Reply #4: It's an expression of our American culture...

[LeahMira]

I liked Andrew Greeley's answer!

I understand where the Rabbi was coming from, but I think the theological discussion of Jesus is not appropriate to bring to the film. I think that this Jewish scholar's response is more on target:

Film is a visual medium, and it is in his use of the camera, not the film's subtitled text, that Gibson's politics most clearly reveals itself. The film's right wing aesthetic comes most fully into its own when the crowd most completely closes in on Jesus, as he carries the cross on his way to his crucifixion. Never has so much emphasis been placed on the physical weight of the cross, as we repeatedly see Jesus stagger under its weight and struggle back to his feet. Accompanying Jesus' repeated and almost rhythmic rise and fall, we experience an emotionally charged and increasingly rapid intercutting between the crowd and Jesus, with the camera and editing throwing us further off balance, echoing Jesus' loss of balance, by occasionally making disorienting swoops around the lone figure of Jesus. The technique was perfected in that masterpiece of fascist film, Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 Triumph of the Will, the Nazi propaganda film that is a cinematic ancestor of Gibson's film. ....

Quick cuts of this sort are a staple of the editing techniques of the action genre with which Gibson is so intimately connected. Above and beyond its stated religious goals, its aesthetic reveals it as a Mel Gibson action film. ....

The basic technique of quick cut between close-up and medium range shot, between the protagonist and the crowd, with the occasional long lingering panning shot to integrate it all, promotes not empathy or compassion, which require greater focus and concentration to be brought forth, but an ersatz immediate identification, one that is elicited as a pre-programmed reaction rather than as an authentic expression of the self. The relentlessness of the film's violence, its senses and mind numbing infliction of blow upon blow, with the audience made to shudder along with each one, short circuits any authentically deep emotional reaction.

With so many concerned about the portrayal of violence in this generation's video games and music, what is often missed is that it is not the surface imagery but rather the deeper structure of the culture that is fundamentally desensitizing. The medium is the real message. The ever escalating need for speed in video games, the dizzying quick cuts of music videos, even what passes for conversation on the TV talk shows (titles like "Crossfire" and "Firing Line" say it all), all promote hair trigger visceral reaction rather than reflective response. The current younger generation is perfectly primed for this film aesthetic. Such a generation may well report that they find the film emotionally moving. But they will most likely be mistaking the addictive adrenaline rush to which they have been conditioned by our culture of rapid response for real depth of emotion. The film actually stands in much the same relation to authentic emotion as it does to anti-Semitism. It does not so much create either as much as it rather recycles and restimulates what is already there.

http://www.tikkun.org/index.cfm/action/current/article/225.html