"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life."
OK. Here i am in 2004. This scene says it all. I'm reading the Gospels According to John aloud while sipping tortilla soup at the Pink Taco last Friday night before Rufus Wainwright's performance at the Joint. My waitress, Chanel, listens attentively as I quote scripture. She's by no means humoring me. On the contrary, she's fully engaged. I ask the Catholic native of Sin City if she thinks I'm the only Jew who has ever read the Gospels to a waitress in the Pink Taco. She smiles. "You're probably the only person, no less Jew, who's ever brought a Bible into this place. I think it's cool."
I tell her I'm doing some biblical boning-up for a piece about The Passion of the Christ. "I want to see that with my mom," she says. Chanel is 27, married, raising two kids—she gave birth to the first at age 19. She is bouncy, sexy, youthful, but not like the rest of the girls in the place. I always meet the freaks, and more often than not, they're approaching some sort of crossroads in their lives. "This city is getting too loud, too crowded," she confesses. "I'm thinking of leaving. I want to raise my kids someplace else."
I'm scribbling notes in the margins of my Bible; I write in all my books. And I read all the time. The quote cited above is the passage that directly precedes the big one—you know, the one you always see behind Tiger Woods on the 18th green, or on some Green Bay Packer fan's shirt when the camera pans the crowd for colorful characters. Over the last couple of years, I've gotten very close to several educated Christians, men of immense faith and nondogmatic wisdom with regards to the Good Book. One is a rock journalist named Mark Joseph, who came into my life four years ago, when he read an interview I did with Alice Cooper in which he came out of the closet about his Christianity for the first time. (Mark wrote a book called Faith, God & Rock N' Roll.) Mark connected with Mel Gibson early in the production of The Passion. He became a music consultant and documentarian and is writing a book on the making of the film. He does not have a publisher yet—well, he didn't before the film did a Noah-like flood at the box office last weekend.
On November 4, Mark set up a screening of The Passion for several faith-based rock artists, including members of POD and MxPx. Mel wanted musicians to see the film in rough cut and, if inspired, perhaps contribute to the soundtrack. I was invited and brought my friend Rex, a Tennessee-born Christian who can quote four books of Kabbalah verbatim and knows more about my people that I ever will. We arrive at Gibson's Santa Monica office at 4 in the afternoon. A couple of lawyers and managers balance out the small but formidable group.
Mel's marketing guy gives us factoids about the picture: It's very bloody and extremely violent. Mel made it with his own money, upwards of $30 million, and at this point, there's no formal distributor. There is growing controversy. Mel has shown the picture to religious leaders of every denomination. There has been praise and condemnation. The word "anti-Semitic" was dropped. Most major film corporations don't wanna touch it with a 10-foot staff.
Twenty of us circle a large table. Mel's guy puts out a few boxes of tissues. "Just in case," he grins. The lights go down, and for the next two hours, there's absolute silence save for sniffles, groans and whispers, ofttimes audible above the sounds of agony emanating from the screen.
As the lights come up, the room is numb. A few rocker wives weep openly. No one smiles. It's like everyone is holding their breath, waiting for permission to exhale after 120 minutes.
My eyes are wet, my stomach in knots. No one save Rex and Mark knows where I am in my life at this moment. I've just separated from my wife and left the city of my birth to relocate to Las Vegas. I miss my daughter so much at times I can barely make it through the day without breaking down. I keep my eyes closed for a moment, meditating on what I've just experienced. When I open them, I looked to my direct right and there's Mel Gibson, sitting in a chair. Rex's face is as pale as Michael Jackson's.
Mel takes a couple of deep breaths and solicits feedback. I am compelled to speak first.
"Well," I begin, clearing the emotion from my throat. "First, I'm a Jew, and I was not offended. Perhaps I don't know enough Scripture to evaluate this presentation accurately, but my gut reaction is I do not believe this film is anti-Semitic. Second, if it was your intention to make me, and everyone else in the room, feel like they'd carried the cross for the past two hours, you succeeded. And third, to me this is not a religious film. It's not a film at all. It's an experience." I pause. My palms are sweating. "The last scene, when He's on the cross, Christ says, 'Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.' Forgiveness transcends religion into the spiritual. I believe that's the message of this movie." Then I shut up.
Mel nods. "Absolutely. Forgiveness. That is the theme of this film. That's what the Gospels say. That's how I saw it."
Others offer comments; I'm too deep in my own funk to hear what's actually said. I do catch a comment Mel makes. He says that at one point in his life, he was a "bad guy." Perhaps this film is his confessional. When the 45-minute chat is over, Mel shakes hands with everyone. He seems easy to approach, so I do, alone, while he's getting a Coke. "You made another film that meant a great deal to me," I say. "Signs. A picture about faith and synchronicity. I saw Signs six times." That brings a wide grin to his face. "I loved making that film," he replies, adding, out of the blue, "Have you seen Scary Movie 3?"
I smile. "No, but I've seen the trailer."
He leans closer. "Oh, man, you have to see it. Charlie Sheen does me in Signs, and he's brilliant, f--king brilliant."
So here we are, four months later, and not only did The Passion of the Christ find a distributor, but it has become one of the most talked-about cultural phenomena in recent memory while pulling in more than $100 million its first weekend. Members of the Jewish faith and critics have indeed crucified Gibson. His motives have been questioned. I've read articles, seen interviews, watched CNN's special on Christ, hosted by the great Hebrew journalist Aaron Brown, talked to people all over Sin City, read a good portion of the Gospels and gone back and reread Ekhart Tolle's extraordinary The Power of Now, a book steeped in spiritual metaphor that defines consciousness as presence. Zen, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Hebrew—the word is the word no matter how you slice it.
While everyone has an opinion on Gibson's motives, his need to self-humiliate, to bloody every film with his own egotistical sense of suffering, on whether he misread the Gospels to satisfy his own artistic ends, to me, it's all noise. Guru Singh, my Kundalini yogi back in Los Angeles, used to say, "The only difference between religion and mythology is that mythology is true." What is your religion? What is your mythology? What is your fantasy? Tolkien was a prophet whose vision now accounts for the biggest profit in Hollywood history. The King has returned, all right, to the big screen. When Samwise carries Frodo up the mountain because he can go no further, is that not Simon the Jew shouldering the cross for Jesus?
The Passion of the Christ has fostered the most heated discussion about faith in recent memory. Whatever your faith, that is a manifestation of spirit in action. Go to the book of Lennon and McCartney: "Say the word and you'll be free/Say the word and be like me/Say the word I'm thinking of/Have you heard, the word is love?" It's chicken soup for the Rubber Soul, maybe even tastier than the tortilla at the Taco.
Word.