The Passion of the Christ in Australia: A controversy that did not happen

By Don Perlgut, University of New South Wales

First published in Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 57-72, October 2012.

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how the controversies over Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ unfolded in Australia. I review the Australian media coverage of the controversy, including the responses from Australian Christian and Jewish leaders. I argue that the Australian media would have been willing to create a media event from The Passion, as they had previously highlighted other recent Jewish controversies, such as that surrounding the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize. Nevertheless, the controversy did not take root in Australia as it lacked a sufficiently important local angle. The Australian Jewish community leadership was also unwilling to engage in detailed criticisms of the film and few Australian Christian commentators used antisemitic language in their discussions about the film. This lack of angry criticism by Australian Jewish community leaders was a deliberate strategy to avoid a similar situation to what happened in the United States. The structure of Australian media also meant that there were few single- interest media outlets (such as Fox News in the United States) that could sustain constant coverage.

Keywords The Passion of the Christ Mel Gibson film controversies antisemitism Australian media Jewish leadership

Introduction

With the release of The Passion of the Christ (hereafter The Passion) in Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand on 25 February 2004, two phenomena quickly became apparent. First, despite early predictions to the contrary due to the unusual religious content of the film (the last twelve hours of the life of Jesus), in the United States the film achieved major theatrical box success and rocketed to become one of the most popular box office successes of 2004. Despite using Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew dialogue with subtitles, The Passion was the third most popular film that year in North America and the most successful R-rated film ever. Second, the momentous American success of The Passion did not fully translate to most other countries, including Australia,

Don Perlgut: The Passion of the Christ in Australia 1 where the film achieved only 40 per cent of its expected box office, based on standard North American Australian comparisons (Boschen 2004; Dale 2004). Debate and controversy about The Passion revolved around three issues: the negative portrayal of many Jewish characters, with strong suggestions of Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus; the excessive depiction of violence; and the extensive use of non-Biblical sources. These controversies, particularly the most hotly debated one about antisemitic elements, provided extensive free publicity for the film. Yet the Australian response to the controversies was very different than that in the United States. This article explores the reasons for these differences.

Antisemitism and The Passion of the Christ

Controversial films are not new to Hollywood, and will surely return again and again, but it is extremely unusual for a blockbuster American film to arrive with a controversy that revolves around its antisemitic portrayals (Phillips 2008). In a January 2003 interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, Mel Gibson acknowledged that the film could upset Jews: ‘It may. It’s not meant to. I think it’s meant to just tell the truth’ (Fox News 2003). The very public and loud controversy concerning antisemitism in the film produced much speculation about Mel Gibson’s own beliefs. As a traditionalist Catholic, Gibson denied the Vatican II reforms and the Nostra Aetate declaration, which had ‘officially repudiated the collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ’ (Dinges 2003). The position of Mel’s father Hutton Gibson – an open Holocaust denier – complicated matters further, as Hutton publicly made a number of antisemitic statements (Agence France-Presse 2004). Mel Gibson’s unwillingness to distance himself from his father’s beliefs coloured much of the debate on antisemitism and gave it additional traction. In January 2004 Gibson said, ‘My dad taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life’ (quoted in Noonan 2004). Mel Gibson also accused both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times of being ‘anti-Christian’ publications and claimed that ‘modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church’ (Boyer 2003).

The main charges of antisemitism in the film relate to casting the Jews as villains. According to Pamela Grace, the film:

emphasises the role of the Jewish priests in arranging Jesus’ arrest and shows their satisfaction as they watch the Roman torturers carry out the persecution and crucifixion … Gibson finally agreed to delete from the picture the most antisemitic phrase in the Bible – the notorious verse 27:25 of the Gospel of Matthew: ‘His blood be on us and on our people,’ a verse that, according to reputable biblical scholars, has no historical basis. (Grace 2004)

Jesus film scholar Adele Reinhartz asserts that, ‘not only does Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ include all the problematic elements of the Gospel sources, but it also inserts extraneous elements that exacerbate the anti-Jewish potential of the Gospels’ account’, exaggerating the role of Jews (Reinhartz 2007: 248). The addition of ‘extrabiblical and

Don Perlgut: The Passion of the Christ in Australia 2 nonhistorical’ elements expanded ‘the Gospels’ anti-Judaism by exaggerating the vilification of the priests, adding to the whitewash of Pontius Pilate – who had sole authority to have Jesus crucified – and inserting satanic images, which are associated with unsympathetic Jews’ (Grace 2004).

