‘Last Temptation of Christ’ - Review
Every year, Christians celebrate the week before Easter, known as Holy Week, in solemnity so that they can remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ — this is what we call the Passion. It’s a sad week, and on Good Friday, it culminates in the death of Christ. Growing up as a Copt, I remember an annual tradition of watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ on Good Friday — clips from the film would silently play on the TVs and projectors in our church as we raised elegiac melodies to Heaven. The Passion is a graphic movie, and it scarred me; the memory of watching Jesus being whipped still lives in my head years later. It's this violent and graphic aspect that draws Christians to the film. The currency of filmic representations of the Passion exists in their ability to arouse pathos: whether it’s through performance or blood, something that Passion does exceptionally well, even if I do get annoyed every time I remember Jim Caviezel plays such a fantastic Christ. Why then does Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, also a retelling of Christ's life and the Passion narrative, not share the same esteem as Gibson’s Passion?
I had a chance to watch Last Temptation for the first time in August as part of a banned movie series playing at the Siskel in Chicago. Last Temptation has a controversial reputation among Christians, in stark contrast to Passion which, ever since its debut, has cemented itself as a core part of 21st-century Christian iconography and identity — across all denominations. I often credit a lot of my thinking on Christianity and religion to reading the book the film Last Temptation is based on, written by Nikos Kazantzakis. Just like the movie, the book met controversy and bans upon its debut. Both book and film take liberties with the Gospel narratives of Christ’s life, and in case this is lost on the audience, they address this in the preface and opening credits.
I don't care for how controversial the book and film are. I am endlessly in love with the story of the Passion and all its artistic representations, whether it’s film, painting, or music. I listen to Fairuz’ album of sacred Easter songs every year. Last year, when I saw Dalí’s Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) at the Met, I stood transfixed. For Christians, to meditate on the Passion is a fearful, yet awe-inspiring experience from which every other thing in life finds meaning. Before the life and death of Christ, I find myself powerless, forever ensnared. Had I not been born Christian, I would have found myself drawn to its gravity regardless.
And all the same, I’m driven mad by how little we know of Christ’s life — the Bible, as I see it, tells us all we need to know, but other than this account of his three-year ministry, do we ever get a look into his childhood, his adolescence, his young adulthood? The Coptic Church has a long-held tradition, little-known to even other Christians, of the young Christ and his three year refuge in Egypt. Where the Christ walked, idols and temples toppled, springs sprang, and people bore witness to the Messiah. On my trip to Egypt this year, I had a chance to see the well from which Jesus drank from during the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. I felt a quietness cover my soul as I stood peering over the edge. What can you say about something that special?
Other than that tradition and a few snippets from the Gospels (e.g. “Jesus wept”, Gethsemane), we are never invited into the mind of the Christ. Jesus is fully God and fully man, meaning that he took on flesh and experienced all the passions of humanity: hunger, thirst, pain, and temptation. Yet he never sinned. What must have been like in the mind of Jesus, a man tempted by the ordinary passions of human flesh, but upon whose mission hinged the union of God and human?
This is where the controversy and the beauty of Last Temptation starts — it imagines all these temptations explicitly, most problematic among them being the temptation of lust towards Mary Magdalene. Last Temptation breaks with Gospel to imagine that these two are destined for love, but the young Jesus refuses her advances in order to be with God, driving her towards a life of sin, yet in his heart of hearts, her love and seduction burn and tempt him. Jesus hesitates, wavers, he’s indecisive — he runs towards her to apologize for breaking her heart, then runs away, in fear, into the desert to hear the voice of God. This didn’t land well with conservative American Christians, who decided to boycott the film. We must believe that Christ is fully man and fully God, but to imagine the former, taken to its full conclusion, makes us uncomfortable.
Why? A few months ago, I had a conversation with a priest about what humility really means in the context of the Christian life: humility is to come before the Divine and to realize the full extent of our wretchedness. The popular understanding of humility as a sort of lessening of ourselves only approximates what this virtue really is. Humility sees the expanse between the created and the Divine and feels a sober awe at that gap that stretches beyond end. Perhaps watching Jesus, both God and man, struggle with the small things that trouble us in our daily lives reminds us how pathetic these tribulations really are. The reactionary response to Last Temptation does not arise out of any genuine humility to be clear, but its origin lies in a similar shame. This is Christ, the redemption of humans, despondent over lost love? Instead of invoking any introspection, critics of Last Temptation turned their shame outwards to ask for the ban and censorship of the film. No — this is not right; we must face it headfirst.
