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Mel Gibson's Martyrdom Complex
August 3, 2003
"The Jews didn't kill Christ," my stepfather was fond of
saying. "They just worried him to death." Nonetheless,
there was palpable relief in my Jewish household when the
Vatican officially absolved us of the crime in 1965. At the
very least, that meant we could go back to fighting among
ourselves.
These days American Jews don't have to fret too much about
the charge of deicide - or didn't, until Mel Gibson started
directing a privately financed movie called "The Passion,"
about Jesus' final 12 hours. Why worry now? The star
himself has invited us to. Asked by Bill O'Reilly in
January if his movie might upset "any Jewish people," Mr.
Gibson responded: "It may. It's not meant to. I think it's
meant to just tell the truth. . . . Anybody who
transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their
own culpability."
Fears about what this "truth" will be have been fanned by
the knowledge that Mr. Gibson bankrolls a traditionalist
Catholic church unaffiliated with the Los Angeles Roman
Catholic archdiocese. Traditionalist Catholicism is the
name given to a small splinter movement that rejects the
Second Vatican Council - which, among other reforms,
cleared the Jews of deicide. The Wall Street Journal's
opinion pages, which have lavished praise on Mr. Gibson and
his project, reported in March in an adulatory interview
with the star that the film's sources included the writings
of two nuns: Mary of Agreda, a 17th-century Spaniard, and
Anne Catherine Emmerich, an early-19th-century German. Only
after Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Los Angeles, among others, spoke up about the nuns' history
of anti-Semitic writings did a Gibson flack disown this
provenance.
Emmerich's revelations include learning that Jews had
strangled Christian children to procure their blood. It's
hard to imagine a scenario that bald turning up in "The
Passion." Indeed, it's hard to imagine the movie being
anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no
major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic
and Latin (possibly without benefit of subtitles). Its real
tinder-box effect could be abroad, where anti-Semitism has
metastasized since 9/11, and where Mr. Gibson is arguably
more of an icon (as his production company is named) than
he is at home. He shot "The Passion" in Italy, where a
recent cartoon in the newspaper La Stampa showed Israeli
tanks about to roll over the baby Jesus' manger. "Do you
want to kill me once more?" read the caption.
In recent weeks Mr. Gibson has started screening a rough
cut of his film to invited audiences, from evangelicals in
Colorado Springs to religious leaders in Pennsylvania to
celebrities in Washington. But the attendees are not always
ecumenical. At the Washington screening, they included
Peggy Noonan, Kate O'Beirne, Linda Chavez and David Kuo,
the deputy director of the White House's faith-based
initiative. Like the membership lists of restricted country
clubs that let in a minority member or two to deflect
charges of discrimination, the screening guest list did
include a token Jew: that renowned Talmudic scholar Matt
Drudge. No other Jewish members of the media were present,
said one journalist who was there.
That journalist must remain unnamed as a result of signing
a confidentiality agreement - a practice little seen at
movie screenings. Since then, some of those present,
including Mr. Drudge, have publicly expressed their
enthusiasm for "The Passion" without legal reprisal,
anyway. One invitee, the radio host Laura Ingraham, gave
Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post a sense of the event's
tone when she told him why she was sorry she couldn't get
to the screening in time: "I want to see any movie that
drives the anti-Christian entertainment elite crazy."
If "The Passion" is kosher, couldn't Mr. Gibson give Jews
the same access to a Washington media screening, so they
could see for themselves? Such inhospitality is not
terribly Christian of him. One Jewish leader whose requests
to see the film have been turned away is Abraham H. Foxman
of the Anti-Defamation League. "If you tell everyone they
won't see it until it's ready, O.K.," Mr. Foxman said in a
phone interview from Jerusalem. "But what Gibson's done is
preselect those who'll be his supporters. If the movie is a
statement of love, as he says it is, why not show it to you
or me?"
When I addressed this question last week to the star's
press representative, Alan Nierob, he told me that the ADL
was being kept out because it had gone public with its
concerns - as indeed it had, once Mr. Foxman's letter to
Mr. Gibson about "The Passion" failed to net a meeting with
the filmmaker or a screening three months after it had been
sent. When I asked to see "The Passion," Mr. Nierob said
The New York Times was a "low priority" because The Times
Magazine had run an "inaccurate" article in March in which
Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson's father and a prominent
traditionalist Catholic author, was quoted as saying that
the Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews"
and that the Holocaust was a charade. But in fact, neither
Hutton nor Mel Gibson - nor anyone else - has contacted the
magazine to challenge the accuracy of a single sentence in
the article in the four months since its publication.
