Is it even worth going there? Is anything to be gained by observing that, lo and behold, the boys from South Park had got it right, and pretty precisely, years ago now?
The relevance of this dismal little episode for our course is not simply that the seemingly imperturbable 'liberalism' of the Hollywood image factory is indeed, and very deeply, mediated by not-so-distant events in the Middle East, but that the bilious 'unconscious' of the 'moral/religious subject' of late capitalism (Mel's determination to accentuate the suffering Christ, the suffering-unto-death of spirit in today's hyper-materialist world) is nothing but a cut-and-paste job stringing together the weariest, emptiest and most stereotypical of racist slogans about Jews. The 'truth' of Mel's tirade is that there is no depth here at all: nothing but a deposit-box stuffed full of promotional flyers from the KKK.
Whither 'man'? Ecce homo?
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I for one agree whole heartedly, Though it is of no surprise that Mel's personal opinions are lacking depth and are just a generic veneer of anti-semitism. It could easily be argued that his career (at least his directorial career) is made up of historical pastiches- Braveheart, the Patriot, We Were Soldiers are just shiny images of feudal Scotland, Colonial America and the Vietnam war respectively, images of a memory of an age.
I'm not sure if thats completely on topic but I will take any excuse to poke fun at the man once semi-deified as the road warrior!
Posted by: Daniel Eisenberg | August 3, 2006 11:28 AM
I just read that Mel Gibson once starred in a movie called "Conspiracy Theory", in 1997, as a taxi driver who discusses conspiracy theories, of which one turns out to be true . . .
Then, nine years later, off camera, he is driving again, and . . .
Aside from the irony, I thought it tied in uncannily (conspiratorially?) with the whole feedback loop running between representation and reality we were discussing in tutorials.
I have to rent that movie now, just to see if it's as wonderfully true as it seems! Almost surreal . . . anyway, I'm amused.
Posted by: Doug | August 30, 2006 10:10 PM