The Last Temptation of Christ is based on a novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis, who is universally regarded as a serious writer. When Kazantzakis’s dead body was shipped to Athens in 1957, the archbishop there refused to allow it to lie in state in a church (though the remains were later given Christian burial). That was the act of a well-meaning priest who believed that an heretically inclined author had led some of the faithful astray. But the archbishop didn’t accuse the author of having been a money-grubbing sleaze merchant. That is precisely what the makers of this extremely faithful, if necessarily synoptic, film adaptation have been called, though they haven’t added a glimmer of sex or an iota of violence to what was in the original story. Why then have the adapters been vilified? Why has Kazantzakis gone relatively unscathed?
I offer two reasons: one circumstantial, the other generic.
Circumstantial: many of the Christian fundamentalists who protested the movie not only refused to see it before they condemned, but have apparently never read the book, perhaps never heard of it before the movie’s release. When the press brought up the matter of the film’s source and the protestors felt obliged to discuss it, they proceeded to get simple facts wrong, facts verifiable in many reference books available in public libraries. For instance, they confused the book’s original publication date (1951) with the date of its American publication (1960). And even when they included Kazantzakis in their denunciations, they nevertheless continued to talk about the filmmakers as if they had invented the most offer d.ng episodes. If there is something spiritually pernicious in the matter of Last Temptation, shouldn’t the originator of the story be blamed before the mere adapters get slammed?
To be fair; those who knew of the book and judged it offensive probably felt that it was too late to do anything about it. It’s been in print in America for the last twenty-eight years. By beginning their protests before the movie was released, they were obviously hoping to head it off at the pass.
But now that both book and movie are commercially available, why does the film still draw most of the fire?
This brings me to the second, generic reason. The movie infuriates because it is a movie. Films have incendiary power that even the most vivid books can’t equal. This power derives from the concreteness of cinema and the relative ease with which even an illiterate or pre-literate audience can follow film narrative. For example, in the library where I am employed, there is absolutely no limit on which books a child may check out. But no child may check out any movie from our well-stocked video collection because the library administrators don’t want R and X rated films getting into the hands of children. So the kids may check out Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, but not its film version. The web of words and the reader’s effort to turn words into mental pictures supposedly render eroticism less explicit than the photographic image. (I doubt that, but my doubts would fill an entire essay.) Since the most denounced scene in Temptation is a sexual one, we may suppose that the cinematic sight of bodies embracing is more offensive than the literary description of same.
To make matters more complicated, no actual love scene takes place during the course of the “real” events in either book or movie. Christ never actually makes love to Magdalene or any other woman. Rather, while on the cross, he is given a chance, by an angel who later turns out to be Satan, to foreswear his godhead and lead a normal, earthly existence, which includes marriage, sex, fatherhood, and death. He momentarily accepts the offer and finds himself living a happy banal life in a sequence that is set in what I guess must be called future-conditional tense. But, finally, he rejects the devil’s offer and dies on the cross in a virginal state, embracing and fulfilling his divine mission. The Christ who married and made love is a Christ who gets cancelled.
Now in literature the future-conditional tense is a perfectly valid device. We entertain the “what if” for several pages, all the while keeping in mind that none of the events we are reading about are actually happening. They are merely being posited for a moment; then they evaporate as the hero or heroine dismisses them from mind.
But, in a movie, there is no conditional tense. Or, to put it more precisely, there is but it registers as a present tense. When we see an imagined act take place on screen, it simply happens, acted out by very solid actors against very solid scenery. Decades ago, such scenes were photographed through gauze or with grease coating the camera’s lens to give them an if-y quality. But, at least since Fellini’s 8-1/2, such devices have been abandoned. Dreams now register with the vividness of reality, and the IF holds the same visual status as the IS. So, when William Dafoe (as Jesus) embraces Barbara Hershey (as Magdalene), the love scene transpires before our eyes as a sensual reality even if Jesus later rejects this possibility. The image of Christ has made love to the image of Magdalene even if the reality of Jesus has not. For those to whom such imagery is vile, the film must be anathema in a way that the book is not. The present tense-ness of film lays it more open than literature to charges of scurrility.
