TO: Mel Gibson
FROM: Jesus the Christ
RE: My Passion
Mel, Mel, Mel,
Why do you hate me so? We're not five minutes into your movie before the high priest's men have punched out my lights, almost bisected me with a rope, and closed my right eye so that I look like Jake LaMotta in his final showdown with Sugar Ray Robinson. Then it's off to the flaying; once those Romans take over you really sock it to me. I get up already covered with bleeding welts, you cut me down; you turn my back into steak tartare, then turn me over and do my front. It makes the end of Braveheart look like the Three Stooges. And we haven't even gotten to the nails yet. But the cruelest cut of all: Did you really have to cast that talent-free pretty boy as me? Haven't we had enough soppy, doe-eyed saviors down the centuries? Especially since the poor kid has to act the entire movie with one eye shut.
Actually Mel, the Byzantine and Romanesque and Renaissance guys notwithstanding, I wasn't that pretty at all. Kind of short and dark and simian. Like Ben Stiller -- only funnier.
But, of course, what I actually looked like and said has never made much difference to people. It's a commonplace as old as the catacombs that everyone always remakes me in their own image; anyone who depicts me is actually painting a self-portrait. Even the guy who's writing this -- as he knows full well -- is giving me a certain non-Scriptural flavor to make his points stick. And it's not just writers and artists; everyone down the centuries and across the globe who believes in me, or has me deep in his or her heart ,or beside whom I walk, is really not walking with me at all but with an ideal of themselves, someone just like them but inconceivably better, a phony savior who cannot save them, with whom, poor things; they're locked forever in the cell of self.
You're no different, Mel. The Christ you flog and flay and strip the meat from, the one you chew the ears and lips of, the one you smash the nails through the helpless palms of --that's you, Mel. Because, for all the reasons that only you and I know, you hate yourself. Self-hatred drives you as it has driven so many self-flagellators and sunken-faced self-deniers, born-again, self-loathing sinners, washed in my blood, dripping with the precious blood that flowed from the bloody gash made in my side by the holy spear -- all those terrible and murderous images that sublimate the anger and savagery in their hearts. But self-hatred is still hatred, Mel, and the only thing I hate is hatred.
Your film, Mel, is far worse than anti-Semitic.(Though, as you're well aware, it is pretty anti-Semitic -- or at least not pro-Semitic.) Plus -- here's something no one seems to have picked up on: Your Satan is gay. Which I find offensive if for no other reason than that my 12 best friends were men. But the real problem is far deeper than these nasty, quotidian prejudices.
Your hymn to bloodlust, despite the unconvincing sops you throw to my true message -- that clunky love-your-enemies scene on the hilltop, for example -- is driven by the same terrible force that underpins all prejudice, that dark energy of the collective id that can in a nanosecond flip from self-hatred to unstoppable, brain-dead inhumanity. It's that raging Nietzschean hormone that floods through mind and muscle, making horrific brutality look like personal redemption, the one that fuels Sturm und Drang and blood and fire and the Cult of the Sang Real, all the deadly old rubbish you'll find in The Da Vinci Code and, yes, even that sweaty éclat of release and relief that finds salvation in a tent in Texas, supposedly in my name but really in a delicious vision of the horrific destruction and eternal torment of other human beings.
Call it what you like: conversion, revelation, the last days, jihad, the final coming of the messiah (or my second one, which I can assure you will not happen anytime soon) -- it's a vision of, and a yearning for, faith-based genocide. The truth is, Mel, your treatment of my passion is profoundly fascist. This is a film Osama bin Laden would (and may) thrill to.
That's because there's only a hair's breadth between fascism and fundamentalism. Both gloat over the bloody death and torment of their enemies. Both long for the earth to be cleansed of them to snowy whiteness. Both interpret with brutal literalism myths and symbols that, even when they first came to the cultural surface, were never meant literally. Both are precisely what I came to overthrow; it's their message of justifiable hate I sought to counter in everything I said and did -- including refusing to defend myself against deadly force. Because it is the fundamentalists of every major faith who are pushing your world toward yet another vast and murderous cataclysm, whatever your good intentions may have been, Mel, the last thing that world needed was another hymn to bloodlust.
Did I experience pain? Of course. Terrible pain. The scourging I was given -- routine for criminals in those days -- was nothing to crucifixion, one of the worst means of execution ever devised, a slow, panicked agony of asphyxiation as the arms were dragged by the body's weight from their sockets and the rib cage collapsed on the lower body. But my real pain -- as you were once taught, Mel -- was not physical. It was terrible gift of omniscience: the horror of knowing every act of violence and hatred, great and small, acts as innumerable as the atoms of the universe, that had ever happened or ever would. Including, Mel, the making of this horrific movie in my name.
Redemption is always possible, Mel. In the tradition of your faith, I'll set you a penance. It seems inevitable that you have a worldwide hit on your hands. All hits this big need sequels. So, having made a movie of the last 12 hours of my life, I instruct you to make one about the first 12 hours of my new life: The Resurrection of the Christ. (The film-school-level throwaway you gave it may well have that intention: It has all the skill of reminding us that Jason or Freddy is still lurking somewhere.) After all, the resurrection was the whole point of my going through the Passion. Let me know when you're ready and this time I'll breathe my true spirit into your hands and eyes. Till then, poor, sad, self-hating Mel, I send you all my love.
Sincerely,
Jesus.
Tony Hendra is an author and an actor. His next book, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, will be published in April.