The visual representation of the film’s Jewish characters troubled many observers, setting the scene for bitter public arguments. Omer Bartov wrote that, ‘It would be hard to come up with a more stereotypical portrayal of Jews outside of “official” antisemitic films produced by the Third Reich’, including actors’ features that ‘are exaggerated through makeup, lighting and angle of photography’ (Bartov 2005: xiii–xiv). In a widely quoted article, Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic that:

In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion is without any doubt an antisemitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of antisemitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely antisemitic images; these are classically antisemitic images. (Wieseltier 2004)

Australian Jewish controversies

In order to understand the Australian controversy over The Passion, it is essential to examine Jewish religious controversies in that country. Although comprising about one- half of 1 per cent of the Australian population and usually avoiding controversy, the Australian Jewish community has engaged in a number of high-profile media activities when community leaders believed the issues to be important (Perlgut 2010). A major Jewish community controversy – and one which turned out to be damaging for the Australian Jewish leadership – first erupted in August 2003, when the Sydney University Peace Foundation announced that a prominent Palestinian politician and intellectual, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, would receive the Foundation’s Sydney Peace Prize in November 2003. This took place only a few months prior to the February 2004 cinema release of The Passion, and heavily influenced how the Australian Jewish leadership responded to that film. Geoffrey Levey and Philip Mendes point out that what began as criticism of whether or not Dr Ashrawi should receive the prize rapidly turned into a storm of controversy about alleged Australian Jewish power, influence and bullying (Levey and Mendes 2004: 219; Ramsey 2003). A Melbourne Age editorial of 8 November 2003 summarized the situation:

The campaign against Dr Ashrawi misfired; it caused division within the Jewish community, and provoked attacks from outside the community that sometimes invoked bigoted stereotypes. The ease with which some supporters of Dr Ashrawi slipped into talk about wealthy Jews who sinisterly manipulate the media and politicians was as alarming as the distortion of Dr Ashrawi’s opinions. (The Age 2003)

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Levey and Mendes concluded that, ‘the episode was a fiasco waiting to happen’ because of the competing interests between various Jewish organizations, as well as ‘Australian Jews’ general sense of insecurity, reflexive pro-Israelism, and political style’ (Levey and Mendes 2004: 219–20). The focus on Israel is particularly unique to Australian Jews, much more important than for American Jews: ‘on almost every available measure – visitation, resident relatives, emotional attachment and philanthropy – Israel figures centrally in Australian Jewish identification’ (Levey and Mendes 2004: 221).

Another example of how an Australian Jewish controversy unfolded took place in 2006 with the release of Australian Jewish writer Antony Loewenstein’s book My Israel Question (2007), in which he severely criticized Israel and Zionism. That controversy included the Jewish publisher of Melbourne University Press, Louise Adler, and many key Jewish organizations, which engaged in extensively reported and heated public discussions (Barclay 2006; Cubby 2006; Rodgers 2006; Australian Jewish News 2006; Goldberg 2006; Kohn 2006).

The Australian media has frequently covered other recent antisemitism issues. A front page article in The Age on 19 January 2007 announced ‘Sheikh Sparks Outrage’, detailing antisemitic sermons by Sheikh Feiz Muhammad of Sydney (with words such as ‘Jews are pigs that will be killed at the end of the world’), released on DVD under the title Death Series (Webb 2007). Another incident occurred in November 2008 when a rural NSW fundamentalist Baptist pastor was quoted as saying that Jews were ‘going to hell and faced a fate worse than the Holocaust because they had not accepted Jesus as their saviour’ (West 2008; Abitol 2008). But this incident did not become a significant ongoing controversy in Australia, as the local NSW Baptist Union quickly criticized Harris, noting that his church was not a member of the Union (Cox 2008). The message was clear: for a religious controversy to ignite in Australia, it needs both institutional support and players willing to argue publicly.

