THE NEW YORKER ON MEL

The New Yorker's Peter Boyer has written a largely sympathetic article on Mel Gibson and his work on his movie, The Passion. There's much on Gibson's strain of Catholicism, as well as how he has changed the movie in reaction to his detractors:

The antagonist in Gibson's vision is plainly the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, played by an Italian actor who can seem a bit of a ham as he cajoles the ambivalent Pilate into executing Jesus. Finally, an exasperated Pilate relents and condemns the prisoner, but, according to the Gospel of Matthew, he first makes a show of his own guiltlessness by publicly washing his hands. In Matthew, that gesture is followed by a shout from the crowd: “His blood be on us, and on our children.” This passage, which is depicted only in Matthew, is one of the sources of the notion of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. Gibson shot the scene, but with Caiaphas alone calling the curse down. Wright, Gibson’s editor, strongly objected to including even that version. “I just think you're asking for trouble if you leave it in,” he said. “For people who are undecided about the film, that would be the thing that turned them against it.”

Gibson yielded, but he has had some regrets. “I wanted it in,” he says. “My brother said I was wimping out if I didn't include it. It happened; it was said. But, man, if I included that in there, they'd be coming after me at my house, they'd come kill me.”

He was referring to his critics, activists at such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, as well as some academics, who worry that Gibson will draw too much upon a literal reading of the Gospels, and not enough upon contemporary scholarship that seeks to distance Jews from culpability in the Crucifixion.

Boyer was able to interview the Jewish Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman, who provided revealing statements:

I asked Foxman if he believed that Gibson was an anti-Semite. “Per se, I don't think that Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic,” Foxman said. “I think that he is insensitive.”

But what of “The Passion” itself, I asked. Is the film anti-Semitic? “The film, per se, is not anti-Semitic,” Foxman said. The problem, he added, was that, as with any literal reading of the New Testament, its message of love could be twisted into something hateful. “The film can fuel, trigger, stimulate, induce, rationalize, legitimize anti-Semitism,” Foxman said.

“You know, the Gospels, if taken literally, can be very damaging, in the same way if you take the Old Testament literally,” Foxman went on. “It says, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' Now, has the Jewish state, or have Jews, practiced the Old Testament by taking an eye for an eye? No. So a literal reading of almost anything can lead to all kinds of things.”

Nah, we don't want to take all that silly ol' stuff seriously.

Boyer concludes:

Speaking with Foxman made me realize just what it was that Gibson had done in making “The Passion.” Gibson had said from the start that he was going to make a movie taken straight from the Gospels. Foxman was saying that, for better or worse, Gibson had done just that. In focussing on Gibson's Traditionalist Catholicism, some of his critics have created the expectation that “The Passion” is a medieval Passion play depicting Jews in horns drinking Christian blood. It is not that. Nor is it the attenuated dramatization that the Catholic scholars might have wished for. Gibson's “Passion” is a literalist rendering of the Gospels' account of Jesus' Passion, which makes it the ultimate Traditionalist expression.

At the end of the day, Gibson's problem is that he's willing to risk taking the Gospel accounts seriously. For that he must be applauded.