08.03.06 Like Father, Like Son

It’s been a profoundly weird week, what with the coast-to-coast heat wave, the escalating crisis in the Mid-East… and the crackup of a certain Malibu movie star. As much as I’d like to keep my head down focused on all things rejuvenile, I’m compelled to take a quick break from such crucial matters as kickball tournaments and adult pajama parties to add another two cents to the frenzy surrounding Mel Gibson’s D.U.I. freakout.

I wrote a feature for the New York Times Magazine three years ago about Mel, his movie The Passion of the Christ and a church he was building in the hills above Malibu. As I was working on the story, Mel was still filming The Passion in Italy and not much was known about his church or the particular strain of Catholic traditionalism he’d inherited from his 84-year old dad, Hutton. I attended a service at Mel’s church, flew to Houston for a weekend with his dad and interviewed dozens of fellow traditionalists, all in an attempt to understand why an A-list movie star would stake his career on what turned out to be a peculiarly orthodox proto-Catholic splatter film.

Mel didn’t talk to me directly, but a month before my story appeared, he went on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to complain about “a media attack” on his pro-Christian message. He capped it with a direct message to yours truly: “You can pick on me,” he said. “But like, if you start picking on my family while I’m out of town, get ready.” The appearance was followed by threatening letters to me, my editors and my father from Mel’s lawyer, a celebrity litigator nicknamed “Mad Dog.”

The ensuing brouhaha mostly left me mystified. When all was said and done, Mel made his millions and became a hero to conservative critics (See: Dennis Prager, Peter Boyer, Michael Medved), who defended him against charges of anti-Semitism and begged tolerance for a filmmaker who had, according to the official line, had a mid-life reckoning that left him happily sober and tolerant for people of all faiths. His public appearances, however, told a different story: appearing on O’Reilly and later with Diane Sawyer, Mel appeared just as unstrung and unstable as the wild-eyed cop he played in the Lethal Weapon movies.

So which was it? Was Mel a man of God whose canny manipulation of the media ensured his message of salvation reached the widest possible audience? Or was he his father’s son, a bitter and conspiracy-addicted loony tune?

Three years later, we have our answer. Deputy James Mee’s police report on Mel’s drunken tirade sounds like a page ripped from one of Hutton’s anti-Catholic screeds, a hateful blend of grandiosity (“Fucking Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”) and street-thug aggression (“You motherfucker, I’m going to fuck you”).

I’m hesitant to play along with the mass schadenfreude now fueling the unfolding psychodrama, but a few points seem to have been lost in the current frenzy. The most important of which is this: Mel and his father are not Catholics. While his handlers have expertly positioned Mel as a hero for red state churchgoers, traditionalism is an outright rejection of any deviation from the strict Catholic liturgy. To many traditionalists, the Catholic Church is nothing less than a hive of idolatry and the fount of a worldwide conspiracy in which the Jews play a prominent and nefarious part.

These sentiments are clearly echoed in Mel’s D.U.I. encounter with the cops. As hard as his defenders try to write the episode off as a drunken rant, Mel’s rantings weren’t plucked from thin air. They’re regurgitations of words Hutton Gibson uttered lo those many moons ago in Houston: “The deliberately trashed our faith,” he told me. “What they did to the mass is pure evil. This couldn’t have happened by accident. It was a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.”

According to Gibson, the conspiracy has played a part in everything from the Civil War to the Holocaust to the 9-11 attacks. Here are a few excerpts from my interview transcripts:

Q: What about the holocaust?

Hutton Gibson: They had to rebuild the whole thing. Who knows if it was there in the first place? They say the Germans blew it up. They blew up the plumbing and left the building there. It’s physically impossible. Go and ask an undertaker who operates a crematorium or something like that what’s it take to get rid of a dead body. It takes one liter of petrol and twenty minutes. Now six million?

(Hutton’s wife) Joy: There weren’t even that many Jews in all of Europe.

Hutton Gibson: Anyway there were more after the war than there were before. They based it on one figure in the Almanac – the figure of 1939 I think showed six million two hundred thousand Jews in Poland. And after the war it showed two hundred thousand of them – therefore there were six million gone they must be dead. But they were gone everywhere.

Yeah there were prison camps but half the people who died in prison camps died from bombings from the allies.

There was no systematic extermination, no. The idea was – what Hitler considered his final solution – was… He made a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs and take up space.

Q: So, was Hitler secretly working with the Jews?

A: He was cooperating with the bigwigs to get the small fry to get out of Germany and go to Israel.

Q: The big wigs were?

A: The financiers.

Q: And what about the World Trade Center hijackers?

A: Who said there were guys on the planes? Anyone can put out a passenger list.

Q: So was it all forged?

A: Probably. It was probably done by remote control. They were crashed by remote control with the targets selected. Because what were these guys—they went to some little school somewhere in the south and they learned how to fly these little planes. The idea that they could have done that is just too damn much of a coincidence.

Crazy stuff, absolutely, easy to write off as the fever dream of a fringe-dwelling crackpot. But the real question was, and is, how much of dad’s hateful theorizing rubbed off on his most famous son? I never assumed that Hutton spoke for Mel, but it’s worth noting that Mel never repudiated his father’s remarks and danced around the matter in presumably more sober public appearances.

In any case, Mel is now in rehab and his publicist Alan Nierob (ironically, the son of holocaust survivors and a congregant at the Temple where my kids go to school) released a statement this week begging forgiveness from the Jewish community. I sincerely hope this latest attempt to clarify and correct his religious views is sincere. Somehow, though, I think we learned more about what really matters to Mel from Mee than Nierob.

I would like to know more about this Mel Gibson character.  You seem to know him well and can provide context.

If Mel Gibson hates Jews why did he hire a Jewish publicist?

For those who say that it was impossible for 6 million Jews to have died in the Holocaust - where is the primary source to point them in the right direction?

How many non-Jews died at the hands of Hitler and the Nazis in the Holocaust?

Interesting article. Edifying, thanks.

“orthodox proto-Catholic splatter film”

Despite the depth and clarity of your reflections on Mr. Gibson’s supposedly alcohol-induced anti-semitic rant, I was most deeply stirred and slightly shaken by the blatant playfulness of your linguistic mastery.

“Orthodox proto-Catholic splatter film” - so succinct, so, well, funny. A welcome touch of playfulness in a hard-edged, informative, and clearly disturbing piece of reporting.