FILM / The Stain / Steve Mitchell
Image © Universal Pictures
Author’s Note: “The Stain” is part of a series, titled Mirrorbox, which combines memoir with film writing as personal exploration, in this case two films about Jesus. Ultimate Trip (2001) is forthcoming in the North Carolina Literary Review, Wheel of Sleep (Melancholia) was recently published in CRAFT Literary, Peace and Noise (Eyes Wide Shut) appeared in entropy, Body of Trust (Stray Dogs) appeared in Passengers Journal, and others have been published in Drunk Monkeys and Red Fez. He’s currently working on an essay which incorporates Exorcist II: The Heretic.
The South is a blood-drenched land—as a region, we know this, embrace it. The blood of Jesus stands deep in eddies and pools on every acre. Long before I was born, the blood of Jesus mingled with the blood of the Confederacy and became one blood—of martyrdom, sacrifice, and redemption—always flowing. For white people. This unique alchemy was only true for white people.
Growing up in the 60s this blood, though unavoidable, hardly wet my shoes. My grandparents were Methodist and Presbyterian, occasional churchgoers who lived lives removed from the heady mix of faux- mortification and orgasm that made up and makes up white Southern Christianity. I had only a glancing exposure to the Blood of the Lamb.
It was everywhere, though; the stain so apparent and omnipresent we ceased to see it. It was an essential element of the landscape—Jesus’ blood, shed for me, leaking from his hands and feet, his side, running down his face, in paintings on walls in living rooms and doctor’s offices and banks and service stations. Jesus bled everywhere in the South. A White Jesus with long blonde hair which made the blood itself more striking.
Though the images are no longer visible in living rooms and barbershops they haven’t vanished. They’re still there—under two layers of wallpaper, beneath the new carpet. White Jesus’ blood feeds every blade of grass in the white Christian South.
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In 1988, my mom and I go to the movies in our mid-sized North Carolina town. Sheriff’s deputies are stationed in the lobby; there’d been a picket line earlier but when we arrive there are no placards in sight. We’re there to see Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which has evoked protests around the country, especially in the South; protests spearheaded, as these things are, by people who have not seen the film nor read the book but have heard about it.
I’m in my 20s then and Mom and I go to movies together occasionally. She isn’t a particularly religious woman, but if asked she would say she believes in God, in Christ, in being nice to people and doing good in the world. She’s religious in a cultural way, less by practice or study than osmosis.
It’s a weekday night and there are only about twenty people in the theatre when the film begins. It’s still another story of White Jesus. Willem Dafoe joins the ranks of Max von Sydow and Jeffrey Hunter, though, it must be said he isn’t blue eyed and blond, instead sporting an 80’s wavy blow-dried look somewhere between the astute Robert Powell (Jesus of Nazareth) and Ted Neeley’s scraggly hippie-Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar. Part way through our showing, the film stops, the screen goes black. A nervous teenaged usher appears at the front to tell us there’s been a bomb threat. We should all file to the parking lot while the police investigate.
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When I was growing up, White Jesus was everywhere, but I never thought of him as a real person. He was like Zeus or John Henry or Captain Kirk—iconic figures operating outside my daily life, moving in worlds so far away they were impossible. I could never imagine these figures living a normal life—being bored, not eating their vegetables, not liking their shoes. And, while Captain Kirk appeared to be immortal, and John Henry succumbed only after defeating the steam engine, the thing that seemed important about Jesus was that he died. Not just any death—a prolonged and torturous one.
No one had ever told me the story of that prolonged and torturous death until my older friend Bobby returned from Vacation Bible School to recount the tale in all its grim glory, step by step, nail by nail. I couldn’t sleep that night; the images flashed in my head, the hammer striking iron and piercing flesh, the shrieks of pain.
Thereafter, I noticed White Jesus peering down at me from seemingly every wall in the South. Bleeding, writhing, agonized. Even if he wasn’t nailed to the cross, I still saw the blood. White Jesus’s smile was always tempered by blood. Surrounded by white angels, comforting white children, walking with white disciples, the blood was always there, flowing just below the surface. The blood was the point.
