Gagging
Mark Morford/SFGate Apr.16.04
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I stopped reading this review of Gibson's Passion of The Christ after the first point. He has nine. I'm sure some of them are amusing, maybe even germane. But it's just bitchy nastiness, chauvinism for things as they are, more defense of the status quo. That's, as I never get tired of pointing out, exactly what got Jesus killed in the first place. Rocking the boat. The problem is now we've got a little flotilla out there, a smorgasboard of status quos, a buffet of lifestyles and choices, all acceptable generally as long as they don't threaten overt violence or get in the way of the economy to which we all pray daily.
The reality of the movie is something people talk about. I haven't seen it.
I just saw Braveheart, probably a lot of civilians think that movie was too violent, as well, but the truth is what was real then couldn't be reproduced on film. Neither could the real Passion. They both happened though. They're real events and many of us had our lives shaped directly by them. All of us have been indirectly affected by them. The inability to confront that violence isn't a desire for a more civilized way of life, it's cowardice, fear, the precise opposite of the protagonists' character in both stories.
What we have inherited is the end result of the steady accumulation of the benefits of compromise with evil. That's what this world is. This is what happens, eventually. Look around you. These are the people who inherit the earth. And this is the earth they inherit.
We tell our children these stories and it seems with each telling one more pertinent detail drops away. The hopelessness of resistance makes a bad movie.
The demonic tools that we now regard as essential to life have each taken only a little bit of our power. An amount so small most of us never even noticed it, like a penny added on to the price of a can of corn. There are billionaires who receive that kind of tribute daily.
Is Gibson fighting that battle? Is that why I'm defending his movie?
Well, I'm not defending the movie. What I'm defending is the effect of the movie. What I'm attacking is the comfortable people who attack the movie. Because what they're attacking is what's given them the position they occupy, and now it's threatening them, by the truth of what it is.
All these years people suffered to bring comfort and safe living to a privileged few here in the US. And now that system is cycling out of all control. Good.
Does simple-minded religion offer hope?
Not to the jaded cynics who've wormed their way into power in this cess pool of karmic waste. But it will strengthen those who are so confused by the seeming impossibility of moral stances they can't find any place to be proud in.
These are the descendants of the broken, not naturally inferior strains of humanity, these are the children of the ones who fought and lost. It's a testament to the blood they carry that there's so much strength still there. The history's been broken as thoroughly as the men were. But it's there, there's something in us that knows this. We're in chains, but we weren't always. And it's wrong. Wrong because it's happening to us, wrong in that sense of loyalty to threatened family and home, and wrong because it's disharmonious, because it raises the worm above the man.
One of the many ways this captivity's been maintained is the constant affirmation of the abstract, the way moral questions are debated in an out-of-context meta-reality that has no substance, to get the mind unmoored from its place in the body, because the body is real, and it's connected to what's real.
And that's what the Passion brings home I think, at least as much as it takes the gloss off the Crucifixion and shows the scabbed blood at the foot of the cross.
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That image is central to this culture - though at the same time it's been castrated, neutered and tamed, and assigned its place in the book of goads and cheers.
I like that the movie's out there. I don't care if he's an egotistical masochist, I don't care if it fuels the dark hungers of seemingly placid Christians, what I care is that the slave mentality induced by the fixed-up image, the ball-less simpering Jesus, is getting replaced by blood and violence. Overtly. Good.
That's the real message.
All that forgiveness and whimpering obedience was tacked on by the monitoring intelligence that directed what it could of history as it unfolded, and damage-controls the rest.
Pussies whose lives are made safe by outsourced death and brutality can do with a taste of their zeitgeist's true nature.
