A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson (Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors) 1666937738, 9781666937732

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
The Religious Thinker
Faith, Female Sacrifice, and the Medieval Martyr in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart
A Challenge to Jewish-Christian Relations
What Apocalypto Reveals
The Power of The Passion
The Social Philosopher
Mel Gibson’s Visceral Vision
The Aretē of War
It’s a Real, Real, Real Man’s World
The Filmmaker and Historian
A Falling Comedy Star
Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto
Film Adaptation, Depoliticization, and The Man Without a Face
Apocalypto and the Ancient Maya
Mel Gibson’s Unarmed War
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson

CRITICAL COMPANIONS TO CONTEMPORARY DIRECTORS Series Editors: Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors covers many directors who have not been studied previously in academic publications and whose works nonetheless are highly renowned nowadays. The intent of the series is to offer interesting and illuminating interpretations of the various directors’ films that will be accessible to both scholars of the academic community and critically-minded fans of the directors’ works. Each volume combines discussions of a director’s oeuvre from a broad range of disciplines and methodologies, thus offering the reader a variegated and compelling picture of the directors’ works. In this sense, the volumes will be of interest (and will be instructive) for students and scholars engaged in subjects as different as film studies, literature, philosophy, popular culture studies, religion, and others. We welcome proposals for both monographs and edited collections that offer interdisciplinary analyses, focusing on the complete oeuvre of one contemporary director per volume. Titles in the Series A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson, edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor, edited by Matthew Hodge, Adam Barkman, and Antonio Sanna A Critical Companion to Wes Craven, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and John Darowski A Critical Companion to Robert Zemeckis, edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick, edited by Elsa Colombani A Critical Companion to Terrence Malick, edited by Joshua Sikora A Critical Companion to Steven Spielberg, edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola, edited by Naaman K. Wood and Christopher Booth A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam, edited by Sabine Planka, Philip van der Merwe, and Ian Bekker A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan, edited by Claire Parkinson and Isabelle Labrouillère

A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson Edited by Adam Barkman Antonio Sanna

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barkman, Adam, 1979– editor. | Sanna, Antonio, 1978– editor. Title: A critical companion to Mel Gibson / edited by Adam Barkman, Antonio Sanna. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: Critical companions to contemporary directors | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The thirteen essays in this book offer various interpretations of Mel Gibson’s work, treating this brilliant but controversial figure not only as a filmmaker but as a historian, religious thinker, and social philosopher”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023052536 (print) | LCCN 2023052537 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666937732 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666937749 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Gibson, Mel—Criticism and interpretation. | Motion picture producers and directors—Australia—Biography | Motion pictures—United States—History— 20th century. | Motion pictures—United States—History—21st century. Classification: LCC PN3018.G5 C75 2024  (print) | LCC PN3018.G5  (ebook) | DDC 791.43/028/092 [B]—dc23/eng/20231206 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052536 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052537 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Andrea Achenza, Daniele Careddu, Davide Farris, Gabriel Caravati, and Gabriele Pinna—for our most pleasant chats and amusing times To Strider Leonidas Barkman: May you have the courage of William Wallace to act on your convictions—“Every man dies; not every man really lives”—and may these convictions be those of Christ so you may one day hear, “I tell you that on this day, you will be with me in Paradise.” I love you, my son.

Contents

Introduction 1 Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna PART I: THE RELIGIOUS THINKER



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Chapter 1: Faith, Female Sacrifice, and the Medieval Martyr in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart Eileen M. Harney

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Chapter 2: A Challenge to Jewish-Christian Relations: Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ 41 Yaakov Ariel Chapter 3: What Apocalypto Reveals: Migratory Premonition and Religiosity in Gibson’s ‘NA’ Film Graham Lee

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Chapter 4: The Power of The Passion: Lessons on the Messiah from the Sacred and Secular Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker

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PART II: THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER

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Chapter 5: Mel Gibson’s Visceral Vision: Exploring Recovery from the Human Condition Katherine Cottle Chapter 6: The Aretē of War: Aristotelian Virtue in Braveheart Anneke Murley-Evenden and Adam Barkman

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Chapter 7: It’s a Real, Real, Real Man’s World: Sexy Martyrdom and Heroic Fortitude in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, and Hacksaw Ridge Josh Morrison, Todd G. Morrison, and Kandice M. Parker PART III: THE FILMMAKER AND HISTORIAN

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Chapter 8: A Falling Comedy Star: The Ascent, Descent, and Shift in the Comedy Film Career of Mel Gibson Peter Piatkowski Chapter 9: Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto: “Not the Maya We Know” Brett A. Houk ‌‌‌Chapter 10: Film Adaptation, Depoliticization, and The Man Without a Face Douglas C. MacLeod Jr.

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Chapter 11: Apocalypto and the Ancient Maya: To Entertain or to Educate? 213 Heather McKillop Chapter 12: Mel Gibson’s Unarmed War: Hacksaw Ridge Andrea Mancini and Antonio Sanna Index

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About the Contributors



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Introduction Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna

American-born and Australian-bred actor, director, and producer Mel Gibson is certainly one of the most controversial figures of the present time for his interpretation of conflicted characters and choice of risky projects, his direction of intense, thought-provoking films or his personal comments on religious, political, and social matters. An anti-Method actor who often improvises on set by adding his own nuances to the characters he interprets and who also occasionally performs his own stunts, he is the first actor who was paid twenty-five million dollars for a role in a single film (for The Patriot in 2000). By 2023, Gibson has starred in over fifty films, directed five films, and created his own LA-based company Icon Productions. He voiced the characters of John Smith in Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Rocky the chicken in Chicken Run (2000), guest-starred on The Simpsons in 1999, and appeared in other director’s films in small cameos.1 In spite of being one of Hollywood’s best paid actors and one of the most powerful figures in the industry during the 1990s,2 Gibson is renowned for creating a serene, even jocund, atmosphere on the sets of his films and collaborating with the entire personnel. He was considered a sex symbol for decades with his intense blue eyes and athletic body enchanting generations of individuals.3 He has also been involved in philanthropic endeavors—promoting scholarships for theatrical achievement bearing his name at the university he attended in Australia, visiting and making donations to the Children’s Hospital in Camperdown, Sydney, and lending his image to American libraries for the promotion of reading and to Earthjustice.4 Gibson is also a part-time livestock farmer, owning thousands of hectares of land in Australia and Montana.5 Some consider him a reactionary while others deem him a man with old and firm principles, his Catholicism leading him on different occasions to strongly oppose birth control, abortion, divorce, and the theory of evolution.6 He was 1

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an affectionate husband and father, as well as an extremely reserved man, who has repeatedly attempted to protect his personal life and his family at all costs from indiscretions, and who has generally preferred the company of people who do not belong in the industry. His battle against alcoholism during the 1980s, attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous during the 1990s, boozy encounters with young women in 1986 and 1990, and arrests for drunk driving (in 1983 and 2006) have provided the basis for countless rumors, gossip, and protests against him throughout the decades, alongside his unguarded, denigrating comments about homosexuals, feminists, women, and Jews. Although such comments and episodes cannot be dismissed entirely from an account of the actor and director’s life, we feel that they cannot necessarily undermine a study of Gibson’s directorial work, on which the volume in your hands is primarily focused. Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson is the sixth of eleven children by Hutton (or “Red”) and Anna Patricia Gibson, born on January 3, 1956 in Peekskill, New York. His parents were religious working-class and well-educated people, and Gibson received a severely-disciplined Catholic upbringing, even though he was also known (and has been ever since) as an indomitable prankster and joyful presence. The family first lived in Verplanck’s Point, moved to Mount Vision, and then to Salisbury Mills. In 1968, they moved near Sydney in Australia (where the director’s paternal grandmother was born) after brief visits to New York, Ireland, England, and Rome. Life in Australia was not very easy for Gibson at the beginning (he took up smoking and drinking beer at thirteen),7 but things changed when he went to the renowned National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) at eighteen. He took acting seriously and gained confidence. At the same time, he had left his family to live in a fourbedroom house with a group of friends he particularly enjoyed partying with, though he was also “shy, vulnerable but completely unconcerned about whether he made it or not.”8 In 1976, he was approached for a role in the road film Summer City (1977), a low-budget production about a group of arrogant young men who enjoy hanging out by the ocean, flirting with girls, surfing, and basically living life without a care in the world. The film—which was only released in Australia and showed a blond-haired Gibson in his debut role, for which he was paid £400—could be considered today as a nice picture on Australia’s 1950s, although it ends in tragedy after a rifle-armed man avenges the violated honor of his daughter by killing one of the boys. Gibson graduated in 1977 and, after being noticed by Australian agent Bill Shanahan, was enrolled for a few apparitions on the soap opera The Sullivans (1976–83) and the TV shows The Hero (1979) and Punishment (1981)—an experience that he instantly disliked for its tight schedules (and would only endure again later in life when

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attending awards shows or an appearance in the series Complete Savages [2004–05]). In 1978, Gibson met the brunette dental nurse Robyn Moore in Adelaide, who was later to become his girlfriend and, from 1980 to 2006, his faithful wife and devoted mother of his seven children (the first one was born in 1980; the last one in 1999). Gibson then auditioned for the film Mad Max (1979), a sort of futuristic Western set beyond the present in a world in which the police fight against nomadic biker gangs. He interprets the character of an unstable man who violently avenges the brutal assault on a colleague of his at first, and then the death of his beloved wife and infant child. The film, which is, according to John McCarty, a satire of Australia’s obsession with automobiles,9 became an international success, grossing over 100 million dollars worldwide (on a $250,000 budget) and became the biggest box-grossing Australian film for the next seven years (though it was a financial disaster in the US), riding the wave of what came to be known as the Australian film industry’s renaissance. While waiting for the film’s release, the actor joined the State Theatre Company of South Australia, with whom he interpreted on stage Henry IV, Cedona, The Les Darcy Show, and Oedipus Rex. Throughout the years, Gibson returned to the stage in plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Waiting for Godot (in 1979), No Names, No Pack Drills (1981), Death of a Salesman (1982), and Love Letters (1993). The actor was then in Tim (1979), playing the role of a developmentally impaired young man who works as a handyman for a middle-age woman to whom he develops an attraction (Gibson’s performance, which fully expresses the unicity, simplicity, and ingenuity of the character in both his expressions and gestures, awarded him the year’s Best Actor award by the Australian Film Institute). Subsequently, he appeared in Attack Force Z (1981), about a secret operations unit made up of Australian soldiers (including Sam Neill in the cast) who, during WWII, attempts to save a diplomat on a Pacific island taken over by the Japanese, massacring anyone who gets in their way.10 Following this film was Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), about the massacre of thousands of Australians near Istanbul in 1915; in the film Gibson portrays one of two jovial runners in search for adventure who experience both the brutality of the trenches on the front and the futility of war.11 The latter film, and Gibson’s interpretation in it, received a lot of critical acclaim (with the exception of British film critics) and awards, but Gibson actually achieved world fame thanks to Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1982), in which he reprised the role of the tormented, leather-clad titular character, this time living in a post-apocalyptic desert world where gangs kill each other for the possession of gasoline. The film earned more than its predecessor, also selling

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more than fifty thousand cassette units and beginning a Mad Max mania throughout the world.12 The actor’s following projects included: Weir’s The Year Living Dangerously (1982), in which an ambitious journalist living in Jakarta, Indonesia, falls in love with the British embassy attaché (Sigourney Weaver) and must find a compromise between the possibility of making the scoop of his lifetime during the 1965 Communist coup d’etat or saving himself and the relationship with the woman; Roger Donaldson’s remake The Bounty (1984), pairing Gibson with Anthony Hopkins on a high seas adventure, the most memorable sequences of which, however, were those love encounters between Gibson and a Tahitian maiden—scenes which would establish Gibson as a sex symbol for decades to come (even if it is a label he was never comfortable with).13 Gibson’s first American film was The River (1984), about a Tennessee farmer fighting against heavy rains and mounting debts and attempting to stop the government from taking his land; this film was followed by Mrs. Soffel (1984), a romantic drama about the real-life romance that developed between a convict and a warden’s wife (Diane Keaton) in 1901. These last three films were not successful from a monetary point of view, but they helped establish Gibson’s credentials as a serious actor even if critics were not always impressed. On the other hand, Max Mad Beyond Thunderstorm (1985), a ten million dollar production involving elaborate chase sequences, fights, a gulag in the desert, a tribe of lost children, the presence of singer Tina Turner as the villainess, and many references to Lawrence of Arabia (including the casting of the same composer),14 earned thirty-six million at the box office. Gibson drank heavily between shooting sessions, and the oppressive heat became nightmarish for the entire cast of the film. His drinking habit and barroom troubles during a film’s shooting (to escape from bad working conditions and to alleviate his missing his family) had begun with Attack Force Z and had resurfaced since the shooting of The Bounty, but it never hampered his acting abilities and professionalism.15 It was then in Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon (1987), with the role of suicidal, overenergetic, and wild Los Angeles policeman Martin Riggs— teamed with his stable partner Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in the LA homicide division—that Gibson (then thirty) consolidated his fame throughout the world, in the first action-packed cop-buddy movie that earned over $120 million worldwide and spanned three sequels. The 1989 sequel (the most successful of the series) used the same mixture of action, special effects, and humor with the addition of the comical character of Joe Pesci and a love interest for the character of Riggs (interpreted by Patsy Kensit) as well as two spectacular climaxes. Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), which earned over $300 million around the world, presents Murtaugh on the verge of retirement and suffering from an emotional crisis, but also adds René Russo to the cast as an

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Internal Affairs investigator in a story that slightly varies on the previous formula while being rigged with spectacular explosions, chases, and gunfights. The fourth installment was released in 1998, with the character of Riggs now about to become a father and dealing with the issues of immigration, labor, slavery, and aging. The last installment was not well received by the critics, but it earned almost $130 million.16 In-between the first two films of the franchise, Gibson starred with Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer in the romantic crime drama Tequila Sunrise (1988) as a former drug dealer who is continually tempted by others to abandon his reformed life and who is in the middle of a love triangle and a series of power games between DEA agents and international drug traffickers. The film (generally considered confusing in plot) earned a modest sum at the box office. In 1990, there was a change in direction in the roles so far interpreted by Gibson, starting with the box-office-success comedy Bird on the Wire (1990), in which he performs the role of an FBI-protected witness meeting his former partner (Goldie Hawn) and living through one (humorous) chase after the other by two corrupt agents attempting to kill them.17 This was followed by the slapstick comedy Air America (1990), concerning a CIA covert airline operation taking place during the Vietnam War; Gibson, teaming up with Robert Downey Jr., took flight lessons and learned to fly a helicopter to play the role of a pilot and gunrunner who, despite starting out rough, redeems himself in the end. Both films were not appreciated by the critics: Bird on a Wire for its thin plot, Air America for its comedic treatment of the original literary text. On the contrary, Gibson’s reflective and dynamic interpretation of the melancholic Prince Hamlet in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990, co-financed by Icon) was almost universally applauded, and it demonstrated the actor’s capacity to fully interpret one of the most difficult roles existent in theatre. After a year-long hiatus in which he rested and dedicated himself to family life at his Victorian cattle ranch, his return to acting led to Steve Miner’s Forever Young (1992)—about a pilot who decides to be cryogenically frozen in 1939 after his fiancée (Isabel Glasser) enters a coma, but is reawakened after fifty years, is befriended by two children and a nurse (Jamie Lee Curtis), and ages rapidly.18 The film was warmly received by the critics and led to Warner Bros. signing the actor a very lucrative long-term contract (estimated at around $100 million). Then came The Man Without a Face (1993), Gibson’s directorial debut, which is an adaptation of Isabelle Holland’s 1972 novel. In this drama, Gibson doubled as the film’s protagonist, Justin McLeod, a former teacher who suffered a terrible car accident causing the death of a student of his and disfiguring half of his face (the character is therefore both emotionally and physically scarred, this being the first time Gibson willingly renounced his good looks in front of the camera). During the summer (the narrative is set

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in 1968), McLeod lives as a recluse in his villa in Maine. A young fatherless boy, Chuck Norstadt (Nick Stahl)—who lives a dysfunctional relationship with his stepsisters and his mother and is then traumatized by the discovery that his father did not die as a soldier but committed suicide while confined to a psychiatric clinic—asks for McLeod’s help to pass the exam to enter a military academy and then forms a strong, respectful bond with him. McLeod, initially introverted and peevish, rediscovers the joy of teaching again (apart from an appreciation for poetry and Shakespeare, he teaches the boy to look beyond appearances, the very theme much of the film is based on), but is also able to learn from his young student, until unfounded suspicions of pedophilia force the two to separate from each other. In the last sequence, McLeod appears from afar at Chuck’s graduation day: he seems to have gone through plastic surgery and, therefore, has probably found peace with his past mistakes. The Man Without a Face depicts enchanting natural landscapes and a nice view of a boy’s life during the summer vacation, as well as managing to enrage or embitter the spectator for the injustice suffered by the protagonists and the power of prejudice over (provincial) people. The film earned $37 million on a $12 million budget and was generally appreciated by reviewers and critics,19 but it also came under attack by the gay community because it changed the contents of the novel by removing the actual love relationship between the two male characters. Gibson then acted in Maverick (1994), an adaptation of the 1957– 62 Western/comedy TV series, also starring Jodie Foster (both Russo and Foster became lifelong friends of the director). The actor’s character is “gunshy,” a coward, and a gambler who spends the entire narrative attempting to acquire a sum of money to allow him to enter a high-stakes poker championship. As its TV predecessor, this film has a parodic intent, satirizing the Western in its use of the close-ups of the villains and the reproductions of the genre’s typical situations and characters. Gibson returned to both acting and directing with Braveheart (1995), the story of William Wallace, the Scottish patriot who, according to the Scotichronicon, first “raised his head” against the English forces of Edward I for the freedom of his country in 1297.20 In its first act, the film recounts the story of Wallace as a child until his father is killed by the English forces and his subsequent return to his native village as an adult where he marries a woman secretly (because of the “Prima Nocte” law, allowing English noblemen to have a right over Scottish brides, had been reinstated by Edward I). When an English soldier later attempts to rape Wallace’s bride Murron (Catherine McCormack) and she is executed for wounding the soldier, the protagonist leads a rebellion, first against the local English garrison, and then against all the forces stationed in Scotland, rallying the support of several Scottish noblemen and winning two great battles (at Stirling and York). It is

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the betrayal and corruption of some Scottish noblemen that causes a clamorous defeat and Wallace’s subsequent life as a fugitive outlaw, until he is betrayed again, captured, and finally executed in London. The narrative is a fierce cry for independence and, as the protagonist says, “in defiance of tyranny,” which ends, however, in martyrdom (very similar to Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 Spartacus).21 Braveheart conveys a realistic portrait of the harsh conditions of medieval villages (as much as of the niceties of simple life) along with the depiction of the injustice suffered by the people who are colonized and oppressed by a foreign enemy as well as of the brutality of the executions at the time (Wallace’s execution is a realistic—though not graphic—spectacle of torture and triple death in front of a public that finally comes to ask for mercy as much as the viewer may do). The film, considered by some too long and repetitive,22 was accused of historical inaccuracy (including the lack of a bridge in the 1297 battle of Stirling, the presence of Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Falkirk, the apparent temporal reduction of the many years of outlawry experience by Wallace and, particularly, the sexual relationship between Wallace and Edward II’s wife, Isabella of France [Sophie Marceau]). Gibson responded to such critiques that “this movie falls somewhere between fact and legend.”23 Furthermore, the scene in which Prince Edward’s (later King Edward II) male lover is hurled out of the window by an irate Edward I, as well as the depiction of the prince (Peter Hanly) as effeminate provoked the organized protests by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), though the director’s defensive (and non-apologetic) response only escalated the issue, even in the following years.24 On the other hand, the film was praised for its engaging narrative, Gibson’s performance, and the battle scenes, whose viciousness accurately reproduces the cruelties occurring on the battlefields of the past.25 Braveheart grossed over $213 million worldwide (on a $40 million budget), earned ten Oscar nominations, and won five of them: Best Director, Best Picture, Cinematography, Sound Effects Editing, and Makeup. The films Gibson acted in during the late 1990s were both public and critical successes: Ron Howard’s remake Ransom (1996) is a thriller in which Gibson is the millionaire owner of an airline (married to Rene Russo’s character) whose life is shattered after his son is kidnapped, but then turns against the criminals by putting a bounty over their heads, thus creating a psychological power game leading to unexpected narrative shifts. In the action/ comedy/thriller Conspiracy Theory (1997), he starred with Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart under Donner’s direction by playing a paranoid New York taxi driver who is tortured and hunted down by CIA agents for discovering an actual conspiracy. In spite of Gibson’s excellent rendition of the protagonist’s nervous twitches and mutterings (a unique role in his career), the film did not earn as much as it was expected. After Lethal Weapon 4, in the neo-noir

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thriller Payback (1999), he uncharacteristically played the role of a villain, a cynical heist specialist who avenges his partner’s betrayal and coldly murders several adversaries to get his money back (the film was well received and earned over $161 million worldwide).26 The new millennium began for Gibson with The Patriot (2000), which earned over $215 million in the world but was heavily criticized for its exaggerated violence and for its unrealistic portrayal of the English redcoats during the American Civil War. His following film, Nancy Meyers’s What Women Want (2000)—about an ad executive being able to read women’s thoughts after an accident and, although he initially uses his power dishonestly, then becomes a better man and father and falling in love with his new supervisor (Helen Hunt)—was very successful at the box office and became the highest-grossing production by a female director (earning over $180 million). The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), based on a story by U2’s singer Bono, portrays Gibson as an unorthodox FBI agent investigating the suicide of a young man in a decrepit building in Los Angeles populated by a varied group of disturbed people. We Were Soldiers (2002), a war epic on the Vietnam war with a $70 million budget, saw the actor training for several days and learning army protocol and how to use weapons in order to interpret the role of a colonel (and religious man) who leaves his large family for the battlefield in Vietnam, where a continuous massacre of both American soldiers and their enemies is represented for almost the entire duration of the film. In Signs (2002)—a film that, in spite of its slow pace, manages to keep suspense alive in many scenes—Gibson plays the role of a placid, grieving farmer (and former priest who lost his faith) discovering huge crop circles in his fields in Pennsylvania and experiencing a series of incidents due to an actual extraterrestrial attack. The Singing Detective (2003), an adaptation of the 1980s BBC mini-series, has Gibson in the secondary role of the psychiatrist of the misanthropic protagonist (Robert Downey Jr.) suffering from psoriasis and fantasizing about the noir detective (and his participation at musical-style numbers) he is writing about. The following year, Gibson released his directorial masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ (2004), a film he had been planning to do for twelve years. Gibson co-wrote the script with Benedict Fitzgerald, basing it on the New Testament as well as on The Mystical City of God by the seventeenth-century nun Venerable Mary of Agrede and on the apocalyptic visions of the Westphalian nun Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich (posthumously published in 1833 as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ). The narrative, which is entirely performed in reconstructed Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin, begins on the night Jesus (Jim Caviezel) is betrayed by Judas and arrested by the temple guards. After being summarily tried by some of the

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high priests and being beaten and insulted by the people in the temple, Christ is brought on the following day in front of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov). The latter refuses to pass judgment on him and sends him to the king of Galilee, Herod (Luca De Dominicis) who, in his decadent court, establishes that Jesus is not a real prophet and miracle-worker and should not therefore be condemned. Pilate then initially orders for Jesus to be severely punished (through torture) but is then forced to acquiesce to the crowd’s desire to crucify him. In the film, this is enacted through an hour-long series of tortures on the body of the protagonist that the camera never hesitates to frame and linger on, thus producing a visual torture for the spectator witnessing such inhumane treatment of a person (and the son of God). Equally painful to watch is Maria’s (Maia Morgensten) presence during the whole procedure, her witnessing the suffering and death of her own son without being able to stop it. Throughout the film, there are several flashbacks reproducing some of the previous moments in the life of the protagonist, including his work as a carpenter, his affectionate relationship with his mother, his intervention to stop Mary Magdalene’s (Monica Bellucci) stoning, his triumphant entry into Jerusalem (on Palm Sunday), and the Last Supper. Many of the most notorious episodes recounted in the four gospels are scattered throughout the story, such as Peter denying Jesus three times, Judas kissing him in order for the soldiers to identify him, and Simon of Cyrene helping him to carry the cross on the way to Golgatha. An addition to Gibson’s sources is Satan (Rosalinda Celentano), a feminine/androgynous figure apparently invisible to the other characters whose words and fixed glances (the devil’s silences are actually more frightening than his/her words) want to tempt Jesus away from his mission to save humanity. The director, who claimed to having been guided by the Holy Ghost during filming, commented: “My aim is to profoundly change people. The audience has to experience the harsh reality to understand it. I want to reach people with a message of faith, hope, love, and forgiveness.”27 As Robert H. Woods has summarized, “The Passion elicited strong reactions from media reviewers, columnists, and others. Some ranted while others raved.”28 The film was indeed heavily vilified by many critics for the historical inaccuracy of some scenes, the atrocity and continuous violence,29 its alleged anti-Semitic message (which was deemed to revive an old religious paranoia),30 as well as “its Mariolatry, emphasis on the human over the divine, and Catholic interpretation of gospel events.”31 On the other hand, the film was equally commended by many other critics for both its contents and its technical achievements,32 received three Academy Award nominations, earned $40 million on its first day screening in the US and then grossed over $612 million worldwide.33 Gibson returned to direct with Apocalypto (2006), the story of a tribe of Mayan who is kidnapped by a group of warriors and brought through the

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jungle to the stone-built capital where the men are sacrificed to the local gods and the women are sold as slaves. The story’s protagonist, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), manages to hide his pregnant wife and young child in a ravine during the initial attack and then escapes the city to return to them while being chased relentlessly by the warriors who captured his people. In its first part, the film represents the peaceful life of the village with its family life, hunting practices, and the narration of stories around the fire at night. After the violent capture of the villagers, a series of cruelties follow one another in a sadistic spectacle culminating in the ritual sacrifice (in front of an either jubilant or indifferent crowd) that feels completely unmotivated and incomprehensible. In this sense, the film is very similar to The Passion of the Christ for its excessive violence, but also for the fact that it is entirely performed in the native language (all members of the cast are Native American and Indigenous Mexicans). Viewers witness such cruelties through the eyes of the protagonist as the camera shows repeatedly what he is looking at, from the views of the luxurious vegetation to the behaviors of the single individuals, especially those living in the capital, who are depicted as belonging to a decadent civilization afflicted by drought and plague. After Jaguar Paw manages to escape the town, a frenetic chase (that certainly “glues” the spectators’ eyes to the screen throughout) begins in the almost-impenetrable jungle in which his tormentors are moved by both thirst for blood and revenge for the cumulative murders of the members of their family. During such a fastpaced series of sequences, there seems to be no chance for survival for the protagonist, but the villains die or are killed one by one (nature seems to help Jaguar Paw through the lethal intervention of some of its creatures) until the protagonist reaches his home village and saves his wife and child. In spite of the happy ending (as Jaguar Paw says, it is going to be “a new beginning” for his family), Apocalypto leaves a bitter aftertaste in the viewer, who knows that the rest of the protagonist’s people have been either massacred or are now slaves, whilst the arrival of the conquistadores’ ships (as a deus ex machina) alludes to the future destruction of Latin America’s civilizations. Many reviewers criticized the film’s excessive savagery (and the violence that potentially resides in all human beings) and the many historical inaccuracies, while others praised Gibson’s technical mastery of direction and fast-paced action.34 With a budget of $40 million, the film grossed over $120 million around the world. During the next four years, Gibson neither acted nor directed. Some critics think this is due to his declining popularity over a series of incidents in which he made some statements offensive to minority groups during a drunk driving incident in 2006. And certainly, things continued to spiral downward for Gibson, after separating from his wife Robyn in 2006 and divorcing her in 2009. Following this, he began dating Russian singer Oksana Grigorieva, but

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the couple separated in 2010 after they had a daughter, and the director was then accused by her and tried (in 2011) with domestic violence35—a situation that was all the more aggravated by the telephone recordings containing racist and misogynistic language that leaked on the Internet.36 Professionally, the new decade had begun for Gibson with Edge of Darkness (2010), depicting the perturbing story of a Boston police detective witnessing the murder of his own daughter and his decision to investigate the case himself, hiding his pain under a mask of rigidity and coldness and facing a fatal question of national security while taking justice (and not revenge) into his own hands. That followed the drama The Beaver (2011), directed by Jodie Foster, about a man who (unwisely) tries to cure himself of his depression by interacting with himself and other people through a hand puppet (the film was a box office failure in spite of the convincing performances of its cast). Get The Gringo (2012) narrates the story of an American criminal who is confined into a squalid, overcrowded Mexican prison where he befriends a young boy and later becomes an antihero by being involved in illegal activities (including many gunfights killing civilians as well) to save the boy’s mother. In Robert Rodiguez’s Machete Kills (2013), an amusing story with surreal, cartoonish gunfights, chases, and murders, Gibson is part of an extravagant cast (including Danny Trejo, Antonio Banderas, Lady Gaga, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jessica Alba) and interprets the criminal mastermind who can allegedly foresee the future and is intent on annihilating the world in order to reform it. In The Expendables 3, a testosterone bomb of hypermasculinity reuniting all the macho heroes of the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s (Silvester Stallone, Arnold Swartzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Wesley Snipes, to mention only a few), Gibson is the target of a mercenary squad he was the co-founder of before becoming an unscrupulous arms dealer, but also an art lover. Blood Father (2016) sees the actor in the role of a recovering alcoholic and father estranged from his daughter (Erin Moriarty) who is caught in a revenge plot by a gang she has betrayed, resulting in a series of chases and gunfights. The only truly successful film among these was Patrick Hughes’s The Expendables 3, whereas the rest of them earned very little, The Beaver, Get the Gringo, and Blood Father even being failures at the box office.37 In 2016, the director’s fifth film, Hacksaw Ridge, was released. This is the biographical narrative of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), the first conscientious objector in the American army. In the first half of the narrative, Desmond, a Seventh-Day Adventist Christian, is depicted as a child and then as a young man growing up in Virginia with an abusive alcoholic father (Hugo Weaving), a traumatized veteran of WWI. After falling in love with a local nurse (Teresa Palmer), Desmond decides to enlist to fight in WWII, but during his training he is repeatedly abused by his comrades for his refusal to bear arms and is even court martialed. Thanks to his father’s intercession,

