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."
"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."
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…]
