Another episode of A Satanist Goes to the Movies. As I mentioned in the episode on Hitchcock’s Rope, this is a project I’ve been wanting to do for a while, a look at the religious themes in the films of Martin Scorsese and in particular at a trilogy of films, The Last Temptation of Christ, Bringing Out the Dead, and Silence. This episode will focus on the first of these, The Last Temptation of Christ from 1988.
For those unfamiliar, Scorsese is easily one of the greatest American filmmakers of the 20th century. He was born in 1942 in Queens to parents whose parents had emigrated from Sicily (Italian-American ethnicity would become one of his films’ central subjects). He had wanted to become a priest but not out of a deep religiosity—he was and is religious, but he found himself more moved by Catholicism’s iconography and theatricality. He had joined a junior seminary at one point but quickly flunked out (Sterritt, 2015). I argue that Scorsese did in fact succeed at becoming a kind of priest or religious teacher. Like all filmmakers, whether they accept the role or not, Scorsese is a moralist. He is also a kind of theologian, and in his role as priest and theologian he explicates the consequences of theology in the dramas of our lives, adjudicating religious morality through the narratives of his films.
This makes his 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, originally published in Greek in 1955, a kind of keystone for the rest of Scorsese’s films. It isn’t his best, but it is excellent. I’ll mention that I have read the novel but it was a long time ago and I don’t remember any of it, so this analysis will be based exclusively on the film. Scorsese had wanted to adapt the book ever since he read it in 1972 while directing Boxcar Bertha. The project was planned to start in 1983, but when Scorsese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy bombed, Paramount Pictures became nervous about the financial commitment that a movie like The Last Temptation of Christ would require. Paramount had also received protest letters from religious groups, as Kazantzakis’s portrayal of Jesus was considered quite controversial, even blasphemous. That was enough to convince Paramount to cancel the production. (Scorsese responded to these threats when he directed the music video for the song “Bad” by Michael Jackson, in which one of the dancers tears down a wanted poster of Scorsese, a wanted poster for the crime of sacrilege).
In 1986, Universal Studios agreed to fund the production on the condition that Scorsese would give them a mainstream blockbuster in the future (which ended up being Cape Fear). They filmed in Morocco, with Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Harvey Keitel as Judas, Harry Dean Stanton as Paul, and, in one of the films many delights, David Bowie as Pontius Pilate. (Another delight is the soundtrack by Peter Gabriel, based in substantial part on Moroccan devotional music). I emphasize Scorsese’s role in the film in this episode but it’s important to recognize that screenwriter Paul Schrader, with whom Scorsese closely collaborated, also had a substantial role in the film’s thematic content. Universal Studios released the film in 1988 to moderate critical and commercial success. But the religious backlash continued. On October 22, 1988, a Catholic fundamentalist group bombed the Saint-Michel cinema in Paris, which was showing the film at the time. Thirteen people were injured, four severely. Scorsese himself was the target of death threats for several years, requiring the director to hire bodyguards. When the movie was released on the home video market, many chains, including Blockbuster Video, refused to carry it.
So why the controversy?
The film opens with an epigraph by Kazantzakis:
The dual substance of Christ—the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God… has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle [sic] anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh… and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
Following this is an advisory notice:
This film is not based upon the Gospels but upon this fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict.
The Last Temptation of Christ, whatever the medium, is drawn from the gospel narrative of Jesus but is not restricted to it. There are extra-biblical details, some of which were considered blasphemous by conservative religious groups, and even the idea of departing from the biblical narrative was considered sacrilegious.
For some background, let’s look into some Christology, which is the subset of theology dealing with the nature of Jesus in terms of his being the messiah and the Son of God.
As the religion of Christianity emerged in the Roman Empire and surrounding territories in the first few centuries AD, it involved many different beliefs about the nature of Jesus. Jesus was understood by many Christians of the era (though not all) as the Son of God—but what exactly does that mean? One such answer is given by adoptionism, according to which Jesus was conceived and born human by the usual means and adopted by God at his baptism, resurrection, or ascension (depending on which version of adoptionism you… well, adopt). Another Christology is docetism, according to which the human appearance of Jesus was an illusion. Under docetism, Jesus is of the same substance as God and did not truly suffer or die on the cross, but only appeared to do so.
