The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson
by Patton Dodd
esus used to be king in Hollywood, and they crucified Him. We’re trying to bring him back.”
I heard those words being uttered as I walked into the screening room. It was late June 2003 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and I was on the campus of the evangelical megaministry Focus on the Family. The words were coming from a representative of Icon Productions, the movie studio owned by Mel Gibson. Mr. Gibson and some of his associates were there to screen his cinematic Passion Play, entitled The Passion, for a select group of religious conservatives they hoped would support the film. I had been piggybacked into the screening because I knew someone who knew someone.
Since June, the title of the film, to be released on Ash Wednesday, has been altered from The Passion to The Passion of the Christ. I imagine that this change is a way of avoiding confusion about whose passion, exactly, we’re talking about here—because, as you know if you’ve been reading the newspapers and weeklies in recent months, Gibson’s movie has inspired passion of all kinds. Vocal criticisms have been levied against the film as the result of a purportedly purloined script read and reviewed by a group of scholars convened by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League. Those scholars called Gibson, a Traditionalist Catholic, to account for the anti-Semitism and dubious history they found dripping from the pages of the screenplay. The scholars believed that the movie was capable of producing the kind of anti-Jewish sentiment and violence that resulted from some Passion Plays past, and they felt themselves to be performing a humane duty of religious tolerance. Change the film, they advised, or run the risk of promoting anti-Jewish fervor the world over. In a now-infamous refusal, Gibson rebuffed the rebuffs of the scholars, and a battle quickly ensued—over biblical authority, higher critical scholarship, and the ethical responsibilities of religious storytellers.
Late last summer and fall, one could hardly pick up a periodical or listen to NPR without getting an earful about Gibson and his movie. As I write this now in late December, the story is being touted as one of the year’s “most interesting” or “shocking” or “compelling” in the television news networks’ yearend roundups. If all press is good press, then The Passion of the Christ is having the best, least expensive marketing run in movie history.
These rumbles had only just begun when I walked into Focus on the Family’s screening room in June, but the words spoken by Gibson’s associate anticipated the hubbub to come and correctly surmised the evangelical position on American entertainment. Christian popular culture has always been rooted in an evangelistic impulse: from Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ” portrait to the Contemporary Christian Music complex to W.W.J.D. paraphernalia, Christian popular culture is a cornucopia of evangelistic outreaches that have grown up to become consumer goods. Christians have been more or less successful at arriving at something like mainstream success in television, books, music, and decorative art, but have not yet had much luck with the Holy Grail of film. Evangelicalism will no doubt someday have its own filmmaking industry beyond the current straight-to-video apocalyptic thrillers hawked on Christian networks, but the film impulse is currently still in the wishful thinking phase, with no Hollywood corollary to Jars of Clay or Left Behind.
It is into this desire that Gibson and Icon Productions brought his tantalizing Jesus movie, and the private movie screenings, even without all the controversy, were sure to garner the fervor of Christians everywhere. Christian leaders sitting next to Gibson in darkened screening rooms, then defending the movie against the liberal onslaught and telling their constituents that Gibson has made a powerful movie, a faithful movie, a biblical movie—this has been a kind of fast forward button on the desire to gain a foothold in Hollywood. Jesus is on screen at last, and it is not Martin Scorcese’s all too human Jesus, nor Pier Paolo Pasolini’s androgynous Jesus, nor Campus Crusade’s grainy mission field Jesus—it is Mel Gibson’s Jesus. It is the Jesus of a Hollywood elite turned evangelist, the Greatest Story Ever Told told by a figure with legitimate cultural cachet and even the approval of Oscar.
