From Nisgua:
With great concern about the new film, "Apocalypto," we are forwarding on two
pieces of analysis about the movie. We strongly urge folks NOT to pay to see
"Apocalypto," which opens today.
Apocalypto Critique
Prof. Gerardo Aldana y V
University of California, Santa Barbara
gvaldana@chicst.ucsb.edu
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 who will have
their perspectives of Maya culture tainted by the agenda of one man with too
much money.
*****
30 Nov 2006
'Apocalypto' is Pornography
With great trepidation I went to an advance preview screening of
Apocalypto last night in Miami. No one really expects historical dramas
to be accurate, so I was not so much concerned with whether or not the
film would accurately represent what we know of Classic period Maya
history as I was concerned about the message Mel Gibson wanted to convey
through the film. After Jared Diamond's Collapse, it has become
fashionable to use the so called Maya "collapse" as a metaphor for
Western society's environmental and political excesses. Setting aside
the fact that the Maya lived for over 1000 years in a fragile tropical
environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S,
we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200-I anticipated a
heavy handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume.
What I saw was much worse than this. The thrill of hearing melodic
Yucatec Maya spoken by familiar faces (although the five lead actors are
_not_ Yucatec Maya but other well known and fantastic Native American
actors) during the first ten minutes of the movie is swiftly and
brutally replaced with stomach churning panic at the graphic Maya on
Maya violence depicted in a village raid scene of nearly 15 minutes.
From then on the entire movie never ceases to utilize every possible
excuse to depict more violence-it is unrelenting. Our hero, Jaguar Paw,
the charismatic Cree actor Rudy Youngblood has one hellavuh bad couple
of days. Captured for sacrifice, forced to march to the putrid city
nearby, he endures every tropical jungle attack conceivable and that is
_after_ he escapes the relentless brutality of the elites. I am told
this part of the movie is completely derivative of the 1966 film The
Naked Prey. Pure action flick, with one ridiculous encounter after
another, filmed beautifully in the way that only Hollywood blockbusters
can afford, this is the part of the movie that will draw in audiences
and demonstrates Gibson's skill as a cinematic storyteller.
But I find the visual appeal of the film one of the most disturbing
aspects of Apocalypto. The jungles of Veracruz and Costa Rica have
never looked better, the masked priests on the temple jump right off a
Classic Maya vase, the people are gorgeous. The fact that this film was
made in Mexico and filmed in the Yucatec Maya language coupled with its
visual appeal makes it all the more dangerous-it looks authentic,
viewers will be captivated by the crazy exotic mess of the urban city
and the howler monkeys in the jungle. And who really cares that the
Maya were not living in cities when the Spanish arrived? Yes, Gibson
includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries (these guys are
too clean to be conquistadors) in the last 5 minutes of the story (in
the real world the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last Maya city
was abandoned). It is one of the few calm moments in an otherwise
aggressively paced film. The message-the end is near and the savior has
come. Gibson's efforts at authenticity of location and language might
for some viewers, mask his blatantly Colonial message that the Maya
needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline
of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was
absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite
culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess. No
mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound
spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering
feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big budget
technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal
to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they
deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500
years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been
thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and
community leaders throughout the Maya area today. Pan-Maya
intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were
manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of
the 1970-90's. To see this same trope, this clearly Western fantasy
about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for
entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. I am
embarrassed for my race that we continue to produce such one sided and
clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New
World.
Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamusel this morning, I am
not a compulsively politically correct type who sees our little brown
brothers as the epitome of goodness and light. I _know_ the Maya
practiced brutal violence upon one another-I have studied child
sacrifice during the Classic period, etc. And I loved Braveheart, I
really did. But there is something very different about portraying a
group of people who are recovering from 500 years of colonization as
violent and brutal. These are not Romans killing Celts. These are
people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism
which at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie
about the 1000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya when only 10 years ago Maya
people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for
being Maya-- is in any way okay or entertaining or gods forbid,
helpful-is the epitome of a Western fantasy of white supremacy that I
find sad and ultimately pornographic. Ultimately it is best to conclude
(and this is surely no surprise to most of us) that Apolcalypto has very
little to do with Maya culture and instead is Gibson's comment on the
excesses he perceives in modern Western society. I just wish he had
been honest enough to say this. Instead he has created a beautiful and
disturbing portrait that satisfies his need for comment but does
violence to one of the most impressive of Native American cultures.
Traci Ardren, PhD.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Miami
Editor, Ancient Maya Women (2002) and The Social Experience of Childhood
in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006)
Quetzil E. Castañeda, Ph.D.
*Founding Director
Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology, OSEA
*Visiting Professor, Spring 2006-Spring 2007
Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Indiana University
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