SACRIFICE [Professors say Gibson's Apocalypto is biased against Mayan bloodletting]

Newsweek ^ | December 5, 2006 | Newsweek

[freedomdefender]

Let's get right to the point, shall we? About halfway through Mel Gibson's movie "Apocalypto," which opens this week, viewers are treated to a stomach-turning scene of human sacrifice, set in a Mayan city around 1500. It's not revealing too much to say that the movie's hero is captured by a gang of marauders, bound, marched through the jungle, painted blue, and forced to the top of a pyramid where heads roll.

In a smaller version of the outrage and skepticism that preceded the opening of "The Passion of the Christ"—is it historically accurate? is it anti-Semitic?—scholars who study the ancient Maya are concerned that Gibson's film will distort the great civilization and demean its descendents, six million of whom still live in Central America. Yes, the Maya sacrificed humans to the gods, but these rituals were part of a complex worldview: the Maya believed that their bodies, their blood, were created by the gods and that they occasionally needed to repay this debt with human life. "The gods need you," explains David Carrasco, professor of religious history at Harvard. "They depend on human life for their own existence, there's this kind of reciprocity." In sacrifice, he adds, the people are becoming like gods. Based on the trailer, Carrasco believes that Gibson has made the Maya into "Slashers," and their society a "Hypermasculine fantasy."

[Dante3]

I agree about the Patriot - the film would have been better if that one scene with his son had been deleted.

"Apocalypto" however showed much of what I learned about the Mayas in my anthropology class. I closed my eyes during some scenes. Overall, it was an engrossing and exciting film and kept me literally on the edge of the seat.

Very well done, but yes a lot of violence, but not a racist film.

[Dante3]

Exactly.

[CharacterCounts]

Violence was evident in the Passion. However, given the definition of gratuitous (being without apparent reason, cause, or justification), I don't think it was gratuitous at all. It brought about none of the baser emotion. There was no adrenaline flowing - only a profound understanding of the sacrifice Christ made for us.

[Polybius]

The original Aztecs were landless mercenaries brought in to help when a war. After the victory the Aztecs took the daughter of the the king that had employed then and skinned her alive. They then danced in her skin in front of her father. ........... This isn't a real popular topic in most of the classes pushing Hispanic studies.

It's funny how, in the U.S., the name of the ancient Roman province of Hispania has become a euphemism for "Aztec" or "Meso-American Indian" while, in Mexico itself, "Hispano" means those evil Spanish Conquistadors who put an end to the Aztec Empire.

[eleni121]

I went to see it with a world class anthropologist and he thought that while it compressed history by about 700 years...it is a movie after all---it portrayed the people and times very accurately and realistically.

He actually dug in those pyramids down there..so he should know.

I was enthralled by it. Action, adventure, human drama, social and cultural narrative---splendid film!