Mad Max And Meathead
Rob Reiner has recently got some attention for calling on Mel Gibson to apologize not just for the comments he made after being arrested, but also for The Passion Of The Christ (which I haven't seen).
When he can come out and say, you know, 'My views have been reflected in my work and I feel bad that I've done that,' then that will be the beginning of some reconciliation for him. I believe that people can be redeemed and people can change, but that's going to be a very long process.There's no doubt what Gibson said is incredibly ugly. Still, what Reiner said is pretty pompous.
The obvious comeback: "I'll apologize for The Passion Of The Christ if you'll apologize for North."
posted by LAGuy @ 1:36 AM
1 Comments:
There is something that has surprised me ever since the controversy over The Passion began (at least a year before its release).
Let G be any group of people (a religion, a political movement, fans of Elvis, whatever). Let H be the founder of this movement, revered as a hero (or more) by all the members of group G.
Let O be some other group, disjoint from G. (A different religion, a rival political party, whatever.)
Now suppose one member of group G makes a hagiographic movie about the hero H. And suppose that some elements of this movie upset some members of group O. So various public spokesmen (self-appointed or legitimate) for group O get together and ask, "Should we protest against this movie about H, the hero of our rival group?"
I would think that the folks in that meeting would say, No way! Even though we feel we have legitimate grievances against this movie, this is still a paean to popular hero H, with whom all the members of G identify. If we protest this movie, the public will surely misunderstand our intentions, and think that we are not just opposing this movie, but are opposing H, and perhaps the entire group G."
For example, if a Muslim filmmaker made a paean to Mohammed, and Hindus throughout India protested, I don't believe that Indian Muslims would say "Clearly these Hindus have nothing against Mohammed or Muslims in general; they must be concerned with certain minor bits in the movie."
Yet I very rarely saw leaders (self-appointed or otherwise) of the Jewish community expressing concern about this. Of course, I read a great deal about this issue and was aware of what the objections to this movie were; I agreed with some and disagreed with others. But I have to think that millions of American Christians just saw that "Jews are protesting against a movie about Jesus". Isn't that a really dumb public-relations move?
Post a Comment
<< Home