Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars

by Thomas R. Lindlof

Anything about Jesus is dangerous.

having the two of them on the bed naked is a red flag that is inviting a reaction that doesn’t give the whole affair a fair hearing.

portraying Judas as Jesus’ close ally was clearly not the orthodox interpretation, but it wasn’t a liability either.

this [film] is a very powerful statement about Jesus.”

Jesus was tortured—at least until he went into the desert and realized that the divine nature he had been fighting was part of himself and in fact his true calling. How then did Jesus deal with this knowledge?

the story Kazantzakis tells is a religious variation of It’s a Wonderful Life.

the difference that any one man makes in the world.

imagine the most profound what-if’s of human experience. What if we had never existed? What if we could choose to live our lives differently? What if we said no to God’s will?

the temptation Satan offers on the cross is the ultimate temptation, . . . the temptation to give up the divine and to live out your life as a human.

So Satan has tempted Jesus with the triumph of his humanity over his divinity.

He always felt that where you got killed was kind of in the middle, where you made a middlebrow movie at a middle-level price with middle-level stars.”

both saw a commercially exploitable vein of controversy in Last Temptation.

This off-the-entertainment-page publicity, so the thinking went, would create awareness of the movie on its own accord, thereby lowering the advertising costs that a movie normally requires to open.

forgiveness as the letting go of one’s self, the path to communion with the other, and the only way of “breaking the chain of evil.”

“[Forgiveness] is not ours to give,” he wrote, “but to receive; the human being cannot create it. We can be certain only that it is beyond us, above us—and we can never entirely know anything on a level higher than our own.”

“Nothing greater can happen to a human being than that he is forgiven,”27 wrote Tillich, because forgiving heals our estrangement from God and our own selves.

When the Italians had to play both Roman soldiers and Jews in one sequence of shots, their faces were wrapped in scarves so the audience wouldn’t know the soldiers were the same people they were confronting.

In Jay Cocks’s view, The Last Temptation of Christ may have actually benefited from its hardships. “When you’re working at that kind of energy, under that kind of time stricture, you really can get a kind of a boldness that might not come through otherwise if you’re a little fatter and a little slower.”

“So we decided,” said Scorsese, “to call it The Passion, because it is full of passion. It is my passion.

They also wanted the administration to get out front on fighting moral decay in the media—especially what they saw as a flood of pornography, violence, and antireligious bigotry.

The 1980s witnessed the takeoff and acceleration of a full-blown evangelical subculture.

a studio-financed movie could pull in a faith-based audience if it had the right spiritual and narrative elements. “You only have your credibility in this business,” Penland once said, “and once you lose your credibility, you’ve lost everything.”

The men shared their life stories and bared their feelings about working in a business that constantly challenged their faith.

It was obvious that he was enough ‘out of phase’ with Hollyweird that if God hadn’t brought him, he wouldn’t be here.”

The Last Temptation of Christ, said Pollock, sets forth that Christ is both divine and human and does not deny anything that finally is important about the nature of Jesus.

This was the only way he could preserve his credibility.

“Joshua went through a process of coming to terms with [questions like] what did he think, why had he left, what didn’t feel right to him, and what did he then believe.”

The hours he spent listening to the SIO participants sharpened Josh Baran’s understanding of how people behave when they feel their beliefs and sacred images are threatened.

he learned that it was vital not to try to “deprogram” anyone, but instead to show respect for—indeed, to encourage the free expression of—differing viewpoints.

Josh Baran’s experience with Sorting It Out prepared him for operating in this battlefield. He had seen the dark side of religious commitment, the tendency of some of its strains to erect a system of beliefs that denies the validity of other ways. Intolerance of any path but the one “true” way follows a similar story line everywhere, whether it is a cult’s perfect master demanding followers’ fealty to an ideal of spiritual purity or religious leaders asserting that the United States is destined to be a Christian nation. Baran saw it as his mission to use the tools of the public relations discipline to open up a space in people’s minds for the concept of freedom of expression—to remind them that it is legitimate in America to write and read varied interpretations of art and religion, to have one’s own internal definition of what is true.

“Ultimately this is . . . a cultural war that’s been going on for a long time and will go on forever probably. And that’s the forces of the reactionary right against an open society.

They’re kind of the thought police.