ST. MEL, PATRON OF FLAKES |
Every once in a while you read something that makes you laugh out loud
or inhale your coffee because it's so preposterous. Reading a priest declare
solemnly that Mel Gibson must have read and been inspired by the Summa
Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, so thoroughly does his latest movie
embody the principles delineated therein, is in that class.
No reviewer to my knowledge has suggested that Mel Gibson
read the "Summa Theologiae" before setting about to direct "The Passion
of the Christ."
But he must have read Question 48 of the third part of Aquinas' "Summa." There, Aquinas examines how the passion of Christ produced its effect -- its efficiency, if you will. Efficiency is a technical, philosophical term that points us back to Aristotle's four causes, and urges us to inquire about what is responsible for something coming into being. In Aquinas' usage, "efficiently" does not connote as it does in modern English the restricted meaning of "working productively with minimum wasted effort or expense." [ ] Mel Gibson directs Jim Caviezel in a way that, in my view, approaches accomplishing the impossible. There are the Christs of Pasolini, of Zeffirelli, and of Rossellini, but the Christ of Gibson captures what these others were content to accomplish by representing a high expression of human values. Although I am not an art critic, it seems to me that the very excesses, even the distortions, which some commentators have questioned, in fact aim to show us that this man is more than human. That we have to look elsewhere for the source of his human endurance. Is it too much a stretch to ask whether Mel Gibson also indicates Christ's divine nature by suggesting that he possesses infused knowledge? For instance, when Christ designs a 16th-century European table for first-century Palestinians? Or when without effort Christ begins to speak with Pilate in Latin? Some experts have wondered about the absence in the film
of Greek; none to my knowledge have conjectured that the "historical Jesus"
would have had the occasion to learn conversational Latin.
Mel
Gibson and Thomas Aquinas: How the Passion Works
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The claims of Mel's erudition from this particular movie purist are
not simply nauseatingly fulsome, but also hilarious, as are all the posters
saying "he's an educated man." I frankly don't see any indication from
anything he's said that he's better read than many book-loving 10 year
olds of my acquaintance. That he has no ability to think critically, or
to be even halfway civil and courteous, is shown by his interviews. And
this is the guy people like Brent Bozell are holding up as a modern holy
man and example of Christian morality?
Most movie heartthrobs don't provoke controversy. Oh,
there's plenty many of them will do to outrage the public. Alec Baldwin
on national television during the impeachment trial, calling for the death
by stoning of Henry Hyde, is a pretty good example of that. What I mean
is that they won't do anything to offend the sensibilities of a far more
important market: Hollywood. Mel Gibson is an exception, perhaps the
exception. Any actor who remarks, "Feminists don't like me, and I don't
like them. I don't get their point," clearly has no use for Tinseltown
conventional wisdom. But there's more heresy where that came from.
For starters, Gibson is devoutly religious, and unapologetic about it, too. To Redbook, he said that mankind was created for the purpose of "the afterlife. This life is just a testing ground. It's not a popular view, I know. People will say that I'm sort of a mindless robot who's using religion as a crutch to get through life. Well, I'm not a mindless robot, but I am using (religion) as a crutch to get through life." He's a traditionalist Catholic, an endangered species in Hollywood if ever there was one. From the stained-glass logo of his Icon production company to his willingness to publicly oppose not only abortion but also birth control -- Neanderthal positions in the sexually frisky entertainment industry -- he's not shy about it, either. "God is the only one who knows how many children we should have," he told the Spanish newspaper El Pais, "and we should be ready to accept them." He and his wife have seven. What may rankle Hollywood trendies the most, though, is Gibson's distaste for the homosexual lifestyle. He parodied an effeminate hairdresser in "Bird on a Wire" -- the activist group GLAAD was not amused, calling the parody a "demeaning stereotype" -- and in the El Pais interview, he expressed puzzlement that anyone might think he was gay. "Do I look like a homosexual?" he wondered. "Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?" Gibson also got in trouble with gays over his Oscar winner "Braveheart." GLAAD denounced as a "nightmarish stereotype" the flamboyant portrayal of one homosexual character, Prince Edward. Apparently GLAAD didn't care that the real-life prince actually was gay, or that his sexual orientation had, as one writer put it, "important plot ramifications in the movie." Gibson did, and refused to change the script. [
