March 29, 2004
Anti-Rock Star Quote of the Week:
"The unsuspecting 'guinea-pigs' were a teenage boy and girl. They had never met previously and were completely unaware of any strange happenings. Unfortunately for them, as they sat getting acquainted in a cozy 'private' room with soft music playing in the background, their reactions were being observed and recorded. When classical music and soft ballads were piped into the room they talked and were friendly, but somewhat aloof. When pop music and jazz were played they quickly developed a much 'friendlier' attitude and began to hold hands and put their arms around each other. When the music changed back to classical and ballads they would again become more formal and reserved. If the music would swing back to the jazz and pop music 'their formality would give way to familiarity.'"
-- Lowell Hart, Satan' s Music Exposed
Reuben Ham offers up Five films about Guys Going To Their Death which affected me more than THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, and why...
I had to write this.
Mel Gibson's film, while undeniably stylish and well-made, is unique in that it seeks to implicate its entire audience; it screams, 'CHRIST did this for you! You must be intimately affected by this PASSION, because it really happened and you really are a piece of shit compared to this superhero, and as a result, you personally owe him everything—your tears, your adulation, your life!' It's more insolently presumptive than even a Lars Von Trier film—the Danish director may shrilly insist that you feel sorry for his central protagonists, but even he doesn't have the audacity to imply that you should adjust your outside-theatre life in emulation and adoration of and deference to, say, DANCER IN THE DARK's Selma.
THE PASSION—and indeed, the wider Christian mythology—doesn't affect me in this way. Should I feel guilty? Am I going to hell? Can I at least explain why I'm not gutted by Gibson's film? Can I offer examples of cinema that actually does emotionally flay me?
Well, yeah. Let's go.
LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995)
You do it to yourself, you do / And that's what really hurts, is / You do it to yourself, just you / You and no-one else
- Radiohead, 'Just'
The deaths themselves—excruciatingly prolonged, apparently senseless, bemoaned by powerless onlookers—are immediately similar, the crucial difference being that Nicolas Cage's alcoholic himself wields the scourge that eviscerates his body. Beneath director Mike Figgis's liquid neon and heat and jazz and desert-sunrise white-noise photography, Cage's character is similarly beatific, a wrongly-beaten child—all sobs and saucer-eyes and tremulous tequila tears—and yet he, more than Gibson's CHRIST, really does possess the power to come down off his cross, to call upon an angel (Elisabeth Shue's hooker) to dissolve his bonds. The argument may be made that alcoholics simply do not possess this power—such being the very nature of alcoholism—but in the history of sloshed humankind, it has been done. More often than, say, calendar-affecting Messianic figures have been magically released from pre-determined execution by glowing armies of extra-terrestrial vigilantes.
We, as an audience, are supposed to be moved by the fact that Gibson's CHRIST chooses not to call upon such an army—because he's a supremely selfless martyr, etc., etc.—and yet we have, only two hours previous, witnessed him in the Garden of Gethsemane pleading to his show-directing (or at least A-reserve-ticket-holding) Father to call off the execution. Not only does he not want the ensuing PASSION, but he knows (and we know) that he cannot mess with what has been pre-ordained. Despite the fact that the events of the entire two hours run on rails so thick as to be unable to be distinguished from the land surrounding the track, Gibson's audience is asked to believe that CHRIST has made a decision as simultaneously tenuous and palpable as Cage's character asking for another gin-and-tonic, as keenly acquainted with the sensuous hair-trigger of self-destruction.
LEAVING LAS VEGAS makes me weep. THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST does not.
THE THIN RED LINE (1998)
And it's not a cry that you hear at night / It's not somebody that's seen the light / It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
- Jeff Buckley, 'Hallelujah'
It's a film more often accused of being 'pretentious' than almost anything except MAGNOLIA. They are both, of course (Hail Kevin, full of grace), two of the greatest films of the nineties—even to me who, as regular VELVET readers will attest, is more than delighted to have fun at genuine wankery's expense (especially my own. Or Lars Von Trier's). Significantly, I recently stumbled upon a criticism of Terrence Malick's war flick in which the detractor berated the director's soldiers as 'second-rate poetry students'—a reference to what is popularly termed the 'pseudo-intellectual philosophizing' of the film's voice-over narration. Would it have been better if these grunts had come across as first-rate poetry students? Would you be emotionally affected by guys heading into the blood and mud and certain death with too few cigarettes composing perfectly structured sonnets, quoting Wordsworth's juvenilia and debating the merits of Foucault and Lacan?
Crucially, these guys admit that they don't know shit. They want to get home and have a Jack-neat and get laid and hopefully not get killed beforehand. At the end of it all, there is no seat at the right-hand of daddy-in-the-big-chair or whatever your concept of God is; there's simply a place without quite so much blood and mud. If they occasionally (or even frequently) pause between killing people to wonder just why the hell they are doing so, or why anybody is doing anything, fucking kudos! It's more than Gibson's CHRIST had to do—shut up, get nailed, live forever in ecstatic eternity inside the great Diazepam In The Sky, knowing that he did better than anyone else at, like, never committing sin and, oh, yeah... saving the world single-handedly. In Christian mythology, he's like the untouchable highschool quarterback. Sure, Satan's like the annoying sullen kid in the long-sleeved-because-I-cut-myself-bwahaha AFI shirt, but whatever. Malick's clueless cannon fodder and Nic Cage in LEAVING LAS VEGAS are my fucking role models, the chief characteristic of a role model being someone you can at least half-way relate to.
