Since we seem to have gotten into something of a groove discussing movies about Christianity lately, let's roll with it and talk about the big one - the controversial blockbuster made by a wild-living, bad boy Catholic director with a troubled relationship with the Holy See, which presents the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus with a raw, heartbreaking physicality and is, in my opinion, essential viewing if you want to talk about Christianity and kino.
In fact I would go further. I would say that if you call yourself a Christian of any variety and you haven't seen Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ you're only LARPing.
Yes, you can see what I did there. But actually let's back up a little before we get into the film criticism, and set down a little of the simple events of my day.
I spent yesterday afternoon helping out with a symposium which was being held at ReCoCo, the recovery college I've been attending and, lately, volunteering at. What I was helping with was running the refreshment stand - providing people attending the symposium with tea or coffee. Five years ago this was something I would take in stride, but between the lower back problems I was starting to get even before the First Year of the Plague, and the post-covid fatigue syndrome I've been saddled with since, after finishing my two hour shift I was a wreck. And the fact I still had an errand to run in town gave me ample opportunity to really confront how utterly broken my body is these days. I've written before about how dependent I've become on the availability of public seating in order to simply be in public (heck, I've even written poems about the shortage of such seating), and on my walk from Carliol Square to Monument I had to take advantage of every opportunity to sit and get some rest. Sadly, when I got to Monument itself I found my rest disturbed by a young man haranguing the good people of Newcastle about Jesus.
To be honest I could hear the noise before I even got to Monument, but it was only there that it resolved itself from noise into something resembling speech. I say 'something resembling' because there was, to be frank, very little real content to it - just a near stream-of-consciousness delivery of various thought-terminating clichés about Christ: Jesus saves, all you have to do is believe, this world isn't real, it only exists to test your faith, God will raise you up, jam tomorrow, etc etc. It couldn't be denied, though, that the young man delivering this sales pitch was doing it with a great deal of energy and a supremely confident delivery. It was certainly more impressive than some of the other street preachers I've seen in town, who often find themselves going off on tangents which undermine their effectiveness (one lady really seems to have a bee in her bonnet about tattoos and jewellery, and it's never very long before she lets us know that come judgement day anyone with ink or bling is really going to get it, just you wait). This chap was really, to put it in profane terms, giving it some bollocks.
It's just a shame that it didn't have anything to do with God, Jesus, or Christianity, really.
Of course it never really does. It's been pointed out by people better qualified than me that the real purpose of this kind of street preaching is not to attract new converts, but to foster in-group solidarity among members of the sect in question by exposing them to a hostile public and confirming the dogma that says the rest of the world really is a nest of sinful vipers. But in the case of the preacher I saw yesterday, it wasn't that aspect of the performance that was the most egregious. No: what was really off-putting was how obviously the guy was getting off on it. He had no genuine interest in the actual salvation of the people he was addressing: he was just using the situation as an opportunity to masturbate his ego.
And it was this that drove me, when I got home, back to Scorsese's adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel about the struggle between the human and divine sides of Christ, written (at least in part - Scorsese and Jay Cocks also did uncredited rewrites) by First Reformed scribe and frequent Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader. As the opening paragraph of this piece implies, I think it knocks Mel Gibson's pompous The Passion of the Christ into a cocked crown of thorns. Part of the reason for that is the humility displayed by Scorsese in choosing to adapt a story about Jesus rather than declaring he is giving us the story; part of it is that Last Temptation is just hands down the far superior film, in terms of acting, cinematography, editing, and so on and so forth; and a key part of it is that Scorsese actually achieves what Gibson tells us he is trying to achieve, but so spectacularly fails to do: he gives us the abjectness of Christ.
The YouTube channel Acolytes of Horror does a good job of explaining the major problem with Gibson's portrayal of Christ in his Passion: macho Mel can't help but make his Jesus into a heroic figure. But that isn't the point of the story. It isn't what made Jesus such a compelling figure compared to the myriad of other dying and reviving gods who pop up in myths throughout the ancient world - indeed, a good heuristic for measuring the seriousness of someone's intellectual engagement with Christianity is to see how much stress they lay on the Resurrection which, theologically speaking, is basically a magic trick compared to the much more important matter of the Crucifixion itself: Good Friday is far more important than Easter Sunday. And again, this is another point where Scorsese wins handily, having the guts to end his film with Christ's cry of 'it is accomplished' rather than, as Gibson does, giving us the Big Comeback in his final scene (and don't miss Passion of the Christ 2: The Repassioni Resurrection, in cinemas this year! No, seriously, they are actually doing that).
What made Christ such a fascinating figure to so many cultures which already had dying and resurrecting gods of their own is the very fact that Christ's sacrifice is not treated as heroic. He isn't just tortured, he's humiliated. He begs to not have to go through with it. On the cross itself He excoriates God, his Father, for forsaking him. He is, to put it absolutely bluntly, and if this sounds blasphemous then I would put it to you that you still aren't getting it, a whiny little bitch about the whole thing.
And that is what fascinates, because it makes him human. He doesn't seem like a god or a hero. He's not Odin, hanging on the world-tree to be initiated into secret knowledge. He isn't Achilles, sulking in his tent because he gets no respect. He's like us. It's this humanity which Kazantzakis' novel, and Scorsese's adaptation of it, address so well. The idea of the last temptation itself - that, at the last possible moment, Satan might tempt Christ with the possibility of just sacking the whole thing off and living a quiet life - fits the accounts we have in the gospels so perfectly, and makes that cry of 'it is accomplished' such a bitterly triumphant thing because it helps us appreciate how hard-won it is.
And the thing is, there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians who really don't like the idea of Christ being abject or weak, actually (Ernst Toller gets harangued by one when he sits in with a megachurch youth group in First Reformed). To them, it seems weak, it seems unmasculine, it seems undignified, it seems faggy. And it is! And that's the whole point! But they hate it, because they don't want to see the qualities they work so hard to repress in themselves represented in their saviour. They don't want the suffering Christ. What they want is Touchdown Jesus.
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