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“He Was Pretty Good in There
Today”
 Analecta Gorgiana

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Series Editor

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Analecta Gorgiana is a collection of long essays and short

monographs which are consistently cited by modern scholars but
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“He Was Pretty Good in There
Today”

Reviving the Macho Christ in Ernest

Hemingway’s “"Today is Friday"” and Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ

Lisa Tyler

Y
W 2013
Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA
www.gorgiaspress.com
G&C Kiraz is an imprint of Gorgias Press LLC
Copyright © 2013 by Gorgias Press LLC
Originally published in 2010
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the
prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC.

2013 ‫ܕ‬

ISBN 978-1-4632-0117-3
Y
W ISSN 1935-6854
Reprinted from the 2010 Piscataway edition.

Printed in the United States of America

4 “HE WAS PRETTY GOOD IN THERE
TODAY”: REVIVING THE MACHO CHRIST
IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S “TODAY IS
FRIDAY” AND MEL GIBSON’S THE
PASSION OF THE CHRIST

LISA TYLER
SINCLAIR COMMUNITY COLLEGE
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ,
like Hemingway’s 1926 one-act play/short story “Today is
Friday,” is about the ways in which its creator believed that
he had directly benefited from Christ’s suffering. Both He-
mingway and Gibson were raised by religiously conservative,
emotionally repressive fathers, and both declared themselves
Catholics. Both men experienced suicidal depression as ma-
ture young men, and each found in Christ’s torment on the
cross both a trope for his own battles with depression and
an inspiration to survive his own emotional suffering. In
this essay, I first place both men within the sociocultural, re-
ligious tradition known as “muscular Christianity” and
trace the ways in which they were both influenced by that
tradition. I document their emotional volatility and their
bouts with profound depression, examining the ways in
which each credits faith with enabling him to survive his
own dark night of the soul.
It is inconceivable that the suffering of Christ on the cross . . .
would mean anything to anyone unless pain was intrinsically
shareable. (Glucklich, 2001, p. 63)
At Chicago’s First United Methodist Church, a group of about 30
people gathered in the spring of 2004 to discuss the film The Passion
65
66 THE BEST OF JMMS

of the Christ. According to a press report, most of those in atten-

dance found the film needlessly, excessively violent. One dissenter,
a homeless man and ordained Baptist minister, raised a hand to ask,
“Can’t a person benefit from someone else’s suffering? My brother
saved me from getting beat up more than once by taking the beat-
ings himself. I’m going through suffering now. If I look at Jesus’
suffering, I know I can do this” (Van Biema, 2004, p. 60). The
other attendees listened politely but remained unpersuaded—a
problem the speaker later attributed to their own remoteness from
suffering.
But that fellow who spoke up, the one who responded to
Christ’s suffering because it inspired him to endure his own suffer-
ing, has a point, one that I think both Ernest Hemingway and Mel
Gibson would appreciate. I want to argue that Gibson’s film The
Passion of the Christ, like Hemingway’s 1926 one-act play/short story
“Today is Friday,” is about the ways in which both men believed
they had directly benefited from Christ’s suffering. Both men were
raised by religiously conservative, emotionally repressive fathers,
and both declared themselves Catholics. Both Hemingway and
Gibson experienced suicidal depression as mature young men, and
each found in Christ’s torment on the cross both a trope for his
own battles with depression and an inspiration to survive his own
emotional suffering.
In this essay, after briefly introducing both works, I first place
both men within the sociocultural, religious tradition known as
“muscular Christianity” and trace the ways in which they were in-
fluenced by both that tradition and their upbringing by strict, relig-
iously conservative fathers. I document their emotional volatility
and their bouts with profound depression, examining the ways in
which each credits faith with enabling him to survive his own dark
night of the soul.
As is now widely known, The Passion of the Christ portrays the
last twelve hours of Christ’s life, drawing extensively on the Gos-
pels for much of its content. Hemingway’s four-page, one-act play
“Today is Friday” focuses on the same event, Christ’s crucifixion,
indirectly, by depicting the reactions of the Roman soldiers who
carried out the execution. Such indirectness was typical for a man
who called his own memoir, A Moveable Feast, autobiography by
reflection (M. Hemingway, 1964) and who once wrote (in an article
not published until after his death) “I sometimes think my style is
 “HE WAS PRETTY GOOD IN THERE TODAY” 67

suggestive rather than direct,” adding, “The reader must often use
his imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought” (Wag-
ner, 1987, p. 275).

MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY
It is important to note that in reviving the macho Christ, both men
are (consciously or not) working within the tradition known as
“muscular Christianity,” a nineteenth-century social, religious, and
cultural movement originating in Britain and emphasizing the im-
portance of health and physical fitness in Christian men. It was not
a new movement even in the Victorian era: “Throughout Western
literature a strong historical connection was drawn between the
idealized knightly soldier and the athlete as Christian” (Ladd &
Mathisen, 1999, p. 17). Its best known proponents were writers
Charles Kingsley, who is now ironically best known for his chil-
dren’s novel The Water Babies, and Thomas Hughes, author of Tom
Brown’s School Days, a paean to violence and the British public
school of Rugby. (Interestingly, Hemingway owned works by both
men—Tom Brown’s School Days, by Hughes, and two copies of
Kingsley’s Westward, Ho! [Brasch & Watson, 1981].)
The movement was later popularized in the United States via
the Young Men’s Christian Association: “The development of the
YMCA in the United States relied on a muscular Christian agenda
to reach a white, middle-class culture” (Ladd & Mathisen, 1999, p.
43). Theodore Roosevelt, a personal hero of Hemingway’s child-
hood (Reynolds, 1986, pp. 28–30, 163, 232), was among the Ameri-
can proponents of the movement.
In considerations of literary history, Hemingway’s work is
usually opposed to the more pious aspects of muscular Christianity.
As Clifford Putney (2001) accurately notes, America’s literary mod-
ernists rejected “the Christian manliness of Ben-Hur and other lit-
erary heroes of an older generation,” instead preferring “Ernest
Hemingway’s soldier-narrator in A Farewell to Arms, a rugged stoic
who confessed to have seen ‘nothing sacred’ in the Great War, and
who wanted nothing more to do with ‘the words sacred, glorious,
and sacrifice and the expression in vain’” (p. 201).
But an occasional literary critic has noted Hemingway’s earlier
indebtedness to muscular Christianity. Although he does not spe-
cifically make the connection to the religious movement, Warren
Bennett (1995) has linked “Today is Friday” with Ezra Pound’s
68 THE BEST OF JMMS

1909 poem “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere” and suggested that
the theme of both is “the masculinization of Jesus of Nazareth” (p.
203). Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, who has openly admit-
ted he “dislikes” “Today is Friday” (1969, p. xiv), has complained
that its “dialogue read[s] like a locker-room discussion among high-
school sophomore football players” (Baker, 1969, p. 169)—thus
linking Christianity with athleticism.
Like Gibson’s film, Hemingway’s short story also takes its
place in a larger societal dialogue about how we see (or should see)
Jesus. It is possible that it is a direct response to Bruce Barton’s
1925 book The Man Nobody Knows.18 Although there is no direct
evidence that Hemingway read Barton’s book, it is probably signifi-
cant that Barton is the son of the Hemingway family’s minister
(Monteiro, 1997, p. 74). Ernest’s father was the Barton family doc-
tor (Fried, 2005), and Barton, a founder of the Madison Avenue
advertising agency BBDO, reviewed The Sun Also Rises for Atlantic
Monthly (Fried, 2005).
In The Man Nobody Knows, Barton (1925), who was 13 years
older than Hemingway, attempts to “re-masculinize” Jesus by por-
traying Christ as a highly successful proto-advertising executive
who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business
and forged them into an organization that conquered the world”
(unpaginated). Like Hemingway and Gibson, Barton is contemptu-
ous of what he sees as the wimpy image of Jesus. “A physical weak-
ling!” Barton (1925) writes in an unpaginated foreword. “Where
did they get that idea? Jesus pushed a plane and swung an adze; he
was a successful carpenter. He slept outdoors and spent his days

