What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
The Texas Wars of
Robert Gates:
On Affirmative
Action and Mexican Migrants
What's Robert
Gates's not-so-distant dirty past? Greg Moses turns over the
dirt in College Station, how Gates fought affirmative action
there and how Reagan and Bush's's slippery spook will run the
new Border War.The End of the Libération
Myth! Meet Libération, turncoat tool of neoliberalism.Pierre
Rimbert traces the decline and fall of one of radical journalism's
great hopes --the paper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. Daniel Wolff describes how Bob Dylan
plays the music of the Apocalypse. Remember, we are funded solely
by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian
in Living Color
Mad
Mel's Mayan Apocalypse
By JOHN ROSS
A funny
thing happened to me on the way to Mel Gibson's Mayan Apocalypse.
Awaiting the 49 bus at Mission and 24th, the BART plaza suddenly
erupted in down-home Meso-American aboriginal ritual as a troupe
of neo-Aztec "concheros" began to stomp and whirl to
the heart-thumping whomp of the drummers, dancing their juju
and offering fragrant copal to soothe the four corners of the
universe.
Despite Mad Mel's cinematic
death sentence, the Aztec-Mayan duality remains quite alive on
the streets of San Francisco. In a neighborhood awash with new
arrivals from the Mayan Yucatan, there are perhaps a dozen distinct
brigades of Mexica warrior dancers practicing their moves in
the Mission District alone, among them Xipe Totec which celebrates
the Aztec God of the New Corn whose priests once donned the flayed
skins of teenage virgins to insure a bountiful harvest. At least
their blood sacrifice was more purposeful than Gibson's avalanche
of gratuitous homicide.
The concheros' performance
on Mission and 24th was designed to ballyhoo the annual December
12th procession to celebrate the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe,
Mexico's maximum religious icon, the trumped-up miracle of whom
single-handedly tricked between 12 and 25 million Indians into
embracing Jesus Christ as their personal savior. A century after
conversion, only 2,000,000 still survived the Christian onslaught
whose coming is the true text of Gibson's racist, euro-centric
gobbledygook.
Appropriately enough, "Apocalypto"
is being screened at a kind of contemporary cathedral, the AMC
multi-story omni-plex that once housed the Kohlenberg Cadillac
showroom, the hope diamond of Van Ness Avenue's Auto Row. I know
of this syncretic transformation only because at the zenith of
the civil rights movement in the spring of 1964, we repeatedly
threw ourselves on the slowly-spinning turntables, paralyzing
the sales floor until the enterprise opened its doors to black
sales personnel ("we can buy 'em but we can't sell 'em.")
I had been hearing dire reports
of the filming of "Apocalypto" for many months. The
scuttlebutt on the left in Mexico City was that Gibson was enslaving
Mayan laborers to build a to-scale pyramid in the middle of the
southern jungle from which to stage a gristly snuff extravaganza
replete with multiple head-loppings, heart-rippings, human sacrifice,
and cannibal banquets--actually the "jungle" in which
he was shooting was a university-run reserve on the San Andres
Tuxtla peninsula in Veracruz and the extras were more Olmec than
Mayan.
But authenticity was not a
priority for casting a movie in which the rule of thumb was the
only good Indian is a dead Indian and it doesn't really matter where
they come from so long as he or she bleeds profusely. Indeed
in a display of aberrant pan-indigenousness, the lead Mayan is
played by a dancer from Oklahoma.
The "chisme" (gossip)
re Gibson's bi-polar outbursts a la Kinski in "Aguirre"
and "Fitzcaraldo" and/or Brando in the other Apocalypse,
were rife in the nearby county seat of Catamaco, the breeding
grounds of Mexican "brujeria" (witchcraft) where many
an evil eye was trained on the production.
One reason for the umbrage was that Gibson, much like John Sayles
when he filmed "Men With Guns" in post-Zapatista Chiapas
had been blessed with permits extended by the hated Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) which has tyrannized Veracruz for more
than seven decades.
But despite his political skew,
Gibson's mayhem is popular in Mexico. Much like "The Passion",
pirated DVDs of "Apocalypto" were already on sale on
the mean streets of Tepito. Mexico City's most pertinent thieves
kitchen, weeks before the flick debuted on the AMC screens.
"Apocalypto" arrived
just in time for Holiday viewing--not because Gibson wanted to
put Christ back into Christmas but because Xmas release was the
last date to place the flick in the Oscar derby. Nonetheless,
Mel's shot at the statuette was fatally derailed by his drunken
tirade against the Hebraic faith, a belief system practiced by
a substantial number of Academy associates.
I bore witness to Gibson's
celluloid sacrilege at a Saturday afternoon kiddies matinee.
There was in fact one kid on hand to savor the carnage, a bawling
infant smuggled in in the arms of its very Mayan-looking parents
perhaps to catch a glimpse of their stolen heritage. The baby's
caterwauling profoundly disaffected several young white cineastes
in the house who threatened the child with suffocation.
In the Gibson oeuvre, "Apocalypto"
falls somewhere between "Braveheart" "Lethal Weapon"
(in all its despicable avatars) and "Mad Max" (particularly
the haberdashery.) Like "The Passion of the Christ"
it is dubbed in the local lingo from start to finish--Yucatec
Mayan is part of a language group spoken by over a million indigenous
people in Mexico, Guatemala, and Central America.
Unlike Earl Shorris in The
Nation I doubt that Gibson's appropriation of Mayan will be a
setback for this mother tongue's remarkable resuscitation in
recent years. Movies after all are made of paper and civilizations
are founded on granite--and "Apocalypto" is just one
more yawningly bad show, which trivializes itself by trying to
trivialize a millennial belief system. Movies are more about
what we bring to them than about what they say they are about.
And Mayan blood sacrifice was
a legitimate belief system despite Gibson's Judaic (hah!)- Christian
zeal to demonize it (Bishop Landa burnt the Mayan sacred texts
with much the same missionary fervor): if the blood of warriors
satiated the gods that governed the crops, the sun would stay
in the sky and the rain fall in buckets to feed the People of
the Corn (so designated by the Popul Vuh.) Sure it was a political
ploy of the priestly class to effectively keep the rabble under
its thumb but it worked--except when famine fanned the flame
of social rebellion.
But none of this context worms
its way into Gibson's missionary tale designed, as it is to showcase
the brute bloodlust of these savages before they were brought
to Christ. In this respect, Gibson reserves his most racist premise
for the final scenes in which the galleons of the Christians
drop anchor off Mexico and a priest and crucifix are glimpsed
being rowed to shore. "You can't outrun your destiny"
the display ads in the Chronicle trumpet Gibson's message.
But the Mayans will outlive
the Christians' appetite for killing them off and in the year
2012 the present cycle of their continuum, the fourth, will end
and a new one will begin. From the Zapatista highlands of Chiapas
to the heart of the Honduran jungle to the littered streets of
the Mission, their resistance to Gibson's brand of extermination
continues to flourish. Indeed, I have no fears that this resilient
civilization will live on long after Mad Mel's has crumbled into
atomic dust.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
