I DISAGREE, SO GO TO HELL:

Film Forum: Gibson's Passion Outraces Hidalgo at Box Office (Jeffrey Overstreet, 03/11/04, Christianity Today)

Once again, The Passion of The Christ topped the box office, bringing its 12-day total to $212 million dollars.

This success continued to astound and bewilder mainstream critics of the film, many of whom continued launching uncharacteristically reactionary and angry protests.

"I can't recall a movie that has depicted torture in such lavish, fetishistic and excruciating detail as … The Passion," says Brian D. Johnson (Maclean's). "What's most astonishing about [the movie] is that it's so luridly secular. Gibson has made a movie about flesh, not spirit—flesh that's kicked, beaten, flayed, punctured and lacerated for what seems like an eternity. I'm not sure Jews ought to feel offended … but Christians should. Anyone stepping into this movie from another planet, knowing nothing about Christianity, would assume it's a barbaric cult of blood sacrifice."

(Note: Brian D. Johnson is the same critic who described David Cronenberg's Crash, an explicit and shocking film about people who like to have sex in the midst of car crashes, as "exquisitely composed but emotionally impenetrable … brilliant and severely beautiful. It works on the mind and the eye, leaving the viewer shocked, haunted and bewildered—wondering what on earth to feel, which is perhaps the whole point of the exercise." When offended by The Passion, his put-down is to call it "luridly secular"?)

Similarly, Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) writes, "Gibson stresses only cruelty and suffering, complete with slow motion and masochistic point-of-view shots. The charges of anti-Semitism and homophobia being hurled at the movie seem too narrow; its general disgust for humanity is so unrelenting that the military-sounding drums at the end seem to be welcoming the apocalypse. If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me."

In The Washington Post, Tom Shales refers to anti-Semitism as "the Big Lie." Indeed, using Christ's death as an excuse to be hateful and violent toward the Jews is indeed a grievous sin. But Shales then accuses Gibson of "recycling" the Lie and making money off of it. (Since when has making a profit from your work become a sin?) Shales concludes with his most presumptuous and revealing remark yet: "Surely [Gibson's] parking space in Hell has already been reserved."

You get your own parking spaces in Hell? No wonder people are dying to get in.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 11, 2004 3:55 PM