Sunday, November 14, 2010

Out of Control


Mel Gibson and Oksana Grigorieva.

Sigh.

Pinpointing what is going on with Mel Gibson is like trying to shoot the villain in a hall of mirrors.  There’s just too much there!  The social critic is paralyzed by an overload of revealing and contradictory behaviors.  However, Mel and Oksana have been in court lately, trying to hammer out the custody of their baby Lucia, so it seems only sporting to try.

Apparently more Catholic than the pope, Mel regularly accompanied his wife Robyn and their seven children to an uber-Catholic church in California.  Robyn is an Anglican who never converted to Catholicism (uber or otherwise), and in fact Mel indicated he was none too confident in his wife’s salvation.

And who is, really?

Then Mel and Robyn separated because Mel was seeing Oksana.  The separation and affair were on the down-low (Robyn waiting for Mel to come to his senses?) until Oksana became pregnant, at which point Robyn filed for divorce.  A godly man, ashamed of how he had let down his church, his family, and himself, Mel expressed his remorse by inviting Oksana to accompany him to premieres and parties where their relationship could be sanctified in the glare of the red carpet lighting.

Then baby Lucia was born and we didn’t hear much from Mel and Oksana for a while.

And then, Holy Shit!  We heard Mel going totally crazy pants on the phone with Oksana.  And then we heard it again.  And again.  What in the world?

Hyperventilating over so many odd things:  how she dresses, how she went to sleep instead fellating him, her bosom, that he has no friends.  My favorite:  “I left my wife because we had no spiritual common ground!”  A remarkable -- and wearable -- observation embedded among the threats of rape, beating, and burial.

It’s so easy to write Mel off as a douche.  Because he probably is.  But what else is going on in that explosive head of his?

Mel is addicted to control.  For 26 years, Robyn Gibson enabled Mel’s addiction, helping Mel to keep it largely under wraps and out of the papers.  She had learned the drill and had decades to perfect it.  Oksana, on the other hand, neither knew nor cared about the drill.  Her courtship with Mel started with him wooing her and telling her she could do no wrong.  Imagine her surprise, once she was already in too deep to get out, when he lost his shit over some randomly misplaced shoe or unguarded observation.  Without Robyn to keep the forks facing the same way and the shirts evenly spaced in the closet, Mel just got more and more tense.  Who did he blame the tension on?  The one who was there, of course!  For Mel, Oksana represents both the cause and consequence of his failure to maintain order in his life.  Thus his rage upon awakening from a sex-induced walking coma to discover that disorder ruled, that he had mated with non-practicing non-Catholic, and that nothing -- not even the blow jobs -- was working out in his favor.

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1 comment:

Laura said...

Maybe someone will pay him to make another movie and he can become someone else for awhile.