Film review
Satan is a fag, in the gospel according to Mel Gibson. In his overrated film "The Passion of the Christ," Gibson portrays Satan (played by Rosalinda Celentano, above) as an androgynous figure that easily can be interpreted as a gay man. (I liked it better when "South Park" portrayed Satan as gay, because I don't think that "South Park's" portrayal of Satan as gay could result in any hate crimes...)
The gospel according to Mel
Today I finally dragged my ass to "The Passion of the Christ," which also could be titled, "Jesus Meets Freddy and Jason."
Seriously: I could have seen "Dawn of the Dead," which was playing in the next theater (it really was; I'm not making that up), and walked away as enriched as I was when I walked away today from Mel Gibson's latest bloody egofest. (Surely Mel would have played Jesus himself if he weren't so long in the tooth.)
For all of the hype that surrounds it, "The Passion of the Christ" is little more than the first snuff-style Jesus flick. Unless you consider enduring two hours of what Roger Ebert called "the most violent film I have ever seen" to be a spiritual experience -- and in the age of "reality television" that may be the closest to a "spiritual experience" that we're going to get -- you will be disappointed, as I was, if you expect any spiritual sustenance from Gibson's film. (Note to self-identified "Christians": The point of Jesus' life is his teachings, not his birth and death, whether they were miraculous or not. Of course, Jesus' teachings call on us to radically change ourselves, which is why we much prefer to focus on his supposedly miraculous birth and death instead of on his teachings.)
I heard at least a few women in the theater audience openly sobbing as Jesus (played by the younger James Caviezel instead of Gibson) takes more and more beatings and sustains more and more open wounds and subsequently looks more and more like a big walking pizza with extra sauce.
As I sat there in the audience watching Gibson's way-over-the-top portrayal of the last hours of Jesus' life -- just when you think that Gibson couldn't make it any grislier, he does -- I couldn't help but wonder if, while they cry at the sight of a catsup-covered James Caviezel playing Jesus, the women who were crying in the audience cry over real-life brutality, such as the thousands of people who have been maimed and who have died in Iraq during this past year because, as former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke recently divulged, Iraq had more military targets than did Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pointed out to him shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Which is, I think, the point of Gibson's film: To allow a bunch of "Christians" to feel that they're pious and holy and saved because they can cry at and/or just endure a fucking movie with the grisliest crucifixion scene in cinematic history.
(While I'm glad that in modern crucifixion scenes they don't shave the actors' armpit hair -- they allow Jesus to have body hair now! -- never before in a crucifixion scene have I seen Jesus' ribs, which Gibson, who is one sick and twisted fuck, delivers to us. [I don't mean that we see the indentations where Jesus' ribs are; we see his ribs.])
Gibson offers up the most-mutilated Jesus we've ever seen on the big screen, and that's about all that he accomplishes in "The Passion of the Christ." While women in the audience were crying over Jesus' bloody and bloodier abuse, Gibson's gory special effects were so overdone that I found them distracting. Rather than feel empathetic for Jesus and cry with the women in the audience -- which I might have done had Gibson shown any restraint -- I found my mind wandering: What was it like for poor Caviezel, all covered in red goo, every day while they were shooting the film? Did he feel like he was playing Jesus Christ, or, because his role consisted mostly of being flogged and crucified and so he had relatively few lines, did he feel like he was the star of an S&M/fake snuff film? Did they use tomato sauce and/or other tomato products for blood, like it looked like they did?
And while Jews might be up in arms over the unflattering portrayal of Jews in Gibson's splatterfest (there is actual splatter and spurting in "Passion"), probably the gay community should want Gibson's head on a silver platter more than any other historically oppressed minority group.
For while the Jews and the Romans are portrayed as Jesus' torturers and murderers in Gibson's version of Jesus' last hours, the really, really, really bad guy -- Satan -- is portrayed as a bald, eyebrowless, androgynous man-woman in a black cloak who lurks in the crowd and whom we glimpse from time to time as he/she looks on approvingly at Jesus' sufferings on his way to his crucifixion. (At first I thought that the character of Satan was played by a biological male, but as the film wore on, the actor looked more like a biological female; I stayed for the end credits to see that "Satan," as the end credits indeed name the creature I had assumed was Satan, indeed was played by a biological female, an actress named Rosalinda Celentano.)
So Mel's message is, I guess: Satan is a fag (or maybe a dyke).
Gee, thanks, Mel.
Nowhere in the Old or New Testament have I read that Satan is an androgyne, possibly a gay man, who lurks about in a black cloak. But Gibson, for some reason, felt the need to add that fabrication to his film.
But it's not surprising, I guess, after the scene in another Gibson film, "Braveheart," in which a cocky but innocent young gay man is tossed from a castle window to his death -- mostly just because he is gay. I remember that the theater audience actually laughed at that scene and that I was appalled that the murder of a gay man -- mostly just because he was gay -- was considered by my "peers" to be comedic.
If that one blatantly homophobic scene in "Braveheart" -- which shouldn't even have been scripted -- had been edited out, it would have been a much better film, in my book.
But there's no saving "The Passion of the Christ," even if the superfluous, homophobic portrayal of Satan were entirely cut out. While Gibson plays lip service to some of Christ's teachings (shown in occasional flashbacks), in his film Gibson primarily focuses on the last violent, bloody hours of Jesus' life. (Ebert notes: "The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of the torture and death of Jesus.") I suspect that the real crucifixion, assuming that the crucifixion of a man named Jesus actually happened, wasn't as bloody as Gibson's film version of it.
I have this crazy notion that if we walk into a movie theater to see a film about Jesus Christ, we should walk out of the movie theater as better people than we were when we walked into it. "The Passion of the Christ" fails that test..
Although, I'm sure, the weeping women in the audience thought that they'd done their "Christian" duty.
My grade: C-
Update (Friday, April 2, 2004): I'm not the only one who puts "The Passion of the Christ" into the same category as "Dawn of the Dead." The current "Boondocks" series is now making the comparison:
Update (Saturday, April 17, 2004): The San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford finally weighs in on "The Passion of the Christ" in a column titled "How to Gag on 'The Passion': Nine Fun-filled Ways Mel Gibson's Brutal Snuff Film Makes a Mockery of True Belief. Clip n' Save!"
5:05:33 PM 
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