t the moment, our news is tangled in the wreckage of unintended consequences. Unrelated matters are so excruciatingly examined that they start to blend into some nonsequitur mobius strip. And I have come to believe that the Martha Stewart trial and the crucifixion of Christ are the same story: Martha is in Jerusalem, Jesus is selling well at Kmart, the Jews are demanding the death penalty for securities fraud, the Christians are being unfairly persecuted by prosecutors with their own agenda, Jesus should have plea bargained, Martha should cater the Last Supper, Jesus was betrayed by his assistant, Martha is betrayed by a disciple, Jesus should have testified.
     See what I mean? The two stories mix and match pretty well.

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     And I am quite certain that if Martha Stewart had any idea how it would all turn out, she never would have sold her ImClone stock. And if the people whose actions brought about Jesus' crucifixion had any idea what that transaction would cost for the next two thousand years, they might have let Jesus continue to make messianic claims. They would have adopted the ACLU logic — the cure for free speech is more free speech — and just let it go. If the Blood Libel, the Holocaust, Vichy France, current France — and most likely future France — could have been foreseen, the high priests of Jerusalem would have let the threat of Jesus run its race. If they could have seen The Passion of the Christ, that in itself might have been reason enough to just let him be. I would like to think that to avoid bad art, a lot of decisions would have been made differently.
     Forgive me for reducing securities fraud and the crucifixion to the same level, but in a week in which Mel Gibson's mere existence — Does he have a Christ complex? Does he deny the Holocaust? Will he ever eat lunch in this town again? — has been granted more gravity than any man who has appeared in a movie with blue paint on his face deserves, I do think some levity is in order. After all, I am Jewish. Jesus is not my lord and savior. I don't have to speak about him in serious, sententious tones. And I am shocked that Gibson's film has been granted every manner of thoughtful criticism, and not enough suggestion that it is the work of a crackpot and ought to have been dismissed long ago.
     The Passion of the Christ is really just a snuff film. If Mel Gibson had gone to a Chilean prison and filmed a man being tortured to death, he would not have produced a terribly different movie. This is death as pornography. Amazingly, Evangelical Christians are taking their kids to see it, as if the blood and guts are somehow more sanctified than sanguinary — as if children’s nightmares can distinguish between divine punishment and Freddie Krueger.

Something about this movie is more of a conversation piece than an experience.

     Now, I understand that reveling in Jesus' suffering is a Christian thing I will never truly appreciate. But it is fair to ask if this passion play is appropriate, because it seems impossible to deal with Christ's death without confronting the contentious issue of who killed him. If one is going to accept the Gospels as gospel truth — and not seek out the historical record — it is impossible not to show the crucifixion as a hate crime, and hence to use it to inspire further hate crimes. Jesus was, in fact, executed for political reasons, in the context of a cruel Roman prefect, and in expectations of imminent insurrection that were finally realized with the Masada uprising in 66 A.D. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson explains that "men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion — Messianic-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough." Without including this information — and there is no reason for a religious fanatic like Mel Gibson, who does not even believe in the Vatican II reforms, to bother — all you get are a bunch of hook-nosed Jews with snaggled teeth and bushy beards, screaming, “Crucify him!” The blame game has been the source of such historical horror that one would hope Gibson, the son of a writer who claims the Holocaust is mostly fictional, would recuse himself from this particular story. He cannot be trusted to be a reliable narrator.
     And it is entirely appropriate here to speak of reliable narrators, because despite Gibson's wild attempts at sincerity, he is a victim of his own overdetermination. The Passion of the Christ — right down to its clumsy titling in the guise of academic precision — is a truly postmodern, cynical piece of work. Its meaning is its final flaw: it has none. Gibson's innovation is his lack thereof; his artlessness extends to the fact that no one in the movie appears to be acting. During filming, star Jim Caviezel sustained a dislocated shoulder, was struck by lightning, obtained a fourteen-inch scar and was apparently left hanging on a cross instead of an effigy — perhaps so he could experience Christ's crucifixion to the extent that it was humanly possible. Hearing about this, I was reminded of the story of Dustin Hoffman preparing for his role in Marathon Man. For weeks, he starved himself and ran long distances — all kinds of method masochism. Sir Laurence Olivier observed this and finally asked, "Why don't you try acting, young man? It is so much easier."

You don't feel the pain of the crucifixion, but you do get the urge to study the details.

