Mel Gibson Is Wrong about Who the Violent Americans Are

[rumpel]

Alternet

By Roberto Lovato, New America Media. Posted December 16, 2006.

The new movie Apocalypto should have left the Maya alone and instead looked for apocalyptic violence in the off-screen history of the Catholic-mestizo families of the Americas.

After watching Mel Gibson’s controversial film Apocalypto, I left the theater pondering the history of racism, pillage and apocalyptic war through my own blood and family history. Gibson, I concluded, would have been more accurate, his film more resonant, had he used another group of people, another culture – certainly not the Maya -- to depict his vision of the Apocalyse.

Like many Central Americans born and categorized as mestizos (mixed Indian and Spanish blood), I watched Apocalypto as someone who consciously revered the Maya and other indigenous groups while subconsciously prohibiting himself any real identification with them.

As a boy, my parents gave me a leather case with a picture of an Indian from the region now known as El Salvador (the Savior). But I heard my father call people he considered ugly “cara de indio” (Indian face). For many of us--mestizo and non-mestizo alike--it’s always been easier to identify with the Christian culture depicted in Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ than with the Maya culture in Apocalypto.

The fundamental problem with Apocalypto’s depiction of Maya culture is that, in a procrustean manner, it imposes violence and an apocalyptic world view on the wrong people. In fact, UC Riverside archaeologist Zachary X. Hruby wrote recently in the San Francisco Chronicle: “There exists no archaeological, historic or ethnohistoric data to suggest that any such mass sacrifices -- numbering in the thousands, or even hundreds -- took place in the Maya world.”

http://www.alternet.org/movies/45584/

[ixion]

1. from my perspective, the Mayans have always been known more for doctrine

and less for warfare. The Aztecs or the Spaniards were far more war-like, IMO.

[randr]

2. Gibsons hypothesis that violence foretells a cultures demise may be right .

His assumption that the graphic depiction of this violence and the general acceptance of the images contained in movies he is responsible for are not part of the escalation of a cultures downfall is wrong.
Mel is possibly, and I say possibly due to Mel's apocalyptic christian belief system,, unknowingly a participant in the destruction of the democratic and human evolutionary potentials we have in front of us as collective peoples on a fragile planet.