If Bobby was to be believed—and he was older, after all—I was implicated in this suffering and death, born into this sin. Later I heard it repeated over and over: As if you yourself drove the nails into our Good Lord’s hands. It seems odd now, this cultural phenomenon, this taking on of religious guilt, though I know how endemic guilt is, how my psyche is hardwired for it. Even if I didn’t believe Bobby’s stories, they penetrated deep. The blood was everywhere. I didn’t have to believe for it to matter.
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Screenwriter Paul Schrader’s film world is one of constant moral and existential battle, an isolated man raging with himself and his demons, inflicting harm on everyone around them as they do—sometimes these struggles are clearly religious (Dominion, First Reformed), sometimes more worldly (Cat People, Light Sleeper). At the heart of every Schrader film is a person attempting to come to be at ease with themselves—not even fit comfortably into the world around them—simply to soothe their own inner turmoil; a turmoil brought on by the tension between who they are and who they could be, morally, spiritually. Adapting Nikos Kazantakis’ novel for film slotted directly into his interests.
In his novel, Kazantakis seeks to reclaim and emphasize the humanness of Christ which, for him, makes his eventual apotheosis even more miraculous. As a human man, tempted by all things which tempt human men, Christ passes every test. The book, published in 1952, was added by the Catholic Church to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of heretical works. The Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church attempted to have it banned upon its release.
Scorsese’s Last Temptation leans into the White Jesus of religious epics. While filmed in Morocco and employing plenty of locals as background actors, all the speaking roles go to white people; they move through the world around them separated from the indigenous population as if on a cloud.
Dafoe’s Jesus holds the film together. Alternately confused, joyous, angry, and calm, he makes visible all the warring emotions of a man besieged by visions who cannot believe he might have a destiny. Dafoe’s face—always strangely alien and beautiful—lights up when he preaches of love. He has the joy and wonder of a child discovering something magical for the first time: a bustling anthill, a fish fluttering beneath the skin of the river.
Harvey Keitel makes no effort to disguise his Brooklyn accent; he plays Judas as a kind of revolutionary Mafioso who just wants to kill Romans. He goes along with Jesus for a time, thinking he might be useful for the cause; he even begins to believe he might be the actual Messiah. I can’t help but love his Judas watching Jesus preach and perform miracles; he has the street-corner vibe of a man who can’t decide whether his intelligence is being insulted.
Scorsese’s film played for a week in a few towns around the South then unceremoniously died at the box office. Home video might have saved it from obscurity but the largest video chain, Blockbuster, refused to carry it, citing objections from the Catholic Church and Southern Christians. The region of the country that embraced the blonde blue-eyed Jesus helped make the film disappear. Last Temptation was not the Christian film the White South wanted to see.
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My mom raised three kids by herself. A nurse, she worked second shift for years because it paid more, leaving me in charge of my two sisters from the age of 12. Dinner is on the stove, call the neighbor if there’s an emergency, don’t open the door to strangers, and I’ll be home by 11. I don’t know what it says about our family that I never thought something important enough to call the neighbor.
Two men in leisure suits—it was the 70’s—and a woman in a long dress knocked on our door late one afternoon. I completely understand, the taller man said, when I explained through the chain that I couldn’t let them in. We’re just in the neighborhood, spreading the Good News. Why don’t you come out on the porch for a minute?
I went outside for the same reason children get in cars with strangers. I’d been taught that adults possessed an innate authority. I would never have let him in the house. My mother’s authority superseded all others. I could, however, step onto the porch.
I don’t remember what they said. The taller man spoke, the other man thumbed a leatherette Bible, reading verses in a low monotone. The woman stood motionless and inscrutable. In a few minutes, we were kneeling—the taller man and me—while the second read about sin and Hell. And, of course, blood.
Theoretically, I gave my soul to White Jesus that day. This act did not make me feel redeemed or lightened. I was not changed. Instead, I felt I’d somehow been deceived into accepting guilt, like the bystander who witnesses a crime he can’t prevent. I nodded and agreed, but only wanted them off the porch.
