Posted on 12/13/2006 4:59:55 AM PST by UltraConservative
According to Mel Gibson, his new movie, "Apocalypto," is a metaphor for the death of American civilization. "The precursors to a civilization that's going under are the same, time and time again," Gibson explained at a film festival in Texas. "What's human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?"
Gibson's comparison between Mayan and American civilization is deeply offensive. To elucidate just how offensive the comparison is, I must review the film's portrayal of Mayan society. (Warning: There are spoilers. If you are intent on seeing this movie, read no further.)
"Apocalypto" portrays two societies within Mayan civilization. The first is a hunter-gatherer sort of Rousseau-ian society, wherein noble savages tell colorful stories, cherish their pregnant wives and play practical jokes involving eating raw tapir testicles. The second is the decadent Mayan city, where slave laborers covered in powder cough up blood as they pound rock; where throngs cheer wildly as power-mad priests engage in ritual human sacrifice, pulling still-beating hearts from chest cavities, beheading victims and tossing those heads down towering flights of stairs to a waiting crowd, which then sticks the heads on pikes; where the headless bodies are dumped in Holocaust-like mass graves, to rot in the sun.
The Mayan city society invades the Rousseau-ian hunter-gatherer society, brutally and graphically raping and murdering its way through village after village. Citizens of the hunter-gatherer society are kidnapped and used for ritual sacrifice, or for sport killing.
Gibson's point is this: Mayan civilization in decline had corrupted itself through brutality and barbarity. It sacrificed its own citizens on the altar of fear. The values that made Mayan civilization worth preserving -- the values embodied by the Rousseau-ian society -- were destroyed so that the fears of the population could be assuaged. In doing so, Mayan society made itself ripe for conquer by the Europeans.
Gibson likens Mayan civilization to American civilization. "We're all afraid," Gibson told Entertainment Weekly. "That's something I've been finding out more recently -- how racked by fear we are as a society." We are discarding our values, Gibson implies. We are engaging in Mayan barbarities in Iraq, sending our own citizens off to die on the altar of fear.
"Apocalypto" opens with a quotation from historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it destroys itself from within." Durant is correct -- but the film's exposition of Durant is utterly wrong. If American (and Western) civilization falls, it will not be because our fears drove us to "Mayan barbarities," but because, like Gibson, we failed to distinguish good from evil.
Not all civilizations are created equal: Some deserve to fall because they are deeply corrupt from the outset. Mayan civilization, with its human sacrifice and primitivism, was never a beacon of liberty. The Rousseau-ian values Gibson sees were not what distinguished Mayan civilization. The strength of Mayan civilization was based solely on its power -- it was doomed to fail from the moment it encountered a society more powerful militaristically and economically than itself.
Western civilization has values worth protecting -- liberty and equality of opportunity -- and those values give it strength. Those values make us stronger than our enemies, unlike the Mayans. Equating all civilizations, as Gibson does, is what undermines Western values. There is a world of difference between using violence out of superstition and using violence to both ensure domestic security and free others from the oppression of a death cult that ritually beheads its citizens or dumps them in mass graves. It is moral barbarism of the highest order to equate the two, as Gibson does.
Critics have rightly focused on the stunning violence of Gibson's "Apocalypto." The movie is certainly one of the most violent ever filmed -- Gibson's camera lingers lovingly over each wound. But it is the violence Gibson does to morality that should worry us. It is that violence that contributes to the internal destruction of Western civilization. If Western civilization is doomed to failure, it will not be despite Mel Gibson's best efforts, it will be because of them.
Mr. Shapiro is a student at Harvard Law School. He is the author of "Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future" (Regnery, a Human Events sister company) and "Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctinate America's Youth" Thomas Nelson).
Written accounts by the first spanish invaders included the description of mounds of body parts. Body parts were divided between the castes. High castes got the better choices.
Mels move shows little of the institutionalized cannibalism, the stratified class structure but does a nice job of detailing a crowd scene around a pyramid on feast day.
