Points of View

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Violent 'Passion' Film Deflects Thoughtful Discussion

By CHRISTINE M. THOMAS

Although Mel Gibson's highly popular and controversial film, "The Passion of the Christ," has attracted comment on its historical inaccuracies and anti-Semitism, other issues merit more attention. Gibson's film indeed departs significantly from ancient sources and amplifies potentially anti-Semitic tendencies in the Gospel accounts. But so do other Hollywood films about Jesus.

Gibson's film is unique in its portrayal of violence. No depiction of the crucifixion on film has been so unremittingly gory. Gibson ramps up the violence of the traditional sources: His Christ is nailed twice to the cross, the second time when the cross is turned over to hammer back the nail points. Why has such a violent depiction of Christ's passion become a mass cultural phenomenon?

Violent religious images often reflect crises in religious identity. Significantly, the graphic style of the film resembles Spanish Baroque paintings of the crucifixion produced during the Counter Reformation.

The original Gospel accounts of Christ's death can similarly be read as texts of religious identity. They were written during a crisis in Judaism, after the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D. Their depiction of Christ's pain legitimates a certain Jewish identity within that crisis. The Christians, who still considered themselves Jews, presented themselves in the Gospels as the true Israel, because they recognized Jesus as Messiah while other Jews persecuted him.

Why do representations of pain work this way? Pain resists language. It is an internal experience that cannot be proven to an outside observer. When pain is described, it is easy to ignore its primary signification, the unfelt pain of the other.

As Elaine Scarry has noted, representations of bodies in pain can easily be taken to refer to something else, as they do in torture, warfare, and terrorism. As a powerful signifier with a weak referent, bodily pain is used again and again not simply as a metaphor, but as a metaphor of the indescribable. It often substantiates things that cannot be defended by language and rational argument.

This explains why a film expressing sincere personal piety can be so violent. For Gibson, Christ's pain refers to something else: the ineffable love of God. The popularity of the film, however, suggests that it also has a social function.

The unlikely combination of the pre-Vatican II Catholicism of Gibson and the predominantly Protestant evangelicalism of his target audience should be a clue that a new identity is being forged around this graphic depiction of pain.

To what crisis does it respond? The public response to "The Passion" begs to be seen in the context of the 9/11 attacks, which used the spectacle of bodies in pain to express a religiously based critique of American power and identity. Similarly, the film's audience rallies around a violent depiction of their primary religious symbol.

I do not suggest the film advocates violence. Its Christ definitively resists retaliation. Violence is usually about something else; here it may be primarily an internal debate about identity.

Liberals and conservatives have differed pragmatically about the response to 9/11, but their division also encompasses cultural and religious dimensions: Republican voters are far more likely to be church attendees, where Democrats have largely abandoned religious rhetoric in public debate.

The public response to the film could be seen as an attempt to form a community and defend a religious identity, but it does this with a discourse that abandons words. Employing the image of a suffering body is a powerful move in public debate: This strategy defends a position by stopping the words of discussion, and usually results in greater polarization and intolerance.