18 George Monteiro has traced the relationship between Barton’s

work and Hemingway’s in more detail. Barton’s book was heavily influ-
enced by his father (Fried, 2005, p. 89), the Rev. William Barton, who like
Hemingway’s father received a degree from Oberlin (Fried, 2005, p. 8),
center of the muscular Christianity movement in America. Intriguingly
(given the thesis of this essay), Barton—like both Hemingway and Gib-
son—experienced his own bouts with mental instability. According to his
biographer, he suffered from insomnia intermittently until the late 1920s
(Fried, 2005, pp. 18–19, 82–83, 142, 240n29) and described himself soon
after his senior year of college as “frightened” that “[he] might lose [his]
mind” and “on the edge of a nervous breakdown” (Fried, 2005, p. 19).
 “HE WAS PRETTY GOOD IN THERE TODAY” 69

walking around his favorite lake. His muscles were so strong that
when he drove the money-changers out, nobody dared oppose
him!” The Man Nobody Knows, while controversial, was fourth on the
nonfiction bestseller list in 1925 and reached first place by 1926
(Montgomery, 1985).
As for The Passion of the Christ, Björn Krondorfer (2004) spe-
cifically linked the film to that tradition in an essay in Cross Currents.
Patricia J. Williams (2004) presented Gibson’s film with a mock
award in her column in The Nation: “Best Harangue in the Style of
Father Coughlin went to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, for
… its reinvigoration of flayed-muscular Christianity as X-treme
sport” (p. 9). Leon Wieseltier (2004) writes of Gibson’s Christ in
The New Republic, “He is what the early church fathers, writing with
admiration of their martyrs, called an ‘athlete’ of suffering” (p. 19).
One scholar has characterized the protagonist of the movie as “the
action hero Jesus” (Lawler, 2004, p. 67). Gibson himself has con-
ceded that he wanted to show us a different and more overtly mas-
culine side of Christ than the usual Hollywood version: “He’s usu-
ally fairly effete and not a powerful presence, which clearly he must
have been” (Mel, 2004).
Both works draw on sports themes in their depictions of the
Crucifixion. “He was pretty good in there today”—the refrain of
the admiring and relatively sympathetic first Roman soldier in He-
mingway’s “Today is Friday”—makes Christ sound like a particu-
larly tough prizefighter. It’s probably not coincidental that one al-
ternate title Hemingway ultimately rejected for “Today is Friday”
was “One More for the Nazarene” (Smith, 1989, p. 154), which
sounds suspiciously like “One more for the Gipper.” While we
now associate those words with the late President Ronald Reagan
(who uttered them in the 1940 film Knute Rockne All American), they
were originally a variation of the famous (albeit possibly apocry-
phal) last words of the legendary George “The Gipper” Gipp,
Notre Dame’s first All American football player, to coach Knute
Rockne in December 1920. Gipp died at 25 of a strep throat infec-
tion that turned into pneumonia in an era before antibiotics
(Howald, 2003).
Hemingway’s play on those words casts the Crucifixion as the
“Big Game” of the college football season. While that might seem
in questionable taste, the poet Allen Tate has suggested that He-
mingway’s attitude toward all sport was “rooted in a religious sen-
70 THE BEST OF JMMS

sibility” (Stoneback, 1991, p. 129), and in his now classic article on

Hemingway’s religious beliefs, H. R. Stoneback (1991) argues that
“Sport as a redemptive ritual is central to Hemingway’s life and
work” (p. 136). Similarly, in a review entitled “Tough Guy,” one
critic writes of The Passion of the Christ, “It’s like viewing an uneven
boxing match in which we are forced to watch the underdog,
pinned against the ropes, get beaten to within an inch of his life”
(Petrakis, 2004, p. 40).
Given these odd (but not historically novel) conjunctions of
sports and religious faith, it’s probably not coincidental that He-
mingway’s official biographer, Carlos Baker (1969), dismissed “To-
day is Friday” as “tasteless” (p. 321), and film critics have re-
sponded to The Passion with comparable distaste, complaining in
Newsweek of the film’s “relentless gore” (Ansen, 2004, p. 60) or
characterizing it in the New York Times as “an unnerving and pain-
ful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one” (Scott, 2004,
p. E1). In his film, Gibson is insistent that Christ endured more
physical suffering than some viewers can bear to witness.
Not coincidentally, both Hemingway and Gibson would have
been indirectly familiar with the principles of muscular Christianity.
Hemingway’s father attended Oberlin College in Ohio (Sanford,
1999, p. 23), where he played on the football team, and “Oberlin
College served as the cradle for the fledgling physical education
profession and the muscular Christianity movement” (Ladd &
Mathisen, 1999, p. 30). Ernest’s paternal grandfather, Anson He-
mingway, was general secretary of the Chicago YMCA—the chief
institutional proponent of muscular Christianity in America—and a
close friend of Dwight L. Moody (Sanford, 1999, p. 18), the fun-
damentalist evangelist who has been described as “the champion of
an indigenous, American brand of muscular Christianity in the final
decades of the [nineteenth] century” (Ladd & Mathisen, 1999, p.
32).19

