It’s a rare year when popular culture gets two booster shots of religion. The jabs this year have come from Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ and Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, soon to be a movie directed by Ron Howard. Both works have had the kind of success which is spoken of in millions: copies, viewers, readers and, most of all, dollars.
At first glance, The Passion of the Christ and The Da Vinci Code are chalk and cheese. Gibson’s movie is a work of piety whereas Brown seems to believe that the entire Christian tradition is a fabrication orchestrated to conceal the truth about Jesus. Gibson engages with the story of Jesus from within a conservative part of the church community. Brown, on the other hand, has nothing to prove. Indeed, he has a lot to disprove. Yet for all their differences in terms of church politics, The Passion of the Christ and The Da Vinci Code are similar in at least one important regard.
There are odd things about Mel’s movie. In a scene where Jesus, as a young man, is flirting with his mother, it suggests that Jesus invented the bar stool. The film is also stupidly violent. The most any one of the four gospels gives to the scourging of Jesus is six words. They want you to know that the crucifixion was not a pretty story but they also understand that the most powerful way to depict violence, as to depict sex, is by showing less rather than more. Mel, however, can’t get enough blood. The effect is deadening. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, which so appalled some of the very people who flocked to the Gibson movie that they forced its removal from the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997, was a more poignant and effective portrayal of Christ’s degradation.
Yet The Passion of the Christ is moving, especially in its portrayal of Jesus’ disciples. It is, if anything, less anti-Semitic than scripture. Part of the baggage that Christianity carries is that one of its most beautiful and central texts is also one of its most embarrassing. John’s Gospel does not speak disparagingly of ‘the Jews in the crowd’ or ‘some of the Jews’. The villains are ‘the Jews’.
Gibson avoids a kind of chardonnay fundamentalism common among articulate Christians. This is the belief that each of the four gospels is a