“Who is your father? Who are you?”

Last updated on: August 15, 2006 at 8:54 am by Peter T. Chattaway

“Who is your father? Who are you?” 2006-08-15T08:54:00-07:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly offers his own two bits on the Mel Gibson controversy. One bit that leaps out at me:

WHY IS MEL SO MAD? During the incident, he sounded like a classic angry drunk. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that when Gibson spewed his anti-Semitic poison at the L.A. officers who pulled him over, it was, to a greater or lesser degree, the booze talking — and it’s also conventional wisdom that that in no way excuses anything he said. I buy all of that. But it strikes me that Mel’s battle with the bottle, in the very slovenliness of its tabloid drama (those pictures of him carousing at the bar earlier that night outdid the 20 worst paparazzi shots of Colin Farrell combined), has overshadowed his real battle, the one that he’s still suppressing: the war with the father whom he refuses to fight. Hutton Gibson is on record as denying the existence of the Holocaust, and while it’s easy enough to say ”Like father, like son,” Mel’s refusal to distance himself from his father’s crackpot revisionist history suggests that he has never truly wriggled out from under Hutton Gibson’s thumb to become his own man.

If you want to know where Mel Gibson’s rage comes from, that might be a good place to start. Holocaust denial is an insidiously deceptive form of bigotry: a philosophy of violence in code. By arguing against the reality of the Holocaust, what it actually does, below the words, is to deny that the suffering and death of Jewish people matters. In the guise of Holocaust denial, it is really, in spirit, Holocaust endorsement.

Much as I deplore Mel’s anti-Semitic comments, I don’t believe that he shares his father’s venomous ”version” of history. Yet his refusal to distance himself from Hutton Gibson’s comments — he has said that his father never lied to him — suggests that he lives in mortal fear of a different kind of denial: the public disavowal of his father’s beliefs. He is still, in other words, a trembling son, a boy, a slave to Hutton Gibson’s patriarchal force. That’s an untenable position — a torturous one — for any grown man, let alone a famous and powerful man, to be in. I am not in any way denying Mel’s responsibility for his actions, but here’s a proposition: Mel’s rage, the rage that he stokes and numbs with alcohol, the rage that he vents at Jews, is really, deep down, the anger that he can never express at the father who taught him to treat Jews as the enemy.

Two and a half years ago, in preparation for reviewing The Passion of the Christ (2004), I made a point of watching Mel Gibson’s previous directorial efforts, Braveheart (1995) and The Man without a Face (1993), the latter of which I had never seen before. I posted some comments on those films here, including this summary of the themes that link all three of Gibson’s films to date — written before I had actually seen The Passion for myself:

Certain themes do seem to come up in all three of Gibson’s films. First, they all take place in the past — from the 1960s to the 13th century to the 1st century. Second, they all feature a character whose face has been disfigured (Gibson has burn scars across half his face in The Man, Ian Bannen has leprosy across half his face in Braveheart, and Gibson has said the Roman soldiers will destroy one of Jesus’ eyes in The Passion — I’m betting it’s his right eye, to follow this pattern). Third, all three films arguably deal with father-son issues of one sort or another, e.g. the protagonists in all three films have surrogate dads, sort of (though it doesn’t sound like The Passion will deal explicitly with the role of Joseph in Jesus’ life — the only parent of his that one hears about in all the reviews is the Virgin Mary). Fourth, all three films feature dialogue in Latin (and the first two films make a point of suggesting that children should be taught the language). And finally, all three films feature men who become martyrs of one sort or another — sacrificing their lives for the benefit of someone else. I almost said all three films feature ‘innocent’ victims, but, well, William Wallace CAN get pretty savage and uppity, even if the film goes out of its way to show the English striking the first blow in his life.

A few paragraphs down, I expanded on the father-son theme as it is developed in Braveheart:

Another of the film’s big themes, of course, is What It Takes To Be A Man, and this is explored through at least four different father-son relationships. The first is the one between Wallace and his own father, who is killed early on, when Wallace is just a boy; shortly before going off to battle, the father tells the boy, “I know you can fight, but it’s our wits that make us men.” When the boy is orphaned, he is adopted by his uncle (Brian Cox, who Gibson calls “one of my favorite actors”), who takes him away and trains him in foreign languages and suchlike. The second, and perhaps healthiest, father-son relationship is between Wallace’s best friend Hamish (Brendan Gleeson) and his dad. The third is between Robert the Bruce, who wants to do the right thing, and his leprous father, who tries to encourage a more cynical and Machiavellian approach to politics; when Wallace is betrayed and captured by the English, Bruce confronts his father and says, “You’re not a man. You’re not my father.” And the fourth is between the tyrannical Edward I and his son, the homosexual disappointment to the royal family.

As everyone who has seen The Passion of the Christ knows by now, my prediction about Jesus’ right eye being the one that gets “destroyed” was correct — and, come to that, Barabbas seems to be blind in his right eye, and the right eye of one of the thieves is pecked out by a crow. Gibson really doesn’t like right eyes.

However, the very first time I saw The Passion, I was also struck by how one of the first things Satan says to taunt or torment Jesus in Gethsemane just happens to be: “Who is your father? Who are you?” That line works well enough within the film, but I was struck, the first time I saw the film, by how personal that line seemed, how uniquely important to Gibson that dual question must be — not just in relation to Jesus, but in relation to himself.

So, Gleiberman’s analysis makes a lot of sense to me.

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