Mel Gibson is on the TV, squinting straight into the camera, talking about … me.
No, wait, this is even weirder: He’s talking to me.
And he’s pissed.
“You can say what you like about me,” he says. “I’m a public person, I suppose, although I don’t remember signing the paper saying I have no rights to privacy. You can pick on me. But like, if you start picking on my family while I’m out of town, get ready.”
He lets that last line hang, leaning forward and raising his eyebrows suggestively. Suddenly he’s Martin Riggs, the wild-eyed cop on the edge from “Lethal Weapon,” laying down the law to a wiseass perp (in a scene that usually comes just before the one where he lets loose a left hook that sends thug teeth flying like so many loose Chiclets. Um, honey, can you check the deadbolt?).
Gibson is appearing on Fox News in the first in a series of charged and bizarre interviews about his film “The Passion of the Christ”; the most recent was Monday’s hour-long exchange with Diane Sawyer on ABC. In addition to defending his movie against fears it will promote anti-Semitism, Gibson has used these appearances to complain about media coverage he says amounts to “character assassination.” While he kept the off-putting conspiracy talk to a minimum Monday night — he’s got a movie to promote, after all — he was never twitchier or more ominous than in his appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” last year.
“When you touch this subject, it does have enemies,” he said. “There are people sent.” Asked if he actually believed a reporter was out to discredit his faith, Mel slipped back into the role of tough cop. “I think he’s been sent,” he said. “That’s the way it is. You’ve got to deal with these things. I’m a big boy and I can take care of myself.”
There it was: a shout-out from Mad Max. At the time of that appearance, I had spent the past two months working on a story for the New York Times Magazine about the film, about a church Gibson is building near his home in Malibu, Calif., and about the Catholic traditionalism inspiring both projects. Requests for an interview were first ignored, then dismissed, and then answered, though not exactly in the form I expected — I idly imagined it might involve strolls across the Italian countryside and late-night chats about faith and history and this whole crazy circus of celebrity. Instead, Gibson elected to go on “The O’Reilly Factor” to complain about a “media attack” on his pro-Christian message.
In addition to representing what surely ranks as the most surreal experience in my professional life — it just doesn’t get much weirder than sitting at home in your pajamas, watching a movie star trash-talk you on Fox TV — Gibson’s appearance on “O’Reilly” transformed what was at the time widely viewed as a curious vanity project into a high-profile battle in the ongoing culture war.
Watching that P.R. offensive unfold at the time, I was simply dumbfounded — I’m a lone freelance journalist who had approached Gibson’s publicist with questions that were bound to come up when he decided to make a movie that not only represents a huge artistic and financial risk but also an open effort to evangelize. Why not simply address questions about faith, family and history? Why send a $400-an-hour litigator nicknamed “Mad Dog” after me, the New York Times and a homeowner’s group that reviewed plans for his church? Why employ the same ignore-and-then-attack strategy with scholars who wanted a say in how the Passion was portrayed? Why limit screening audiences to political conservatives, evangelical Christians and Kathie Lee Gifford? Why offer this response to a critical piece on the film by New York Times columnist Frank Rich: “I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick … I want to kill his dog.”
Really, Mel: Why go ballistic?
Over the course of the past year, I’ve flip-flopped between two explanations. The first is that the aggressive approach is all part of a preplanned, Machiavellian promotional campaign designed to antagonize Hollywood and appeal directly to church groups and the NASCAR crowd — in effect, to treat “The Passion of the Christ” as a political candidate aimed squarely at the red states. Which makes sense, given that “The Passion of the Christ” is a self-financed project with no big stars filmed entirely in the languages of ancient Palestine. It was rejected by his home studio Fox and snickered at by industry peers. He himself called it a potential “career killer.” And yet it opens on Feb. 25 in 2,000 theaters; all signs point to a monster opening weekend and a long life in the industry paradise of DVD aftermarket. Church leaders are buying huge stacks of advance tickets, some for themselves, some just to make a point.
The violence that some find so objectionable — and at a certain point in the film, I did start to wonder if Gibson’s amorous depiction of torture might be inspired by something a little baser than spirituality — is sure to draw moviegoers who don’t get fired up by religion but love a gory crowd pleaser like “The Patriot” or “Braveheart.” Far from being a “Battlefield Earth”-style bomb, Gibson’s movie is poised to easily recoup its creator’s $25 million investment. Gibson’s production company Icon is already talking about starting an entire division devoted to religious films.
