Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Then Gibson expressed his feelings about Rich. “I want to kill him,” he said. “I want his intestines on a stick. . . . I want to kill his dog.” At this, Paul Lauer, Gibson’s marketing man, who had been quietly engaged in deskwork, glanced at me, and calmly said, “The thing you have to understand is that the distance between Mel’s heart and his mouth is greater than the distance between his imagination and his mouth. He is an artist, and he says these things, and his creative energy kicks in, and he comes out with these imaginative, wild things. But his heart . . .” He shrugged, and went back to work.

  Gibson has half-jokingly remarked that The Passion may be a career-killer for him. If it is not, if it somehow manages to open, and even to succeed, it will be in no small measure owing to Lauer’s efforts. Lauer, whose father is Jewish, is a practicing Roman Catholic who has often heard Gibson’s Traditionalist views about the current Vatican (that the last “real” Pope predated Vatican II), and seems mostly unperturbed. More pressing, to him, is the difficult question of opening a movie that, even without the attacks against it, presents some formidable marketing problems: it is a religious film, whose actors speak their lines in two dead languages. Lauer has always known that the make-or-break audience for The Passion is the active Christian community, which could effectively kill the film if it discerned even a hint of blasphemy. As Paula Fredriksen has written in The New Republic, “evangelical Christians, in my experience, know their Scriptures very, very well.”

  For that reason, Lauer began to cultivate Christian groups almost from the start. I first heard about The Passion from Billy Graham’s public-relations man in Dallas, A. Larry Ross, who had seen the film in late May at the Icon offices. The evangelical reaction to the movie was almost uniformly enthusiastic. When the attacks on the film began, Icon was able to turn its marketing strategy into an effective counter-offensive. This summer, Lauer scheduled a series of screenings and appearances by Gibson before Christian groups and conservative columnists, who praised the film to their congregations and readers. “I can say The Passion is the most beautiful, profound, accurate, disturbing, realistic, and bloody depiction of this well-known story that has even been filmed,” the nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas wrote in August. “Its message is not just for Christians, but for everyone. I doubt a better film about Jesus could be made.” David Horowitz wrote in his Web log that “it is an awesome artifact, an overpowering work.” Michael Medved said in a television appearance, “It is by a very large margin of advantage the most effective cinematic adaptation of a Biblical story I have ever seen.”

  I accompanied Gibson on several such appearances, and at each he was received with an enthusiasm that seemed to reach beyond the movie itself, to a deeply felt disaffection from the secular world; now an icon of that world was on their side. In Anaheim, Gibson showed a trailer of the film to a convention of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, and received a standing ovation. Afterward, the daughter of the organization’s president laid hands on Gibson and asked Jesus to “bind Satan, bind the press, we ask you, Lord.”

  That same evening, Gibson made another appearance—the only one that seemed to make him nervous. It was a screening for three hundred and fifty Jesuits, who had gathered in an auditorium at Loyola Marymount University. After the film, Gibson took to the stage, and, shuffling his feet and staring at the ground, asked the priests if they had any questions. Gibson later explained the reason for his and Lauer’s anxiety: “If anyone’s gonna kill you, its’ those guys, right? We’re Catholics, right? We’re scared of the Jesuits. Every good Catholic is.” He needn’t have been. Some of the Jesuits had eschatological concerns (Couldn’t there be more of the risen Christ?), and one elderly priest wondered whether the subtitles might be made larger. The closest that anyone came to suggesting political correctness was when one priest toward the front urged that the language be more inclusive. “Rather than using ‘Jesus, the son of man, maybe Jesus, the son of all’?” The other Jesuits booed him down, and the evening ended with another standing ovation.

