What if, rather than hating the man himself, I generally find his movies to be trash? Is this one likely to be any different?

That’s a good question. The only other movie of his that I’ve seen is The Passion which I would argue is a substantial, impressive, but flawed movie—certainly not trash. I’m not sure that Apocalypto is different enough from The Passion to appeal to someone who views the latter as trash.

Rebekah hates, hates, hates Braveheart, but claims that this movie, while incorporating many of the same themes as Braveheart, manages to transform what were formerly damning flaws into assets.

What led me to not want to watch the movie was not any reason of hating Gibson as a person, or as a movie director (although I generally don’t like his movies, and I hated Braveheart), but my sort of general dislike of particularly violent movies. I was fascinated by the idea of a movie in the Mayan language (I was, similiarly, intruiged by the idea of a movie in Aramaic, but then I heard/read that The Passion of the Christ was incredibly violent and anti semetic), and then I saw a preview, and I was just like…um…ew…too much violence for my taste. So, the whole point was, I’m not going to go see the movie.

Are people taking for granted that Mel Gibson is anti-semetic? I would hope people are not making that assumption on the basis of tabloid-like journalism. As a work of art, it’s not clear to me that “The Passion of the Christ” adds anything more than visual flesh and blood to the long standing happenings of the Gospels. Why are people not likewise accusing him of being an anglophobe because of “The Patriot”? I left Passion feeling much more against the brutality of Romans anyhow, and without any misfeelings for the movie’s Jewish characters.

I edit and respond to myself. I looked up Mel Gibson in wikipedia and found that people in fact have accused him of anglophobia. See below. This seems ludicrious to me because I don’t think that portraying characters as evil is to imply a guilt upon their race.

Accusations of anglophobia

Gibson was accused of anglophobia by English audiences and press based on his direction of Braveheart and the liberties taken with historical content in the film. In addition, Gibson was further criticized for The Patriot. [35] [36]

Although he did not write the screenplay, in his film Braveheart Prince Edward of Carnarvon (later King Edward II of England) was depicted as an effete homosexual who was not the true father of his son, the future Edward III of England. The film also made use of the concept of Droit de seigneur although this is historically inaccurate. Gibson has stated that it was more cinematically compelling to falsely include the Droit de seigneur because it portrayed Edward Longshanks, the King of England played by Patrick McGoohan as a sinister tyrant.

Gibson was further accused of anglophobia following the release of The Patriot in 2000, despite neither directing or writing the script for the film. The movie depicted the British in an extremely negative light and took many liberties in its depiction of the American character played by Gibson, who was loosely based on “The Swamp Fox,” Francis Marion.

According to Wensley Clarkson’s unauthorized biography, the Gibsons, like many Irish-American families, have always been openly anti-British. Clarkson further cites family friends and relatives who allegedly told him that Gibson’s maternal grandmother was raped by the Black and Tans during the Irish War of Independence. [37] Although it is not understood why Mel Gibson voice acted a British character, John Smith in Disney’s Pocahontas after his accusations of anglophobia.

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to know whether Gibson is anti-semetic. I can readily believe that his drunken epithets were the result of prejudices and beliefs into which he was indoctrinated but which he does not believe; similarly, I can believe that he really does think those things and attempts to hide them. But _The Passion_ is not such a cryptic or convoluted work that we need recourse to the director’s character to judge its own nature. The Passion certainly did not seem to me to be an anti-semetic work (unless the Gospels are themselves, which is a possible argument), and every argument to the contrary that I’ve read or heard to date has seemed quite flimsy. That’s where my ability to usefully judge stops.

Tori, not seeing the movies because you have no interest in being subjected to violent horrors seems like a perfectly sensible reason for not seeing Gibson’s movies.

Nate,

It was I admit with a certain amount of trepidation that I looked forward to your reaction to Apocalypto. I didn’t want to get into more fights on your page than I have to. Well, I’m relieved!

In parenthesis, before and after seeing the movie (the first movie I’ve seen in the theatre since Pirates II, so I’m not about to make any “Best Picture of the Year!” claims, denials, or comparisons), I read several dozen reviews online, and they were all, with only one or two exceptions, pure crap. It almost makes me lose my faith in professional critics.

What cheesed me off the most (besides the endless Gibson psychoanalysing, which was predictible, pointless, stupid, and inept) was all the complaints about the violence. “The most brutally and unrelentingly violent movie I’ve ever seen!!!”; “Gibson does nothing but think up ever new ways to tortue and mutilate people! [psst, he’s a medieval Catholic sado-masochist!]” etc. And this is pure crap. Sure, the movie is extremely violent, and if you don’t like graphic violence in movies in principle or in general, don’t see it. But honestly after all the reviews I found it much less violent than I expected. The violence was no more graphic, nor more abundant, nor more gratuitous than that in Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List or Kill Bill or many other movies which received critical aclaim and/or awards and honors. It seemed to me much *less* gratuitously violent than your average R-rated horror film these days. I recently saw the remake of “Dawn of the Dead”, which I rather enjoyed, by the way, though I’m by no means a horror movie fan most of the time—but come on: THAT was a movie with unrelenting gratuitous graphic violence.

I think the problem people have with violence in Gibson’s movies is that, far from trivializing and delighting in it, they show violence in its true colors, brutal and horrible and sickening. And it’s brutal and horrible and sickening to watch, which is a good thing. Apocalypto does not trivialize life and death and terror and fear the way your run-of-the-mill zombie or slasher movie does; it’s not fun. I think the critics’ problem is that they generally seem to think it’s supposed to be and are disgusted.

The racism thing is crap too. Taken as a work in itself Apocalypto has no race issues whatsoever.

As for Rousseau, Nate, I don’t see your point. Where were the noble savages?

For my part, and I’m the one who said they weren’t going to see it because it looked too violent, that’s generally true in how I pick my movies. I haven’t seen Kill Bill or Saving Private Ryan, or, generally, movies that I think are going to be too violent for my tastes. But I also, generally, don’t try to tell people not to watch movies, just not to try to make me watch them with them.

Rebekah hates, hates, hates Braveheart, but claims that this movie, while incorporating many of the same themes as Braveheart, manages to transform what were formerly damning flaws into assets.

