LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 40

rr- -sM i I ttQlftQ i 1 4-II i fX Hvisr-1 5 yjf Jesus learning to be Christ. Jesus Doesnt Live Here Anymore kills what he hates, Judas cant comprehend his leaders tortuous path and finally exclaims in frustration: First, you talked about love. Then about the ax. Now you say you have to be crucified! He is expressing our frustration with this Messiah who just cant seem to 'get it together, at least not until hes finally condemned to death by Pontius Pilate (in a witty cameo by David Bowie). In the end, Jesus does, of course, make it to Calvary and die on the cross, and the meandering nature of his joumey-unto-death becomes part of the point.

For Jesus isnt being presented here as a teacher of doctrines; the movie is strikingly short on parables, sermons, homilies about the Kingdom of Heaven. What he says matters less than what he is in Kazantzakis words, the supreme model to the man who struggles. That is, Christs life matters because it is a metaphor for the essentially human story of the battle between flesh and spirit. Given this emphasis on struggle, the agon, its not wholly surprising that Die Last Temptation of Christ boldly depicts how profound religious experience overlaps with pain, madness and sexuality. Whether its Jesus writhing on the ground as Gods voice violates his skull, naked women shimmying ecstatically around John the Baptist (one of many vestiges of paganism Scorsese includes), or the graphic brutality of the crucifixion scene, the movie goes against the clean, orderly notion of revelation that Hollywood (and organized religion) likes to give us.

It plunges into the murkiest depths of the psyche. For Scorsese is showing us the savage side of Christian myth and ritual, in particular the emphasis on blood the blood that pours from the wounds, the blood that is drunk during communion, the blood that links Christianity to other religions that Christians often find primitive. By flaunting the visceral underpinnings of Christian religion, Die Last Temptation of Christ is bound to offend many, if not most, Christians. Naked in its emotions, raw in its violence, this is the kind of movie that gets into your head and just wont leave, even if you want it to. It is, lets be frank, a fundamentalists nightmare.

And it flies in the face of much modern art which (since the Renaissance) has increasingly treated such awareness as a dirty secret. Scorseses harsh, lovely imagery harks back to those earlier centuries when religious iconography was awash in blood, death, eroticism and transcendence inseparable parts of the same spiritual moment. Such ferocity makes The Last Temptation of Christ an extraordinary movie but maybe not a wise one it wallows in the storys craziness instead of thinking it through. And it doesnt achieve some of the deeper resonances one finds in ordinary movies about Jesus Christ, ones written by a less ambitious fellow than Paul Schrader and directed by a lesser talent than Martin Scorsese. It is, in fact, peculiar to see a movie about the clash between flesh and spirit made by men who seem as unhappy with the flesh as these two (just think of the sexual attitudes in American Gigolo, Cat People, The King of Comedy, After Hours or whose idea of spirit is so thoroughly suffused with torment.

(Do these guys even believe in God?) I can scarcely imagine a writer less suited to adapt Kazantzakis warm-hearted novel than Schrader, a half-lapsed Calvinist who has built a career out of doing dirt on life (as D.H. Lawrence liked to say). His is a spirit that seems bent on torturing his characters, not finding them paths of transcendence. And though or the last several weeks, Christian fundamentalists have been laying media siege to Martin Scorseses film, The Last Temptation of Christ. Theyve termed it blasphemous; theyve threatened to boycott its distributor, Universal Pictures; they have even offered to buy up the negatives for $10 million and bum them before the eager eyes of their endangered flock.

Ten minutes into Scorseses movie, I knew the fundamentalists were right to believe themselves threatened: Nobody who sees this unsettling film will ever think of the Jesus story in quite the same way. Certainly not those beaming Christians who make such a virtue of their narrow-minded cheerfulness, who reduce Christs message to bumper-stickers or enthusiastic acronyms who imagine their Redeemer as a hygienic male model, eyes kitschily aimed skyward. No, The Last Temptation of Christ is like time-bomb ticking inside the faith of those who take their New Testament literally. This does not mean that the movie is blasphemous in any shallow, familiar sense. It is not a vile erection scrawled across Christs image by an angry iconoclast or child playing at naughtiness.

The Last Temptation of Christ is a dead serious work (in some ways, deadly serious), an extraordinary piece of filmmaking that should be seen, talked about, criticized and, ultimately, seen in the context of its profound limitations. If it falters, grows stiff, or provokes unintentional laughter and it does all this such failings are neither surprising nor damning. Few tasks could be more delicate or demanding than to reconceive the story of Jesus Christ, a myth that lies in the intellectual and psychological marrow of the Western tradition. The sheer audacity of taking on this project in 1988 makes The Last Temptation of Christ exemplary. Along with Wim Wenders Wings of Desire, it is one of the few recent movies to acknowledge, much less address, enduring spiritual questions.