19 Kathleen Verduin (1987) has traced the presence of muscular

Christianity in Hemingway’s writings but mentions “Today is Friday” only
briefly and does not note Ed Hemingway’s involvement in the movement
as a result of his Oberlin education.
 “HE WAS PRETTY GOOD IN THERE TODAY” 71

Gibson, too, would have been acquainted with muscular

Christianity. After the Gibson family’s move from New York to
Australia in the sixties, Gibson’s father enrolled 12-year-old Mel in
St. Leo’s Christian Brothers School, “run by an Irish religious or-
der, with an emphasis on religion, sport and discipline” (Pendreigh,
1997, pp. 37–38). The school modeled itself after the British public
schools (Clarkson, 1999, p. 36)—in other words, the birthplace of
muscular Christianity. Gibson’s American accent made him some-
thing of an outcast initially, and the teachers were evidently given
to corporal punishment; he and a classmate would compete to see
who could get the most “strappings” in a day, and Gibson won—
with 27 (Clarkson, 1999, p. 37; Pendreigh, 1999, p. 38). One biog-
rapher suggests that there were rumors that some boys at the
school were sexually molested by the priests (Clarkson, 1999, p.
38). Gibson, who told a friend that the priests at the school were
brutal (Clarkson, 1999, p. 37), was later publicly quoted as saying,
“Some of them were regular sons of bitches” (Clarkson, 1999, p.
38).

STRICT UPBRINGING
Both men were raised by strict, religiously conservative fathers.
Perhaps partly as a result of his Oberlin education, Hemingway’s
father disapproved of dancing, drinking, smoking, and card-playing
(Sanford, 1999, p. 39). Mr. Hemingway believed in corporal pun-
ishment, and Hemingway’s sister Marcelline recalls her father using
a razor strap occasionally and then compelling his children to kneel
and ask God’s forgiveness for their transgressions. The Heming-
way household upheld high standards: Jack London’s works were
forbidden for their “coarseness” (Sanford, 1999, p. 107), and after
reading In Our Time, Hemingway’s father wrote Ernest that “no
gentleman spoke of venereal disease outside a doctor’s office”
(Sanford, 1999, p. 219). Ed Hemingway was horrified by the news
of the breakup of his son’s marriage and wrote, “Our family has
never had such an incident before and trust you may still make
your get-away from that individual who split your home. . . . Put on
the arrows of God and shun evil companions” (Mellow, 1992, p.
342). He called the adulterers “Love Pirates” and wrote that he
wished them in hell (Mellow, 1992, p. 342). As Hemingway’s older
sister recalls of her father, “the rules he had in his own mind as to
what was right and what was wrong were very rigid. With him it
72 THE BEST OF JMMS

was black and white with very little gray between” (Sanford, 1999,
p. 39).
Mel Gibson’s father also sees morality in absolute terms:
“There’s right and wrong, and that’s all there is” (Pendreigh, 1997,
p. 26). “The greatest benefit anyone can have is to be a Catholic,”
he once said. “You have the life-long satisfaction of being right”
(Clarkson, 1999, p. 5; Pendreigh, 1997, p. 26). Hutton Gibson, Jr.,
entered a Catholic seminary as a young man and studied to be a
priest but eventually dropped out. He seems to have felt the Catho-
lic Church was not sufficiently conservative in its practices, and he
particularly opposed the Church’s move away from the traditional
Latin Mass and other reforms resulting from the Vatican II confer-
ence (Clarkson, 1999, p. 41; Pendreigh, 1997, pp. 26–27; Perry,
1993, p. 10). He apparently believes that Jews have infiltrated the
Catholic Church (Clarkson, 1999, pp. 41–43; Pendreigh, 1997, p.
26).
Like Hemingway’s father, he resorted to corporal punishment.
“Hutt believed in the power of the hand. If the children did not
behave they got hit,” one family friend told a biographer (Clarkson,
1999, p. 18). Gibson’s father prohibited not just the usual cursing,
smoking, and drinking, but also television, comic books, and most
movies (Clarkson, 1999, pp. 18–19).

