FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF TOTAL SELF-UNAWARENESS:

NAILED:
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” (David Denby, 2004-02-23, The New Yorker)

In “The Passion of the Christ,” Mel Gibson shows little interest in celebrating the electric charge of hope and redemption that Jesus Christ brought into the world. He largely ignores Jesus’ heart-stopping eloquence, his startling ethical radicalism and personal radiance—Christ as a “paragon of vitality and poetic assertion,” as John Updike described Jesus’ character in his essay “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.” Cecil B. De Mille had his version of Jesus’ life, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese had theirs, and Gibson, of course, is free to skip over the incomparable glories of Jesus’ temperament and to devote himself, as he does, to Jesus’ pain and martyrdom in the last twelve hours of his life. As a viewer, I am equally free to say that the movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood, and agony—and to say so without indulging in “anti-Christian sentiment” (Gibson’s term for what his critics are spreading). For two hours, with only an occasional pause or gentle flashback, we watch, stupefied, as a handsome, strapping, at times half-naked young man (James Caviezel) is slowly tortured to death. Gibson is so thoroughly fixated on the scourging and crushing of Christ, and so meagrely involved in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he falls in danger of altering Jesus’ message of love into one of hate.

And against whom will the audience direct its hate? As Gibson was completing the film, some historians, theologians, and clergymen accused him of emphasizing the discredited charge that it was the ancient Jews who were primarily responsible for killing Jesus, a claim that has served as the traditional justification for the persecution of the Jews in Europe for nearly two millennia. The critics turn out to have been right. Gibson is guilty of some serious mischief in his handling of these issues. But he may have also committed an aggression against Christian believers. The movie has been hailed as a religious experience by various Catholic and Protestant groups, some of whom, with an ungodly eye to the commercial realities of film distribution, have prepurchased blocks of tickets or rented theatres to insure “The Passion” a healthy opening weekend’s business. But how, I wonder, will people become better Christians if they are filled with the guilt, anguish, or loathing that this movie may create in their souls?

By the beginning of 2000, my life had changed in a number of extraordinarily important ways, but most of it was still in place.

As I saw it, my job, as always, was to build a family, build a career, observe, observe, learn a few things, write them down, and get them into good enough shape to publish in a magazine or a book. I was a married, middle-class professional, a critic and journalist-an Upper West Sider, and therefore one of God's sober creatures, a householder and provider living among Manhattan's brown and gray buildings. The Upper West Side was the land of responsibility, a family neighborhood, hardworking, increasingly prosperous-and pleasureless, some would say. There were parks, there were dogs, there were many places to buy broccoli and diapers, to get suits pressed and prescriptions filled.

But there were few elegant people (even the wealthy dressed like assistant professors), few art galleries or clubs, no wicked entertainments to speak of. You could walk for blocks without finding so much as a neighborhood bar.

My wife and I had added two boys to the swarm of children laughing and shoving on Broadway and shooting basketballs at the netless rims in Riverside Park. They were skinny boys, both of them. We fed them virtuously with fresh vegetables and fruit purchased at the long produce counters of the great Fairway Market, at Broadway and 74th. At breakfast, I plowed through the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and at night I watched the news (the stentorian Tom Brokaw, holding aloft the national virtue) and political chat shows (Chris Matthews interrupting God as He explained His policies on the third day of creation). I made my living writing for The New Yorker (and earlier for New York magazine). I went to Woody Allen movies and sometimes (as a type) appeared in them. I had been reviewing movies in one place or another since 1969. At the beginning of the nineties, when it became obvious to anyone with eyes to see that American movies, under conglomerate control, were not going anyplace wonderful, I wrote Great Books, in which a middle-aged man-me-slapped himself out of unhappiness by returning to his undergraduate college (Columbia) and rereading some of the Western literary and political-theory classics. Defending the books against the ideological manhandling they were being subjected to from left and right, I had made a few enemies to be proud of with that book, and a few friends, too, also to be proud of.

Thus the armature of routine, the thick-barked trunk of family love and work for a man of fifty-six. But in the months before I heard myself chattering, my daily habits had changed: I had become obsessed with piling up money, obsessed with the stock market, and I spent hours most weekdays watching CNBC. The men and women of financial reporting, my new friends, went on the air every trading day at five in the morning.

They remained on the air all day, mopping up after the market closed at 4:00 P.M. with various recaps, surveys, predictions, and so on, continuing until eight, at which point the hard-blowing Matthews and the somber Brian Williams took over with the less important criminal, political, and constitutional entertainments of the day. Like several hundred thousand other Americans, I had become addicted to the reporters on CNBC, our joshing chroniclers of the national hopes. They were with us.

