Man's Inhumanity to Man - Appocolypto

Bummed….I am SO bummed!!!! Today was the last day of my ten day vacation. I SO do not want to go back to work!! I was talking to my mom earlier, bemoaning the fact that it was over. “You wouldn't really want to stay home all the time would you? You’d get bored” Bored? Bored? BORED???!!! Surely you jest!!! Ah….like no….with the world wide web at my fingertips? With so much stuff I want to read and explore and THINK about? With three teenagers and a husband to care for? (granted the teenagers are with their dad half the time, but still……) No…I could happily be a stay at home mom…..even though the kids are big enough to not really need one.

But anyway, we got a lot accomplished this vacation (yes, the flowers are planted, thank you very much) but there were a few last minute things still to be done this afternoon/evening. I promised Keith I would watch one of the four movies he rented on Friday and that I would share a bottle of wine from a nearby central Pennsylvania winery. We watched the movie this afternoon. I am sipping the wine right now.

He rented four movies (ever the movie buff) and I picked the one I wanted to watch with him (I am never the movie buff). It was between The Fountain and Appocolypto. With this preoccupation I’ve had lately with sacrifice, Girardian theory, the scapegoat….I thought it might give me some additional insights…..and it surely did!!!

Actually at times it almost brought me to tears. I’ve heard Keith talk about man’s inhumanity to man. Boy, oh boy….was there inhumanity in this movie. It began with scenes of everyday life in the villi age of the people who were destined to be the scapegoats. They were not violent people at all….and there were scenes of humorous interaction between them, a scene of the whole villi age sitting around the fire listening to one of their old men tell stories, scenes of family life and devotion. By the time the Mayans came to plunder their villi age, I had grown to really like them.

The Mayans were chilling. The leader adorned himself with bones…human bones (a big jaw around his neck….and a row of smaller human jaws up and down his arms) He was big and bad….and mean. They attacked early in the morning, while the villagers slept. They plundered and pillaged and tortured…throats were slit…..people were hogtied, subdued by a collar like noose slipped around their necks. It was truly horrifying. What went through my mind as I watched the scenes of conquest is that scenes similar to that probably took place as the children of Israel were killing off the Amalekites and the Canaanites. Chilling. It gave a face to the faceless atrocities in the OT. Atrocities people attribute to the divine decree of our God…in whom there is NO DARKNESS AT ALL. The journey to the Mayan city was filled with other cruelties…more inhumanity

The scenes in the city were almost overwhelming. They marched them in, collared to a piece of wood….all in a row…..one behind the other…..hands bound. Actually that is the way they made the trip….all bound to the beam. There were graphic scenes of the sacrifices….a top a huge tower like structure with many steps. (Think staircase Rocky bounded up times ten) The royalty sat up there….close up….watching the sacrifices….including a boy of about 7. The looks on their faces were so ho-hum. Almost bored. Same old, same old. There were priests in all kinds of witch doctor like outfits, huge masks and headdresses….and they proceeded to cut the hearts out of the captives one by one, followed by lopping off their heads. Gross. Totally gross. Then they rolled the heads down the stairs…..for the crowd to catch. There were baskets of heads sitting here and there. Shorty after they rolled the headless corpse down the stairs….and their body was stacked atop a big pile of bodies. The crowd was in a frenzy. Dancing and chanting….and the “priest” whipped them into a greater frenzy. Some Girardian theory was there. The high priest talked about the issues that plagued them….the failure of their crops, the disfiguring skin disease (not sure what it was) that plagued them. The crisis part of Girard’s theory was there….”people say we are weak,” he shouted. “People say we are rotting”

You know, they say timing is everything, and how true in the story line of this movie. There was a total eclipse right when the hero was about to be sacrificed. The conclusion of the priest was that the god they were placating had (his name escapes me) had his fill of blood that day. The rest of the movie was about the hero trying to get back to his very pregnant wife and young son (who he had lowered into a deep, deep rocky hole in the ground to protect them from capture by the Mayans) while being pursued by 8 or 10 Mayan men.

As I said earlier, it provided a graphic picture of sacrifice….one we might not envision without Gibson’s imagination and cinematography. So many things went through my head as I watched the movie. The sacrifices to Baal….when the Israelites sacrificed their own children…..and countless generations of the nameless, faceless scapegoats. Man’s inhumanity to man, indeed.