Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ

3. The Word Made Film

c h a p t e r t h r e e The Word Made Film Long before its release on Ash Wednesday 2004, The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s story of the final days of Jesus Christ, had already generated the kind of publicity most filmmakers can only dream about. “Inadvertently,” Gibson told Peter J. Boyer in the New Yorker, “all the problems and the conflicts and stuff—this is some of the best marketing and publicity I have ever seen.”1 At the heart of all the problems and the conflicts and stuff were widespread accusations that viewing the film could fuel anti-Semitism, especially because of its implication of Jewish leaders and a Jewish mob in the crucifixion of Jesus on the orders of the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate. Controversy particularly swirled around Gibson’s use of a speech by the high priest Caiaphas after Pilate condemns Jesus to death but then washes his hands, publicly disclaiming any responsibility for his execution:“His blood be upon us, and upon our children ”—a transparent device for fixing the guilt for Jesus’s death on the Jewish community that Gibson shot in Aramaic for his rough cut, removed from a later cut, then restored to release prints without providing an English subtitle translating it. Speaking to Boyer six months before the film’s release, Gibson defended the speech and regretted removing it from the film under pressure from Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, and others.“I wanted it in. My brother said I was wimping out if I didn’t include it. It happened; it was said. But, man, if I included that in there, they’d be coming after me in my house, they’d come kill me.”2 The warrant for Gibson’s assurance that it happened is the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which alone of the four Gospels includes the line, though ascribing it not to Caiaphas but, in the Authorized Version, to “all the people” (Mt 27:25). This literal fidelity to Matthew has led commentators like Steven Waldman to conclude that if Gibson’s film is anti-Semitic, that is only because Matthew’s record itself is.“Jews should admit that some of their forefathers probably helped get Jesus killed,” Waldman, writing for Slate, admonishes , adding, however, that “there is a strong possibility that the Bible itself , in effect, distorted the history of the ‘Jewish’ role. . . . The New Testament either gave Jews a bum rap or, at minimum, was written in a way that left it highly susceptible to misuse.”3 Does following Matthew, even if he tones his source down by transferring the offending speech from “all the people” to a single high priest, provide adequate cover for Gibson? Or is it true, as a group of ecumenical Catholic scholars have argued, that “one cannot assume that by simply conforming to the New Testament,that antisemitism will not be promoted”?4 Invited to comment on the doctrinal controversy, film scholar Jeanine Basinger agreed with this group that religious films as different as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999) have often aroused controversy , but she offered another perspective, subordinating religious doctrine to entertainment: “People have an entertainment experience, not a religious experience ,at the movies.People who go to this movie will be going to a Mel Gibson movie.”5 The controversy surrounding Gibson’s film raises three general questions about filmed lives of Jesus that it brings into unusually sharp focus: What is the relation between inspiration (“a religious experience”) and mass entertainment ? How does Scripture focus problems of fidelity more urgently than any other precursor text filmmakers could possibly choose to adapt?And what does it mean to make a film that is faithful to the Gospels? Reviewing the ways earlier movies based on the life of Christ deal with these questions provides a firmer basis for assessing the claims Gibson and his critics have made about The Passion of the Christ. Since most commentators would probably agree with Basinger that enter48 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents tainment and inspiration rarely coincide as goals for filmmakers,it might seem especially challenging for an entertainment text, in this case a movie designed to entertain enough people to recoup its investment and return a profit, to be faithful to...