  The next morning, Robyn Gibson asked her husband not to read the newspaper until he had had his coffee. The Los Angeles Times had published a column, by Tim Rutten, that likened Gibson to “an unwholesomely willful child playing with matches. The immediate temptation may be to let the little brat learn the lesson that burnt fingers will teach.” Gibson was still fuming when he reached his Icon office, where another special screening was scheduled, this one for the television evangelist Dr. Robert Schuller. The preacher’s entourage arrived and took their places in the screening room, without Schuller, who had apparently got lost inside the building’s corridors. While waiting for him, Gibson talked about the column, and observed, to general agreement, that “the L.A. Times, it’s an anti-Christian publication, as is The New York Times.”

  A moment later, Schuller walked in, with a book in his hand, which he presented to Gibson. It was a polemic called Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted, by Bob Kohn.

  “It hits the stores this week, and we expect it to be on the best-seller list,” Schuller said. “And the author is very prominent, Bob Kohn, very wealthy . . . and Jewish.”

  “Hey! That’s a great gift!” Gibson said, brightening. “Thank you.”

  After the film, Schuller said that he had watched carefully for “who the Christ-killers were, and it was really the Romans.” Mrs. Schuller wiped tears from her eyes, and said to Gibson, “You have a powerful masterpiece here.”

  Before leaving, Schuller faced Gibson and, his broadcaster’s voice assuming the tone of prayer, pronounced his judgment on the film. “It’s not your dream, this is God’s dream,” he said. “He gave it to you, because He knew you wouldn’t throw it away. Trust Him.”

  The Christian groups, however, can’t distribute the film, and Gibson has twenty-five million dollars of his own money at stake. Twentieth Century Fox has already said that it does not plan to take on The Passion. But word of mouth is everything in Hollywood, and Icon’s strategy of selectively previewing the movie has played directly into the film community’s native wish to be on the inside. Lauer has let it be known that he is planning several screenings over the coming months for selected people in the industry, a tactic that has only heightened interest in the film. Jeff Berg, the chairman and C.E.O. of International Creative Management, which represents Gibson and handles his distribution deals, is talking to several studios about a possible deal, among them Paramount, Warners, and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. He has told them that he will show the film only to those studios which agree, in advance, to Icon’s terms—an effort to weed out the merely curious.

  “Inadvertently,” Gibson says, “all the problems and the conflicts and stuff—this is some of the best marketing and publicity I have ever seen.”

  In his 1997 film Conspiracy Theory, Gibson played a paranoid New York taxi-driver who sees in everything around him the malign work of a dark, invisible hand. In the film’s opening scene, Gibson’s character is shown in a montage of taxi rides, in which he reveals his crazy notions to a series of bemused fares. “I mean, George Bush knew what he was saying when he said, ‘New World Order,’ ” Gibson tells one rider. “Remember those three little words? ‘New World Order’? Well, he was a thirty-third-degree Mason, you know.” To a pair of nuns riding in the back seat, Gibson declares, “Hey, don’t get me wrong, Sister, I’m sure your heart’s in the right place, O.K.? But, you know, somebody’s got to lift the scab, the festering scab, that is the Vatican.” The scene is played as screwball comedy, and during the movie Gibson’s character comes to believe something even loonier—that the government is trying to kill him, because he knows too much. The movie’s twist, revealed at the end, is that Gibson’s character is right—he’s a former government assassin who had been part of a mind-control experiment. His conspiracy theories were true. In the movies, the technique is called “the slow reveal.”

  It has been an in
side joke among some of Gibson’s pals that the opening scene of Conspiracy Theory wasn’t scripted, that Gibson just played it off the top of his head, employing dialogue reflecting his own views. By the end of my visit with Gibson, I realized that they weren’t entirely kidding.

  After the screening with Schuller, Gibson was scheduled to fly to Washington for an appearance at a gathering of the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic charity organization, and thence to more of Lauer’s marketing stops. That evening, I joined Gibson for the trip East, along with Lauer and Danny Rafic, an Israeli film editor who is working on The Passion .

