March 7, 2014
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You do not mess with blind faith.
Just a humble
reminder. You do not question the dully codified stories of
Christianity, or challenge them, or offer even remotely refreshing,
alternative storylines with anything resembling intelligence, or humor,
or deep intellectual curiosity.
What are you, a masochist? To do
so would imply there is something to be gained, some sort of cultural
progress to be made in the realms of the exhausted – but still deeply
paranoid and very simpleminded – Christian faith, when there most
certainly is not. Besides, you want to make lots of money, right? Of
course you do.
Do you know who understands this overarching rule
perfectly? Mark Burnett, the goliath TV producer who single-handedly
destroyed the modern world by popularizing reality TV. Burnett and his
wife, “Touched by an Angel” actress Roma Downey, know exactly how
sucker-able are the vast majority of the world’s Christians. Because
they’re evil that way. Smart. I mean smart.
So smart are the
Burnetts that they recently hacked together a terrifically lousy movie
about the life and times of Jesus, called Son of God. They made it by
cobbling new footage with bits of last year’s 10-hour History Channel
miniseries on the Bible that was already quite perfectly lousy but still
really popular because, you know, Jesus.
But of course, they
didn’t stop there. The Burnetts recently travelled the country, shilling
this new hunk of spiritual Valium to pastors, churches and shopping
malls in hopes of pre-selling millions of tickets, safe in the the
knowledge that devout Christians will see just about anything that
reassures (but never, ever challenges or advances) their faith, no
matter how poorly made, intellectually insulting or terminally boring it
might be.
Sexy. Hunky. European. Heavily sedated. Nice hair. Bland as dishwater. Praise!
Are
they right? Of course they’re right. There is tremendous money to be
made endlessly reinforcing what the masses have already been told to
believe, in keeping millions addicted to the very same drug they’ve been
taking for millennia (hi, Fox News). Conversely, there is less money to
be made – though much more fun to be had – sparking religious
controversy, or at least trying to create something, you know, incisive,
spiritually messy, or artistically interesting.
Here’s a fun
factoid: Back in 1988, I worked as a lowly intern for a small record
label that had its offices in the Universal Pictures building in
Burbank, the very same year the “The Last Temptation of Christ” came
out. Oh, what a time it was.
Controversy! Melodrama! I remember
looking out the smoked-glass windows of the label’s office one fine
morning and seeing a very long, poorly dressed line of angry-looking
Christians marching uniformly toward the building, holding signs and
yelling slogans, protesting the film’s “radical,” “blasphemous”
portrayal of Jesus. It was all sort of adorable.
Do you remember
what Jesus’ “last temptation” actually was? To be a normal guy. Wife,
kids, a glass of wine before bed, mortality. This was the great,
“sacrilegious” controversy: that Jesus might have been a little bit
troubled, a little bit scared, a little bit human about accepting his
divine fate. Being the messiah, after all, is a bitch.
But here’s
the best part: The movie hadn’t even been released yet. Not a single
protester had actually seen the film (much less read the original Nikos
Kazantzakis novel). None of them had any real idea what the film
actually depicted, or that it ended on a perhaps even more genuinely
spiritual note than the same childish, Sunday school narrative they
already knew.
Did it matter? Of course not. They’d been told – by
a callow priest, an angry radio host, a terrified grandma – that the
movie was heresy, that a tiny aspect of their faith was being lightly
prodded by a popular entertainment. They were told to be outraged.
Because if there’s one thing that threatens God’s all-encompassing love,
compassion and eternal omnipotence, it’s an ’80s Scorsese flick.
The
church, of course, has been doing this same dance for millennia –
rallying their sheep to protect their own version of religious history,
the very history they themselves made up/swiped from pagan sources,
rewrote, rewrote again (and again and again) and then forced down the
world’s throat for 2,000 years. Great scam.
Fast forward to 2004.
It was exactly 10 years ago that the nation endured “The Passion of the
Christ,” Mel Gibson’s sadomasochistic splatter-fest, a film so
grotesque, so ultra-violent and cruel, it was like a master class in how
to shred human flesh with a whip.
But oh, how the believers
flocked! By the millions, over and over again, all at the behest/command
of their pastors, fundamentalist radio hosts and their Rick Warrens.
Entire Christian families packed the country’s theaters for weeks and
even months, stone-faced and miserable – many bringing along their young
children – as Romans beat poor James Caviezel’s Jesus into bloody veal
for two hours straight. The more devout believed they were seeing actual
history, when all they were seeing was one man’s violently distorted
horror fantasia. It was ugly.
The good news is, Son of God offers
no such melodrama, on either end of the spectrum. It takes the exact
opposite tack, going straight for saccharine blandness, depicted Jesus
as a hunky, cream-filled, Euro-looking white boy completely lacking in
mystical intrigue, Hallmark-ready and devoid of anything resembling true
spirit. Or brain. Or heart. Or spark. Bring the kids!
Whoops,
how did this spiritual icon representing all of consciousness, a figure
that precedes Christianity by many thousands of years, get in here?
Sorry.
Whoops, how did this ancient spiritual figure that
precedes Christianity by many thousands of years and which represents no
dogma or churchly power-grab get in here? Sorry.
As irreverent
Episcopal deacon David Henson pointed out in his hilarious live-tweeting
of the movie: there’s no heresy here. But there is some weird racism.
White supremacy. White people everywhere, in fact. Also, Jesus not
really giving a damn about the poor or the oppressed. Is Jesus
perpetually on Xanax? Sure looks like it. Is everyone speaking in a
British accent? Apparently.
Son of God offers, in short, every
bit of clunky spiritual pabulum the church has endorsed out for
centuries (full disclosure: I watched exactly 58 minutes of the History
Channel miniseries, more than enough to glean the suffocating blandness.
I’m quit sure the movie offers little else).
Is there any other
way? Sure. You may, if you are so inclined, create something
thatsubverts religious dogma, by either exploding it with wild, Monty
Python-grade satire or smartly undermining it with fantastical literary
genius (ref: Kazantzakis, or even something like Philip Pullman’s
brilliant His Dark Materials). Of course, doing so will only please
those who already get it, who are educated and therefore capable of
complex, nuanced, abstract critical thinking. In other words, exactly
not the millions of literalist faithful one might hope to entice to
begin to think for themselves.
So here we are, 2014, and to the
church’s delight, the song remains ever the same. We have another
big-budget, terminally weak Jesus rehashing, featuring the same
stultifying ideas, the same staleSunday school mythologies originally
(re)written by some very old, very repressed men who lived so long ago
they might as well be aliens, men whose job it was to destroy/refashion
ancient pagan belief systems to suit the church and fortify its power
for centuries.
Kudos, then, to Mark Burnett for buttressing their
musty cause, for inspiring not a single new possibility or tantalizing
spiritual idea, for merely pouring another bucket of lukewarm water into
what’s already a very tepid ocean. The church should be pleased.
Jesus, not so much.
