The Bible onscreen in the new millennium: New heart and new spirit

By Manchester University Press

The remarkable commercial success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in 2004 came as a surprise to the Hollywood establishment, particularly considering the film’s failure to find production funding through a major studio. Since then the Biblical epic, long thought dead in terms of mainstream marketability, has become a viable product. This collection examines the new wave of the genre, which includes such varied examples as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), along with the telenovelas of Latin America. Such texts follow previous traditions while appearing distinct both stylistically and thematically from the Biblical epic in its prime, making academic consideration timely and relevant. Featuring contributions from such scholars as Mikel J. Koven, Andrew B. R. Elliott and Martin Stollery, and a preface from Adele Reinhartz, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of film, television and religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526136596

Book preview

The Bible onscreen in the new millennium

The Bible onscreen in the new millennium

New heart and new spirit

Edited by Wickham Clayton

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3657 2 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

This book is dedicated, as always, to my son George, who asks me philosophical questions that challenge me in ways no theologian ever could, and to the memory of Dr Laurence Raw, the first person to take a chance on publishing my writing.

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Preface by Adele Reinhartz

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Wickham Clayton

Part I Producing biblical film and television

1Battles over the biblical epic: Hollywood, Christians and the American Culture Wars

Karen Patricia Heath

2Depicting ‘biblical’ narratives: a test case on Noah

Peter Phillips

3Special effects and CGI in the biblical epic film

Andrew B. R. Elliott

4The phenomenon of biblical telenovelas in Brazil and Latin America

Clarice Greco, Mariana Marques de Lima and Tissiana Nogueira Pereira

Part II Modern narratives and contexts in adapting the Bible

5Mythic cinema and the contemporary biblical epic

Mikel J. Koven

6The Nativity reborn: genre and the birth and childhood of Jesus

Matthew Page

7Convince me: conversion narratives in the modern biblical epic

Chris Davies

Part III Critical readings and receptions

8Controversy and the ‘Culture War’: exploring tensions between the secular and the sacred in Noah, the ‘least biblical biblical movie ever’

Becky Bartlett

9‘Can anything good come out of Southern California?’* (*hyperlink to John 1:46): the Christian critical reception of elliptical Jesus narratives

Wickham Clayton

10Examining the digital religion paradigm: a mixed-method analysis of online community perception of epic biblical movies

Gregory P. Perreault and Thomas S. Mueller

Part IV Culture and representation

11The devil and the Culture Wars: demonising controversy in The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ

Karra Shimabukuro

12Ben-Her(?): soft stardom, melodrama and the critique of epic masculinity in Ben-Hur (2016)

Thomas J. West III

13The biblical-trial film: social contexts in L’Inchiesta and Risen

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Emiliano Aguilar

14‘Squint against the grandeur’: iconoclasm and film genre in The Passion of the Christ and Hail, Caesar!

Martin Stollery

Filmography

Index

Figures

0.1‘The Passion of the Jew’, South Park (2004): Kyle (voiced by Matt Stone), a Jewish child, goes to see The Passion of the Christ and later has scary dreams of himself as a member of the Sanhedrin.

0.2Friday Night, Saturday Morning (BBC 2, 9 November 1979): ‘You’ll get your thirty pieces of silver …’. Left to right: Mervyn Stockwood (Bishop of Southwark), Malcolm Muggeridge and Monty Python members John Cleese and Michael Palin heatedly debate blasphemy in Life of Brian (1979).

0.3The Prince of Egypt (1998): In a moment of spectacle, lightning backlights the sea life in the wall of miraculously parted water as the Hebrews cross to safety.

1.1Con Air (1997): Director Simon West’s use of a ray of light to illuminate Cameron Poe’s face (played by Nicolas Cage) directly references Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1940).

2.1Greimas’ structure based around actants.

2.2Greimas’ theory applied to a story of a prince helped by a magic horse to save a princess.

2.3Griemas’ theory applied to the story of Noah.

7.1King Arthur (2004): Bors (Ray Winstone) mocks Horton’s (Pat Kinevane) faith, as the corrupt Roman Christians occupy and later flee Britain.

