[Aztlan] Apocalypto

[Dito Morales]

As I see it, this discussion dances around one of the main problems we face 
in education today. Students are more and more confusing entertainment with 
education.

General textbooks are increasingly more reliant on slick graphics and less 
on detailed and extensive information (text). This makes them look and read 
more like web sites. I've heard publisher reps admit that this is 
intentional. They want to make the books more appealing to students. This is 
a symptom of the dumbing down of our educational system, short and simple.

News programs now look more and more like entertainment programs, and their 
content is becoming increasingly light and fluffy. Sports and entertainment 
get similar time and depth in broadcast coverage as life and death 
issues--which all share similarly splashy graphics and theme music. We're in 
a "Colosseum Culture," as Howard Risatti recently called it, where spectacle 
is replacing substance. Who can blame our students for occasionally 
confusing spectacle and substance?

Movies are movies. I liked watching some of Apocalypto. But I like the 
entertainment of going to the movies. I'm very used to it. I also liked the 
junk food I abused like bad drugs while watching the movie. The aftereffects 
of both, however, left me queasy. Re-entering the 'real' world from the 
cavernous theater I realized that the throngs passing me on their way into 
the ritual chamber might actually believe some (most?) of that crap.

I remember the strange questions I got when teaching Italian Renaissance art 
a few years ago ("Isn't that a woman in Leonardo's Last Supper?"). Once I 
realized a book by Dan Brown was well-read by my students, while their 
assigned readings were not, I caught on. I was no longer working against a 
lack of knowledge, I was working against well-learned fiction--and very 
entertaining fiction; sweet like candy and just as nourishing.

Gibson's gratuitous anti-Maya candy, as popularly grotesque as it is, will 
force us to teach pre-Columbian culture by un-teaching Apocalypto, just as 
we un-teach The Da Vinci Code, and un-teach Alexander, and un-teach a lot of 
Islam, and un-teach "Cave-Man Paintings" (my personal un-favorite).

But that's what we do. When we stop, they win. When they stop, we're bored.

Dito Morales