Netflix isn’t quite feeling the Christmas spirit.
It’s Christmas season, which means it’s popular to politicize the birth of Christ and use the faith as material for dense attempts at satire. If you browse Netflix, you can find that in The First Temptation of Christ.
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Released on the streaming platform this month, the short film depicts Jesus showing up for a surprise birthday party with a special guest. In the film, Jesus is gay, Joseph is miffed that God impregnated his wife, Mary is adulterous, and God quips that he “wiped out the dinosaurs with a fart.” The film is posed as satire, but it will be far from funny for anyone who’s Christian.
As entertainment website Decider notes: “Known for its social and religious satire, [Brazilian sketch-comedy collective] Porta dos Fundos is wildly popular for making hamburger out of sacred cows, notching more than 16 million followers on YouTube. Their previous special, The Last Hangover, reimagined the Last Supper as a night of drunken apostle mania followed by a bleary morning after; First Temptation stages Jesus Christ’s 30th birthday party on the day he returns from finding himself for 40 days in the desert.”
The Last Hangover is also streaming on Netflix. But it was the release of this second short film that prompted many Netflix users to cancel their subscriptions, and 1.9 million people around the world have signed a Change.org petition asking Netflix to pull the film from its site. One signer wrote, “You wouldn’t do this to the Islamic religion. Christianity needs to stop being the free game of every media outlet.”
Even the son of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tweeted, “We are in favor of free speech, but is it worth attacking the faith of 86% of the population?”
Jesus being gay is the least of the film’s problems, but Fabio Porchat, co-founder of Porta dos Fundos, says the backlash is just thanks to homophobia. “For some Catholics here in Brazil, it’s OK if Jesus is a bad guy, uses drugs: That’s no problem,” he said. “The problem is he’s gay. No, he can’t be gay. And that’s interesting because Jesus is everything. God is black and white and gay and straight. God is everything. It’s more homophobic to be insulted by a gay Jesus than to make Jesus special.”
Porchat also responded to the criticism that Porta dos Fundos doesn’t satirize other faiths by saying, “We’ve satirized terrorists, for example.” Because observant Christians and radical Islamic terrorists definitely belong in the same category, apparently.
There are plenty of films that make fun of various faiths on Netflix and elsewhere, and of course, they’re protected by the First Amendment. But the “What if Jesus actually slept with people?” narrative a la The Da Vinci Code, which came out in 2003, isn’t exactly a new and notable form of fan fiction. It’s pretty boring, and it’s designed only to stoke outrage.
In case Netflix didn’t notice, it now has competition. If it doesn’t want to alienate needlessly a large portion of its customers, Netflix might want to reconsider streaming this kind of content in the future.
