A Critique that Mel Doesn’t Deserve
By Via Trend…
In an interview with Reuters, Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, said, “Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue.” Lucio Yaxon, described by Reuters as a 23-year-old Mayan human rights activist, added, “Basically, the director is saying the Mayans are savages.”
If there’s a single theme to Mel Gibson’s work as actor and director, it’s that we’re ALL savages. Gibson clearly believes that any culture at any time in virtually any circumstance can produce murderous brutality, coincidentally giving him an opportunity to make a movie about a beset upon hero getting tortured, beaten, drawn and quartered, crucified, etc. I suppose it’s possible that Gibson would hold the opinion that European colonialism could “rescue” the Maya from brutality (never good to credit Mel with too much intellectual consistency), but I’d be pretty surprised if he actually believed that. I’ve also never been moved by the notion that pre-Colombian America was a space free of war, slavery, torture, state sponsored coercion, etc.
I don’t doubt that Apocalypto is historically inaccurate in many ways, and I have no plans to see it, but the themes fit seamlessly into Gibson’s body of work.