Given the opening week success of The Passion of the Christ, the obvious question is: What next? Does this mean we have to suffer a bevy of biblical fantasies writ large, with exotic historical trappings like foreign languages and ultraviolence (because, let us recall, in the Christian world gory violence signifies realism, but explicit sex signifies the work of Satan)? Please, if you haven't seen the film yet, don't. You will only be encouraging them to make more of this nonsense.
The relative success of The Passion of the Christ combines the two central obsessions of American life: capitalism and religion. For the producers of culture, the Christian culture in the United States has proved profitable ground. Many lucrative seeds have been sown in the music industry, with such Christian rock acts as POD, Chevelle, and Evanescence, the book industry, with the Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind series, and now in the movie industry. In part, this stems from the easily identifiable needs of this very large community; it's easier to sell stuff to a group of people with dogmatic tastes than it is to the secular crowd and its transient fads.
The marketing of The Passion of the Christ must sit alongside that of Blair Witch Project as a successful experiment in a movie finding and exploiting a subculture. The Mad Mel circus has tapped the eager-to-proselytize character of evangelical communities to push its merchandise, from the film to the picture book to the souvenir iron spike necklace. It's the perfect combination of fanaticism and fandom, religion and capitalism, which both rely on the act of selling for their prosperity, as the film The Big Kahuna nicely illustrated.
Frank Rich of the NY Times said, "the marketing of this film remains a masterpiece of ugliness when hucksters wield holier-than-thou piety as a club for their own profit. That a movie star should fan culture wars for dollars is perhaps no surprise."
For the fans of this movie, the creation of a mass media branding of Jesus (excuse the pun) gives them an opportunity to indulge both of their central passions, piety and purchasing. Consumption is, after all, a substitute for identity, a composite of signifiers that condense our multiple and heterogeneous desires into a recognizable cadre of products and services. For some, "the clothes make the man." For others, a car can convey a wildly divergent and expressive panoply of ambitions and emotions. And for the evangelical Christian, going to see The Passion of the Christ is an act of belonging to a consumer group, voting for Jesus with one's dollars, obeying the eleventh commandment: shop 'til you drop.
To this end, Christians aided in the marketing of The Passion of the Christ:
The film has touched a nerve in the U.S. evangelical Christian community, which boasts millions of members and spending power of billions of dollars. It is a group that can swing presidential elections, turn obscure books into overnight best-sellers and quite possibly make “Passion” a blockbuster.
Hundreds of churches are selling advance tickets, and promoting the film from the pulpit.
It used to be, priests denounced moral inquities from the pulpit. Now, they push product. This hymn is brought to you by McDonald's. McDonald's: Jesus is luvin' it. How long before churches depend on businesses for a steady stream of parishioners? That is, how long before the relationship between commerce and religion is inverted, and commerce is the engine that drives religion?
The end result of this meeting of god and mammon is that more religious films are on the way:
Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, said that he knows of at least 10 biblical films now in the works, several with major studios competing for them.
Paul Lauer, director of marketing for Gibson's Icon Productions, told Reuters last month that if "Passion" does as well as they hope the opening weekend, "I think there'll be a lot of powerful people in Hollywood saying, 'Somebody get me a Jesus picture.' "
...
"I do expect a Noah's ark film and a Revelations film down the pike pretty quickly after this," said David Mumpower, president of Box Office Prophet.com, which forecasts and tracks movie revenue. "A Ten Commandments remake isn't outside realm of possibility."
Here's the real problem with making a movie based on the Bible:
Two young women leaving the theater who declined to give their names seemed nearly speechless.
"It was overwhelming," said one, "the story of someone giving up their life."
Another preview patron, Joan Moder of Aurora, near Chicago, said, "I think everybody should see it. You read the Bible like it's a fairy tale. It's a true story; it really happened. It gives life meaning."
No. The Holocaust is something that really happened. The Bible contains historical facts, but also contains a great deal of what this woman calls "fairy tale." The Bible is not what any scholar would label "a true story." But in the world of commerce, realism goes to the movie with the best production values. People can be overwhelmed by theatrical productions, given the sense of verisimilitude by the size and slick finish of the production.
History -- real history as it exists in the debris of archeological artifacts and prosaic accounts -- simply can't compete with the gut-level response of an ultraviolent spectacle from the star of Bird on a Wire.
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