The understandable yet unusual figure of speech serves to "defamiliarize" the subject described (As Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Tomaschevsky, two of the greatest Russian Formalist critics, say), so we see it as new. "After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it-hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception... And art exists that we may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."12
Tim Rice does the same thing. Only he uses the familiar and the prosaic as metaphoric tropes (figurative turns of phrase) for things we have sealed away behind stain glass. If poetry usually brings out the unnoticed sacred beauty in the ordinary, Rice has set himself the task of having to defamiliarize the extraordinary. For we take even the extraordinary for granted. Because the gospel events are extraordinary, superhuman, we have elevated them to the status of religious myth and dogma. And, ironically, these we take for granted! Once one has heard them embedded in dull sermons for years, clubbed to death by a decade of pedantic Sunday School teachers, the shocking mandates of the Sermon on the Mount come to seem as familiar as the words of a TV commercial. Thus it comes to be that tales of a crucified god rising from the dead seem as dull as reruns of Green Acres. And so, if the tale is to strike us again, it must be defamiliarized. And the only way to defamiliarize it is to make it sound mundane, profane. Once the cross, the ancient Roman device of execution by slow torture, has become a piece of gold jewelry, we may have to depict Jesus dying in the electric chair. It was a trope to make the splintery cross a golden throne. Now, to communicate afresh the original point, we may have to trope that throne into one of today's engines of brutality.
It is one thing to remind oneself that the Shakespearian eloquence of the Bible's Jesus must have been put forth in common speech for the original audience. But it is quite another thing to have it rendered directly in today's slang. While the new wording of Superstar is faithful in spirit to the original, the fact that Jesus and his disciples are made to speak our own vernacular, even our own slang, gives it all an arresting quality. Linguist Eugene Nida might call what Superstar does "dynamic equivalence" translation. That is what Bible versions like the Living Bible and the Good News Bible do. The same basic idea, but in familiar modern speech. But there are additional elements in Rice's version of the gospel drama.
If You'd Have Come Today
One of these is an intentional use of anachronism. Anachronism is placing something in a story of the past that didn't exist at the time. For instance, the rumor is that if you slow down the tape when you are watching Ben-Hur, you can spot one of the ancient Roman chariot drivers wearing a wrist watch. Or in The Shadow, one museum guard suggests to another that they order a pizza. But they couldn't have ordered one. The Shadow's adventures occur in the 1930's, but Americans only encountered pizza in Naples after World War Two. In Jesus Christ Superstar the crowd of gawkers dogging Jesus' footsteps while he is led, bound, to Caiaphas' palace suddenly become a crowd of pestering reporters. And one of them fires off the mock assurance, "You'll escape in the final reel!" Obviously this presupposes the audience knows about B-movies with last minute rescues. But movie theaters were scarce in first century Palestine, to say the least. A colossal anachronism in the movie version of Superstar occurs when Judas, writhing in self-reproach at conspiring with Jesus' enemies, is buzzed by warplanes. He has unleashed against Jesus the dogs of war, and the modern weaponry drives this home with a force that a Roman chariot with sword-bearing legionaries could never do.
What is the point of Rice's constant use of anachronism? We see it most clearly in the scene near the end where the glorified Judas descends from heaven confessing his continued bafflement. Though assumed into heaven in acknowledgement of his innocent complicity in God's dirty scheme, Judas is no more enlightened as to the point of it all than he was before his suicide. "Every time I think of you, I can't understand... If you'd have come today, you've reached a whole nation. Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication." Judas speaks from the still-baffled perspective of the twentieth century. That is the "today" of which he speaks. Judas, both here and elsewhere, serves as the reader's representative, the sympathetic but skeptical outsider. In our day, many would hasten to admit Jesus was among the most admirable figures in history. But they feel they can no longer share the religious worship of Jesus. They feel confused both at why Jesus should be given religious veneration ("He's not a king; he's just the same as anyone I know."), and at their own sense that there is something important about him that they are missing ("I don't know how to love him." "Neither you, Simon, nor the fifty thousand...nor Judas… understand").
The most obvious, as well as the most important, piece of poetic anachronism in Superstar is the very title of the work. The term "superstar" comes from the modern entertainment industry, especially movies and rock music. Tim Rice has explained that his intent was to, as he has Judas say, "strip away the myth from the man." He wanted to portray Jesus as a real human being, not a god in human guise. Theoretically, this should offend no one, no matter how theologically orthodox, since the official Christian claim has always been that, no matter how fully Jesus was God, he was also fully a human being. Now, on the human level, what would it have meant for Jesus to be such an object of popular adulation? And how would he and others have perceived the sudden abandonment of Jesus by the fickle crowds? Surely the best equivalent is the figure of a superstar, a celebrity who exercises potent charisma on the crowds, and yet is dependent on their adulation as the source of the charisma he wields over them. When the cheering stops, when the ratings drop, the helium leaks swiftly from the balloon, and it soars no more.
One must at the same time pity and admire the celebrity actors and singers whose heyday was the 40's through the 60's, the icons of the old musicals and night clubs. Many of them realize they are lampooned as grotesque caricatures by the baby boomers who had to sit through their appearances on The Hollywood Palace show because their parents controlled the TV set. So they make the best of it and appear on David Letterman and MTV as living parodies of themselves. When Robert Goulet shows up on Letterman singing the theme song for the "Supermarket Finds" segment, and glad to get the work--well, it's kind of pathetic. Like Bela Lugosi being directed by Ed Wood, or anybody sitting on Joe 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!