TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/88/88furor.1

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                                                                                August 15, 1988

CINEMA

A Holy Furor


Boycotts and belligerence greet a startlingly new film about
Jesus


Jesus has brief onscreen sex with his first wife Mary Magdalene
and later commits adultery. Judas is a hero, the strongest and
best of the apostles. Paul is a hypocrite and liar. Jesus is
so dazed that, even on the eve of his Crucifixion, he is still
not quite sure whether to preach love or murder Romans.

Ready for Director Martin Scorsese's new movie, The Last
Temptation of Christ?

Powerful, eccentric, bloody, filled with theological gaffes,
Temptation is an excruciatingly earnest and freewheeling
docudrama based on the 1955 best-selling novel by a tormented
Greek Orthodox believer, Nikos Kazantzakis. It is the result
of an obsessive 16-year quest by one of Hollywood's most
esteemed directors to bring to the screen a struggling Christ
who only slowly comes to see himself as the Messiah. The movie,
Scorsese says, "is my way of trying to get closer to God."

When it opens this Friday in New York, Los Angeles and other
cities, religious crowd scenes are almost certain to appear
outside the theaters as well as in them. For the past month,
conservative Christians have denounced the film as blasphemous,
staged demonstrations, called for boycotts and shaped a
national campaign to have the picture destroyed or withdrawn.
Along the way, there have been anti-Semitic incidents and
threats against the "non-Christians" at Universal Pictures who
took a chance on the film partly to encourage the filmmaker to
pursue future projects at the studio.

So far, most of the voices raised against the film belong to
people who have not yet seen it. Italian Director Franco
Zeffirelli called the movie "damaging to the image of Christ.
He cannot be made the object of low fantasies."
Fundamentalist Leader Jerry Falwell called for a boycott against
MCA, Universal's parent company; all MCA products, which
include Grosset & Dunlap publishers, Spencer Gifts and Motown
Records; and any theater that shows the film. Said Falwell:
"Neither the label "fiction" nor the First Amendment gives
Universal the right to libel, slander and ridicule the most
central figure in world history."

To head off further furor or perhaps even cash in on it,
Universal decided last week to move the opening up from Sept.
23 to Aug. 12. Says Tom Pollock, chairman of MCA's motion
picture group:  "The best thing that can be done for The Last
Temptation of Christ at this time is to make it available to the
American people and allow them to draw their own conclusions,
based on fact not fallacy."  But Tim Penland, a born-again
marketing expert once hired by Universal to placate conservative
critics and now a critic himself, believes the six-week jump
will unleash more Fundamentalist anger. "It's the most serious
mistake a studio has made in decades," he says.

The dramatic centerpiece of the film is a half-hour segment in
which the dying Christ, played by William Dafoe, hallucinates
about the devil's final temptation:  come down from the Cross,
renounce your role as the Messiah, marry Mary Magdalene and
live a long and ordinary life.

Nothing unorthodox there, strictly speaking. As both fully
human and fully divine, Jesus is viewed in Christian theology
as free of sin but subject to all temptations, including sexual
ones. Following Kazantzakis, however, Scorsese presents the
early Jesus as a weak and dithering collaborator who builds
crosses used by the Romans to execute Jewish rebels. Later he
becomes the wild- eyed guru to a band of ragged followers but
remains apprehensive and fundamentally confused about his
message and his mission. He persuades Judas, his best friend,
to betray him to fulfill God's plan. During the reverie on the
Cross, Jesus is shown briefly having sex with his wife, Mary
Magadalene. Later in the fantasy, after Magdalene dies, he weds
Mary of the biblical duo Mary and Martha, then commits adultery
with Martha.

Temptation is drenched in blood. The blood of sacrificed
animals runs through the streets, blood unaccountably pours out
of an apple Jesus eats and, at the Last Supper, the wine
literally turns into blood. In one grotesque scene, Jesus
reaches into his chest (though it looks more like his belly),
yanks out his heart and holds it up for his apostles to admire.

For a few critics, this display seems to be an arch-sendup of
the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Some
dialogue also hints at satire, probably unintentionally. Asked
by a Zealot to compare being dead with being alive, a
resurrected Lazarus says thoughtfully, "I was a little
surprised. There isn't that much difference."  At times Jesus
sounds like a mumbling method actor (his first sermon begins
"Umm, uh, I'm sorry"), at others like a recent graduate of the
Shirley MacLaine School of Theology ("Everything's part of
God").

For Scorsese, a former altar boy who once wanted to be a
priest, the movie is no frivolous matter. Actress Barbara
Hershey, who plays Mary Magdalene, gave him a copy of the
Kazantzakis novel in 1972, and he has been contemplating it ever
since. Kazantzakis' Jesus, he insists, is both human and
divine, in accordance with Christian teaching. What interested
Scorsese in the author's approach "was that the human part of
Jesus would have trouble accepting the divine."

For many believers, the problem with all this is that Scorsese
is not tinkering with a minor historical figure, as Gore Vidal
did with Aaron Burr, but with founder of their faith. "This is
an intentional attack on Christianity," concludes Joseph
Reilly, national director of Morality in Media. The group is
particularly incensed by Jesus' anguished comment, "I am a
liar, I am a hypocrite, I am afraid of everything . . . Lucifer
is inside me."