EMOTIONAL VOLATILITY
It’s interesting that both Hemingway and Gibson have chosen to
revive muscular Christian themes in their art from a Catholic per-
spective; the muscular Christian movement has its roots solidly in
English and American Protestantism, and Catholic involvement
has traditionally been marginal (Putney, 2001, pp. 87–89). I think
it’s significant (and revealing, and again, not coincidental) that it is
the Catholic Church that has the strongest strictures against suicide
of perhaps any mainstream Christian denomination. Both He-
mingway and Gibson experienced profound emotional depression
as young men. While Hemingway is known to have suffered from
manic depression late in life and ultimately committed suicide, it
has never been conclusively determined when the mood disorder
first manifested itself. Noting that most people with the disorder
begin to experience symptoms during their twenties, Peter L. Hays
(1995) makes a persuasive (if admittedly speculative) case that He-
 “HE WAS PRETTY GOOD IN THERE TODAY” 73

mingway was already experiencing symptoms as early as 1923–25,

when he would have been 23 to 26 years old.
Hemingway wrote “Today is Friday” in May 1926 (Smith,
1989, p. 154). He claimed to George Plimpton to have written it
along with “The Killers” and “Ten Indians” all in the same day,
possibly during a manic interlude. “I had so much juice I thought
maybe I was going crazy,” he told Plimpton (1986, p. 122). His
mood did not last long; that same month he wrote to F. Scott Fitz-
gerald, “I feel too low to write” (Baker, 1981, p. 203). Hemingway’s
self-disgust was profound: He signed another letter to Fitzgerald,
“Ernest M. Shit” (Baker, 1981, p. 205).
Hemingway was guilt-stricken over his adulterous affair with
Pauline Pfeiffer. In February he had sailed to New York to switch
publishers, and upon his return, stayed in Paris with Pauline rather
than going on to Schruns, Austria, where his wife, Hadley, and
their son were staying (Baker, 1969, pp. 165–66). As Hemingway
himself (1964) later acknowledged in A Moveable Feast, “I did my
business in New York and when I got back to Paris I should have
caught the first train from the Gare de l’Est that would take me
down to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris then,
and I did not take the first train, or the second or the third” (p.
210). In a passage that does not appear in the published book, he
wrote that “the unbelievable wrenching, killing happiness, selfish-
ness and treachery of everything we did gave me such a terrible
remorse” (Baker, 1969, pp. 165–66).
Hemingway’s conscience seems to have tormented him for a
long time over his betrayal of his wife. “Ernest felt very sorry that
he was doing this to me,” Hadley herself told researcher Alice
Sokoloff (Diliberto, 1992, p. 230). “He had dreadful remorse. It
made me suffer to see the way he suffered for me. I don’t think he
ever did get over it, but I tried to make him feel it was all right”
(Diliberto, 1992, p. 230). Biographer Carlos Baker (1969) notes that
Hemingway was contemplating suicide as early as March 1926 (two
months before he wrote “Today is Friday”), citing as evidence
Hemingway’s own journal entry, in which he contemplates the me-
chanics of suicide at some length:

I like to think about death and the various ways of dying. And
I think probably the best way, unless you could arrange to die
74 THE BEST OF JMMS

some way while asleep, would be to go off a liner at night.