7.2Noah (2014): Noah (Russell Crowe) wrestles with his faith and undertaking ‘the Creator’s’ will.

7.3Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014): God, or his messenger, represented as a petulant and vengeful child (Isaac Andrews).

7.4Ben-Hur (2016): Christianity as a source of redemption and domesticity is restored in the ending as Judah (Jack Huston) and Messala (Toby Kebbell) embrace their family.

9.1The Young Messiah (2016): Jesus (Adam Greaves-Neal) faces a Roman soldier.

9.2Last Days in the Desert (2015): Yeshua (Ewan McGregor) rests with the Father (Ciarán Hinds) and Son (Tye Sheridan) as they build a new house.

10.1Co-occurrence network depicting perceived attraction to biblical epic movies.

10.2Regression tree predictive model predicting experience of the divine.

10.3Chart illustrating the correlation between church attendance (per month) and experience of the divine.

11.1The Last Temptation of Christ (1988): The Girl Angel (Juliette Caton) saves Jesus (Willem Dafoe) from crucifixion.

11.2The Passion of the Christ (2004): Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) in the Garden of Gethsemane.

12.1Ben-Hur (2016): According to the critics, Judah (Jack Huston) in the galleys looks more like George Harrison than Charlton Heston.

12.2Ben-Hur (2016): Messala (Toby Kebbell) has become, as Judah puts it, like one of the statues that Rome insists on putting everywhere.

12.3Ben-Hur (2016): This Ben-Hur allows for a melodramatic reconciliation that occurs in the nick of time rather than too late.

13.1–2Risen (2016): Reminiscences of terrorism.

13.3Risen (2016): Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) becomes a disciple.

13.4L’Inchiesta (1987): In the film’s final shot, we see the corpse of Tauro (Keith Carradine) abandoned in the desert.

14.1The Passion of the Christ (2004): Jim Caviezel as Jesus.

14.2Ben-Hur (2016): Crucifixion of Christ featuring Rodrigo Santoro, used for some marketing materials including posters.

14.3Hail, Caesar! (2016): Baird Whitlock/Autolycus Antoninus (George Clooney) struggles to squint against the grandeur.

Contributors

Emiliano Aguilar has an MA from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. He has published on science fiction in journals such as Lindes and Letraceluloide and has chapters in Orphan Black and Philosophy, edited by Richard Greene (2016); The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy, edited by Bruce Krajewski (2017); Giant Creatures in our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture, edited by Camille Mustachio and Jason Barr (2017); Twin Peaks and Philosophy, edited by Richard Greene (2018); and American Horror Story and Philosophy, edited by Richard Greene (2017), among others.

Becky Bartlett is currently a Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Glasgow, where her teaching has included courses on cult film and television and religion in film and television. She is currently working on her monograph (Edinburgh University Press, expected 2020) and has contributed essays to Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Cult Film. Her research interests include cult cinema, bad movies, religion and film and Hollywood gorilla men.

Wickham Clayton is a Lecturer in the School of Film Production at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. He is the author of See!Hear!Cut!Kill!: Experiencing Friday the 13th (forthcoming), editor of Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film (2015) and co-editor of Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon (with Sarah Harman, 2014). He has written a number of essays on genre (primarily horror), aesthetics and adaptation.

Chris Davies is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Blockbusters and the Ancient World: Allegory and Warfare in Contemporary Hollywood, and his research interests include history on film, principally the ancient world, westerns and war films, as well as sci-fi and comic book movies. He currently works as a Senior Compliance Officer at the British Board of Film Classification. His views are his own and do not reflect those of the BBFC.

Andrew B. R. Elliott is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln, where he works on the representation of history in film, television and video games. He has published on a number of aspects relating to historical film, television and video games, from the classical world to the Middle Ages, and most recently has published on special effects in the epic film and the HBO/BBC series Rome and is editor of the collection The Return of the Epic Film (2014), featuring essays on a range of topics relating to the alleged return of the epic. His most recent book is Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (2017).

