The trailer has provoked anger over the casting of Israeli actors to play Mary and other central roles, while ‘erasing the characters’ Palestinian roots’, as the London-based Middle East Eye put it. The sentiment was further explained by a social media user quoted on the website as saying: ‘There is something profoundly offensive about having an Israeli actor play Mary, the mother of Jesus, while Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, killing some of the oldest Christian communities in the world and erasing their heritage sites.’
Earlier, Mary director DJ Caruso told Entertainment Weekly, ‘It was important to us that Mary, along with most of our primary cast, be selected from Israel to ensure authenticity.’ Caruso’s comment is designed to confuse cinephiles who have not studied West Asia, and therefore, understandably, do not know the difference between the ancient Israel mentioned in the Bible versus the modern-day country known as the State of Israel, or the historic region of Palestine versus the present-day State of Palestine.
If you’re getting lost in this sea of information, set it aside for a moment, and remember the long-running global discussion about the representation of gender, race, and ethnicity in cinema. Viewed solely within this context, Caruso’s claim of ‘authenticity’ is at odds with his principal cast’s appearance and accents, both of which contradict the historical reality that Jesus was from West Asia of antiquity, and most likely a brown-skinned man, contrary to depictions in Western paintings.
On the face of it, this casting choice for a West Asian historical drama is a step backward from the progress achieved in the past century in film industries worldwide, taking us past the days when men played women’s parts in Indian cinema, blackface on White actors was deemed kosher in Hollywood, and a Sri Lankan actor sported a vague South Indian accent to play a turbaned Punjabi Sikh in the 1970s British sitcom, Mind Your Language.
I say ‘on the face of it’, because although Hollywood has evolved in this regard, it has consistently portrayed Jesus as a White man, played most famously by Willem Dafoe in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ, and Jim Caviezel in 2004’s Mel Gibson-directed The Passion of the Christ. ‘Cultural appropriation‘ may be a buzzword in Western liberal circles, but this appropriation of Jesus and the erasure of his brownness rarely comes up in popular public discourse. That said, like all social media outrage, in this case too, it’s necessary to separate the grain from the chaff and the logic from the noise and abuse. Trolls objecting to the Jewish religious identity of the actor playing Mary must be condemned. It’s just as important though to call out news media that are focusing solely on this offensive aspect of the argument. Perhaps a good way to explain this obfuscation is to hark back to last year’s racist backlash in the US when an African-American actor was cast as the mermaid Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Among other arguments was a claim that since the film was based on a Danish fairytale, Ariel must be White. I kid you not! Racists demanded accuracy in the casting of a mermaid! Now, racists are fuming that the casting in Mary is being criticised.
There should be no confusion here since Mary was not a mermaid. She was not a mythical creature with fish scales and tail. She was a human being who, according to the Bible, was the mother of Jesus, a preacher who historians agree existed, in a land roughly falling within today’s Israel, which lies within the historic region of Palestine. There’s nothing innocent in Hollywood’s continued deletion of Palestine in this saga.