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he can then leave for Japan to fight on the front line as a combat medic. The second half of the film focuses on the Americans’ attempts to take over the titular location, in a series of relentless scenes of destruction fully conveying the reality of war through the images of the confusion on the battlefield, its dirt and smoke as well as the devastation caused by weapons on the bodies of the American soldiers (and their anonymous Japanese counterparts, who are portrayed as cruel, inhumane murderers unconcerned with death). There, Desmond is revealed as braver than many of his fellow soldiers in his determination to save lives, even when witnessing the decimation of his comrades around him (which occurs instantly because of the use of bombs and automatic weapons). As is typical of war films, Gibson lets the viewers have affection for the film’s characters and lets us cheer for them and fear for their lives, but without sparing us the pain to witness their deaths as well. Also, the director emphasizes the moments Desmond begins to bond with his comrades on the battlefield and gives spectators much satisfaction when the protagonist is finally recognized as a hero. Indeed, when Desmond is left alone on the ridge after the second devastating assault of the Japanese, he saves seventyfive comrades (who had been abandoned among the corpses and the mud) by lowering them down the ridge with a rope, and after the final victory of the Americans and his return home, he is awarded a Medal of Honor. The film was a critical success and earned over $180 million on a $40 million budget.38 Between Hacksaw Ridge and the present day (2023), Gibson acted in sixteen films (with more scheduled to be released). He now appears as an aged man with gray hair and beard (he turned sixty in 2016), his face marked by expressive wrinkles. His talent is as convincing as ever, and he has been sober for over a decade. As a protagonist, he worked first in Dragged Across Concrete (2018), the brutal story of a policeman near retirement who has never advanced in his career because of his rough methods and his disinterest in political matters. He is suspended from work and decides, along with his colleague (Vince Vaughn), to commit a few crimes to pay for his family expenses but is finally involved in a violent robbery, and its aftermath costs him dearly. An excellent interpretation also characterizes The Professor and the Madman (2019), which tells the story of James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary during the last two decades of the Victorian age, who is helped in his major effort by an unstable but brilliant man (Sean Penn) confined to an asylum. Gibson then took on an unexpected and original role in Fatman (2020), in which he interprets Santa Claus as a mature, bearded man in ordinary clothes, who trains to keep fit, breeds reindeer, and runs a factory of elves but is threatened by a professional assassin paid by a spoiled child unsatisfied with his Christmas present. Finally, On the Line (2022) is a very suspenseful thriller in which he plays the host on a night radio show talking live with troubled people and, specifically, with a maniac who keeps his

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family hostage while forcing the protagonist onto a nightmarish live program. All of these films were box office failures. Simultaneously, Gibson acted as a secondary character in Force of Nature (2020), in which he is a stubborn retired policeman and diabetic who helps two cops to foil a robbery in his block of flats in San Juan during a hurricane; Boss Level (2021), which presents the actor as a would-be dictator experimenting on a device that could rewrite history while hiring a group of killers to murder the protagonist (Frank Grillo) stuck in a time loop; the crime film Last Looks (2022), with Gibson as a sort of caricature of a rich and eccentric TV star with the moustache and goatee who is arrested as the first suspect in his wife’s homicide; Hot Seat (2022), presenting him in the role of a mustached, skilled bomb-disposal engineer trying to save a former hacker (Kevin Dillon) forced to act illegally because of a bomb placed under his chair; and Confidential Informant (2023), in which he plays the role of a severe and pragmatic police lieutenant overseeing the case of a detective who plans with an informant to be killed in the line of duty in order for his family to receive his death benefits, as he is already dying of cancer. Notable among these films are also Daddy’s Home 2 (2017)—an amusing comedy set at Christmastime in which Gibson portrays the father of one of the two protagonists and performs a series of hilarious sketches that involve the other grandfather (John Lithgow) and are alternated to the serious moments representing a conflictual relationship with his son (Mark Wahlberg)—and Father Stu (2022), in which he is the atheistic, ill-tempered, and oppositional father of the pugilist title character who decides to become a priest (Mark Wahlberg). Noteworthy in some of the films of the last decade is also the fact that Gibson’s character dies of his gun wounds, thus demystifying the myth of the invincible man created with the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon sagas. Among these films, only the 2017 comedy and Father Stu achieved financial success, although in fairness, most of them only had limited release. Other films released in the past few years include Gibson only in small parts. This is the case of Dangerous (2021), in which he is a psychologist keeping in touch telephonically with a former criminal (Scott Eastwood) who breaks parole, placidly urging him not to kill the gang hunting him and his family; in Panama (2022) he appears only twice as a CIA operative recruiting an agent (Cole Hauser) for a mission to the titular country, but he also acts as the voiceover narrator throughout most of the film; and Agent Game (2022), in which he appears at intervals throughout a nonlinear narrative as an intelligence agent in charge of a group of undercover agents fighting terrorism. Finally, the biographical Bandit (2022) lightheartedly recounts the deeds of Gilbert Galvan Jr., a Canadian fugitive and bank robber (Josh Duhamel) during the 1980s, with Gibson playing the role of his illegal money-lender and partner in crime. Considering the amount of films he acted in during the past

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few years, we can certainly affirm that Gibson’s career is still thriving and he will, hopefully, entertain and interest viewers for years to come, either as an actor or a director. Many books are dedicated to the life and career of Gibson, from Neil Syniard’s Mel Gibson (Crescent Books 1992) and John McCarty’s The Films of Mel Gibson (Carol Publishing Group 1997) to Peter Carrick’s Mel Gibson (Robert Hale 1998) and Wensley Clarkson’s Mel Gibson—Man on a Mission (John Blake 2015). Contrary to the present volume, these books do not contain any deep, academic analyses of the director’s works. Several volumes are dedicated specifically to the director’s third film and his treatment of the biblical material. Edited collections such as Kathleen E. Corley and Robert L. Webb’s Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History (Continuum 2004), S. Brent Plate’s Re-Viewing The Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics (Palgrave 2004), Zev Garber’s Mel Gibson’s Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications (Purdue University Press 2006) and Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt’s Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and “The Passion of the Christ” (University of Chicago Press 2006) examine the 2004 film through religious studies and biblical scholarship, reconstruct the director’s historical sources, and question the film’s representation of violence and brutality and the question of anti-Semitism. Characteristic of some of the essays from the aforementioned collections is the fact that, as different reviewers have pointed out, though many of them have a tone of “neutrality,” other essays adopt a defensive or ideological tone, as due to the nature of the argument under examination. Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy: The Cross, the Questions, the Controversy (edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia, Open Court 2004) adds to such discussions and perspectives a series of philosophical readings including the issues of choice, truth, and forgiveness, as well as the theories of philosophers such as Socrates and Hegel. Apart from very few mentions of The Man Without a Face, none of these books analyze the three other films directed by Gibson. Although numerous reviews by contemporary authors have examined Gibson’s films, there is currently no monograph or edited collection of essays that explores all of his cinematic productions. A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson, therefore, is the first volume to offer an in-depth study of his entire oeuvre as a director. The volume is an edited collection that contains twelve chapters and is organized into three sections. The first section centers on religious readings of the director’s films. By considering key elements from and patterns within the Western hagiographical literary tradition, Eileen M. Harney demonstrates that, throughout Braveheart, Gibson weaves images and plot points into this heroic epic that draw not only from biblical

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imagery but also from distinctly medieval conceptualizations of sanctity and martyrdom. In the second chapter, Yaakov Ariel places The Passion of the Christ within larger developments in Christianity and interfaith relations and explains the popularity of the film, especially among conservative Christians, as well as the concerns of more progressive Christians and Jewish observers. The following chapter, by Graham Lee, argues that the plot device called “migratory premonition” (a vision or dream by some character) figures centrally into the narrative of Apocalypto. The utilization of migratory premonition in the narrative suggests that the 2006 production qualifies as a religious film. The fourth chapter of this section, by Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker, is focused on The Passion and examines the use of religious themes, like that of the Messiah figure, found within a secular context, and how the dialogue between popular culture and religion supports a similar discourse, leaning on the work of Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (2017), through the use of extreme acts of violence. The second section of this volume focuses on the philosophical readings represented in, by, and through Gibson’s films. It begins with a chapter by Katherine Cottle, who affirms that the director’s films explore visualizations of human recovery—from his own addictions as a person and artist, from physical disfigurement/injury, from war, from loss (of family and country), from society—and its inevitable exploitation, consumption, and corruption, from collective sin and from age. Such a recovery is not possible without an acknowledgment of the flawed human condition. In their chapter, Adam Barkman and Anneke Murley-Evenden focus on Braveheart as revealing that “freedom” is not so much the ability to live as one wishes, but rather it is the ability to do what one ought to do. The figure of William Wallace thus reveals that there is a higher purpose in the meaning of “freedom” and demonstrates that true freedom is actually having the ability to “attain perfection for the kind of creature you are,” as Anthony Esolen argues. In the following chapter, Todd G. Morrison, Josh Morrison, and Kandice M. Parker argue that, despite their different foci, certain themes serve to unify Gibson’s directorial efforts, namely, hypermasculinity (i.e., exaggerated beliefs about the constellation of attributes that connote “being a man”) and femmephobia (the devaluation of femininity). The chapter also elucidates those elements of Gibson’s films that may be viewed as troubling/destabilizing a purely masculinist reading of his work (such as the eroticization of suffering and the male body as an object of desire). The third and final section of A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson consists of five chapters dealing with the adaptation issues concerning his representation of history as well as his work as a comedic actor. In the first chapter, Peter Piatkowski examines Gibson’s film career as a comedian along with the cultural context of his films—in particular, his 1980s successes that took place

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in Reagan-era America, in order to demonstrate how the director used his star image/persona to further his career, branching out into comedic work. Brett A. Houk then explores the criticisms and defenses of Apocalypto from the archaeological community who struggled to reconcile the painstaking details portrayed in the film with the obvious geographical, chronological, and “factual” inaccuracies. In the third chapter, Douglas MacLeod demonstrates how The Man Without a Face significantly deviates from the political agenda of Isabelle Holland’s young adult 1972 novel of the same name, which speaks of taboo subject matters such as gay culture and pedophilia. In the following chapter, Heather McKillop compares Apocalypto with National Geographic, History Channel, Nova, and other more documentary-style films on the subject and explores how such films about ancient Maya can reach a wide audience as did Apocalypto. The volume concludes with Andrea Mancini and Antonio Sanna’s chapter, which argues that by simultaneously depicting brutality and violence along with the interior struggle of its protagonist, the war film Hacksaw Ridge could be read as a text that continually calls itself into question by favoring a “man of peace” who is placed in the context of war. Mel Gibson is a controversial director and figure—one whose films’ narratives are frequently characterized by violence and the use of weapons, whether he appears in them as an actor or behind the scenes as a director. The volume in your hands illuminates some of the aspects and thematic concerns of the films he directed, thus offering a series of critical interpretations that, hopefully, will further stimulate interest in Gibson, whose presence and importance in the cinema of the past forty-five years is undeniable. NOTES 1. These are Chain Reaction (1980), Casper (1995), Father’s Day (1997), Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997), and Paparazzi (2004). 2. Gibson produced some of his own films since Braveheart, but also other directors’ films, including the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005) and the Gothic film Stonehearst Asylum (2014). 3. As Clarkson affirms, “there is a nudity clause in every movie contract Mel signs”; Wensley Clarkson, Mel Gibson: Living Dangerously. A Biography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999), 222. 4. See Jim McAvoy, Mel Gibson (San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 2002), 84. 5. See Clarkson, Living Dangerously, 301–07. In 2005, Gibson bought a 5,400-acre private island in the Pacific from a Japanese company. 6. See Wesley Clarkson, Mel Gibson: Man on a Mission (London: Blake, 2004), 317. 7. See Clarkson, Living Dangerously, 38. 8. Ibid., 50.

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9. John McCarty, The Films of Mel Gibson (Secuacus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1997), 8. 10. A major fault of Attack Z is that the killings are not realistic (each time an Australian soldier fires, he hits his target, whereas Japanese often miss their enemies; also, all Japanese die immediately, even from a single shot). The film ends on a tragic note, as all the Australian soldiers are killed at the end of the mission (except Gibson’s character) and the mission itself is a failure. 11. Gallipoli is noteworthy for the lightheartedness of the young characters’ behavior, their joviality, before they arrive in the trenches, where fear and death by the Turkish machine guns suddenly become real. 12. Clarkson, Living Dangerously, 93–94. 13. Hopkins’s captain character was rendered more humane and less dictatorial in The Bounty. See McAvoy, Mel Gibson, 42. McCarty believes that “the film hints that the older Bligh may have had a homosexual crush on the handsome, twenty-two-year-old Christian . . . and that he cracked emotionally after seeing Christian carrying on with a gorgeous native girl in the heterosexual paradise of Tahiti,” but also recognizes that Fletcher’s mutiny is more akin to “the ultimate act of adolescent rebellion against parental authority.” McCarty, The Films of Mel Gibson, 95 and 97. 14. Ibid., 112. 15. See Clarkson, Living Dangerously, 123, 173, 175, 177, 181, 183, 269–79. 16. According to McCarty, “each sequel grew progressively more cartoonlike, with Gibson pushing the Riggs character in an increasingly zany direction: the hero-as-heart-throb version of the Three Stooges.” McCarty, The Films of Mel Gibson, 24. 17. McCarty affirms: “Bird on a Wire surely holds the record for the most butt references in a single film. . . . Even the baboons at the zoo fail to escape the filmmakers’ almost obsessive fixation with this particular part of the anatomy.” McCarty, The Films of Mel Gibson, 143. 18. According to McCarty, “Forever Young is about growing up, about reaching maturity and facing responsibility without sacrificing the sense of wonder, idealism, and brio in that kid you once were. It’s a theme intrinsic to many of Gibson’s films, especially his first film as a director, where it is more deeply explored. It seems to resonate with Gibson, who freely admits in interviews that he’s just a big kid.” McCarty, The Films of Mel Gibson, 37. 19. Roger Ebert lauded the “intelligence of the language” used in Man Without a Face, its director’s “confidence to know what needs to be told and what can be left unsaid” and the performance of Nick Stahl as the boy. On the other hand, Marjorie Baumgarten criticizes the lack of direction of the story, the continuity gaps and affirms: “Perhaps more accurately titled The Man with Half a Face, you can practically tell what kind of emotion each particular scene is going to convey solely by the angle from which Gibson’s face is shot. . . . It all builds to a climax that, in the real world, would have been completely avoidable, followed by a conclusion that concludes nothing.” Roger Ebert, “The Man Without a Face,” Rogerebert.com, August 25, 1993, https:​//​www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/the​-man​-without​-a​-face​-1993; and Marjorie Baumgarten, “The Man Without a Face,” The Austin Chronicle, August

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27, 1993, https:​//​www​.austinchronicle​.com​/events​/film​/1993​-08​-27​/139088/. Both accessed on Jan. 24, 2023. 20. Quoted in Magnus Magnusson, Scotland: The Story of a Nation (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 131. 21. This is definitely reinforced by the portrayal of Edward I as a hateful and false character, a ruthless and misogynist king, who smiles only when in contempt or insult of others and is ready to betray even his own people, as it occurs when he orders his archers to fire on his own soldiers fighting at close quarters against the rebels. 22. See McCarty, The Films of Mel Gibson, 178. 23. Qtd. in Clarkson, Living Dangerously, 330. 24. See McAvoy, Mel Gibson, 75. 25. Cherry lauds Gibson’s “solid brio and physical presence” and argues that Braveheart “demonstrates the vast, faceless misery of war like no other movie of recent memory,” but also criticizes the lack of interlude sequences among the battle scenes, which leaves no room for further development of many characters. Davenport applauds instead Patrick McGoohan’s performance as Edward I, “half-basilisk, half brass-rubbing” and argues that “the film dovetails neatly with Hollywood’s revisionist agenda in respect of the western. Indeed, the wild Scots, plaited and bearded, still using woad as warpaint, are in effect surrogate Red Indians.” On the other hand, Ella Taylor affirms that Gibson’s film is “epic in length only and peppered with sniggering homophobia, the homage to Himself drags on for three hours going on three years.” See Nanciann Cherry, “Scottish history unfolds on medieval battlefields,” The Blade (May 24, 1995): 19; Hugo Davenport, “The western goes north,” The Daily Telegraph (September 8, 1995): 16; and Ella Taylor, “Braveheart,” LA Weekly (June 1, 1995): 54. 26. Director Brian Helgeland dropped off the Payback project after some rewrites requested by Gibson, who was one of the film’s producers, which led to the rumor that Gibson actually ghost-directed the production. Helgeland’s director cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2007. This is the first among the only six films in which Gibson portrays a villain, the others being Get The Gringo, Machete Kills, The Expendables 3, Boss Level, and Bandit. 27. Clarkson, Man on a Mission, 336. 28. Robert H. Woods, “The Audience Responds to The Passion of the Christ,” in Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. Plate, 166. 29. Leon Wieseltier defines The Passion of the Christ as “a repulsive, masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film”; David Denby describes it as “a sickening death trip.” Both are quoted in Robert K. Johnston, “The Passion as Dynamic Icon: A Theological Reflection,” in Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. Plate, 57. 30. As Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer affirm, The Passion of the Christ is anti-Semitic because it does not portray any positive image of the Jews and their traditions and ancestral faith, nor does it depict Pontius Pilate as the intolerable cruel governor he actually was (“yet Gibson asks us to believe that cunning, unscrupulous Jews manipulated Pilate and were the real force behind the torture and execution of Jesus”). Furthermore, “placing Satan amid the Jewish mob repeats the medieval myth that Jews are his agents”; Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, “The Medieval

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Passion Play Revisited,” in Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. Plate, 11 and 12. According to Amy-Jill Levine, “the movie strips Jesus and his followers of any visual codes indicating that they are Jewish . . . Jesus wears neither a head covering nor the fringes worn by Jewish men of the time, as the gospels themselves attest . . . Gibson does not have Jesus crucified in the nude, so we see no mark of circumcision . . . On the other hand, one could claim that the film goes out of its way to avoid impressions of anti-Semitism: some Jews do protest the Sanhedrin decision; the Roman soldiers explicitly identify Simon of Cyrene as a Jew and so indicate the state of occupation of Judea; Mr. Gibson’s well-publicized hand drives in the first nail and so attests that he along with the rest of humanity placed Jesus on the cross; Jesus himself . . . states ‘No one takes it [my life] from me, but I lay it down of myself’”; Amy-Jill Levine, “Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the Pharisees,” in Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. Plate, 145–46. 31. Wood, “The Audience Responds,” 167. 32. Robert K. Johnston believes that “Gibson is not inviting his viewers into a story, but offering them a visual means through which to contemplate Christ’s wounds. The movie is devotional much in the tradition of . . . the fourteen stations of the cross that are present in every Catholic church or the five sorrowful mysteries”; Robert K. Johnston, “The Passion as Dynamic Icon: A Theological Reflection,” in Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. Plate, 66. David Morgan and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona praise the film for its reliance on pictorial motifs from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries (especially Caravaggio and Rembrandt), and, thus, for “magnif[ying] the scourging of Jesus through the lens of Catholic devotional art.” See David Morgan, “Catholic Visual Piety and The Passion of the Christ”; and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, “On Seeing the Passion: Is There a Painting in This Film? Or Is This Film a Painting?” Both sources come from Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. Plate, respectively 86 and 97–108. 33. According to S. Brent Plate, “Evangelical Christians have been principal aids in [the film’s] success, setting up websites to promote the film, buying up blocks of tickets, and publishing numerous reviews.” S. Brent Plate (ed.), “Introduction: Reviewing as Remembering,” in Re-Viewing the Passion, xvi. 34. According to Frederic and Mary Anne Brussat, “Apocalypto makes the point that the way out of fear is to go through it. . . . Fear is a boogeyman but it can’t get a true hold on you if you know who you are and where you belong. Jaguar Paw stays with his fear and uses it to get himself back to where he has a chance for survival. He knows that the minute he ignores his fear or give in to it, he’s finished.” On the other hand, Claudia Puig criticizes the fact that none of Mayan achievements (in astronomy, mathematics, science and writing) are depicted in the film. See Frederic and Mary Anne Brussat, “Apocalypto: Review,” Spirituality and Practice, n.d. www​.spiritualityandpractice​.com​/films​/reviews​/view​/16374; and Claudia Puig, “Review: Apocalypto,” USA Today, July 12, 2006, https:​//​usatoday30​.usatoday​.com​ /life​/movies​/reviews​/2006​-12​-07​-review​-apocalypto​_x​.htm. Both accessed on Jan. 23, 2023. 35. Gibson was sentenced to three years’ probation, one year of domestic violence counseling and community service, in addition to having to pay several fines.

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36. See Elizabeth Wagmeister, “How Does Mel Gibson Still Have a Career?” Variety, July 2, 2020. https:​//​variety​.com​/2020​/film​/news​/mel​-gibson​-controversies​ -career​-1234696080/. Accessed on January 25, 2023. 37. The earnings of the films Gibson acted in between 2010 and 2016 are the following: Edge of Darkness ($81 million on a $80 million budget), The Beaver ($7 million on $21 million budget), Get the Gringo (almost $9 million on $20 million budget), Machete Kills ($17 million on almost $9 million budget), The Expendables 3 ($214 million on $90 million budget), and Blood Father (almost $7 million on $15 million budget). All the information about the films’ earnings is taken from IMDbPro’s Internet site boxofficemojo.com, accessed on January 30, 2023. 38. Marjorie Baumgarten considers Hacksaw Ridge as “a perfect comeback vehicle” for Gibson; she also notes the parallels with the 1941 war film Sergeant York by Howard Hawks and further states: Desmond Doss’s “commanders and companions witnessed his bravery and valor in action, eliciting apologies from several of his previous tormentors. (One has to wonder if the inclusion of these apologies holds special resonance for the Mel Gibson comeback story).” Wendy Ide applauds Garfield’s performance and Gibson’s “robust directorial technique” in the war scenes but does not approve of the “sledgehammer lack of subtlety” in the rest of the film. Peter Bradshaw compares the film to Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge (1986) and laments that “the basis of Demond’s ‘conscientious operation’ is not in fact investigated all that rigorously.” See Marjorie Baumgarten, “Hacksaw Ridge,” The Austin Chronicle, November 4, 2016, https:​//​www​.austinchronicle​.com​/events​/film​/2016​ -11​-04​/hacksaw​-ridge/; Wendy Ide, “Hacksaw Ridge review—punchy like a sledgehammer,” The Guardian, January 29, 2017, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2017​ /jan​/29​/hacksaw​-ridge​-review​-punchy​-like​-a​-sledgehammer​-mel​-gibson​-andrew​ -garfield; Peter Bradshaw, “Hacksaw Ridge review—Mel Gibson’s war drama piles on the gore,” The Guardian, January 26, 2007, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/film​ /2017​/jan​/26​/hacksaw​-ridge​-review​-mel​-gibson​-andrew​-garfield​-second​-world​-war. All accessed on January 24, 2023.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane. “On Seeing the Passion: Is There a Painting in This Film? Or Is This Film a Painting?” In Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, edited by S. Brent Plate, 97–108. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Baumgarten, Marjorie. “Hacksaw Ridge,” The Austin Chronicle, November 4, 2016. https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2016-11-04/hacksaw-ridge/. ———. “The Man Without a Face.” The Austin Chronicle, August 27, 1993, https:// www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/1993-08-27/139088/. Bradshaw, Peter. “Hacksaw Ridge review—Mel Gibson’s war drama piles on the gore.” The Guardian, January 26, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/ jan/26/hacksaw-ridge-review-mel-gibson-andrew-garfield-second-world-war.

Introduction

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Brussat, Frederic and Mary Anne. “Apocalypto: Review.” Spirituality and Practice, n.d. www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/reviews/view/16374. Cherry, Nanciann. “Scottish History Unfolds on Medieval Battlefields.” The Blade (May 24, 1995): 19. Clarkson, Wensley. Mel Gibson: Living Dangerously. A Biography. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999. ———. Mel Gibson: Man on a Mission. London: Blake, 2004. Davenport, Hugo. “The Western Goes North.” The Daily Telegraph (September 8, 1995): 16. Ebert, Roger. “The Man Without a Face.” Rogerebert.com, August 25, 1993, https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-man-without-a-face-1993. Ide, Wendy. “Hacksaw Ridge review—punchy like a sledgehammer.” The Guardian, January 29, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jan/29/hacksaw-ridgereview-punchy-like-a-sledgehammer-mel-gibson-andrew-garfield. IMDbPro. www.boxofficemojo.com. Johnston, Robert K. “The Passion as Dynamic Icon: A Theological Reflection.” In Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, edited by S. Brent Plate, 55-70. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Levine, Amy-Jill. “Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the Pharisees.” In Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, edited by S. Brent Plate, 139-49. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Magnusson, Magnus. Scotland: The Story of a Nation. London: Harper Collins, 2001. McAvoy, Jim. Mel Gibson. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 2002. McCarty, John. The Films of Mel Gibson. Secuacus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1997. Morgan, David. “Catholic Visual Piety and The Passion of the Christ.” In Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, edited by S. Brent Plate, 85-96. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Perry, Marvin and Frederick M. Schweitzer. “The Medieval Passion Play Revisited.” In Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, edited by S. Brent Plate, 3-19. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Plate, S. Brent. Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Puig, Claudia. “Review: Apocalypto.” USA Today, July 12, 2006, https://usatoday30. usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/2006-12-07-review-apocalypto_x.htm. Taylor, Ella. “Braveheart.” LA Weekly (June 1, 1995): 54. Wagmeister, Elizabeth. “How Does Mel Gibson Still Have a Career?” Variety, July 2, 2020. https://variety.com/2020/film/news/mel-gibson-controversies-career-1234696080/. Woods, Robert H. “The Audience Responds to The Passion of the Christ.” In Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, edited by S. Brent Plate, 163-80. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

PART I

The Religious Thinker

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Chapter 1

Faith, Female Sacrifice, and the Medieval Martyr in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart Eileen M. Harney

The powerful image of the martyr is central to Mel Gibson’s medieval epic Braveheart (1995). Given the director’s religious beliefs as a traditionalist Catholic and as evidenced by his more recent epics, The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Apocalypto (2006), it is clear that martyrdom accounts are not only familiar and of great import to Gibson but also critical to his conception of how compelling stories of self-sacrificing heroism should be told. The martyrdom accounts of the early and medieval Church loom in the background of the narrative structure, visuals, and pacing of William Wallace’s story as it unfurls in the film. Alongside the more commonly recognizable images from saints’ lives and martyrdom accounts such as Wallace’s single-minded devotion to the freedom of his people, the recognition of his singularity by his followers, his graphic, violent, and public death, and the continuation of his mission by key survivors, appear perhaps less commonly recognizable visual and narrative elements such as his having visions from a young age, his feminized endangerment and suffering by proxy, his conversion of people in positions of power to his cause, and the crowd’s calls for “mercy” as they look on at his torture and death. This chapter focuses on Gibson’s Wallace as medieval martyr in a hagiographical narrative with highly significant sexualized and gendered elements. While the narrative of Braveheart follows a standard martyr- or hero-story structure and while Wallace is an overtly masculine and notably virile figure, the use of female characters and female imagery are critical to the character design and motivations of the protagonist.1 As has been explored by others 25

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such as Lee Quinby and Robert Bartlett, the primarily homosocial setting of the film is fueled by the symbolism associated with the symbolic and physical suffering of female bodies. This argument seeks to add another dimension to these discussions of women’s roles in the film and offers an examination of the narrative that is rooted in the medieval hagiographical tradition. Gibson’s representation of Wallace’s fight for freedom and passio is not only reliant on the bodies of women but also visually and symbolically dependent on the connection between the hero’s handsome body and female-associated imagery. The filmmaker makes use of familiar motifs and plot points, utilizing female bodies as extensions of the male, thereby inscribing on the male body the traumas (and gains) of female experiences. The argument herein provides examples of the types of narratives (not the narratives themselves) that seem to have been drawn on while Gibson constructed his visually stunning passio of Wallace. Examining the 1995 film in this way, alongside primarily the accounts of virgin martyrs and those of male saints in which women feature prominently, provides an alternate angle from which to interpret his decisions and intentions. It does not necessarily challenge others’ arguments regarding Gibson’s constructions of masculinity or his uses of female bodies but rather offers a different entry point to the film, viewing the sweeping cinematic experience as a filmic experiment in the Catholic hagiographical tradition. “TRUTH” IN THE RETELLING Throughout Braveheart, Gibson weaves images and plot points into his heroic epic that draw from biblical imagery as well as from distinctly medieval conceptualizations of sanctity and martyrdom. In doing so, he presents his audience with a visually stunning medieval-inspired hagiographical account in motion, one providing, as many have noted, an only loosely accurate retelling.2 The historicity of Gibson’s sweeping epic has been under fire since the film was released. The filmmaker, however, is not directing, starring in, producing, and co-creating a historical docudrama.3 The intention of the movie seems to be to present the truth (or a truth) of Wallace’s story rather than the story itself. Details such as dates and chronologies, timespans, and accuracies as modern-day audiences understand them would have been of less importance for a medieval audience than a meaningful and (ideally) compelling narrative.4 Wallace’s story, a medieval martyrdom, and that story’s (at times iconic) imagery5 present the truth of Wallace-as-saint’s passio in a manner that is resonant with the historicity of medieval saints’ passiones. Martha Driver, discussing films that are less bound to medieval history and more bound to truths about the medieval period, asserts that “many of the

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most instructive and enduring films about the Middle Ages do not try literally to replicate the precise details of historical events.”6 Something similar may be understood here. Viewers may not learn strictly accurate details about thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Scotland; however, they will be drawn into and will take part in a compelling medieval martyrdom narrative, the passion of Gibson’s “Saint” William Wallace. Viewing the film as a hagiographical piece allows the viewer to set aside a large number of expectations for a historical film and become more accepting of the poetic license in Braveheart. There is a deeper “truth” in hagiographical texts, and historical facts, as we tend to understand them now, are far less important than the objective of the story and the details that demonstrate the importance of qualities and action of the main figure. From this perspective emerges Gibson’s interest in portraying the deeper “truth” of Wallace-as-martyr, Wallace-as-sacrifice, Wallace-as-inspiring-icon-for-the-cause. Of course, once one views the movie as a hagiographical piece, figures and themes from medieval passiones and the passio(nes) of Christ himself inevitably surface. Some of these are problematic and dangerous. Two such harmful themes present in Braveheart are anti-Semitism and homophobia. Although these images will not be the focus of this chapter, they nevertheless must be acknowledged. Within saints’ lives, those who test, tempt, and/ or oppose the saint or Christ figure tend to be seen as “evil” or somehow aligned with or influenced by Satan.7 Dangerous is the ease with which such associations can recall the medieval hatred and bigotry toward the Jewish population.8 The Scottish nobles in Braveheart take on the role of those who disagree with and challenge the Christ figure, Wallace. The scenes in which they refuse to support the protagonist’s plan to invade England and, even more overtly, in which they betray him on the battlefield and subsequently hand him over to the English (who take the place of the Romans in the narrative) are reminiscent of the various gospel scenes in which Jesus is challenged by Jewish authorities, reacts in the Temple marketplace, and is handed over to Pilate. Gibson’s homophobic views have also received attention and criticism on account of his portrayal of Prince Edward.9 While saints’ lives and Catholic literary and iconic traditions are far from universally heteronormative or seen as strictly adhering to gender norms (within any given time period), the traditional Catholic stance has been decidedly against same-sex sexual unions.

