In Jewish business, anti-Semite Mel Gibson gets Golden Globe nomination for new film

You’ll Work in This Town Again – by JERRY STAHL

GOD bless Mel Gibson.

Of course, the deity doing the blessing is less likely to be Yahweh than Gukumatz, traditional Toltec god of culture, agriculture and opening weekend grosses.

By now the miracles have been quantified. “Apocalypto,” when it opened, promptly took the top box office spot with $15 million. Plus — what are the odds? — his Joseph Campbell-meets-Mesoamerica epic has been nominated for a Golden Globe, and is now being mentioned in the same sentence as Oscar.

It’s the last thing you’d expect for a movie in Mayan — especially one made by a man whose last project was a staging of Hate Crime Theater on a Malibu police-cam. Which begs the question: How low does a human being have to sink before Hollywood shoos him away and he can’t get an Oscar?

Stars have always been bent. Wallace Reid, the silent screen’s first heartthrob — and a full-on dope fiend — needed the studio to slip him morphine to keep production going. (This was the pre-rehab era; Reid died trying to kick his habit in a sanitarium.)

The celebrated Charlie Chaplin? In his 20s, he married a 16-year-old moppet; in his 30s, married another 16-year-old; in his 50s, settled down with a 17-year-old. But his penchant for child brides did not prevent him from receiving the longest standing ovation in Oscar history when he was given an honorary statue in 1972. Of course, Chaplin’s honor also marked his return from exile in Switzerland.

Once, Hollywood required scandal-ridden stars to go away for a while — a penitent hiatus before they could enjoy redemption, their second acts. So after being banished for years for her baby with Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman was, in 1956, finally welcomed back and given an Oscar.

Roman Polanski waited decades after fleeing a warrant for pedophilia before he finally snagged, in absentia, his best director statue for “The Pianist.” And even Leni Riefenstahl, the Führer’s darling, received a posthumous mention among the notable Hollywood dead at the 2003 Oscars.

But less than five months have passed between Mr. Gibson’s spouting of tequila-fueled bons mots on the dread power of the Hebrews and his basking in the glow of a No. 1 movie. His brief time in the wilderness may represent the fastest about-face since Democrats re-embraced Joseph Lieberman after he bested Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate race.

I know what you’re going to say: Fatty Arbuckle. The exception to the rule. Once bigger than Chaplin, he’s now remembered as the gold standard of degraded celebrity, someone who allegedly committed such unforgivable acts that he could never really come back. In 1921, the year he became the first comic actor to make $1 million a year, he was accused of raping and murdering an actress during an orgy at a San Francisco hotel.

It wasn’t Hollywood that finally barred the door to Arbuckle — friends like Buster Keaton helped him scrape together directing gigs under a pseudonym — his audience left him. Back then, the Christian reform movement blamed movies for an epidemic of teenage degeneracy, but these proto-Don Wildmons loved Arbuckle, who radiated less sex than a lawn chair.

So when the comedian was exposed as a sweaty, waif-crushing love-manatee, it wasn’t just a revolting crime — it was a core betrayal of his conservative fans. A jury found him innocent, but it was too late. In this industry, Arbuckle’s sin was worse than Mr. Gibson’s: he wasn’t bankable anymore.

That’s what it comes down to. If you’re going to offend your peers, parade unforgivable behavior and find all-new ways to turn your life into a nonstop shame-fest, you’d better also deliver big box office.

Speaking strictly as a paranoid Jew, I want my celebrity anti-Semites to be loaded mega-stars screaming into the night by the side of a road. How much more disturbing would it be to hear, say, Wilfred Brimley making the same racist claims over a bowl of groats, sober as a judge?

Mr. Gibson’s anti-Semitism is in fact the least interesting thing about him. Maybe he was simply craving that next level of public humiliation; maybe his espousing of such heinous opinions and subsequent talk show tortures are valuable research for his violent onscreen debasements.

The point to remember is that every award won by “Apocalypto,” every ticket sold, doesn’t mean that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” will start inching upward on Amazon. Mr. Gibson’s anti-Semitism may be as American as canned ham (that’s the dark truth of why he’s not been completely shunned), but his film will win accolades in spite of who he is — not because of it.

What do I know? I’m in this business because somebody made a movie about my life as a drug-addled loser in Hollywood. If lifelong integrity were required for gainful employment in the entertainment industry, then I’d still be sweating through my McDonald’s poly-blend, serving Happy Meals alongside other showbiz reprobates.

You simply can’t vet the moral worth — or at least, the absence of obvious, deep-seated depravity — of every potential Oscar nominee. If they only gave work, let alone awards, to non-sickos, non-egomaniacs and non-hypocrites, there would be nobody left to make movies but Tom Hanks.

(Jerry Stahl is the author, most recently, of “I, Fatty.”)