Rumor has it that Mel Gibson wants to use his profits from "The Passion of the Christ" to make a movie about the Maccabees, whose story - he says - is like a western.
The press is quick to point out that this is the story that led to the celebration of Chanukkah. What they don't mention (of course) is that the rabbis have always wanted to de-emphasize the victory of the Maccabees in favor of the miracle of the lamps that burned for eight straight days and nights. The dreidel says "A great miracle happened there/here" not "We kicked their Syrian Hellenic butts," after all. Jews have never been particularly anxious to celebrate military victories, when you think about it.
A great military victory in Gibson's imagination will contain lots of gory, over-the-top violence, heroes suffering great pain but being sustained by great resolve, and most importantly, PAYBACK.
Mel Gibson seems to think that any historical event can be reduced to breathtaking cinematography, captivating music, and a certain type of acting.
I'm all for cinematic dramatization as a medium for telling stories, but if you don't understand the limitations of the media, you run the risk of flattening the event, not animating it.
Real-life events don't have music, the lighting is usually lousy, and the principals have never had lessons in diction. There is chaos, incoherent utterings, and little sense of climax. People are exhausted rather than exhilarated. The heroes usually have lousy teeth.
Directors who believe that they want to create an "authentic" account of the historical events, it can be fair to say, are deluded. We may laugh at Nazi officers speaking English with each other, except with a German accent, but this has the advantage of reminding us that it didn't happen that way. When Gibson has his main characters speak broken Aramaic and (presumably) equally bad Latin because this makes it all more authentic, he is committing a sort of artistic fraud.
The central element in the story of the Maccabees isn't that they fought and (for a short while) prevailed. It's rather the conflict between rebellion and appeasement. The various occupiers of Judea, after all, didn't mind religious pluralism but they had a very low tolerance for sedition. Jews were supposed to accept that their religious sensibilities would be offended if it suited the rulers. If they resisted, the Jews would be cruelly punished. The Maccabees put their fellow Jews at tremendous risk by staging the revolt.
The miracle of the lights is a juxtaposition of the spectacular military victory, the quiet and subtle stealing all the attention from the military victory.
This has parallels in the present day:
Arguably, the most memorable remnant from the end of the Six-Day war is "Jerusalem of Gold," a love song to a city. Were it so that Mel Gibson would make a movie that made alive that kind of love.
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