The Passion and its deceitful critics

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views March 15, 2004]

[M]ost critics last week circled their wagons and took shots at The Passion of the Christ, complaining about excessive violence. It seems like the old story of people only resenting movies with serious content. Casual violence shown just for fun doesn't raise critics' ire; they only get upset when violence is made to matter, when it’s presented artistically.

Movie journalists revealed their cultural biases in last week's attacks on Mel Gibson, but the hysterical denunciations also exposed their dishonest esthetic criteria. One reason we're regularly assaulted with garish, smutty action films like Twisted is because that's what is routinely accepted in the culture. It was stunning to see David Denby on the Charlie Rose Show call The Passion of the Christ "a snuff movie," the kind of insensitive comment that would never be applied to, say, Schindler’s List, out of simple cultural respect. Denby breaches that caution--and appears righteous in doing so--because contemporary film culture is dominated by disbelieving skepticism.

If there is a lack of piety in Gibson's film, it has been outmatched by the cynicism of incredulous reviewers--and by the weekly tide of sarcastic, nihilistic, anti-human movies like Twisted . . . All the lame criticism against The Passion of the Christ exposed the full deceitfulness of contemporary film culture.

-- Excerpt from film review by Armond White, New York Press (3/3/04).

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