Apocalypto

[Gem]

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto has opened at number one in the US box office. Anyone seen it yet or going to see it?
Does Gibson's actions (see HERE ) in the past affect your decision to watch the film?

 

[Madeline]

No. Mel, to me, will always be Mad Max

 

[Smila]

Well...yes. I won't actually pay to see anything he does anymore. Cannot support someone so stupid financially. I might watch Apocalypto if it shows up on HBO or Showtime. But definitely will not give him another cent.

 

[FrodoLIVES]

Did anyone see the Saturday Night Live skit last week where they made fun of this movie. I haven't seen the movie but it made me laugh. They took a movie trailer and inserted their own subtitles.
THE JEWS ARE COMING!!!
I smell.....BAGELS!!!
Hehe...I'm easily amused

 

[Smila]

Yes, I saw it. Very funny! I loved the ending...I smell bagels! I'm Jewish and I thought it was hilarious!

 

[RitalinKid]

I don't think his incident will affect viewers. Most people have been drunk and done or said something stupid that they had to apologize for.

 

[Smila]

I don't think his incident will affect viewers. Most people have been drunk and done or said something stupid that they had to apologize for.

Well, this went way beyond stupid. His comments were obnoxious, offensive, anti-semitic, and hurtful. I don't think being drunk is much of an excuse. Those feelings would not have come out if they were not there to begin with. I for one hope it does affect his pocketbook in a big way.

 

[Anamnesis]

For whatever reason I don't go out to the theater that often, but if I did I'd be interested in seeing Apocalypto. Mel's comments were embarrassing to say the least, and I'm not entirely convinced by his "apology", but what he chooses to do in his daily life has no bearing on whether or not I'll go see his latest film.

 

[Smila]

For whatever reason I don't go out to the theater that often, but if I did I'd be interested in seeing Apocalypto. Mel's comments were embarrassing to say the least, and I'm not entirely convinced by his "apology", but what he chooses to do in his daily life has no bearing on whether or not I'll go see his latest film.

To each his own. Though I would recommend thinking twice about who you give your hard earned money away to. I personally do not give mine to anti-semites, racists and pure idiots!

 

[ValkyrieRaven88]

I have to agree with Smila. I'm a Christian, but I have a Jewish friend and I will not be paying to see anything else Gibson does. Unfortunately, I am very interested in the movie because of what it is about...so I confess that I will probably tape it off of HBO or whatever. But I won't be paying to see his movies anymore. I won't contribute to the income of someone like that.

Some people may think I'm being silly, but I know if he were making homophobic remarks instead that I would be pissed. And being drunk is not an excuse for misbehavior. If you act that stupid when you're drunk, you shouldn't drink. Period. So a drunk person should be held accountable for what he or she does under the influence. They can't neglect their responsiblity to be a law-abiding citizen for anything.

 

[RitalinKid]

I can't judge him on something he said one time, while drunk, and then apologized later for. It would be different if he were sponsoring the "Did the holocaust happen?" conference in Iran, but he isn't. He was drunk, said something stupid, and apoligized for it.

My cousin's husband can't drink because he transforms from a witty, intelligent guy into an angry SOB, but it took getting drunk twice to figure that out. Now he doesn't drink.

Mel Gibson is a professed alcoholic. He slipped, did something out of character, and apologized. Are we supposed to hold mistakes over people's heads if they admit wrong-doing and apologize? No. We forgive. That is, unless, we judge race related slip-ups with a double standard. And make no mistake about it, society does have a double standard for all things race related.

I'll also add that if you study history, you'll see that it's ingrained in humans to strike out against those that look different or act different. The pattern is obvious. The fight against racism is a struggle for humans because it's so easy to lash out at someone that has done you wrong and identify that with the most obvious thing about them, the way the dress, the color of their skin. I heard it all the time in college when people didn't like a professor and he or she was foreign. When you're upset, our makeup makes it real easy to do or say something stupid, but we learn restraint, and we learn to apologize, and we learn to understand and to forgive.

To contrast, I wouldn't stand up for Iran's president. He's obviously anti-semitic. He's the other case. He's openly racist and unapologetic, like these "white power" guys you see on The History Channel but on a world political stage.

