to all interested in theMayans.
Posted on 12/11/2006 5:04:28 PM PST by veronica
"Apocalypto," Mel Gibson's new thriller about the ancient Maya civilization, is exactly that: thrilling. But this entertainment comes at a price.
The Maya at the time of Spanish contact are depicted as idyllic hunters and gatherers, or as genocidal murderers, and neither of these scenarios is accurate. The film represents a step backward in our understanding of the complex cultures that existed in the New World before the Spanish invasion, and it is part of a disturbing trend re-emerging in the film industry, portraying non-Western natives as evil savages.
"King Kong" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" show these natives as uncaring, beastlike and virtually inhuman. "Apocalypto" achieves similar goals, but in a much subtler fashion.
As in "The Passion of the Christ," Gibson utilizes native language to invoke a veneer of credibility for his story, in this case Yucatec Maya, a technique that unfortunately does much to legitimize this rather strange version of Maya history.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I take it Zack is an expert on Mayan civilization?
what's the upshot of the critique? That it was thinly veiled anti-Semitism? Or right-wing propaganda?
Did you read the article?
Did you read the article?
Is Mel unfair to the Mayans, or unfair to left-wing, politically correct, revisionist anthropology professors?
I thought the Maya were extinct by the time the Spanish arrived and this was about the Aztecs.
Its a movie folks. Its a movie. Relax.
As opposed to portraying them as noble savages?
It would appear that he is: Zachary X. Hruby...
"Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocalypto,” which opened Dec. 8, gets a thumbs down from University of California, Riverside Maya scholar Zachary X. Hruby, who was asked to pre-screen the movie by National Geographic."
The Mayans are alive and cutting your lawn.
I'm sure the Mayan's all sat around singing Kumbaya in between a daily routine of smoking pot and engaing in homosexual sex, as the SF Chronicle imagines them.
The guys who cut my lawn are either White or Black but nice try at thread hijacking.
to all interested in theMayans.
The author must associate apes with central americans. Who is the racist now?
Movies are movies, and most of the critics are on crack.
I couldn't get the link to work.
I am certain that the movie will be a huge hit in SF area......Yeah right.
Hey Zach, can only Caucasians be depicted as evil savages? Would that make you happy? What if Mayans were evil savages sometimes? Would it still offend you to portray them that way?
Oh, by the way, Zach, you might not know this because you are only an expert on such a race of absolutely perfect and non-violent people as the Mayans, not on anything else, but many ancient civilizations, even relatively advanced ones, did have their share of "evil" and "savage" practices. Did you know, Zach, that ancient Carthage engaged in the systematic killing of babies? Huh, Zach? The priests threw the newborns off the cliffs into pits called toffets. But we couldn't actually show anything like that in a film, now could we, Zach, seeing as how that would offend you. And we really CARE about your personal view of history, Zach, really we do.
Hey Zach, why don't you keep you politics out of my face and go away.
This man is no expert.
Hruby's article is misleading in some respects, accurate in others. As portrayed in the movie, the Mayans of the early 16th century were in fact jungle dwellers whose great civilization had collapsed centuries earlier.
Hruby is correct in saying that there is no evidence of Mayans practicing human sacrifice on the same enormous scale as the Aztecs. That isn't saying much, however, since there is no doubt at all that the Mayans did practice it. The most famous example is the original form of the Mesoamerican game ulama, which included sacrifice of the entire losing team. Tlachti, the Aztec version of the game, did not involve sacrifice. Some of the remains of sacrifice victims recovered from the Mayan "cenotes" show evidence of unusually cruel and barbaric methods, notably "de-fleshing."
Academics like Hruby consistently mislead their students about this, as well as about cannibalism and ritual torture among native Americans, apparently in pursuit of some political agenda.
Large Mayan population in South Florida now. Most of the gardeners in my parents' gated community in Boca speak Quiche Mayan, NOT Spanish.
What do you expect a liberal San Francisco Chronicle movie critic to say? He said what all of us on Freerepublic could have predicted - the Politically Correct statement about the Noble Savage. If Mel had wanted praise from the San Francisco types, he would have made a movie showing the evil white Spanish Catholics beating innocent minorities (Mayan natives_ to death with crosses.
What the hell is a "non-Western native?"
"The guys who cut my lawn are either White or Black but nice try at thread hijacking."
The guy who cuts my lawn is a fat, balding white guy.
Me.
Same here.
***Hruby is correct in saying that there is no evidence of Mayans practicing human sacrifice on the same enormous scale as the Aztecs.***
But they DID practice it. How much Human sacrifice is "not as much"?
Funny thing: In Mel Gibson's last movie, he depicted a civilization that took delight in engaging in a form of torture in which the victim's extremities were pierced and used to hang him so that the pressure on his body caused him to suffocate. He would push himself up, upon the spike in his feet, to try to breathe. Exhausted, he'd then collapse, suffocating again.
This civilization had some of the greatest innovations in the ancient world and is the necessary precursor to all of Western Civilization.
I didn't hear anybody complaining about Mel Gibson maligning the Romans.
Hard to say with absolute certainty what the Mayans did and did not do. Pretty thick jungle down there.
"portraying non-Western natives as evil savages."
Most present-day interpretations of the Mayan civilization indicate that the Mayans were warring and engaged in ritual human sacrifice. Now, if that's a fact, what is inaccurate about Gibson's movie?
I thought the violence in "Saving Private Ryan" was a little overdone, but that doesn't mean that World War II wasn't, in fact, savage and bloody.
Must be, Hruby is a typical Mayan name, it means "a fat one" :)
"King Kong" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" show these natives as uncaring, beastlike and virtually inhuman."
