Where Was the Maya Civilization in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto?
New America Media , Commentary, Gerardo Aldana, Posted: Dec 10, 2006
EDITOR'S NOTE: To the many scholars around the country who are familiar with the intricate and complex legacy of the Maya, Mel Gibson's new film is an affront and embarrassment to that history. Gerardo Aldana is Professor of Ancient Mesoamerica in the Department of Chicana Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
SANTA BARBARA -- To my great disappointment (and this is tough since I had little hope for the movie to begin with) Mel Gibson has gone beyond depriving the Maya of voice in Apocalypto, one of the first (nominally) Maya representations to hit the big screen. Gibson has created a monstrosity of his own limited imagination, and then painted it with a “Maya” veneer.
This is no idle observation, particularly since the product consists of a misrepresentation of some of the movie’s most horrific behaviors. After viewing an early screening of the film, three points struck me.
The 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, the animated Dreamworks film about two colonial Spaniards looking for an ancient city of ‘gold’ in the New World); 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-backed) Peruvian Amazon (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: Mathew Restall’s recent Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest gives a good overview of how unreliable Spanish accounts may be; and 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.
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User Comments
vera on Jan 20, 2007 at 19:40:01 said:
i dont think that Mel Gibsot was trying to show the Maya colture, but to say somting that he is thinking (sorry for my english ) its not MY first language
Dan on Jan 20, 2007 at 12:52:08 said:
Quite frankly, the film was a western take on a non-western culture (the wild west of the Maya if you will). It is a chase movie that has taken on superficial cultural details and placed them in an entertainment package.
So... can we hope for this to be some kind of accurate expression of the maya? Of course not. It is a violent exploitation suited for the purpose of a violent film.
Quite frankly, I feel any meaning is lost in this film- symbolic or historical. It miseducates those who know little of the maya, and angers those who know much.
So.. is it an Iraq war critique then? I guess it could be, but he sure picked a convoluted way of doing it.
A Stanton on Jan 11, 2007 at 18:37:04 said:
I think the movie was terrible. But looked great due to the cinematography, set and costumes. The last 30 mins was utterly predictable and full of cliches and I\'m not sure what all the gore is about - the guy with blood spurting from his head at the end (???) What was the point dramatically? let alone historically.
Pat on Jan 04, 2007 at 20:15:27 said:
Based on the stated credentials (Gerardo Aldana is Professor of Ancient Mesoamerica in the Department of Chicana Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara) I have to assume that he (the Professor) is a subject expert and his list of historical inaccuracies is accurate. I can understand that the Professor is a little put off by the movie. I have a friend, who is a Forensic Identification Technician, who sits through every showing of CIS muttering and laughing (however he does watch the show....hmmm). My point is that although the movie is Hollywood and arguably inaccurate, how many thousands of people have viewed the movie and gone home to Google Mayan history. The interest generated by this action film is priceless to researchers and scientists for backing and budget. Ride the wave Professor and keep publishing the flaws but you may wish to tone down the personal attacks on Mr. Gibson. I do not know the man and he may or may not be a nice person. However, his two films (Apocalypto and Passion of Christ) have certainly created discussion and interest into to both subject fields.
J Jenkins on Jan 04, 2007 at 11:36:18 said:
These weren't Mayans...They would be the Toltecs, the ones who over ran the Mayans in their decline, with no idea who, what, or how the pyramids were built, no inkling of astronomy, except for their "royalty", only a bunch of savages who interpreted the world through superstitious means. The Mayan culture was long gone in the seventeenth century and its cities inhabited by barbarians who only could copy the Mayans by superficial methods, in dress, pecking order, and a warped religious approach, such as cutting out the heart in a sacrificial manner instead of what possibly could have been an actual surgery performed by the original Mayans. Trepanning (head surgery) was practiced in many of the earlier cultures of Mesoamerica. Here in today's world we see all the wonders of science on a daily basis without the average human having the least idea of how planes fly, cars go, doctors operate, etc. In the fall of a civilisation, no one will be left to perform all these "miracles" and the barbarians will once again be sacrificing captives to a god unknown among the ruins of our great cities. Thanks Mel.