 

[Smila]

You seem to have forgotten Mel Gibson's tainted history. Like his father, who joins Iran in stating that the holocaust wasn't really all that bad to the Jews(!!) And you have forgotten the outrage many members of the Jewish community felt at watching the hook nosed Christ killing Jews portrayed in the Passion of the Christ. I do not (and will not) get into a debate on the merits of the Passion - but you should realize that Mel Gibson has an appalling history - dating back to his father - of, at a minimum, being in the presence of and accepting people who are of dubious character and of whose twisted beliefs he remains silent.

Yes, if you study history you will of course see racism and intolerance. But comparing the methodical slaugher of human beings to not liking your professor because he is a foreigner is an extremely poor analogy. If you study history, you will see a time in history when 6 million Jews and millions of Catholics, Gypsies, feeble-minded, disabled and homosexuals who were brutally murdered. Comparing that to the history of intolerance or not liking people because they might be different from you is rather naive. Anyone who can even tolerate the concept of those dark years being "not so bad" does not deserve a single sheckel from me. And will never receive it.

As for suddenly becoming an anti-semite when drunk - thats purely absurd. I have been drunk on occasion and never once engaged in racial or religious slurs. I might have gotten very silly, because thats my nature. It is not in my nature to say hurtful, ugly and rude statements to people, drunk or not. Mel Gibson's true character was on display that night he was pulled over. To think otherwise is to bury your head in the sand and its an insult to many people who have been deeply offended by his words, his art, and his behavior.

 

[beer good]

Dostoevsky was an out-and-out antisemite. It doesn't make his books any worse, so I'll not stop reading them.

Mel Gibson might not be one. It doesn't make his films any better, so I'll not start watching them.

 

[Smila]

Dostoevsky was an out-and-out antisemite. It doesn't make his books any worse, so I'll not stop reading them.

Mel Gibson might not be one. It doesn't make his films any better, so I'll not start watching them.

First of all - we were addressing whether or not it made sense to put money in Mel Gibson's pocket when he is such a hate-filled moron.

However, I will address your comparisons to Dostoyevky - of which there are really none. Dostoyevsky lived in a different time and space than Mel Gibson and it must been examined in that light. Mel Gibson is just simply a fool. However, Dostoyevsky was no fool.

As Dershowitz points out, "Dostoyevsky's views of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy are not much different from the views expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf or in the Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." For Dershowitz, as for Joseph Frank, there are two Dostoyevskys, and that his fame "is based on his fiction writings and not on his nonfiction rantings." Yet there are also anti-Semitic passages in Dostoyevsky's fiction. Book XI of The Brothers Karamazov contains the following conversation between the crazy Liza and Alyosha:

...Alyosha, is it true that the Jews steal little children at Passover and kill them with knives?'
'I do not know.'
'Well, I have a book in which I read about a trial somewhere, where a Jew had first cut off all the fingers of both hands belonging to a child of four years old, and then crucified him against a wall, hammered in nails and crucified him, and then at his trial he said that the boy died quickly, within four hours. That was quick! He said that the boy had groaned and groaned and that he had stood feating his eyes on him. That is good!'
'Good?'
'Yes, good. I sometimes think that I myself crucified him. He hung on the wall, groaning, and I sat down opposite him and ate pineapple compote. I'm very fond of pineapple compote. Are you?'

The "two Dostoyevskys" approach to this is perhaps the most generous and forgiving one, but it also expresses the bewilderment of many people who, like Dershowitz, cannot understand how it's possible that "a man of Dostoyevsky's brilliance and insight in so many areas could have harbored such primitive fantasies about the Jews." After all, Dostoyevsky's fame rests above all on his reputation as a preacher of Christian love and human brotherhood. In his introduction to David Goldstein's Dostoevsky and the Jews, Dostoyevsky's biographer Joseph Frank goes out of his way to create a special category which can be applied to Dostoyevsky, that of "guilty anti-Semite". Doatoyevsky himself claimed that he was never an anti-Semite, and this leads Frank to suggest that the novelist was split: "There is evidence here of something else besides the usual contempt or disdain, and it indicates that Dostoevsky was capable of both reactions at the same time."

