Mel Gibson on Bush's 'Fearmongering'

NewsMax

Time magazine is running an exclusive feature on Mel Gibson's forthcoming film "Apocalypto," shooting right now in Mexico. For those of you who haven't heard about this film, it's a $50 million action picture dealing with the collapse of Mayan civilization some 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas. The film will star mostly Mayan locals, who will speak the Yucatec Mayan language in the film.

The film's trailer looks quite exotic and compelling, and this is actually one of the very few films this year we're looking forward to seeing. According to the Time article, Gibson apparently "... wants to 'shake up the stale action-adventure genre,' which he feels has been taken hostage by computer-generated imagery, stock stories and shallow characters. To rattle the cage, he says, 'we had to think of something utterly different.'"

All well and good - that's certainly the impression one gets from the film's trailer, and from some of the film's production stills. At the same time, Gibson seems motivated by other factors. Thus, we read:

"[Gibson] likes to confound expectations - he wears a cross containing relics of martyred saints, but he can swear like a Quentin Tarantino character - and those who peg him as a reactionary may be surprised to learn that his new film sounds warnings straight out of liberal Hollywood's bible.

"'Apocalypto,' which Gibson loosely translates from the Greek as 'a new beginning,' was inspired in large part by his work with the Mirador Basin Project, an effort to preserve a large swath of the Guatemalan rain forest and its Maya ruins.

"Gibson and his rookie co-writer on 'Apocalypto,' Farhad Safinia, were captivated by the ancient Maya, one of the hemisphere's first great civilizations, which reached its zenith about A.D. 600 in southern Mexico
and northern Guatemala.

"The two began poring over Maya myths of creation and destruction, including the Popol Vuh, and research suggesting that ecological abuse and war-mongering were major contributors to the Maya's sudden collapse, some 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

"Those apocalyptic strains haunt 'Apocalypto,' which takes place in an opulent but decaying Maya kingdom ... Gibson, who insists ideology matters less to him than stories of 'penitential hardship' like his Oscar-winning 'Braveheart,' puts it more bluntly: 'The fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys.'"

Now, it's disappointing to read this for any number of reasons. Let us begin by saying we've generally avoided referring to Gibson himself as a conservative, focusing instead on the content of his film "The Passion"
and on the justifiably positive reception the film had among conservative audiences.

We've actually never been under the impression that Gibson was a conservative in the political sense, nor do we think that's deeply relevant to his filmmaking. Gibson appears to be an iconoclast, with a healthy rebellious streak in him, all of which is fine - in fact, it's the best thing possible within an increasingly conformist Hollywood.

Here's the problem, however: A great many of President Bush's supporters in "The Passion's" audience just made Mr. Gibson a very rich man, essentially purchasing the creative freedom he now enjoys to make "Apocalypto." Is it asking too much that he now not gratuitously insult their sensibilities?

Gibson did not mind appearing on Rush, Hannity and O'Reilly's shows, etc., in order to promote his product at the time. He cried persecution at the hands of the Hollywood system and then threw himself on conservative audiences to bail himself out. Are we to assume now those audiences are no longer useful to him?

Frankly, with his film being set about a thousand years ago on the Mayan peninsula, "Apocalypto" would appear to have exceptionally little to do with American politics of today. Could Mel and everyone else just possibly leave the domestic politics alone for a while? For example, are we soon to be told that Wolfgang Peterson's "Poseidon" is actually a metaphor for Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina? Or that "Superman Returns" is a meta-narrative of the Barak Obama presidential campaign? Where does this lunacy end?

It's infinitely frustrating that the storyline of every film these days - from "V For Vendetta" to "Syriana" to "Good Night, and Good Luck" to now, apparently, "Apocalypto" - must be contorted by its creators into a sub rosa diatribe against the Bush administration. This practice is becoming extraordinarily tedious, creatively stultifying, and we'd hoped Gibson was above it. Apparently he isn't.