Clarice Greco is Professor in the Postgraduate Programme in Communications at Paulista University (UNIP), São Paulo and a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), having received a PhD and an MA from the same institution. She is a Researcher at the Centre for Telenovela Studies at ECA-USP (CETVN) and at the Ibero-American Observatory of TV Fiction OBITEL and Vice-coordinator of Obitel Brazil-USP.

Karen Patricia Heath is a Senior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. She is a historian of the modern and contemporary United States, with specialist research interests in the Culture Wars, political ideologies, and the place of the arts in public life. Karen is currently preparing a book manuscript for publication, provisionally entitled Conservatives and the Politics of Federal Arts Funding, from the Great Society to the Culture Wars.

Mikel J. Koven is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Worcester. He is the author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (2006), Film, Folklore and Urban Legends (2008) and Blaxploitation Films (2010).

Mariana Marques de Lima is a PhD candidate (funded by CAPES agency) in Communications at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo and a researcher at the Centre for Telenovela Studies – CETVN and at the Ibero-American Observatory of TV Fiction – Obitel.

Thomas S. Mueller is a professor of advertising at Appalachian State University and the senior member of his university’s Faculty in Residence programme. He is a quantitative analyst with research interests in analytics marketing, energy research and predictive models for consumer behaviour. His work has been published in the Journal of Higher Education Management, Journal of Bullying & Social Aggression, Energy Research & Social Science and the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.

Matthew Page is an independent scholar who has been researching in the area of the Bible on film for almost twenty years. He recently had two chapters published in De Gruyter’s The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film (edited by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, 2016) and has others in The T&T Clark Companion to the Bible and Film (edited by Richard Walsh, 2018) and the forthcoming T&T Clark Companion to Jesus and Film (edited by Richard Walsh). He has also contributed numerous entries to De Gruyter’s Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (2009–present). He currently runs the Bible Films Blog.

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) – Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. He teaches courses on the international horror film. He is director of the research group on horror cinema ‘Grite’ and has chapters in the books Divine Horror, edited by Cynthia Miller (2017); To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post 9/11 Horror, edited by John Walliss (2013); Critical Insights: Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Douglas Cunningham (2016); Reading Richard Matheson: A Critical Survey, edited by Cheyenne Mathews (2014); and The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy, edited by Bruce Krajewski (2017), among others. He is currently writing a book about the Spanish TV horror series Historias para no Dormir.

Tissiana Nogueira Pereira is a PhD candidate (funded by CAPES agency) in Communications at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo and a researcher at the Centre for Telenovela Studies – CETVN and at the Ibero-American Observatory of TV Fiction – Obitel.

Gregory P. Perreault is an Associate Professor of multimedia journalism at Appalachian State University. He is a media sociologist who primarily examines journalism, gaming and representations of religion. His work has been published in Journalism: Theory, Criticism & Practice, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, Howard Journal of Communication and Games & Culture. His research has been widely discussed in publications including VICE, Le Monde, Kotaku and Yahoo! Games.

Peter Phillips is Research Fellow in Digital Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, and Director of the Research Centre for Digital Theology. His most recent work is ‘The Pixelated Text’ in Theology journal, November 2018 and The Bible, Social Media and Digital Culture (Routledge Press: 2019).

Adele Reinhartz is a Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa and author of Bible and Cinema: An Introduction (2013).

Karra Shimabukuro’s work analyses folkloric figures in medieval and early modern literature and popular culture for the ways they are vehicles for the fears, desires and anxieties of a particular historical and cultural moment, and how this opens new avenues of thinking about, and challenging, well-known texts, genres and periodisations. She is an Assistant Professor at Elizabeth City State University.

Martin Stollery is the author of Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (2000), L’émigré (2004) and co-author of British Film Editors (2004). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on various aspects of North African and British film history.

Thomas J. West III is an independent scholar who earned his PhD in English from Syracuse University. His dissertation, entitled ‘History’s Perilous Pleasures: Experiencing Antiquity in the Postwar Hollywood Epic’, explored the ways in which biblical epics of the 1950s and 1960s provided both an experience of and escape from the terrors of modernity. His work includes published and forthcoming essays on the HBO series Rome, the epic film The Robe and the Starz series Spartacus.

