Media Criticism

There’s a good amount of debate amongst film critics this week regarding Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. The predominant perception seems to be summed up by the Houston Chronicle’s Amy Biancolli in her review, “Intense, exciting and way too bloody,” when she writes:

It is at times a film of engrossing power and extraordinary craftsmanship. It is at times an exercise in sadism. It is, at many times, a stirring look at an ancient people on the eve of annihilation. And it is Mel Gibson’s latest proof that as a director, his ambition is boundless and his energy nearly so, but his judgment is sorely lacking.

After viewing the flick last weekend, I’m mostly inclined to agree with that. Gibson does craft some exciting action sequences and chase scenes, and there’s no doubt the film has high production value, as they say in L.A. But as someone with a long time interest in the ancient Maya and their intriguing galactic calendar, I was vastly disappointed in the narrow thematic content of the film. I was expecting some insight on the culture of the ancient Maya, but Gibson offers very little.

A new web site about the Mayan calendar issued a press release this week that summarizes the feelings of many when it says:

Perhaps the most scathing criticism, coming from parents of school-age children to professors to film reviewers from The Hollywood Reporter and the New York Times, is the movie’s extreme focus on violence and its complete exclusion of the Maya’s brilliant advances in art, science, mathematics and astronomy.

But if Apocalypto is indeed trying to depict the end of a civilization, it completely misses the one thing that does explain it, according to the Maya themselves—the Sacred Mayan Calendar.

There’s only really one scene that takes place in the Mayan city and it consists of nothing besides multiple human sacrifices on top of a pyramid. The astronomer priests also are made out to be using a solar eclipse only to manipulate the masses into believing that the sacrifices are appeasing the gods. There is one brief reference to being “masters of time,” but no follow up.

University of Miami anthropology professor Traci Ardren offers a similar view in her review, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” when she writes:

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.

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.

People who are unfamiliar with the ancient Maya will learn very little about them from Apocalypto and will leave the theater thinking they were just blood thirsty savages. This makes it appear that Gibson is on a disinformation mission to discredit the advanced understandings of the Maya and ward off interest in their galactic calendar, which comes to an intriguing conclusion on the winter solstic of 2012, now just six years and one week away.

An AP article entitled “Mayans excited but unsure about Gibson’s Apocalypto” offers some strangely conflicting information:

Outsiders’ views of the Maya have long been subject to changing intellectual fashions. Until the 1950s, academics often depicted the ancient Mayas as an idyllic, peaceful culture devoted to astronomy and mathematics. Evidence has since emerged that, even at their height, the Mayas fought bloody and sometimes apocalyptic wars among themselves, lending somewhat more credence to Gibson’s approach.

“We know the Bible talks about prophecies, and that the Mayas spoke of a change of energy on Dec. 22, 2012, and it (the movie) is somewhat focused on that,” Amuy said. “People should perhaps take that theory and reflect, and not do these things that are destroying humanity.”

Unless what Amuy was talking about got left on the cutting room floor, I utterly fail to see how the film was in any way “somewhat focused” on the significance of 2012. And this is the great disappointment for so many aficionados of the Maya, as well as many in the metaphysical community.

In the production notes, Gibson says, “one of the things that just kept coming up as we were writing is that many of the things that happened right before the fall of the Mayan civilization are occurring in our society now. It was important for me to make that parallel because you see these cycles repeating themselves over and over again. People think that modern man is so enlightened, but we’re susceptible to the same forces—and we are also capable of the same heroism and transcendence.�?

There’s a noble aspiration there to draw a parallel with the darker elements of modern society’s Titanic drift toward a looming global iceberg. But between Gibson’s over-reliance on gorey violence and his failure to offer any context for it within a much more complex society, he fails to deliver a meaningful allegory.

David Walsh of the World Socialist Web Site hits on this in his review, “Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto: a painful experience,” when he writes:

The filmmaker does not trouble himself to attain an accurate historical picture. Shocking images are easier to create. Gibson’s narrative makes no particular sense. How is it that one portion of the Mayan population lives in harmony while another murders and enslaves without batting an eyelid? Is it the very advance of civilization into the cities that has turned people into monsters? One should not insist on too precise an answer, it will not be forthcoming.

Entirely arbitrary indeed. It begs the question of why Gibson set the film among the ancient Maya in the first place? My disinformation theory is the only reason I can come up with. It is for all these reasons that I give Apocalypto a big thumbs down.