Let’s get the trivialities out of the way. I don’t like Mel Gibson.

That’s not a recent development, either. Australia has, let’s face it, always added to the Americana palate by occasionally churning out really horrible sex symbols built upon a moronic image of Man. “Rugged”, I believe is the term. The American women just love it, because it allows them to indulge in something a part of them probably feels maybe they shouldn’t like so much. Rough, slutty bastards – who have a tendency to drink a little too much, and smash telephones – are not exactly what the all American girl, true to the dream, should be lusting after. But hey, it’s okay – they come from that piss ant little country down the bottom of the world. Of course, that piss ant little country would produce such barbaric creatures. The novelty factor makes it sexy, in a condescending sort of way, without being unacceptable.

I don’t like them. I’ve told bars full of Sydney film students that I absolutely adore Mad Max, and for no other reason than that I can’t be bothered getting into any argument where I may have to… well… allocate thought to Mel Gibson. I just don’t like him. Sorry. The only thing I’ve carried with me of the Mad Max trilogy is a Tina Turner filmclip, and that’s all I’m prepared to keep.

 

He annoyed me with his homophobic era - nothing more. At the time, everyone expected me to be outraged, but I chose simply to shrug, and ignore it. I didn’t like him, anyway - so what drivel would I expect to come out of this guy’s mouth? At least Russell Crowe liked to romanticise himself as being quite ‘cultured’ underneath (however untrue this essentially was); Mel romanticised something quite different – a thuggish sort of self-righteousness. Mel Gibson’s a homophobe. Shock horror! Next.

It was, then, quite a logical evolution when Mel Gibson ended up being a Celebrity Christian™. And Mel was – true to his Aussie archetype of the handsome thug – a physical phenomenon. He was, after all, a physical creature; a commercialised brutality that appealed to a more evolutionary design. Of course, his depiction of Christ – tainted with just the right amount of messianic self-projection to make it somewhat disturbing, yet undetectable to so much of the public who saw it – was always going to be a physical story. Spirituality, to Gibson, was quite logically a brutal affair.

I had no time for it, at all. I’m all down with Christ, don’t get me wrong. But not in that Christian sort of way – I actually quite dig the story of a social rebel who got way pissed off about how screwed up everything was. And Mel’s Christian way was that warped breed of masculinised religion. Jesus was a bloody legend, who fought through the pain of the evil he drudged through. Oh, Mel.

And the anti-Semitism? Well, it went without saying that the handsome thug was a Daddy’s boy. Handsome thugs are, rest assured. Not that they’re totally sweet with Daddy – the torment of the brutal father makes for a tormented, brutal boy. If the tormented, brutal boy also happens to be handsome, then hey presto, you can make a real killing in America.

So, Mel’s father was a bigot, a cold brutal man who did not believe in the holocaust, and was a very nasty drunk. What a surprise! And Mel’s… oh my God… also an alcoholic bigot! How very bizarre!

Who were you expecting? Christ?

Poor Mel. But you know, for some people currently saying those two words – “poor Mel” – there’s not a hint of sarcasm. I was listening to the radio tonight (only because I was held hostage in a car that had no CD player), and the ditzy host of the Hot 30 countdown muttered those exact words... and actually meant them.

“What do you mean? How can you feel sorry for him?” her co-host asked.

“But he’s an alcoholic!” she protested. “He has a disease.”

Oh. A disease. We’re real frightened of them, of course. Diseases are bad.

More importantly, they’re the “other”. Diseases are external things; they take over, parasitically arresting your very being. But it’s not you – that’s the very important thing to remember with diseases. And truth be told, that’s why we like the word so very much.

In the 80s, the biomedical model was a consumer hit. It had made its way into science already, but it now became the term du jour for society on the whole.

Psychology was first. Suddenly, everything was a disease. Depression was now a disease. Today, if you go to a doctor suffering headaches and sleeplessness, it's quite likely you could walk out with antidepressants - whether your stress has any logical connection to your life, or not. It's not because people are reacting, feeling, being human – no, no, it's all some terrible organic circumstance. We like those. We like things we have no control over, and things that essentially have no origin of meaning in our actual lives. The organic world – where the term originates – is such a place, where blame can have no meaning.

