Quotes of the Day

For the Christian viewer, the biggest question about Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto is: why does its hero turn away from the Cross at the end?

All in all, there's not a lot of Christ — passionate or otherwise — in Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's first film since The Passion of the Christ. But a crucifix finally shows up at the film's end, and the film's response to it is surprisingly equivocal.

The movie tells the story of a peaceful 16th-century jungle-dweller named Jaguar Paw. The first quarter of the film presents his idyllic village as a kind of Eden. The second quarter is a vision of Hell, as a raiding party for the nearby Mayan empire torches the town, rapes the women and drags the men to the Mayan capital as featured guests at a monstrous and ongoing sacrifice to the gods. JP watches in horror as a priest has several of his friends spread-eagled on squat stone, then hacks out their still-beating hearts and displays them to a howling crowd. JP narrowly avoids the same fate, escapes, and spends most of the rest of the film picking off an armed pursuit party, one by one, in classic action-film fashion.

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.

Given Gibson's fervent Christianity, you might have expected JP to run up and genuflect. Why does he turn away?

My colleague, film critic Richard Schickel, has observed 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 — not an issue in Jaguar Paw's day.

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, Mel may have little interest in how Christian culture might reconfigure either the peaceful village-dwellers' way of life or the bloodthirsty Mayans'.

The third possibility, it seems to me, is that Gibson does know — 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.

It was only about halfway up the spiral — when it had become harder to run screaming for an exit — that one encountered a grey-green stone about three feet high. It was sleek and beautiful — almost like a Brancusi sculpture, I thought — 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 — it was like coming across a gas chamber at an exhibit of interior design.

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 — and a sacrificial Aztec knife.

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, I wondered why Gibson hadn't created the cinematic equivalent: an ode to the progression out of savagery, through the vehicle of Christianity.

The answer, of course, is that the cross's iconography was a lot simpler than Mexican history. I called Charles C. Mann, author of the highly respected history 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Mann first noted a couple of anachronisms in the film. The Mayan capital, including any great temple of the sort in the film, had mysteriously disappeared 700 years before the Spanish arrived. Moreover, although the Mayans probably engaged in some human sacrifice, there is no evidence that they practiced it on the industrial scale depicted in the movie For that, as the Guggenheim exhibit suggested, one would have to look 300 miles west to the Aztecs, who had made it their religious centerpiece. Hernan Cortes (who probably rounded upward, since he conquered them), claimed the Aztecs dispatched between three and four thousand souls a year that way. Why Gibson decided to turn the Mayans into Aztecs is anyone's guess.

Most interesting, however, was Mann's observation that if the boat Jaguar Paw sees is indeed the 1519 landing party of Cortes (who pushed quickly through what remained of Mayan territory on his way to the bloody battle of Tenochtitlan), the man holding up the cross was no particular friend to the indians. It was not until 1537, Mann said, that, after considerable debate both ways, Pope Paul III got around to proclaiming that "Indians themselves indeed are true men" and should not be "deprived of their liberty." In the intervening 18 years roughly a third of Mexico's 25 million indigenous population died of smallpox the Europeans brought with them, and the Spanish had enslaved most of the remaining six million able-bodied men. And that's not counting the 100,000 Aztecs Cortes killed at Tenochtitlan alone.

So here is the conundrum. If you had to choose between a culture that placed ritualized human slaughter at the center of its faith, but that only managed to kill 4,000 people a year, and a culture that put the sacrificial Lamb of God at the center of the universe but somehow found its way to countenancing the enslavement of millions and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the same neighborhood, which would be more appealing?

Perhaps Gibson's problem is with the institutional church after all. Not the institutional church of Vatican II, but the church that managed to get so mixed up with worldly power that it was able to side with the centurions rather than with Christ for those crucial 18 years.

And perhaps he was right to have Jaguar Paw, having sampled the worst that the first civilization had to offer, take one look at the arrival of the second, and head back into the woods.

• David Van Biema
• Christianity makes only a brief appearance in his film Apocalypto. And it's not exactly welcomed