Tuesday, December 19, 2006
No Pleasing Some People
Mel Gibson makes a movie in a dead Indian language and gets a list of complaints ("The Sober Racism of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto") for his trouble:
As a cultural anthropologist who has worked for thirteen years among different Maya peoples of Mesoamerica and who speaks the Q'eqchi' Maya language fluently, I found Apocalypto to be deeply racist. The Maya in the film bore no resemblance to the hardworking farmers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and women of Maya descent that I know personally and consider among my closest friends.
Central America was not exactly overrun with Mayan lawyers in 1492. In fact, the movie takes place a long time ago.
To me, these actors didn't look or sound Maya at all. Their Yucatec diction was terrible and lacked the real lyric cadence of Maya languages. If someone exploited local labor to make a cheap film about gang-violence in Brooklyn and employed heavily-accented Australian and British actors, would critics still praise it as "authentic" simply because the actors are speaking English?
In the film about Jesus of Nazareth, King of Kings, John Wayne says, in John Wayne style rather than Roman Latin, "Surely this was the Son of God." Germans in WWII movies speak English with an English accent to provide a "foreign" contrast with American English. And so on. In Hollywood, close enough counts.
Read the rest of this "article" and marvel.
|posted by Jim on 11:30 PM|
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