A great big Fuck You to Subcomandante Marcos, in the language of his forefathers.

Mel Gibson is at it again.

I obviously haven't seen Mel Gibson's new movie, Apocalypto, and I have only the vaguest idea of the plot. Supposedly it is to be another dead-language "historical" epic, this time filmed in Classical Maya. But lest you assume that Gibson has thrown over the radical Catholicism of his previous effort and gone Zapatista, all you need to do is watch the trailer.

Without regarding the trailer as anything other than a work in its own right and a product of Gibson's vision: It is a nasty piece of work. It starts out with the Will Durant quote, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," against a black screen. This is replaced in short order with a dimly lit shot of some grotesque, sinister-looking native Mesoamericans, shiny with sweat and soot, which tightens onto the face of a woman with a Frida Kahlo unibrow and some sort of dental jewelry, grinning lewdly. It is almost as if Gibson wants to combine the notion of the decadent aristocrat along with a retrofit of a stereotypical "greasy Mexican". It's fairly outré and racist but then all of a sudden we're off into the largely undifferentiable mass of percussion-driven blockbuster action movie trailers, this one of the subtype distinguished by the prevalence of green blur on the screen and cod-African pretensions on the percussion (viz. Predator).

In the light of history, that is, what happened to the Maya in short order after the events of the trailer (set in around 1400 AD) it is impossible not to associate the "conquest from without" of the quote with the Spanish conquest. I have not read any Durant, and I therefore do not know what his statement was actually intended to mean. In this context, however, what it means, that is, what Gibson is using it to say, is that Maya civilization was destroyed (in fact, it was not) because of its intrinsic decadence or wickedness, rather than, for example, Spanish firearms, which historical records suggest played a large role in the loss of Mayan political independence.

In this context, it is always and everywhere flatly wrong to state that internal "decay" is the precondition for external conquest. Abstract "wickedness" does not predispose a society to collapse, and the wickedness probably alluded to here by Gibson, human sacrifice, was practiced in turn by numerous pre-Columbian Mexican, Mesoamerican, and South American cultures with no concomitant ill effect on their fortunes. Rather, they tended to thrive or decline with their economies and their relative technological and military power, as states tend to do. Gibson suggests that virtue on whatever model leads to security, and this is transparently not the case. The Achaemenid Empire was arguably just as virtuous as the Macedonian, and Darius III more virtuous a ruler than Alexander, but look what happened to that. Tibet: Also didn't "destroy itself from within" before its conquest by China. The only way you can possibly agree with Gibson's interpretation of that quote, and therefore with the message of the trailer, is if you think that "destroying one's country from within" means the failure at any cost to stay technologically and militarily at the top of the heap. Otherwise what are you doing? Clucking your tongue about some long-dead priest pulling the still-beating heart from some longer-dead prisoner's chest. Mother Teresa would approve, I suppose.