Movie stirs passions as visual culture enters overdrive.
In all of this talk of Mel Gibson’s new movie, the Passion of the Christ, on whether it is a faithful depiction of the story told in Gospels, on whether it is anti-Semitic, on whether it will make money, on whether Gibson will ever work in Hollywood again, a key point has been forgotten.
It’s just a movie.
Americans invented the movie a century ago and today regard it as perhaps the highest form of art, and certainly the most commercially lucrative. This attitude could only be the result of our unfortunate cultural narcissism. Americans have created great art, but it is primarily jazz that has lasting value, not movies.
Movies are supposed to educate us. Many people base their lives on movies. Electronically broadcast moving pictures, also known as television, are a related obsession. These dark days you hear more references to Simpsons episodes than to Shakespeare or works of literature. We raise our children to know a forest of detail about the lives of cartoon characters, but not to properly spell. This is all terribly sad.
Movie making is inherently a commercial venture. There is no reason to believe that any kind of video production can ever faithfully portray any real event that ever occurred. Video can only portray a myth, a set of events that could not occur, because the view of the characters is limited by that of the audience and that of the audience is constrained by the small window through which the subject is filmed. (*)
Americans take movies far too seriously. Mel Gibson apparently expects that masses of people will start converting to Christianity after viewing the film. I have only skepticism that the movie will do anything other than make money and provoke some discussion. The movie is not a form of high art and it has little consequence in human affairs. Film buffs often cite the Triumph of the Will as proof that movies have great impact upon the world, but historians have no need to refer to it when they explain how World War II or the Holocaust started. Propaganda does have effect, but visual propaganda is weak compared to the power of the spoken or written word.
If I start hearing verbal abuse heaped upon Jews, then I would become concerned. Yet we must recall that the current great wave of Jew-hatred primarily comes from Islamofascists and their supporters, not Christians. (†) Hearing no verbal abuse heaped upon Jews other than that which was done before, my advice is not to worry about this movie or any other. Be concerned not with the phony two-dimensional world, but with the real one. Don’t watch a movie. Read a book.