The Wrong Lesson

I had meant to write about claims that Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism (which wasn’t exactly a secret before his recent DUI at any rate) should affect the evaluation of his art (which, for me, couldn’t get much lower in any case.) Fortunately, Roy (“though his public downfall is well-deserved and hilarious, I wouldn’t let it touch my view of his art, any more than I would refuse to drive a Volkswagen because of its associations with the Third Reich”) and Matt are on the case. It’s worth making a couple of distinctions here:

• Whether the creator of a work of art is a bad person is, I think, fundamentally beside the point. The fact that Bellow was a serial adulterer (or, for that matter, that Celine was a fascist) doesn’t make their novels worthless, and by the same token Braveheart doesn’t suck any more than it already does because Gibson is anti-Semitic. Being nice to your grandmother doesn’t make you a great artist, and being an asshole don’t mean you’re not a great artist.
• When bad politics are actually part of the film it’s a little different–you can’t easily separate form and content, and it’s part of what you experience. Evidently, this is relevant to The Passion of the Christ, which I haven’t seen, but I agree with Matt that reducing the film to its politics is still an impoverished way of looking at things (and, at any rate, what matters is what’s in the film, not what Gibson believes. It’s like the debates about whether John McCain in his heart of hearts is really anti-choice; it’s both ultimately unknowable and irrelevant in evaluating him as a public figure.)

The incident provides more evidence that Gibson is a crackpot, but as for his work it’s neither here nor there.