I knew it wasn't a great idea to chortle during the scourging of Christ, but some things you can't help.
The woman seated next to me better preserved her composure; all I heard was a clucked tongue, like you'd hear in the company of a grandparent if young kids were cursing on the bus. I was impressed. The soldiers, after all, were really leering right then; they'd set the plain whips down and picked up huge chains, dangling with crooked, dirty metal. I struggled to keep from roaring.
And, someday, believe me, people will come around to my point of view, and we'll all finally agree that
The Passion of the Christ really was the tackiest movie in the whole wide world circa 2004. And no, I'm not addressing its cultural implications or whether it's a 'snuff film' or not; I didn't think it's
worth that, aesthetically. It's
silly! I
tittered! There's a lot of gooey makeup, yes, but gosh - I was raised Catholic, my 2nd grade teacher had a postcard painting of the scourged Christ standing there with his skin hanging off his body in bloodied strips, the guy who played Jesus in that movie was my college commencement speaker, and I've no doubt watched enough horror movies to establish a
prima facie case for my own mental derangement, this column standing as Exhibit A.
In sum, you need more than gore effects and Jesus Christ to move me. And, sitting there in the theater that day, it didn't seem like the crowd was terribly moved either. No screaming children. No laments. I'd heard stories on the internet of people falling to the floor and wailing in the restrooms, although I guess those might have been the same people the media kept identifying as folks who didn't go to movies otherwise.
Suddenly, the spectral form of film critic Armond White appeared above my shoulder, as had been happening with worrisome frequency since I got bounced off my dad's insurance.
"
Drop those scales from your eyes, kid, it's time to see the light," he bellowed. "
We've had enough of your lefty-secular condescension. People who don't watch movies like this? Get over yourself, asshole. Where's your respect for humanity? You don‘t know a thing, wallowing in your B-nerd laziness, looking at a film like Dreyer's and seeing nothing?"
"Dreyer?!" I choked, gasping, "Armond, Jesus just invented the modern table! Everything's slow motion and exotic chants! Satan walked by holding a baby with a scary guy's face on it, like
Come to Daddy!"
"
And? Why is that wrong? Because it's the apparatus of the mainstream? The popular communication? You're dreaming! It's like Dreyer because it's transubstantiating art into spirituality, and people, lots of real, thinking people tragically beyond your unctuous social privilege, understand that in a way your art school terminology and your anti-religious critical non-tradition can't cope with! And what's wrong with slow motion? Out of fashion? Are you some kind of… hipster??"
Wind bellowed through the theater then. I covered my ears. The glasses on the woman next to me cracked. The screen warped. Dragons roiled in the abyss below. The werewolves howled in triumph. I pulled out my St. Catherine of Bologna keychain. It was different. She was frowning.
I've never fully recovered from that incident, but I remain resolute in my cinematographic values. It's not that I think the spirit is a theme that belongs to some austere, churchmouse-quiet substrata of film, but every frame of the Mel Gibson film groans under gloss, hunched from action movie techniques and banally ‘ecstatic' poetry. Its creative toolkit is popular, but also
distracting from constant usage in monied Hollywood products. Some would call that turning the secular world's weapons against it, but I say it kicks back to defeat the purpose.
No, when I want some hard-hitting contemporary mass religious art-as-cultural subversion, I find myself always returning to the comics of Jack T. Chick. Many words have been written about Chick -- his famous giveaway tracts have doubtlessly made him one of the most-encountered cartoonists in the United States, though most readers couldn't tell you his name -- yet few of them consider the cultural stance of his art, campy and out-of-it though the stuff might seem.
Chick began as an artist in 1960, after all, a time when comics still had much of the snap of mass appeal. His innovation was to marry the appeal of comics art, so easily consumed, with the long-lived format of religious tracts; the idea supposedly came from hearing of Chinese communists distributing comics to the wider populace in the decade prior. And indeed, his comics would eventually come to engage the reader in the manner of psychological warfare, poking and prodding at cultural certainties, and shouting over and over that funny things were true, and that sure things were nothing surer than ruin.
This was not so unique. By the time Chick's comics began pouring out in earnest, the underground era of comics had begun in North America. The old E.C. genres became forums for questioning the majority culture, if only by way of being overtly sexual, or funny or gross in a way funnybooks couldn't have been before. They didn't need the straight newsstands either; head shops would do.
The same was true for Jack T. Chick. His operation was (and is) small, with the vast majority of his comics drawn by himself or his popular realist hand Fred Carter. His distribution was tiny, but
canny, relying on payment in bulk from a system of often ad hoc purveyors who'd then give the product away, often just leaving them in opportune spots. Truly this was
underground work, and personal!
And yes, it was
against the culture. You can call Christians the majority in the United States, but you'd be hard-pressed to apply that label to Chick's form of evangelical fundamentalism, and from that perspective he fronted a popular cultural resistance, if one more inclined to masquerading in the majority's dress before striking. Chick's comics sought popularity, yes, and often in generic terms: the blaxploitation film; role-playing fantasies; super-charged Biblical tales. He and Carter even started a proper comics pamphlet series,
The Crusaders, in which a pair of idealized man-of-action versions of the authors starred in bloody suspense thrillers and horror pieces, all for the love of Christ.
