gulity about, and the concave, convex relationship between the inner, private self and the outer, public self.
