'The Passion Of The Christ' At 15: Untangling The Crown Of Thorns Of A Divisive Religious Blockbuster

In The Passion of the Christ, Jesus endures unrelenting brutality, so much so that it's not hard to see why the film's detractors might label it "Christian torture porn." At the same time, if you venture onto YouTube, let's say, and start reading the most upvoted comments below clips from the movie, it can be like peeking into an old-time big-tent revival, where worshipful strangers are giving praise to Jesus and sharing testimonials of how their lives changed after watching The Passion of the Christ. It's a religious film, yes, but it's also clear that this movie was a downright religious experience for some people.

Just to let you know where I'm coming from — my background and bias — I'm a pre-seminary dropout turned teacher who moonlights as a movie blogger. Around the turn-of-the-millennium, after Saint Augustine's Confessions blew my 18-year-old mind, I attended a private Lutheran college with an eye toward becoming a pastor. Even though I ultimately decided against pursuing that vocation, I still attend a small Lutheran church and I've probably studied the New Testament of the Bible more than the average layperson.

Anyway, that's the perspective that I'm bringing to The Passion of the Christ. It's a different perspective, I imagine, than you're apt to find on most mainstream movie blogs. Yet even with that point-of-view, I can see that The Passion of the Christ does show literal torture. Unless you're a gore hound, it's one of the most graphic films you're ever likely to see. The real question is whether the "graphic," in this case, reaches a wanton pornographic level. Is it truly torture porn or something else?

Let's address that question right off the bat with an in-depth (and indeed, obsessive-compulsive) analysis of the whipping, or scourging, scene, which easily rates as the most prolonged scene of over-the-top bloodshed in the movie. One of the most frequent criticisms of The Passion of the Christ is that it is needlessly, excessively violent. How does that criticism bear out when you attempt to quantify the cruelty?

More so than the climactic crucifixion, it's the whipping scene that really serves as the sadistic centerpiece of The Passion of the Christ. That's not to say, necessarily, that the film itself is sadistic (though detractors would argue that it certainly is). It's just to say that the film unquestionably depicts the gleeful sadism of Roman soldiers as they rip the flesh off Christ's back and as we hear every squishy strike of their whips. These soldiers chain Jesus to a post in a courtyard, gather around his back like a pack of hyenas, and set about lashing him mercilessly.

If you thought they were going to stop at the standard 39 lashes, you'd be wrong. Because I have OCD (it's a problem), I actually went back and tried to count the number of times they whip Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.

What makes this a slight challenge is that the subtitles drop out during the whipping scene. Gibson originally wanted to make The Passion of the Christ as a foreign-language film with no subtitles. He eventually compromised and included some, but there are still other parts where he left the subtitles out in favor of trying to tell the story in a raw visual manner.

During the first round of lashes with stick whips, Jesus receives 32 lashes, by my count. Then, one of the soldiers breaks out a flagellum, or cat o' nine tails whip, demonstrating in an unforgettable fashion how this particular metal-tipped torture instrument can rip wood off tables.

The count starts over. On the tenth flagellum lash, the whip rips a big chunk of flesh off of Christ's side. For a while, the whipping fades to the background, making it harder to keep count, but if you watch and rewatch the scene the way I did, you'll soon find yourself learning to recognize Latin numbers. This makes it easier to do course-corrections with counting.

At one point, while Mary, mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, are off weeping, away from the sight of the whipping, the camera pans over to John, the beloved disciple. Right at this moment, the voice of the counting Roman can distinctly be heard saying, "Quadraginta!" (Latin for "40") in the background.

That's 40 lashes in the second round, plus 32 in the first round, for a grand total of 72 lashes ... and we're still not done yet.

The importance of cinematography has been a hot topic as of late, thanks to the recent kerfuffle with the Oscars almost presenting this year's Best Cinematography award during a commercial break. The Passion of the Christ was actually nominated for that same award. Caleb Deschanel's cinematography makes the movie look like a painting come to life.

