Connect: Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ is a full-blooded assault on the senses, a "shock and awe" gore-fest and a disturbing example of technology as religion. Certainly, it has power - in the way a helicopter gunship, say, has power - but it lacks soul.
It's ultra-violent. Christ is utterly dehumanised (indeed the title's "the Christ", which in the Bible emphasises Jesus Christ's link to divinity, dehumanises him further). Supporters of the film argue that its gore restores a lost truth about the suffering of Christ. Over centuries, they claim, the essential horror of scourging, crowning with thorns and crucifixion has become diluted.
As a result, they argue, Christianity has lost vital primal energy, become effete and lacks the power that once characterised it. This may be so - Friedrich Nietzsche was bellowing the same stuff 120 years ago - but attempting to restore that lost energy by using technology is doomed and ominous. After all, it was science which, more than anything else, weakened Christianity.
It is film technology of the kind that brings the visual wonders of Star Wars, The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings to cinema screens that underpins Gibson's film. Its production values are, as the cliché has it, state of the art but this film is certainly not art. Neither, of course, is it documentary, as its more fundamentalist supporters and apologists would have it.
It is a grossly simplified schlock-horror version of a transcendent story which has long generated reverence in the Western world. It is, despite some strong performances, state of the art production techniques and (albeit decontextualised) focus on the final 12 hours of the reported life of Jesus Christ, artless and patronising. The film is patronising because it attempts to convince viewers in a black-and-white manner. Like George Bush's brutal "you're either with us or with the terrorists" ideology, this film attempts to tell viewers they're either with Christ or against him. You are bludgeoned into taking it on its terms, not on your own. As such it is unavoidably a dehumanising film.
It does what it uses film technology to rage against. Because of this it could reasonably be argued that it is, at heart, an anti-Christian film. Gibson and the film's supporters would, of course, denounce such a reading. But really - and though it's arguably unsporting to mention money - this is a film whose kingdom, like America's, is very much of this world.
Gibson has reportedly made a couple of hundred million dollars or so. Who cares? Perhaps that doesn't really matter. But there are websites advertising "DVDs, official soundtracks, promotional packs - posters, postcards". Others advertise "The Hollywood Jesus Eclectic Collection" (don't ask) for a mere $99. You can even pay to advertise your "church" before screenings. A website asks if you "want to support the film and encourage new people to visit your church? ICON [Gibson's production company] has officially licensed a TV trailer commercial that you can sponsor. Take advantage of this amazing evangelical outreach tool." A Belfast church has done so in Dublin.
I'm uneasy about a version of Christ's passion being used as an "amazing evangelical outreach tool" (note the dead, technologised language). No doubt, some people promoting this, eh, by-product see no incongruity between Christianity's core message and making money. Certainly, in parts of the southern US, some preachers have rendered the two synonymous.
Most disturbing of all about The Passion of the Christ is the way its technology-dependent "shock and awe" message, its black-and-white vision and its gross championing of making money coincide so thoroughly with the US of Bush and his neo-conservative backers. There are even websites (with pictures) deriding European art's effete depictions of the passion.
This is ignorant, politicised, gung-ho "religion", the American Bible Belt's version of the old, ignorant European crusades. In fact, the film seems a mirror image of the Islamic fundamentalism of al-Qaeda's unholy crusade. The US Bible Belt and fundamentalist Islam promote extremes that are both mutually perpetuating and self-perpetuating.
Ostensibly, Christianity in a largely secularised West does seem effete beside militant Islam in a dangerously fundamentalised East. Western technology is pitted against Eastern fanaticism while the major problems are ironically caused by Western fanaticism (Bush-Blair-Aznar crusade) and Eastern technology (New York, Bali, Madrid outrages).
The lesson of a schlock-horror film like Gibson's is that self-justification for being as we are - Western and Eastern - only deepens the crisis by driving us all further apart. How many people changed opinion over the Madrid slaughter? Very few, it seems: Aznar was always right, Aznar was always wrong . . . and the knot gets ever knottier.
Much has been made of alleged anti-semitism in The Passion of the Christ. Certainly, the Jews are held responsible for killing Christ but Romans carry out the dehumanising butchery. Mind you, unlike Gibson's fundamentalist film, don't Israeli repression and Palestinian suicide bombers mirror the East-West "chicken and egg" conflict of the wider world? Ultimately, Christianity, Judaism and Islam are infinitely more subtle than Gibson's brutal (even if well-intentioned) film. That is its gravest sin.