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STRUCTURING THE MEDIEVAL HAGIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE Medieval martyrdom accounts are designed to reflect the basic narrative structures of Jesus’s Passio(nes); however, the distinctly medieval “flare,” especially of later saints’ vitae and passiones, involves elaborate, shared story points and graphic, often sexual, tortures. When examining these narratives, one must embrace repetition. It is in this repetition that the truth and identity of the hagiographical tradition lie. Much like many traditional hero narratives, saints’ vitae and passiones follow similar patterns or templates. Concerning virgin martyr legends, Karen Winstead states: “The similarities among the legends were quite deliberate, for hagiography as a genre aimed to suppress individualizing detail and to bring out the saints’ resemblance to one another and to Christ.”10 This assertion applies to martyrdom accounts in general. How does one know this person is a hero? This person’s narrative looks like the narrative of previous heroes. How does one know this individual is a saint? This person’s narrative looks like the narrative of previous saints. How does one know this person is a virgin martyr? This individual’s narrative looks like the narrative of previous virgin martyrs. And so on. The key elements included in these narratives may be combined or moved around; they do not always appear as distinct plot points or in the same order. Furthermore, despite the intention of emphasizing sameness, martyrdom accounts of highly popular saints do highlight signature tortures of the saints or critical scenes from their stories. The iconography of the saints include identifying features, which inevitably differentiate one martyr from another, thereby inscribing individuality on figures within a genre focused on minimizing that same individuality. In their traditional iconographies, martyrs are portrayed with instruments or bodily evidence of their signature tortures: Saint Lawrence is depicted with the gridiron on which he was cooked alive; Saint Agatha is depicted holding her amputated breasts on a plate and/or with the pincers that removed her breasts; Saint Katherine is depicted with the wheel upon which she was tortured; Saint Sebastian is depicted pierced with arrows or holding the arrows that pierced him.11 In short, being a martyr within this tradition means looking like those who came before, while still establishing memorable singularities. Braveheart, as a hagiographical work, resembles these martyrdom narratives. Among the most notable shared elements are his defense of faith and country, physically and verbally, and the utilization of female bodies to convey meaning where the heroic (medieval) male body cannot.

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LADY SCOTLAND: FAITH AND COUNTRY The core struggle in Braveheart reflects the standard core struggle in early martyrdom accounts: the threat of the “pagan” enemy or, in the instance of Braveheart, a nominally Christian enemy headed by their “pagan” king.12 The “pagan” English are seen as the outsider oppressors who subjugate the holy and righteous (devout) Catholic Scotland, killing the men and raping the women and, by extension, the country.13 From a young age, Wallace will be called to fight for his entwined faith and homeland. Gibson’s portrayal of the hero’s early years emphasizes trauma. The opening scene sets up the viewer to experience the tragedy alongside the film’s young protagonist. Just over three and a half minutes into the film, the atrocities inflicted upon Scotland and the Scots by the “pagan”-led English soldiers are encapsulated in the barn full of hanging bodies of murdered Scottish lords and their pages. The horrific scene pans from one dead body spinning and swaying to another with close-ups on faces that bear the marks of varying manner of death throes. The incident, which takes place when Wallace is just a boy,14 has a profound and spiritual impact on him. Following this scene, Wallace (James Robinson) has his first dream in which one of the dead pages, still hanging in the barn, raises his head and says “William,” awakening him in time to hear the attack plans of his father and the other farmers. This dream, and those following, all indicate that he is chosen, that he has a mission. The dead speak to him and encourage him. Yet, it is not until he experiences intimate, familial trauma that he is able to begin his preparation and education. Once his father (Sean Lawlor) and brother (Sandy Nelson) die fighting the English in response to the murder of those in the barn, Wallace is, in the immediate aftermath, a vulnerable child alone. His second dream takes place just after their deaths. Wallace lies next to his father’s dead body, which has been laid out on the table beside his elder son’s. In the dream, his father turns to him and tells him to “have the courage to follow [his heart].” After this, Wallace leaves his home with his recently arrived, educated, and worldly paternal uncle, Argyle (Brian Cox). Wallace (Mel Gibson) returns from his education abroad after an unspecified amount of time.15 When he does, he is that undefined ideal age for men in heroic or romantic narratives and remains seemingly unchanged throughout the rest of the film.16 He is multi-lingual, articulate, handsome, capable, strong, and hardworking. He is old enough to want to be married and, despite his education and travels, inexperienced enough to believe he can live peacefully in his oppressed country. Step by step, viewers watch Wallace shed his naivety as the truth of the situation is brought home to him. He experiences more and more personally the symbolic rape of his country, carried out

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literally and figuratively on the women in the film, until it affects him directly and demands action. The pattern of loss experienced first distantly with the Scots in the barn and then intimately with his father and brother is repeated. Wallace is first exposed to the realities facing women and, by extension, Scotland during a local wedding celebration. This is the scene in which Wallace, his peers and the viewer are visually introduced to the horrific practice of prima nocte, which allows an English lord to rape brides of common birth on their wedding night. The scene in which this concept is first introduced takes place in King Edward I’s (Edward “Longshanks,” portrayed by Patrick McGoohan) war room. Princess Isabelle of France (Sophie Marceau), sent by her husband, Prince Edward II (Peter Hanly), to take his place at the council, is treated by Longshanks as, at least partially, the inspiration for the law. The king, annoyed by her presence and clearly intending to exploit her vulnerability as a woman and as a representative of France in the otherwise male-occupied English space, focuses his eyes on hers as he sinisterly, yet gleefully, explains the meaning of the (mythical) law of prima nocte: “When any common girl inhabiting their land is married, our nobles shall have sexual rights to her on the night of her wedding. If we can’t get them out, we’ll breed them out. That should fetch just the kind of lords we want in Scotland.” The king’s leering, threatening gaze at the princess indicates his willingness to apply such subjugating, violent tactics against all women in all countries under his rule. The destructive hunger of England in Braveheart aligns with that of the cruel Roman Empire responsible for the suffering and attempted rapes in Christian martyrdom accounts. The princess is also the focus of the first reference to rape in the film, which takes place during the first wedding scene. The voiceover in the royal wedding of Princess Isabelle to Prince Edward II states: “It was widely whispered that for the princess to conceive, Longshanks would have to do the honors himself. That may have been what he had in mind all along.” From her introductory scene, the princess becomes an objectified, sexualized, and endangered symbol of France. Longshanks’s cruelty, lust, and desire for wide-stretching control are all made clear in this first scene featuring the English royals, which includes little speech besides the voiceover, only hushed spoken and sung Latin. Like the traumatic scenes in Wallace’s youth and the subsequent Scottish wedding celebration, this uncomfortable sequence relies on the facial expressions of the actors and actress, the innocence and confusion of the princess contrasting strikingly with the judging hostility of the king, and the disgusted discomfort of the prince. At the Scottish wedding, which takes place three scenes later, the atmosphere quickly switches from joyful celebration with games and dancing to fear and outrage upon the arrival of the English lord. This is Wallace’s first

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introduction back into his childhood community. The viewer is to understand that it is also his first introduction to the extent of the abuses against Scotland, represented by the intimate, violent abuse of Scottish women. Once the English lord appears, the festive Celtic music played by musicians in the scene cuts abruptly, replaced by the soundtrack overlay of haunting, lilting flutes. This musical shift gives the sense that the motion slows down (it does not) and contrasts with the overt rage and violent outbursts silently expressed by attendants and the bridegroom. The nameless, quintessential Scottish redheaded bride, donning a circlet of flowers and leaves stands in for not only the Scottish everywoman but Scotland herself as she resignedly walks through the English soldiers, halting their swords before lovingly attempting to placate and save the life of her husband, the representative of the Scottish everyman. A moment later, the English lord and his soldiers carry her off. As the English depart, an older soldier leers at Murron (Catherine McCormack), Wallace’s lifelong love interest. The look foreshadows the series of events that will lead to her death and Wallace’s crusade against the English. Despite the clear and present danger to his country, his countrymen and especially his countrywomen, Wallace continues to resist action, hoping to sidestep the English decree by marrying Murron in secret. It is only after his attempt to avoid English interference results in her death that his education reaches the necessary level for him to become the soldier his faith and country demand. He is the reluctant hero turned warrior saint, inscribed with the symbolic rape and slaughter of his wife, his country, and his countrymen. MURRON: THE SUFFERING WOMAN AS PROXY In a number of saints’ lives, especially those in which torture is featured, the saints do not experience all of the torments themselves. The litany of tortures is spread across not just the saints themselves but also their family members, followers, and converts. Sexualized and/or gendered torments, in particular, may be experienced by a woman in a male saint’s life or by a man in a female saint’s life. For example, the martyrdom account of Saint Blaise, patron of those with throat diseases, includes the torment of seven devout women.17 Even though Blaise and the women suffer some similar torments, such as the scraping of their flesh with sharp iron instruments, the description of the women’s torments is lengthier and more graphic. Their tortures are also rife with maternal symbolism, including the appearance of children asking for their mothers’ nourishing milk to be replaced by heavenly nourishment and the flowing of milk instead of blood from their wounds. The women act as proxies for and extensions of Blaise, allowing the maternal and pure imagery of milk to apply to him. Importantly, Blaise’s death further emphasizes the

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maternal connection conveyed through the women’s torments as he is martyred with the two children. What his followers are, he must also be; what they suffer, he suffers. Sex-specific tortures may also be visited on proxies of the same sex. Such tortures both connect the saint with and distance the saint from the implications of the torments. Saint Katherine, the premier female saint and bride of Christ of the late Middle Ages, like the women in Blaise’s legend, bleeds milk when she is beheaded.18 Katherine’s accounts rarely include a scene in which she herself is assaulted sexually due to her status as (supreme) bride of Christ. Therefore, the sexual and gendered assaults must be performed on another’s body. The queen (or empress), wife of Maxentius, the pagan authority figure who has amorously pursued, attempted to intellectually challenge and is currently intending to kill Katherine, converts during a late-night conversation with the saint. She becomes a spiritual child of Katherine, an extension of the saint herself. When the queen is tortured at the command of her husband, she acts as proxy for Katherine and suffers the sexualized torture of having her breasts torn off.19 Katherine, like Blaise, suffers and yet is spared the torture her follower endures. She is assaulted by proxy but remains physically intact; yet, she bears, symbolically, the sexually charged torture as Blaise does the maternally charged. Murron, like Katherine and many, many other female saints, is objectively beautiful and, therefore, desirable. Viewers understand that it is not only Wallace who sees her physical appeal but the English as well. Establishing Murron as an object of physical, worldly desire similarly establishes her vulnerability and preciousness. Within the hagiographical tradition, Murron resembles virgin martyrs. During her courtship with Wallace, she demonstrates an intelligence, despite not having a formal education, and independence that are in line with expectations for female martyrs. R. Howard Bloch makes the distressing point regarding “a certain inescapable logic of virginity, most evident in medieval hagiography,” which is “that the only good virgin— that is, the only true virgin—is a dead virgin.”20 As in medieval hagiographical texts, female bodies are constantly under threat in Braveheart. Although not a virgin after her secret marriage, Murron is chaste and willing to physically and aggressively defend her body. When the English soldier who leered at her at the close of the Scottish wedding attempts to rape her, she fights back, and when he holds her down, she struggles wildly and bites off part of his cheek. She does not give a disdainful speech, as is expected in martyrdom accounts, but her disgust is evident in her body language and expressions. Though she escapes the soldier, she is caught almost immediately. The next scene is her death. The sentiment stated by Bloch may be adapted here. In Murron’s case, the only good chaste woman—that is, the only true chaste woman—is a dead

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chaste woman. Murron next appears being shoved toward and about to be bound to a post in preparation for her public execution. Moments later, her throat is slit. This manner of death in a hagiographical text may be interpreted as a symbolic rape, something traditionally associated with women. The throat in medieval tradition is associated with femaleness as female throats symbolically stood in for vaginas in the tortures of women in medieval texts.21 The execution scene, while brief, feels far longer than its approximate minute and a half, especially while the camera focuses on Murron’s face as her eyes search the surroundings for her absent husband. Murron’s symbolic rape is directly connected to and committed by the same forces responsible for the symbolic rape of Scotland.22 Murron, as Wallace’s wife and thereby an extension of Wallace himself, acts as Wallace’s proxy.23 He has been assaulted and yet not assaulted. She functions in the same highly gendered manner as the women in Blaise’s legend and the queen in Kathrine’s. The symbolic sexual assault on his wife, who functions as the most intimate proxy possible for Wallace, connects and yet distances the hero to and from the trauma. As Wallace later tells the princess during their first meeting, “We married in secret because I would not share her with an English lord. They killed her to get to me.” The admission directly links Wallace and Murron’s attempted avoidance of rape by the English under prima nocte to the symbolic rape by the English carried out through Murron’s mode of death. The connection between Murron’s death and his own mission and sufferings are emphasized not only through the protagonist’s seeming recognition of the connection himself during his admission but also through the visions of Murron later in the film. He was not there at her death as one of the presumably countless and nameless sacrifices for Scotland; but she, and her tragic experiences, remain with him until his death as the martyr for Scotland. The proxy allows the saint, or in this case “saint,” to experience, and yet not, the full range of horrors that a persecutor can bestow. In this sense, Wallace has experienced the sexualized abuse of his wife. His body is inscribed with that torture as he goes forward into battle against the English. She, as an extension of him, adds her litany of sufferings to his. Murron, killed in her prime, is ever preserved as the image of tragic perfection. An indefinite amount of time later, Princess Isabelle assumes the position of female proxy for Wallace. PRINCESS ISABELLE: CONVERSION AND INFILTRATION Once the outrages of attempted and then symbolic rape are visited upon his own wife, Murron, in her sexually charged public execution, Wallace comes

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close to fully grasping the mission for which he has been called since childhood. His remaining education entails learning “hands on” truths and what is required to live his faith and distinct Scottish-ness, heeding God’s laws rather than “man’s” the worldly laws as set out by the English. Upon meeting Princess Isabelle during her journey to Scotland to discuss Longshanks’s terms, the two spend time alone in her tent, engaging at first in a verbal sparring match. The scene conjures the image of the first meeting of Saints Chrysanthus and Daria, who enter into a chaste (in this instance “chaste” means virginal) marriage and die together as martyrs. Chrysanthus’s pagan father, who is dismayed by his son’s Christian faith and rejection of worldly, sensual pleasures, arranges their initial encounter. He brings Daria, a highly educated, beautiful pagan virgin, to his son’s quarters with the expectation that she will be able to influence him. She enters dressed in gold and gems and is compared to sol radians (“the shining sun”).24 The two are intellectually well matched and spend the night in philosophical discussion.25 By the morning, Chrysanthus has converted Daria, and they decide to enter into a chaste (virginal) marriage. There are obvious deviations from the Chrysanthus and Daria model, as Wallace and Princess Isabelle’s relationship has a sexual dimension and is an extramarital affair on her part. Their first meeting, however, fits securely into the tradition of saints engaging in, often late-night, intellectual exchanges with soon-to-be converts. The Chrysanthus and Daria example is especially relevant because there is an element of attraction and an emphasis on male and female beauty despite their shared intention for a virginal pairing. Furthermore, a similar emphasis on education and learning that exists within the Chrysanthus and Daria legend is found in Braveheart. Since the opening of the film, Wallace has been learning and preparing for his mission. His father emphasizes “wits” over the ability to fight in their first exchange. Upon their first meeting, Wallace’s uncle tells him he has to learn to use his mind before he learns to use a sword. When the protagonist returns to Scotland, he is multilingual, a skill he uses to impress both Murron and the princess. He promises to teach Murron how to read, but she presumably is killed before they are able to work on that skill. Wallace does educate the princess about the “true” history of Scottish-English relations under Longshanks. He imparts knowledge convincingly to the well-educated, beautiful, dazzlingly attired “pagan”-affiliated woman, another Chrysanthus to another Daria. In this sense, he is able to do for the princess what he could not for Murron. The princess’s conversion upon speaking with Wallace is internal, quiet. She does not rally outwardly for the Scottish cause, but she does work to help the Scottish people and the protagonist.26 The extent of her conversion of perspective is underestimated by her husband and father-in-law. Even on the

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day of Wallace’s public torture and execution, the prince refers to her interest in the Scottish prisoner as her being “quite taken with him.” He clearly does not suspect that she is pregnant with his enemy’s child. Her pregnancy allows Wallace to “impart” another type of lasting influence. Knowledge spreads, so does blood. Viewers are given to understand that the princess, the stronger of the royal pair, will soon be the controlling party (in action if not in name) after the king dies. In one of her most assertive actions in the film, she informs Longshanks, as he struggles to breathe on his deathbed, that she all but has erased his bloodline from future rule. Such reversal of fortune for the persecutor in a saint’s life is another standard motif. Those who target, torture, and kill saints frequently experience violent ends that appear as forms of poetic justice. Less frequently, the persecutors convert.27 Longshanks’s institution of prima nocte has, in a sense, been reversed.28 The princess becomes a vessel for infiltrating the “pagan” hierarchy both through her emotional and mental conversion to the Scottish cause and through her pregnancy.29 In bringing both body and soul, literally, into the conversion and into the life of the people of whom she will soon be queen, she acts as an extension of Wallace himself. In carrying, and viewers are to assume bearing, his child, she does what he physically cannot and extends the reach of his mission into the very core of Scotland’s enemy’s stronghold represented by Longshanks’s bloodline. Wallace, too, inspires a conversion of sorts among the English body politic. The conversion is at least a momentary one of hearts if not minds as the crowds at his martyrdom are moved to pity, crying “Mercy!” at the height of his tortures.30 Viewers are to understand that Wallace’s handsome body has been rent extensively and is in the process of being disemboweled. Regarding the distressing scene, Bartlett notes that “The prolonged torture of Wallace at the end of the film . . . corresponds to the slow and painful death he actually experienced.”31 The torture scene is suggestive, but Gibson exposes the viewer to minimal gruesomeness, focusing instead on the protagonist’s physical responses. The hero’s refusal to ask for mercy despite the extent of his torments prompts the reaction of the crowd and his two friends, Hamish (Brendan Gleeson) and Stephen (David O’Hara), who have infiltrated the English throng. In Wallace’s final moments, Murron reappears, doing for him what he could not do for her. She remains an extension of him as does the princess even in the final moments. EPILOGUE: THE LEGACY The epilogue to Gibson’s film showing the Scottish army on the battlefield about to fight the English (again) similarly follows the hagiographical pattern

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and, while not explicitly expressing such, presents Wallace as a patron saint in a more overt light. Wallace continues to inspire his followers, notably Robert the Bruce (Angus Macfadyen) and those friends who witnessed his torture and death, those who would be considered confessors in the hagiographical tradition. Recognizable Scotsmen from the earlier battle scene at Stirling are also present. The range of characters at this point indicates the breadth of Wallace’s influence. He inspired and “converted” not only his close friends but also previously unknown “everymen” as well as the premier candidate for the throne of Scotland, Robert the Bruce. The motivation behind their fighting and therefore their victory can be attributed to his influence and guidance. Gibson’s Wallace, like many saints, continues to provide leadership and inspiration to his followers after death. Like the princess’s unborn child, who will be his physical continuation, the freeing of Scotland will be his spiritual legacy, brought about through the actions of his male devotees and companions. While choices in Gibson’s film may warrant criticism from historians, they fall into a more understandable, if still somewhat problematic light, when examined as a work of hagiography. The director’s imagery and pacing follow the narrative traditions of early Christian martyrs from the opening scenes through to the epilogue with Robert the Bruce, which implies that Wallace, even in death, is leading his followers to victory over the “pagan” enemies and saving his beloved (Catholic) Scotland. As a hagiographical text, Braveheart is intended to provide the viewer with hope, horror, determination, and inspiration. Gibson links his epic and ultimately blockbuster and Oscar-winning film to the heroic tradition of his own faith and, in doing so, demonstrates the relevance and appeal of the genre. The story’s pattern, which follows in many ways that of the universal hero’s pattern, and the deeply personal and spiritual, although as shown in Apocalypto, not necessarily Christian, purpose continues to speak to a contemporary audience. The extremity of the violence, and especially torture, in Gibson’s films has been written on extensively, especially regarding the torments of Christ in The Passion. Quinby notes that “the primary empathic focus in all of his films is on the body of the hero who has been seized and assaulted by torturers—the perpetrators of evil who are often holders of official power . . . In each instance the main character’s heroic stature depends on his being tortured, sometimes to death.”32 Quinby further asserts that “despite [Gibson’s] overt denunciation of torture, his films are sometimes construed as protorture” before describing Gibson’s approach as “misguided.”33 Examining Braveheart as a hagiographical text is especially useful since it places the movie within a historical narrative tradition, one in which torture is inflicted in precisely the way Quinby describes it. Those in power, who are “perpetrators of evil,” torture the saint who opposes them in some way, whether that be by actively warring

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against them, refusing to toe the line, as it were, and sacrifice to their gods, or rejecting a marriage proposal. The punishment for martyrs, especially in medieval tradition, is extensive, often gruesome, torture. Martyrs are victorious in death and are often depicted with their persecutor or enemy under their feet (most famously, the Archangel Michael and Satan; Saint Katherine often is shown stepping on the neck of Maxentius). When torture or torturous events do befall the persecutors, they are often after the death of the saint, which puts the events under the “divine reordering” of things. Longshanks’s death in the film and Robert the Bruce’s victory, which may be interpreted as a punishing of “pagan”-led England and a freeing of Catholic Scotland, are instances of the world rectifying itself at the end of Braveheart thanks to the lessons imparted and sacrifices suffered by its patron saint. NOTES 1. Quinby cites the blurring of Gibson, whose in-person drama and oscillation between aggressor and martyr in real life affects the viewer’s interpretation and understanding of his films and his characters that “is particularly pronounced in Braveheart, not only because he plays the role of the film’s hero, William Wallace, but also because Wallace’s temperament, as portrayed in the film, does bear a resemblance to Gibson’s own brashness.” Lee Quinby, “Mel Gibson’s Tortured Heroes: From the Symbolic Function of Blood to Spectacles of Pain,” in Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination, eds. Michael Flynn and Fabiola F. Salek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 39. 2. Jorge Bastos da Silva states that Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto “inculcate a sense of history as liturgy.” Randall Wallace, screenwriter for the 1995 film and author of the novel upon which the movie is based, “stresses that he is not a historian, but a dramatist or ‘sacred poet.’” He claims, “I’m trying to be the sacred poet of William Wallace. In ever substantive way my picture is historically accurate . . . [I] tried to use history as an inspiration and draw from legends that may or may not be historically correct.” Quoted in Brian Pendreigh, Mel Gibson and His Movies (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 216. Jorge Bastos da Silva, “Bodies of Estrangement: Mel Gibson, Sacrifice and History,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19, no. 4 (2014): 67; Randall Wallace, Braveheart (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), 216. 3. For a summary of the medieval legends and texts used in constructing the details of Wallace’s story for Braveheart’s plot, see Robert Bartlett, “Braveheart and Sexual Revenge,” in Emotion, Violence, Vengeance, and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller, eds. Kate Gilbert and Stephen D. White (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018), 254–59. Bastos da Silva notes, again regarding Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, that “these films amount to self-authorizing narratives (in that they depend on, and rather spectacularly convey, a sufficiently coherent understanding of the situation of the individual and of communities in

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history) more than rely on a proven commitment to documentary fidelity or textual accuracy.” Bastos da Silva, “Bodies of Estrangement,” 72. 4. Arthurian legends of the high and late Middle Ages and saints lives from the same periods offer many instances of story and meaning taking precedence over historical detail. For an overview of how Gibson’s Braveheart has inspired nationalistic sentiments in modern-day Scotland and where the film fits in the history of retellings of the Wallace legend and Wallace’s story’s enduring appeal and inspirational qualities, see Rachel D. Brewer, “‘We will drain our dearest veins, but we shall be free!’: The Legend and Legacy of Sir William Wallace, Warrior, Martyr, and National Icon,” Legacy 10, no. 1 (2010): 67–85. 5. It is important to note that Gibson’s production company is ICON. 6. Driver’s cited examples in this discussion are Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal (1957) and Terry Gilliam’s and Terry Jones’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Martha Driver, “Teaching the Middle Ages on Film,” History Compass 5, no. 1 (2007): 165. 7. This does not mean that conversion or salvation is out of the question (see below). Some persecutors are converted during the saint’s life; others convert after the saint’s death; and, of course, many do not convert at all. When the deaths of those who do not are reported, they are usually violent. 8. Jewish characters are often presented as antagonists, those to be one-upped, outwitted, and/or conquered. 9. For expressions of Gibson’s homophobic sentiments in his films, see David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2009), esp. 211–12. For criticism of Braveheart, see Michael D. Sharp, “Remaking Medieval Heroism: Nationalism and Sexuality in Braveheart,” Florilegium 15 (1998): 251–66. 10. Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–3. 11. Not all are traditionally shown primarily with their mode of torture. Saint Agnes, the young, passionate bride of Christ, who is stripped naked, threatened with rape, burned, and finally stabbed in the throat, is frequently shown with a lamb by her side. Her legend notes the connection between her name and the Latin term for lamb, agnus. As the bride of “the Lamb of God,” she is accompanied by the lamb, which symbolizes her virginity and connection to her bridegroom. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 101–04. 12. The opening voiceover introduces King Edward I (Edward “Longshanks”) as a “cruel pagan.” 13. See Bartlett, who argues that Gibson seems to be conflating (or confusing) Scotland and Ireland insofar as the relationship and tensions with England. Bartlett, “Braveheart and Sexual Revenge,” 263–64. 14. R. Wallace’s novel cites his age as seven. However, the film opens in 1280 CE, which would make Wallace approximately ten years old. Wallace, Braveheart, 5. 15. The film is deliberately vague, only noting the next series of events begin “many years later.” R. Wallace’s novel similarly states, “years later.” Ibid., 25.

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16. The ideal age for a man in the hagiographical tradition is thirty-three, the age of Christ when he died. Wallace dies at approximately thirty-five in 1305. 17. According to tradition, Saint Blaise was martyred in the fourth century. A concise version of his legend appears in the mid-thirteenth-century collection by de Voragine, The Golden Legend, vol. 1, 151–53. 18. According to tradition, Saint Katherine was martyred in the fourth century. For a concise version of her legend, see de Voragine, vol. 2, 334–41. 19. This scene is often extensive with vivid language. The Golden Legend simply states they “tore off her breasts with iron pikes, an then cut off her head.” Ibid., 338. 20. R. Howard Bloch, “Chaucer’s Maiden’s Head: ‘The Physician’s Tale’ and the Poetics of Virginity,” Representations 28 (Fall 1989): 120. 21. Dying by beheading or piercing of the throat is also a convention in the legends of virgin martyrs. This is the mode of death for two of the most famous virgin martyrs, Saints Agnes and Lucy. For this scene in the accounts of Agnes and Lucy respectively, see de Voragine, The Golden Legend vol 1, 103 and 29. This is an ancient association as well. Nicole Loraux notes the significance of women’s throats in Greek tragedy, stating that, “for a woman, [her throat] is above all the point of greatest vulnerability.” Furthermore, Loraux asserts that, regardless of the motivation for death, it “requires women to die by the throat, and only by the throat.” Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 50 and 52. 22. As noted, the English king’s lust for power, associated with sexual aggression and force, is also visited on his daughter-in-law. See also Bartlett, “Braveheart and Sexual Revenge,” 259–60. 23. For the arguably sensual aspects of this scene, see Bastos da Silva, “Bodies of Estrangement,” 71. 24. Passio SS. Chrysanthi et Dariæ Martyrum Romæ in Acta Sanctorum, Oct. XI, 473F. 25. Their initial encounter clearly is intended to recall Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon. 26. For example, she donates the gold that was intended as a bribe for Wallace to the children of Scotland instead of bringing it back to the king. She later warns Wallace of a trap that Longshanks set for him. 27. See, for example, Saint Dorothy’s account (Acta S. Dorotheæ et Socior in the Acta Sanctorum Feb. I, 773–76). 28. See also Bartlett, “Braveheart and Sexual Revenge,” 269. 29. Bartlett (following a discussion on masculinity, Wallace’s attractiveness to women and revenge) discusses the pregnancy as a form of revenge and notes the importance of the princess’s French blood and that Wallace does not debase himself by coupling with an English woman. Ibid., 268–69. 30. For an example of a martyrdom account in which the crowd has a similar reaction, see that of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis in Herbert A. Musurillo’s The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 31. Bartlett, “Braveheart and Sexual Revenge,” 263–64.

