Professor, Madman, Father, Churchgoer

"Whose mistake am I anyway?"

Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar

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"Marge:    They're passes to a test screening of a new movie starring [gasps] Mel Gibson!
Homer:    Who else is in it?
Marge:    Who cares?  Mel Gibson! [...] Besides, it's not just his chiseled good looks.  "People" magazine says he's a devoted father, goes to church every week, and likes to fix things around the ... Homer, let's make love!"

 

The Simpsons - Beyond Blunderdome (1999)

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Watching The Professor and the Madman reminded me we're supposed to hate Mel Gibson now, as we all wait for him to slip up again and off-handedly bash Jews. Of course, you don't have to notify us every time Mel Gibson's been accused of antisemitic comments. For one thing, at his age he can be presumed engaged in some flavor or another of angry grandpa rambling at any given time. For another, by this point any new accusation loses relevance for sheer volume, seems like the accuser's just piling on for media attention. I guess Winona Ryder's a credible witness now? At least when she's joining in against an acceptable target.

 

Anyway, he plays the professor, Sean Penn plays the madman, and together they are... Task Force O.E.D.(dun-dun-duuuUUUNN!!!)

Not a bad flick all told, but definitely falls short of its potential. What could have been an exploration of intellectual aspirations and their denigration by powermongering both high and low-brow mires in strained populism, a shallow by-the-numbers condemnation of old-school cuckoo nesting, feeble attempts to paint the more likeable thinkers as everyday Joes, and a couple of predictable face-offs between plucky underdogs and entrenched elites. Nevertheless, the acting's palatable enough and at least the central topic hasn't been re-done to undeath, which is more than you can say for 99% of anything you'd watch these days. Worth a gander.

It's worth wondering though how Gibson's escaped ostracism despite repeatedly slipping up and making politically incorrect comments in a sociopolitical climate where many have lost their careers even for a perceived lack of inquisitorial zeal, much less for a single word slanted against official dogma. Not too hard to explain once you note the inordinate screen time The Professor and the Madman devotes to domesticity and romantic gestures in defiance of its true subject matter. Gibson is, once again, as always, playing to female tastes: a daddy figure, a prince (or at least rising star) most charming, a family man who challenges the world to better your station by proxy, schedules soulful apologies to his wife regardless of objective faults or guilt or lack thereof, opens his intellectual endeavor by an act of home improvement and nevertheless has to be rescued by his wife's eloquence on his behalf. How much of this was historically, anecdotally true of Murray's life (and more importantly, reflective of his milieu) is beside the point; it's the anecdote we want to hear.

Or at least it's the anecdote women want to hear. We conveniently forget which half of the population elevated and maintained his status in the limelight for forty years. For all the moral outrage at Gibson's comments, he remains politically correct to the widest, most entrenched, most fundamental determinant of plains-ape morality, to the female majority whose consensus dictates social acceptability, and whose choice of males to include and elevate to "prince charming" status or to banish to the fringes of society as disposables has shaped both our tendencies and our expectations for millions of years.

 

Political correctness is anything but egalitarian. It's a hierarchy of beatitude by fiat, and women simply outrank jews.