Bloodred Beauty: A Meditation on Mel Gibson's Midlife Allure

Within seconds of Payback's opening, Porter's bloodred back fills the screen, except for his bullet-split shirt, which frames the two gunshot wounds at the center of the composition. A dubiously prepared doctor removes a bullet and plops it in a glass, where Porter's blood mixes with whiskey. Much later, he bleeds from his toes, hammered by the sadist minion of his enemy, Bronson. Wallace wears his own and others' gore, which is his most stunning adornment. Blood is a fugitive pigment as it dries, cracks, and lightens.

Lingering on the skin, it leaves a trace or can be rubbed off. But either we are not aware of these states or processes, or we never see them in Gibson's films. High gore, like a carefully chosen and skillfully applied rouge or lipstick, makes Mel's body more expressive than it would be in its natural state, maximizes its effect as both a terror and a seduction.

I'd like to watch Mel in a movie that creates emotions within characters, narrative, and audience, unfolding like flower petals, with that delicacy and inevitability.

Films thick with brutalities, such as Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1999), can provide such an experience. Mars, presiding over the red planet--fields of corpses and still-living, but slashed or battered bodies--can play the heartstrings with Venus's passionately capricious tenderness. Mel's blood-covered heroes offer catharsis differently. They purgatively nurse my in-the-bodyness by reminding me where I come from: the interior bloodiness of my mother's body, her blood that flowed with me through her vagina--the safety of her blood-red beauty. I have heard and read that birth traumatizes the newborn. if that is true, the shock site has yet to reveal itsself to me, and right now, the rich red palette of an exquisitely lurid Mel--bloodbathed birth phantasm--heals my current wound, my being bloodied in soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body by my parents' deaths.

I am still bleeding from my vagina, curious about the irregular periods that herald my menopause. Maybe, in my immanently permanent cessation of natural bleeding, Mel's extravagances of blood entrance me. He bleeds from just about anywhere. Because he doesn't have my sex's gift, he does the best he can. I do my best to forgive him for savagery. I am not a proper man.

Red Hot

Shimmer hot spots with fairy fey Sprinkle me red without delay

Bloodlust can lead to overkill, which may be war. But overkill may also be cosmetic excess or intensity, such as unrelenting red; a look that succeeds, if it does at all, through intimidation. I imagine that Mel's bloodred cosmetic overkill magically defends him from death, and that it turns him at times almost into a war god, like Mars, or into the destroyer goddess Kali archetypal Mother, who gives birth to human flesh and then devours it. Kali's worship demanded blood sacrifice, and the Mahanivanatantra tells us that because Kali "chews all things existing with Her fierce teeth, ... a mass of blood is imagined to be the apparel of the Queen of the Gods at the final dissolution." [8] Like the femme fatale whose scarlet lipstick signals that she may be a hunter of sex action or other forms of erotic vivacity, Mel knows how to wear his reds. He and the femme fatale are both lovely predators. Mel looks as dauntingly tantalizing as homoerotic spectacle Jiro Sakamoto, a bloodied beauty, in Pierre et Gilles's Les Plaisirs de la foret (1996), a series that melds the horrifically haunting qualities of both fairy tales and Sade.