Why are we crucifying Mel Gibson?

The actor's drink-fuelled outburst was odious but should not blind us to other, more dangerous, zealots

Mary Riddell
Sunday August 6, 2006
The Observer

Once, I spent an hour with Mel Gibson. He was quite a disappointment. Though he had recently been voted the world's sexiest man, his lecture on the test-tube breeding programme at his cattle ranch was dull enough to make the most impressionable interviewer hope he might soon skip on to less carnal matters.
After we had exhausted cow eugenics, he spoke mostly in monosyllables, while chain-smoking roll-ups in the twitchy way of someone who sees visitors as an obstacle between a man and his tequila bottle. Not so, Gibson said. He had once been 'a little frantic', but his drinking days were over. And, anyway, the stories of him swallowing five pints before breakfast had been exaggerated. 'Drink was never that much of a problem to me,' he said. 'Well, at least, I never got fired.'

That boast looks hollow now. Gibson's anti-Jewish tirade, delivered when he was pulled in for drink driving, could be the end of his career. As he confessed to me, he had some history of gratuitous insults. Pressed for an example, he said, bizarrely, that he had once claimed a co-star, a famous Hollywood actress, had 'really rotten breath'.

While halitostic slurs cannot go down well in Tinseltown, they are not to be compared with bad-mouthing an entire race. Gibson's alleged charge that 'the fucking Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world' has provoked international outrage. Some Jewish groups have forgiven him, provided he fights both alcoholism and his 'disease of prejudice'. Others consider that even eating humble pie on Oprah until the second coming would be insufficient reparation.

My guess is that it's not all over for Gibson. On the contrary, this could be his biggest break. Hollywood loves money and repentance and he can supply bucketloads of both. Obviously, a dignified apology for his ridiculous remarks would have been wise, but his serial grovelling demeans those he insulted and heightens the absurdity of the whole affair.

If ever there was proof of a world gone mad, this was it. As the roster of the dead in the Middle East lengthened, the outburst of a sozzled zealot was elevated to a global catastrophe. The damning of Gibson was tempered only by a few kinder voices arguing, rightly, that the lynch mob of the righteous should pity him for his problems.

It is understandable that some Jewish people feel disinclined to champion Gibson. But the uninsulted who cried for his work to be outlawed or banned should ask themselves whether they would have been cheering if the author of the Sikh play, Behzti, had apologised for writing such a shocker. Would Britain be better if Jerry Springer: The Opera had been driven from the stage by Christian protesters dispensing the pique of God? Clearly not. Yet ABC has canned Gibson's mini-series on the Holocaust, while the controversy over The Passion of the Christ, in which the Jews were cast as villains, is on the boil again. Though Gibson's star will rise once more, there may be no further chapter of the gospel according to St Mel.

That would not be much of a loss, since Gibson inhabits the fruitcake frontier of hardline Catholicism. But that is by the way. Threats against blasphemous art, from Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, to Jerry Springer have always rallied liberals against suppression. For Christians, Sikhs, Muslims and Jews to have their faiths questioned or mocked is far preferable to religious intimidation.

Yet that lesson is still unlearnt. Last week, the Pope accused Madonna, who arrives in Rome today, of 'blasphemy and profanity' for wearing a crown of thorns and aping the Crucifixion in her Confessions tour. The Vatican, which is only just getting over its crossness at The Da Vinci Code, is now wondering, in its charitable way, whether to excommunicate her.

Obviously, the right of artists to offend does not imply the right of legless actors to reel around addressing police officers as 'Sugar Tits' and maligning the Jewish race. But causing offence is an over-rated sin, especially when free speech is so threatened. Remember the fight to water down the insidious incitement to religious hatred bill. Remember, too, how some imams whipped up global riots over the Muhammad cartoons and the rightful unease in Britain at an Austrian court's jailing of the Holocaust-denying historian, David Irvine.

Free expression should have some limits, but so should outrage. The tut-tutting over Gibson, euphemised as political correctness, is actually a subscription to the fundamentalism that forms the global faultline of the 21st century. Some who excoriate Gibson are matching his brand of viciousness with theirs. Something else, though, is at work here.

Britain and America are obsessed with celebrity. When the collapse of Paul McCartney's marriage gets treated as a national tragedy, it is inevitable that Mel Gibson's outburst against Jews provokes more populist horror than the Iranian President's hope for an Israel-free map. The sages of Heat magazine are becoming the 21st-century's oracles of Zeus. Now that Georges Michael and Clooney are foreign policy gurus and Angelina Jolie is saving Africa with a little help from Gordon Brown, it may not be long before Victoria Beckham starts instructing Ukraine's incoming Prime Minister on how to build bridges between Brussels and Moscow.

But the way celebrity has infected politics goes deeper. The war of good versus evil follows a Hollywood script in which the nice guys will, sooner or later, triumph over the bad. Perversely, that blockbuster school of global politics gave Osama bin Laden a power and status he could never have achieved alone. Once a loathsome but obscure jihadist, he was recast by Western leaders as a warped mutation of Mad Max.

Meanwhile, the fuss about Gibson's outburst has eclipsed less famous prophets, such as the Rev John Hagee. A Texan televangelist, Hagee recently told a meeting of Christian Zionists that the attacks on Lebanon are 'a miracle of God'. Several senators attended his symposium, at which he received a personal message of praise from President Bush.

Jews and Christians should be ignoring Gibson and denouncing the crackpot views of Hagee and his millions of disciples. They, not he, are the ushers on the road to Armageddon. Leave Gibson to his Latin masses, his tequila twilight and his demons and hope that he gets well. He is no threat to anyone except those blind enough to imagine they get some moral kudos from reviling a man high on the lethal cocktail of God and liquor.

Gibson is under the influence of an even more fissile brew. He has shown what happens when you mix celebrity and fundamentalism, two of the most potent hallucinogens of the modern world. For that revelation, at least, he should be praised.