Let me start off by saying I don't care what anyone says - the Mel Gibson phone calls are funny.
Sure, they're disturbing and a bit terrifying. But how could you not find it endlessly hilarious to hear Mel Gibson - aka Mad Max, aka Braveheart - snarling with dramatic angst, practically panting and hyperventilating, drunkenly hurling whatever invective he could think of at his former girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, who recorded these calls without his knowledge and which are now out there for your listening pleasure on the World Wide Web?
You'd think a guy who once proclaimed he had so much love for Jesus Christ that he made a hit movie about the man's last hours on Earth would be a peaceful, forgiving soul. But as the calls have shown, that's not the case. Gibson goes off on his ex like a rabid pit bull, reaching crazed crescendos of profane vulgarity I haven't heard since the last time I saw Blowfly in concert.
Not only can I not quote most of the things he said, I can barely paraphrase them. But let's just say, the man establishes he needs three things in his life: 1) a decent woman to give him some good, good loving; 2) his newborn baby girl; and 3) a maid. Or else he'll burn the house down.
There is something else I got from the tapes: a man in dire pain. It appears that the notorious night back in 2006 when he drunkenly made offensive remarks about Jews and female cops as police officers took him into custody for drunken driving and despicable behavior has turned him into a Hollywood pariah. In these recordings, he lays out how bad times have gotten: He doesn't have any friends; he's had to sell things (including his box seats at Lakers games); his longtime marriage has dissolved; and his career is pretty much in the toilet.
Of course, I'm not saying you should take pity on dude. After all, he makes himself out to be a racist, a misogynist, a guy who isn't afraid to knock a woman's teeth out while she's holding their baby daughter in her arms, and an all-around sociopath, always ready with a death threat or two.
And yet, if you talk to certain psychologists, Gibson's behavior is not that out of the ordinary. In an interview posted on Salon.com, Washington, D.C.-area therapist Steven Stosny says it's not Gibson's anger that's unusual. "The difference isn't in emotional intensity; it's in boundary violations," Stosny says. "He's threatening her and intimidating her, and most couples don't cross that line. But abusers feel entitled; they feel they have a right to do what they're doing, because they feel like victims. The way she dresses humiliates him. The way her breasts look humiliates him. It's a failure of compassion - he's not able to see the world through her eyes. He's just seeing her as an extension of him."
Stosny also says he hears pain in Gibson's voice. "There's a lot of self-loathing," he says. "This is a person who really can't stand himself."
Another expert who hears emotional pain and distress in every growl is Dr. John Grohol, who runs the PsychCentral.com Web site. In a piece he posted on the site - "Mel Gibson, Bipolar Disorder and Alcohol" - he breaks down how Gibson's rants don't sound like the rants of a man with bipolar disorder. (Gibson said he was diagnosed with the disorder in the 2008 documentary "Acting Class of 1977.") Grohol mainly chalks it up to two things: the self-entitlement (or narcissism) that Stosny hints at - and getting hammered. "Many celebrities suffer from this concern - it comes with the territory of years of people worshipping the ground you walk upon," writes Grohol, later adding, "When a person is drunk, they also tend to focus on themselves and their own feelings -- not on others."
Whether Mel Gibson can bounce back (again!) from these recordings remains to be seen.
(As someone who thought singer R. Kelly's career would be over after his sex-tape scandal, I've decided anything is possible in this forgive-and-forget world.)
I find Gibson more fascinating now than I ever did during his '80s/'90s ascension from Aussie matinee idol to A-list movie star to Oscar-winning auteur. Never at any of those points did I sense we were getting the real Mel Gibson. But these recordings give us the really-real Mel: a mean, nasty, deplorable, and ultimately, human figure. A man just as flawed, confused and scared as most of us can be.
When it comes to recorded celebrity meltdowns, Mel Gibson has officially raised the bar.
