Yesterday I re-watched Martin Scorses’s Casino, which may be my favorite of his films. You may be aware of a scene towards the end of the film generally held up as one of the most graphically violent in film history. I want you to trust me when I say that it’s worse than you’ve heard. I’m going to try to talk about it without spoiling the film for those of you who haven’t seen it, which may not be the most effective way to go about this, but: The first time I saw it, since I had my own experience with the kind of relationship shared by the two people on the receiving end of the attack, I broke down and sobbed. Each time I’ve seen it since then, my gut tightens in anticipation, and then when the scene is actually in progress it’s so disturbing I can feel it all through my body, from my head to my throat to my stomach to my genitals. It’s beyond appalling into the almost overwhelming.
And yet I think it’s entirely appropriate. The characters who are attacked have been repeatedly shown to be the absolute scum of the Earth. Most viewers would, by that point in the movie, welcome their deaths. Scorsese was faced with the challenge of depicting a death so horrific that it would shock the audience out of their too-comfortable endorsement of gangster’s justice and into a realization of just how terrible this lifestyle really is. I also believe that this and indeed the whole of Casino was a reaction to its more warm and humorous predecessor, GoodFellas, in much the same way that the relentlessly grim Godfather Part 2 was Coppola’s attempt to prove to his audience that his intent with the first Godfather movie was not to romanticize the mob. In Casino, Scorsese wanted to make his characters hard to love, hard to enjoy. I think he wanted to make the film that way, too. He succeeded in no small part because of that final act of violence.
My point is that extreme, graphic violence often does serve a purpose in filmmaking. Barker and Cronenberg use it to comment on the relationship between mind and body (Barker somewhat more positively than Cronenberg). Tarantino uses it to reflect on what constitutes honor, loyalty, a life well lived (people miss this since it’s layered with pop-culture irony, but it’s there). The indie horror cycle of the early 1970s (beginning in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead) used it to comment on the horrific injustices of that era, and to break through audience resistance to them.
Mel Gibson is different. He’s not making a filmic point. He’s not making a thematic point. He’s not even making a political point. He’s making a life-philosophy point. He wants his viewers to internalize the violence in The Passion of the Christ, take it upon themselves, feel that they are the people wielding the whips and the scourges and driving the nails. I think he knows full well that in addition to the guilt and shame that this will produce (as it must: guilt and shame are integral parts of his vision of Christianity), it also produces a vicarious thrill, a sado-masochistic charge, and a desire for collective expiation of those feelings against a similar scapegoat. That feeling you get in your gut and your balls when you see that beating in Casino? He wants that to be the basis for how you live your entire life. He wants that to be the basis of your relationship to God Himself.
That’s sick.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have an emotional basis for your faith. In my opinion, no other basis for faith is possible–an intellectual basis misses the point of faith, an inherently non-intellectual value, altogether. The problem is that this is deeper than emotion, into a physical reaction of revulsion and disgust, which since they cannot be indefinitely borne, are translated into emotional/intellectual actions–in the case of Casino, condemnation and rejection. In the case of The Passion, it’s supposed to translate into adoration and obedience, an ever-present knowledge that this happened because of you, that your only salvation is following the man this happened to, and that those who do not follow him are committing the kind of sin that caused this man to be brutalized so in the first place. There are other mass movements in recent times that tried to bridge the physical and emotional in worship of an extraordinary man and his extraordinary ideals and in fanatical opposition to those who opposed him. I need hardly mention the names.
In my original post on The Passion I stated that I doubted the anti-Semitic nature of the film because I trusted the judgement of American critics and pundits like Ebert & Roeper and the God Squad. But Gibson is not a film critic or an ecumenicist, and neither is his target audience. His loathsome political leanings are clear enough: His throwback anti-Vatican II “Catholicism,” his damnation of all people not of his denomination, his homophobia, his flirtation with Holocaust revisionism. I say we take Gibson at his word, and believe that his faith is what motivates his every action. His faith, therefore, is what leads him to make these grotesque statements and hold these awful beliefs. His faith is one of cataclysmic violence and pain–violence so profoundly all-encompassing that he felt the need to continuously one-up the Gospel descriptions of it. Torture, maiming, and killing aren’t just a facet of his faith–they’re central to it. And the film’s Jews are central to that central point. That’s the faith he’s promoting.
That’s why I will not see his movie.