Weirdhouse Cinema: The Last Temptation of Christ

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss Martin Scorsese’s 1988 religious epic “The Last Temptation of Christ,” starring Willem Dafoe and featuring an amazing, ambient worldbeat score by Peter Gabriel.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is
Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
we're going to be talking about the nineteen eighty eight
film The Last Temptation of Christ, directed by Martin Scorsese,
based on the nineteen fifty five novel by Niko's Cousinsakas,
which addresses one of the central mysteries of Christianity, how
could God become a human and what would that be like.

(00:38):
I had somehow never seen this movie before, which might
come as a surprise to listeners who kind of know, Oh,
I don't know my tastes of narratives of antiquity and
the Bible and stuff like that. But somehow I had
never seen it before, and Wow, I loved it. I
can't wait to talk about so many things about this movie.

(00:59):
I'm so glad you picked it for this week, Rob.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Awesome. Yeah, this is a film that I had never
seen before either, but I've been drawn to it for
most of my life in a weird way. And it's
weird like that with films, you know, it's like sometimes
something remains on the two watch list for most of
your time here on Earth, and then when you finally
get around to it, well, sometimes it's just it's just

(01:25):
that's when you were meant to see it, you know.
So I was I was ten years old when this
film first came out, so I don't really you know,
I certainly don't remember the marketing for it. I don't
remember trailers for it, and I don't actually remember any
of the initial controversy about it, which we'll get into,
but I certainly picked up on that later on, sort
of the shockwaves of that initial controversy, in these shockwaves

(01:49):
that continue to resonate around it, like you can't generally,
if you think about the Last Temptation of Christ, you
think about some degree of controversy, and we'll get back
to that as well. My other door way into the
film was my long standing appreciation for the music of
Peter Gabriel, which we'll come back to as well. And
at one point i'd actually picked up a copy of

(02:09):
the Cousin Zakis novel because that it's based upon, and
I read at least part of it during a part
a period in my life where I was doing a
lot of religious pondering, and I remember, I do strongly
remember the passages from it about the presence of God
like a raptor's talons in one's mind, and uh, yeah,
but it's still I never got around to seeing the

(02:31):
film long wanted to watch it. And then, you know,
over the past few years, since we started doing weird
House cinema, I kind of got into my mind, hey,
maybe the Last Temptation of Christ would be a good
weird house selection, and uh and then you know, more
recently I looked into it a little bit more, sort
of identified a few a few factors in it where
I'm like, yeah, that checks that, that checks off the

(02:52):
right boxes. I think we could do it. And so
here we are. So let's go ahead and acknowledge the controversy,
since that is often the case with films that stir
up controversy, The controversy like hits first anyway, so we
certainly shouldn't understate the uproar. There were threats and acts
of violence over this film when it came out. I
feel like very little of the uproar has anything to

(03:15):
do with the actual content of the film, though, as
is often the case with this sort of thing. It's
about the idea of what this film might be. And
I think we can kind of boil that down to
this idea that was spreading that, Hey, you have this
blasphemous Hollywood production that's going to depict Jesus Christ as
something he's not held to be within dominant Christian groups, specifically,

(03:38):
something from outside of the faith depicting something within the faith.
And of course, again this kind of idea ends up
taking on a life of its own and runs contrary
to the actual professed spirituality and religion of the original author,
the screenwriter, and the director, and just the content and

(03:59):
contact of the film itself.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yeah, I think that's absolutely there a feeling that some
conservative Christians had about somebody who doesn't understand the story
the way that I do is talking about it and
I don't like that. And you know, it can always
to anybody you can sympathize with feeling uncomfortable about the

(04:21):
idea of somebody talking about what's meaningful to you. You know,
somebody else is talking about this thing that maybe I
suspect they don't really understand or care about the way
that I do. So I think there is that kind
of suspicion, but there also clearly was a i think
a specific type of content that upset people, and it

(04:43):
had to do with the core theme that the author
was trying to explore in the book this movie is
based on, and so is certainly a core theme of
the movie as well. It's one of the central Christian
mysteries which I alluded to at the top. How can
God have become a human being? That is the idea,
you know that most Christians today believe that somehow God,

(05:05):
omnipotent and omniscient, a being of spirit, the creator of
the world, knowing everything, capable of anything, became a human being.
And the novel takes that idea seriously and says, what
would that mean for God to be a human being
with all of the characteristics of a human being, including

(05:27):
selfishness and desires, And especially I think this is the
part that really set a lot of people off lust,
you know, feelings, cravings of the flesh, and so a
lot of people I think reacted to the idea that
the Jesus in the movie is not depicted as actually,
you know, wantonly sexually sinful, but is depicted as a

(05:50):
human being feeling human desires including the desire for sex
and love, and a lot of people could not handle
that that was infuriating to them.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah, and again on this sort of like, you know,
the controversy wavelength level of everything, it can feel like
instead of it being oh, this is a meditation on
what this idea means and what it would be like,
and more of like, hey, this dude says Jesus has sex.
Boycott this movie, burn this movie.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
You know.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
That's how controversy tends to to, like flames begin to
get out of hand.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Yeah. So there's a thing I kind of wanted to
address here at the beginning of the episode, which is
about the idea of making a movie about the life
of Jesus. This movie is based on the story of Jesus,
but it is not simply an attempt to put the
Bible on screen, And so the question is what is it? Then?

(06:49):
I think it's best understood as a fictional original novel
with partial basis in biblical literature. And I think this
is this is a very interesting and fruitful approach, especially
given problems with all of the other ways you can
think of to put the life of Jesus into a movie.

(07:10):
So when you want to make a film about the
life of Jesus. There are several different paths you could take.
You could take one of the four Gospels of the
New Testament and try to adapt it scene by scene
to the screen, and you might call this a faithful
literary adaptation. So, you know, you treat a single source

(07:31):
as a piece of literature, for example, the Gospel of Matthew,
and you just go line by line and you try
to put the story to film as directly as you can.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Can you punch it up a little bit at an
action sequencer too.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
That's a good question. I mean, everybody who even tries
this approach just a faithful direct adaptation of a single gospel.
I've seen at least one movie I know of watched
you know in school, that was a direct adaptation of
the Gospel of Matthew to screen. But even that requires interpretation.

(08:04):
You have to kind of read in between the lines
to fill in some of the action, because you know,
there's literally you can't just turn the text into a film.
You have to interpret to make things real. So but yeah,
imagine you try to make the Gospel of Matthew into
a movie. This approach would have problems for a lot
of Christians, because the New Testament canon doesn't have just

(08:27):
one account of the life of Jesus. It has four. Again,
it has the Gospels which are Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
Not to mention accounts that are not included in the
standard canon of Christian scripture today, but that many Christians
in history believed in things like the Gospel of Thomas
and Gospel of Peter and so forth. There are a

(08:47):
lot of them, actually, and all four gospels in the
Bible today have elements that Christians think of as part
of the life of Jesus and integral to the story.
So the visit of the magi that's only in the
Gospel of Matthew, The parable of the prodigal son is

(09:08):
only in the Gospel of Luke. The story of the
woman taken in adultery is only in the Gospel of John.
In fact, that story was almost certainly not even written
by the author of the Gospel of John. That only
appears in later manuscripts of the Gospel of John. And
there's just tons of things like this that are you know,
the story we think of as the story of Jesus

(09:30):
is actually scattered across multiple different sources that each have
their own take, So in order to get all the
stuff you want into the story, it's tempting to try
to combine all of your favorite elements, combine the four
Gospels into one big narrative that weaves them all together.
And so this is sort of the second possible approach

(09:51):
you could take to making a Jesus movie. You could
call it like the synthetic literary adaptation, where you're combining
the four accounts into and making this meta narrative into
a film. But I think there's a major problem with
this approach too, and the problem is it doesn't take
any of the Gospels seriously as its own piece of literature.

(10:14):
The Gospels are fundamentally four different stories with narrative and
theological contradictions between one another. They have different emphasies, different
theological concerns, and in some ways very different renderings of
the character of Jesus. And if you doubt this, I
would just recommend reading like the Crucifixion narrative. You read

(10:36):
the crucifixion narrative in the Gospel of Mark and then
compare that to the Gospel of John. They're like extremely
interestingly different characterizations of the behavior and attitude of Jesus
as he is going to his death. You know, in
the Gospel of Mark you get a lot of indications
of bafflement and despair. He cries out, my God, my God,

(10:58):
why have you forsaken me? Whereas in the Gospel of John,
Jesus going to his death is very calm and in control,
and he's, you know, the master of his own destiny.
He knows what's happening. And so I think, if you're
going to take this, you know, this ancient literature seriously,
you have to take each book on its own terms.
There are some Christians who insist on seeing the Bible

(11:22):
as an inerrant and univocal authority, meaning everything in it
is correct and it's all agreeing with itself. All the
books in the Bible are agreeing with each other and
saying the same thing. And I would argue that if
you don't allow yourself to see the differences between the
Gospels and the New Testament, you're not really treating the

(11:45):
texts with respect because you're not allowing each of them
to be what they are. And so synthetic literary adaptations
are I think, at least to me, sometimes distasteful because
they can like smooth over these differences, and they don't
allow them to breathe, they don't allow them to be
contemplated by the audience. So you might think of this

(12:07):
like a synthetic literary adaptation, as a kind of pseudo
faithful literary adaptation. It's faithful in a way in that
it's taking things from all the sources, but it's also
not letting the individual sources be different. So if you
accept the problems with a synthetic literary adaptation, you could
also try a different approach. I don't know if anybody

(12:30):
has ever fully tried to do this, but you could say,
what if instead we try to make a historically accurate adaptation,
So we go to the historians and say, what's your
best guess of what actually happened historically in the life
of Jesus. You could try this, and there are some
common views among historians about the historical Jesus, but you

(12:53):
would hit a big problem here, which is just paucity
of detail. I mean, even if you take a fully
fleshed out narrative like one of the Gospels and try
to adapt it. We were just talking about how you
have to fill things in right because you would still
it would require some gaps to be filled in to
make sense of how they get from one scene to
another and so forth. If you go with the historically,

(13:16):
you know what the historians are confident of, there's way
way less stuff than that. It's basic things like Jesus
was Jewish, he preached about the coming kingdom of God,
he was crucified by ponscious pilot, and after his death
some of his followers proclaimed he had risen from the grave.
You know, so you don't have a lot to go on.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, it sounds like it could at best be a
segment on unsolved mysteries.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Right, Yeah, So there's not enough detail to make a
story out of this. To make the historical Jesus into
a story with scenes and dialogue, you'd either have to
rely on detail from the Gospels, which is, you know,
less historically certain, or you would simply have to imagine
new events that you think you know would fit in
with the story. You become a creative storyteller yourself. And

(14:04):
so finally that brings us to what the cousant Zakis
novel and its film adaptation actually are, which is what
you might call meditational fiction. It's a fictional story grown
out of what seems to me to be very serious
contemplation of the stories we get in the Bible. So,

(14:24):
in one sense, the novel is a kind of synthetic
literary adaptation in that it takes elements from all four Gospels,
it's not confined to just one. But it does not
represent itself as the ultimate telling of the story, or
as a faithful direct adaptation of the Bible, nor as

(14:45):
a historically accurate account. Instead, it's very clear about being
a work of fiction. So you know, it's not saying
I'm an authoritative account on the life of Jesus. It's
the author's attempt to understand the meaning of Jesus as
discovered through fictional imagination about the unknown things in his life.

