Whatever Happened to Hippy Jesus?

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/whatever-happened-to-hippy-jesus/284138/

Serious, Biblically correct films like Son of God make it easy to forget the Jesus Christ Superstar-style whimsical messiah who once reigned at box offices.

EDWARD J. BLUM AND PAUL HARVEY
MAR 4 2014, 7:30 AM ET



Jesus Christ is serious business. The remarkable ratings of The Bible miniseries on the History Channel led to the release of the new film Son of God. Producers played up the fact that it had been 10 years since Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was released and grossed at the box office more than $600 million internationally. In its opening weekend, the Son of God made $26 million—not bad, given that its content had previously aired on television.

Both films are serious for their revenue generating, their strategic niche marketing to the religiously devout, and their tone, style, and approach. The Passion was two hours of brutality. Some reviewers screamed that it was a horror flick, not a holy one. Gibson was intent on accuracy (or at least how his particular Catholicism viewed the sacred story). The characters did not speak English and he had the color of actor Jim Caviezel’s eyes digitally altered from blue to brown and gave him a prosthetic nose to make him look “authentically” Jewish. The Son of God is serious in its own way. A “political thriller” and an epic “love story,” the film features overtly evangelical themes of the virgin birth, miraculous healings, vicious crucifixion, and the resurrection.

Jesus films have not always been so serious, and they have not always been directed toward particular segments of the Christian community. In the 1970s, Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar used whimsy, even silliness, to tell the old, old story, and both sought mass appeal. Neither film grabbed the market share Passion of the Christ did, but they were popular for their day. Why did so many Americans of the 1970s gravitate to inventive, artistic, and playful accounts of Jesus, while today Christ films are brutal and interested giving in a literal-seeming interpretation of the Bible?

Jesus Christ has played a prominent role in the American cinema since its modern genesis. In the beginning of the 20th century, directors D. W. Griffith and Cecil DeMille not only made the son of God a star on the silver screen, but also consciously set him in conversation with the nation’s most visible problems. After Griffith’s Ku Klux Klan-glorifying film Birth of a Nation (1915) had Jesus appear to bless white supremacy, Griffith tried to prove his love for liberty with Intolerance (1916). In it, nasty Jews crucify the peaceful Jesus. Understandably, this had American Jews crying racism, much as blacks had done with the first film.

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