On my tv news right now: Jason West, the 26 year old mayor of New Paltz, NY (who won his office on the Green Party ticket) says that he’s going to start marrying same sex couples tomorrow. Four couples are far on the list so far. Experts say that nothing in NY State law says that he can’t do that.
I just love New York!

OK. I admit, upfront, that I’m biased. Beginning with the time Sister Mary Whatshername took our sixth grade class to see a Black Friar-produced Passion Play, and continuing through another half-dozen years of Stations of the Cross and Seven Last Words and various other celebrations of that noxious crucifixion, I pretty much had my fill of the story’s gory details.
Maybe that’s why, sitting through Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ this afternoon with my mother snoozing on and off next to me through the less loudly symphonic parts, I felt….well….I felt bored.
Or maybe that’s not why. I mean, I really like going to the movies. And I am deeply enamored of all kinds of mythologies. There was a time that used to to read the gospels over and over because I loved the stories. Hearing Haydn’s interpretation would move me to goose bumps and tears. So, why did Gibson’s Christ leave me cold.
Well, first of all, costly coagulated make-up effects and lots of eerily expressive faces aside, Gibson directed this movie like it was a film student’s final project. All of that slow motion drifting of various droplets, bodily and otherwise! Those creative camera angles and constant crescendos of new age-y music! And, of course, those lengthy close-up portrait shots of fluid-oozing faces!
Anyone who doesn’t know the details of that mythic journey might totally lose track of the story line as it flashes back to various signficant moments in the Christ’s life-before-flogging. You really had to have read the book. Probably several times.
And then there was the flogging. And the flogging. And the flogging. No man born of woman would have lived past the first round. By then, essential organs would have been mortally wounded, and at least a few ribs cracked and sticking in and out of places that they were never meant to be. Certainly, after having just about every inch of skin pretty much flayed to strips, any human would have fainted from the pain, gone into catatonic shock.
Oh, what’s that you say? But he wasn’t human. Oh, but the point of the movie and of scripture is that he was. His father in heaven did not protect him or save him or take that chalice from him. He made his choices and he took his chances.
And so it was with Gibson-the-director. He chose to turn one of the greatest stories ever told into what amounts to a graphic novel. Oddly enough Pontius Pilate comes off as the only character who thinks in more than one dimension. Unfortunately, the historical Pontius Pilate was much less bothered by conscience than the one that Christian mythology has come to embrace and the one that Gibson chose to portray.
I think that Gibson has done a great disservice to both faith and myth, which, when it comes to the passion of the Christ, are based in so much more than the skin-deep story that his movie tells.
Instead of being drawn into the heart of the matter, as I watched Gibson’s movie I was remembering my sixth grade introduction to the Passion Play, when Stanley Szymanski sat next to me and held my hand. And during the most dramatic moment of the play, when the Christ was hanging on the cross and about to utter his last words, and the sound effects thundered and the lighting effects blinded. Stanley leaned over and said to me “let’s get hitched.”
P.S. For some clever related visual sacriligious humor, check out Rage Boy’s “Christ on a Crutch.”