Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, 2006)

[Mr Sausage]

I've been reading about William Blake lately, and Blake always puts me in mind of apocalypses, so I wanted an apocalyptic movie to go along with that feeling. I remembered the accusations of racism when the film came out, which Wikipedia has a good summary of: "[The movie has a] blatantly colonial message that the Mayas needed saving because they were 'rotten at the core."; "[The movie] 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 deserved, in fact, they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people." I kept these arguments in mind while watching the film.

Yet the movie is not titled Salvation. It's titled Apocalypse. The movie is not about salvation or rebirth, but end times. It's about a waning civilization, a great city in fact, whose fears and anxieties, whose shaken sense of its own greatness and impermanence, has bred outrageous displays of violence, intricate and outlandish rituals meant to reassert control over natural cycles, and a hubris to match its anxieties. It's a city whose excesses and extravagances are not proof that it and its people need to be cleared away, but products of a decline that has already been at work for some time.

Much of the racism accusations centre on one very brief moment at the end, the arrival of Christian missionaries. If Gibson intended this to be the Mayans' coming salvation, he chose an odd way to shoot it, with ominous black clouds and slashing rain, menacing soldiers occupying the central boat rather than kindly priests (a pointed image in a movie whose villains are a conquering army who worship human sacrifice), and with the camera always from the Mayans' perspective. There are even four galleons substituting for horsemen. It seems clear the Spanish are not saviours, but harbingers. They are the final part of a tissue of omens that run throughout the movie, from the prophetic visions of the stricken child, to the eclipse, to the jaguar. These latter three would be odd images for a movie of Christian colonial polemic. Christian orthodoxy would not allow the pagan universe to offer signs and portents of a coming end; they would need to come from the Christian god and demand repentance. The movie's apocalypse seems non-specific.

The lack of specificity suggests there is a polemic here, but it's not one of condescension. The Great City is a stand in for western civilization (even America in specific), which in the early-to-mid 2000s, right in the midst of the terrorist attacks, the war in Iraq, and all the gross extravagances of the Bush administration, was accruing its own apocalyptic rhetoric. The standard comparison at the time was to the decline and fall of Rome, but Gibson wanted a more primal, less political apocalypse in which to show a great civilization grown sick, inward, and terminally violent.

Most people associate apocalypse entirely with destruction and ruin, but that's misleading. Apocalypse is a Greek word meaning Revelation, that is, the stripping away of a veil or covering so that everything hidden can be seen. In Christian mythology, the fallen world is destroyed and cleared away so that the full order and meaning of reality can be seen unobscured. Apocalypse is a moment where the true order of things is revealed, and you'd have to be working pretty hard to contort this particular movie into a revelation of the truth of Christianity. I think the revelation Gibson intends is how our own civilization is in a cycle of destruction whose portents are being ignored, even twisted by various leaders into signs that actually portend the renewal of our greatness. Embracing violence and elaborate rituals, listening to blind leaders who trumpet their greatness with blood on their hands, worried sick and feeling increasingly unsafe and unable to assert control--it's not hard for me to see the parallels even today. The film's critics see a division between Mayan and American societies that I don't think exists. This story is meant to be familiar, a criticism not of a centuries dead civilization but of our own current society, just displaced into the past. Our own violence, hubris, and sickness is the order being revealed.

This is a fun wilderness adventure film. Gibson's direction is hamhanded and overblown as usual, but it doesn't get in the way of the story too much, and I admire how directly he brings you into the physical and aural realities of this world. You can almost smell and feel the world here. And I love how much effort went into reproducing the linguistic features of the time--I'd like to see more movies do that. The movie has been unfairly criticised--understandably so given Gibson's words and behaviours at the time, but it's still plain that its critics want the movie to be racist.

[therewillbeblus]

I haven't seen this since theatres, but I recall its impact was incredibly effective, and demonstrated Gibson's directorial skills in ways he's never flaunted quite so consistently before or since

[Mr Sausage]

It’s far less noxious than Hacksaw Ridge where the Christ-like nature of the hero’s pacifism contrasted awkwardly with the movie’s unending, romanticised glee in watching people be blasted apart. And considerably less noxious than The Passion of the Christ, which leans into maybe the most unpleasant aspect of Christianity, its torture worship. I don’t think it’s healthy or edifying to believe the greatest moment in the history of the physical universe was a man being tortured and murdered, let alone wallow in every grisly detail. It says something about orthodoxy that Christians (the vast majority of whom would otherwise never agree to watch torture porn) found Scorsese’s Jesus film the objectionable one.

Braveheart and The Man Without a Face I haven’t seen since my early teens.