Kenneth Duran is the film critic for the LA Times and this morning offers his review of Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's latest film. The review makes it clear that Duran sees the primary experience of the film as an immersion in brutal and primitive violence:
Who knows what violence lurks in the hearts of men? Mel Gibson knows, and he just can't resist putting every last ounce of it on screen. He also can't resist pulling those bloody, still-beating hearts out of human bodies and putting them up on screen as well. And that's just the beginning.
Numerous good things can be said about "Apocalypto," the director's foray into the decaying Mayan civilization of the early 1500s, but every last one of them is overshadowed by Gibson's well-established penchant for depictions of stupendous amounts of violence.
Despite a genuine talent for taking us to another time and place, a gift that under other circumstances would be worth experiencing, Gibson has made a movie that can be confidently recommended only to viewers who have a concentration camp commandant's tolerance for repugnant savagery.
Mountains of hacked up corpses, exit wounds spewing fountains of blood, spears shattering teeth, warriors literally beating each other's brains out, it's all here in living and dying color.
It would be easy to write about the apparent fetishizing of violence that Gibson has been accused of; that would fit the conventional wisdom and a good case could be made that his loving approach to violence and the celebration of violence in his most recent efforts offer multiple, worthy occasions for Psychoanalytic discourse. It would be easy but I doubt if it would be enlightening.
I did not see The Passion of the Christ. The subject matter is somewhat removed from my interests. I did not appreciate the knee jerk reaction of many Jewish spokesmen who decried his presumed anti-Semitism based on a movie they hadn't seen, though I had some concerns about the tendencies of a man who could not bring himself to clearly repudiate the odious anti-Semitism/Holocaust-denial of his father. Gibson's more recent exposition, under the influence of alcohol, of his theories on the Jewish responsibility for wars throughout history, remains troubling. I would be much more willing to dismiss concerns about his anti-Semitism as an internal conflict liberated by the disinhibiting effect of too much alcohol if Gibson would actually undertake to do something more than defend himself on uncritical talk shows. (May I suggest he donate some of the profits from his movies to the Israeli Magen David Adom?) However, Mel Gibson's stupidity or perfidy does not particularly engage my interest. It is what Duran ends his review with that is of much greater import:
Gibson unblushingly intends "Apocalypto" as a clarion call warning modern man to watch his step or risk following the Mayas into decline and near-extinction. To this end he opens the story with a famous quote from historian Will Durant about the fall of Rome: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
This is all well and good, but the reality of "Apocalypto" is that this film is in fact Exhibit A of the rot from within that Gibson is worried about. If our society is in moral peril, the amount of stomach-turning violence that we think is just fine to put on screen is by any sane measure a major aspect of that decline. Mel, no one in your entourage is going to tell you this, but you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. A big part.
There are two important ways in which Duran makes and misses his own point. The first significant point reflects the tendency of so many of our elites to privilege the superficial image above the reality. (As a corollary, they also tend to value the spoken word over the brute reality that the words so often contradict.) In other words, while Mel Gibson's loving depiction of violence may indeed be an exhibit of "the rot from within" it is hardly "exhibit A." Depictions of violence are mere virtual reflections of real violence. There are many who download images of the most real and most gruesome violence. Young men of a certain belief structure download recruitment videos which feature the beheading of infidels which far surpass even the most graphic violence in movies such as Apocalypto; these videos, grainy and unclear as they are, far surpass Gibson's violence because they are real. Available on the Internet for Kenneth Duran's edification are videos and stills of women and men being stoned to death for adultery; of homosexuals being hanged for the crime of loving a same sex partner; of hands being chopped off and broken for the amusement of tyrants. MEMRI has an interview available with the Saudi Arabian kingdom's official beheader in chief. These are films of real violence, perhaps of less cinematic texture and crispness, but of far greater import.
And that leads to the second, even more significant point, that Duran makes and misses. The failure of Western elites to recognize the difference between the primitive and degraded brutality of our enemies and the measured violence of the Western military, under the delusional belief that all violence is the same, all of it is bad, and all peace, even the illusory peace of the living dead, is good, is truly "exhibit A" of the "rot from within" that Duran warns of.
There is a difference between the occasional, necessary, and regrettable savagery of civilized men and the savagery of the primitive. Savages use violence and the threat of violence to cow and threaten and harm innocents. Civilized men will sometimes require savagery in order to protect those innocents from the savages. Large cohorts of influential people (our elites) suffering from the acquired thought disorder of Post-Modernism who fail to see the difference epitomize the "rot from within" that represents one of the gravest threats facing our civilization.
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