LA Times op-ed: Mel Gibson's dark fantasies and bloody porn [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

What's with Mel's bloody porn?
Gory scenes of torture in "The Passion of the Christ" and "Apocalypto" tell us much about Gibson's sensibilities.
By Richard Schickel (RICHARD SCHICKEL is a film critic for Time and the author of many books, including "Elia Kazan: A Biography.")
December 13, 2006

....why is Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" so upsetting? Let's set aside the director's drunken anti-Semitic rant of last summer (if that is possible). Let's also set aside the rank primitivism of "The Passion of the Christ" and its gazillion-dollar success (if that's possible). Let's simply concentrate on what Gibson is showing and telling in this particular movie....I know the movie topped the box-office charts last weekend. But I suspect that in the end, "Apocalypto" will perform like your average horror movie — doing well with bloodthirsty adolescent males for three days, then dropping 50% or 60% the following week. Maybe we should just let it die its death. Generally, we do not comment extensively on road kill. We just avert our eyes and hurry on past it.

That's especially so when the critical community has done its job, crying "Yuck" (in chorus) about this movie. I thought that was particularly true of Kenneth Turan, writing a follow-up piece in this newspaper in which he compared Gibson's approach to that of Clint Eastwood in his two current releases, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima," both of which depict death and make us question its military necessity but do not linger on the agonies of the final moments of people we've come to admire in the course of the films. This is, one might say, old-fashioned moviemaking, and the two films are the better for Eastwood's discretion. Or should we say his maturity?...

***

(Gibson) loves to get people painfully restrained and then do really bad things to them — Turan mentions the actor's drawing-and-quartering scene in "Braveheart" and the ghastly flogging of Jesus in "The Passion." We are not, in these instances, dealing with mere "violence." We are dealing with ritualized sadomasochism — an open manifestation of one of those dark fantasies that those in thrall to them must endlessly repeat and that have, of course, some sort of psychosexual component....Psychosexual violence of the kind Gibson is drawn to takes us to a truly ugly place. It is beyond the reach of the law, diplomacy, public policy or moral resolve. We can punish its practitioners only when fantasy turns into horrific, real-world acts. But we cannot cure them. They represent the irreducible, ineluctable evil of the world — the grimmest side of the social compact.

Gibson, of course, would argue otherwise. He believes that the blood of martyrs fertilizes good things like faith and freedom and that graphic depictions of their torments must strengthen our resolve in these matters. I say his slavering interest in the torture of the innocent and the idealistic is a form of pornography. I wouldn't ban it. But, were it not for stern critical duty, I would shun it — because it is infantile. And because it tells me more than I want to know about the filmmaker's mind, spirit and unspoken fantasies.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-schickel13dec13,0,7156372.story?coll=la-home-commentary