Universal Pictures had anticipated controversy. Paramount,
originally set to produce the movie in 1983, backed out just
weeks before the cameras were to roll. To head off a storm,
Universal took the unusual step last January of hiring Penland
to calm down the religious right. But Penland resigned in
June, charging that Universal had reneged on a promise to let
conservative religious leaders see the film and comment on it
well in advance of its release.

Although Universal did hold screenings for religious leaders
last month, most conservatives refused to come. Instead they
staged protests at the Universal lot and published and
admonishing ad in the Hollywood Reporter. In a letter to MCA
Chairman Lew Wasserman, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ
offered to raise money to reimburse Universal for all copies of
the film, which would "promptly be destroyed."  Universal
responded with lofty, full-page newspaper ad in four cities,
quoting Thomas Jefferson and announcing that the constitutional
rights to free expression and freedom of religion were not for
sale.

In the most organized campaign of resistance, Methodist
Minister Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family
Association, is sending out 2.4 million mailings protesting the
film and has scheduled anti-Temptation spots on 700 Christian
radio stations and 50 to 75 TV stations. "In the twelve years
of my current ministry," he says, "I've never seen anything like
the response to this movie."

Make that the response to the response. As an annoyed Scorsese
points out, "Ninety-nine percent of the people who are
complaining have not seen the picture."  Any complainers are
instead responding to a bootleg copy of an outdated script,
circulated by the Sisterhood of Mary, a group of
ultraconservative Protestant women. That version contained the
egregious line, which is not in the movie, spoken by Jesus to
Mary Magdalene:  "God sleeps between your legs."

Universal has tried to calm things down, inserting a disclaimer
in the movie saying it is fiction and making Scorsese available
for interviews stressing his religious sincerity. Yet the
protest has taken on a life of its own. Virtually every
televangelist, including Pat Robertson, has mentioned the film
during appeals for money. A nonsectarian group called
Concerned Women for America has asked all MCA stockholders to
sell the company's stock on Sept. 15. And Mother Angelica, a
nun who runs the nation's largest Catholic cable network, is
calling on protesters to drive with their lights on on Aug. 22.
Both dates were picked at random when the opening was still set
for September.

Some of the protests have taken on ugly anti-Semitic overtones.
Three weeks ago, the Rev. R.L. Hymers Jr., a Christian
extremist in the Los Angeles area, staged a demonstration near
the Beverly Hills home of MCA Chairman Wasserman, who is Jewish.
An actor portraying Wasserman stepped repeatedly on the bloody
back of an actor dressed as Jesus and carrying a heavy cross.
An airplane meanwhile flew overhead trailing a banner that
read, WASSERMAN FANS JEW-HATRED W/ TEMPTATION, and a crowed
chanted, "Bankrolled by Jewish money."

As conservatives shriek all around them, liberal churchmen have
been bending over backward to avoid criticizing the film,
stressing Scorsese's right to interpret Jesus in his own way
and sometimes issuing a tepid defense or two. Fundamentalist
fears are exaggerated, says the Rev. Eugene Schneider of the
United Church of Christ, because "people who go to the movie are
going to come out bored and leave before it is over."

The Rt. Rev. Paul Moore Jr., Episcopal Bishop of New York,
offered one of the strongest defenses, calling Temptation
"theologically sound."  Though the lovemaking between Jesus and
Mary Magdalene may offend some, he said, "Remember, it's a
dream. This is yet another portrait -- a work of art -- which
emphasizes certain aspects of Jesus."  The Rev. William Fore of
the National Council of Churches similarly sees the movie as "an
honest attempt to tell the story of Jesus from a different
perspective."

Catholics and Methodists have issued no formal response to the
film. Bishop Anthony Bosco of Greensburg, Pa., head of the
communications department for the National Council of Catholic
Bishops, thinks that the movie should be allowed to expire
quietly. "This too shall pass away," he says. But not all
Catholics are so patient:  his office has received hundreds of
phone calls demanding that the church speak out. Says Bishop
Bosco:  "The anti-Semitism and the hatred this movie has caused
can hardly please the heart of Christ."

Many clergymen say they have no interest in fanning hysteria
over the film, but they wish that Scorsese had made a better
movie. The film's Jesus questions himself so much that "it's
sort of like watching The Three Faces of Eve," complains the
Rev. Michael Morris, who teaches religion and the cinema at a
Catholic school in Berkeley.

There are knotty theological problems too. In the dream
sequence, for example, when Jesus interrupts Paul's preaching
to explain that he did not die and rise again, Paul says the
facts are not important as long as people have something to
believe in. This appears to reinforce the familiar and cynical
view that Paul invented Christianity and distorted Jesus'
teachings. Scorsese's Jesus also makes a number of doctrinal
blunders. He announces that his death will pay for his own
sins, rather than for the sins of mankind. And he picks up dirt
and stones and says, "This is my body too," which apparently
makes him a founder of pantheism as well as Christianity.

Such theological slipups are fueling passions about the film.
Father Morris says he was told by Scorsese that the filmmaker
wonders why everyone is so upset when "it's just a movie."
After all, the director said, he has a right to work out his
private quest for Jesus on film. "This irks me a bit," admits
Father Morris. "You can't be working out private problems to
the degree that it causes people to riot in the streets."
Although that prospect is unlikely, The Last Temptation has
touched off the angriest religious debate in years.

By John Leo. Reported by Marguerite Michaels/New York and
James Willwerth/Los Angeles.