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August 3rd, 2006

Please Know From My Heart That I Am Not An Anti-Semite. I Am Not A Bigot.

Sure thing Mel…

"For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the ’60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules. Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated… The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don’t believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends.It’s the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it."

Mel Gibson, in an interview with El Pais in January 1992, discussing why his brand of Traditionalist Catholicism does not subscribe to the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 rulings on various subjects including who was responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.

"Why are they calling her a Nazi? …Because modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church. And it’s a lie. And it’s revisionism. And they’ve been working on that one for a while."

On criticism of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a nineteenth-century nun whose writings influenced his portrayal of Jesus’ death. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003

"That’s bullshit…I don’t want to be dissing my father. He never denied the Holocaust; he just said there were fewer than six million. I don’t want them having me dissing my father. I mean, he’s my father."

On allegations that his father is a Holocaust denier. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003

"I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

In The New York Post, January 30, 2004

"They take it up the ass. This [pointing to his butt] is only for taking a shit."

When asked what he thinks of homosexuals in an interview with El Pais in January 1992

"With this look, who’s going to think I’m gay. I don’t lend myself to that type of confusion. Do I sound like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?"

When asked during the El Pais interview if he is afraid of being mistaken for a homosexual, because he is an actor.

"I have no idea how anti-Semitism entered into it. But I do feel that gay people will burn in hell. Their way of life goes completely against God’s plan for procreation."

When asked by Philip Wuntch during filming of The Man Without A Face about the El Pais interview

"Fucking Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

During his arrest for driving under the influence, July 2006

"What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?"

To a female sergeant during his arrest for DUI

"In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images."

Leon Wieseltier on The Passion of the Christ

It’s worth noting that The Man Without A Face, was produced after Gibson’s homophobic outburst in El Pais, and was widely taken at the time (mostly by heterosexuals sympathetic to Gibson) as a kind of apology to the gay community. I’ve read the book the film was based on, I still have it on my shelves. The story is about a young boy growing up in an emotionally abusive family, who turns to an older neighbor for support and guidance. As their relationship develops, the boy finds himself experiencing a nascent sexual awakening and desire for the older man, which the older man gently but firmly turns aside. He is not interested in having a sexual relationship with the boy, he just wants to help him through a difficult time in his life, despite the suspicions of the local townsfolk. The final confrontation in the book comes when the boy discovers that the man really was a homosexual, and he lashes out at him in fear and confusion over his own sexual orientation.

The story is about growing up, trust, and what it is to genuniely love someone. It’s about accepting differences in others, accepting yourself and not running away from your life. The punchline is that the man was gay, and so was the boy, yet the man did not take advantage of him. There was real love and friendship there between them, that was taken away and destroyed by fear and prejudice. The prejudice of the townspeople, and the boy’s own fears and doubts about himself. Gibson, in making the film, turned the man into a heterosexual who had only been mistaken for a homosexual once in his life, when he was falsely accused of having an affair with a former student, effectively nullifying the book’s point that to be homosexual isn’t necessarily to be a child molester, and thereby weakening the impact of its message about love. The townsfolk were right about the man…and yet they were wrong. The boy lashed out at the man from fear of something within himself. This is what prejudice does to us…it tears us apart from within, tears neighbor from neighbor, friend from friend. But Gibson could not bring himself to make that film. So he turned the story into a tale about the unjust persecution of a heterosexual. Yet to this day people point to this film, Gibson’s directorial debut, as some kind of proof that Gibson really isn’t a homophobic bigot after all.

So when Gibson offered to make a film about the Holocaust after the outrage over Passion of the Christ…I laughed. Some blogger wag whose name I cannot recall just now, joked that in his script for his Holocaust film, Gibson changes the story to make it a bunch of Jews who kill six million Nazis. But no…he would have made a very nice film about the crimes against the Jews by the Third Reich, and few would have noticed that the film’s basic premise was, as Gibson’s father insists, that the killing of Jews by the Nazis wasn’t anything special or systematic, because a lot of people died during world war II.

At the root of prejudice is a terrible blindness to the humanity of the hated other. The hated other is not really human, so the things that happen to them are not remarkable. It is only injustice when bad things happen to real people. Not when it happens to Jews. Not when it happens to women who challenge the authority of men. Not when it happens to homosexuals. That is the message of every film Mel Gibson has ever made. It is what he believes. It is his bedrock. You saw it again last week in Malibu, without the silver screen makeup.

[Edited a tad more…]

Bill S Says:
August 3rd, 2006 at 3:18 pm

Another change from the book, ironically, is the circumstance under which his face was disfigured-in the book, it was a drunk-driving accident.
“Braveheart” eschewed historical accurcy in order to be more homophobic. Not only is Edward II a cowardly faggot, but there’s a scene in which Edward I actually kills one of his son’s lovers. (Edward I never killed or even harmed any of them.) There’s also the fictitious romance between Wallace and Isabella, Edward II’s future wife. She’s attracted to Wallace because he’s a “real man”. In truth the two never met-she was only 9, and living in France, at the time of the events that unfold in the movie. (Also, Wallace wasn’t only hanged, his penis was severed. I think I can guess why Mel left THAT out. :) )
I found “The Road Warrior” homophobic too. It’s bad enough that the movie equate’s Wez’s lover with Max’s dog, but, in terms of what we see, he actually of less value-he doesn’t have a name or a line of dialogue, and barely registers with the audience before he’s killed, without provocation, by the feral boy*. Moreover, the audience isn’t supposed to empathize with Wez-he’s the villian, after all. Another subliminal detail-the family-like community that Max sides with doesn’t have a single gay couple. So even in a post-apocolyptic world, the “good guys” have a “No Fags Allowed” policy. Gays are the Others.
*the first, and last child in a movie I actually wanted to see get killed onscreen. Does this make me a bad person?

