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Can a Movie Be Hazardous to Your Health?

Mel Gibson’s Christ – Nothing but a Piece of Meat

A Commentary by Chet Day
Editor, chetday.com
First Posted on February 29, 2004
Latest Update March 1, 2004

Boy, did I crack open a can of worms when I told readers of my crockpot recipe newsletter that after seeing the Ash Wednesday opening of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ” I considered the film “a creepy, warped, and even sadistic depiction of Jesus’ sacrifice for the sins of humanity” and that people should keep children and young teenagers away from it and that everyone else should save their money unless they enjoyed watching ultra-violent movies.

As I write these words, I’ve been inundated for days with angry email from evangelical, born again, fundamental Christians as well as an equal (slightly more as of March 1) supportive letters from Christians and non-Christians.

Before I put my head in a noose and pound out some detailed and heart-felt observations about “The Passion of Christ,” I want to thank everyone who wrote in, even those who are now praying for my salvation because they’ve concluded I’m a doomed-to-Hell non-Christian or, even worse, an agent of Satan who is seeking to destroy Christianity behind the guise of a mild-mannered crockpot recipe newsletter editor.

A few of these rather strange people, who always identify themselves as Christians before letting off their opening salvos, even told me I was dooming others to perdition because I’m encouraging parents to keep children away from the movie and flat-out telling men and women who are sensitive to violence not to waste their money on this ultra-brutal film.

Well, after several days of pondering close to a thousand bipolar emails that have flooded my mailbox, it’s painfully obvious to me that Mel Gibson’s movie will evoke nothing but steadfast adoration and praise from the evangelicals, and that anything anybody says to the contrary about the film will most likely evoke a “You’re an evil doer” condemnation.

In other words, Mel’s movie expands the already deep rift between those on the evangelical right of Christianity and everyone else.

The predominant accusation that’s been thrown at me is that I’m apparently too stupid to understand that “The Passion of Christ” had to be a visually violent and disturbing movie because the more violent and disgusting the depiction, the more viewers will appreciate the sacrifice Jesus made in dying for the sins of humanity.

Although I understand this point of view from working as an editor, webmaster, and ghostwriter for an evangelical Christian preacher for eighteen months just before Y2K didn’t destroy humanity, I find the perspective wanting because it blunts so much of the power of Christ’s life and parables.

For me, a middle-aged fan of most of Mel Gibson’s other movies who was reared as a Christian but who -- from decades of study, reading, praying and meditation -- has ended up with a deep appreciation for not only Jesus’ teachings of love and peace but also for Zen Buddhism as well as elements of most of the other great religions of the world, the ironic, tragic, and terribly sad point of what I’ve learned since mentioning “The Passion of Christ” in my newsletter is that many evangelicals actually believe Mel’s violent “Jesus Chainsaw Massacre,” as a reviewer at Slate called it, will bring people by the hordes to Christianity.

Why they believe a film that glorifies torture, hatred, and death in pornographic detail will result in even a single conversion to Christianity, I find inexplicable, though perhaps it has something to do with thinking you can see another person’s face in a mirror, when, in reality, it’s your own face that you’re viewing.

I went into each of my two viewings of “The Passion of Christ” wanting and expecting a religious experience, a two-hour spiritual shaking that would have more firmly etched Jesus into my heart than he’d ever been etched before. I went a second time to make sure my first impression would hold up.

With each viewing, because of the over-the-top violence, by the time the nails were going through Jesus and into that old rugged cross, I didn’t care a hoot about this movie’s brutal depiction of the Son of Man, a depiction that evoked so little of his grace and power and the reason for his death.

Less Real than a Spaghetti Western

You see, for me, the battered and stabbed, spit on and struck, flogged and stuck with thorns, and so on until your stomach wants to heave Jesus in this film ended up being less real that the squinty-eyed characters in the old Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.

I mean, seriously, there I was sitting in the theater in downtown Shelby, NC, munching away at my $5 tub of unbuttered popcorn, watching crazed, sadistic, drooling, howling Roman guards pounding nine-inch nails through the palms of Jesus with deep Dolby sound effects manipulatively geared, I guess, to bring out the willies in even a stone cold serial killer, and there I was thinking, detached as all get out, thinking at the time that I had been a whole lot more moved by the heroism and self sacrifice when William Wallace died in “Braveheart” or when Jack sacrificed his life for his lover in James Cameron’s “Titanic.”

I had to dive for my handkerchief at the end of both of those movies because the films had made me care for the characters.

Gibson’s “Passion” didn’t make me feel anything for Jesus.

I mean, really, why would a thinking, feeling person convert to a religion populated by individuals who not only venerate suffering and torture the way it’s venerated in “The Passion of Christ” but who have repeatedly told me that Mel didn’t go far enough. That the “real” passion of Christ was much more violent.