On New Year's Day of 2000, the market was closed, and I relinquished CNBC and went to a party. A terrific group had gathered together, teachers, lawyers, journalists, editors, novelists, smart people, and nice, too -good people -and I ate smoked salmon and drank mimosas and spoke too rapidly to a great many of them. I wanted to talk about the market, and they wanted to talk about politics, journalism, and children, and after a while, I thought, Pleasure! What a waste of time! Every other weekday morning, I would take my post in the kitchen, looking at the little TV perched on the granite counter. A half hour, I told myself. Forty-five minutes, that's all! The kitchen was not a comfortable place to watch TV. But then, ignoring the cat, Daphne, who rubbed against my shins and nipped at my ankles, I would sit there for two or three hours, fascinated by the stock tickers running at the bottom of the image, by the declining thirty-year- bond yield and the shocking new Producers Price Index Number. Everything that happens in the market is related to every other thing; it is a gigantic puzzle whose parts move as unceasingly as the tentacles of an underwater creature. It was all new to me-the Consumer Confidence Index! Wow!-and I was amazed. Even though I knew that some of what they said was hooey, I sat patiently through interviews with strategists from the big brokerage houses, with CEOs and money managers, with gurus and savants of various sorts who spread their blankets and displayed their urns and gourds and gave their opinions of shifting currents in the bazaar. It was a rattle of semi-worthless but spellbinding words. I loved it.

Speaking over the din of a brokerage trading floor, many of the CNBC reporters and their guests raced like corsairs. They had very little airtime in which to say complicated things. But more than that, they were driven by the tempo of the market itself, the pulsing, darting flow of money around the globe, all of it intensified, as the CNBC anchors broke for commercials, by that rhythmic clickety-clack of electronic noise needled by a snare drum ... dig-a-dig-a-dig-a-dig-a-DIG-a-dig-a ... Were all the beats the same? Or were there, as I imagined, little emphases which turned the pulse into the music of money? Speed was inside my head, and I couldn't get it out.

At that moment, in early 2000, you were sure that if you could just grab hold of the flying coattails of the New Economy investments, you could get rich very quickly. The newspapers and CNBC were filled with stories of twenty-four-year-old millionaires, start-up companies going through the roof, initial public offerings outlandishly doubling and tripling their price on their first day of trading. And the market! In the previous year, 1999, the Nasdaq composite index went up 85.6 percent; it went up by more than 39 percent the year before. And, as the market soared, you could feel it. You would have to be insensible not to feel it. All around, in the suddenly resplendent corporate pomp of once-dreary San Jose in Silicon Valley; in the crisp linen and sparkle of a downtown Manhattan restaurant at lunchtime; in the fatted pages of new and brazenly successful Internet magazines like the Industry Standard-in all these places and many more, you could sense the thrilling, oxygen-rich happiness of wealth being created overnight.

My urgency was driven by hunger. Making money seemed a function of quickness, and in the market, more than anywhere else, you experienced time as the instant dead past. The market underlines the mystery and terror of time: It never stops. As I sat there in the kitchen watching CNBC, there was only the next instant, and the next, rushing toward you, and I kept trying to catch up. In Times Square, across the street from The New Yorker's office, the news headlines and stock results from Dow Jones -"the zipper"-flashed around the corners of the old Times tower. My eyes would travel with a group of words until they hit the corner and disappeared. That was time, always moving on:

No one could pull the words back. Either read them or lose the information forever. The zipper made me slightly ill, and there were much more powerful zippers around. Using the Internet as a speed lane, an ideally informed person would never sleep at all but would trade the markets and chase news and rumors through the links twenty-four hours a day. What bliss! What a nightmare! The market, it turns out, is the quintessence of instability in the Information Age, the perfect paradigm of life as ceaseless change. That is why it is so mesmerizing, so defeating, and, again, so mesmerizing.

I needed to make money, serious money, that year. Not for the usual reasons that prosperous people want to have more cash. I did not want to buy a villa in Tuscany or a BMW 540i or the Lynx $7,692 gas grill with dual smoker drawers. What in the world could you do with such a resplendent cooking apparatus? Barbecue gold-leafed weenies on it? In all, I was quite sure that I was not the patsy-victim of the standard smug liberal critique -the American who does not know that money can't buy happiness.

No, I didn't want to buy anything in particular. I wanted the money so I could hold on to something very important to me. For I had already lost something of incomparable value - not a possession, but the center of my life-and I was in danger of losing a great deal else.

At the beginning of 1999, a year earlier, my wife, Cathleen Schine, announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me. She had to leave, she had to get away for a new life, for she had mysteriously changed in her affections. Not just in her affections.

She had changed in her being, and she was no longer whole, she was broken, and I was not the one to fix what was wrong.

This, then, is our circumstance. Something has gone dreadfully wrong with the world, and with us in the world. Things are out of whack. It is not all our fault, but it is our fault too. We cannot blame our distant parents for that fateful afternoon in the garden, for we were there. We, too, reached for the forbidden fruit-the forbidden fruit by which we not only know good and evil, but, much more fatefully, presume to name good and evil. [...]