  When Gibson was in Rome shooting the film, he told an Italian interviewer that he had felt moved by God’s spirit to undertake the project. I asked him what he’d meant by that. How did he know that God wanted him to make The Passion?

  “There are signals,” he said. “You get signals. Signs. ‘Signal graces,’ they’re called. It’s like traffic lights. It’s as clear as a traffic light. Bing! I mean, it just grabs you and you know you have to listen to that and you have to follow it. Like last night, you know?”

  He reminded me of an incident that had occurred the night before, as we were driving to Anaheim. Gibson was behind the wheel of his silver Lexus, negotiating the nightmarish traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway, when a car pulled in front of him and immediately hit the brakes. Gibson had seemed ready to unleash some invective, when he stopped and stared at the offending car’s license plate. “Look! Look at what it says!” The car’s license-plate holder bore the inscription “Psalm 91.” Gibson said that on that very morning, after he’d been vexed by the Los Angeles Times column, one of his associates had urged him to read the ninety-first Psalm, and that he’d been moved to tears by it. (“A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. . . . For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”)

  “It was weird,” Gibson said. “Those are signals, all right?”

  He then told me about something that had happened when he was building his church. He had wanted to fill the place with antique candlesticks and such, and he’d had a hard time finding them. He was in Philadelphia shooting a picture, and someone told him about a man who had a storehouse of old church items. Gibson called the man, and asked if he was willing to sell any of the stuff. The man, considering his celebrity customer, was reluctant. “Not if you’re gonna put it in a disco, or fornicate on it,” he said. Gibson talked to him for a while, and convinced him of the purity of his intent. They did business, and just before Gibson left the man pulled something out, and offered it to Gibson as a gift. It was a small, faded piece of cloth. “What is it?” he asked. The man told him that he had a special devotion to a nineteenth-century Augustinian nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, and that the cloth was a piece of her habit.

  As it happened, Emmerich had special meaning to Gibson as well. Emmerich was an impoverished Westphalian farm girl who had visions at an early age. She was so pious that when she joined a convent, at the age of twenty-eight, she was considered odd even there. Eventually, she began to experience ecstasies and develop stigmata. Her experiences attracted Church inquiries, state suspicions, and popular curiosity, and ultimately the attention of the poet Clemens Brentano, one of the founders of the German Romantic movement. Brentano made his way to Emmerich, who was ailing, and who told him that she had been awaiting his arrival. He wrote down her visions, including detailed narratives from Christ’s Passion, and published them after her death, in 1824, in a book called The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Six weeks after she died, Emmerich’s body was disinterred, and was said to show no decay. In Catholic theology, ecstasies are considered a rare gift from God, and Emmerich is proceeding toward beatification.

  When Gibson returned to his faith, he acquired, from a nunnery that had closed down, a library of hundreds of books, many of them quite old. He says that when he was researching The Passion one evening he reached up for a book, and Brentano’s volume tumbled out of the shelf into his hands. He sat down to read it, and was flabbergasted by the vivid imagery of Emmerich’s visions. “Amazing images,” he said. “She supplied me with stuff I never would have thought of.” The one image that is most noticeable in The Passion is a scene after Jesus’ scourging, when a grief-stricken Mary gets down on her knees to mop up his blood.

  I reminded Gibson, who carries the Emmerich relic in his pocket, that some of his critics have pointed out that Emmerich’s depiction of Jews is inflammatory, thereby imputing anti-Semitism to Gibson’s film. “Why are they calling her a Nazi?” Gibson asked. “Because modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church. And it’s a lie. And it’s revisionism. And they’ve been working on that one for a while.”

  We talked of the nature of Gibson’s faith, and I asked him about an aspect of Vatican II which has not been much discussed in the debate over his film. One of the council’s most significant acts was its Decree on Ecumenism, which declared that all Christians, even those outside the Catholic Church, “have the right to be called Christian; the children of the Catholic Church accept them as brothers.” This effectively overturned the Catholic notion that the only true course to salvation was through the Catholic Church.

