Brian Walter -- Love In The Time of Calvary: Romance and Family Values in Crucifixion Films

Love In The Time of Calvary: Romance and Family Values in Crucifixion Films
by Brian Walter
Cineaction #88 (2012)
While marketing his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson pointedly shared anecdotes about the Muslims and agnostics among his film crew who converted to Christianity during the filming. Previewing his already controversial film for conservative Christian leaders across America before its official Ash Wednesday release, Gibson essentially offered it up as a weapon that they could use in the ‘red state/blue state’ culture wars to win converts to Christ. These anecdotes constituted just one element of Gibson’s clever “guerilla marketing” campaign,1 which rather remarkably helped what might otherwise have remained little more than an art-house curiosity—with its remote historical and geographical setting, no stars, and English subtitles to translate the two dead languages used for dialogue—earn more than $600 million at the box office and qualify as an improbable blockbuster.2

Or so it could easily seem. When considered within the longer history of Hollywood’s treatments of Biblical material, the success not only seems much less improbable, but actually almost predictable. At least since D. W. Griffith and the early days of feature films, filmmakers had regularly looked to well-known literature for story material in general and to Biblical stories in particular as conveniently pious vehicles for the revealing costumes, grandiloquent dialogue, and massive crowd pageantry so indispensable to the genre.3 If Cecil B. DeMille is most famous today for establishing Charlton Heston as a WASP icon by casting him as Moses and having him intone the voice of God in his extravagant 1956 Technicolor version of The Ten Commandments,4 it helps to recall that DeMille began mounting his spectacular visions of the Bible several decades earlier, in the silent era, following Griffith’s example in Intolerance with a 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and then, a few years later, conjuring a frankly Salomesque version of Mary Magdalene for Jesus to convert in 1927’s King of Kings. Its venerability may spark debate, but the Biblical epic certainly boasts a long history, suggesting its enduring appeal for American audiences.

The mid-century renaissance of Hollywood’s “swords and sandals” epics shows how well the genre could adapt both to industry anxieties and to America’s popular self-image. After losing control over the exhibition of its product and finding itself on the losing end of demographic shifts that saw fewer and fewer Americans going to the movies as their primary source of entertainment, Hollywood resorted increasingly to costly color and widescreen technologies in an effort to maintain its profits, emphasizing the technical superiority of the theatrical film experience over the increasingly ubiquitous home television.5 The Biblical epic lent itself superbly to the “big event pictures” that Hollywood produced to keep audiences coming to theatres,6 and not only because of the visual splendors available in depicting the glory that was imperial Rome or the majesty of pharaonic Egypt. The genre similarly supported the melodrama of erotic love striving for mastery with family identity or, still more, with spiritual duty. Heston’s Moses is a prince of Egypt who spurns the powerful princess Nefretiri first to save the otherwise helpless slaves and then to marry a humble shepherd woman from the countryside whom he later also abandons (in effect), the better to fulfill his divinely-ordained mission by leading the Hebrews out of bondage and to the Promised Land. So, in addition to championing American ideals of freedom in the face of oppression, DeMille’s Ten Commandments catered to conservative white America’s image of itself as a piously disciplined and wholesome alternative to the corruptions of urban life and inherited power, precisely at a time when white middle-class Americans were increasingly abandoning urban centers for the suburbs.7

Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ does not fall simply and easily into an unbroken line of Hollywood Biblical epics such as The Ten Commandments, but it does mine a vein of conservative Christian separatism that Hollywood had sought to tap going back at least to the 1930 establishment of the Motion Picture Production Code, which represented an “attempt to bind movies to Judeo-Christian morality.”8 Gibson’s entry retains and/or reproduces several core characteristics of the genre, particularly the rules that require love plots entangled with the Christ story to emphasize a conflict between selfish earthly desires and grandly selfless acceptance of higher callings. The women—including, on occasion, even the Virgin Mary—in these story lines tempt men to reject spiritual or otherwise higher imperatives. The specific circumstances and even the results differ, but the age-old association of femaleness with the lower, bodily faculties and maleness with higher, intellectual, spiritual motives prevails, in some form, across the decades in these films.

To connect Gibson’s notoriously brutal scenario to the long history of Biblical epics, it is useful to compare its treatment of love plots to similar subplots in two earlier Crucifixion films, The Robe (1953) and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). In The Robe, the oldest and most generically conventional of these films, Diana, the female lead, finally joins her male counterpart, Tribune Marcellus Gallio, in defying the young new emperor Caligula and embracing a beatified martyrdom; though she strives earnestly to lure Gallio away from his staunch religious commitment—offering the joys of marriage and domestic life as an alternative—Diana finally and heroically gives up this dream for her own conversion, wedding political independence to spiritual apotheosis in a way that seems surprisingly progressive in comparison to the later films. Just as surprisingly, though from a different angle, it is The Last Temptation of Christ—the object of a remarkably potent and successful right-wing Christian protest—that proves perhaps the most philosophically conservative of the three, forcing Jesus simply and consistently to reject the women who love him to become the Messiah, embracing his identity as the son of God only by dismissing the flesh and the women who so temptingly embody it for him. Finally, in The Passion of the Christ, the quasi-allegorical relationship between Pontius Pilate and his unhappy wife, Claudia, serves to confirm comfortable truisms about the conflict between love and moral duty needing to resolve itself decisively (however painfully) in favor of the latter.

