The Passion
The unprecendented acclaim continues: the great evangelist Billy Graham has seen the film and cried during it, saying it was "a lifetime of sermons in one movie". I'm getting nervous; I'll be worried if my eyes aren't spigots on Feb. 25. To be honest the fragments of trailers I've seen haven't impressed me, probably because I'm desensitized to "blood and guts". Gore is to dramas what slapstick is to comedies - the easy way out?*
Part of what is driving the attention, of course, is the charge of anti-Semitism. If this is bumping advance ticket sales then it is an enormous turnabout. Why? Because the normal posture is for Christians to be in the position of providing publicity and the foil for depraved acts, like Janet Jackson's stunt (which no doubt spiked her record sales).
How wonderful it is to be on the other side for a change! Secularists are on the defensive, unwittingly plugging what they loathe.
* - Update: Interesting comment from Neil Dhingra on Amy's blog: "There is, it has been suggested, a certain pleasure that comes from gazing voyeuristically at the brutalized body of Christ - a powerful combination of guilt and desire, since Jesus suffers horribly in bearing our sins but it is through these very sufferings that we are healed. This is very similar to the pleasure that come from a torrid love affair in which the feelings of self-reproach intensify the eroticism. Now, this might make for deeply affecting cinema. One can argue that it has done exactly that in other Mel Gibson films. But it there anything religious about it? Carroll and the Metropolitan's comments suggest that the answer is "Not really."...we can worry that a Passion Play that finds itself relatively unconcerned with the resurrection has lost its very meaning. It ceases to be about communion with God; it becomes - at best - melodrama."
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