Month: February 2004

I don’t want readers to think I’m spending all my time worked up about Mel Gibson’s theology. In fact, I spent most of yesterday working with Vince on the rec-room in my house, which I’m trying to convert into a library/study of epic proportions. We made some pretty good strides with that reclamation project. Photos to come, when the room is finished.

Also, we managed to get The Heaviest Treadmill of All Time upstairs to my living room, so I can run while watching hoops, listening to the iPod or fulminating about Mel Gibson’s theology. Evidently, the makers of the LifeFitness Sport ST-55 thought it would be funny to incorporate dwarf-star matter into the construction of its treadmills.

While I did some final install stuff to the treadmill, Vince called me over to the dining room window. Three deer were outside, rooting through the leaves and grass (more leaves than grass, unfortunately). Two more wandered into view. He said, “You’ve got a herd of ’em!”

Then they heard a noise, and bolted for the woods, followed by four more. So, in total, there were nine deer meandering through my yard and looking for food. They move beautifully, like suggestions of motion, fluid then sharply zig-zagging. I continue to live a life of wonders.

Time to go sandpaper yesterday’s spackling work.

My coworker Jack liked the previous entry about the Passion, and wrote:

Jim has said well what so many of us try to say. I guess that’s what separates the men from the matzoh.

One minor observation in response to his comment about visiting Golgotha and feeling it, the weight of the slaughter. I was there a couple of years ago and there is no Golgotha. The christians built a church there. Actually, warring factions of christians built a pile of chapels there. No hill, no nothing. Just rooms with candles and incense and red and gold fabrics and every possible bit of religious crap you can imagine. So no, you can’t feel it there. What you do feel is your wallet, as you clutch it in a protective grasp.

It doesn’t seem like all of Christendom is mad at me because of that entry I wrote about the Passion flick. One guy writes:

You seem very passionate about the passion. Im sorry that you feel so bad about this movie but it is an accurate depiction of the life and death of Christ according to the scriptures. Before you take other peoples word about how bad it is, maybe you should just watch it. Or just ask someone who has what it was about. Maybe Mel Gibson was just an actor, but even Christ himself was the son of a carpenter and no scholar. Just my opinion.

This ignores the fact that I haven’t made any judgements about this movie being good or bad. I’ve argued that Mel Gibson’s interpretation of religion is irrelevant. Also, as my buddy Vince points out, “How can you have an accurate depiction of the life and death of Christ according to the scriptures? They contradict each other!”

Vince’s friend Jim of his wrote a review of the flick. I haven’t checked out his site yet:

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is not a film about Jesus. It is also not a film about history or figures that move through history affecting humanity and the events of history. It is a film about Christianity. More to the point, it is a clumsily packaged Hollywood depiction of 1,500 years of Catholicism. It is religious propaganda. And I do not use the term pejoratively. Every piece of art with a point of view is more or less propaganda, but let’s call a spade a spade: If Gibson, a devout traditionalist Catholic set forth to espouse his faith and depict the center of his own passion; mission accomplished. But this movie, like Christianity, has nothing to do with any Jesus of Nazareth.

Let me put it this way; Passion is not unlike Oliver Stone’s JFK. Not too much JFK in there, unless we see his head coming apart on his wife’s lap. No PT-109, no Harvard, no senator, no president, or Bay of Pigs, or Cuban Missile Crisis or Marilyn Monroe. His head coming apart. Over and over and over. JFK is about assassination theories. Passion is about the Christian obsession with sacrificial blood ritual.

Watching this film took me back to the days of sitting in church as a kid and expecting to see or hear anything about Jesus underneath all the ritualistic dogma. It’s damned frustrating, and hard to argue that the context of which has inspired horror shows like the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust. But it also doesn’t mean it cannot be revisited as art either. Although, for me, it would have been more compelling had it not been more of the same damn thing.

Beyond the ultra-Hollywood violence – jacked up a notch for the video game generation – we get the usual stuff here. Christ dying for our sins. He comes. He dies. End of story. No back-story. No politics. No spirituality. No philosophy. No revolution. No mission. No life affirming usably enlightened theories about embracing empathy and discovering divinity. Suffering. Death. Good drama. Big box office, but no Jesus.

Once again, we get lifeless puppet characters playing their parts in a suicide pact with God, sufficiently answering the question, “Who killed Jesus Christ?” Because when viewed through the lens of Biblical faith – replete with the Lord killing innocents all over the place – and all the evidence in Gibson’s film, the verdict is clear: God killed Christ. Or, more to the point of Gibson’s way of thinking, we forced God to kill him. Kind of like the Jewish authorities forcing Pontius Pilate to kill Christ.