I read the day after Ash Wednesday, that a woman in Australia died while watching the final minutes of this movie.

I doubt that it was a conversion experience hurrying her over to paradise.

More likely, the foul and unspeakably gross depiction of blood spewing halfway across the rock of Golgotha from the speared and ripped open side of Jesus broke her heart – in more ways than one.

A Great Testimony for Christianity?

Since so many evangelic leaders for months and months now have been calling Mel Gibson’s movie “a great testimony for Christianity,” I spent hours reading the Internet, but I couldn’t find a single conversion report from some poor lost soul who walked into “The Passion of Christ” a New Age agnostic but who crawled out on his knees a born again Christian.

I did read several hundred posts from born again types who praised the movie to high heaven, but, alas, it was all-too-obvious that these folks had their conversion experience long before wallowing in the celluloid depiction of Jesus’ suffering they watched on silver screens rented by their, let me be kind here, well-meaning pastors clear across America.

These Christians obviously appreciated the suffering of Jesus in the film, the vivid rendering of which many of them practically salivated over as they recounted again and again how non-believers (i.e., people who don’t define Christianity as they do) needed to carefully view every detail of the horrible suffering so they could truly appreciate the sacrifice Jesus made in taking on the sins of the world and thusly opening a place in heaven for sinful humanity.

In this regard, I can’t help but think of Mark Twain who, in his infamous “Letters to the Earth,” asked the rhetorical question, “Would you really want to spend eternity with millions of Christians singing the Hallelujah Chorus over and over again?”

Anyway, I try to appreciate the point of view of evangelical Christians, but I have to admit it’s a tough old row for me to hoe. I guess it helps if you think of the world as a dirty place that’s full of sinners who can’t or won’t take responsibility for living a clean, honest, and loving life and who instead rely on instant and ever-lasting salvation simply by being “born again” once in a life-time to prove their worth and neutralize their sins.

This is too easy for me. I’m like Smith-Barney is with money when it comes to salvation. I feel you have to earn it with your works and the way you treat people.

But let’s move on.

In addition to being endlessly lectured to regarding my inability to appreciate the violence and suffering of Jesus in the film, I also had several letters from people telling me to get out my Bible, that I had better read the four gospels before I dared to criticize Mel’s “Passion.”

Although I don’t thump my bible the way many of these folks do, I know and have read the good book long enough and well enough to recognize baloney when I see it.

You see, the shine on Mel’s and the evangelicals’ “true to the gospels” marketing propaganda started seriously falling apart for me the moment the film deviated from scripture and showed the Jewish temple guards throwing a heavily chained Jesus over the side of what appeared to be a least a 25-foot bridge. Since we still had almost 90 minutes to kill before the 30-second resurrection scene, the chains pulled Jesus up short (without even breaking his back or splitting a few ribs) a foot or two before his body hit the ground. After staring at Judas, who just happened to be cowering in the muck below the bridge, Jesus was pulled back up by the Jewish temple thugs.

I don’t recall much of the preceding in the gospels, do you?

Okay, okay, cut the director some slack. Poetic license, you know.

Hey, I’m a writer and novelist. I hear that.

And I’ll even do it.

In fact, I dug Mel’s deviance from the Gospels in an earlier scene where a single pale maggot wormed its way out of the nose of the androgynous woman playing Satan’s part (and the bit with the snake, oh, that was an original touch too), and throughout the movie I appreciated the way this evil being wove in and out of various scenes, always keeping an eye on things, maybe even trying to stir up the evil-doing Jews and Romans.

Honestly, I don’t recall Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John telling us in the gospels that the Evil One was snaking around all over the place during the final twelve hours that Jesus spent in bodily form, do you?

Well, okay, there are numerous other instances where the film forsakes scripture for additional violence, gore, or gross effects, but let’s forget the gospels because “The Passion of Christ” isn’t really a literal depiction of the bible, as my less fanatical evangelical friends will admit if pressed, it’s actually Mel Gibson’s artistic interpretation of the gospels.

Okay, then, let me wander around the film from that angle.

I’ll no doubt generate at least another 253 angry letters by writing this, but if we’re talking art, depth of thought, and meaningful depiction of Jesus and the people in his life and story, I’ll take Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” over Mel Gibson’s paean to brutality any day of the week, and, dare I say it, twice on Sunday. Marty’s movie certainly gives a fuller (and much more interesting and human) sense of Christ’s sacrifice beyond the pain and torture of his suffering.

Yes, Mel plugs in a few instances of artsy fartsy stuff, and the cinematography occasionally rubs shoulders against some of the old masters who painted the passion and I thought the movie was beautifully scored, but depth of character… nah, the violence in this movie was so far over the top and so obviously presented for shock value I couldn’t feel what happened to Jesus.

