apocalypto: fecund nightmare

Mel Gibson is criminally underrated as a director. Before y'all start howling, let me state my case.

Great directors have some things in common: a strong and unforced personal style, for one. There's a unity to their works, related through shared themes, with personal demons and power-images recurring in apparently disparate films. The camera-work is deft and bold, drawing attention not to itself but to the telling of the story, which is conveyed as adeptly through images as through words. Lastly, great directors sin boldly; their mistakes tend rather to be mammoth, interesting blunders from running too far out on the limb than sins of omission or timidity.

I'm a sucker for a guy with vision, even if that vision is disturbing.

There's a thing that Mel Gibson does as well as and possibly better than anyone else. It's the effortless visual shift he makes between an intimate, thought-reading shot into a swift, clear action shot and back again. He's got a natural feel for the dynamic of it, and tells a clear, personalized but fast-paced chase story like it's the easiest thing in the world. And it's not. In fact, I suspect it's a dying art. Even slower-paced stories get lost these days in shenanigans behind the camera. Sean Penn's The Pledge and Fernando Meirelles' the Constant Gardener come to mind, both potentially great stories that sputtered and perished because the director was showing off, superimposing his own presence between the camera and the story. As for action films, well... as I say, a lost art. I've given the rant before and I won't repeat it here. The point is that Gibson turns everything into an action film, and he's a master of it.

Two directors remind me most of him: Terrence Malick, whose films step easily across continents and centuries, but whose style and obsessions are such that his fingerprints are magnificently apparent on each, and Sam Peckinpah, whose shoddiest studio drudgework bears personal scars and some scintilla of greatness from an ongoing wrestling match with his personal demons. Cross a Malick with a Peckinpah, Mel's in there somewhere. He's a bloodthirsty sumbitch, for sure. There's a lingering salivation in all three films over torture suffered by his characters, but to stop there in describing him is to commit an injustice, as has been argued in regard to Peckinpah. And, devout like Malick, it's not only in the uber-Catholic Passion of the Christ that Gibson's religious phantoms emerge. His demons and fascinations are worn on his sleeve for all to see, captured in brilliant visuals.

*****

WARNING: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

and CAVEAT: I haven't seen Man Without a Face, and I'm no fan of Braveheart, which I consider his juvenilia, but it bears the hallmarks of, and forms a sort of tryptych with, the later two, fully-formed works, so I'll be alluding to it.

*****

In all three, a hero submits to an ordeal in order to save his people. In the first two, the hero dies and the people are saved. In Apocalypto, the hero lives through a combination of his own efforts and divine assistance (that crazy solar eclipse; the fastest one in history) but the white man has arrived, and a race is about to be decimated. It looks like the gods are on the side of the hero, but Gibson makes it plain through the device of a prophecy that God is on the side of the hero only as an afterthought to being on the side of the approaching white man. Jaguar Paw, the hero, becomes a sort of John the Baptist figure, unwittingly ushering in the era of the conquistador.

Here in Gibson's jungle, people undergo unrelenting brutalities. Those who don't die are left unblemished by their ordeals. It's a Nietzschean place: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Ugly arrow and spear wounds (including one Christlike to the hero's side) magically heal, and a woman is ready to travel apparently just days after giving birth while standing on a slippery rock in a pit up to her neck in rising water while carrying her firstborn on her shoulders. If this were the real world, she'd at least have a headcold and a very sick child.

But it's not the real world. Gibson takes legends and finds the action films lying dormant within them.

*****

ON THE SUBJECT OF BIGOTRY

A great fracas came about with the releasing of the very Catholic (very Traditionalist Catholic, I should say) Passion of the Christ, much of it in charges of anti-semitism. Yes, the Romans come off better than the Jews. Gibson has an innate feel for the soldier, traditional machismo, and the man of discipline, all which skew the affections of his camera toward the Romans. When the Christ rises up after his three days dead, it is to the martial music of drums; he wakes as a soldier, marching into war. Any cursory reading of the New Testament, though, will tell you that Gibson didn't invent the anti-semitic slant. It's there already, in the pointed focus on Pilate washing his hands, in the Jewish crowds crying for the release of the criminal Barabbas, in the finaglings of the Sanhedrin. Gentile rationalizations were built into the story from the beginning. We didn't do it, swear to God; it was THEM that did it. Gibson didn't invent that. As a traditionalist Catholic with pre-Vatican-II sympathies, he just doesn't let political correctness stand in the way of his telling it like he reads it.

