I was (mostly) wrong about Mel Gibson
[Warning: Spoilers follow.]
Well, I finally got to see "Apocalypto" yesterday, and let me start by saying that I was wrong about the movie in my earlier comments here. It is a stunning film, and I heartily recommend it to those who can stand some gore. I did look away a couple of times, to be sure, but for most of the film, the violence is profoundly contextualized; I was not prepared for Gibson to show in the faces and reactions of his characters the pain of violence and cruelty. In this, it's much like "The Passion of the Christ," in which the violence was given deep meaning. In the moments before the mini-apocalypse strikes the peaceful village where Jaguar Paw and his tribe live, we see, among other things, Jaguar Paw lying down by the fire with his son and pregnant wife, and him observing his unborn child moving underneath the skin of his wife's belly. It's a moment of almost unbearable tenderness (says the father of a newborn). By the time Jaguar Paw and the others are led as slaves into the evil tribe's city, and we see from a distance heads rolling down the stairs from the high altar where humans are being sacrificed, we understand that the casual cruelty we've seen inflicted on Jaguar Paw's tribe is in fact the apotheosis of the sadistic civilization that has enslaved them.
In fact, I can't think of a film that is at once so violent and such a protest against violence. For me, the key moments of "Apocalypto" come atop that high altar, when the high priest is ripping the hearts out of and decapitating prisoners, while the bored royal family looks on. They've seen it all before. This is their "normal." Their ho-hum, anesthetized reaction to the unbelievable sadism they're inflicting on human beings is more shocking than any disembowelment. When I saw that, I thought about the concentration camp workers who went about their satanic jobs, then went home to their wife and kids and slept peacefully. And I thought about our ancestors who, not terribly long ago, enslaved Africans and treated them with similar barbarism, and yet were quite civilized. And I thought about how we today are even more civilized, yet we tolerate this -- and indeed quite a few Americans see this as a virtual sacrament. The Mayans in the "Apocalypto" grotesquely sacrificed innocent humans so that they could live as they wished to live; so do we, in our way. I came away from "Apocalypto" unsettled, convinced in an unfamiliar way that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with us humans. We are born to trouble and violence, and will to power.
I'd said in my earlier postings that I suspected Gibson didn't know what he was doing -- that his filmmaking in fact embodies the thing he supposedly protests. I based my remarks on the number of reviews I'd read in which the gore level was explored and condemned. Having seen "Apocalypto" myself, I completely agree with Ross Douthat's observation that most critics, in this respect, reviewed the film in bad faith. While the movie is gory, it is by no means gorier, or even as gory, as plenty of films whose brutality passes without complaint, or is celebrated for its "kinetic" qualities, or whatever. The violence in Apocalypto is anything but ironic -- though it must be said that Gibson really, really, really is in need of some artistic restraint On this point, I urge you to read Tom Hibbs' insightful thoughts on how Mel Gibson and M. Night Shymalan need to work together, because each bolsters what the other lacks.
[I should say too that as an exercise in pure filmmaking, "Apocalypto" is a phenomenal piece of work. I realized at the end that I had just watched a two-hour film about tribal derring-do, filmed in an ancient Indian tongue, and I had been entirely engrossed, as if hardly any time had passed at all. Any filmmaker who can do that is a master. If somebody other than Mel Gibson had m ade this film, he'd be the toast of Hollywood.)
Knowing that Gibson is a conservative Catholic, I puzzled over the film's ending: Jaguar Paw's life is saved when he reaches the beach, exhausted, with two pursuers still chasing him. The three tribesmen confront a party of conquistadores rowing ashore, along with them at least one cleric bearing a cross. The conventionally Catholic thing for Gibson to have done would be to have the evil pursuers run away, and Jaguar Paw embrace his saviors, foreshadowing the eventual triumph of Christianity over the pagan death-cult civilization. But that's not what happens. Jaguar Paw runs back to the forest to rescue his family, while the two evil pursuers run forward to greet the Spanish. And the final scene shows JP and his family, reunited, consciously choosing not to join up with the Spanish, but instead to retreat further into the jungle "to make a new beginning."
What is the Catholic Gibson saying here? I can't mull this over without considering the opening quote for the film, Will Durant's observation that great civilizations first decay from within before they are conquered from the outside. Plainly Gibson intends to show us a Mayan civilization whose complexity is only a thin mask for grotesque cruelty -- the skin over the skull. I tried last night after seeing the film to think of "Apocalypto" as a contemporary socio-political allegory, but I just can't see that it works that way. Rather, I think this is Gibson's commentary on civilization, period. The Spanish are going to be better than the Maya -- this Gibson knows, this we all know. But given human nature, Gibson appears to be saying, they are doomed to create institutions that will ultimately make violence and inhumanity abstract, with the effect of reducing, even abnegating, the humanity of all members of that civilization. If I'm reading Gibson right here, there's something about Bigness that makes us less human. We become part of the System, and can justify the most barbaric cruelty because of it.
