A Scholar's Review of Apocalypto
APOCALYPTO-ATTACK ON OUR HIST0RY!
Body: Read UCSB Professor's critique below:
Having viewed a screening of Apocalypto at UCSB on
December 3rd, I walked away recognizing three main
points within Mel Gibson’s movie. This first colors
the entire story, seemingly as a kind of guiding
moral: “the good Indian is the savage one in the
forest.” There is absolutely nothing appealing about
Maya city-life in this movie-no indication that Maya
urban centers flourished in the region for hundreds of
years. Instead, religious figures are depicted as
fraudulent or heavily drugged; political figures are
fat and passive (both of these characterizations
having been lifted straight from The Road to El
Dorado); and everyone else seems to be living a
nightmare of hard labor, servitude, famine, and/or
disease. The “Maya” living in the forest village, on
the other hand, are fantasized animations of
National Geographic photos of Amazonian tribes.
These “hidden” Indians provide the audience the only possibility
for sympathy-and this perhaps restricted to puerile
humor or one family’s role as (surprise!) the underdog.
For Gibson, it appears, the “noble savage” remains a
valid ideal.
Second, for having a completely clean slate upon
which to write, the story is pathetically unoriginal.
From his decidedly Western constructions of
masculinity, gender, and sexuality, to the use of a baseball
move in a critical hand-to-hand combat scene, to
lifting an escape scene from Harrison Ford’s character in The
Fugitive, one gets the sense that all of his creative
energy was invested in discovering ways to depict
(previously) unimaginable gore. In fact, I would
be ready to write off the entire movie as nothing
more than a continuation of Gibson’s hyper-violent
mental masturbation, except for the real-world
implications.
This leads me to the third point, and the real
crime, which is Gibson’s interpretive shift in his
representation of horrific behaviors.
Specifically, four of five viscerally repugnant cultural
practices that are here attributed to Maya culture are
actually “borrowed” from the West. The raid on the
protagonist’s village constitutes the first
interpretive shift viewed by the audience. The
brutality and method of this raid directly replicate
the documented activities of representatives of the
British Rubber Company in the Amazon Basin during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
the Amazon case, those perpetuating the human rights
violations were European or European-descendents
against indigenous communities; the raiding of
villages for human sacrifice is undocumented for
Maya cultures. Next, the slave market depicted in the
city constitutes a mirror image of the Trans-Atlantic
slave trade in the pre-Civil War United States. In that
case, the “sellers” of African slaves were
Europeans or European-Americans, dehumanizing Other peoples
by treating them as commodities. While slavery is
documented for Maya cultures (and Greek, and
Roman, etc.), there is nothing that attests to their
having been bought and/or sold in public market contexts.
A third objectionable attribution is that of
decapitated human heads placed on stakes within
the city center. Documented examples of this practice
come from Cortes’s entrada into Central Mexico
committed by Spanish conquistadors against their indigenous
“enemies.” Depictions of “skull racks” do exist,
but there is no evidence that these resulted from mass
murder or even that they still had flesh on them
when they were hung. Finally, the escape portal for the
protagonist-the releasing of captives to run
toward freedom while being shot at-is straight from
ancient Rome (or at least Hollywood’s depictions of Roman
coliseum “sports”) and finds no corroboration in
records concerning Maya peoples.
Heart sacrifice is the only practice that scholars
have “read” from ancient Maya cultural
remains-although the scale and performance is
Gibson’s fantasy alone. The attribution of heart sacrifice
to the Maya is largely anchored to Spanish accounts
of Aztec practices, which raises two additional
issues: i) Mathew Restall’s recent Seven Myths of the
Spanish Conquest gives a good overview of how unreliable
Spanish accounts may be; and ii) Mel Gibson
clearly could not have substituted the Aztec capital for
his “Maya” city given the same Spanish accounts of it
(e.g. Bernal Diaz del Castillo on approaching
Tenochtitlan: “With such wonderful sights to gaze
on we did not know what to say, or if this was real
that we saw before our eyes. On the land side there
were great cities, and on the lake many more…”)
In any event, these perversions of the historical
record appear to be Gibson’s alone and cause me to
wonder if they reflect an agenda. Whether he meant
to claim that all cultures have been as grotesquely
violent or inhumane as the West (and so in some
twisted way, making such behavior “ok”), or if
there is a more nefarious attempt at disparaging
Mesoamerican cultures in some sort of
justification of their “conquest” (implied by the pristine
representation of the Spaniards)-this is a
question Gibson alone can answer.
Whatever his response, my assessment is that-apart
from its “artistic” license-because it takes the
worst of the West and “reads” it into one or two days of
“Maya” civilization, this movie comprises an
extreme disservice to Maya (and Mesoamerican) cultures
past and present, and to indigenous people of the
Western Hemisphere. The case is so extreme, I wonder if it
might constitute a legally actionable hate crime
against Maya people. At the very least, though,
with this movie, Gibson has performed a tremendous
disservice to scholars who aim at accurate
representations of the past, and to the audiences
whowill have their perspectives of Maya culture
tainted by the agenda of one man with too much money.
