Stage 6 in Jesus Christ Superstar: Chapter 1 Part 8 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Stage Six in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

As previously mentioned, few films adopt a stage-six style as openly as Rashomon, which insists on the inextricable unity of perception and perceiver. Jesus Christ Superstar, however, comes close. Its characters are twentieth-century people who don anachronistic costumes and act the parts of Gospel personae and the movie slips between the ancient and modern contexts, never totally privileging either one or any of the characters through which it is told.
First comes Judas. He complains: “Listen Jesus, do you care for your race?/Don't you see we must keep in our place?” Since he is played by an African-American actor, this allusion to an Uncle Tom position seems to impugn everything else he says. One rumor about the film is that it is all filtered through Judas’s consciousness and thus warped in a single, predictable way, but this disregards its giving voice to the other characters who express their diverse understandings in impassioned songs.
He does, nonetheless, offer a frame for the ensuing drama. With the camera assuming his vantage, he sometimes looks down on the action as if he were really in a position to comment on it all. Character after character does this, each coming to a slightly different conclusion, showing that his or her attempt at a mountain vista is ultimately subjective. Furthermore, even though Judas has not fully understood stage six, much that he says about Jesus follows a standard, stage-six Christianity, which is also supported by a majority of the drama. This includes the liberal doctrines that Jesus was not God, that his sayings were more important than his alleged divinity, and that he needs to be de-mythologized (or, as Judas phrases it, “strip the myth from the man”). Thus, like Che Guevera in another of Andrew Loyd Webber’s musicals, Evita (1996), he intuits a meaning that suggests some coherence for events, though without the drama’s implying that he should be taken quite literally.

For instance, the Jesus that enters is not the megalomaniac Judas described. Instead of preaching his divinity, he is simply urging attention to the present and trying to dissuade his disciples from asking about the “buzz”: “If you knew the path we're riding,/You'd understand it less than I.” Jesus is admitting he does not comprehend it fully himself. Not understanding him either, Judas finds him “mystifying,” which is not necessarily the same as Christian mysticism.

Whereas the Biblical Christ champions spiritual attention to the present and total trust in God, Superstar’s slangy insistence on heeding present emotions may derive merely from a stage-six realization that others’ feelings are as real as material things. Echoed by a chorus of Apostles’ wives, Mary Magdalene, however, presumes that Jesus is refusing to face the future from fear; thus, he needs to be calmed with scented oils so that he can have a sound rest. Unable to empathize with either her or Christ, Judas objects to the expense, and Jesus counters, “You'll be lost, you'll be so sorry when I'm gone”—a remark that sounds petulant. The director, Norman Jewison, though, softens it by ending it in almost an embrace between Judas and Christ.
In a scene not in the musical, the movie adds a debate between the pugnacious, stage-three Annas and stage-four Caiaphas. The latter declares himself to be “law and order.” As an embodiment of religion and patriotism, he convinces the Jewish leaders to put Jesus to death for political reasons: “For the sake of the nation, this Jesus must die.”

Similarly interpreting Jesus as a political liberator, the Palm Sunday crowd asks him to “fight” for them, which he refuses. Pilate has a prophetic dream of being blamed by millions for the death of a “haunted, hunted” Galilean. Since the “buzz” is that Jesus will be brought to the Romans for trial, such a dream is not necessarily supernatural and it distinctly omits reference to Jesus’s divinity. Suddenly, in the next scene, the sick surround Jesus, and he urges them to heal themselves as he complains in a far from divine manner: “There's too little of me...Don't crowd me.” In the midst of a love song about him, Mary Magdalene testifies, “He’s just a man.” Without making his own motives clear, Judas sells Jesus to Caiaphas and then accuses Jesus of wanting to be betrayed—an accusation Jesus seems to substantiate by asking him if he will “go do it.” Although Jesus shows some insight into how Judas and Peter will treat him, he is less clear about the effect of his life: “I must be mad thinking I'll be remembered.” His doubts, however, are essential to the movie’s stage-six structure because if he spoke omnisciently about the action he would be like a single, narrative voice, precluding relativism.

Interpreted according to stage six, Judas seems more dogmatic and thus less sympathetic. At the threshold of that stage, he understands that he should care about other people, hence his obsession with giving to the poor, but he remains blind to actual emotions such as Mary Magdalene’s love and Jesus’s passion. Judas, though, is more appealing than the other Apostles, who are back at stage five. Busy bees, eager to hear the “buzz” about their business, they regard their calling as a career that they planned (“Always hoped that I'd be an apostle./Knew that I could make it if I tried.”) They even look forward to the day they can give it up and compose their memoirs:

“Then when we retire, we can write the Gospels….”
Even Jesus, though, is not entirely selfless. In contemplating his death, he wants to know what will be his “reward.” Apparently also at stage six, he thinks about it only in terms of the impact that crucifixion will have on humanity, not about power, profit, or mystical atonement between Son and Father. At any rate, he is in the midst of change (“I have changed…. Take me now..before I change my mind.”) He is desperate to glimpse the structure of events, the “why” he must die, but, instead of rising to the panorama of stage seven, he is bound to the pluralism of six. Has he intuited some meaning that he cannot entirely bring into awareness? Perhaps.
The closest the film comes to a final summary is the scene where Judas apparently returns from the dead to comment—though, it may be meant as Jesus’s hallucination, or a meta-theatrical device with “Judas” returned to his initial role as twentieth century visitor to Israel pretending to be Judas. He speaks from the 1970s, complaining that if Jesus were the Word of God revealed, he should have chosen a period with mass communications. With a stage-six pluralism, he groups Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam together in an attempt to equalize the Truth claims of any of them. Nonetheless, despite his singing the title song of the film, Judas cannot here be entirely a spokesman for the film (or stage six) because he is fiendishly tormenting a crucified man—an action antithetical to empathy. After the crucifixion, the actors pack up and leave on their bus—all except Ted Neeley, the film’s Jesus, whose absence suggests that he has himself died in this psycho-drama; certainly, he is not present as resurrected God to deliver any final Truth. Begun as an album, then a musical (which has been playing almost constantly since, one place or another), Jesus Christ Superstar makes Jesus not merely very human (as with Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ) but a stage-six mystery refracted through conflicting viewpoints.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 1 Part 9

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