In fact, it may be unavoidable: one of the most poignant moments of the film comes when the evil Maya who has led the slave-gathering expedition tells his adult son, who has been with him on the trip, that today, he has proven himself a man -- and then he (the father) passes the mantle of manhood on to his son in the form of a hunting knife. It really is a tender moment between father and son, because in risking their lives to gather slaves, they have enacted a ritual that their civilization teaches them is a good and necessary thing to become fully a part of society. And yet, they have done great evil. It is easy to imagine a slave-ship captain sailing out of Ghana with a load of human beings in the hold, genuinely praising his own son for having bravely done a man's work that day. It is hard not to wonder what cruelties you and I accept, tragically unaware, as part of our role in our own civilization.
And me being me, I couldn't help thinking of how many Catholic bishops in all sincerity thought tolerating and covering up for the cruelty of clerical child abuse was actually a noble and necessary thing, to keep the "civilization" of the Church running -- and how that corruption has in fact led to a weakening of that civilization. Given Gibson's deep faith as well as his disdain for institutional Catholicism, I find it hard to believe that this thought didn't cross his mind.
It's not a Catholic thing, mind you, but a human thing, and insofar as the Catholic Church, or any other institution, is made up of humans, we will see things like this. Gibson seems to be saying that cruelty and violence is an inescapable part of our nature, and that the only institution that you can finally rely upon as a refuge from the world is the family -- or at least smaller social units, where the humanity of your neighbors is always before you. A question left unexplored is how the small unit -- the village, say -- is to protect itself from marauders. The answer, of course, is that .. . they build cultures and civilizations, working together for the common good. Until they eventually succumb to corruption, and die out first spiritually (the cynicism with which the high priest and the royal family go about their duties suggests that when the leadership of a civilization ceases to believe in sacred truths at the heart of the civilization, it is bound to fail), and then in material ways. The civilization represented by the conquistadores appears to be expiring from exhaustion and loss of faith. Gibson seems to be endorsing the social cycle theory of history, and saying that civilizations may come and go, but the family endures, and in the family is our hope. And that idea -- that the family, not the individual, is the natural basis for society -- is deeply Catholic, deeply conservative, deeply true -- and deeply un-American.
These are just my random musings a few hours after having seen "Apocalypto." I wanted to make sure to get them down, even if they're disordered, because I'd made such a big deal about how I wasn't going to see the film, and I wanted to say how mistaken I was. And I wanted to thank those like Charlotte Allen, Ross Douthat, Peter Suderman and readers of this blog, whose public and private comments to me convinced me that "Apocalypto" was worth seeing.
Well, I finally got to see "Apocalypto" yesterday, and let me start by saying that I was wrong about the movie in my earlier comments here. It is a stunning film, and I heartily recommend it to those who can stand some gore. I did look away a couple of times, to be sure, but for most of the film, the violence is profoundly contextualized; I was not prepared for Gibson to show in the faces and reactions of his characters the pain of violence and cruelty. In this, it's much like "The Passion of the Christ," in which the violence was given deep meaning. In the moments before the mini-apocalypse strikes the peaceful village where Jaguar Paw and his tribe live, we see, among other things, Jaguar Paw lying down by the fire with his son and pregnant wife, and him observing his unborn child moving underneath the skin of his wife's belly. It's a moment of almost unbearable tenderness (says the father of a newborn). By the time Jaguar Paw and the others are led as slaves into the evil tribe's city, and we see from a distance heads rolling down the stairs from the high altar where humans are being sacrificed, we understand that the casual cruelty we've seen inflicted on Jaguar Paw's tribe is in fact the apotheosis of the sadistic civilization that has enslaved them.
In fact, I can't think of a film that is at once so violent and such a protest against violence. For me, the key moments of "Apocalypto" come atop that high altar, when the high priest is ripping the hearts out of and decapitating prisoners, while the bored royal family looks on. They've seen it all before. This is their "normal." Their ho-hum, anesthetized reaction to the unbelievable sadism they're inflicting on human beings is more shocking than any disembowelment. When I saw that, I thought about the concentration camp workers who went about their satanic jobs, then went home to their wife and kids and slept peacefully. And I thought about our ancestors who, not terribly long ago, enslaved Africans and treated them with similar barbarism, and yet were quite civilized. And I thought about how we today are even more civilized, yet we tolerate this -- and indeed quite a few Americans see this as a virtual sacrament. The Mayans in the "Apocalypto" grotesquely sacrificed innocent humans so that they could live as they wished to live; so do we, in our way. I came away from "Apocalypto" unsettled, convinced in an unfamiliar way that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with us humans. We are born to trouble and violence, and will to power.