Apart from him sharing the same initials as Jesus Christ, much has been made of the eerie coincidence whereby lightning struck Jim Caviezel as he was up on the cross on the film set. He already had experience playing a Christ figure in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, but The Passion of the Christ goes further and puts him in full Jesus make-up with a prosthetic nose. Flashbacks frame him in a manner similar to the beatific, brown-bearded Jesus of medieval or Renaissance art. His face almost looks air-brushed at times, and the eyes they give him — those digitally enhanced, preternaturally brown eyes — can be distracting at times.

At other times, The Passion of the Christ presents iconography that seems less like Renaissance art and more like something you would see in the "Hell" panel of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Suffice it to say, the splatter film (of which torture porn could be considered a sub-genre) isn't the only horror genre whose tropes The Passion of the Christ emulates. At odd junctures, the film also verges on full-blown supernatural horror, not only because of Satan and the demon baby but because of the buildup of macabre imagery around Judas Iscariot.

In contrast to the singing, sympathetic Judas of Jesus Christ Superstar, the Judas we see in The Passion of the Christ is physically and mentally cursed. After he betrays Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, his lips crack and his skin breaks out in sores. Under a bridge, he shares the darkness with demons. Visions of devil children torment him. He calls them "little Satans." When they finally drive him to commit suicide, he hangs himself with a rope from a dead donkey that is crawling with maggots and has flies buzzing around it.

Other than the silver pieces and the hanging, none of this is in the Bible. Rather, Gibson has used his own artistic flourishes to fill in the blanks of the story of Judas. That speaks to a larger tendency in the movie. The Passion of the Christ doesn't usually contradict the Bible, per se. What it does is funnel vague passages through Gibson's highly idiosyncratic vision as a director.

Even for someone like me who was raised Protestant and studied to be a pastor, there are some things in The Passion of the Christ that I would only understand once I realized Gibson was drawing from Catholic liturgy and sources outside the Bible, like the impressively named The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich.

This helps explain some curiosities like the emphasis on Simon of Cyrene, the assistant cross-bearer whose role is beefed-up, similar to the whippings, from a one-line mention in the Bible. In his 2004 review of the film, Roger Ebert wrote:

"The screenplay is inspired not so much by the Gospels as by the 14 Stations of the Cross. As an altar boy, serving during the Stations on Friday nights in Lent, I was encouraged to meditate on Christ's suffering ..."

"Suffering" is a key word here. I've heard Catholics and lapsed Catholics alike joke about "Catholic guilt," but if ever there were a movie to show what a non-joke that can be, The Passion of the Christ might be it. The movie lays the suffering on so thick that it almost seems like it's trying to guilt-trip viewers with the constant question, "Don't you see what Jesus endured for you?!"

Apart from the Judas subplot, the film is full of other embellishments. Did you know that Christ the carpenter invented the dining table with chairs? Neither did I. Elements like these show The Passion of the Christ to be a fundamentally quirky conceptualization, not the gospel truth (unless your idea of that is the Gospel of Mel).

Gibson took further liberties with the Garden of Gethsemane scene, having Satan make a non-scheduled appearance with a weird squirmy thing showing in his/her nostril. Satan sends a snake slithering across the ground toward Jesus and Jesus stomps the snake with his sandal. That's not in the New Testament ... it's trying to link the story back to the Garden of Eden and to show how Christ triumphs where Adam failed.

The sum total of all these things is a movie that relies on shock value — the shock of new and strange and viciously violent twists on an old story — to shake the viewer out of apathy. Whatever its faults, The Passion of the Christ does succeed as a kind of religious Grand Guignol. With all the creature comforts of the 21st century, it's easy to forget the trail of blood and barbarism that leads through history to where we are now. The Passion of the Christ sprays blood on faces; it turns a white cobblestone courtyard into a blood monument.

So now we've arrived at the long-ignored elephant in the room. Is The Passion of the Christ antisemitic, and moreover, homophobic? To approach this question, we'll need to dive into some old history from the early 2000s. The intent here is not to dredge up the past as a weapon. It's merely to use some (quite possibly forgotten) background knowledge about the movie's release as a tool for discernment.

