Those Who Forget the Past (40 page)

FRANK RICH

The Greatest Story Ever Sold

Then Gibson expressed his feelings about Rich. “I want to kill him,” he said. “I want his intestines on a stick. . . . I want to kill his dog.”

—
The New Yorker,
September 15, 2003

PETA MEMBERS may be relieved to learn that I do not have a dog.

As for the rest of Mel Gibson's threats, context is all: the guy is a movie star. Movie stars expect to get their own way. They are surrounded by sycophants, many of them on the payroll. Should a discouraging word somehow prick the bubble of fabulousness in which they travel, even big-screen he-men can turn into crybabies. Mr. Gibson's tirade sounded less like a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini than a tantrum from Sinatra in his cups.

My capital crime was to write a column on this page last month reporting that Mr. Gibson was promoting his coming film about the crucifixion,
The Passion,
by baiting Jews. As indeed he has. In January, the star had gone on The O'Reilly Fac
tor
to counter Jewish criticism of his cinematic account of Jesus's final hours—a provocative opening volley given that no critic of any faith had yet said anything about his movie (and wouldn't for another three months). Clearly he was looking for a brawl, and he hasn't let up since. In the
New Yorker
profile, Mr. Gibson says that “modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church,” a charge that Abraham H. Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League, labels “classic anti-Semitism.” Mr. Gibson also says that he trimmed a scene from
The Passion
involving the Jewish high priest Caiaphas because if he didn't do so “they'd be coming after me at my house, they'd come to kill me.”

Who is this bloodthirsty “they” threatening to martyr our fearless hero? Could it be the same mob that killed Jesus? Funny, but as far as I can determine, the only death threat that's been made in conjunction with
The Passion
is Mr. Gibson's against me.
The New Yorker
did, though, uncover one ominous threat against the star: “He's heard that someone from one of his hangouts, the Grand Havana Room, a Beverly Hills smoking club, said that he'd spit on him if he ever came in again.” Heard from whom? What is the identity of that mysterious “someone”? What do they smoke at that “smoking club”? Has the Grand Havana Room been infiltrated by Madonna's Kabbalah study group? I join a worried nation in praying for Mr. Gibson's safety.

His over-the-top ramblings are, of course, conceived in part to sell his product. “Inadvertently, all the problems and the conflicts and stuff—this is some of the best marketing and publicity I have ever seen,” Mr. Gibson told
The New Yorker
. That's true—with the possible exception of the word “inadvertently” —and I realize that I've been skillfully roped into his remarkably successful p.r. juggernaut. But I'm glad to play my cameo role—and unlike Bill O'Reilly, who sold the film rights to one of his books to Mr. Gibson's production company, I am not being paid by him to do so.

What makes the unfolding saga of
The Passion
hard to ignore is not so much Mr. Gibson's playacting fisticuffs but the extent to which his combative marketing taps into larger angers. The
Passion
fracas is happening not in a vacuum but in an increasingly divided America fighting a war that many on both sides see as a religious struggle. While Mr. Gibson may have thought he was making a biblical statement, his partisans are turning him into an ideological cause.

The lines are drawn on
seethepassion.com
, the most elaborate Web site devoted to championing Mr. Gibson. There we're told that the debate over
The Passion
has “become a focal point for the Culture War which will determine the future of our country and the world.” When this site criticizes the
Times,
it changes the family name of the paper's publisher from Sulzberger to “Schultzberger.” (It was no doubt inadvertent that Mr. O'Reilly, in a similar slip last week, referred to the author of a
New Republic
critique of Mr. Gibson, the Boston University historian Paula Fredriksen, as “Fredrickstein.”) This animus is not lost on critics of The Passion. As the A.D.L.'s Rabbi Eugene Korn has said of Mr. Gibson to
The Jewish Week,
“He's playing off the conservative Christians against the liberal Christians, and the Jews against the Christian community in general.”