Mark Silk, a professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Connecticut, recently completed a study of the media’s coverage of the film and the religious issues involved. His final report, titled “A Case Study in Media Manipulation?” details how Gibson fanned the flames of controversy while complaining about the heat. “Gibson appears to have been doing what Hollywood producers always try to do: get as much positive buzz as possible about his film before the public,” he says. “What’s different here, of course, is that the people he has gone to for such buzz have not been the usual collection of flacks and blurb-meisters but some of the most ideologically engaged media folks in the country.” Silk concludes, “To say this has been a press agent’s dream is to understate the case on a truly biblical scale.”
Then again, Gibson’s motivations might be much more, as they say, faith-based. As the premiere looms closer it seems increasingly clear that Gibson genuinely believes he has been targeted by shadowy forces aligned to subvert his message of salvation. The strongest evidence of this notion is the film itself, a rough cut of which I saw last week. “The Passion of the Christ” is indeed as bloody, grueling and ultimately difficult as Gibson promised it would be. (I clocked a climactic flagellation scene at just over 10 minutes.) Leaving aside the portrayal of Jewish clerics as vengeful villains and of Pontius Pilate as a sympathetic stooge who was essentially bullied into crucifying Christ - that matter is better debated by Bible scholars - the film is obviously the work of a man who believes he possesses the truth and that the truth has enemies.
I got a brief but intense tutorial in that perspective from Gibson’s father, Hutton, the 84-year-old author and activist who has criticized the Vatican for more than 30 years, writing books titled “Is the Pope Catholic” and a newsletter, “The War Is Now!” which rails against a pope he calls “Garrulous Karolus, the Koran Kisser.” Last November, Hutton Gibson invited me for a weekend at his home near Houston to share his revisionist takes on the pope’s declining health (“I think he’s playacting”), the scandals facing the Catholic Church (“The Vatican bred it all”), and historical accounts that 6 million Jews died in the holocaust (“I don’t believe that for a minute”).
In comments since that interview was published, Gibson has sought to downplay his father’s extremism while suggesting that the holocaust denials were somehow squeezed out of an innocent bystander as part of a sinister plot. “As soon as we started filming, that beacon of journalistic integrity the New York Times dispatched someone to go down there and take advantage of my father,” he told Sawyer. “Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father.”
I’ll admit that I was deeply anguished during the two days I spent listening to Hutton Gibson. But it wasn’t because I felt badly about “driving a wedge” between father and son, or about talking to a man who is, after all, as entitled to his opinion as the pope, a Supreme Court justice or anyone else active in public life at an advanced age. The source of my angst in Texas had nothing to do with Hutton Gibson’s age and everything to do with his worldview; as he laid out his alternate history of the 20th century, I had that gut-churning sensation familiar to any journalist witnessing something horrible — the shock of seeing it, laced by the excitement of being on hand to record it. And while I never assumed that Hutton spoke for his son, the film Mel produced and his comments about it certainly suggest father and son share a core of moral certainty that can alternately come off as righteous, uncompromising or pathological.
So which is it: Is Gibson a master marketer or a conspiracy-minded ideologue? After a year of reporting on and following this remarkable story, I still can’t decide. Gibson himself seems happy playing both roles. He said it best at the press conference at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios two years ago. Twirling a cigarette mischievously and looking for all the world like the wild-eyed cop who always gets his way, he told the crowd, “They think I’m crazy, and maybe I am. But maybe I’m a genius.”
My son pooped on me this morning.
The pooping occurred at approximately 6 a.m. after the 2-year-old leaped into bed and suggested that he’d be most grateful if I got up, escorted him downstairs and turned on his favorite program, a quasi-educational cartoon about a bilingual girl and her pet monkey.
What he actually said was this: “Daddy, up! Dora show! Dora show now!”
On most days, “Dora the Explorer” is good for a solid half-hour of pre-breakfast calm. But not today. Today Oscar motioned to his midsection and said he “hurt.”
Woefully misunderstanding the situation, I kissed him on the head and loosened his diaper. At which point he tore off the nappy and grabbed hold of my leg.
And then he pooped on my foot.
This may or may not have been an accident. Looking up at me in the messy slow-motion moments that followed, his expression could only be described as satisfied.
I have two things to say about this. First: It is truly remarkable how tolerant of bodily waste one becomes raising small children. Before I became a dad, the news that my everyday routine would include being defecated upon would have sent me diving for a home vasectomy kit. It is some measure of how far I’ve come (or how low I’ve sunk) that Oscar’s outburst prompted little more than an exasperated moan as I backed away in search of industrial-grade cleaning supplies.