That’s intriguing. I hated Braveheart for lingering over violence while giving short shrift to the story. Too much what and not enough why. So I haven’t seen a violent Gibson film since.

I’d be interested in your opinion of Mad Max.

Mike: I would definitely say that Apocalypto doesn’t dwell on violence instead of on story—violence is much of its story.

I am embarassed to be unable to offer you an opinion on Mad Max—I stopped watching after about fifteen minutes because I found it too upsetting.

Michael:

I agree with you 100% regarding the violence in Apocalypto and the almost universally ridiculous claims about them in critical reactions to the movie.

I particularly agree with this:

I think the problem people have with violence in Gibson’s movies is that, far from trivializing and delighting in it, they show violence in its true colors, brutal and horrible and sickening. And it’s brutal and horrible and sickening to watch, which is a good thing. Apocalypto does not trivialize life and death and terror and fear the way your run-of-the-mill zombie or slasher movie does; it’s not fun.

Part of the reason the movie made such an emotional impact on me was that there was a profound catharsis in not having violence manipulated into being any less awful than it truly was.

As to Rousseau, my worry is simply that the village was extremely idyllic and beautiful and peaceful and that evil seemed to come about entirely because of civilization. (Think about the shock and horror of seeing that first corn field.) This is not, mind you, a criticism to which I’m committed—I’d be very interested in a defense/explanation.

Also, calling it Rousseaian is something I should admit as being imprecise—the noble savage is truly on his own in Rousseau. This is closer, perhaps, to the first city Socrates suggests in The Republic… the one without couches.

Ha ha, a chance to expound on the best academic paper I’ve written all year - in normal conversation! The fundamental dream of the overeducated!

The Maya equivalent of Genesis is the Popul Vuh, which was only set down in writing after the Conquest and is specifically about the Quiché Maya, but reflects centuries of Mesoamerican oral traditions. (Most of the gods, for instance, have clear counterparts in other traditions; the Toltec and Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, who might even have been around since the Olmecs millenia earlier, appears in the Popol Vuh as Gucumatz, and Gibson’s Yucatec Maya would have called him Kukulkan.) So it’s a fairly decent record of Mesoamerican (and specifically Mayan) beliefs of that time - indeed, it’s basically the best we’ve got.

Here’s my point. The Popol Vuh has a creation myth based on four distinct stages of human development (I could explain how the Aztec calendar pictorially depicts their similar beliefs, but it is both complicated and irrelevant), much like the Greco-Roman Ages of Man. Both groups believed that one race of men was created and then was destroyed to make room for the next - indeed, they even agree that a flood caused the destruction of a race who had become impious. However, while the Greeks (and the Hebrews) believed that man was first created perfect and fell from grace by the acqusition of knowledge (fire for the Greeks, good and evil for the Jews), the Maya (and the Norse) believed that the first men were barely even sentient, and that each successive race of humans was wiser, better, and closer to the gods. In other words, they were evolutionists, while the two most influential European mythologies were devolutionists.

In either the Greco-Roman or Mesoamerican model - I’ll discuss them because they’re more neatly divvied up than the Judeo-Christian or Germanic - each age seems to correspond directly with a level of technology. The Golden Age men of Hesiod or Ovid lived as peaceful gatherers in a totally natural state, and each successive age became more advanced, more warlike, further from nature, and more dependant on human creations like agriculture rather than the natural bounty given by the gods.

The Maya four ages were quite different. The first men were not made of gold but of mud; they were so primitive they were basically animals. The second race of men were of wood, and were able to think and speak and hunt in the forests, but they forgot their gods and were destroyed. It can be argued whether there was in fact a third race; the Popul Vuh itself seems kind of confused, but (to my mind) implies there was a race of tzitzé wood - the tzitzé is a shrub with edible berries - similar to the the wooden men. (Perhaps the gatherers to the wooden hunters?) The final race was made out of corn meal, which is fitting because they were modern, agriculture-driven humans, living in settled communities.

So, right, I said I was getting to the point like four subpoints ago, so here’s my own belief: the “noble savage” mythos is based on devolutionism and the underlying belief that we have fallen from a state of perfection. Judging from their myths, the Maya would not, in general, have seen anything noble in men living as hunter-gatherers or the like. Indeed, they would consider them to have fallen - for men made of maize to not grow maize would probably be considered shameful if not sacreligious, and, though I’m just speculating here, might well have been a partial motivation (though there are plenty of practical ones) for going after less-advanced civilizations to get the prisoners they needed to sacrifice to keep their gods alive.

Of course, the real question is about what Gibson thought, not what his characters might have thought. So it’s quite possible that Gibson, and thus the movie, might be devolutionist even though that could be said to run contrary to actual Maya belief.

And people say studying pre-Columbian Mesoamerican mythological systems never did anyone any good!

Oh, wow, that was so long I can’t fit the whole thing on my screen at once. Consider yourselves lucky, though, that I didn’t just copy and paste the entire original paper. Especially since it’s in Spanish.

Nate,

I didn’t see Jaguar Paw and his tribe as being Rousseauean noble savages. In fact at least one review I read complained that they were portrayed as vulgar and uncouth, unlike the natives in “The New World”, which the reviewer seemed to approve of much more (I didn’t see the movie because of the universal reports of its boringness), who appear to have been portrayed as true noble savages in the classic Western model.

If anything I thought Gibson’s portrayal of the tribe went out of its way to show the natives as being largely “just like us” in terms of their personalities; sure, they’re wearing loincloths and hunting tapirs through the rainforests, but look, they play (sometimes funny, sometimes cruel) practical jokes on each other, have family problems, turn reflective when sitting around the fire, aren’t prudent in seeing obvious warning signs of danger to come, etc. You’re certainly right that they don’t lay on couches or eat delicacies, however.

I doubt that Gibson had either Rousseau or Greek mythology in mind in his storytelling. It seems to me that the dedication in the credits—“In Remembrace of Able”—is the best clue to what he was thinking. Able lived off of animals while Cain invented agriculture, as well as city-dwelling; and we all know who killed who. Gibson seems to think there’s an inherent danger of “civilization” preying on the “uncivilized”, and the possibility of the “uncivilized” retaining virtues that the city-dwelling crop-growers lose. This theme is of course extremely easy to find in Braveheart as well if you’re looking for it.

