Mel Gibson’s ‘Apocalypto’ Not Only Not Anti-Semitic, But Actually Pro-Jewish
February 7th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
Here is my review of Gibson’s film, scheduled for this issue of the Touro (I guest lectured an art history course there, briefly) Independent. (It’s not yet online, so here it is.)
Towards An Apology For His Father’s Holocaust Denial:
Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto”
Hollywood figures often function much like cult leaders, with initiated devotees and critical outsiders. It is rare to find viewers who perceive of actors or directors within a gray area characterized both by success and failure. If viewers have heard of a movie artist, they generally either adore the actor’s or director’s work or hate it, and it is likely to take many examples of work over a number of years to convince the public that an artist deserves either a promotion or demotion. Proving either expert or inept at their careers guarantees actors and directors much attention in the public arena; being average condemns them to oblivion.
But for better or for worse, actors and directors are held to a higher moral standard—the liability of their fame and wealth. It will take a tremendous effort for Michael Richards to reemerge as an artist to be taken seriously after his recent racist rant, and it will take an equally mammoth synagogue donation campaign for the ADL to slap a kosher certification sticker on Mel Gibson’s career after his recent drunken anti-Semitic conversation with a police officer. Gibson’s film “The Passion” and his father’s alleged Holocaust denial will not help his case either.
And yet, Gibson’s new film—although highly controversial—can be viewed as not a further perpetuation of his anti-Semitic remarks and of his father’s Holocaust denial, but as an apology and clarification therein. Through “Apocalypto,” Gibson emerges as new, redeemed man, and whether viewers choose to accept the apology, at very least Gibson deserves an audience for his apology.
A December 8-posting on the self-described blog of “daily Manhattan media news and gossip” that reports “live from the center of the universe,” Gawker, collects the titles journalists used for their reviews of Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” Unfortunately for team Gibson, none are worthy to be included in future press releases and packets. “Snuff Epic,” cried The Indianapolis Star. “Drowning in sea of blood,” charged the Edmonton Sun. “Rape, murder, mayhem—there goes the civilization,” moaned the SF Chronicle. “Savage and then some,” added The Dallas Morning News. And the clincher from Salon: “‘Apocalypto’: Mel Gibson’s latest pretends to care about the fall of man, but it really only wants to impale, flay, disfigure and torture him. Sound familiar?”
With this in mind, it was hard to go to the theater without looking for opportunities to pan “Apocalypto.” Some even threw about charges of anti-Semitism and Holocaust-exploitation. A recent Saturday Night Live (fake) clip of “Apocalypto” (on YouTube, of course) shows Gibson’s Mayan warriors running through the woods, as the subtitles ask, “What could cause one of the greatest civilizations in history to disappear?” One warrior snarls, “The Jews,” as his peers run through the forest crying “The Jews are coming. Run for your lives!” A high priest or kingly sort holds his hands up dramatically from atop a great pyramid-shaped temple, crying, “Hey you guys! The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!”
The SNL clip is a fake to be sure, but some critics of the real film are rallying to call it anti-Semitic. A professor of Mayan history at UC Riverside, in an article bearing the subhead, “‘Apocalypto’ should be viewed as entertainment, not historical fact,” observes: “The film feeds into old stereotypes about the Maya being savages … If it’s a hit, it could have a lasting effect on the way the public views the ancient Maya, and by extension, the modern Maya.” The scholar, Zachary X. Hruby, who allows that Gibson accurately depicted the Mayan king’s regalia, describes a scene of human sacrifice as anything but scholarly: “Hundreds of men are sacrificed on an Aztec-style sacrificial stone, their headless bodies thrown into a giant ditch reminiscent of a Holocaust documentary or a scene from the Killing Fields.” A Townhall review echoes the talk of “Holocaust-like mass graves.”