I remember the smell of his aftershave and the weight of his dry hand on my shoulder. The dark, lightless eyes of the woman, hair pulled tightly away from her set face, hands folded at her waist. They stood completely still—as if stillness were a condition of the ritual—and the man with the aftershave and the hand peered up, into the ceiling of the porch, beseeching White Jesus on my behalf. I don’t remember what was said after my redemption. I’m sure I smiled, nodded. I might have mouthed Amen. I closed my fingers loosely around the small leatherette Bible the woman wordlessly dropped into my hand, waving as they moved to the next house.
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I can still be affected by the power of the Jesus-y bits in a film or song on a kind of reptilian level, so deep—near genetic—is my White Southern upbringing. I didn’t inherit it from my immediate or extended family. It was in the water, the drenched soil, invisibly knitted into the air around me, made evident by the ubiquitous pictures of Bleeding White Jesus. Sometimes I view these feelings—at the swell of Amazing Grace or a verse from the Sermon on the Mount—with disgust at a part of my past I’ve yet to fashion enough distance from.
There’s a temptation to write them off as vestigial, remnants of a former life—not only my own but those of my parents and grandparents I still carry. Sometimes, though, I can accept the thrum of the music as pure sensation, feeling the hope and history riding the notes, resonating in the voice—a current running through my body, a current perhaps always present. In those moments, I understand the metaphor of blood as something life-giving, shared, unitive. It’s the internal revealing itself, becoming visible. Here, Power in the Blood is the power of belonging, of community.
But, Bleeding White Jesus has long ago lost its significance as a spiritual belief, becoming instead a worldly icon of manifest destiny and how White People suffer under the harrowing responsibilities of running the world. The blood became a symbol of our suffering—for being Southerners, for being white—and, in a way that’s never directly stated, the blood of our enemies which will be spilled at the time of our resurrection. When our Kingdom comes. When our Will is done.
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The specter of the Confederacy was omnipresent but rarely visible when I was young—the loss, the humiliation, the resulting defeated pride created a weird, unarticulated lens distorting our view of the world. There were Confederate flags to be seen, but the Confederacy lived less in stories of the war than in folktales of NASCAR and running liquor, tax men and law enforcement venturing into the hills to look for stills and never returning, black men staying after sundown in the city limits, hippies beaten for their troubles, their hair cut, run out of town on a rail.
The Government was a distant occupying force, issuing pronouncements without understanding, or caring, who we were. From Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, through stories and songs and the omnipresent paintings of the Bleeding White Jesus, the White South propagated a myth of the region and the Confederacy that rested upon the fundamental belief in our honor for rising to defend our way of life, our persecution at having to defend it, and our crucifixion at the hands of the North (Rome). The blood-drenched story of Jesus became the story of southern white men. We, like him, were simply waiting—anticipating—our coming resurrection.
White Southerners colonized Jesus the same way we colonized the land—bulldozing over all around us, claiming everything as ours, then complaining about how little we were appreciated for the progress we had wrought. The robes of the Ku Klux Klan were meant to evoke the ghosts of the Confederate dead, thundering into the night to deliver justice. More than 100 years later, those ghosts are kept alive by spite, pettiness, and an inherited fear untethered to memory or experience—a fear arising from an imagined past. It’s a faith still waiting for its ill-defined savior, less interested in salvation than retribution.
White Jesus suffers for the cities Sherman burned, the ravaged returning soldiers, the loss of a way of life which was only ever a way—plantations, hoop skirts, and Southern gentility—for a select few. When the blood of White Jesus rises it’s not an indication of a bruise but a deep wound, nurtured with apocalyptic fervor. White Jesus suffers for our image of ourselves, sullied by outsiders. He promises a return. White Southerners have viewed themselves as an oppressed people for nearly 150 years.
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My family, as far as I know, were never slave owners. We had no stories of lost wealth or well-to-do relatives. My grandparents never talked about their past and I took this to mean we derived from a long line of petty thieves and town drunks. The few surviving photographs appear to substantiate this suspicion. I hardly ever heard them speak in an overtly racist way, but this had more to do with the total segregation of our lives than a moral stance.
