The Devil has been in movies virtually from the medium's inception. But in "The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson takes the character into a bold new direction, depicting Satan by turns as a wraithlike androgynous figure, a snake and -- perhaps most creepily -- as a series of increasingly terrifying children. (Mr. Gibson, Rosemary called: She wants her baby back.)
The movie's most memorable characterization of the Devil -- played by the otherworldly-looking Rosalinda Celentano in a turn that's both alluring and repellent -- meets the challenge of erasing, at least momentarily, a century's worth of iconic representations of Satan in cinema, from Emil Jannings's portrayal of Mephisto in F.W. Murnau's "Faust" to Al Pacino feasting on the scenery in the 1997 movie "Devil's Advocate." (In 1988 Martin Scorsese made the controversial choice of portraying Satan as a young girl who offered Jesus a glimpse of the life he might have had if he had not obeyed God's will in "The Last Temptation of Christ.")
Although Satan didn't figure this literally in the Gospels that inspired "The Passion of the Christ," the movie's co-screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, said that from the beginning he and Gibson agreed the presence of evil should be made palpable throughout the story. "If you remember, after the temptation in the desert, before Jesus's public life, there had been a rather elaborate temptation and none of it had succeeded," Fitzgerald said during a recent telephone conversation from his home in Los Angeles. "Whereupon, upon leaving him, Lucifer said he was going to come back at a more opportune time. . . . And this seemed to be the most opportune time, when in fact man is in a state of terror, fear, prayer and is sweating blood."
They chose Celentano, he added, because they wanted to "get away from the notion of the sort of faithless, hooded dark presence, which has become almost an icon in cinema. You always represent it in the way of the horsemen in 'The Lord of the Rings.' Well, evil is far more seductive than that. The Devil would choose a more seductive representation for himself." (The startling image of a maggot disappearing up Celentano's nose, he said, was a reference to "The Lord of the Flies.")
At work through all the depictions of evil in "The Passion of the Christ," and part of the explanation of the movie's extraordinary success, Fitzgerald says, are the subconscious forces viewers bring to the film. "There is an archetype at work in the brutality, which we all on some subconscious level understand," he said. "It's not the same as the representation of brutality or violence, true violence, we're used to seeing in films, but a brutality which . . . is an elevation of the sacred in terms of self-sacrifice. It goes very deep and it's a powerful, powerful way of reaching into the human heart, reaching areas that are not often addressed in the secular world."
Rosalinda Celentano in "The Passion of the Christ": A Lucifer who's both alluring and repellent.