The oldest of these films, The Robe, was made as an event film from top to bottom, but it also bears clear marks of Hollwood’s self-doubts in the early Cold War era. The first film presented in the new CinemaScope aspect ratio, The Robe also boasted glorious Technicolor processing and stereophonic sound at a time when Hollywood was already (according to conventional wisdom) losing much of its viewership to the popular new home television set. But beyond its technological advances, The Robe betrays Hollywood’s political anxieties in the 1950s, finding in the story of a dissolute Roman tribune’s conversion to Christianity what would seem to be a rather unlikely paean to the heroic, solitary champion of democratic freedoms rebelling against the suffocating forces of inherited and centralized power. Tribune Marcellus Gallio finds himself in the film’s second act in Palestine commanding the Roman soldiers who crucify Christ and barter his fateful robe at the foot of the cross in the midst of a gathering storm. Driven mad by his contact with the robe, Marcellus only finds relief when he converts to Christianity, returning to Rome in the film’s final act to antagonize and finally reject the authority of the spoiled, whiny, sexually suspect Caligula, who, as emperor, sentences Marcellus to execution at the very end of the movie. Debuting in 1953, a few years before its more famous Biblical epic counterpart, The Ten Commandments, The Robe anticipates the later film’s improbable treatment of the Old Testament Exodus as a story of heroically devout rebels taking a stand for liberty and democratic freedoms by ascribing egalitarian virtues to a scion of the Roman empire who bravely turns against the privilege of his upbringing.9

The Robe also shares with The Ten Commandments the figure of the female outsider who falls in love with the eventual man of God before his conversion and who later finds herself spurned for the sake of his higher, divine calling. From her debut in the Roman marketplace, Diana is both Roman subject and critic, an outsider whose dress, movements, and placement within the public space offer Marcellus an alternative to the decadence and cynicism that otherwise prevails. The film opens with a montage sequence of pagan statues and marching soldiers that takes full advantage of the elongated CinemaScope frame to overwhelm viewers with the simultaneous glory and corruption of imperial Rome. The montage sequence ends with Marcellus’ss debut, wandering through the market, perusing slaves for possible purchase. Diana eventually appears behind him, and the busy mise-en-scène of the flesh market around Marcellus immediately gives way to calm and clarity around this woman who remains on the margins. The cross-cutting in the conversation that ensues and the camera placement of the subsequent auction scene between Marcellus and Caligula (not yet emperor) continue to emphasize Diana’s alienation from the sordid business of the place.

Subsequent scenes work to establish a subtly mixed status for Diana: both a loyal Roman subject and an independent spirit devoted to Marcellus even in his eventual madness. She combines these two seemingly incompatible traits perhaps most markedly in the scene when Marcellus returns from Palestine (his grip on sanity already loosening) and she presents him to the old emperor. Displacing the classical architecture, colorful robes, and stately dialogue into the remote countryside, far from the political bodies and flesh peddlers of Rome, this sequence offers the best of both worlds to contemporary conservative Christian viewers, shunning the corruption of the city for the idyllic retreat of a rural life which nevertheless supports civilized, even decorous behavior. Diana is at her best in this setting, reconciling her duties as a Roman subject to the emperor (who, like his wife, would prefer to see her marry their son, Caligula) with her ardent faithfulness to a rebellious tribune. Diana waits for Marcellus on a stone bench overlooking a cliff that drops away to the sea, a bracing setting for Marcellus’s return and the fateful incorporation of the life-changing experience he has had in Palestine into the progress of their love. In her previous two scenes, both set in Rome, Diana appeared in wraps and head-coverings, protected not so much against the weather as from the dangers of imperial decadence, but here, with the striking stonework of a Roman house crowning the hill behind, she appears openly in an off-the-shoulder yellow gown, arm-band, and head-dress, a noblewoman of the empire free to the elements. Here in this outpost, Marcellus releases Diana from her commitment to him—a freedom she pointedly does not accept, instead rushing to take his hand as he heads back to the house to report to the emperor. She serves, in fact, as his go-between, risking the emperor’s wrath to spare Marcellus from exposing his addled state (caused by his contact with Christ’s robe). And when the emperor follows Marcellus’s example at the end of their interview by freeing her from her promise to the beleaguered tribune, Diana refuses once again, a prelude to her final rejection of Caligula at the end of the movie when she elects to join Marcellus in martyrdom. In the midst of his madness—the first step toward his conversion and beatification—Marcellus can no longer fulfill his duties as subject of the empire unless Diana runs interference for him. She puts herself at risk to rescue his interview with the emperor, who thinks she deserves more: “What a wife you would make for an emperor,” he says, shaking his head over her devotion to Marcellus. She chooses long-time, innocent love over power, letting her man leave to heal himself before returning to her. In her brave faithfulness, standing by her almost helpless man, Diana somehow confirms the timelessness of middle-class American family values.

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