The more a lead character is brutally beaten and the more he suffers, the nobler and purer of heart and closer to God he is, and the more deserving of worship. This was basically the idea or strategy behind Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ, which obviously paid off with conservative hinterland Christians. This idea has now been more or less appropriated by Angelina Jolie, which surprised me. All along I thought Angie was just another fair-minded humanist liberal but there’s obviously a strain of conservative sentiment within. How it got there or why is a mystery, but it’s somewhere in her psyche.