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TAXI DRIVER (1976)
This stuff will probably kill you / Let's do another line
- Tom Waits, 'Heartattack And Vine'
Importantly, Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is fallible. He wants to change the world, and indeed even sets about doing so, but ultimately fucks up. Simple. This guy possesses clarity masquerading as naiveté, a kind of goodness (curiously) not recognized by CHRIST's followers—aesthetically-pleasing, beautiful goodness rather than tightly-gnarled moral goodness, and the ability to wake up, breathe, do something in the normally crippling absence of a single cheerleader (no, not even an all-powerful galaxy-sized father-figure in the wings).
He's alone, he's unhappy, he tries to do something about it, he fails. We weep for him, with him, for ourselves, for other human beings who endure the same, with other human beings with whom we share the experience of Scorsese and Schrader's film.
If viewers of THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST ever see a figure onscreen as worthy of pity and admiration and fucking empathy as Travis Bickle—as opposed to a superior officer with perfect hair and a rich daddy—they should mail me. They're seeing something I never will.
SE7EN (1995)
I'd rather be famous / Than righteous or holy / Anyday, anyday, anyday
- The Smiths, 'Frankly Mr. Shankly'
At least Kevin Spacey's John Doe knows he's above us. There remains something attractive about this kind of supreme narcissism, about not trying to play for Team Bitch and Team Butch. Furthermore, if you're going to claim to be making things better for other people (or, you know, the whole of humankind), you'd better make sure you deliver. Otherwise you're going to look like a narcissist masquerading as a philanthropist, and essentially like a gigantic dick.
SE7EN's John Doe may want you to suffer, but he's a) doing it in aesthetically interesting ways, and b) not giving a shit if you return the same to him. None of CHRIST's 'take this cup from me', let-me-play-among-the-miracles-for-a-bit-longer bullshit. John Doe wants you to pass him the fucking cup. Let's do something, anything sincere and pure and viscerally spontaneous and conclusive, anything other than working 9-to-5 and dying of slow-seeping cancer hunched over a crossword and cup of herbal tea. (Yeah, Palahniuk—fuck you. There's room for the both of us. Although the fact that we care enough to write about it kinda disqualifies us as dystopian Übermenschen. 'Nother beer? Okay, I'm done.)
The PASSION of Gibson's (and wider Christianity's) CHRIST does not make me feel better. If anything, it makes me feel worse. CHRIST? Dude, you didn't have to do it. It hasn't made any difference—and would not make any difference, were I to (God forbid) become a 'Christian'—to my fears, my loves, my sense of the meaning of everything (beer, for the record). More than that, you didn't have to do it in a way that has bizarrely convinced a sizeable portion of the globe's population that their fears, loves, and sense of the meaning of everything are suddenly different since your PASSION.
Oh, and Brad Pitt calling Milton a 'poetry-writing faggot' in SE7EN makes me laugh. That has nothing to do with anything. Except laughing, with which THE PASSION has nothing to do. Sorry: Fincher has the upper hand.
DONNIE DARKO (2001)
It's easier for me to get closer to heaven / Than ever feel whole again
- The Cure, 'Disintegration'
Well, Donnie does it for love, right? Of a girl, I mean. Nails and thorns are fine, but I've always found that a girl's lips get right to the point.
Let's not argue about what is really going on in Richard Kelly's masterwork. We should be able to agree that Donnie digs a girl more than anything else, and he's not around at the closing credits ('Ah, but if you rewind the tape and begin the film again, you'll find that...'—sniiiiiiiip! Wait! It's a loop! Time is a loop! I saw LOST HIGHW...'—sniiiiiiiip!).
Think about it. Would you want to be a Messianic superhero who is, granted, horribly executed, but who is, granted, completely fine three days later and in fact ready to begin life in eternal paradise, if you had to do so without ever being snogged? (Or at least without anyone ever writing about you being snogged? Fuck, which is worse?) CHRIST: the only highschool quarterback in history who didn't get any. Interesting. Interesting also that the only thing that means anything to me—the love of my girl—meant approximately nothing to CHRIST. Uh, yeah—I relate. I'm going to centre my life around yours, man.
Yeah, I relate to Donnie. Me and every other 15-25 year-old in the Western world who isn't a highschool quarterback or a spiritual extra at the scene of the crucifixion, apparently. I love that Richard Kelly's film has drawn us together across cities and continents. I love that, in 2004, the opening strains of ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN's 'The Killing Moon' signal a communal leap in the communal chest of the young and the sad and the wistful. I love that Gary Jules' cover of TEARS FOR FEARS' 'Mad World' is a fight song for us, a lyrical admission that no, we don't have it all figured out; that yes, we think everything beyond the lips of our boys/girls means, essentially, nothing; and that sometimes a giant rabbit makes more emotional sense than anything else.
Confess your sins of the last 12 hours, blasphemous suggestions of other dead-dude/martyr films more moving than THE PASSION, or unashamed love for Jim Caviezel's blood-stained pecs to shadowrain@hotmail.com.
© Reuben Ham
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