(place plaintive sigh here)

Admittedly, the thing is aptly named. After all it is The Passion of the Christ, although I would have preferred, Jesus Gets it for Opening His Big Mouth, or This is What Happens When One Love’s One’s Enemies. But it’s hard to argue that the very essence of the gospel’s enlightened Nazarene, a charismatic healer exalted by an inspiring philosophy leading a penetratingly gorgeous spiritual movement is sucked right out. In its stead we have a pawn for sadomasochistic mayhem; what I like to call the Euro-Christ.

But even two millennia of Christian rhetoric has yet to erase the impact of the historical Yeshua of Nazareth, from the Council of Nicea to Godspell. Yet this movie manages to do it. I didn’t think it was possible, but Mel Gibson actually succeeds in portraying a completely empty depiction of Jesus Christ.

Not that actor James Caviezel doesn’t capture the Catholic Christ pretty well; a vessel for torture and death set up as humanity’s sacrificial lamb by the sadistic Lord God of the Israelites. He portrays a great punching dummy and the make-up people did a bang-up job. Lots of pain, but again, no Jesus. Lots of blood and suffering and reams of Catechism, but no Jesus.

So, in a sense, Passion is the perfect Christian art, an animated version of Renaissance paintings, (Gibson claims he endeavored to recreate Caravaggio’s gruesome images) but not particularly good art at that; effective, in that it has caused a stir like most viable art, but poor in the literal sense. The way smearing a painting of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung is a sensationalistic artistic statement, but as a gripping, meaningful rendering, it’s lousy.

As a movie, Passion is bad. The acting is predictably stiff, the set-design sub par for a Biblical epic, the music surprisingly non-descript and the directing ham-fisted. I usually don’t like religiously themed films, but most give me at least a moment of chills or reflection, an uplifting of heart or a distinct feeling of something. This thing drones from the opening frame and settles into two-dimensional drudgery.

However, I cannot engage in hypocritical blather about “too much violence” here. You want to concentrate compulsively on first century Roman scourging and crucifixion as a means for redemption, fine; but its not going to be pretty. This kind of thing went on all the time in first century Jerusalem. Hundreds upon thousands slaughtered by Roman governors. Take a trip to Golgotha now and see if you don’t feel it. Not unlike, I’m sure, sitting in Auschwitz or Dachau today.

But I would forget theological debate and historical content when judging Passion. It is poor storytelling packaged as a religious tool. Period. This might be great for some, namely fanatical Christians, but as forceful narrative, it is disappointing. And it is certainly no “true depiction” of historical events in any way, shape or form. Gibson picks and chooses his gospel versions like mad scientist forcing a solution. He might have been better off from a theological stand-point to stick with, say, the Gospel of John, which dominates most of the storyline, instead of jumping all over the Biblical map to suit an agenda. Although, once again, a good framework for religious theory, but hardly accurate.

When I heard about this project some two years ago, I was finishing up the manuscript to my last book, a story based on my trip to Israel in search of the historical Jesus. I was excited about the prospect of hearing the gospel characters speak in their original dialect, and the promised “realistic depiction” of the ordinarily sanitized crucifixion scenes of earlier Hollywood efforts. But even I was left feeling I’d just seen the last ten minutes of “Scarface” for two hours.

Finally, Gibson nor the actors, or anyone connected to the making of this thing should feel badly. Based on concepts like “Jesus Christ was born to suffer and die for the sins of humankind” and “in suffering there is cleansing” all the participants can be nothing if not merely chess pieces in a fixed game. And that is how the characters in this film go about their business, like marionettes marching in step to a mystical slaying.

(place despondent wail here)

It is my fault for expecting to see anything else. The film’s popularity (beyond pure curiosity and pack mentality) speaks to the human condition to be drawn to signature moments that usurp the entirety of an event, or to miss it completely.

We read about a warrior for peace slain in his prime and choose to remember him with a gory effigy of torture and death.

More response to the issue about Mel Gibson’s flick, from my buddy Elayne. No word on whether she plans to watch Club Dread this weekend.

First, I am still stunned that Signs did not shut down all serious discussion of Mel Gibson, period. But since I was mistaken about that, I think we now must admit it: there are several “constant variables” in the world and one is that Mel Gibson is a wack-job. A full-on nutter, by the looks of it. The Catholic sect that his father runs is populated by a Holocaust-denying bunch of evangelicals and, as Christopher Hitchens points out, in the aforementioned film he plays an ex-minister who “recovers his faith after seeing little green men.” He releases this new and, from what I can gather, searingly sadistic exercise on ASH WEDNESDAY. The pretension of that alone gives one pause. So I am coming out as oppossed to Mel Gibson, and on principle.