To a certain degree this seems to back up Martin’s info, and indicate that Gibson may think that the mediterranean myth is more true than the mesoamerican one. It’s worth remembering, though, that unlike in the Greek myth, Cain and Able were cotemporaneous, representing not eras or stages of development but perennial possibilities for human living.

But I also think that both Braveheart and Apocalypto contain counterinstances of the “thesis” that serve to undermine its universality. When Jaguar Paw goes over the waterfall and boasts of his virtues as a forest dweller, he’s clearly disconcerted when his pursuers follow him down. Although as the hero he’s more jungle-savvy and hardcore than they turn out to be, they certainly haven’t lost all of their primitive virtues and skills (the father-son relationship in the Holcane platoon also seems to me to introduce some moral complexity and sympathy into (some of) the invaders that I haven’t seen remarked on in any of the reviews), contrary to his expectations. And in Braveheart, the ultimate savior of Scotland, the one who actually secures political independance for the Scots, is not Wallace but the wholly civilized, almost-English Robert the Bruce, who is inspired by Wallace without becoming him. (Contrast with “Brotherhood of the Wolf”, in which contrary to all expectation the Frenchman turns out to be more native than the native)

Cain and Abel is an interesting example, Mr Sullivan. Though, as you say, the characters are contemporaneous, the basic struggle they exemplify seems to me to tie in perfectly with the overall theme of devolution and falling from grace that seems to be fundamental to Genesis. (Note also that while Cain and Abel start out as contemporaries, in the end it’s Cain who survives.) Given Gibson’s faith, it’s not unreasonable to assume that his basic philosophy about mankind has been impacted by the Biblical account.

I should, however, make it clear that my thesis (which is largely unsupported by any evidence, and, even if it were, it wouldn’t be very good evidence) wouldn’t require Gibson to be consciously thinking about the Bible or the Ages of Man to be affected by them. In what is probably a completely insane leap, I’m postulating that the fact that Gibson (and Rousseau, for that matter) comes from an essentially Judeo-Christian culture built upon a Greco-Roman mythological substrate, and that these two belief systems have affected the literature and philosophy of the culture so profoundly that everyone in our society has been shaped by devolutionism - even those of us only passingly familiar (if that) with Genesis or Hesiod.

What this actually means I don’t really know, but it sounds pretty cool. It is interesting to note that in general the areas that split away from the Church during the Reformation had a strong Norse mythological substrate, while those that stayed were influenced by the Greco-Roman tradition. Pretty nifty, innit? Of course, the next step is to prove that Protestantism shares more with Norse beliefs in general (and evolutionism in particular) than Catholicism does, and you still have to explain why the Celtic/Norse nations of Ireland and Scotland went such radically different ways despite their similar substrates. And for that you’d have to not be an intellectual dilletantte like me.

Mr Marks,

please note that my theory was not just a wild guess, but actually supported by the text itself—your comments seem to ignore this fact. I doubt that Gibson was just sort of unconsciously thinking some of this stuff: a certain level seems to be quite deliberate.

As for your larger guesses, I’ll just say I find them unconvincing and leave it at that. After all, much more than the mediterranean converted to, and long remained in, Catholicism: including central and south America. It also seems to me that in the last century or so evolutionism has become much more of a default mode of thinking for westerners than its contrary.

I’m sorry, Mr Sullivan, I thought I was basically agreeing with you. Perhaps the misunderstanding was mine. Your latter points are excellent ones which I have pondered as well, but I doubt you want to hear more of my sociological speculations.

Mr Marks,

I think you were basically agreeing with me too. Sorry for not being able to resist the urge to quibble.

I do love this blog.

Martin: I very much appreciate the background on pre-Columbian Mesoamerican mythological systems. I did a fair amount of research on the three major civilizations of pre-modern South America back in the day. By “back in the day” I mean when I was a seventh grader, and when I say “a fair amount of research” I mean that I read all the books on the subject in my Junior High library. All of this serves merely to create a background of interest upon which your detailed information falls quite welcomed.

Did you happen to be at St. John’s the year that Eva Brann gave a lecture on the Cortez and the Aztecs? It was quite an influential lecture for me personally, one that asked deep questions about what exactly was happening when two cultures crashed into one another.

I do think your points about the differences between frameworks which posit technological stages as points of evolution or devolution are interesting and relevant. I very much like Michael Sullivan’s point, though, about how in Hebraic terms, both are presented as constant possibilities, not as progressive (or regressive) steps. Also, though Abel was killed, Cain was cut off from human society, thus removing both of them from historical survival.

Michael: My concern is that the tribe was “just like us” in the same way a Norman Rockwell painting is “just like us”. Granted, this is at least a bawdier version of Rockwell—your point about the practical jokes verging on cruelty is fair. But even the victims of the practical jokes are laughing before long.

But I’m not sure this is a problem, even though the city (which surely had similar aspects) has no such moments shown—even stories which deal with such universal issues are and have to be very particular, and the story is properly entirely about Jaguar Paw’s experience. As such, when I get too concerned about the idyllic nature of the village, I think, “But doesn’t my own life seem that way to me most of the time? And my life isn’t perfect.”

I loved reading your thoughts on the movie, if primarily because the more I dwell on the story, the more it means to me. Your zeroing in on the moment that the warriors follow Jaguar Paw over the waterfall is particularly nice—I hadn’t thought about the importance of how disconcerted he was before.

All in all, the farther I get from Apocalytpo, the more it seems like a movie expansive enough to dwell in and think about, much the way Wes Anderson films turn out to be vaster than one could possibly imagine when watching one for the first time.

Nate,

your generous compliments might have swelled my head had I not just realized that I’d been typing “Able” instead of “Abel”. I’m dumb.

I agree that it was a fine (I won’t go so far as “great” at this point) movie that is both great to watch and improves on reflection—a rare combination. But then, I’ve always been a Braveheart fan as well as a Wes Anderson one.

*laugh* I do very much enjoy the ability to go in and edit my comments when I notice (sometimes significantly after-the-fact) egregious errors. “anti-semitic” has recently transformed into “anti-semetic”… “the moment that the warriors follow Jaguar Paw over the moment” has changed to read “the moment that the warriors follow Jaguar Paw over the waterfall“… so, no worries.

Whenever people point out blatant errors in their previous comments, I’m happy to go back and correct them.

