Posted on 03/05/2004 8:26:00 AM PST by Pikamax
Frank Rich: 'Passion' and the U.S. culture war Frank Rich NYT Friday, March 5, 2004
NEW YORK Thank God - I think. Mel Gibson has granted me absolution for my sins. As "The Passion of the Christ" approached the $100 million mark, the star appeared on "The Tonight Show,'" where Jay Leno asked if he would forgive me. "Absolutely," he responded, adding that his dispute with me was "not personal." Then he waxed philosophical: "You try to perform an act of love even for those who persecute you, and I think that's the message of the film."
Thus we see the gospel according to Mel. If you criticize his film and the Jew-baiting by which he promoted it, you are persecuting him - all the way to the bank. If he says that he wants you killed, he wants your intestines "on a stick" and he wants to kill your dog - such was his fatwa against me in September - not only is there nothing personal about it but it's an act of love. And that is indeed the message of his film. "The Passion" is far more in love with putting Jesus' intestines on a stick than with dramatizing his godly teachings, which are relegated to a few brief, cryptic flashbacks.
With its laborious build-up to its orgasmic spurtings of blood and other bodily fluids, the film is constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding music. Of all the "Passion" critics, no one has nailed its artistic vision more precisely than the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who called it a homoerotic "exercise in lurid sadomasochism" for those who "like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time."
If "The Passion" is a joy ride for sadomasochists, conveniently cloaked in the plain-brown wrapping of religiosity, does that make it bad for the Jews? Not necessarily. As a director, Gibson is no Leni Riefenstahl. His movie is just too ponderous to spark a pogrom on its own - in America anyway. The one ugly incident reported on Ash Wednesday, in which the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church posted a marquee reading "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus," occurred in Denver, where the local archbishop, Charles Chaput, had thrown kindling on the fire by promoting the movie for months. Whether "The Passion" will prove quite as benign in Europe and the Arab world is a story yet to be told.
But speaking as someone who has never experienced serious bigotry, I must confess that, whatever happens abroad, the fracas over "The Passion" has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before. My quarrel is not with most of the millions of Christian believers who are moved to tears by "The Passion." They bring their own deep feelings to the theater with them, and when Gibson pushes their buttons, however crudely, they generously do his work for him, supplying from their hearts the authentic spirituality that is missing in his jamboree of bloody beefcake. Jews, after all, can overcompensate for mediocre filmmaking in exactly the same way; even the schlockiest movies about the Holocaust (Robin Williams as "Jakob the Liar," anyone?) will move some audiences to tears by simply evoking the story's bare bones in Hollywood kitsch.
What concerns me much more are those with leadership positions in the secular world - including those in the media - who have given Gibson, "The Passion" and its most incendiary hucksters a free pass for behavior that is unambiguously contrived to vilify Jews.
Start with the movie itself. There is no question that it rewrites history by making Caiaphas and the other high priests the prime instigators of Jesus' death while softening Pontius Pilate, an infamous Roman thug, into a reluctant and somewhat conscience-stricken executioner. "The more benign Pilate appears in the movie, the more malignant the Jews are," is how Elaine Pagels describes Gibson's modus operandi in The New Yorker this week. As if that weren't enough, the Jewish high priests are also depicted as grim sadists with bad noses and teeth - Shylocks and Fagins from 19th-century stock. Yet in those early screenings that Gibson famously threw for conservative politicos in Washington last summer and autumn, not a person in attendance, from Robert Novak to Peggy Noonan, seems to have recognized these obvious stereotypes, let alone spoken up about them in their profuse encomiums to the film.
Nor do some of these pundits seem to recognize Holocaust denial when it is staring them in the face. In an interview in the current Reader's Digest, Noonan asks Gibson: "The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that some of his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he responds: "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps." Yes, mistakes happened, atrocities happened, war happened, some of the victims were Jews. This is the classic language of contemporary Holocaust deniers, from David Irving to Gibson's own father, Hutton Gibson, a prominent anti-Semitic author and activist. Their rhetorical strategy is to diminish Hitler's extermination of Jews by folding those deaths into the war's overall casualty figures, as if the Holocaust were an idle byproduct of battle instead of a Third Reich master plan for genocide. Rather than challenge Gibson on this, Noonan merely reinforces his junk history. "So the point is that life is tragic and it is full of fighting and violence, mischief and malice," she replies.
No, that is not the point of the history of the Holocaust. Of course, if a Jew points out such callousness, he is not practicing journalism or trying to clarify the historical record. He is instead "rabidly anti-Christian," as James Dobson of Focus on the Family is fond of describing Jews who raise questions about Gibson. The message is clear: Jews who criticize a poor, defenseless multimillionaire movie star and his film are behaving much as Caiaphas and his cronies do in "The Passion" itself. There's a consistency of animus here.
