Stage 1 in The Last Temptation of Christ: Chapter 1 Part 3 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Stage One in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST
(1988)
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So why all the Christ imagery [in the 1999 season opener of the X-Files]? Turns out Duchovny, who co-wrote the episode with Chris Carter, wanted to structure the episode along the lines of Martin Scorcese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ—in fact, Mulder’s musings on a life that could’ve been were patterned directly after Christ’s dream in that movie [as was the scene where Mulder lies in a loin cloth with his arms spread in a cross and medical devices resembling a crown of thorns on his head] —Will Lee, “Burning Question,” Entertainment Weekly (Lee, 13) |
The prestige of the novel brought it to the screen, so that such viewers as Duchovny saw the movie through the filter of Kazantzakis’s reputation for intellectual complexity. Duchovny thus associated it with the stage-seven character Fox Mulder, who is trying to piece together a frighteningly vast pattern. Without that reputation, the movie would never have been made; furthermore, it cannot be fully understood without reference to Kazantzakis’s ideas. Much of the film, nevertheless, reduces its protagonist to stage one, because of his depression. I choose this film to illustrate that stage, precisely because a purer cinematic depiction of stage one would not be, in the philosophical sense, a “big picture.” To contrast the two stages, I am thus treating a mostly stage-one film that, nonetheless, has traces of Kazantzakis’s work.
That source holds itself above dogmatism in a meeting ground between all the world’s religions: “Kazantzakis's life-long effort to reconcile the universals of Christianity with the ideals and rhetoric of Marxism, to combine the clear, unassuming simplicity of Buddha with the Nietzschean views of the Übermensch and the death of God and with the Élan vital of Bergson . . . .” (Levitt, 13). The reference to Buddha is significant since Buddhism was for Asia one of the first developed expressions of stage seven as, for Europe, it came from certain figures in Romanticism, including Nietzsche. Kazantzakis wrote his dissertation on Nietzsche, who learned Sanskrit and named his hideaway “Nirvana,” because he and his works fell strongly under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer. “As early as 1910, [Kazantzakis] was linking Schopenhauer and Buddha as life deniers” (Bien, 136). Kazantzkis’s entangles these sources together into the unsettling intricacy typical of stage seven.
Because Kazantzakis spent much of his life writing and revising his play Buddha, its religious ideas serve as an introduction to his fragmentary presentation of his career-long ota in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ as well as to the slivers of it that help make the movie sufficiently ambiguous to be tolerable to people at various Gravesean levels. Shortly before he died, Kazantzakis said: “Buddha is my swan song. It says everything. I'm glad that I have managed to utter . . . my final word in time, before I go.” (Buddha, xviii .) In that play, reality is a unity, transcending analysis: “. . . all certainties have gone astray . . . . I shout, I command, but my voice boomerangs in chaos and strikes me like a stone.” (Buddha, 152) Apparently, despite his career-long desire to contact the psychological depths, Kazantzakis remained largely in the conscious side of stage seven, caught in chaological feedback (the boomeranging voice). This is probably why Jesus has only a vague glimpse of the Self in either the novel or film of The Last Temptation of Christ.
Uncertainty, according to Kazantzakis, is the condition of the ego, isolated from the world, listening only to its own preconceptions. In other words, selfishness is a separate chaos, fallen from the more general one. Kazantzakis believed, however, certain inspired ascetics understand the general tangle intuitively. In The Last Temptation of Christ, he presents that disarray as a Bergsonian élan vital, the evolution of the universe toward higher levels of awareness. In rising above the ego, the superior individual (e.g., Dionysus, Christ, or a character named “Chiang” in Buddha) is sacrificed by the fearful masses. During suffering, the Übermensch intuits a way of liberation from self to Self. Thereby, the level of human consciousness rises—the theme of Kazantzakis's novels.
Kazantzakis thought he felt this elevation as he composed The Last Temptation of Christ, his pages smudged by his tears (Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 505). In a 1952 letter, he added: “But while I was writing this book, I felt what Christ felt. I became Christ. And I knew definitely that great temptations, extremely enchanting and often legitimate ones, came to hinder him on his road to Golgotha. But how could the theologians know all this?” (Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 517).
Typically eclectic, the novel is also characteristic of Kazantzakis's
works in the protagonist's manic-depressive mood swings: tearful sufferings but also
bliss of believing one knows more than the theologians. Unlike the entirely depressive
movie, the novel starts, “Every obstacle in [Jesus'] journey became a milestone,
an occasion for further triumph” (Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ,
4).
Cross Maker
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Buddha, Christ and Dionysus are one—the eternal suffering man. —Nikos Kazantzakis |
Standing with his arms on the cross, Jesus expresses his sense of guilt (a symptom of depression), and shares some of his suicidal fantasies (another symptom). For the moment, he wants forgiveness. He asks Judas. Not tired of humbling himself, he goes to beg Mary Magdalen; but she is occupied.
