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Mad Mel
Follow-up to my New York Times Magazine feature on Mel Gibson, in which I attempt to describe the deeply surreal experience of having Mad Max trash talk me live on Fox TV. Was it brilliant marketing, or pathological paranoia? Published in Salon.com.
Gibson has accused a lot of people—including me—of plotting against his controversial new “The Passion of the Christ.” Is it brilliant marketing, or serious paranoia?
Mel Gibson is on the TV, squinting straight into the camera, talking about ... me.
No, wait, this is even weirder: He’s talking to me.
And he’s pissed.
“You can say what you like about me,” he says. “I’m a public person, I suppose, although I don’t remember signing the paper saying I have no rights to privacy. You can pick on me. But like, if you start picking on my family while I’m out of town, get ready.” He lets that last line hang, leaning forward and raising his eyebrows suggestively. Suddenly he’s Martin Riggs, the wild-eyed cop on the edge from “Lethal Weapon,” laying down the law to a wiseass perp (in a scene that usually comes just before the one where he lets loose a left hook that sends thug teeth flying like so many loose Chiclets. Um, honey, can you check the deadbolt?).
Gibson is appearing on Fox News in the first in a series of charged and bizarre interviews about his film “The Passion of the Christ”; the most recent was Monday’s hour-long exchange with Diane Sawyer on ABC. In addition to defending his movie against fears it will promote anti-Semitism, Gibson has used these appearances to complain about media coverage he says amounts to “character assassination.” While he kept the off-putting conspiracy talk to a minimum Monday night—he’s got a movie to promote, after all—he was never twitchier or more ominous than in his appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” last year.
“When you touch this subject, it does have enemies,” he said. “There are people sent.” Asked if he actually believed a reporter was out to discredit his faith, Mel slipped back into the role of tough cop. “I think he’s been sent,” he said. “That’s the way it is. You’ve got to deal with these things. I’m a big boy and I can take care of myself.”
There it was: a shout-out from Mad Max. At the time of that appearance, I had spent the past two months working on a story for the New York Times Magazine about the film, about a church Gibson is building near his home in Malibu, Calif., and about the Catholic traditionalism inspiring both projects. Requests for an interview were first ignored, then dismissed, and then answered, though not exactly in the form I expected—I idly imagined it might involve strolls across the Italian countryside and late-night chats about faith and history and this whole crazy circus of celebrity. Instead, Gibson elected to go on “The O’Reilly Factor” to complain about a “media attack” on his pro-Christian message.
In addition to representing what surely ranks as the most surreal experience in my professional life—it just doesn’t get much weirder than sitting at home in your pajamas, watching a movie star trash-talk you on Fox TV—Gibson’s appearance on “O’Reilly” transformed what was at the time widely viewed as a curious vanity project into a high-profile battle in the ongoing culture war.
Watching that P.R. offensive unfold at the time, I was simply dumbfounded—I’m a lone freelance journalist who had approached Gibson’s publicist with questions that were bound to come up when he decided to make a movie that not only represents a huge artistic and financial risk but also an open effort to evangelize. Why not simply address questions about faith, family and history? Why send a $400-an-hour litigator nicknamed “Mad Dog” after me, the New York Times and a homeowner’s group that reviewed plans for his church? Why employ the same ignore-and-then-attack strategy with scholars who wanted a say in how the Passion was portrayed? Why limit screening audiences to political conservatives, evangelical Christians and Kathie Lee Gifford? Why offer this response to a critical piece on the film by New York Times columnist Frank Rich: “I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick ... I want to kill his dog.”
Really, Mel: Why go ballistic?
Over the course of the past year, I’ve flip-flopped between two explanations. The first is that the aggressive approach is all part of a preplanned, Machiavellian promotional campaign designed to antagonize Hollywood and appeal directly to church groups and the NASCAR crowd—in effect, to treat “The Passion of the Christ” as a political candidate aimed squarely at the red states. Which makes sense, given that “The Passion of the Christ” is a self-financed project with no big stars filmed entirely in the languages of ancient Palestine. It was rejected by his home studio Fox and snickered at by industry peers. He himself called it a potential “career killer.” And yet it opens on Feb. 25 in 2,000 theaters; all signs point to a monster opening weekend and a long life in the industry paradise of DVD aftermarket. Church leaders are buying huge stacks of advance tickets, some for themselves, some just to make a point.