Mr. Esterheld: Three cheers for the ensemble cast here at Monadology!

Nate, you said “My concern is that the tribe was “just like us” in the same way a Norman Rockwell painting is “just like us”.”

It seems to me that this is typical moviespeak and not something to dwell on much in any particular movie. Think of Mission Impossible III and how picture-perfect Tom Cruise and What-her-name’s relationship was, and how P.S. Hoffman’s cuddly teddy-bear side didn’t really get a fair showing; or Rocky IV and the silly banter between the happy and prosperous American family, the retarded but friendly and servile robot, Mr Balboa’s improbable apparent rise in IQ from the earlier movies (soon to drop again for Rocky V), without any loss of “heart”, all contrasted with the cold hard unfeeling boxing-on-scientific-principles technology-driven world of the Pinko Commie bastards and Big Scary Blond Commie Boxer Man (yes, he had a name, but I don’t remember it), whose (surely existent) lovable side wasn’t really relevant to the movie’s message and so wasn’t allowed to take up valuable training-montage time. No, Mr Balboa and his family had their problems and their dark and problematic sides, but it wasn’t necessary to show them here because you could glean that information from other sources (Rocky I and II, of course).

Well, maybe it’s not That Example Than Which None More Apt Can Be Conceived, but it’s what sprung to mind at a quarter to one in the morning.

I don’t mean (and don’t have time) to peer too deeply into the piece in The Nation, but I want to say at least that it is not, properly speaking, a review: its author is not concealing the fact that he has not seen the movie (he comments on its lead by having seen photographs), and the blurb to the side suggests he’s not the movie critic but something more like the Mesoamerica- commentator. From the cursory once-over, it seems to me that he might be exactly right though the movie be a masterpiece (I don’t know that it is, and haven’t seen it yet, but whatever). I might have missed something, but it recalls to me Chinua Achebe’s criticism of Heart of Darkness, which novella reduces a continent and its peoples to a sinister and mysterious backdrop for a European story. It’s a damned remarkable book (I’d wager better than the Gibson flick), and I wouldn’t give it up, but it’s racist. I think that can be acknowledged and discussed fruitfully without throwing it out of the libraries or the reading lists.

Of course I don’t know the kind or complexity of Gibson’s thinking about Jews, but I’m comfortable thinking that The Passion is about as or slightly less anti-Judaic than the New Testament, which is hard to avoid when what’s at stake is the distinction between Christians and Jews. Of course the whole thing is a Semitic story (and with maybe the most Semitic-looking actors in the lead roles of any Jesus movie ever), with enough reminders that heroes and villains alike are Jews.

But I disagree with G that the movie adds nothing more than “visual flesh and blood” to Gospels. The Gospels describe but do not dwell on the crucifixion; the movie is a two-hour barrage of violence and tearing flesh. It’s hard to believe that a man subject to such abuse (and blood loss) would have survived all the way to Golgotha.

And that, I think, was the object of most mainstream (i.e., not the ADL) criticisms. What I found troublesome were not the claims of antisemitism (which seemed reasonable enough) but the condescending and admonishing lessons to Gibson and Christians about what Christianity is really about: the peaceful moral philosophy of Jesus. A lot of non-Christians have a really rather palatable view of what Christianity is (what with all this turn-the-other-cheek business and what-have-you) and it is rather startling to find that this movie basically skips right over that in favor of an extended exhibition of blood and suffering. Perhaps there is a historical precedent for such emphasis, but most of us were ignorant of it.

I ran into this confusion another way when I wrote my senior paper on the Gospel of John, and my (Catholic) adviser seemed at one meeting downright offended that I wasn’t really talking at all about the crucifixion. I got the impression that he thought I was missing the point of the whole affair. And in a sense, I guess, maybe I was. And maybe the (sterilized) iconography of the cross itself should have tipped me (and the non-Christian critics) off.

I saw the movie on opening night with the Christian Fellowship (they bought a block of tickets, you might remember). It seemed to me that the better part of audience had stained foreheads (it was Ash Wednesday), and I never heard such weeping and wailing in my life. I saw people I had in precept weeping like I don’t think I have ever wept. And the timing of the rises and falls in wails were especially meaningful to me. I recall a scene when I thought the sound reached its peak: Jesus, carrying the cross, stumbles; Mary reaches toward him, and he notices her and the look on her face; through suffering, his own face is transcendent, maybe even surprised or disapproving of her response, and he says (through the subtitles) something like, “I make everything new.” That this line would so augment the weeping was maybe a suggestion to me of what they were all weeping about.

I have not seen the movie since and am not sure that I ever will again, but the circumstances that I saw it in made the experience one of the most affecting and instructive of my life. And in light of that experience I think the violence in the movie carries a very different value for different audiences — it is seen in utterly different ways, and both sides would do well to try to see it from the perspective of the other.

I was also reminded of an introduction I read to some edition of Elie Wiesel’s Night. The man who wrote it, a Christian, spoke of meeting Wiesel, and of the effect the Holocaust had on Wiesel’s thinking about God. The probably-misremembered line in my head is something like, “The human suffering that was an obstacle to his faith was a premise of mine.” I don’t think those critical movie reviewers have such a view of Christianity as that.

I haven’t seen the new Gibson yet but would like to (and The New World, too, for that matter). We should remember that the reviews are not all bad, too — some of them are actually rather positive. I think the tomatometer had it in the controversial-but-not-awful area, and I’m fairly sure it got some positive comments, if measured ones, from some biggies (A.O. Scott at the NYTimes, somebody or other at ChiSunTimes, New Yorker, Variety, etc.)

Mr Pollack:

re: the passion story getting disproportionate treatment.

It’s true that the crucifixion per se was not described in detail in the Gospels. Presumably most of the original audience was familiar with crucifixions first hand, since it was a very common Roman punishment. But the passion story as a whole—i.e. the scope of the whole Gibson movie—does indeed occupy a disproportionately large percentage of each one of the four Gospels; if memory serves it’s around 20-25%. Considering that much of the Gospels isn’t action at all but parables and lectures, this is a huge amount of the “action” of Jesus’ life given.

