undercurrent

May 04, 2004

Feel the Pain - Celluloid Epiphanies

Random thoughts set off by Glueboot's relishing the cartoonised violence of Kill Bill whilst avoiding watching The Passion of the Christ (when you do, watch it on a big screen, not illegally downloaded on a monitor, for christ's sake (literally)!)

What made The Passion of the Christ such an example of cinema as elemental force, for me? It's not really 'nightmare-inducing' in a scary-violent-gore sense, in fact blow-for-blow it's rather mild, it's more the fact that violence and suffering per se are treated at length and seriously, that makes it remarkable. It resounds with the visceral power of the cult of Christ; watching it, for the first time I actually understood the awesomeness of the suffering and its religious import. I could therefore also understand the logic of there being a stack of church brochures in the cinema foyer (presumably an approved Gibson tie-in since they had stills from the film in them - what about litle plastic bleeding Jesuses in McD's Happy Meals though? The Chapmans would have been up for that I'm sure!).

The exaggerated effect it had on me may be due to the fact that the only Christianity I have ever been exposed to was half-hearted, feeble-minded Protestantism at school - religion was just not mentioned at home at all, and I just never thought about it except to think how stupid and arbitrary it all seemed, and how boring the hymns were. (The Thirst for Annihilation: indifference is the only proper response to god, but Land finds himself incapable of moderating his hatred - I'd wager that this rage isn't generated without (as with Nietzsche) the burden of a religious upbringing). To me, and I accept that in some sense I've really missed out here, it's always been precisely a matter of indifference and mild perplexity which, however much I read about Christianity, I couldn't overcome. Incidentally I don't really believe that many 'christians' really feel that much differently to this either, and all the experiences I've had of the contemporary church have only reinforced the indifference and the sense that the only possible reason for doing this stuff was if you were desperate for comfort and had little enough self-respect to admit it.

But the elemental force of the image doesn't attempt to 'explain' : it's directly neuro-physiological, emotional, violent : in this sense the film is obviously a modernised version of the Stations of the Cross paintings in churches (the only previous occasion on which I've reached any appreciation of what 'the Passion' meant was in the Basilica of the Holy Blood in Bruges, which has a beautiful series). These mediaeval comic-strips are intended likewise to draw the viewer into a meditation on the pain of Christ, to enter into the pain. Compared to this, Tarantino violence is just bad graphic design.

Given this revelatory quality, I've no difficulty in believing (and I look forward to the statistics on this) that it really could turn someone weak and searching for certainty (as we all are at some time) into 'a believer'. It really is seriously evangelical in intent, make no mistake about that.

However, interestingly, it doesn't necessarily assume or generate any metaphysical basis for belief - there are no miracles, the resurrection itself is only barely hinted at before the credits roll. Satan appears in several scenes, an otiose symbolic gesture that does little to modify the grinding, material-political engine of blood and hatred that drives the film, and whose effect would be no less whether or not you professed a belief in a supernatural deity. The power comes only from human suffering, from human empathy, from the barbarity and lack of redemption within the narrative scope of the film. It hints at the fact that the cult of christ is a syncretic appendage of monotheism rather than essentially of it: the cinematic experience unwittingly revives the occulted taproots of the Christ-cult, the mystery religions, sacrifice, the shamanic enlightenment of unbearably attenuated pain. Perhaps in the contemporary world where the cinematic experience has raised the stakes, only film has the power to deliver epiphany (no doubt it simultaneously is responsible for, and holds the keys to, our atrophied imaginations). This would then be a logical homecoming, a return to the most natural habitat for this complex of image, myth, narrative, and transcendence. Perhaps (frightening but unlikely) a sign of christianity, after centuries of retreat into pseudo-rational politicking and feeble sentiment, feeling its way back to where real power dwells. Is this the inverse of a previous movement from the image to the word which made the faith such a dry, mediocre parody of itself? A move away from the quiet, utilitarian capital-friendliness of latter-day christianity towards a new irrationalist immersion in blood, crusade, the heat of untethered sacrificial religiosity that the 'clash of civilizations' tempts us to imagine?

How strange then that cinemagoers, stunned into silence by this unsparing spectacle, are expected to be scooped up on the way out by these leaflets, pathetic invitations to insipid 'modern' sermons, cold half-empty village halls, wheezing electronic organs and tepid cups of tea - the moribund remains of a declawed, emaciated 'faith'. How bizarre that a force that changed the world is reduced to soliciting in cinema foyers. (And how peculiar that I sat for an afternoon with lots of little old ladies watching a man being scourged and it affected me more deeply.)

The film is a glimpse at an energy that's already gone, leaving its negative trace indelibly on the world : a world which still, and perhaps terminally, lacks an alternative source of energy. As naive as the director and his intentions may be, and whatever the historic infelicities (as if it could ever have been possible to satisfy everyone), I'd rather have this depth-charge of an experience than another superficial, ironic reminder of the current state of post-christian (where 'post' signifies the overwhelming power of the negative relation to the past) nonculture .

Posted by robin at May 4, 2004 03:25 PM