'The Passion': powerful but disturbing.

Is there anything left to be said about Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ?"

Much has already been written, and the critics are bitterly polarized. Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier denounced the small-minded Gibson and his sacred "snuff film"--soaked in blood, reveling in torture, and resurrecting anti-Semitism as religious dogma. Wieseltier, the child of Holocaust survivors, bitterly complained that Gibson's literal reading of the Gospels omitted Christ's most important message: love and forgiveness.

In contrast, a review in the interreligious journal First Things, written by a professor of Catholic studies and an art historian, described "The Passion" as "the best movie ever made about Jesus Christ" while confidently denying any "concerns about the film stirring up anti-Judaism."

Most people I talk to are boycotting "The Passion." They have been convinced that the film is dangerously anti-Semitic and that it would be an act of betrayal to contribute to its commercial success. They assumed that my reason for going was to weigh in with another denunciation of Gibson and his Holocaust-denying father.

In fact, I decided to see and review the film for two very different reasons. First, "The Passion" is one of the rare movies that is also an important cultural event. My friends may be boycotting it, but audiences are attending in record numbers. It seems to me a mistake to turn one's back on a cultural event of this magnitude.

Hostile critics have compared "The Passion" to the Nazi propaganda film that Leni Riefenstahl made about Hitler--"The Power and the Glory." It is, they suggest, the aesthetic of fascism. But Gibson's "Passion," in my opinion, comes from the same sensibility and formula we saw in his Oscar-winning "Braveheart." William Wallace, the courageous hero of Scotland who suffers and dies for his country, is replaced by Jesus of Galilee who suffers and dies for humanity.

A second reason for seeing and reviewing "The Passion" was that, as a psychiatrist, I hoped to understand the deeply contradictory reactions to the film. Wieseltier's brilliant denunciation of Gibson was a "never again" cri de coeur. But a distinguished Catholic colleague confided to me that she had wept through the scenes of Christ's flagellation and crucifixion. She came away from the film with a deeper sense of Christ's suffering and regretted that she had not been a better Christian. She assured me the film was not anti-Semitic and sent me the review in First Things. These are both intelligent people of good will, and I would guess that my Catholic friend is no more tolerant of blood and guts than Wieseltier. Certainly, she is not anti-Semitic.

Many of the greatest filmmakers have wanted to do a version of the Christ story. But how do you translate a sacred text into a screenplay? Pasolini did a Marxist version; Zeffirelli did a Sunday-school documentary; and Scorsese used Kazantzakis' existential novel--a book on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books--to make "The Last Temptation of Christ," a remarkable but anti-Church telling of the Christ story. Gibson tells us that he found religion as he struggled with alcoholism and suicidal depression and that he wanted to portray the Catholic faith that had saved him. He describes his film-making as--and I believe him--an act of faith.

As I waited in line to enter the theater, an elderly woman who was coming out stopped to advise me that I would need two hand-kerchiefs. She was wrong: I sat stunned, as I watched the most anti-Semitic film I had ever seen in my life.

Even more horrifying was the realization that I could not dismiss "The Passion" as a second-rate film. Yes, one can connect the dots from the torture scenes of "Mad Max" to "Lethal Weapon" to "Braveheart" to "The Passion," but Gibson also made a passable Hamlet; he is a serious person who has created a powerful film. The cinematography is an astonishing accomplishment inspired by great religious art. It is also the most cruel and bloody I have ever seen. Episodes of sadistic brutality establish the rhythm of the film, taking the audience again and again to the limits of its capacity, yet neither I nor anyone else in the theater walked out.

A quotation from Isaiah 53:5, familiar from Handel's "Messiah," prefaces the film: "He was wounded for our transgressions." Surprisingly, the quotation is accompanied by a specific date (742 B.C.). The dated quotation establishes the truthtelling tone of the film and its serious religiosity. Through a blue haze, we discern James Caviezel as Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Caviezel is not asked or allowed to act the part of Jesus; he exists only to present the human body in which the Christ is incarnate and will suffer. For that purpose, he is superbly cast. Gibson wanted his cinematography to pay homage to Caravaggio, and Caviezel's body is very much like that of Jesus in the great painter's "Flagellation of Christ."

