ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates medieval Christian iconography and Mel Gibson’s 2004 fi lm The Passion of the Christ as distinct but related ways of experiencing the “monstrous epic.” This term describes how the epic properties of the Passion narrative, especially ideas of visual spectacle, immersion, the grotesque, and the carnal, transform Christ’s body into a monstrous image that is simultaneously divine and abject. Inspired by Timothy K. Beal’s suggestion that “we can learn something about a religious tradition by getting to know its monsters, and that we can learn something about monsters by looking into their religious backgrounds,” my goal is to consider how The Passion of the Christ not only drew heavily upon iconographic and discursive representations of the Crucifi xion derived from medieval image-making but also transformed the fi gure of Christ into a metaphorically overdetermined “monster” for twenty-fi rst-century audiences who could barely look at the screen for the second half of the fi lm.1 Following a discussion of the striking parallels between the devotional practices of believers from the Middle Ages and contemporary viewers of Gibson’s fi lm, I will examine the “monstrous dimensions” of The Passion of the Christ, drawing upon the
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work of medievalist theorists John Block Friedman, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Timothy K. Beal.
