"He was Pretty Good in There Today": Reviving the Macho Christ in Ernest Hemingway's "Today is Friday" and Mel Gibson's the Passion of the Christ‪.‬

Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, like Hemingway's 1926 one-act play/short story "Today is Friday," is about the ways in which its creator believed that he had directly benefited from Christ's suffering. Both Hemingway and Gibson were raised by religiously conservative, emotionally repressive fathers, and both declared themselves Catholics. Both men experienced suicidal depression as mature young men, and each found in Christ's torment on the cross both a trope for his own battles with depression and an inspiration to survive his own emotional suffering. In this essay, I first place both men within the sociocultural, religious tradition known as "muscular Christianity" and trace the ways in which they were both influenced by that tradition. I document their emotional volatility and their bouts with profound depression, examining the ways in which each credits faith with enabling him to survive his own dark night of the soul. It is inconceivable that the suffering of Christ on the cross ... would mean anything to anyone unless pain was intrinsically shareable.