If Mel Gibson saw this, he'd have a fit. :-)
Oh what the fuck. Here it goes again. I took this post down on the morning of Feb. 26 because I didn't like it. But after watching MSNBC on Friday night I've changed my mind and decided to repost it after rewrite. Here goes:
What a busy day Wednesday Feb. 25, 2004. Where to begin? We had the opening of Mel Gibson's furious blood squirting spaghetti western passion play "The Horsewhooping of Jesus" to entertain us, and on the other hand we have HIS eminence grise, Calvinist Elect George W. Bush, hurling down edicts ex cathedra on the true nature of the "institution of marriage" as if he were the Sun King.
Meanwhile, CNN, MSGOP, and other like experiments in histrionics and repetitious amplified clangor, have been busily waving the bloody shirt of Gibson's monomaniacal invention around for at least the last 14 days. And Feb 25 was certainly no exception. The TVNews-noise snake oil costermongers didn't nurse this little baby viper just to let it slither off without a good milkin'. (giggling all the way to the ratings bank I'm sure)
All that cable network promotional marketing of Gibson's holy roller snuff flick, wrapped up and presented as reporting on the promotional marketing of Gibson's holy roller snuff flick, will finally deliver it's cleverly preened payload as throngs of Elmer Gantry droogies flock to the moviehouse for a heapin' helpin' of surrealistic quasi-historic clockwork orangean flogging and cruelty and ultraviolence.
And, as some have suggested, subtlely veiled (wink-wink) anti-semitism. There are no dirty frightening ass bumping dance routines involving swarthy boobies jumping out from behind hoary bustiers. Which is a good and decent long overdue precedent, I supose. Otherwise there would certainly be hell to pay and lawsuits to be filed on behalf of delicate national sensibilities. What would we tell the children!
So ok, I guess it's alright to drive the kids to the metroplex by the Baptist sponsored busload to marvel in the sheer ghastly plasma splattered flesh shredding cinematic beauty of marvelous Mel's romanticized Golgotha. Praise the barbarous Lord!
Fortunately, as I write this, the easily piqued true believer mobs exhorted by the chucklehead trumpets of twenty four hour cableTV news-squawk and the testimonial incitations of Falangist ideological perverts like William Donohue - and any number of evangelical mountebanks like, well, you name em' - are off purifying themselves in the bent flickering light of chimerical bloodbath theater. It's a great day for spiritual renewal. Eh?
And surely it's no accident that our very own infallible heroic Christian leader, George Pontificus Pilot Bush, chose the eve of this Ash Wednesday to launch his re'lection year crusade against the heretical homosexual matrimony menace attempting to subvert the canons, customs, and canards of institutionalized western Christian heterosexual dominion.
Unfortunately this entire fetishized torture chamber of repetetive blather and blusterbus will continue its downhill careen ad nauseam tomorrow morning (and the tomorrow morning after that) when the first wave of news gigglers wash up on the television sound stages and begin with their usual chirpings and chortles and cheery imbecilities all of which the hold the intellectual weight of an average an ninth grade hoky poky mixer.
And truely, was anyone outside of a facility for the criminally insane, or at least living this side of 1899, under the impression that being bound and beaten and screwed to a pole almost 2000 years ago anything less than a truely horrific experience? I mean was anyone somehow under the illusion that Christ's crucifixion was a day at the beach? Huh? What the fuck.
So, if the case can be made that pretty much no-one this side of a medieval leech gnawed bloodletting has ever been under the impression that being hoisted upon a crucifix was a day at the beach, then what in God's name was the point of making a movie that surrealistically depicts, and aggravates, in apparently exacting autopyslike cinematic detail, the intricate physical agonies of being slowly and unmercifully flayed and strung up in such a manner?
Whats the point? Are the fetishized borderline sadistic intricacies of such physical torments really of any importance at all with respect to the greater life of Jesus Christ or the message of the Gospels and the higher truths that Jesus Christ supposedly expressed? Huh?
Gibson's movie is a pointless self-righteous flagellation. For profit. It's a grim ritualistic vulgarity elevated to some kind of death notebook. (the Nazi's loved this kind of mind numbing quasi-scientific Cult of Death worship shit.) All intended to attract pliable know-nothings sniffing some superstitious hero-myth the way a triple hooked deadly creature bait is intended to attract a dumb fish. It's intended to catch fish. Stupid fish. Pure and simple. And really stupid fish at that. This ain't no historic film. It's a fiction. A romanticized gothic interpretation of the crucifixion despite the warblings of joyless sadistic idiots who make claims (of non-fiction) to the contray. It's a gassed up fertilizer bomb. It's a surrealistic creep show. As weird and sociopathic and telling as anything the Columbine killers came up on their high school shoe-string persecution trip budget.
It's a land mine designed to detonate in the public square. And it has. And the right wingers are simply giddy with the profitable brain spattered fallout. That outta tell everyone something.
It ain't about character. It's about characterization. And Gibson's film is a loveless hollow pointless serpent leering down at all of us from the tree of life.
http://corrente.blogspot.com/2004_02_22_corrente_archive.html#107796388775340569
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