That way there could be no doubt about the thing going
through and it does not seem a nasty death. There would only
be the moment of taking the jump and it is very easy for me to
take almost any sort of jump. Also it would never be definitely
known what happened and there would be no post mortems
and no expenses left for any one to pay and there would al-
ways be the chance that you might be given credit for an acci-
dent. (Baker, 1969, p. 167)

Hemingway resumed his affair with Pauline at the end of

March, and Hadley confronted him about it later that spring
(Baker, 1969, p. 168). Hemingway was profoundly troubled by his
betrayal of his wife and later confessed in a November 12th letter to
Pauline, “Last fall I said perfectly calmly and not bluffingly and
during one of the good times that if this wasn’t cleared up by
Christmas I would kill myself” (Baker, 1981, p. 222). He wrote F.
Scott Fitzgerald in September 1926, “Still having been in hell now
since around last Christmas with plenty of insomnia to light the
way around so I could study the terrain I get sort of used to it and
even fond of it and probably would take pleasure in showing peo-
ple around. As we make our hell we certainly should like it” (Baker,
1981, p. 217). In November, he wrote Fitzgerald, “Anyway I’m
now all through with the general bumping off phase and will only
bump off now under certain special circumstances which I don’t
think will arise. Have refrained from any half turnings on of the gas
or slitting of the wrist with sterilized safety razor blades” (Baker,
1981, p. 232). Clearly, before writing “Today is Friday,” Heming-
way had experienced suicidal thoughts and what certainly sounds
like clinical depression.
There is no evidence that Mel Gibson has ever been diag-
nosed with either depression or bipolar disorder. Yet his emotional
volatility has been widely publicized and was evident very early in
his career: “Intriguingly, Mel was at the time already becoming a
two-levels personality, even admitting once that he had ‘this maniac
inside, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing’” (Clarkson, 1999, p. 44).
One of the extras on the 1984 film The Bounty called him “a bit of a
Jekyll and Hyde figure . . . in the day all solemn while at night he
got drunk and did wild and crazy things” (Clarkson, 1999, p. 159).
 “HE WAS PRETTY GOOD IN THERE TODAY” 75

(Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is regarded by

one researcher who herself has been diagnosed with bipolar disor-
der as a particularly apt rendering of what it is like to have “con-
flicting, or polar, selves” [Jamison, 1993, pp. 126–27].) An early
girlfriend reported that Gibson had extreme mood swings: “He
could have very solemn moods and be very miserable, [and] then
he would be up again. I remember discussing the fact of there be-
ing no middle ground with him. He said he was on an even keel
but the truth was that one moment he was funny, [and] the next he
was quiet and introverted” (Clarkson, 1999, p. 75).
Biographers have noted his bouts with alcoholism, an afflic-
tion that he has said runs in his family (Clarkson, 1999, p. 316).
While not all alcoholics are mentally ill, alcoholics are significantly
more likely to be diagnosed with manic depression, perhaps in an
attempt to self-medicate (Jamison, 1993, pp. 37–38); Hemingway,
who was diagnosed with manic depression late in life, was himself a
lifelong alcoholic. Gibson repeatedly drank until he blacked out
(Clarkson, 1999, p. 193) and (like Hemingway) has sometimes be-
come involved in bar brawls (Clarkson, 1999, pp. 269–70). He liked
to mix a double Scotch with beer, a combination he called “liquid
violence” (Clarkson, 1999, pp. 159–60). In April 1984 he was ar-
rested in Toronto for drunk driving after he rear-ended another
vehicle; he later pled guilty (Pendreigh, 1997, p. 109). “What I
probably needed were some guys in white jackets,” one biographer
has quoted Gibson as saying about that time in retrospect. “I was
going around the twist. I knew I had to channel the maniac inside
me. I had to get hold of it” (Perry, 1993, p. 128). He later conceded
that a doctor had diagnosed damage to his liver as a result of his
excessive drinking (Perry, 1993, p. 148).
His emotional volatility manifested itself in other ways, as
well. In Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM, Peter Bart
writes of Gibson’s 1984 film Mrs. Soffel, “By the time the shoot was
over, some $50,000 had been spent to repair damage inflicted on
his rented house in Toronto as a result of the actor’s after-hours
tantrums” (Pendreigh, 1997, p. 112). Gibson behaved erratically in
interviews, cursing, spitting, confessing he was intoxicated, and
calling Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome “a piece of shit” to an on-set
reporter (Perry, 1993, pp. 135–37; Pendreigh, 1997, p. 117). In
1993, the tabloids published embarrassing photographs of a
drunken Gibson drinking from a woman’s high-heeled shoe and
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