{"id":3934,"date":"2006-12-15T10:30:54","date_gmt":"2006-12-15T10:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/apocalypto-and-the-cross.html"},"modified":"2006-12-15T10:30:54","modified_gmt":"2006-12-15T10:30:54","slug":"apocalypto-and-the-cross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/apocalypto-and-the-cross.html","title":{"rendered":"Apocalypto and the Cross"},"content":{"rendered":"

TIME says it’s ambiguous:<\/a><\/p>\n

(Haven’t seen it, so I can’t judge)<\/p>\n

\n
\n

It is only at the very end that Christianity makes a brief but portentous appearance, aboard a fleet of Spanish ships that appears suddenly on the horizon. JP and his long-suffering wife watch from the jungle as a small boat approaches shore bearing a long-bearded, shiny-helmeted explorer and a kneeling priest holding high a crucifix-topped staff. "Should we join them?" asks his wife. "No," he replies: They should go back to the jungle, their home. Roll credits. <\/p>\n

Given Gibson’s fervent Christianity, you might have expected JP to run up and genuflect. Why does he turn away? <\/p>\n

My colleague, film critic Richard Schickel, has observed<\/a> that Gibson has little use for the institutional Roman Catholic church, preferring a "less mainstream version of his faith." True, but the Traditionalists with whom Gibson is often associated are defined primarily by their objections to the liberalizations under the Second Vatican Council of 1962-5 \u2014 not an issue in Jaguar Paw’s day. <\/p>\n

Another explanation is that the director has always been better at Crucifixions than at Resurrections. Just as the risen Christ seemed like something of a tack-on to The Passion,<\/em> Mel may have little interest in how Christian culture might reconfigure either the peaceful village-dwellers’ way of life or the bloodthirsty Mayans’. <\/p>\n

The third possibility, it seems to me, is that Gibson does know \u2014 and wants no part of it. I tend toward that last one because it reflects a learning curve of my own. About a year ago I visited an exhibit on another Mexican civilization, the Aztecs, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The show was cleverly arranged. Visitors walked up the Guggenheim’s giant spiral, the first few twists of which were devoted to the Aztecs’ stunning stylized carvings of snakes, eagles and other god\/animals, and explanations of how the ingenious Aztecs filled in a huge lake to lay the foundation for Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. <\/p>\n

It was only about halfway up the spiral \u2014 when it had become harder to run screaming for an exit \u2014 that one encountered a grey-green stone about three feet high. It was sleek and beautiful \u2014 almost like a Brancusi sculpture, I thought \u2014 until I read the label. It was a sacrifice stone of the sort in the movie. Not a reproduction, not a non-functioning ceremonial model, but the real thing. People had died on this. I felt shocked and a little angry \u2014 it was like coming across a gas chamber at an exhibit of interior design. <\/p>\n

But I kept walking, and at the very top of the museum I encountered another object that might be considered an answer to the sinister rock: a stone cross, carved after the Spanish had conquered the Aztecs and were attempting to convert them to Catholicism. Rather than Jesus’s full body, it bore a series of small relief carvings: his head and wounded hands, blood drops \u2014 and a sacrificial Aztec knife. <\/p>\n

How striking, I thought. Here was a potent work of iconographic propaganda using the very symbols of a brutal religion to turn its values inside out, manipulating its images so that they celebrated not the sacrifice, but the person who was sacrificed. Visually, at least, it seemed an elegant and admirable transition. And after seeing Apocalypto,<\/em> I wondered why Gibson hadn’t created the cinematic equivalent: an ode to the progression out of savagery, through the vehicle of Christianity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/span>:<\/strong> Peter Chattaway adds fuel to the fire, suggesting that he thinks there’s an anti-<\/em>Church message. He ties it into a prophecy uttered by a little girl.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TIME says it’s ambiguous: (Haven’t seen it, so I can’t judge) It is only at the very end that Christianity makes a brief but portentous appearance, aboard a fleet of Spanish ships that appears suddenly on the horizon. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}