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32. Lee Quinby, “Mel Gibson’s Tortured Heroes: From the Symbolic Function of Blood to Spectacles of Pain,” in Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination, eds. Michael Flynn and Fabiola F. Salek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 35. 33. Ibid., 35 (emphasis mine) and 36.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bartlett, Robert. “Braveheart and Sexual Revenge.” In Emotion, Violence, Vengeance, and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller, edited by Kate Gilbert and Stephen D. White, 255–70. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. Bastos da Silva, Jorge. “Bodies of Estrangement: Mel Gibson, Sacrifice and History.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19, no. 4 (2014): 65–78. Bloch, R. Howard. “Chaucer’s Maiden’s Head: ‘The Physician’s Tale’ and the Poetics of Virginity.” Representations 28 (Fall 1989): 113–34. Bolland, Johannes et al. (eds.), Acta Sanctorum. 68 vols. Paris: Victor Palmé, 1863–1870. Braveheart. Directed by Mel Gibson. USA: Icon Productions & The Ladd Company, 1995. Brewer, Rachel D. “‘We will drain our dearest veins, but we shall be free!’: The Legend and Legacy of Sir William Wallace, Warrior, Martyr, and National Icon.” Legacy 10, no. 1 (2010): 67–85. de Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., translated by William Granger Ryan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Driver, Martha. “Teaching the Middle Ages on Film.” History Compass 5, no. 1 (2007): 159–74. Greven, David. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2009. Loraux, Nicole. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, translated by Anthony Forster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Musurillo, Herbert A. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Pendreigh, Brian. Mel Gibson and His Movies. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Quinby, Lee. “Mel Gibson’s Tortured Heroes: From the Symbolic Function of Blood to Spectacles of Pain.” In Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination, edited by Michael Flynn and Fabiola F. Salek, 35–52. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Sharp, Michael D. “Remaking Medieval Heroism: Nationalism and Sexuality in Braveheart.” Florilegium 15 (1998): 251–66. Wallace, Randall. Braveheart. New York: Pocket Books, 1995. Winstead, Karen. Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Chapter 2

A Challenge to Jewish-Christian Relations Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ Yaakov Ariel

Few feature films on religious themes have stirred so much controversy and contradictory emotions as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). Tens of millions have watched the film, and many committed Christians— including and, even especially, conservative Evangelicals—have identified with its narrative and the points of view it has presented. Alongside its popularity among many Christians, the film created unease among Jews and Christians involved in movements of interfaith dialog and reconciliation. Gibson produced The Passion four decades after Vatican II (1961–1965), the Catholic general council that gave rise to an era of unprecedented improvement in interfaith relations. Among the latter’s resolutions was Nostra Aetate, a passage of which stated that “what happened in His [Jesus] passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” Few events had a transforming effect on Christian-Jewish relations as that declaration. Protestant mainline churches adopted similar resolutions. Catholics and Protestants developed the declaration further, creating a movement of interfaith reconciliation that has tried to put away negative stereotypes and promote instead respect and appreciation toward other faiths. Gibson’s film signaled a different attitude, not of an attempt at reconciliation, but of a return to pre-Vatican II modes of Catholic piety and interactions with non-Christians. Most importantly, the film rekindles and re-embraces the 41

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Passion plays that Late Medieval and Modern Catholic Europe performed for centuries with the accusation of Deicide, the alleged Jewish hatred, betrayal, torture, and killing of Jesus. Gibson grew up in a home that refused to accept the resolutions of Vatican II, the reforms launched in the Church that brought with them liberalization, change in liturgies, and openness to faiths and ideas that come from outside the faith. The Gibsons have been part of a growing movement of Catholics that have come to resent the changes that Vatican II brought with it. Such conservatives have called for a reaction and return to older ways, and have reclaimed older liturgies and tenets of faith, including the claim to exclusivity of the Catholic Church as the one true Christian way. One should examine The Passion, and the strong reactions to that film, as representing larger developments in contemporary Christianity and interfaith relations. A MOMENT OF CONCERN In 2003, Jewish leaders, as well as Christians committed to Christian-Jewish reconciliation, became worried when they heard about an unusual film in production.1 They heard that the renowned actor Mel Gibson was amid directing a film on the Passion that chose to present Jesus’s arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion in a realistic manner, taking the Gospels’ accounts at face value. Even more alarming, the Catholic director added additional, damning elements relating to the alleged role of the Jews in the Passion in line with Central European traditions of Passion plays, which went a few steps beyond the Gospels narratives. Passion plays came about in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, radicalizing anti-Jewish sentiments in Central European societies.2 If previously, Christian theologians were mostly focused, in their complaints about Jews, on the unwillingness of those people to accept Jesus as their Savior, now Passion plays, available to and influencing large crowds of spectators, portrayed the Jews as the slayers of Christ.3 Jewish worries were enhanced by the knowledge that the movie’s producer and director was not merely a conservative Catholic, but a militant reactionary, who opposed the reforms brought about by Vatican II, which had liberalized contemporary Catholicism. Gibson has thus been uncommitted to the rapprochement achieved in the past half century in the relationship between Christians and Jews, and unimpressed by the Church’s absolution of the Jewish people from the accusation of Deicide. The film, many believed, could curtail the achievements of decades of dialogue and reconciliation between Christian and Jews.4

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TOWARD DIALOGUE AND RECONCILIATION The relations between Jews and Catholics, as well as other groups of Christians, have undergone momentous changes between the 1960s and the 2000s. The transformation has particularly been apparent in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews. Until the early 1960s, Catholics prayed the “Good Friday Prayer,” asking God to remove the blindness of the Jews, so that people finally accept the truthfulness of the Christian gospel. Until Vatican II, the Catholic Church held firm to its conviction that there was no justification for the existence of a Jewish people outside of the church.5 Following the sacrifice of Jesus, Judaism, according to the Church’s view, was an anachronistic misinterpretation of biblical passages and of God’s intentions and was unable to offer salvation to its adherents. Theologically misinformed, Jews were morally deprived and thus capable of evil deeds. Until the early 1960s, for example, the Catholic Church recognized, as saints and martyrs, several children who were allegedly murdered by Jews for ritual purposes.6 Attitudes in the Catholic Church began changing before the 1960s. Protestants with the cooperation of Catholics initiated the early beginning of dialogue at the turn of the twentieth century, with their efforts gaining more ground in the decades between the two world wars.7 In the 1920s, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish activists in the United States established a “Committee on Good Will.” The motivation for the creation of the Committee was more social than theological and had to do with the rise of hate groups in American public life during the 1920s, a reality that alarmed Catholics and Jews, as well as some liberal Protestants.8 Interfaith cooperation turned into dialogue, in English-speaking countries, when promoters of interfaith understanding established Councils of Christians and Jews.9 The more tolerant atmosphere in English-speaking nations is evident when looking at the deteriorating relation to Jews in continental Europe during the 1930s-early 1940s, where the attitudes of Christian nations toward the Jews reached an historical low. While the interfaith dialogue in America, Canada, and Britain progressed, the relationship between the faiths in these countries was far from being ideal. During the 1920s–1930s, several Christian groups and individuals joined in attacking Jews, blaming them for the world’s problems. One of the most noted Roman Catholic clergymen in America during the period, Father Charles Coughlin, a pioneer of radio preaching, used his radio program as a vehicle to attack the Jews and blame them for the troubles of the age.10 Protestant ministers who promoted a reactionary political agenda, such as Gerald L.K. Smith, also included attacks on Jews in their rhetoric.11 It was

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no wonder that, during the 1920s–1930s, Jewish organizations institutionalized their involvement with interfaith dialogue and turned it into important items on their agenda. Christian representatives in the dialogue were often sympathetic to Jewish struggles. However, they neither represented all branches of Christianity nor even their denominations as a whole. While opposed to bigotry, Christian churches at the time were far from recognizing Judaism as a legitimate faith. The position of many church leaders was that while Christians might establish cordial relationships with their neighbors, Judaism was not equal to Christianity and could not offer its members spiritual comfort, moral guidelines, and, most importantly, salvation for their souls. Not only conservative groups, but mainstream Christian churches as well, continued their efforts at evangelizing Jews. An early proponent of a new inclusive attitude, which recognized Judaism as a legitimate religious tradition, was Reinhold Niebuhr, one of America’s leading Christian theologians between the 1930s and 1960s. His was a groundbreaking outlook, on the part of a Christian leader, which offered recognition and acceptance to Judaism as a religious tradition equal in worth to Christianity. Niebuhr, a pastor in the German American Evangelical Church, worked for a number of years as a minister in Detroit and encountered socially active Jewish leaders and congregations. Rejecting traditional Christian attitudes, he concluded that Jews held high moral standards and were therefore not in need of the Christian Gospel.12 Niebuhr’s outlook signified a revolution in Christian thinking about Jews and Judaism. With few exceptions, mainstream Christian theologians, as well as church councils of the first half of the twentieth century, followed the traditional Christian line, constructed by the Church fathers in the early centuries of Christianity. Having rejected their Messiah, the Jews lost their position as the covenant people, and God’s promises to Israel were inherited by the Christian Church. Judaism, as a separate faith from Christianity, became redundant, except as a group holding witness to the triumph of Christianity, and the misery of those who refused to recognize its truth.13 Moving to serve as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he advocated a neo-Orthodox theology of “Christian realism,” Niebuhr became a supporter of Zionism and, in the early 1940s, helped found the Christian Council for Palestine, which mustered American Christian support for the establishment of a Jewish state in what was then British Palestine. During the same years, a number of Jewish thinkers, such as the Reform rabbi Solomon Freehof, developed a new, more appreciative and accepting opinion on Christianity. A younger generation of Reform and Conservative thinkers opened to Christian-Jewish equality as never before. Few followed Rabbi Stephen Wise, who called upon Jews to adopt Jesus as one of their

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own, or Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist program, which suggested that Jews give up on their claim to be the chosen people.14 But like their Christian counterparts, Jewish thinkers of the era were laying a foundation for further recognition and dialogue. The spirit created by World War II helped change the relationship between the faiths. Virulent forms of anti-Semitism decreased significantly in America, Britain, and other Western nations, during the post-war years, and the public image of Judaism improved considerably. The social and economic changes that came about in the years following the war were also congenial to progress in the relationships between the faiths.15 The Cold War also enhanced the atmosphere of interfaith reconciliation in Western nations, especially in America, as it helped legitimize middle class religious expressions in all their varieties. The United States engaged during the 1950s in an intensive global struggle and ideological debate with the Soviet Bloc. Participation in religious life became equated with the “American way.” Jews went along with the spirit of the age, building hundreds of suburban synagogues, architecturally in line with the tastes and values of middle class America of the period, a move that helped turn Judaism in the 1950s into one of the “public religions” in America.16 The changes in the post-World War II era in the relationship between the faiths were also enhanced by the growth of the Christian ecumenical movement, which promoted unity and dialogue between the different Christian churches. In 1948, such ecumenically inclined Protestants established the World Council of Churches (WCC), composed of mainline Protestant churches, as well as Orthodox, Middle Eastern, and ThirdWorld churches.17 Many of the Protestant churches affiliated with the WCC changed their approach toward the Jews, and other non-Christian faiths, throughout the 1960s–2000s, abandoning missions and emphasizing instead dialogue and recognition.18 Participation in interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews enlarged considerably during the 1950s–1960s, coming to include most mainstream Christian and Jewish communities.19 The improved relationship between the faiths made open anti-Semitism in Western nations socially unacceptable, while more covert forms of Christian anti-Jewish sentiments still ran strong. A sociological survey, conducted at the initiative of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League in the early 1960s, discovered that prejudices against Jews were still prevalent among the majority of Christians in America and were especially strong among members of the more conservative Christian groups. Members of churches taking part in the dialogue with Jews were relatively more tolerant.20

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VATICAN II AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF DIALOGUE The election of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli to the papacy, as John XXIII, in October 1958 encouraged an agenda of interfaith reconciliation, which stood at the center of the groundbreaking council the elderly Pope had called for, and officially opened in October 1962. The council, Vatican II, served as a catalyst for a new era of reconciliation and mutual respect among communities of faiths. Pope John XXIII (1881–1963) wished to change the relationship between the Church and contemporary culture, and bring about reconciliation between the Catholic Church and other faiths. Vatican II thus attempted to put to rest some of the old hostilities between the different Christian churches, as well as between Christianity and other religions.21 In its first stages, the Council concentrated on inner reform and intra-Christian relationships, moving later to promote an atmosphere of forgiveness and mutual recognition between the different religions. Toward its very last sessions, Vatican II came out with a resolution on its attitudes toward Jews. Among other things, it stated: “The Church . . . cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant . . . the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accused by God.”22 The document warned against the accusation of Deicide, the claim that the Jews as a people, in all generations, have been responsible for the killing of Jesus, whom the Christian tradition has viewed as the Messiah and the Son of God.23 The resolution opened a new, reconciliatory, phase in Catholic-Jewish relationships and served as a stepping- stone for additional declarations of good will on the part of Christian Churches in their relation to Jews.24 The Catholic Church’s attitude influenced Protestant groups and, to a lesser extent, Orthodox Christian churches. Several mainstream and liberal Protestant churches issued statements on the Deicide charge, proclaiming, sometimes even more emphatically than the Vatican II document, that the Jews were not guilty of the murder of Jesus.25 Among the first Protestant groups to issue such a statement was the Synod of Bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States, which stated: The charge of deicide against the Jews is a tragic misunderstanding of the inner significance of the crucifixion. To be sure, Jesus was crucified by some soldiers at the instigation of some Jews. But, this cannot be construed as imputing corporate guilt to every Jew in Jesus’ day, much less the Jewish people in subsequent generations. Simple justice alone proclaims the charge of a corporate or inherited curse on the Jewish people to be false.26

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The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the US, an ecumenical, liberal organization, issued the following statement: “Especially reprehensible are the notions that the Jews, rather than all mankind, are responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, and God has for this reason rejected his covenant people.”27 A new attitude gained ground in Christian liberal circles toward the Jewish faith and heritage. The position Reinhold Niebuhr advocated as early as the 1920s became more prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s among liberal Protestant and Catholic theologians, especially in the English-speaking world.28 Liberal theologians and churches gave up on the claim to be the sole possessors of the road to salvation, replacing it with the idea that non-Christian religions could offer moral guidelines and spiritual meaning to their adherents, Judaism not excluded. One immediate result of the new atmosphere in interfaith relationships affected missions. Influenced in no small measure by the strong Jewish objection to the missionary activity, the Catholic Church, as well as mainline Protestant churches, decided to shut their missionary enterprises among Jews, as well as give up on the traditional Good Friday Prayer.29 Evangelizing the Jews remained the declared agenda of the more conservative Protestant churches, which have not taken part in the dialogue, such as the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod or the Southern Baptist Convention.30 While conservative churches have continuously insisted that Christianity is the only viable religion and only its adherents have truly found the path to salvation, they too have been influenced by the atmosphere of interfaith reconciliation.31 They, too, attempted to eradicate ethnic prejudices and establish a more benevolent basis for the relationship between the faiths. Having acquitted the Jews of Deicide, the years-old accusation of having killed God, liberal Protestants and Catholics went a step further to clear the atmosphere of hatred that this, and other similar charges, had created. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, both Protestants and Catholics examined textbooks that had been used in their religious schools and removed passages with anti-Semitic overtones or that drew a negative portrait of the Jews.32 No less revolutionary than clearing the textbooks of negative images of Jews has been the scholarly work carried out by liberal Christian theologians, who undertook to examine the corpus of Christian writings in order to understand and correct the ideas and claims that had produced the negative images of the Jews.33 European and American Christians, both Protestants and Catholics, were motivated, at least in part, by a sense of guilt over the historical role of Christian anti-Jewish accusations in bringing about the mass murder of Jews during the World War. By the 1960s, Christian thinkers and leaders became fully aware of the scope of the horrors that befell the Jews at the hands of Christians during World War II. A number of Christian thinkers reached a realization that the Nazi hatred of Jews had been fed by ages of anti-Jewish

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incitement stemming from Christianity’s adverse and hostile attitude toward Judaism and Jews.34 Christian theologians have written about the significance of the Holocaust for Christianity.35 Though sensitive to the suffering that had been the lot of the Jews, Christians tried to ascribe a Christian significance to the murder of millions of innocent people.36 Perhaps the most impressive development that has come out of the movement of interfaith reconciliation has been the growing interest among Christian thinkers, scholars, clergymen, and students about the Jewish roots of Christianity, with many paying special attention to the Second Commonwealth and early Talmudic periods, the study of which sheds some light on the history of Christianity. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s enhanced an understanding among a number of Christian and Jewish scholars that Jesus and his disciples operated alongside other Jewish and Messianic groups.37 Turn of the twenty-first-century scholarship of early Christianity tends to speak about rabbinical Judaism and Christianity as twin traditions that developed during the same period, emerging from the same cradle.38 In this atmosphere of reconciliation that developed in the aftermath of the Vatican Council, groups of Christians and Jews organized in European, American, and other nations to discuss issues of mutual concern, and engage together in community projects. Visiting each other’s communities of faith has become a feature of Sunday school curriculums in liberal Jewish and Christian congregations in America. For centuries, synagogues had been territories reserved exclusively for Jews and churches for Christians. By the turn of the twenty-first century, in the American open market of religion Judaism has become, almost in spite of itself, an option that American spiritual seekers, most of them from Christian backgrounds, have often considered.39 Since 1978, three popes—Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVIII, and Pope Francis—have contributed enormously to reconciliation between Christians and Jews.40 While Catholic critics of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have considered them to be conservatives, especially on issues of sexuality and gender, in the realm of reconciliation between the faiths they have adopted a progressive and inclusive stance. Making unprecedented gestures, the popes visited synagogues in Rome and met with Jewish delegations. Likewise, both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis visited the Holy Land, touring, in addition to Christian sites, Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, as well as the Wailing Wall, a Jewish historical and spiritual site.41 In defiance of hundreds of years of separation and animosity, the Vatican allowed for the creation of an association of Hebrew Catholics, composed mostly of Jews, who have wished to combine their Jewish identity and culture with their Catholic faith.42 A number of Hebrew Catholic communities organized in Israel, conducting their liturgy in Hebrew.43 The Church

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in Israel/Palestine is mostly Arab speaking, and the Vatican authorized the creation of the Vicariate of St. James for its Hebrew followers. AN ELEPHANT IN A CHINA SHOP? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the dialogue between Christians and Jews headed into a new century, its proponents looked back with contentment at half a century of an interfaith reconciliation movement and concluded that huge improvements have taken place in the relationship between the two communities of faith.44 The movement of interfaith dialogue has succeeded, at least moderately, at putting to rest old prejudices and animosities and has succeeded in at least combating centuries-old Christian accusations against Judaism and Jews. It removed unfavorable stereotypes from sermons, prayer books, textbooks, and scholarly publications. Most importantly, the movement of reconciliation between Christians and Jews helped improve the sense of security and dignity of Jews as an accepted people with a respectable religious tradition.45 It is little wonder that advocates of the interfaith dialogue have looked upon Mel Gibson as marching into the field of Christian-Jewish relationship the same way they would have looked at an elephant walking into a china shop. Aware that the film might portray the Jews in an unfavorable light, leaders of the dialogue created a committee of Christian and Jewish scholars to offer advice and advocate changes in the screenplay of the film. They feared, even before the filming, that Gibson would show little concern for the possible impact the movie might have on Christian attitudes toward Jews, as well as for historical accuracy.46 Granted, Gibson did make some gestures or concessions toward “Jewish sensitivity,” such as not placing in the English subtitles of the film the horrific words, “His blood be upon us and upon our children” (based on Matthew 27:25), which the Jewish crowd in the movie utters in Aramaic, the language Gibson, and others, imagined Palestinian Jews to have spoken in Jesus’s time. Wishing to dramatize the passion narrative “just the way it happened . . . the story as the Bible tells it,” Gibson had no use for sophisticated scholarship on early Christianity, and ignored academic works that have cast doubt on the authenticity of Gospel passages that tell the story of the passion. However, he relied, at least in part, on the visions of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, an early nineteenth-century German Catholic nun, and added to the screenplay elements that go beyond the New Testament narratives. Her visions, and other moments in which Gibson allowed himself to deviate from and exaggerate, or aggravate, the already uneasy, if not damning, New Testament narratives, add to, or highlight, the Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus and portray the Jews of the era, and especially the

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priestly elite, in a particularly negative light.47 This is evident in the film, for example, when Mary Magdalene approaches Roman officers, asking for the release of Jesus, but the Romans’ hands are tied. The Jewish authorities had ordered Jesus’s arrest, and there was nothing the Romans could do to change this unfortunate decision. The cross on which the Roman authorities crucified Jesus was produced, according to the movie, in no other place than the Temple. Gibson filmed long, gruesome scenes of torture and humiliation that come to give a realistic depiction of the scope of Jesus’s suffering for which Jews, along with Roman soldiers, are responsible. Actors in traditional passion plays, most of them amateurs, who performed voluntarily had not experienced the pain and injury, which Jim (James Patrick) Caviezel, who played Jesus Christ in The Passion had undergone. Both the director and the major actor had seen the filming of a Passion play as a mission. Scholars of early Christianity have taken special exception to Gibson’s portrayal of the realities of the Roman rule in Judea. Paula Fredrickson and Elaine Pagels, for example, went out of their way to protest the picture that The Passion has suggested.48 Kathleen Corley and Robert Webb edited a collection of essays presenting the research of thirteen scholars that compared elements in the film to the actual historical realities of the New Testament narratives.49 They point out that the Romans ruled Judea, not unlike other provinces of their empire, with an iron fist, suppressing all groups or individuals that challenged their rule. Crucifixion was a routine Roman punishment, inflicted liberally, for a wide range of crimes. The Romans were not an auxiliary force that abided by the decisions, let alone whims, of the Jewish priestly class, but rather stern and powerful rulers of the country. Pontius Pilate was known as a firm and harsh ruler, and the Romans in Judea were far from lenient when confronting messianic groups and preachers that announced the coming kingdom. “Both the Plot and the characterization in the Passion significantly alter the Gospels’ portrayals,” the editors concluded.50 Observers have also questioned Gibson’s stance on non-Christians’ faiths in general, and on Jews and Judaism in particular. In an interview with the New Yorker, the filmmaker stated that non-Christians, as well as errant Christians, are going to hell.51 His father, Hutton Gibson, is a promoter of Sedevacantism, the idea that the popes who conducted or followed Vatican II are not legitimate heirs of St. Peter.52 Likewise, he was a Holocaust denier, one of those who claimed that the murder of European Jews during World War II never happened. Combining traditional anti-Jewish statements and the rejection of Vatican II, Gibson’s father has also supported the opinion that the Vatican II Council was a Jewish-Masonic plot.53 Mel Gibson has largely followed in his father’s footsteps, leading many to conclude that he identifies with his father’s opinions.

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Such voices did not deter the public, as is evident by the huge popularity of the film. The Passion has proved to be a commercial success with tens of millions of people, especially in the United States, with its huge conservative evangelical constituency, hailing the production.54 For many, it has become a devotional film, stirring strong Christian sentiments and a renewed religious commitment.55 Surprisingly, audiences have not necessarily noticed anything extraordinary about the narrative of the film, and were mostly unconcerned about the portrayal of the Jews. As far as the viewers were concerned, a decision to watch the movie did not signify bad will toward the Jews. Likewise, the film did not alter the attitudes of most spectators about the Jews. Whatever opinions they had held about Jews before they watched the film remained mostly unchanged. The benign reactions of Christian laypersons to the film, in contrast to the outcries of the scholarly and interfaith communities, pointed to unawareness, or indifference to Jewish concerns, as well as a sense among many that the film depicted loyally the historical realities of the Passion. In that, the reactionary Gibson could declare a triumph.56 While not necessarily the general sentiment, the movie gave rise occasionally to anti-Jewish reactions. The Jerusalem Report published, for example, a photograph of a Pentecostal church that announced on its billboard, for all the world to see, that “the Jews killed the Lord Christ,” a less likely means of attracting attention before the movie aired.57 The Passion also offered more legitimacy to other productions or publications with similar theological messages. The creators of the movie Judas, for example, released their film, “which had been sitting on the shelf since 2001,” only after The Passion succeeded beyond expectations in attracting large audiences. Gibson’s film thus allowed the producers of Judas to promote their movie as a film akin to The Passion and as such interesting for the same audience.58 The success of The Passion should not be surprising. Although the interfaith dialogue has had remarkable achievements in decreasing negative stereotypes and improving relationships between Jews and Christians, it would be wrong to describe the attitude, since the 1960s, of all of Christianity toward the Jewish people as merely that of amity and friendship. The dialogue was spearheaded by liberal and scholarly Christian elites in mainstream churches, often where synods, councils, theologians, popes, and bishops had seen it as their duty to educate the rank and file and bring about a change in Christian attitudes toward the Jews. They labored hard in their attempts to combat negative stereotypes and could claim impressive achievements in a relatively short period of time. However, they could succeed only so much in eradicating centuries-old images, and accusations. Jewish observers have noted that official recognition did not necessarily equal true acceptance, while others have complained that many Christians replaced old anti-Jewish sentiments with more covert forms of anti-Semitism.59 In addition, the movement

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of interfaith dialogue has not made inroads into all Christian quarters. Among conservative Christian groups, Orthodox or Middle Eastern churches, for example, Replacement Theology still prevails, and many churches have not even entered dialogue with Jews. As a rule, popular culture is truer to the sentiments of the populace than high brow theological publications. Old accusations against Jews did not disappear in Christian popular culture, even if they were less prevalent than before. Christians continued to portray Jews as the slayers of Jesus or as the motivating cause behind his death in musical and theatrical works, even before the production of The Passion. For instance, in Jesus Christ Superstar, a stage production of the 1970s, the Jews cry out: “Crucify him, crucify him.” Such negative presentations of Jews, which have gone on since the Late Middle Ages, and have deep-rooted cultural impact, could not disappear within one generation. The Passion should therefore be viewed not as an aberration in Christian relations to the Jews, but as representing a widely held and popular sentiment, which some Christians have struggled against and others have partially disguised, under pressure from the more progressive forces within Western Christianity. The interfaith dialogue was led from above, in the more hierarchical, or centralized, mainstream churches, and by theologically educated elites. The leaders have not always consulted laypersons and carried reforms despite opposition from persons such as Hutton Gibson. The latter have found in the production of The Passion, as well as other such popular venues, opportunities to express their pre-Vatican II convictions. CONCLUSION The Passion attacked, at times inadvertently, the premises of Christian-Jewish reconciliation. It portrayed the Jews as the major culprits in the decision to kill Christ, as those insisting on his execution against the inclination of a lenient governor, and as those taking part in Jesus’s humiliation and torture. It ignored the Catholic, and other churches’ declarations in the generation preceding the production of the film, which emphasized the limited Jewish involvement in the killing of Jesus. The movie is oblivious to, if not outright antagonistic, to a half century of attempts to eradicate traditional defamatory accusations against the Jews, choosing instead pre-Vatican II portrayals of Jews and their role in the death of Jesus. The success of the movie, despite its rebellion against the theological currents, pointed to the limitations of the movement of interfaith dialogue and to the mere partial success of the Catholic reforms in the Church’s attitudes toward the Jews. Church councils can pass resolutions, theologians can write new positions on Jews, and scholars can point to inaccuracies in sacred

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narratives. Old habits, however, die hard, and centuries-old convictions, often non-historical, or holding only partial connection to past realities, have become sacred narratives and as such are often part of popular perceptions. The Passion and similar productions have thus popped out from under the official Christian rug, to haunt the reformers and remind the Jews how fragile and problematic their place is within the Christian mind. Interfaith dialogue itself is a delicate mechanism where good will and generosity of spirit attempt to overcome long held sentiments of those taking traditionalist reading of sacred scriptures. Still, The Passion did not launch a theological counterrevolution, but rather pointed to strong reactionary undercurrents that would become more forceful in the years following the release of the film. The movement of interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews has been a revolutionary development in the history of Christian relations to the Jews, one that could not pass without objections, dissent, and negative sentiments and actions. The 2010s–2020s have witnessed a partial retreat in Christian commitment to improved relationship with the Jews; The Passion of the Christ played however only a relatively small part in bringing about the changing atmosphere. NOTES 1. Marcie Lenk, “Mel Gibson’s Passion and the Jews,” https:​//​www​.myjewishlearning​ .com​/article​/mel​-gibsons​-passion​-and​-the​-jews/. Accessed on April 6, 2023. 2. James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York: Vintage, 2001). 3. See James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 32–36. 4. See, for example, Lilith Wagner, “HaBesora Al Pi Gibson,” Yediot Aharonot, August 5, 2003, 14.15; Peter Boyer, “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession,” New Yorker, September 15, 2003, 71; Amy-Jill Levine, “Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the Pharisees,” Religion in the News 6, no. 3 (Fall, 2003): 13–15, 23. 5. Karma Ben-Johanan, Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021). 6. Miri Rubin, “A Life, a Death, a Legacy: the History of Ritual Murder,” a lecture given in London, November 14, 2014 https:​//​bisa​.bbk​.ac​.uk​/event​/a​-life​-a​-death​-a​ -legacy​-writing​-the​-history​-of​-ritual​-murder/. Accessed April 20, 2023. 7. For examples of such encounters, see Lawrence G. Charp, “Accept the Truth from Whomsoever Gives It: Jewish-Protestant Dialogue, Interfaith Alliance and Pluralism, 1880–1910,” American Jewish History 89, no. 3 (September 2001): 261–78; On the World Parliament of Religion, see Marcus Braybooke, Pilgrimage of Hope: One Hundred Years of Global Interfaith Dialogue (New York: Crossroad, 1992).

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8. Benny Kraut, “A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics, and the Protestant Goodwill Movement,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William R. Hutchinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193–230. 9. On interfaith dialogue in Britain, see Marcus Braybooke, A History of the Council of Christians and Jews (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1991); Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Future of Jewish Dialogue (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999). 10. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1985), 403–04; May Christine Athans, The Coughlin-Fahey Connection: Father Charles E. Coughlin, Father Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., and Religious Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1938–1954 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). 11. On Gerald L. K. Smith and his relation to the Jews during the period, see Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith, Minister of Hate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). On the rise of anti-Semitism in America during the period, see Leonard Dinerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 48–149, and Frank E. Eakin, What Price Prejudice: Christian Antisemitism in America (New York: Stimulus, 1998), 95–100. 12. On Niebuhr and his attitude toward Jews, and the Zionist movement, see Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Rapprochment between Jews and Christians,” Christian Century, January 7, 1926, 9–11; Reinhold Niebuhr, “Jews after the War,” Nation, February 21, 1942, 214–16; February 28, 1942, 253–55. See also Dan Rice, “Reinhold Niebuhr and Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45 (March 1977): 101–46; Egal Feldman, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 46 (Summer/ Fall 1984): 292–302; Richard Wrightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Egal Feldman, “American Protestant Theologians on the Frontier of Jewish-Christian Relations, 1922–1982,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 363–85; Eyal Naveh, “The Hebraic Foundation of the Christian Faith, According to Reinhold Niebuhr,” Judaism 41 (Winter 1992): 37–56. 13. For example, Carroll, Constantine’s Sword. 14. On Wise’s controversial sermons, see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 302. On Kaplan and the early Reconstructionist movement, see Richard Libowitz, Mordecai M. Kaplan and the Development of Reconstructionism (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983); Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). 15. Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), 106–28. 16. Ibid.; Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (New York: Anchor Books, 1960). 17. R. M. Brown, The Ecumenical Revolution (London: Burns Oates, 1967); L.E. Dirk, The Ecumenical Movement (New York: World Council of Churches, 1969); Marcus Braybrooke, Inter Faith Organizations, 1893–1979 (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1980).

