Weirdhouse Cinema: The Last Temptation of Christ

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

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

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Speaker 3: 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. 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. I'm so glad you picked it for this week, Rob.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 contact of the film itself.

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Speaker 3: 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 3: You know.

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

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Speaker 3: 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? 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. 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 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.

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

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Speaker 3: 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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

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Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 being buffeted about by all of these different influences and he's trying to find his way toward being the savior of humankind.

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Speaker 2: 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, 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 own mind. Play in these scenes and be true to Yeah.

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Speaker 3: 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, 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.

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Speaker 2: Absolutely.

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Speaker 3: 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 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 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 me upset. I think this is a great attempt to deal with what Christianity means.

00:19:44
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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.

00:21:02
Speaker 3: 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. 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.

00:21:33
Speaker 2: 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.

00:21:52
Speaker 3: Yeah. In other words, I liked this movie. I thought it was very good.

00:21:56
Speaker 2: 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. 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.

00:22:39
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:23:13
Speaker 2: You that you quite possible?

00:23:15
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah?

00:23:16
Speaker 2: 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.

00:23:26
Speaker 3: 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.

00:23:36
Speaker 2: 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 to the graphic content. But you know, everyone's mind is going to vary on that sort of thing.

00:24:01
Speaker 3: 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 a famous for doing.

00:24:25
Speaker 2: 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, 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, 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 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 five's After Hours, and eighty six is the Color of Money.

00:25:54
Speaker 3: 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.

00:26:17
Speaker 2: 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 been interesting, would have been a different film though, Yeah.

00:26:43
Speaker 3: All right, asking for that all that world. I like Willem Dafoe a lot.

00:26:47
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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. 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 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 nine hundred and eighty eight years earlier.

00:28:34
Speaker 4: Right.

00:28:36
Speaker 3: 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 that there is a historical setting by having all of the characters speak with British accents, which is hilarious.

00:29:05
Speaker 2: 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.

00:29:13
Speaker 3: 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 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. 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.

00:30:14
Speaker 2: 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 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 up sounding a little New York. Well, you know, that's just part of who's making it.

00:31:03
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:31:38
Speaker 2: 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 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. I love that, Yeah, like leaning on some of the tricks that low budget, scrappy filmmakers were having to employ.

00:32:30
Speaker 3: 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.

00:32:39
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:33:10
Speaker 3: I love that too. Yeah, I mean, you can't tell it it doesn't feel like a cheap movie.

00:33:16
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

00:35:27
Speaker 3: 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 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, which we previously covered. Yeah, he's in Streets of Fire. I keep thinking we've done that, but we haven't yet.

00:36:14
Speaker 2: 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.

00:36:22
Speaker 3: In which he also plays Jesus.

00:36:24
Speaker 2: Well he does, yeah, kind of right, he plays He plays a very good, like moral compass sort of character.

00:36:30
Speaker 3: 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.

00:36:43
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:37:11
Speaker 3: But when he does play a bad guy, he's capable of an absolutely like world class evil grimlin face.

00:37:19
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 facial expressions and so forth.

00:38:26
Speaker 3: 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, 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.

00:39:07
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:39:40
Speaker 3: 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.

00:39:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, They're like, who's this guy that makes me sense?

00:39:54
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah. Oh.

00:39:56
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 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 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 probably more most memorable performances as well.

00:41:51
Speaker 3: And the original one, not the one with Nicholas Cage.

00:41:54
Speaker 2: 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.

00:42:05
Speaker 3: I'm to understand almost nothing. From what I understand.

00:42:07
Speaker 2: 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.

00:42:18
Speaker 3: We'll see you.

00:42:19
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:42:52
Speaker 3: 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.

00:43:14
Speaker 2: 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. Uh And and I think it's terrific.

00:43:38
Speaker 4: They did.

00:43:39
Speaker 2: They heaped on The Shining when it came out, ripping both Kubrick and Shelley Duvall, Like who's outside of Stephen King?

00:43:47
Speaker 3: Who?

00:43:48
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:44:27
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 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.

00:45:51
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 say this, but he is very loving and loyal and all of this ends up, you know, making sense in the plot.

00:47:02
Speaker 3: 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, 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 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.

00:48:02
Speaker 2: 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?

00:48:11
Speaker 3: 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?

00:48:27
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, So that's Judas.

00:48:38
Speaker 2: And we're not going to go through all the disciples, just to be clear, otherwise we'll be here all day.