The natives in these two movies are fictional people in fictional places, and shouldn't be taken seriously as anything but plot devices.
Seriously, these movie reviews tell you more about the reviewer's prejudices than they do about the movies.
The White House strangely buys at least half that story..
"I didn't hear anybody complaining about Mel Gibson maligning the Romans."
That's different. You just don't understand.
The author has a PhD. He is an objective scientist with no agenda other than the truth.
All cultures are equal. Tearing peoples hearts out and eating them is not wrong if it is part of their indigenous culture, especially if they only do ten or twenty at a time.
Give them credit that they don't do thousands at a time.
(sarc)
Well, I have a PhD, too. But mine's in mathematics.
Anthropology...why do they even bother?
*Gag*
All the while conveniently ignoring the fact that everywhere Christianity has touched down and held, societies have improved and prospered. The Western World's foundation is rooted in explicitly Christian tenets that go back what, 1,000 years? They have become so ingrained that secularists take them for granted.
It's why this is going to be a long war.
I've got a fantasy sequel idea for Mel: the Turks meet the Mayans in an orgy of beheadings and flaying-alives.
Nobody gives a d*mn about the Romans....
Well, you've got the whole think backwards; the Mayan descendants are doing just fine on the Yucatan Peninsula and other places, while the Aztecs have vanished without a trace (there are no Aztecs blood line anywhere to be found, although a whole bunch of Mexican revisionists wants you to believe otherwise!).
Remember that Aztlan Nation crap they want you to believe it existed and a large portion of the USA's South-West States belonged to that fantasy Mexican ShangriLa?.
What did the Romans ever do for us?
According to Spanish sources, as well as frescoes and sculptures from the city of Tajin, the original form of the Mesoamerican game ulama included sacrifice of the entire losing team.
Mayans also held the belief that cenotes or limestone sinkholes were portals to the underworld and sacrificed human beings to please the water god Chaac. The most notable example of this is the "Sacred Cenote" at Chichen Itza where extensive excavations have recovered the remains of 42 individuals, half of them under twenty years old.
LOL! Kind of like the Alien vs. Predator movie but with Muslims vs. Mayans - No matter who wins, you lose!
Just be glad that the Spanish and not the Mohammadans colonized the New World.
However, the epic "mythic action-adventure" Apocalypto was Number UNO at the box office.
MOVIEWEB Interview: How did you research this film to make it authentic?
Mel Gibson: There's a lot of books around. There's a lot of evidence being unearthed as we worked. They were digging out murals going, "Look at this." We even changed some murals we drew on the walls... to emulate the murals that they just found. They were a whole different color scheme and we changed it. Some of the stuff was so cryptic when you looked at it... you couldn't quite make it out. We had to make things a little bit more readable. One's eyes don't just adjust to that unless you lived in that culture.
So the human sacrifice scenes that was what it was like for that time period?
Mel Gibson: I would think so. There's a lot of hypothetical dialogue in terms of what's addressed, but I'm sure that that's what it was about. It was an appeasement of God's wrath. The hearts and bloodletting... that's what it was about. So we just put words to it. I don't know whether they used those words but they probably used something like them. It used to take them less then a minute to get a guy's heart out. That's if you didn't go through the ribcage. It was just awful what they did to one another. Chewing their fingers off, cutting their eyelids off, and their lips. They were doing target practice on real targets.
Farhad Safinia (co-writer) : I think it was about humiliation.
Mel Gibson: It was so much about humiliation. That's the really crazy thing about the culture. You have this fantastic civilization on one hand, and there's such acts of barbarism in there. They knew about the stars, and the constellations, and about all kinds of things; buildings. They a library with books and a language. They were like the Greeks, you know?
What is the key for you in humanizing these people?
Mel Gibson: It's all to do with the human story. It's the universal, mythic kind of tale but knocked down to a level, hopefully, we can all understand. When I was 15 years old, you're not complete at all, in fact I'm not complete, yet! I just remember some older guy, really putting the jab into the middle of me by calling me the most insulting thing I could think of, what he did was to call me "Almost." "Hey, Almost." Like that, and I was just so offended by that. That's where that came from in the film. It means Almost. He really is Almost and then he becomes. Those human experiences we have get put into it.
The film's about fear. We've explored every primal fear we could fit into two hours and five minutes.
Can you talk about the waterfall sequence?
Mel Gibson: Well, it's a real waterfall. We used a SpiderCam. We put the Genesis on it. I think that's the first time that's happened. We had to span the waterfall and river with cranes and put the cables up. It was quite an elaborate setup to enable the camera to go over the guys shoulder, down on the water, over the edge, turn around and then pull back in one shot. Of course you're not going to make a real guy jump off something like that. He'll kill himself.
A cow fell over one day. A cow was trying to swim across... it was just overtaken by the depth of water and it fell over the waterfall! It hit the water and I thought, "It's toast." It was about 170 feet, this waterfall. It came up somewhere on the other side and it was all busted up... then the waves got it, it was upside down, bouncing off the rocks... and it got into this deep water. One of the local guys, this is the weird thing of all... the cow's in the water, but this Mexican guy just goes up to it and it's like he said something to it, it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, and the cow just walked up and started eating grass!
Farhad Safinia: The cow was just munching grass. It felt like it didn't remember a thing.
Well, how do you explain the fact that there are still more than 1.5 million people in central Mexico speaking Aztec (Nahuatl) language?
Mexico City - the oldest and largest city in America (established in 1325 as Tenochtitlan) never lost its demographic continuity. Well into last century there were neighborhoods which did not use Spanish language.
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