The First Word from the cross: "Father, forgive them." Forgiveness costs. Whatever the theory of atonement, this is at the heart of it, that forgiveness costs. Any understanding of what makes at-one-ment possible includes a few simple truths. First, like the child, we know that something very bad has happened. Something has gone very wrong with us and with the world of which we are part. The world is not and we are not what we know was meant to be. That is the most indubitable of truths; it is beyond dispute, it weighs with self-evident force upon every mind and heart that have not lost the sensibility that makes us human. The something very bad that has happened takes the form of the long, dreary list of history's horribles, from concentration camps to the tortured deaths of innocent children. And it takes the everyday forms of the habits of compromise, of loves betrayed, of lies excused, of dreams deferred until they die. The indubitable truth is illustrated in ways beyond number, from Auschwitz to the shattered cookie jar on the kitchen floor. Something very bad has happened.

Second-and here I simplify outrageously, but our purpose is to cut through to the heart of the matter-we are complicit in what has gone so terribly wrong. We have problems with that. World-class criminals, murderers and drug traffickers, if they know what they have done, may have no trouble with that, but for many of us it may be a bit hard to swallow. I mean, we haven't done anything that bad, have we? Surely nothing so bad as to make us responsible for the death of God on the cross ? True, the writer of 1 Timothy called himself "the chief of sinners," and St. Paul did do some nasty things to the Christians in his earlier life as Saul of Tarsus. But then it would seem that he made up for it with an exemplary, indeed saintly, life. Chief of sinners? There would seem to be an element of pious hyperbole there, perhaps even an unseemly boastfulness, a reverse pride, so to speak.

It is difficult to face up to our complicity because the confession of sins does not come easy. It is also difficult because we do not want to compound our complicity by claiming sins that are not ours. We rightly recoil from those who seem to wallow in guilt. The story is told of the rabbi and cantor who, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, lament their sins at great length, each concluding that he is a nobody. Then the sexton, inspired by their example, laments his sins and declares that he, too, is a nobody. "Nuh," says the rabbi to the cantor. "Who is he to be a nobody?"

Contemporary sensibilities are offended by what is dismissively termed "guilt tripping." Some while ago I was on the same lecture platform with a famous television evangelist from California who is noted for accenting the positive and upbeat in the Christian message. According to this evangelist, it is as with Coca-Cola: Everything goes better with Jesus. He had built a huge new church called, let us say, New Life Cathedral, and he explained that during the course of the building there was a debate about whether the cathedral should feature a cross. It was thought that the cross might prompt negative thoughts, maybe even thoughts about suffering and death. "Finally, I said that of course there will be a cross," the famous evangelist said. "After all, the cross is the symbol of Christianity and we are a Christian church. But I can guarantee you," he declared with a triumphant smile, "there is nothing downbeat about the cross at New Life Cathedral!"

St. Paul said the cross is "foolishness to the Greeks" and a "stumbling block to the Jews" and seemed to think it would always be that way. Little did he know what gospel salesmanship would one day achieve. In the eighteenth century, Isaac Watts wrote the hymn words: "Alas! and did my Savior bleed, / And did my Sovereign die? / Would He devote that sacred head / For such a worm as I?" A worm? Really now ? A contemporary hymnal puts it this way: "Would he devote that sacred head / For sinners such as I?" Surely "sinners" is bad enough. Similarly with the much beloved "Amazing Grace." "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me." "Wretch" will never do. That is cleaned up in a contemporary version: "That loved a soul like me."

Examples can be multiplied many times over. Groveling is out, self-esteem is in. And if self-esteem seems not quite the right note for Good Friday, at least our complicity can be understood as limited liability. Very limited. Perhaps the changes in Christian thought are not all bad. There have been in Christian devotion excesses of self-accusation, of "scrupulosity," as it used to be called. Wallowing in guilt and penitential grandstanding are justly criticized. And yet ? We cannot just take the scissors to all those Bible passages that say he died for us and because of us, that they were our sins he bore upon the cross. Yes, Christianity is about resurrection joy, but do not rush to Easter. Good Friday makes inescapable the question of complicity.

I may think it modesty when I draw back from declaring myself chief of sinners, but it is more likely a failure of imagination. For what sinner should I speak if not for myself? Of all the billions of people who have lived and of all the thousands whom I have known, whom should I say is the chief of sinners? Surely I am authorized, surely I am competent to speak only for myself? When in the presence of God the subject of sin is raised, how can I help but say that chiefly it is I? Not to confess that I am chiefly the one is not to confess at all. It is the evasion of Adam, who said, "It was the woman whom you gave to be with me." It is the evasion of Eve, who said, "The serpent beguiled me." It is not to confess at all, and by our making of excuses is our complicity compounded.

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do." But now, like the prodigal son, we have come to our senses. Our lives are measured not by the lives of others, not by our own ideals, not by what we think might reasonably be expected of us, although by each of those measures we acknowledge failings enough. Our lives are measured by who we are created and called to be, and the measuring is done by the One who creates and calls. Finally, the judgment that matters is not ours. The judgment that matters is the judgment of God, who alone judges justly. In the cross we see the rendering of the verdict on the gravity of our sin.