It's like this post by Kit Duncan could predict my immediate future. I am really struggling to separate the artist from the man at this moment. Because make no mistake, I am a huge fan of some of Gibson's film work. Why must the trifecta of talent, wealth and good looks happen to the so ill deserving?
As with anyone enduring shame, I look to the past for any obvious signs that I should have known. Of course there was the 2007 drunken, anti-Semitic rant incident, which was disgusting and gave Gibson's thriving Hollywood career a much deserved kick in the nutsack. But I truly didn't grasp the level of this man's depravity until the details of the filthy, violent, racist rants against the mother of his 8-month old daughter became public. It isn't that he wasn't a jerk before, but it is one thing to yell obscenities and quite another to threaten to bury the mother of your child in the rose garden, after you have apparently also knocked her teeth out.
What's going on here? I don't think I can ever watch another Gibson film again. He is sick. I am anti-violence in general, but I wish that we could run Mel through the tortures that every minority group in the world has been made to endure: lynching, gas chambers, untouchability, and every other form that you can imagine. I think it is his enraged arrogance, the pure effrontery at daring to be challenged that I hate the most. But I must try not to let his hate become mine.
Now that I have purged, he deserves to be forgotten. I hope Oksana and her daughter are somehow able to do the same.
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Comments
Did you hear about Urkel? That and Mel and I just don't know what to think.
I wrote off Woody Allen films years ago, even though I love his writing. I can't stomach sending money to someone I believe to be evil. What I can't understand is why it is still quite en vogue in Hollywood to associate with artists like Allen and Polanski.
I somehow don't see Gibson maintaining this kind of cache with his colleagues after this bit. But Hollywood's ability to forgive has sickened me before - so in the end, he could become the "misunderstood misanthrope" (Hello, Alec-"You fat little pig"-Baldwin), and the sympathy he gets could actually improve his status with actors and producers. What a shame that would be.
I understand he is attractive and easy to watch in amusing scenes, but there has long been a darkness growing there that I
At least with Gibson, I've already consumed his art and don't feel compelled to do so again, but there are others who make this choice more difficult.
Michael Jackson-I've been a fan for as long as I can remember and still enjoy his music today. Was he a pedophile? There is compelling evidence that he was. How can I enjoy the music of a child rapist?
Woody Allen-Maybe the best auteur of my generation. I even took a class on him in college, so enamored was I with his body of work. Yet he married his adopted daughter, and according to Mia Farrow in her memoir, he may have molested his biological daughter...a real mensch right?
Roman Polanski is another brilliant artist who commited a reprehensible crime, but he also had a reprehensible crime commited against his wife and unborn child. What am I supposed to do with that?
I suspect there is much we don't know about a lot of people we admire.