Christian Bale's Terrible Terminator Tantrum

If you haven't heard Christian Bale's terrific meltdown on the set of Terminator Salvation last summer, then go to TMZ.com and listen to the humiliating tirade he unleashed on some poor photography director.

Caution: Bale's language is explicit and vulgar, just like he is. You've been warned.

OK, look, I'm no saint when it comes to cursing. I love it. I do it every day. It's practically an autonomic function. It's as natural to me as gettin' nekkid, and it's always directed toward the overpaid, overblown idiots, morons and stuffed shirts with whom I work. Or dumb-ass drivers. Or people at the supermarket who are too lazy to return their carriages. Or people who don't brush the snow off the tops of their cars. They all deserve the damnation I direct toward them. They're too stupid to live because they make life too difficult for everyone around them.

Which brings me to Christian Bale's descent into sheer and utter madness. Look, I understand that everyone has and is entitled to their fair share of bad days. It's inevitable in this world because this world is completely crazy. But what Bale did and what I do are two different things:

You see, I don't let my tantrums fly right in the faces of the putrefactive people I'm damning to hell for all eternity; rather, I do it at my desk at work (as quietly as possible, which really isn't saying much), in the privacy of my home, or in the car where no one else can hear me. I've even lost it in conference rooms with the door closed, and it's just me and a manager sitting across the table from one another.

Bale, however, chose to chew out one guy on the set in front of everyone else, and then had the unmitigated gall to call the guy "unprofessional." Bale was so far out of line that he's nothing more than a ... smudge. A sludgy smudge. An ungrateful, uncouth, uncivilized sludgy smudge on the page of a script he doesn't deserve to be reading.

We've all heard plenty of "Hollywood horror stories," but actually hearing one for ourselves, as it happened, really drives it home, doesn't it? Pretentious Hollywood types like Bale (or Lily Tomlin and her trash mouth from a year or two ago) — who make the real workers feel like shit, and make them cower in fear for their jobs and meekly agree that they, not the actors, were at fault — remind me regularly that the "mystique" the media has built up around these silver-screen "people pretenders" for decades and decades is just ... plain ... wrong. When are we finally going to tear them down from their towering heights, like a Saddam Hussein statue, and just be done with them?

This whole thing just pisses me off. Look, if you're reading this now, but you never return to this blog again, then at least take this with you:

• You're special.


• You're important.


• You matter.

Don't ever let some prissy snot wrongly embarrass you in front of others — and I don't care if it's your boss, your spouse, your kids, your friends, a complete stranger or whomever. Stick up for yourself. Speak up and be heard. Don't be bullied. Don't be cowed by pretentious pretenders to peoplehood who aren't worth the skin they were born in. Fight back. Take them down. Keep them down.

And fuck you, Christian Bale. Fuck you and the fucking fallopian tube you fucking fell out of.