On Adaptions of the Bible (oddly, sprung from Book of Boba Fett)

This is material from an FB post shaing a video on things from first episode of Book of Boba Fett, and an aside I put in a comment instead of main post turned into a more full piece on a certain type of project on Biblical material. 

 The video is here:  

 

The main post is this: 

Kind of Star Wars nerdy, but also a lot of cool exposition of literary qualities and resonances with a larger world of art and culture, from a larger sci-fi tradition larger to ancient cultures; I do think Favreau and Filoni are going for a larger world of resonances in creating an extended social order and geo-political world in the wake of the empire (itself a respected area of historical study, social orders of various scales in the wake of empires), in addition to the western genre 

 

The Comment delving int biblical material is this 

I like the socio-political world-building project in a fictional realm like this. I should note though that I am not a fan of the same in relation to the Bible, including the psychologization side of the social. I think that if you want to look at what the social texture of the world of the historical life of Christ was like on the personal and interpersonal level like that, the more productive place to look in the modern world would be Arabic peoples in the Middle East, particular Islamic ... just as Arabic as a language has been much more conservative over the centuries in its development and is thus much better to consult for productive comparisons in studying biblical Hebrew than is Aramaic (the theory is that the three languages descended from a parent language that was a proto-Hebrew); I think that in the socio-psychological aspect that is analogous to that linguistic thing, people are very shaped by the land and developments of how groups and cultures have adapted to existence in it and that, were you to talk to Jesus of Nazareth and the group who regularly traveled with him, you would find the same disjuncts as a suburban American that you would find if you were in rural areas in the Middle East: things you find humorous they would find enigmatic and odd and vice versa, not just knowing inside jokes or not, but the very way of experiencing humor ... I think that what you get when you get Western 20th/21st-century Christians hypothesizing the socio-psychological character of the experiential world of biblical events is usually simply a social and personal quality that looks a lot like that of the world form which the modern maker comes (including political biases and the like). 

 

I think the better way to think of biblical characters is much more like an icon than a photograph. I think there is a point to acknowledging that there would have been personal and interpersonal psychological and social dimensions there, that the "flesh" of "and the Word became flesh" would have involved that, but I don't think we have the access to it that a supposed photographic reproduction would claim and I don't think that having such is the point of the Bible. I am fine with a Christ who speaks in the voice of a priest, be it the reedy voice of a tall stringy priest or a short froggy slow priest (being Catholic, where only a priest or deacon reads the Gospel from the pulpit and even in the long narratives on the feasts when a lay person reads the narrative and the congregation says the crowd's part, only the priest reads the words of Christ), I don't need a version of Christ and his disciples written by Shakespeare (even if I thought WS was all he was cracked up to be [I am more of a Tolkien school of thought on that, who differentiated between what he calls narrative art and elements like drama and indicated in a letter once that he thought it was futile to look for good plot etc. in WS, and I think more than anything lamented the assumption that drama is the core of literary art to the starvation of narrative quality, a move in Western literature very impacted by the prevalence of WS, in spite of whatever his strengths might be in other aspects of poetry etc.; he's undoubtedly a huge effect in the Western canon that you must study, in part because of his deployment as cultural justification of a cultural identity that was the center of a secular empire, but just as the fact that one MUST study the seminal figure of Descartes if one is to get the modern shift in Western thought does not mean Descartes was correct or a GOOD influence, the fact that one MUST study WS to get anything that happened after him in the Western literary canon does not mean his influence is all good, unless of course one is a straight-up Anglo-triumphalist, which I'm no; I think on those levels, WS is a mixed bag], and even if I thought contemporary projects of that type with biblical material lived up to WS)

 

I must say that I say all that in caution; I have encountered people who do gravitate to those projects who I think to be infinitely better people than I, infinitely more genuine and charitable.

I should also say that I don't put Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ in that category. Whatever arguments may be made about that project, including what impact personal faults on Gibson's part have on it, it's not this particular thing I am talking about here with the application of socio-psychological modeling to the biblical material in the name of realism. Gibson's scenes are much more like tableaus (fitting his stated goal of a Caravaggio tone, thinking his movement in painting terms like icons) and his dialogue is very sparse and mostly restricted to what is in the Gospel accounts. And what is added is obvious and open about being highly interpretive symbolism (nobody thinks that there might have been a bald, androgynous Satan walking around holding a bald man-baby that looked like Pilate, not in the way contemporary Christian audiences think that Christ might really have joked around with the disciples in this way that actually looks more like a 21st-century work retreat), even the rare added "funning around" scene has a highly symbolic thrust: Christ and Mary laugh, with him teasing and her rolling her eyes when she tries to figure out what he means by sitting at the higher table he's working on, and that table really defines what the scene is doing in the film: the low table is Middle Eastern and the higher table is European, fore-shadowing the world-stage movement in which Christianity would be involved over the next thousand years; whatever one thinks about that shift itself and Western European interaction with the East (Near, Middle, and Far), the elements of that scene are more about that world-stage movement than about a psychological personal realism for its own sake (not that Gibson's film is devoid of dramatic elements [as neither is Tolkien's work], but they function differently in the more icon/painting-style film ... It crushes me when I watch Mary reach out in kindness, some confusion but always kindness, and Peter cringes away from the touch out of shame, and it's absolutely haunting the way she sweeps with her hands through the air, lower and lower to the floor, and then puts her face to the ground as if she can feel what the scene reveals in then going down through the floor to see Christ hanging by the wrists from a ceiling directly below her, looking up as if he can sense her through the stones and dirt) ... Other added elements also have historical resonance, like "Why is this night different from all other nights?" from the Passover seder ... if you have read Elie Wiesel's Night and can get how he works with imagery from the Jewish religious tradition (nutritionaless snow flakes and a scrap tossed by a German woman into a rail-car full of emaciated humans for amusement, turning manna imagery into false hope and inhumane baiting), you know that that line can have some very dark resonances from 20th-century European history; Even the Ecco Homo line, not interpolated, can bear world-historical symbolic significance: I was talking an intensive course in Latin around that time and the instructor was saying he didn't like that they had it pronounce with the soft C (the "ch" when two of them) rather than the hard C that would have been historically accurate for that time, but he conceded at leas as far as, "ok, I can see you point," when I said that, for a film like this, that line embodies more than the material detail of the one historical moment, much more of the development of understanding of the Incarnation over millenia, even maybe resonances with somebody like Nietzsche using it as a title for a work with a very different take on it.

Here is a video of the Mary and Jesus through the Floor tableau scene