Word: gibsonized
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Director Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ represents the teachings of Jesus through a gore-drenched recreation of the final twelve hours before his death. Here, the son of God is a wholly human figure, and Gibson constantly reminds his audience of this with an unceasing depiction of shredded flesh and spattered blood. The effect is alternately piercing and numbing. Nevertheless, Gibson eventually succeeds in overwhelming his audience with the kind of potent visual poignancy unseen in his previous directorial work. The telling of the story is equally effective, as screenwriters Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald (Wise...
...cultural ascetics who haven’t yet seen it, Gibson’s film deals in images that find striking parallels in the standard news coverage of Ashura. Not one bloody detail escapes the attention of Gibson, who, like the BBC, seems to love nothing more than shredded flesh and the sight of fresh blood streaming down the forehead of a young Middle Eastern man. Based on The Gospel of Mel, Jesus’ torture seems to have been far more important than his actual teachings or moral legacy, two subjects which are hardly treated...
...believe it’s anti-Jewish,” Aitken explains. “Gibson picks up on the rhetoric of contention in the gospels—the reification of Jewish and Christian communities— and heightens it to an incredible extent...
Aitken highlights historical errors as well; for example, despite the extreme unlikelihood that Jesus would have spoken any Latin, he converses with Pontius Pilate fluently in the film. Greek, which was spoken commonly in Jerusalem at the time, is completely absent. Additionally, Gibson misrepresents the ethnic make-up of Jerusalem and greatly heightens the role of the so-called “Jewish mob,” which calls for Jesus’s death. According to Aitken, Gibson also fictionally contextualizes Judas’s story, adding a scene of his harassment by a group of morphing, devil-like...
...points out that Gibson took Jesus’s famous “I am the way, the truth and the life” quotation—which is not in the passion narrative—and juxtaposed it with the spectacle of the moments just before Jesus’s death on the cross. “In doing so, there’s no religious openness. There’s simply a sense of ‘believe in me,’ or be wrong...