As one critic has emphasized, Dostoyevsky's hostility to Jews was only one of a whole series of hates, which included "the Poles, the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church, the socialist idea, the West, atheism, and materialism. In fact, his contempt for the Roman Catholic Church is unparalleled in literature."

The following words of Shatov in The Possessed give us some idea of how Dostoyevsky saw the world:

"Reduce God to the attribute of nationality?...On the contrary, I elevate the nation to God...The people is the body of God. Every nation is a nation only so long as it has its own particular God, excluding all other gods on earth without any possible reconciliation, so long as it believes that by its own God it will conquer and drive all other gods off the face of the earth. At least that's what all great nations have believed since the beginning of time, all those remarkable in any way, those standing in the vanguard of humanity...The Jews lived solely in expectation of the true God, and they left this true God to the world...A nation which loses faith is no longer a nation. But there is only one truth; consequently, only one nation can possess the true God...The sole "God bearing" nation is the Russian nation.."

While acknowledging the debt owed by Russian Messianism to the Messianism of Judaic thought, Dostoyevsky believed that Russian Orthodoxy would eventually conquer the decadent civilizations of the West, and he was implacably hostile to anything or anyone that would stand in the way of this conquest.

In confronting Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism, it seems that we are forced to choose. If his anti-Semitism was seriously felt and intended, then his writings, including the great works of fiction for which he is famous, are ironic. If, on the other hand, it was the expression of a fundamental split in his character, of which he was aware, and ironically aware, it may be that in the end it was not anti-Semitism at all, but rather an attempt to overcome the culturally-determined anti-Semitism of his upbringing and background in favour of those "who left this true God to the world." It could even be that were Dostoyevsky alive today, he would be in the forefront of those who defend the state of Israel, and see it as an upholder of virtues and morality that most of the West has forgotten.

For myself, I am skeptical. The presence of anti-Semitism in literature - from Chaucer and Shakespeare and Marlowe through Smollett, Voltaire, Dickens and Thackeray to Eliot and Pound - is all too perceptible, and Dostoyevsky does not constitute an exception, but rather a depressing conformity to the rule. As far as his being a proponent of Christian and brotherly love is concerned, I think one needs to reflect that Dostoyevsky was profoundly affected by the years he spent in prison, in the penal colony in Siberia to which he was exiled. The Christianity at which he ultimately arrived was far from being a simple or straightforward creed. It is not by accident that the Devil is the most important character in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. And, as the author wrote at the very end of his life, in the notebook for 1880-81:

The Devil. (Psychological and detailed critical explanation of Ivan Fyodorovich and the appearance of the Devil.) Ivan Fyodorovich is deep, this is not the contemporary atheists, who demonstrate by their unbelief only the narrowness of their world-outlook and the dimness of their dim-witted abilities... Nihilism appeared among us because we are all nihilists. We were merely frightened by the new, original form of its manifestation. (All to a man Fyodor Pavloviches.) ...Conscience without God is a horror, it may lose its way to the point of utter immorality... The Inquisitor is only immoral because in his heart, in his conscience there has managed to accommodate itself the idea of the necessity of burning human beings... The Inquistor and the chapter about children. In view of these chapters you could take a scholarly, yet not so haughty approach to me where philosophy is concerned, though philosophy is not my speciality. Not even in Europe is there such a power of atheistic expressions, not has there been. So it is not as a boy, then, that I believe in Christ and confess Him, but through the great crucible of doubt has my hosannah passed, as I have him say, in that same novel of mine, the Devil.

Okay, now your thoughts???

 

[beer good]

Woah. That's all very eruditely put* and I agree with a lot of it. I would recommend Leonid Tsypkin's "Summer in Baden-Baden" for a spectacular look at the problem of how to relate to Dostoevsky's anti-semitism as a Jew; great book.

