Why I didn't watch The Passion of the Christ (again)

Themes: Representation

During our Doctrine class today, the lecturer, Michael Jensen, showed a clip from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It was a clip that had been shown last term in another Doctrine lecture by a different lecturer and at the time I, and others in the class, had found the clip quite confronting. The violence in the film is well known and has caused a fair degree of controversy among Christians (and others). I saw the film when it was released and have watched excerpts a couple of times since then. I think it is a remarkable film, when I first saw it I was moved and provoked – it’s hard to get a better reaction to a work of art. Further, a prominent consideration in my mind was the impact that the film would have on non-christian viewers and the opportunities this would present for conversation. As Michael pointed out today, Gibson’s film is the most significant piece of Christological thinking, at least in terms of reach and breadth of engagement, that has occurred in a very long time.

Yet this time, when the clip was about to be shown, I and few others left the class.
Why? The question has been bugging me ever since.
Here are some thoughts:

First, what was different?
I left because I felt like I didn’t want to watch the brutality of the scene again, I saw others leaving and felt that gave me permission to leave, and I also thought that my leaving might support others who wanted to leave but needed encouragement. These were the spur of the moment reasons. It may be that everything which I’m about to say is simply to justify a gut-reaction.
That said, sometimes you need to trust your feelings, so why was I uncomfortable watching? As anyone who knows me well can testify, I don’t have a weak stomach when it comes to film. I can happily watch Fight Club or Pulp Fiction. So what’s different?
I can take this a step further. I am apparently happy to sing fairly gory songs that celebrate the bloodiness of Jesus’ death. I meet in a building festooned with crosses. I am not often affected the same way by other works of art that depict the crucifixion. In fact, the work of Christ has been a central motif within the Western aesthetic tradition, and most of these works of art I am perfectly comfortable with.
It seems that there may be something going on with the medium of film: It could be forcing me to confront something that has been buried within other artworks through my over-familiarity. (perhaps the barbarity of the crucifixion should confront me whenever I see the top of our steeple); or is it that film transgresses upon territory that other forms of art don’t?

People have often pointed out that film, perhaps more powerfully than any other artistic medium actively invites the viewer into a complicity with the Director and his/her gaze. The people on the screen are completely ‘beings-for-us’ and we enjoy the dark room, the loss of any sense that we are ‘beings-for-others’. We almost entirely surrender our critical, ontological encounter with the world to a set of prefabricated experiences contrived by the Director. Perhaps this is why film seems to achieve levels of catharsis of which Aristotle could only dream.
But what happens when the one dying on the screen is a representation of the One who died for me? He is so completely a being-for-us that the image escapes from the bond of the screen and invades my consciousness. As Bonhoeffer observed (a quote from Michael’s blog), he cannot be ontic (merely ‘there’), he must be ontological (‘there’ as a question for Being). Suddenly, I cannot escape seeing myself as a ‘being-for-him’ and it is nauseating, the film watches me.

Another thought:
Does film walk an overly fine line between proclamation and re-enactment for it to be a suitable vehicle for communicating about the death of Jesus? Maybe these aren’t very useful terms, or maybe even a false dichotomy. What I’m trying to get at is the sense that we want to maintain the particularity and unrepeatable nature of Jesus’ life and death. Film is always militating against this: first, it attempts to make possible the immediate presence of any person into a thoroughly absent world – 1st Century Palestine; second, it is an infinitely repeatable experience.
Are we getting a little bit close to a re-sacrifice of Christ on film, rather than a proclamation of his death (until he comes) in words, deeds, and even artworks that refer back to his singularity?

Throw into this mix the Gospels and the Lord’s Supper – both dramatic, narrative, and aesthetic. Are these the only authorised vehicles for the remembrance of Jesus? Are they unrepeatable works of Art? Confessions rather than architypes? Can a Christian artist represent the crucifixion and what kinds of representations would be appropriate?
It’s getting late and I’ve got more questions than answers.

One things I’m convinced of, we can’t let ourselves be protected from the suffering, rejection, and godforsakenness of Christ. It’s too easy to put ‘roses on the Cross’ and pass quickly on to the glory. In that sense, we should never look away from The Passion of the Christ.

[The Cross] destroys the god, miserable in his pride, which we would like to be, and restores to us our abandoned and despised humanity. (Moltmann, The Crucified God, 71)

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A Fork

Themes: On Language, Philosophy, Representation

Words are like cups or forks or jumbo jets or carpet. The ontology of language is not to be separated out from general ontology.
Theories of language have been betwitched by Platonic ontology.
The assumption that language is essentially about reference is just another manifestation of the Platonic ontological claim that the essence of a thing is found, not in itself, but in an independently existing Form.
We basically got over it in general ontology, but in popular versions of the philosophy of language we are still haunted by the Platonic ghost.
Words do not refer to things or anything.

