MEL GIBSON”S ULTRA-VIOLENT‘APOCALYPTO’
The Mayan civilization used hieroglyphics to keep important historical records, made many advancements in mathematics, and had a highly accurate astronomy system. Throughout their years of existence, the Mayans proved to be one of the most advanced civilizations ever recorded. Their hieroglyphic writing skills have been documented to be some of the most sophisticated in all of ancient
In addition the Mayans have been recognized by their advanced calendar, astronomy, architecture, arts, and mathematics. The Mayans was a highly advanced civilization instead Mel Gibson chose to highlight human sacrifices and extreme violence and demonstrated a negative view about the Mayans. In the movie apocalypto Mel Gibson is misrepresenting the Mayan culture and demonstrates many inaccurate historical facts about the Mayans civilization. Mel Gibson demonstrates a civilization engaged in extreme sacrificial ceremonies a civilization seen as a bloodthirsty and extremely violent. My research is set during the time period of the Classical period. The Movie Apocalypto drama unfolds in the last days of the Mayan civilization in Central America Mel Gibson starts the movie with the arrival of the Spanish.
Apocaltpyto story begins with a peaceful village that gets ransacked and burned to the ground by a group of warriors; its inhabitants killed or carried off as captives. One young man, Jaguar Paw manages to hide his pregnant wife and child in a well before he too is captured and taken away. After a terrifying journey, the warriors and their captives arrive in a large Mayan city in an area suffering from drought and plague. In the main temple the prisoners are to be sacrificed in an effort to appease the angry gods. After a natural miracle barely saves Jaguar Paw from this fate, he manages to flee, wounded, into the jungle. The fearsome warriors give chase. Then Jaguar paw and his wife are saved. Their two elements dominated in the film extreme violence and mass human sacrifices.
Apocalypto has many inaccurate in the historical facts about the Mayans. The extreme violence is one of the inaccuracies in the historical facts of the Mayans. The Mayans were not extremely violent like showed in the movie Apocalypto. While I understand that extreme violence is necessary to keep the plot moving along in an action film and effective in capturing the audience’s attention, I thought the use extreme violence in this film was so wrong .The scenes that most stand out in my opinion were those of unjust bloody battles, outright violent murder including of women and children with heavy and sharp weapons., and of course,.
However, the movie also depicts the Mayans as being extremely violent. Said the level of bloodshed is historically inaccurate and makes the Mayans seem savage. Ricardo Cajas, Guatemala
's presidential commissioner on racism said "It's a case of Western civilization imposing its view about
other civilizations," he said. "It shows the Mayans as a barbarous, murderous people that can only be
saved by the arrival of the Spanish," Cajas told the Associated Press. Cajas's criticism follows the
comments of Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture, who
slammed Gibson's film for purveying "an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one
another... and thus deserved rescue".(1)
The mass human sacrifice Mel Gibson useses human sacrifice to get the attention to the audience. This is one example of many inaccurate historical facts that Mel Gibson uses the description of scenes that projects a civilization that has masses of human sacrifices. I my opinion Gibson made his point after I saw one head falling from the steps of the central Mayan pyramid. The several scenes of sharp blades plunging into human flesh to extract pulsating hearts followed by decapitations of sacrificial victims all while onlookers of the Mayan king’s loyal subjects cheered and demanded more. The killers were portrayed as sadistic and bloodthirsty while the victims were other frightened. This nonstop extreme violent carnage throughout the movie combined with the highlighting of human sacrifice portrayed the Mayans as bloodthirsty savages.
Instead of demonstrating a highly advanced civilization Gibson demonstrates the Mayans violent, uncivilized and savages. , According to an UC Riverside archaeologist Zachary X. Hruby wrote recently in the San Francisco Chronicle: “There exists no archaeological, historic or ethno historic data to suggest that any such mass sacrifices numbering in the thousands, or even hundreds - took place in the Maya world.” The fundamental problem with Apocalypto’s depiction of Maya culture is that, it imposes violence.”(2). According to Gibson, film focuses on the director’s view that the practice of mass ritual human sacrifice which the movie depicts as having been performed on a massive scale, was one of the primary reasons for the downfall of the Maya. That is what raises the eyebrows of archaeologists and scholars since there is absolutely no evidence that Maya practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale.
