Book Review: Mel Gibson

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Mel Gibson: Man on a Mission

Author: Wensley Clarkson

Author's web site: http://wensleyclarkson.com/

(Subject's latest movie: http://deadline.com/2017/09/daddys-home-2 )

Date: 2004

Publisher: Blake

ISBN: 1-85782-537-3

Length: 348 pages

Illustrations: black and white photo spreads

Quote: “Actors only write books when they run out of money. Anyway, there's enough people writing about me...somebody's wandering about talking to everyone I've ever known.”

(Is this one a Christian book? Well...it's about a Christian...)

Wensley Clarkson intended this unauthorized biography to “disturb, distress and infuriate” Mel Gibson. It's not a really hostile biography, just one of those bids writers make to cash in on other people's fame and talents. Does that put you off buying it? It would have put me off buying it, but this is another one of those books a friend who's much better at buying and selling other things, not books, made the mistake of buying and then dumped on me to try to sell.

This book was, of course, written before the real midlife crisis, the breakup of the family, the petty incidents that stirred up swarms of haters. Of which Hollywood was full...

Recap: Apart from a church-sponsored effort to reenact the Gospels, the last “Jesus movie” to hit the theatres had been a tacky unhistorical trifle in which, among other things, Jesus supposedly fantasized on the cross that “there is only one woman” so a man can sleep with “her” in as many different forms as possible...Where was the feminist outrage? Apparently the hardcore feminists of 1987 didn't watch Jesus movies.  

After that, people seemed to feel that enough Jesus movies had been made for another fifteen, almost twenty years, and then up came Gibson with the idea of using new technology to make the horror and violence of the Crucifixion into The Goriest Jesus Movie Ever (without actual harm to actors). Jesus never said he had not come to save the “Mad Max” and “Lethal Weapon” men of this world—in fact the mention of a disciple known as Simon Zelotes suggests that Jesus did indeed talk to, and befriend, that type of men—but I don't care for their company, so I never watched Gibson's Passion of the Christ, which is the topic of the final chapter in Clarkson's book.

But...well, in a Passion Play it's hard to divide the role of “heavy villain” equally. Sometimes in a church group the decision to make Caiaphas or Pilate the heaviest villain may be determined by which of the church men can look scarier. Gibson was Catholic; Catholics tend to identify with Rome, call attention to Pilate's vacillating, and feel that Caiaphas ought to be cast as the really bad man. It's not easy, although it's appealing in theory, to show Caiaphas and Pilate trapped in the same mess of greed, fear, politics, and self-delusion...to remember that the Gospel writers identified the Evil Principle itself as Jesus' first enemy and cast it as the real baddie, manipulating puny Pilate and stupid Caiaphas alike.

Gibson grew up hearing a lot of antisemitic rants but it's hard to claim that he was ever a serious hater of Jews. How do we know? Same way you know your Auntie Pris never was a serious hater of ethnic minorities. If you really hate people you don't go to work in a city that's full of them. Still, there, in the years immediately after his Jesus movie aired, was Mel Gibson, a rather “conservative” Catholic but a fair-minded and tolerant one, having worked with and lived among Jewish people all his adult life. And there were certain Jewish people hating Gibson's Jesus movie and projecting their hate onto him. It wasn't pretty. Gibson apparently suffers from classic Irish-type alcohol intolerance—one drink, one drunk, lot of English guys fall down—and somebody goaded him into a drunken rant about “you'n'ose Jews” and who knows what he intended to say about them. People in the commercial media made sure the whole world also knew about his divorce and the related drunken rants...

Clarkson chronicles the star's years of drunkenness and sobriety up to 2004, the smash-hit action movies, the what-were-they-thinking? movies, the celebrity-trivia bickering. Was Gibson Australian or American? Both, and being above all an actor he could do other credible accents as well. (Clarkson explains how Gibson was born in the U.S. and moved at an early age to Australia.) Did he live by the pre-Vatican-II Catholic rules he publicly advocated for others? (The answer seems to be that, most of the time, he tried...when he was sober.) Was he, in real life, violent? (Not under traditional Irish Catholic rules, where hitting noncombatants was a sin, but “taking your part” in a drunken brawl was normal and spanking naughty children was a positive duty.) What would it really be like to be married to that...For one thing, Clarkson makes clear, Gibson's body was never really perfect; one of the first illusions movie photographers learn to produce is the more or less standard illusion that short-legged, average-to-short actors are tall and well built. Beyond that, the answer apparently always was “None of your business.”