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Graven Images

Themes: Representation

Movies borrow the emotionally situating power of music, add that to the identity-shaping power of narrative, and mold them both onto a visual representation that appeals to our criterion of truthfulness.

- that’s almost certainly a convenient simplification, but something along these lines is happening.

The danger (is it a danger? or am I just a reactionary?)…
The sadness with which I watch Movies flows from the way in which this powerful medium also partakes in the weakness of all representation: immediacy.

Maybe it’s wrong to call this a weakness. After all, it’s also the strength and substance of representation. A representation is something available when the original is gone.
(I don’t think that this is all a representation does)
But what about when the original is really gone, irrevocably, irretrievably? What about when the ‘goneness’ is an essential part of the original.
There are things which can never be represented because their originality and uniqueness are part of what they are.
- a copy or representation cannot, by definition, capture these things.

Actually, everything is like this. Everything is gone, every spark from the Heraclitean fire, burns, glows, mottles to black, and is no more. And at every instant it is different to what it was an instant before. Every moment in history is unrepeatable, the ‘goneness’ of what was here a moment ago is essential to what it now is, and to what everything now is.

On a completely trivial level, Movies always fail to tell us the most important thing about the past. It is gone. We live more and more in an eternal present, all the Ages that have ever been are available to us Now. (maybe this isn’t so trivial)

If you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything.

Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.

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Landscaping and Shaping

Themes: Representation

Perhaps it is all part of ruling and subduing?

Perhaps so, but that doesn’t answer the question ‘why this form?’

That humanity has been given a a mandate to landscape our surroundings does not relieve the question about the shape to which we’re ‘scaping.

I suppose one answer would be that the Garden of Eden was in fact much like Constable’s Wivenhoe Park or some other English Parkland, and we are all sub-consciously seeking to recreate the earthly paradise.

Tough, if your taste in topiary is of a Japanese clip…

I’m not sure that an argument from creation does more than allow us to smuggle in our own cultural tastes as universal values.

After all, humanity had occupied this continent for thousands of years before European colonisation, and yet there weren’t a lot of English-style gardens.

The shape to which we’re ‘scaping – whether Landscaping or Manscaping – has something to do with the relation between Art and the World…
which in turn has something to do with the power of Cinema…
and lurking in the chaos are idols, likenesses, and The Image.

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Landscaping

Themes: Representation

There is an overgrown garden just outside the tiny village of Laurel Hill, in the Snowy Mountains. Not much is known of the history of this garden, I’ve heard that it used to be a Cobb & Co Hotel in the days of Early Australian Settlement. Whatever buildings once stood there are now long destroyed. Left behind are a pond, a Chestnut tree, Holly, Lindens, and a beautiful Claret Ash. Every time I visit the garden has sunk a little further into ruin. The drought which held that part of the country for the last 5 years nearly finished it off.

The garden was is significant because it belongs (in a small way) to the tradition of Victorian (Era) landscaping. The trees and pond are planted in a way designed to produce a ‘picturesque’ effect. The unknown gardener wanted to look out upon a picturesque English garden. It is quite possible that this gardener had never been anywhere near a genuine English garden (I have no way of knowing). What matters though is that it conforms to a image of what a garden should be like.

This little garden near Tumbarumba is just a very small example of something that can be seen almost everywhere in the closely settled parts of the Australian landscape. It is the shaping of this country to look like another. The early settlers drew upon an ideal which they then sought to realise in the world. In fact, they saw the land, not merely as ‘land’ but as ‘Landscape’ – that is, as the potential subject matter of a painting.
(in contrast, our most common way of referring to land is as ‘environment’ – why? and what does this mean?)

Strangely, the hunt for ‘Landscape’ had been going on in England for even longer than in the Colonies. The great Estates and Parks that came into being over the last two and a half centuries are also the products of a deep desire to shape the land into a Landscape.

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Cinema and Seeing

Themes: Representation

Moving Pictures, Cinema, Television – that whole realm of art – is arguably the greatest artistic innovation of the last century. During this time many forms of artistic endeavor found new forms of expression. Technological progress enabled new ways of production, recording, and distribution of art. However, and I’m willing to admit that I haven’t thought about this in a great deal of depth, I’m not sure that anything else has arisen that enables such a significantly new representation of the world to ourselves.

The Cinema is a synthesis of visual representation, narrative, and sound. As such, a movie draws together elements from previously separate artistic disciplines into a powerful fusion. And like all Art, Cinema does not only represent the world to us, it provides an interpretive pattern for future viewings of the world.

Art shows us the world, and in doing so Art molds how we will see the world thereafter. It changes the relationship we have with the world.

In thinking, seeing, and believing, the making and watching of movies has made us different.

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