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Not a fan of either Mel Gibson or blood and gore, I avoided Passion of the Christ and his latest film Apocalypto. While it topped this past weekend's box office sales, the film has not incited as much controversy and boycotting that Passion of the Christ did. But it should. The problem is, does anyone care?
The film, which is set in ancient Maya, follows the main character as he tries to save his wife and child and avenge his fellow villagers after they are massacred by a group of mauraders. While it has been lauded as an accurate depiction of life in Central America before the colonization of the Spanish, there have been some questions about the casting of the film.
Maybe it’s because of the director, whose anti-Semitic rants got him in hot water earlier this year or because of his own religious beliefs, but while lauded as an excellent filmmaker, trouble seems to follow Gibson – albeit mostly self-imposed. The controversy begins with Gibson’s decision to cast non-Maya people with no previous acting experience despite the fact that there are approximately one million Maya who reside in Mexico, where the movie was filmed. There are also at least 100,000 Maya people who speak the difficult Yucatecan Maya language. The actors in the film had to learn in the language for the movie.
In his article for The Nation, Earl Shorris, who has considerable knowledge about Latin America, looks at the lives of Maya people in Mexico today, the amount of discrimination they face in Mexico and the fight to maintain the Yucatecan Maya language where he says is not commonly spoken within Mexico, as Maya people, especially the younger generation have internalized the discrimination about their language and culture. Shorris writes that Gibson motives should be questioned and the absence of Maya people in front of the camera does a disservice to the Mayan people by perpetrating racial stereotypes:
The Yucatán is not entirely a white world, yet the Maya suffer the most severe prejudice of any large ethnic group in Mexico. In the language of prejudice in Mexico, the Maya are said to be people with big heads and no brains, too short, too dark and with a strange, laughable Spanish accent. Gibson accepted the stereotype and embellished it.
While his press junkets have been geared primarily to Latino and Native American groups and his decision to cast non-Maya actors was because they “looked like you imagined they should," one wonders if Gibson was aware of the racism that exists within Mexico against Maya people and wanted to use actors whose looks where more socially palatable for a wider audience.
This is not the first time where there has been some talk about the ethnic authenticity of characters in movies (Memoirs of a Geisha, World Trade Center,A Mighty Heart - the upcoming Biopic on Marianne Pearl - and Halle Berry's upcoming flick),But coming from Gibson, one has to wonder what his motives are. Hell, perhaps he is just dealing with the reality of our racist society, giving the public what they want, but on the other hand, he is benefiting from the history of a people who continue to struggle for equality.
