The Social Contract

Select transcript of Mel Gibson’s 1998 interview.

The social contract: you can’t get mad; you can’t get mad, you can’t let it get you. You have to make a deal with everyone else and it’s almost unspoken, that you are going to be fucked over at some point, by people, who you may have done something nice for. And it may happen that by circumstance, or even very purposefully, that you fuck someone over. But that shouldn’t get in the way of you being able to sit down and have fun with them. You can’t build a resentment about it, you have to still try and love those people, because that’s the way they are thinking. It’s not personal. They don’t really mean to hurt you, not really, I don’t quite understand, well there’s still lot of motivation for why it happens!

You have to choose what level of integrity you are coming in and I have often felt that, I have sat there and I have felt the knife slip through in between my shoulder blades and trying to have it shove through the other side through my heart, and I have actually felt the whole thing and feel like.., crying out.., and you resent it for a little while and then you got to let it go, otherwise you will eat yourself alive! I think it takes that kind of cockroach resilience to survive in this town. I mean this is a bizarre place.

It doesn’t take very long, before it gets to you, its cascading on you all the time, you can’t get away from certain attitudes, from certain modes of behavior that this town and the industry dictates. And no matter how strong you are, when you come in of the farm, with those convictions and a certain line of attack, no matter how strong you are, you are going to be affected by this place. It is going to divert you from where you are going.

When I came over here, I was in my mid-twenties. I had a whole bunch of weird paranoid suspicions about what the hell was going on because there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t understand and nobody was really bothering to explain it to me. And I formed a bunch of opinions about the town and about the people in it, that were like, surely that couldn’t be..! Because, the whole place can’t be like a weird town. And then you go away and think no, ‘I’ was wrong, it’s insane thinking, ‘I’ am paranoid, ‘I’ imagined that stuff. That couldn’t be the reason why so-and-so was acting like that, could it?!

And then you find out later in the track that you were exactly on track, with a lot of this stuff. No specifically on track! But, then that tells me your worst nightmares were real.

There is way of doing it without doing it! That takes time. It takes relaxation. Not being uncomfortable, realizing it for what it is, understanding what it is, once you understand it, well then you are not afraid of it anymore, you can walk around it and through it and then get along what you were trying to get along in the first place. A place like this can humiliate you and it can be humbling, it does rip your life to pieces.

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The context of the conversation is how people behave and certain patterns that drives the industry and the mechanization therein. However, if we read it for what it is and look around, it sounds and feels familiar, as if we have been in this place. Has such a social contract slipped through into our life, a life which we feel is reasonably isolated from the weird things of the world? Are we behaving differently than what we used to, say two decades ago? What is driving our attitude and our choices?

It is not empty paranoia; these are necessary questions for introspection. Do we humiliate ourselves and rip our life to pieces to coexist in this town or do we stand out and build, rebuild a town that values dignity? What do you think?