On The Passion

As I mentioned earlier, I finally saw The Passion of the Christ last night. I need to see it again to really write a review of it, mainly because it is hard to separate the faithfulness of the film with the artistry of the film, something akin to trying to judge the merit of a faithful likeness of a loved one. You see who is being portrayed to such a point that the work itself is hard to see.

In a big way, this is inherently a success as a piece of evangelization. However, it makes it difficult to look at it in terms of art.

So, until I get a chance to see it again, here are a few reflections.

First, I think Fr. Sibley pointed out how cold Gibson’s Satan was, and I agree. This Satan was a little sexier than Dante’s, but not to the level of Milton's. I liked the androgynous look for Satan, and the nose maggot was a good touch. A question, though: why didn’t Gibson have the Blessed Mother crush the snake’s head? I certainly understand having Christ do it, especially in the context of the Passion, but Gibson missed (or chose not to use) an opportunity to add some imagery from Scripture that is often associated with Catholicism only.

Second is something that is inherent to the story of the Passion but really hit me: in all the pointing fingers at Jews, Romans, all mankind for the charge of deicide, one thing that gets missed is that essentially every form of government was involved in the Passion. We have absentee colonialism in the form of Caesar, military dictatorship in the form of the actual Roman presence, theocracy in the form of the Sanhedrin (or clerico-fascism, as Gabriele Ranzato calls it in The Spanish Civil War), direct democracy in the plebiscite that freed Barrabas, republicanism (again, looking at Caesar and his precarious relationship with the Senate – a stretch perhaps, but the point of the roles of all of these forms of government is their degeneracy, so I think it is fair to include), and monarchy in the form of Herod.

I first thought of this after discussing it with my friend, the crypto-anarchist who accuses me of looking to salvation in the temporal order. He compared the Temple Guard to the Falange. It is actually a fair comparison, insofar as the Gospel presents us a picture of ALL human government failing to keep people from killing the Son of Man. Due to original sin, no temporal order can gain us salvation (although try telling that to a neo-Liberal/neo-Con who insist that free markets and free elections will bring about global utopia, if only people would get past these outmoded notions that hold them back).

Amália just woke up. More later.