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The passion of Mel Gibson.

Article Excerpt
Even by his own account, Mel Gibson is a troubled man. Alcohol, drugs, and the dark demons of depression all torment him still even in his life as a Roman Catholic Christian. In a TV interview with Diane Sawyer, he exhibited behaviors I haven't seen in thirty years--since I was researching the biochemical basis of schizophrenia at a mental hospital in Upstate New York. Hyperactive, with maniacal movements of the hands and eyes, casting darting yet penetrating glances all about, pulling his ears and speaking with a fanatical intensity worthy of the Ayatollah Khomeini, he gave the appearance of a man who shouldn't be allowed to run loose without a shock collar. If I didn't know he was under the influence of reactionary Latinate Catholics, I would assume he was just another Hollywood personality under the control of the Scientologists.

Mel Gibson's Passion is Mel Gibson's passion. That is, although on the surface it is a Roman Catholic version of the New Testament passion myth, underneath it seethes with the paranoid religiosity that has sundered an erstwhile integrated personality into jagged mental fragments that no longer can be held together.

The Passion of the Christ is, as already noted, a Catholic version of the story of the supposed suffering and atoning death of Jesus of Nazareth. In the credits, one can even find acknowledgment of "The Jesuits" in general, and one Father William Fulco, Ph.D., in particular. Fulco is the Jesuit scholar who translated the script into Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin, and then translated everything back again into the English subtitles for the film. (Incongruously, he has Jesus speak to Pilate in Latin instead of Greek (the administrative language of the Eastern Empire), and he makes Pilate sometimes speak in Aramaic when Greek would have been more believable.

All fourteen stations of the cross are...

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