Australian media and The Passion of the Christ

The Australian media showed substantial interest in The Passion, if only because of Mel Gibson, who was strongly identified as ‘Australian’ to most Australians. Although born in the United States, Mel Gibson had moved to Australia at age twelve, had a highly successful acting career in Australia and at the time of the film’s release maintained a number of business interests in the country. Gibson’s non-Australian films had always found success in Australia, with his first directorial effort Braveheart doing especially well locally: the seventh top box office performer in 1995, compared to eighteenth that year in North America.

Australia is also only one of a handful of countries where English is the first and primary language of an overwhelming majority of residents. Thus Australians had easy access to numerous American reports on The Passion’s controversy (see Novak 2004), as well as Internet reports and overseas versions of American magazines like Time magazine and Newsweek (then still being published in Australia), both of which extensively covered the

Don Perlgut: The Passion of the Christ in Australia 4 film’s developing American controversies. Australian media expressed a high level of interest in the film: the Anti-Defamation League in New York reported that it had more enquiries from Australian journalists than from any other country during the film’s American controversy in 2003 and 2004 (Perlgut 2010a). The Australian press mostly reported what was happening in the United States until just prior to the film’s release on 25 February 2004.

Australian and American religion, political cultures and culture wars

There are deep and abiding differences between Australian and American political cultures, ones that were reflected in the different responses to The Passion in the respective countries. For example, only 5 per cent of Australian voters regularly vote based on religious grounds, compared to up to 40 per cent of American voters. Damien Murphy points out that the 2004 Australian Senate election of Steve Fielding from the religiously identified Family First Party was a one-off activity, ‘only due to Victorian Labor strategists being too smart by half and messing with a preference deal’ (Murphy 2009). Nevertheless, Marion Maddox notes that when John Howard was Prime Minister, his government progressively ‘imported policies normally associated with the American Christian right’ within an attractive framework of ‘white picket fence nostalgia’. She concludes that while Australia lacks ‘the large conservative Christian voter base [and …] is no easy haven for religious right ideas [… the] current combination of social conservatism and free market economics looks remarkably like the American phenomenon’ (Maddox 2005: 200).

In the United States, there was a strong correlation between viewers of The Passion and Republican voting: a 2004 Zogby International Survey reported that two-thirds of Democrat voters (for John Kerry) had watched Fahrenheit 9/11, compared to only 3 per cent of Republican (George W. Bush) voters. By contrast, about half of the Republican voters had watched The Passion of the Christ, compared to only 15 per cent of Democrat voters (Green et al. 2006: 12). Although comparable research does not exist for Australia, any correlation between viewers of The Passion and political voting is likely to have been weak at best.

David Throsby points out that there are substantial differences in the American and the Australian ‘culture wars’. In the United States, the significant ‘hot’ issues have been abortion, gay rights and censorship of art. By contrast, Australian concerns are for the ‘three Rs’ –republic, reconciliation and refugees:

Cultural battles have been fought along similar ideological fault-lines, but the issues have become more sharply defined around what are seen as fundamental Australian values: attitudes to multiculturalism, to the teaching of history, to the treatment of refugees, to Aboriginal reconciliation, to the republic, indeed, to the very notion of Australian identity. (Throsby 2008)

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Deborah Caldwell explained the direct connection between the ‘culture wars’ and the American evangelical Protestant support for The Passion:

The Evangelicals feeling of exclusion […] undergirds the structure of America’s culture war. The movie served as a lightning rod for many of those conflicts. What resulted was a perfect storm over pluralism, free speech and family values. These issues are always filtered through American politics, which in turn filters them back through religion. (Caldwell 2004: 213–14)

