The Last Temptation of Christ is a paradigm-breaking film. The character isn’t man. He had his tribulations, his sorrows, his lacerations, but no, he isn’t man. He came to walk on earth to bear the cross for humanity’s sins. He is God. Many have gone onto the cross before him and many after him, but none like Him. When you place Him within cinema’s paradigm and its conventional arc of overcoming temptation and torment, you risk breaking that paradigm. If you humanize Him to do so, you risk rupturing his godly presence in the collective consciousness. For Scorsese, there are no easy answers as a director. But he saw this interpretation of Jesus straddling manly shortcomings and godly purity to finally ascend above as more impactful than other retellings. As a testament to this faith of his, when the curtains close, you tell yourself that if anything, this film is sincere.
The sincerity in his treatment of Kazantzakis’s subject shines as he chronicles Jesus of Nazareth. Scorsese is constantly depicting him between being a man and being the Son of God – he has visitations from the divine, but he walks through Magdala like all men do and he visits the den of a fallen Mary Magdalene. At the grotesque market of Jerusalem, he realizes that he needs to die on the cross to bring salvation to mankind. There is no need to be explicatory in your treatment because of who you are chronicling. You needn’t show why he chose to go to Jerusalem or why he felt he needed to die on the cross. In that sense, Jesus is not man according to the conventions of cinema. However, he is a man because in Kazantzakis’s interpretation he did yield momentarily to the final temptation of escaping death while on the cross. So, the duality of being God and faltering as Man exists only in that brief period before his return to the cross. By being truthful in all which precedes that final temptation, Scorsese renders to us this vision of his faith that is adequately sincere. The more I think about it in retrospect, the more its quality of being sincere impresses itself upon me.
On the other hand, as a man of faith, you are hand-bound to toe in line with pious propriety. The most invidious scene in the movie was perhaps when Jesus visits Mary at Magdala. She is in the act of prostituting herself to men who listlessly languish behind her curtains. Jesus waits the entire day to seek her forgiveness. He watches men play chess, ogle at her, and smirk. Throughout this ordeal, you can see that Jesus isn’t indulging in sin. He watches man indulge in sin. Unlike a moral man, he doesn’t churn or seethe with rage at this immorality. Instead, his eyes mellow with pity. He genuinely feels sorry for the bestiality that is being exercised and the insouciance that goes along with it. Scorsese believed that Magdala at that time was a crossroad for caravans and for merchants to sound their trade, so he isn’t wholly mistaken in his extended assumption that there is a possibility that Jesus might have come across a naked woman. It circles back to the central idea that when you humanize God, liberties that usually stretched out for miles before you shrink to become no longer than an inch.
The only two inches he did venture forward within his treatment are adherent to Kazantzakis’s original narrative – orienting Judas to be a more willing conspirator in the crucifixion and Mary and Martha becoming Jesus’s wives. At first, I couldn’t disassociate Keitel’s Brooklyn accent from the sternness of Judas. It was creating comical mismatches, but it soon settled into the film, and I guess Scorsese actively made the decision not to shoot in Aramaic because he prioritized it to be relatable rather than historically reliable. Regardless, the interpretation that both the novel and film present don’t mar Judas to be the man who plotted Jesus’s downfall – it shows him as a man with his contradictions who acquiesced to aid Jesus to accomplish his divine mission. In doing this, Scorsese perhaps wanted to isolate Jesus’s only tribulation to be the temptation that he indulged. After he descends from the cross, he is seen consummating his supposed marriage with Mary Magdalene before she is taken away by God. Mary and Martha are offered instead. Only at the end of this manly life is it revealed that the angel of God was an agent of Satan, and Jesus crawls back to Golgotha asking his Father in heaven to take him back to the cross. Within this single sequence, Jesus too is made to go through man’s conventional arc of redemption before his final deliverance.
