I'll have more to say this evening about Barry's hysterical meltdown, but in the meantime, here's a post I made back in 2007 after Barry had brought this up again. The Maya expert in the Salon article I quoted was, um, not exactly the only knowledgeable person to have been upset by the movie:
A few selections from articles discussing the historical inaccuracies in "Apocalypto" >From the San Diego Union-Tribune, 12/6/06: 'Apocalypto' a pack of inaccuracies Maya experts say Gibson's violent film wrong historically By Mark McGuire NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE December 12, 2006 Mel Gibson's historical drama "Apocalypto" certainly has a veneer of authenticity. If you have to scramble to remember your fifth-grade lessons on Maya culture, you'd certainly believe you're watching an accurate, detail-rich depiction of Mesoamerican life. "A lot of people will think this is how it was," said Walter Little, an anthropologist and expert on Maya language and culture at the State University of New York at Albany. "Unfortunately." Little and two other Mesoamerican scholars at the Albany campus recently screened the big-budget, subtitled epic, which opened Friday and was last weekend's No. 1 movie, grossing $14.2 million. All three said they were disappointed by the plot and taken aback by the graphic violence, which to these eyes suggested "Braveheart" as directed by Quentin Tarantino in a particularly vile mood. But even if they could sponge away the blood, these experts found the devil or at least a set of thumbs-down reviews in the details. "This was not a film about the Mayas," said Robert Carmack, a retired anthropology professor from SUNY Albany's lauded Mesoamerican program. "It's a big mistake almost a tragedy that they present this as a Maya film." In any genre film, experts and geeks alike will pore over the minutiae. In their estimation, a movie rises or falls on the little things. Seafaring experts debate the minor gaffes of "Titanic," while experts on ancient Rome talk about minor historical imperfections in "Gladiator." Most moviegoers won't catch these mistakes or willful fact- doctorings. Does it matter to the average ticket holder that Gibson apparently fudged some facts? Not really, especially if you're just looking for a period adventure featuring, by my unofficial count, 12 wildly different modes of killing. There are no guns, but lots of lethal weapons. To those in the know, however, the flaws stick out like Roseanne Barr in a Broadway musical. Take the film's depiction of a major Maya city that serves as the setting for much of the film's third act. Many of the architectural details are correct, but they're cobbled together from different locations (including ancient cities in Guatemala and the Yucatan) and different eras, the experts said. So what, you say? Try picturing 16th-century explorer Giovanni da Verrazano navigating the east coast of the New World, and then ending his journey by traversing the New York City suspension bridge that bears his name. You get the idea. The experts said they thought, during much of the movie, it was set sometime between A.D. 300 and 900 until a closing scene places it closer to the early 1500s. "It was a postmodern collage," Little said. "It was a hodgepodge." Carmack grew more and more steamed in his post-screening analysis. In particular, he seethed over the portrayals of human sacrifices and other spectacles, which he said more closely resembled practices used by the Aztecs or even the ancient Romans. The sadism that permeates the movie was simply not part of the culture, the experts said. Yes, the Mayas practiced human sacrifice, but in ways that were highly ritualized and usually involved a single victim. Not pretty, to be sure, but a far cry from the slaughterhouse of mass sacrifice depicted in "Apocalypto" a virtual conga line of the soon-to-be headless, followed by desecration of their bodies. The body count was high, and the treatment of the dead cavalier, all three anthropologists said. The Mayas, an agricultural society, also would not have had an open field of rotting corpses situated near their crops. Modern-day descendants of the Mayas "would be totally disgusted by this film," Carmack said. "It was all invented. The ritual was a disgusting perversion of human sacrifices among the Mayas." Edgar Martin del Campo, a newly arrived faculty member who begins teaching at SUNY Albany in January, talked about religious glitches and other flaws. Examples: Mayas would not have been awed by an eclipse as they were in the film they were, in fact, early astronomers. Villagers would not have been dumbstruck by a city; most lived in or around metropolises. The costumes were contrived. Give the film this, the scholars said: Gibson was brave enough to make the movie in the Yucatec language. But just as the use of Yucatec isn't exactly a guarantee of boffo box office, the historical inaccuracies of Gibson's latest will zoom right by the average viewer. The gore