Violence in the Passion

I hesitate to contribute to the discussion of Gibson's Passion before seeing it, but I came across an observation that seems worth considering when talking about violence in films.

Peter Robinson, over at the Corner, shares some thoughts of one of his friends, Bill Park, "a scholar of film and literature." He says something that seems true to me about the use of violence in films today. Gibson has made a film in the aesthetic film tradition of Samuel Peckinpah and Quentin Tarrantino. Films in which the portrayal of violence begins to look like ballet. It is orchestrated and arranged for different purposes perhaps but it is integral for the film's purpose. Hence, I wonder, doesn't it make Gibson's film the film of Christ for our day?

“[S]hould the flagellation be alluded to, the results shown, but the actual whipping and gouging removed from view? The Greeks never exhibited such sights; the Elizabethans delighted in them. Our own age favors the Elizabethans. Ever since the Production Code was abandoned in 1967, the aesthetic of Hollywood has favored sensationalism, blood spattering and explosions as a kind of ballet of gore. Gibson has merely applied the aesthetic of Peckinpah and Tarantino to the Gospels…."

I am not trying to justify the use of extreme violence in Gibson's film, or in any other. I merely offer what looks like to me as the tradition of film that Gibson (and we too, in a way) is a part of and in which he creates his telling.