I am not arguing here that King of Kings is the best Christ film ever produced in cinema history; but the historical background of its production was uniquely Hollywood. To begin with, the producer of King of Kings is none other than the nephew of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Samuel Bronston (1908-94). Of course, it would be fallacious of me to give you the impression “like uncle like nephew” here; but a biographical piece might be of interest for us. Bronston was educated at Sorbonne at a time when cinema culture germinated and flourished under a heated debate on the definition of socialism between Marxists, Catholic moralists, and among them, various forms of “existential” thinking, the same environment that gave birth to Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? by André Bazin (1918-58), and eventually, the New Wave (in fact, Nick Ray himself was one of the Hollywood auteurs whom the Cahiers group worshipped in the 1950s; for some of the cultural atmosphere in Paris of the time, see, for example, Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford UP, 1978)).
Surrounded by talents who were exiles or second-generation immigrants from Russia, Poland, as well as Americans from Jewish families and political liberals (including the pre-conservative Charlton Heston, 1923-2008), Bronston became one of the independent producers in Hollywood who saw in a Christian text possibilities for multiple, alternative, and most important, contesting readings that could be commercially exploited for spectators who would come to the theatres for their private interpretative spaces. To ensure that such spaces would be abundantly open, Bronston hired Nicholas Ray, an almost openly gay director who made such “bad boy” and “bad girl” classics as The Lusty Man (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel without a Cause (1954), and True Story of Jesse James (1957).
Of course, if the human figures do not appeal to your connoisseurship, Nick Ray, a student of Frank Llyod Wright (1867-1959), offers you high modernist architecture (including a geometrically flawless Temple, art deco palaces, minimalist Roman furniture and bathhouses, abstract paintings, and a Bauhaus Eucharist table--a triangular one, mind you), surrealist landscape, and minimalist costume: different strokes for different folks.
Nevertheless, King of Kings is not just about sex, nor is it a 1961 version of Queer Eye (prod. David Collins and David Metzler, Bravo, 2003-07). Sinner as I am, I assure you that I did not end up masturbating to the film (in a Rita Hayworth manner, “I'm decent”). In fact, on the poetic, theological, and philosophical levels, the film has an inspiring and touching dimension (so, let's be serious).
The opening of the film, under the ominous narration of Orson Welles (1915-85), thematises the conception of Christ according to Nick Ray. In this sequence, we first see the Roman invasion of the Temple in 134 BCE. Antiochus VII opens the Kodesh Hakodashim, and finds within it nothing but the Torah, an act that was not really committed by Antiochus, but by the British Army during its invasion of Palestine (and the Royal Army actually found ”nothing”--not even the Torah--in it). Antiochus then takes the Torah away from the sanctuary and is ready to throw it into the fire. A rabbi walks up to him and begs for the Torah. In a striking close-up, we see Antiochus's hand putting the Torah on top of a fire, and only after a second of hesitation does he hand it to the rabbi. In this sense, the film opens the Messianic narrative by cinematically (dis)placing the law in the ontological void named God, and by taking it back out of the Kodesh Hakodashim, in the hands of a Gentile (ethnē).
What is the implication of this image? In this process of pillage, appropriation, and transaction, the Torah is made profane by the Roman/Briton through colonisation, and at the verge of its wholesale destruction, returned to the rabbi only as a profane object. As any carefully structured Hollywood semantic unit, this gesture of the Roman/Briton's handing back the Torah as a gift in the terms of colonial benevolence is a double bind. On the one hand, this gesture questions the theological legitimacy of the modern Jewish state (in itself a profane entity), by suggesting that its very creation is nothing more than a colonial gift exchanged under the law of the gentiles. On the other hand, the film also suggests that in order for the Messianic narrative to begin, in accordance with Pauline theology, the Torah has to be rendered inoperative precisely by its profanation by the gentiles, and shall be (re)contracted (both in the sense of linguistic reduction and communal binding) into a new law that will redraw the boundary between those who are included (the chosen) and those who are excluded (the new definition of ethnē that trespasses the boundary between Jews and non-Jews; see Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 47-49).
