Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — April 11, 2004

The phrase is my brother John’s description of Mel
Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, and
it’s the most apt I’ve heard. To dwell on the Passion
on Easter Sunday may not seem appropriate, but that also is apt,
I think, in this case, as I shall explain.

I did not see the movie until most of the fuss had died down.
I was not at first sure that I wanted to, in light of what I was
hearing about its vivid depiction of extreme violence. I decided
in favor of seeing it for two reasons: first, the good opinions I
was hearing from people I respect, including not only friends and
relatives but also journalists like Ramesh Ponnuru of National
Review, whose eloquent and clearly heartfelt review was
NR’s March 8 cover story, and second, the hysteria of some
of the film’s opponents, which seemed to require some
explanation.

Having decided to see it, I had to admit to myself that I
didn’t really want to, as it promised to be a grueling
experience. So I was in no great hurry. Moreover, I felt
instinctively that it was not something to be seen without at
least a little preparation, and I was very busy. I didn’t
want to squeeze it in hastily between work and other obligations
and distractions. It wasn’t until last week that I had
slowed down a bit and found a little time for prayer and
scripture, so it was on Wednesday night of Holy Week that I
finally made my way to the theater, alone because my wife had
decided early on that she did not want to see it, as she has a
very low tolerance for cinematic violence.

I had been thoroughly prepared for the violence and was
expecting to need to avert my eyes often. I was steeled for that.
What I was not prepared for was the beauty that accompanies the
violence. I thought several times of W.H. Auden’s Musee
des Beaux Arts and its description of a painting in which
Icarus falls from the sky while the natural world and normal life
go on undisturbed. I should have seen this coming, for even if
one dislikes, as I do, many contemporary films (for reasons which
are to me obvious and which I will forebear to rant about here),
it can’t be denied that the level of sheer craft in images
and sound attained by today’s filmmakers is extremely high.
So the settings of The Passion—the stones, the
light, the desert, the birdsongs—are rich in that unnatural
way cinematography can achieve, and which, for me at any rate,
always brings home the real and solid goodness of the created
world. The contrast with the devilish torture being perpetrated
by the human beings in the drama makes for a terrible
poignancy.

Without repeating what so many others have said, let it be a
sufficient statement of my reaction to the movie that I could
probably not have spoken for the first fifteen minutes or so
after it ended. I found myself driving very slowly through side
streets all the way home, with one idea in my head: this is
the cost of sin.

Was it necessary that the story be told with such emphasis on
the violence? In asking the question I refer not to the question
of whether the violence as it occurred in real life may or may
not have been accurately represented, but to the ability of
modern cinema techniques to emphasize it so unsparingly: the
sheer size of the screen, the huge sound of every blow, the
crushing slow-motion fall of the Cross onto the crumpling figure
of the flayed Christ. I am far from the first or only commentator
to answer that question with the famous remark of Flannery
O’Connor: “To the hard of hearing you shout and for
the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” I
had not thought of myself as one of these, but I came away
believing that I had been in need of the shock I was
given—in need of facing the cost of sin.

I am not one who can much stomach horror movies, and
don’t consider myself nearly as jaded with regard to screen
violence as many people seem to be. Yet I would have to admit
that I am in a sense jaded about the Crucifixion. It has been
tamed for me by art and habit. The Passion achieved its intended
effect on me, and I am not sure that it would have done so if it
had been gentler. It has been many years since I felt the depth
of Good Friday and of Easter as I did this year, and Mel
Gibson’s film is the reason. This revivification
was the gift in the dark
wrapping, recapitulating in my inner life the external reality,
the death-wrapped gift of eternal life given to us by the
historic Passion.

I did not consider the film perfect as a work of art. If Mr.
Gibson had thought to ask my opinion as he worked, I would have advised him
to do certain things differently. But measured against its
strengths my criticisms seem like quibbles, hardly worth
articulating.

And for the opponents of the
film—“opponents” seems the right word, rather
than “critics,” because so many of them seem offended
that it exists at all: it is perfectly reasonable to object to
The Passion on artistic grounds, to be so appalled by its
amplified violence as to be unable to receive its message, or to
refuse to see it at all on the grounds that to be a spectator of
such violence is not healthy. The fear that it might encourage or
reinforce anti-Semitism is also reasonable, although I’m
pretty certain that only one who brings anti-Semitism, or the
fear of it, to the film would see it there. But I’m afraid
it must take a dangerously hardened heart to see it and respond
only with mockery and sneering. There is much to be said about
this phenomenon, but that is a discussion about the psychology
of the viewer, not about Mel Gibson’s movie.