To what end? For the film's supporters, the battle is of a piece with the same blue state–red state cultural chasm as the conflicts over the Ten Commandments in an Alabama court-house, the growing legitimization of homosexuality (Mr. Gibson has had his innings with gays in the past), and the leadership of a president who wraps public policy in religiosity and called the war against terrorism a “crusade” until his handlers intervened. So what if “modern secular” Jews—whoever they are— are maligned by Mr. Gibson or his movie? It's in the service of a larger calling. After all, Tom DeLay and evangelical Christians can look after the Jews' interests in Israel, at least until Armageddon rolls around and, as millennialist theology would have it, the Jews on hand either convert or die.

Intentionally or not, the contentious rollout of
The Passion
has resembled a political, rather than a spiritual, campaign, from its start on The O'Reilly Factor. Since the star belongs to a fringe church that disowns Vatican II and is not recognized by the Los Angeles Roman Catholic archdiocese, his roads do not lead to Rome so much as Washington. It was there that he screened a rough cut of the movie to conservative columnists likely to give it raves—as they did.

The few Jews invited to
Passion
screenings by Mr. Gibson tend to be political conservatives. One is Michael Medved, who is fond of describing himself in his published
Passion
encomiums as a “former synagogue president”—betting that most of his readers will not know that this is a secular rank falling somewhere between co-op board president and aspiring Y.M.H.A. camp counselor. When non–right-wing Jews asked to see the film, we were turned away—thus allowing Mr. Gibson's defenders, in a perfect orchestration of Catch-22, to say we were attacking or trying to censor a film we “haven't seen.” This has been a constant theme in the bouquet of anti-Semitic mail I've received since my previous column about
The Passion
.

I never called the movie anti-Semitic or called for its suppression. I did say that if early reports by Catholic and Jewish theologians alike were accurate in stating that
The Passion
revived the deicide charge against Jews, it could have a tinderbox effect abroad. The authorities I cited based their criticisms on a draft of the movie's screenplay. (The most forceful critic of the movie has been Sister Mary Boys, of the Union Theological Seminary in New York.) I have since sought out some of those who have seen the movie itself, in the same cut praised by Mr. Gibson's claque this summer. They are united in believing, as one of them puts it, that “it's not a close call—the film clearly presents the Jews as the primary instigators of the crucifixion.”

Mr. Gibson would argue that he is only being true to tradition, opting for scriptural literalism over loosey-goosey modern revisionism. But by his own account, he has based his movie on at least one revisionist source, a nineteenth-century stigmatic nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, notable for her grotesque caricatures of Jews. To the extent that there can be any agreement about the facts of a story on which even the four Gospels don't agree, his movie is destined to be inaccurate.
People
magazine reports he didn't even get the depiction of the crucifixion itself or the language right (
The
Passion
is in Latin, Aramaic, and Hebrew, not the Greek believed to have been the
lingua franca
of its characters). Like any filmmaker, Mr. Gibson has selectively chosen his sources to convey his own point of view.

If the film does malign Jews, should it be suppressed? No. Mr. Gibson has the right to release whatever movie he wants, and he undoubtedly will, whether he finds a studio to back him or rents theaters himself. The ultimate irony may be that Jews will help him do so; so far the only studio to pass on the movie is Fox, owned by a conservative non-Jew, Rupert Murdoch. But Mr. Gibson, forever crying censorship when there hasn't been any, does not understand that the First Amendment is a two-way street. “He has his free speech,” Mr. Foxman says. “I guess he can't tolerate yours and mine.”

As for Mr. Gibson's own speech in this debate, it is often as dishonest as it is un-Christian. In the
New
Yorker
article, he says that his father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, “never denied the Holocaust”; the article's author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a “tragedy” in an interview he gave to the writer Christopher Noxon for a
New York Times Magazine
article published last March. Neither the word “tragedy” nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that
Times
article, and according to a full transcript of the interview that Mr. Noxon made available to me, Hutton Gibson said there was “no systematic extermination” of the Jews by Hitler, only “a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs. . . .” (This is consistent with Hutton Gibson's public stands on the issue; he publishes a newsletter in which the word Holocaust appears in quotes.)