These controversies threatened the unity of the early church and, by extension, that of the 4th century Roman Empire, in which Christianity had become a major social force. To resolve the disputes, ecumenical councils were convened to decide on what would be the orthodoxy of this new religion, beginning with the First Council of Nicaea in 325. The outcome of these councils, over the course of several centuries, is what we now accept as mainline Christian orthodoxy. Not all of the divisions of Christianity have accepted these decisions and so there have been various schisms as a result, but when we talk about Christianity in the West, we’re usually talking about a fairly narrow range of theologies and Christologies out of the many extant in the world and the many more that have been adopted over the centuries. Within this Christology, Jesus has two complete natures which are unified in a single person, a status described by the term hypostatic union: Jesus is both fully God and fully human. This paradox is similar to that of the Christian Trinity: God the Father is not God the Son but both are God; two things are equal to the same thing but not equal to each other.
Supposing I were a Christian, it would be easy enough for me to affirm orthodoxy by saying, “Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human, two natures in one person.” I just said it and I’m not even Christian. But what does that mean, and what does it mean for us? For comparison, Scorsese’s brilliant 1973 film Mean Streets is about a low-level gangster, Charlie, struggling to act morally in an immoral world. He’s faithful and fears Hell; a recurrent motif in the film has Charlie holding his hand over open flames to test himself against the infernal fires. He has a monologue early in the film:
Okay, I just come out of confession, right? Right. And the priest gives me the usual penance: Ten “Hail Marys,” ten “Our Fathers,” ten whatever. Next week, I’ll come back and he’ll give me another ten “Hail Marys” and another ten “Our Fathers” and… I mean, you know how I feel about that shit. Those things, they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just words. Now, that may be okay for the others, but it just doesn’t work for me. I mean, if I do something wrong, I just want to pay for it my way. So, I do my own penance for my own sins.
This echoes a brief voiceover at the very beginning of the film voiced by Scorsese himself: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Scorsese has repeatedly affirmed his Catholic faith throughout his career. He said explicitly in 2016 that he “believe[s] in the tenets of Catholicism” (Wooden), but when we look at Charlie’s monologue in Mean Streets, we can see that Scorsese isn’t content to just say the words and leave it at that. Scorsese begins with orthodox Christian belief and uses his films to deeply explore the implications thereof. In this sense, Scorsese is much like the black metal band Deathspell Omega, who do not simply reject or reverse Christianity, as do many other black metal bands, but rather push out to its extreme but inevitable conclusions. Scorsese wants to understand, not in abstract theological terms but in the real terms of human life, what it means for Jesus to be of two natures unified in a single person.
And so we first meet Jesus in the film struggling against his divine nature. He’s building crosses for the Romans, crosses that the Romans use to brutally torture and execute his fellow Israelites. He experiences his divine nature as pain and wants God to hate him so that God will leave him alone. His friend Judas admonishes him for this. For Judas, religious struggle is a practical and external matter. It’s about fighting Roman tyranny. For Jesus, the true war is the war in his heart; the struggle against the Romans pales in comparison.
We can read the character of Jesus as being an avatar of the very film that he’s in, and of film in general (Scorsese more directly explored the notion that film can be salvific in his 2011 film Hugo). The film The Last Temptation of Christ is itself a struggle, a struggle for the real meaning of the Sacred amidst the tyranny of hollow words and against a rigid orthodoxy that threatened Scorsese’s productions and even his life. And just as the Jesus of the film revolts against his divine nature by building crosses for the Romans, Scorsese revolts against orthodoxy through a sacrilegious portrayal of Jesus—sacrilegious but authentic and uncompromising in its quest to understand in real terms the nature of Jesus.
Suppose we take hypostatic union as axiomatic and see what follows. This is to say, we take it as a given that Jesus was both fully God and fully human, two natures and two substances united in a single person. What does that entail?
In a way, this is something that is true for all of us. We are, on the one hand, animals, a species of great ape. We have apelike physical bodies which are driven by animal instincts to feed, reproduce, and socialize with others of our species, and in many ways we behave under these drives much like our fellow great apes: chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, gibbons, and so forth. We are, at the same time, possessed by something alien to us, the big Other, the authoritative presence of symbolic reality. Our language, our values, our cultures, our moralities… these are not manifestations of our individual being but rather emerge from collective experience. At the same time, no person experiences themselves as the collective. We are thrown into a symbolic reality which we did not choose but which nevertheless governs our behavior.
