It was the defining celebrity moment of 2006 - Mel Gibson's DUI arrest in California, and the subsequent news of his anti-Semitic, sexist tirade. I mean, this was Mel Freaking Gibson - the guy from Lethal Weapon for Christ's sake, the guy from Mad Max (gotta love those leather pants). A guy who, at one time, could've laid claim to being the biggest movie-star on earth. Who won Oscars for Braveheart, and had one of the highest-grossers of all time with Passion of the Christ. This wasn't some z-lister getting drunk and rowdy, this was Hollywood royalty for God's sake. And we were looking at his mugshot. We were hearing about how he got liquored up and drove too fast, and got pulled over, and went on a rant against Jews while being hauled to the pokey, and called some female cop "Sugartits." I mean, this kind of shit didn't happen to Mel Gibson - it happened to Andy Dick or Nick Nolte or Courtney Love. Not Mel Gibson. But, sadly, we had to admit it - Mel Gibson was a dirtbag. Much as we wanted to deny it, chalk it up to one bad night, we had to face the reality that Mel Gibson probably really was that anti-Semitic, that screwed up. And in the end, that altered perception is what makes Mel Gibson the biggest loser of the year - not that he's probably lost money over it, and will have to go on for years answering questions about it, but just the simple fact that, now, every time we see a Mel Gibson movie, we'll think about that mugshot, we'll imagine that dark night when Mel let the movie-star facade slip away and showed us what was truly in his heart. And we'll make bad jokes. We'll yell out "Sugartits" every time he interacts with a female co-star. We'll snicker every time he acts crazy, thinking to ourselves that it's not really acting. We'll no longer be able to give ourselves over to the illusion of the character, but will get caught up on that image of Mel, slobbering drunk, in the backseat of a police car saying the Jews were responsible for all the wars on earth and asking the arresting officer if he was a Jew, and saying that he owned Malibu. The tragedy of the whole thing being not that Mel has lost prestige or job opportunities, but that we've all lost Mel.