Prof. Gerardo Aldana y V
University of California, Santa Barbara
Source
Body: Read UCSB Professor's critique below:
Having viewed a screening of Apocalypto at UCSB on
December 3rd, I walked away recognizing three main
points within Mel Gibson’s movie. This first colors
the entire story, seemingly as a kind of guiding
moral: “the good Indian is the savage one in the
forest.” There is absolutely nothing appealing about
Maya city-life in this movie-no indication that Maya
urban centers flourished in the region for hundreds of
years. Instead, religious figures are depicted as
fraudulent or heavily drugged; political figures are
fat and passive (both of these characterizations
having been lifted straight from The Road to El
Dorado); and everyone else seems to be living a
nightmare of hard labor, servitude, famine, and/or
disease. The “Maya” living in the forest village, on
the other hand, are fantasized animations of
National Geographic photos of Amazonian tribes.
These “hidden” Indians provide the audience the only possibility
for sympathy-and this perhaps restricted to puerile
humor or one family’s role as (surprise!) the underdog.
For Gibson, it appears, the “noble savage” remains a
valid ideal.
Second, for having a completely clean slate upon
which to write, the story is pathetically unoriginal.
From his decidedly Western constructions of
masculinity, gender, and sexuality, to the use of a baseball
move in a critical hand-to-hand combat scene, to
lifting an escape scene from Harrison Ford’s character in The
Fugitive, one gets the sense that all of his creative
energy was invested in discovering ways to depict
(previously) unimaginable gore. In fact, I would
be ready to write off the entire movie as nothing
more than a continuation of Gibson’s hyper-violent
mental masturbation, except for the real-world
implications.
This leads me to the third point, and the real
crime, which is Gibson’s interpretive shift in his
representation of horrific behaviors.
Specifically, four of five viscerally repugnant cultural
practices that are here attributed to Maya culture are
actually “borrowed” from the West. The raid on the
protagonist’s village constitutes the first
interpretive shift viewed by the audience. The
brutality and method of this raid directly replicate
the documented activities of representatives of the
British Rubber Company in the Amazon Basin during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
the Amazon case, those perpetuating the human rights
violations were European or European-descendents
against indigenous communities; the raiding of
villages for human sacrifice is undocumented for
Maya cultures. Next, the slave market depicted in the
city constitutes a mirror image of the Trans-Atlantic
slave trade in the pre-Civil War United States. In that
case, the “sellers” of African slaves were
Europeans or European-Americans, dehumanizing Other peoples
by treating them as commodities. While slavery is
documented for Maya cultures (and Greek, and
Roman, etc.), there is nothing that attests to their
having been bought and/or sold in public market contexts.
A third objectionable attribution is that of
decapitated human heads placed on stakes within
the city center. Documented examples of this practice
come from Cortes’s entrada into Central Mexico
committed by Spanish conquistadors against their indigenous
“enemies.” Depictions of “skull racks” do exist,
but there is no evidence that these resulted from mass
murder or even that they still had flesh on them
when they were hung. Finally, the escape portal for the
protagonist-the releasing of captives to run
toward freedom while being shot at-is straight from
ancient Rome (or at least Hollywood’s depictions of Roman
coliseum “sports”) and finds no corroboration in
records concerning Maya peoples.
Heart sacrifice is the only practice that scholars
have “read” from ancient Maya cultural
remains-although the scale and performance is
Gibson’s fantasy alone. The attribution of heart sacrifice
to the Maya is largely anchored to Spanish accounts
of Aztec practices, which raises two additional
issues: i) Mathew Restall’s recent Seven Myths of the
Spanish Conquest gives a good overview of how unreliable
Spanish accounts may be; and ii) Mel Gibson
clearly could not have substituted the Aztec capital for
his “Maya” city given the same Spanish accounts of it
(e.g. Bernal Diaz del Castillo on approaching
Tenochtitlan: “With such wonderful sights to gaze
on we did not know what to say, or if this was real
that we saw before our eyes. On the land side there
were great cities, and on the lake many more…”)
In any event, these perversions of the historical
record appear to be Gibson’s alone and cause me to
wonder if they reflect an agenda. Whether he meant
to claim that all cultures have been as grotesquely
violent or inhumane as the West (and so in some
twisted way, making such behavior “ok”), or if
there is a more nefarious attempt at disparaging
Mesoamerican cultures in some sort of
justification of their “conquest” (implied by the pristine
representation of the Spaniards)-this is a
question Gibson alone can answer.
Whatever his response, my assessment is that-apart
from its “artistic” license-because it takes the
worst of the West and “reads” it into one or two days of
“Maya” civilization, this movie comprises an
extreme disservice to Maya (and Mesoamerican) cultures
past and present, and to indigenous people of the
Western Hemisphere. The case is so extreme, I wonder if it
might constitute a legally actionable hate crime
against Maya people. At the very least, though,
with this movie, Gibson has performed a tremendous
disservice to scholars who aim at accurate
representations of the past, and to the audiences
whowill have their perspectives of Maya culture
tainted by the agenda of one man with too much money.
Prof. Gerardo Aldana y V
University of California, Santa Barbara
Source