Of Jesus movies and Jews

(This blog occasionally addresses non-political subjects on the weekends. As I write, it is still Sunday.)

I've never before used this humble column to present a film review. A movie most of you will never see has prompted me to take up the evil habit. I do so in order to segue into the larger topic of film's relationship to religion and history. Some of you may interpret the last half of this post as anti-Semitic. It is not, but if you choose to misread my words in that fashion, don't expect me to pretend to give even a quarter-damn.

(Warning: You may encounter spoilers. I don't consider them major -- certainly not when dealing with a film which focuses more on atmosphere and theme than on narrative.)

Abel Ferrara's 2005 independent production Mary stars Forest Whitaker as a father, Matthew Modine as a son, and Juliette Binoche as a holy ghost. Modine plays a foul-mouthed, somewhat self-centered director -- modeled, perhaps, on Ferrera himself (best known for the excellent Bad Lieutenant). He has just directed, and starred in, a controversial film called This is My Blood, about Guess Who. Binoche plays his Mary Magdalene. Whitaker plays a "serious" television interviewer of the Bill Moyers type; his shows often feature religious scholars, even though he is of uncertain faith.

After completion of filming, Binoche becomes so obsessed -- or possessed -- by the Magdalene that she begins to relive, mentally, the disciple's life. She flies off to Israel, pretty much intending to come down with a case of Jerusalem syndrome. Dramatizations of the non-canonical (and very incomplete) Gospel of Mary punctuate the film, and we are not told if these segments represent Modine's film or Binoche's trance-fantasies. Probably both.

Let's get the Consumer Reports aspect of this review out of the way quickly. The film fails.

It fails honorably, because Ferrara has made a well-crafted, well-acted attempt to deal with serious matters. Nevertheless, it is muddled. It does not move us when it intends to leave us shattered. It concentrates on establishing a spooky-spooky mood while neglecting clear exposition and other basic narrative chores. It seems fearful of its most interesting ideas, retreating, in the end, to a comfortable schoolboy Catholicism. It keeps well-educated characters inarticulate when you most want them to make incisive comments.

The greatest disappointment is Binoche's character, who may or may not provide a voice for the Magdalene's ghost. A fascinating premise, that. Alas, Ferrara refuses to do much with it. The character has no arc; in the first ten minutes of the film, she does pretty much everything she's ever going to do. Toward the end of the story, she gives counsel to a man in spiritual crisis, and her message (in essence) is pray. Well, if MM has nothing more interesting to say after her 2000-year journey through time, she need not have made the trip.

The man in crisis is Whittaker, who cheats on his pregnant wife. He develops a major case of the guilties when premature labor endangers the child.

For some reason, his interview subjects tend to be experts on the gnostic gospels. One wonders why Whitaker seems so fascinated by those texts, since neither he nor Ferrera understands them. Although many variants of gnosticism existed, most gnostics disdained monotheism and considered the material world beyond redemption -- or rotten, to use the technical term. The creator god of the Jews was the gnostic equivalent of Satan -- after all, the SOB made this place, didn't he?

To the gnostics, bringing an innocent child into this corrupt and corrupting world is a crime graver than abortion. A truly gnostic Magdalene would have told Whitaker: "Your baby may die? He's lucky." Granted, she would probably have phrased the thought in a nicer way.

Instead, a soul-torn Whitaker retreats into the familiar mythos: God is one, God is love; his world is inherently good, and people are inherently bad; repent, ye sinner, repent! This, I suspect, is all that Ferrara knows or ever will allow himself to know of religion. He comprehends nothing beyond that which the penguins forced into his cranium during catechism class.

The ignorance is catching. Elaine Pagels (author of the seminal The Gnostic Gospels) appears on Whitaker's program and proceeds to make an extraordinary blunder: She claims that the Gospel of Mary was found in 1946 at Nag Hamadi along with the gospels of Thomas and Philip. Not true. The book (or the few pages left of it) was included in the Akhmim Codex, purchased in Cairo in 1896. If someone like Pagels can screw up like that (and she seems to be speaking extemporaneously), one can't blame a layman like Ferrara for flailing.

The most interesting -- and most muddled -- of the film's three intertwining plots concerns the director played by Matthew Modine, who functions as Ferrara's alter ego. His movie-within-the-movie strikes me as both deeply-felt and well-done, yet everyone (onscreen and off) hates both the project and its creator. His colleagues hate him, the reviewers of Mary hate him, and even Abel Ferrara seems to hate him. I may be the only person who does not consider Modine's character a monster.

