Can a conservative Catholic accurately portray pre-Christian Mayan culture in film? Can you make a film that honestly portrays their society while trying to use that culture as a metaphorical critique on your own? While Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” has been getting some good reviews, academics with knowledge of Mayan history, and the current descendants of the Maya are speaking out about the supposed “accuracy” that the film portrays. Anthropologist Traci Ardren, writing for Archeology magazine, thinks the film borders on the pornographic.

“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?”

Actual Mayans aren’t too happy with the film either.

“Activists are angered by the depiction of their ancestors as a savage race with a penchant for spear-hurling and human sacrifice. “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,” argued Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture.”

Topping all this is the anachronistic arrival of the conquistadors (bearing a big ol’ cross naturally) at the end of the film. Here is what Gibson had to say about the ending in an interview with MTV News.

“…how did the conquistadors take power? I think that the majority of the populace was really discontented with what was going on. They didn’t dig it. Twenty-thousand people being bumped off? It was like, who’s next? And they began to rebel. I think the conquistadors led more of a revolution with the help of the people. But many of these conquistadors were pretty wild guys – you weren’t getting the cream of the crop from Spain, okay? They considered the people to be animals, without souls. And so indiscriminate killing was also part of what they did. And they actually recorded that it was the Franciscans baptizing these people that saved them from being killed – the conquistadors wouldn’t kill them because they figured they must have a soul. I think that Christianity gets a bum rap a lot of the time in the history books. But you’ve got to consider who’s writing them.”

Did Christianity get a “bum rap” here? Leaving aside the complications of portraying the fall of the Maya, the violent society that Gibson portrays had been gone for hundreds of years by the time the Spanish arrived. A point made by several critics.

“…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.” – Traci Ardren, Archeology

“Maybe the Mayans really did bounce human heads down the steps of their pyramids but, being as their civilization collapsed hundreds of years before the Spanish conquest, how would we know? “A lot of it, story-wise, I just made up,” Gibson confessed to the Mexican junketeers who visited his set last year. “And then, oddly, when I checked it out with historians and archaeologists and so forth, it’s not that far [off].” Or far out, for that matter. Irrational as it may be, Mel’s sense of history does have a logic: JP’s trip to hell ends when the Christians arrive.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“The Spanish conquistadores (who were historically savagely violent in their own regard) are presented as mere bystanders to Jaguar Paw’s persecution; religious symbolisms such as crosses and bibles in the hands of friars indicate that the Spanish have arrived to Christianize the heathens in order to save them from the savagery they inflict on each other.” – Gabriela Erandi Rico, U.C. Berkeley

Even respected Mayanist Richard Hansen, who was a consultant on the project, is starting to distance himself from the film (which won’t open in Mexico until next year).

“there were things I didn’t like that they went ahead and did anyway…there was a lot of artistic license taken…I’m a little apprehensive about how the contemporary Maya will take it.”

So what is the take home message? Just that any film headed by Mel Gibson can never be trusted to get history right (see: Braveheart, The Patriot, The Passion of The Christ) no matter how many subtitles he uses. The fact that he felt the need to add the blatant Christian triumphalism at the end of the film only proves that Gibson is more interested in selling a “message” than giving us an nuanced view of complex points in history. As Latin American scholar Dr. Kathryn Lehman asks, who benefits?

“So if you show this film, give students the basic facts about indigenous peoples TODAY and ask students who benefits from this representation TODAY?”

Tags: Apocalypto, Christianity, Maya, Mayan, Mel Gibson, Paganism