In March 2003, The New York Times ran an article ("Is the Pope Catholic ... Enough?") in which it detailed how Gibson had been quietly bankrolling a traditionalist Catholic church in the mountains outside of L.A. The church, it seems, would conduct its services in Latin only ... which suddenly casts a different light on the choice of Latin over Greek in The Passion of the Christ. Did an esoteric worship language preference, and not just a lack of comparative Koine Greek sources, partially motivate this decision?

As the Times notes, Gibson's church "wasn't affiliated with the Roman Catholic archdiocese." In point of fact, it reportedly rejected the line of Popes from 1958 onward (a position called sedevacantism) and rejected the landmark reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965.

Incidentally, one of the reforms in that council was a "Decree on the Jews," which eventually morphed into a "Declaration on the Church's Relationship to Non-Christian Religions." This document, referred to as Nostra aestate (Latin for, "In our time") was instrumental in re-framing the Church's position on Jewish involvement in the death of Christ.

No more, the bureaucracy had decided, were Jews to be considered the deicidal cabal of Christ-killers. As a Jewish writer for the Times put it in another article ("Mel Gibson's Martyrdom Complex") published later that year: "The Vatican officially absolved us of the crime in 1965." Never a man to mince words, Gibson once said he wanted to kill this same writer (and his dog).

Looping back to the first Times article, there's some stuff in there that almost sounds like a deleted subplot from Gibson's movie, Conspiracy Theory. Introducing him as "a rabble-rousing theologist," it paints Gibson's father, Hutton (then 84 years old, now 100), as a Holocaust denier who also believes there were no hijackers, just remote-control detonation, when the planes crashed on 9/11. The Times quotes Hutton Gibson saying that the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews." It stresses:

"Whether any of this has rubbed off on Hutton's son Mel is an open question. A church elder at Holy Family [Gibson's church] says that while the two share the same foundation of faith, Mel Gibson parts company with his father on many points."

Before we get bogged down in too much more hearsay, let's give Gibson the benefit of the doubt. Let's say he made The Passion of the Christ with the best of intentions, with nary an antisemitic thought entering his head. There's still the fact that a joint Catholic-Jewish scholarly group and the Anti-Defamation League itself was issuing statements against The Passion of the Christ even before it hit theaters, based on a version of the script that leaked.

With all of this stuff out there in the media in 2003, Gibson had the chance to take people's feelings into consideration well before the Ash Wednesday release of The Passion of the Christ in 2004. He appears to have resisted the rising tide of pre-release criticism.

In one part of the movie, he took out the subtitles but left in the Hebrew dialogue where the Jewish high priest, Caiaphas, says, "His blood be on us and our children!" This is actually a line from the Bible and Gibson has gone on record in interviews to say that he doesn't interpret it as a curse on the Jews but as a line directed at all of humanity. Yet he also admitted that one of the reasons he kept the Hebrew blood invocation in there was that he "didn't want to let someone else dictate what could or couldn't be said."

That line of defense ("They can't tell me what to do!") sounds an awful lot like the one that fellow ultra-violence purveyor Quentin Tarantino has taken vis-a-vis his use of racial slurs in some of his movies. Maybe we should read it as a lesson in how not to react to frank criticism, circa the 21st century.

Maybe filmmakers, especially ones who fit the profile of "Caucasian male, strident in his views," aren't the ones who get to decide what's appropriate anymore when they have inadvertent focus groups telling them their movie is racist. Rather than remain oblivious to the unconscious prejudices powering them, maybe they should try listening for a change when people try to point out their blind spots.

In The Passion of the Christ, Jesus himself draws a line in the sand, and although we don't hear him speak the words, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," we see the effect of those words visually reenacted. With all the unfiltered judgmentalism that occurs online (of which I am as guilty as anyone else), that's a good principle to keep in mind anytime one ventures into the blogosphere or starts engaging in trial by Twitter.

