Dandy New York Times op-ed columnist and alleged intellectual David Brooks took time out last week from admiring Barack Obama’s “perfectly creased pant” and bemoaning America’s disregard for his beloved educated elite class to explain the Mel Gibson mess in The Gospel of Mel Gibson. With all the pop-psychology gravitas of a Cosmopolitan sex advice column, Brooks declared Gibson the prototype narcissist, the “Valentino of all self-lovers:”
His self-love is his most precious possession. It is the holy center of all that is sacred and right. He is hypersensitive about anybody who might splatter or disregard his greatness. If someone treats him slightingly, he perceives that as a deliberate and heinous attack. If someone threatens his reputation, he regards this as an act of blasphemy. He feels justified in punishing the attacker for this moral outrage. And because he plays by different rules, and because so much is at stake, he can be uninhibited in response. Everyone gets angry when they feel their self-worth is threatened, but for the narcissist, revenge is a holy cause and a moral obligation, demanding overwhelming force.
Perhaps if Brooks weren’t so infatuated with that impeccable crease, he’d realize he just described the President. Are all of the educated elite this dense?
“Narcissist” belongs to the “genius,” “love,” and “Nazi” category of words that have long ago lost their true meaning from overuse and misapplication (e.g., “I so love Obama because he’s like a genius who’s gonna fix all that stuff that dumb Nazi Bush messed up.”). The prevailing view among clinical psychologists is that is that narcissistic personality disorder is rooted in self-loathing, not this precious self-love Brooks speaks of. No matter. Brooks’ educated elite class credentials give him the authority to use the term any way he wishes, and to diagnose Gibson based on a glimpse of the man at one of the lowest points in his life. I wonder what penetrating insights Brooks could glean from the celebrated voicemails of Alec Baldwin and Pat O’Brien. And was it self-love or love of underage sodomy that motivated Hollywood folk hero Roman Polanski?
At times, it seems Brooks is projecting his own self-realizations onto Gibson:
It is striking how morally righteous he is… It is striking how quickly he reverts to the vocabulary of purity and disgust… It is striking how much he seems to derive satisfaction from his own righteous indignation.
When Brooks says, “His breathing is heavy. His vocal muscles are clenched. His guttural sounds burst out like hammer blows,” I can picture a drunk, shaking, enraged, crazy-eyed Mad Max frothing into a phone receiver. I can also picture a drunk, shaking, O-faced Brooks, dressed only in his Ginch Gonch, sitting alone in his dimly-lit living room surrounded by Zima empties watching an Obama speech on his Tivo.
With his trademark pretentiousness, the thinking man’s Anderson Cooper offers uncanny insights into Gibson’s relationship with Oksana Grigorieva:
Gibson was the great Hollywood celebrity who left his wife to link with the beautiful young acolyte. Her beauty would not only reflect well on his virility, but he would also work to mold her, Pygmalion-like, into a pop star. After a time, she apparently grew tired of being a supporting actor in the drama of his self-magnification and tried to go her own way. This act of separation was perceived as an assault on his status and thus a venal betrayal of the true faith.
So not only is Gibson a narcissist, evidently there’s also some Christian persecution complex at play here (a subtext Brooks develops throughout the column; a piquant wink at The Passion of the Christ). Peculiar that a man like Brooks, who seems uncertain of his own personal convictions and tendencies–political, philosophical and otherwise–would assume such a cocksure position about another.
Is it conceivable that Gibson is just a drunk, bipolar, bigoted jerk being manipulated by a conniving gold digger more sophisticated than he? His drinking problems are legendary. He’s admitted to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And Grigorieva is no wilting violet whose sole purpose in life is to perform sex acts, take a punch with a smile, and give birth (like the wives of Charlie Sheen, for instance). This is not the standard-issue tabloid twit America has come to embrace. But you can’t milk an entire New York Times op-ed piece, complete with Homer reference, out of the simple explanation.
True-to-form, Brooks concludes the column with a hackneyed, partly-accurate, pseudo-lofty observation that Gibson is emblematic of “an era where self-branding is on the ascent and the culture of self-effacement is on the decline.” You’ll notice the de rigueur educated class device of connecting the banal analysis with some indictment of society.
It’s true: Twitter, Jersey Shore, $5 botox shots and the existence of the term “me day” may all be signs that society is devolving into some vapid, self-obsessed state of nihilism–the Hollywoodization of America. But the link to Gibson is a dubious one. The so-called “narcissism” of Gibson’s breakdown isn’t that far removed from Miley Cyrus blogging about her own excrement, Tom Cruise publicly berating Brooke Shields over her pharmaceutical choices, and Oprah telling a national audience of millions, “my vajayjay is painin‘.” The latter examples are arguably more vulgar cases of self-indulgence since those people knowingly acted in public.
Personally, I don’t fear for society because Mel Gibson yells awful things at his ex-girlfriend and is fond of racial slurs. I’m more concerned that over five million people care about Ashton Kutcher’s favorite kind of muffin and his views on immigration policy (Curious? twitter @aplusk). It’s this frenzied fascination with celebrities that landed a garden-variety Hollywood rage-extortion-Russian-whore story in the sublime pages of the New York Times op-ed section. It’s what makes David Brooks tingle when he sees Barack Obama’s pants. And worst of all, it’s what put an unqualified, insignificant, marginally-competent socialist with a rock star complex in the White House.
David Brooks need not look towards Mel Gibson as a barometer of the decline of society. He need only look at the narcissist in the mirror.
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