Mel Gibson's Apocalypto

An excerpt of a review, fwiw. From counterpunch. There’s things in it i agree with and things i dont.

Some critics seem to think Gibson was depicting the Mayans as kinda brutal sadistic savages and he was ignoring Mayan achievements — but i didn’t see it that way. I mean, its an adventure-chase movie. How is he supposed to turn that into a nuanced exploration of all the good and bad in Mayan culture?

I dont think he was picking on the Mayans.

I also didnt interpret the ending as a statement that the Mayans were being ‘rescued’ by the Europeans. I looked at it more like “Oh, you thought Predator was bad, wait till you see Freddy Krueger” Or somethin like that.

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Mad Mayan Max:https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/18/the-mad-mad-mayan-world-of-mel-gibson/

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………see link….That being said, the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans were class societies and relatively advanced in comparison to Jaguar Paw and his ilk. All you have to do is visit the Teotihuacan pyramids north of Mexico City to become convinced of this. Furthermore, there is at least one Marxist anthropologist who would lean toward the “Apocalypto” narrative—Thomas Patterson.

About twenty years ago, when I first began studying indigenous peoples’ history in earnest, I turned to his “The Inca Empire: The Formation and Disintegration of a Pre-Capitalist State”, fully expecting it if not to conform to the noble savage prototype to at least pay the Incas their proper respect after the fashion of José Carlos Mariátegui: “the communitarianism of the Incas cannot be denied or disparaged for having evolved under an autocratic regime.”

But Patterson would have none of that. Even without taking human sacrifice into account, life for Peru’s Jaguar Paws was pretty miserable: “The state had available a series of institutions and practices to ensure the regular and systematic extraction of tribute from the peoples they subjugated. This exploitation was backed up by the army, diplomacy, coercion, and intimidation.”

Of course, we have plenty of first-hand evidence as to what the common folk thought of their masters in Mexico and Peru. The conquistadors took advantage of local resentments to build an allied army of indigenous peoples bent on revenge. That, plus the spread of infectious diseases such as smallpox, had more to do with the collapse of the Incan and Aztec empires than Spanish horses, armor or guns.

In an interview with MTV, Gibson demonstrated some familiarity with the terrain almost as if he had read a book or two—or at least skimmed through the pages. When asked about the violence he portrayed in the film, he replied:

“Some of the stuff they did was unspeakable. You could not put it on film. I really did go light. There are accounts of when the conquistadors first arrived in the Aztec empire and saw something like 20,000 human sacrifices in four days. They must have had four or five temples going at the same time. All these hearts being ripped out — it was a kind of culture of death.”

In terms of the willingness of the subject peoples to be used by the conquistadors, Gibson put it this way: “I think the conquistadors led more of a revolution with the help of the people.” That was some revolution that led Mexico and Latin America into what Galeano described as five centuries of pillage in “Open Veins of Latin America”. It should also be mentioned that around the time that Gibson made the film he was momentarily open to the feeling of discontent that was sweeping the nation and presumably Hollywood as well. Gibson said, “The fear-mongering we depict in the film reminds me of President Bush and his guys.”

Gibson and screenplay co-writer Farhad Safinia, an Iranian-American, strove for accuracy. They hired a mostly Mayan-descended cast and had them speak in the Yucatec Maya language. I will give them credit for that.

They also used a consultant named Richard D. Hansen who was an academic expert in Mayan civilization and a frequent guest on television shows. Hansen stood behind the film when other experts challenged it. A typical dismissal of the film came from anthropologist Traci Arden who posed the question “Is Apocalypto Porn?” in Archaeology magazine.

“Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamucil this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in “Apocalypto,” 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. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World?”

Probably the most egregious violence done to indigenous history in the film was the mass sacrifice done before a frenzied mob as if someone was being lynched in the Deep South. In fact, it was Aztecs who engaged in mass sacrifices, not Mayans. Furthermore, the victims were rival elites, not commoners like Jaguar Paw.

Defending the film, Hansen said that the sacrifices were meant to represent late Mayan civilization when the Aztecs had penetrated south and exerted an influence on the empire that predated them.