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Bozell, who has complained about others using selective editing, is
guilty of the same himself: compare his version of Gibson, with the unexpurgated
comments below: "Saint Mel" doesn't come off quite as nobly longsuffering
and virtuous without quite a bit of polishing. From Playboy, July
1995 (Vol. 42 ; No. 7 ; Pg. 51):
PLAYBOY:
Do you believe in Darwin's theory of evolution or that God created man in his image? GIBSON:
PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
PLAYBOY: You don't? GIBSON:
PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
PLAYBOY:
GIBSON: I'll get kicked around for saying it, but men and women are just different. They're not equal. The same way that you and I are not equal. PLAYBOY:
GIBSON: You might be more intelligent, or you might have a bigger dick. Whatever it is, nobody's equal. And men and women are not equal. I have tremendous respect for women. I love them. I don't know why they want to step down. Women in my family are the center of things. And good things emanate from them. The guys usually mess up. PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
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If he can say "She was a cunt," (and thus reveal that he thinks that there is no worse insult than to be biologically female!) - and then say he doesn't understand why we have a problem - well, obviously he doesn't have much processing ability. And he doesn't know much about traditional Catholic dogma or history if he thinks there can be no questions of celibacy (and no discussion of what is allowed!) - after all, St. Patrick himself was a third-generation RC cleric. And Byzantine Catholics are just as Catholic as Romans (let alone schismatic ones) - and they've always been allowed to have married priests; remember Chesterton's humorous remark about people ignorant of the Church who are shocked to find "wedded and bearded" Eastern Rite clergy? I guess GKC is too much of a modern for the Gibsons pater et filius.
(We won't even get into the fact that he obviously doesn't know about the older encyclical on evolution, Humani Generis,* and isn't literate enough to have read it if he did. Let alone the Summa, since he doesn't even understand the theory of evolution - though to be fair, the Playboy interviewer doesn't either. But I'd love to see Gibson confronted with the ideas of creation and potentiality that I was hit with in Medieval Phil and Metaphysics class, the questions of whether or not everything was created as it is now, or whether there were simply "seeds" of everything that was to be - which sounds a bit like a proto-evolutionary theory, doesn't it now? and comes from St. Bonaventure, I'm pretty sure. And the really radical idea of St. Augustine that maybe all the six days are just a schematic device, a way of breaking down everything for our sequential human minds to understand it, because it all happened at once but we're not equipped to think that way, and six is a symbolically perfect number, and so is seven, and hence the construct of "six days of creation" being something like a verbal diagram, not a chronological timeline. Now that would blow poor "Traditional Catholic" Mel's mind, wouldn't it? Dolt.)
He is, unquestionably, a homophobe. Now, I don't think that everyone who has a moral objection to homosexual activity is necessarily a homophobe - but there's no way of getting away from Gibson's fears, they stand out from miles away. The more he talks, the more inescapable the conclusion becomes that he is a) fascinated by homosexuality, b) drawn to it, c) terrified of those urges urges which according to James Jones and all the WWII veterans and milhist folks who have praised his novels as the most accurate depictions of modern combat and combatants' experience for the past forty years are universal and indiscriminate in many human beings, male heterosexual macho warrior dudes or not.
I mean, just listen to the guy!
Heartthrob actor Mel Gibson, asked by one of Spain's
leading magazines what he thinks of homosexuals, launched into a tirade
against gay men.