The film itself: Who cares if the film is anti-Semitic? That isn’t the point, really. The point is that the conception of the film most certainly is. And, again with a nod to Mr. Razor [Hitchens], it appears anti-Christian as well. If you go around bemoaning the crucifixion, what kind of God-damned Christian are you? I am not Christian. If I died and woke to find myself in Heaven, I would puke. But it seems just ever-so-fundamental that the crucifixion is the central necessity for the continuation of that religion itself. So this is puzzling. I have a list of things to do this week… get my hair cut, give my friend Kelly a call, go shopping. Watch Christ die, in real time, is not on that list. Whose list is it on? People who still rewind their 9-11 videos for hours on end. People who go to the web looking for photos of the jumpers from that day–still. It is simply (?) an investment in “the horror” of man, of our never-quite-graspable attraction, no, drooling lust, for the bloodfeast. I don’t knock it, but I think that is behind it, at least in part. And so the “lacerating detail” of Gibson’s film is in an ideological cuddle with the alarming propaganda behind the entire project.

And people want Christianity to win out. They don’t like the fact that a significant sector of the world’s population believes they will get to fuck a bunch of virgins if they die a martyr. That freaks us out, and it should. But folks prefer to identify with the predictable o drama of hanging on a cross (cuz you have nails in your hands) so you can save mankind from the trouble that apple let fly. So The Passion is tapping into that, but only because of Gibson. The other films on Christ have mostly faded from view, and Scorsese’s film is only ever watched anymore so people can laugh at Harvey Keitel’s accent. It is Gibson’s persona that is selling the film. Whether or not he is well-suited to inaugurate this new dawn of aestheticized, vengeful, ignorant, and scared Hollywood worship is not a question Joe Six-Pack is probably asking himself. He is probably just glad it wasn’t Danny Glover.

I dunno. Maybe Hitch put it best when he said “If the Jewish leadership had any guts, it would turn on all those who taunt it with ‘Christ-killing’ and say, ‘Yeah, all right, since you keep mentioning it, we did you a favor. Judas too. Where would your faith be without us?’ This would have the effect, however, of giving away the open secret that religion is man-made. For some reason, we are assumed to need protection from such a revelation.”

When what we really need is to be protected from Mel Gibson. And ourselves.

By next week, I hope to get a “comments” function added to VM. Until then, I’ll post any e-mailed responses people have to the blog. This one comes from someone I don’t know. One of my coworkers has forwarded my Passion Play to some people, and it’s begun meme-ing around:

Mel Gibson is no more Mad Max than this guy Gil is Jesus Christ. Perhaps the “Kingdom of God within you” includes the tolerance and wisdom that acknowledges the human inside the actor. That wisdom would also allow that the relationship to worship starts with the idolizer — not the idol. Gil seeing these celebrities as idols and not humans is his problem — don’t you think?

And a long response just showed up this very minute:

Lighten up! It’s only a movie. Haven’t seen it yet but it’s on my list, especially after the crowds dwindle. Mel became MY theologian with the first Mad Max movie. The second Lethal Wepon solidified his position along side St. Augustine, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton.

And since when are whores a bad thing? Profitable business acumen, usually. Highly motivated, usually. And victimless, usually. Besides, who’s to complain if Brittany Spears wants to stick her tongue down the appropriately monikered Madonna’s throat? Certainly not the NASCAR Dads.

After all, the denial-of-sex-as-a-natural, biological function – especially as it pertains to the two women-twins concept – dominates the entire Bush Administration psyche. To wit, John Ashcroft’s throwing a sheet over the Statue of Justice. After reading the Patriot Act, that drapping, his first official act as Attorney General, is highly symbolic and evocative of his trampling on America’s civil rights, not to mention his part in the usurpation Christ’s Kingdom here on Earth.

Gil, I was born American with a French, Scot, and Native American heritage. I was raised Catholic (I’m Lapsed at the moment); I wasn’t born one and I’m horrified by ALL Born Again bigots. Never in my parents home did I hear ANYTHING that suggested that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death. To the contrary, what I was taught both at home and at the mandatory religious classes from first-through-twelfth grades was this: Jesus was a Jewish carpenter who died for the sins of mankind. True or not, what’s not to admire?

