Jesus Christ, Movie Star

12.09.11 | George D. Allen | Staff NotesPrint this Post

I have a personal relationship with Jesus.

To be more specific, lest the huffing and puffing get too heated right out of the gate: what I mean is that I have a personal experience related to the intersection of Jesus, entertainment, and controversy, which makes the treatment of the Christian savior in motion pictures of particular interest to me. I’ll pocket that story until the end, though, so we can move more quickly into this rumination of Jesus on film.

Talking Jesus and movies is a little like talking politics and movies. I haven’t had any trepidations about occupying this space with pieces involving the latter coupling (go here, and here, or even here to see what I’m talking about), but I will admit that putting words to screen on the former was a job that lent itself easily to much procrastination.

Why? Because even more so than mixing thoughts on movies and politics, venturing into the thorny thicket of Jesus Cinema presents two distinct and intimidating handicaps from the start. There’s the search for an original approach to the subject matter—sort of like what the writer faces trying to discover something “new” to say about Citizen Kane or Psycho—and then, there’s the reality that most people come to the conversation with hardened (if not positively confrontational) opinions about which movies dealing with Jesus are:

…worthwhile;

…meaningful;

…intelligent; 

…reverent;

…and, on the flip side of the coin, positively blasphemous.

And, therefore, you have a much greater chance that most (if not all) of what you have to offer on the topic will bring about the most predictable responses from people who, as Philly-area radio host Michael Smerconish might say, are just “suiting up in their usual jerseys.”

Are there people out there who boycotted Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ at the command of religious leaders they trusted, only to later experience the film on its own merits and change their minds about the film’s intentions and effect? Are there moviegoers who, while disapproving of Mel Gibson the man, nevertheless took it upon themselves to open their minds to what The Passion of the Christ asked viewers to absorb? Boy, would I like to hear from them.

There are three basic ways to experience a Jesus movie: as a believer, as a nonbeliever, and/or as a movie fan. Two of those perspectives are always available to the viewer simultaneously, but often, the issue with Jesus Cinema is that people will often limit themselves to one: Believer, rather than believer and movie fan; nonbeliever, rather than nonbeliever and movie fan. In so doing, they close themselves off to the additional benefits those second, and then third, perspectives bring to enrich their experience of films about the Jesus story: a nonbeliever’s perspective, if you are a believer; a believer’s values, if you do not subscribe to any faith; and a movie fan’s bearing and sophistication, to appreciate the artistic merits of the films rather than only their piety or provocations.  

That choice doesn’t so much hurt a film (to take a page from biblical jargon, it is what it is) as it hurts the filmgoer, and it inevitably hurts the conversation with others who see things differently.

Given all that, what effective preparations can one make to set up a Jesus article that aims to go beyond the historical tidbits that make up a nostalgia-centric chronology? Before settling down to tackle “The Jesus Post,” I did an awful lot of fiddling about in the hopes of finding constructive inspiration:

I picked up the tremendous book Jesus at the Movies, in which author W. Barnes Tatum delivers a thoughtful history of Christ pictures of every stripe (that few could hope to equal), exploring them through their artistic, literary, historical, and theological merits, and steering them towards categories of either “harmonizing” or “alternative” approaches to the Gospels;

The Jefferson Bible would be my go-to source for the text of the Jesus story, as our nation’s third president created the perfect “Cliff’s Notes” edition of the saga;

I decided to read Alabama pastor David Platt’s book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, because it seemed to offer the in-your-face approach to Jesus I thought might inform and expand the range of possibilities for what a Jesus Movie post might be all about;

And, I looked at some Jesus films I hadn’t yet seen, including the 1935 French offering Golgotha—the first Jesus movie with sound, that also prefigured Gibson’s focus on the experience of Jesus’ final days. The available print is a bit shabby, and the English-language dubbing is about as stiff as you might expect from a film of this vintage; however, with enough patience, you might find the formality, grain, and darkness of the film somewhat hypnotic. The era from which this movie originates probably feels about as remote to many people as Jesus' time, and with a little imagination on our part, it acquires almost a "found footage" feeling, the appeal of a mystical artifact.

I had a look at Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, the film I suspect would be the Christ picture to wind up in the Occupy Wall Street Movie Library (should there ever be one), given its documentary style and focus on Christ as a revolutionary figure. I wonder if perhaps many of today's Christians would have differing estimations of the film, which contains a wealth of dialogue taken right out of the Gospels, before and after they read that the protagonist is often characterized as Marxist.

Earlier this year, I deliberately held off tackling the Nazarene in this space once I knew I would be attending a special screening of Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ, Savior: a filmed record of Kinski’s defiant one-man show from the 1970s, a fiery event that found the iconoclastic actor actually arguing back and forth with crowd members who occasionally stormed the stage and tried to take over the show because they were so angered by the message he was presenting:  

I am not the Jesus of the official church tolerated by those in power. I am not your superstar.