The big Other is a concept in the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in various works, compares the big Other to God. After all, we relate to the big Other as to an ultimate moral judge. It is the realm of the Symbolic alone in which we are saints, sinners, murderers, thieves, honorable or dishonorable, virtuous or vicious, and these appellations are thrust upon us by the big Other whether we like it or not. These two substances—animal body and abstract symbolic reality—unite in each of our persons, but the union is not a peaceful one. The symbolic order functionalizes us, speaks through us, places us in particular roles, and we are inextricably entangled within it. For Scorsese, the big Other is not God, but Satan. It is the world of domestic social obligations; it is Judas’s call to lead a rebellion against the Romans; it is the social call for him to settle down with a woman and have children. But Jesus senses the inhumanity that oppresses him and inheres within him: he is at once united with God and barred from God by the entanglement of language. Language cannot encompass the Sacred and so Jesus is barred from his own being in what Lacan called castration.
I want to clarify here that I don’t personally believe that these substances are different at the fundamental level: the material reality that we experience is in fact, I believe, a modality of the mental substance which also comprises abstract symbolic reality. That’s not important for our purposes in this episode but I didn’t want there to be any confusion with statements I’ve made in other recent episodes.
Early in the film, Jesus comes to the house of the prostitute Mary Magdalene. He waits patiently through the day, watching her service her clientele, and at the end of the day, when only he remains, he comes to speak with her, to ask her to forgive him. We learn that they had once been in a relationship, and that whatever had happened between them had led to her becoming a prostitute. She still loves him and says that if he wants to save her, he can do so by uniting with her sexually. When he pulls away, she says, “Is that the way you show you’re a man?” This is a repeated theme throughout the film: attacks on the masculinity of Jesus. Given the evangelical fetishization of the masculinity of Jesus, it’s not surprising that they would be offended by this, but if we accept hypostatic union, this is an unavoidable consequence. The category of human is prior to that of man, “man” in the sense of the man/woman binary. God is not a human, so Jesus, who is fully God, is not a man. Yes, Jesus is also fully human, but not all humans are men. Hypostatic union implies that Jesus is male-bodied, but not essentially a man. Reflecting this, Scorsese, whose characters often embody the macho gender and sexuality tropes of Italian-American culture, portrays Jesus as sensitive, fragile, and almost effeminate.
Upon arriving at the house of Mary, Jesus had said to himself, “Thank you, Lord, for bringing me where I did not want to go.” Why was Jesus reluctant to come to the house of Mary to ask her forgiveness? Precisely because a quiet life with her was what he really desired. This becomes key later in the film, in the third act, when Jesus is tempted by Satan. There is a convoluted psychology at work here: Jesus does not want to go to the house of Mary precisely because he wants to go to the house of Mary. The big Other directs Jesus towards a domestic life with a family. At one point in the film, a man taunts Jesus, saying, “See, this is what happens when a man doesn’t get married. The semen backs up into his brain.” In another scene, a woman tells him that he shouldn’t be fasting in the desert to find God; he should be making children. Heteronormativity is, in the world of the film, a temptation of Satan.
In a vision later in the film, two serpents appear before Jesus and mate. The serpents resemble the tattoos on Mary’s feet and the sign on her door. Watching them, Jesus says, “Everything is from God. Everything has two meanings.” This is true for us as well. The world signifies to us in multiple modes simultaneously. A rose, for example, signifies itself and roses in general. It signifies local growing conditions, weather, seasons. It signifies beauty, and in fact that signification is constitutive of what beauty is. It signifies love, romance, a series of 15th century English wars… but the way roses signify roses and the way they signify the 15th century Wars of the Roses are different modalities of signification that operate at different levels of abstraction. Roses signify roses by the lack of difference between one rose and another; they signify the 15th century Wars of the Roses through a series of namings and heraldic associations which are at least somewhat arbitrary. And key for our purposes, not all signification is linguistic. But these different levels of signification exist in tension with one another: the beauty of roses and beauty in general as signified by roses are in tension with the brutal violence of the Wars of the Roses. And it’s not a trivial matter; these tensions can have serious material consequences on the world. Just look at the pointless and harmful material reality of the war on drugs and how that’s been facilitated by our reverence for the symbolic reality of law.
One of the best scenes in the film comes when Jesus arrives at the river where John the Baptist is ministering to his congregation. It’s a wild scene filled with shots of naked ecstatic dancing and mortification of the flesh, all accompanied by vigorous drumming and ululating chants. And through it all, John the Baptist, played by André Gregory, is dramatically fortelling doom and suffering:
I will raise up evil against you out of your own house, and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor and he shall lie with your wives.