All of which is well and good — there’s no point getting overly worked up or grossed out over something so ubiquitous to family life that we parents simply call it “number two.”
The second thing I have to say is harder to reckon with. Because the truth is this mishap was entirely in keeping with the general climate of aggression, crankiness, impatience and determined messiness that has come to characterize Oscar’s personality over the last year or so. He demands. He resists. He screeches.
We’ve reached the point where I find myself seriously pondering the question: Is my kid a dick, or is he just 2?
Because you never know. As much as it goes against the current mode of progressive, project-management-style parenting, I take it for granted that some kids are trouble right out of the gate. They’re the preschool gangsters and playground terrorists, flicking boogers and insults at those they’ve identified as too weak to fight back. Just as some kids are born sweet-tempered and naturally gentle, others arrive as thuggish as HMO claims adjusters.
But heaven forbid you ever speak this basic truth among parents. Acknowledging a child’s dickishness is truly one of the last taboos of modern family life.
A child may have “behavioral issues” or “developmental challenges,” but the basic character of a kid must never be called into question. It’s always, “Cody must be tired,” or “Dakota needs a snack” and never, “Wow, Taylor’s kind of a prick.”
The trouble, of course, is that it’s exceedingly difficult to distinguish garden-variety assholery from the normal psychosis of toddlerhood.
Some naughtiness is entirely normal, I know. The pileup of parenting books on my bedside table assures me that kids between 13 and 36 months often experience “challenging developmental steps.” They’re testing limits, exploring their autonomy, learning to control their emotions.
One need look no further than the table of contents of the modern standard, “What to Expect: The Toddler Years,” to get a quick and terrifying picture of how toddlers operate. Whole sections are devoted to “antisocial behavior,” “caveperson language,” “crankiness,” “annoying habits picked up at play group,” “jealousy,” “biting,” “wall art and other destructive drawing,” “toothbrushing tantrums,” “coat combat,” “repeated ‘no’s'” and “impatience (now!)”
You’d never know it looking at him, but my son samples freely from the standard menu of misbehavior. In pictures he’s doughy and sweet with a mop of blond hair, big blue eyes and an irresistible grin. He couldn’t be cuter, really. Most of the time, especially when he’s at play, in the bath or asleep, he is by any measure the most perfect creature ever to grace the earth. Then he whacks you on the head with a spoon, laughs like a banshee and tells his mother that her new earrings are ugly and stupid.
Much of this nastiness is standard-issue obstinacy, but it mostly takes the form of an obsession with control. Control and honor. It often feels like I’m living with an embittered and incontinent samurai who must enforce his will and save face at all costs. As such, he’s ritualistic and rigid, demanding that I and not his mother unbuckle him from the minivan or that he receive one red and one purple Flintstones vitamin or that his diluted fruit juice go in the cup with the frog and not the one with the rabbit. Any deviation from the script is met with screams of protest and a flurry of little flailing fists.
We’ve tried discipline, distraction and even strict adherence to his demands, but the maddening fact is you never really know when he’s going to go ballistic. At an airport security checkpoint recently, he blew up when we removed his shoes and then found a new, more extravagant pitch of tantrum when we tried to put them on again. Later at a Chinese restaurant, he dumped his noodles on the floor and then ran among the tables, licking the tops of the Hoisin sauce containers. At a family barbecue last week, he greeted an elderly relative with a swift punch to the nuts (mercifully, he aimed left).
I wish I could say I take all this in stride, but the fact is it bothers me more than I can say. I’ve heard people without kids complain that parents have a blind spot when it comes to their own kids, that otherwise reasonable adults are only too happy to gush over the preciousness of their progeny while their little darlings run riot like English football hooligans.
I seem to have the opposite problem; instead of glossing over my son’s misdeeds (or, say, chalking them up to standard-issue tomfoolery), I latch on to them as terribly important signifiers of my kid’s true identity. Far more troubling than the chaos or general untidiness of parenthood is the ongoing agony of distinguishing passing phases from the first signs of what sort of person your child is and will forevermore be.
Never mind that his days are spent gnawing on blocks and smearing mucus across his cheek. Somehow, I can’t help feeling that he came in fully loaded, that his identity is complete and while he may get better at sharing his toys and using the potty, this is pretty much it. This is him. Behold my son, the dick.
No wonder so few parents are willing to acknowledge their own kids’ misbehavior. Doing so not only insults your offspring, it inevitably leads to reflection. For if my kid is a red-hot pig, what does that make me?
