Apocalypto, the new Mel Gibson offering, is apparently full of violence including savage murder and cannibalism.
How do we respond to this?
Here's one view from one reviewer, Craig Childs, author of the forthcoming House of Rain.
"To the religious core of pre-Columbian Mayans, a beating heart ripped from someone’s chest was a thing of supreme sacredness and not prosaic violence."
Supreme Sacredness. O-K. That changes everything.
"If Apocalypto has a fault, it is not with its brutality, but with us in the audience who cringe....
Right, moral relativism to the rescue. The fault is not with the culture that rips beating hearts out a man's or woman's chest, it is with us for recoiling at this action.
"The fault lies in our misunderstanding of a complicated history, thinking we can lump a whole civilization into a single response and walk out of the movie saying, “That was disgusting.’’
The fault, as usual, lies with us.
Seems in our morally relative culture, it always does.
And that's the way the Ball bounces.
2 comments:
It's too bad we can't be made personally responsible for a lot of other things.
Watching a revolting movie and misunderstanding it seems like such a small matter.
Hi. What we have here is the Equality trap, confusing the word with Identical, the same, leading to comparing Christianity (on which Western society is built) with cannibalism, which leads to quite different results. Equality means Equal Before The Law (of the same value), so as to avoid "class justice", one law for the poor and another for the aristocracy. Confusing this, leads to discussions as per above, comparing apples and pears.
Cheerio, Cassandra
http://millennium-notes.blogspot.com/
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