Apocalypto has less gratuitous violence than a typical slasher move and far less horror than most teenager movies.
Until the hero took his second spear to the shoulder we all considered it the best movie of the year.
I and mine will take your word for it and continue to avoid Gibson gorefests, mad slasher movies, and teenage-oriented horror flicks alike.
You missed nothing , it was embarrasing for him. Mel is a very talented guy, but he looks and acts like a train wreck. He kind of reminds me of his character in Lethal Weapon, on the crazy side, without the handsome and loveable!
Gibson had "Jaguar Paw" on with him. The actor is VERY suited for movies with subtitles, as he was pretty much inarticulate.
Gibson says the primary reason for a movie is entertainment.
He didn't know about the Holocaust Denial conference in Iran, because he doesn't watch TV.
He might make another Lethal Weapon movie.
His "unfortunate incident" has allowed him to grow as a person.
It's really early in Hollywood compared to New York.
His movie isn't as violent as "Braveheart."
He was not very charming, was jittery, and displayed no sense of humor.
To equate the freeing of 15 million from a barbaric dictator to the genocide of a peaceful society is the height of ignorance. Hope mel lost some of that money he made from the Passion.
Pray for W and Our Troops
He did seem to be holding back anger/hostility...but not very well, or convincingly.
..did nothing to recommend his movie, even if I was inclined to see it, which I'm not!
Because the human sacrifice scenes are a metaphor for the 6:00 am sale frenzy at Best Buy. ;)
After five hundred years of fighting moors in spain the spanish were masters of whatever they did.
That just about summed it up!
Get a grip. Mel, IN HIS OWN WORDS, has told you what HE thinks the movie is about, and Christianity isn't the point!
Actually, cultural leaders equating human sacrifice with self-defense and the imposition of law and order is grounds to be concerned about our future.
One more example of how hard drinking kills brain cells.
I've never seen Gibson so ... animated. His eyes were darting around the room, and he seemed to answer everything sarcastically. He seemed almost apoplectic.
When Steve Doocy (sp?) asked what Gibson thought about the ongoing anti-Jewish "conference" in Iran, Gibson feigned to know nothing about it, saying "I dont watch TV."
Maybe it was my perception, but Gibson seems to have lost his natural joviality since his DUI arrest where he was rightfully admonished by the general public for his a-holish comments about "Jews being the cause of nearly all wars," or whatever it was he said.
You nailed it. I gave a summary of the interview a few posts above yours.
I always wondered why Gibson made all those Lethal Weapon movies with the ultra left-wing extremist and kook, Danny Glover. Maybe things are as the author states -- that Gibson doesn't know right from wrong.
I think if one sees the movie and draws their own conclusions one may see it from my prespective which is this:
Many in the US on the left embrace a New Age belief that we should all get in touch with how the indians were back before Europe invaded the Americas.
Well, thanks to Mel he has shown everyone what this would mean.
And it's becomes clear to anyone viewing the movie what changed all of this sick behaviour at the every end.
Thanks Mel, I don't care what you say it means, I think once you see it it makes it's own statement very nicely.
Gibson is a flaming idiot. No better than Babs, Danny Glover, or any other hollywood dingbat.
At least with The Passion, there was a reason for the violence. IMO, the violence demonstrated just how much Jesus Christ endured for the sake of humanity. However, it was a very hard movie to watch and I had to turn away several times.
OTOH, blood and gore for its own sake... no thanks.
I went to see the Nativity instead. Very uplifting!
It was released on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which does not occur in the summer.
To be fair though, if Apocalypto is an accurate portrayal of the violence that went on back then, then it does not exist for it's own sake. It exists as a window to the past, to the history of how these people really were.
Now, you can choose to look through the window or walk right on by. Makes no difference which really. The fact remains however, that if it is an accurate portrayal, then it does not exist for it's own sake.
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