The culture wars helped The Passion’s marketing strategy in the United States, ‘not so much because liberals started out attacking the film, but because conservative Christians assumed that they were, and that they would. As a result, conservatives spent a lot of time in adrenaline-rush counterattack mode’. Abraham Foxman from the Anti-Defamation League and Frank Rich from The New York Times ‘blundered into this other reality’. Thus the criticisms made by liberals and Jewish organizations ‘played right into Gibson’s positioning: both he and his film stood for Christianity, the Gospels and family values’ (Caldwell 2004: 215). For Jews, this ‘marked one of the rare times in recent American history that [they] have sensed themselves as cultural outsiders’ (Berenbaum and Landres 2004: 4). In its 2004 end-of-year wrap-up, an editorial of the New York-based Jewish Daily Forward newspaper commented:

It surely says something about the standing of Jews in the mind of the West when America’s best-known battler against antisemitism speaks out on a movie with suspected anti-Jewish overtones and ends up himself being accused of waging a smear campaign to fatten his own agency’s coffers. That’s pretty much what happened (in 2004) to Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti- Defamation League, when he tried […] to engage Mel Gibson […] Foxman’s critiques were generally measured and on target; his missteps were tactical, letting himself be outmaneuvered as Gibson cannily played the martyred artist fighting for free expression. (Jewish Daily Forward 2004)

One of the most remarkable aspects about the popularity of The Passion was the film’s appeal to evangelical Protestants in the United States, where they are a significant political force and very large in numbers – at least one-quarter of all Americans (Caldwell 2004: 215; George 2008: 103–05) and possibly up to 34 per cent (Kosmin and Keyser 2009: 2). By contrast, the estimated numbers of evangelicals in Australia are only a few per cent (Bouma 2006: 74).

Why The Passion controversy did not take off in Australia

In March 2004, Diana Bagnall wrote in The Bulletin that, ‘The storm over the depiction of Jews in Mel Gibson's film The Passion seems largely to have passed over Australia’. She contrasted it directly with the ‘Jewish fury’ and resultant ‘voluble hostility towards the so-called Jewish lobby’ evidenced in the Hanan Ashrawi incident (Bagnall 2004). In my 2010 article that described the impact of The Passion six years after the film’s

Don Perlgut: The Passion of the Christ in Australia 6 release, I identified five key elements that minimized the film’s controversy in Australia (Perlgut 2010a): 1. Although he lived a substantial part of his life in Australia, Mel Gibson did not visit during the film’s promotion and theatrical release, thereby depriving Australian media of a ‘hot’ personality to interview and a good local ‘angle’. 2. The leadership of the Australian Jewish community was generally unwilling to engage in a vigorous, pointed and detailed criticism of the film and its content. Nor did the controversy have the essential criteria (local issue, Israel focus) for Jewish community mobilization. 3. Unlike in the United States, no Australian Jewish commentators were willing to support Gibson. 4. Although a number of Australian commentators wrote and spoke favourably about the film, no Christian commentators used antisemitic language in the discussions. 5. The Australian public did not respond to the antisemitism conflict, probably due to a different media structure, with fewer – and less powerful – niche and single-interest media outlets (such as Fox News) that were able to sustain constant coverage.

Australian Jewish leaders and The Passion

By comparison to the statements by some American Jewish leaders, the comments by Australian Jewish leaders were remarkably restrained, considered and muted. The Hanan Ashrawi affair described above shows that this level of response was not necessarily pre- ordained, but the Australian Jewish leadership was still reeling from that event, which had taken place only a few months earlier. The negative response to Ashrawi was widely considered to have been a serious public relations mistake and a major loss of face, producing deep divisions in the Jewish community and reinforcing stereotypes of ‘Jewish control’. One effect of that controversy was that the Jewish community leadership became more committed to coordinating responses to public issues (Levey and Mendes 2004: 224).

For many months before The Passion opened in cinemas in late February 2004, the Australian Jewish leadership also had the opportunity to observe how the American Jewish community responded to the film. Australian Jewish leaders clearly decided that any significant response was likely to encounter a major reaction, and that such a reaction could very well backfire by stimulating greater publicity for the film. The decision to avoid a fight that was both unnecessary and unwinnable was a savvy political calculation. This strategic move thus dealt with the reservations expressed by American Jewish Congress leader David Twersky, who acknowledged that while ‘Jewish groups had no choice but to attack the movie’, he worried about the lack of results from the Jewish attacks: ‘When you fight this kind of fight and lose, it encourages people who don’t like us to step back in the fray’ (Cattan 2004).

