Franklin's splitting Naugahide couch.
Suddenly the fate of the martyr, or of young, dead showbiz icons venerated as if they were martyrs (James Dean, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe), starts to look pretty good. For a former superstar, fading quietly away must be an even more agonizing way to go. Is it possible Dr. King would have sunk to the annoying has-been status of his surviving colleague Ralph Abernathy, had King not perished at the height of his fame? This is what the Superstar Jesus begins to realize in Gethsemane when he demands to know from God, whose advice he will grudgingly follow as if God were his agent, "Why, why, why must I die? Would I be more noticed than I ever was before? Would the things I've said and done matter any more?" You bet they would, and it is perhaps because Jesus himself begins to realize this that he is willing to see the whole thing through. Better a short life with an immortality of fame than a long life followed by historical oblivion for its sequel. At the last supper, after all, his principle fear is long-term historical insignificance: "I must be mad thinking I'll be remembered; I must be out of my head! Look at your blank faces! My name will mean nothing ten minutes after I'm dead!" But the cross remains his best hope of remaining at the "top of the poll." His strategy is "to conquer death, you only have to die."
So anachronism is a means of forcing the story into the present, and forcing the audience into the narrative world in which the opera takes place. We are practically on stage. Strangely, the idea is not unlike the Roman Catholic idea of transubstantiation, the miracle of the mass, whereby the past event of Jesus is drawn forward into the present, so that the communicant is brought to stand at the foot of Calvary.
I am not trying to attribute some kind of religious motive to Tim Rice, much less to suggest that Jesus Christ Superstar is a sacramental ritual. No, the point is just the reverse: the similarity between the rock opera and a sacramental ritual points up the fact, long known to anthropologists and liturgical theologians alike, that the effectiveness of rituals is in their character of theater, drama. This is not the place for it, but I am prepared to argue that the only "faith" necessary for religion to work for you is what Coleridge called the "poetic faith," the "temporary willing suspense of disbelief" we experience whenever we find ourselves drawn into a movie or a play. If it gets especially suspenseful, romantically tragic, or frightening, we have to remind ourselves that "it's only a play." As long as you become drawn into the drama of religion during the weekly service, it does the trick; you hardly have to bother trying to believe in the supernatural for the rest of the week!
Don't Crowd Me--Heal Yourselves!
Anachronism is not only a device for defamiliarizing the gospel story so it can speak to us anew. It also helps create the element of ironic distance which permeates Superstar. Irony usually suggests satire and parody, if not even outright mockery. I do not mean to suggest that Superstar subjects Jesus to mockery. To the contrary, the scene in which Jesus is made sport of by Herod Antipas strikes many listeners either as sadly poignant or, on the other hand, as doubly ironic since the joke seems ultimately to be on Herod himself who is too dull-witted to see what counts as real Messianic glory. It has little to do with walking across swimming pools, much to do with the cross.
Ironic distance is something else. Irony is used by the author in this case as a technique for pulling the reader back from a complete and comfortable absorption in the story. You begin to see a gap opening between what the characters think is going on and what the narrator thinks is going on. He is inviting you to share his privileged, extra-textual standpoint. Usually authors try to get you to agree to that "temporary willing suspense of disbelief" Coleridge talked about. Usually this works well in a movie of a book. It has worked very well indeed when we find ourselves crying at the sad events in a fictional drama. Or when we are as scared as the victims in a horror movie. In fact, our anxiety may grow so great that we try to get hold of ourselves and say, "Hey, calm down! It's only a movie for Pete's sake!" Ironic distance is the same sort of reminder. The author is telling the reader: "Wait just a minute! What's wrong with this picture?" To take an extreme example, I see the cartoon The Simpsons and the sitcom Married with Children as being based entirely on the device of ironic distancing. Unlike the old sitcoms like Father Knows Best, where you were to identify with the characters so as to share vicariously in their trials and triumphs, the presupposition behind every minute of Married with Children is "What a bunch of jerks!" One does not sympathize with Al Bundy's disasters for a split second, since they were the predictable results of his own shifty schemes. The Bundy family are one and all bad role models, so the show does not urge us to identify with them; on the contrary, it forbids us to empathize with them.
It is worth noting that narrative irony, ironic distancing is not alien even to the four canonical gospels. Robert C. Tannehill has demonstrated how Mark's Gospel first depicts the twelve disciples of Jesus in an enviable and admirable role, confidants and colleagues of Jesus. They are privy to Jesus' plans and privileged to hear more of his teaching than anyone else. The reader is led to think, "If only I could be like them!" But gradually, as Mark's story unfolds, a rift opens up between the reader and the disciples. Mark writes with irony, winking to the reader who soon comes to realize that he understands Jesus better than the disciples did! It becomes apparent that the disciples never seem to get the point of any of the parables; they ignore Jesus' predictions of his death and resurrection; it never sinks in that he can do miracles to get them out of a jam, even though they have seen him do enough of them. The author is in the know; so is the reader. It is the thick-headed disciples who are lost in confusion. "Mark shapes a story which encourages the reader to associate himself with the disciples... However, the relation between the disciples and the Christian reader does not remain simple as the portrait of the disciples becomes clearly negative, the tendency to identify is countered by the necessity of negative evaluation. A tension develops between these two attitudes, with the reader caught in the middle... [And] as the inadequacies of the disciples' response to Jesus become increasingly clear, the reader must distance himself from the disciples and begin to seek another way." 13 What is Mark's point? It is hard to be sure, but we may venture a guess or two. It may be that Mark sides with the Apostle Paul and wanted to make Paul's rivals, the Twelve, look inept, unworthy of the faith many Christians had placed in them and their teaching. Or it might be that he is warning the reader: see where the Twelve strayed off the path? Is it can happen to them, it can happen to you. Watch your step! Tannehill opts for the latter.
So much for Mark. Why does Tim Rice employ ironic distance throughout his gospel, Jesus Christ Superstar? A moment ago I tried to explain how modernizing gospel language helps make the story of Jesus available to us freshly in the present. But at the same time, as paradoxical as it may seem, the anachronisms, as well as the slang language, keep us aware that we are in our own time looking back to the time of Jesus. Unlike the old TV show, Rice is not telling us, "All is as it was then, only YOU ARE THERE!" No, we are here. If Superstar sometimes sounds almost parodic ("You'll escape in the final reel"), it is trying to remind us that we are outsiders, no matter how much we might wish to be insiders. Otherwise the temptation will be too great to do what people do when they read the four gospels: to identify so closely with the text, imagining that we are part of it, that we begin subtly to rewrite the text even as we read it, filtering it through the grid of our beliefs and expectations. It is from such a too-comfortable acquaintance with the gospels that we need to be disengaged if they are to have any power to speak anew to us, to surprise and amaze us, as Jesus is shown amazing and affronting his disciples.
Thus it is Judas Iscariot, not Jesus, nor even Peter, whose viewpoint we share. "Basically, the idea of our whole opera was to have Christ seen through the eyes of Judas."14 Like Judas, we are interested in Jesus, admiring of him, yet eternally puzzled. No serious reader of the gospels can easily satisfy his curiosity. There is no obvious solution to the mystery hymned by the chorus, "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Who are you? What have you sacrificed?" Legions of theologians as well as simple believers have pondered these same questions throughout the Christian centuries. There was a whole series of debates among theologians and bishops in the fourth and fifth centuries over these questions. Was Jesus simply a great man? Was he an incarnation of God? Was his human aspect merely a sham? Was he a man who "channeled" the voice of God? Was he something like an angel come to