The violence that some find so objectionable—and at a certain point in the film, I did start to wonder if Gibson’s amorous depiction of torture might be inspired by something a little baser than spirituality—is sure to draw moviegoers who don’t get fired up by religion but love a gory crowd pleaser like “The Patriot” or “Braveheart.” Far from being a “Battlefield Earth”-style bomb, Gibson’s movie is poised to easily recoup its creator’s $25 million investment. Gibson’s production company Icon is already talking about starting an entire division devoted to religious films.
Mark Silk, a professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Connecticut, recently completed a study of the media’s coverage of the film and the religious issues involved. His final report, titled “A Case Study in Media Manipulation?” details how Gibson fanned the flames of controversy while complaining about the heat. “Gibson appears to have been doing what Hollywood producers always try to do: get as much positive buzz as possible about his film before the public,” he says. “What’s different here, of course, is that the people he has gone to for such buzz have not been the usual collection of flacks and blurb-meisters but some of the most ideologically engaged media folks in the country.” Silk concludes, “To say this has been a press agent’s dream is to understate the case on a truly biblical scale.”
Then again, Gibson’s motivations might be much more, as they say, faith-based. As the premiere looms closer it seems increasingly clear that Gibson genuinely believes he has been targeted by shadowy forces aligned to subvert his message of salvation. The strongest evidence of this notion is the film itself, a rough cut of which I saw last week. “The Passion of the Christ” is indeed as bloody, grueling and ultimately difficult as Gibson promised it would be. (I clocked a climactic flagellation scene at just over 10 minutes.) Leaving aside the portrayal of Jewish clerics as vengeful villains and of Pontius Pilate as a sympathetic stooge who was essentially bullied into crucifying Christ—that matter is better debated by Bible scholars—the film is obviously the work of a man who believes he possesses the truth and that the truth has enemies.
I got a brief but intense tutorial in that perspective from Gibson’s father, Hutton, the 84-year-old author and activist who has criticized the Vatican for more than 30 years, writing books titled “Is the Pope Catholic” and a newsletter, “The War Is Now!” which rails against a pope he calls “Garrulous Karolus, the Koran Kisser.” Last November, Hutton Gibson invited me for a weekend at his home near Houston to share his revisionist takes on the pope’s declining health (“I think he’s playacting”), the scandals facing the Catholic Church (“The Vatican bred it all”), and historical accounts that 6 million Jews died in the holocaust (“I don’t believe that for a minute”).
In comments since that interview was published, Gibson has sought to downplay his father’s extremism while suggesting that the holocaust denials were somehow squeezed out of an innocent bystander as part of a sinister plot. “As soon as we started filming, that beacon of journalistic integrity the New York Times dispatched someone to go down there and take advantage of my father,” he told Sawyer. “Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father.”
I’ll admit that I was deeply anguished during the two days I spent listening to Hutton Gibson. But it wasn’t because I felt badly about “driving a wedge” between father and son, or about talking to a man who is, after all, as entitled to his opinion as the pope, a Supreme Court justice or anyone else active in public life at an advanced age. The source of my angst in Texas had nothing to do with Hutton Gibson’s age and everything to do with his worldview; as he laid out his alternate history of the 20th century, I had that gut-churning sensation familiar to any journalist witnessing something horrible—the shock of seeing it, laced by the excitement of being on hand to record it. And while I never assumed that Hutton spoke for his son, the film Mel produced and his comments about it certainly suggest father and son share a core of moral certainty that can alternately come off as righteous, uncompromising or pathological.
So which is it: Is Gibson a master marketer or a conspiracy-minded ideologue? After a year of reporting on and following this remarkable story, I still can’t decide. Gibson himself seems happy playing both roles. He said it best at the press conference at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios two years ago. Twirling a cigarette mischievously and looking for all the world like the wild-eyed cop who always gets his way, he told the crowd, “They think I’m crazy, and maybe I am. But maybe I’m a genius.”
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(UPDATE: Following is from a blog entry on Rejuvenile.com in Septemeber 2006, following Gibson’s drunk driving outburst in Malibu)
It’s been a profoundly weird week, what with the coast-to-coast heat wave, the escalating crisis in the Mid-East—and the crackup of a certain Malibu movie star. As much as I’d like to keep my head down focused on all things rejuvenile, I’m compelled to take a quick break from such crucial matters as kickball tournaments and adult pajama parties to add another two cents to the frenzy surrounding Mel Gibson’s D.U.I. freakout.
