[Aztlan] Apocalypto PLUS

[john.pastore]

I finally caught the film on its last showing---a few days after a lid had nearly been put on the subject.

Some here may recall when a writer, connected to the film, questioned the list regarding the Maya. 

I was glad to see then the practical joking of the Maya having been incorporated into the film’s script. It was right-on.
Also the incorporation of the rather innovative weapon of a live beehive plus what had yet to occur to me until seeing the film: just how a bearer of such a weapon would protect himself from the weapon.

As it turned out, I should have recalled the “Clay Men” of the old Flash Gordon serials.

I do take reservation with all the chasing. The characters spoke Yucatec Maya and, thus, the terrain must have been the rough and deeply cragged limestone shelf that is the Yucatan. With even armor-plated combat boots such running, bounding and jumping would, and is, impossible. If their footwear lasted at all, all such runners would have been shredded to pieces with all the tripping and tumbling that would have occurred.

The reservation is minor given the poetic license allowed film and its being, as I would think, the most probable reason for the film, as it turned out, having to be shot elsewhere.

Originally, I had my reservations with both the squalor and disorder of the city. In my imagination I had always pictured particularly the parade of captives and ultimate sacrifices to have been attended by nearly everyone while all adhered to a strict, though ecstatic, regimen.

In retrospect, however, the informalities of especially the crowds, were probably appropriate to a civilization in decline.

I did read one critique of the film which castigated the film’s veracity, in part, for the decline of the Mayan civilization to have occurred centuries prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. This critique was obviously based on the Old World assumption however that all cities had to have been simultaneously occupied and, subsequently, must have been uniform in all their ups and downs. 

The simultaneous occupation of the cities was not the case however as chroniclers from the very arrival of the Spaniards and through the forays of the Yucatan peninsula by the Montejos attest.

I have to suppose that the general lack of human remains, bones in particular, and what they could tell, one way or the other, has had its role in definitively supporting or dispelling the critique’s basic notion of an Old World standard for urbanization having to apply to the New---forcing historians, in turn, to still quest for the very explanation of why no (or so few) bones.

So much so that yet another Old World criterion has been assumed, “crematoria,” which has, again in turn, forced historians to look for them; but, having found none, forced the assumption that even the small stone houses, numerous to especially the Mayan Caribbean, having to be those “crematoria”---though the very remains of their thick interior plasters, not only free of any soot but also pigmented still by their original paints, belie such assumption.

Thus, in part, another retrospect of the film: the bonfires reducing limestone to the talc required of both mortar and plaster (and even tortillas)---a manufacture sill prevalent in the Yucatan today.

Everywhere visible is the once living past of coral, shell and bone on and in the limestone. What an easy step it would have been to visualize adding one’s own.

Could the bones (if any distinctions were made) of foes been cast to such pyres to thus imbue, in mortar and plaster, even the skull racks (and even tortillas) with their calcified remains?

Could the bones of family been cast to yet other such pyres to, likewise, imbue the families’s very homes (and even meals)?

After all, could it have not been that “Home is where the bones are”?  

Is there a way to test? The plaster?

Cheers,
John Pastore



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