You’ve got to hand it to Mel Gibson. When it comes to potentially career-ending outbursts of vile bigotry, there really is nobody better. As somebody posted on Twitter this week (there is increasingly little point in even trying to formulate this stuff yourself), ‘You’re a pretty hard-core ass when drunkenly yelling about Jews running banks and calling a lady cop “sugar tits” is your cute, lesser rant’.
We’ll come to that one in a moment. This time around, the star of many of my favourite films was taped, allegedly, having a go at his then girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. Go out dressed like that, he basically said, and you are liable to ‘get raped by a pack of niggers’.
Which, do you reckon, is the most offensive bit? The n-word made the headlines, and ‘raped’ isn’t great either, in context. For my money, though, it’s the rather more subtle ‘pack’ bit that does a lot of the work, racistly speaking. Mind you, it’s worth noting that this was not solely a racist statement. You see, what Gibson is saying to his other half here (allegedly, allegedly) is that even given that black people are sub-human molesters who roam like dogs, if she goes out like that, and they rape her, it won’t be their fault. It’ll be hers. Because of her clothes. Misogyny, in other words, and at no extra cost. Awesome stuff.
Gibson has racist form. The ‘cute, lesser rant’ mentioned above took place in 2006, when he was arrested for driving under the influence. The story goes that he called a female arresting officer ‘Sugar Tits’, before asking her male partner if he was Jewish and saying ‘the f***ing Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world’. Since then, the only bit he’s denied was the ‘Sugar Tits’ stuff. Gibson’s dad, not entirely irrelevantly, is a noted conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier. ‘Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,’ he once instructed a reporter from the New York Times. ‘It takes one litre of petrol and 20 minutes. Now six million?’
Still, modern society is surprisingly forgiving of people who randomly blame Jews for wars, as frequently evidenced by the comment pages of the Guardian. Pure vanilla racism, though, is altogether more damaging. People forget, but before he was mad, Gibson joined Danny Glover in the greatest black/white cop-buddy act that Hollywood has seen, in the form of the Lethal Weapon franchise. Indeed, Lethal Weapon 2, in which the villains were South African, had a powerful anti-racist message. Racists, said that film, are such bad people that they deserve to be shot in the head, even if they’re unarmed, holding up their hands and saying ‘deeeplomatic eeemunity’. And yet, two decades later — ‘raped by niggers’. God knows how that happens. Maybe he never saw it.
So is Gibson a racist? Yes, unquestionably. And does it matter? Well, that’s got to be a big ‘yes’ again. At least, inasmuch as we’re talking about his moral worth as a human being (low), or whether you’d want to introduce him to your rabbi (not much). But where it doesn’t matter at all, I’d suggest, is when it comes to whether or not we’re still allowed to enjoy his films.
‘Now hold on,’ you may be thinking. ‘This is Mel Gibson we’re talking about. Not Ingmar Bergman. What’s even to like?’ Plenty, I’d say. The comic book dystopia of Mad Max and the aforementioned flawlessness of the Lethal Weapons were all good enough, but it’s only really since he went nuts that Gibson has been brilliant. Braveheart was brilliant without actually being very good, but the intense, flesh-rending, bloodied squelchiness of The Passion of The Christ and, most of all, Apocalypto are your proper, bonkers sort of genius. I’m serious. Snigger all you like.
Plenty of creative geniuses, after all, are racist. I think we’re pretty comfortable saying that Richard Wagner was probably a racist, aren’t we? Martin Amis virtually confessed to being racist, and said his father was too, and it’s hard to see why that should have a bearing on the books of either. One might even argue that J.R.R. Tolkien was only good because he was a racist, and got considerably less good when, in his later years, he stopped being one. Film legend holds that Michael Maloney turned down a part in Withnail and I because he considered the script ‘anti-gay, anti-black and anti-Irish’. He was right, but that doesn’t make the film itself any less brilliant, or him any less sanctimonious, for avoiding it.
How dull life would be, if we were only allowed to enjoy the creative labours of those of whom we morally approved. Most pop stars and footballers are pretty dubious, sexually speaking, but we’re allowed to be fans of theirs. Nobody says Polanski doesn’t make good films, just because he’s a nonce. Damn it, no, I refuse to feel ashamed. I remain passionately keen on the work of Mel Gibson. I just wouldn’t have him in the house. Ghastly man.
I’m quite upset that the coalition has scrapped plans to introduce a 55 per cent barrier for a vote to dissolve parliament. It’s not that I thought it was a good idea. It palpably wasn’t. It’s just that I understood it, and almost nobody else did, at all.
As I’ve written before, knowledge for a journalist usually arrives by accident. For me, in this case, it involved being told to write something about it, and having a long conversation with my then colleague Peter Riddell, and then staring at a wall for most of an afternoon, going ‘…but that would mean… oh!’ Thereafter, I suppose I became quite insufferable.
When people mentioned the 55 per cent, I had to chip in. When people wrote about it, correctly saying it wouldn’t work but not quite accurately grasping why, I had to email them and put them straight, even if I didn’t know them very well. Sometimes I’d even do this on messageboards, like a lunatic. I genuinely couldn’t stop myself. The problem was that people kept calling it a ‘no confidence threshold’, and it wasn’t one at all. In fact it was something quite different, and would have meant that… no. It’s starting again. I’m sorry. No more.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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