Last Temptation’s enemies are welcome to the above argument, but count me out of the picket line. I admire the film. If the future-conditional love scene registers vividly, the ultimately chosen and irrevocable sacrifice on the cross is even more powerful. In fact, the film’s main virtue is that it conveys the biblical events with present-tense vividness. Here is a life of Christ filled with characters who don’t realize that they’re supposed to be the supporting cast milling around the Savior. Each person, whether enacting a major role or simply filling in the background, seems to think that he or she is the hero of this story. Nobody stands respectfully still to hear the latest Good News; each is too busy trying to hustle a living, outdo a competitor, schmooze with the neighbors, when suddenly this stranger from another village wanders through saying things that are nonsense or sedition or comfort and joy, depending on who is listening. It’s not that Christ is turned into a walking Rorschach test. Hardly. But Martin Scorsese, following Kazantzakis’s lead, refuses to deny the people caught up in the story of Jesus their own selfish reasons for being there. And, since nobody realizes that Christ is about to turn B.C. into A.D., nobody stands on ceremony with him. He’s just another prophet and listen, Bub, we’ve had a million of ’em so what’s your story? This creates suspense.
Instance: when Christ moves in to save Magdalene from stoning, none of her attackers is particularly intimidated by Jesus. To this mob, he’s just a meddling fool who’s asking for it. There’s no holy laser beam streaming out of Jesus’s eyes and neatly paralyzing some bully’s arm—zap!—in mid-throw. Instead, Jesus has to think quick and lines that look great in print, “let he who is without sin cast etc.,” aren’t going to be enough. In fact, Scorsese’s whole strategy in this, as in many other scenes in the movie, is not to let authorized aphorisms do the work of drama. Instead, we are allowed to eavesdrop on history and discover exactly what dangerous improvisation Jesus might have had to resort to in order to quell a mob. This Jesus doesn’t know if he’s going to succeed, and his uncertainty makes us feel the suspense that the scene should rightly evoke.
Instance: the Lazarus episode. This is usually staged with some wide cave filling the cinemascope screen, and Christ’s voice ringing out stereophonically. That approach is fine if Jesus is meant to be as cockily confident of his effects as P.T. Barnum. But suppose Christ isn’t sure he can raise the dead? This Jesus can’t afford to shout from a distance; he may well find himself shouting in vain. He gets close to the field of operation, right up to the mouth of the tomb, and peers into the darkness. We peer right into it with him. It’s unfathomable darkness. Nothing can live down there. It’s foolish to speak into such darkness. And it’s scary too. Jesus speaks quietly, shakily: “Lazarus, come forth.” Nothing. Silence. Reverse shot of Christ’s face at the cave’s mouth, darkness filling three-quarters of the screen to the right of Jesus’s pensive face. One troubled visage hovering above so much blackness. “Lazarus, come forth.” More silence. Nothing happens. Waiting. Stasis. Then: s-s-s-s! a bandaged arm sizzles out of the darkness and grabs Jesus’s hand with a smack. A quarter of the audience screamed and I nearly jumped out of my seat. It’s strictly a B-horror-movie effect (Scorsese used to work on Roger Gorman monster movies), yet it works. This Lazarus episode carries at least a scintilla of the shock it must have produced in its first witnesses. Part of the reason why it works here is that Christ is as shocked as anybody in the audience. We jump when he jumps. But what has happened to the serene Divinity who never seems more than mildly surprised at anything that happens to him?
There aren’t any novelistic, close-up descriptions of Christ’s reactions in the Gospel, so we can’t be clear about Jesus’s responses to his own miracles. But too much catechism cover artwork, plus too many bad Hollywood movies starring dignified bores such as H.B. Warner and Jeffrey Hunter, have perhaps left an image in too many minds of a Christ who is infuriatingly calm, serenely smug: a male Mona Lisa. I confess that such an image has lodged in my head for too many years. This movie shattered it. I was glad to let it go.