I'd said in my earlier postings that I suspected Gibson didn't know what he was doing -- that his filmmaking in fact embodies the thing he supposedly protests. I based my remarks on the number of reviews I'd read in which the gore level was explored and condemned. Having seen "Apocalypto" myself, I completely agree with Ross Douthat's observation that most critics, in this respect, reviewed the film in bad faith. While the movie is gory, it is by no means gorier, or even as gory, as plenty of films whose brutality passes without complaint, or is celebrated for its "kinetic" qualities, or whatever. The violence in Apocalypto is anything but ironic -- though it must be said that Gibson really, really, really is in need of some artistic restraint On this point, I urge you to read Tom Hibbs' insightful thoughts on how Mel Gibson and M. Night Shymalan need to work together, because each bolsters what the other lacks.
[I should say too that as an exercise in pure filmmaking, "Apocalypto" is a phenomenal piece of work. I realized at the end that I had just watched a two-hour film about tribal derring-do, filmed in an ancient Indian tongue, and I had been entirely engrossed, as if hardly any time had passed at all. Any filmmaker who can do that is a master. If somebody other than Mel Gibson had m ade this film, he'd be the toast of Hollywood.)
Knowing that Gibson is a conservative Catholic, I puzzled over the film's ending: Jaguar Paw's life is saved when he reaches the beach, exhausted, with two pursuers still chasing him. The three tribesmen confront a party of conquistadores rowing ashore, along with them at least one cleric bearing a cross. The conventionally Catholic thing for Gibson to have done would be to have the evil pursuers run away, and Jaguar Paw embrace his saviors, foreshadowing the eventual triumph of Christianity over the pagan death-cult civilization. But that's not what happens. Jaguar Paw runs back to the forest to rescue his family, while the two evil pursuers run forward to greet the Spanish. And the final scene shows JP and his family, reunited, consciously choosing not to join up with the Spanish, but instead to retreat further into the jungle "to make a new beginning."
What is the Catholic Gibson saying here? I can't mull this over without considering the opening quote for the film, Will Durant's observation that great civilizations first decay from within before they are conquered from the outside. Plainly Gibson intends to show us a Mayan civilization whose complexity is only a thin mask for grotesque cruelty -- the skin over the skull. I tried last night after seeing the film to think of "Apocalypto" as a contemporary socio-political allegory, but I just can't see that it works that way. Rather, I think this is Gibson's commentary on civilization, period. The Spanish are going to be better than the Maya -- this Gibson knows, this we all know. But given human nature, Gibson appears to be saying, they are doomed to create institutions that will ultimately make violence and inhumanity abstract, with the effect of reducing, even abnegating, the humanity of all members of that civilization. If I'm reading Gibson right here, there's something about Bigness that makes us less human. We become part of the System, and can justify the most barbaric cruelty because of it.
In fact, it may be unavoidable: one of the most poignant moments of the film comes when the evil Maya who has led the slave-gathering expedition tells his adult son, who has been with him on the trip, that today, he has proven himself a man -- and then he (the father) passes the mantle of manhood on to his son in the form of a hunting knife. It really is a tender moment between father and son, because in risking their lives to gather slaves, they have enacted a ritual that their civilization teaches them is a good and necessary thing to become fully a part of society. And yet, they have done great evil. It is easy to imagine a slave-ship captain sailing out of Ghana with a load of human beings in the hold, genuinely praising his own son for having bravely done a man's work that day. It is hard not to wonder what cruelties you and I accept, tragically unaware, as part of our role in our own civilization.
And me being me, I couldn't help thinking of how many Catholic bishops in all sincerity thought tolerating and covering up for the cruelty of clerical child abuse was actually a noble and necessary thing, to keep the "civilization" of the Church running -- and how that corruption has in fact led to a weakening of that civilization. Given Gibson's deep faith as well as his disdain for institutional Catholicism, I find it hard to believe that this thought didn't cross his mind.
It's not a Catholic thing, mind you, but a human thing, and insofar as the Catholic Church, or any other institution, is made up of humans, we will see things like this. Gibson seems to be saying that cruelty and violence is an inescapable part of our nature, and that the only institution that you can finally rely upon as a refuge from the world is the family -- or at least smaller social units, where the humanity of your neighbors is always before you. A question left unexplored is how the small unit -- the village, say -- is to protect itself from marauders. The answer, of course, is that .. . they build cultures and civilizations, working together for the common good. Until they eventually succumb to corruption, and die out first spiritually (the cynicism with which the high priest and the royal family go about their duties suggests that when the leadership of a civilization ceases to believe in sacred truths at the heart of the civilization, it is bound to fail), and then in material ways. The civilization represented by the conquistadores appears to be expiring from exhaustion and loss of faith. Gibson seems to be endorsing the social cycle theory of history, and saying that civilizations may come and go, but the family endures, and in the family is our hope. And that idea -- that the family, not the individual, is the natural basis for society -- is deeply Catholic, deeply conservative, deeply true -- and deeply un-American.
These are just my random musings a few hours after having seen "Apocalypto." I wanted to make sure to get them down, even if they're disordered, because I'd made such a big deal about how I wasn't going to see the film, and I wanted to say how mistaken I was. And I wanted to thank those like Charlotte Allen, Ross Douthat, Peter Suderman and readers of this blog, whose public and private comments to me convinced me that "Apocalypto" was worth seeing.
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