will not. Gibson's last subtitled period piece, 2004's "The Passion of the Christ," was an international hit. Even so, that graphic drama drew criticism similar to that already levied against "Apocalypto," angering many scholars and Jewish leaders for its depiction of Christ's final hours. "The Passion" was a cultural phenomenon that sparked mainstream debate over the Gospels and the history of anti-Semitism, among other topics. It's doubtful the history behind "Apocalypto" will prompt widespread research by moviegoers most of whom will be in search of nothing more than two hours of action. Regardless, the experts will be howling. It will be up to you whether to listen. "The problem is when you misrepresent (a subject to) somebody, they don't always seek out the correct version of things," Little said. "They're going to accept that as reality. So why would they go search out what it really is?" http://tinyurl.com/2u3vas Excerpt from an article in National Geographic News, an interview with Zachary Hruby, a Maya expert at the] University of California, Riverside (the full article details many more historical inaccuracies): Hruby: By the time the Spaniards arrived, the social problems associated with the Classic period collapse, as portrayed in Apocalypto, did not exist. NG: In terms of historical accuracy, the arrival of the Spaniards is a problem in itself, right? Hruby: The movie ends with the Spaniards coming [which didn't happen in Mexico until long after the Classic Maya collapse]. So basically we're looking at a 400-year difference in architectural style and history. The movie is mixing two vastly different time periods. This Classic form of kingship ended around 900 A.D. http://tinyurl.com/ylo7ql >From an article at Archeology Online, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, by Tracy Ardren, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami: But I find the visual appeal of the film one of the most disturbing aspects of "Apocalypto." The jungles of Veracruz and Costa Rica have never looked better, the masked priests on the temple jump right off a Classic Maya vase, and the people are gorgeous. The fact that this film was made in Mexico and filmed in the Yucatec Maya language coupled with its visual appeal makes it all the more dangerous. It looks authentic; viewers will be captivated by the crazy, exotic mess of the city and the howler monkeys in the jungle. And who really cares that the Maya were not living in cities when the Spanish arrived? Yes, Gibson includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries (these guys are too clean to be conquistadors) in the last five minutes of the story (in the real world the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last Maya city was abandoned). It is one of the few calm moments in an otherwise aggressively paced film. The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson's efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess. Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamucil this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in "Apocalypto," no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, 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 deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970- 1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World? I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic. It is surely no surprise that "Apolcalypto" has very little to do with Maya culture and instead is Gibson's comment on the excesses he perceives in modern Western society. I just wish he had been honest enough to say this. Instead he has created a beautiful and disturbing portrait that satisfies his need for comment but does violence to one of the most impressive of Native American cultures. http://tinyurl.com/ya5kd7 A comment on a review: Ignacio Ochoa's [director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture] comment that "Gibson replays... 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" articulates what I was feeling, especially towards the end of this film. When the Berkeley crowd started booing at the end of the film as the Spanish-Christian missionaries arrive, I'm sure it was in response to this sense. >From India Times via Yahoo News: Washington, Jan. 11 (ANI): A Guatemalan official has reportedly blasted Hollywood filmmaker Mel Gibson for the insulting depiction of the Mayan civilisation in his new film 'Apocalypto'. Guatemala's presidential commissioner on racism, Ricardo Cajas, feels that Gibson's movie has caused a drastic setback to the image of the Mayan people in Apocalypto. He says that that the movie seems to be an attempt at imposing the Western viewpoint about other civilisations of the world. "It's a case of Western civilisation imposing its view about other civilisations," Contactmusic quoted him as saying. "It shows the Mayans as a barbarous, murderous people that can only be saved by the arrival of the Spanish," he added.... http://tinyurl.com/2uqhys