Bruce Says:
August 3rd, 2006 at 4:53 pm

The gratuitous homophobia in The Road Warrior was what made me start paying attention to Gibson. My straight friends at the time told me I was being overly sensitive, but it seemed to me, as you say, that the killing of Golden Youth (really…that’s his character’s name according to the cast credits), was supposed to be applauded by the audience, and Wez’s grief over his death held as evidence of how sick and perverted he was, and it royally pissed me off. I simply refused to watch a Mel Gibson flick after that, until The Man Without A Face came along and I had to see for myself what Gibson had done to it.

It was, so I’m told, pretty much the same story with Prince Edward in Braveheart. His homosexuality was there to show people what a weak and contemptible person he was. I’m told audiences have laughed, cheered and applauded when Edward’s lover is thrown out the window to his death by Longshanks. Pure Gibson.

Bill S Says:
August 3rd, 2006 at 5:46 pm

I don’t credit Gibson for the homophobia of “The Road Warrior”, (after all, he didn’t direct it or write the script), I only mention because it’s such an early example of gay-baiting found in his movies (most people cite “Bird On a Wire”-the only movie in which I didn’t enjoy watching Goldie Hawn.)
I will say that I think both “Gallipoli” and “The Year of Living Dangerously” are quality films. That he appeared in them may be only a coincidence. As is the fact that, in the first one, the highlight is him swimming nude with a bunch of other guys, and in the latter, he’s upstaged by a woman in drag.

Bruce Says:
August 3rd, 2006 at 8:56 pm

Yeah…Gibson neither directed nor wrote Road Warrior, and had he given anyone the slightest sign that he wasn’t comfortable with depecting gay people like that I wouldn’t have held it against him. Actors after all, particularly at the start of their careers, can find themselves in all kinds of dubious places. But it left me with a really bad feeling about the kinds of movies I could expect to see him in. And then the El Pais interview came out.

Gibson didn’t write the script for Braveheart either. It was written by Randall Wallace, a divinity school student who said of it, “When Braveheart came out, I felt as though it was the purest sermon I could ever have preached, and people around the world have had a chance to see it.” I hear they had a good time watching Edward’s lover being thrown to his death. That never happened to the real Edward’s lover. So what prompted Wallace to put that scene there, other then to preach to his audience that brutal and cruel though Longshanks may be, at least he knows what to do with a pervert. Wallace is saying there, make no mistake, that Edward I is for all his villainy, more man then Edward II.

You keep seeing these themes in Gibson’s films and you wonder how much of it all really is just the randomness of his career path, and how much is an affinity for material that demeans certain groups of people. Certainly of his later work, where he as more control over the content, there is little doubt.

Bruce Says:
August 3rd, 2006 at 10:03 pm

I sat down with the book again to refresh my memory about its themes. Some of it had merged with some of what was in the film, and the film departs from the book in so many trite little stupid ways. So I reworked the paragraph about the books themes a tad. Homophobia was not so much a dominant theme in the book, and when it came forward was more about the boy’s own fears and self doubts then the townsfolk’s. Their prejudice towards McLeod was more that he was an oddball loner with a disfigured face.

Tukla in Iowa Says:
August 4th, 2006 at 7:19 pm

I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms.

Ah, the good ol’ “Some of my best friends are…” line. That always convinces me that someone isn’t a hateful bigot! ::/sarcasm::

Bill S Says:
August 5th, 2006 at 5:24 pm

I e-mailed this to the folks at World O’Crap, but, for you, I’m repeating it.
A Musical Tribute To Mel Gibson
[with apologies to Cat Stevens]
Oh, I’m getting plastered in the Moonshadows
Moonshadows, Moonshadows
Driving like a batard from the Moonshadows
Moonshadows, Moonshadows

And if I get pulled over too
Well I’ll just ask, “Are you a Jew?”
And if I don’t come off too well
Oh wee-hee-hee-hee-hee, Sugar Tits,
I’ll hide in rehab for awhile.
:)

Bill S Says:
August 5th, 2006 at 5:27 pm

And yes, I know that was in poor taste, but I couldn’t resist writing it when I learned the name of the bar he’d hung out in.

Bruce Says:
August 5th, 2006 at 5:43 pm

Oh that’s hilarious!

A side note… I did a double-take when I saw the name of the bar. Back when I was dating Keith once upon a time, we used to go to this gay club called Moonjammers.

Tukla: Yeah…that "some of my best friends are" crap is so goddamned tiresome. They’re not your friends Mel, if you keep crapping on them like that.

williehewes Says:
August 7th, 2006 at 6:57 am

It’s amazing what a bad choice in friends some people have…

(That’s assuming it’s not complete bullcrap, which undoubtably it is.)

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