You see, Mel turned Jesus into nothing more than a piece of meat for me when he went over the top with the scourging. I counted 67 blows before I stopped keeping track, and the blows seemed to go on off-screen long after that. The human body Jesus inhabited would have died from shock or blood loss from the extreme, bone-baring lacerations that Mel so lovingly and loudly shared with his audience, a scourging that goes far beyond that detailed in the gospels as well as in Isaiah.

Mad Mel’s Christ wasn’t the Jesus who has an important place in my life. The Savior in this movie was just some actor getting the crap kicked out of him in as many ways as Mel’s violent imagination could connive.

Jesus was turned into a piece of red, raw, open meat.

Christ as hamburger.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m going to get plenty of hate mail as a result of those comments, but, hey, it’s the truth, and if I’m going to stick my neck out and spend more than thirty hours of my time thinking about, reading about, researching, and then writing a review of this disappointing movie I’m going to stick it out all the way.

A few more thoughts, and then I’m going to shut my yap.

I read somewhere on the Internet, “If you are a committed Christian, you must support this film. The future of your religion depends upon it.”

Now that’s a mouthful.

The problem of course is that such a statement requires an important qualification that the fundamentalists seem to not see.

It should read, “If you are a committed evangelical, born again Christian who thinks a violent film will bring people to our Savior, then you have to buy tickets for all your born again friends so all can sit in the theater and agonize and rhapsodize through the torture of Jesus Christ. This way the world will think this is an important film that is changing people’s lives.”

Seriously, if the future of a religion depends on viewers supporting this movie, I don’t think that religion has much future going for it.

Concluding Observations

Finally, after two viewings, hundreds of emails, and hours of reading various commentaries on the Internet, my opinion of “The Passion of Christ” hasn’t changed since I wrote my initial words on Thursday morning…

  • I still think it’s an interesting movie but ultimately a failure, mainly because the ultra-violence detracted from Jesus’ message and sacrifice rather than reinforcing it.

  • I still think it’s utterly irresponsible to take anyone under the age of 17 to see this gore-soaked bloodbath. In fact, I would call abusive any parent who took a child to see this ugly film. Dr. James Dobson (the Focus on the Family guy who panned Gibson’s “Braveheart” for violence “extreme, explicit and, in a few cases, exploitative”) and Mel himself say children under 12 should not see “Passion,” but that it’s fine for older kids. How either of these two adult males could recommend this kind of violence as being suitable for anyone under 17 pretty much blows my mind.

  • I still think the film has the potential to do long-lasting harm to delicate and sensitive minds because it reveals so little, oh so little, of the power and inspiration of Jesus’ presence and the message behind his sacrifice.

I’m not alone in thinking this way.

Roger Ebert, a critic I respect, liked the movie for what it was and gave it four stars but called it “The most violent film I’ve ever seen.”

Newsletter’s critic, David Ansen, another critic whose work I admire, wrote:

Relentlessly savage, “The Passion” plays like the Gospel according to the Marquis de Sade. The film that has been getting rapturous advance raves from evangelical Christians turns out to be an R-rated inspirational movie no child can, or should, see. To these secular eyes at least, Gibson's movie is more likely to inspire nightmares than devotion... It's the sadism, not the alleged anti-Semitism, that is most striking.

“Numbing and shocking, rather than enlightening” was the summation of the Halifax Daily News while the Montreal Gazette reviewer called Gibson's “literalist Gospel account” the “most sustained sadistic violence I have ever experienced in mainstream commercial cinema.”

Well, critics are a dime a dozen, and, ultimately, the box office will determine the fate of “The Passion of Christ.”

I predict that evangelical fervor, zealous pastors with large congregations, and the marketing genius of Mel Gibson will carry the film for another week or two, but there’s no way it’ll stick in the theaters or collective conscious the way, for example, a film like Titanic did for month after month after month.

That’s because James Cameron gave us characters we cared about.

By the time Mel’s movie climaxed with a 30-second resurrection scene where a hard-eyed Jesus looked like he was about to stomp out of his tomb and go bear hunting with his fists, I just plain didn’t care.

I wasn’t emotionally drained, upset, or tingling all over from the “spiritual experience” the evangelicals promised me I would get from watching “Passion.”

As I mentioned earlier, I really wanted to walk out of Mel’s movie with Jesus etched more deeply and more vividly in my heart.

Instead I came out of “The Passion of Christ” with gross memories of a celluloid Jesus who was nothing more than a chunk of meat, a whipping boy for actors who couldn’t quite pull off their strange roles as drooling, sadistic animals torturing and finally, finally, after the unrelenting, repetitious, and downright gratuitous violence, putting to death the King of Kings.

Thank God, it’s over, I thought.

And I didn’t mean the suffering of Mel’s Jesus.

I meant his movie.

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