In Braveheart, homophobia was the issue (although he was also accused of the lesser offense of Anglo-bashing), the most egregious instance being the sickening moment in which Edward Longshanks defenestrates his son's gay lover, a scene played for laughs. The incident itself is telling about Longshanks, but the comedic angle draws our gaze to the director. Not necessarily gay men, but the effeminate, the "unmanned", are a frequent source of Gibson's ridicule. In the Passion, the court of Herod Antipas is a nest of decadence, which one knows because it is filled with grotesquely-maquillaged, epicene courtiers and slatternly women. This scene also drew cries of anti-semitism, which seems to me a wrongheaded perspective. He's not talking about Jews, but a specific roomful of aristocrats. The court of Herod has always been a symbol of extreme licentiousness. (Married his sister, slavered over her daughter's dance to the extent that he cut off the Baptist's head and gave it to her on a plate. Sybaritic decadence. No question.) If there's an uncomfortableness to be had, it's that his visual expression of that decadence is in willfully womanish men. In Apocalypto, the same attitude manifests in a painfully protracted and embarrassingly puerile string of gags at the expense of a fellow unable to sire children.

His bigotry can be distracting and offensive, but his worst flaw as a storyteller is his mortifyingly bad sense of humor. The jokes in all three films are, if not insulting, then barely not. Jokes he does not do well. Peaceful Village Life is also not his forte, possibly since he tries to incorporate humor into it. What he does is action, and this he does better than anyone.

******

A SHORT TO MIDDLIN' DIGRESSION ON HISTORICAL INACCURACY IN HOLLYWOOD FILMS:

Don't learn your history from Hollywood. Even films that feel true like Munich and the New World begin showing their artistic license at second glance. A movie is there to tell a story. Enjoy it, then go read a book.

My favorite response to charges of historical accuracy came from Gibson himself who voiced Captain John Smith in Disney's animated Pocahontas, which caused its own hubbub among historians. He said, --and I wish I could remember where I read this,-- "Come on. It's got a singing raccoon in it. How realistic is it gonna be?"

There are two charges against Apocalypto that I dismiss from the start: first, that his portrayal of the noble villager vs. the corrupt city-dweller is untruthful. This is an age-old story-telling trope, big-city-bad, small-town-good, particularly used since the dawn of Hollywood, and needs no defense. The other is his compression of time. The charge is that he's taken details from several periods of Maya culture and thrown them together slapdash; this is another well-used cinematic tool. In every culture as old as this one, big holes exist in our knowledge of a specific year, and where better to find material to fill in those holes but from other centuries from the same culture? Drink it in, enjoy the story, then, again, go read a damn book.

This man is no stranger to causing uproar amongst academics. In real life, for instance, Isabella of France never met the real William Wallace as she does in Braveheart, much less bore his child. Still, look how much stronger the plot is when Wallace's secret heir is destined, after his terrible death, to take the throne of England! Bad history it is, but it's great story-telling, and we gave him an Oscar for it.

What the havoc cried over Apocalypto mostly comes down to is that he didn't make the film they wanted him to make. A historian wants a documentary, and Gibson made an adventure film. Julia Guernsey from the University of Texas, interviewed in the Times Herald Record, was asked what she'd hoped for before she saw it. "I thought it would highlight some of the achievements of the Maya, but none of them is presented. They show some buildings but they don't talk about them. You get glimpses of some art, but it's overwhelmed by the nonstop violence." ("Expert: Apocalypto is an insult to Mayan Culture", 12/14/2006, on christianaggression.org)

Gerardo Aldana, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, brings up the objection (in "Where Was the Maya Civilization in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto?" 12/10/2006 New America Media) that Gibson has projected four bloodthirsty practices from the white man's West onto the Mayans: "...the raiding of villages for human sacrifice is undocumented for Maya cultures." Richard Hansen, field archaeologist and technical consultant for the film, counters, "There was tremendous Aztec influence by this time. The Aztecs were clearly ruthless in their conquest and purusit of sacrificial victims, a practice that spilled over into some of the Maya areas." Aldana objects to the depiction of public slave auctions while he admits to Mayan use of prisoners as slaves. He objects to the human heads impaled on stakes in the city center. While he admits that the Mayas left us "depictions of skull racks," he sees no evidence that there was flesh on them when they were impaled. Which brings up a few questions: why is using slaves okay as long as they're not bought and sold in a public forum? why is an acre of human heads on stakes "more humane" if they've been stripped of flesh before being displayed? Gibson is taking the basic facts of slave-use and heads-on-stakes and making the most visually interesting use of them.