Preface

Adele Reinhartz

The Bible epic has existed as long as cinema itself. Among the very earliest films to be made were movies based on great biblical figures. Among the first Old Testament films to be made were La Vie de Moïse [The Life of Moses] (1905) and Moïse sauvé des eaux [The Infancy of Moses] (1911), both by Pathé, and the much more ambitious, five-reel spectacular, The Life of Moses (1909–10), by Vitagraph, which covered Moses’ life ‘from the bulrushes to Mount Pisgah’ (Pearson 2005: 69). Filmmakers soon broadened their horizons to other stories, such as Adam and Eve (1912), Joseph in the Land of Egypt (1914) and Cecil B. DeMille’s first version of The Ten Commandments (1923). Patrons flocked to see films about Jesus, such as the Horitz Passion Play (1897), The Passion Play at Oberammergau (1898), From the Manger to the Cross (1912) and Christus (1916). The most popular and best-loved Jesus film of the silent period was Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927). This film remains highly entertaining even today, due to its witty dialogue (conveyed through intertitles) and creative back story (in which Mary Magdalene and Judas were lovers before Judas was ‘seduced’ by Jesus into following him around the Galilee and Judea).

These films constituted the first phase in the history of the Bible epic genre (Reinhartz 2013). With the onset of the Depression, and later, the Second World War, the genre declined, primarily for economic reasons (Babington and Evans 1993: 7–8). With the resurgence of the American economy after the end of the war, however, the epic genre also revived, with such films as Samson and Delilah (1949), The Story of Ruth (1960), David and Bathsheba (1951), A Story of David (1960), Solomon and Sheba (1959), King of Kings (1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).¹ This period also saw the release of the most enduring and iconic Bible epic of all time: Cecil DeMille’s 1956 film, The Ten Commandments. This film, still viewed widely during the Passover/Easter period, remains for many viewers their main source of knowledge of the Exodus story.

The return of the Bible epic in the postwar period was due not only to the booming economy but also social and political factors such as the Cold War, the creation of the State of Israel and the changing role of women. Bible epics were an important weapon in Hollywood’s anti-Communist arsenal, as illustrated by DeMille himself, who, in the opening scene of The Ten Commandments, steps out from behind the curtain to compare the ancient Israelites’ struggle against their Egyptian slavemasters to the mid-twentieth-century battle against the Red Menace of the Soviet Union. Postwar epics also convey a growing interest in and sympathy for Jews and Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. This may have been a factor in the production of films about figures and stories from the ‘Old Testament’ (Babington and Evans 1993: 34). Special attention was given to female figures such as Ruth, Delilah, Bathsheba, Sheba, Mary and Mary Magdalene. These women are portrayed as strong personalities in their own right, yet they ultimately remain in, or return to, the domestic sphere. In this regard they mirror the American wives, mothers and sisters who went out to work, often in positions of responsibility, during the war, but returned, whether reluctantly or willingly, to their ‘ideal’ household roles afterwards.

Finally, technology and competition also played a part in reviving the Bible epic in the postwar period. The advent of television created some anxiety for the film industry; large-scale technicolor epics were one way in which the movie studios could claim superiority to the upstart technology that provided entertainment without the need to leave the house.²

The late 1960s saw another decline in the genre, to which the growing costs of the epic and the relentless popularity of television surely contributed. The highly patriotic and morally simplistic worldview conveyed by the epics seemed inappropriate in an era marked by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism (Sobchack 1990: 40).

Forty years later, along came Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, inaugurating what seems to be a third era of the Bible epic. Gibson’s film – and his meticulous marketing to evangelical Christian audiences – may have encouraged others to see the economic potential of Bible epics. None of the films released since 2004 has seen quite the same attention and box office success as Gibson’s film did. Nevertheless, they keep on coming, at least for now. The optimism of filmmakers may well be due at least in part to the increasing public presence of evangelical Christianity. At least some of the new Bible epics convey messages that reinforce the values of this group and that therefore might be expected to do well at the box office.

