The Passion of the Christ: Mel's Passion for flogging
Gort Slypesunder
27 February 2004

Hoo-eee. You'd never know Mel Gibson was born in Australia. His passion for religious violence is as down home Umeruhcan as it can get. And there is where it is resonating the strongest. Every simple-minded Yank--from the tavern-crawler with a yen for flaying helpless women, to bible-thumping preachers whose successes are based on how much they can scare their flocks--are hovering like a plague of Huns just itching to avenge the Jesus they can't live up to. Expect some horrific murders in the next few months. In the name of The Lord, of course.

The only people who will want to see this flaying flesh feast twice are gun-toting Christians and serial killers.

But before the film even starts, Australian viewers are forced to watch a 30 second commercial advertisement from Val Morgan, paid for by the Australian Passion Network, in which two footy players and an Australian Idol runner-up tell us how the film changed their lives. But wait, there's more. They want us to believe it's a true story! Wait a minute. It very well might be, but "the oldest surviving texts are copies of copies 150 years removed from the originals," which no longer exist. Oy vey!

These three delusionaries walking quietly on to the screen are downright creepy. If you haven't already seen it, take a squiz here.

So what is the film like? If you aren't steeped in the gospels then you won't know how everyone got where they are. It's just time to capture Jesus and get on to the flaying. But because Brother Mel didn't fill in the pre-film storyline, it all becomes a one dimensional fictional docudrama purporting to be truth. From the moment Jesus is found, his beatings begin. And they do not stop for the next two hours.

Pontius Pilate and his wife are the only two characters with substance. They question and agonise over the decision to crucify Jesus for what they see as a bogus charge. In the end it becomes a political decision: if diffident Pilate blows it one more time here in the colonies (too many past uprisings), Rome will have him flayed. As for the other mostly marginal characters, they haven't a lot to do. Sympathisers are shown shedding tears or gaping, while the barbarians are having a grand old time.

There is a cartoonish Barabbas, the criminal Pilate offers to execute in place of Jesus. When the offer is refused by the mob and Barabbas is set free, his village-idiot theatrics reminded me of Nazi caricatures of the Jews: distorted and ugly. If there is an anti-Semitic message to Gibson's film, then this would be its crowning glory. Personally, I don't think people will walk out of the theatre feeling antagonism towards Jews, unless they were anti-Semitic in the first place. I mean, Jesus bucked the establishment. Of course the Jews wanted him removed. So what's new? Or old, as the case may be.

Ultimately the film is boring, in that there is only one thing ever happening. Hence the docudrama effect. You just sit there enduring the violence and waiting, Oh Lord, for the end.

Ah yes, the violence. Relentless, ridiculous, absurd. How this film earned an MA rating (in Australia) and not an R, like Tarantino's far less violent Kill Bill Vol 1, speaks volumes for the acceptability of violence where religion is concerned.

Once captured, Jesus is beaten all night. Then in the morning he is flogged and flayed by a couple of thugs who enjoy their work and are no different to the thugs employed by terrorist states ever since. (A few of the descendants of this hardy strain are probably perfecting methods of torture for ASIO as I write.)

This scene goes on and on and on. Sometimes it stops and you think, "Whew!" But then it starts again. And then stops. And then starts. Any human being taking a beating like that would have died well before it was over. Yet, the next day, Jesus is made to stand next to Pilate and hear the final word of the crowd. He appears to have had no medication applied to his wounds overnight. In fact, he would have been dead of shock by now, but Mel wants more from him. And besides he was the Son of God, given to performing miracles for others, why not for himself?

After the final verdict is made, Jesus then begins to carry the cross. A cross, incidentally, that appears to be hewn from timbers that weigh a tonne. A man with great strength and in full health would have trouble hauling this thing, but no matter.

To add to his woes, the Italian village used in the filming is perched on a hill, so that a zig zag route is required to reach the highest point, his destination. With his fatal wounds it is just not possible that he could have travelled this distance. But never mind, this is Mel's boyhood fantasy and Jesus, though displaying a very mortal body, is the SoG and so forth.

For most of this impossible journey there are no supporters. I began to wonder, "Didn't anyone care?" Suddenly, who knows, the weekend market closed, or everyone woke up from their siesta, all these people appear weeping and wringing their hands.

Despite well-wishers, Jesus is beaten mercilessly for the entire course of his journey, falling so many times, as Jim Schembri says, it almost becomes comical. But wait again, there is more again. First Jesus is nailed to the cross in graphic detail and then the cross is flipped over so that the nails can be bent over to prevent them coming out. We are shown every muscular ripple of his body trying to come away from the cross when it is turned. The final spearing results in a gusher of blood.

The last scene is curiously unsettling. It is ineffective and almost childish. A powerful indirect shot of the great stone cover of the cave of resurrection being removed then shows us a reconstituted Jesus standing and walking off screen as if, as one reviewer said, he were a zombie. Well, that's what he would have been, non?

If I have sounded flippant, it is because I am sick unto death of simple-minded, monotheistic literalists who require reasoning human beings to take hearsay for fact. They have made a mighty hash of our history.

All in all, Mel Gibson has given us a brutally naïve depiction of a story based on accounts that were written down centuries later. That anyone could still firmly declare these events to be true defies reason. But that's the 21st-cum-14th century we live in.

Me, I prefer Monty Python's "The Life of Brian".