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18. “First Assembly of the WCC, Amsterdam, Holland, 1948, The Christian Approach to the Jews,” in Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. Helga Croner (New York: Stimulus Books, 1977), 72–85. 19. Ben Merson, “The Minister, the Rabbi and Their House of God,” Collier’s, February 17, 1951, 27, 36–37. 20. Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966). 21. George Weigel, To Sanctify the World: the Vital Legacy of Vatican II (New York: Basic Books, 2022). 22. Croner, Stepping Stones, 1–2. 23. On the council and its attitude toward Jews, see Arthur Gilbert, The Vatican Council and the Jews (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1968). 24. Cf. Croner, Stepping Stones; Helga Croner ed., More Stepping Stones to Jewish Christian Relations (New York: Stimulus Books, 1985). 25. See such declarations as Croner (ed.), Stepping Stones and The Theology of the Churches and the Jewish People: Statements by the World Council of Churches and Its Member Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1988). 26. Croner, Stepping Stones, 87. 27. Ibid. For similar statements in the 1970s and 1980s, see Croner, More Stepping Stones, 86. 28. Franklin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Roy A. Eckardt, Elder and Younger Brother: The Encounter of Jews and Christians (New York: Scribner’s, 1967); Paul M. Van Buren, Discerning the Way: A Theology of the Jewish Christian Realities (New York: Seabury Press, 1980). 29. On the debates within the Lutheran churches, for example, see Arthur Gilbert, “New Trends in the Protestant Mission to the Jew,” Conservative Judaism 19 (Spring 1965): 51–56. 30. Bruce J. Lieske, Witnessing to the Jewish People (St. Louis, MO: Board for Evangelism, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, 1975). 31. Yaakov Ariel, “A Different Kind of Dialogue? Messianic Judaism and Jewish Christian Relations,” CrossCurrents 243 (September 2012): 318–27. 32. Gerald Strober, Portrait of the Elder Brother (New York: American Jewish Committee and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1972). 33. For example, Rosemary Ruther, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Root of Antisemitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974); Carroll, Constantine’s Sword; John T. Pawlikowski, Christ in the Light of the Christian Jewish Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1982). 34. For example, Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews; Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide. 35. For one of many examples, see Alice L. Eckardt and A. Roy Eckardt, Long Night’s Journey into Day (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). 36. Eva Fleisher, Auschwitz—Beginning of a New Era: Reflections on the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1977); Abraham J. Peck ed., Jews and Christians After the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982); Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (Louisville, KY: Westminster John

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Knox Press, 1995), 120–40; Alan L Berger, Harry Cargas and Susan Nowak eds., The Continuing Agony: From the Carmelite Convent to the Crosses at Auschwitz (New York: Global Publications, 2002). 37. David Flusser, in collaboration with R. Steven Notley, Jesus (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2001). 38. For example, Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 39. Yaakov Ariel, “Unofficial Conversations: Non-Jewish Participants in Contemporary American Synagogues,” in Becoming Jewish: New Jews and Emerging Jewish Communities in a Globalized World eds. Tudor Parfitt and Netanel Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 334–52. 40. Ben-Johanan, Jacob’s Younger Brother. 41. On John Paul II and his relation toward the Jews, see, for example, Darcy O’Brien, The Hidden Pope (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1998); On Pope Francis and his involvement with the Jews and Israel, see “Pope Francis Appeals for Israeli -Palestinian Dialogue,” by Vatican News Staff Member, Vatican News, November 27, 2022 https:​//​www​.vaticannews​.va​/en​/pope​/news​/2022​-11​/pope​-francis​-appeals​ -for​-israeli​-palestinian​-dialogue​.html. Accessed April 19, 2023. 42. Association of Hebrew Catholics website, https:​//​www​.hebrewcatholic​.net/. Accessed April 19, 2023. 43. Emma O’Donnell Poliakov, The Nun in the Synagogue: Judeo-Centric Catholicism in Israel (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020). 44. Yaakov Ariel, “Interfaith Dialogue and the Golden Age of Christian-Jewish Relations,” Studies in Christian Jewish Relations 6, no.1 (2011): 1–18. 45. Rebecca Moore, A Blessing to Each Other: A New Account of Jewish and Christian Relations (New York: Herder and Herder, 2021). 46. Steven Leonard Jacobs, “Can There Be Jewish-Christian Dialogue after the Passion?” in Mel Gibson’s Film and its Critics: Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 43–54. 47. Robert L. Webb, “The Passion and the Influence of Emmerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” in Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: the Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History, eds. Kathleen E. Corley and Robert L. Webb (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 160–73. 48. David Reminick, “Groves of Academe: Passions, Past and Present,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2004, 26–27. 49. Corley and Webb eds., Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. 50. Kathleen E. Corley and Robert L. Webb, “Conclusion: The Passion, the Gospels, and the Claims of History,” in Jesus and Mel Gibson’s the Passion of Christ, 173–82. 51. Boyer, “The Jesus War,” 71. 52. Steven Kurutz, “Hutton Gibson, Extremist and Father of Mel Gibson, Dies at 101,” The New York Times, June 4, 2020 https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/06​/04​/us​/ hutton​-gibson​-extremist​-and​-father​-of​-mel​-gibson​-dies​-at​-101​.html. Accessed April 19, 2023.

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53. Stuart Schoffman, “The Gospel According to Gibson,” The Jerusalem Report, March 22, 2004, 40; Frank Rich, “Mel Gibson’s Martyrdom Complex,” The New York Times, March 08, 2003 https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/08​/03​/movies​/mel​-gibson​-s​ -martyrdom​-complex​.html. Accessed April 19, 2023. 54. Neal King, “Truth at Last: Evangelical Community Embrace the Passion of the Christ,” in Mel Gibson’s Film and its Critics: Re-Viewing the Passion, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 151–63. 55. Randall Colburn, “The Passion of the Christ was the Blunt Force Weapon Evangelicals Were Looking For,” AV Club, March 7, 2019 https:​//​www​.avclub​.com​ /the​-passion​-of​-the​-christ​-was​-the​-blunt​-force​-weapon​-ev​-1832999651. Accessed April 19, 2023. 56. Mark Royden Winchell, God, Man & Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from the Birth of a Nation to the Passion of the Christ (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), 215–33. 57. Schoffman, “The Gospel According to Gibson.” 58. Peter Chattaway, “The Passion of the Christ,” Christianity Today, February 25, 2004 https:​//​www​.christianitytoday​.com​/ct​/2004​/februaryweb​-only​/ passionofthechrist​.html. Accessed April 19, 2023. 59. Cf. Judith Hersheopf Banki, Christian Responses to the Yom Kippur War: Implication for Christian Jewish Relations (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1974); Michael Lerner, The Socialism of Fools: Antisemitism on the Left (Oakland: Tikkun Books, 1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ariel, Yaakov. “A Different Kind of Dialogue? Messianic Judaism and Jewish Christian Relations.” CrossCurrents 243 (September 2012): 318-27. ———. “Interfaith Dialogue and the Golden Age of Christian-Jewish Relations.” Studies in Christian Jewish Relations 6, no.1 (2011): 1-18. ———. “Unofficial Conversations: Non-Jewish Participants in Contemporary American Synagogues.” In Becoming Jewish: New Jews and Emerging Jewish Communities in a Globalized World, edited by Tudor Parfitt and Netanel Fisher, 334-52. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Association of Hebrew Catholics website, https://www.hebrewcatholic.net/. Athans, May Christine. The Coughlin-Fahey Connection: Father Charles E. Coughlin, Father Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., and Religious Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1938-1954. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Banki, Judith Hersheopf. Christian Responses to the Yom Kippur War: Implication for Christian Jewish Relations. New York: American Jewish Committee, 1974. Ben-Johanan, Karma. Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. Berger, Alan L, Harry Cargas and Susan Nowak, eds. The Continuing Agony: From the Carmelite Convent to the Crosses at Auschwitz. New York: Global Publications, 2002.

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Boyer, Peter. “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession.” New Yorker, September 15, 2003. Braybooke, Marcus. A History of the Council of Christians and Jews. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1991. ———. Inter Faith Organizations, 1893-1979. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1980. ———. Pilgrimage of Hope: One Hundred Years of Global Interfaith Dialogue. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Brown, R. M. The Ecumenical Revolution. London: Burns Oates, 1967. Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. Chattaway, Peter. “The Passion of the Christ.” Christianity Today, February 25, 2004 https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/februaryweb-only/passionofthechrist. html. Charp, Lawrence G. “Accept the Truth from Whomsoever Gives It: Jewish-Protestant Dialogue, Interfaith Alliance and Pluralism, 1880-1910.” American Jewish History 89, no. 3 (September 2001): 261-78. Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. The Future of Jewish Dialogue. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. Colburn, Randall. “The Passion of the Christ Was the Blunt Force Weapon Evangelicals Were Looking For.” AV Club, March 7, 2019 https://www.avclub. com/the-passion-of-the-christ-was-the-blunt-force-weapon-ev-1832999651. Corley, Kathleen E. and Robert L. Webb (eds.), “Conclusion: The Passion, the Gospels, and the Claims of History.” In Jesus and Mel Gibson’s the Passion of Christ, 173-82. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Croner, Helga, ed.. More Stepping Stones to Jewish Christian Relations. New York: Stimulus Books, 1985. ———. Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-Christian Relations. New York: Stimulus Books, 1977. ———. The Theology of the Churches and the Jewish People: Statements by the World Council of Churches and Its Member Churches. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1988. Dinerstein, Leonard. Antisemitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Dirk, L. E. The Ecumenical Movement. New York: World Council of Churches, 1969. Eakin, Frank E. What Price Prejudice: Christian Antisemitism in America. New York: Stimulus, 1998. Dolan, Jay P. The American Catholic Experience. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1985. Eckardt, Alice L. and A. Roy Eckardt. Long Night’s Journey into Day. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Eckardt, Roy A. Elder and Younger Brother: The Encounter of Jews and Christians. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. Feldman, Egal. “American Protestant Theologians on the Frontier of Jewish-Christian Relations, 1922-1982.” In Anti-Semitism in American History, edited by David A. Gerber, 363-85. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

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———. “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Jews.” Jewish Social Studies 46 (Summer/Fall 1984): 292-302. “First Assembly of the WCC, Amsterdam, Holland, 1948, The Christian Approach to the Jews.” In Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-Christian Relations, edited by Helga Croner, 72-85. New York: Stimulus Books, 1977. Fleisher, Eva. Auschwitz—Beginning of a New Era: Reflections on the Holocaust. New York: Ktav, 1977. Flusser David, in collaboration with R. Steven Notley. Jesus. Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2001. Gilbert, Arthur. “New Trends in the Protestant Mission to the Jew.” Conservative Judaism 19 (Spring 1965): 51-56. ———. The Vatican Council and the Jews. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1968. Glazer, Nathan. American Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Glock, Charles Y. and Rodney Stark. Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966. Haynes, Stephen R. Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995. Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew. New York: Anchor Books, 1960. Jacobs, Steven Leonard. “Can There Be Jewish-Christian Dialogue after the Passion?” In Mel Gibson’s Film and its Critics: Re-Viewing the Passion, edited by S. Brent Plate, 43-54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Jeansonne, Glen. Gerald L. K. Smith, Minister of Hate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. King, Neal. “Truth at Last: Evangelical Community Embrace the Passion of the Christ.” In Mel Gibson’s Film and its Critics: Re-Viewing the Passion, edited by S. Brent Plate, 151-63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Kraut, Benny. “A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics, and the Protestant Goodwill Movement.” In Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960, edited by William R. Hutchinson, 193-230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kurutz, Steven. “Hutton Gibson, Extremist and Father of Mel Gibson, Dies at 101.” The New York Times, June 4, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/us/ hutton-gibson-extremist-and-father-of-mel-gibson-dies-at-101.html. Lenk, Marcie. “Mel Gibson’s Passion and the Jews,” myjewishlearning.com, n.d., https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mel-gibsons-passion-and-the-jews/. Lerner, Michael. The Socialism of Fools: Antisemitism on the Left. Oakland: Tikkun Books, 1992. Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Levine, Amy-Jill. “Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the Pharisees.” Religion in the News 6, no. 3 (Fall, 2003). https://www3.trincoll.edu/csrpl/RINVol6No3/Mel%20 Gibson,%20Scribes,%20Pharisees.htm.

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Libowitz, Richard. Mordecai M. Kaplan and the Development of Reconstructionism. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983. Lieske, Bruce J. Witnessing to the Jewish People. St. Louis, MO: Board for Evangelism, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, 1975. Littell, Franklin. The Crucifixion of the Jews. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Merson, Ben. “The Minister, the Rabbi and Their House of God.” Collier’s, February 17, 1951, 36-37. Meyer, Michael A. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Moore, Rebecca. A Blessing to Each Other: A New Account of Jewish and Christian Relations. New York: Herder and Herder, 2021. Naveh, Eyal. “The Hebraic Foundation of the Christian Faith, According to Reinhold Niebuhr.” Judaism 41 (Winter 1992): 37-56. Niebuhr, Reinhold. “Jews after the War.” Nation, February 21 and 28, 1942. ———. “The Rapprochment between Jews and Christians.” Christian Century, January 7, 1926. O’Brien, Darcy. The Hidden Pope. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1998. O’Donnell Poliakov, Emma. The Nun in the Synagogue: Judeo-Centric Catholicism in Israel. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020. Pawlikowski, John T. Christ in the Light of the Christian Jewish Dialogue. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. Peck, Abraham J., ed. Jews and Christians After the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982. Reminick, David. “Groves of Academe: Passions, Past and Present.” The New Yorker, March 8, 2004, 26-27. Rice, Dan. “Reinhold Niebuhr and Judaism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45 (March 1977): 101-46. Rich, Frank. “Mel Gibson’s Martyrdom Complex.” The New York Times, March 08, 2003 https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/movies/mel-gibson-s-martyrdomcomplex.html. Royden Winchell, Mark. God, Man & Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from the Birth of a Nation to the Passion of the Christ. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008. Rubin, Miri. “A Life, a Death, a Legacy: the History of Ritual Murder,” a lecture given in London, November 14, 2014 https://bisa.bbk.ac.uk/ event/a-life-a-death-a-legacy-writing-the-history-of-ritual-murder/. Ruther, Rosemary. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Root of Antisemitism. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Schoffman, Stuart. “The Gospel According to Gibson.” The Jerusalem Report, March 22, 2004, 17-21. Scult, Mel. Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Shapiro, James. Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play. New York: Vintage, 2001. Strober, Gerald. Portrait of the Elder Brother. New York: American Jewish Committee and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1972.

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Van Buren, Paul M. Discerning the Way: A Theology of the Jewish Christian Realities. New York: Seabury Press, 1980. Vatican News Staff Member. “Pope Francis Appeals for Israeli -Palestinian Dialogue.” Vatican News, November 27, 2022 https://www.vaticannews.va/en/ pope/news/2022-11/pope-francis-appeals-for-israeli-palestinian-dialogue.html. Wagner, Lilith. “HaBesora Al Pi Gibson.” Yediot Aharonot, August 5, 2003. Webb, Robert L. “The Passion and the Influence of Emmerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” In Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: the Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History, edited by Kathleen E. Corley and Robert L. Webb, 160-73. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Weigel, George. To Sanctify the World: the Vital Legacy of Vatican II. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Wrightman Fox, Richard. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Chapter 3

What Apocalypto Reveals Migratory Premonition and Religiosity in Gibson’s ‘NA’ Film Graham Lee

This chapter argues for two main claims. First, that the plot device that can be called “migratory premonition” figures centrally in the narrative of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006). A migratory premonition is a vision, often a dream, had by some character(s) in a film that signals the later arrival of a deus ex machina by means of which and of subsequent migration both the protagonist(s) survives. Subsequently, the chapter argues that the utilization of migratory premonition in the film suggests that the film qualifies as a religious film in the broad sense of Mariola Marczak. In that case, not only is The Passion of the Christ (2004) not the only religious film directed by Gibson (a related case might be made regarding the 1995 Braveheart), but that his directorial intentions in Apocalypto are in part religious is indicated by his utilization of migratory premonition in the film as its director. In summarizing her distinction between the broad and narrow notions of the religious film genre, Marczak notes that the former comprises all films referring to any religion or religiosity in any way, even to a variety of films of different genres.1 Films about, produced by, and intended specifically (though not necessarily only) for Native Americans (qua viewers) might be termed “Native films”—or, less exclusionarily and simply in a way, “Native American films.” Hence, we can refer to Apocalypto as an “NA” film—other examples including Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe (1991), Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005)—as shorthand for films about, though not produced by, Native Americans. The distinction is important because, not being produced by and intended specifically for 63

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Native Americans, they in general might take NA films not to be applicable to themselves (as in the more traditionally acronymic “N/A”) such that they do not or would not claim—and would not want others to think they claim— such productions as their own. It would be suggested by this that they take the films to be undeserving of designation by the conventional moniker associated with them as a people. Some prominent Native Americans in the film industry who have received some such films well might not have this issue with the sort. Relatedly, some Native Americans who have a stake in the reception of Apocalypto and its ilk have themselves received it warmly, adding an interesting complexity to controversies surrounding the film. These include controversies primarily concerning Gibson, the film’s quality according to certain Hollywood elites, and its cultural faithfulness and accuracy according to Mayan descendants and scholars. However, there is relative consensus in scholarship in terms of assumptions of Gibson’s directorial intentions, which will be examined in detail in preparation for the analysis of the last two sections of this chapter.2 THE CONTROVERSIALITY OF APOCALYPTO Apocalypto has remained controversial since the date of its release, while its controversiality has remained eclipsed by that of Gibson himself. Yet, the controversiality of each on its own has fed into that of the other. Notable controversy surrounding the director, varying opinions on the film and scholarly disagreement regarding the film are detailed in this section. Indeed, there has been significant controversy concerning Gibson since before the time of the film’s release. As Adam Ellwanger summarily puts it, “Gibson’s public life has been marked by numerous controversies, and he has often made public comments that fuel the claims of his detractors.”3 Robert Yelle notes (at least some of the) many things for which the filmmaker has been famous, including as star and now director of some of the more violent films created in an age seemingly devoted to violence; as director of The Passion of the Christ (2004), a hyperbrutal and ostensibly literal depiction of Christ’s last days and Crucifixion that merged the genre of action film with the most famous story ever told, resulting in what Leon Wieseltier referred to in The New Republic as a “sacred snuff film”; as admirer of the ultra-conservative nineteenth-century Catholic nun Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824), who was beatified in 2004; and as DUI perpetrator whose offensive rant against Jews while inebriated and in police custody confirmed the image of a troubled and prejudiced man.4

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Responding to if not predicting such remarks regarding the film, A. O. Scott comments in a 2006 New York Times article, “[S]ay what you will about [Gibson]—about his problem with booze or his problem with Jews—he is a serious filmmaker.”5 Opinions about Apocalypto range from highly supportive to highly critical. Some in the entertainment industry have been on the more enthusiastic end. In perhaps the most favorable review of Apocalypto (ever) given, Robert Duvall said, Maybe the best movie I’ve seen in twenty-five years is Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Brilliant. I said to my wife, ‘is this as good or better than Apocalypse Now?’ She said, ‘it’s more complete.’ Now some may disagree, that’s fine. Like some idiot in The Washington Post, something Hunter . . . Well, he’s a jerk and you can quote me. He said that Mel Gibson is not a deep thinker, whatever that means. Well [Hunter’s] just a corpulent philistine from Kansas City! [laughs]. ‘Cause when I saw that film, I’d never seen anything like it. I don’t care what anybody says, I’m voting for it for Best Picture.6

In an interview with another actor, Edward James Olmos remarked, “I was totally caught off guard . . . It’s arguably the best movie I’ve seen in years. I was blown away.”7 Meanwhile, Spike Lee is noted as having put the film on his list of all-time essential films in 2013.8 Opinions on the film among Mayan descendants and local Guatemalans are mixed. Some activists in Guatemala, where a large part of the Mayan empire was located, have said the film is unrealistic. According to Lucio Yaxon, one such activist, Gibson suggests through the film that Mayans are savages.9 This sentiment is shared by some Mayan descendants in Guatemala and Mexico, who “say the portrayal of Mayas in Apocalypto is derogatory, showing them as being savage.”10 Penelope Kelsey remarks that the film and Malick’s The New World “have been rejected by descendants of the Indigenous peoples purportedly portrayed in them.”11 Still, the following favorable opinion of the film is given by a Guatemalan family interviewed for the 2012 documentary, Gods and Kings: “Apocalypto: [it was] very nice. It showed the cruel life we had in those times. They used parts of skulls that they had hanging all around their necks. That was definitely how the ancestors lived. It’s a very true movie.”12 Perhaps the most critical reception of the film has been in academia. David Freidel, an archaeology professor at Southern Methodist University, preemptively comments, “I can promise you that there will be a massive repudiation of this film, not only as a work of fiction, but as a systematic and willful misrepresentation of the Maya.”13 Yet, there has been a fair amount of debate in scholarship over the film, typically concerning its depiction of the Maya along various dimensions. One example is Gibson’s choice to shoot

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the film “entirely in Yucatec Maya,”14 which has been a subject of scholarly debate.15 A more prominent locus of debate is the nature and extent of Mayan human sacrifice, which has been connected by some to the Aztecs. Evidence suggests that the Maya did commit human sacrifices, as indicated by the walls of carved skulls found at Chichen Itza, among other sites, and by the paintings of human sacrifices recently unearthed at San Bartolo.16 In an interview for an issue of Archaeology, Richard D. Hansen comments, “We know warfare was going on. The Postclassic center of Tulum is a walled city; these sites had to be in defensive positions. There was tremendous Aztec influence by this time. The Aztecs were clearly ruthless in their conquest and pursuit of sacrificial victims, a practice that spilled over into some of the Maya areas.”17 According to Lisa Lucero of New Mexico State University, though, “the classic Maya really didn’t go in for mass sacrifice . . . That was the Aztecs” (my emphasis).18 Others, while noting likely Aztec influence on the phenomenon of human sacrifice in Mayan culture, emphasize that the practice occurred late in the history of Mayan civilization.19 Meanwhile, Farhad Safinia, co-producer of the film, suggests that the reality of Mayan savagery is much more intense than even the film indicates. Referring to evidence that Mayan crowds tore apart the bodies of sacrificial victims “limb by limb,” Safinia commented that “‘you can’t show that stuff’ on screen.”20 He also remarks, “The Mayans did engage in decapitation. They did roll bodies down the temple steps.”21 According to Lucero, the film focuses on the function of mass sacrifice as if ready to inject its own view amid the lack of scholarly consensus. She takes the “lack of signs of warfare” at sites she studied and many others to more support “a political collapse of the classic Maya,” with people moving northward or back into the jungle during political upheaval and drought.22 Lucero’s stance indicates another point of dispute in scholarship concerning the film’s depiction of the Maya: what became of their civilization. Archaeologists have noted that no one knows why the Maya, who ruled for more than a millennium in the Americas, “abandoned their cities and allowed their majestic pyramids to become overgrown with jungle.”23 What is known is that the Mayan civilization began its decline after the eighth century.24 SCHOLARS ON GIBSON ON THE “END” OF MAYAN CIVILIZATION Gibson has been upfront about the decline of Mayan civilization as one of his thematic focuses in the film. Scholars generally have been critical of him on this front. Both are discussed in this section, in preparation for the discussion

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of the themes focused on in the next section. Here are some oft-cited remarks by Gibson as to his aims for the film (hence quoted at length): Well, what I am making, first and foremost, is an action-adventure film. What I was looking for was a place and time in which to set the story. Now, the Mayan civilization per se didn’t specifically speak to me as a civilization above any other. It’s really the characteristics that brought about their downfall, which were also present in the collapse of other civilizations, which I thought would serve as a really interesting and heretofore unexplored backdrop for the story. It is mysterious, and I suppose that appealed to me. It’s a civilization about which there is still a lot to be learnt. . . . It was interesting to delve into reasons why [this civilization] may have crumbled and collapsed and moved on. And the Mayans used to do this periodically. Their civilizations would rise to great heights and collapse completely many times over the course of centuries. I think we have come up with plausible reasons as to why they underwent such collapses.25

Gibson noted that it was important for him to make this “parallel” since the cycles repeat “over and over again.”26 He comments, “People think that modern man is so enlightened, but we’re susceptible to the same forces.”27 The director has made clear in this interview and others that he means for the film to refer to environmental destruction, unbridled consumerism and the war in Iraq—that, as Stephen Spence puts it, “[Gibson] wants the bloodthirsty Mayans to represent an American society of spectacle and waste. He wants us to see the Mayan civilization as somehow ‘us.’”28 This, according to Spence, is one identification the filmmaker wants his audience to make but which ultimately undermines the latter’s “civilization in decline” analogy.29 Spence takes the premise of the film to be “muddled” because there is far from consensus in scholarship on the reasons for the decline of the Mayan civilization, as noted earlier, and he takes the film to have failed to convey that it was in decline, let alone that there was a certain reason for its decline. While the priest in the film mentions difficult times, a civilization on the brink of ruin is belied by “depictions of mining and use of the forest’s raw materials.”30 Sympathetically, Traci Ardren, recognizing the brutal violence practiced by the Maya on each other and avowing her study of child sacrifice during the classic Maya period, laments the lack of mention of Mayan achievements in art, science, spirituality, agriculture, and engineering in their urban centers.31 “Instead,” she says, “Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue.”32 Pete Sigal sees in the depicted Mayan brutality a harbinger of the film’s deus ex machina of sorts, Christian civilization: the director “fantasizes about a world in which the all-too-human hero (who,

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Gibson imagines, is just like him in so many ways) fights against perversion—the sadistic Maya state—saved in the end by the arrival of Christianity and an escape back to the forest.”33 James Aimers and Elizabeth Graham echo this sentiment, with a caveat. Jaguar Paw tells his wife that, instead of greeting the strangers, they ought to return to the forest. This is what many Maya in fact did, fleeing to remote parts of modern-day Campeche and Belize during the early period. At the end of the film, the viewer is reminded of the quotation opening it: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Aimers and Graham ask, Could it be that a Maya society that is collapsing on itself in an orgy of decadence and violence will in fact be saved by the arrival of Christianity? Do the Maya need the civilizing influence of the church, however brutal its application? Do they, in fact, deserve what is coming in some cosmic sense? It is hard to see any other reason for their arrival, unless Gibson wants to imply that a sequel will show us even more horrendous misery at the hands of the conquerors. (original emphasis)34

David Laraway makes explicit the new possibility Aimers and Graham intimate. In the last scene of the film, the young family, fatigued by and grateful for surviving their trials, notice the approach of several Spanish ships. The message is unmistakable: Jaguar Paw’s escape from his enemies despite the odds pales in comparison to the now looming threat. Laraway writes, The appearance of the first European ships on the horizon coincides precisely with the disappearance of his old world, as comfortingly familiar yet unblinkingly dangerous as it was. The wheel has turned once again: a new epoch has begun and all the previous travails of the protagonist are rendered moot and meaningless in the dissolution of a particular indigenous world.35

Laraway might agree with Gibson that there are ever-repeating cycles but might disagree as to whose they are, attributing their perpetuation (if in part) to the director rather than the Mayans. Whether Gibson intends Christianity as the implied savior of the Maya, he is assumed to have intended the sense of their disappearance. Spence notes that the film is a perfect example of what film scholar Jacqueline Kilpatrick refers to as “frozen time,” in terms of usual representation of the Hollywood Native American.36 One sort of case of frozen time is when a cultural production (e.g. a film) “depicts Native people as extinct or vanishing, relegating their existence in the present to a state of invisibility. The dominant culture can then go on in a state of denial: if Indians don’t exist anymore, then there’s no point repairing damages done to them in terms of land, language,

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or culture.”37 Spence adds that Gibson seems to be in this state of denial—if not plain ignorance—in interviews, such as when he says in an interview with Diane Sawyer that the Mayan people “aren’t around anymore,” and elsewhere expresses his interest in the “shroud of mystery” behind the Mayans’ disappearance.38 Mayan descendants living in the Yucatan Peninsula and other parts of Central America “might take issue with these statements,” Spence adds.39 MAYAN SURVIVAL AND MIGRATORY PREMONITION The film’s motif of Mayan survival is bound up with the theme, the plot device, we can call “migratory premonition.” This section is focused on their connection and is preparatory for an investigation of said theme in the plots of three other influential films about Native Americans preceding and from the same period as Apocalypto, in the next section. Britt Harrison notes that, in the film, the main character(s) is confronted by the realization that his to-then worldview “has been wholly inadequate in its partiality,” and is left to ponder how he “(and thus we) might practically and emotionally go on living.”40 Spence argues that the return and disappearance of Jaguar Paw and his family back to and in the forest is the most evident way in which the film may in fact undermine or contradict “Gibson’s ruminations on this ‘lost culture.’”41 In this, the director recycles the “‘back to nature’ trope so often leveled at the Hollywood Indian . . . to ‘make a new beginning,’ implying that his is the line that will survive, while the bloodthirsty masses he escaped from will fall.”42 Sigal traces this point to another scene, when children from one village encounter children from another group and invite the latter to join them. While the combined group follows captured villagers from afar in the forest, one of the older girls shouts to the parents not to worry about the children, that she will take care of them and that they now are her responsibility.43 Spence remarks that it is on account of this scene that he expected Jaguar Paw and his family to rejoin the children as the first generation of “a new beginning.” That the latter do not reappear is to leave us supposing their survival.44 Indeed, the survival of Jaguar Paw and his family (not to mention the children) is premonitorily foreshadowed in the film. After taking Jaguar Paw and other adult villagers captive, the slave traders force them to march to their destination in the heart of the Mayan Empire. Along the way, the traders encounter a plague-stricken girl. She predicts their demise by way of the following prophecy: You fear me? So you should . . . all you who are vile. Would you like to know how you will die? The sacred time is near . . . Beware the blackness of day.

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Beware the man who brings the jaguar. Behold him reborn from mud and earth . . . For the one he takes you to will cancel the sky . . . and scratch out the earth. Scratch you out. And end your world. He’s with us now . . . day will be like night. And the man jaguar will lead you to your end.

As Richard Walsh notes, the prophetess’s “incredible words come true in providential detail, and Jaguar Paw, in fulfilling them, escapes the sacrificial altar, a murderous gauntlet, hunters in the jungle, and various jungle terrors in order to return to his ruined village and save his family.”45 This suggests, if implicates, Gibson’s intentions for the film (some of them anyway) about which we can be sure. For, the premonition in the plot refers to and is fulfilled by the deus ex machina appearing at the end of the film (the arrival of the Spanish Christians), by means of which Jaguar Paw and the survivors live on. Implied is their doing so depending on them migrating and their migrating in order to do so, since survival has now become their primary goal. The filmmaker’s use of this theme of migratory premonition in the film indicates that his directorial intentions for it are in part religious. In summarizing her distinction between the broad notion and the narrow notion of the religious film genre, Mariola Marczak notes that the former comprises all films referring to any religion or religiosity in any way, even to a variety of films of different genres. This includes “adventure historical films (such as The Mission, 1986, dir. Roland Joffé; Black Robe, 1991, dir. Bruce Beresford), anthropological feature films (Apocalypto, 2006, dir. Mel Gibson).”46 In addition to the fact that Marczak considers Apocalypto to be a paradigmatic example of a religious production, the film evidently qualifies as one because of its inclusion of premonitory migration, an overtly religious theme. We saw that Gibson utilizes this device in the film to advance the plot, even to bring it to conclusion. According to Marczak’s rubric, in addition to Black Robe (1991), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and The New World (2005) also should be included in the religious film genre in the broad sense, since there are prophetic elements in these films that should be taken as indicative of religiosity. The theme of migratory premonition centrally figures in the plots of these three other mainstream films about Native Americans, discussed in the next section. Indeed, it is plausible that some or all of the three films influenced Gibson in his direction of Apocalypto. The three, like the fourth, are influential Hollywood films from the 1990s to 2000s centrally about, though not produced by, Native Americans47—and which Native Americans might as such take to be inapplicable to themselves. Hereafter, I refer to such as “NA films.” It is worth exploring these films with respect to this theme because doing so may shed light on cues to look for in other NA films in order to potentially uncover the theme in them. The more NA films the theme is unveiled in, the more

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prevalent a thematic trend that can be traced among them, the presence of which should be of research interest in its own right and may have sociological implications worth exploring besides. MIGRATORY PREMONITION IN SOME OTHER NA FILMS By the final scene of Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), only three of the main characters (and the protagonists) are still alive: Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe), the eldest and only surviving daughter of Colonel Edmund Munro (Maurice Roeves); Chingachgook (Russell Means), the last of the Mohicans; and Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), his adopted half-white son. Here are some of the final lines of the theatrical version of the film: CHINGACHGOOK: The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the red man of the wilderness forests in front of it. Until one day there will be nowhere left. Then our race will be no more, or be not us . . . The frontier place is for people like my white son and his woman and their children. HAWKEYE: That’s my father’s sadness talking. . . . CHINGACHGOOK: No. It is true . . . One day . . . there will be no more frontier. Then men like you will go, too. Like the Mohicans. . . . And new people will come. Work. Some will make their life. But once we were here.48

According to the timeline of the story, we see Chingachgook making an assured prediction about the future of his people and those following them. As a matter of historical record, the Mohican tribe eventually relocated, mostly on account of wars and forced displacement, primarily to parts of the northeastern US and Canada. In this context, it seems, Chingachgook’s prediction is to be taken in the film as prophetic about the tribe’s later migratory fate. Indeed, Chingachgook’s unexpected prediction serves as a deus ex machina of sorts with respect to the Mohicans’ survival. For, by the film’s end, he is the last surviving Mohican. So, the only way, despite this, for the Mohican tribe to survive is for his prediction to play out historically—for it to be true and true that they survive in migrating. Potential instances of prophecy are mediated by means of otherworldly communication in Terrence Malick’s idyllic fictionalized adaption of the story of Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), John Smith (Colin Farrell) and John Rolfe (Christian Bale), The New World. The film’s screenplay presents this description of a dream had by Powhatan, Pocahontas’s father:

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‌‌‌POWHATAN’S DREAM—STRANGE LANDSCAPE, TREE, STAIRCASE Powhatan finds himself in a land he has never seen before, surrounded by strange flowers and animals. Ranks of clouds move through the sky. A man stands before him and shows by a gesture that he has come from the west and that he means to marry his daughter. They will spawn a new race. All at once a tree takes root in front of him and begins to grow at astonishing speed, higher and higher, until it reaches into the heavens. Powhatan steps through the bark of the tree. Inside, he discovers a winding staircase. He climbs the staircase, his shadow climbing ahead of him.49

This dream seems to refer directly to the last scene of the theatrical version of the film, centering on a tree reaching to the heavens that presumably is intended by Malick to represent Pocahontas. We could then compare Powhatan’s dream to his and his tribe’s relocation: AMBUSH, POWHATAN MOVES OUT, VILLAGE ON FIRE The colonists skirmish with the Indians, until Powhatan, defenseless against their superior arms, decides to abandon the Tidewater and push west, by canoe and caravan, into the territory of enemy tribes. The longhouses are bundled up, the stores unearthed and sealed in clay pots, the villages burned to the ground. Pocahontas sees, in the distance, the black columns of smoke. She stands and wonders how much more destruction she will witness. Tears rise up behind her eyes. TIGHT ON POWHATAN His face set like a flint, Powhatan bids farewell to his ancestral home.

In the context of what becomes of Powhatan and his tribe in the screenplay, his dream seems to function much like Chingachgook’s prediction: as prophetic about the tribe’s later (supposed) migratory fate. A vision had by Pocahontas seems to be premonitory concerning her eventual migration to England (Smith’s home), and perhaps even her final encounter with him: VISION OF SMITH That night Pocahontas dreams of her own mother, a lordly woman who summons up the ghost of Captain Smith. Smith has something in his hand, a little

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book, which her mother insists she take from him. She studies the books, but she can make no sense of it. When she looks up, Smith is beckoning her. Where?

Through the events of her unexpected meeting of and relationship with John Rolfe, including the birth of their son, she is able to survive her depression in the aftermath of her loss of Smith. This hints at Rolfe’s role as a deus ex machina—if not his and their son’s—in the film’s narrative with respect to Pocahontas. But, when confronted with Smith at their last meeting, she chooses to completely let him go and embrace a life, her life, without him and without the intervention of Rolfe or her son—on her own. Upon her return, she takes the hand of Rolfe and saves him from certain despair. In this she becomes a deus ex machina regarding him. Indeed, it may even be that her resilient embrace of her death at Gravesend, and the strength she imparts to Rolfe and their son up to and in anticipation of it, helps them weather her passing and uncover meaning for themselves in its aftermath. Inasmuch as the vision is premonitory regarding Pocahontas’s migratory fate in the film, it is so indirectly regarding her eventual passing in Gravesend and the events bound up with these. Migratory premonition, then, is comprehensible in the vision. In Bruce Bereford’s Black Robe, the Native pathfinder of the party, Chomina (August Schellenberg), has a dream portending that the young Jesuit priest, Father LaForgue (Lothaire Bluteau), will wound him in some way. In the dream, Father LaForgue and a raven are seen in winter. The raven pecks out and eats Chomina’s eye. There also is a woman with white hair, presumably representing a deity. Concerned, Chomina relays the occurrence to his wife: . . . I dreamt. Of what? Many things. There was a raven. It attacked me. I could not move. The raven is the Blackrobe. The Blackrobe? But how do you know? I know.50

Soon after, there is a scene during which Chomina and his comrades discuss the dream: He spoke to his woman. I saw him. I was telling her to smoke the meat. For the journey. What will we do? Leave the Blackrobe. And go hunting. There are moose down there. I say we kill the Blackrobe. But he did not die in my dream.

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Then we must understand and obey the dream. A dream is more real than death or battle. We must find a sorcerer. He will tell us what to do.

Mestigoit (Yvan Labelle) is the sorcerer they later consult, who reports what follows after a heated exchange with Father LaForgue: He is possessed by a demon. But how do you know? I am not a man, but a spirit. I dwelt under the earth. I know the dead—and the evil. Then what must we do? Kill him! Who will kill him? You? Then you will be hunted by Champlain. But who will talk? We are all friends here. The spirits are angry with you. For travelling with the demon Blackrobe. Listen . . . They are saying I must protect you from this evil.

Chomina’s dream is taken by his wife, his comrades and himself as premonitory of what may happen if he does not act upon the dream’s counsel. This leads his comrades to counsel killing Father LaForgue, while Mestigoit perhaps counsels the same for ulterior motives and without deference to the dream. Yet Mestigoit himself suggests that he is clairvoyant on account of his otherworldly nature. Somewhat ironically, both premonitory messages serve to advance the plot, which leads to Chomina and Father LaForgue’s shared migration up to and following capture by the Iroquois,51 culminating in Chomina’s death toward the end of the film and Father LaForgue’s arrival and settling at the Jesuit mission. At the very end of the film, we learn that the mission is abandoned fifteen years later, after the Huron there convert to Christianity and later are killed by the Iroquois, with the surviving Jesuits returning to Quebec. Whether Father LaForgue is to be counted among the survivors is left an open question. Right before Chomina dies in Father LaForgue’s arms, the following interchange takes place: Lord, I beg you . . . show your mercy to these savage people . . . who will never look upon Your face in Paradise. Tell me, Black Robe . . . What do your dreams see now? I’m too weary for dreams. But you must. If you do not . . . how do you see the way that lies ahead?

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I trust in God. He will guide me . . . all the way to Paradise. You have not seen this paradise. No man should welcome death. This world is a cruel place . . . but it has the sunlight. I’m sorry that I should leave now. Chomin, do you hear me? My God loves you. If you accept His love, he will admit you to Paradise. I’ll go with you, Father. You must stay with her. She has lost everything because of us. She needs you more than I do. We will do what she asks. What can we say to people who think that dreams are the real world . . . and this one is an illusion? Perhaps they’re right. Good bye, Father LaForgue. No Farewells, not in this land and no greetings, no names. The forests speak. The dead talk at night. God bless you both.

Even as Father LaForgue vacillates between his evangelistically Christian sentiments and newfound consideration of Native cosmological views, he affirms both in finally recognizing the natural premonitory occurrences and concluding with a Christian blessing of the others. This paper discussed various controversies pertaining to the film Apocalypto, including ones concerning its director, its quality and its veracity. After that, it discussed the relative consensus in scholarship in terms of assumptions of Gibson’s directorial intentions, in preparation for subsequent analysis. It then was argued that the theme and plot device of migratory premonition centrally figures in Apocalypto and (at least) a few other NA films—The Last of the Mohicans, The New World and Black Robe—and that its utilization suggests that they qualify as religious films in the broad sense, according to Mariola Marczak’s framework. The expectation is that migratory premonition plays a prominent role in the plots of many, if not most, other NA films at least of the era, and perhaps in many properly NA films as well. Exploring the extent to which it does, and the implications of it doing so, is within the purview of future work that may shed further light on the genre. NOTES 1. The author thanks John A. Ruddiman and Antonio Sanna for helpful comments on drafts of this chapter. 2. All the internet sources have been accessed on October 22, 2022. 3. Adam Ellwanger, “Apology as ‘Metanoic’ Performance: Punitive Rhetoric and Public Speech,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2012): 317.

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4. Robert A. Yelle, “The Ends of Sacrifice: Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto as a Christian Apology for Colonialism,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23, no. 1 (April 2011): 83. 5. A. O. Scott, “The Passion of the Maya,” The New York Times, December 8, 2006, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/12​/08​/movies​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-maya​.html. 6. David Carr, “Apocalypto’s Biggest Fan,” The New York Times, February 12, 2007, https:​//​carpetbagger​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/02​/12​/apocalyptos​-biggest​-fan/. 7. Robert W. Welkos, “Gibson dives in,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2006, https:​//​www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2006​-nov​-13​-et​-apocalypto13​-story​.html. 8. Jesse David Fox, “Read Spike Lee’s ‘Essential List of Films for Filmmakers,” Vulture, July 26, 2013, https:​//​www​.vulture​.com​/2013​/07​/read​-spike​-lees​-essential​ -films​-list​.html. 9. Anonymous, “Gibson Film Angers Mayan Groups,” BBC, December 8, 2006, http:​//​news​.bbc​.co​.uk​/2​/hi​/entertainment​/6216414​.stm. 10. Judith Villa, Lindsey Smith and Penelope Kelsey, “The New World and Apocalypto: Updates of Old Stereotypes for the New Millennia (Introduction),” Studies in the Humanities 33, no. 2 (2006): 132. 11. Ibid. 12. C. James MacKenzie, “The Mayan Pope and His Competition: Local, National and Transnational Representations of the 2012 Phenomenon,” Anthropologica 57, no. 2 (2015): 368. 13. William Booth, “Culture Shocker: Scholars Say Mel Gibson’s Action Flick Sacrifices the Maya Civilization to Hollywood,” The Washington Post, December 9, 2006. https:​ / /​ w ww​ . washingtonpost ​ . com ​ / wp ​ - dyn ​ / content​ / article​ / 2006​ / 12​ / 08​ / AR2006120801815​_pf​.html. 14. Ben Zimmer, “On the Road to ‘On Language,’” American Anthropologist (New Series) 113, no. 2 (June 2011): 344. 15. See Dan Vergano, “‘Apocalypto’ Now for Mel, Maya and Historians,” USA Today, July 18, 2006, https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20071102063514​/http:​//​www​ .globalheritagefund​.org​/apocalypto​.html; Anonymous, “Gibson Film Angers Mayan Groups”; and “Conversation: Mel Gibson’s Maya,” Archaeology 60, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2007). https:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/0701​/etc​/conversation​.html. 16. Milo Sweedler, “The Politics of Sacrifice: Mel Gibson and Georges Bataille,” Intertexts 11, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 160. Comparing Bataille’s and Gibson’s interpretations of Mesoamerican sacrifice rituals, Sweedler notes that one way in which they differ is with regard to the culture of reference. Bataille’s is the Aztecs, while Gibson’s is the Maya. David Freidel, an archaeology professor at Southern Methodist University, criticizes Gibson for misrepresenting the latter, contending that the uniformly savage killing fields in the film are foreign to the Mayan world. Yet Friedel concedes that there is evidence suggesting that the Maya in fact committed human sacrifices, citing the walls of carved skulls at Chichen Itza and other sites. Gibson insists on the suggestion, citing the paintings of human sacrifices at San Bartolo. Sweedler argues, however, that the comparability of the Aztecs and the Maya does not only involve questions of historical accuracy. As he puts it, “Both Gibson and Bataille, despite the

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latter’s copious documentation, are more interested in appropriating the sacrificial practices of pre-Columbian Mexico to their own ends than they are in offering a historical account of past rituals. And the choices they make in presenting the culture touch at the heart of their projects” (160). 17. Anonymous, “Conversation: Mel Gibson’s Maya.” 18. Vergano, “‘Apocalypto’ Now for Mel, Maya and Historians.” 19. Welkos, “Gibson dives in.” 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. See also Booth, “Culture Shocker”; and James J. Aimers and Elizabeth Graham, “Noble Savages Versus Savage Nobles: Gibson’s Apocalyptic View of the Maya [Review of Apocalypto],” Latin American Antiquity 18, no. 1 (March 2007): 105–06. 22. Vergano, “‘Apocalypto’ Now for Mel, Maya and Historians.” 23. Welkos, “Gibson dives in.” 24. Anonymous, “Gibson Film Angers Mayan Groups.” 25. Fred Schruers, “Q&A: Mel Gibson, Cowriter-director of Apocalypto,” https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20071102063514​/http:​//​www​.globalheritagefund​.org​/ apocalypto​.html. 26. Booth, “Culture Shocker.” 27. Ibid. 28. Stephen Spence, “The Revelations of Mel,” The American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 497. 29. Ibid., 496–97. Paul Worley contends that the general Western intrigue regarding Mayan culture cannot be disassociated from “the recent spate of Maya-themed movies like Apocalypto,” intrigue partly responsible for the ‘Maya fever’ that gripped many in Western media as 2012, the “end” of the Mayan calendar, approached. He takes these films to “nonetheless represent a cinematographic and artistic trend that distorts Native American cultures, histories, and knowledges in ways that are easily accommodated to Western ways of knowing.” Such works attain their signifying power through “alienation of indigenous cultural elements.” They are “an avenue through which dominant societies discursively assume control over indigenous cultures, using them as primary material to stage a variety of ideological fantasies” (149). 30. Spence, “The Revelations of Mel.” 31. For his part, Hansen states, “There was nothing in the post-classic period that would match the size and majesty of that pyramid in the film. But Gibson . . . was trying to depict opulence, wealth, consumption of resources.” Welkos, “Gibson dives in.” 32. Traci Ardren, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?,” Archaeology Magazine, December 5, 2006, https:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto​.html. 33. Pete Sigal, “Making Maya Men: Fantasy, Voyeurism, and Perverted Penetration,” GLQ 26, no. 1 (2020): 2. 34. Aimers and Graham, “Noble Savages Versus Savage Nobles.” 35. David Laraway, “Only a Jaguar-God Can Save Us: Borges, Heidegger, and the End of the World in ‘La escritura del dios,’” MLN 129, no. 2 (March 2014): 294. 36. Spence, “The Revelations of Mel,” 494–95.

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37. Ibid., 495. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Britt Harrison, “Review of A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment,” Philosophical Investigations 43, no. 3 (July 2020): 296. This point is intended by Harrison to also apply to the 2008 autobiographical film, Waltz with Bashir. The context of the point is Harrison’s summary of a comparison of two films by Rupert Read in the latter’s A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. 41. Spence, “The Revelations of Mel,” 496. 42. Ibid. 43. Sigal, “Making Maya Men,” 29, n22. 44. Spence, “The Revelations of Mel,” 496. Spence quips that the film seems to know what its director does not: that the Mayans survived until the present-day, despite Gibson’s (apparent) perception of their civilization’s end. 45. Richard Walsh, “The Horror, The Horror: What Kind of (Horror) Movie is the Apocalypse?,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 8. 46. Mariola Marczak, “Screening Religiosity in Contemporary Polish Films. The Role of Religious Motifs in Visual Communication,” Journal of Religion & Film 22, no. 3 (December 2018): 2–3. https:​//​digitalcommons​.unomaha​.edu​/jrf​/vol22​/iss3​/10. 47. And, for that matter, directed by influential white male directors. 48. The script for The Last of the Mohicans can be found here: https:​//​www​ .mohicanpress​ .com​ /mo07026​ .html. Compare Chingachgook’s monologue to this statement by James Fenimore Cooper in his Introduction to the novel: The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent. They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frost, is represented as having already befallen them. There is sufficient historical truth in the picture to justify the use that has been made of it.

James Fenimore Cooper, “Cooper’s Introduction,” in The Last of the Mohicans (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), xxix. 49. The New World’s screenplay can be found at https:​//​indiegroundfilms​.files​ .wordpress​.com​/2014​/01​/new​-world​-the​-numbered​.pdf. 50. A copy of the film’s script can be found at https:​//​www​.scripts​.com​/script​-pdf​ /4197. 51. For a description of Iroquois precombat religious rituals that is germane to earlier discussion of Mayan sacrifice rituals, see Daniel Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” The William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 4 (October 1983): 535 and 534, n22.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aimers, James J. and Elizabeth Graham. “Noble Savages Versus Savage Nobles: Gibson’s Apocalyptic View of the Maya [Review of Apocalypto].” Latin American Antiquity 18, no. 1 (March 2007): 105–06. Anonymous. “Conversation: Mel Gibson’s Maya.” Archaeology 60, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2007). https:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/0701​/etc​/conversation​.html. Anonymous. “Gibson Film Angers Mayan Groups.” BBC, December 8, 2006. http:​//​ news​.bbc​.co​.uk​/2​/hi​/entertainment​/6216414​.stm. Ardren, Traci. “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” Archaeology Magazine, December 5, 2006. https:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto​.html. Booth, William. “Culture Shocker: Scholars Say Mel Gibson’s Action Flick Sacrifices the Maya Civilization to Hollywood.” The Washington Post. December 9, 2006. https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp​-dyn​/content​/article​/2006​/12​/08​/ AR2006120801815​_pf​.html. Carr, David. “Apocalypto’s Biggest Fan.” The New York Times, February 12, 2007. https:​//​carpetbagger​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/02​/12​/apocalyptos​-biggest​-fan/. Cooper, James Fenimore. “Cooper’s Introduction.” In The Last of the Mohicans, xxvii-xxx. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. Ellwanger, Adam. “Apology as ‘Metanoic’ Performance: Punitive Rhetoric and Public Speech.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2012): 307–29. Fox, Jesse David. “Read Spike Lee’s ‘Essential List of Films for Filmmakers.” Vulture, July 26, 2013. https:​//​www​.vulture​.com​/2013​/07​/read​-spike​-lees​-essential​ -films​-list​.html. Harrison, Britt. “Review of A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment.” Philosophical Investigations 43, no. 3 (July 2020): 295–98. Laraway, David. “Only a Jaguar-God Can Save Us: Borges, Heidegger, and the End of the World in ‘La escritura del dios.’” MLN 129, no. 2 (March 2014): 288–307. MacKenzie, C. James. “The Mayan Pope and His Competition: Local, National and Transnational Representations of the 2012 Phenomenon.” Anthropologica 57, no. 2 (2015): 367–81. Marczak, Mariola. “Screening Religiosity in Contemporary Polish Films. The Role of Religious Motifs in Visual Communication.” Journal of Religion & Film 22, no. 3 (December 2018): 1–30. https:​//​digitalcommons​.unomaha​.edu​/jrf​/vol22​/iss3​/10. Mohican Press. https:​//​www​.mohicanpress​.com​/mo07026​.html. Richter, Daniel. “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience.” The William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 4 (October 1983): 528–59. Schruers, Fred. “Q&A: Mel Gibson.” https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20071102063514​/ http:​//​www​.globalheritagefund​.org​/apocalypto​.html. Scott, A.O. “The Passion of the Maya.” The New York Times, December 8, 2006. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/12​/08​/movies​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-maya​.html. Sigal, Pete. “Making Maya Men: Fantasy, Voyeurism, and Perverted Penetration.” GLQ 26, no. 1 (2020): 1–34. Spence, Stephen. “The Revelations of Mel.” The American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 491–503.

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Sweedler, Milo. “The Politics of Sacrifice: Mel Gibson and Georges Bataille.” Intertexts 11, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 157–71. Vergano, Dan. “‘Apocalypto’ Now for Mel, Maya and Historians.” USA Today, July 18, 2006. https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20071102063514​/http:​//​www​.globalheritagefund​.org​/apocalypto​.html. Villa, Judith, Lindsey Claire Smith and Penelope Kelsey. “The New World and Apocalypto: Updates of Old Stereotypes for the New Millennia (Introduction).” Studies in the Humanities 33, no. 2: 128–39. Walsh, Richard. “The Horror, The Horror: What Kind of (Horror) Movie is the Apocalypse?” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 1–27. Welkom, Robert W. “Gibson Dives in.” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2006. https:​ //​www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2006​-nov​-13​-et​-apocalypto13​-story​.html. ———. “In ‘Apocalypto,’ Fact and Fiction Play Hide and Seek.” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2006. https:​//​www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2006​-dec​-09​ -et​-apocalypto9​-story​.html. Worley, Paul. “Why All the Excitement?: ‘Hbaatab haaswelah,’ a Yukatek Maya Oral History of the End of the World.” Romance Notes 51, no. 1 (January 2011): 149–58. Yelle, Robert A. “The Ends of Sacrifice: Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto as a Christian Apology for Colonialism.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23, no. 1 (April 2011): 82–89. Zimmer, Ben. “On the Road to ‘On Language.’” American Anthropologist (New Series) 113, no. 2 (June 2011): 344–45.

Chapter 4

The Power of The Passion Lessons on the Messiah from the Sacred and Secular Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker

The 2004 contentious production of The Passion of the Christ depicts the final twelve hours of Jesus’s life and was co-written and directed by Mel Gibson. Reviews from various religious circles and the media proved to both applaud and condemn his work, and much scholarship has emerged to offer in-depth scrutiny on its content and the accuracy to that of biblical texts. In truth, the odds of completing the film were against Gibson from the beginning, as he received no financial backing or support from Hollywood. The feedback he had received indicated that there was no interest or demand for another religious reproduction of the death of Christ. He had to fund the project if it were to come to fruition. Another hurdle to overcome were the strange occurrences during the filming that almost claimed the life of Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in the story. His film, it seemed, was doomed to fail. Yet, The Passion, which was mostly shot in a wintery Italy, using Hebrew, Latin, and some Aramaic as dialogue with English subtitles, became an iconic success story. Gibson brought the “real” Messiah to life in a grand and violent Hollywood tale of tragedy, showing to the world a bloody body-horror film never witnessed before on screen. In this chapter, we explore the journey of Gibson’s The Passion, focusing on how he used violence and suffering to create what is arguably the most dramatic religious production of all time. Due to the number of historically poor to mediocre religious films available, Gibson received a complete lack of support from production companies. They believed that the film would not be a viable prospect for varying reasons including a general lack of interest from audiences for these types 81

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of religious or biblical films. Bill Jenkins contends that religious films “are usually poorly directed and consequently take a good script and make it into a boring film,”1 an unviable option in a difficult market. Other arguments suggested that it “is impossible to represent Christ on the stage. If he is made dramatically interesting, he ceases to be Christ and turns into a Hercules or a Svengali.”2 The result was that Gibson had to make a personal investment of approximately US $25 million to produce the film himself. Film critic, Roger Ebert, states that the film largely “depends upon theological considerations,” claiming that the director’s creation is “a personal message movie of the most radical kind, attempting to re-create events of personal urgency to Gibson.”3 The director’s convictions, however paid off, and prior to The Passion’s release, “had already generated the kind of publicity most filmmakers can only dream about.”4 The film was initially aimed at a conservative audience with a huge advertising and marketing campaign that targeted Christian churches. It generated a gross income of over $611 million worldwide and became “the eighth highest in movie history and the highest for any R-rated (for violence) film.”5 “The Passion of the Christ became a box office goliath”6 even after emerging as a highly controversial film, and receiving polarized reviews from critics and audiences around the globe. “Predictably it divided audiences,”7 with some viewing the film as a deeply holy and religious experience, while others labeled it as anti-Semitic, and criticized the elevated level of violence delivered on screen. Produced from a traditionalist Catholic viewpoint, “Gibson’s The Passion appealed to conservative Christians, for whom the extreme suffering and blood violence dramatized the love of Jesus for sinners in need of atonement.”8 The death of Jesus, presented “in one of the most influential nations in the world, was witnessed by millions and millions, and was the object of enormous media interest and critical analysis.”9 Millions of people have viewed the film to date, with many churches across the globe still airing it to congregations almost ten years later during Lent in the lead up to Good Friday. Perhaps one could argue that there was more to this film than met the eye, as aside from these polarized views and the unimagined success of the film, there were several bizarre anomalies that took place while filming. In fact, it could be deemed “miraculous” that The Passion was even completed, as Jim Caviezel, playing Jesus, suffered significantly with several bouts of hypothermia and pneumonia as he worked in his loin cloth during the wintery months. On his Instagram posts, the actor described the filming as “torture right from the beginning.”10 He also suffered a dislocated shoulder from carrying the cross and was accidently struck in the scourging scene with a lash of the whip that left a fourteen-inch scar on his back. Caviezel posted that “It ripped the skin right off my back, but I couldn’t scream because the pain knocked

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the wind out of me. It was so horrendous that my voice got away from me, quicker than I could scream.”11 The most frightening experience, however, was that the actor was struck by lightning while shooting the “Sermon on the Mount” and again while doing the “crucifixion” scene. Although his hair caught on fire, he was “miraculously unharmed.”12 Caviezel said that About four seconds before it happened it was quiet, and then it was like someone slapped my ears. I had seven or eight seconds of, like, a pink, fuzzy color, and people started screaming. They said I had fire on the left side of my head and light around my body. All I can tell you is that I looked like I went to Don King’s hairstylist.13

Quite literally the making of The Passion almost cost him his life—“It nearly killed me” he stated in a 2018 interview,14 as he describes how he has since had two heart surgeries following these events. The first assistant director, Jan Michelini, “was also struck by lightning—twice.”15 RELIGION AND POPULAR CULTURE Solano argues that “we long for images and filmic stories to help make sense of our world and our place within in it.”16 In many instances, these filmic stories are filled with religious imagery and teach moral values to audiences. There is a natural affinity found between religion and film since they are similar in many ways. Both set out to re-create the world with an alternative, improved version, and then invite us to witness and participate in it.17 In some cases, it is easy to identify religious stories and ideologies filtering into conventionally secular film. For example, the messianic figure is a common trope, particularly within the action, disaster, and apocalyptic genres, where the main character is portrayed as a savior figure who must face sacrifice and hardship to save others, if not the whole of humanity. This can be seen in the character of John Connor from James Cameron’s 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day where he is the leader of the worldwide resistance group fighting against Skynet. The focus is placed on Skynet needing to exterminate Conner to finally crush the resistance and take full control. Similarly, in the Wachowski’s 1999 The Matrix, Neo takes the role of savior, fighting against the artificial intelligence that is controlling the world. More examples can be seen in the DC and Marvel Cinematic Universes with heroes such as Iron Man, Captain America, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, to name a few. These messianic tropes are not new to Gibson who “has played leading or supporting roles in more than thirty motion-picture features, often cast as a martyred hero” himself.18 We contend that the director’s personal experience

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with roles such as Max Rockatansky in the Mad Max trilogy,19 William Wallace in Braveheart (1995), and Captain Benjamin Martin in The Patriot (2000) may have provided the inspiration needed to create the true Hollywood messianic blockbuster of all time. There is a dearth of scholarship examining how religion and religious artifacts are appropriated into secular film and television productions.20 B. D. Forbes and J. H. Mahan argue that there is a constant use of religion and/ or religious items within popular film that are placed intentionally to carry religious significance. Items such as a crucifix and holy water are the onscreen methods to protect from dark forces, and churches, rosary beads, and altars are associated with in-film spirituality and prayer. The point being that these artifacts provide immediate recognition in the films of a person or place of God, understood by all audiences, and that although these texts are mostly seen as secular, they carry deep meaning and inference to biblical signs and symbols.21 Although this in itself is an interesting topic, we are more interested in examining how religion has been appropriating popular culture. In this case, Gibson took the biblical story of the last few hours in the life of Jesus, and, using some Hollywood flair and grand production techniques, he created the “real” or true messianic character in The Passion, to be viewed across the globe in cinemas and homes as a blockbuster movie. The film, however, is not simply something of a “media phenomenon”; it became a “religious phenomenon, especially in the United States,” and in so doing, Gibson’s film “offers an unusual opportunity for scholars to explore how religion and popular culture often merge.”22 There is criticism that Western popular film is dangerous because it offers nothing more than a vacuous secular form of entertainment. Aldous Huxley believed that a “transfixion with entertainment would drown our desire for real knowledge—and that society would allow itself to be consumed solely with that which is amusing—disregarding anything of importance” or that which is meaningful.23 One could argue then that, by this account, any form of indulgence in popular film is meaningless, provided to distract people from focusing on issues of importance like political agendas. William Anderson adds, however, that “Hollywood is not neutral in any shape or form” and affirms that these “films are telling us what to believe, feel and value.”24 As such, film becomes an important platform of communication, and even though it may present itself in secular form, there is a continued dialogue between popular culture and religion, as religion performs a similar function of teaching and guidance. This is seen in the research by Bruce David Forbes, who believes that popular culture “represents and sometimes advances values and perspectives about gender roles, race, sexuality, economic objectives, definitions of success, the relative importance of youth and the elderly, and so on.”25 For example, the messianic figure in popular film

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can often be seen as the estranged husband and father who is desperately trying to save his family when disaster strikes. In films such as Ric Roland Waugh’s Greenland (2020), or Brad Peyton’s San Andreas (2005), the messianic father not only saves them, but also the lives of many others. These heroes place their families as their top priority, act ethically, and operate with the deep faith that salvation will be shortly at hand. This discourse with popular culture includes core values of religious teachings, and as such can be seen as communicating similar messaging. Forbes contends that there are also occasions when both religion and popular culture “talk to and about the other side,”26 often seen in political discourse, for example, where the Bible has been used to justify political action, segregation, and alienation.27 Presidential candidates use the beliefs and convictions of religious groups to gain votes by promising to address their concerns with new legislations, even though at times this may be to the detriment of other groups or minorities. Other examples can be seen in the political campaigns that were held in the United States, where religious artifacts are used in an appeal to win right-wing conservative votes. On June 1, 2020, Donald Trump, who posed as the “law and order” candidate,28 dispersed the peaceful George Floyd protesters with riot control and tear gas from Lafayette Square, so that he could walk to the St John’s Church to pose for a photo shoot with a Bible in front of the damaged church.29 Trump believed that this would gain important votes. In view of this discourse between religion and popular culture, it is easy to understand why Gibson had decided to bring Jesus to Hollywood. He wanted to use the power of cinema to promote the story of Christ dying to save the world from what he believes is an imminent danger. Previous religiously themed films like George Stevens’s 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told or Franco Zeffirelli 1977 TV series Jesus of Nazareth have provided individual interpretations of biblical events, but often it is left to the producers to “fill in the blanks” (albeit speculatively),”30 creating a somewhat biased rendition of the stories told, and falling back into the very same mold discussed by Anderson in 2001. Gibson’s intention was to produce a replication of Jesus’s death without faltering from the biblical text, using the technology, visual presentation, and awe of mainstream Hollywood to do it. The Passion set out to reverse the traditional cinematic versions of a neat and groomed Jesus and his disciples of the past and show them as the poor people in a poor country that they were. As Barbara Nicolosi suggests, “Gibson brought forth the most significant piece of religious cinema ever made.”31 His project was no small feat, and Beal and Linafelt suggest that “the question of how Jesus has gone from a man who was largely deserted by his followers and executed as a criminal two thousand years ago to the hero of a blockbuster motion picture is both dauntingly complex and endlessly fascinating.”32 They affirm

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that “Gibson’s film is sure to remain a prominent presence on the American religious landscape for decades to come.”33 VIOLENCE ON SCREEN Horror is one of the oldest genres in popular culture, providing intent to thrill, shock, and scare its audiences. When examining the genre, there is a heavy reliance on the “evocation of audience participation”34 that is often rooted in the current fears of the society from where it emerges. The film industry is, therefore, selling us “not a material thing but an experience, or promise, of pleasure.”35 We are captivated by the terror or dread on screen that beckons us to participate in the journey. Lowrey and deCordova believe that this “fear (and excitement) of violation may be the key to the experience of the horror film.”36 In this chapter, we argue that Gibson’s The Passion relies on these conventions of the horror genre to shock viewers by representing “the materiality of the body and the visual display of its destruction,”37 which in turn heightens the engagement in the film. The director has incorporated the growing popular demand of horror and torture into his production so that audiences can witness the physical and mental torment of Jesus in his depiction of the Passion. The cinematic horror in this film produces exaggerated violence which, according to Henry A. Giroux, is part of the screen culture today.38 It is not uncommon to see torture and sadistic acts played out in horror films, and in an effort to retain audiences, Hollywood “constantly ‘turn[s] up the heat,’ so to speak, on increasingly graphic and violent acts of horror.”39 The “public pedagogy of entertainment includes extreme images of violence, human suffering and torture splashed across giant movie screens . . . offering viewers every imaginable portrayal of violent acts, each more shocking and brutal than the last.”40 Among the films in the sub-genre of splatter horror, for example, James Wan’s 2004 Saw sees the “Jigsaw Killer” putting his victims through a series of “games” whereby they must inflict extreme bodily pain upon themselves and others to survive. The Saw franchise (2004–23) has, in fact, been so popular that it now boasts a series of nine gore films (with Saw X due for release in October 2023) that apparently raise the level of torture and violence in each new offering. These “explicit scenes of torture and mutilation were once confined to the old 42nd Street . . . whereas now they have terrific production values and a place of honor in your local multiplex.”41 The unanimous opinion regarding The Passion is that there is an extremely high level of suffering and pain shown on screen. From the beginning of the film, the cruelty is foregrounded by the betrayal of Jesus and his capture in the night. The film’s protagonist is chained by his arms, feet, and neck, and while walked into the city he is being beaten continuously. He

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is then pushed off a bridge, suspended face-down by his chains within inches of the ground, revealing his bloody and beaten face. As Dana Polan says, horror films are continuously showcasing horror as “a part of us, caused by us,”42 and here, Gibson wants the audience to recognize their part in Jesus’s demise. As his captors pull him back up to the road, Jesus is staggering while they jeer and laugh. Jesus is subsequently charged with being a criminal who has broken the Jewish temple laws. The rabbis maintain he is also the leader of a dangerous and large sect, and that he claims to be the Messiah. He is brought before Pontius Pilate for sentencing and then passed on to King Herod, but neither believe him to be more than a “crazy” man. Gibson has poised the scene at this point, to cross over into the realm of body horror, as Stopenski states that “audiences enjoy body horror because it is reinforced by the sadomasochistic desire to experience terror.”43 The onlookers are standing before Pilate in a horde, demanding that Jesus be punished so that they can witness his fear and suffering. The pressure placed on the Romans to “punish” Jesus mounts, and although his body has already been beaten, Pilate decides to have him scourged and released. He tells his guard to ensure the punishment is severe, but not to kill him. Witnessing the scourging scene can only be described as horrific and gory. Jesus is chained to the pillar and stripped to his loin cloth, followed by thirty-two lashes across his back and legs with canes. As he writhes in pain, Gibson offers close-up views of his contorted body, making a spectacle of the pain and terror before us. For this reason, Pamela Grace believes that the film has an “inappropriate use of horror-movie conventions, and general tastelessness.”44 On the other hand, Barbara Creed argues that the viewing of biologically horrific media on screen is “a desire not only for perverse pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images, being filled with terror/desire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, having taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, throw out, eject the abject (from the safety of the spectator’s seat).”45 While undeniably gruesome, the audience is unable to look away. As Carina Stopenski argues, “body horror broaches complex feelings that we associate with humanity and what it means to disrupt the human experience.”46 Gibson does not pause; he piles on the heat as we see the guards swap their canes for flogging whips garnished with glass and metal hooks. In case there is any doubt of what is to come, the guard first strikes the wooden table, ripping the wood away as he pulls it out. This is meant for Jesus, and the increased intensity of these graphic and brutal acts of horror here are very disturbing. David Huckvale argues that “the horror and psychological denial we have of our mortality, along with the corruptibility of our flesh, are persistent themes in all drama, which body horror films have, of course, intensified in increasingly graphic terms over the years.”47 This occurs in The Passion once

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the scourging is restarted and the audience witnesses a close-up account of the next seven lashes, each grabbing into his body and ripping his flesh across the screen. What is also portrayed here is that the onlookers are excited by the thrashings and encouraging the guards to continue, while the guards are filled with a frenzied bloodlust. As Ecce Pomo affirms, “we know this because the camera makes a fetish of the process,”48 even turning Jesus over when there is no more of his back to strike. Christ is now on the floor writhing in agony as his blood splatters across the faces of the guards. Pomo further states that “violence of this kind is generally seen only in horror movies,”49 which resonates with the review from Richard Corliss of Time magazine, who made the pertinent comment that The Passion “may be the eruption of a new genre, the religious splatter-art film.”50 There is no doubt here that Gibson’s creation of The Passion is far more brutal than anything ever seen before in the religious film sector, and Corliss correctly places the production as a horror spectacle of gore, not unlike splatter or body horror movie. This blood frenzy ceases only when Abenader (the soldiers’ superior), arrives to see the carnage and instructs them to take Jesus back to Pilate. Jesus is having difficulty breathing but is dragged away with his eyes rolling in his head while Gibson ends the scene with an overhead shot of the scourging pillar, with blood strewn several meters in all directions across the floor. His mother and Mary Magdalene are on their knees sobbing as they attempt to clean it. In this respect, Brigid Cherry contends that movie producers are proving to be fearlessly “confrontational in their writing or in their explicit visuals.”51 Gibson’s provocative visuals indeed serve to pause the film here for a moment so that the audience can consider the gravity of what has just happened. There is a sense of relief found in this bloodied floor that the horrific events have passed. But this moment is soon gone, and Jesus is once again the center of unparalleled abuse as he waits to be seen by Pilate. A crown, made with long, spined thorns is placed upon his head and brutally pushed down, and viewers can see the blood streaming from his new inflictions as he faces the camera. Christ is “all but unrecognizable, a mass of flayed and bloody flesh, barely able to stand, moaning and howling in pain.”52 As A. O. Scott points out, Gibson has directed the film in a manner which “urges the spectator into a relationship with the film’s action that goes beyond that of passive witness and ultimately creates a sensual viewing experience that forces spectators into a body-centered Passion encounter. This characteristic produced anxiety amongst many critics.”53 While these unfolding barbaric and sadistic events are indeed hard to view, they show the sense of urgency that Gibson is making for the viewers to stop and pay attention to his truth about the biblical Passion. When Pilate sees Jesus, he is visibly shocked at the brutality, like us, and tells the crowd that he is “innocent of this man’s blood” when they insist that Jesus be crucified.

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During this period, the Romans were renowned for their barbaric and cruel methods of punishment, torture, and execution. One of their most disturbing, yet popular forms of execution was by way of a crucifixion, which “was considered one of the most brutal and shameful modes of death.”54 Candida Moss states that this form of execution was utilized by them frequently “when punishing slaves and those guilty of sedition . . . but the Romans used this particularly brutal form of execution as a means of producing social conformity. It was, the Roman politician Cicero says, the “most cruel and hideous of tortures. The bodies of the condemned would remain on crosses for days.”55 Gathering archaeological evidence of such crucifixions has been difficult, as the “victims often didn’t receive a proper burial,” but from the recovered bodies found there is confirmation of “severe suffering endured before death,” where “victims could take between three hours and four days to die.”56 Under the Roman Empire, this form of death sentence was shameful, and “reserved for enslaved people, Christians, foreigners, political activists, and disgraced soldiers. Cause of death was typically suffocation, loss of bodily fluids and organ failure.”57 Jesus was sentenced to death by crucifixion under Roman leadership, and thus it could be argued that Gibson’s brutal depiction of the suffering and extreme torture was, although highly disturbing, a close rendition of the actual events of these last hours of Jesus in these times. The Romans were masters of torture, and by “maximizing the public display of torture the message to onlookers was quite clear: undermine the empire and the same thing could happen to you.”58 Once the crucifixion for Jesus has been approved by Pilate, the suffering and brutal attack on his body continues as he is tied to a cross and is made to walk up to Calvary. He is spat on, stoned, and whipped in the streets, falling over several times, and is seen to lose consciousness for short periods. This is a reminder of Fred Botting’s explanation that “the macabre repertoire of terror” is designed to prolong “the interplay of anticipation and apprehension”59 and the unending attack on Jesus’s body has rendered him unable to carry his cross. A bystander is called to help him as Christ has no more to give. These continuous body violations, met with the enthusiasm of the crowd, speaks also to the research by Giroux, who maintains that “sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalised in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanising itself.”60 Giroux argues that the devaluation of the social, together with the loss of democracy, ethics, and rationality has created “spectacles of violence and brutality” that have merged “into forms of collective pleasure.”61 Gibson shows how this suffering man is providing a spectacle of pleasure to the bystanders, who are seen actively participating in this violence, laughing and mocking Jesus, while the audience is once again lured into the blood, gore, and grief that he is being made to endure. As Raphael Shargel indicates, “nowhere else in the history of the commercial

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cinema has a director devoted so much energy to a physical assault upon a single character.”62 Gibson uses the film to show the corruptibility of human flesh in a vision of body horror and in turn the “omnipresent fear of our own mortality,”63 pushing the boundaries and shocking the audience in this display of violence to the body of his film’s protagonist. Furthermore, The Passion not only uses a display of physical torture to render the horror but also the dread and the witnessing associated with death. Within horror these deaths often “end in physical disintegration”64 and the maiming of the body. Jesus has endured unthinkable pain by this point in the film: his body has been completely violated and his blood saturates his clothing. Gibson has convinced us that these threats to life have some measure of reality about them, and that they exist within a filmic world which we “certify as a real, although aberrant, part of our own environment; hence, they represent a threat not just to our existences, but to our very human nature.”65 As Huckvale affirms, “we are, after all, nothing more than the will-to-live, and by contrasting this with annihilation, the will-to-live becomes even more pronounced.”66 On the top of Calvary, Jesus is almost lifeless yet still he is being mocked and beaten. Gibson’s repeated use of slow motion and close-up frames of the protagonist’s face let us see him “cry out and writhe in pain.”67 He is slammed to the ground atop of his cross. As Pomo suggests, “the crucifixion becomes a forensic spectacle. An arm is brutally pulled out of its socket; nails are driven into Christ’s hands. We see it all-again and again.”68 Grace believes that it was the “sacrificial killing and atonement theology-elements that elicited strong audience responses . . . Despite its excesses . . . The Passion shows crucifixion for what it was—a sadistic, bloody, prolonged method of political torture and execution.”69 In an acknowledgment of his own guilt and sin, Gibson films his own hand holding the nail that is hammered into Jesus’s palm, telling us once again to pause and think about our own part played in the death of the Messiah. Barbara Creed poses that the horror film also “abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, tears and putrefying flesh.”70 Gibson draws a very direct connection to the degradation of Jesus’s body in the last scene, where, in the seconds before his death, we see a last close-up of his mutilated frame with open ribs and mangled, lashed form. His side is pierced with a sword by one of the guards, and Jesus’s blood explodes outward several feet from his body, drenching the face of the guard below. He utters “it is accomplished” and takes his last breath.

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CONCLUSION Morris Dickstein states that the “decline of religion and the increasing secularization of society have given more and more mythical resonance to popular culture, which provides us with binding and common experiences and satisfies some primitive needs. The subcultural material in horror films is one form of this return of the repressed.”71 In this respect, Barbara Nicolosi contends that “Gibson has planted the image of the Cross back in the consciousness of the Church with the compelling power of cinema,”72 but we argue that it may not only be the churchgoers that have been drawn into this tale of body horror and death. There is no doubt that the director has created an extremely violent “religious-body horror-splatter” film using the biblical messianic figure as the focus of his bloodshed and gore. Monica Migliorino Miller believes that “reactions to the movie really depend upon one’s own spirituality,”73 claiming that the 2004 film affects people differently according to their own level of commitment and knowledge of the biblical story. She argues that it is a film of extremes, produced to elicit extreme reactions, and that “it is not a movie that simply entertains and then conveniently can be left behind and forgotten.”74 A reviewer commented that it was “two and a half hours of almost uninterrupted bloodshed, including the protracted torture of Jesus Christ . . . For the faint of heart The Passion was not.”75 According to Roger Ebert, “instead of being moved by Christ’s suffering or awed by his sacrifice, I felt abused by a filmmaker intent on punishing an audience, for who knows what sins.”76 Ebert felt that this was “the most violent film I have ever seen,” and that what it “has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of.”77 In Gibson’s film, Pomo states, Jesus endures more torture and punishment than any human being could tolerate. He’s more like contemporary film heroes: tough guys who get beaten up, slashed, shot and somehow keep on going. Indeed, Gibson’s films—from Mad Max onwards—have a distinctly masochistic flavour about them. Still, the Passion’s protracted display of violence resonates beyond any standard Hollywood frame of reference. It reflects wider cultural anxieties concerning embodiment.78

The film has, however, also seen large acceptance of these undeniably gruesome depictions of violence against Jesus, “with American evangelist Billy Graham stating that it is ‘a lifetime of sermons in one movie,’ and Cardinal Dario Castrillion Hoyos, the Vatican Prefect, commenting that it was ‘more effective than any sermons I’ll ever preach.’”79 We contend that Mel Gibson’s film is certainly one that will remain etched in viewer’s minds for a very long time.

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NOTES 1. All the internet sources have been accessed on January 10, 2023. Bill Jenkins, “Jesus Christ, Superstar? Why the Gospels Don’t Make Good Movies,” Journal of Religion and Film 12, no. 2 (2008): n.p. https:​//​digitalcommons​.unomaha​.edu​/jrf​/ vol12​/iss2​/3​/​?utm​_source​=digitalcommons​.unomaha​.edu​%2Fjrf​%2Fvol12​%2Fiss2​ %2F3​&utm​_medium​=PDF​&utm​_campaign​=PDFCoverPages. 2. W. H. Auden, “Postscript: Christianity and Art.” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, selected by Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 457. 3. Roger Ebert, “The Passion of the Christ,” RogerEbert.com February 24, 2004 https:​//​www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-christ​-2004. 4. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the Christ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 47. 5. A. D. Lavender, “Gibson, Mel (1956-),” In Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices, 2nd edn, eds. Roger Chapman and James Ciment (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1200. https:​ //​ search​ -credoreference​ -com​ .ezproxy​.aut​.ac​.nz​/content​/entry​/sharpecw​/gibson​_mel​_1956​/0​?institutionId​=5349. 6. Alison Griffiths, “The Revered Gaze: The Medieval Imaginary of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,” Cinema Journal 46, no. 2 (2007): 9. 7. Ecce Pomo, “Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ Is Much More a Product of This Society Than Its Proponents or Critics Would Like to Admit,” Arena Magazine 70 (2004): 50–51. 8. Ebert, “The Passion of the Christ.” 9. Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt, Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Passion of the Christ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2. 10. Lou Haviland, “‘The Passion of the Christ’: The Cast Member Who Needed Two Open-Heart Surgeries after Filming,” Showbiz Cheat Sheet April 10, 2020 https:​ //​www​.cheatsheet​.com​/entertainment​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-christ​-the​-cast​-member​-who​ -needed​-two​-open​-heart​-surgeries​-after​-filming​.html/. 11. Ibid. 12. Louis Chilton, “The Blood, the Outrage and the Passion of the Christ: Mel Gibson’s Biblical Firestorm, 15 Years On,” Independent February 25, 2019 https:​ //​www​.independent​.co​.uk​/arts​-entertainment​/films​/features​/passion​-of​-the​-christ​-15​ -years​-mel​-gibson​-jim​-cavieziel​-movie​-reaction​-christianity​-a8788381​.html. 13. Haviland, “‘The Passion of the Christ.’” 14. Mark Pattison, “For Shakespeare, the Play’s the Thing; for Caviezel, It’s the Script,” Catholic Courier February 28, 2018. https:​//​catholiccourier​.com​/articles​/for​ -shakespeare​-the​-plays​-the​-thing​-for​-caviezel​-its​-the​-script/. 15. Chilton, “The Blood, the Outrage and the Passion of the Christ.” 16. Jeanette Reedy Solano, Religion and Film: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2022), 2. https:​//​ebookcentral​.proquest​.com​/lib​/AUT​/detail​.action​?docID​=6819716.

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17. S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). http:​//​ebookcentral​.proquest​ .com​/lib​/AUT​/detail​.action​?docID​=5276198. 18. Lavender, “Gibson, Mel (1956-).” 19. Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985). 20. See Terry Ray Clark, “Introduction: What Is Religion? What Is Popular Culture? How Are They Related?” in Understanding Religion and Popular Culture: Theories, Themes, Products and Practices, eds. Terry Ray Clark and Dan W W Clanton, 1–12 (New York: Routledge 2012); Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Seduces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Julia Corbett, Religion in America. vol. 3 (Hoboken, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997); B. D. Forbes and J. H. Mahan, Religion and Popular Culture in America vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Anton Karl Kozlovic, “Sacred Subtexts and Popular Film: A Brief Survey of Four Categories of Hidden Religious Figurations,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 18, no. 3 (2010): 317–34; Caesar A. Montevecchio, “Framing Salvation: Biblical Apocalyptic, Cinematic Dystopia, and Contextualizing the Narrative of Salvation,” Journal of Religion and Film 16, no. 2, (2012): n.p. https:​//​digitalcommons​.unomaha​ .edu​/jrf​/vol16​/iss2​/7/; Conrad E. Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003). 21. Ostwalt, Secular Steeples. 22. Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt, Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Passion of the Christ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2. 23. Quoted in Barry Ritholtz, “Orwell Vs Huxley: 1984 Vs Brave New World,” The Big Picture, November 15, 2011 https:​//​ritholtz​.com​/2011​/11​/orwell​-vs​-huxley​-1984​ -vs​-brave​-new​-world/. 24. William H. U. Anderson, “Introduction,” in Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, eds. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (New York: Routledge, 2001), xx. 25. Bruce David Forbes, “Introduction,” in Religion and Popular Culture in America, 3rd edn, eds. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H Mahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), xx. 26. Ibid. 27. James Crossley, “The Apocalypse and Political Discourse in an Age of Covid,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 44, no. 1 (2021): 93–111. 28. Nelson, “Trump: ‘I am the law and order candidate,’” Politico November 7, 2016. https:​//​www​.politico​.com​/story​/2016​/07​/trump​-law​-order​-candidate​-225372. 29. O’Neil, “What do we know about Trump’s love for the Bible?” The Guardian June 2, 2020. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/us​-news​/2020​/jun​/02​/what​-do​-we​-know​ -about​-trumps​-love​-for​-the​-bible. 30. Anderson, “Introduction,” xx. 31. Barbara Nicolosi, Preface, in The Theology of the Passion of the Christ, ed. Monica Migliorino Miller (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 2005), xxxiii-xiv. 32. Beal and Linafelt, Mel Gibson’s Bible, 5.

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33. Ibid., 3. 34. J. P. Telotte, “Faith and Idolatry in the Horror Film,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 27. 35. Dennis Giles, “Conditions of Pleasure in Horror Cinema,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, eds Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 37. 36. E. Lowrey and R. deCordova, “Enunciation and the Production of Horror in White Zombie,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 205. 37. Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Carnivalesque,” in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, eds. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 128. 38. See Henry A. Giroux, “Disturbing Pleasures. Murderous Images and the Aesthetics of Depravity,” Third Text 26, no. 3 (2012): 259–73. 39. Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker, “Game of Thrones as a Gothic Horror in Quality Television,” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 20 (2021): 116. 40. Giroux, “Disturbing Pleasures,” 263. 41. Davis Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn,” NYMAG.com January 26, 2006 https:​//​nymag​.com​/movies​/features​/15622/. 42. Dana Polan, “Eros and Syphilization: The Contemporary Horror Film,” in Plants of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 193. 43. C. Stopenski, “Exploring Mutilation: Women, Affect, and the Body Horror Genre,” Sic 12, no. 2 (2022): 6. 44. Pamela Grace, “The Passion of the Christ,” Cineaste: America’s Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema 13–17 (Summer 2004): 13. 45. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), 71. 46. Stopenski, “Exploring Mutilation,” 1. 47. David Huckvale, Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020), 5. 48. Pomo, “Mel Gibson’s Passion,” 50. 49. Ibid. 50. Quoted in Grace, “The Passion of the Christ,” 13. 51. Brigid Cherry, True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 7. 52. A. O. Scott, “The Passion of the Christ: Good and Evil Locked in Violent Showdown,” The New York Times February 25, 2004 https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2004​ /02​/25​/movies​/film​-review​-good​-and​-evil​-locked​-in​-violent​-showdown​.html. 53. Jill Stevenson, “The Material Bodies of Medieval Religious Performance in England,” Material Religion 2, no. 2 (2006): 207. 54. F. P. Retief and L. Cilliers, “The History and Pathology of Crucifixion,” The South African Medical Journal 93, no. 12 (2003): 938–41.

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55. Candida Moss, “New Evidence of How Romans Would Have Crucified Jesus,” The Daily Beast June 10, 2018 https:​//​www​.thedailybeast​.com​/new​-evidence​-of​-how​ -romans​-would​-have​-crucified​-jesus. 56. Livia Gershon, “Rare Physical Evidence of Roman Crucifixion Found in Britian,” Smithsonian Magazine December 10, 2021, https:​//​www​.smithsonianmag​ .com​/smart​-news​/first​-physical​-evidence​-of​-roman​-crucifixion​-found​-in​-britain​ -180979190​/​#:​​~:​text​=Under​%20the​%20Roman​%20Empire​%2C​%20crucifixion​ ,bodily​%20fluids​%20and​%20organ​%20failure. 57. Ibid. 58. Moss, “New Evidence.” 59. Fred Botting, Gothic (Milton Park, UK: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 5. 60. Giroux, “Disturbing Pleasures,” 260. 61. Ibid., 260. 62. Raphael Shargel, “The Exaltation of Brutality,” New Leader 87, no. 2 (2004): 32–34. 63. Huckvale, Terrors of the Flesh, 7. 64. Ibid., 127. 65. Telotte, “Faith and Idolatry in the Horror Film,” 23. 66. Huckvale, Terrors of the Flesh, 169. 67. Pomo, “Mel Gibson’s Passion,” 50. 68. Ibid. 69. Grace, “The Passion of the Christ,” 13. 70. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 53. 71. Morris Dickstein, “The Aesthetics of Fright,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. B. K Grant and C. Sharrett (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 55. 72. Nicolosi, Preface, xiii. 73. Monica Migliorino Miller, The Theology of the Passion of the Christ (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 2005), xix. 74. Ibid., 115. 75. Chilton, “The Blood, the Outrage and the Passion of the Christ.” 76. Ebert, “The Passion of the Christ.” 77. Ibid. 78. Pomo, “Mel Gibson’s Passion,” 50. 79. Quoted in Miller, The Theology of the Passion of the Christ, xxiii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, William H. U. “Introduction.” In Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, edited by Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo, 33–35. New York: Routledge, 2001. Auden, W.H. “Postscript: Christianity and Art.” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

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Beal, Timothy K. and Tod Linafelt. Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Passion of the Christ. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Botting, Fred. Gothic. Milton Park, UK: Taylor and Francis, 1999. Cherry, Brigid. True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Chilton, Louis. “The Blood, the Outrage and the Passion of the Christ: Mel Gibson’s Biblical Firestorm, 15 Years On.” Independent February 25, 2019 https:​//​ www​.independent​.co​.uk​/arts​-entertainment​/films​/features​/passion​-of​-the​-christ​-15​ -years​-mel​-gibson​-jim​-cavieziel​-movie​-reaction​-christianity​-a8788381​.html. Clark, Terry Ray. “Introduction: What Is Religion? What Is Popular Culture? How Are They Related?” In Understanding Religion and Popular Culture: Theories, Themes, Products and Practices, edited by Terry Ray Clark and Dan W. Clanton, 1–12. New York: Routledge, 2012. Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Corbett, Julia Mitchell. Religion in America. vol. 3. Hoboken, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997. Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Carnivalesque.” In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, edited by Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, 127–59. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. ———. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Crossley, James. “The Apocalypse and Political Discourse in an Age of Covid.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 44, no. 1 (2021): 93–111. Dickstein, Morris. “The Aesthetics of Fright.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by B. K Grant and C Sharrett, 50–62. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2004. Ebert, Roger. “The Passion of the Christ.” RogerEbert.com February 24, 2004 https:​ //​www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-christ​-2004. Edelstein, Davis. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” NYMAG.com January 26, 2006 https:​//​nymag​.com​/movies​/features​/15622/. Forbes, B. D. and J. H. Mahan. Religion and Popular Culture in America vol. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Forbes, Bruce David. “Introduction.” In Religion and Popular Culture in America, 3rd edn, edited by Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H Mahan, 1–24. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Gershon, Livia. “Rare Physical Evidence of Roman Crucifixion Found in Britian.” Smithsonian Magazine December 10, 2021. https:​//​www​.smithsonianmag​.com​ /smart ​ - news ​ / first ​ - physical ​ - evidence ​ - of ​ - roman ​ - crucifixion ​ - found ​ - in ​ - britain​ -180979190​/​#:​​~:​text​=Under​%20the​%20Roman​%20Empire​%2C​%20crucifixion​ ,bodily​%20fluids​%20and​%20organ​%20failure. Giles, Dennis. “Conditions of Pleasure in Horror Cinema.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 49–67. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Giroux, Henry. A. “Disturbing Pleasures. Murderous Images and the Aesthetics of Depravity.” Third Text 26, no. 3 (2012): 259–73.

