'Apocalypto' does disservice to its subjects

SF Chronicle ^ | December 11, 2006 | Zachary X. Hruby

[veronica]

"Apocalypto," Mel Gibson's new thriller about the ancient Maya civilization, is exactly that: thrilling. But this entertainment comes at a price.

The Maya at the time of Spanish contact are depicted as idyllic hunters and gatherers, or as genocidal murderers, and neither of these scenarios is accurate. The film represents a step backward in our understanding of the complex cultures that existed in the New World before the Spanish invasion, and it is part of a disturbing trend re-emerging in the film industry, portraying non-Western natives as evil savages.

"King Kong" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" show these natives as uncaring, beastlike and virtually inhuman. "Apocalypto" achieves similar goals, but in a much subtler fashion.

As in "The Passion of the Christ," Gibson utilizes native language to invoke a veneer of credibility for his story, in this case Yucatec Maya, a technique that unfortunately does much to legitimize this rather strange version of Maya history.

[Old_Mil]

Mesoamerican game ulama, which included sacrifice of the entire losing team.

Sort of puts the whole soccer hooligan thing into perspective , eh?

[L.N. Smithee]

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!

I think the source of his ire is this:

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Third, once Gibson paints this bloody picture of 15th century Maya civilization, the ultimate injustice is handed the pre-Columbian Maya. As the jungle hero escapes the evil city and is chased to the edge of the sea by his antagonists, with literally nowhere else to turn, Spanish galleons appear, complete with a small, lead boat carrying a stalwart friar hoisting a crucifix. For Gibson, the new beginning for these lost Mayan people, the Apocalypto, evidently is the coming of the Spaniards and Christianity to the Americas.

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[GladesGuru]

Meso-American 'cultures' practiced cannibalism on a grand scale. The great temple structures were also butcher shops where meat from the sacrificed was sold.

Savage is as savage does. or,, as savage did, in this case.

Whenever I hear a whine about Western, technologically based society painting savages as savages, I know a Libroid is pushing the Critical Theory schtick again.

Considering that one is hard pressed to name anything admirable about the entirety of South America in terms of civilizations, what is wrong about defining the savagery that was inherent in Meso-American indigenous peoples/cultures?

[SoCal Pubbie]

Cortez's interpreter and mistress, "Doña Marina" or "La Malinche" was most likely Nahua, and was said to have been sold as a slave to the Mayans. She was offered to Cortez by The Chontal Maya, in what is the present day Mexican state of Tabasco, so she must have been one spicy chica!

[oneamericanvoice]

The professor states that they weren't amoral, or non-civilized, etc. Guess cutting open a person's chest and ripping out their still beating heart fits his idea of morals. There is no doubt that the Mayans had many things that were advanced for their time, but their ruthlessness doesn't mean that they had risen to new heights in the civilization catagory. He talks about the supposed lack of archeological evidence of the depiction of the mass slaughter in the film. The humidity of the jungle would have rotted the bones of the victims long ago, one can surmise. Beyond that there is all the evidence provided by the Mayans themselves. I have seen too many of these apologist/revisionists in the Indian community, and he is just one more.

[oneamericanvoice]

Be suspicious of anyone with an X in their name. He is just another apologist/revisionist hiding behind credentials.

[SoCal Pubbie]

It is inconceivable that a nation of people, even reduced as it was to less than two million, simply disappeared. The very term Mestizo refers to the mixture of Spanish and native blood. Of course the people of Tenochtitlan didn't even call themselves Aztecs, but by whatever name you can be sure their bloodlines carry on.

[fish hawk]

I didn't find much wrong with the culture in the movie however I didn't care for an eclipse if the sun that lasts for only five or ten minutes. I've actually seen an eclipse of the sun and it takes quite awhile for the moon shadow to cross it. It did not ruin the movie for me as I realize "it's only a movie" and they do things like that.

[Major_Risktaker]

LOL!

[oneamericanvoice]

Actually you are wrong about the Aztecs. The use of Aztec by some Mexicans is like people in American saying "Native American". It is also the case that some of them know that there is Indian blood in their lineage, but they don't know which tribe, so Aztec is used. As for real Aztecs being completely gone, that is inaccurate as well. I know one.

