(Contains spoilers.)
This is the second film I’ve seen in recent months whose climax touches on the Christianization of “primitive” peoples whose traditional social frameworks are being destroyed by environmental change – but beyond their basic premise the two movies couldn’t be more different. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen depicted its protagonists’ journey from shamanism to Christianity with sensitivity and tact; Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto tackles similar themes with all the blunt force of the axes his pseudo-Mayans wield on each other with increasingly monotonous regularity.
Pseudo-Mayans because, as with The Passion of the Christ (which I haven’t seen), Gibson’s deployment of authentic language and locations obscures the liberties taken with historical accuracy. As has been hashed out elsewhere, Apocalypto compresses several hundred years of Mayan civilization into the same milieu and throws in some Aztec motifs to boot, while failing to pay even lip service to the cultural, scientific or social achievements of either the rural or urban Amerindians.
Much of this inaccuracy can be forgiven in the name of artistic license, but Apocalypto seems in part to be an exculpation of Europeans in Central America, starting with its opening quote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Certainly Mayan civilization had tumbled far from its peak by the time the conquistadors arrived, but some of the motifs in Gibson’s film suggest a questionable reframing of the Europeans’ arrival as a doomed attempt at salvation, rather than a largely remorseless process of colonisation.
For example, we see a young girl suffering from smallpox – a disease that Amerindians first contracted from Europeans. It is hard to see how such an obvious anachronism could have accidentally survived the editing process; but if it is deliberate, it would seem to be blatantly revisionist. The hero’s journey, too, is suggestive: having survived a gruelling ordeal (seemingly another Gibson motif) his skin is saved – quite literally! – by a succession of miracles: an eclipse (yawn), a jaguar, a snake, a waterfall.
Are these sent from God, or the spirits of the jungle? That question goes unanswered, since it is Jaguar Paw’s decision to become predator, rather than prey, which turns around his fortunes. (Mind you, God does help those who help themselves.) Ultimately, he turns his back on the landing missionaries to return to the animist forest: even the noblest of the savages is ultimately doomed. It’s not an unsympathetic decision: after all Jagar Paw has been through, it’s hardly surprising that he doesn’t trust his fate to another group of outsiders.
The consequences of Godlessness are drawn more explicitly in the broader milieu. The good guys are live in something akin to a state of grace (albeit one in which bawdy humour is much appreciated); the baddies are the urbanites whose implausibly cruel society appears to comprise little more than a vast machine for enslaving and sacrificing legions of innocents. It’s hard to escape the message that heathens just can’t assemble a half-decent civilisation without it turning into a death cult. Given that the film is partly an allegory for our own times, the moral – and the presumed remedy for our social ills – is clear.
Does any of this really matter? After all, nobody really expects historical accuracy from Hollywood, do they? Well, no – although I’d argue that this lack of expectation itself suggests worrying complacency. But Apocalypto is not, in any case, a Hollywood movie in many respects. Mel Gibson bankrolled and co-wrote as well as directing it, making it an uniquely personal creation – and one that has more in common with the works of Werner Herzog than Tom Cruise.
Gibson has his strengths as an auteur: as Peter Bradshaw observes, it’s hard to see how such a “mad and virile” film could have been made through the usual channels. Apocalypto might be light on plot and characterisation, but it’s muscular, energetic and visually stunning. (It’s refreshing to think that other squillionaire and hopefully non-Scientologist stars might choose analogously risky vehicles in the future.)
But Bradshaw also comments on the difficulty of assessing Apocalypto without being swayed by Gibson’s personal, but well-publicized, beliefs and public (mis)behaviour. He’s a professional, so he manages. I’m not: and I can’t be well satisfied by any film whose context and content both make me so consciously second-guess its creator’s motives.
