March 3, 2004
“The Passion of Christ”
Enjoyed seeing Gibson's film last Friday with my friend Janet Cook’s church group. I found it faithful to my vision of the Passion formed by reading my parent’s copy of 
The Day Christ Died
The scourging was the part of the film that was perhaps the most inhumane of all. Gibson finds a style closer to Fellini than that of any American filmmaker to depict the hideousness of Jesus’s flaying alive -- a touch of the impossible, the unreal, a call to a buried awareness that such bullying could part of human nature.
I wondered as Christ staggered to Golgotha whether modern crucifixions would deter the crime rate. Certainly scourging looked like it would give pause to any post-Renaissance mind, even the knucklehead population of our drug-dealing street corner here in Upper Fells Point, Baltimore.
Here’s Richard Cohen’s take on the Passion, terming it “fascistic,” buttressing this observation with rather inpenetrable logic. He does acknowledge not being a typical viewer. One wonders about the futility of this column, an atypical viewer professing incomprehension, which could be summed up by the headline “member of the Mandarin class takes platform to demonstrate Mandarinness.”
