{"id":546,"date":"2004-02-25T11:00:54","date_gmt":"2004-02-25T19:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2004\/02\/blood_money\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T22:50:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T02:50:49","slug":"blood_money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2004\/02\/blood_money.html","title":{"rendered":"BLOOD MONEY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is it safe to say that anyone who buys a ticket to “The Passion of the Christ” is paying Mel Gibson blood money? Whether the term is defined<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/a> as 1) “compensation paid to the family of a murdered person,” or as 2) “reward for information about a murder,” or as 3) money “paid to a hired murderer,” I’d say it applies in all three degrees. But that’s only a secondhand guess. To know firsthand, I would have to pay to see the flick. That I won’t do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever genre\u00a0“Passion” is — whether it’s a slasher film, a horror movie, or a spinoff of a Homer Simpson fantasy<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/a>, or maybe a snuff trip more accurately titled “The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre”<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/a>\u00a0— I leave to the critics who’ve seen it<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/a> to define, including whether it’s purposely anti-Semitic. Something I do know, without seeing Gibson’s flick, is that it’s one more signal of a perverse cultural moment. Add it to our Maximum (“I’m a War President”)\u00a0Leader’s call for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/a> and Der (“No Two Ways About It”) Gropenfuhrer’s order to halt<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/a> gay marriages in San Francisco, and we’ve got a three-fer. \u2014 jh<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Is it safe to say that anyone who buys a ticket to “The Passion of the Christ” is paying Mel Gibson blood money? Whether the term is defined as 1) “compensation paid to the family of a murdered person,” or as 2) “reward for information about a murder,” or as 3) money “paid to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-8O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73831,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions\/73831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}