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There were other reasons why the Australian Jewish community leadership did not respond more strongly and avoided a religious argument about the film. Australian Jewish community leaders had worked for many years on developing good relationships with Catholic leaders, only a few of whom became ardent advocates for the film (as discussed below). Further, Australian Protestants did not embrace The Passion like their American counterparts did. This was typified in my discussion with a Sydney Anglican Minister, who explained that he was not going to see the film because it was ‘too Catholic’. By contrast, American evangelical Protestants showed surprisingly few concerns about The Passion’s Catholic interpretations. Stephen Prothero believes that the ‘ongoing culture wars’ made the evangelicals ‘close ranks with Gibson, who must be commended for so adroitly spinning the debate over his depiction of Jews into an apocalyptic battle between secular humanists and true believers’ (Prothero 2004: 276– 77).

Although the issue of antisemitic images in The Passion was important, Australian Jews viewed it more as an American controversy and not core to the Australian Jewish community identity and Israel-focussed concerns. Thus, The Passion controversy did not meet the essential criteria for mobilization: no Israel connection (such as the Palestinian Ashrawi), no local identities as the ‘bad guys’ (such as Antony Loewenstein or Sheik Feiz Muhammad) and no specifically local issue. The American debates – no matter how vociferous and seemingly relevant – simply did not engage Australians in the same way.

With some notable exceptions (in particular Cardinal Pell in Sydney; see below), the lukewarm to cool reception by many Australian Catholic leaders towards the film allowed Australian Jewish leaders to provide careful and measured responses. Rabbi Raymond Apple of Sydney’s Great Synagogue declared that ‘There is a very good relationship between the Jewish community and the Catholic Church and I’m sure that no film is going to disturb that’ (Tedmanson 2004). Michael Danby, Jewish Federal Member of Parliament (Melbourne Ports), believed that the movie would not stir up antisemitism, because ‘The Catholic Church and the Pope have over the past 30 years effected a reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity that is really wonderful and as far as I am concerned the Pope speaks for Catholics, not Mel Gibson’ (Tory Maguire 2004). Jeremy Jones, President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, noted ‘Most mainstream Australian church figures took advantage of the screening of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ to caution their followers against anti-Jewish prejudice’ (Jones 2004).

There are consistent themes running through these comments: the Jewish leaders projected calm, they used reasonable language and they expressed confidence that Australian Christian leaders would assist in preventing any outbreak of antisemitism. The Australian media tracked down numerous Jewish leaders in late February 2004 and sought their views on The Passion. Although critical, Australian Jewish leaders gave restrained responses in contrast to their North American counterparts. After viewing a preview at Parliament House in Canberra, Athol Morris (Executive Council of Australian Jewry) said the film ‘had the potential to stir latent antisemitism’ (Morris 2004a). Rabbi Raymond Apple said, ‘I was so sorry that I went, that, with all the violence I really would

Don Perlgut: The Passion of the Christ in Australia 8 have walked out before the end if I had had the guts to do it. I felt the violence obscured the message’ (Bowden 2004).

The Australian Jewish responses tended to take two forms: reiterating the good relations the Jewish community had with the Christian community or repeating the message that ‘it’s only a movie’. It was not, of course, ‘only’ a movie – it was a major cultural phenomenon (see Perlgut 2010a), but that was the consistent message. Significantly, unlike in the United States, there were no instances of identified Jewish commentators in Australia supporting Mel Gibson, disagreeing with negative reviews or criticizing Jewish community leadership and statements. There were no Australian parallels to the politically conservative American Jewish commentators who praised the film, who included Michael Medved (2004), Rabbi Daniel Lapin (2004), bloggers Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart, columnist Don Feder and historian Paul Gottfried. Nor did any Australian Jewish spokesperson take a lead role like in the United States, where both The New York Times columnist Frank Rich (who is Jewish) and Abraham Foxman (Anti- Defamation League) had public long-running arguments with Mel Gibson (see Foxman 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c; Rich 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). Gibson’s language proved to be particularly colourful, saying of Rich that, ‘I want to kill him … I want his intestines on a stick … I want to kill his dog’ (Boyer 2003).