“A lot of non-Christians have a really rather palatable view of what Christianity is (what with all this turn-the-other-cheek business and what-have-you) and it is rather startling to find that this movie basically skips right over that in favor of an extended exhibition of blood and suffering. Perhaps there is a historical precedent for such emphasis, but most of us were ignorant of it.”

This is an insightful and interesting comment. And it’s true that non-Christians have not seen or wanted to see the importance of the death of Jesus is evaluating his life: those non-Christians, at least, who wanted to retain some measure of respect for Christianity. Thos who didn’t used the accounts of Jesus’ death against the religion, by deriding anyone who worshipped a God that suffered a criminal’s death, either out of weakness or lack of self-respect or dignity of whatnot.

The two reactions are two sides of the same coin, i.e. not wanting to confront the claims the Christians themselves made at face value. Not only are the Gospel accounts themselves disproportionately full of the Passion narratives, but the death of Jesus is about the only part of his life that St Paul ever talks about. Where in his epistles does Paul ever mention Jesus’ miracles, or parables, or feel-good brotherliness? But he’s always talking about the Cross, which he readily admits is a scandal to the Jews and a stumbling-block to the Greeks.

Apparently it still is.

Mr. Pollack,

Thanks for sharing the story of your trip to see “The Passion.” I’d heard tell of instances like what you described, but never first-hand. My first time to see it (I’m almost certain) was during the wee hours of the night, after a fourteen hour work day, watching a borrowed DVD while sitting alone in the crew mess on a merchant marine vessel crossing the Atlantic Ocean. I always wondered what it would have been like to see it in the theatre. I watched it only once more, during lent the following year, with my dad, which was a mistake (my father is a committed Catholic, but those of you who know him might imagine how he would find the movie hard to endure, much less be edified by). At any rate, thanks for sharing the tale with us. Now if I can just figure out when to see Apocalypto…

Here’s one of the better Apocalypto reviews I’ve come across:

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2006/12/08/apocolypto-mel-does-a-mitzvah/

Mr. Pollack,

1) I don’t mean (and don’t have time) to peer too deeply into the piece in The Nation, but I want to say at least that it is not, properly speaking, a review…

Good point. I apologize for the mis-representation on my part.

2) I find Mr. Chinua Achebe’s criticism of Heart of Darkness a more damningly flawed argument than the aforementioned criticism of Apocalypto. Heart of Darkness is not even remotely racist; that Mr. Achebe thinks one of the most beautifully specific works of fiction somehow passes judgement on a continent shows how poorly he understands the central endeavor of the work itself.

Though Apocalypto does not begin to approach the magnificence of Heart of Darkness, most criticisms seem to me to similarly fall far outside of even the spectrum of artistic criticism, so far are they from understanding the central endeavor of storytelling.

3) I, too, very much appreciated reading your description of seeing The Passion. I was very unwilling to see The Passion because of reactions like those you describe—the kind of focus on the corporal death of Christ that leads many Christians to the development of intense sympathy with the events of Jesus’ Passion always seemed to me to be quite wrong-headed. The moment of true world-shattering was the moment that Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (The greatest literary reference ever?) That God could separate himself from himself is the basis of salvation—that one man was tortured brutally is not.

(I have moderated this view somewhat—I’ve been convinced by several interlocutors that it is a similarly incorrect error to wholly deny the importance of the physical suffering of Christ.)

But the main thing I would say is that I think you’ve perceived accurately an important difference in the way Christianity is perceived from the outside and from the inside. The moral philosophy of Jesus is wonderful and true, but it is not what makes most of us Christians—Christ makes a unique claim to be the Truth—not to be a representative of it or to say true things, but to be it. And the central pillar of most of Christian theology is that Christ’s was in order to die.

This may, of course, be a lot of rubbish. But I think people who do not believe it true would be better off leaving Jesus outside of their attempts to disabuse Christians—as attractive of a moral philosopher as he is, his recorded words dabble far too much in infinites, in metaphysics, and in things not easily reconciled to gentler philosophy.

(This is a perhaps dangerous thing to say, and any Christians should feel free to leap in and denounce this, should they so desire.)

Also, this quotation: “The human suffering that was an obstacle to his faith was a premise of mine.” …is awesome. I fully agree with it.

Michael — that was a great review. Post links to any others you find that are worth keeping a record of here.

So I saw the movie. And I look forward to your comments, Nate, since I was less enthusiastic than you seem to be (maybe I was expecting too much?). I enjoyed it, maybe along the lines of the review Mr. Sullivan links, as a fun and beautifully-shot chase movie; but I thought it heavy-handed and not terribly provocative. Complaints about its violence are surely overemphasized because of Gibson’s history, as the violence is no worse (and in fact a lot less awful, and more justified) than in countless other movies that take less heat for it. I agree with your estimation about Rousseauian (un)truthfulness.

I’m sympathetic for your love of the Conrad (I have also always found the book rich and powerfully affecting), but find the phrase “not even remotely racist” rather suspicious. Are we talking about the same book? I will make no claims about the “central endeavor” of Heart of Darkness, but Achebe deserves more esteem than you’re allowing him. I am less severe than he is in my estimation of the book, but his is compelling to me, and I am at least open to the possibility that I am less severe because I am less personally offended and that it is a personal failure.

Maybe the accusation of racism is harder to hear when it is understood to imply emptiness of value, and whatever Achebe thinks, I surely would not require that implication. It is a great and powerful book (and Achebe does acknowledge, if grudgingly, that it has its credits — it is automatically classified “permanent literature”). But it does require a condescending reduction of Africa, the sinister realization of Europe’s origin in and likeness to such rank savagery. In this sense it is not “beautifully specific,” but very general, about all humanity: “This, too,” like everywhere, one supposes, “was one of the dark places.” And there may be deep and valuable insight there, but it is realized in comparison to that perfect dark place, that eidos of savage unhumanity, Africa.

The Achebe essay is worth reading.

And about the Passion:
My casual recollection of the New Testament very heavily favors the Gospel of John, since that’s the book I studied in precept, translated in its entirety, and wrote several papers on (including the big one at the end). The rest of the compilation I have read exactly once, though with some re-examining of passages by way of comparison to John.

