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April 19, 2006

The Last Temptation of Christ

Flawed Son of God

By Andrew

There were all sorts of ways to recognize the recent Easter holiday, with varying degrees of religious appreciation. On one end, you had the practices of dubious devoutness, such as the millions of children who took the opportunity of the weekend to consume unhealthy amounts of candy, torn from wrappers available in a host of Spring pastels. On another end, my mother recognized the holiday in a more honorable — and certainly more Papally approved — fashion, singing for three hours in the late night mass of her Catholic church. Though I skirted church and scarfed down my own fair amount of chocolate, I'm not sure where exactly along the continuum I would fall, as I chose to honor the holiday by viewing Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ [1988].

Baptized but never confirmed, I'm not terribly familiar with the scriptures, nor do I, like any good Catholic, harbor much guilt about it. Nor am I all that familiar with the shitstorm that raged when this film was first released, as I was all but five years old at the time anyway. Nor have I read the 1955 Nikos Kazantzakis book on which the film is based. In other words, I am able to watch the film with a certain amount of distance. Accepting, that is, for the knowledge that this is very much a Scorsese film. After viewing the film, Scorsese's choice to adapt the book (off a script by Paul Schrader) makes all sorts of sense. In everything from Mean Streets to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull to Bringing Out the Dead, the Flawed Man has always been his forte.

The film follows the conventional narrative of Christ — from carpenter to the recruitment of apostles, from palm Sunday to the last supper, and so on — but fills it in with an individual's details. In The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus [a wonderful Wilem Dafoe] appears to us a very confused man. If not flawed himself (not as flawed as, say, Travis Bickle) he does represent — fatally — the flaws of the world he lives in. As an individual, Jesus must weigh his own cause of love and salvation against the violent cause of revolution against Rome demanded by Judas (gruaff as always Harvey Keitel); and both causes against his own desires to live a quiet, unremarkable life as a father and husband. In the process, the film turns an idol into an enigma, opening the parables of Jesus' life so wide that the morals of the stories are no longer straight-forward, but rather snarled and sinuous. In perhaps its most controversial — and most crucial — metaphor, Jesus is taken down from the cross and enters a reserved retirement, bringing Christianity's stars down to earth.

In Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love, two characters discuss a theory of Simone Weil. "You know what she said about the Bible? That it wasn't a theory about God, but a theory about Man." This is all I know about Weil, but I think the same applies to Scorsese's Christ. Arm this Jesus with a magnum, tailor the man a suit, build a city around him, watch him try to do some good, and what you've got is the gangster pic Scorsese is most well known for. Nor do we need a Judas with a New York accent or a Peter Gabriel soundtrack rife with 1980s drum beats to recognize that Scorsese is employing the story of Jesus within a very contemporary context.

As Jesus disrupts money-changing in the temple with riotous righteousness (I can't help but wonder, Is TBN watching?) a rabbi responds to Jesus's fiery oratory with the retort "That's blasphemy!" Jesus replies, "I'm the saint of blasphemy." Remember, I'm not at all familiar with the gospel, but within this context, Jesus might as well be responding to the holier-than-thou critics of the film. Another product of the 1980s and New York, the punk outfit Reagan Youth wailed that "Jesus was a Communist," and as The Last Temptation of Christ reminds us, the comparisons don't rest solely on the ideological tenets of serving the poor. Like anyone with a commit to an ideal, Jesus struggles with how to reconcile his means and his ends within a world that demands compromise at every turn.

At last, Jesus chooses martyrdom, leaving a metaphor to the world that has been torn in both liberating and suffocating directions in the two thousand years since it has supposed to have taken place. The Last Temptation of Christ, like any Flawed Man story, makes its own compromises; for instance, accept as fodder for Christ's confessions and booty calls, women aren't around all that often. Not that the film doesn't know this; Jesus very forcefully forgets his mother. But in making this compromise, the film must tear in the same directions as Jesus' legacy: towards a tearing down of the fictions of a Man's authority to order the world; or towards a recapitulation — albeit a more complicated one — to idols and one-man leadership?

In the end, the film leaves the resurrection — you know, Easter — to our imagination. Does knee-bending strengthen our own resolve, I wonder, or cause us to live our lives on our knees? While the film leaves integrity up to the viewer, Christians themselves — with the Berrigan brothers on one hand, and Bush family on the other — have done a good job of demonstrating that there are several options open to the devout. That won't get me into church on Sunday — or on Easter, for that matter — but it does inspire me to a life worth living.

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