What local readers may be as delighted to read as I was, is that The River may have meant even more to Gibson than it did to us his delighted hosts. The River was a forgettable, one-dimensional movie with landscapes as its main attraction, about a farmer who recovers from a flood and saves his low-lying farm by working as a scab in a coal mine. We remember the filmmakers' difficulty in choosing a real place to film the movie: what they wanted was Clinchport before the 1977 flood, but Clinchport no longer looked like that. Real towns in the Appalachian mountains, a filmmaker complained to local newspaper reporters, were just too clean and prosperous for The River. A riverfront property in Tennessee was chosen for the home scenes, and after strenuous efforts Gate City managed to get Kane and Water Streets looking scruffy enough for the town scenes.

Gibson identified with his character, whose biggest problem, while scabbing, was not the angry union miners threatening his life, but the nights away from his family. While filming The River Gibson rented a farmhouse near Kingsport where his wife and children could stay. “It was to have a lasting effect,and ultimately convince him to enter...livestock farming,” which became Gibson's main offstage activity back home in Australia.

An amusing minor detail of the international story is Clarkson's growing, yet incomplete, awareness that colloquial words have different implications in different places. He sounds defensive of Gibson's wife Robyn in explaining that “'backward'...is purely a Southern States alternative word for 'shy': backward, she ain't!” Yes, but he's already described Gibson's mother as “homely” in a paragraph that defines that Britishism well enough to make it redundant: she enjoyed “a fine relationship with her parents,” “continued living at home after getting a job,” “relished family life and happily obeyed the rigid rules.” 

If I'd been editing the book I would have let those word choices, and a startlingly British use of “frisky” with which I was previously unfamiliar, and a few others, stand as they are, proof that the U.S. and U.K. are still Divided by a Common Language. What I find unjustifiable, and would have excised, is Clarkson's unquestioning use of the claim that “homophobic” means “not having complied with the homosexual lobby's demand that we all do a 180-degree reversal from the attitude toward homosexuality we all were taught when Gibson was growing up.” The facts of the story make it clear that Gibson was not, in fact, irrationally afraid of homosexuals, merely that he's not inclined that way himself and he once recast a character, written as homosexual in the script, as heterosexual in the movie. Considering that Hollywood has constantly recast middle-aged, plain-looking characters as young and cute ones to make it easier for young, cute stars to play those characters (Charlie Sheen as Mitch Snyder?!), and has been known to alter characters' nationalities for similar reasons...bah, humbug. Don't you get tired of the bullying tactics of the homosexual lobby? Real homophobia did society no good and much harm in the twentieth century. Standing up to bullies is, nevertheless, something I admire. I find myself feeling more respect for Mel Gibson after reading this book.

(Fair disclosure: I've had fannish feelings about several celebrities but never about the males who were marketed as “sex symbols.” The idea of an actor or singer as “sex symbol” invariably triggers a reaction like “Hmph...does nothing for me,” and how could he, given that I've only ever seen him as an image flattened out on a screen. I preferred almost any male actor whom I wasn't told I was supposed to consider sexy: Michael J. Fox or George Burns, Roy Rogers, Bill Cosby, Robin Williams, but the “sex symbol” marketing did a lot to undercut my appreciation even of Paul Newman.)

In summary...well, once again: unauthorized biography. I'm not sorry that I read this study of what a notoriously private actor has done to justify some of the emotion people have vented on him. I'd heard that Gibson was an Irish Catholic alcoholic before; maybe reading 348 pages of details about it gave me more empathy, an impulse to pray for Gibson's complex relationship with God—I don't normally pray for actors. Perhaps that's a good spiritual effect for the book to have on me, perhaps on other Christians. So I'm willing to resell this book, but bear in mind: unauthorized biography!

Clarkson is still alive and writing, mostly crime stories these days, so Mel Gibson is a Fair Trade Book. To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package (two books of this size per $5 package), plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address (scroll down to see the addresses at the bottom border). From this total of $10 or $11, we'll send $1 to Clarkson or a charity of his choice.