Aldana allows that there was some evidence of Maya heart sacrifice (ie: ripping the heart out of a living victim's chest), but that its "attribution to the Maya is largely anchored in Spanish accounts of Aztec practices..." Mark Stevenson in LiveScience ("Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims,"AP, 1/23/2005) says that Indian codices depict the Mayan use of multiple forms of human sacrifice, although the numbers were probably inflated in Spanish reports. "Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples." Children were victims ("...it was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of the sacrifice..."), but more often the victims were enemy rulers or strings of warriors, as in this film. And, says Dr. Herman Smith on DigIt, the warriors were painted blue, just like in the film, stretched across an altar and had their heads cut off or their hearts pulled out in public rituals, just like in the film. Even the outraged Julia Guernsey admits that there were accounts of sacrificial temple-pyramids, and that the priest probably did "roll the bodies down," just as in the film. In fact, Dr. Smith says, Gibson showed some restraint: "...the corpse would be thrown into the courtyard below where priests of lower rank would skin the victim except for the hands and the feet. The skin would then be worn by the officiating priest who would solemnly dance among the spectators. If the victim had been an especially brave warrior his body might be butchered and eaten by the nobles and other spectators..." Imagine the wailing and gnashing of academic teeth if Gibson had gone with the skin-wearin', flesh-eatin', baby-killin' Texas-chainsaw-massacre version.

The point is, many would like Gibson to say that the Maya were noble and exalted. And he DOES: they WERE that, but they were other things, too, like all men everywhere are. White men don't have the monopoly on cruelty and bloodlust. We've been extraordinarily talented at it for a very long time, but other folks have got some licks in, too. Gibson did his research, got the details in costume and architecture and geography right, then he took a rollicking, bloody, hero-outwits-pursuing-villains story, set it in that time, in that place, and told it very, very well.

*****

The movie opens with a long tracking shot closing in on greenery in a peaceful forest. A tapir leaps out at full speed, and a handful of villagers hunt it to its death. It's a gorgeous sequence, a simple and astute opening metaphor which also introduces us to a mechanism which will be involved in a crucial plot-point down the line, and the action is engaged. Their triumph is interrupted by a chillingly beautiful bit in which Jaguar Paw stands up, leaves the frivolity of his companions, faces a seemingly empty jungle and asks, "What do you want?" There is a silent shift and a whole tribe appears. They have been rousted from their own village by raiders. The encounter between these bands of strangers, who will meet again under worse circumstances, is tense and lovely, perfectly filmed.

The first time I watched it, I nearly turned the thing off in despair at about the 45 minute mark, at which time Gibson was relishing the cruelty and violence of the raiding party on the villagers. If you saw the Passion of the Christ, you know the kind of lip-smacking gusto for sanguinary horrors that I'm talking about.

I was glad I stuck with it, because the film doesn't really take off until the creepy little leprous girl makes her prophecy of doom. (But you can say that about so many films, can't you?) It acts as a skeletal shell into which he splashes his mad colours, up to the edges and overflowing. He's at his best when working within a structure. In the Passion, two of the awfullest bits were the crow pecking out the eye of Gestas and the "Jesus-Invents-the-Dinette-Set"(*) scenes, both of which sprang up from the fervency of his own imagination which had momentarily thrown off the happily honing effects of his source material. One of the best is Judas Iscariot's gibbering run toward madness and death, depicted using horror film conventions, which ranks among my favorite dark and phantasmic scenes in all of cinema.

Here, too, some of the best details are nightmarish images. All the visuals are stunning. The cinematography, the production design, the camerawork, the editing are some of the best you'll find in any recent film. Gibson has an extraordinary talent for ocular unfolding. As the prisoners enter the city, it seems to unveil itself to us slowly in all its strangeness and vibrant, gemlike colors. Then, once Jaguar Paw escapes and starts the run through the wilderness which will fill up the rest of the film, Gibson is on his best footing and rarely falters. He shoots the forest so that we feel an intimacy with it, the same intimacy Jaguar Paw knows, having lived in it all his life. He makes it a character without belaboring the point, and that is no mean feat.

*****

All right. You can start your howling now. But at least watch the films. Look at the strange, fecund nightmare that is Apocalypto, shot in the brilliant colors of a lost world, a melding of history, legend and perversity. Look at the unspeakable, misshapen beauty that is the Passion. From the first shot of the moon over Gethsemane to that extraordinary drop of rain falling on the Cross which is the movie's sole allusion to the presence of God in a world rampant with the Devil, it's like no other movie you'll ever see.




(*) Many thanks to Derek Hill for naming the Jesus-Invents-the-Dinette-Set scene. I wish I could take credit for it myself.