Australian Christian leaders and commentators and The Passion

Aspects of religious belief are generally not seen as suitable topics for debate in Australian public life, with Australians usually preferring to see religion as a private matter (see Frame 2009; Brennan 2007). As Damien Murphy contends, unlike the situation in the United States and France, where ‘protecting religious freedom means rigorously policing the boundary between church and state […] Australia has invested little energy in public debate about the place of religion in a secular society’ (Murphy 2009).

Unlike in the United States, a number of Australian Christian commentators made sincere attempts to avoid feeding the antisemitism controversy surrounding The Passion. Michael Malone, Catholic Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, said he was ‘sitting on the fence’ about the film, and ‘would not advise Catholics one way or another about the movie’ (Paul Maguire 2004). David Schutz, Executive Officer of the Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission, Archdiocese of Melbourne, wrote:

It is a great pity that charges of anti-Semitism were made concerning this film long before it even reached filming stage, let alone released for viewing. Perhaps it is impossible today to create a version of the Passion that is faithful to the Gospels and the Tradition of the Church without this charge being laid […] We need to remember too that the treatment Jesus received was not unique. The Romans crucified tens of thousands of Jews. Only one, however, rose from the dead. (Schutz 2004)

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Because the local Jewish community refused to present a target for attacks, Australian supporters of the film directed their most severe opprobrium at overseas sources. Writing in The Australian, Frank Devine repeatedly took aim not at the Australian Jewish community but at The New York Times, its columnist Frank Rich and the mixed Catholic and Jewish ‘Ad Hoc Group of Scholars’, which had reviewed the draft script (Frank Devine 2003, 2004a, 2004b). Miranda Devine (Frank Devine’s daughter) echoed similar sentiments while admitting that, ‘Maybe, as a Catholic, I am not in a position to judge, but it is difficult to see how the movie is anti-Semitic’ (Miranda Devine 2004a, 2004b).

The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, repeated some of the same themes, writing that, ‘In the USA, anti-religious forces disguised their early hostility by claiming the film was anti-Semitic’ (Pell 2004b). Cardinal Pell became the most articulate high- profile Australian Catholic advocate for The Passion. His statements that the film was not antisemitic and was ‘truly based on the gospels’ were widely quoted, both in Australia and overseas, including on the front page of The Australian (Tedmanson 2004). While acknowledging that the film is ‘strong meat’ and ‘not for the faint hearted’, he described the film as ‘a contemporary masterpiece’, ‘genuinely spiritual’, and ‘a classic’ (Pell 2004a).

There were a range of other comments. Gerard Henderson examined the history of antisemitism and its relation to the Catholic Church, and concluded that while Mel Gibson’s film ‘is not explicitly’ antisemitic, it could ‘inflame the prejudices of real and latent antisemites’ (Henderson 2004). Religion journalist Ian Kirkwood expressed the view that, ‘the global wave of complaint said more about modern Jewish paranoia than The Passion’, and referred to ‘an apparently self-appointed set of Jewish critics’. He was certain that, ‘Gibson makes sure his audience doesn’t miss who the bad guys were [i.e. the Jews]’ (Kirkwood 2004). Andrew Bolt described the film as a ‘gore splattered fantasy’ that distorted the gospels and was not just as antisemitic ‘as many Jews feared, but disturbingly sado-masochistic and even homophobic’ (Bolt 2004). Conservative writer Angela Shanahan took a belligerent attitude towards the antisemitism allegations, writing that Hollywood ‘can’t cope with the basic story’ and that it was not ‘Gibson’s fault that the chief priests and Pharisees are, in fact, the baddies of a story that has been told in churches for 2000 years’ (Shanahan 2004).

