Martin Scorsese’s Raging Christ

Jesus Christ as allegory? Turn the Son of Man into the Son of Metaphor? The idea strikes a nerve as deep as the thought of re-telling Gone With the Wind from a slave’s perspective.

You’ve got to admit, Martin Scorsese had a lot of chutzpah. When he brought Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ to the screen in 1988, he must have known he’d rouse a lot of rabble. How dare he make a movie where Christ comes off the cross, has sex with Mary Magdalene, sires children and grows old beyond his allotted 33 years?

Blasphemer, infidel, son of Satan.

But if we’re going to call Scorsese names, let’s add visual poet, cinema philosopher and envelope-pusher to the list. This is an altogether bulletproof movie, built to withstand attacks from both the vox populi and the cinescribes. Scorsese is sure to pull out a defense like “I wasn’t trying to please anyone but myself in making this picture.” Indeed, his passion for his subject and his earnestness in getting his message across drive the film forward. You cannot deny the power of The Last Temptation of Christ—no matter if it provokes you to inspiration or derision. Many of those who denounced the film when it was at the height of its notoriety in 1988 never saw it, reacting with the rest of the knee jerks in the flock of sheep.

An Admission: I was part of that flock and resisted seeing the movie for 13 years. My beliefs and my upbringing as a preacher’s kid made me wary of what I’d heard was a blasphemous bit of film. I had a hard time reconciling that Jesus-Mary sex scene with whatever noble intentions Scorsese might have had. And so, I avoided The Last Temptation of Christ like a Pentateuchian plague.

But people change and time mellows everything. When I saw the DVD copy of Temptation sitting on the Blockbuster shelf, I gave in to my curiosity.

Thank God I did.

The Last Temptation of Christ is thought-provoking, deeply-moving and more of a spiritual experience than its detractors would have the flock believe.

This is a film Scorsese had wanted to make for years—ever since Barbara Hershey handed him a copy of Kazantzakis’ book while the two of them were making Boxcar Bertha back in 1972. The surreal, allegorical interpretation of Jesus’ life struck a chord in Scorsese’s Roman-Catholic heart. In 1983, he engaged Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Raging Bull) to write a screenplay. With his Calvinist background, Schrader would bring yet another viewpoint to the novel which had been written by a Greek-Orthodox. “It’s not an accessible book—its power lies in its ideas,” Schrader says in the DVD’s outstanding commentary (which also includes input from Scorsese, Willem Dafoe and screenwriter Jay Cocks who did uncredited work on Temptation).

Soon after Scorsese pitched the concept to the studio suits, controversy erupted from the right wing and the project was eventually shelved for years. But Scorsese must have known he was setting himself up for box-office failure. How do you make a surreal, allegorical motion picture about the goodest fella to ever walk the mean streets of earth without throwing your audience into spiritual torment? It’s nearly an impossible task—not quite a water-into-wine feat, but past attempts like Jesus of Montreal and Godard’s Hail Mary have done fair-to-middling business in the art-house circuit.

It helps to have a name like Scorsese, which automatically casts a wider net—but also raises a few eyebrows. This is, after all, the director who dwells in the modern age and uses blood and bullets and urban angst to define a hard language of film. Remember, this was years before Scorsese proved he could stretch into another era, a softer style with The Age of Innocence (okay, there was New York, New York, but still we’re talking the Big Apple and DeNiro—robe-and-sandal epics still seemed like a long-shot for the director).

At times, you wonder if the director felt as lonely as Travis Bickle talking to himself in the mirror. Who would listen to his version of the greatest story ever told without feeling the urge to throw things at the screen? Use Christ as a symbolic figure representing the struggle between the human and the divine, with the human side appearing to win out in most cases? C’mon, man, that’s taking it too far…

Scorsese would answer that Christ is already a symbol of God, that his time here on earth was, essentially, a 33-year metaphor. The movie takes the already-symbolic events of Christ’s life and presents them to us in a new and different light so that even the symbolic becomes symbolic. As Schrader notes in the commentary, “Christ’s doubts are all part of the process of the human becoming divine.” Christ’s struggle is also a mirror of our own spiritual wrestling matches as we seek, find, reject or ignore God in our own lives. Starting with the first shot of the film (Christ writhing on the ground as he suffers from “God, the ultimate headache”) and continuing through the time he climbs down off the cross, Scorsese skews our Sunday School mindset.


**BEGIN SPOILER**
While I generally try not to reveal movie secrets, any discussion of The Last Temptation of Christ must include the controversial final 20 minutes of the film where a young angel appears to Jesus in the hour of agony and frees him from the cross. This is the last temptation: to side-step the holy duty in order to just be a man, plain old John Q. Jesus, for the rest of the time here on earth. The cup is taken, the slate’s wiped clean and Jesus can finally give in to his lust for Mary Magdalene. But it’s all an illusion, an Ebenezer Scrooge hallucination of “the shadows of things that may be.” Neither Scorsese nor Kazantzakis is suggesting that Christ actually un-nailed himself and quit the cross. No, it’s a 20-minute metaphor and, in the end, it makes Christ’s ultimate decision all that more powerful in the last few seconds of the movie. When his gore-streaked head falls limp and he cries out, “It is accomplished!” you feel the full extent of the sacrifice.
*END SPOILER*


Schrader’s script is dense with layers of meaning and can, at times, be difficult to absorb—at least on first viewing. This is a film which rewards multiple visits, thanks to what Scorsese is doing on the screen and Schrader is doing in the dialogue. “Everything’s a part of God,” Jesus tells Judas. “When I see an ant, when I look at his shiny black eye, you know what I see? I see the face of God.” Lines like those grip the brain and don’t let go.

Or images like this: At the end of Christ’s 40 days in the desert—after he’s been visited by Satan in the form of a snake, a lion and a pillar of fire—a tree appears at the edge of the circle he’s drawn on the ground. On that tree is an apple, bright as a Christmas ornament. The famished Jesus reaches up, plucks it and takes a bite. Blood gushes out of the apple and runs down his chin. Sin, bloody sin.

As technically good as The Last Temptation of Christ is (and if there were enough space and time, I’d rave on and on about the way Scorsese used a small budget to create a palpable, detailed world…or Peter Gabriel’s mesmerizing score…or Michael Ballhaus’ splendid cinematography), it would be as dry as dirt if it weren’t for the passionate performances from Harvey Keitel (as a red-haired Judas), Barbara Hershey (Mary Magdalene), Andre Gregory (John the Baptist) and especially Willem Dafoe (Christ). It’s a daunting task to play the second leg of the Trinity, but Dafoe inhabits the role as no one else could (Christopher Walken, Eric Roberts and Aidan Quinn were also considered for the part). Dafoe is utterly convincing as Christ moves from migraine torment (“I’m afraid of everything…Fear. You look inside me and that’s all you’ll find.”) to self-doubt at the start of his ministry (“What if I say the wrong thing? What if I say the right thing?”) to white-hot rage at the hypocritical Pharisees (“Didn’t they tell you? I’m the Saint of Blasphemy!”). The actor fills the skin of Christ, but leaves enough wriggle room for us to wonder at the interpretation: Is Jesus a raving lunatic? Is he a frustrated prophet? This is not a historic Jesus, it’s a literary Jesus, but it’s a Jesus you will never forget.

The last line from Christ on the cross is, “It is accomplished.” And then the film literally ends: burns, unspools, flickers into the void. Scorsese says that part wasn’t intentional, that the camera malfunctioned and allowed light to leak onto the footage. Either way—accident or intention—it’s a fitting way to end a movie which will continue to flicker and burn, flame-like, in your head long after you’ve stopped watching.