There is also a mighty strange inversion of reality. America is 82 percent Christian, and 60 percent of the population believes the Bible is historical fact. (The Jewish population is 2 percent.) The president of the United States has endorsed Jesus as his favorite philosopher, and Gibson's movie had almost as large an opening week as "The Lord of the Rings." The star has won his battle. He's hotter than ever in Hollywood, a town whose first commandment is that you never argue with a hit. ("If Hitler did a movie with these numbers, we'd give him his next deal," one Jewish mogul told me in a phone conversation this week.) So by what stretch of the imagination is Gibson so aggrieved that he can go on "The Tonight Show," purport to be a victim and not be laughed at by Leno or anyone else? For all his talk of "suffering" for his art, it's hard to see exactly how Gibson has suffered.
The vilification of Jews by Gibson, his film and some of his allies, unchallenged by his media enablers, is not happening in a vacuum. We are in the midst of an escalating election-year culture war in which those of "faith" are demonizing so-called secularists - any Jews critical of Gibson and their fellow travelers, liberals.
Politicians, we are learning, seem increasingly eager to wrap themselves in "The Passion of the Christ" as a handy signal to indicate they are opposed to all those "secularists" whose conspiracy is undermining all that right-thinking Americans hold near and dear. Predictably enough, both the president and Mrs. Bush have publicly indicated their desire to see Gibson's film. But when even Connecticut's John Rowland, a scandal-ridden governor facing impeachment, starts to rave about "The Passion" in public ("unbelievable!" "breathtaking!"), as he did last weekend, it's clear that we're witnessing the birth of a phenomenon. You come away from this whole sorry story feeling that Jesus died in "The Passion of the Christ" so cynics, whether seeking bucks or votes, could inherit the earth.
In Frank's world, Christian-baiting is A-Okay.
And Christianity itself is anti-Semitic.
WHAT??
What media have YOU been watching/reading/listening to?
That's understandable. I don't know if you've expressed this indignation on other threads, but I wonder if it's misconstrued by those you've corresponded with.
Or is that unimportant?
Someone who has made himself into a moron, by having the journalistic ethics of a depraved alley cat, by twisting facts, printing lies, and always keeping his personal bigotry, front and center, now THAT's a person who needs to be baited. I do not care the least that Frank Rich is a Jew. I'm not too concerned that he is a screaming liberal. However, he deserves everything he gets for being a pus-filled blister on the backside of American journalism.
Or am I being too kind to the gentleman?
Congressman Billybob
On the contrary, there is a question that it "rewrites history". What history book is he reading?
The group with the bad teeth where the hired mob, poor and badly needing a dentist, and very much for sale as a mob, as the film rightly portrayed. I really didn't see any bad teeth in the corrupt mouths of that corrupt segment of the Priesthood.
The author needs to get over himself, corrupt priests are no secret to the world. They are in every religion, including those priests and pastors in both the catholic and prodestant demonminations in the Christian churches.
The author is running from swords that are not there and ignoring swords that are at his back. Voting demonrat is certainly ignoring a real sword at his back, while whining over a film that has little to do with the Jewish race is running from an imaginary sword that has captured all his attention.
He doesn't like Mel Gibson and seeks to unload that dislike on Gibson's movie, not a very honest individual is he.
I think if you read the passages I mentioned, it will be clear. That is my point.
Anyone who has read Isaiah could not possibly come away with the conclusion that God thinks anti-Semitism is justified.
This is the author's way of saying "I am a complete and total jackass, utterly incapable of coherent, civil discourse. Please don't bother reading any more of my drooling tripe."
So I won't.
I doubt that. But I can understand why you might feel this way.
Is there no concept of the individual Jew as imperfect human beings apart from the entire Jewish people?
Were the Nazi's Christian?
How about those who were helped them, but weren't "card-carrying members" of the party?
How about those who didn't help, but took the Jews possessions afterwards?
No need to respond to these questions, but I've asked them of other Christians. Would you be surprised to learn that they don't consider any of these types to be Christian? The only ones they consider Christians were those who helped the Jews.
To answer your question more directly, no Jew likes to learn that someone who was born Jewish has committed some misdeed which might reflect badly on all Jews. But, strange as you may find it, that's how we think...that the misdeeds of one are reflected upon us all.
Is it Hollywood's position that Catholics have to admit having a Torquemada, Protestants have to admit having a Henry VIII, Muslims have to admit to having tyrannical mullahs but Jews must never be portrayed as ever having a Caiphas?
Let's not bring the muslims into this. Since 9/11, I think Hollywood has gone out of its way to avoid portraying Muslims as terrorists. But that may just be my perception.
Be that as it may, I haven't seen any movies about Torquemada or Henry VIII. Nor have I seen any movies where Christians were stereotyped. Maybe I need to spend less time on FR and more time in the theaters. :-)
If YOU understand then I don't understand what the purpose of your Posts on this Thread are for.
I don't see how. They published quotes from Jewish and Christian clergy. How could you conclude anything about their politics from that?
I have read some of your comments, but I forget-- have you seen the film?
No, and I haven't made any comments about the film either. I have commented on the reactions of those who have since I've read them.
Do you intend to?
No. As I've mentioned on other threads, I go to the movies for entertainment. If I want to understand something serious, I'll read the book. That way, I try and connect with what the author is saying - as opposed to what the producer, director, and actors think the author is saying.
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