The Last Temptation of Christ pictured Jesus Christ in
a state of moral squalor with a tattooed Mary Magdalene. It also
had Jesus Christ lending a hand at the crucifixion of a fellow Jew.
The New York Times, even as it noted these scenes,
considered the movie “genuinely transcendent.” The movie exerts
“enormous power,” said its reviewer. “Anyone who questions the
sincerity or seriousness of what Mr. Scorsese has attempted need
only see the film to lay those doubts to rest.”
New York Times columnist Frank Rich hasn’t seen Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ but he already knows
it’s insincere. “I have no first-hand way of knowing whether the
film is benign or toxic and so instead must rely on eyewitnesses,”
he writes. If Jerry Falwell attacked a film through “eyewitnesses,”
Rich would knit his brows over such a lunging affront to “art”. But
it is okay for Rich to do, because “I am one of the many curious
Jews who have not been invited to press screenings of ‘The
Passion.’”
Rich, who usually denounces conservative busybodies, has become
a liberal busybody of comic proportions, hovering over Gibson’s
project and fretting about its potential “tinderbox effect.”
Divisive art never worried Rich before. But then, he is adopting
a lot of new attitudes, such as his sudden concern for Pope John
Paul II. Gibson’s production team, charges Rich, duped the Pope
into publicizing the movie. “Pope John Paul II, frail with
Parkinson’s at 83, is rarely able to celebrate Mass. But why should
his suffering deter a Hollywood producer from roping him into a
publicity campaign to sell a movie?” writes Rich. The reported
papal endorsement of Gibson’s movie doesn’t sit well with Rich. He
says “it demeans the pope to be drafted into that scheme.” That the
Pope, a former playwright, approved of the movie isn’t an
eyewitness account Rich is ready to believe.
Rich’s column is titled (in one edition) “Chutzpah and spiritual
McCarthyism.” It sounds autobiographical but it isn’t. Rich can
describe a film as anti-Semitic without seeing it, can smear it
through “eyewitnesses,” without falling into spiritual McCarthyism
apparently. He can also attack Gibson’s faith through an attack on
Gibson’s father’s faith without falling into it.
Last year, the New York Times thought it fair to run a
piece basically portraying Gibson’s father as a demented
anti-Semite, with the insinuation that warped views had traveled
from father to son. The writer of the piece was Christopher Noxon,
the son of a homeowner who objected to Mel Gibson’s construction of
a church in the Agoura Hills in California. Rich has been
consulting with Noxon about the elder Gibson’s views. In a column
last September, Rich said Noxon “made available to me” a “full
transcript of the interview” in which the senior Gibson supposedly
denied the Holocaust. And Rich is also a careful reader of the
elder Gibson’s newsletters, noting that “he publishes a newsletter
in which the word Holocaust appears in quotes.” Rich, in that
September column, was also on to Gibson’s publicist Alan Neirob for
playing “bizarre games with the Holocaust.” Neirob, said Rich, is
not a “founding member of the national Holocaust museum,” as he
claimed, but probably only a charter member of the museum. Rich
couldn’t find Neirob’s name “inscribed in granite on the museum’s
wall,” but in a moment of generous speculation, Rich opined,
“Presumably he was instead among the 300,000 who responded to the
museum’s first direct-mail campaign for charter members. That could
set you back at least 25 bucks.”
None of this is spiritual McCarthyism, of course. No, no Rich is
the victim of it. After all he has received hate mail (which of
course he very fairly blames on “Gibson and his supporters”).
Rich naturally abstains from all the McCarthyite tactics he
deplores. He just doesn’t want the film’s marketing — “a
masterpiece of ugliness typical of the cultural moment, when
hucksters wield holier-than-thou piety as a club for their own
profit” — to succeed.
But it is fitting of the New York Times and its sense
of accuracy that The Last Temptation of Christ —a movie
that wildly departed from the Gospels, even to the point of having
Christ assist at the crucifixion of a fellow Jew — didn’t upset
it. But The Passion of the Christ based on the Gospels
does. Because Gibson doesn’t treat the Gospels as art — fictions
to be reshaped according to liberal sensitivities — he is one
artist Frank Rich and the Times won’t respect.
George Neumayr is managing editor of The American
Spectator.
