Rhetoric Race and Religion
The Bible miniseries concluded Easter Sunday on The History Channel, with a fairly conventional playing out of the Passion story. From Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) toJesus (a Campus Crusade for Christ production from 1979) to Mel Gibson’s 2004 gorefestThe Passion, generations of Americans have seen this in film form before. And, while the twitter-storm that grew up (and quickly passed over) about how Satan looked like Obama was a tempest in a teapot, it is entirely true to the genre that Satan must appear as darker-skinned, as Scott Poole (a scholar of how Satan appears in American history) explains here. (To me, he most resembled Emperor Palpatine from The Empire Strikes Back; either that, or the Grim Reaper from The Seventh Seal).
Following the stories from the Gospels, in a brief coda for the rest of the New Testament, the final hour races through the Pentecost traced in the Book of Acts, Paul getting struck down on the road to Damascus, and John making it to the Isle of Patmos, ready to receive Revelation. Alas, that weirdest and most apocalyptically dramatic of books is passed over entirely, despite the vaunted CGI budget the producers insisted on from THC. Doubtless that was a smart move on the part of the producers, since not even a basically literalist reading of the Bible (but one full of inaccuracies of the sort that have driven commentators and Bible scholars nuts) can be sustained through its most psychedelically trippy book.
With all the attention the series has gotten and silly brouhahas it has generated, ultimately the show’s concluding hours and the spinoffs planned by the producers have settled into a formula that fits the genre of films and television shows from the Bible. I’ll just enumerate briefly here three of those.
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