Last Temptation confronts our shame by taking an adoptionist view of Christ (e.g. Jesus who became God, not at birth, but later in life), and so he is a Christ for the 20th-century and beyond: he is torn in a million directions, he tears his clothes to shriek to Heaven to ask God, “What do you want from me?” The call towards God comes as a pain, as voices that torture him without ceasing. This is not a Christ who comes down from Heaven to subsume humanity into God, but a man who rises up from Earth to draw humanity into the fold of the Divine. This is a Christ who wrestles with his destiny. The film foreshadows this arc in its opening shot: Jesus the carpenter finishes a cross and stretches his hands across it; the cross he hesitantly embraces will kill another, but this is what he must do — he must embrace his own Cross and death for the sake of humanity. This view of Christ’s Divine and human nature lies outside orthodox Christology, but Scorsese takes the dogmatic lens on Christ we’re taught and purposely distorts it to magnify his humanity on the silver screen. Willem Dafoe’s emotive performance only elevates this perspective. When Dafoe’s Christ cries and blubbers in the Garden of Gethsemane for the Father to take away this cup from him, I could hear sniffles from every corner of my theater.
Last Temptation transgresses theological lines, but its careful and measured twists of Christology speak to a deep, deep love for the religion and the Passion. Kazantzakis waxes poetic in the preface to Last Temptation, writing, “If we are to be able to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish: his victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men.” How many times was my heart pierced by Kazantzakis’ writing? I wish I knew more of Jesus: his sufferings, his little earthly desires and hopes, the silences he shared between himself and his disciples, his friends. I bleed, because I am ever drawing closer, yet there is still a gulf between my wretchedness and the perfection of Christ.
Aside from centering the pathos of the story of the Christ, Last Temptation leverages the medium to make novel theological points with implications for the Christian life. The entire film builds up to, well, a final and last temptation on the Cross. Jesus is humiliated and crucified, naked — Christ very likely died naked, as this was the norm for crucifixions during Roman rule. How humiliating, how pathetic, how black was the death of God that day, nude and scarred, betrayed and alone. In the Biblical account, someone jeers and asks Christ why he does not save himself. In both Kazantzakis’ and Scorsese’s account, Christ imagines being saved — he is taken off the Cross, and a girl, ostensibly an angel, brings him to Mary Magdalene. They profess their love, marry, and that same night, she nurses Jesus’ wounds. Soon, they begin having children.
In his vision, he feels content, he has attained all that he ever wanted, namely, the domestic life. Surrounded by wives and children, he grows old. What else does a man need? This is both the smallest and greatest joy of humans: the plain, resounding joy of family, love, and companionship. Jesus becomes feeble in his old age and on his deathbed, his disciples, betrayed by Jesus’ act of self-preservation, come to bitterly chide him. The full weight of his actions comes crashing down; Jesus has forsaken being the Christ for a temptation of the Devil. Outside his room, Jerusalem burns to ashes, and amidst the flames, he crawls to Golgotha to plead to go back, to die on the Cross. Scorsese traces the details of Christ’s imagined family life for what feels like the better part of an hour — the whiplash when we cut from Jesus among the flames to the bloodied Jesus on the Cross proclaiming, “It is accomplished!” brought to mind Scorsese’s quote from an interview earlier this year: “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be…” Me too. How dear this medium is to me.
In the Bible, the greatest temptation of the Devil is the promise of all the Earthly powers and kingdoms; in Last Temptation, the greatest temptation inverts the world for domestic life. It’s not greatness or power or control, but the simple joy of a family that becomes Jesus’ biggest stumbling block. We often call Christ the second Adam — the first Adam brought forth humanity and sin, a separation from God, and to account for the failure of the first, the second Adam brings forth a new humanity that is in communion with God. Surrounded by all of Creation, the first Adam was still alone, to the point of Divine intervention ("It is not good for the man to be alone," reads Genesis 2:18). The second Adam must overcome this loneliness that is a perpetual thorn in his side. If he gives up this mission, humankind will continue to be broken, bound by death, in separation from each other and the Divine. He sacrifices his union with Mary Magdalene in view of something greater.
Christ’s mission weighed heavy on his soul. He must have imagined if there were another way. The new humanity, this new possibility of union with the Divine is hard-won, now the hate that has fractured the human heart is mended — now the human can reach the Divine. Last Temptation is a bleeding-heart portrayal of the humanity of Christ.
In spite of how somber this whole affair is, I attribute a lot of my optimism to Last Temptation. In the film, Christ speaks to a crowd in Jerusalem, and they ask if he has come to do away with the Covenant. How does his message of love mesh with the God who calls himself a “man of war” in Scripture? God’s Word does not change, answers Jesus, but man’s heart simply expands to hold more of it. I think reading that part of the book years ago is what made this whole religion click for me — our telos is unity with God, to eternal communion with him, and even now our hearts keep expanding to understand more and more of Christ’s message. If our hearts can change and grow, if this creature we call “human” holds the very Image of God, there’s hope! The arc of history will bend towards justice! This has particular importance to me as a Copt — our people have been persecuted for centuries and centuries, and yet we survive and persist. We’ll continue to do so, in love and hope: now joined to Christ, Death has been overcome. God is not done with us yet. How dearly I hope and pray so.
As Last Temptation ends on an image of a triumphant, smiling, bloodied Jesus on the Cross, trumpets sound and dazzling images of red and blue fly by — Jesus has fulfilled his mission, he has overcome the last temptation, and the powers of Heaven welcome the Victor over Death.
I am adding a new tradition of watching The Last Temptation during Holy Week. To my last breath, this film will be close to my heart.