In the South, it’s never the black people we know—from work or even church—that we feel a deep terror of. It’s Black People—an amorphous fearsome mass arising in our collective nightmares. This mythology is a chief feature of our culture, and it didn’t bubble up among or belong to the poor or working whites of the South; it was the terror of rich landowners and politicians, outnumbered by the community of slaves around them and painfully aware of their tenuous position. These men seeded their own terror in the larger South through myth, legend, anecdote. They made speeches, they ran newspapers, they wrote books.
The most hated-filled and virulent racists we may see in the media today probably do have black friends, people they enjoy, appreciate, even love, but the dividing wall between those friends and their mythological Southern conception of Blackness is nearly impossible to breech. The two populations may never come into contact in a single mind. The racial dysmorphia of the South provides a fluid, ever-shifting border separating one from the other.
I still remember an aunt explaining to me there would be no Black people in Heaven but not to worry because the good ones would be made white before they entered.
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Sixteen years after Last Temptation, Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ. Gibson is an accomplished filmmaker, and the film is a dark and personal vision. Twisted, bleak, pornographic, it reveals more about the filmmaker than the biblical story. Much like Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, it’s a startling glimpse into a white male filmmaker’s unconscious, simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.
The film, tellingly, concerns itself only with the time between the betrayal of Jesus in the Garden and his resurrection. There is little here of his teaching—a few words, a couple of meaningful looks—leaving more screen time for torture and blood. There’s a lot of that. We the audience know who the good people are in the film; they’re all played by American or European—very white—actors. Everyone else is resolutely, irredeemably bad. And everyone, it seems, from the guards to the townspeople to the priests, want to get a lick in on White Jesus. Even before he’s brought before the priests, he’s already bloodied, limping, his eye swollen shut. For over two hours Gibson the filmmaker tortures Jesus with the studied glee of a sociopath slowly killing a small animal.
There is no doubt in Gibson’s Christ. No temptation. No spiritual struggle. His Passion is a male empowerment fantasy—the soldier giving up his life for his platoon, the spy never breaking under punishment, the moral man unseduced by women or the world. The centerpiece of the film is a torture scene—over five minutes long—in which Jesus is beaten and whipped, the skin flayed from his body. Everyone seems to be having a good time except the overtly white people: Mary, Mary Magdalen, and Jesus himself. Everyone laughs, cheers, makes jokes, while the pool of blood around him grows wider and deeper. White Jesus, for his part, never cries out. He’s a real mensch. Jesus the person is not the point here. The blood is the point. The cruelty is the point.
Passion of the Christ is the most successful independently released film of all time. Church groups throughout the South bussed their flocks to multiple screenings. There were altar calls in those theatres; pastors preached that finally the true film had been made about the suffering and death we were all in thrall to, we were all simultaneously indicted and acquitted of. His suffering could be finally experienced in all its glory. The story of a White Man martyred for his convictions; this was the film the White Christian South wanted to see.
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I don’t think it occurs to any of us, standing in the parking lot on a warm August evening, that there might be a bomb. We imagine some confused doofus placing the call in a fit of righteous fervor. We watch as the police dogs enter the theatre with a kind of ironic bemusement. We take it about as seriously as we take the occasional Klan parades downtown—ten paunchy white men with flags playacting a scene they think dignified and courageous.
There were preachers on street corners in those days, with a megaphone, or a mic and a box speaker at their side, and they shouted about damnation and sin—eyes gouged out by demons for eternity, burning in lakes of fire. They were imaginative concerning the punishments of the damned, but strangely vague in their descriptions of God’s love.
The KKK and the evangelicals faded from our collective awareness, became an element of local color, a part of the landscape. Yet, the blood of White Jesus dripped from their fingertips to their feet and if we ignored them, it was the same as persecuting them, and their persecution could only strengthen them and elevate them in God’s sight.
We joke outside the theater, the motley group of strangers: a college professor here, two aging hippies, a couple of would-be film students, a middle-aged couple with their teenager son, my mom and me. We roll our eyes at the absurdity of the situation. We couldn’t have said it, but perhaps we’d come to see the film in the belief that a different kind of story might staunch the invisible river of blood, might begin to heal the lingering wound.