Jon Bowne on Jan 04, 2007 at 01:03:57 said:
Who are you fighting for Gerardo? No really..who are you truly speaking to. Are you so offended by Mel Gibson that you would exploit an untapped movie genre? Give it some time there champ...the movie about Pacal and the golden age of Palenque is right around the corner by some director you don't have a beef with. But hey, while your having your tirade how about attacking John Ford or Howard Hawks for their propagandized depiction of the mass genocide of the native americans. Hell, Sam Peckinpah was a woman beater..let's nitpick his movies for what they are lacking. I have a better idea...why don't you shut your freakin mouth and go make a better movie.
sophie on Jan 02, 2007 at 11:50:42 said:
I agree on some points, but this movie will NOT become a cult classic and I really think everyone should calm down a little bit. I really enjoyed this movie and I think almost this ENTIRE review was nonsense. Mel Gibson is not trying to make a completely historically correct movie, and it's stupid to say he borrowed his ideas from every other movie imaginable. I enjoyed this movie and it's not like I will think about this movie and every little detail the next time i think about mayans.
Not picky on Jan 02, 2007 at 06:44:32 said:
I think Mel should have left out the quote:
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
Did Will Durant say that or Ariel, his wife?
It's hard to tell critics, "relax, it's just a movie" when you whack people over the head with a quote like that.
Tom Collins on Dec 30, 2006 at 10:09:37 said:
Gore-fest! I think there is something wrong with Mel Gibson. This movie had so much potential but Mel ruined it with excessive graphic violence.
Chris on Dec 30, 2006 at 03:20:58 said:
(1) As for the eclipse, yes, it is hyperbole (most storytellers do this, you know?), but no, it is not an inaccurate depiction of how the elites in any society control, manipulate, and exploit the masses. Sure, the priests would know of the eclipse (as demonstrated by his laughter at the masses amazement), but the vast majority of Mayans would be generally ignorant of such intricacies (check the historical accounts of education and hierarchy). (2) Gibson mixes cultural aspects of the Mayans and Aztecs, and that might be pushing things, but the deforestation, warfare, famine, drought -- all those things lead to the downfall of the Mayans...and by the way, that's how most empires fall, Western, Eastern, or otherwise. (3) Look, depicting the "bad side" of a culture isn't morally wrong. Yes, I know that Western history is filled with historical lies about other cultures, but do we then ignore the downside of those cultures, or do we get into this glorification of all things Native? (4) The movie was a human story...period! I didn't find myself thinking the Mayans were any less than the brutal Romans, Greeks, Arabs (of the Middle Ages), Han Dyansty of China (and other dynasties), the Japanese warlords, the East Indian Aryans, Perians, Vikings, tribes of New Guinea, and many of the historic tribes of Africa, such as the Zulu.
Daniel Welsh on Dec 26, 2006 at 15:31:59 said:
Gerardo's critic of Mel Gibson's parabolic "Apocalypto" reminds me of what one wise guy said "As the legs of the lame are not even, so is a parable in the hands of a fool"--And since he probably wouldn't "get" that proverb, let's put it this way: In-other-words Gerardo just doesn't 'get' the movie.
Gerardo (as well many similar culture ideologues) can be pictured as some anthropologist in the 25th century studying his 'roots' to USA culture and pissed off at some future movie maker who only portrays the decadent side of USA culture, i.e. its rape and pillage of Iraq to appease its oil gods which keep their 'civilization' alive.
Pissed because the 'future' movie maker didn't show the great advances in USA engineering, architecture, arts etc.
Also Mel was not stupid enuf to know that the Mayan priests, with their knowledge of astronomy, weren't "in" on the eclipse---just as Bush and his cronies were "in" on 911. Hey, why do you think the priest was laughing? Sometimes I think guys like Gerardo have absolutely no sense of reality. Geeeze! I'd hate to be in one of his classes if his perception of history is as dull as his understanding of movies. Ha, Ha!
Ricardo Cervantes on Dec 26, 2006 at 09:33:44 said:
I completely agree that the movie is inaccurate in many respects. But I think the bottom line is that it's only a movie. I don't turn to Hollywood to educate me on history or cultures. I just need them to entertain me for a couple of hours when I need it. This movie did that for me.
