Mel Gibson's Blown Image

Maybe we'd all be better off if celebrities' private lives were kept private.

This age of new media is shattering our collective fantasies of fame. To think that one could be as famous as Mel Gibson – once one of the richest men in Hollywood – and still find it difficult to get a blow job without threatening to burn the house down.

I can live my life quite well without knowing a thing about the people behind the characters we watch in music videos or on the silver screen, I don’t need to see Britney Spears’ bald snatch, Lindsay Lohan’s latest drunken bender, a decrepit Jack Nicholson eating a sandwich, or an upskirt of some rising teen angel. Yet there I am, day after day, trolling through the web with millions of others, exploring the darker side of the people we watch, dance to, and even admire and wish to be.

Perhaps behind this collective fascination with Gibson’s inner animal – the accusations of anti-Semitism and racism, the uncouth and violent behaviour toward his trophy wife, Oksana Grigorieva – is a drive to reassure ourselves that we are better than, or at least as good as, those who walk on red carpets. The leaky properties of new media – cell phones, the internet, the everything-is-connected-to-everything-else world we live in – level the playing field. Any one of us is liable to be publicly humiliated for our ill-considered words and actions. If, as Gibson did with the Grigorieva, you lose it and scream “bitch, cunt, whore, gold-digger” until you are literally panting with rage, it is best not to do it over a cell phone.

We know about this ripe tirade because Grigorieva, mother of Gibson’s eighth child, recorded a cell phone conversation after Gibson allegedly threatened to kill her. The Russian singer, reportedly the primary reason behind Gibson’s breakup with his former wife, leaked a series of cell phone conversations to the internet. The Los Angeles Times notes that, in the absence of Mel’s consent to be recorded, the leaked conversations might have little standing in the court of law. In fact, Grigorieva’s act of making surreptitious recordings may have been a crime.

I am not about to deliver an ethical analysis that weighs the actions of a possible gold-digger against a probable violent jerk. Regardless of the evidence spilling out across cyberspace, we still don’t know the whole story. Nonetheless, sides are being drawn, and Gibson’s rage is now part of the ideological battle between the left and the right. Conservative bloggers, according to the New York Daily News, are defending Gibson, while the left is burning him in effigy for all manner of reasons.

If we look hard enough into the latest series of internet-fed celebrity scandals – Tiger Woods, Jesse James, et al – we will see a little bit of ourselves. Each of us has two slightly different selves, a public one and a private one. Psychologists reassure us that in this we are perfectly normal (just don’t ask a psychologist what “normal” is). Many of us will make poor decisions, think unspeakable thoughts, lose our cool, and play the fool in the privacy of our homes. I say this not to excuse Mad Max Mel, but to use his behaviour as an exemplar of the human situation – imperfect, conditioned by context, wrapped in myth and fantasy.

Perhaps what makes these moments of A-list epic failure so shocking is the surrounding media culture of hyper-reality. The people we see on magazine covers or in movies are not real. Our celebrities are highly constructed products of skilled Photoshop wizards, our heroes the product of careful media handling and excellent lighting. When the background of their mundane humanity breaks through into the internet, we are collectively reduced to children who have just learned that Santa Claus is smelly Uncle Sid.

The real danger here is not that all our myths will succumb to the “truthifying” power of the internet. The real danger before us is the possible collapse of trust within personal relationships and the loss of the private sphere. If we keep shoving a camera up the dark side of each other’s private lives, we stand to lose our multiple self-hood. If we insist on violating the domain of the private in the pursuit of the next viral video, we may all one day be forced to live in just one world – an overexposed and unforgiving digital public sphere.

The other lesson to take away from here is much more obvious. You can win an Oscar, but you can still be a schmuck.