[Aztlan] Apocalypto - Review/Interview with Julia Guernsey

[Greg Sandor]

I saw Apocalypto yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Get popcorn and a 
Coke and settle in for a terriffic pre-automotive car-chase.  It is fun and 
beautiful and terrible and awesome.  I am glad to see this part of human 
civilization enter the modern popular vocabulary and look forward to more of 
it.

Regards,

Greg

(614) 517-7204
greg at gregsandor.com
http://www.gregsandor.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Elaine Day Schele" <eschele at austin.rr.com>
To: "Aztlan" <aztlan at lists.famsi.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2006 9:37 AM
Subject: [Aztlan] Apocalypto - Review/Interview with Julia Guernsey


'Apocalypto' is an insult to Maya culture, one expert says
An <Art> history professor explains where Mel Gibson got it very, very wrong
By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
As we stagger out of a sneak peek of Mel Gibson's Maya historical thriller 
"Apocalypto," Julia Guernsey is visibly shaken. She's upset and not a little 
angry. She barely can contain her disgust, but she also can barely speak. 
I'm a little worried. Guernsey is an assistant professor in the Department 
of Art and Art History at the University of Texas. Given her emphasis on 
pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art and culture, we invited Guernsey along to the 
preview last week so she could illuminate where Gibson got his history right 
and where he got it wrong.

The upshot: Boy, did he ever get it wrong.

Caution: The following interview with Guernsey contains spoilers.

Austin American-Statesman: You looked truly disturbed after the movie.

Julia Guernsey: My first reaction was to the extraordinary, gratuitous 
violence. And the ending with the arrival of the Spanish (conquistadors) 
underscored the film's message that this culture is doomed because of its 
own brutality. The implied message is that it's Christianity that saves 
these brutal savages. I think that's part of Gibson's agenda, sort of, "We 
got the Jews last time (in 'The Passion of the Christ'), now we'll get the 
Maya." And to highlight that point there's a lot of really offensive racial 
stereotyping. They're shown as these extremely barbaric people, when in 
fact, the Maya were a very sophisticated culture.

Yet he goes out of his way in the first third of the movie to depict how 
peaceful and human at least some of them are.

Yes, they're shown as wonderful, but ignorant. They're wonderful and they 
get along great and they've got this rip-roaring humor, but they don't know 
what's going on a day and a half's walk away, where this massive city, this 
metropolis, is being constructed. They haven't gotten wind of that because 
they are in their forest, the forest of their fathers, the forest of their 
sons. I can feel my heart beating faster talking about this.

You just hate this movie.

I hate it. I despise it. I think it's despicable. It's offensive to Maya 
people. It's offensive to those of us who try to teach cultural sensitivity 
and alternative world views that might not match our own 21st-century 
Western ones but are nonetheless valid.

What were you hoping for going into the movie?

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 non-stop 
violence.

What are inaccuracies you noticed?

For one thing, the characters walk through a tunnel-like space and it's 
covered in wall murals. I'm nitpicking and it would mean nothing to most 
people, but it's a reconstruction of some murals that were just discovered 
in the past few years. They're from the site of San Bartolo in the Maya 
region (of Guatemala). Some pieces of it are copied exactly from the mural, 
but part of it is this gory scene of an individual holding a severed human 
head with blood flowing out of it. That's not in the mural! That's just 
Gibson on his violence kick. Plus, the murals are Late Pre-Classic, dating 
to about 100 B.C., making it very problematic that these people were walking 
through murals dating from 100 B.C. and then we have the arrival of the 
Spanish, which was in the 16th century. That's like 1,700 years apart.

Couldn't they just be walking through an ancient area?

You could argue that, except that the film presents an inaccurate 
hodge-podge of architecture. Some of it looked like Tikal Classic Maya, 800 
A.D. Some looked Puuc, which is closer to 1000 or 1100 A.D. These are very 
different regions. It's like the difference between Texas and Delaware. It 
also looked like they were borrowing from El Mirador, this Pre-Classic 
metropolis that flourished around the year 0 A.D. It would be as though 
somebody did a movie on our American culture and they had Madonna and 
Marilyn Monroe riding in a car together, or they had a meeting of George 
Bush, Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington because why not condense a 
couple hundred or a couple thousand years? We would be appalled. We take our 
culture seriously. We demand historical specificity, something completely 
lacking here. Gibson had a responsibility to know better. He was consulting 
experts who should have told him.

Were the sacrificial pyramid/temples really like they are in the movie?

We have accounts from the Aztecs of such things; it shows up in their 
mythology. And we have some images from the Maya that suggest that that kind 
of sacrifice did take place and that they probably did roll the bodies down 
(the pyramid). Now, the guys in the movie at the bottom catching the bodies 
with nets? That is crazy. We have no evidence for that. Another thing that 
was so funny was all that crazy, wild dancing with women's breasts flapping. 
I was just reading hours before I saw the movie with you a 400-page textbook 
dedicated to Maya dance, and it talked about how women played no major 
public role in these ceremonies but much more subtle roles.

Was the depiction of sacrifice â?" lining victims up as if they're in a 
ticket queue in front of a hysterical public crowd â?" accurate? That was 
startling.

We have evidence to suggest that there were group sacrifices. But it would 
probably have been done as a pious act with solemnity. Some of it was 
probably public spectacle. But I'm suspect of the women gyrating and going 
into some kind of trance state, as, let's not forget, the world's fastest 
ever solar eclipse is taking place.

Did it bother you that the movie completely ignores the ancient Maya 
inventions and achievements, such as urban planning, writing, mathematics, 
astronomy and art?

I did hope they would dwell on their achievements. There's this noble 
savage, 19th-century idea of barbaric savages, and it was like Gibson was 
rooted in that. All of these advances we've made in understanding their 
culture were completely forgotten. I think Mel Gibson is the worst thing 
that's happened to indigenous populations since the arrival of the Spanish. 
I say that in jest, but what is scary is that people will leave the movie 
thinking that because the characters were speaking Mayan there is an air of 
authenticity.

What about the garb and elaborate ornamentation they wear in the movie, 
including bones in their noses?

Some of that is based on images we have that are probably more or less 
accurate. But again, they played it up in a way to make them seem somehow 
subhuman. So the costuming just played into the idea of them as real 
savages, rather than what it was for the Maya, which was an aesthetic 
display of beauty, just as we take care of our clothing and appearance. The 
whole thing was wrong. I was looking at the film's trailer, which says, "No 
one can outrun their destiny." And I thought, "You better run. You better 
outrun this movie."

cgarcia at statesman.com; 445-3649
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