Previous movies have exhibited almost every aspect of prostitution. Seldom, though, has such a melancholy waiting room appeared, with expressionless patrons, isolated from one another and unexcited at thoughts of imminent iniquity. Finally, Jesus's turn comes, which he uses not for fornication but a farewell; then, he wanders alone into the desert.
More mocked than followed there, he again attempts to move into stage two (trusting human contact), by forming a band of faithful disciples. He fails and seeks total isolation in the desert, where (typical of Stage one’s archetype, the Fool) he has imaginary companions. Details of his visions are from the novel, where they have considerable meaning. Instead of the elaborate allegory employed in the book, however, the camera shows a man too much alone in a stark desert, hallucinating rather than having relationships, but his delusions give him the energy to make another attempt at stage two. Unfortunately, returned to his disciples, Jesus finds them unfaithful, quarreling, and tired of waiting. He calls not Peter but Judas a “rock,” since as in many modern interpretations (e.g., Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973), Judas is a dominant figure, a constant reminder of the doom that awaits the lonely Savior.
To re-convince his disciples, he agonizingly pulls out his own heart and offers it. This miracle cheers no one, nor do the other wonders. With a sad expression, he heals the multitudes. In the resurrection of Lazarus, he seems startled or frightened when the corpse moves and is himself momentarily pulled into the tomb. (Rendering the resurrection almost pointless, Lazarus stays alive for only a short time; then the Zealots murder him.) Jesus is deemed a lunatic and stoned by the Nazarenes.
His relatively active period ends during a riot that he has agreed
to lead. He stops because his hands bleed mysteriously. Perhaps the scene suggests
that his guilt for helping with crucifixions has suddenly surfaced, or perhaps the
bleeding prefigures Jesus' destined death. At any rate, it is another vestige of
the novel with less meaning in the movie than to Kazantzakis. He long hero-worshipped
the stigmatic Saint Francis. Although Kazantzakis never had stigmata per se,
while writing The Greek Passion, he recorded in a notebook: “My lip began
swelling just at the moment in my novel where I describe the swelling on the face
of the hero, who enacts the role of Christ” (Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzkis,
168, 478). His wife explains this notation as evidencing her husband's faith in “the
influence of the soul upon the body” (Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 478).
Just as he believed that matter was evolving into spirit (élan vital),
so he assumed that spirit affected matter. The latter should give way to the former,
a process culminating in the crucifixion but foreshadowed by repeated imagery of
blood, the stigmata being the most striking of it. Reacting to the stigmata, Jesus
begins actively planning his own death. A series of scenes display his sufferings
and humiliations, culminating in the crucifixion.
Lost in the Bardo
In The Last Temptation of Christ (both movie and book), the devil in the
form of an angel seemingly removes Jesus from the cross and leads him to Mary Magdalen.
The two appear to wed, preparatory to a brief sexual interlude. During this adaptation
by Kazantzakis of the Tibetan Buddhist bardo (dreams during and after death),
God kills Magdalen. Jesus marries again since he is told that there is only one woman
in the world (probably the “Eternal in Woman” from Goethe's Faust, which Kazantzakis
translated into Greek). In the movie, though, it seems but another instance of the
Fool’s imaginary companion, always a personification of his own mind. Within the
novel, this period is a regression, preparatory to Christ’s rising above stage seven.
The dying Jesus, founding a Church that will inspire much of the world, achieves
a level comparable to stage eight. Since the Jesus of the movie has never developed
previously even to stage two, this apparent entry into it seems progress, but turns
out to be his own hallucination. He returns to the cross and for virtually the first
time in the movie, he smiles—perhaps a very faint vestige of Kazantzakis’s theme
that embracing suffering elevates consciousness. Or perhaps he is simply lost in
his folly.
As church bells sound, the movie ends in splicing and a white light. Kazantzakis had previously wanted to write a cinematic script of Buddha: “I feel a most bitter, Buddhistic pleasure in creating passion, love, and conflict out of shadows and then in seeing them suddenly disappear, mutely like ghosts. Isn't the vast screen of the universe the same?” (Bien,13). His Christ also attains this enlightened distance, beyond earthly attachments, but, except for such viewers as Duchovny, who translates the movie’s imagery into stage seven, the film simply ends with a white light, a consummation of its constant simplicity.
If the movie accomplishes anything aesthetically, it stems from
the originality of its extreme minimalism. Furthermore, through the controversy it
generated, the movie brought what to many people was a new and challenging notion:
Christ, the Ideal, may have been very human indeed. This is what made it attractive
to Scorcese, who had once considered joining the prieshood, but felt alienated by
Catholic emphasis on Christ’s divinity. To spread this thought, Kazantzakis risked
excommunication from the Greek Orthodox Church. The book long remained on the Roman
Catholic index of forbidden books, and its filmic incarnation had little to commend
it except a cinematic power to reduce Kazantzakis’ vision of divine humanity to a
simplicity that allows it to spread (brought to public attention even by those who
oppose it).
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