     But then, everything in Passion appears to be a big boast, signifying nothing. I happen to be fluent in Hebrew, and I'm able to understand Aramaic. (I say understand Aramaic, because at this point in time, no one speaks it; it's the written language of the Gemarra, but it is a shock to hear it aloud.) So for much of the movie, I focused on how well the actors mastered words they likely could not understand. In case you're interested, they did it pretty well. But it adds up to very little: Jesus talks to God in Hebrew, the Jews speak to each other in Aramaic, the Romans talk in Latin, and as far as I know, none of this is accurate. Evidently, Gibson's labor-intensive effort to install these ancient languages into his film was unnecessary. Except as a plodding detail.
     Something about this movie is more of a conversation piece than an experience, despite the intense immediacy of all that is happening. Because The Passion is so hollow deep down, you don't feel the pain of the crucifixion, but you do get the urge to study the details. In my case it was linguistic eccentricities, but another person might become enthralled with the wounds, the foliage, the birds flying overhead. The "spiritual experience" many evangelical Christians talked about with Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer might have been their response to seeing any film. These were people who said that they otherwise never went to the movies.


Full disclosure: I do live in a Christian world, and of course I have been exposed to Jesus' teachings. While The Passion of The Christ was earning $117 million last weekend, I was busy reading the four Gospels. Yes, I spent Friday night at home with the Bible.

Somebody ought to do Jesus the dignity of an honest historical masterpiece.

     And truth be told, I was sold. I was ready to sign up for whatever. The Good Book really is good. Even before that, I'd always loved certain fragments — I have had the "love thine enemies" speech, as it is recorded by Luke, hanging over my desk for several years now, right along side Portia's "quality of mercy" monologue from The Merchant of Venice. Both of them remind us of what we're all up against, what the best of the good can be. Jesus was a Jew — most of his teachings from the Sermon on the Mount were derived from Jewish ideas. He was a student of the great Rabbi Hillel, and it is obvious that Jesus presented his teacher's top pop hits to his followers. But Jesus' special genius was that he assembled it into one lecture, one religion, one faith. This brings to mind the cinematic possibilities for anyone willing to make a movie about Jesus' real life, his intellectual perambulations, his true relationships. Somebody ought to do him the dignity of an honest historical masterpiece.
     The Passion flashes back to bits of Christ's life, but at no point does it reveal the humanistic view of Jesus as a revolutionary, as a man who saw the harshness of the Old Testament and wanted to respond with mercy, who softened the vengeful and jealous God of Moses by greeting hate with love. He preached charity — material and spiritual. That this message has been transformed into occasion for so much bloodshed over the centuries seems divinely improbable. In fact, I find it heartbreaking: accepting Jesus seems to have offered many people enlightenment that has been squandered in violent, hateful ways. It's hard to make sense of.
    But thanks to films like Gibson's, I am beginning to see the light — and it's the kind that makes you want to squint and look the other way. In The Passion of the Christ, we are presented with a violent situation in which Jesus becomes the impetus for violence. We don't hear anything Jesus says during the Sermon on the Mount (although he is shown standing there, conveniently enough, on a mount). When Jesus protects the adulteress from those who would stone her to death, we don't hear him say, "He who is without sin, cast the first stone." Jesus is the star, but he has no good lines — as if that might adulterate the purity of purpose of the film itself, which is to show him as an object of obliteration and nothing more. This is the most nihilistic, Nietzschean version of Christianity I have ever encountered: God really is dead. And all we know is that he died a bloody death, that blood is blood is blood, the Crusades are blood, Bloody Sunday is blood, the Blood Libel is blood, wine is blood, the scarlet letter is blood red, everything that happens in Ireland and Lebanon and Alabama in the name of Christianity is blood. Jesus might be the one who turns the other cheek, but his followers seem to be the ones who want to punch.
     On Ash Wednesday, the day The Passion of the Christ opened, the misnomered Loving United Pentecostal Church of Denver arranged the letters on its marquee sign to read, THE JEWS KILLED OUR LORD AND SAVIOR. I don’t get the feeling this is meant as a thank-you note.
     It would appear that Mel Gibson agrees with the Loving congregants. But you'd think, as a decent person, as a good Christian, he'd want to refrain from doing further harm.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Elizabeth Wurtzel is Nerve's film critic. She is the author of the books Prozac Nation, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, More Now Again: A Memoir of Addiction, and Radical Sanity.