The Dude on The Passion

With just about everyone else weighing in on the Mel Gibson movie, I thought I'd keep quiet till I'd seen it. But the more I read about it, both from those hostile and those not, the less I feel I want to see it. This, from Christopher Hitchens, has further tilted the odds against my doing so, but I still may want to go and judge for myself.

Gibson claims that the Holy Ghost spoke through him in the directing of this movie, and that everything in it is from the Bible. I very much doubt the first claim, and I can safely say that the second one is false.

The Bible does not have an encounter between Jesus and a sort of Satanic succubus figure in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Bible does not have a raven pecking out the eye of one of the crucified thieves. The Bible does not have Judas pursued to his suicide by a horde of supernatural and sinister devil-children.

Moreover, whatever the Bible may say, the Roman authorities in Jerusalem were not minor officials in a Jewish empire, compelled to obey the orders of a gang of bloodthirsty rabbis.

It was Rome that was boss. Indeed, Pontius Pilate was later recalled by the Emperor Tiberius for the extreme brutality with which he treated the Jewish inhabitants (and you had to be quite cruel to get Tiberius to raise his eyebrows).

Yet Gibson is evidently obsessed with the Jewish question, and it shows in his film.
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In order to keep up this relentless propaganda pressure, Gibson employs the cheap technique of the horror movie director.

Just as you think things can't get any worse, he shoves in a gruesome surprise.

The flogging scene stops, and you think: "Well, that's over." And then the sadistic guards pick up a new kind of flagellating instrument, and start again.

The nails go through the limbs, one by one, and then, for an extra touch, the cross is raised, turned over and dropped face-down with its victim attached, so that the nails can be flattened down on the other side.

The vulgarity and sensationalism of this would be bad enough if there wasn't a continual accompaniment of jeering, taunting Jews who want more of the same.

(Hat tip: yes... Anthony again.)