The Associated Press reports that it is too early to say what effect Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks will have on his career. Abraham H. Foxman has already called on Hollywood to ostracize Gibson, while some anonymous studio chiefs have said that the public has a short memory and will easily forgive Gibson and go to his movies, especially “if the film is perceived as worthwhile.”
The article also notes that Gibson, when promoting The Passion of the Christ (2004) over two years ago, told Diane Sawyer, “To be anti-Semitic is a sin. . . . To be anti-Semitic is to be un-Christian, and I’m not.” And for what it’s worth, I think we need to keep this earlier declaration in mind, as Foxman and others assert that Gibson’s drunken behaviour “reveals his true self”.
I am uncomfortable with the assertion that Gibson’s drunken rage revealed “his true self” because I believe that self-control is one of the ways in which we make ourselves more like the people that God wants us to be, and thus it is one of the ways in which we become our “true selves”. This sick, sinful, corrupted flesh of ours is only a shadow of the “true self” that each of us is struggling to become (on our better days, at least). And I think a lot of us have darker impulses that we fight to rein in all the time.
Like the woman says in Batman Begins (2005), “It’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.” Our choices matter. And like St. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, there is a conflict between the “spirit” and the “flesh” in all of us, which is precisely why we are supposed to follow the path of self-control and not the path of drunkenness and fits of rage. I suppose it is possible that Gibson’s fit of drunken rage revealed one aspect of his “true self”; but it is also possible, and perhaps even more accurate, to say that Gibson’s drunkenness damaged a part of his “true self” that would have held those passions back.
(Note, BTW, that the term “self-control” implicitly assumes that there is an aspect of us that needs to be controlled; the fact that we have a darker side does not mean that exercising our “self-control” is a negation of our “true selves”. It is kind of like the relationship between bravery and fear; we wouldn’t need bravery if we felt no fear, but would anybody say that a person who acts bravely and suppresses his fear is somehow not showing his “true self”?)
So I am reluctant to say anything so bald or definitive as “Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite”, because I don’t think we should judge people by what they do when they’re drunk — unless, I suppose, they are drunk all the time, but I don’t get the impression that that is the case here. A person might be perfectly chaste, but have an intense sexual attraction to a stranger that only manifests itself after he has had too much to drink; a single lapse of that sort does not make the person a slut, though it does suggest he should make a point of avoiding putting himself into situations where it is difficult to maintain the necessary level of self-control.
And I would still encourage people not to make the leap from “Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic” to “his movie is anti-Semitic”. Movies are not their directors; they are sometimes better and sometimes worse. Admittedly, The Passion is a mixed bag on this score, and I find myself thinking that one of Gibson’s alleged comments (“The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”) casts a sinister light on that utterly bogus bit in The Passion where a pensive Pontius Pilate frets that Caiaphas, of all people, might lead a rebellion against him. But I think it is worth noting that almost all of the allegedly anti-Semitic elements in The Passion happen to be imported from Gibson’s source materials (Sr. Anne Catherine Emmerich’s visions, etc.), whereas Gibson himself put in quite a few pro-Semitic elements that, AFAIK, are original to him.
Finally, it seems to me that Gibson has been very gracious and helpful to his own friends in Hollywood — he was one of the first to hire Robert Downey Jr. after the latter came out of rehab, for the lead role in the remake of The Singing Detective (2003) — so I sincerely hope those friends do not turn their back on him, now.
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