The Atzlan myth was brought into the picture during the Chicano Convention in the '60s when a poet composed and read a piece to invigorate their campaign for rights. He didn't mean for them to bastardize the meaning into what MECHa and La Raza have made it. Beyond that, Montezuma told Cortez in the 1500s that Atzlan was a myth.

[oneamericanvoice]

"I didn't hear anybody complaining about Mel Gibson maligning the Romans."

That's because the Romans don't have a bunch of guilt ridden people romanticizing them.

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

Hruby is correct in saying that there is no evidence of Mayans practicing human sacrifice on the same enormous scale as the Aztecs.

This is the same as saying there is no evidence that Pol Pot practiced genocide on the same enormous scale of Hitler. He's quibbling over magnitude. ;-)

[Brad from Tennessee]

Thanks for the review Ciexyz. I'll trust your judgement and go see the movie.

[glorgau]

The following was an anonymous posting on Craigslist San Francisco Rants & Raves board: An outstanding piece of analysis

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Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is the most powerful film of all time, is packed with strong positive messages and is the most polished, iconic and awe-inspiring allegorical warning against the unrestrained power and abuse of government that cinema has ever seen.

The plot of the film depicts Aztec warrior armies being sent on missions to capture and enslave neighboring tribes and bring them back to be used as fodder for human sacrifice. Set in Mesoamerica just before Spanish contact, it depicts the decline of the Maya civilization.

Gibson again sets the tyrannical power of the state against the family and the rag-tag bands, it's what we witnessed in The Patriot and Braveheart but the message is driven home even more authoritatively in Apocalypto. In almost every case throughout history, the state is brutal, murdering and oppressive and it is out to dominate and enslave the only people you can trust, your family, your brethren, your tribe.

The film details the horrors of unrestrained government and how tyrants always seize the reigns of control, press on the nerve of power and abuse, dominate and terrorize populations. This is the norm of human history.

Apocalypto highlights the process of targeting the leading warriors of the enemy tribe, the tallest, toughest, meanest, would be the prime candidates for sacrifice and torture. This was done in an attempt to please the gods with the most coveted sacrifice and is the reason why indigenous populations in the region today are little over 5 foot tall on average.

Human sacrifice is a fundamental tenet of all historical dictatorships. It was practiced in ancient Germany, Greece, Asia and across the planet. The Mayans saw it as a normal function of society and would consider anyone who dissented as insane. Just as today, the police state, the surveillance state, torture and numerous other bizarre and abusive actions of the state are being normalized.

A telling moment in the film serves as commentary for the foreknowledge and exploitation of astronomical occurrences throughout history, where elite guilds versed in the secret wisdom of astronomy would anticipate solar and lunar eclipses and use them to hoodwink their populations into believing they held divine power, thus enlisting their enslavement and obedience under the threat that sun and moon would not return unless the people displayed total submission.

Parallels can be drawn to modern times where a population paranoid, fearful and uneducated can be brought to heel by manufactured monsters and imagined foreboding disasters in the name of the war on terror.

The film also illustrates how elites throughout history push bread and circuses, sporting and gladiatorial events, to distract the public from real issues and create false heroes to dislodge the natural mooring of man's moral compass and create a vacuum of good examples of how humans should function in a free society.

The Britney Spears of yesteryear, the adulated ones with their robes, bobbles and trinkets are exalted above all others and worshipped as gods on earth.

The film also has a message of rejecting fear as a sickness, again alluding to today's society where fear is used as a method of brainwashing and control by the state.

Watching the film evokes a total immersion in the atmosphere of the experience. You are able to suspend disbelief and really imagine you are there in Mesoamerica. You feel the ancestral memories of the elders around the camp fire, it stirs the instinctive echoes of time that we as humanity all share.

There are very few films that have the impact of leaving you uplifted and enlightened as you leave the cinema, and for those impressions to stick. Apocalypto achieves this and teaches a philosophy of perseverance and courage that maintains an indelible mark on the viewer.