(15:06):
So the narrative does reproduce some stories from the four Gospels,
but it adds new details. Other times, the author invents
new scenes and situations entirely that are nowhere to be
found in the Bible. And I love this approach. I
found this so refreshing and exciting and even true. I've
watched a lot of stuffy Bible movies in my day.

(15:30):
I don't think I have ever encountered such a serious
and sincere attempt to make sense of the story of Jesus,
and that attempt is done through fictionalizing the story. So
just one example of how I think the fictionalizing approach
works so beautifully. You know, I mentioned that I have

(15:52):
a distaste for these synthetic accounts of the Bible that
just sort of steam roll over all the different characterizations
of Jesus across the Gospels. I think Last Temptation brilliantly
deals with many of these differences by choosing to portray
Jesus as conflicted, confused, and uncertain. So you get Jesus

(16:14):
saying very different kinds of things in this story, and
it grows out of him being pulled in different directions
by what he believes to be the voice, the voice
of God speaking to him, but then also by prophetic
influence by other people. He is influenced by the people
around him. They sometimes people are able to make persuasive

(16:36):
cases to Jesus and prevail upon him. Judas does that
in the movie. The John the Baptist does that in
the movie, And so he's not depicted as superhumanly confident,
all knowing, omniscient in his human form, because it doesn't
make sense that a human could be omniscients. It's taking
the humanity of Jesus seriously and saying no, he's actually

(17:01):
being buffeted about by all of these different influences and
he's trying to find his way toward being the savior
of humankind.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, yeah, I agree, and you know it jumping ahead
of myself a little bit. But obviously if you know
anything about the film, you know that Willem Defoe plays
Jesus in this and I was listening to a bit
of an older interview. This is, you know, decades old
at this point where he was talking about it. In
the interviewer ask him, well, you know, what was it
like to prepare to play Jesus or what was it
like to play Jesus Christ? And his response was like,

(17:31):
I wouldn't even begin to know how to do that.
I played, you know, I played this guy in this
in this screenplay based on this book. You know, because
it has to be grounded in something that is you know,
for an actor like to Foe to take it on,
it has to be grounded in something human and real,
something that he can actually like work out in his

(17:52):
own mind. Play in these scenes and be true to Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Yeah, So the Jesus in this movie is very human,
and he's the It's the first time I've ever seen
Jesus played as a character, you know, not as just
an infallible kind of wall of pronouncement of wisdom and authority.
He's a human character, and he he deals with with doubts,

(18:17):
you know, great doubts. He's portrayed as in some ways
a very flawed character, but again one who is able
to come into his destiny as the savior of humankind
with great struggle.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
So one thing I didn't know if I was going
to talk about this in the episode, but I after
seeing this movie, I actually found myself getting a bit
angry about the idea of you know, certain Christians trying
to shut down this movie and you know, saying is
blasphemous and you know, you can't you can't release this

(18:53):
because it's it's just such a misunderstanding. This is, again,
the most serious and thoughtful engagement with the meaning of
Jesus that I've ever seen in a film, and it
just kind of strikes me that if you really think,
if you believe in God, and you really think that
God would not tolerate a sincere attempt to grapple with

(19:16):
the story like this. Then I'm skeptical that you really
believe God is good. You know, it just makes it
seem like you think that God is so easily offended,
and you know, it's like a narcissistic dictator who's going
to smash you if you give a poorly phrased compliment. Yeah,
it just I don't know. That mindset was just making

(19:38):
me upset. I think this is a great attempt to
deal with what Christianity means.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
Yeah, I mean, this is a film that engages the
viewer in the idea, in the character of Jesus, like
in a way that I mean, you know, I'm not
saying that it works as any kind of like Christian propaganda,
but I can imagine people seeing this film and then
being like, we know, maybe I should go back to church,
maybe I should give another shot, maybe I should look
at it from a different angle, and so forth. I mean,

(20:05):
it is thought provoking about about Christianity, about the character
of Jesus, and I think for anyone who has any
level of familiarity with Christianity, be it you know, a
positive story, a negative story, you know, some part of
their past life or an important part of their present life.
You know, it gives you something to think about and
wrestle with. And uh, and yeah, it certainly depicts a

(20:28):
different Jesus than the sort of god emperor Jesus that
you see with varying shades of uh, you know, the
ubermensh machismo, you know, the sort of like you were saying,
this sort of like Jesus as a wall of judgment. Uh.
You know, it's it's totally different from that. I'm not
drawn to those depictions of Christ. I like, I like

(20:52):
what we see here, a highly relatable human Jesus. Like
that's something I can engage with, you know, and that
gives us gives me like so much more to think about.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah, I would agree, but I would say it's not
just more relatable to have a human Jesus like this.
It's also there in the core doctrines that I would
say most Christians today believe some form of this, that
Jesus was both fully God and fully human. And it
seems like if you're not going to wrestle with the
story in this way, then you're just not thinking about it.

(21:24):
You're just putting it out of mind. I mean, you're
not grappling with the majesty and mystery and terror that
is implied by what you supposedly believe in. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, Because again, this is not just throwing it out
there like, hey, hear me out, what of Jesus slaved vampires.
It's not even saying, hey, hear me out, what of
Jesus experienced lust? You know, it's again to your point,
it is tackling with some central themes to the whole
Christian scenario.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah. In other words, I liked this movie. I thought
it was very good.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yes, this is a great film, and I'm so glad
I finally watched And hey, if you out there listening
to the show and or watching the show even would
like to view The Last Temptation of Christ as well well.
It is widely available, which is great because time was
when certain major video stores, including Blockbuster, refuse to carry it.

(22:17):
So keep that in mind the next time you encounter
someone pushing some like Blockbuster video store nostalgia. Certain films
weren't on the shelf, but you can easily find this
one digitally today. It's wherever you digitally get your films,
go for it. But also, the Criterion collection Blu ray
is the definitive physical release.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
This is interesting. You mentioned about the blockbuster thing years ago,
many years ago. Now, there was a time when I
house sat for somebody I knew, somebody I greatly admired,
who has since passed away. But he and his wife
in their house, they had a VCR and I only
remembered them own they had a VCR. But I only

(23:00):
remember them owning one VHS tape and it was the
Last Temptation of Christ. And I was like, that's kind
of strange to be the only movie you own. I
guess they just rented their other videotapes. But it kind
of makes sense that you can't rent that one, can.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
You that you quite possible?

Speaker 3 (23:15):
Yeah? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Or maybe the other version is this is the only
movie they ever watched. They had one copy of it.
It's the only one they needed. They played it every night.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
I mean, I do love this movie. I don't know
how many times a year I want to watch it. Yeah,
you know you can get you can get enough crucifixion
scenes for to do you for a while.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah, Yeah, this one I will. If anyone out there
is hesitant because of crucifixion scenes. Yes, this film does
include some graphic depictions of crucifixion, but this film also
doesn't go as hard on that as other adaptations have.
So you know, I didn't feel like I was personally
put through the ringer on this one when it came

(23:57):
to the graphic content. But you know, everyone's mind is
going to vary on that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
I would argue that this movie does deal head on
with the pain implied by torture and execution. It deals
with the pain of crucifixion, but it deals with it
as something that is meaningful because it's happening to a
human character. It does not use it as gore spectacle
the way some other movies that we might not name

(24:24):
a famous for doing.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, all right, well, let's get into the people behind
this film, starting of course, at the top of the director,
Martin Scorsese, who was born in nineteen forty two and
as of this recording is still out there, still producing, directing,

(24:46):
making movies. I don't think he's ever going to stop.
He has, of course, a living icon of American cinema.
We previously discussed him very briefly in our episode on
Krisawa's Dreams because Marty shows up in that playing Vincent
van go Oh, so were just like you know who.
This says now we can talk about him a little
bit more. At this point in his career, he was,

(25:08):
of course, already a season pro, an Oscar nominee. All
of that just to say the least. He directed multiple
short films during the sixties, a longer documentary, as well
as the sixty seven feature length film Who's That Knocking
at My Door starring Harvey Titel in the first of
many projects together. He followed that up with the Roger

(25:29):
Korman produced boxcar Bertha in seventy two, Mean Streets in
seventy three, that being you know his real breakthrough Alice
Doesn't Live Here Anymore in seventy four, Taxi Driver, of
Course in seventy six. Subsequent films leading up to Last
Temptation included nineteen eighties Raging Bull that was nominated for
an Oscar, eighty two Is the King of Comedy, eighty

(25:50):
five's After Hours, and eighty six is the Color of Money.

Speaker 3 (25:54):
I know I'm not the first person to think of this,
but you can't help but wonder about an alternate version
of Last Temptation of Christ, starring more some other of
Scorsese's regular favorite actors as the role of Jesus and
so forth. So you know Jesus, says de Niro. Jesus
is Joe PESHI.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Steve Simmy was apparently in the
running for the role, and really yeah, yeah, I've heard
that he auditioned for it any rate. I don't know
to what degree he was like a serious contender. I
think he would have done a great job. It would
have been a different movie. So yeah, de Niro, I
mean de Niro in eighty eight. Yeah, it would have

(26:39):
been interesting, would have been a different film though, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
All right, asking for that all that world. I like
Willem Dafoe a lot.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, I think he's wonderful here. And we'll get back
to him in just a minute. But but yeah, for
as far as Scorsese goes, the last temptation was, if
you'll allow me to say so, a passion project for him,
and the studio apparently agreed to it in exchange for
a more commercial project down the line, and this would
end up being ninety one's Cape Fear. But Marty had
to make do with a pretty small budget on this one,

(27:09):
all things considered, just seven million dollars. Now, it's always
hard for me to figure it, and we're talking about
anything over even like one million, I'm like, what does
that number even mean? I don't know. But to put
it in context of just films that came out that year,
Rambo three had a budget of between fifty eight and
sixty three million dollars. Supposedly Crocodile Done Dee two had

(27:30):
fourteen million dollar budget, so twice that of Less Temptation.
John Carpenter's They Live had a three million dollar budget,
and then Killer Clowns from Outer Space had a budget
of one point eight million. So you know, there's all
sorts of sorcery involved in Hollywood budgets and film budgets.
But maybe that puts everything in a loose perspective here.

(27:51):
So despite the controversy surrounding this picture and some of
the blowback, Scorsese would of course return after this film
with the nineteen ninety hit Good Fee. He's been nominated
many times for an Oscar, including for Last Temptation, finally
won the Oscar in two thousand and seven for That Departed.
Now there's a lot you can say about Scorcedes particular

(28:12):
fingerprints on a film like this, because of course we
associate Marty with New York City, and here he populates
a story of Jesus Christ with a variety of New
York actors, or at least actors who might seem more
in keeping with a contemporary New York City movie as
opposed to one set in the Roman province of Judea

(28:33):
nine hundred and eighty eight years earlier.