But in Caravaggio's sensibility, Christ's body is entirely unmarked. While Gibson's film may have started with Caravaggio, it will end with the tortured, flayed Christs of the northern Renaissance. From the first moment we see Jesus, he is in agony, praying to God and wrestling with the temptations of an androgynous Satan, played by a woman with a shaved skull (Rosalinda Celetano).

Christ is not only made to suffer beyond human endurance. But under Gibson's direction, he refuses to surrender to the pain and loss of blood. Incredibly, he struggles to his feet, only to incite the Roman soldiers to beat him down again with greater violence. Yes, this is prototypical Gibson-macho, but it is also a compelling depiction of the sacred spirit, incarnate and refusing to succumb.

"The Passion" is suffused with blood and gore, and the torture is sustained for most of the film until it reaches its apogee on the cross as Christ asks why he has been forsaken. All this is precisely as Gibson intended. His purpose was to make Christ's suffering visible--Christ, who suffered for the sins of mankind.

What one sees on the screen depends very much on one's religious background and whether one in fact believes in Christ. Wieseltier was a serious student of Jewish history; in his tirade against the film he had the candor to concede that he does not believe in Christ. Roger Ebert, the full-time film critic and onetime altar boy, described his experience of the very same scenes: "What Gibson has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of." We have no more powerful demonstration of the axiom that everyone in a theater sees a different film.

This may be one of the best examples of what we have learned about cognitive bias, e.g., Tversky's availability and representativeness heuristics together with the new social psychology research on implicit bias. We have begun to document the "implicit" mental processes that take place outside our awareness and that structure our sense of the world. Under the huge wave of visual information that comes in a film, those processes may take on an even greater import. What you see in the protracted torture of Caviezel depends substantially on whether you believe in Christ. And what you see in this entire film depends on your social/cultural/spiritual identity.

In the face of the conflicting accounts of the Passion, I asked myself how my own past experiences determined the frightening anti-Semitism that I saw. What immediately came to mind was my best friend telling me--we were both 8 years old at the time--that he had been taught by his priest that "you Jews killed Jesus." If you see "The Passion" through that lens, I think you, too, will be horrified.

Wieseltier was particularly incensed that Gibson had told Diane Sawyer on television, "Critics who have a problem with me don't really have a problem with me and this film. They have a problem with the four Gospels." Gibson has, I fear, a better argument than Wieseltier allows. It is very difficult to find a scene in "The Passion" that is not in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

Gibson has given many Catholics what they wanted and perhaps needed: an occasion to embrace their own fundamentalism. Certainly, the church has neither rejected nor distanced itself from "The Passion." Priests took whole congregations to see it on Easter Sunday.

Set aside the question of personal lenses, and one is still left with the concern that Gibson's film marks the unofficial return to the pre-Vatican II catechesis of church doctrine. In following the literal words of the Gospel, it reasserts the dogma, one that the Vatican in its ecumenical moments has qualified, that can be traced back to the earliest days of Catholicism: "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," outside the church there is no salvation, no way to God the father except through his son Jesus.

Gibson's own radical form of Catholicism rejects Vatican II, with its affirmation of religious tolerance. He gives us traditional faith without the ecumenical respect for Judaism, Islam, and other religions to which the church pledged itself in Vatican II. It was a pledge that left open the possibility of salvation outside the church and of forgiveness for everyone made in God's image.

If Vatican II was in large measure a response to the Holocaust and to the church's own history of anti-Semitism, then the success of "The Passion" is a cultural event that may signal the end of that Christian feeling of remorse. If it does nothing else, "The Passion" should remind us all that the impulse of fundamentalism now sweeping the world is dividing humanity even as it seeks a more sacred community.

BY ALAN A. STONE, M.D.

DR. ALAN A. STONE is the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard University.