Wayne Besen - Author, Activist, Columnist, Public Speaker

Monday, January 31, 2005

by Wayne Besen

In a recent USA Today column, radio host Michael Medved wrote an absurd rant about Hollywood's supposed disdain for Neo-Puritans simply because Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ did not get an Oscar nomination for best picture.

"The Oscar nominations announced Tuesday illustrate Hollywood's profound, almost pathological discomfort with the traditional religiosity embraced by most of its mass audience," wrote Medved.

Did it occur to the conservative shock jock that The Passion didn't get nominated because the profitable movie on the prophet was just God-awful? Does today's conservatively correct crowd have such a big chip on its shoulder that it can't handle any legitimate criticism? Holding the belief that The Passion didn't deserve an Oscar nomination is not liberal or anti-religious - it is simply pro-art.

Look, I've seen hundreds of movies and "The Passion for Pain" was the worst one ever made. The movie was grotesquely and gratuitously hyper-violent, virulently anti-Semitic and virtually devoid of Jesus' true message of love and compassion. Why would Gibson waste a few minutes of film showing Jesus loving thy neighbor when he could dedicate the celluloid to Biblical brutality?

The entire movie consisted of Jesus getting slowly beaten to a pulp by sneaky Jews with Louisville Slugger-like noses. I got the impression that Gibson scoured every Synagogue and bagel shop in Manhattan to find the 100 most sinister-looking, beady-eyed stereotypes imaginable. It might be news to Gibson, but not every Jew looks like the Grim Reaper.

I'm a fan of action and horror movies, but the stomach-turning violence in The Passion was overkill to the extreme. The movie industry should have given it a rating of S&M. Gibson and his apologists defend his pornographic snuff film by saying that it was important to get across that Jesus had suffered. Sure, because before Gibson's morbid movie, everyone was under the impression that crucifixion was a ball.

Come to think of it, The Passion was like a self-righteous Rocky flick with Jesus playing the bad-ass boxer and Mother Mary in the ring-side role of Adrian, as she followed her son from one grisly scene to another. "Yo, Mary." Only the tacky Gibson could turn the Biblically beautiful into a bruising burlesque.

I was also bothered by Gibson's sanguinary scenes, which were unbelievably phony and shockingly unrealistic. Gibson's Jesus shed enough blood in the first hour to have killed any man. Instead of dying, we got another hour of gore with enough blood to fill the Red Sea. If Jason from Friday the 13th were at the theater he would have stood up and screamed, "Enough Already!"

The most absurd Medved point was that Hollywood has lost its moorings because it used to celebrate successful movies like Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments.

"Hollywood once chose to praise movies that eloquently affirmed the religious convictions of the mass audience. But in 2005, top nominations went to films that went out of their way to assault or insult the sensibilities of most believers."

To compare The Passion of the Christ to classic movies like these is laughable. Gibson's movie was shallow, one-dimensional and bizarrely fixated on torture. The Ten Commandments, on the other hand, was a terrific movie with layered characters, an engaging plot and the violence was within the context of the story -- not the point of the story.

If Gibson had produced The Ten Commandments, the first half of the movie would have been the Egyptians drowning at sea, with money shots of their bloated, eye-bugging, asphyxiated carcasses. The second half of the movie would have been Moses suffering in excruciating pain as he walked through the scorching desert. Gibson would have shot close-ups of Moses' parched tongue and we would have been voyeuristically treated to his starving, skeletal followers barbecuing scorpions to survive.

We can only hope that Gibson stays away from creating more films where he turns peaceful, non-violent men into vigilantes. Give Gibson the chance he'd give Gandhi a gun and arm Buddha with a Beretta.

Finally, what disturbed me most about The Passion was that when I went to the theater it was packed with impressionable children. It seems it's okay for conservatives to bash violent movies as long as they cater to a liberal audience. But, if a movie portrays Jesus or even Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, sickening displays of bubbling blood and spilling guts is considered wholesome family entertainment.

Hollywood got it right by not succumbing to the far right's pressure campaign to nominate an inferior, psychotic movie produced by what appears to be a highly disturbed Mel Gibson. If the judges asked "What Would Jesus Do"(WWJD), I think it is clear he would snub Gibson and vote for "The Aviator".

4 Comments:

Superbowl Sunday's The Simpsons deals with Ned being Mel: he creates bloody bible-based movies. Marge boycotts. Hilarity ensues. Of course.
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