  I told Gibson that I am a Protestant, and asked whether his pre–Vatican II world view disqualified me from eternal salvation. He paused. “There is no salvation for those outside the Church,” he said. “I believe it.” He explained, “Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am. Honestly. She’s, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it, she’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.”

  With that, Gibson excused himself, and headed toward the galley of the plane, where an attendant had laid out supper. I glanced up at the video monitor at the front of the cabin, showing our progress on the journey to Washington. We were fortyfive thousand feet over the high plains of Colorado, heading toward Kansas, according to the monitor, which displayed the name of the town shimmering faintly below us. It was a place called Last Chance.

  The next morning, Gibson was rousingly received at the Washington Hilton ballroom by the Knights of Columbus. One of the group’s leaders, in introducing Gibson, reminded the big crowd that the Knights had been called to battle before on such issues as abortion and prayer in school. “If there’s going to be a fight, maybe we should not duck it,” he said. “Maybe we should make sure that Mel Gibson gets a fair hearing in this.” After the event, I thanked Gibson, and bade him farewell. When I arrived home in New York, I called Abraham Foxman, of the A.D.L. By then, Foxman’s associate Eugene Korn had managed to see a screening of The Passion, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Afterward, the A.D.L. had issued another statement warning of its grave concern that the film “could fuel hatred, bigotry, and anti-Semitism.”

  I asked Foxman if he believed that Gibson was an anti-Semite. “Per se, I don’t think that Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic,” Foxman said. “I think that he is insensitive.”

  But what of The Passion itself, I asked. Is the film anti-Semitic? “The film, per se, is not anti-Semitic,” Foxman said. The problem, he added, was that, as with any literal reading of the New Testament, its message of love could be twisted into something hateful. “The film can fuel, trigger, stimulate, induce, rationalize, legitimize anti-Semitism,” Foxman said.

  “You know, the Gospels, if taken literally, can be very damaging, in the same way if you take the Old Testament literally,” Foxman went on. “It says, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ Now, has the Jewish state, or have Jews, practiced the Old Testament by taking an eye for an eye? No. So a literal reading of almost anything can lead to all kinds of things.”

  Speaking with Foxman made me realize just what it was that Gibson had done in making The Passion. Gibson had sa
id from the start that he was going to make a movie taken straight from the Gospels. Foxman was saying that, for better or worse, Gibson had done just that. In focusing on Gibson’s Traditionalist Catholicism, some of his critics have created the expectation that The Passion is a medieval Passion play depicting Jews in horns drinking Christian blood. It is not that. Nor is it the attenuated dramatization that the Catholic scholars might have wished for. Gibson’s Passion is a literalist rendering of the Gospels’ account of Jesus’ Passion, which makes it the ultimate Traditionalist expression.

  That fact will eventually become evident, no doubt. By then, The Passion may well be out of the theaters and playing on cable. That is the art of the slow reveal.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Because of an editing error in the original piece, part of the passage describing Hutton Gibson’s view of the Holocaust was wrongly attributed to The New York Times. The passage in my original manuscript, describing the elder Gibson’s view that the tragedy had been “hyped out of proportion,” was based on my own reporting. The use of the word “tragedy” in reference to the Holocaust was my own, and was not meant to suggest Hutton Gibson’s attitude toward the event. Indeed, in a similar passage, the Times employed the term “catastrophe” in describing the elder Gibson’s Holocaust theories. While neither the Times’s writer nor I can read Hutton Gibson’s heart, his theories about the Holocaust would not obviously indicate that he views the Holocaust as either tragic or catastrophic.

  FRANK RICH

  The Greatest Story Ever Sold

  Then Gibson expressed his feelings about Rich. “I want to kill him,” he said. “I want his intestines on a stick. . . . I want to kill his dog.”

  —The New Yorker, September 15, 2003

  PETA MEMBERS may be relieved to learn that I do not have a dog.