Posted on 12/13/2006 4:59:55 AM PST by UltraConservative
According to Mel Gibson, his new movie, "Apocalypto," is a metaphor for the death of American civilization. "The precursors to a civilization that's going under are the same, time and time again," Gibson explained at a film festival in Texas. "What's human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?"
Gibson's comparison between Mayan and American civilization is deeply offensive. To elucidate just how offensive the comparison is, I must review the film's portrayal of Mayan society. (Warning: There are spoilers. If you are intent on seeing this movie, read no further.)
"Apocalypto" portrays two societies within Mayan civilization. The first is a hunter-gatherer sort of Rousseau-ian society, wherein noble savages tell colorful stories, cherish their pregnant wives and play practical jokes involving eating raw tapir testicles. The second is the decadent Mayan city, where slave laborers covered in powder cough up blood as they pound rock; where throngs cheer wildly as power-mad priests engage in ritual human sacrifice, pulling still-beating hearts from chest cavities, beheading victims and tossing those heads down towering flights of stairs to a waiting crowd, which then sticks the heads on pikes; where the headless bodies are dumped in Holocaust-like mass graves, to rot in the sun.
The Mayan city society invades the Rousseau-ian hunter-gatherer society, brutally and graphically raping and murdering its way through village after village. Citizens of the hunter-gatherer society are kidnapped and used for ritual sacrifice, or for sport killing.
Gibson's point is this: Mayan civilization in decline had corrupted itself through brutality and barbarity. It sacrificed its own citizens on the altar of fear. The values that made Mayan civilization worth preserving -- the values embodied by the Rousseau-ian society -- were destroyed so that the fears of the population could be assuaged. In doing so, Mayan society made itself ripe for conquer by the Europeans.
Gibson likens Mayan civilization to American civilization. "We're all afraid," Gibson told Entertainment Weekly. "That's something I've been finding out more recently -- how racked by fear we are as a society." We are discarding our values, Gibson implies. We are engaging in Mayan barbarities in Iraq, sending our own citizens off to die on the altar of fear.
"Apocalypto" opens with a quotation from historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it destroys itself from within." Durant is correct -- but the film's exposition of Durant is utterly wrong. If American (and Western) civilization falls, it will not be because our fears drove us to "Mayan barbarities," but because, like Gibson, we failed to distinguish good from evil.
Not all civilizations are created equal: Some deserve to fall because they are deeply corrupt from the outset. Mayan civilization, with its human sacrifice and primitivism, was never a beacon of liberty. The Rousseau-ian values Gibson sees were not what distinguished Mayan civilization. The strength of Mayan civilization was based solely on its power -- it was doomed to fail from the moment it encountered a society more powerful militaristically and economically than itself.
Western civilization has values worth protecting -- liberty and equality of opportunity -- and those values give it strength. Those values make us stronger than our enemies, unlike the Mayans. Equating all civilizations, as Gibson does, is what undermines Western values. There is a world of difference between using violence out of superstition and using violence to both ensure domestic security and free others from the oppression of a death cult that ritually beheads its citizens or dumps them in mass graves. It is moral barbarism of the highest order to equate the two, as Gibson does.
Critics have rightly focused on the stunning violence of Gibson's "Apocalypto." The movie is certainly one of the most violent ever filmed -- Gibson's camera lingers lovingly over each wound. But it is the violence Gibson does to morality that should worry us. It is that violence that contributes to the internal destruction of Western civilization. If Western civilization is doomed to failure, it will not be despite Mel Gibson's best efforts, it will be because of them.
Mr. Shapiro is a student at Harvard Law School. He is the author of "Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future" (Regnery, a Human Events sister company) and "Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctinate America's Youth" Thomas Nelson).
*4,000 unborn babies murdered every day
*embryos used for experiments, stored and frozen for future "use".
*Terri Schiavo tortured to death by dehydration
I guess people will see what they want to see.
Oh, come on! I have a feeling Shapiro has an alterior motive in his review.
Ping!
What? he really has gone off it.
Try this, Mr. Gibson: "What's human sacrifice if not 43 million innocent unborn babies slaughtered and flushed down the toilet, efficiently enough that the women who bore them can get back to work before thier freaking lunch hours are over?"
Mel, totally missed your time. This was your chance. You're done. You blew it.
Did he really say that?
God help him.
You could say that about any civilization that gets reorganized out of existence by another civilization that impinges successfully on it, which is exactly what happened to the New World societies, which were ravaged by Old World diseases propagated in the Columbian Exchange (see, Secret Judgments of God, which discusses both the colonial and precolonial epidemics which attacked New World societies after first contact).
Gibson's Apocalypto is based in part on the boutique idea of the last decade, that (classical) Mayan civilization simply exhausted its resources and thus undermined its own abilities to organize people, competencies it tried to leverage by intensifying the organizational activities in order to try to meet the crisis. Postclassical Mayan cities are also thought to have been in crisis before the Spanish arrived, as witness the formation of the defensive League of Mayapan in the Yucatan, and perhaps for some of the same reasons, but the full story may not have been elucidated yet.
This exhaustion thesis is also being pushed concerning central Mexican civilization, and it is supported by forensic studies of excavated burials, which show deteriorating health among the people.
The collapse of the Mayan Classic cities occurred centuries before contact, and the Postclassical Mayan city of Tulum in the Yucatan, which Gibson's fictional city resembles sitewise, fell to revolt at least 50 years before the arrival of the Spanish (about the time of first contact, in other words).
The fate of the city depicted in Apocalypto turns, however, not on its afflictions, but on a "judgment of God" formed in secret and then delivered to the frightened Mayan warriors by a plague-stricken but inspirited girl, who pronounces an oracular doom on the city. The rest of the film is the unfoldment of her doomsday pronouncement of divine judgment, which is contrasted with the cynicism of the head chac officiating at the ceremonies and declaiming to the vast crowds below.
The bottom line is that the arrival of the Spanish in the New World was, in Gibson's opinion at least, as expressed through his film, the descent of the hand of God Himself on the civilizations of the New World and the fulfilment of His fatal judgment of their lurid perversions and brutalities. Noah's neighbors got the Flood, Lot's got the brimstone, and the Mayan kings and priests got the conquistadores.
My question: how come he didn't make a movie about the Navajo, or the Sioux? Why didn't he make a movie about the ancient Egyptians, or the Indus Valley civilizations? The Crusades? The Napoleonic Wars?
Why didn't he continue "The Passion" with the story of the Resurrection and the events in the Book of Acts?
I believe the answer lies in the fact that none of these could have included bloody human sacrifice, and I will leave it to the psychologists to determine why someone would dwell on such stuff.
Agreed.
Several years ago I saw an exhibit at the Florida Museum in St Pete about the Mayans, Aztecs, et. al.
It seemed that the academics were trying to portray those barbaric societies as victims of the Spanish.
After I walked out I asked the question to the guys I was with if "in a thousand years, will the liberals consider the nazis victims of the allies?"
Just a reminder that in spite of The Passion of the Christ, Mel is a Hollywood wh*re.
The human sacrifice in our society is not sending men to Iraq to die but the sacrifice that comes from millions of abortions.
Although Gibson is a loon - he does have a point of our civilization being destroyed from within. We are also letting the Islamic hoards take over the West.
"while the western society isn't capable of defending itself against the horde of invaders..."
I find it very interesting how the US is portrayed as unable to win the war in Iraq, which can be stretched to "unable to defend itself." This is so absurd. The US absolutely can win the war in Iraq and we can defend ourselves. We just don't seem to WANT to defend ourselves. Big difference. It's like having someone tying us all up with toilet paper and then beating the crap out of us. Clearly we could break free from the TP, but we just lie down and take the whupping until we truly are incapable of defending ourselves. We have the strength. We have the weapons. We don't have the will to use any of it for fear of being called a Bully. God save us all.
we aren't 'unable' we're 'unwilling'.
BFD ... I don't watch a whole lot of TV either (what a colossal waste of time!) ... but for FR, I wouldn't know about it either.
For some folks, the Holocaust, Holocaust deniers, Israel, etc. form the central focus of their lives.
For others ... they don't.
I watch WGN, 8AM EDT every morning, the Beverly Hillbillies back to back...beats the news everyday!
Well put - even if the Spanish Conquistadores were the judgment of God on the Mayans, they were angels of mercy compared to the Mayan priests and people. The Spanish did not sacrifice or eat the Mayans but the Mayans had no scruples about doing this to others.
OhmygoshwhatanIDIOT!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.