We’ve come this far already, you see, and there’s been no mention of King of Kings (either version), The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus of Nazareth, or any number of the other dozens of films focused on the life and times of Jesus that might hold special meaning for you. Maybe you winced at the first mention of the Scorsese movie; maybe you read the first sentence and were instantly offended by what seemed at first glance to be proselytizing on a blog about movies.

On the other hand, you may have already caught on to my misdirection of sorts. As little interest as I have in delivering a benign and compact account of Jesus movies, I’m equally unmotivated to try to convince you of the particular worth of one film over the other.

That’s not so much an avoidance of taking a position on the kinds of Christ films I would “endorse” by way of recommendation, or historical review, or exclusion, but a decision to spend the time instead talking about how I believe we relate to the films, and how the act of communicating with others about them can—and should—be a challenge.  

But, for anybody interested now in the full disclosure:

I’m a committed agnostic. My “favorite” Jesus movie is the Scorsese picture, which, to define that clearly, means it was (and is) the film that makes what I consider to be the meaning of the story come alive for me in a powerful fashion. I remember attending the premiere in Harrisburg, PA, after my dorm neighbor showed me the “Tear Up This Ticket to The Last Temptation of Christ, Saying ‘No Thanks!,’ and Mail It to (Universal Studios executive) Lew Wasserman” campaign, a mailing of extraordinary hathos from the American Family Association.

My feeling is that the film’s emphasis on the dual nature of Christ as fully divine and fully human (as per the Kazantzakis novel) both brings the viewer into close personal contact with the character and makes the arc of his ministry more about personal courage than divine predestination. (As screenwriter Paul Schrader was raised Calvinist, this is an interesting distinction to think about) 

Pace Gibson, I found the likewise-controversial The Passion of the Christ to be both a bit on the disappointing side as a movie while also being undeserving of the bile heaped upon it (and him). As a work that seeks to provide special focus on a very narrow portion of the tale, the picture is uniquely suited to allow the faithful (or even the devoutly aggrieved nonbeliever, I suppose) to enjoy a special identification with Jesus—as an object of persecution. For that reason, I have every understanding why the film might “fail” for me and “succeed” for others.

There is a precedent for how Mel’s film pulls forward the climax of the story and uses it to create an impression of the whole saga. Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which takes us from the start of Joan’s trial through her burning at the stake, is to the story of Joan what Gibson’s film is to the story of Jesus. Both pictures are technically strong and at times overwhelmingly intense—they’re just not the movies you would want serving as your introduction to their respective subjects.

I’m drawn to both of those Jesus films (though I believe one to be significantly superior to the other) because they have strong aims and are unafraid to court controversy with a controversial subject.

And that now brings us to my primary qualification on this matter, and exactly what I know about Jesus and controversy:

That’s me (on the left) at age 16, playing Jesus in my high school’s production of the musical Godspell. 

Shortly before the show opened, a local pastor organized a very public campaign to have it canceled—arguing that its presentation represented a violation of church and state in the same manner that prevented him from coming into the classroom and preaching the gospel according to his Baptist beliefs.

Of course, if religious instruction were somehow being snuck into the public school forum, he wouldn’t really have a problem with that; his problem was with the construction of the play, which, to his eyes, represented a portrait of Jesus that was “irreverent and blasphemous.” I’ll never forget how he accented the last word—irreverent and blas-FEE-mous—mainly because his words about the subject (and ours) were covered by two out of the three local news networks.

The play wasn’t shut down. The mini-storm of controversy did make the already emotional experience of performing it that much more affecting; I know from firsthand experience that you don’t have to be a member of the faithful to be moved by the Jesus story. By the end of every performance, there were tears aplenty flowing from both audience and cast members. (Me excepted, since I had the job of being crucified)

Along with that close-up brush with evangelical narrow-mindedness, I learned a rather embarrassing lesson of my own that I’ve carried forward in life and can easily apply to the exploration of Jesus Cinema. Once I learned two local news stations were coming to cover the story, I feared I would be asked difficult questions on camera; though I knew there was nothing at all inherently wrong with what we were doing (and that the show was about as far from being blasphemous as you could get, really), I was still nervous about it and sought out advice from others about “the right things” to say. I wound up using ideas and words not fully my own because I thought they sounded good; the reporter sensed it, and turned those words cleverly back at me in a way that was momentarily—but quite visibly—uncomfortable for me.

What the Gospel of Matthew (from which Godspell is derived) has to say about false prophets doesn’t fit so very neatly into this lesson, but John warns: “…do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits…”

That’s what I offer as my guidepost when it comes to Jesus Movies. If you have even the slightest interest in and respect for the subject, don’t take as gospel what someone else tells you when it comes to which films are “righteous” and which films aren’t.

Look a little deeper, and test them yourselves.