Then again, Mel Gibson's publicist, Alan Nierob, also plays bizarre games with the Holocaust. He has tried to deflect any criticism of the Gibsons by identifying himself in both the
New
York Post
and
The New Yorker
as “a founding member of the national Holocaust Museum.” That's not a trivial claim. The founders of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington are an elite donors' group specifically designated as such; they gave a minimum of a million dollars each and are inscribed in granite on the museum's wall. Mr. Nierob is not among them. Presumably he was instead among the 300,000 who responded to the museum's first direct-mail campaign for charter members. That could set you back at least 25 bucks.

Mr. Gibson has told the press that he regards
The Passion
as having actually been directed by the Holy Ghost. If the movie is only half as fanciful as its promotional campaign, I'd say that He has a lock on the Oscar for best director. A Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for Mr. Gibson himself, though, may be something of a reach.

POSTSCRIPT

Peter Boyer's September 15, 2003, article in
The New Yorker
contained at least three factual errors: 1) the malignant and false insinuation that the freelance journalist Christopher Noxon, who was assigned by
The New
York Times
Magazine
to write an article about Mel Gibson's sponsorship of a new church in Malibu, California, had a personal agenda in undertaking the story. (Mr. Boyer wrote: “Some local homeowners objected to [the construction of the church] as it made its way through the zoning process. One homeowner suggested that his son, a freelance journalist named Christopher Noxon, write about the church.”); 2) the statement that Mel Gibson's personal publicist was a “founding member of the National Holocaust Museum” in Washington, D.C., which he was not; and 3) the statement that Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson's father, had told Mr. Noxon “that the Holocaust was a tragedy that had been hyped out of proportion,” when Mr. Gibson had said nothing of the kind to Mr. Noxon.

Though I pointed out errors 2) and 3) in my subsequent
New York
Times
column of September 21, 2003 (collected within these pages),
The
New Yorker
has yet to publish a correction of any of them (as of this writing, January 2004). Now, Mr. Boyer has used this anthology as an occasion to state that one of these errors—Hutton Gibson's characterization of the Holocaust as a tragedy—was based on his “own reporting,” rather than Mr. Noxon's, attributing the mix-up in
The New Yorker
to an “editing error,” whatever that means. (Presumably, this errant sentence not only went through The New Yorker's fact checkers but was read in galleys by Mr. Boyer.)

What is Mr. Boyer's “own reporting” on this question? He doesn't explain where Hutton Gibson is on record anywhere referring to the Holocaust as a tragedy. Apparently, we are supposed to take this assertion on faith.

For those who want actual reporting, here is an excerpt from the transcript of Christopher Noxon's taped interview with Hutton Gibson and his wife, Joye, for Noxon's
New York Times Magazine
article. Far from being “dragged” into the story about Mel Gibson, as Mr. Boyer writes, Hutton Gibson invited Mr. Noxon to visit him and interview him at length at his home in Cypress, Texas. Hutton Gibson is a public figure in his own right, the author of three books on Traditionalism, the publisher of a quarterly newsletter on that subject, an activist, and a talk-radio guest. As I wrote in my column, Hutton Gibson refers to the Holocaust in quotes in his newsletter, “The War Is Now!” Here he elaborates on his views about what he calls the “Holocaust.”

CN: What about the concentration camps?

HG: They had to rebuild the whole thing. Who knows if it was there in the first place? They say the Germans blew it up. They blew up the plumbing and left the building there. It's physically impossible. Go and ask an undertaker who operates a crematorium or something like that what's it take to get rid of a dead body. It takes one liter of petrol and twenty minutes. Now, six million?

Joye: There weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe.

HG: Anyway there were more after the war than there were before. They based it on one figure in the almanac—the figure of 1939, I think, showed six million two hundred thousand Jews in Poland. And after the war it showed two hundred thousand of them—therefore there were six million gone they must be dead. But they were gone everywhere.