Messiah Without a Cause

Said a dry friend, sending me off with a salutation to a screening of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Say hello to Jesus the Heavy Breather for me.”

Contrary to his and the protesters’ mostly uninformed predictions, I didn’t run into Jesus on the Make. Not that I found Jesus the God-Man of the Scriptures anywhere in the vicinity of the Universal Studio lot either. The character that I did run into was more along the lines of Jejune Jesus, Mundane Jesus, Jesus Without an Agenda--Messiah Without a Cause, if you will.

As interesting a temperament in turmoil as Jake LaMotta? Maybe. Someone whose tenets a thoughtful soul would want to base his or her own actions on--let alone someone whose divinity you’d want to stake your life on? Not likely.

So while it’s amazing that so many evangelical Christians would waste so much energy bringing their collective wrath down on Martin Scorsese’s erratic opus--which is undeniably meant to be an “affirmation of faith”--it’s perhaps even more amazing that the director actually expected the devout to enthusiastically endorse his reluctant Nietzschean superman as the same guy as their Lord and Savior.

“Last Temptation” presents an uncomfortable quandary for those of us caught in the middle of the controversy: As a modern-day believer in Jesus and a fan of most of Scorsese’s work (as well as some of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s, when he’s not punishing the filmgoing world for his strict Calvinist upbringing with scripts like “Hardcore” and “Light of Day”), I found myself wanting desperately to forgive dramatic liberties as poetic license and be able to reconcile the admittedly fictional Christ on the screen with the real one.

Scorsese’s (and source novelist Nikos Kazantzakis’) unflaggingly brave approach is to give us Christ as an ordinary guy caught up in extraordinary circumstances (i.e., his impending death and resurrection), and this sort of populist, Christ-as-Everyman approach has its merit as a pendulum-swing away from the “glow-in-the-dark Jesus” of the awful epics of old.

If Scorsese and the terrific actor Willem Dafoe are successful in presenting Christ as fully man, if not as fully God, they at least get half of the dual-nature thing right--which is more than can be claimed for “King of Kings” and all the other oldies, whose Messiahs were definitely more Disneyland-Abe Lincoln than divine and who in all their glorious stiffness didn’t seem perceptibly human either.

For giving us a screen Jesus of sacrificial flesh and blood for the first time, and for offering a bloody, sensual, pungent, gritty realism that can’t help but add a new flavor to rote readings of the four Gospels, Christians rightly owe at least a little gratitude to Scorsese.

But there’s something fundamentally ignorant--not so much blasphemous, mind you, as ignorant--about setting out to remake Christ as “like the guy on the street,” as Scorsese has described his intentions. It’s difficult to imagine a revisionist fiction in which Martin Luther King Jr. or John Kennedy or Jesse Jackson was to suddenly, for whatever inspirational purposes, be made “like the guy on the street.” Humanized, yes, but we’d be hard-pressed to swallow these history-changers at any point during their lives as average . Though Christ is more distant, it’s safe to assume that whatever he was--divine, mad or deeply misunderstood--he was no John Q. Public.

Or Dagwood Bumstead. This groping Christ seems a reflection not so much of the mysterious Triune God as of the commentator played by Kevin Nealon on “Saturday Night Live,” who keeps changing his train of thought mid-ramble, saying: “I didn’t know what I was talking about before. This is my real point. . . .”

(Sympathetic, perhaps, but unlikely to inspire a devotion leading to martyrdom for most of his immediate followers.)

Robbed not only of an inevitable sense of mission, but--by the “ordinary man”-style simple dialogue--of even his poetry, Scorsese’s Christ isn’t sure whether to preach a New Age Message of Luv or to get mad at injustice. Ultimately, instead of making up his mind, he opts to just die instead. What for is anyone’s guess.

That most of the protesters seem almost wholly concerned with the “sex scene” only goes to show the infantile level of most modern-day Christian activism. Their Gilded Eunuch Jesus seems as limited and mundane as Scorsese’s.

The living Jesus of the biblical accounts was cited as tempted by the Devil with something greater than symptomatic sins: Pride--which is what brought down the Bakkers and the Swaggarts of the world, even if they go to their graves still insisting it was sex.

Is the film’s “last temptation,” the desire to fade from notoriety and just settle down in the country with a wife and kids, really the greatest one that faced Christ in the desert or on the cross? How does this compare to the lust for power, the compulsion to establish a mighty kingdom in this world and not of the next--a temptation glossed over in the film in a few seconds while the marriage fantasy gets half an hour?

In novelist Kazantzakis’ day and age, a message about resisting complacency and the promise of a simple life to put your neck (or wrists) on the line as an activist may have been more crucial. It seems less so in Scorsese’s and our very different time. How many leaders or media celebrities--and who isn’t a media celebrity in this age of 15 minutes’ fame for everybody, whether it’s on CNN or CBN or MTV or public access--really find themselves faced with an overwhelming compulsion to fade into the woodwork and stay out of the public limelight? Isn’t the greed of public power and prominence, be it in entertainment or politics, a little more seductive in 1988? Loud, raging pride would seem a greater Satanic bait than quiet domesticity, now as it was for Christ in the Gospel narratives.

Still, the picture’s intentions, however confused, are pious enough, and it’s difficult to imagine a God concerned with righteousness being as ticked off about “Last Temptation” as he would likely be about, say, “Cocktail.”

As an introspective character who constantly doubts himself and the voices he hears, Scorsese’s Christ isn’t dramatically uninvolving, and may even be heroic, in the way that questioners-of-self are as heroic in the ‘80s as questioners-of-authority were heroic in the ‘60s. Messiah Without a Cause is absolutely a likable fellow, but pardon us if we’d rather not worship him.