"They take it up the ass," Gibson told El Pais as he got out of his chair, bent over and pointed to his butt. "This is only for taking a shit," he said. Reminded by the interviewer, Koro Castellano, that he worked with gays while studying at the School of Dramatic Arts, Gibson added: "They were good people, kind, I like them. But their thing is not my thing." Castellano said, "But you were obsessed with the thought that if you were an actor, people would confuse you with one of them." "Yes," Gibson admitted, "but I did it. I became an actor despite that. But with this look, who's going to think I'm gay? It would be hard to take me for someone like that. "Do I sound like a homosexual?" he asked. "Do I talk like them? Do I move like them? "What happens is when you're an actor, they stick that label on you," Gibson said. "I go from playing rugby one week to taking dance classes in black leotards the next. Many of the girls that I met in school took it for granted that I was gay." Gibson's holds extreme conservative views on other issues. He has quit the Catholic Church because he believes the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s went too far. "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," he explained to El Pais. "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," he said.
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This is not the talk of someone who is indifferent to the matter, or for whom it is a question of abstract ethical principles, or who is secure enough to be able to work within the tensions between religious tenets and personal longings (q.v. Evelyn Waugh.) This is someone who is obsessed with the thought that he might be gay. It reminds me of the white supremacist in Boston who turned out to be so zealous because he was, in fact, of mixed race and in denial.
Says Christopher Hitchens, writing on Passion for Slate, "But it came back to me this week that an associate of his had once told me, in lacerating detail, that an evening with Mel was one long fiesta of boring but graphic jokes about anal sex. I've since had that confirmed by other sources. And, long before he emerged as the spear-carrier for the sort of Catholicism once preached by Gen. Franco and the persecutors of Dreyfus, Mel Gibson attained a brief notoriety for his loud and crude attacks on gays. Now he's become the proud producer of a movie that relies for its effect almost entirely on sadomasochistic male narcissism."
In re Braveheart - the issue with his portrayal of the English prince, later king, and his lover is not that they were, yes, lovers, but that they were bisexual - the prince left three children fathered on the redoubtable Isabella, his nemesis (aka The She-Wolf of France) and they weren't Wallace's bastards either, and his partner left a daughter - and that neither of them were mincing drag queens, particularly Piers Gaveston, who was picked by Edward Longshanks to be a warrior mentor for his son and described as "redoubtable" at the joust, and the problem with their relationship wasn't the homosexuality so much as the fact that like every noble with a lover, young Edward lavished riches and rank and authority on his favorites (who just happened to be male) which caused political problems for the Plantagenets and their associates in government. --But then we all know that history isn't Gibson's strong point
Then there's the flakyness of his Conspiracism - even among conspiracists,
this is pretty much the dregs, if you don't even understand the principles
of the theory but you hold it anyway based on faith in what someone smarter
than you said - but the funniest is the first line, given the present
circumstances.
PLAYBOY:
How do you feel about Bill Clinton? GIBSON:
PLAYBOY: Who? GIBSON: The guy who's in charge isn't going to be the front man, ever. If I were going to be calling the shots I wouldn't make an appearance. Would you? You'd end up losing your head. It happens all the time. All those monarchs. Ifhe's the leader, he's getting shafted. What's keeping him in there? Why would you stay for that kind of abuse? Except that he has to stay for some reason. He was meant to be the president 30 years ago, if you ask me. PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
PLAYBOY: You really believe that? GIBSON: I really believe that. He was a Rhodes scholar, right? Just like Bob Hawke. Do you know what a Rhodes scholar is? Cecil Rhodes established the Rhodes scholarship for those young men and women who want to strive for a new world order. Have you heard that before? George Bush? CIA? Really, it's Marxism, but it just doesn't want to call itself that. Karl had the right idea, but he was too forward about saying what it was. Get power but don't admit to it. Do it by stealth. There's a whole trend of Rhodes scholars who will be politicians around the world. PLAYBOY:
GIBSON:
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We don't think he's a nutcase because he's a religious God-fearing family man, we think he's a nutcase because he's a nutcase. And a sexist, homophobic bigot. And a low-level opportunist.
36. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church
does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences
and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced
in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in
as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from
pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold
that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in
such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable
and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary
seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared
to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission
of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the
dogmas of faith. Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion,
when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and
living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which
have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as
if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands
the greatest moderation and caution in this question