'Passion's innovations lack authenticity

If you were at the panel on "The Passion of the Christ" the other day, you might have noticed that I was the guy in the back who asked Professor Cornel West the question along these lines, "Do you think it is dangerous for this movie to be marketed as nonfiction when, in fact, it is simply one interpretation of the story?"

I would like here to explain the impetus behind my question. We all like to watch movies, both standard fictional and documentary films. We relate to the former differently than we relate to the latter. When a movie is presented as fiction, then we understand when liberties are taken with dramatization in order to make it a better story.

But Gibson presents his movie as fact. He has said, "This film will capture the Passion of Christ by realistically portraying his divinity and human sufferings exactly as they occurred, based on the authority of the four Gospels and accuracy of historical, ecclesiastical and linguistic research."

When a movie is presented in such a way, we expect certain things. We expect that the movie will be completely nonfiction, without fiction thrown in to make it a better story. To throw in fiction into a purportedly nonfiction movie is to betray the viewer.

One might object along the lines of what the self-appointed Catholic defender of the Gibson film, William Donohue, said at the panel discussion: "It's Mel's movie. Go make your own!" In other words, he is objecting that Gibson's responsibility for painstaking accuracy should be mitigated by the poetic license anyone has when making his own film.

My answer to this objection is threefold: Not when he markets his movie as a nonfiction movie. Not when he seeks to use his film as an expansive missionary tool. Not when certain groups are bound to become targets of hate crimes due to the very misrepresentations his movie creates.

The truth is that religion experts from universities across the country are going on record to say that the movie is historically inaccurate with regards to many essential aspects surrounding Jesus' crucifixion. In addition to countless scenes that are simply not in the Gospels, such as Mary's cleansing of Jesus' blood after his beating, Pontius Pilate is whitewashed of his record of being a ruthless murderer, and all Jews are made out to be homogeneous evildoers who all share the same beliefs and personalities.

Admittedly, much of the details surrounding Jesus' crucifixion are simply not present in the Gospels, so filling in the gaps with embellishment scenes such as the Mary scene can be warranted. But there are other details added to this film which are not just fillers. They are utter historical inaccuracies with potentially dangerous consequences. The unprecedented skewing of culpability for Jesus' death and the homogeneous racist depictions of Jewish people — not accounting for either their physical or ideological differences — are misrepresentations which not only do injustice to Christians watching the film, but also threaten to incite violence against Jews, especially in areas such as Europe and the Middle East where anti-Semitism is on the rise.

West seemed to have agreed with these arguments when he answered my question, saying, "Any movie that combines Jewish guilt and Roman innocence is in effect anti-Semitic even if it is not intentional . . . It's dangerous when Mel Gibson says his movie is nonfiction, in a culture that does not want to address the issues of literalism and fundamentalism."

Gibson had the gravest of responsibilities, one he should have felt honored to have had. He has made a film which will be shown all around the world. It will be used in churches to reinvigorate Christian spirituality. For countless Christians and non-Christians around the globe, this will be their first and last encounter with Jesus' crucifixion.

For a majority of these viewers, "The Passion" will be viewed as Truth or as close to it as cinematographically possible. Even I almost confused it for historical truth in the theater when hearing the effortless Aramaic and flawless Latin of the Jewish and Roman characters respectively.

But the movie is false on many levels. And when dangerous fictions are so smoothly blended into what is portrayed as Truth, I can not help but be reminded of the similar methodologies employed by the "-ism's" of which this world thought it saw a final end. Steven Kamara is a politics major from Manhasset Hills, N.Y. You can reach him at skamara@princeton.edu.