Violent affect, aesthetic intimacy and salvific pain in The Passion of the Christ

It should not be surprising that an ultra-violent image of the final hours of Jesus' life emerged in a post September 11, 2001 global media context. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) was willed into production by a conservative and perhaps reactive desire for cultural renewal at a time when the certainty of Western cultural dominance had been violently challenged. By focusing exclusively on the capture, torture, humiliation, and death of Jesus, the film presented an intriguing approach to the 'classically over determined' (Groebner, 2004: 88), yet foundational Christian sign of Christ on the cross by reviving the Passion images and plays of late medieval Europe. In the process, the film courted controversy for its depiction of Jewish culpability, but was nonetheless highly successful at the box office around the world and in the US in particular. [1] This success could not have been possible without the acceptance by Christian groups of the film's graphic violence.