It's especially relevant to keep in mind when talking about public figures, who, by definition, don't have the same comfy cloak of anonymity over their private lives that we the assembled Internet voices peddling our hot takes do. Here's a neat thought experiment: what if there were cameras trained on your life at all times, like in The Truman Show, but you were too drunk to realize? Would any skeletons come dancing out of the closet, then, while people were watching?

I don't know what's in Mel Gibson's heart, and truthfully, I'm less interested in him than I am his art as a product of him. In past interviews, he's claimed to be bipolar and alcoholic, and if that's really true, then I wonder if his publicly documented bad behavior would be half as shocking to a clinical psychologist as it was to those of us who follow the news and occasionally pay attention to the personal lives of celebrities.

Having said that, Gibson's apology tour ("All the necessary mea culpas have been made copious times"); Robert Downey, Jr.'s 2011 plea for forgiveness on behalf of his old friend; and the 2016-2017 awards success of Hacksaw Ridge made it look like Hollywood had come around, over about a five-year stretch, to forgiving the director. That, of course, was before the Weinstein effect came into play in late 2017.

The immediate reception to The Passion of the Christ was split right down the middle. The film opened with a 54% Tomatometer rating, which has since slipped to 49%. Maybe part of the reason for that slippage is some abhorrent, decidedly unchristian behavior that came to light in the year's following the film's theatrical run.

In 2006, Gibson's drunk driving incident thickened the cloud of antisemitism accusations hanging over The Passion of the Christ. 2010 only made matters worse when audio of him leaked using racial epithets to verbally abuse his girlfriend.

Laundry-listing these incidents is not an attempt to drag the same sordid sins out into the light again and re-litigate Gibson's case in the kangaroo court of public opinion. It's just to give context for why many moviegoers might still have a bad association with his name and the movie title The Passion of the Christ. The man who played Mad Max made Jesus part of his brand and when your whole belief system is founded on the idea that you're an ambassador of Christ, it raises the bar for the standard by which you will be judged. Like it or not, the court of public opinion doesn't obey the same legal standard of "innocent until proven guilty" (nor should it, some say).

Last year, on the day after Christmas, I had an article post here on /Film about two Holocaust films, Schindler's List and Shoah. The director of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, who passed away last year, was fundamentally opposed to any sort Holocaust reenactments, believing them to be exploitative. Having written at length now about two deeply Jewish films and two deeply Catholic films (again, here's the link to The Last Temptation of Christ feature), there's a part of me that comes away feeling like any sort of biblical reenactments on celluloid are, likewise, just liable to fall prey to the same inherent corruption as the imperfect human vessels bringing them to life.

It seems weird, or perhaps all too appropriate, to quote this novel, but there's a line in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code that says, "The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven." Christians regard the New Testament as divinely inspired; the problem comes when people start to regard their own interpretations of it as the Word of God. As we've seen with The Passion of the Christ, or Gospel According to Mel, you have all these little impurities — I think of them as "Satanic verses" — that start creeping into the text, obscuring its original intent, muddying its meaning.

A funny thing happened as I was rewatching The Passion of the Christ for its 15th anniversary. As I sat there pondering the demon baby during the courtyard whipping, I found myself wondering whether it would be a stretch to see that inverted Jesus figure as a vision of Christianity to come. What if that baby represents, not some outward villain, but the bad side of the religion itself?

To put it into movie terms, that baby might be everything from the Inquisition period, parodied by Mel Brooks in History of the World, Part I, to the more modern era of highly publicized child sex abuse cases, time-capsuled in part by Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar winner for Best Picture. If you think about everything outside those two bookends and in-between — all the fake, glad-handing televangelism and garden-variety hypocrisy of other eras (including, but not limited to, the President Lex Luthor era) — it comes out looking like Christians are their own worst enemies. The web of their actions and complacent non-actions doesn't just run counter-productive to their message; it's entirely at cross-purposes with their message sometimes.

Movies, like religion, hinge on a suspension of disbelief. At the end of the day, what we're left with in The Passion of the Christ is another film whose legacy has been tarnished by a high-profile name stuck to it. There are getting to be a lot of those, but the cultural narrative surrounding this movie, in particular, really exemplifies that quote: "The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."