In the movie hundreds of people appear to be sacrificed at once according the article Apocalypto tortures the facts, expert says “The Aztecs were known to have sacrificed large numbers of people, through according to the archaeological record, we are unsure of how many would be sacrificed at one time. There are no data to support that the Maya carried out sacrifice on such a large scale. The evidence we have suggested that sacrifice was a very personal thing, and so even the captives were personal objets.Another form of sacrifice to the Maya is auto-sacrifice, or bloodletting ….”(3)
According to historians the sacrifice among the Maya, as in many Mesoamerican societies, was based on the interdependence of the human and divine realms. Blood was the vehicle of life energy, circulated within ecology among humans, nature, and the gods. Because blood was the most sacred substance a human could offer to the gods, Maya nobles were often depicted in scenes of solemn bloodletting, giving of their own blood through piercings through the tongue, lips, genitals, and other quick-healing parts of the body, usually in private ritual. Sacrifice was a spiritual practice. The sacrifice scenes in Apocalypto, in contrast, are meant to horrify the audience. They aggrandize the power of the rulers and humiliate their sacrificial captives, who are slaughtered in numbers with gory heart extraction and decapitation. What is left of the body is tumbled down the stairs, onto the ground level of the temple, and the severed heads were skewered upon poles and left to decay. The Mayans human sacrifices were given more respect than seen in this film. The living human sacrifice was the embodiment of a god, and he or she was due that reverence even unto death. Instead in Apocalypto the viewer gets dehumanizing, scenes in the movie.
According to Peter Ackroyd he remarks that
The Maya may not have practiced human sacrifice to the same extent as the Aztecs, but it was still a part of the ritual calendar. They killed women and children as past of their ceremonies. The Mayan tortures their victims before killing them….In a city called Bonampak Murals were found some unique murals, dating from about 800 CE, the images of music and dancing and dancers wore monstrous masks but there were sense of torture and decapitation. There were prisoners with bleeding hands, their fingernails having torn out. (4)
In addition the Mayans had many religious ceremonies some religious rituals took place every day in peasant homes and on the steps of great stone temples. I n many huts a mother would offer a tortilla to their god Ixhel for the health of her child. Another example that the Mayan farmer fouls before going to work in the fields would be to burn incense and pray to the god Chac to bring rain. In some ceremonies involved the most precious of offerings their own life itself. The sacred essence of life what the may called kul was the blood of living things were offered in only special occasions. Like sacrificing a small bird and human blood. But these religious ceremonies were not a mass amount of human sacrifices.
According to Charles George and Linda George suggest that “Among the Maya, human sacrifice was not a common occurrence as it was among the Aztec. Only major rituals, such as the coronation of a new ruler, a natural disaster, or dedication of a new temple or ball court, required human victims….The Maya often offered captured prisoners, as human sacrifices for their gods.” page 39.(5) Some were bent over a stone or alter and had their heats removed.
In 1566 Diego de Landa reported that another technique often used by the Maya was to have a large group of individual’s fire arrows into the body of the sacrificial victim:
The people went through a solemn dance …around the wooden pillar
[Where the victim was tied] . . . .[When] the . . .priest [made] a sign to
the dancers, they began in order as they passed rapidly, dancing, to shoot
an arrow to their victim’s heart, and quickly made of this chest a s ingle
point, like a hedgehog of arrows(6).
Other inaccurate facts about the Mayans were the interpretation between heaven and Hell. Apocalypto should not have used "hell" in its subtitles. Traci Ardren is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami. Dr. Arden has studied the Maya for over twenty years and has directed excavations at Chunchucmil, an ancient Maya trading center in the northwestern Yucatán peninsula that dates to the Classic period (200 - 900 A.D.) said “Aside from the mainstream ideas of Hell as a realm of eternal torment, presided over by the masters of evil, the defining feature that most clearly distinguishes it from Mesoamerican concepts of the underworld is that Hell is a place to punish the guilty for their choice to do wrong. In most of the world religions, one's afterlife depends on how that person lived. In ancient Mesoamerica , this depended on how that person died.”(7).
The Aztecs had an especially elaborate geography of the netherworlds. People who died from drowning, lightning, or other water-related accidents would come to the watery paradise of Tlalocan... “Human sacrifices were ensured the supreme honor of the highest heavens, where the spirits of warrior men brought the sun into the sky and deified women who died in childbirth would carry it into the underworld at dusk. Most deceased commoners had to pass through a series of trials along a path taking four years on foot, ending at the 'land of the dead' that was Mictlan.”(8).
