creepy Jesus and other thoughts

I re-watched Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ for the first time in years this past weekend. I'm not sure how I missed this screamingly obvious detail when I last saw the movie in a Korean theater, but this time around, I saw that Jesus' eyes were a disturbing color—somewhere between light brown and yellow, a kind of weird amber. The effect looked almost evil; it certainly put me into the uncanny valley. Perhaps the point was to simultaneously emphasize Jesus' humanity and his divinity—his humanity came through as we watched the man suffer at the hands of the Romans; his divinity was made manifest through the otherworldliness of his eye color (actor Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus, has naturally blue eyes, so they were re-colored by computer). 

I'm again reminded of Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever: The main character, Thomas Covenant, is driven crazy at the beginning of the story by finding himself in an alternate universe where he is healed of his leprosy, allowing him to feel things again and removing the impotence caused by his leprosy. Covenant meets a lovely teenage girl, Lena, who is nothing but kind to him; his self-hatred, plus the impossible return of his health, makes him angry at her kindness and drives him mad; in a horrible act that taints the rest of the chronicles, he rapes her. In the second novel of the first chronicles, Covenant meets the adult Elena, child of his rape (time moves differently between worlds); she has an otherworldly, displaced stare because she is the child of two different worlds. I thought of Elena's unnerving stare every time I looked into the movie Jesus' eyes.

And since my recent review of the movie Project Hail Mary went on about book-versus-movie differences (book review here), I guess it's only fair to point out how Gibson's film departs from various aspects of scripture: the flashbacks to Jesus as a child being comforted by Mary; the scenes of the Devil (Rosalinda Celentano) and the Devil's weird child (Davide Marotta); the quick scene of Judas being harassed by the furry, simian demon, then later being harassed by the crazy-eyed, demonic children who eventually goad him into suicide; the various cruel details of Jesus' crucifixion; the number of times Jesus falls in the movie (six) versus the Stations of the Cross (three); the detailed look into the character of Simon of Cyrene (Jarreth J. Merz), etc. Was Gibson justified in treating the Jesus story this way? To get the viewer to feel something instead of taking us with faithful literalness through the story? Was this a case of feelings over facts?* (And isn't that normally what liberal-leftists are accused of doing when they argue? Prioritizing feelings over facts?)**

Aside: I did a review of/meditation on The Passion of the Christ way back in 2004 when the film had first come out, and my blog was not even a year old. That essay made it into my first self-published book, Water from a Skull (2006)—no longer available through the now-downsized CafePress, which doesn't allow authors to self-publish books anymore. Water from a Skull will eventually be back, but on Amazon this time.

Did you rewatch The Passion of the Christ? Did you watch some other cinematic portrayal of the Jesus story this Easter season? Maybe the more Gnostically tinged The Last Temptation of Christ, or something more classic like The Greatest Story Ever Told? Did you take your celebration in a more pagan direction (this looks like a website worth exploring: It's by an atheist but against many anti-theistic misuses of history to formulate anti-religious arguments)? Or did you just have yourself a normal weekend free of all this Easter nonsense?

Well, I guess we can all look forward to Low Sunday this coming weekend.

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*I'm using facts, here, in a sense meant to be appreciated by scripturalists. If you're an atheist, you are of course more likely to dismiss scripture as merely a silly fairy tale.

**A partial answer might be that Gibson's version of the story was based on the mystical writings of AC Emmerich, a German nun prone to visions.