Mel Gibson is already being subjected to ridiculous hit pieces which attack him for depicting the real nature of the brutal Mayan culture.

An Austin-American Statesman article written by Chris Garcia features an interview with assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas, Julia Guernsey.

The arguments used to bash Apocalypto are nitpicking jabs at minutia which are then exploited to demonize the message of the entire film, such as claimed minor inaccuracies in cave drawings and outright false assertions such as the notion that women were not involved in the sacrificial rituals.

The sacrifices themselves are not denied and in fact are exalted as nothing more than a cultural tendency. Guernsey even has the temerity at one point to spew that human sacrifice and sacrifice of babies was a "pious act" done "with solemnity." Guernsey recoils and sneers at the very notion that human sacrifice should be condemned.

Slamming a precise portrayal of Mayan culture as offensive and racist is to be expected from moral relativists who are completely absent any factual evidence to counter Gibson's depiction. The Nazi culture was barbarous, genocidal and a disgrace to humanity - is it racist towards German people to suggest this was the case?

Bounding babies and small children every morning and sacrificing them to the water gods and the fertility gods is wrong. It was wrong then and it would be wrong now.

Cutting someone's heart out at sunrise and sunset is wrong. It is not racist or offensive to judge a culture if it is clearly distasteful. It is not unacceptable to discern what is right according to our innate moral compass. In fact, any attempt at removing the boundaries and definition of evil is simply evil itself trying to erase our frame of reference to characterize it.

Mel Gibson is Stanley Kubrick on steroids and Apocalypto elevates him to the position of the greatest living director in the world today. He is the standard of casting, cinematography and research. Apocalypto is avant garde, state of the art and evergreen at every step of the way.

The world is not a safe place and history shows that the most dangerous force is always government and the crime syndicates that grow up around it. The same high priesthood that manipulated and controlled the Mayan tribes of thousands of years ago were beholden to the same statecraft of tyranny that is embraced by our rulers today. Apocalypto is the very definition of this message and its power obtains it the accolade of the most important film of our generation - and possibly of all time.

[justa-hairyape]

Mexicans have more Indian blood then European.

If you go back 30 to 40 thousand years, all Indians of North, Central and South America originally came from their Central Asian ancestors in Kazakhstan. Those Kazakhstanians are also the ancestors of all Europeans. They migrated to Kazakhstan from the Middle East after leaving Africa. At least according to 'The History of Man' PBS program (there source data was DNA analysis from male blood samples). So we will all end up looking like Central Asian Kazakhstanians after the DNA bloodlines get mixed back together through globalization.

[BigCinBigD]

"The guy who cuts my lawn is a fat, balding white guy."

Just doing the jobs the Mayans wont do. ;)

[ChicagoHebrew]

I thought the Maya were extinct by the time the Spanish arrived and this was about the Aztecs.

The Maya weren't, and aren't extinct. There are still Mayan villages in Mexico (where the Mayan language is spoken, and some elements of Mayan culture remain).

The Maya did, however, experience a steep decline about 400 years before the Spanish arrived -- abandoning all their major cities. Gibson is flat, stupid wrong to depict huge Mayan cities and pyramids at the time of the Spanish conquest. It would be like depicting Soloman's Temple existing at the time of the Crusades. . .

[justa-hairyape]

Parallels can be drawn to modern times where a population paranoid, fearful and uneducated can be brought to heel by manufactured monsters and imagined foreboding disasters in the name of the war on terror.

Thanks for posting that anonymous review. Nothing manufactured about the destruction of the WTC by terrorists. Historically however the worse monsters were the states themselves and they were as real as the sun and the moon. The people who were captured and sacrificed by the Mayan State would agree with that.

[skr]

Perhaps the fired Alabama coaches would feel better if they knew what happened to the fired Mayan coaches.

[Moonman62]

Large Mayan population in South Florida now. Most of the gardeners in my parents' gated community in Boca speak Quiche Mayan, NOT Spanish.

The Sun-Sentinel has done a couple of cheerleading articles recently about their prowess at collecting welfare.