In addition to commercial potential, the return of the biblical epic is enabled by technological advances since the 1960s. These advances have made it easier than ever to make a movie of epic scope without the epic cost. Bible epics can capitalise on the obvious popularity of epic themes – as exemplified by the Star Wars franchise as well as war movies, disaster movies, apocalyptic films and other grand narratives – as well as the perennial appeal of the Bible.

Just as the epics of the mid-twentieth-century Golden Age addressed the pressing social issues of that era, so too might we find that the new Bible epics address the issues of our time, such as environmentalism, sexuality, violence and democracy. The present volume addresses the films that have come out from 2004 to 2018 from a variety of perspectives and for that reason serves as a first foray into the New Biblical Epic. The films being considered are of varying aesthetic quality, but they all are worthy of study as glimpses into our present cultural moment.

Notes

1 For history and discussion of the films in the silent era and the Golden Age, see Hirsch ( 1978 : 11–28).

2 See Wood ( 1975 : 168).

References

Babington, Bruce, and Evans, Peter William (1993) Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hirsch, Foster (1978) The Hollywood Epic, South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, pp. 11–28.

Pearson, Roberta A. (2005) ‘Biblical Films’ in Abel, Richard (ed.) Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, New York: Routledge, pp. 68–71.

Reinhartz, Adele (2013) Bible and Cinema: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Sobchack, Vivian (1990) ‘Surge and Splendor: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic’, Representations 29, pp. 24–49.

Wood, Michael (1975) America in the Movies or, ‘Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind’, New York: Basic Books.

Acknowledgements

This book has very complicated origins. It is clearly a divergence from my research to date, but is part of a lifelong fascination with and personal exploration of the concepts of faith and theology. Of course, I am only the editor, and I would like to thank all of my wonderful contributors for working hard and being a part of this with me. I would also like to thank Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press for supporting this project and helping to bring it to publication.

My family back in Virginia – Mom and Dad, Whitney and Catie – who are devout Christians, are an indispensable part of this journey for me. I should also give recognition to the Reverend Don Davidson, who spent a significant part of my adolescence and young adulthood in discussing these Bible stories (which endlessly fascinated me) and conceptions of faith with me. Thank you all for sparking this lasting interest.

This project started in the summer of 2016, when I first saw the trailer for Timur Bekmambetov’s Ben-Hur, a project which struck me as fascinating in concept. Unbeknownst to him, my good friend Kyle McCollum was sitting next to me as this project sparked a weird chain reaction in my brain, and Chiara Mestieri eventually accompanied me to see the movie later that year. Thank you both for being great cinema company. You never talk during the movie, as it should be. And when you do, you make it worth it.

I am incredibly lucky to have so many mentors, colleagues, and friends in this strange career who are tremendous inspirations to me personally and professionally. Some of these incredibly important people are: Stacey Abbott, Claire Barwell, Lucy Bennett, Todd Berliner, Paul Booth, Simon Brown, Jerry Peter DeMario, Rhio Evans, Zalfa Feghali, Hattie Fell, Steven Gerrard, Maren Hahnfeld, Tiana Harper, Nuampi Hatzaw, Bethan Jones, Joe Ketchum, Shellie McMurdo, Laura Mee, Ed Oliver, Alex Pearson, David Roche, Karra Shimabukuro, Andy Small, Sarah Taylor-Harman, Carol Walker, Johnny Walker, Tom Watson and many, many more.

I’d like to thank Tes and Isaac. They have been a source of continued enjoyment and intellectual stimulation. Tes and Isaac have joined me in fun over the last year and a bit (at the time of writing). They don’t quite ‘get’ what I do (or at least the way I do what I do (though Tes notably gave me some great editorial assistance)) but they have strongly encouraged it and I thank them for that.