The Maya underworld was Xibalbá, the place of fright, a vast underground realm with houses of bats, knives, darkness, and cold, inspired by impressions of deep caverns as portals to the land of the dead within the earth. Even the rulers descended into this realm upon death. “The Maya did not expect to reunite with their loved ones upon death. This is a Christian interpretation. Which could be said for most of the Maya religion in Apocalypto.” (9)Their were many scenes in Apocalpyto that had many Christian ideas and interpretation and not the interpecatation in the Mayans gods.
Another inaccurate historical fact demonstrated in Apocalypto towards the end of the movie was the scene of the arrival of the Spaniards. The fall of the Mayan Empire was during the late Classic period, during some time between 700-900 AD. Instead towards the end of the movie of Apocalypto it showed the arrival of the Spaniard ships this scene was inaccurate.Gibson includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries in the last five minutes of the story the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last Maya city was abandoned. The message towards the end of the movie was historically inaccurate.
The movie ends with the Spaniards coming which didn’t happen in
Mexico until long after the Classic Maya collapse. So basically were looking at a 400- year difference in
architectural style and history. “The movie is mixing two wastly different time periods. This Classic
form of Kingship ended around 900 A.D” (10).
In other inaccurate facts is that movie suggest that there were several reasons for the Mayans collapse. There are many causes for the fall of that form of Classic –period social organization. Multiple historical, economic, and environmental factors were in play simultaneously at that time. It was a time of particularly bad drought. There was heavy deforestation. The ancient Maya overused their land and were no longer producing the amount of food they needed.
At the same time, populations were going through the roof. There were too many people, and the pie simply wasn’t big enough. There was also increased warfare in some areas. Royals were trying to kill off each other. The appeared to have occurred over a 100-to 150 period, so it wasn’t one single event. And it occurred largely in the southern Maya lowlands. “In some areas in the north, the construction of pyramids and other buildings continued unimpeded after A.D. 900.It is important to remember that the Maya didn’t disappear. They reorganized. So we should think of it more as a social reorganized than a collapse. By the time the Spaniards arrived, the social problems associated with the Classic period collapse, as portrayed in Apocalypto did not exist”. (11)
In conclusion the Mayans were a great civilization. Instead Mel Gibson movie Apocalypto demonstrates a civilization did mass human sacrifices and that were extremely violent. Apocalytp demonstrates a negative view about the Mayans. Mel Gibson misrepresents the Mayan culture and demonstrates many inaccurate historical facts about the Mayans civilization. Gibson demonstrates a Mayans as a civilization engaged in extreme sacrificial ceremonies a civilization seen as a bloodthirsty and extremely violent. Instead the Mayans should have been portray differently .Instead of been highlighted by the mass human sacrifices and violence Mel Gibson should of highlighted there advanced calendar, astronomy, architecture ,arts, and mathematics of the Mayans.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(1)News Scientist Environment. (2001, December 05).Ancient Mayan
Retrieved March 02, 2008, from http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn1650
(2)Archaeology (2006, November 27). Betraying the Maya
Retrieved March 03, 2008, from http://wwww.archaeology.org
(3)(9)(10)National Geographic News. (2006, December 06).Apocalypto Tortures the facts.
Retrieved February 12, 2008 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news
(4)(8)Library of Congress, Peter Ackroyd , Ancient Civilization The Mayas 2005 Published by Chelsea House Publishers.
(5)(6)Library of Congress, John MD Pohl Exploring Mesoamerica 2001 Published by
oxford University Press Inc New York , 100016-4314
(7)Beyond Chron News(2007,February 23).Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto
Retrieved March 05, 2008, from http://quartz.he.net
(11)La Opinion Apocalypto (2005, April 12). Apocalypto Criticado por Racista
Retrieved March 03,2008,from http://www.laopinion.com
Carmen,
Good to see that your blog is up! Your information about the Mayans are very thorough. You may want to take time to revise you paper though. I enjoyed reading your paper and I like the visuals that you added! I love the movie...I wish I came up with this idea! Good job! Remember on the revision though!
Posted by: Roxanne Santos | April 30, 2008 at 01:22 PM