00:48:42
Speaker 3: But we're going to the film does make Judas the most important to Yes, yeah.

00:48:47
Speaker 2: 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, 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 and co star David Carodine.

00:49:33
Speaker 3: Wow.

00:49:34
Speaker 2: 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.

00:49:45
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know if that's the version I want.

00:49:49
Speaker 2: 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. I think she's really great here. It's a yeah, it's a complicated role, and she does a fabulous job with it.

00:50:19
Speaker 3: 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.

00:50:33
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:51:32
Speaker 3: Trench and Inside Andre.

00:51:36
Speaker 2: 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 more about this later, but the John the Baptist in the film is wonderful and weird. I really like it.

00:52:03
Speaker 3: 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.

00:52:21
Speaker 2: 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 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 performances Saul.

00:53:04
Speaker 3: 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 you're not worth my time, get out of here. And yeah, he's brutal.

00:53:28
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:54:01
Speaker 3: 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.

00:54:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:54:20
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:54:21
Speaker 2: 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.

00:54:44
Speaker 3: 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.

00:54:55
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:55:26
Speaker 3: He was in Raw Deal.

00:55:28
Speaker 2: 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 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 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?

00:56:28
Speaker 3: 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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.

00:59:04
Speaker 2: 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?

00:59:18
Speaker 3: You know?

00:59:18
Speaker 2: 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.

00:59:34
Speaker 3: 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.

00:59:48
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

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

01:04:09
Speaker 3: 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.

01:04:29
Speaker 2: 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.

01:04:36
Speaker 3: 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 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 afraid of it.

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

01:05:25
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

01:08:16
Speaker 2: 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 disgusted with me, and I don't know what to do with these this this power, this voice that is moving through me.

01:08:43
Speaker 3: 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, 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 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 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, 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.

01:10:25
Speaker 2: 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.

01:10:37
Speaker 3: 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. 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 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, 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 the Western Church, and over time this evolved into the belief that Mary Magdalen was a penitent prostitute.

01:12:15
Speaker 2: 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.

01:12:26
Speaker 3: 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.

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

01:12:40
Speaker 3: 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 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 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, 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 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.

01:14:22
Speaker 2: 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.

01:14:33
Speaker 3: 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 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.

01:15:13
Speaker 2: 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 more angry at yourself and at Jesus and at the world.

01:15:37
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 temptation to pride.

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

01:18:35
Speaker 3: 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 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 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, 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 bit later, I don't remember, but at some point here there's a montage scene of Jesus like assembling the team. Yeah.

01:20:09
Speaker 2: 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.

01:20:19
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.

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

01:21:22
Speaker 3: 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. 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 me like an angry bird.

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

01:22:14
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 is surprised and often dismayed by his own preaching.

01:23:26
Speaker 2: 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 going to have someone else to deal with. You won't cure the basic sickness now here.

01:23:53
Speaker 3: 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.

01:24:04
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:24:04
Speaker 3: 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.

01:24:24
Speaker 2: 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, so he doesn't see them approaching, but then turns around and sees them.

01:24:51
Speaker 3: 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 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. 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 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? He says, love or the axe, But you have to tell me. And yeah, I like how he draws a circle in the earth.

01:26:28
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:26:28
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:26:29
Speaker 2: 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.

01:26:46
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 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.

01:28:12
Speaker 2: 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.

01:28:23
Speaker 3: 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 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.

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

01:29:08
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

01:31:33
Speaker 2: 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 pulling back.

01:31:56
Speaker 3: 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.

01:32:09
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:32:21
Speaker 2: 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.

01:32:31
Speaker 3: 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 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.

01:33:08
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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.

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

01:34:13
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

01:35:14
Speaker 3: 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 of the cross through this tiny alley which is not even wide enough for the beam to pass. He has to turn its sideways.

01:35:45
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:35:46
Speaker 3: 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

01:40:29
Speaker 2: 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.

01:40:42
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 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.

01:41:57
Speaker 2: 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.

01:42:19
Speaker 3: 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 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.

01:42:52
Speaker 2: 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.

01:43:11
Speaker 3: 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, and at that point he's he sort of is God once again, fully God and not fully human anymore.

01:43:38
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

01:43:53
Speaker 3: 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.

01:44:10
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:44:31
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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.

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

01:45:31
Speaker 2: 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.

01:45:38
Speaker 3: 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.

01:45:49
Speaker 2: 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?

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

01:46:02
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

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

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

01:47:12
Speaker 3: 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.

01:47:36
Speaker 1: 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.