That’s 2 Samuel 12:11, in case anyone was wondering. Interesting chapter. A prophet comes to King David and says, “Let me tell you a story. There’s this rich guy with a big flock of sheep, and another very poor guy with just one sheep that he really loves. A traveller comes and instead of making a meal for that person with a sheep from his own flock, he takes the poor person’s sheep.” David becomes furious and says that the rich man deserved to die for this. Then the prophet says, “Guess what David, I’m talking about you.” Because David had many wives and took Bathsheba, the only wife of Uriah, as another… and also conspired for Uriah to die on the battlefield. And now God’s going to punish him by having other men sleep with his wives… which just goes to show you how the authors thought about women. But this story also reflects on Jesus’ relationship with Mary. He left her (we assume) for God, and now she lies with other men, and this is another emasculation for Jesus.
So Jesus comes to talk with John the Baptist. Jesus comes up behind the baptist as he is preaching, almost sneaking up on him. The baptist senses Jesus’ presence and stops mid-sentence to turn around and ask, “Who are you?” Jesus says, “Do you know the prophets? What does Isaiah say?” “He says, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’ Are you telling me that’s you?” “I don’t know, tell me.”
Then something miraculous happens. The sound of the ecstatic crowd disappears, leaving only the sound of the river. John looks around and sees on visual inspection everything continuing much as before, but he can’t hear any of it. Nothing except the river. And here we see the key theme I’d like to examine across these three episodes: the silence of God.
As I mentioned earlier, Jesus, entangled in the symbolic order of language, is barred from his own divinity. When he encounters it directly, it is as a silence.
In a later conversation, John the Baptist kisses Jesus on the lips, quite passionately. We’d be right to suspect that some tongue was involved; the shooting script included a voiceover line that was struck from the final cut: “His tongue felt like a hot coal in my mouth.” I’ve already mentioned some of the queer subtext present in the film; as with Hitchcock’s Rope, I could probably do an entire episode on it. There’s a great essay in the anthology A Companion to Martin Scorsese by Daniel S. Cutrara called “The Last Temptation of Christ: Queering the Divine” that goes into more detail.
Jesus then goes out into the desert—a dry and desolate waste where there’s nothing to hear but the sound of dust in the wind—so that he can hear the voice of God and answer the question of whether to lead through love or by the ax. “Just speak to me in human words,” he says as he draws a circle in the rocks and pebbles surrounding him for miles. But of course this isn’t going to happen. God has no human words. It is Satan who appears to Jesus, in three forms, and speaks to him in human words. When the second form, a lion, appears to Jesus and offers him power over countries, Jesus responds, “Step into my circle so I can pull your tongue out.” It is the words, the language, that threaten, and so Jesus threatens to stop them at the source.
When God does speak, it is through imagery. An apple tree appears before Jesus; the apple bleeds when Jesus bites into it. He finds an ax in the sand and, at the behest of a vision of John the Baptist, Jesus takes it and hews down the tree. God operates at a lower level of signification than language: God speaks by manifesting the world. An ax signifies violence not arbitrarily, the way that the word “ax” signifies the object; the potential for violence inheres in its form and the relationship between that form and the human arm and hand.
For the most part, the first two acts of the film follow the Gospel narrative with some minor variations. Jesus goes to the desert and is tempted by Satan; he returns and leads his followers to Jerusalem; he overturns the stalls of the moneychangers in the Temple; he’s betrayed by Judas (at Jesus’ explicit instruction), tried by Pontius Pilate, and crucified. This is the transition to the third act, which concerns the Last Temptation for which the film is named. In agony on the cross, Jesus cries out, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” The metal fans in my audience will likely immediately hear the opening riff of the Deicide song “Once Upon the Cross” in their heads—they sampled the movie to open the song—but once past that, we’ll notice that a miraculous silence has descended again. Jesus looks around. He sees the other crucified criminals screaming and writhing in agony. He sees the crowd shouting and the Roman soldiers yelling at them to stay back. But he doesn’t hear anything. Again we find the presence of the Sacred marked by a profound silence.
And then a small girl appears before him, who we find out later is Satan. She says that she’s an angel of the Lord, and that she’s come to release Jesus from his suffering. He’s not the messiah after all, it turns out, and God doesn’t want him to suffer needlessly. So Jesus comes down from the cross and is allowed to live out the entire remainder of his life. He marries Mary Magdalene, who later dies, but Jesus recovers from the grief and marries the sisters of Lazarus. It’s curious that Satan’s temptation includes such profound suffering, but Scorsese knows that it would be hollow to present Satan as a malicious deceiver who tries to tempt Jesus away from the cross with visions of a perfet life free of suffering. Rather, Satan, as in the Garden of Eden narrative, tells the truth and offers a choice. This suffering, this grief, is part of the truth of material reality. “You didn’t complain when God let you live,” Satan explains. “You can’t complain now because he let her die.”