Although there were obvious reasons for the Aztecs to be either hated and/or feared, I find it hard to take the arguments of a Hansen or a LeBlanc to heart when I consider what the conquistadors likely saw when they first encountered Tenochtitlan, the place that would become Mexico City. Cortés admitted: “Motecuhzoma had a palace in the town of such a kind, and so marvellous, that it seems to me almost impossible to describe its beauty and magnificence. I will say no more than there is nothing like it in Spain.”

Jacques Soustelle, the French anthropologist who specialized in Aztec studies and also ignominiously served as Minister of State in charge of Overseas Departments under DeGaulle during the Algerian war of liberation (he was nearly assassinated by the FLN), wrote “Daily Life of the Aztecs” in 1962, a necessary corrective to the Hansen/Gibson worldview.

The book, which can be read on Google, puts things into perspective:

“Besides, the conquerors saw comparable marvels from the time they first came into the valley of Mexico. They passed the night before their entry into the capital at Iztapalapan. Diáz was entranced by the palace in which they stayed — ‘so large and well-built in the best kind of stone, with the roof-timbers made of cedar and other sweet-smelling woods—very big rooms, and what was particularly worth seeing, patios covered over with cotton awnings. When we had looked through all this, we went into the garden; it was delightful to walk in it, and I was never weary of observing the variety of the plants and their perfumes, the flower-beds, many fruit-trees and roses [sic] of the country, and a pool of sweet water. There was another extraordinary thing: large boats could come right into this orchard from the lake.’ And the old Spanish soldier, writing his memoirs many years later, adds sadly, ‘Ahora todo está por el suelo, perdido, que no hay cosa.’ Now all that is fallen, lost: nothing is left any more.”

At least for today’s versions of the Jaguar Paw in Mexico City, those not fortunate enough to enjoy the splendors of neoliberal capitalism, those words ring true: Now all that is fallen, lost: nothing is left any more.

Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

zn wrote:

Thanks for posting that. As it happens I personally am very familiar with the controversies surrounding the film. I tend to approach it this way—I always say, as I do here, that it plays fast and loose with the history at points but that it does not matter while watching it. While watching it, you see there is nothing like it. Even fantastically implausible things like leading the panther into the pursuers, I just forgive. Overall, it’s a unique film. It has led many to say Gibson is a great director (including Tarantino, who called it a masterpiece). One of the things that makes it work is that once Jaguar Paw leads the gang dominated by Zero Wolf back into the woods, everything JP does is based on the woods being his turf and having ancient knowledge of the woods in his head, put there by his people who always lived there. Therefore his resourcefulness is not this action adventure trope, it’s just his cultural knowledge at work–he knows the forests, they’re his, he knows how to “use” it all. I also thought btw that Raoul Trujillo was just fantastic as Zero Wolf. His ferocity is very real on screen. It’s like he didn’t portray that, he incarnated it.

Here’s a paragraph from the wiki:

Apocalypto gained some passionate champions in the Hollywood community. Actor Robert Duvall called it “maybe the best movie I’ve seen in 25 years”. Director Quentin Tarantino said, “I think it’s a masterpiece. It was perhaps the best film of that year. I think it was the best artistic film of that year.” Martin Scorsese, writing about the film, called it “a vision,” adding, “Many pictures today don’t go into troubling areas like this, the importance of violence in the perpetuation of what’s known as civilization. I admire Apocalypto for its frankness, but also for the power and artistry of the filmmaking.” Actor Edward James Olmos said, “I was totally caught off guard. It’s arguably the best movie I’ve seen in years. I was blown away.” In 2013, director Spike Lee put the film on his list of all-time essential films.

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The panther scene was the worst scene in the movie, by far, I’d say. It was cartoonish. I have no idea how or why that survived editing.

I watched the commentary, btw, and what struck me was, what a smirking smartass Gibson was throughout the whole commentary. Just seemed like a dick to me. And yet he did an awful lot of beautiful film-making with this movie.

Then again, maybe its not so surprising — i mean there’s a lot of bathroom-dum-jock kinda humor in this film. Coupled with this visual beauty and film-artistry and incredible attention to detail in a very difficult setting.

…i saw another chase-movie a long long time ago. Set in Africa. Basically, just a guy running from bad-guys in the jungle or desert the whole movie. It was good too, but i cant remember the name of it. This movie reminded me some of that one.

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Yup. Thats it.

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