True, the director who cast himself Jesus does tend to drop a lot of F-bombs once the cameras stop rolling, but a lot of people in the industry are like that. Yes, Modine commits the "sin" of trying to market his movie, but he does so because film-makers have an obligation to their backers. Ferrara wants us to view the man as a gauche huckster. I can't go along. In fact, Modine seems more sinned against than sinning, especially when Whitaker interrupts the man's every attempt to explain himself.

At first, we are led to believe that the people assailing This is My Blood are fundamentalist Protestants annoyed by the inclusion of heretical material. Even Whitaker accuses the director of insulting Jesus. Yet he does nothing of the sort. No part of the movie-within-the-movie conveys heresy or defamation -- indeed, we see no offensive material of any kind. As noted above, some episodes dramatize the Gospel of Mary. Strange as that text may be, the portions enacted on screen are not notably unorthodox or blasphemous. It's hard to understand what the fuss is supposed to be about.

As the film heads toward the finale, we learn that the folks most incensed by This is My Blood are not evangelicals. They're Jews.

The picketers dress in concentration camp uniforms. They decry the movie as anti-Semitic. A bomb threat (perhaps meant to mirror a suicide bombing in Israel, as seen earlier in the story) empties out the theater. A Jewish demonstrator tells a television reporter: "This lie inspired the murder of millions of my people over the centuries! This lie inspired the Holocaust itself!"

Yet we see no evidence of actual anti-Semitism in This is My Blood. So what is Ferrara trying to tell us?

At this point, we must zoom out and address a subject larger than this one film.

The apocalyptic ending of Mary -- unlike much of what precedes it -- rings true. The demonstrators target This is My Blood not because it ignores the canonical works but because it tells their story.

Hollywood has always feared the passions aroused by the Passion. The C.B. DeMille silent version of King of Kings includes a hilarious title card in which a post-crucifixion Caiaphas makes sure that we understand that the blame for everything belongs to him, to Caiaphas alone, not to anyone else, just him him him. (I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the original title card really is that obvious.) The Robe, which premiered in 1953, gives the Romans full blame for the death of Jesus. We catch no whiff of opposition by any Jewish priest -- in fact, every non-Roman in Jerusalem just loves the guy. The tribune even provides the 30 pieces of silver!

(Was it Dwight MacDonald or Stanley Kauffman who made the crack about Richard Burton playing the "fall goy"?)

I can understand Jewish sensitivity over the issue -- to a point. But the outcries which attend every Jesus movie have taken on a ritualistic quality, and the rite has become tiresome. I'm reminded of the shouts of "Racism!" which we heard throughout 2008 every time someone suggested that Barack Obama might not be the best Democratic nominee. After a while, transparent attempts to manipulate emotions can become annoying, ineffective and downright infuriating.

I didn't much care for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (the target of my second-greatest prank). Still, some of the Jews who over-reacted to that movie pretty much made clear that they would be offended by any attempt to tell the Jesus story. Some insist that the Gospels themselves are inherently racist. As this news article put it, "Jewish groups, notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the United States, worry that the film's very fidelity to the Bible texts is going to make it anti-Semitic."

The Anti-Defamation League said that Gibson's film portrays Jews as uniquely "blood-thirsty, sadistic and money-hungry," a bullshit claim that will persuade only those who have never seen the movie (or who insist on "seeing" the film they've read about, as opposed to the one on screen). The ADL also averred that the film depicts "the high priest's control of Pontius Pilate" as well as a "cross built in the Temple at the direction of Jewish religious officials." In short, the ADL saw many things in the script and/or the finished product that were invisible to non-insane viewers. No, I will not apologize for the previous sentence.

I've read the Gospels with care, as most Jews (and many Christians) have not. I do not view those texts as inherently racist. Perhaps the author of John does occasionally bitch and complain about his fellow Jews (and it is obvious to me that he, whoever he was, was Jewish), but his attitude mirrors the way I bitch and complain about my fellow Americans. Any writer who does not lambaste his countrymen is a thug.

We still often hear the nonsensical assertion that the Gospels caused the Holocaust. In fact, Hitler always made very clear that his murderous racism was based on biology, not religion. He never cared for Christianity. To him, a baptized Jew was just as odious as any other variety.