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White Jesus has slowly faded from the landscape of the South, covered by sleek modernist facades, quaint retro-Southern homes, and Taco Bells. White righteousness is no longer confined to the southern States. The blood—of imagined oppression and humiliation, of heightened destiny, of the resurrection—flows over our borders to the West and the North. Few who embrace it outside the South notice the sticky fingerprints of White Jesus, yet he’s the connective tissue binding each slogan and shout. When a religion is overtaken by fear and grievance, its performance of suffering and persecution generates a kind of negative joy, the only feeling it has to offer.
There are sins we’re born to and, while we may not be personally guilty, we’re nonetheless called to redeem them; called not by a God but by our own humanity. The temptation to fully accept the life we find ourselves in—its historical and cultural assumptions, its privileged or underprivileged birthrights, its caste assignment—is fierce. Reinforced on all sides by the weight of history and the grip of those around us, we’re drawn into an illusion of a constancy which takes effort to resist.
For much of Last Temptation, Schrader’s Jesus is trapped between the comfort of remaining nestled within history or challenging it. The pressure to move outside his small and simple life feels like it’s killing him and maybe it’s only when our past can no longer shelter us, when there is no comfort to be had, that we can pull free of the temptations of comfort and step into the unknowing that is change. It isn’t certainty that pushes Schrader’s Jesus to declare “It is finished,” it’s abandon. There is faith in this abandon but it’s wild and dangerous; and it promises nothing.
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I’m in my fifties when a co-worker asks me to pray with her—her son had just been in an automobile accident—and I do without hesitation. Living in the South, I’ve often found myself praying with others. I’m not a believer, but I bow my head; I’m silent for a moment.
It’s early in the morning; she and I are the only two in the building. She takes my hand and we stand together, heads down, while she prays aloud. She’s black, she’s older than I am—I don’t know the color of the Jesus she prays to. There’s a silence after the prayer when only our breathing is audible and the morning hums around us. In a moment, she releases her grip and I’m sorry to feel her hand slide away.
Years after, when my son is in a coma and we don’t know whether he will ever regain consciousness, I do not pray. I do not talk to God. I talk to my son. I tell him stories about his past. I tell him stories about the world that awaits when he is re-born. I hold his hand, even though he’s in his twenties. I talk to him the way I might talk to a child in the womb. I have no doubt my co-worker prayed for him.
Her son recovers, my son recovers. Their experiences, edging so close to death, change them. We talk about it, she and I. Their sudden resolve and direction. Their stillness and introspection. The way that, for a time, they seem to see the world anew; we catch them smiling at the purr of a cat or the smoothness of a spoon. It’s as if they stepped into a darkness they might not otherwise have found and emerged changed.
There are times as I pray with others when I can almost feel the power—the necessity, even—of prayer. A prayer like a beacon, a lighthouse, a way of finding the way home. When I talked to my unresponsive son, that was what I wanted him to know—that there was a place to return to—that he could come home again, and someone would be there. I know this is what prayer feels like to those who believe, both the path home and home itself.
Yet, the home we leave is never the one we return to and the leaving is necessary both as a purge and a re-discovery. It’s nearly impossible for me to imagine this South—now aggrieved white people across the country, culturally White Jesus Southerners—abandoning what they see as a home, the negative space of assumed humiliation and grievance they’ve created. I only know it will take a kind of death to accomplish.
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My mom could be maddeningly literal toward films and, in the car on the way home from the theatre (which is where all film discussions used to take place), she asks:, did Jesus die or get married in the end? I explain that his vision of a simple, married life is the last temptation of the title. Mom nods, thinking for a moment, then asks: But, why would someone want to blow up the theater?
Steve Mitchell, a writer and journalist, has published in CRAFT Literary, entropy, december magazine, Southeast Review, among others. His novel, Cloud Diary, is published by C&R Press. His book of short stories is The Naming of Ghosts from Press 53. He has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC and Editor at Scuppernong Editions. Find him at: www.clouddiary.org