Sat 28 Feb 2004
I must admit, I have not yet seen The Passion of the Christ, but I can’t wait until I get a chance to do so. Apparently one other person who hasn’t seen the movie is John Kerry, although that didn’t stop him from weighing in with his opinion on the film (Democrat Kerry Urges Caution on ‘Passion’).
"I don’t know," he said when asked if he would see the Mel Gibson film about the last days of Jesus’ life and its particularly harrowing focus on his crucifixion. Kerry, a Catholic, said he was worried about the movie’s potential anti-Semitism. Some critics have complained that Gibson portrays Jews as responsible for Jesus’ death. "I am concerned," he told reporters. "I don’t know if it’s there or not but there’s a lot of it around now. I think we have to be careful."
To me it is very simple - anyone even remotely familiar with the Passion story would know that it is not anti-semitic. By even repeating that ignorance does a disservice to all. But is is, after all, a movie about Christianity, so clearly it is open to ridicule. It’s fine to portray Jesus as a character as long as you make him a fool. Try to show a literal interpretation of the Gospels and that is clearly dangerous.
But all that aside, there was probably the best summary of the real motivation behind the comments, interestingly enough, in a column by Ed Siegel in today’s Boston Globe (On religion, ‘Passion’ is literal, ‘Rings’ is liberal):
Conservatives would tend to agree with Gibson, that evil is as absolute as the truth. In "The Passion," the devil is real, not abstract. Pilate’s moral relativism ultimately thwarts his standing up to the mob. He asks his wife "What is truth?" and it is his Hamlet-like inability to see that Christ represents the truth which gives Caiaphas, the Jewish leader, the opportunity to demand the death of Jesus. It is the same kind of moral relativism that drives conservatives crazy about liberals. Why can’t liberals see, conservatives wonder, that Saddam Hussein is pure evil?It’s the absolutism of people like Gibson and President Bush that drives liberals crazy. Why, for example, can’t conservatives see that Hussein was no greater danger than other dictators? There is a lot of questioning about where the truth lies in "The Lord of the Rings," as in most modern literature and modern art in general.
Elections, today, are often fought between absolutist conservatives and relativist liberals, with Middle-earth — or Middle America — deciding between those poles. Think of how Michael Dukakis’s relativist answer about capital punishment turned off voters in 1988. Ditto Pat Buchanan’s absolutist performance at the 1992 Republican Convention. Voters preferred Bill Clinton’s relativism to Republican absolutism, but couldn’t decide between the two eight years later.
And now? For George W. Bush, as for Mel Gibson, you’re either for us (or Jesus), or against us. The truth is not so simple for John Kerry. Changing his mind about Vietnam years ago, and insisting that not every issue has a simple answer, is a sign of strength to his supporters, a sign of weakness to conservatives.
To quote Gandalf, then: "So it begins, the great battle of our time."