It’s clear that you — with the entire Bush cohort — have missed the point. For now, at least, we have the ability to view, read, hear, feel, experience — or not — pretty much everything. Choose as you will, rail against whatever you will.

My suggestion for you, Gil, is to focus on matters that really count: your loss of civil liberties under the guise of Homeland Security, for example. Or to understand what Junior (who should be tried in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity), Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, and sadly Colin Powell — are really doing. I do not want to live in a prison, even one as vast as the continental United States; for reference please read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”

So, please don’t do anything harsh to my friend, [who forwarded your post to me], or anyone else for that matter. Whether or not my God is within me, I do my best to find the Almighty in a good glass-or-three-or-four of beer, as, apparently, should you. If, however, drinking to excess doesn’t work for you, perhaps another movie that opens this weekend may work: Club Dread. My daughter, who lives in Mexico where this was filmed, has a minor role in it.

Hasta manana,

Pablo Incognito

As my friend, who forwarded this over to me, writes, “I don’t think he’s read anything else you’ve written, Gil.”

And, in the midst of posting that e-mail, here comes one from a buddy I met back in grad school:

good entry.

couldn’t the same thing be said for celebs who become sociopolitical theorists and soapbox firebrands every election year?

It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m hoping Club Dread (from the makers of Super Troopers) will dwarf what I like to call “the passion the of the christ” at the box office this weekend.

So it appears the jury is in! If Club Dread manages to bring in more box office than Mel Gibson, I’ll have somehow triumphed. I think. GodDAMN is this a confusing world.

Anyway, in response to Pablo Incognito, be assured that I’m all about frivolous entertainment. It seems to me that this movie (the Jesus one) doesn’t qualify as frivolous. It’s not a free speech issue at all. I’m not calling for the movie to be banned. I’m calling for people to find their interpretation of religion somewhere other than on a movie screen. And if watching someone’s flesh get flayed for an hour is your idea of frivolous entertainment, you should probably seek therapy.

I haven’t been out to see The Passion of the Christ. I don’t really plan on doing so, but I have a question for those of you who are going to see it:

If this movie was directed by someone who wasn’t a Hollywood movie star, would you go to see it?

If the answer is yes, then you can skip on to another entry. But if your answer (look in your heart) is no, then let me ask this followup question:

When did Mel Gibson become our pre-eminent theologian?

Because this movie is about theology, and it comes from a pretty fringe sect of Catholicism, as near as I can gather. I also gather that the grand majority of Americans had no idea what this sect was, prior to Gibson’s movie project.

So, has it become compelling subject matter because it’s being promoted by Mel Gibson? If so, do you realize how absolutely insane that position is? You’re saying, “I want to try to get a better understanding of the Gospels through an interpretation by the man best known for the Lethal Weapon movies.” Why on earth would anyone give credence to that person’s views?

You wanna know why? It’s because we live in a culture of starfucking celebrity-whores, and this is just the most extreme example of that to come along in, oh, a week or two. Sure, we thought that having Congressional hearings about an over-the-hill pop diva’s breast-exposure was bad, but we’re at a point where the national conversation is about Mad Max’s take on Jesus Christ!

How insane can you fucking people get?! Read a motherfucking book! Read the Gospels, if that’s what you want to understand! I’m a Jew, so this stuff isn’t my province, but isn’t the kingdom of God supposed to be within you?

And print this out and pass it on to anyone stupid enough to give a crap about what the star of Bird on a Wire thinks about the redemption of our souls.

–Gil Roth
groth@chimeraobscura.com

I’ve been a little busy procrastinating lately, so here’s an entry from Sirk, one of my devoted readers:

My iPodMini passed away this morning at the ripe old age of 5 days. In those 5 days it played 2 complete songs and 20 minutes of an audiobook, twice completed syncs with no songs present on the hard drive and had to be restored once. It is survived by an iRiver iFP-395T. Requiscat in pace and may God have mercy on Steve Jobs’ soul.

Record traffic for Virtual Memories this month (and there’s still a few days left, plus it’s a short month)!

Now if only more of you would buy The Immensity of the Here and Now, that novel about 9.11 by Paul West that I published last fall.

Last week, I mentioned that I needed a translation from the Swedish for this review of Immensity. Well, Ken Schubert took care of it for me, and did a bang-up job. Here’s his translation:

“I’ve become an anxious person”

The art, film and music worlds responded quickly to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Literature was slower. Dan Jonsson has read three novels about two airplanes that changed the world.

Caption: Why did the world change? Was it all the suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production?

For once, it appears to have actually happened.

The events in New York on September 11, 2001 literally changed the world.

Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is what really caused that change. Was it all the human suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production — images of the planes crashing into the buildings, the soundlessly collapsing towers, the ash-strewn surroundings and the austere romanticism of Ground Zero? The symbolic, clinical sharpness of the images painstakingly concealed the essence of the attack — the death of its victims.

Literary portrayals of major historical traumas are normally long in coming, but September 11 has provoked prompt counterattacks on all fronts. Last fall marked the release of Paul West’s The Immensity of the Here and Now, a painful excavation of the psychological devastation that the attacks left in their wake. Around the same time, Frenchman Frederic Beigbeder published Windows on the World, a controversial bestseller that attempts to recount the episode from the vantage point of the famed tower restaurants.

Common to the two novels is their focus on inner processes rather than the all-too-familiar course of events. As Beigbeder comments dryly at the beginning of his book, “You all know how it ends: everyone dies.” That foreknowledge also casts a dramatic shadow over Else Buschheuer’s diary novel www.elsebuschheuer.de, presumably the first piece of September 11 fiction when it came out in February 2002. Much of it was written, and even published, before the attacks in the form of a running Internet diary of what was to be an extended visit to New York.

The first two months are a long, tumultuous tour de force of the city’s merchandise fetishism and media mirages, executed with great linguistic zest and ironic distance.

Reading the book is like sitting with your seat belt clasped in one of those planes, more and more terrifying the closer you come. The September 8 entry is about a “cozy evening at home in front of the TV” and the heading for September 9 is “Tidbits.” Triviality waxes prophetic when she expresses her “great relief” on September 5 that the New York sky “could never fall down on my head. The buildings are so high. They hold everything up, I thought, and grew calm.”

The attacks appear midway through the book like a classic peripeteia, turning everything into its opposite. For a moment, the writing becomes agitated, emotional, confused, vulnerable. The people around her — parents, boyfriend, a daughter not previously mentioned — are unexpectedly visible. “I have become an anxious person,” she writes on September 13. “Before this I wasn’tafraid of anything, except that someone would get too close to me. Now I’m afraid of everything.” The fear is accompanied by a vague sense of guilt about the flippancy of her previous life, uncertainty as to whether what she has just gone through is reality or mere images on a TV screen, and the fact that the victims are somebody else.

Similar issues plague Beigbeder in Windows on the World. But while Buschheuer’s talents are in the realm of the documentary, Beigbeder’s are closer to the essay. His book interweaves the tale of a Texas real-estate broker and his two sons with autobiographical reflections. Although the terrorist attacks are the kernel of the book, the narrative branches out both thematically and psychologically.

Beigbeder writes with a mixture of gusto and earnestness that can be explosive. The protagonist tries to console his sons by describing the world as a carnival attraction with special effects by George Lucas. Beigbeder points out that the lapse between collision and collapse is about as long “as a normal Hollywood movie.” He immediately follows that up with a well-aimed dig at his own “dandyism” — in other words, the author as perpetrator, fiction as a sinister moral vacuum. While aware of the risk that he will be regarded as speculative, Beigbeder argues that even a traumatic event of this magnitude deserves retelling in fictional form: “You have to write that which is forbidden” — i.e., what can’t be written. If that’s true, The Immensity of the Here and Now is the closest you can get to such a novel.

Three years after the terrorist attacks, Shrop and Quent, who have been friends since the Second World War, struggle with their phantom pains. Shrop is suffering from extensive memory loss, which Quent — a psychoanalyst — tries to cure.
Memory loss — West avails himself of a popular contemporary metaphor — becomes a composite symbol for innumerable smaller deprivations: a sense of reality, courage to live, trust among human beings, connectedness, comprehensibility, historical understanding and existential meaning.

With its Joycean flow of words, The Immensity of the Here and Now can either intoxicate you or make you give up in exhaustion. Given the abruptly shifting associations between the trivial and the momentous, the book often resembles a kind of collective psychoanalysis. Other times it is more like a melancholy dream, absurd and linguistically absorbed — a Finnegans Wake for a fragmented era. Shrop sees himself as fumbling for a pillar to lean on in a world that has spun out of control — as if the terrorist attacks were intentionally carried out “to devastate consciousness.”

His conclusion is that “something had happened that was nothing.” To encounter that “nothing” is to be at the juncture where language stops functioning. And to write in and around that juncture is — if I understand West and Beigbeder correctly — the author’s sole responsibility.

Dan Jonsson, kultur@dn.se

My pseudonymous buddy in Iran now has a blog! Check out the Brooding Persian!