This book is dedicated to two people. I’d first like to take a moment to honour the late Dr Laurence Raw. I never had the pleasure of meeting Laurence in person, but he has left a tremendous impact on my life. Laurence gave me my first shot at publication with a book review in the Journal of American Studies Turkey (JAST). We have since stayed in touch, and he has given me a tremendous amount of faith, encouragement and support in my burgeoning writing and publishing career. His faith gave me confidence. Laurence had a major impact on me, as I understand he did on a large number of academics, particularly in the area of Adaptation Studies, which this book clearly builds upon in some ways. Therefore, this book is in part for Laurence.

The other person I dedicate this book to, as I have my others, is my son, George. I can only say that he challenges me and brings me joy in every moment I have with him. I write this book for him, not only the financial benefits (which, let’s be honest, are likely to be fairly insignificant), but to enrich the environment around him – both around the house, and possibly even in the contribution to knowledge and understanding. Kid, you’re hilarious. You mean the world to me.

Introduction

Wickham Clayton

I learned that – well, have another Bible script handy because the studios are all going to want to do it now. I don’t know. That’s – I’m sorry. I’m being flip. – Mel Gibson. (Fox News 2004)

Seventeen years ago it would be nearly unimaginable that someone would have a Hollywood luncheon to discuss God. Mel Gibson was still a marketable star with no scandals to his name (yet) and some public but muted affiliation to traditional Catholicism. And this Hollywood star had tried, and failed, to get funding for his filmed version of the Passion Play, which existed in the form of cultic dramas in religions predating Christianity, and became a mainstay in organised Christian tradition at least since the medieval period. Out of his proclaimed intense desire to make the film, Gibson funded it independently and in 2004 The Passion of the Christ was released to lukewarm, at best, reviews and staggering box office success.¹

The significance of The Passion of the Christ and its immediate commercial success as well as its enduring popularity (and infamy) have been subject to much theoretical discussion and debate. Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd Penner identify the relevance of the contemporary socio-political climate in the USA:

Aside from the deep-rooted and longstanding traditions of American identity that circumscribe the debates swirling around The Passion, the current climate of the war on terror and the broader mindset of an America still reeling from the shock of 9/11 deserve to be given a more central role in framing the analysis of Gibson, his film, his audience(s), and his critics. (2006: 35)

Indeed, the significance of 9/11 for American culture had an immediate and lasting impact with the religious right – a right farther right than the established right which was instrumental in the popularity of the Tea Party and later the following, if not the election, of Donald Trump in 2016 – as a driving force for the film’s success. Brian Walter notes its political lineage in Hollywood, saying that the film ‘does mine a vein of conservative Christian separatism that Hollywood had sought to tap going back to the 1930 establishment of the Motion Picture Production Code’ (2012: 5). This is not to ignore its success with the religious faithful not descended from the 1980s Moral Majority – according to Melanie J. Wright, ‘whilst Gibson belongs to a traditionalist Catholic church, the film found popularity with mainstream Catholics, Protestants, and other Christians’ (2008: 168). Furthermore, it does indicate the monetary power held by those adhering to a faith-based worldview following a period of perceived social secularisation.

And even this cultural moment, this film particularly, still has political resonances. According to entertainment journalist James Ulmer, Steve Bannon, the far-right former adviser to and continued supporter of Trump, identified the cultural significance of this moment. According to Ulmer:

So [Bannon]’d go to this whiteboard and … he had the word ‘Lord’ on the whiteboard and he circled it, and there were all kinds of other circles on the whiteboard leading to different names of different movies. And I said ‘What’s that?’ He said ‘Well, think of it, James,’ he said, ‘2004, February 25th. Seminal watershed weekend in the history of the Hollywood right.’ I said ‘What do you mean watershed?’ And he said ‘Well, The Passion of the Christ is released on Ash Wednesday, and then four, five days later you have one of the great Christian allegories, Lord of the Rings’ he said ‘was at the Oscars and won eleven Academy awards,’ he said. ‘Now that’s,’ he says, ‘an example of the great Sodom and Gomorrah of Hollywood bowing to the Christian God.’ (Quoted in McEvers 2017)

It has also been argued that the film, quite apart from appealing to Christians, drew a mainstream crowd made curious by negative press. Adele Reinhartz writes that the film’s ‘heavy-handed violence and its negative representations of the Jewish authorities touched off a major controversy that may well have contributed to its box-office success’ (2013: 61). Both the extreme violence and negative Jewish representation continue to be the subject of much debate in the media as well as in critical and scholarly writing. The contemporary mainstream conversation was bolstered by extensive media coverage, with Gibson and other members of cast and crew providing interviews. The Passion of the Christ was even the central focus of an episode of South Park (Comedy Central 1997–present) entitled ‘The Passion of the Jew’ which engaged in its own brand of irreverent cultural criticism and observation.