This transaction between the sacred and the profane would become the operative force behind the film's narrative and poetics. The Messianic narrative thus rendered cannot be understood strictly in either Christian or Judaic terms; rather, what Nick Ray attempts to do is to re-articulate this narrative from a post-chronological perspective. Later on in this opening sequence, we see Herod the Great (r. 37 - 4 BCE; Grégoire Aslan, 1908-82) riding his sedan, witnessing Roman soldiers crucifying mountains of Jews. Images of human carcasses rolling down the hills, buried en masse by impersonal Roman soldiers invoke memories of the camps. In this sense, the “Old Law” and the “New Law” had been completely destroyed by the Holocaust (literally, completely burnt, a linguistic sign that echoes the close-up of the Torah transacted on top of the fire). As a result, the Law (I hereby use the capitalised Law to refer to the “sacred” Law, and the small lettered law to refer to the law of the land; both of them, of course, are found within the Torah) has been rendered completely inoperative; or, in other words, chronos has ended, only that we cannot sense it (for it is impossible for us to sense the end of time; see Agamben, 68-69). How can we reconfigure the role the Messiah plays in our post-chronological time?
Our understanding of Ray's Messiah should therefore start with the role of Jesus within the dramatic structure of the film. The most prominent feature of King of Kings, according to the popular understanding of the film, is the insertion of Jesus Barabbas (Harry Guardino, 1925-95) into the narrative. In the film, Barabbas acts as a revolutionary leader, and his bearing the same name with Jesus ben Nazareth is overtly repeated in the dialogue. According to Ray's fictionalisation, Barabbas has a follower, Judas Iscariot (Rip Torn, b. 1931), who, upon hearing ben Nazareth's preaching, decides to abandon arms. Before ben Nazareth's triumphant entrance into Jerusalem, Judas goes to see Barabbas and begs Barabbas to urge his fellow fighters to join the force of peace against the Romans. Instead, Barabbas leads a revolt that day and fails. As a consequence, Judas decides to report the gathering place of the disciples to the Pharisees, in the hope that ben Nazareth, under the threat of physical violence, would eventually show muscular might against the Romans.
Later on, Ray tactfully omits any representation of the “Jews'” demanding Barabbas's release over ben Nazareth (thus avoiding the very passage and possibly, misreading, which have fuelled anti-Semitism). Instead, Ray only has Lucius entering Barabbas's cell, releasing him, and urging him to follow ben Nazareth because “it could, and should, have been you.” Put within the terms of classical Hollywood narrative structure, what Ray arranges here is the mechanism of the double and of substitution (displacement). On the surface, the film conforms to the classical Christian notion: Jesus dies for the sinner. Nevertheless, on a structural level, Jesus ben Nazareth is effectively the displacement of a political failure. In other words, what the film asks is: Can will still, in this post-chronological state, displace our political failure to the notion of the Messiah as a bearer of our guilt? Is the destruction of the Law (instantiated by the Holocaust, and is repeated over and over again in every act of political violence) not the imminent moment for us to re-establish our relationship with the notion of Christ?
What (not so much who) is Christ (the Messiah)? Ray's obsession with the notion of the Law is overt throughout the film. In fact, King of Kings has one of the most memorable trial scenes in cinematic history. In this scene, Jesus is brought to Pilate, mediated by Lucius. In an unusually lengthy manner, Pilate explicates the essence of the Roman law and Jesus's rights under it. Pilate's speech here, from a historical perspective, is incoherent, because technically, Jesus was not a Roman citizen and thus did not enjoy the rights described by Pilate in the film. As depicted by the four canonical gospels, Jesus remains silent (for, according to classical theology, he is not to be judged under the law, but is the Law that judges all laws). Pilate explains to Jesus that he has the right to hire an advocate, and without any invitation, Lucius acts on behalf of Jesus. This narrative move, from a classical theological standpoint, is sacrilegious, for who can speak for the Law? Nevertheless, Lucius is trying to prove, in a technical language that can hardly be understood by any spectator, that Jesus stands outside the Roman law. The rest of the story is of course familiar to us: Jesus is then sent to Herod Antipas (r. 4 BCE - 39 CE; Frank Thring, 1926-94), and here, once again, Jesus stands in silence as he stands outside Herod's law. Here, Ray tries to foreground for his spectators (who might have never pondered over the Messiah's relation to the law) a classical theological issue: the Messiah is one who stands outside the Law/law. Framed within the opening sequence, what the Messiah is supposed to do is to restore the Kodesh Hakodashim to its pure state: a state prior to the Word instantiated by the Torah and after the the Word instantiated by the human flesh of Jesus: pure emptiness.