I wrote a feature for the New York Times Magazine three years ago about Mel, his movie The Passion of the Christ and a church he was building in the hills above Malibu. As I was working on the story, Mel was still filming The Passion in Italy and not much was known about his church or the particular strain of Catholic traditionalism he’d inherited from his 84-year old dad, Hutton. I attended a service at Mel’s church, flew to Houston for a weekend with his dad and interviewed dozens of fellow traditionalists, all in an attempt to understand why an A-list movie star would stake his career on what turned out to be a peculiarly orthodox proto-Catholic splatter film.
The ensuing brouhaha mostly left me mystified. When all was said and done, Mel made his millions and became a hero to conservative critics (See: Dennis Prager, Peter Boyer, Michael Medved), who defended him against charges of anti-Semitism and begged tolerance for a filmmaker who had, according to the official line, had a mid-life reckoning that left him happily sober and tolerant for people of all faiths. His public appearances, however, told a different story: appearing on O’Reilly and later with Diane Sawyer, Mel appeared just as unstrung and unstable as the wild-eyed cop he played in the Lethal Weapon movies.
So which was it? Was Mel a man of God whose canny manipulation of the media ensured his message of salvation reached the widest possible audience? Or was he his father’s son, a bitter and conspiracy-addicted loony tune?
Three years later, we have our answer. Deputy James Mee’s police report on Mel’s drunken tirade sounds like a page ripped from one of Hutton’s anti-Catholic screeds, a hateful blend of grandiosity (“Fucking Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”) and street-thug aggression (“You motherfucker, I’m going to fuck you”).
I’m hesitant to play along with the mass schadenfreude now fueling the unfolding psychodrama, but a few points seem to have been lost in the current frenzy. The most important of which is this: Mel and his father are not Catholics. While his handlers have expertly positioned Mel as a hero for red state churchgoers, traditionalism is an outright rejection of any deviation from the strict Catholic liturgy. To many traditionalists, the Catholic Church is nothing less than a hive of idolatry and the fount of a worldwide conspiracy in which the Jews play a prominent and nefarious part.
These sentiments are clearly echoed in Mel’s encounter with the cops. As hard as his defenders try to write the episode off as a drunken rant, Mel’s rantings weren’t plucked from thin air. They’re regurgitations of words Hutton Gibson uttered lo those many moons ago in Houston: “The deliberately trashed our faith,” he told me. “What they did to the mass is pure evil. This couldn’t have happened by accident. It was a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.”
According to Gibson, the conspiracy has played a part in everything from the Civil War to the Holocaust to the 9-11 attacks. Here are a few excerpts from my interview transcripts:
Q: What about the holocaust?
Hutton Gibson: They had to rebuild the whole thing. Who knows if it was there in the first place? They say the Germans blew it up. They blew up the plumbing and left the building there. It’s physically impossible. Go and ask an undertaker who operates a crematorium or something like that what’s it take to get rid of a dead body. It takes one liter of petrol and twenty minutes. Now six million?
(Hutton’s wife) Joy: There weren’t even that many Jews in all of Europe.
Hutton Gibson: Anyway there were more after the war than there were before. They based it on one figure in the Almanac — the figure of 1939 I think showed six million two hundred thousand Jews in Poland. And after the war it showed two hundred thousand of them — therefpre there were six million gone they must be dead. But they were gone everywhere.
Yeah there were prison camps but half the people who died in prison camps died from bombings from the allies.
There was no systematic extermination, no. The idea was — what Hitler considered his final solution — was he made a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs and take up space.
Q: So, was Hitler secretly working with the Jews?
A: He was cooperating with the bigwigs to get the small fry to get out of Germany and go to Israel.
Q: The big wigs were?
A: The financiers.
Q: And what about the World Trade Center hijackers?
A: Who said there were guys on the planes? Anyone can put out a passenger list.
Q: So was it all forged?
A: Probably. It was probably done by remote control. They were crashed by remote control with the targets selected. Because what were these guys—they went to some little school somewhere in the south and they learned how to fly these little planes. The idea that they could have done that is just too damn much of a coincidence.
Crazy stuff, absolutely, easy to write off as the fever dream of a fringe-dwelling crackpot. But the real question was, and is, how much of dad’s hateful theorizing rubbed off on his most famous son? I never assumed that Hutton spoke for Mel, but it’s worth noting that Mel never repudiated his father’s remarks and danced around the matter in presumably more sober public appearances.
In any case, Mel is now in rehab and his publicist Alan Nierob (ironically, the son of holocaust survivors and a congregant at the Temple where my kids go to school) released a statement this week begging forgiveness from the Jewish community. I sincerely hope this latest attempt to clarify and correct his religious views is sincere. Somehow, though, I think we learned more about what really matters to Mel from Mee than Nierob.
