Sacrificial Masculinity in The Passion of the Christ

Abstract

Long before its cinema release on Ash Wednesday, 25 February 2004, The Passion of the Christ attracted media attention.³ Much of this owed to the fact that Director Mel Gibson is an outspoken Roman Catholic and was keen to air his strong personal opinions on the subject of the film. More specifically, Gibson belongs to a conservative Catholic group known as Traditionalists, who have rejected the Church’s efforts in relative modernization ever since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) in the 1960s. Further, the same group is understood still to hold the Jews accountable for Jesus’s death, an anti-Semitic sentiment deemed as incendiary and rejected by Vatican II. The anticipatory interest was also cultivated by Gibson’s public assurance that his Passion would be like no other version screened before. His contemporary interpretation would eschew the saccharine quality of early Hollywood religious cinema, notable in films such as King of Kings (1961), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and Jesus of Nazareth (1977),⁴ while avoiding the postmodern stylizations of more recent offerings such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Jesus of Montreal (1990). Drawing inspiration from all the synoptic Gospels, as well as from extra-biblical material in the form of Sister Anne Emmerich’s devotional book The Dolorous Passion of Christ,⁵ Gibson avowed that his film would provide the most explicit and ‘realistic’ representation of the last twelve hours in Jesus’s life that the world had ever seen.

When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law.¹

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Christ’s Redemption is not the ‘negation’ of the Fall but its accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that, according to Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the Law.²

Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity