Mel Gibson Is Really Fucking Stupid

In news that will be startling to absolutely no one, Austin 360 has posted an interview with a professor who is outraged over the content of Mel Gibson's new movie Apocalypto. The professor in question is one Julia Guernsey, an associate prof over at the University of Texas. She happens to um, have devoted her intellectual life to this stuff, so let's see what she says.

"I hate it. I despise it. I think it's despicable. It's offensive to Maya people. It's offensive to those of us who try to teach cultural sensitivity and alternative world views that might not match our own 21st-century Western ones but are nonetheless valid."

Well, hey now, opinions are like oranges or some shit, right? Maybe she's just not a big movie fan. It's not like the movie is completely constructed out of bullshit, right?

"The whole thing was wrong."

Oh. Um. Well, maybe it's just artistic license?

" What are inaccuracies you noticed?

For one thing, the characters walk through a tunnel-like space and it's covered in wall murals. I'm nitpicking and it would mean nothing to most people, but it's a reconstruction of some murals that were just discovered in the past few years. They're from the site of San Bartolo in the Maya region (of Guatemala). Some pieces of it are copied exactly from the mural, but part of it is this gory scene of an individual holding a severed human head with blood flowing out of it. That's not in the mural! That's just Gibson on his violence kick. Plus, the murals are Late Pre-Classic, dating to about 100 B.C., making it very problematic that these people were walking through murals dating from 100 B.C. and then we have the arrival of the Spanish, which was in the 16th century. That's like 1,700 years apart.

Couldn't they just be walking through an ancient area?

You could argue that, except that the film presents an inaccurate hodge-podge of architecture. Some of it looked like Tikal Classic Maya, 800 A.D. Some looked Puuc, which is closer to 1000 or 1100 A.D. These are very different regions. It's like the difference between Texas and Delaware. It also looked like they were borrowing from El Mirador, this Pre-Classic metropolis that flourished around the year 0 A.D. It would be as though somebody did a movie on our American culture and they had Madonna and Marilyn Monroe riding in a car together, or they had a meeting of George Bush, Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington because why not condense a couple hundred or a couple thousand years? We would be appalled. We take our culture seriously. We demand historical specificity, something completely lacking here. Gibson had a responsibility to know better."

Okay, yeah, my bad. Mel Gibson is, apparently, still firmly entrenched as the King of Retard Town.