Christians and Pagans at the Multiplex

By Crispin Sartwell

Violence is a fundamental fact of human existence. We see it now from everywhere: Haiti, Iraq, Israel, our inner cities and our countryside. But it is not just a matter of seeing. It's a matter of our sense of our own embodiment, of the vulnerability that is our condition. Now, as ever, our mammalian bodies can be pierced or torn apart; our skin conceals and barely shields our viscera. Visceral, too, is the hunger and rage that we share and that makes us capable of killing one another.

It is hardly surprising or reprehensible, then, that violence is an overwhelming theme in all media. We could not express or explore our lives without expressing and exploring it. But the "issue" of violence in media conceals a diversity of the ways that violence is depicted and used, the ways its meanings are made.

In virtuoso films such as Robert Rodriguez's "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" and Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill," violence is the occasion of beauty. It is stylized and transformed into ballet: lovely people such as Uma Thurman and Antonio Banderas visit it upon their opponents in a slow-motion dream of pain and invulnerability. Blood is transformed into a formal element of the dance, a Mondrian primary red used as an abstract compositional element.

That violence is an aesthetic in these films has been alternately used to condemn and defend them. They "celebrate" violence as they stack corpses like cord wood, but they also "stylize" violence. They are remarkably undisturbing, a fact which, it is said, either sanitizes us from the pollution which the depiction of violence introduces into us or makes us indifferent to suffering.

The opposite approach is taken by Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," in which a single human body is scourged, flayed, hung, and, in short, tortured slowly to death before us. Here the violence is supposed to affect us, as the violence in "Kill Bill" is not: to move us to outrage and grief, to remind us of our own intimate knowledge of pain and our capacity to inflict it.

This is an approach to violence which is also common to many films - recently, notably in "Mystic River," an interesting case as many critics remarked, because of director Clint Eastwood's journey from aestheticized to visceral violence, from celebration to mourning, a trace of the basic process of our maturation or at least our aging.

The suffering of Christ is central to Christian theology; indeed, in many ways it is the distinctive feature of the religion. Pagan gods were powerful and violent: they inflicted rather than suffered pain, like Tarantino's Thurman or Rodriguez's Banderas. But Christ suffered as us and for us. The Pagan gods aroused our admiration or loathing; the Christian God solicits our empathy and expresses his empathy with us. The pagan gods intimidate and impress us; the Christian God enters into our suffering with us.

Thus the violence of "The Passion of the Christ" is a fundamental statement of Christian theology, similar in this regard to the great Isenheim Altarpiece by Grunwald, which depicted the body of Christ as something utterly human and utterly desecrated, and invited us to feel what he must have felt, or to enter into our own pain with renewed intensity and with the hope that our suffering redeems us.

But an altarpiece is one thing, and a huge Hollywood movie is another, and one cannot but connect the experience of "The Passion" with the experience of "Kill Bill." Despite their fundamental opposition, they come to us in the same medium, under the same circumstances. We have paid our ten dollars and entered the darkened chamber of our dreams. Like "Kill Bill," "The Passion" is a spectacle that arrives at a moment when we have grown accustomed to extreme displays of violence on screen. The violence is celebrated both as a theology and an entertainment, and it is intensified to create an effect on our jaded senses.

Ultimately, we might say, "Kill Bill" and "The Passion" alike are expressions both of anxiety and redemption, sweeping our vulnerability and our rage into art, magnifying ourselves into giants who kill and suffer both beautifully and wretchedly, as Christians entering into an imitation of Christ and as pagans who worship at the altar of celebrity.

Both, finally, are testimonies to our resolution to transcend our condition into art or into heaven. And they are testimonies to the fact that we will continue as long as we are human to kill like wolves or like gods, and to die like dogs or like messiahs.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives." .