That said, the Gibson movie does begin with some attention to Gethsemane and a trial, and has a brief resurrection coda at the end; and there are some flashbacks to the Last Supper and so on; but Jesus is a bloody mess for surely more than 2/3 of the movie as I recall. While, on the other hand, the scourging and crucifying part makes up part of a chapter or two in John, which appears in the canon with 21 chapters. Maybe there’s more detail I’ve forgotten in the other books.

In any case, percentages of book-space taken up by some part are suspect since they may be measures of words or pages or chapters or some other thing, with different figures for all. My point was only that Gibson’s emphasis on the violence and suffering — even if it follows some tradition or other and finds its root in the New Testament — is not so evident in those books that outsiders reading them would anticipate it. And most outsiders (a lot of insiders too, I suspect) have only second- or third-hand knowledge of those books, so the movie was quite an unpleasant surprise. The less open-minded, rather than letting Gibson and other Christians speak for their religion themselves, assuming that surely it is they and not we who misunderstand it, thought he must be some kind of sadomasochist to tell that story like this; and the pattern of his other movies did little to disabuse them of the notion.

Mr. Pollack - tell me what you think of this understanding I have toward Heart of Darkness: I don’t find the book racist because I think the reader is supposed to understand both savagery and civilization (whatever those may be is up for debate) to be a matter of the human condition and not isolated to geographic locale or cultural association. If this is the case, then there is nothing more essentially savage about Africa; only accidental or maybe visibly obvious savagery is more obvious there.

On your other point, you seem to be arguing that Gibson’s portrayal of the Passion is improperly proportioned because of the heavy weighting of the movie toward the physical suffering of Christ which is not as obviously highlighted in the written narratives. There are two things I want to say here.

First, I don’t think that length of text is a good measure when evaluating the import of an event in any written work. Often a short, powerful, paradoxical event will require volumes to evaluate and understand it. I would argue that the crucifixion is just such an event and the New Testament that follows is such a volume intended to evaluate and understand it. What does it mean that God can die? What does it mean moreover than he can suffer? How does this change what we think about nearly everything? Yet, these questions and answers by going on at length often enter our minds, take them over, dwarf the event itself, causing us to underestimate it. Gibson is refocusing our attention in grisly detail to disallow such underestimation in order to make the event and following conversation more proportional - not less as you indicate.

Secondly and related, I don’t think that as an artist with his own message Gibson ought to be confined to the Gospels. It goes with out saying that he ought not contradict them, but just as each Gospel narrative is different with its own nuances because they each try to accentuate a particular aspect of Christ’s life and mission, Gibson is likewise different because he too is trying to stress a particular aspect of Christ’s life and mission. Speaking for myself, I think the message is a poignant reminder that those who follow Christ should not only take him as a friend, which is a popularly taught relationship, but also as a savior to whom we owe a debt because he suffered on our behalf. This debt that we owe in terms of love and gratitude is rarely spoken of and so the film that refocuses our attention on this equally valid part of a relationship with Christ is welcome and helpful. I think that this view of the movie is dependent on this understanding, and those non-Christians who don’t hold it themselves may not see that what is overtly disgusting and cruel is in reality the highest display of love possible. “No greater love than this, to give up one’s life for a friend.” I take you to be correct in identifying that dichotomy between populations who saw the movie and understand the violence differently.

Mr. Pollack,

I’m sorry to hear that you were disappointed by Apocalypto. For me, the question of what it means to live in a world with other men is an important one with terrible possibilities—and terrible actualities. We are a creature with a hunger that cannot be sated, a hole that cannot be filled (the myth that opens the story). What this means are continually overlapping waves of mankind, and with every overlap there is murder and rape and terror. You feel the tension of it in the tribe’s first contact with the other group of Mayans—the extreme danger of their simple presence. And you feel it when Jaguar Paw looks out across the water and sees nothing but the next wave coming. There is no peace for man on earth.

Against this is placed the fierce will for survival of Jaguar Paw himself, a man who cannot desire to live for his village or for a city or for a nation, but chooses to live instead only for his family—or for himself. What kind of answer is this? A precarious one, and one that strikes me as potentially legitimate for that very reason.

***

I just finished reading Achebe’s essay, which was certainly better than I anticipated, even if it leaves me more frustrated than before with his interpretation of Heart of Darkness. I certainly agree with Achebe that there exists such racism as he describes. But he misreads Conrad in a number of ways that make me want to bury my face in my hands.

The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.” That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith.

What Achebe and “many Conrad critics” apparently are happy to dismiss as either evil or merely flawed is, by my lights, one of the greatest strengths of the novel. Here: “For the Thames too ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace,” Achebe simply mis-reads Conrad, who holds no such love for civilization. He describes, in fact, his own journey into the Congo (upon which his novel is based) as the point at which he became human himself. Before that, he was “mere animal”.

Going to the Congo seems to be a place where Conrad believe it possible to witness truths about humanity. This is not because he gets to go see Africans, but because he sees the terrible transformation which occurs to both white and black as the two cultures meet each other and mutually destroy each other’s capacity for virtue. (Or better: reveal their fundamental incapacity for it.)

Conrad was certainly not able to understand the various activities that were going on in the villages in the jungle. But he, unlike many travellers, pretends to no such knowledge.

It’s difficult, too, to forget what a thoroughly mediocre work is Achebe’s own Things Fall Apart, so impermanent, and vaunted only because of the desperate necessity to ameliorate some of the racist attitudes Achebe (accurately) describes. He could benefit substantially from having some of the terrifying glimpse of infinities that Conrad himself did.

Martin G:
I didn’t mean to criticize the Gibson movie for a disproportionate focus on the suffering; only to say that it was his focus that most bothered his critics, and that they neither understood nor anticipated it (I am more critical of the critics’ tone than of the movie’s, though I am somewhat sympathetic to both). I agree that the length of some part or other is not always a good measure for evaluating importance in a book (though it may sometimes lead us valuably in some direction). I also agree that he should not be limited to the Gospels: in fact, I wouldn’t even say that it “goes [without] saying that he ought not contradict them.” He can contradict them or not, and I’m not sure either case is more or less likely to produce something great.

I hope to respond to your comments on the Conrad in my response to Nate, below.