Many tried, but few survived as Chick did. I think it's his very success, his willingness to try and adapt his subject matter to different modes of popular culture for subversive purposes that have led people to deem him a camp figure, a hapless lunatic. But I'm not laughing, not like I did with Mel Gibson - Chick's work is too shoestring personal, too consistent with its voice across hundreds of stories, so many with little unbelievers -- good people, Christian many, but insufficiently so -- hearing hundreds of truths, shocked and brought to tears. There's raw power to that, repulsive as some of the ideas are.
Moves too, can manage that Jack T. Chick effect. Not Chick's own movie, unfortunately; he put together a film titled
The Light of the World in 2003, a pan-‘n-zoom tour of 360 oil paintings by Carter, but its staid pace (and awful, hectoring narration) captured none of the immediacy of the man's comics, terrific Carter monster designs aside.
No, I'm thinking of something like Ron Ormond's 1971 hour-long picture
If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? Ormond was an exploitation and country-fried specialist who gave up the likes of
Mesa of Lost Women (1953) and
The Girl From Tobacco Row (1966) for cinematic witnessing after surviving a plane crash. He hooked up with noted preacher
Estus W. Pirkle, an entrepreneur in selling taped sermons, and the two set about adapting
one of Pirkle's most famed pieces to film.
It's extraordinary to watch, because Ormond left behind absolutely none of his interest in exploitable, no-money regional pop filmmaking. It is
exactly like a Chick comic brought to life -- to the point where it's very easy to find for free online -- even borrowing the structure of a disbeliever -- a young girl with a hot roddin' boyfriend -- hearing of all the fevered, mad things in store for those who don't accept Christ as his or her personal savior.
The big threat is Communism -- yes, the inspiration for Chick's format of choice! -- the Horses prepared to bring hell upon complacent American Christians (some horror is predicted "within the next twenty-four months") who can't outpace the Footmen of slow sin. A public school teacher lectures the children on "the seven erotic zones of passion in every woman," television cartoons are rightly (if not specifically) decried, and dancing is duly labeled "the front door to adultery."
Half the film is spent staring at Pirkle himself, or the congregation he's addressing with his narration. Constantly, the action cuts away to vignettes, at first symbolic -- people in shirts and ties and Sunday dresses splashing through streams as horsemen pursue -- then literal, illustrating both everyday sins and brutal, fevered depictions of American life under Communist rule.
I have never seen a film so chock-full of violence against or involving children; one scene has kids holding a man aloft, stringed onto a pulley, then dropping him onto metal spikes in the grass. A boy (8, 9 or so) has his ears punctured with bamboo sticks and vomits all over himself; another had his head cut off and thrown into a field. All the while, Our Heroine rocks her head back and periodically smiles in reverie, rocking with her boyfriend as spooky strings play, or grimacing as her dead mother laments her lack of faith, to the same sounds.
And it's absurd, sure. The Communists speak in bizarre, indistinct accents, the gore effects are crude, and nobody can ‘act' in the traditional sense.
But then, that's part of the point for me. It's crude, but
alive in the telling; you can sense the voice behind everything, despite it being a motion picture, redolent with necessary compromise in the way comics don't always have to be. It's raw, and you laugh
nervously. And laughter is a tricky thing in exploitation - the filmmaker H.G. Lewis (of
Blood Feast) has said he doesn't mind at all if audiences approach his work ‘ironically' or so-bad-it's-good, because his intent was pure entertainment, and what does it matter if that goal is reached in some different, fashionable-to-the-audience manner?
The same goes for Jack T. Chick, and I suspect the late Ormond too. You can jeer, but hell: part of the trick is
looking like entertainment, while planting the seed of conversion, to change society. And it's funny - you can glimpse the
resisting culture through the work too, especially the film. Mel Gibson didn't have a
ton of money, not compared to other productions, but his picture's marketing scheme stoked a culture conflict in the abstract, its fog of style and dead language allowing no light in; I wondered, who'd be into this?
Ormond's film, though - through its swiss cheese aesthetic, its crowds of extras posing as corpses, its little kids laying in grass in bright Karo syrup, you can
see these church-recruited folks as
people, unattractive by the mainstream standard, running, running from horses, splashing, people who lived, people into some of this, that culture, and your empathy is demanded.
It ain't Dreyer; it's resistance, slow-coming. And all the while, the message percolated.
"You too might have a need for Jesus," Pirkle purrs, his movie having become entirely hallucinogenic, the disbelieving girl seeing her mother in a casket in the front of the room, weeping as the converted of Jack T. Chick do, loud comic book tears, and Pirkle is then staring at YOU, through your computer. There is no then; there is no theater. No film critics in Socratic dialogue. No time - just the heart of the art.
"Will you come? Will you come? Will you come?"
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