But really, the only reason I brought up Dostoevsky was to point out that sometimes it's healthy to keep at least a little distance between artist and art (for lack of a better word). A lot of my favourite musicians, writers, directors and actors have habits, personality traits or opinions I find despicable; if I were to get too hung up on that, I wouldn't be able to enjoy any of it. Even if Dostoevsky was an anti-semite in his personal life, his books (for the most part) tell of a much more compassionate view of the human race, and that's what I take with me from them - not his private opinions. (Again, I'll refer anyone interested to "Summer in Baden-Baden"; read it, love it, treasure it.) Just like watching a Roman Polanski movie doesn't make me want to become a rapist, or listening to Miles Davis makes me want to shoot heroin and abuse women.

That said, I'm not interested in defending Gibson. If I thought he was worth defending as an artist I might point out that the "two Dostoevskys" argument can be applied to Gibson as well, but I won't since I consider him a crap actor, a crap director, and by all accounts (not just his despicable comments about Jews) not a very nice person, and I wouldn't be putting money in his pockets anyway. I was just making a point, 'sall.

* Though I'm wondering if they're really "your thoughts"? You might have given credit to David McDuff. But thanks for directing me to it even if you didn't write it yourself; it was very interesting reading.

 

[Smila]

Woah. That's all very eruditely put* and I agree with a lot of it. I would recommend Leonid Tsypkin's "Summer in Baden-Baden" for a spectacular look at the problem of how to relate to Dostoevsky's anti-semitism as a Jew; great book.

But really, the only reason I brought up Dostoevsky was to point out that sometimes it's healthy to keep at least a little distance between artist and art (for lack of a better word). A lot of my favourite musicians, writers, directors and actors have habits, personality traits or opinions I find despicable; if I were to get too hung up on that, I wouldn't be able to enjoy any of it. Even if Dostoevsky was an anti-semite in his personal life, his books (for the most part) tell of a much more compassionate view of the human race, and that's what I take with me from them - not his private opinions. (Again, I'll refer anyone interested to "Summer in Baden-Baden"; read it, love it, treasure it.) Just like watching a Roman Polanski movie doesn't make me want to become a rapist, or listening to Miles Davis makes me want to shoot heroin and abuse women.

That said, I'm not interested in defending Gibson. If I thought he was worth defending as an artist I might point out that the "two Dostoevskys" argument can be applied to Gibson as well, but I won't since I consider him a crap actor, a crap director, and by all accounts (not just his despicable comments about Jews) not a very nice person, and I wouldn't be putting money in his pockets anyway. I was just making a point, 'sall.

* Though I'm wondering if they're really "your thoughts"? You might have given credit to David McDuff. But thanks for directing me to it even if you didn't write it yourself; it was very interesting reading.

Yes, it is David McDuff! Thank you for citing him. Apologies for not. It was not intentional. I am at work and cut and paste too quickly without editing my post.

Are they my thoughts as well? For the most part. I have been studying the role of anti-semitism throughout current popular culture and literature and am attempting to complete a long overdue thesis. Wherein I do cite my sources!! I understand your analogies to the contemporary (and historical) world of artists that have outrageous habits or idealogies. You must understand though, that given the current world situation and taking a completely unbiased view of history (and the expulsion of Jews from country to country until the ultimate expulsion in WWII Germany) Jews and others are going to tend to have a knee jerk reaction to Mel Gibson. Coupled with his father's history of revisionism and his refusal to totally denounce it - Mel looks especially heinous. I love Dosoyevsky. I am torn and personally share Dershowitz's confusion over his work. How could someone with so much talent and obvious empathy harbor such ignorance. I LIKE to believe that he was simply echoing his time - his culture in his words. That is, he was showing us his world not telling us that is what he necessarily believed. Am I foolish?? Nice chat, by the way.

 

[RitalinKid]

I don't defend Mel Gibson because I find him an incredible artist or as a role model or anything out of the ordinary. I defend him as a human whose every word and behavior has been dissected by the public. I looked up some material on him, not much though, and he has plenty of views I disagree with, including some remarks about homosexuals that I found troubling, but those remarks were also from his younger years when he admitted to other mistakes like drug abuse. If you were to compare my views now with those from high school, you'd think I was a different person altogether, so I won't judge him based on comments from decades ago.

After not being able to find anything about a denial of the holocaust (which isn't definitive), I did find another quote. Here are the words of a hate-filled moron.