Speaker 4 (28:34):
Right.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Well, I mean there's a thing that the movie does
which I actually greatly respect, which is it doesn't try
to homogenize the human character texture. You know, it doesn't
a lot of historical movies. I think we've talked about
this irony before that a lot of historical movies indicate

(28:57):
that there is a historical setting by having all of
the characters speak with British accents, which is hilarious.

Speaker 2 (29:05):
Yeah, we know, we all know only the Romans spoke
with British accents, if we know anything from cinema, and
I guess this film kind of sticks to this.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
No, well no, but it's I think that's only because
David Bowie actually had a British accent and he plays
the Roman. The main Roman character pilot here. But that
is a funny point. But yeah, everybody just talks the
way they talk. There is a there is a loose
fluid letting people just be themselves in the way they

(29:36):
act out their characters. That is, it feels appropriate to
the approach here in much the same way that the
story does not claim to be an accurate historical representation
of who Jesus was, nor does it claim to be
a you know, a faithful direct adaptation of the Christian literature.

(29:56):
It is its own modern exploration of the story through
through creative originality, and the acting feels the same way.
It is a modern, original exploration of these characters, not
attempting to be grounded in the reality of the time
and place. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah, they're not speaking in Aramaic. They're not speaking like
it's the King James version of the of the the Bible.
It's it is in kind of a New York vernacular.
I was listening to an old Terry Gross fresh air
interview with one of the stars of this film, Barbara Hershey,
and Terry, in an offhand comment, describes the film as

(30:36):
a kind of quote New York contemporary version of the Bible.
Which which Hershey then agrees to on some to some extent,
but she says, quote, Marty's ears are New York ears,
and you know, she basically says that, you know, like
Marty was just going for like what felt real, and
that meant the real performances, and you know it's ends

(30:58):
up sounding a little New York. Well, you know, that's
just part of who's making it.

Speaker 3 (31:03):
I mean, I think if you accept the spirit in
which the story is told, it works just fine. I
like it a lot, and in fact, I would say
we'll probably get to this in just a minute. A
lot of the hate that Harvey Kayitel for his performance
in this movie, which I think is entirely unjustified, is
just about the fact that he was speaking in his

(31:25):
natural accent, and that just didn't feel right to people
who were used to stuffier historical epics where everybody either
has naturally or puts on a British accent to be
from long ago.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now here's another interesting thing about Scorsese's
approach to the film. Well mentioned the budget seven million dollars,
and I was listening to some old, an old interview
with Marty himself about the film and he really drove
home how like low budget and scrappy this movie really was.
You know, all the actors were working for skill. It

(32:00):
was shot in rural parts of Morocco. Willem Dafoez pointed
out in interviews that in between takes, you didn't get
to go to your trailer, You got to go to
a tenant if you were lucky. That sort of thing.
It was. You know, they're kind of roughing it. And
Marty actually credited his work with and his familiarity with
Roger Corman for being able to pull off the production.

(32:22):
I love that, Yeah, like leaning on some of the
tricks that low budget, scrappy filmmakers were having to employ.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Yeah, and Marty's not alone in that regard. A lot
of the greats in American cinema learned it from Roger
Corman or from being around the Roger Corman camp. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
So there's a particular story that Scorsese has shared. We
have a scene in the film where you have like
Roman soldiers coming in from one side and then another,
and then there are these levied soldiers as well. But
Marty only had five stumpmen that he brought in from Rome,
and so he had to have them play first the
five Roman soldiers coming from one direction, and then all right,
move them over here and have them come from the

(33:00):
other direction. Okay, and now they have to dress up
as the levels and do that number. So really, just
trying to make the most out of a limited budget,
limited people in limited time.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
I love that too. Yeah, I mean, you can't tell
it it doesn't feel like a cheap movie.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
No, no, I mean it doesn't feel And I may
have even included the description of a reallypic religious epic,
and it is a religious epic, and it's I guess
in its subject matter, but not in the sense of
like eighteen thousand extras and some sort of huge budget
religious epic. Not that sort of epic, right, Yeah, few

(33:40):
bodies on the screen really when you compare it to
other Bible movies. But then it works in its favor
because this is a film about more about interpersonal relationships.
So you know, how much of a crowd do you
want in a scene like that? All right, moving to
the script here again, let's start with Nick Cousin Zakis,

(34:00):
because we mentioned him already wrote the original novel. He
lived eighteen eighty three to nineteen fifty seven, Greek author,
best known internationally for nineteen forty seven Zorba the Greek
and fifty five Is the Last Temptation of Christ, as
both were famously directed for English language film. Zorba was
of course adapted in nineteen sixty four in a film
starring Anthony Quinn. The first film adaptation of his work

(34:24):
was nineteen fifty seven's He Who Must Die, based on
his novel Christ re Crucified. Now the adaptation here. The
screenplay comes to us from Paul Schrader born nineteen forty six,
as a screenwriter, well known for his work with scorsesea
on such films as seventy six As Taxi Driver and
eighties Raging Bull. He started directing in seventy eight with

(34:45):
Blue Collar, and then went on to helm the likes
of seventy nine's Hardcore, eighty two's Cat People, eighty five's
Mashima A Life in Four Chapters, ninety four's witch Hunt,
two thousand and five's Dominion, and twenty seventeens First Reformed
That and him an Oscar nomination. But yeah, so it's
interesting to think about this being a Paul Schrader script

(35:07):
because I don't know when I think about him, I
think about taxi driver. I think about like really or
I think about hardcore. I think about something that was
like really gritty and probably not so directly dealing with
themes of like love and forgiveness. Not to say those
textures are not there in his work. But you don't think,
Paul Schrader think get this guy a Jesus movie.

Speaker 3 (35:27):
Yeah, it doesn't feel like a natural fit for a
telling of the you know, or an exploration of the
life of Jesus. But I think the script is excellent. Yeah,
I think it's wonderful. Yeah, absolutely all right. Getting into
the cast, as we mentioned already, Jesus is played by
Willem Dafoe born nineteen fifty five, American actor of stage

(35:48):
and screen, who came out of the New York City
based Wooster Experimental Theater group, of which he was a
founding member in the late nineteen seventies. His first notable
film appearance was eighty one's The Loveless from from Catherine
Bigelow and Monty Montgomery, and of course, he pops up
briefly as second phone booth youth in eighty three's The Hunger,

(36:08):
which we previously covered. Yeah, he's in Streets of Fire.
I keep thinking we've done that, but we haven't yet.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
No, no, but that's that's one of the early big ones.
Eighty four on that eighty five is to Live and
Die in La And then a real breakout role in
eighty six is Platoon.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
In which he also plays Jesus.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Well he does, yeah, kind of right, he plays He
plays a very good, like moral compass sort of character.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yes, he plays a character who is viewed viewed as
a quite heroic and noble by the main character, and
then and then dies almost in a way that's implied
to be dies for the sins of others.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Oh wow. Yeah. And I've also read that like this
was kind of like a key role in sort of.
I mean, I think an actor with Defoe's abilities and
his and his taste was always going to play a diverse,
diverse array of roles. He wasn't. This is this guy
was never gonna get pigeonholed into just playing villains. But

(37:03):
it helps, probably from like a business of Hollywood standpoint,
to have a really standout role occur when you're playing
just an absolute good guy.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
But when he does play a bad guy, he's capable
of an absolutely like world class evil grimlin face.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yes, he man. There's so much to say about Defoe.
I mean, he's yeah, because he's He's played heroes and villains,
He's played weirdos and straight shooters, grim faced, you know, evildoers,
comedic characters, He's played monsters, and of course the Messiah
just has amazing range. He has this gloriously contemplative voice

(37:42):
that I was thinking it's it's almost like a red
based instrument, and he has this slow, deliberate delivery in
the way he says everything, especially in this film. And yes,
of course an incredibly expressive face capable of just extreme
broad expressions but also great delicacy, and you know, just

(38:02):
so much range too. That like, Defoe's one of those
guys who can with very little, you know, or at
least subtle makeup. He can play suave, he can play
like every day you know, blue collar, he can play
grotesque like he can do at all. And so much
of it is just in what he knows how to
do with his own body, his own voice, his own

(38:24):
facial expressions and so forth.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
One thing that I think is pretty amazing about his
performance in this movie is how is the range of
his level of dominance that he displays, because there are
scenes in which he is in which he credibly commands
a crowd. You know, you can see him as the
leader of an insurrection against Rome or the you know,

(38:49):
the preacher who people are following. Other in other scenes
he is utterly lost and hopeless and does not know
what he's doing and seems can fused and awkward, and
he occupies the entire range there flawlessly, I would.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Say, yeah, absolutely, yes, scenes where he is just commanding
the crowd, and then these scenes where he's like I
am afraid, I need you to hold me judas uh,
you know, and and just you know, completely believable. In
all this, it's just an incredible performance full of it's
just raw and and and there's torment, and it's he's

(39:27):
ultimately a human being, just like all of us. Uh,
but there is this divine force that is at times
moving through him, that is animating him, that's confounding him
and is tormenting him at times.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
Yeah. Yeah, I also really like the scene we can
talk about this later, but the scene where he's not
good at preaching yet, when he starts preaching in parables
and he's doing a bad job and people are not
following him.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah, They're like, who's this guy that makes me sense?

Speaker 3 (39:54):
Yeah? Yeah. Oh.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
And then and then you have the some some characters
willow thing and he says, oh, those who are laughing
now may be crying later, and they're like, yeah, that's right,
Jesus will kill these guys. I didn't say anything about
killing anybody. So you know, there's some mild life. This
is not a comedy, but this is not the life
of Brian. But there's you know, perhaps a few nods
here and there that you can, you know, rightfully giggle at.