andrea love on Dec 23, 2006 at 07:12:05 said:
A great Hollywood film!!!!!Sorry everyone is so stuck on Gibson being a regular human jackass...many creative people are *ssholes....but I think the message was about humankind beyond any civilization...a culture must be divided to be conquered in the first place...he speaks to me about the relentless battle of the innocent to stay innocent whilst having to defend their lives and freedom...........and that is all this movie said...and it was amazing to watch....see ya at the movies
Aaron Atwood on Dec 22, 2006 at 02:30:49 said:
Come on guys. IT'S A MOVIE!!! Are you all so accustomed to launching yourselves so passionately in defense for every misrepresented culture or entity that hatches from a Hollywood tale?? I would expect not as that would require the kind of energy that a full time job might, except without the pay. Anyway, everyone knows this is the information age and if they want the truth they will check the facts, cross-referencing and double/triple-checking reliable sources. If they don't do that, well ignorance is still a freedom of choice in this country as far as I know and who cares anyway? Do you think the ancient Mayan's are rolling in their graves about an innaccurate story told about them? You can't sue someone for fiction.
On the other hand, what is such a stretch beyond the eclipse scene and maybe Cortez arriving in Guatemala like that? *hehe*
Slaves make the most sense to be the sacrifice. Are you to argue that all of the well documented sacrificials were volunteers? Pa'lease!!
Also, what's the big deal here? I mean.. .every single culture that I can think of had slaves and abused them (is that a redundant statement?). So, why not the Mayan, huh??? And how else do you go about obtaining your slaves but by raiding villages etc.? No biggy. Been done before, been done since.. .
My final point: The movie was entertaining, it was GRIPPING, brutal, ruthless, exciting, heart-pounding, it was terrible, depressing, and captivating. There was an underdog to root for, and a lot of eye candy (let's face it, the costumes where great). What's not to enjoy? I saw it twice, and both times sweating, pulse racing. Name the last movie that made you feel that way and you may find yourself thinking of another Mel Gibson movie (Braveheart).. .Mel may be an ignorant prik, but who's going to let that ruin a movie for them? Not me.. .no thanks.
Gerardo Aldana on Dec 19, 2006 at 02:10:26 said:
Actually, the eclipse scene is a really good discussion topic. As Gibson has represented it, the entire eclipse takes a minute or two maximum--and it is critical to the storyline that it progress at this rate. As Newton's gravitational principles showed at about the same time the movie is supposed to be set in (within a century, anyway), eclipses take far longer-- totality alone usually lasts longer than Gibson's entire eclipse.
The point: Gibson is even manipulating the "laws of the universe" to fit his storyline... certainly a little thing like historically accurate representations of cultures won't get in his way.
Leticia Castañeda on Dec 18, 2006 at 14:19:10 said:
I concur with Gerardo Aldana's interpretation of Apocalypto. It was so one-dimensional in it portrayal of the Mayan culture and clearly came from a Western fantastical world view.
Mel Gibson has lots of explaining to do. It will take more than his million dollar donation to indigenous peoples in Mexico to make up for this grossly negligent film.
As a filmmaker, I am concerned that money is being spent on such nonsense when our culture is rich with amazing history ie: the Aztec calendar, astronomy, chocolate ...
Daniel Wanies on Dec 18, 2006 at 06:36:37 said:
This was a great movie. I am not a historian yet it struck me as more Aztec than Mayan; especially with the arrival of the bearded Cortez at the end. I cannot believe this rampant dissection and critisizm. It was an excellent story with non-stop action. I feel that most are judging based on their feeling towards Mel Gibson.
Zach Shatz on Dec 17, 2006 at 12:46:30 said:
It's an imperialist exploitation to misrepresent an entire cultural history for the furtherance of one's own, here the capitalist enterprise of fast-action, blood-and-gore moviemaking.
One point I haven't seen in the commentaries lambasting Gibson's irresponsible depiction of the Mayas is his mistreatment of the eclipse scene. The Mayas were thoroughly and intimately aware of such celestial events.
In the film, some of the Mayas were startled by the eclipse, while the elite seemed perhaps knowing but disinterested. An event such as a full eclipse would be anticipated and celebrated, as their entire culture revolved around celestial movements.
Mel Gibson has shown us he understands Mesoamerican culture no better than the Jews and the women he's denigrated. I guess these heathen types are all the same.
Lilly Roddy on Dec 15, 2006 at 05:15:54 said:
As the movie began, I knew that I was clearly watching a western patriachal view imposed on a notion of Mayan culture. Given Gibson's own religous leanings, I was not surprised.
Alberto Carvajal on Dec 11, 2006 at 08:24:19 said:
You're right. I watched the movie and the depiction of the mayans is total fantasy.
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