—

Nate:
I am similarly interested in the questions that you raise, but it was not clear to me that the movie did such a fine job at raising them, or that it did much with them once they were raised. The opening myth, certainly, is all of the things I said the movie isn’t. But should I give credit to the movie for that? Because the movie had the sense to include it at the beginning? Certainly the movie can provoke a conversation like this one in us (so maybe it is provocative after all), but I have a sense that it is inciting but not participating in our conversation. Discussions of some movies and books have a way of continually returning to them, ideas and questions leading out and back in again; my thoughts about this movie lead me maybe to Rousseau or to history or to this or that, but not very much back into the movie (maybe because so much of the movie was the action-entertainment). I had actually forgotten about the beginning of the movie when I wrote before; fifteen or twenty minutes into it I had a different impression than I did an hour or two later, and those early minutes maybe lead me to expect more than I found.

You allude to the final moments in a way that suggests you don’t want to spoil them, but they’re hard not to anticipate. If anybody hasn’t already figured it out and doesn’t want to know before seeing it, skip what follows for now.

The conquistadores — especially coming as they did at the height of the action, as our hero runs for his life and his lady is literally giving birth while almost drowning waiting for rescue — pulled me further out of the movie. I and the person next to me groaned audibly when we saw the sandy beach (which we hadn’t seen before) and knew immediately that Gibson actually had the audacity to do it. And then he wouldn’t just do it, but had to have the long, dramatic reaction-shot, and the camera turns to see what they see. Jaguar Paw might have quickly found a way to save himself and his family with his own wiles (he was doing rather well before the deus ex mare — with apologies to Mr. Sullivan if I misconjugated that), but how very handy for him to be so saved. (The ambivalence, I suppose, is to the movie’s credit.) In a different movie maybe I would have felt differently about the sight of those boats, but I think a different movie would have felt differently about them, too. As it was, it felt like more heavy-handedness, like the author awkwardly taking me by the hand and walking me through all the dots.

This all gives the impression that I really didn’t like the movie, but I want to be clear that I actually did, and my tone here is maybe establishing itself in contrast to yours. I liked it. But I just liked it, is all.

—

I’m glad that you appreciated the Achebe essay. And you may be right that he underappreciates Conrad’s complexity — and maybe that’s a result of being personally offended by Conrad (which wouldn’t reflect terribly well on Achebe, but would be understandable).

I had forgotten until you quoted the essay, but I think I remember noticing when I read Conrad at St. John’s (but not when I read him in high school), his “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.” Maybe his mere acknowledgment
of inexpressible and incomprehensible things is endearing, but he does seem often to rely on merely telling the reader that something can’t be told. A Dante, for instance, or a John-the-Evangelist, does quite a lot less of that while dealing with quite a lot of (one would assume) inexpressibles and incomprehensibles. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison, and I don’t mean it as a condemnation of Conrad, but, rather, to suggest why I don’t think his “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery” is “one of the greatest strengths” of that or any novel.

Achebe quotes Conrad:
“For the Thames too ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace.”

And you respond:
Achebe simply mis-reads Conrad, who holds no such love for civilization.

And maybe he is under-reading Conrad, but the tense of Conrad’s verb (“has been one of the…”) suggests to me that Achebe is literally correct in his interpretation (that in some obvious way it no longer is). I don’t think it is the darkness of the Thames that is disturbing to Marlow — it is the former darkness, the kinship to darkness, the darkness that maintains some sort of deep and subtle presence though it has been pushed away.

And, finally, whether or not Conrad esteems European civilization, whether or not he sees savagery as an aspect of all humanity, Africa in Heart of Darkness is a sinister backdrop, his descent into it almost like Dante’s into hell; and Africans, who surely make up the vast majority of people in the book, are not humans but symbols, ciphers through which Marlow can realize his own savagery. It is as if to say I have recognized my own hidden ugliness by discovering my likeness to you, who are the very image of unbeauty, ugliness itself.

I haven’t read any Achebe except for this essay, but of course his own fiction bears no more influence on my consideration of his view of Conrad than does your great movie on my consideration of your view of Gibson. I will believe that he could benefit from a terrifying glimpse of infinity; and I will add that a man may have such a glimpse and still be racist, that we may get such glimpses in a book which is still a racist book. For several reasons I am less willing than Achebe is to condemn Conrad-the-man as a racist, but the claim that the book is racially condescending and dehumanizing to blacks seems rather reasonable to me.

(An aside that comes to mind by the “adjectival insistence”: I was told by an Argentine non-native English speaker — who in my opinion speaks and writes English no worse than I do — that Conrad, who learned English as an adult, is the particular English writer for people like him, a sort of patron saint of non-native English speakers, and that I can never understand the special affection. He claimed to detect in Conrad a clumsy quality, a sea-sickness in English that eloquence could yet transcend, and likened it to his own experience in the language.)

Robbie,

“Certainly the movie can provoke a conversation like this one in us (so maybe it is provocative after all), but I have a sense that it is inciting but not participating in our conversation.”

That is certainly the issue at stake; I should acknowledge that I, generally, seem to have a larger tolerance for movies that merely suggest larger worlds of questions than do other people. (I quite enjoyed the latter two Matrix movies, for instance.) But I still think the movie may be of more particular assistance than is immediately apparent: certainly, the deep ambiguity of the meaning of the landing on the beach suggests to me that there are complex tensions in interpretation of the story. There is fear, too, a theme which I think the movie explores with quite satisfying—if not easily understood—specificity. (Jaguar Paw’s father’s take; the fear that lies behind the human sacrifices; the fear that makes Jaguar Paw unwilling to accept death.) I would certainly admit that I worry that there is not the kind of ultimate confluence of themes that rests at the center as the beating heart of great works of art. But certain aspects of Apocalypto’s specificity seem to me to justify themselves regardless: merely seeing the look in the villagers’ eyes as they witness city for the first time.

As to Heart of Darkness:

“And maybe he is under-reading Conrad, but the tense of Conrad’s verb (“has been one of the…”) suggests to me that Achebe is literally correct in his interpretation (that in some obvious way it no longer is). I don’t think it is the darkness of the Thames that is disturbing to Marlow — it is the former darkness, the kinship to darkness, the darkness that maintains some sort of deep and subtle presence though it has been pushed away.

