{"id":1400,"date":"2004-03-02T19:34:52","date_gmt":"2004-03-02T23:34:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/03\/02\/a-passion-lacking-humanity\/"},"modified":"2004-03-02T19:34:52","modified_gmt":"2004-03-02T23:34:52","slug":"a-passion-lacking-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/03\/02\/a-passion-lacking-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"A Passion lacking humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

So I went to see the Gibson version of the Passion narrative the other day.<\/p>\n

For a good review of all the artistic issues, take a look at this
\narticle in the New Republic<\/a>.  I’m not gonna recapsulate
\nall of that.<\/p>\n

For me, I can’t say I really believed it.  I was never able to
\nsuspend disbelief and get lost in this.  It just seemed like a set
\nof scenes with lots of gruesome pain as their motif.<\/p>\n

I mean this on a very basic level.  The movie was a cartoon: all
\nthat blood and violence and savagery and for what?  It wasn’t
\nparticularly believable.  It looked and impressed at about the
\nsame level as a Schwarzenegger or, well, Gibson action flick. 
\nThere’s no sense of empathy there.  Christ suffers, and I can’t
\nunderstand why I was supposed to care.  We never really got to
\nknow him (I guess it’s assumed we were supposed to before we walked
\nin), and we just see Him suffer a lot.  It’s gory, but to what
\neffect?  In the end, I think, my reaction has come to be something
\nclose to “Who cares?”<\/p>\n

I mentioned to my monk friend that I felt more about the Passion of
\nChrist when we recite or chant the narratives in church on Palm Sunday
\nand Good Friday then I did in this film.  I care then.<\/p>\n

It may be that, as an American, I am inured to violence on such a level
\nthat this had no effect on me.  What it seemed like was just the
\nnext step in the envelope pushing that we get used to in the
\nmovies.  Special effects, violence, sex, all that stuff gets made
\nmore and more fantastic, more and more graphic, more and more “real”,
\nbut in the process of so doing, it becomes surreal and unreal. 
\nThis film did not seem much more than the progression of that
\ntrend.  I didn’t understand, feel, or relate better to Christ’s
\nsuffering and death by seeing the film, and I guess I don’t understant
\nwhy some people do, unless they have so little imagination and feeling
\nof their own that they need a movie to do it for them.  <\/p>\n

I don’t know what it is that the movie is supposed to show me. 
\nThat Christ suffered for my sins?  Yeah, I already knew that. That
\ncrucifixion was really bad?  Yeah, i already knew that too. 
\nThat this is a true account of Christ’s death?  Well,
\nhardly.  It’s certainly not “literal,” like he maintains, as it
\ncontains the “visions” of an 18th century German nun and all sorts of
\nextra-biblical material.  That Christ was a human sacrifice for
\nsin?  That’s a theological position, a theory of atonement that I
\nfind less persuasive than a more incarnational one.  And the movie
\ndoesn’t make anything beyond gallons of blood very clear (no pun
\nintended).<\/p>\n

Besides that, the acting was flat, and the only thing that Gibson seems
\nto have to say about the life and death of Christ was that there was a
\ndeath and, boy, was it horrible.  He seems to be so “literalist”
\nin his interpretation (a point about which many have argued over the
\nlast week, so I’m not going to plunge into that discussion right now)
\nthat he’s made a hollow life of Christ.  It’s like he doesn’t know
\nthe person he calls his Savior.<\/p>\n

Gibson, in focusing so hard on Christ’s human suffering, failed to give Him any humanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I went to see the Gibson version of the Passion narrative the other day. For a good review of all the artistic issues, take a look at this article in the New Republic.  I’m not gonna recapsulate all of that. For me, I can’t say I really believed it.  I was never able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rayleejun"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-mA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}