The whole notion of shrinking the schism between Man and God had left many devout individuals sour and enraged. Scorsese had death threats brandished at him, theatres were burnt, its audiences were maimed, and religious authorities came down on it with the same force that they exerted to suppress Kazantzakis’s book two decades ago. Pre-production, too, was a long, anguishing road for the makers. Every time financing came close to it, the heat against the lending hand forced its withdrawal. Scorsese himself was unsure if the film would finally go on the floors. When it finally did, he managed to draft the sequence where Paul the Apostle chides Jesus for his obstinate demands of truth. He says that he’d crucify or resurrect Jesus in his lies if that’s what is required by the people. Scorsese’s interpretation of that categorical statement might only be minor, but it is reflective of the notion that sometimes the truth surrounding God is malleable because that is what is necessary for His people to adhere to His principles.
If you look at the two ends of Scorsese’s career, you see that there are two of his major works on his faith. His decision to take the Last Temptation of Christ wasn’t premeditated, he only received and read the book after Barbara Hershey gave it to him. Silence on the other hand took decades to come to fruition. Technically, he could take more liberties in the depiction of disciples of Christ than with Christ himself. Moreover, he had more years to be meticulous in his construction of imagery in Silence. As a result, it’s unsurprising that, as a film, Silence mounts a more visually transcendental view of faith and its tribulations. His faith and his directorial prowess matured to evince and that shows across all qualities of his film-making sensibility at the tail-end of his career. It reinforces the notion that when it comes to God and worship, as a creator, you are encaged to only take steps within a certain perimeter to avoid maiming your work’s reception.
As someone who was born in a faith that has always been quite categorically a world and a half away from monotheism and Abrahamic religions in general, it’s an interesting parallel. In Hinduism, you certainly cannot appropriate gods in their original form and dilute them – you’d most certainly receive equal animosity and hatred. But the notion of incarnation is much more widespread. The notion that God has taken many avataras to walk amongst men exists. Therefore, the schism between man and God is relatively smaller as opposed to Christianity. In Tamil culture at least, the practice of worshipping ancestors as God has existed since time immemorial. It might not be in the same vein as being supreme, but it is certainly similar in the vein of worship and being above human shortcomings. In the latter sense, directors from the East aren’t shackled like directors in the West. I’d take out examples from popular culture over the last two decades in Tamil cinema to illustrate this because they serve as mirrors of ingrained beliefs. In Billa, at the foothills of the Murugar statue in Kuala Lumpur, the people sing – “Aadhi thamizhan aandavan aanan, meedhi thamizhan adimaigal aanan” (The oldest of Tamil forefathers became God, the rest of us became their disciples). In Karnan, singing for their imprisoned son, the people sing – “Oorellam koyilappa, koyilellam samiyappa, otha poodam kooda illayappa, enga kudumbathula oruthanappa” (Countless temples across these villages, countless deities inside them, not a single mound of worship for the one that’s from our family). In this branch of faith, as a filmmaker, you have more liberty to bridge the schism between man and God without reaching polemic extents.
That brings me back to the score of Peter Gabriel. I remember walking into the screen and the first thing that was on was softer, trickling theatre music. Right before the film, The Feeling Begins was played and it seamlessly segued into the opening credits. The music seemed extremely out-of-step with what you’d usually expect in a Christian film – the beats were heavily eastern, and the tempo seemed to resemble inner anguish over tranquility. They came back during many pivotal moments of the film, and it wasn’t until the last phase of the film that you’d move into what you’d usually expect – organs and strings. So, during the entire phase of trial and transformation, you had a more raucous trans-diegetic sound – one that wasn’t necessarily heard by Jesus but sufficiently captured his affliction. Subtle, yet powerful to choose a kind of music that the Western world wasn’t very used to at the time. It’s probably reflective of the instruments that did exist in Roman Judea and the music that must have surrounded Jesus as he walked the terrain. It isn’t until that final utterance of “It is accomplished” do we hear the full might of organ music.
The Last Temptation of Christ is a sincere portrayal of a man’s faith and his interpretation of that faith. Scorsese intended to make a documentary on the Gospels, but Kazantzakis gave him another avenue to display his faith to the world. Unorthodox, certainly. Blasphemous, I’d think not. Scorsese might have shown Jesus to walk amongst men and falter against Satan’s ruse, but the destination was to always choose the divine in the duality that he had to bear since birth. A tortuous path to faith, but a sincere path nonetheless.
