THE TALKIES: Why Not Be Anti-Semiotic?
Bowman, James
T HE LATE PROFESSOR GEOFFREY SHEPHERD of the University of Birmingham in England, at whose feet I sat for a time back in the 1970s, once observed that for medieval Christians the central event in...
...There was a moment when no one answered the call—" he says, oddly recalling a similar moment on the Cross, and when "I lost something...
...The Good News of the Gospel was intended for a mass audience...
...True, this Christ is, like the Fisher King on whom He is said by some to be based, a victim-hero who may be strengthening to the faith of many...
...It sounds hokey, but somehow it isn't...
...But now the central event in human history, at least to judge by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, is the Flagellation administered to Jesus by the Romans before the Crucifixion—which in the film is reduced to an anticlimax...
...Just lately, however, the Crucifixion has again fallen into eclipse...
...We persist in believing that to peep behind the veil of decorum is to observe something real...
...Thus even A.O...
...Wheezy and cheesy, as you might say...
...As Yates was lowering him on a rope in a snowstorm, he went over a ledge and could neither go back up nor farther down, nor could he alert his partner who was 150 feet above him...
...They might be a bit slow to recognize that this kind of slow-mo, blood-spattered violence owes less to Caravaggio—whom Gibson claims to have taken as his model—than it does to Sam Peckinpah...
...Or, as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times put it, the movie "has the cartoonish violence of a Sergio Leone Western...
...After some time during which the day grew darker and the storm worse and he began to feel himself being pulled off the mountain, Yates cut the rope...
...T HE LATE PROFESSOR GEOFFREY SHEPHERD of the University of Birmingham in England, at whose feet I sat for a time back in the 1970s, once observed that for medieval Christians the central event in human history had not been the Crucifixion but the Harrowing of Hell...
...Could there be any connection between the 30 or 40 years' growth of movie-goer blood-lust and the fact that Hollywood's image of the Church has progressed over the same period from The Sound of Music (1965) to The Magdalene Sisters of last year...
...You'd think somebody would have said something more than that if He had been virtually flayed alive...
...Yet there was something more stirring to the spirit about his experiences than all the tawdry cinematic gore of The Passion...
...Today, this unscriptural doctrine, though it has never been disavowed, is • preserved only in the Apostles' Creed ("He descended into Hell"), but its significance for centuries of Christians tells us something important about them—for instance, their understanding of how vital are the links between the Old Covenant and the New...
...But Scott means "reality" in the same way that Gibson does, I think...
...Although Gibson's stress on the promiscuous spattering of blood and flesh on Jesus' torturers and other bystanders and observers—let us spray, quoth Mel—doubtless arose out of his devotion to the faith, it had the effect of reintegrating Christianity into the pop-cultural mainstream, only at the cost of aligning itself with the cult of victimhood which the movies have done so much to promote...
...Political and religious conservatives, disdaining as they do the vulgarity and trashiness of the popular culture, have some excuse for thinking this way...
...ITHIN A DAY OR TWO of the opening of The Passion of the Christ, I happened to watch ° another film based on images of a young man being tortured almost to death and reduced to a mere husk of humanity by nearly unimaginable suffering...
...This seems to me to be as revealing about our own times as the emphasis on Christ's descent into Hell is about the Middle Ages...
...He means movie reality...
...I lost me...
...Simpson tells us that he was raised a devout Roman Catholic and, having lost his faith, wondered if it would occur to him to say a prayer when death was all but certain, as it was on more than one occasion...
...There is barely one of the Resurrection...
...The semiotics of movie blood since, oh, say Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or The Wild Bunch (1969) has been bound up with the thrill of the forbidden...
...Here was an image of hope and despair, the latter particularly in the look on Joe Simpson's face as he described that awful instant, just before his rescue, when he thought Yates had broken camp and left, thinking him dead, and that all his efforts had been for nothing...
...It is the movies that have taught us that the more blood we see the more "real" it is...
...Naturally, there is no mention of the Harrowing of Hell...
...When the media that serve such an audience in our time came to regard it as a religion of nuts and killers and rednecks and child-abusers, it was not only wounding but it called into question the very foundations of the faith and the self-identification of its adherents...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie critic...
...By rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus' death and fixing our eyes on every welt and gash on his body, this film means to make literal an event that the Gospels often treat with circumspection and that tends to be thought about somewhat abstractly...
...But it shouldn't be forgotten, either, that our empathetic response is meant to be with the torturers and not with their victim, which goes clean contrary to the tendency of the victim-culture on which the film so largely depends...
...Incredibly, Simpson survived, though only after days of crawling and dragging himself, when every foot was agony, over miles of glacier, moraine, and icefield...
...The Bible tells us only that Jesus was scourged...
...Scott of the New York Times, who didn't like the film, concedes that it is disturbingly real...
...To those of us who have been watching this kind of thing for over 30 years it looked much more familiar—so much so that to me it seemed old-fashioned and unreal...
...You might even call it a spaghetti crucifixion, 'A Fistful of Nails...
...After reaching the summit of a hitherto unclimbed peak with his climbing partner, Simon Yates, Simpson had badly broken his leg on the descent...
...It is the tendency of the medium—so "real," so immediately engaging—and cannot be wished away because the medium is being used to represent events with spiritual meaning...
...Excuse me, but on what basis is this gory spectacle supposed to be "reality...
...It never did...
...I don't mean to be contemptuous of those who want to be loved by Hollywood...
...They don't go to movies very often...
...Is it, I wonder, entirely coincidental that the days when the victims of movie violence simply keeled over, said a few last words, and expired decorously with not a mark on them, save perhaps for a slight bruise (no swelling) on their forehead, ended almost simultaneously with the kind of Tridentine Catholicism that Mel is said to be bringing back...
...Christianity has throughout its history been a popular religion...
...Now there's a cinematic representation of reality...
...Mel Gibson recognized this when he had his own hand photographed driving in one of the nails, but most people watching will feel the scourge on their own backs and be moved not to repentance but to self-pity, as they are in other cinematic representations of pain and suffering...
...I also wonder if some of the Christians, evangelical as well as Catholic, who have celebrated The Passion haven't been flattered into thinking that the full movie treatment of their sacred mysteries means that they are somehow hip again, their faith included in the celebrity "lifestyle" from which Christian piety has for at least a generation been rigidly excluded...
...Based on a true story about a climbing accident in the Andes in 1985, it presents its own hero-victim, Joe Simpson, merely describing his experiences to the camera, as an unscarred talking head, while an actor portrayed in dumb-show their high points...
...Kevin McDonald's Touching the Void, the Movie of the Month, I found to be a much more spiritually edifying experience, even though it explicitly disavows having a religious meaning, or even that there is such a thing in the world...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