Jesus has to see what his life really would have been like if his sacrifice is to mean anything, not just the pleasures, but the suffering as well.
In another key scene, one of my favorites from the film, Jesus, now old and with a large family, encounters Paul in a public forum. Paul is preaching about the death and resurrection of Jesus, despite that not having actually happened in this timeline. Jesus confronts him and calls him out as a liar: after all, he’s standing right there and obviously hasn’t died or ascended to heaven. Paul responds, “I don’t care whether you’re Jesus or not. The resurrected Jesus will save the world and that’s what matters…. If I have to crucify you to save the world then I’ll crucify you, and if I have to resurrect you then I’ll do that too, whether you like it or not.” Paul says that people will martyr themselves in any case, and says, “You know, I’m glad I met you, because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more important and much more powerful.” In this scene, Jesus comes face to face with his own abstract reality, and we the audience encounter another dimension of his hypostatic struggle, the struggle between what we are in ourselves and what we become in the minds of others, during our lives and after our deaths. Jesus has encountered himself as a kind of zombie—not the zombie of the “zombie Jesus” jokes that play on the resurrection of his physical body, but the “living death” of what has been abstracted from his life. This is another unpleasant but necessary truth which Jesus must confront: he will be made a martyr regardless of his actions. He has agency over his life alone and not over what others will make of it.
There’s a joke that goes, “Jesus died for our sins, but what did he really sacrifice? He was only dead for three days. So really, Jesus gave up his weekend for our sins.” I remember being unmoved by the story of Christ when I was a child because it seemed like it couldn’t have been any other way: Jesus was sent to the world to die for our sins, and being a perfect person, he was committed to his duty, so he carried it out and that was that. To put it another way, it never seemed to me like all that much of a sacrifice. But we get something different in the story of Jesus in Scorsese’s film: a Jesus who reflects and manifests our own struggles between the concrete and abstract realities of our existence.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m not at all inimical towards Jesus. After all, Satan wasn’t, given what we read in the New Testament. Jesus is certainly less than friendly towards Satan in numerous passages, but Satan’s actual appearance in the New Testament is limited to two events: the temptations of Jesus in the desert and the possession of Judas to force him to betray Jesus. In the former case, we might say that Satan was working to undermine Jesus’ mission, but reminding Jesus that he has the ability to feed himself and offering great power are not exactly hostile. In one of my first essays I argued—and I still hold to this—that the temptation in the desert can be read as Satan testing Jesus, as one tests a potential peer. And if Satan’s possessing Judas is what caused him to betray Jesus, remember that that had to happen to effect the salvation of humankind. Satan in the film is doing exactly that: for the death of Jesus to be salvific, for Jesus to be the Lamb, it has to be a real sacrifice.
Clearly Scorsese’s purpose here isn’t evangelical, as might be the case with other films about the Gospel narrative of Jesus: Scorsese’s not trying to get people to accept Jesus as their lord and savior so that they recieve the gift of salvation. He made this film, I believe, by way of facing his own hypostatic struggle and as a medium through which his audience can face their own. Who am I? What is the Real of my being? I cannot answer this question by recourse to the symbolic order: the Real is precisely that which cannot be symbolized. I can escape neither the Real nor the Symbolic, and they exist in tension with each other. This is a constitutive tension of human existence, a tension embodied famously and prominently in the character of Jesus of Nazareth.
Works Cited or Referenced
- Cutrara, D.S. (2015). The Last Temptation of Christ: Queering the divine. In A Companion to Martin Scorsese (A. Baker, ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
- Scorsese, M. (Director). (1973). Mean streets [film]. Scorsese Productions; Warner Bros. Pictures.
- Scorsese, M. (Director). (1988). The last temptation of Christ [film]. Universal Pictures; Cineplex Odeon Films; Testament Productions.
- Scorsese, M. (Director). (2011) Hugo [film]. GK Films; Infinitum Nihil; Paramount Pictures.
- Sterritt, D. (2015). Images of religion, ritual, and the sacred in Martin Scorsese’s cinema. In A Companion to Martin Scorsese (A. Baker, ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
- Wooden, C. (10 December 2016). Filmmaker Martin Scorsese talks about his faith, upcoming movie ‘Silence’. In Catholic News Service. Retrieved 29 September 2023 from https://web.archive.org/web/20171016014456/https://www.ncronline.org/news/media/filmmaker-martin-scorsese-talks-about-his-faith-upcoming-movie-silence
- Žižek, S. (2006). How to read Lacan. W.W. Norton and Company.
- Žižek, S. (2012). Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. Verso.