Hooked to the Silver Screen I 9 I The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ is the best movie in which David Bowie ever appeared. Bowie plays the small but crucial role of Pontus Pilate, and, in his brief time on screen, lays out one of the movie’s major subplots.

A question looms throughout the movie of whether Jesus is actually divine, if he actually hears the voices of demons and angels, if he actually performs miracles. Within the context of the movie, there is evidence in both directions. Even the resurrection of Lazarus is ambiguous— Jesus appears to have raised Lazarus from the dead, but I’m reminded of the atheist’s observation that God must hate amputees. Faith healers seem only able to cure ailments that don’t involve deformity, and in the case of Lazarus, for all we know he might have simply come out of a coma. Shortly after his scene with Jesus, he’s murdered once and for all.

In Bowie’s scene, Pilate confronts Jesus and asks him to perform a miracle by way of demonstration. Jesus demurs and says it doesn’t work that way. Pilate is dismissive, but goes on to explain that the reason Jesus is dangerous to the Roman social order is because, “Its one thing to want to change how people live; but you want to change how they think and how they feel…It doesn’t matter how you want to change things, we don’t want them changed.”

In this one, brief exchange, Pilate explains both why the message of Jesus doesn’t really need the miracles in order to be revolutionary, as well as why Christianity endured far longer than some of the competing religions of the time.

This is an important point that the movie makes, but it isn’t the movie’s main point. The main point has to do with free will and the consequences of one’s decisions. Jesus is tempted by visions of a normal life, while Judas is reluctant to play his part by betraying Jesus. Both characters ultimately accept their roles and do what they don’t want to do, but in so doing lay the groundwork for the kind of change that concerned Pilate.

Did Jesus and Judas have a choice in the matter? On the surface, that’s what the movie implied. Part of the vision Jesus has of a happy, normal life is that, as a result, the world breaks down into violent chaos. His vision is not necessarily one of a supernatural cataclysm, but could easily be societal breakdown— which is ironically more or less what Pilate was worried about. The implication is that Christianity provided for a new, better social order regardless of whether it ushered in the actual Kingdom of Heaven.

But how did Jesus and Judas know that they had binary choices? Were they destined to do what they did? If so, then they did not have free will. Or, does the movie imply a highbrow version of Marvel’s multiverse concept, with Jesus getting a look at an alternate reality in which he took a different path?

Again to underscore the point that the supernatural elements of the story didn’t really matter, the movie concludes with Jesus making a decision, while on the cross, and not with Jesus returning from the dead. As far as the movie tells us, Jesus did nothing more than make sense out of his own predicament— if his vision of a normal life was merely a delusion, he didn’t really have the option of getting down off that cross.

Also, by not showing the resurrection, which most Christians consider to be absolutely fundamental to the religion, the movie’s point comes closer to a tenant of Stoicism, that everyone has a role and the best thing to do is embrace that role and do it was well as possible. Pilate might not have been happy with Jesus, but the Emperor Marcus Aurelius might very well have been.

The intersection between these threads and that of the Pilate scene is that they all have to do with the social order here on Earth. None of this discounts the spiritual significance Jesus or his story, but a consistent theme of the movie is that the supernatural, spiritual side of the story doesn’t really matter.

Good use of Bowie?
I remember getting excited when I first saw advertisements for the movie back in 1988 because Bowie’s name was one of five to appear on the promotional poster, like he was one of the stars. Instead, he turns out to be on screen for less than five minutes. The video clip attached to this post is his entire scene, which is the only scene in which he appears. So the use of Bowie’s name to draw people to the movie was misleading.

That said, he seems perfectly cast. Bowie’s English accent, contrasting to Willem Dafoe’s (Jesus) American accent does the trick that George Lucas figured out by using such contrasting accents to suggest empire versus rebellion. More than a random actor, Bowie brought to the brief role all sorts of implications — his previous music touched on many of the movie’s themes, while his speech to Jesus could easily be Bowie talking about himself. On a very subtle level, the casting of Bowie helped drill the point home. So, yes, this was a good use of David Bowie.

Rating: Even if I held Bowie’s brief screen time against this movie, it overall is too good to get anything other than the highest rating. So, this one gets four out of four Bowies.

🧑‍🎤👩🏿‍🎤👨‍🎤👩🏻‍🎤

Tally

👩🏻‍🎤🧑‍🎤👨‍🎤👩🏿‍🎤 Four Bowie movies reviewed thus far
Labyrinth (1986)
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

👩🏻‍🎤🧑‍🎤👨‍🎤 Three Bowie movies
The Prestige (2006)
Basquait (1996)
The Snowman (1982)
Zoolander (2001)

👩🏻‍🎤🧑‍🎤 Two Bowie movies
Into the Night (1985)

👩🏻‍🎤 One Bowie movies
Just a Gigolo (1978)
Yellowbeard (1983)

Hooked to the Silver Screen is my series of commentaries about movies in which Bowie appeared. The name of the series comes from a line in the song, “Life on Mars.”