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

Maybe red scares us more than other colors because it is the hottest one. We yearn for its erotic brilliance but also run from it. But we burn in empathy with the uncommonly masculine Mel, the man's man who is a ladles' man, which means he is the perfect lady, though no more a proper woman than I am a proper man. Mel would not read red hot if his maximum masculinity did not require maximum femininity.

Garnet

Shimmer shimmer star that bleeds

Dressed in the color of garnet beads

Mel Gibson's physical beauty as public spectacle puts him in danger of being the journalist Susan Faludi's ornamental male. [12] Pronounced furrows across his forehead, major crow's feet, and deep nasal-labial folds--features disallowed for female film stars--do not detract from Gibson's ability to sell himself in today's ornamental culture that celebrates a cosmetic manhood in which the solely bodily attractiveness of a glamorous masculine pose performs the feminine vanity for which both feminists and misogynists have criticized women. If Gibson's midlife characters were only the ornamental male, which Faludi severely though compassionately critiques, then they would be simply prime beefcake and Mel could not exist.

His ornamentality is full of heart, like the gay rock star Curt Wild's in Velvet Goldmine and like Peter O'Toole's as the real-life action hero T. E. Lawrence--who was a homosexual--in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Wallace, and even the mostly hardboiled Porter, are bleeding hearts, poignantly so in scenes that display Mel at his most alluring, gleaming like a dark jewel, like a garnet.

Wallace rides on horseback into the market where his newlywed wife has just had her throat slashed by an English garrison chief. In slow motion, Wallace grows gradually larger onscreen as he comes closer to committing revenge. Arms raised, hands behind his head in the classic gesture that says, I am not a threat, he also resembles a marine Venus, and he is ravishing. Grayblue sky appears between the strands of hair that frame his heartbroken, pink-cheeked face which is darkened by stubble. My eyes as fingers roam over his deltoids and solid neck, his biceps and triceps, and stroke his forearms, from elbow to wrist and wrist to elbow, tarrying where the backlight emphasizes the soft hairiness near the tenderest skin of the inner arm.

The warrior exists in an altered state. [13] It enables action; and Mel, in that altered state, moves from ordinary human being and common masculinity into bloodred beauty. Perhaps gender is also an altered state of consciousness from which the colorful character may escape. Batchelor asserts that color connotes escape--from words, self, sanity, and concepts. [14] Let's add gender. He explains, too, that color represents loss of focus and identity. [15] Colorful Mel's Venus has lost the conventional action hero's common masculinity. As fe-mel(le), fe-Mel and fe-Mel(le), Braveheart's Venus offers in-the-bodyness to a many-gendered--or join me in a truly altered state of mind--a beyond-gendered gaze. [16] Either way, color queers stability, and as the gay filmmaker Derek Jarman understood, "Colour seems to have a Queer bent." [17] How exquisite fe-Mel would look in the rope of garnet beads my mother gave me years ago for a birthday present.