This conception of pure emptiness is carefully reiterated in the film's representation of the resurrection. In this final sequence of the film, Ray again spends an unusual amount of footage showing the empty tomb. The act of resurrection is therefore interpreted by the film as an act of “vacation.” The death of Jesus (and the disappearance of his physical body) is therefore reconfigured by the film as Jesus's effort to vacate the Law, together with the very conception of the Messiah, from the Kodesh Hakodashim. Following the conventional belief, Ray has Mary Magdalene running up to Jesus without recognising him as her master, and demands from this stranger the remain of Christ. The key of this sequence, contextualised within our reading, is not so much about Magdalene's “misrecognition”; rather, the very conception of Christ, once vacated from its relationship with the law, should no longer be found in body or in spirit. As a result, whom Magdalene sees is indeed a stranger (someone who is completely severed from the Law), too sacred (or out-Lawed) to be touched (as instructed by Jesus to Magdalene). Borrowing from Agamben's reading of Paul, the “Christ” Magdalene sees (not the one who/that reveals him/itself) is the “Christ that remains”: the remnant of Christ's instantiation in flesh (which sums up, and vacates with him the Torah), and the complete vacation of the conception of Christ at (or right after) the end of chronos (Agamben, 72-74).
In the film, this conception of the Christ that remains is prefigured, not unexpectedly, by John the Baptist (Robert Ryan, 1909-73). In the film, when John the Baptist first sees Jesus walking up to him, Ray cuts to a shot-reverse-shot between the extreme close-up of Jesus's eyes and John the Baptist's. The shot-reverse-shot poetics is not unique in King of Kings; but here, the graphical tightness of the shots have effectively isolated the eyes from the narrative, or, in fact, the scopophilic economy of the continuity structure. At first glance, what this shot-reverse-shot exchanges seems to convey the idea of “mutual recognition.” Nonetheless, what Ray employs is something specific to the cinema: the affection image (the pure reduction of the image to another kind of temporal structure within the chronologic flow of the movement image (the temporal continuity of the narrative) through a pure moment of affection (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 87-101). Within this chronological moment, the image vacates from chronos and extends itself into the depth of it not as another chronological flow, but, as Agamben argues, as a temporal relationship: the time it takes between the moment of vocation (kairos) and the end of chronos, i.e. the time remains for time to end (Agamben, 65-69). In the case of the Baptist, this moment sums up and contracts the past (the eskhatos; or the judgement), and his physical body, once being vocated (and vacated), is “remained” as a tool to be used (see Agamben, 23-35).
This concept will now make sense to one of the film's most memorable scenes. Before Salomé takes the head of the Baptist, Jesus visits the Baptist. Ray builds a tilted wall between the barred window (on top of the slope) and the floor to which the Baptist is chained. In order to obtain Jesus's final blessing, the Baptist has to crawl up the tilted wall in order to hold the hand of Christ. What Ray has done here, probably inadvertently, is to spatialise this concept of Messianic time, the time it takes for the Baptist to reach the end of time, the end of his suffering, and the end of the difference between pleasure and suffering, all vacated with the vacation of the Messiah from the Law.
How do we reconcile the profanity of queer desire and the theological messages that find themselves in a product of consumerist pleasure? The very conception of the Messiah as conveyed narratively and poetically by King of Kings is precisely one that vacates from the tension between the sacred and the profane. The Christ that remains is, like the Torah that has been transacted through the hand of the Roman/Briton, is the difference between the pure sacredness of the Kodesh Hakodashim (the pure emptiness) and the profane corporeality of Christ in flesh. The very coexistence and codependence between the desirable body of Christ, ready to be consummed, mass produced, mass copied, and commercially and sexually fetishised (literally, with its aura deprived), is perfectly put together in a Hollywood film in relation to its vacation, disappearance, and disengagement from the Law. In other words, cinema is indeed the perfect image of the Messiah in relationship with its final vacation from the image. The problem with Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), in this sense, is his wholesale focus on the corporeal body, a complete profanation of the Messiah without any room for its possible relationship with the sacred, collapsing time into a chronological drag.
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