And the truth is I’m very familiar indeed with many of the despicable aspects of my 2-year-old. I too am often overwhelmed by a desire to kick and scream and punch creepy old strangers in the nuts. Like my son, I’m often irrational, hate being told what to do and cranky when sleep-deprived. But, really, who isn’t? Aren’t we all, on some deep and rarely acknowledged level, temperamental toddlers? We’re just better at hiding and managing it, thanks to helpful crutches like cocktails, reality TV and cardio boxing classes.
For now all I can hope is that my son finds some crutches sooner rather than later. He just turned 3, actually, graduating out of “terrible twos” and into a period rumored to be less traumatic and tumultuous. My two oldest kids are 6 and 8, and I like to think they’ve never been anything less than the sweet and mostly respectful darlings they are today. If I’m being entirely honest, however, I’m pretty sure I could recall a horror story or three.
None of which lessens today’s trauma. Developmental misbehavior may be a normal part of growing up, but pooping on your dad? That’s just wrong.
I’ve never been particularly religious. I’ve got Canadian Quakers on my dad’s side and Midwestern Protestants on my mom’s, but growing up in ’70s and ’80s Los Angeles, whatever spiritual yearnings I possessed were satisfied via a consuming passion for “Star Wars.” My best friend Jimmy was an altar boy at a church where they prayed to a spooky guy on a cross. I was fine with Obi-Wan.
But then I grew up and fell in love with a Beverly Hills Jewess, and we got married by a cool Reform rabbi who, unlike my mother-in-law, didn’t mind that my first name began with the word “Christ.” And now we have three kids, who, by mysterious matriarchic law, became Jews the moment they touched down at Cedar’s Sinai. All of which explains how I find myself a big goy surrounded by Jews. My kids go to a school called Temple Israel, where they’re drilled in Hebrew and the demands of their religious calling (nothing too major, just tikkun alum — heal the world). At school, there’s a name for families like ours: interfaith. The three kids and the wife, they’re the faithful. I’m the inter.
All of which is fine, really. Even as I stubbornly remain nonchosen, I love that my kids are part of such a deep and durable tradition. I love that they’re soaking up the high value placed on learning and argument, jokes and food. I’ve even come to love Shabbat at my in-laws’ every Friday. And while I don’t think I’ll ever understand gefilte fish, and I’ve been to a few bar and bat mitzvahs that contradicted everything I believe about decency and goodness, on balance I have no regrets about being the flaming shaygetz father figure of a proud Jewish household.
Still, the interfaith equation does get complicated. The biggest hitch emerged in our carefree pre-parenthood years, back when our fiercest arguments were over where to get takeout. Even then, we’d hit a rough patch a few weeks near the end of the year. It was like clockwork. On the day after Thanksgiving we entered the Season of the Perpetual Bicker. The particulars are too boring to detail here, but let’s just say we experienced irreconcilable differences over a holiday whose name shall not be mentioned. Turns out my lovely bride not only didn’t celebrate this holiday but kind of hated it.
She was unmoved by the irresistible aroma of fresh-cut pine and unconvinced that decorating our very own miserable/sweet Charlie Brown sapling with glass balls and paper ornaments was a cultural, not religious, tradition. She failed to see the charm in my abiding love for Claymation Rudolph or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir holiday album.
I began to yearn for the tree, the cookies, the stockings. I had vivid sense memories of tiptoeing out of my bedroom in footsie pajamas, sneaking into the living room to behold the glittering, obscene pileup. As an adult, I couldn’t write off all of that. I didn’t mind ditching Easter and had no trouble donning a kippah every Friday or spinning a dreidel on Chanukah or reading aloud from that wacky Passover booklet about pestilence and frogs. But I found I couldn’t go the extra step of abandoning the holiday whose name shall not be mentioned.
I began discussing our holiday plans with the neutrality and good cheer of a Fox News pundit. While my fellow besieged goyim got fired up in defense of God and faith and family, I felt the righteous call to defend the sanctity of superficial crap. I never gave two shits about tinsel before I got married. Now I wanted to coat our house in it.
And so we ended up where all bickering interfaith couples end up: couples therapy.
My wife picked the shrink. She told me not to make a big deal out of the fact that the shrink was Jewish. What, we should waste our time with one of the three non-Jewish psychiatrists in L.A.? And so we spent six sessions tromping recklessly through a minefield known in interfaith circles as “The December Dilemma.” Never before have the emotional dimensions of a tangerine in the toe of a sock ever been so fully explored. I demanded respect for the tangerine. She demanded respect for going to the movies and eating Chinese food.
