ONE VIEW
‘Passion’ is just one version of the story
What’s yours?
By Jim Boushay
Many thanks for Ken Trainor’s insightful column last week, The passion, the power and the gory. Rickey Sain and I were fortunate in January to see the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ, as part of a focus group of faith-based organizations and individuals. Here’s my review, an addition to the ongoing conversation about the movie’s meaning and message.
Movie director Gibson shows the skilled passion of similar directors who engage history dynamically by the way he, and they, say to the viewer in a compelling way, “This is how I think it was.” Think Marvin Chomsky’s Roots: The Miniseries, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth.
The direct and starkly brutal approach in the movie is making for robust commentary, as did the three antecedents just mentioned. The discourse occurs amid the back-and-forthing of a culture existing in the ambiguity of its own life-and-death contradictions about violence and brutality around the world. Whether we win, lose, or draw in our search for answers to ambiguity, it is true that the action of the movie—Gibson’s cinematic statement—is expressed dramatically in painfully compelling celluloid images and in the rich spoken words of Latin and Aramaic. Together, his selection and arrangement of the movie’s elements offer an integrated view of Gibson’s understanding of what he believes is a complete and entire story of misery and degradation in the final hours of a human life—the Jesus of history.
It is the director’s obligation to tell us the truth of what he thinks, experiences, feels, knows of that truth, as he himself has grown to see the truth. That’s the tradition of democratic movie making.
The result entirely compels viewer compassion, manifestations of which are everywhere in the movie. The citizenry itself will see plenty of pathos and compassion when the movie goes public today, Ash Wednesday. This day marks the beginning of the journey of Lent and the annual process of rebirth for Christians. It is a day, otherwise, that falls within a season of renewal for still other religions and creeds. The season in many faith traditions calls for new insights and further introspection, new learning, new understanding.
The conversation about the movie has naturally generated new thoughts about the director’s controversial—because unique—traumatic snapshot of Jesus’ final agonizings. The movie is generating intriguing discourse about the dynamic and shifting character of Gibson’s cinematic message, mystery, meaning. Thanks to Mr. Gibson for offering the opportunity through the movie to engage compelling talk about a compelling movie. It is a layering of the complex meanings in individual stories of betrayal, all gathered within one gripping story of brutality leading to utter defeat.
Like the many hopeful statements made about the movie by people everywhere, statements of this or that human concern—statements theological, historical, psychological, or a combination of all three "ologies”—Gibson is saying something that goes like this: “My movie is as I think it was. The movie tells my story, my concerns, of what I see and believe about Jesus and how and why he died.”
Gibson tells us his story of the day. He tells us something of what’s on his mind—his concerns—in a journey of religious belief. He publicly brings in front of us a cinematic example of his private story of Jesus. The story now takes its place among the millions of Jesus stories brought forth during the last 2000 years. Praise the kaleidoscope of storytelling in all its diversity of shifting forms and expressions. Somehow all stories seem to reflect humanity’s hopes and prayers. It may be that in Gibson’s own living room, he’d say to us, gathered there over coffee, that the movie hopes to bring his religious concerns in front of us. Maybe it is in that safe space in his home that we learn something new about him, based on our encounter with the movie’s unique perspective.
It’s often said that cinema—you know, movie watching—accounts for better than 40 percent of learning in the American culture. No matter how much anyone in this country or beyond its borders learns from the visual combined with the auditory, however, we should ask and look for a consistency of vision in his deployment of the celluloid medium.
Gibson’s creation is one reflection of what the director imagines, and feels, and experiences, and knows in telling a story. The film demonstrates how he has creatively exercised his human capacity to get viewers to pay attention to his version of things. There’s always the story—and then always there’s the story of the story. So Gibson tells a story of what he feels and believes happened to the Jesus of history. And we tell our story about his story. Like the Jesus story—and even Jesus-like stories of betrayal and suffering—Gibson’s story falls too within the diaspora of the accumulated historical and kaleidoscopic narratives of the Jesus truth.
Opportunity is abounding. What’s the story you yourself would tell of Jesus’ final hours, as you understand the final hours?
Reprinted by permission from a February 25, 2004 article in Wednesday Journal
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