(40:19):
So there's of course much to be said about the
varying ways that we've depicted Jesus Christ over not even
the cinematic history, but the course of Christianity across many centuries.
We've seen visions of Christ as pretty much every racial
group on earth. And to be clear in this, in
this case, we do have a very white Jesus, there's
there's no denying it. But we've had depictions of feminine

(40:42):
Christ that go way back as well. So if the
story of Christ is that of God reaching out to humanity,
then our depictions of him are also part of this
reaching out to each other, I feel, and that's what
I love so much about Defoe's performance here throughout the
entirety of the film, from beginning to end, and he
feels so relatably human. Yeah, all right, let's talk about

(41:06):
Judas then, played by Harvey Kaitel born nineteen thirty nine.
If there was ever any doubt. Brooklyn born American actor
best known for playing tough guys, often morally ambiguous figures.
He's worked six times with CORSESI thus far. He was
in Who's that Knocking at My Door? Mean streets, Alice

(41:27):
Doesn't Live Here Anymore? From seventy four, Taxi Driver, Last Temptation,
and then much later on The Irishman in twenty nineteen,
so his work with Marty was among his earliest film credits.
He's also well known, of course, for his work with
Tarantino and ninety two's Reservoir Dogs ninety four is pulp fiction.
Ninety two's Bad Lieutenant stands out as one of his

(41:48):
probably more most memorable performances as well.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
And the original one, not the one with Nicholas Cage.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
Right right, Yeah, this would be we're talking about the
the Abele Ferrara film, not the Herzog film, which I
it's very little connecting the two other than the title.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
I'm to understand almost nothing. From what I understand.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, maybe they're part of the Bad Lieutenant universe, because
I think there's another Bad Lieutenant film coming out at
some point. I don't know. I don't know anything about it, but.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
We'll see you.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah. But Kyitel would also earn an Oscar nomination for
his work in ninety two in the film Bugsy. This film, however,
or for this film, Kyeel received a Razzie Award nomination.
We alluded to some of the blowback regarding his performance here,
and I normally wouldn't even mention the Razzies because my

(42:41):
opinion in general is that they vary from the very
varying degrees of tone deaf, mean spirited, and just above
all not fun and well.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Just can I offer one counter example. I think it's
fun that Paul Verhoven showed up in person to accept
his Razzie Award for show Girls. Oh but I don't.
I'm not a big follower of the Razzies or anything,
but yeah, I get the feeling that some of these
awards are received more in the spirit of good fun
and other ones are kind of hurtful.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
Yeah, yeah, And maybe I just end up focusing more
on what seems mean spirited or tone death or just
historically stupid, like for instance, you know, they've they've heaped
on Neil Morricone for his score for John Carpenter's The
Thing score. Great score, yeah, but people buy it on vinyl.

(43:35):
Uh And and I think it's terrific.

Speaker 4 (43:38):
They did.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
They heaped on The Shining when it came out, ripping
both Kubrick and Shelley Duvall, Like who's outside of Stephen King?

Speaker 3 (43:47):
Who?

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Who? Who really sits around talking talking about how bad
the Shining is? You know, And they've they've given worse
Special Effects awards to Industrial Light and Magic. They gave
a Worst Original Song Award to Prince of all people.
So yeah, I'm not a fan of the Razzies. But
I guess if you're looking to criticize that sort of
New York wavelength to the last Temptation of Christ, I

(44:08):
guess Kytel's Judas is sort of the lightning Rod, though
only marginally more so than some of the other New
York associated actors in the picture. But I think Kytel
is actually pretty great in this as we'll discuss his
Judas is a lot more complicated than the idea of
a mere betrayer, someone who just sells out Christ.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
Oh, absolutely so much more. You know. I would say
one thing that this movie has in common with Jesus
Christ Superstar is that Judas is like the most interesting
character to me, And like, you know, maybe apart from
Jesus himself in this movie, who they actually do make
incredibly interesting. But yeah, Judas is a is a fascinating

(44:49):
complex character. He is somebody who he has his own desires.
And I wanted to talk about this later in the
plot section, but I think it's so interesting that they're that,
even after the Ministry of Jesus begins, that he is
somebody who's gathering followers as a teacher and a leader
and maybe a messianic type figure. That he and Judas

(45:10):
treat each other as peers, and they they sort of
trade authority back and forth when they have debates and conversation,
and that, you know, Judas is well, I like in
this movie that he's kind of a tough guy. Like
that is a different, a different take than you would
usually get on Judas, who is often portrayed as a

(45:32):
more kind of a sinister backstabber. But this is this
guy is the opposite of a backstabber. He's a front stabber.
He is a he's a very tough, a tough, no
nonsense guy who has strong beliefs and he stands up
for them.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah, he's blunt, he's brutally direct. He's a soldier of
rebellion in a troubled world who finds himself gradually and
kind of guardedly opening up to this message of passivism,
love and submission. I really like there's there's a point
in the film where he Judas comes up to Jesus
and he says, and my delivery of this is not

(46:13):
going to be I'm just going to read the lines.
But Kittel does such a great job with them, with
the words I thought, and he says, the other day,
when you said turn the other cheek to the man
that hit you, I didn't like that. Only an angel
could do that, only an angel or a dog. I'm
a free man. I don't turn my cheek to anyone.
And you can imagine a read of these lines. This
just complete tough guy. You know, it's just like, like,

(46:35):
you know, I don't buy into that at all, but
Ky tell manages to balance it all just perfectly. Like
he is a tough guy. He does disagree, but he
is trying really hard to understand what this man is
telling him, a man that he that he really trusts
and has grown to trust so much. Yeah, this is
a Judas that is you know, may seem ironic to

(46:55):
say this, but he is very loving and loyal and
all of this ends up, you know, making sense in
the plot.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
Absolutely. I mean, in this telling of the story, Judas
betrays Jesus because he is loyal. I mean, you know,
it should already be clear that you know, this will
contain spoilers for the movie, so you know, if you
want to see it with all surprises intact, of course,
please pause here and go watch the movie first. But yes,

(47:23):
Judas in this movie is explicitly given instruction by Christ.
Jesus tells him, You've got to turn me over to
the Romans. That's what has to happen. And I think
this is another case where that you know, it doesn't
say in the Bible that Jesus tells Judas to betray him,
but it does address a strange mystery that is implied

(47:46):
in the text. You know, a lot of Christians over
the ages have wondered, why is it that Judas is
treated as as this great villain of history, as the
worst there ever was? If what he did was what
had to happen in order for God's plan to be fulfilled.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
Yeah, yeah, even Dante doesn't understand that. I guess putting
him right there in Satan's mouth is one of the
three great right, the three great traders of all time?

Speaker 3 (48:11):
Yeah, but I mean, you know, people come up with
different ways of trying to address that, but I think
it's a serious question. So if you believe in God,
and you believe God wanted and needed this to happen,
how could he punish the person who did it? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (48:27):
Yeah, all right, So that's Judas.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
And we're not going to go through all the disciples,
just to be clear, otherwise we'll be here all day.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
But we're going to the film does make Judas the
most important to Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yeah, And I will say that that is one of
the other reasons that Kay tells Judas is so key
here is because we get to know Jesus as a
character so much more than other films, but also there's
a certain amount of understanding him through the eye of
the people who are witnessing him, and Judas is really,
if not the primary witness, one of the primary witnesses. Yes,

(49:08):
one of the others too, being the character of Mary Magdalen,
played here by Barbara Hershey born nineteen forty eight. Mentioned
Boxcar Bertha already from seventy two. She was in that
that was Corman produced, and apparently on the set of
that film she had hyped up the novel The Last
Temptation of Christ too Storsese along with her then husband

(49:31):
and co star David Carodine.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Now we can also imagine an alternate universe where David
Carodine ends up playing Jesus in this film, and maybe
he would have been great, but it would have been
a different film, a different Jesus.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
I mean, I don't know if that's the version I want.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
Other Barbara Hershey films include eighties The Stuntman, eighty twos,
The Entity, ninety three is Falling Down, twenty ten's Black Swan,
and the Insidious film franchise. She won an ME and
a Golden Globe for Outstanding Lead Actress in a mini
series for her role in A Killing in a Small
Town in nineteen ninety and she was nominated for an
Academy Award in ninety seven for the Portrait of a Lady.

(50:13):
I think she's really great here. It's a yeah, it's
a complicated role, and she does a fabulous job with it.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
Like some of the other actors in here, like Harvey Kaitel,
and like Harry Deane Stanton, she gets great scenes of
just berating Jesus to his face and telling him the
things that are wrong with him, and she's not wrong.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Yeah, yeah, So we'll get into some examples of that
here in a bit. Let's see, I'm trying to go
faster with some of these here. Verna Bloom plays Mary,
mother of Jesus. She lived nineteen thirty eight through twenty nineteen.
American actress of stage, screen, and TV. You might have
seen her in such films as seventy three's High Planes Drifters.
Let's see. We also have John the Baptist showing up

(50:54):
in this film, played by Andre Gregory born nineteen thirty four.
If you're familiar with the nineteen eighty one film My
Dinner with Andre, even only by its title, well, This
is Andre frenchborn American theater director, writer and actor, often
associated with the avant garde. I believe he's retired from
active directing now but remains active in the arts. Dinner

(51:18):
was his first film role, however, and he followed that
up with roles in such varied movies as eighty six
is the Mosquito Coast, ninety three is Demolition Man, ninety
four is The Shadow, and the twenty sixteen series The
Young Pope.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
Trench and Inside Andre.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
So this is one of many performances in this film
that I think really brings an excellent weird energy to
the spirituality and religiosity of the picture. Like this, it
reminds you that this is not We're not dealing with
a religious world of cathedrals here. We're dealing with the
religion of the desert. And this is yet. We'll say

(51:58):
more about this later, but the John the Baptist in
the film is wonderful and weird. I really like it.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Yeah, this is not This is not a boring Sunday
service With John the Baptist, his religiosity is wild. Yes,
I already mentioned Harry Dean Stanton as playing Saul of Tarsus,
slash Paul the Christian. What a strange role for Harry
Dean Huh, yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Absolutely. Harry Dean Stanton, of course, lived in nineteen twenty
six through twenty seventeen American character actor who was just
in so much six decades of work in such movies
as Cool Hand, Luke in sixty seven, Godfather Part two
and seventy four, Wise Blood in seventy nine, Alien Escape

(52:42):
from New York. I could go on and on. There's
just so many great roles for him. But there's often
a sort of meekness to a Harry Dean Stanton role,
you know, there's sort of a you know, he often
plays these kind of like, you know, meek, not really
shy characters, but they kind of in and out of
the background. But you can't really say that about his

(53:03):
performances Saul.

Speaker 3 (53:04):
Here, not at all. No. I mean there's a scene
late in the film where he tells Jesus off because
Jesus tries to disagree with his preaching and Saul or
I guess he's Paul at this point. Paul is just
like get out of here. There's a line where he says, like,
I'm glad I met you, so I can forget You're

(53:24):
you're not worth my time, get out of here. And yeah,
he's brutal.

Speaker 2 (53:28):
Yeah, and there's a scene in Lazarus. The resurrection of
Lazarus is depicted in the film, and he murders Lazarus.
So there's this great scene where Saul comes up to
him and he says, feeling better and Lazarus says, Lazarus is,
you know, kind of dazed. He's come back from the dead.
And he says, I like the light. And Saul says,
what was it like, which is better life or death?
And Lazarus says, well, I was a little surprised there

(53:51):
wasn't that much difference. And Saul says, well, let me
help you make up your mind, and then stads in
front steps yeah, and I was like, wow, this does
not play around.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Yeah, but I mean I think that's depicted as part
of Saul's persecution of Christians before his conversion. His persecution
of Christians goes so far that he cannot even allow
this resurrected, this man resurrected by Jesus to live. He's
got to put down any scent of this heresy.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
We also have a character show up in the film
that is referred to as the Old Master, and he's
played by Robert S. Blossom with nineteen twenty four through
twenty eleven, perhaps best known to many as the Old
Guy from Home Alone. Stage actor and character actor of
TV and film, with credits going back to the fifties,
noted for roles in such films as seventy seven's Close
Encounters of the Third Kind and eighty three's Christine.

