The Uncomfortability of Christ

Responding to pleas from believers too squeamish to brave his magnum opus the first time out, Mel Gibson has announced plans to cut the more grisly scenes from his Passion of the Christ for a lighter, less lacerating Easter release.

According to one interpretation of the Bible, Jesus' travails through the Stations of the Cross must, by definition, equal the whole of all sins of all people from all time. The idea is not to make actuarial sense of human experience so much as it is to reach the threshold of the describable, and then point beyond. However unimaginable the pain endured in the Crucifixion-so this line of thinking goes-the true horror exceeded it.

By this measure, anything Gibson could ever deliver would be too tame.

Oddly, this is exactly the same argument used by post-Holocaust artists to justify the brutality in their works. After WWII, mere poetry was hard pressed to compete with the systematic slaughter of a people (and some flatly denied it could be done). Certainly, ever since the salad days of Sam Peckinpah, and the rest of the generation formed by Never Again morality, the big screen has been a ready canvas for violence as ballet.

In this sense, the movie that the first Passion most closely resembles is Pulp Fiction. Think of Samuel L. Jackson's Biblical recitation with gun cocked. Or while we're at it, of John Travolta's character resurrection in the last third of the action. Then imagine that Quentin Tarantino loosed a second version of his magnum opus, one in which Uma Thurman merely gets stabbed in the chest, rather than being impaled on a giant syringe. Would anyone see it as anything but a cynical ploy to make some extra cash?

Gibson would like to have it both ways. If he can get away with it (and I think he can), it's only because of his subject. Other directors can always look to their next movie. Gibson, however, has made The Movie, which, as Walter Benjamin once pointed out about all holy texts, is endlessly translatable. However many edits Gibson makes on the Passion, it will still be the Passion.

For his next re-edit, then, I'd like to recommend a version more in keeping with the Holy Spirit-as mysterious in its coming as in its going. A movie whose right hand does not know what its left hand is doing. A movie, in short, that dares to make sense beyond the efforts of its creator. Something that aspires to Godard's Hail Mary would be a good start.

But there I go, invoking the merits of religious nonsense again.