While filming the movie Apocalypto in the jungles of Mexico's Veracruz state, Mel Gibson donated money to build houses for poor people in the region after some severe flooding wiped out many homes, stating: "[T]hey had a lot of floods down there. It was like Louisiana down there in the southern regions. They had severe flooding and something like a million people were displaced and washed out. I've always been of the opinion that if you go into someone else's country to make a film you don't just go in there and stomp all over the place. You bring a gift. It's like going to somebody's house. You bring them a bottle of wine or a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates and it's the same sort of thing on a big scale when you're going in to somebody's country and they are going to help you make your film. You help them first somehow or you give them a gift or you help in what way you can. So we sort of assisted with the flood relief stuff down there."

Somebody contain his hate before it consumes us all. My point is that most people cannot be lumped into some generalized category based on one action or one set of actions. Calling someone a name like hate-filled moron is an over-generalization, the same kind of ideas that lead to racist ideas. Even if Gibson has some negative generalizations of one group or another, does that alone make him a hate filled moron? From another angle, does one thing that you hate about yourself make you hate the whole of you?

I need to clarify a few things. Have any of your friends ever been rude to you when they were drunk? Do you judge them based solely on that? To say that drinking does not affect your personality is absurd. Lots of people lose their ability to filter when drunk. The stupidity that spewed from Gibson's mouth, might well have never made it past a fledgling thought if he were sober.

Also, I never compared disliking someone to the holocaust. Only you did that Smila, and you're right that's a terrible comparison. But I will tell you how it's related. Do you think the German people prior to the rise of the Nazis were more racist than any other group of people on the planet? I would be willing to bet not. Then all of the sudden, we see the German people buying into this horrible set of ideas. People have this built in mechanism whereby we are susceptible to generalizing and laying blame for our problems on others, especially people who don't talk like us or dress like us or look like us. Hitler nurtured that response into a complete catastrophe. We still fight this today. The right has tried to make homosexuals the enemy of the family (and hence the enemy of society) for decades. Politicians play to our ability to make generalizations that we use daily to make even simple decisions.

Have you ever walked into a classroom or a subway station and had to choose who to sit next to? There's a guy with purple hair and piercings o' plenty. THere's a kid with trenchcoat on. There's a preppy kid, and on and on and on. At that instant, you have a response where you make a lot of quick generalizations and assumptions. More than likely you will sit next to the person most like you, where you feel most comfortable (or equivalently, less threatened). That response is the result of evolution, a behavior ingrained into us during a time when humans were not friendly to those who were not familiar. Now days, this response takes a negative role sometimes because those simple generalizations that are meant to keep you from wandering into a dark alley to be mugged can be nurtured into hate. The problem is that those quick generalizations is that your ability to conjure them is right below the surface (created possibly involuntarily), and they need to be filtered sometimes. It's when they fail to be filtered or are nurtured that these generalizations become negative and sometimes dangerous.

The point of all this is that Gibson apologized for his rant, which means that he knows it's wrong to say hurtful those things and feel that way. That's the important part, that it is not acceptable to make negative generalizations about people or groups of people. The policy of saying, "No. You slipped up, you error committing human" is pointless.

As a side note, the majority of the ideas that I have on human behavior are influenced by books like The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, neither of which I quoted here.

 

[Smila]

Thanks for your thoughtful post. I am afraid we will have to politely agree to disagree and move on.

 

[RitalinKid]

Agreed. Thanks as well for your posts.

Edit
I also wanted to inquire about Dostoevsky. I'm curious; did he make anti-semitic remarks outside his literature? I'm familiar with the passage in McDuff's work, and I interpreted the passage to be comical, a poke at the fact that some people will believe anything you tell them. I'm no scholar of Dostoevsky, so I don't hold my interpretation too dearly. I was just wondering if there were letters or articles Dostoevsky had written with anti-Semitic remarks as a further base for McDuff's (and I suppose others) arguments. This is just a question; I'm not trying to open up another line of debate.

 

[Middle Eye]

I know this is an old, dead thread...but I had to bring it back up to say that everyone who is now against Mel Gibson because of this and that should set that aside for this one film only.
Apocalypto was fantastic and you shouldn't force yourself to watch it on tv when you have the chance to see it in the theatre.