Did Mel get his big unit cut off
or was it f/x?
You wish.
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Fowler's knots? Did you say ... fowler's knots?
MovieChat Forums > Braveheart (1995) Discussion > Did Mel get his big unit cut off
Yes, they gelded him
Say, do you hear that? It's the sound of the Reaper.....
no, they don't show him getting emasculated or his entrails cut open and burned in front of him. they only show him drawn up by the horses and dropped. and then he screams freedom. in real life however, his end was way way worse, taken naked from the tower, dragged by a horse through the city, his "big unit" and balls cut off, his guts cut open and thrown in the fire for him to watch, oh they hanged him first, but not to death, just to inflict pain. then stretched him apart with horses tied to each limb until her has ripped apart, his head chopped off, covered in tar and placed on the bridge
shareNo, he wasn't torn apart by horses; that was no part of the treatment for high treason, for Wallace or anyone else. The body was simply cut into quarters after death, just as the carcass of a butchered animal would be.
shareIt's castrated, not emasculated... geeeez
shareActually you're dead wrong. Emasculate means 'to deprive of virility', physically or figuratively, in any number of ways. So does castrate. Check any dictionary.
But when animals such as cattle and sheep are castrated, only their testicles are removed, not their penises. So if castration has any narrower sense, it's 'removal of testicles only', which is not what was done for high treason.
That might be true, but still all irrelevant because Mel was not castrated in Braveheart.
shareActually he was; he was just too bashful to spell it out. There's a shot quite early in the proceedings where you just see his torso as far as the waist, and you see him give a little grimace. That was supposed to be his reaction to having his wedding tackle removed. Seriously.
shareMel Gibson actually said that he wasn't, it was just filmed and edited in such a way that made it easy to assume. Sorry dude.
shareAh? So Gibson's not merely bashful, but so protective of his masculinity that he wasn't prepared to have his character's family jewels cut off, even off-screen? That would figure...
But this really must be one of the silliest execution scenes ever. Not only for the wild historical inaccuracy - no emasculation; no disembowelling (whatever that steel thing with the hook was supposed to be, it wasn't anything you could use to split a man's belly open with); no heart removal; decapitation while still alive; the interpolation instead of a totally unhistorical 'submit and be spared all this' and so-called 'racking' - but its physiological impossibility.
If you're hanged by the neck - even for only a few seconds, and even if the knot isn't under your chin - your eyes will bulge, your face will be congested and your larynx will be, even if not totally crushed, too damaged for you to speak any time soon, let alone go yelling anything.
And if you try to rack anyone by hanging them up by their wrists and driving away a couple of horses attached to their feet, you won't actually achieve more than you would by simply leaving them hanging there and letting gravity do the work - you can't get the tension you need for racking, which needed to be done (when it was done, which in England wasn't till 1447 - contrary to what most people believe, England was a judicial-torture-free zone till the early Renaissance) on a horizontal frame with crank handles and rollers. What Braveheart shows here is a pointless hybrid of the strappado and tearing-apart-by-horses.
Yes, Wallace (in historical reality) was hung (as shown), drawn (behind horses) and quartered, which included having his genitals sliced off, before his innerds.
shareReal life: William Wallace was castrated. In this movie, it’s not clear, as they don’t show outright (for good reason)
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