Speaker 3 (54:44):
And Home Alone. The salt turns the bodies into mummies,
but the irony being in this movie we see him
being buried in a very creepy ethereal almost mummy like scene.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's see. We also have Peter Is.
I think he has a lot of screen time in
this played by Victor Argo, who lived nineteen thirty four
through two thousand and four, a New York character actor
of stage, screen and TV, known for his work with
Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and so forth, often played tough
guys and heavies. Other noted films include eighty six is

(55:17):
Raw Deal in nineteen nineties King of New York definitely
a strong bit of New York City cast in color here.
I would say even more so than Harvey Kaitel.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
He was in Raw Deal.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yeah, I think he plays like dangerous man or something
in Raw Deal again, often played Heavies all right, And
as mentioned earlier, we have David Bowie playing pilot. We've
talked about Bowie multiple times in the show before because
we've talked about several Bowie films. Seventy six is The
Man Who Fell to Earth, eighty three is The Hunger,
eighty six is Labyrinth, and here he plays the fifth

(55:50):
Governor of the Roman Province of Judea, A definite historical person,
but one subject to a vast array of portrayals and
religious tradition and religious media. Throughout the history of Christianity's
he has been regarded as everything from a saint to
a reluctant judge to just a you know, a mustache

(56:11):
twirling villain himself. And I really found Bowie's portrayal interesting
here He's so he's not reluctant, but I would say
he is. He comes off. He came off to me anyway.
Is bureaucratically detached?

Speaker 3 (56:28):
Absolutely, yes, detached, So you know the real you use
the word reluctant, and yes, the reluctant pilot is a
convention going way back in Christianity and was actually I
think it's widely understood by many historians at least to
be part of the anti Jewish developments in the story

(56:53):
of the Crucifixion over time. So, like if you track
depictions of the Crucifixion and how Christian theologians to talk
about it over time, the earliest accounts and earliest discussion
are going to acknowledge Pilot as he's the one responsible.
He's condemning Jesus to torture and death. That is generally
what historians think probably happened in history. But later accounts

(57:16):
increasingly portray Pilot as reluctant to harm Jesus, and these
stories shift the blame onto the Jewish leaders or sometimes
even on to the Jewish people. Sometimes this is interpreted
by historians as a result of conflict between like Roman
Christians and Jews who did not accept the resurrection of Christ,

(57:37):
you know, so they like make them the bad guys
of the story. So this does not fall into that
Katie Pilot is not portrayed as reluctant here, but it's
something that I think could easily be interpreted as reluctance
it's actually just that Pilot is very gentle and soft
spoken and cultured. In the scene where he condemns Jesus,

(58:00):
he is absolutely, I think a figure of evil in
this story. He represents one of the most evil, like
really the central locus of evil in the story, except
apart from the character of Satan himself. But the way
that he represents evil is in how he hands out
torture and death like it's nothing, without the least a

(58:23):
bit of excitement or anger or any emotion at all.
He comes off as someone who is sophisticated and urbane
and probably even kind to people in his personal dealings,
but will just send people to the cross for the
slightest whiff of troublemaking. And you know, there's a moment
in the movie where he sits down and gives Jesus

(58:44):
an explanation. This just like, you know, I'm sorry, this
just can't be tolerated. Attempts to change the order of
the world. They're not tolerable to the empire. And it
doesn't matter whether that change comes by violence or by
a message of love. You're just you're walking the boat.
That's not acceptable. You're going to die now, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
And he has this. He also ends with this great
line about the number of skulls at Golgotha, like saying,
I wish I wish you people would count the skulls.
Maybe would make a difference, but probably not. You know, which,
you know? Is it?

Speaker 3 (59:18):
You know?

Speaker 2 (59:18):
I think Cements is sort of his cold estimation of everything.
You know, It's like, these are all the skulls that
I have helped accumulate there by sending people to torture
and death, and it's not going to stop. But I
also highly doubt any of it makes any difference. Yeah,
so yeah, rather chilling.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
It's almost that the way Pilot is characterized here, it's
like it doesn't matter to him if the skulls and
the crucifixion are a deterrent or not. He just thinks like, well,
this is what you do, This is what you gotta do.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
Yeah, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna I have some
other people in the notes, some other actors. I'm going
to skip them. We may come back to them when
we get into the plot. I'm going to mention really quickly.
The cinematographer here is Michael Aauhaus, who of nineteen thirty
five through twenty seventeen German cinematographer, known for his work
with the Renier Vernervet Fastpender, as well as his work

(01:00:09):
on ninety two's Brams Stoker's Dracula and multiple Scorsese films
from eighty five's After Hours till two thousand and six.
Is that departed and at least writ in my own mind,
it was very interesting to think about that Dracula connection,
given the great use of darkness in some key scenes
and Last Temptation. So we'll refer back to some of
the lighting in these scenes as we proceed. But then finally,

(01:00:32):
the score for this film is famously the work of
Peter Gabriel born nineteen fifty English musician, best known for
his work as the original front man of the rock
band Genesis, and of course his long solo career. His
first four studio albums are simply titled Peter Gabriel and
have been given shorthand titles based on their evocative album Mars.

(01:00:52):
He had seventy seven's Car seventy eight Scratch eighties Melt
in eighty two security, and it was apparently on Melt
that his interest in world music really began to materialize,
and I'd argue for my money anyway, This is when
his work really solidifies into the sound I associate with him,
a fusing of world music styles that I think will

(01:01:17):
seem fresh and exotic in Western popular music at the time,
creating this world beat sound. This becomes like a really
driving force in Gabriel's creative output. He founds the World
of Music, Arts and Dance or WOEMD, a festival with
this name in nineteen eighty two, and then he founds

(01:01:37):
real world records and real world studios as well, all
of this to foster the international reception of world music.
And so all of this, of course makes Gabriel kind
of like the perfect person to score The Last Temptation
of Christ, combining a modern ambient vibe with a rich
array of world musical artist leaning on those Woe Mad Connections,

(01:02:00):
and several noted traditional performers. Now, there was apparently a
kind of a constricted production timeline on the film, So
like the music in the film is, to be clear, terrific,
it's great. But then after the film comes out, Gabriel
continues to work it over a little bit. So the
versions of the tracks you hear on the album Passion

(01:02:20):
music for the Last Temptation of Christ are a little
different in places, but I mean they're both tremendous. That
album goes on to win a Grammy Award for Best
New Age Album in nineteen ninety and is I believe,
highly regarded as a really influential release in the global
promotion of world music. And I really can't overstress how

(01:02:43):
important the Peter Gabriel score is, as well as the
film's use of digetic music that really, you know, it
just all really propels The Last Temptation of Christ forward,
at times ethereal, you know, propelling us through the mysteries
of a desert God, and other times pounding, pulsing with frantic,
almost orgasmic energy of fanatic devotion. I'm always saying on

(01:03:06):
Weird House, see this movie in the best visual quality possible,
but I'd also stress listen to this film as you
watch it in the best sound quality possible. I watched
it on an airplane, which is to say I did
not have maybe like the best screen viewing experience. I
had my phone, but I did have some great earbuds

(01:03:29):
in and I've just was overwhelmed by how great this
film sounds it's just amazing. Now, outside of this Gabriel
score two other films, previously eighty five's Birdie and then
later on two thousand and two's Rabbit Proof Fence, But
for my money, the Last Temptation of Christ Passion is
the absolute best. This is just an amazing score.

Speaker 3 (01:03:51):
Never listened to it on its own, so I'll have
to check it out. But I did like the music
in the film.

Speaker 5 (01:03:55):
Yeah, yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
Do you want to talk about the plot some Yeah,
let's get into it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:09):
So I'm not going to do a detailed scene by
scene narration like we do with some movies. I feel
like that always makes more sense in a I don't know,
more downscale B movie. Context doesn't make as much sense
for classics. But instead here I think we can do
a combination of general summary and some thematic organization.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
Yeah. Plus, it's one of those stories where a lot
of people are going to know some of the beats,
You know some of the things that are going to happen.
You probably know the big thing that's going to happen.

Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
Yes, So at the beginning of the story, Jesus of Nazareth,
played by Willem Dafoe, is a Jewish carpenter living in
Roman occupied Judea in the first century, and when we
meet him, he is already and has been for a
long time, tortured by inner visions. He hears voices, he
has sensations of God, and he believes all of this

(01:04:59):
is sent to him by the divine But we sense that, Rob,
did you get the same feeling that at the beginning
of the story. He doesn't understand it. He just knows
that God is doing something to him and sending him
these visions and sensations and maybe calling him to something.
But he doesn't understand what it is, except that he's

(01:05:21):
afraid of it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
Yeah, he doesn't fully understand it, and he does not
want it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:25):
Yeah, and so so whatever it is, he can't bear
to face it. He seems to understand, possibly that it
could involve his death or at least some danger to
him and Jesus at the beginning of the story. This
is one of the most interesting plot conventions. I looked
it up that this does not predate the Cousin Zakas novel.
This plot convention was invented by Cousin Zakas. Here, Jesus

(01:05:50):
makes a living building crosses for the Romans. He makes
crosses for the Romans to use in the crucifixion of
other criminals, many of whom are Zealots who are revolutionaries
who try to resist the Roman occupation with violence. And
in the beginning here Jesus has a friend named Judas,

(01:06:12):
who is himself a Zelot. Like we see Judas this
is the harveke Tell character fighting and killing Roman soldiers
and escaping afterwards. And Judas is Jesus's friend, but he
is completely disgusted by Jesus's collaboration with the Roman authorities.
And it's worth noting that throughout this whole beginning part

(01:06:35):
of the film, Jesus is pretty consistently portrayed as weak, confused, frightened,
and even cowardly. Yeah, so at the beginning of the movie,
Jesus is a traitor to his people. He's despised by everyone. Now,
I did want to do a brief note on here
because I think this is kind of interesting. The idea

(01:06:55):
of having Jesus making crosses for crucifier, I think is
such a fascinating ironic detail to add to the story.
Of course, that's not in the Bible, and I wanted
to raise the question. Briefly, does the Bible actually say
that Jesus was a carpenter. This is often said of him,

(01:07:16):
not exactly the English translation that states back to the
earliest English translations of the Bible, it does say he's
a carpenter in there, but this is in the Gospel
of Mark, and the original Greek in the Gospel of
Mark refers to Jesus as the word is a tecton,
which means a builder or a craftsman, so someone who

(01:07:37):
works with their hands and builds things, and this would
include carpentry, but it could also equally mean a stonemason
or any other kind of builder, and would often be
you might think of it as like a construction worker
or a general contractor somebody who might do all of
these things. But so it does have Jesus work with

(01:08:00):
wood in this context, making these crosses and at the
same time getting these attacks of spiritual pain, almost like
he's having seizures. He describes, you know, he describes the
feeling like the visceral direct sensations of God reaching into him.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Yeah, so it's like it's really the early Jesus here.
First of all, shorter hair, you can tell how how
how much he's embraced his identity based on the length
of Dwollem Defoe's hair. But but yeah, it's like he
he almost seems to have like no agency in his life.
It's like, the Romans tell me to build these crosses.
I'm the only one that will do it, so I
guess I'll do it my you know, my friends are

(01:08:37):
disgusted with me, and I don't know what to do
with these this this power, this voice that is moving
through me.

