In the Flesh: The Passion of the Christ (Patreon)

Mutilation is the mechanism by which torture compels its recipients. Our bodies recognize agony as a sign that soon our extremity will take on permanence, our body’s functions breaking down, ligaments severed, fingers cut away, skin hanging from raw flesh like ragged vestments. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ depicts the scourging of Jesus with almost pornographic intimacy and attention to sensation, lingering over the unmaking of Christ’s body as glass-tipped lashes strip the skin from his bones and carve bloody rivers in his back and chest. By the end of the film bone and fat glisten through his wounds and he resembles less a man than a walking collection of injuries, a numb and mumbling puppet sheeted in gore. Even before his hands are taken from him, his feet ruined beyond repair, his life slowly drained away, he would never again have lived another moment without pain.

The film around the breaking of Christ’s body is often heavy-handed and earnest to a fault, its visuals a mixed bag of so-so computer effects and marvelous prosthetics, but once the messiah (Jim Caviezel) is transformed from an attractive and soft-spoken orator to a near-lipless ghoul staggering inexorably toward his own crucifixion, the kind of blood-soaked hysteria which lies at the core of Catholic religious ecstasy takes hold. The sight of Mary (Maia Morgenstern, preposterously only six years younger than Caviezel) cradling her dead son in her arms and pressing her lips to his ruined face until her mouth and hands are smeared with deep crimson arterial blood anneals the film’s roughly fitted elements into a moment of divine awe and terror, the ruined human body sprawled across her lap, grit mashed into its wounds, at once horrible to behold and the transcendent zenith of human experience.

Be deciding to render Christ’s suffering near-unwatchable, his body a twitching ruin, his face a slack-mouthed death mask, Gibson revitalizes the spectacle of the crucifixion in a way that cuts through every instance of overwrought Schumacher lighting, every corny swell of woodwinds and hide drums. He’s showing us human sacrifice in cruelly intimate detail, attuning us to the precise moment torture slips past the boundaries of individuality and renders the body both spectacle and prison. The death of Jesus is grueling, grotesque, and intensely sexual, a baring of the body more searingly intimate than any lover’s touch and a delivery of forgiveness and absolution from the mouth of a man who looks like he belongs in Hellraiser. In prosthetic injuries alone The Passion of the Christ sets its own standard, and in spite of its considerable shortcomings it remains a silencing and visceral experience.