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

Joanna Frueh

He walks in blood, like women do. When I lost my mother, I discovered Mel Gender and nurture. These are the crisscrossing avenues I travel as I meditate on Mel.

He and Mel Gibson are not the same. Gibson is a real person whose work in film, primarily as an action hero, has made him one of the most famous men in the world. Mel is an intimate and epic individual, a fetish and fixation that serve mechanisms of displacement, projection, and transference. These beauties and functions do not differ from those of other movie stars, except that Mel has provided me with a psychic, emotional, and intellectual sustenance that no other fantasy figure derived from popular culture figure has.

Braveheart (1995) is Gibson's tour de force. He won an Academy Award for directing the film, which also took the Award for Best Picture, and he stars as Scotland's medieval patriot leader, William Wallace, Braveheart himself. I watched Braveheart for the first time in May 2000, a couple of months after Mom's death. Dad had died eight months earlier. As the art historian Griselda Pollock writes, "The subject is always massively unknown to itself," and little did I know that, in my bereft state, I needed both to love a hero and to be one. [1] I viewed almost all of Gibson's more than thirty films over the summer of 2000. Braveheart and Payback (1999) are my favorites. Not only are they aesthetically compelling--Gibson's other films are not-but because they are midlife projects and I myself am in midlife, they allow me an acutely satisfying identification with Mel. Gibson made Payback when he was forty-two: before I learned that he was thirty-eight when he acted in Braveheart. I thought he was in his midforties, if not close to fifty in the film itself. [2] Gibson and I look more or less the same age, even though, as I write, I am just about fifty-three.

Aspects of Gibson's personal, midlife allure contribute to Mel's: the strong, round muscles of his built body, which resemble mine, and the wide face, dark, silvering hair, and intense, inviting eyes--features that we share. Mel lushly inhabits his body, and Mel and I inhabit one another. An unparadoxical weight and lightness--dense muscle, ease of movement--characterize Mel's rich corporeality, which I call in-the-bodyness. Despite its inelegance, that phrase describes a grace of soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body, and it recruits me into Mel's charisma, which I come to realize is my own. The word recruit is derived from the French recrute, new growth, and the Latin re-, meaning again + crescere, to grow, increase. In the acts of enjoying and thinking about Mel, the charisma that withered after my parents' deaths grows again; he stirs my blood, my heart increases, he nurtures a new life.

Years ago I believed that, as Tina Turner sings in the Mod Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) soundtrack, "We don't need another hero." [3] Beyond Thunderdome is the last of the Mad Max trilogy, which brought Gibson, who played Max each time, intemational stardom. Art cowboys, corporate adventurers, antic avant-gardists and politicians, and scholarly, bureaucratic, and playboy patriarchs upon patriarchs bored and repulsed me. But Mel, in his bloodred beauty, both humanizes and womanizes the hero, so that, at the age of fifty-two, with his help, I could under stand that the hero is, and has always been, me.

Hero derives from the Avestan haraiti, (he) protects. Certainly, Gibson's heroes through out his career protect an ultimate manliness glamorized in Western civilization's gender designs. Consequently, Wallace and Porter, the professional robber protagonist in Payback, could have been in danger of the emotional and aesthetic deficiency that signals kitsch; they could have dazzled me simply, with a beauty that is mere manly charm. [4] Mel is penis/phallus extraordinaire. When coffee-shop counter girl (Marisa Tomei) asks Nick Marshall (Gibson) in What Women Want (2000) if he's ordering a Tall or a Grande, Mel responds, "Grande. At least, I like to think so." Yet, he also protects as if he were the embodiment of motherhood, by providing and sacrificing. [5] That can be as kitsch as phallic grandeur. Mel's in-the-bodyness, however, exceeds gender designs, making him as much a poem as he is a person played by a grandly attractive man. That poem is the cognitive body, which persuades me to fall in love with Mel cum Wallace and Porter; and as I fall in love with midlife Mel, I am continually falling in love with myself.

Bloodlust

Shimmer shimmer savage stars

Me and Mel and planet Mars

Bloodlust can lead to blood flow. Color, like blood let from the body, is fluid, as Plotinus wrote, "devoid of parts." [6] Nurture and nurse are cognates that share the Latin root nutrire, which is related to the Greek naein, to flow. Blood flows around Mel and from him. It paints his skin and clothes; splatters, stains, and smudges him with madders, scarlets, lakes, and crimsons, as if he were an Abstract Expressionist canvas. I wonder if Gibson knew this when he offered the following description in an interview about Revolutionary War battle scenes in The Patriot (2000): "beautiful, the whole atmosphere of it, like a painting. " [7]

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.