Speaker 3 (01:08:43):
Yeah, and he not only makes crosses. He after he
makes the cross parts, he assists with the crucifixion of revolutionaries.
Like so it showed. There's a scene at the beginning
of the movie of the Romans crucifying someone for claiming
that Messiah would come free the people from Roman rule,

(01:09:04):
and it shows Jesus carrying part of the cross up
to the hill so this other guy can be crucified,
which is again an interesting irony there. But there's a
part where Jesus talks about He says that he makes
crosses hoping that it will make God hate him, because
if God hates him, maybe God will choose someone else
to send these visions to and choose someone else for

(01:09:27):
whatever this is he's being called to do. Now. After this,
there's a very interesting part of the movie where Jesus
goes on a journey. He has the feeling that he
has to go somewhere, so he's getting ready to leave
and he's talking with his mother Mary, and Mary says,
are you sure it's God calling you? What if it's
the devil? And Jesus says he doesn't really know. And

(01:09:50):
his mother says, if it's a devil, it can be
cast out, like you could get over this problem. If
it's just a devil, we can get you an exorcism.
But Jesus says, but if it's God, God can't be
cast out. So what he's really afraid of is that
it's God and not a devil. And so he goes
out walking. He's going somewhere, we don't know where initially,

(01:10:12):
and as he's walking there's this thing where he hears
footsteps behind him. This seems to happen to him often.
It's like there's another presence wherever he is that's haunting
him and it's not a comfort to him. There is
a presence that is putting him on edge.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
And in the sound design here is terrific too, because
it is like otherworldly footsteps, something unseen, but titanic in
its size and its endport.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
So eventually he arrives in this place that's kind of
a it's a raucous party, like all these people are
hanging out, you know, for hanging out waiting for something.
It's like sort of a waiting room canteena type area.
So he's hanging out with a bunch of guys, and
what we eventually realize is that it's a bunch of
guys waiting to book some time with Mary Magdalen, the prostitute.

(01:11:01):
And so another interesting Bible fact. A lot of people
naturally think Mary Magdalen is the prostitute from the New
Testament who is a follower of Jesus, but actually the
Bible does not say that Mary Magdalen was a prostitute.
That is later a lore. In the Gospels, she is named,
and she is only described as an important disciple. We

(01:11:25):
learn a few things like that Jesus casts seven demons
out of her and that she is in some tellings
one of the witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus, but
she's never said to be a prostitute. Separately from Mary Magdalen.
Jesus is described as associating himself with sinners and prostitutes,

(01:11:46):
and so this misconception conflating these things traces back to
based on what I was reading, back to the sixth century,
when Pope Gregory the First gave an Easter sermon where
he conflated the biblical character of Mary Magdalen with an
unnamed sinful woman in a different story in the Gospel
of Luke. And this association stuck to some degree in

(01:12:08):
the Western Church, and over time this evolved into the
belief that Mary Magdalen was a penitent prostitute.

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
It's just like screenplay writing sometimes, and you're adapting something,
You're like, what if I just combined these two characters,
wouldn't it be so much easier. We got a name here,
we got to roll here. Let's make these two one.

Speaker 3 (01:12:26):
There you go. Also, did you catch the crabs in here?
At the Mary Magdalen waiting room, there's like a cook
with a platter of fried crabs.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
They're a fair number of critters in this film. I
noted crabs, lizards, and did I see monkeys? At one point.

Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
Later during the vision from the Cross, you know the
part we talk about we'll talk about later at the
end of the movie. There were monkeys running across the ground. Yeah,
but yeah, Mary Magdalen seems to have pet lizards. But
so Jesus waits all day here, letting everybody else go
ahead of him to have their turn with Mary. And
then finally it's dark and he's the only man left

(01:13:01):
waiting and he approaches Mary, but not with lust. Instead,
he wants to talk to her. He asks her to
forgive him, because actually there's a scene where we meet
her earlier. When he's carrying the cross up the hill
for the Romans to use in crucifixion, he crosses paths
with Mary Magdalene and she spits in his face. She

(01:13:23):
hates him, and so he tells her that he is
about to go out into the wilderness, and before he goes,
he wants her forgiveness for the bad things that he's done,
and she's very angry. She's basically like, you might need forgiveness,
but it's not up to me to give it to you.
And at fair point, I think she's kind of like, like,

(01:13:45):
your problems are bigger than me, you know, I can't
forgive you all the forgiving you need. But then there's
an interesting twist. There's a backstory between them, like why
is she here in this situation? Well, it seems that
in the story it has something to do with Jesus
having had left her in the past. So Jesus and

(01:14:07):
Mary we learned. Did you understand it the same way
as I did? That they grew up together, and they
were childhood friends and at some point they fell into
they fell in love, but it was an unfulfilled love.

Speaker 2 (01:14:22):
Yeah, And I vaguely remember reading some of this in
the novel Ages Ago, but it was just kind of
like a Feigt impression that kind of, you know, synced
up with my viewing.

Speaker 3 (01:14:33):
Yeah, So they were childhood friends and they loved each other,
but Jesus rejected her. He would not love her or
marry her for reasons having to do with his inner
manifestations from God and with fear and apprehension about what
that meant, and just general fear that he wouldn't he
wouldn't be with her, he wouldn't marry her. And then

(01:14:54):
after she was rejected, Mary Magdalene becomes a prostitute in
this telling of the story. So I think it's interesting
when you think about his relationship with Judas and his
relationship with Mary. Here at the beginning of the story,
Jesus has failed and disappointed all of his friends and
the people he loves.

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
Yeah, he does not look seem like he should be
on the short list anybody's short list or the long
list to be a messiah. Yeah, he's just he does
not have it together at all, and encounters with Jesus
seems to leave people feeling worse. Yeah, you spend any
time with Jesus, you're just going to feel a little

(01:15:33):
more angry at yourself and at Jesus and at the world.

Speaker 3 (01:15:37):
So he's trying to understand now what God wants of him.
So he decides he's going to go into the desert
to join an ascetic brotherhood at least for some time.
So he goes out to this brotherhood. He has interesting
prophetic interactions, like when he gets there, this is where
he meets the Old Master and the Old Master tells

(01:15:58):
him I know you, I know where you're here. But
then he later discovers that the Old Master had actually
died like the day before he had the meeting with him.
And there's this haunting scene where they bury him in
this canyon in the middle of a dust storm. But
while Jesus is there in the desert, he has more
terrifying visions and this increasing consciousness that he may be

(01:16:20):
the Messiah. So what exactly does this mean. It's worth
noting that the modern understanding of the term Messiah is
different than what it would have meant to do Jesus
or people in Jesus's time and place. In the modern world,
influenced by the history of Christianity, people often think of
Messiah as either synonymous with God or meaning a person

(01:16:44):
who is sacrificed to save others from their sins, and
neither of these is the original meaning messiah. Originally, it
literally means anointed in the sense that a person would
be blessed and chosen for a special honor, like being
a newly coronated king or an ordained priest or something,

(01:17:05):
and in that case they would be anointed with oil.
You put oil on their head, and that is making
them a messiah, a blessed anointed person. And in the
historical context of Jesus's time, the Messiah was a figure
of prophecy, a figure who would come to be a
savior and leader of the Jewish people. And in the

(01:17:25):
first century this was understood by many Jews. This was
by no means universal, but it was a common understanding,
was that it would be a leader who would lead
a rebellion to throw off the yoke of the Roman
Empire and become a new king of the Jews. So
that's going to be a major interpretation of what it
means to be the Messiah. And this meek, cowardly guy

(01:17:49):
is getting these feelings that he's maybe supposed to be
the Messiah. Though. It's interesting he raises in this section
of the movie that this consciousness of being the Messiah
maybe a blasphemous temptation by Satan, which is a great question. Again,
this is like seriously dealing with the story to you know,

(01:18:10):
taking it for real, saying, if you take the humanity
of Jesus seriously, how would a truly human Jesus know
that his awareness of himself and his sense of his
own mission and importance was not a delusion or, in
theological terms, a lie coming from the devil, or a

(01:18:31):
temptation to pride.

Speaker 2 (01:18:33):
That's right, yeah, because if one is real, the other
is real.

Speaker 3 (01:18:35):
Right Yeah. So anyway, while Jesus is out here in
the desert. There's some very nice scenes in this part.
Maybe we could come back to him if we want to.
But where he has conversations with this other guy who's
devoted to this sect named Jeroboam, where you know, Jesus
is explaining how basically God, his God, is fear, that

(01:18:56):
his whole life is ruled by fear and lack of courage.
But while he's out in the desert, one night, Judas appears.
His friend Judas played by Harvey Keitel. He appears, pulls
Jesus out of his hut and tells him that he
has been sent by the Zealots to kill Jesus for
collaborating with the Romans. And instead of killing Jesus, they

(01:19:18):
start talking and Jesus gives this speech to Judas about
the strange consciousness roiling in him. This one part he
talks about. He says, when I look at an ant
at its shiny black eye, I see the face of God.
He's talking about how he sees the face of God
in everything and he doesn't know what it means. And
Judas is put back on his heels and Jesus says,

(01:19:41):
maybe God didn't send you here to kill me. Maybe
he sent you to follow me, And so now they
actually Judas seems to kind of assent to this that
he says he'll follow Jesus, but he warns him that
if he thinks Jesus is straying from the path of
revolution against Rome, he will kill him. And together they
start to gather followers. It might come actually a little

(01:20:03):
bit later, I don't remember, but at some point here
there's a montage scene of Jesus like assembling the team. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
Yeah, and it really does seem like they're about to
pull off the biggest highest ever. Yeah. They're they're going
to steal Pilot's treasure hoard or something, right.

Speaker 3 (01:20:19):
Yeah, So most of what has come already in the
story has been original, but this is when the story
begins to align with certain events told in the Gospels.
So you've got the story of the woman taken in

(01:20:40):
adultery that is somewhat replicated in a scene where men
try to stone Mary Magdalene and Jesus saves her. It
elaborates on that story by showing Jesus confront the crowd
with knowledge of their own hypocrisies about like naming their
equivalent sins. So all Zebede comes out. He really wants

(01:21:01):
to stone. He's happy, he's very excited to throw stones.
But Jesus is like Zebede, God sees how you cheat
your workers, and he's seeing you with that widow woman too.
And Zebedee here is played by Irvan Kershner, director If
the Empire Strikes Back.

Speaker 2 (01:21:17):
Yeah, yeah, some directors casting directors here. But he's good.

Speaker 3 (01:21:22):
Yeah yeah, I like the scene. And Jesus starts preaching
after this. He starts to gather some followers and begins
preaching a message of God's infinite universal love. It's a
lot about love at this part of the movie, though
at the same time, his preaching feels disorganized and uneven.