A few national conservative politicians engaged in the controversy following a Parliament House theatre screening on 18 February 2004. Tasmanian Labor MP Harry Quick, secretary of the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, denied that the film was anti- Jewish, arguing that, ‘For the Jewish lobby to say it is anti-Semitic is a bit beyond the pale’. (It was not clear whether Quick was referring to the American or the Australian ‘Jewish lobby’, or both.) The then Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, was more circumspect when he said that ‘if the film was anti-Semitic, the same charge could be leveled against the gospels’ (Morris 2004b). Other members of Parliament quoted at the time included then Multicultural Affairs Minister Gary Hardgrave, who commented on the film’s violence but refrained to make other observations (Tory Maguire 2004).

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Just prior to Easter 2004, both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age published unsigned editorials critical of The Passion. The Age piece commenced with the statement ‘Mel Gibson has shown that Jesus sells movie tickets. What else he has shown is disputable’ (The Age 2004). Not surprisingly, one of the most vigorous Australian attacks on Gibson came from broadcaster and avowed atheist Phillip Adams in The Australian. Adams, an iconic Australian journalist, accused the film of ‘dredging up that same old anti-Semitic sentiment’ and contributing to religious conflict. He also criticized Gibson for defending his father’s Holocaust denier views and ‘yelling “fire” in tens of thousands of cinemas. In these explosive times, they will be heard’ (Adams 2004).

The structure of the Australian media

In addition, Australian media companies are structured much differently from those in the United States, without the extensive number of targeted media outlets that have significant numbers of readers or viewers with singular political and/or religious viewpoints. For example, there is no Australian equivalent to Fox News, which takes a consistently and energetically conservative right-wing approach to political and social issues – and took a particularly supportive stance towards The Passion. Rod Tiffen points out that ‘the popularity of Fox is strictly an American phenomenon’ and has ‘no export appeal’ (Tiffen 2011).

In 2010, media analyst Ken Auletta quoted figures from TiVo based on 35,000 viewers: ‘for each Democrat who watches Fox News there are eighteen Republicans, and for every Republican who watches MSNBC there are six Democrats’, and Democrats ‘outnumber Republicans on CNN by a less two and a half to one’ (Auletta 2010: 47; also see Pew Research Center 2008). The proliferation of such politically targeted American news media contrasts with the Australian experience, where most major news media have a broader base and are less identified with one political or cultural viewpoint. There are also many fewer players in Australian media and most of them attempt to cluster to a perceived ‘centre’ political viewpoint (Mutz 2006; Rosenstiel 2006; Easterbrook 2006; Eakin 2004).

Conclusions

While the film of The Passion – with its biblical setting, Italian locations, subtitles, use of ancient languages and international cast and crew – was anything but ‘American’, the religious and political controversies and accompanying media appear to have been primarily an American phenomenon, and thus difficult for Australians to engage in. Interest in the film by the Australian media was very high and the Mel Gibson connection presumably made Australia a natural place for a controversy. However, despite a number of attempts to stimulate controversial discussions, the Australian media ended up primarily reporting about the American controversy rather than creating its own.

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There were a number of important reasons why a substantial Australian religious controversy over The Passion did not take place. The Australian media did not view Mel Gibson as a sufficiently ‘local’ angle despite his strong historical connections with the country. The apparently coordinated decisions made by Australian Jewish community leaders to avoid controversy also minimized opportunities for media attention. No Australian Christian religious commentator used antisemitic language during discussions about The Passion, and – unlike in the United States – not one Australian Jew publicly supported Gibson or his film.

The lower level of religious observance in Australia compared with the United States almost certainly also meant that a religious-based controversy about the film would interest fewer people. The different Australian media structure, with very few niche and single-interest media outlets such as Fox News, also meant that there were limited opportunities to sustain specific debates.

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Suggested Citation

Perlgut, Don (2012), ‘The Passion of the Christ in Australia: A controversy that did not happen’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 6: 1, pp. 57-72, October 2012.

Contributor details Dr Don Perlgut is an executive media and education leader, writer and part time lecturer in Media and Public Relations at the University of New South Wales.

Contact: P.O. Box 155, Roseville, NSW 2069, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

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