I don't have anything much to add the discussion re Gibson's "The Passion," except that reading the description of the effects of the violence reminded me of something: the debate about the flagellation scene in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The rap on UTC is, of course, that he's a denatured black man, that the death scene is slavering, excessive, and sadistic (most famously in James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel"). And of course, UTC is propaganda, meant to provoke outrage. Interesting that Stowe was very much a product of mainstream Protestantism (she was the daughter, sister, and wife of Congregational ministers), versus Gibson's brand of Roman Catholicism.

I was teaching the MCAT class today and the movie came up: one of my students parroted, "Well, the movie's just showing what's in the book" (or Book, I suppose). I didn't bother probing that assumption; it would just have looked tendentious on my part.