Many critics are charging the movie with three other inaccuracies. Some historians are saying Mayan art never depicted decapitations, despite drawings to that effect in the movie. Additionally, a solar eclipse in the film stuns the Mayan people, though critics are saying the Maya were well aware of astronomy (and that the full moon just after the eclipse in the movie is an astronomical impossibility). And finally, the human sacrifices in the film are lowly captives, but one critic argues that the Maya would only have sacrificed kings to their gods for their human sacrifices.
Inaccuracies aside, the film is deeply troubling and violent. It is subject to debate whether the alleged Holocaust references are indeed at play in the film or whether they only appear to people who are looking for them. But judging a film director by the upsetting content of her or his film has never worked. By all accounts, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and Rod Serling were normal people despite their on-camera monstrous creations. Condemning Gibson because his film is bloody or because it appears to have Holocaust references is as absurd as judging him for his father’s position on the Holocaust. The Bible tells us not to condemn the son for the father’s sins, and in fact, if censors are about looking for fodder, the Bible could be censured for its violent scenes. It is not the content, but the moves the artist makes with the content that will prove relevant in discussing the film’s merits.
As art, “Apocalypto” calls upon the reader’s suspension of disbelief from beginning to end in a plot that can only be described as a run-on sentence. A non-stop chase scene, the film leads its protagonist, Jaguar Paw, through an attempt to sacrifice him to the Sun, a fight with a jaguar, a leap off a Niagara-like waterfall, a friendly swim in quick sand, episode after episode of spear and other projectile dodging, and somehow, Jaguar Paw, who sustains two injuries that should each have been fatal, manages to finally reunite with his son and his wife, who has meanwhile given birth (on her own) to a child underwater at the bottom of a deep pit. Like the Energizer bunny, Jaguar Paw is simply made of better stuff than the opposition.
The film liberally borrows from Aristotelian models of artistic theory from hubris to anagnorisis. The opening scene—in which Jaguar Paw and company successfully hunt a tapir—foreshadows the change is fortune where Jaguar Paw becomes the pursued in a human hunt that evokes Richard Edward Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” It is hard to find any winners in Gibson’s movie, even as it does not end strictly as a tragedy, since Jaguar Paw finds his wife and lives to raise his two children. But the Spanish have arrived on the scene with their boats, and although the Mayans cannot know that they will soon be “saved,” viewers cringe with the knowledge that this genocide and mass murder is but an appetizer in the larger narrative of destruction that Gibson could have explored.
But a close reading of the film yields quite a different perspective on Mel Gibson the man and the director. If the mass graves of Native Americans murdered by the Maya are Holocaust references, then the sympathetic portrait Gibson illustrates of the massacred people is transferable to the Holocaust victims. The Holocaust references, then, are not inappropriate manipulations of Holocaust memory, they are not attempts to trivialize the Holocaust, but instead, they are efforts to show that just as the atrocities in “Apocalypto” grab the viewer’s attention and sympathy, so too do all atrocities and genocides, including the Holocaust.
When the Maya wickedly toy with their prisoners and drink water in front of the captives who are tired and thirsty, they evoke Nazi tormenters. When the Maya effectively create scapegoats of their prisoners—believing that in sacrificing them they can better their own position with the gods who control their crops—they recall the Nazis who were told by Hitler that the Jews were responsible for all of their economic problems. The SNL clip addressed above then becomes not merely as a satirical parody of “Apocalypto,” but also a serious piece of literary analysis.
And perhaps most importantly, the decision that Jaguar Paw makes for his family to return to the forest rather than walking towards the Spanish conquistadores directly mirrors the decision many haredi and Chassidic people made post-Holocaust: clinging to tradition, even in the face of emergent modern technology and culture. Gibson, in suggesting that peoples who have survived genocide ought to continue to occupy their own land and culture as a tribute to their ancestors, can hardly be accused of being anti-Semitic. He made some foolish remarks driving drunk one day, and readers can debate ad nauseum whether he believed what he said, but either way Gibson’s “Apocalypto” presents an argument for cultural diversity and preservation, and for the triumph of oppressed minorities over tyrannical regimes. Gibson has taken a step towards seeking to repair his relationship with the Jewish community. We at least owe it to him to hear him out.