The Try-Works

I rewatched Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s attempt to do for Indians what he’s so recently done for Jews, over the long weekend. Seeing as how we managed to host a brawl between Rudy Youngblood’s agent and several of his detractors right here on the Try-Works, I figured it’s about time I came up with some comment on the flick.So what do I think of it? Well, you can probably guess. It’s heavy, contrived, pompous horseshit, complete with not one, but two, faux-Shakespearean wraith-like prophets of doom. And, as far as I can tell, it has no relation whatsoever to the Mayan people it purports to portray. Nor, for that matter, to any of the most basic building blocks of what’s widely considered, well, narrative. The characters’ only similarity to living, breathing human beings is that they occasionally manage walk upright. And, of course, the plot’s riddled with more holes than a Falluja hospital after a US precision strike. In other words, it’s colonial porn, with the Mayan represented as a viciously and wholly corrupt people, in desperate need of some Great Paternal Hand to reach out to them across the ocean and guide them out of their barbarity. Which Mr. Gibson is all too happy to provide.

In other words, it’s a Vincent Carroll wet dream. As I pointed out here.

The only reason I wasn’t more appalled is that I also made the mistake of rewatching Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. What little Apocalypto left out from the grand repertoire of Indian-hating, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee made up for. It’s no wonder this bag of shit wasn’t filmed until well after Dee Brown’s death. I consider it absolute proof of the non-existence of an ethereal afterlife that he hasn’t risen from the grave and stabbed the fucking director to death with a dull pencil.

The only thing to say in the movie’s favor is that it has absolutely no bearing on Mr. Brown’s landmark work at all, leaving very little chance that anyone will likely confuse the two. Hell, as far as I can tell, Mr. Brown doesn’t mention Charles Eastman — the purported protagonist of the flick — even once in his book.

However, my favorite fictional moments (And I had to do quite a bit of picking and choosing here, as the movie gets pretty much everything wrong, from the Wounded Knee massacre to the Battle of Greasy Grass, and even the most basic points of Charles Eastman’s biography):

1. Wherein Colonel Nelson Miles justifies his extermination campaign against the Lakota by claiming the Lakota have down the same to the Kiowa, amongst others. Said conversation never happened, but more interesting is that this scene has been a staple of extermination rhetoric for four hundred years. As given here, it’s nearly inseparable from similar horseshit in the likes of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, and Increase Mathers’ Early history of New England: Being a relation of hostile passages between the Indians and European voyagers and first settlers, to name three of the better known examples.

2. Wherein Sitting Bull forces one of his people to let his daughter die rather than leave their newfound home in Canada. This also never happened. The writer, Daniel Giat, claims to have included it to humanize Sitting Bull.

3. Wherein Sitting Bull whips the shit out of two boys for horse-stealing, and shoots the horse they purportedly stole. Again, never happened, contrary to the director’s idiot claim that some unnamed Osage told him it did. Mr. Giat also claims this was included to humanize Sitting Bull.

Funny how much “humanizing” Sitting Bull needed. Particularly since Mr. Giat seemed to feel no such need to “humanize” Henry Dawes, the architect of one of the most viciously cynical land grabs in the history of humanity. Mr. Dawes is presented throughout as a decent, well-intentioned gentleman who just happens to divest American Indians of more than a hundred million acres of their land, force them into absolute starvation conditions, and, to quote my personal hero Theodore Roosevelt, “pulverize” their “tribal mass.”

A real sweetheart, that Mr. Dawes.

See, I’d have picked him to “humanize.”

With, say, a scene wherein Mr. Dawes locks a Lakota four-year-old in his basement and slowly starves her to death for shits and grins.

Update: For far more and far better on Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, check out Blue Corn Comics.