How great literature can change your life

Film Friday

Mel Gibson is in the news again with recorded rants against his girlfriend that are so vicious that even his ardent supporters are backing away. (You can learn about, and even listen to, the rants here but I advise caution.)    I’ve never been a Gibson fan and this website ran an article critical of his Passion this past Easter.  But as one who teaches a History of American Film course, I’ve had to look seriously at his films.  What one discovers is that he is a very angry man who is obsessed with the theme of male humiliation.

I heard a paper on Gibson several years ago (at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference) arguing that his life is shaped by the same drama as his films.  He self-destructively puts himself in positions where the entire world will condemn him and then works to redeem himself.   The conference paper examined an incident where, after being picked up by the police for driving drunk, he launched into an anti-Semitic tirade.  Years ago South Park did a remarkably prescient satire of Gibson and The Passion where it exposes his anti-Semitism and his sado-mascochism.  You can watch it here. 

Christopher Hitchens argues that Gibson appears to have been warped by the fascistic Catholicism of his father.  The elder Gibson may well have been religiously abusive—by which I mean, enforcing in his son an unbalanced vision of himself as sinful and unworthy.  (Psychologist Alice Miller, examining Hitler and other Nazis, has written persuasively on the impact that such an upbringing can have.)  So maybe that’s where the anger is coming from.  At any rate, while Gibson appears to have a Catholic vision of human redemption growing out of extreme suffering, all his emphasis is on the suffering.

Think about the Mad Max and Lethal Weapons movies, where Gibson (like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Willis) plays the 1980’s hard-bodied hero. In “Race, Class, and Gender in the Male Rampage Film, ” film historian Fred Pfeil argues that male working class audiences identified with how these heroes are punched and gouged, which spoke to their own vulnerability in the 1980’s economy that was leaving them behind.  The broken male body was a metaphor for their own shattered psyches, and they could regain a modicum of dignity through imagining “payback” (the title of another Gibson film).  The final triumph of the hero’s hard body was assurance that they themselves would survive.

Gibson continued this theme of the suffering but triumphant male body when he became a director.  In Braveheart, Wallace is drawn and quartered but dies shouting “Freedom.” The Passion, with its hard-bodied Christ, surpassed all other Christ movies in its graphic violence, but we are reassured that he will rise again. Apocalypto revels in human sacrifice but the hero escapes and triumphs.

It is one thing to indulge in male rage in the movie theatre.  Maybe films provide us with a critical safety valve: we pay our $10, blow off steam, and then return to our lives.  But irresponsible politicians and pundits have tried to use that rage to their own advantage, and Frank Rich of the New York Times asks us to remember how Gibson used to be a “powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism.”   For a while he was a used as a club by the Christian right.  The latest incident shows that we are playing with fire when we throw around intemperate words and give ourselves over to violent fantasies.  I’ve been arguing for a while on this website for less venting and more rational discourse as we confront the challenges of the 21^st century.  Mel Gibson could be Exhibit A.