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<div>From the Anthro-L list: a review by an anthropologist familiar
with the Maya. Read, then weep... -Ron</div>
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<div>Is "Apocalypto" Pornography?</div>
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<div align="right">December 5, 2006</div>
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<div>by Traci Ardren, assistant professor of anthropology at the
University of Miami.</div>
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<div><i>A scholar challenges Mel Gibson's use of the ancient Maya
culture as a metaphor for his vision of today's world.</i></div>
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<div><i>Traci Ardren, an assistant professor of anthropology at the
University of Miami, knows the Maya well. She has studied Classic Maya
society for over 20 years while living in the modern Maya villages of
Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Espita in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Her
credentials include contributing to and editing</i> Ancient Maya
Women<i> (2002) and</i> The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient
Mesoamerica<i> (2006). Ardren's reaction to the new film "</i>
Apocalypto<i>," follows. Scholars are well aware that some
aspects of Maya culture were violent, but Ardren finds fault with what
she sees as a pervasive colonial attitude in the film.</i></div>
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<div>With great trepidation I went to an advance 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
best-selling book<i> Collapse</i>, 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 more than a thousand 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.</div>
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<div>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<i> not</i> Yucatec Maya but other talented 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, played by 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.</div>
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<div>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, and 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 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 five 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.</div>
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<div>Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamusel 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?</div>
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<div>I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But
there is something very different about portraying a group of people,
who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and
brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of
persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To
think that a movie about the 1,000 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, entertaining, or
helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find
sad and ultimately pornographic. It is surely no surprise 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.</div>
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