This is why the gay gene movement took off in the early 90s amongst the gay community, itself. I was personally stunned to understand why gay men and women were so eager to see themselves as a biological incidence (or of course, in the dimmer light, dysfunction). But it became central to the idea of acceptance. Imagine a society where a sexuality deemed improper, was seen to be an effect that had a cause. Imagine the groundswell there would be to isolate the problem and eradicate it. Imagine the blame that would be affirmed in families that had somehow “produced” it in their children. It was much easier to believe that it happened somehow by chance, or at very least, as a result of something the individual could not necessarily be blamed for.

 

The concept of the “disease” is very similar. When we’re down, it’s quite easy to adopt this idea that we are at the throws of some terrible chemistry that can be fixed by doing nothing more than taking a pill. It’s not our fault, you see. You can’t make a judgement on the person, because it has no bearing to who they “really” are. We save our self-image, because we don’t really have to face anything too unpleasant about ourselves.

Mel Gibson would very much like us to believe that his crude sexism, racial slurs, and – but of course – phone smashing (I believe he failed to outdo Russ, all the same, in that department), are the result of a “disease”. He usually isn’t a nasty bigot like his father, heavens no. It’s that damn disease. And it’s not passed down from behaviour to behaviour – he no doubt “caught” it through his genes.

Mel is truly an astounding man. He has taken the conceptual “disease” of Alcoholism to an all new extreme. You see, not only is the disease making him drink, explaining his behaviour to reach for the glass. The disease is also implanting thoughts in his head that are completely out of character. Any longer at the hands of this disease, and Mel Gibson could very well start telling people he’s black - such is the power of the disease to usurp and alter entire personalities and personal ideologies. The years of thought and accusation that Mel was an anti-Semitic asshole like his Daddy are nothing but coincidence. He doesn’t hate Jews! No, no! He has a disease, and the disease was just making him act like he did. Other people get pissed and just have a habit of saying, well, what they actually think. Mel is special. Entire schemas enter his head, for no apparent reason. Poor Mel.

But what bothers me about this latest media blitz (I guess that means we’ve forgotten about Tom Cruise for now, does it?) isn’t just that Mel Gibson turned out to be a fuckwit. As I was saying, I’ve known that for years.

It’s that Mel Gibson is finished in Hollywood. Kaput. Hello, it’s a town run by the modern American Jew. Sure, some of them will turn around and say that because of their faith, they accept his apology, yada yada yada (but even this is a sort of sly backhander, in its own way). It still makes no difference. He'll never have the options, and the pull, ever again. It’s over. As it should be.

But you know what that means, don’t you? Where do you think the thug will take refuge, when his career in the good old U S of A is officially dead and buried? This is like Kylie Minogue, when she tried to create her own music, and the UK panned her - whaddya know, she returns to the country she basically shunned, and Kylie is our best friend again. But this is worse, of course. Much, much worse. At least we got rid of Kylie, again. Mel’s not going to have too many places left to go.

And like Kylie, we’ll embrace him. Ten bucks says we forgive poor Mel. Yes, we like to cut our poppies down – it’s because we’re so insecure, and in crucifying those who make it, we feel a little better about our own powerlessness (hey, we have the power to cut the powerful down, don’t we?). But because of that insecurity, in the end, we will take the fallen heroes back. We’re so insecure, if they tell us they’re home because they’ve realised they were wrong, and that we are indeed the country that anyone would choose, we lap it up without question. It makes us feel better about not having a choice, to have a big star affirm us by telling us we wouldn’t choose anywhere else, even if we did. Mel will come back, and he will tell us how much we have always meant to him. He's still called Australia home.And besides, unlike Kylie, we never actually got around to crucifying Mel. Truth be told, most erased his heritage from their minds, all together. It was easier that way. We didn't have to feel quite so rejected. It should be dead easy to remember, once the power dynamic suits us.

And sure, he’s a fuckwit. But go easy on poor Mel - he has a disease. It’s really not his fault. He’s really not like that. He's actually a top bloke.

“But he was so cool in Lethal Weapon!” remembered the radio presenter.

Mel’s coming back. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But the road to crucifixion will bring him home. God help us all.