Friday, January 30, 2004

The Greatest Story Ever Picketed. A.O. Scott looks at the debate over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in The New York Times today. He uses the brouhaha as a starting point to explore the history of New Testament cinema, from Technicolor Biblical spectacles like William Wyler's Ben-Hur to low-key experiments like Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and from the religious no-nothings who condemned The Last Temptation of Christ sight unseen to the secular no-nothings doing the same thing to Gibson's picture. I wish he'd had space to get into the bizarre religious movies of the 1920s -- Noah's Ark, the original Ben-Hur -- but one can't have everything... [Hit & Run] Someone named Dan wrote a comment on the post which I think is interesting enough to point out: I am assuming, sight unseen, that the picture will be anti-semetic. My reason for assuming this is simple -- I'm taking Gibson at his word, that he'll be completely faithful to the story of the crucifixion. And the story of the crucifixion is, itself, the world's oldest anti-semetic hoax. Explanation: It is understood, by secular (and many sectarian) New Testament scholars, that story of Christ's crucifixion cannot possibly be true. The Jews did not ask the Romans to execute heretics; they did it themselves. The Romans did not pardon criminals at the request of the Jews; Pilate in particular HATED the Jews, and was quite vicious to them. They certainly would never have pardoned a known rebel just to execute a Jewish heretic. Then there's the weird coincidence that the other criminal was *also* named Jesus, called "the Son of the Father" (Barabbas). And of course, no crowd of people is going to yell "his blood be on us and our children". The whole story stinks to high heaven, if you stop to think about it for just a minute. What probably happened is something like this: the Romans killed Jesus, for rebellion. Much later, Romans Christians -- ie, the people who redacted and assembled the New Testament and most of its books -- were faced with the task of reconciling Rome's execution of the "son of God" with the fact that they, themselves, were Roman patriots. So, big surprise, the Jews (a perpetually-rebellious pain in Rome's ass) get the full blame: they framed Jesus, took full credit for it, and forced Romans to kill him. So -- to sum up -- I believe Gibson. I think he really is making an "accurate" movie of the crucifixion... which is a bit like making an "accurate" adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 6:54:03 PM    comment () The Horserace. How can Bush lose in November? Ken Layne counts six ways. I don't agree with everything he says, but I sure got a kick out of hearing him say it. [Hit & Run] He makes one point which is particularly good: It's truly a shame that the fanatic chicken-little left has been yelling nonsense for three whole years, because a lot of swing voters are so turned off by this noise (including me!) that it took me a long time to really despise this administration. Dubya's secret commandos Michael Moore & Al Franken have done such a good job since 2000, making sure the sane voter tunes out all the "Bush = Hitler" crap. I hope Karl Rove is paying those boys well, because Christ knows they're earning it. 6:24:41 PM    comment ()

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