Payback is based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, which features the predatory antihero Parker. But Payback's Porter, besides being a hunter, also lets himself become prey. Sade's libertines make their victims into meat, and Bronson notes to Porter during the toe-hammering episode that the flesh, which the camera does not show, is starting to "look like roast beef." Porter is choice meat/male. Indeed, Porter equals porterhouse. Here, the bloodred look works its spell through words rather than visuals to captivate as cosmetics do, by making flesh more appealing; in this case, by drawing us to Mel's corporeal vulnerability as much as to his stoicism.

Like Pierre et Gilles, the director Todd Haynes creates a delicious homeerotic vision of blood. As a child, Jack Fairy, who becomes the originator of glam style in the London of Haynes's Velvet Goldmine (1998) smoothes his own blood over his lips after other schoolboys have beaten him up because of his uncommon masculinity. As he grins with the joy that powerful, self-loving knowledge can bring, Fairy recalls to me that lipstick began with blood--women's application of menstrual blood to their lips. Besides painting their faces with menstrual blood, women have cut themselves around their mouths and tattooed "dribble lines" from lower lip to chin tip to signal menstruation. [9] The mythic vagina dentata injures its prey; and predator animals "bleed" from the mouth, sometimes with humans' blood. [10]

Action heroes and fairy men: maybe both have stolen women's blood. But why be ungenerous with bloodred beauty? I don't believe that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, as John Gray professes in the tide of his depressingly popular book. Wallace is no braver a hero than Fairy, and Mel and I have both appropriated the green brooch that travels from one man's hands to another's in Velvet Goldmine. For Haynes, the brooch first belonged to the gay icon Oscar Wilde, and it bestows what I call "fairy beauty," an extraordinary allure, on its owners. The magic of fairy beauty, which incorporates maternal femininity, macho chutzpah, and femme-fatale sexual radiance, makes Mel red hot.

Color scares people. In the art critic David Batchelor's Chromophobia, we learn that color disorients, intoxicates, and spurs desire. Color, often associated in the West with the primitive and the savage, is a kind of overkill, a delirium, joy, and sensuality that threaten reason and order. Wallace refers to himself as "a savage;" a petty drug dealer who wants to convey Porter's crude and frightening fierceness describes him as "a real Cro-Magnon-lookin' bastard." Excelling in the virility tests--the ritual bloodletting of war and murder, the kosmetikos of red--Mel becomes a literally colorful character, stunning in his display of overkill. Wallace and Porter both wear dribble lines of human blood more than once. Porter's is his own, and Wallace's comes from battle slaughter. (Blood runs from Kali's mouth, and sometimes a red triangle, an apex under her lower lip, represents the fluid.) Both heroes wreak havoc: Wallace creates mayhem for Edward I's England, and Porter equally disturbs The Outfit, a criminal organization headed by Bronson.

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.

I imagine them on Porter when he's showering, sad and weary from both his wife's treachery--she's the one who shot him in the back--and his attempt, before the shower scene, to end her heroin habit, an effort that he probably knows is futile. Paybeck's color is stylishly faded, often only bluish, with reds snapping out as surprises. The garnet necklace, dark though it is would catch our eye in this way. Porter leans, with both arms in front of him, against the wall that holds the fixtures. The camera gives us his lower back and right side, and for some seconds his head as well, before offering a close-up that features his gunshot scars. We also see most of a tattoo of the letters USMC--United States Marine Corps--on his biceps. Full of the self-consciousness that we associate with postmodernism, Payback borrows from film noir and 1970s detective movies, and its time period is ambiguous. Details and atmosphere refer to any decade between the 1930s and now. This ambiguity permits me to think that Porter is a V ietnam vet whose bloodred beauty was born in jungles and monsoons. In the heat and rain of the shower, I see the beads at his nape as he luxuriates with slight sinuosity. If only he would let us hear him moan. I kiss the places where the garnets lay.

Me and Mel, standing face to face, palms up, fingertips touching, green brooch glittering where our flesh meets; Me and Mel, standing skin-to-skin, naked except for garnets, one necklace apiece, each bead an allusion to our broken hearts.

