From his earliest films, Mel Gibson's cinematic opus enacts narratives that torture its heroes for their homo-erotic desires and then use the suffering they incur to justify the revenge they exact. Gibson's conversion of self-hatred into vengeance pits temptation, in the form of homo-erotic desire--always figured as evil--against the virtue of extreme suffering. This narrative informs Gibson's version of The Passion of the Christ, which dwells extensively on suffering while implying that the audience's post-cinematic actions fulfill the film's impetus for vengeance. In exactly the same way, at exactly the same time, targeting exactly the same audiences, the Bush 2004 re-election campaign merged, under the rhetoric of post-9/11 vengeance, national defense with the (gay-bashing) "defense of marriage" initiatives.
Alan Nadel, William T. Bryan Chair at the University of Kentucky, is the author of several books, including Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Duke UP, 1995), Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America (Rutgers UP, 1997), and most recently Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (2005). He has over 100 publications, including poetry in major journals and prize-winning essays in Modern Fiction Studies and PMLA. He is also former President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