(01:21:42):
It's kind of veering around to different tones and topics.
He doesn't seem to yet be able to command the
attention of the crowd very well. A lot of the
crowd is skeptical and unimpressed, but he does pick up
a few followers, including the sons of Zebedee. There's one
part in this section where he's he's like, God attacked

(01:22:03):
me like an angry bird.

Speaker 2 (01:22:06):
That part, yeah, again, I get that. That's directly from
the text I remember that the talons in the mind.

Speaker 3 (01:22:14):
Yeah, but he also has there are scenes of him
having debates with Judas like what should we do first,
overthrow the Romans or purify the human soul through love,
and that they just don't agree on this. Judas is like,
you know, we know we've got to deal with the
body first, which means we overthrow the Romans first and
then we can perfect the human soul. And Jesus wants

(01:22:36):
it the other way around. And I sort of alluded
to this earlier, but I think it's so interesting that
Jesus's wisdom and authority is not presumed. Judas argues with
Jesus as if he sometimes believes he has more moral
authority than Jesus does, and on some issues he's defiant

(01:22:57):
when challenged. On others, he kind of reconsidered he I
don't know. And another thing is the way Jesus is
depicted as often. I don't know if you saw it
the same way. It seemed to me. He was shown
as not understanding why he says the things he says
or where they come from. That he is often Jesus

(01:23:21):
is surprised and often dismayed by his own preaching.

Speaker 2 (01:23:26):
Yeah, yeah, And he alludes to this at one point,
saying like, basically, I'm going to get up there and
I'm going to and God is going to talk through me.
And I don't necessarily know what he is going to say, yeah,
but I do. Like you have this conversation that Jesus
and Judas have where they're and Jesus is ultimately like, yeah,
the soul is the foundation. If you don't fix that,
you're just if you throw off the Romans, you're just

(01:23:46):
going to have someone else to deal with. You won't
cure the basic sickness now here.

Speaker 3 (01:23:53):
At some point, Jesus and Judas decide that Jesus needs
to go get baptized by John the Baptist, or maybe
not give baptized. They're at least like, you should go
to John the Baptist. He'll know if you're the mascare.

Speaker 5 (01:24:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:04):
Yeah, So John the Baptist is down in the river
baptizing people and it is a wild scene with dancing
and drums and people naked and you know, painting their bodies,
and John is going a little over the edge and
not just preaching into he's like doing belligerent ranting.

Speaker 2 (01:24:24):
Yeah yeah, And it is a very again, this is
like mystery religions of the desert. Here, this is like
rhythm of the heat. There is dancing, there is nudity.
People are getting baptized in a very aggressive fashion. And
I like the framing of the scene too, where Judas
and Jesus end up like approaching John the Baptist from behind,

(01:24:47):
so he doesn't see them approaching, but then turns around
and sees them.

Speaker 3 (01:24:51):
Yeah, so in this scene, Jesus does get baptized by
John the Baptist. John the Baptist tries to resist at first,
but like in the Bible, you know, he says, no,
you know, it is important to fulfill alrighteousness. I don't
remember how he phrases it here, but he gets baptized.
And then later that night Jesus has an argument with
John the Baptist where they have fundamentally different spiritual visions

(01:25:15):
of what's wrong with the world and what God wants
of them. Jesus has he's getting a message from God
that there is something about love that needs to be preached,
whereas John is preaching fire and brimstone and the tree
is rotten, we must chop it down, and you know,
destruction of this sinful world, and we've got to rebuild it.

(01:25:38):
I think I transcribed part of what John says. He says,
on the day of the Lord, blood will come from wood,
the stones of the houses will come alive and kill
their owners. That day is here. He gave me the acts,
now I give it to you. And so there at
an impasse here also, but this leads. This leads Jesus

(01:25:59):
to say, well, I've got to go to the desert.
Maybe there God will talk to me. I'll force him
to talk to me and tell me what it is
he actually wants. So this leads into the story from
the Gospels of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, where
he goes out alone. He sits by himself, looking to
receive a message from God. What is he supposed to do?

(01:26:20):
He says, love or the axe, But you have to
tell me. And yeah, I like how he draws a
circle in the earth.

Speaker 2 (01:26:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:26:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:29):
And then the various apparitions that he faces here, the
fire with the voice of the devil, the lion, which
speaks with Judas's voice, Yeah, and the snake, which speaks
with the Mary Magdalen's voice.

Speaker 3 (01:26:46):
Yeah. So the snake offers him temptations to flesh and
temptations of the heart that you should know love and
you should have a family. The Lion offers him temptations
of power, you know, you should, you should step into power.
And the pillar of Fire offers him temptations of telling

(01:27:06):
him he is God, which is weird because it keeps
blurring the line. Here like what Christians would traditionally assume
is Jesus's full inner consciousness of his godhood, here is
presented as this repetitive but uncertain and dangerous message that
may well be coming from Satan. Yeah, so after his time, Oh,

(01:27:28):
and so Jesus comes out of his experience in the
wilderness deciding, Okay, John the Baptist was right, it's the axe.
You've got to be a I was preaching about love,
but now it's about the axe. It's got to be
a cleansing fire. So he comes out of the desert
and there's an interlude where you know, he needs water,
and he stumbles into the home of Mary and Martha

(01:27:48):
of Bethany, and they're very kind to him. They show
hospitality to a foreigner like the Bible says you should,
and he thanks them, but Mary tells Jesus, you know,
he's talking about what he represents, and Jesus, you know,
if you want to serve God, read your scriptures. They
don't say go fast and pray in the desert. They
say have a family and make children. It's what God wants. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
Yeah, So they're presenting, you know, quite naturally and without
any ulterior motive here something that is going to go
on to become part of the titular Last Temptation.

Speaker 3 (01:28:23):
Yeah. One thing I really like is in the scenes later,
a consistent thing is that Jesus's apostles are not perfectly
devoted either. It shows them being annoyed and unconfident and
wanting to leave Jesus's movement and get back to their
sheep or get back to their fishing. One guy keeps
talking about, I don't know what happened to my sheep.
I'm really worried about it. Yeah. But at this point

(01:28:46):
Jesus is like, Okay, I don't invite you to love.
I invite you to war. It is time for fire
and the axe. And so we get some miracles throughout here.
We get the scene of the raising of Lazarus. Again
strong horror movie themes here Lazarus is like a mummy.
This scene is very patient and suspenseful and pretty scary.

Speaker 2 (01:29:06):
And the use of darkness here as well.

Speaker 3 (01:29:08):
Yeah, and finally, I think I'm want to be a
little more summary. As we move on towards the end
of the movie, we get to the scene of the
Conflict of the Temple where, you know, this is in
the Bible as well, where Jesus goes with his disciples
to the temple in Jerusalem and he is disgusted at
discovering the money changers there at the temple. Who it's

(01:29:29):
interesting also the priests here, or maybe it's not the priest,
somebody explains the reason that the money changers are there,
and it's not just like a scam. It is like
a there is a sensical reason based on their religious
beliefs that the money changers have to be there. That
you know, they have to pay the temple tax and
they don't want to do it with profane Roman coinage,

(01:29:49):
so they have to exchange it for with coinage that
will not be part of you know, that will not
have the profane image of the emperor on the coin.
So that's why it's going on. But still it's business.
It's business taking place at the temple, and Jesus doesn't
like it, you know, he walks around. There's a scene
where he asks one of the money changers, how much

(01:30:12):
profit do you make, you know, on all the pilgrims
who are coming to the temple here, and the money
changers like it's fair, it's fair, And Jesus attacks the
money changer, stalls and leads a near riot. He has
an argument with the High Priest, and for a while
here in the movie, it seems like Judas is going
to get what he wants. He's going to get to
see Jesus leading a rebellion against Rome. But so this

(01:30:37):
kind of happens actually across a couple of scenes, like
they come back to the temple later and they're gonna
it looks like they're going to stage a rebellion finally,
but in a way that I love this choice in
a way that is depicted is actually quite shameful and
difficult to watch. After assembling the crowd and having them
face off against the Roman soldiers, Jesus backs away from

(01:31:00):
leading the revolt. He has this experience of like pre stigmata,
where he starts bleeding from his hands and realizes a
different He has a new consciousness now, a different idea
of what is it he has to do, not lead
a revolt but die. He realizes he has to die.
And so this this descends into chaos. You see the

(01:31:23):
soldiers coming in, like beating up the people that Jesus led.
There again, it's like, I love how it's engaging with
this kind of like this shameful failure, you.

Speaker 2 (01:31:33):
Know what I mean, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And it's like
the team just kind of falls apart as I mean,
we know scripturally it's going to happen like that. You
know he's going to be denied and so forth. But yeah,
it's like they're at the very forefront of actually stepping
into this role as the true rebel Jesus and then

(01:31:55):
pulling back.

Speaker 3 (01:31:56):
So Jesus, now having this new awareness, tells Judas that
Judas has to turn him over to the Romans to
be executed. He is now aware that he has to
be a sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Speaker 2 (01:32:09):
And this is a really great scene, really heartbreaking stain
between Judas and Jesus that it's not just like where
Jesus is like, yeah, I gotta dice you need to
turn me in, and Judas is like, you got.

Speaker 3 (01:32:18):
It, pal, No, he doesn't want to hear this.

Speaker 2 (01:32:21):
Yeah, he doesn't want to do this, but he agrees,
and Jesus is like, you're this is the only way
it can happen. I'm not strong enough to do it
on my own. You have to turn me in. You
have to be the one that makes this happen.

Speaker 3 (01:32:31):
You're stronger than I am, so you have to do Yeah.
So this leads up to the famous scene in the
Bible where Jesus is captured in the Garden of Gethsemone.
You know, he cuts the ear off of the Roman guard,
but then Peter does and then Jesus heals it, and
they do with that reverse reverse photography thing to have
the ear heal, and he's brought before ponscious Pilot. In

(01:32:53):
the scene we discussed earlier with David Bowie, he is
unemotionally condemned to death and we see him whipped, beaten,
and in an echo of the opening scene, we see
him forced to carry his cross to the hill of
his execution.

Speaker 2 (01:33:08):
I want to say that there's so much about crucifixion,
iconography and descriptions of crucifixion that, especially within Christian culture,
you almost become dead into after a while. Like I
remember a whole Baptist sermons when I was a child
where all the grizzly details of crucifixion were explained to me.

(01:33:30):
And you know, there's so many visual depictions and then
film depictions that it can almost kind of lose its grizzliness,
and the mystical symbol that is formed out of the
grotesque kind of ends up overpowering it. And I thought
this film did a great job subverting some of that
in some interesting ways. Like I don't know, there's a
scene much earlier on. I'm not even a scene. It's

(01:33:52):
just characters talking about crucifixion, and at this point you've
already witnessed a crucifixion that Jesus is therefore early on
with the crucifixion of the Zealot. But there's a scene
where someone's saying, have you ever seen somebody crucified? Like
after two days, they don't even have any eyes anymore,
and dogs have eaten their feet and it's like.