In the laws of sympathetic magic, garnets, whose rich dark red resembles venous blood, relate to bleeding and wounds, blood bonds and disorders, and blood itself; people have used red stones to treat blood diseases. [18] Venous, Venus: Mel, and my bleeding hearts, bonded through bloodred beauty, suffer from lovesickness, a disorder that Venus both creates and cures. Mom, my lost love, comes to me in dreams and times of tremendous stress, as Murron, Wallace's wife, comes to him. My mother's garnet gift to me, and its imagined replica, which I've given Mel, are amulets. The authority on symbols Barbara G. Walker writes, "In the Middle Ages, red garnets were credited with the power to dry up and heal bleeding cuts and other wounds." [19] Maybe Gibson should have shown Wallace (1270-1305) and his war companions applying garnets to their injuries. Of course, I doubt the efficacy of such a treatment, yet I believe that in the magic (which is the reality) of psycho-dynamics, garnet, my birthstone, is as beneficial a s love. [20] That is why I give the beads to Mel.

Bloodlovers

Shimmer spritely tongue and kiss 'em

Enraptured by the narcissism

Gibson is the only movie star whose characters I'd like to watch fucking. Sex/love scenes are few and far between in his films, and when we're granted one, they're all too short. (I say "sex/love" because Gibson's characters, throughout his career, do not play fast and loose with women.) I don't use fucking as a harsh word, but rather to express my interest in Mel's in-the-body-ness activating graphic patterns of sexual beauty. Fucking is fairy intercourse, any of whose participants are simultaneously fucker and fuckee. Fucking, like fairy beauty, can incorporate the maternal, the anal, the manly, the nipple, the vulval, the red-lipped: the Morgan le Fayish and Lola Montezish; the Little Richardesque to the Lord George Byronish; Phryne-like nudity to Navratilovalike musde to Nijinsky-like litheness; the fairy prince, the fairy princess, and both the canons and the decanonization of all of our my-heroes.

Red advances, it is a demanding color; so bloodred beauties make advances to one another, require mutual intimacies. I want to be Wallace fucking Wallace, enjoying orgasms in my vagina. I specify a vaginal rather than a clitoral orgasm, because the sensations are very different, and the former is far more pleasurable for me. I am Joanna fucking Mel, delighting in our phallicly flirting hips.

Before discovering Mel, I liked Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), captain of the starship Enterprise in the television and film series Star Trek: The Next Generation. But now I experience him as the negative epitome of father, an impossibly aloof daddy, a militarized, though intellectually energetic, absentee from pleasure. With his baldness, except for close-cropped hair at the sides and back of the head, Captain Picard reminds me of the phallus-headed men in May Stevens's Big Daddy paintings (1967-76), although Picard is attractive and her daddies are not. Picard's hairstyle also reminds me of a tonsure, and his monkish qualities include withdrawal from Earth and earthly delights his commission and starship serve as a monastery. He rarely becomes intimate, sexually or otherwise, with anyone--unlike James T. Kirk, captain of an earlier Enterprise, who wants to fuck almost any young woman who crosses his visual path. Note that I don't refer to the Stewart character as Jean-Luc. Sean Connery's James Bond also has appealed to me, but despite Connery's playing the role with impeccable irony, Bond, compared to Mel, is still a callously elegant asshole.

In contrast to Mel, Bond and Captain Picard are bloodless. Not only do they emerge amazingly unbloodied by physical conflicts, but they radiate an aura of emotional independence that borders on psychic isolationism. The one-man militia of the soul that Porter and Wallace seem to be, they nonetheless crave love: to give and take it. In this give-and-take, they want to lean on someone, and have someone lean on them.

Part of the ornamental male's allure can be "the lean," a term coined by the philosopher Susan Bordo to describe a posture assumed by beautiful male bodies in contemporary advertising. This pose skews gender norms, for the male offers, invites, receives, and responds as he props or rests himself against something, or reclines, all "in the fashion typical of women's bodies." [21] Porter leans in the shower, asking our eyes and bodies to take him. He also leans against Rosie, his lover, and they let his gentle yet ample weight as well as her insistence ease them onto a sofa. Some time after Murron's death, Wallace meets the Princess of Wales in a hut. She has warned him twice of her father-in-law Edward's plans against him, and the narrative has already established the attraction between princess and warrior. He steps near her, raises one arm so that his hand rests against a ceiling beam, and leans closer yet. Their kiss is seconds away. Although Mel's anthem could be AC/DC's song "You Want Blood," it could als o be "Lean on Me."

Mel, lean toward then on and into the full length and breadth of my in-the-bodyness, closer than most people think that close can ever be.

