But there’s an air of painful realism to Bowie’s scene late in the film, when the arrested Christ is brought before Pilate. As Governor over Judea, Pilate represented the Roman Empire to the people of the occupied land and considered petty disagreements between religious factions as beneath him. In Scorsese’s telling, when this Pilate even meets Christ, it is inside of the Roman governor’s stables. Pilate begins the scene with his back turned to the camera and to Jesus, paying more attention to the steed brought for his inspection.
“So you are the King of the Jews,” he asks with disinterest, only turning around when Jesus responds, “King’s your word.” Even then there’s more than a little condescension when he asks Jesus to perform a miracle for him. When none is forthcoming, Pilate wearily decides that he’s “just another Jewish politician.” Pilate tries to provoke Jesus, pointing at him and calling him dangerous, but even that can’t elicit a desired reaction. When Jesus retells a prophecy from the book of Daniel, interpreting it as a story about how God will use him to topple Rome, Pilate cuts him off, clearly bored with another story about the occupied people destroying the occupier.
For most of the two-and-a-half-minute scene, Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus emphasize Pilate’s distance from Jesus. The scene begins in a wide shot, showing the physical space between them. As the camera cuts to closer shots, Jesus and Pilate rarely appear in the same frame. At the end of the exchange, the camera stays on Pilate as he strides away, having fully measured Jesus up and deemed him as just one more rabble-rouser that the empire must clean up.
A Tale of Two Kingdoms
Bowie uses that distance from the camera, as well as his precise interlocution, to heighten Pilate’s unearthly qualities. That decision flies in the face of common sense. After all, he’s in a scene with Jesus, proclaimed as God in the form of human. Even in their conversation, Jesus explains that he represents a kingdom that, in his words, “isn’t here.” Shouldn’t Dafoe be playing the alien one here?
Because Scorsese and Schrader are creating a grounded, human Christ, however, they want to achieve the exact opposite. Like Kazantzakis’ novel, The Last Temptation takes inspiration from the Gospel of John, which emphasizes Jesus as inaugurating a kingdom unlike any on Earth. So the human qualities and focalization through Jesus makes injection of an Earthly kingdom feel strange. In other words, to represent Rome, the ultimate unreal kingdom in John’s Gospel, Bowie must feel as alien as possible.
Bowie expresses that perspective with his nonchalant attitude toward Jesus, all hand waves and arched eyebrows to look down on his charge. But the real testament to Bowie’s skill comes when the scene changes and Pilate sits next to Jesus.