Speaker 3 (01:34:10):
The birds come and suck their eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:34:13):
And just that description alone like gave me, like without
even depicting anything visually made me like see the horror
of this practice in a new way. And then you know, again,
this film doesn't go as hard as other films have
gone depicting the you know, the whipping of Christ and
the placement of the crown of thorns, though it is

(01:34:33):
there and it is bloody, but they depict a lot
of it. And then when we actually go up to Gogatha,
the place where the crucifixions are are, where they are
carried out, we don't get that very iconic three crosses image,
you know, that very like asymmetrical vision of things. And

(01:34:54):
instead it looks like a place of ignoble death. It
looks like a place of loneliness and horror. And I
also really liked that it did not look like holy
iconography and therefore did not seem like a holy place,
which it wouldn't be in this world. Like that's something
that comes later with the religious tradition.

Speaker 3 (01:35:14):
Right, It was not supposed the Romans were viewing it
as the exact opposite of a place of like honor
and reverence. It was supposed to be a humiliating, painful,
shameful death. Yeah, and I love another detail in this
scene of how narrow. The avenue is where Jesus has
to carry his cross, So he's carrying the cross beam

(01:35:37):
of the cross through this tiny alley which is not
even wide enough for the beam to pass. He has
to turn its sideways.

Speaker 5 (01:35:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:46):
Yeah, So while he's on the cross, here comes probably
the most famous thing about the Last Temptation of Christ,
the thing that a lot of people react to in
terms of the plot, and also one of the most

(01:36:08):
interesting and original things about it. While Jesus is suffering
on the cross in this telling of the story, he's
granted a reprieve. He sees a young girl sitting on
the ground and sort of all the sound is sucked
out except for Jesus and the girl, and the girl

(01:36:29):
tells him that she is his guardian angel and it's
all right. He has proven himself worthy and God doesn't
want him to suffer anymore. God wants him to be happy.
And they have this exchange where Jesus asks, wait, you
mean I'm not the Messiah and she says, no, you're not,
and he's so relieved that it doesn't have to be him,

(01:36:51):
and she brings him down off the cross and she
kisses his wounds and they begin to heal, and she
leads him away from the hill. Suddenly the world is green.
There's a genuine shift in the scenery. The same scenery
up till now has been very dry desert, you know,
a very very white and brown and just not a

(01:37:14):
lot of life. And suddenly we see these green fields
and hills and vegetation, and Jesus has sort of led
into this forest and now he gets to live the
life that he was denied. He marries Mary Magdalen and
they love one another. They have a happy life together.

(01:37:37):
We see them together in this sort of cabin in
the woods, and eventually Mary dies. But then the guardian
angel who always walks beside Jesus now tells him to
take a new wife and to have a family. So
he does. He has children, He has a family, and
we see him, you know, he's just going through his life.
And then we come across one very interesting scene, which

(01:38:00):
is the confrontation with Paul soul Is. Paul is out
in the middle of somewhere. People are gathering and Paul
is preaching. He is preaching the Christian message. He's preaching
salvation to all through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Christ and Jesus confronts him. He comes up and he says,

(01:38:21):
that's not true. I'm that man you're talking about, and
I never died. And Paul gets up in his face
and argues with him, and he hates meeting Jesus. He's like,
this guy is terrible. What a let down. This was
the line, I'm glad I met you, so I can
forget all about you. You are nothing like the Jesus
I preach. The Jesus I preach is great, and he

(01:38:44):
makes the emphasis that it's kind of like, I don't
care if what you're saying is right or not. I
don't care if you are that man and you never died.
The story I'm telling is true, whether it actually happened
or not. But Jesus doesn't buy this. He is disturbed.
He's like, how can it be right to preach the
story if it's built on a lie. So they do
not agree here, you know, they part ways and Jesus

(01:39:08):
is like, it can't it can't be a true story
if it's a lie. And so later, when Jesus is
old and on his deathbed, it happens to be during
the Siege of Jerusalem, which was in the year seventy
in the first century. So the Romans are here laying
waste to the city, and Jesus is visited by his

(01:39:29):
old disciples, including a Judas, and it's seen that it
lays bare his betrayal of his purpose by the life
that he led, and this scene brings a terrible final revelation.
So his whole life up to this point, and now
he's led this good life with love and marriage and
a family and pleasures and peace, and you know, he's

(01:39:52):
dying in old age, but the whole time, his guardian
angel has walked beside him. And in a frightening and
sickening twist, the gentle guardian from all these years is
revealed to have been Satan, which makes sense if you
think back on it. I love this twist because you
now start to think back on things the guardian Angel

(01:40:13):
said throughout the montage of the Years, where the guardian
Angel speaks words that sound enough like wisdom, but really
what they were was what Jesus wanted to hear.

Speaker 2 (01:40:29):
Yeah, Like, the angel even backs it up with scripture
and says like, didn't you know, didn't God save Isaac
from Abraham's hand at the last minute? That's what I'm doing. Now.
This is what God wants for you as well.

Speaker 3 (01:40:42):
It sounds like wisdom, but it's always whatever Jesus wished
were true, which is I mean, that's a great people,
that's a great piece of wisdom generally. How easy it
is for sophistory to sound correct and to sound like
wisdom itself when it's what you want to hear. We've
always got to be suspicious of things, no matter how

(01:41:05):
true they sound, if they also happened to be the
thing we would like to be true. Yeah, yeah, so
horrified and shamed. At this point, Jesus is you know,
he's an old man, he's dying, but he crawls, dragging
his aged and sickly body up to the hill of Golgotha.
He climbs up to the hill of the cross, and

(01:41:26):
he begs God to give him another chance to die
for the world. And now here's where the title comes in.
Having passed the last temptation. The other earlier temptations were
in the desert, and now he's had the last temptation
here on the cross. He has returned to the cross
as if everything that we saw since this point had
been a dream. Now, I don't know how we're supposed

(01:41:49):
to take that. Was it all a dream and he
was really just here on the cross all the time?
Or when you're talking about the power of God, does
it even make a difference. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:41:57):
Yeah, I don't know. I guess then for my own part,
I just imagined it as like this is that this
is just all a temptation happening in the moment while
he's on the cross, and then that is rejected, And
this is just how it's presented cinematically. But I mean,
when you're dealing with divine powers and infernal powers here,
I guess it could go in various directions.

Speaker 3 (01:42:19):
So the story ends with the death of Jesus on
the cross here and he says it is accomplished, which
are his words I believe from the Gospel of John.
So it's interesting that the story comes back and it
ends the same way we normally see in the gospel accounts.
Of course, it doesn't address the resurrection, which I think
is an interesting choice. You know, you almost always have

(01:42:42):
to have the resurrection of Christ in the story about Christ.
That's sort of like the central tenet. According to most Christians,
at least but it leaves that part out.

Speaker 2 (01:42:52):
Yeah, yeah, you can easily imagine a version of the
film that has that at the end as well. But
in a way, I guess, you know, it is accomplished.
He has resisted the temptation and done the thing that
he had to do, and therefore it's as good a
place to end it as any one.

Speaker 3 (01:43:11):
Thing you might say is that if this fictional account
of the life of Jesus is is explicitly aimed at
exploring the humanity of Jesus, you know, to cousin Zakas,
he may I don't want to put words in his mouth,
but he may well have believed that. You know. It's
the humanity is what ended at the time of Christ's death,

(01:43:31):
and at that point he's he sort of is God
once again, fully God and not fully human anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:43:38):
Yeah, it's like this is this has been a story
of integration and at this point, with the resurrection, like
man and God are fully integrated in one being, and
they're like, it's a different story and a different character.

Speaker 3 (01:43:47):
Yeah, yeah, could be I'm just guessing.

Speaker 2 (01:43:50):
There, but no, no, that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 (01:43:53):
But so anyway, last Temptation of Christ, this is a wonderful, beautiful,
fascinating film. I just so much, so much love for
this movie. I'm sad it took me this long in
life to see it, but I'm very glad I finally did.

Speaker 2 (01:44:10):
Oh, don't feel sad. I mean, I think it's sometimes
we think that like that, like that, we think, oh,
this is a great film. It's been around all my
life and so forth. Why did I wait until now?
It's like, if you'd seen it years ago, you wouldn't
get to see it for the first time. Now you
know this film was out there waiting on you.

Speaker 3 (01:44:26):
That's true. I think if I had seen this in
high school, I probably would not have appreciated it quite
as well.

Speaker 2 (01:44:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love the ending. Here we get
a splash of otherworldly color right here at the very
end of the film. It's shocking, it's beautiful. I was
like I was taken aback by it. Apparently this was
an accident of filmmaking, the color integrity of the image
of the film. It's somehow been compromised. But of course

(01:44:52):
they ended up really liking it. And yeah, I think
it's a beautiful, beautiful way to land the picture. And
I mentioned I watched this on the plane. The plane
landed as the film was landing, and I don't know,
not always like that, but in this case it really
worked for me. It was kind of like, this is
actually a pretty great situation in which to watch the film, Like,

(01:45:13):
I don't really like flying. I'm always a little bit
afraid while I'm flying. This is a film about fear
in many respects. And then yeah, everything just comes together
right there at the end.

Speaker 3 (01:45:23):
Did you think much about how it was only two
weeks to get from Demon Warp to Last Temptation of Christ?

Speaker 2 (01:45:31):
That's a good point. It is interesting that we did
Demon Demon and then Last Last to Demons in Yeah,
and then two last films.

Speaker 3 (01:45:38):
So Demon Pond, Demon Warp, Last Last Man on Earth,
Last Temptation of Christ. Yeah. I enjoyed all four of them.
You know, we've been on a good run.

Speaker 2 (01:45:49):
Yeah, Yeah, it has been a good run. Good run.
I don't know how where we'll go from here. Where
do you go from Last Temptation of Christ?

Speaker 3 (01:45:55):
Probably a real stinker. I'm thinking, like a late nineties
made for TV sci fi movie is what I'm thinking.

Speaker 2 (01:46:02):
All right, Well, we have some good choices out there,
that's for sure. Right, Well, Yeah, this one's a great one.
Highly recommend it. If you haven't seen The Last Temptation
of Christ and you made it through this episode, go
see it. If it's been a long time since you've
seen it, go see it again. And if nothing else, yeah,
just dive into that score. Oh my goodness. Like I said,
I've been listening to to Passion for decades and it

(01:46:27):
didn't ruin me for anything, in part because it is
a little different from what you hear in the film.
And yeah, absolutely terrific. All right, at this point, we'll
just quickly remind you Stuff to Blow your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcasts with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, but here on Fridays, and this is
a good Friday. We set aside all that stuff and

(01:46:48):
we just talk about a weird film, and it's up
to us to decide exactly what constitutes a weird film.
I should met We're going to end this podcast eventually,
but I will mention there is a scene in this
movie where Jesus takes his own heart out yep, And
that was a moment where I'm like, that happens in
this movie. We can do weird house about.

Speaker 3 (01:47:06):
It before that?

Speaker 2 (01:47:08):
Yeah, yeah, how it did is but that is a
wonderfully surreal moment in the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:47:12):
Okay, where are we? We're closing it out right? Okay,
so huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:47:36):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.