I re-read that section; the text certainly does make clear that Conrad is talking about the primitive origins of London. What still seems entirely unclear to me is that Marlowe views the fundamental nature of the place as changed—that he sees civilization as being truly redeeming, in the way that Kurtz is purported to before he goes to the Congo. Again, I feel like any accusation of racism relies on the idea that Marlowe believes in a kind of genuine redemption to be had in “things in their places” (as Achebe asserts). This seems to me to run counter to what I see as a fundamental truth of Heart of Darkness, which is that what is revealed to Marlowe in the Congo illuminates (a word specifically contrary to what Marlowe means) the actual nature of mankind everywhere—including modern London.

“And, finally, whether or not Conrad esteems European civilization, whether or not he sees savagery as an aspect of all humanity, Africa in Heart of Darkness is a sinister backdrop, his descent into it almost like Dante’s into hell; and Africans, who surely make up the vast majority of people in the book, are not humans but symbols, ciphers through which Marlow can realize his own savagery. It is as if to say I have recognized my own hidden ugliness by discovering my likeness to you, who are the very image of unbeauty, ugliness itself.”

I agree that the Africans in the story are ciphers; this seems to me honesty rather than racism. Just as I was finally forced to understand when standing in front of a classroom of Cameroonian students, being close to someone, being face-to-face with someone does not necessarily bring you any kind of understanding of his soul. Acknowledging the inaccessibility of this is essential to any honest travelogue, and this essential dishonesty is what leads me to an intense distrust of so many travel writers.

Also, the Congo was hell—a hell of King Leopold’s making… a hell for those inequipped to have any understanding of what the jungle meant, just the way a city could easily be a hell for someone unable to understand the meaning of its matrices. So much of the strength of Heart of Darkness is its subjectivity—of its honest and intimate description of Marlowe’s experience. Conrad continually explores the infinity between these subjective worlds: what could the cannibals mean to Marlowe? What could he possibly mean to them?

I haven’t read any Achebe except for this essay, but of course his own fiction bears no more influence on my consideration of his view of Conrad than does your great movie on my consideration of your view of Gibson.

It’s fair to hold me accountable to my own standards of artistic separation, but surely an artist’s work has slightly more relation to his criticism than a person’s life to his art?

That question aside, I acknowledge that it was a rather unjust blow to make against Achebe.

Your friend’s thoughts about Conrad’s English are fascinating; I certainly am ready to believe that there is a “sea-sickness” about Conrad’s prose, as it’s a name I would readily grant to a quality that I love about Heart of Darkness: that its prose seems itself to physically reflect darkness and light, to suffer from delerium and heat-sickness. I am myself rather unequal to the task of describing this in more helpful specificity; if pressed, I would point to the over-technicality of words, to the way Conrad continually describes things with a strange and rather purple precision that loops back on itself with similar words but altered connotations. It made the book very hard for me to read, actually; I didn’t much enjoy it ‘til I’d read it four times.

Thanks for your thoughts on this matter—it’s doing me considerable benefit to have to examine Achebe’s claims in more detail, which I simply scorned prior to this discussion.

There are plenty of ultra-violent movies, certainly — but Gibson’s violence distinguishes itself in two ways: He is an amateurish, ham-handed, gung-ho auteur; he is a breathless sort of sadist. These two things unite in his movies; so it is hard to talk about one without the other.

Just think back on Apocalypto and try not to laugh at the adolescence and unrelentingness of its ultraviolence. A character is speared through the face! Then one has his face eaten by a jaguar! Then one is struck by a venomous snake! Bam, bam, bam. There is a waterfall! and then there is quicksand! and then there are overgrown hornets! and then there is a monsoon! and then there are conquistadores! It’s like a home-made comic book. And every character must suffer — every one. The toddler’s leg is torn open — and the mother, well: Let’s have her fall hard when she descends into the cistern! Let’s have raging monkies menace her! Let’s have her go into labor pains! while drowning! while her drowning toddler is sitting on her head!

I am doing a poor job of writing coherently here in your little comments-box — but then the movie is incoherent, and I think I make my point well enough. Gibson is known for his ultraviolence because it’s all he’s got. Sure, he isn’t Hollywood — and I admire that — but he isn’t good. Sure, maybe he’s an educational change for average American audiences, but American audiences need to watch true auteurs from across the water — then they’ll learn how a movie not Hollywood can still truly be not amateur and awful.

Yo Porter,

I haven’t seen the movie, but I have seen Braveheart and The Patriot, which I hated and the filmmaking of which I deplored. Gibson can definitely be said to employ violence to ends peculiar to his character. But there has to be some difference between the perspective from which you’re approaching the movie (looking through the lens of “ultraviolence”) and that of the rest of the thread, as I understand it, (examining the overall work, as opposed to simply one aspect of it or indeed the intention of the artist). Your point is well-taken: from the perspective of those tallying and classifying violence, this movie is over the top. What about the intersection of these two perspectives?

I’m not examining the ultraviolence in itself — the whole point of my post is that comparing ultraviolence alone between Apocalypto and other ultraviolent movies can’t explain my and the critical negative reaction to it. I am examining the story in Apocalypto and saying that bizarrely unrelenting ultraviolence is all it’s got — which is what makes the movie as a story remarkable and amateurish and awful.

But you’ve reminded me to clarify that I am not speaking of the movie’s actors, or cinematography, or set-pieces. Those ranged from good to wonderful. It is not in those ways that the movie is like a home-made comic book.

And, for what it’s worth, I do not feel my money or time was wasted watching Apocalypto.

Having still not made it to the theatre to see Apocalypto (next week, I hope), I thought I’d offer this link to an article by Thomas Hibbs, whose thoughts on movies I always enjoy reading. He’s a self-described “recovering horror film addict,” and his insights into that genre have always seemed particularly interesting to me. This piece is less a review than an essay based on an interesting juxtaposition. Perhaps it might interest others as well.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTNjNDE5MTVkZmE5NGFjMWRjY2JkOWY2MDQ0ZDY1MDg=

I very much appreciated that link, Mike—I enjoy reading articles and reviews of movies that are not a straight review… that can back off from the primary function of telling people what to see and what not to see and can dwell with more leisure on the nature of movies as art, as things that stick around and continue to matter after their initial runs in the box office.

I hope you can check in here on Monadology with your own thoughts on Apocalypto once you’ve seen it. If you (or any other Monadologist) feel like writing a lengthier response to the movie, I’d be happy to post it in its own entry.