Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Brilliant marketing, or serious paranoia?

Still more media coverage of the movie it was feared no one would go see (The Passion of the Christ), and about its media coverage.

The source of my angst [had] everything to do with [Hutton Gibson's] worldview; as he laid out his alternate history of the 20th century, I had that gut-churning sensation familiar to any journalist witnessing something horrible -- the shock of seeing it, laced by the excitement of being on hand to record it. And while I never assumed that Hutton spoke for his son, the film Mel produced and his comments about it certainly suggest father and son share a core of moral certainty that can alternately come off as righteous, uncompromising or pathological.

It's that intense moral certainty that can lead to revisionism. This is why Mel, his movie, and most of all his fundamentalist Catholicism fascinate me so.

And how he's walking that fine line between madness and genius.

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