Note: This proposal was originally written for a book collection entitled Passionate Dialogues: Critical Perspectives on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Thus, the expected essay that was to be produced from it was much longer than those I typically assign. Hence, why there are about 3 paragraphs worth of intro material rather than a single paragraph. If you look up the published essay, you will find that these three paragraphs are largely unchanged and make up what is the introduction of that essay.

Also, you will note that the proposal contains all of the elements necessary to a good thesis proposal or introduction to a research paper. 1) It introduces the subject matter. 2) It introduces the critical conversation that has existed around that topic (normally, more of this discussion would have been derived from scholarly journals—however, at the time that I wrote this The Passion had been in release for about 2 months, thus there were no critical essays on the film as of yet and, thus, why I use web based criticism instead—this is not really a preferred method of research just a necessity in this case). 3)It introduces the thesis (the last sentence of the third paragraph).

The Beauty of Violence?: The Transubstantial and Charismatic Semiotics of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ

In “The Fiction Writer & His Country” (1957), Flannery O’Connor addresses concerns and critiques that her fiction contains figures and imagery that are both overly grotesque and overly violent by explaining that:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make those appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. (34)

If O’Connor was right in feeling concerned that her audience would be unfamiliar with the Christian meaning, and, if that audience was shocked by the violence that she used to represent her images, a similar defense might be made of a similar artist with a similar worldview. Or, if not a defense, at least an explanation of the necessity that the Christian artist or, more specifically--in the case of both O’Connor and Mel Gibson--a Catholic artist feels in presenting violence as a vehicle to understanding the world or how violence informs the traditionalist Catholic worldview.

Indeed, criticism of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004)--like criticisms of O’Connor’s fiction--have largely focused on the violent imagery of this work. A quick scan of Yahoo’s “Critics Reviews” of The Passion will find critiques of the movie, like Ty Burr’s “'Passion of the Christ' is a graphic profession of Mel Gibson's faith,” that describe its “bludgeoning, forensic intensity” and how it is “a gruesomely physical picture.” In “Movie review: ‘The Passion of the Christ,’” Michael Wilmington chastises it for being “more of a study in brutality than an exploration of Christ’s message^” and by claiming that it is a “graphic depiction of the crucifixion of Christ [that] misses any spiritual meaning to this seismic event.” Additionally, he claims that the work “is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath.” Yet, as Cynthia Fuchs points out in her review entitled “What is Truth?,” to her this is a film concerned with and derived from a very particular worldview, as she points out that much of Gibson’s film work (as an actor, not a writer/director) has recently done. Fuchs suggests that The Passion’s focus seems to be on addressing “the problem of truth” just as a movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s faith-centered Signs (2002) is. While Fuchs acknowledges this concern by examining scenes involving Christ and Pilate’s discussions or Pilate and his wife’s discussions of truth, nevertheless, it is not these scenes of prophetic truth vs. philosophical stoicism or pragmatism vs. intuition that become the focus of the film’s framing of a proper epistemology. Instead, she suggests that what is at “issue here is the way that violence makes its own kind of truth, even as representations of violence reframe presumptions of truth” because “Jesus' bloodied body incarnates a reality” through its message of the “obvious, literal, embodied loss of life.” If this “literalization” becomes a vehicle for truth, she asks, “how can anyone process imagery so suffused with violence and suffering?”

The answer to this question may be quite simple: one who holds with a traditionalist Catholic worldview. It is notable that the crucifix of Catholic iconography contains the bloodied body of Christ on the cross, while the more Anglicized, Protestant cross is empty. While the latter symbol seems to emphasize the resurrection of the Christ (a now empty cross), the former seems to emphasize the necessity for remembering the suffering of the Christ as the means to salvation. Fuchs observes that the purpose of The Passion seems to be “to make clear the agony Jesus (must have) endured, [and] to give viewers an ‘experience’ that approximates the Passion, a pain they will remember and believe (in).” This focus on the audience’s direct experience of suffering, agony, is akin in some way to the experience of stigmata in Catholic mysticism. The stigmata are not a mere representation of the suffering of the Christ; it is a literal experience of the pain endured by Christ and, again, most literally through actual wounds, not representations of them. Fuchs suggests that Gibson’s literality of “viciousness and distress [. . .] suggests a strange dearth of imagination, as if distrusting that viewers might see metaphor as a means to truth.” Indeed, however, the distrust that viewers might see “metaphor as a means to truth” seems to be critically bound up in the notion of Catholic faith. Thus, I plan to show that understanding the aesthetics of the film requires an understanding of the Catholic worldview and how that view represents the relationship between violence and truth.