4 - Sunday, August 21, 1988 - North Shore News

© strictly personal ©

COURTESY OF Cineplex-Odeon entertainment magnate
Garth Drabinsky, I got to attend the private screening of
director Martin Scorsese’s controversial The Last Tempta-
tion of Christ before it was released for general viewing.

It was a great flick. I recom-
mend it unreservedly — especially
for those people who are scream-
ing the loudest about banning it:
Christians. Particularly fundamen-
talist Christians.

Indeed, there is a love scene in
the final sequences of the movie
where Jesus makes love to Mary
Magdalene. As sex scenes nowa-
days go, it is milquetoast, believe
me.

But sex wasn't the ‘‘last tempta-
tion’’ of Christ, as Scorsese told a
group of us at the Centre for Ad-
vanced Film Studies during a clos-
ed workshop a few hours before
we saw the film.

The last temptation was to live a
normal life, raise a family, and be
an ordinary man instead of the
Messiah.

I knew this, of course, having
read Nikos Kazantzakis’s incredi-

This week
at councils

NORTH VANCOUVER CITY
COUNCIL, Monday, -sug. 22, at
6 p.m.: committee of the whole
(in-camera) re: police counsellor
and Block Parent coordinator
program/ Park and Tilford
gardens/ Tempe Heights market-
ing/ land sale and possible acquisi-
tion. Public hearings (7:30 p.m.).
Council re: impact of Canada Post
plans on city residents/ zoning
bylaws procedure/ rezoning ap-
plications/ bid for zoning amend-
ment Jack Lonsdale’s pub
courtyard seating’ lighting in city
parks/ notices of motion re: her-
bicide spraying/ various bylaws.
NORTH VANCOUVER
DISTRICT COUNCIL, Monday,
Aug. 22, at 7:30 p.m.: policy and
planning committee re: Westview
interchange socio-community
study/ proposed ICBC claim cen-
tre east side of Lillooet Road/
Deep Cove hoathouse/ Deep Cove
Days/ proposed policy on outdoor
dining, drinking’ BC Transit fare
system options/ household haz-
ardous wastes. Council re:
developmem variance permits/
bylaws re: recCentre Magnussen
expansion, Marine Drive com-
munity plan.
WEST VANCOUVER DISTRICT
COUNCIL: next scheduled
meeting Sept. 12 at 7:45 p.m.
Agenda items published in this
column are included as space per-
mits. For a comprehensive agenda,
residents should contact the
respective municipal halls.

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ble novel back in the early '60s. at
that time, the book not only ab-
sorbed me, it shook me.

Kazanizakis’s genius was to take
the historical figure of Christ and
exaznine the human side of his
nature, as though he really was a
man — not some gold-flecked
cardboard cut-out in a catechism
book,

No shining nimbus. No walking
on water. Miracle-working, sure.
But it was all of the laying-on-of-
hands variety, something which
there is much evidence can be —
and has been — accomplished
many, tnany times by less well-
known avatars.

Kazantzakis’s ‘treal’* Christ suf-
fered fully as a man, first denying
his manhood, then denying his
divinity. This virtual schizophrenia
continued all the way to the cross,
and only then did he come to terms

with being the ‘Son of God’* and
accepting it.

Martin Scorsese's ‘‘reel’’ Christ
follows the novel's story-line ex-
actly.

All the way through, we see a
Jesus who vacillates between paci-
fism and revolutionary zeal, but
who falters when the moment
comes to raise a sword against
Rome, unable to reconcile the
command to ‘love’ with the polit-
ical necessity of rebellion.

Instead, he opts to listen to the
voice of God speaking inside him,
commanding him to sacrifice
himself with the goal in mind of
transforming the destiny of hu-
manity.

The messianic and martyr im-
pulses are, of course, the highest
stirrings a person can know. They
are hardly unique. Nor are their
mysterious workings, associated
with deep egotistical — probably
even libidinal — impulses. neces-
sarily benign.

After the movic, my wife
remarked wrvly that Jesus in the

film reminded her of every ‘Jesus
freak’’ she’d ever met. Of course,

he was the prototype, at least from

the vantage point of our era.

Before him, no doubt, there
were muliiiudes of **Meassiatss.
And I'm sure that future history
contains an endless succession of
them.

It is to director Scorsese’s credit
that he did such justice to Kazant-

zakis’s interpretation of Jesus. It is

difficult enough to bring a simple
characterization to the screen, let
alone an enormously complex one.

And Kazantzakis went the distance

as far as probing Jesus’s psyche is
concerned.

ce

K. azantzakis’s ‘real’

Christ suffered fully
as a man, first

denying his manhood,

then denying his
divinity.”’

One thing the fundamentalists,
who are in the absurd position of
refusing to sec the film yet con-
demning it as blasphemy, should
understand is that the movie fully
accepts the idea that Jestts was,
indeed, the Son of God. At one
point in the film, he removes his
heart from his chest and holds it in
his hand.

God does speak to him. And
again and again the Devil appears

in various guises to tempt him,
failing utterly each time — until, it
seems the end, when he is nailed to
the cross and he ‘‘hallucinates’’ (at
least that’s the word we would use
nowadays) an aiternative lifetime
in which a guardian angel removes
the nails, allows him to come down
and marry Mary Magdalene and
have a family, devoting himself to
being a simple carpenter.

Only on his deathbed is the
‘‘angel’’ revealed as the Devil in
his final disguise, trying to thwart

_ God’s will.

Now this is all heavily religious
stuff. Jesus may look a bit mad
and occasionally as daft as your
standard-brand modern street
freak, but Scorsese goes to great
pains, as did Kazantzakis, to make
it clear that he believes in Jesus’s
essential divinity.

This particular movie character
is every bit as heavy-handedly
“*cosmic,”’ when you get right
down to it, as Moses in Cecil B.
DeMille’s The Ten Command-
ments — ard therefore, for
unbelievers, basically unrealistic.

Speaking for myself, I loved the
picture, just like I loved the book.
Like Scorsese, I am a lapsed Cath-
olic. Yet the idea of a universe
without God is an absurdity, as far
as | can tell. And the idea of a
human being existing ‘‘outside
God’’ — that is, in isolation — is
equally alsurd.

A tremendous theological flick.
See it. Especially if you call
yourself a Christian @

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