In the wake of the Gibson film, a South African rabbi said (vis-a-vis the ADL's leader) that "what he is saying is that the only way to escape the wrath of Foxman is to repudiate your faith." I agree. Moreover, I think that this message became standardized well before Mel Gibson directed his first movie in 1993, and well before Abraham Foxman started heading up the ADL in 1987.

From Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry:

By the 1970s, anti-Semitism was no longer a salient feature of American life. Nonetheless, Jewish leaders started sounding alarm bells that American Jewry was threatened by a virulent "new anti-Semitism." The main exhibits of a prominent ADL study ("for those who have died because they were Jews") included the Broadway show Jesus Christ Superstar and a counterculture tabloid that "portrayed Kissinger as a fawning sycophant, coward, bully, flatterer, tyrant, social climber, evil manipulator, insecure snob, unprincipled seeker after power" - in the event, an understatement.

I recall reading, back in the early 1970s, a particularly over-the-top Jewish condemnation of the film version of Superstar, a work which most people find offensive only on musical grounds. The author of that screed, if sincere, was paranoid; if insincere, calculating.

Back to Finkelstein:

For organized American Jewry, this contrived hysteria over a new anti-Semitism served multiple purposes. It boosted Israel's stock as the refuge of last resort if and when American Jews needed one.

Moreover, the fund-raising appeals of Jewish organizations purportedly combating anti-Semitism fell on more receptive ears. "The anti-Semite is in the unhappy position," Sartre once observed, "of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy." For these Jewish organizations the reverse is equally true. With anti-Semitism in short supply, a cutthroat rivalry between major Jewish "defense" organizations - in particular, the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center - has erupted in recent years.

The main ulterior motive for sounding the anti-Semitism alarm bells, however, lay elsewhere. As American Jews enjoyed greater secular success, they moved steadily to the right politically.

Just as organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, so it remembered The Holocaust when American Jewish power peaked. The pretense, however, was that, there and here, Jews faced an imminent "second Holocaust." Thus American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying.

"Bullying" is, I think, a good word to describe some (hardly all) of the Jewish reaction to Gibson's movie, to Andrew Lloyd Weber's noisy operetta, toScorcese's fine movie (whose critics, most now forget, were not all fundamentalist silly-billies) and even to the beloved miniseries created by Zeferelli and Burgess.

And what has been the result of all this hysteria? Few in Hollywood would now dare to make a film about Jesus. (The last attempt was the insipid The Nativity.) More than that: Few would dare to make a film touching on Christianity in any way, however obliquely. That's why the brief image of Christ in Bad Lieutenant shocks us more than does the brief glimpse of Havey Keitel's peepee. There are taboos, and then there are taboos.

In the so-called Golden Age, it used to be said that religion in Hollywood amounted to Jews selling Catholicism to a nation of Protestants. (Think Bells of St. Mary, Song of Bernadette, Keys of the Kingdom...) Now, religion plays almost no role in studio-produced films -- except, arguably, for the Holocaust-themed films. Jews selling Judaism to Jews. Such films should exist, but must they be the only films touching on questions of faith?

Of course, in the alternate reality of the fundamentalist "marketplace," many movies do serve to sledgehammer Jayzuss into the brains of the faithful. These productions -- artless, unsubtle, propagandistic and trite -- exist within a ghetto. They will never mean a thing to anyone who lives outside that ghetto, to anyone who doesn't also think that George Dubya was a really good president. I suspect that within the studios there are plenty of people who want to address religious themes, directly or indirectly, in a serious and artistically satisfying way. Some of them want to ask questions about faith, which the ghetto-dwelling fundies never do.

Would a movie of that sort have an audience? Of course. Unfortunately, the protestors -- Christian fanatics and Jewish fanatics -- have made the production of such films difficult, if not impossible.

And that's why, in the end, I respect what Ferrara has done. Yeah, his movie is a mess. But at least he made an honest mess. A brave mess. He confronts themes that most American film-makers have learned to avoid.

By the way: Throughout Mary, Forest Whitaker compulsively watches televised footage of violence in the Middle East. The viewer longs to hear the ghost of Mary Magdalene say a few words about all of that. (I mean something aside from a generalized statement about peace being good and war being bad.) Alas, not even Ferrara has the balls to venture into that territory.