![]() ![]() The undeniable accent on self-imposed violence, however, exceeds any “religious” justification. Anyone who has read the Gospels and the Gnostic texts, such as The Gospel of Judas, knows that Jesus’ persecutors were acting according to a divinely ordained, prestabilized plan–a plan that Jesus had accepted in advance. Accept it with gladness and exultation, for you have a rich reward in heaven in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you”. “How blest you are, when you suffer insults and persecution and every kind of calumny for my sake. Of course, there is scriptural evidence to support Jesus’s affirmation of his own mortality. It is repeatedly stressed in this work that Jesus loves his persecutors, loves his persecutions, and welcomes and affirms his own death. One of the strongest images in the film has The Christ embrace his own crucifix as if it were a lover. Throughout, Jesus’s voluntary assumption of his torture and death is emphasized. The Passion of the Christ is, sensu stricto, a horror film. It is not accidental that The Passion of the Christ has horror-cinematic elements: the attack on Judas at the hands of screeching daemon-children, the ubiquitous presence of an androgynous Satan, the demotion of someone-or-other to Hell, etc. One suspects that Gibson has a particular interest in cruelty for cruelty’s sake–not for any “transcendent” purpose. The film has an independent investment in brutality, in cruelty. They appear to be designed to make the torture seem relevant, i.e. We see snapshots of his past in the form of flashbacks. The film focuses on the condemnation, scourging, and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth the rest of his life is almost entirely bracketed out. What that “deeply personal program” might be is worth pondering. It is not merely a personal reinterpretation of the Jesus myth, but a hand-wringingly serious appropriation of that myth for the sake of a deeply personal program. “Personal” to the point of autobiography. ![]() An exceedingly, excessively, earnestly personal film. ![]() Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) is a personal film. An Analysis of The Passion of the Christ (2004) by Joseph Suglia ![]()
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