Figure 0.1 ‘The Passion of the Jew’, South Park (2004): Kyle (voiced by Matt Stone), a Jewish child, goes to see The Passion of the Christ and later has scary dreams of himself as a member of the Sanhedrin.

Whatever the reasons for its success, Gibson, in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, rightly observed that studios will be wanting to produce Bible scripts. Following from this success came, not an abundance, but a regular stream of films based on biblical stories, such as The Nativity Story (2006), One Night with the King (2006), Noah (2014), Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) and the TV series The Bible (History Channel 2013); or films based around biblical characters and events, such as Last Days in the Desert (2015), Risen (2016) and the latest adaptation of Ben-Hur (2016). And while these are the most visible, they are merely the American productions. It cannot be firmly said that these films have in any way dominated the entertainment industries, as the failed Fox Faith film label indicates. However, major biblical productions now see more mainstream representation than the small Christian film industry which caters specifically to its target audiences, such as Sony’s Affirm Films.

Furthermore, the recently well-publicised release of Mary Magdalene (2018), which makes efforts to view Jesus through a distinctly feminist lens, shows the efforts to revivify and make relevant these stories for the new cultural moment. But on the other hand, the announcement² that Mel Gibson is currently in production on The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection (forthcoming), particularly in light of the intensifying partisanship of the current political climate globally, demonstrates the other side of the efforts to use biblical adaptations to capture the divisiveness we see around us. In fact, this partisanship can be illustrated through significant films on the political ‘left’. Several months after the release of The Passion of the Christ, Michael Moore released his unprecedented box-office smash hit Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which attempted to expose the corruption and ineptitude of the Bush presidency. The film covered Bush’s contentious election to the Iraq war, and filtered these events through the lens of 9/11. It is also notable that a few months after Gibson announced the production of The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection, Moore released Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018), exploring the political state of America, Trumpism and gun violence. This is not to say that there is any direct link between the two filmmakers and their respective (ostensible) series, but it does highlight the strongly partisan culture at each of these periods. Certainly, the simultaneous expression of politics and religion in popular culture is at least a notable coincidence, if not indicative of some real parallels.

As a renewed fixture in mainstream entertainment, the biblical adaptation meets certain challenges in discourse, which have been debated at length in academia. Bruce Babington and William Peter Evans have gone some way to exploring the biblical epic within film scholarship. For example, they have identified the difficulty in using precise terminology to describe these films: ‘Attempts to be accurately inclusive produce unwieldy terminology like the Hollywood Judaeo-Christian Epic of Origins or the Hollywood Biblical (and immediately Post-Biblical) Epic. But even these would struggle to cover The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which in many ways takes leave of the Hollywood Epic style’ (Babington and Evans 1993: 4). It is with this that Babington and Evans utilise the term Biblical Epics as shorthand to indicate a broad range of texts, and in this collection variations of this term are applied.

Of course, in using the word ‘category’ I have carried us directly into the long-running debate over whether the biblical film is a ‘genre’ or a ‘mode’ of filmmaking. Do these films belong to a category which indicates types of stories with common, clearly identifiable structures and aesthetics, or are they simply similar ways of expressing whatever story is at hand? For myself, I would categorise the classical Hollywood biblical epic, which was a strong, profitable force in Hollywood until the 1960s, as a genre – a view supported by a number of theorists such as Babington and Evans. However, this new breed of biblical film, running through the new millennium, is trickier and under-defined. The stories may share general similarities, which engage in the use and deconstruction of generic iconography, but it could be argued that such texts are stylistically different, even