The late post-Classic Maya and the Aztec symbolically associated human blood and chocolate. This is possibly because both the somewhat similarly shaped heart and cacao pod produced precious substances.[22] The Aztec army ate chocolate as war rations; chocolate was a metaphor of sensuality and luxuriousness for the Aztec; and they and the Maya added the dried and ground powder of chili peppers to their chocolate drinks, creating chilcacahuatl, which, unlike our cocoa, was cool.[23] In one of his songs, the Aztec poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl, called chocolate "flower of the cacao tree," and the Aztec spiced their chocolate with various powdered flower petals.[24] Seeds from the tree called achiote or annatto probably colored chocolate drinks reddish, and according to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, reporting during the Spanish conquest of Nicaragua, natives' mouths, lips, and whiskers turned red, as if they'd been drinking blood, after they had drunk chocolate containing achiote.

Mel, delectable as chocolate

Bloodrich as the heart from which it comes,

I cannot determine the extent of your ravel of reds.

It does disorient me from the sidewalks that I follow every day

But I am ready for more revelry

Tempt me more, flowering chocolate Mel,

Test my lipstick

Chili is its name

By leaving its imprint from your lips

Where my mother's gamets touch my skin

Mix us Chilcacahuatl, burning, bitter

But sugar me with tweaks and teasings of our gender

Inspire us to be as darkly pretty as the maroon petals of

Chocolate Coreopsis and cymbidium

And as fierce as the reds of births and deaths and mothers often are

While we suck truffles until they melt

Sit beside me

While we mourn the short-lived beauty of the chocolate-red

Tall bearded iris unfolding

In the vase on the same table that holds the candy box.

Iris was my mother's favorite flower

Joanna Frueh's most recent book is Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love (University of California Press, 2001). She is currently writing a memoir. A History of Chocolate, Including Action Heroes and Fairy Men. She teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Photos: Russell Dudley and Joanna Frueh.

(1.) Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 101.

(2.) Wallace died at age thirty-five.

(3.) The song precedes Barbara Kruger's photographic use of the slogan, "We don't need another hero," in 1986.

(4.) Kathleen M. Higgins, "Beauty and Its kitsch Competitors." in Peg Zeglin Brand, ed., Beauty Matters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). defends beauty against the deficiencies in kitsch and glamour (as well as flawlessness).

(5.) Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Americon Man (New York William Morrow, 1999). 38, compassionately understands that a "maternal conception of manhood' characterized by "the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice" under-girded men's bonding and community in an industrial society. Her argument throughout the book relies, to a great extent, on the idea that men's maternal femininity is both useless and not respected in our contemporary society of consumption and service.

(6.) Plotinus, quoted in David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 85.

(7.) Mel Gibson, interview by Michael Fleming for Movieline (July 2000), www.melgibson.com.

(8.) Mahanirvanatantra quoted in Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1983), 492.

(9.) Judy Grahn, in Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 75-78, discusses women's painting and tattooing themselves with blood as "signs of warning and instruction." Chin tattoos, she says, "were sometimes called 'dribble lines.'" Barbara Ehrenreich, in Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), 107, asserts. "Maori and some Amerindian women tattooed themselves with ... 'dribble lines'; moderns wear lipstick."

(10.) Ehrenreich, 103, discusses links between human females and predator animals.

(11.) Grahn 248-71, offers information and speculative questions about men's stealing and denigration of women's blood ritual. She concisely yet substantively critiques male imitations of menstruation in "From Sacred Blood to the Curse and Beyond," in Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982), 272-76.

(12.) Faludi, 34-40, begins to analyze the ornamental and celebrity culture that is a prime contributor to the late twentieth-century male crisis. Like maternal femininity, the ornamental male is foundational to Faludi's study.

(13.) In "The Ecstasy of War," which is the first chapter of Blood Rites, Ehrenreich considers how and why warriors and Societies attain an altered state, a psychological transformation, in order to promote and endure war.

(14.) Batchelor, 82-83.

(15.) Ibid., 51.

(16.) Johanna Burton and I laughed with pleasure when she coined the simultaneously absurd and appropriate word "fe-Mel" during a conversation in December 2000.

(17.) Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Color (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1995), 58.

(18.) See entries for garnet and ruby in Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (San Fancisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 511, 520.

(19.) Walker, Woman's Dictionary, 511.

(20.) Gibson and I, both born in January, share the same birthstone.

(21.) Susan Bordo in The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 188-93, describes and assesses the lean.

(22.) See Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coo, The True History of Chocolate (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), l00-103, for a short section on cacao in Aztec symbol and ritual.

(23.) Coe and Coe, 88-93, discuss various Aztec additions to chocolate drinks.

(24.) Ibid., 03.

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