Scorseses film has been adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis 1955 novel of the same title, a moving, heretical work that seeks to recast the life of Christ in modem, almost Nietzschean terms. Although brushed with the divine, the novel remains a very human story about the struggle (Kazantzakis key word) between the flesh and the spirit, a battle with the human soul as its arena. As Kazantzakis conceives the story, Jesus must rise above the temptations put before him and assume his triumphant death on the cross; he makes himself into a savior. This may sound mild in the abstract, especially as The Last Temptation works within the confines of the Christian myth. Yet what makes the novel (and the film) subversive is that it uses the familiar contours of this myth to deconstruct ordinary Christian certainties: It demystifies Christ; it emphasizes the blood consciousness within Christian ritual; it denies that redemption is simply Good News.

Here is a vision fraught with agony, despair, lurking madness. he most radical feature of this movie is its unwillingness to give us a likable Jesus, or one confident in his messianic role and assured of his grace. Instead, here Magdalene (Barbara Hershey) and addresses the crowd, Scorsese doesnt deliver the expected payoff: a boffo sermon, the crowd enthralled by His words and His presence, the music swelling at the spiritual grandeur of the Savior. Instead, his talk surges and rambles like that of a passionate teacher who has come to class badly prepared Jesus is winging it! And the effect is disturbing. For you sort of expect Jesus Christ to have charisma.

Indeed, as Jesus flounders, you initially doubt that Dafoe has it in him to play this character, that he could ever match the power and dimension of Robert Powells work in Zeffirellis Jesus of Nazareth (probably the best-acted Christ yet filmed). But the film doesnt want us to see Jesus as godlike, especially not in the beginning when he is still seeking his destiny. For most of the movie, in fact, Jesus is far from lucid or masterful. Hes all-too-human in the modern sense confused, passionate and rather lost, driven by obscure desires, unable to draw a bead on his goal. It is only when Jesus becomes more certain of his imminent death on the cross that Dafoes presence takes on a holy assurance and the story assumes a conventional arc.

Until that point, however, he lacks the clarity of vision and purpose one associates with Jesus. Hes not sure hes the Messiah or if he wants to be; he preaches universal love, sort of; he performs miracles, but theyre no big deal; he rounds up apostles and then takes no interest in them; he heads into the desert and comes back full of talk about the ax and baptism by fire. Part Raging Jesus, part Jesus Bickle, hes all over the map for most of the movie, a fact that makes him baffling to his apostles and to a modern audience alike. In particular, this Jesus confuses his most loyal disciple, Judas Iscariot (forcefully played by Harvey Keitel), whose destiny in this film is positively Borgesian. A practical man who loves what he loves and dreadful thought that he may be the Messiah.

This is hardly the easy figure of orthodoxy, the man-God announced by angels and wise men, or the hippie redeemer of Jesus Christ, Superstar; nor is it even the fierce radical of Pasolinis Gospel According to St. Matthew, whose work blurs easily into Liberation Theology. At times, this Jesus wanders round like a madman, a God-daffy fool: Kicking the tables of the moneychangers in the temple, he might also be a lunatic trashing the stalls along Venice Beach. Never before has the Jesus story been more earthbound, more paranoiac, more brushed with the risk of psychosis more like it may have seemed at the time. In Scorseses first shots of Jesus (Willem Dafoe, whos been promoted from being a mere Christ figure in Platoon), he is enduring a life of seizures, holy terror, and mortification of the flesh.

Goaded by his own fear and outsized guilt, he builds crosses, carries them through the streets (foreshadowing his own fate) and even helps the Romans perform crucifixions an act of barbaric punishment that The Last Temptation depicts in unprecedented and excruciating detail. Its hard, at first, to know what to make of this carpenter who, walking alone, will turn to challenge an invisible stalker, rather like a Biblical Travis Bickle. From its beginning, in fact, The Last Temptation of Christ has the feel of a fever dream it comes closer to Taxi Driver's narrative delirium than to the familiar dramatic structures of The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which famous Biblical events tick by like (very slow) clockwork. Scorseses scenes unfold with a leaping, hallucinatory logic, which often seems like the projection of Christs uneasy soul. During the opening hour at least, this surreal narrative flow makes it extremely difficult to know exactly what were viewing.

When Jesus stops the stoning of Mary i i I 1 4 is a man aching in his mortality a guilty, erratic loner filled with desires (he lusts for Mary Magdalene), pained by Gods voice roaring in his skull, tormented by the ft) WEEKLY mi', lb I ht il.