Eventually, we arrived at our bottom lines. No matter how superficial or secular the holiday had become, she argued, it was still Christ’s birthday, and my beloved just couldn’t be party to that. No tree, no mistletoe, no Santa. I took stock and realized … none of that mattered to me, either. I didn’t care about the trimmings — they were mostly tacky and meaningless anyway. What mattered to me, as both a grown-up and a parent, was the make-believe. When I boiled it down, all I wanted was someone magical to break into our house and leave us cool stuff.
It began, like all holidays and superheroes do, with an origin story. Late one night a few years ago, we told our children, a stranger appeared on our doorstep. It was a chicken, a Bantam rooster with pure white plumage and an impressive red crown and wattles. He was from the Snowy North. And he came with good news: He’d visit our family with gifts and good cheer every year on this night onward. All we had to do is write our wishes on a note and burn them before going to bed. He’d fly over our house, reassemble the ashes and then, while we slept, haul our goodies into the house and pack them into pants hung over the fireplace.
Every year the holiday gets more elaborate. That’s the thing about a customized holiday; since all the traditions were plucked from thin air, new ones materialize all the time. We now have a songbook of Winter Wonderday classics that includes a recording of “Born to Be Wild” with all-poultry vocals. While burning our wish lists, we now raise our voices in a song that includes a line written by 7-year-old Charlie: “Santa is fired from the job/ He gives presents like a slob.” We’ve also begun the custom of leaving out a tray of food near the pant-festooned mantle — Irving, the kids discovered, favors sunflower seeds and fruit juice. And we now go to great lengths to build a nest for Irving, the construction of which begins with a Winter Wonderhike to collect twigs and leaves, which we then stuff inside a ring of chicken wire (and which is mysteriously littered the next day with soft white feathers that look very much like they were clumsily extracted from an expensive pillow).
In recent years we’ve spent the evening with bowls of candy, frosting and cookie pieces, building entire encampments of Snowy North gingerbread chicken coops. And we’ve found that no Winter Wondereve is complete without a feast at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, where we delight in the combination of maple-soaked fried dough and the sacrificial body of our host.
Friends and family are mostly supportive, but it has been suggested that Winter Wonderday may needlessly confuse our kids or expose them to ridicule from nonbelievers. One can only guess what the playground alpha boys and girls make of our kids’ wide-eyed reverie over the magical talking snowchicken who fills their pants with presents. I’m happy to report, however, that the kids take it in stride. To hear them tell it, our family has an exclusive contract with Irving, so it’s no wonder that other kids might not understand, or even be jealous. And instead of keeping quiet about the holiday, they embellish it — in their version of the myth, Irving works on an “ice farm” where all ice cream and popsicles are made and where he’s assisted by an army of fluffy white helper chicks. On the way to school today, my eldest son, Charlie, told me Irving selected our family over all others because he heard my wife and I bickering about the holiday all the way from the Snowy North.
Charlie is a smart, sophisticated third grader, but when it comes to Winter Wonderday, he still believes. He buried his doubts last year after obtaining what he believes is definitive proof of Irving’s existence. In the weeks leading up to the big day, we spent hours discussing plans to photograph or videotape Irving during his visit. The stakes were high, we understood. If the so-called Irving plot was discovered, our feathered friend might take back our presents and never visit us again. I rejected a proposal to stay up all night inside a hidden sofa cushion fort. Charlie accepted that we couldn’t justify the cost of a motion-activated video camera. And so we settled on a more straightforward strategy. Alongside the 800-twig-count nest, we left a note and a camera. “We want to see what you look like! We hope your feathers are sturdy enough to push the button!” And lo and behold, we awoke the next morning to discover not only a bounty of gifts but also a blurry but identifiable Polaroid self-portrait of a noble white chicken that could only be Irving himself.
The kids are 8, 6 and 2 now, and Winter Wonderday is much more than an in joke (no Festivus or Christmakkah for us!). Several other families join us each year. An old friend has even begun marking the holiday with his interfaith family all the way in Maui. And the kids have begun evangelizing to friends, pointing out all the ways Winter Wonderday is better than that other holiday. Nests are more eco-friendly than trees. Unlike Santa, who is so busy with his Coke billboards and shopping mall appearances that he often forgets presents and leaves behind a mess of chimney soot, Irving is courteous enough to enter through the (tinsel-decorated) dog door.
And perhaps, most important, pants are way bigger than stockings.