The film has plenty of faults. So many, in fact, that some intelligent people will be exasperated, even bored by it. Scorsese’s nervously leaping, tracking camerawork nicely duplicates the exclamatory style of Kazantzakis’s writing, but his work with the actors is more problematic. Scorsese’s previous work has been on colloquial scripts, often peopled with the Italian-Americans he grew up with. Here, the drama requires larger gestures, more sustained rhythms. The supporting cast is generally fine. Barbara Hershey is a Magdalene of troubled sensuality and baffled compassion. Verna Bloom is a fine-boned Mother Mary. David Bowie as Pontius Pilate amazed me. He has to play his interview with Christ entirely in longshot, using only his back, one quarter of his profile, and his voice to convey the Governor’s quizzical hedonism. This rock star responds with a vocal richness and physical finesse worthy of the finest Shakespearean actors.
But the main characters are Jesus and Judas, two men locked in a spiritual wrestling match that recalls the Myshkin-Rogozhin relationship in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. As Judas, Harvey Keitel hobbles his otherwise fine, fierce work with a too noticeable accent. Accents bedevil all costume dramas. They must never be too local. Keitel’s speech locates Judas not only in America but in a particular borough of New York City. When Judas tells Christ that “I’m not like udder [other] men,” he sound like a street hoodlum expostulating with his parish priest. But Keitel’s body, full of impacted violence, and his eloquently sullen face almost carry his performance past his vocal absurdities.
Kazantzakis’s depiction of Jesus reminds me of the way drama critic Stark Young described Othello: “. . . he has the simple human qualities to a magnificent degree . . . but all of them wholly and only alive within the tremendous current and blind propulsion of his nature.” William Dafoe is very good at suggesting Christ’s simpler human qualities. He holds children with convincing tenderness. He weeps feelingly for Magdalene’s self-degradation. He is a sly and debonair wonder-worker at the wedding in Cana. But he lacks “the tremendous current and blind propulsion” of a man who transcends humanity. He never suggests that angels and devils are always hovering near this Christ. Dafoe’s performance makes me wish that Scorsese had succeeded in shooting this movie when he first wanted to, six years ago. At that time Robert DeNiro had been mentioned as the actor who would play Christ. If only he had. The role needs a volcanic presence.
In his novel’s introduction, Kazantzakis states his fascination with “the dual substance of Christ . . . so human, so super human.” Christians won’t argue with the “dual substance” idea. But in the novel’s Jesus the substances don’t coexist peacefully. They struggle toward, sometimes past, each other. The Greek author’s Jesus thinks he is merely a man until he discovers the truth about himself. Discovers. In that word lies the difference between the Gospel Christ and Kazantzakis’s. The Gospel Christ launches Himself into the world in order to reveal Himself to others. Kazantzakis’s Christ begins his pilgrimage first to discover himself and only then to reveal himself to others. He is full of self-doubt and keeps switching courses: first the way of joy, then the way of the sword, then the path of self-sacrifice. This Jesus is, up to the moment of his death, always in the process of becoming Jesus, of finding out who Jesus is. In shoe, he is a dramatic tragic hero.
And that is the real source of the real problem with The Last Temptation of Christ, both novel and film. For orthodox Christians are not worshiping a tragic hero when they practice their faith. They are not worshiping a struggler but the resolution of the struggle; they are not studying narrowly transcended failure but seeking unimpeachable spiritual success; they do not want a potential sinner who has overcome his sinful nature, but the unbesmirchable Forgiver of all sins. In short, they do not want, cannot abide, a Jesus in flux. They want stability.
This is the real folly, from the Christian point of view, of The Last Temptation of Christ, not the three seconds of sex that so incense the protestors. Their rage over this brief passage has helped narrow the debate over the film and given both intelligent and stupid agnostics and atheists one more occasion to laugh at fundamentalist Christians as illiterate fools. And, since the Temptation controversy was never a matter of censorship, but rather a power struggle to determine whether many people would see the movie or stay away, the protestors have lost.
Life is not a hothouse and we are not shrinking violets who wilt at the first blast of cold, alien air. This movie will not shrivel the souls of the strong. And—this cannot be said too often—major works of art communicate themselves only to the strong.
Heretical or not, Kazantzakis and Scorsese tower over their accusers.