Given Mr. Nierob's inclination to use p.r. spin to defend a
Holocaust denier, it was hard to take seriously his claim
that the invitation lists to idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="148040">"Passion"
screenings "have nothing to do with anyone's religion."
Especially when he laughed as I questioned him about it. As
it happened, Star Jones praised the film that day on "The
View," saying she had attended a New York screening. How
had she seen "The Passion," and Barbara Walters had not?
Ms. Jones was invited by her pastor.
Eventually, Mr. Gibson's film will have to face audiences
he doesn't cherry-pick. We can only hope that the finished
product will not resemble the screenplay that circulated
this spring. That script - which the Gibson camp has said
was stolen but which others say was leaked by a concerned
member of the star's own company - received thumbs down
from a panel of nine Jewish and Roman Catholic scholars who
read it. They found that Jews were presented as
"bloodthirsty, vengeful and money-hungry," reported The
Jewish Week, which broke the story of the scholars' report
in June. One of the panelists, Paula Fredriksen, the
Aurelio professor of Scripture at Boston University, writes
in the current issue of The New Republic that all her
colleagues were "shocked" by the screenplay's resemblance
to the passion plays of old (or not so old, in the case of
Germany).
Perhaps "The Passion" bears little resemblance to that
script. Either way, however, damage has been done: Jews
have already been libeled by Mr. Gibson's politicized
rollout of his film. His game from the start has been to
foment the old-as-Hollywood canard that the "entertainment
elite" (which just happens to be Jewish) is gunning for his
Christian movie. But based on what? According to databank
searches, not a single person, Jewish or otherwise, had
criticized "The Passion" when Mr. Gibson went on Bill
O'Reilly's show on Jan. 14 to defend himself against "any
Jewish people" who might attack the film. Nor had anyone
yet publicly criticized "The Passion" or Mr. Gibson by
March 7, when The Wall Street Journal ran the interview in
which the star again defended himself against Jewish
critics who didn't yet exist. (Even now, no one has called
for censorship of the film - only for the right to see it
and, if necessary, debate its content.)
Whether the movie holds Jews of two millenniums ago
accountable for killing Christ or not, the star's
pre-emptive strategy is to portray contemporary Jews as
crucifying Mel Gibson. A similar animus can be found in a
new book by one of Mr. Gibson's most passionate defenders,
the latest best seller published by the same imprint (Crown
Forum) that gave us Ann Coulter's class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="173303">"Treason." In "Tales From the
Left Coast," James Hirsen writes, "The worldview of certain
folks is seriously threatened by the combination of
Christ's story and Gibson's talent."
Now who might those "certain folks" be? Since no one was
criticizing "The Passion" when Mr. Hirsen wrote that
sentence, you must turn elsewhere in the book to decode it.
In one strange passage, the author makes a fetish of
repeating Bob Dylan's original name, Robert Zimmerman - a
gratuitous motif in a tirade that is itself gratuitous in a
book whose subtitle says its subject is "Hollywood stars."
Another chapter is a screed about how "faith is often the
subject of ridicule and negative portrayal" in Hollywood.
One of the more bizarre examples Mr. Hirsen cites is
value="45699">"Sophie's Choice," in which
"passages from the New Testament are quoted by Nazi
officials in support of atrocities that were committed."
Now sectarian swords are being drawn. The National
Association of Evangelicals, after a private screening of
"The Passion," released a statement last week saying,
"Christians seem to be a major source of support for
Israel," and implying that such support could vanish if
Jewish leaders "risk alienating two billion Christians over
a movie." Mr. Foxman says he finds that statement
"obnoxious and offensive."
"Here's the first time we've heard that linkage: we support
Israel, so shut up about anti-Semitism," he added. "If
that's what support of Israel means, no thanks."
But the real question here is why Mr. Gibson and his
minions would go out of their way to bait Jews and sow
religious conflict, especially at this fragile historical
moment. It's enough to make you pray for the second coming
of Charlton Heston.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/arts/03RICH.html?ex=1061027623&ei=1&en=76f4781c890cfb8e
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