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Grace, Pamela. “The Passion of the Christ.” Cineaste: America’s Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema (Summer 2004): 13–17. Griffiths, Alison. “The Revered Gaze: The Medieval Imaginary of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.” Cinema Journal 46, no. 2 (2007): 3–39. Haviland, Lou. “‘The Passion of the Christ’: The Cast Member Who Needed Two Open-Heart Surgeries after Filming.” Showbiz Cheat Sheet April 10, 2020 https:​ //​www​.cheatsheet​.com​/entertainment​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-christ​-the​-cast​-member​ -who​-needed​-two​-open​-heart​-surgeries​-after​-filming​.html/. Huckvale, David. Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020. Jenkins, Bill. “Jesus Christ, Superstar? Why the Gospels Don’t Make Good Movies.” Journal of Religion and Film 12, no. 2 (2008): n.p. https:​//​digitalcommons​ .unomaha​.edu​/jrf​/vol12​/iss2​/3​/​?utm​_source​=digitalcommons​.unomaha​.edu​%2Fjrf​ %2Fvol12​%2Fiss2​%2F3​&utm​_medium​=PDF​&utm​_campaign​=PDFCoverPages. Kozlovic, Anton Karl. “Sacred Subtexts and Popular Film: A Brief Survey of Four Categories of Hidden Religious Figurations.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 18, no. 3 (2010): 317–34. Lavender, A.D. “Gibson, Mel (1956-).” In Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices, 2nd edn., edited by Roger Chapman and James Ciment, 262. New York: Routledge, 2013, https:​//​search​-credoreference​ -com​.ezproxy​.aut​.ac​.nz​/content​/entry​/sharpecw​/gibson​_mel​_1956​/0​?institutionId​ =5349. Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the Christ. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Lowrey, E. and R. deCordova. “Enunciation and the Production of Horror in White Zombie.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 229–64. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. The Matrix. Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. USA: Warner Bros., 1999. Miller, Monica Migliorino. The Theology of the Passion of the Christ. Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 2005. Montevecchio, Caesar A. “Framing Salvation: Biblical Apocalyptic, Cinematic Dystopia, and Contextualizing the Narrative of Salvation.” Journal of Religion and Film 16, no. 2, (2012): n.p. https:​//​digitalcommons​.unomaha​.edu​/jrf​/vol16​/iss2​/7/. Moss, Candida. “New Evidence of How Romans Would Have Crucified Jesus.” The Daily Beast June 10, 2018. https:​//​www​.thedailybeast​.com​/new​-evidence​-of​-how​ -romans​-would​-have​-crucified​-jesus. Nelson, Louis. “Trump: ‘I am the law and order candidate.” Politico November 7, 2016. https:​//​www​.politico​.com​/story​/2016​/07​/trump​-law​-order​-candidate​-225372. Nicolosi, Barbara. Preface. In The Theology of the Passion of the Christ, edited by Monica Migliorino Miller, xiii-xv. Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 2005. O’Neil, Luke. “What do we know about Trump’s over for the Bible?” The Guardian June 2, 2020. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/us​-news​/2020​/jun​/02​/what​-do​-we​ -know​-about​-trumps​-love​-for​-the​-bible. Ostwalt, Conrad E. Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003.

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Pattison, Mark. “For Shakespeare, the Play’s the Thing; for Caviezel, It’s the Script.” Catholic Courier February 28, 2018. https:​//​catholiccourier​.com​/articles​/ for​-shakespeare​-the​-plays​-the​-thing​-for​-caviezel​-its​-the​-script/. Plate, S. Brent. Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. http:​//​ebookcentral​.proquest​.com​/lib​/AUT​ /detail​.action​?docID​=5276198. Polan, Dana. “Eros and Syphilization: The Contemporary Horror Film.” In Plants of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 193–207. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Pomo, Ecce. “Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ Is Much More a Product of This Society Than Its Proponents or Critics Would Like to Admit.” Arena Magazine 70 (2004): 50–51. Retief, F. P. and L. Cilliers. “The History and Pathology of Crucifixion.” The South African Medical Journal 93, no. 12 (2003): 938–41. Ritholtz, Barry. “Orwell vs. Huxley: 1984 vs. Brave New World.” The Big Picture, November 15, 2011 https:​//​ritholtz​.com​/2011​/11​/orwell​-vs​-huxley​-1984​-vs​-brave​ -new​-world/. Rutherford, Amanda and Sarah Baker. “Game of Thrones as a Gothic Horror in Quality Television.” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 20 (2021): 111–28. Saw. Directed by James Wan. USA: Lionsgate, 2004. Scott, A. O. “The Passion of the Christ: Good and Evil Locked in Violent Showdown.” The New York Times February 25, 2004 https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2004​/02​/25​/ movies​/film​-review​-good​-and​-evil​-locked​-in​-violent​-showdown​.html. Shargel, Raphael. “The Exaltation of Brutality.” New Leader 87, no. 2 (2004): 32–34. Solano, Jeanette Reedy. Religion and Film: The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2022. https:​//​ebookcentral​.proquest​.com​/lib​/AUT​/detail​.action​?docID​=6819716. Stevenson, Jill. “The Material Bodies of Medieval Religious Performance in England.” Material Religion 2, no. 2 (2006): 204–32. Stopenski, Carina. “Exploring Mutilation: Women, Affect, and the Body Horror Genre.” Sic 12, no. 2 (2022): n.p. Telotte, J. P. “Faith and Idolatry in the Horror Film.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 27–49. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Directed by James Cameron. USA: Tri-Star Productions, 1991.

PART II

The Social Philosopher

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Chapter 5

Mel Gibson’s Visceral Vision Exploring Recovery from the Human Condition Katherine Cottle

It is hard to find one, or even several words, to describe Mel Gibson and his work as a director. “Gamble,” “Passion,” “Ego,” “Violence,” and “Purpose” are just some of the terms that lead titles from scholarly articles about his directorial work. Part of the challenge of pinning Gibson down is his lifework, which borders a calling as much as it does a career. One must acknowledge the juxtaposition of his directorial impact on film over the last three decades in attempting any label: he is hated and loved, revered and detested— sometimes even by the same critics and viewers. Amidst the various controversies and bad press of his personal decisions and offensive language since the early nineties, Gibson continues to produce films that explore visualizations of human recovery—from his own addictions as a person and artist, from injury and public judgment (in Man Without a Face [1993]), from the casualties of familial and country occupation (in Braveheart [1995]), from individual sin (in Passion of the Christ [2004]), from civilized destruction (in Apocalypto [2006]), and from the wounds of war (in Hacksaw Ridge [2016]). ACTOR/DIRECTOR VS. ART As Chris Nashawaty asks in “Is It Okay to Like a Mel Gibson Movie?” (2011), “At what point does an actor or director’s offscreen life affect how we see them on screen? Gibson fans have been grappling with that thorny question for a while now.”1 While it is easy to condemn many of the director’s 101

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past actions, which include anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks; violent threats and actions; and arrests for driving under the influence, it is much harder to dismiss the power of addiction in the nourishment of these actions. Is it possible to empathize with addicts, but condemn the addiction and their negative actions? Groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which Gibson has attended throughout his life, surely think so. The director describes the recursive recovery process of sobriety as “an ongoing battle.”2 Unlike the cycles driven by economics of movie studios and mass media, Alcoholics Anonymous promotes a view of one’s flawed past, which is accepting, ongoing, and necessary to achieve full recovery: “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”3 Alcoholics Anonymous believes that addicts must accept and learn from the past, versus denying or regretting the history of their problematic behaviors. Does AA’s philosophy explain the range of reactions to Gibson by viewers? Do viewers’ and critics’ personal experiences with addiction (either their own or others’) make them hesitate before throwing stones at Gibson from their own glass houses, even if those houses are composed of minor offenses? Gibson has touched on the hypocrisy of the Hollywood business, which requires actors (and directors) to “have to be like a kid”4 in their day jobs, yet still live within the nuanced parameters of an adult world, which requires public relations and handlers, a recipe and disposition that surely fosters addictive behaviors and, often, self-medication. On set, the creativity and imaginative reach that most are encouraged to discontinue after childhood— including accurate portrayals of extremely flawed human characters—is celebrated and compensated; yet off the set, money and trends drive expectations of actors’ behaviors, creating a tension between art and capital, which ultimately both feeds and destroys its members. Gibson is not alone in having to come to terms with these battling forces, admitting that “I’ve always been terribly impulsive, and I still am to a degree. But the day comes when you say to yourself, ‘Gee. How could I have driven that fast? Why am I still here?’”5 Perhaps what makes Gibson stand out is the intensity and longevity of his public outbursts and problematic behaviors, which continue to cycle through his life. As well, audiences have been able to see and hear this revolving door (and to realize the door is unable to stop turning), as Gibson persists in asking the following question, repeatedly, through his films: “Why am I still here?”6

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THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE: INTERNAL RECOVERY FROM EXTERNAL INJURY Each new Gibson film has provided an outlet for this impulsiveness and for the director’s need to explore the contradictory, flawed, and ambitious traits that often accompany the human condition. The Man without a Face, Gibson’s directorial debut, presents the overt visual of an injured and scarred man, Justin McLeod, perhaps not so surprisingly played by Gibson, whose recovery is only possible through the development of a secret relationship with a young boy battling his own demons. Reviews for the film were generally fair upon its release, with many reviewers highlighting the process of McLeod’s internal recovery and evolution from past predator to powerful mentor: “In their first encounter, the hideously scarred face of the man whom everyone reviles as the local freak badly scares a tire-stabbing juvenile delinquent. How the embittered pariah (Gibson) becomes a saving tutor and father figure for disgruntled little Charles (Nick Stahl) makes an affecting, and at times very funny, movie.”7 Reviewers, such as Peter Travers, highlight the combination of heavy-handed dialogue and dramatics with noticeable sensitivities to character vulnerabilities, declaring “Gibson [to be] that rare actor-director who doesn’t make himself the whole show,”8 an actor-director who attempts a vision supported by a cast of multiple people also in need of recovery. However, the contrast between Gibson’s directorial decisions and the novel, which inspired the film, was not lost on critics and academics, who scrutinized the way “Gibson turned Isabelle Holland’s novel about the awakening to homosexuality of a teenage boy into the story of the impossible relationship between Chuck, the son of a man who committed suicide—the man without a face of the title—and Justin, a teacher unfairly accused of sexually abusing a male student.”9 Gibson was accused of gay erasure10 and homophobia, a critique that only increased after his infamous 1991 interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais.11 Repeatedly recorded as rigid and ambiguous, Gibson’s first directorial debut proved positive in reinforcing views of his film role as both a “martyr” and a “menace.” Sara Martin Alegre declares the “face here is a stigma that man bears, a mark of innocence soiled by unfounded accusations” and “the face of the missing ideal father according to Hollywood.”12 Of note, however, is the fact that McLeod’s (and Gibson’s) face is only half disfigured in The Man Without a Face, showing two sides, a past and a present self, both innocent and guilty, a father only through mentorship, and a man “made rather than born.”13 Part of McLeod’s perceived depravity is his decision to socially isolate himself from others in the community. McLeod recognizes that his role

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is that of “a proper fairytale troll. The tourist board ought to pay me. It’s my job,”14 utilizing sarcasm to recognize the entertainment that his disfigurement and isolation is providing for others in the community. McLeod will never be able to recover from his external injuries and the perceptions of his society, but he will be allowed a chance at internal redemption through his paternal mentorship of another young man (Charles), who is also flawed and without a face,15 though Charles’s disfigurement is internal, due to a lack of a father and dysfunctional female family members. Recovery, for McLeod, includes healing not only from the physical scars of biological injury, but also from the critical judgments of those who are not disfigured or socially isolated. Internal recovery rests on McLeod’s (and subsequently, Gibson’s) ability to help future selves (in the case of The Man Without a Face, a fatherless Charles) to learn and grow, despite these external challenges. McLeod’s plea is not only intended for those suspicious of his actions, but also for the viewers of the film, who hear their own symbolic pleas of validation for a vision of humanity, which extends beyond the skin: “I assure you it is human, but if that’s all you see, then you don’t see me.” Regardless of one’s critical response to the director’s revision of the book, which inspired the film, the line of loyalty and the role of the student in a teacher’s learning and transformation is brought to the forefront of the recovery process. Mary Dalton’s survey of “The Hollywood Curriculum: who is the ‘good’ teacher?” (1995) includes the 1993 film in her “Teachers Learning from Students” section, which identifies visual narratives of teachers who learn “valuable lessons from their students” and are only then able “to find the meaning to live richer lives than they lived before special students came into their lives.”16 Consequently, Dalton argues, the Hollywood teacher is “idealized enough to inspire viewers and manageable enough to leave the status quo intact.”17 If true “salvation” is possible “[f]or teachers, this means they must choose students over schools and other societal institutions.”18 This educational loyalty, however, risks not only inappropriate power dynamics and potential abuse by teachers, but ostracization by the societal status quo. The Man Without a Face surely foreshadows these perils for Gibson, especially in his reception as a renowned actor and director. BRAVEHEART: REBELLION RECOVERY FROM THE CASUALTIES OF OCCUPATION Two years after the release of The Man Without a Face, while reflecting on his dual roles of actor and director/producer in Braveheart, Gibson stated, “there’s that balance between, ya’ know, artistic endeavor and the

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practicalities of being a producer, which a lot of people come to loggerheads with, but I think that the two can co-exist.”19 In fact, that balance provided the filmmaker with additional praise and public awards, including the coveted best director Academy Award for Braveheart. The Academy’s endorsement of the film’s quality provided an ironic validation of Gibson’s vision and creative aims, as the filmmaker notes: “I think it’s something from a storytelling point, from a performing aspect that one does crave, but you don’t do this for some sort of elite. You do it for the masses as a Statement to identify or focus on what you know to be true about life and behavior from a human point of view.”20 Braveheart’s search for authenticity stems from its presentation of the behavioral steps needed to recover from familial loss and the lack of national freedom. Gibson explores these elements through the eyes and actions of William Wallace, a knight who led the Scottish rebellion during the First War of Scottish Independence. The film’s opening scenes depict Wallace’s early losses of his father and brother, but it is “the attempted rape and subsequent execution of his wife, Murron, at the hands of English soldiers that finally turns Wallace into a warrior for Scottish freedom.”21 As viewers and critics, such as Michael D. Sharp, observe, “[a]ccording to the film, Wallace’s bride Murron is the primary reason that Wallace becomes involved in the wars of independence.”22 Recovery from the loss of Murron requires the commitment to the societal battle for Scottish independence, as well as the violence that accompanies that goal. Sharp’s analysis merges the two losses, wife and country, into a singular lens: “Wallace’s relationship to his country is thus expressed in terms of a marital metaphor. His role as good husband enables his subsequent role as freedom-fighter and patriot.”23 Within this merging of marriage and country, the “good husband” is eventually able to seek intimate recovery through a relationship with a royal woman from the enemy’s side, Isabella of France (Sophie Marceau), without the stigma of widower replacement or country disloyalty. In fact, his former wife’s independence is transferred, as noted when Wallace tells Isabella, “I see her strength in you.”24 The symbolism of marriage and country, as Sharp mentions, is directly visualized from the beginning of the film when a young Murron hands a young and mourning Wallace “a thistle, one of Scotland’s national symbols. Thus Wallace’s romantic connection to Murron is, from the beginning of the film, based at least in part on her understanding and support for his nationalist sentiment.”25 Viewers, and Wallace, realize that his vision and fight for an independent Scotland will continue even after his death, on societal and genetic levels, as Isabella tells King Edward Longshanks (Patrick McGoohan) on his deathbed, “A child who is not of your line grows in my belly. Your son will not sit long on the throne. I swear it,” indirectly implying that Wallace’s bloodline and national purpose has been recovered.

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The majority of critics praised Braveheart, such as New York Times reviewer, Caryn James, who highlighted Gibson’s grandiose and quixotic reach, declaring the film to be “a great, ambitious gamble that pays off.”26 A large part of that gamble was the intense and mass-populated battle scenes, which Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers commended, reflecting that “Wallace could relate to any story that pits one pissed-off fighter against the system.”27 However, Gibson’s lofty and recalcitrant vision, often threaded with theatrical humor, also received significant criticism, especially for its portrayal of Edward II, as Sid Ray notes: “Gibson’s insistence on Prince Edward’s effeminacy and on his father’s brutal virility illustrates no truths about sanctioned masculinities in the Middle Ages, but instead draws on homophobic de-contextualized overgeneralizations, which are themselves false.”28 Additional criticism includes reviewer Peter Stack, who argues that Braveheart “comes up short by beating the drums of human treachery and violence so loudly they become assaults.”29 After referencing the scene where the Scottish foot soldiers moon the British, Glenn Kenny theorizes that “Braveheart is one big moon for all of those who thought Gibson wasn’t capable of anything more than Mad Max or Lethal Weapon sequels,”30 a loud and violent cry for independence against a doubting public. Controversy was also not lost on Gibson’s directorial decisions, which prompted claims of historical inaccuracies. While Braveheart was based on a historical narrative (versus the literary foundation of The Man Without a Face), Gibson continued to be critiqued for fabricated narrative, homophobic character portrayals, and contemporary manipulations of dialogue and actions. Tim Edensor explains how “[t]he first lover of Wallace, the elfin Murron, apparently has no basis in documented evidence. Other writers directed particular outrage to the absence of a bridge in the scenes of the Battle of Stirling Bridge, the mythical capture of York and the inauthentic shortness of Mel Gibson in contrast to the towering height of Wallace.”31 Roger Ebert, however, defended Gibson, clarifying that “Gibson is not filming history here, but myth. Wallace may have been a real person, but ‘Braveheart’ owes more to Prince Valiant, Rob Roy and Mad Max. Once we understand that this is not a solemn historical reconstruction (and that happens pretty fast), we accept dialogue that might otherwise have an uncannily modern tone.”32 That myth continues to be a narrative to revenge the casualties of the ruling order, not only constructed for Braveheart and Wallace, but also for Gibson in a recovery only possible through violence and sacrifice.

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THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: COLLECTIVE RECOVERY FROM INDIVIDUAL SIN The Passion of the Christ surely meets most viewers’ and critics’ bar for extreme violence and sacrifice. Early interviews with Gibson note his awareness and intention of inordinate blood and torture in the visualization of Christ’s crucifixion and atonement: “I wanted it to be shocking. And I also wanted it to be extreme. I wanted it to push the viewer over the edge . . . so that they see the enormity—the enormity of that sacrifice—to see that someone could endure that and still come back with love and forgiveness, even through extreme pain and suffering and ridicule.”33 Viewers and critics responded accordingly, with reviews and scholarship often devoted as much to the physical reaction of viewers watching the film, as the film itself. Kelly Denton-Borhaug notes that “[v]iewers describe multiple physical responses to The Passion, including weeping, sweating, shaking, speechlessness, hiding their eyes, feeling sick, etc. Film scholar Barbara Creed explores the significance of these physical reactions to film as most commonly associated with the viewing of horror films.”34 In fact, Hammer and Kellner assert “that the violence . . . being inflicted on a major global religious figure adds to the horror and provides iconography of violence as extreme as any in cinema history.”35 The crucifixion of Christ is, perhaps, the ultimate horror story, speaking in terms of narrative craft, regardless of one’s religious faith, in its visceral capture of individual human suffering for the forgiveness of and recovery from collective sin. The film also suggests a pornography of violence, Hammer and Kellner argue, “with savage beatings, brutality, and torture as extreme as any in S&M porn films.”36 Gibson’s role as crucifier, as “Gibson himself allegedly held the hammer that pounded the nail through Jesus’s hand,”37 leaves viewers uncomfortable in their awareness of the director’s public acknowledgment of his own sin and his willingness to share, or rather his inability to hide, his daily struggle for faith, and recovery from his individual failings. “Jesus Christ was beaten for our iniquities,” Gibson said [in his ABC News Primetime Interview], “[h]e was wounded for our transgressions and by his wounds we are healed. That’s the point of the film.”38 The film wounds its viewers as they learn, through watching the torture as voyeurs, that wounds are required and the violence necessary, to reach a place of grace. The director’s own internal suffering led to his decision to make the film, to attempt to recover from his own addictions and “spiritual bankruptcy.”39 After considering suicide, Gibson decided to “reexamine Christianity, and ultimately to create ‘Passion of the Christ’—‘my vision . . . with God’s help’ of the final hours in the life of Jesus.”40 Gibson might be reimagined as a horror

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director, not in the traditional genre of horror film, but in his reach for the depiction of human horrors that repeat, time and time again, throughout history. The physicality and perpetual presence of human sin in his films surely checks all of the horror elements, which impede spiritual progress and live within the shell of the decaying human body and its seven deadly sins: gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory, and pride.41 Viewers of his films and critics of his life surely walk away from this exposure, horrified by the damage that humans are capable of, especially against one another. While many critics applauded the film, just as many provided severe criticism, charging Gibson with claims of anti-Semitism, biblical, and historical inaccuracies, and exploitative violence. S. Scott Bartchy reveals a lack of context in the film, which includes “medieval speculations and nineteenth century visions,” “demoniz[ation] [of] most of the Jewish leaders,” and a neglect of “the historical Jesus’s actions, prophetic social critique, and profound concern for the poor and marginal.”42 In fact, Bartchy declares, Gibson “presents a Jesus who reveals more about Gibson than about Jesus in his context.”43 Bjorn Krondorfer describes this lens: “What this film shows is the undoing of a human rather than a story of the resurrected Christ.”44 Gibson’s desire to produce “education entertainment,” which “attempt[ed] to dramatically, artistically, and realistically depict the events leading up to and surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus Christ”45 struck many as his own evangelical narrative, determined to reach non-believers at the cost of bias, inaccuracy, and offense. However, defenders, such as theological and historical consultant for the film, William Fulco, found himself having to repeat the reality that the film “is an artifact. It’s a piece of art. It’s not a documentary.”46 Fulco refutes those who see the film through the simplicity of directorial ego; rather, he suggests “what Mel is doing is the Gospel according to Mel. People have said that sarcastically in critiques of the film, but in fact that’s not a bad expression. He also saw a historical event which suggested to him that human suffering can have a redemptive quality.”47 Fulco parallels the Gospels’ creative and often contradictory spin on a historical event with that of the director: “He’s expressing this artistically through the medium of film, just as the Gospels used the medium of words.”48 Following the success of Gibson’s previous formulas seen in Mad Max and Braveheart, Richard Hutch affirms that “Jesus fits nicely into Gibson’s worldview where apocalyptic events bring on uncertain existential closure.”49 In what Sandra Scham terms “Hollywood Holy Land” (2004), Gibson’s vision aligns with his viewers in wanting the past to provide recovery for the present, in order to gain validation through a connection to history. Scham notes that “[a]rchaeologists and historians are rapidly coming to the conclusion that, for most people, the past is a sort of theme park—and they want the themes to be familiar ones.”50 Gibson’s theme

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park approach to the biblical account of the crucifixion is definitely not the Disney approach, but rather the AA approach, as “[w]ithin this narrative and world view, Gibson recognizes his need for ‘faith, hope, love and forgiveness.’”51 While viewers and critics may question or dismiss the filmmaker’s evangelism and the accuracy of his biblical vision of the Gospels, Gibson’s need for spiritual recovery overrides any fear of rejection: “It is reality for me. . . . I believe that. I have to . . . for my own sake . . . so I can hope, so I can live.”52 APOCALYPTO: RECURSIVE RECOVERY FROM CIVILIZED DESTRUCTION As Richard Schickel reinforces, “[t]he dim past—that place where the mindlessly cruel and the idealistically aspiring meet in vicious conflict—has been good to Mel Gibson.”53 The tension between civilizational progress and primal human violence themes all of the director’s films, but Apocalypto’s directorial reach into a past civilization in decline—in this case, Mayan—mirrors Gibson’s vision of societal recovery as a recursive pattern of destruction, starting from within. The 2006 film was well-received upon its release, with many other directors, such as Spike Lee54 and Martin Scorsese, commenting on their admiration for it. Scorsese, highlighting Gibson’s proclivity for depicting the adverse conditions of humanity, remarked that “[m]any pictures today don’t go into troubling areas like this, the importance of violence in the perpetuation of what’s known as civilization. I admire Apocalypto for its frankness, but also for the power and artistry of the filmmaking.”55 Yet, Gibson’s 2006 DUI arrest and anti-Semitic remarks, made just months before the release of Apocalypto, could not be dismissed from most reviewers’ minds, and his off-screen words and behavior often became intertwined with the critiques of the film and filmmaker, as evidenced in A. O. Scott’s review: “The brutality in ‘Apocalypto’ is so relentless and extreme that it sometimes moves beyond horror into a kind of grotesque comedy, but to dismiss it as excessive or gratuitous would be to underestimate Mr. Gibson’s seriousness. And say what you will about him—about his problem with booze or his problem with Jews—he is a serious filmmaker.”56 In the short term, it looked questionable whether Gibson would recover from the DUI incident, as a reputable director and as a citizen with a tarnished reputation. What did withstand the personally controversial release of Apocalypto, however, was Gibson’s directorial decisions in terms of casting and dialogue. While generally critical of the film and the director, many reviewers applauded Gibson’s commitment to hire Mayan experts for technical advising and to cast native and relatively unknown actors. An Archaeology (2007) interview

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with Mayan expert and technical advisor, Richard Hansen, predicted that the film’s release would make great strides in educating the public on Mayan history.57 While many of the scenes and costuming were researched for authenticity, Hansen admits, there were definitely elements of “artistic license” in the film.58 Many reviewers, like Stephen Spence, appreciated the Yukatec Maya dialogue but felt unable to defend a script that catered to tropes and problematic indigenous representation: “If only it didn’t play like an Indian Braveheart, or feel like Die Hard with a Mayan Vengeance.”59 Referencing the New York Times, Spence quotes A. O. Scott’s determination that “the film’s real language is Hollywood’s, and Mr. Gibson’s, native tongue.”60 In other words, Apocalypto’s recovery of precolonial history and awareness is for Gibson’s and Hollywood’s benefit, not the Mayans’. “Gibson loves operating in that historical territory,” Schickel notes, “where the record is sketchy and subject to mythic reinvention, which leaves him— and anyone else—free to fill in the blanks with whatever dubious ideological instruction he likes.”61 Deliberately choosing characters and histories that are not traditionally preserved or documented provides Gibson the space to recover the unfiltered and imaginative extensions of his childhood fantasies with the accessibility and economic funding of directed Hollywood distribution; in other words, merging his day and night jobs into visions of visceral impact. Yet, this is also the territory where historical accuracy quickly blurs into speculative reach, where validity is often sacrificed for the sake of creativity. David Freidel composes a laundry list of historical inaccuracies of Mayan representation in the 2006 film, admitting that “Gibson has several engaging natives in his tableau macabre nightmare of civilization versus nature, but they bear only superficial resemblance to Maya peoples, ancient or modern, despite speaking the Yucatec language.”62 Like many other critics of the film, Freidel sees Gibson’s vision of recovery of Mayan history and awareness as a selfish endeavor, versus an artistic reach for knowledge and societal responsibility.63 While many Apocalypto critics felt the need to house themselves under pro- or anti-Gibson tents, some, such as Hansen, highlighted the complexity of the film and its release, noting how “the elements of truth, public perception, relativism, revisionism, and emic/etic perspectives coalesced into a case where truth, fiction, and the virtues and vices of the authors and director of the film as well as those of critics were exposed.”64 To rephrase, critics scrutinized the film through an academic and historical non-fiction lens, in which it is the director’s obligation to implement historical accuracies, versus a fictive lens, which allows for creative interpretation of historical events and people. Hansen devoted an entire article to the defense of Gibson’s directorial choices in Apocalypto, arguing that “Gibson was within his right to tell the story as he saw fit, particularly if it adhered to the ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and

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archaeological facts.”65 Thus, the degree to which “story” retains the necessity of purist accuracy in historical fiction remains tied to one’s moral standings on societal responsibility. For some critics and viewers, like Richard Blake, the excessive violence in Gibson’s films crosses this line. Blake theorizes that “[t]hose who found edification in Gibson’s sadomasochistic dance through the New Testament in ‘The Passion of the Christ’ will probably find penetrating historical analysis in ‘Apocalypto.’ Not me.”66 Violence and human sacrifice—whether self-imposed or forced, as visualized in Apocalypto, repeatedly represents the place where opposing forces meet, whether that is in terms of civilizations, religions, industries, cultures, or even the self. HACKSAW RIDGE: REFUSAL AS RECOVERY FROM THE WOUNDS OF WAR The focus on war continued to provide the visualization for the recovery from physical and mental wounds in Gibson’s 2016 Hacksaw Ridge, based on the first conscientious objector, Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), to receive the Medal of Honor after demonstrating extraordinary bravery in the rescue of seventy-five men during the Battle of Okinawa in World War II. The early scenes of the film provide the context and catalyst for Doss’s declaration to never to take up arms: the childhood fight in which Desmond hits his brother on the head with a brick, causing a critical injury, which almost resulted in his brother’s death. By the middle of the film, viewers also witness a flashback to a moment when Doss comes close to killing his father (Hugo Weaving), but then consciously chooses to kill him solely in terms of the metaphorical destruction of their internal relationship. Prime in the protagonist’s identity formation, in addition to his brother’s injury and the trauma from his father’s familial violence fueled by the PTSD caused by losing so many of his peers to early deaths in WWI, is Doss’s faith in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Anthony Lane declared Hacksaw Ridge to be “the strangest release of the year: an implacably violent film about a man who wants no part of violence at all.”67 The context of this paradox is bound to the visual relation between spirituality and violence, with the continual tension of a world where both human traits have mapped histories since the earliest traces of documentation. Lane asserts that “[m]ore than any other living director, even a fellow-Catholic such as Martin Scorsese, Gibson seems to be gripped by the spiritual repercussions of pain. Within the bounds of his vision, it is quite natural to cut from Doss inside a church, polishing the stained-glass windows, to a nasty accident on the road outside and the impaling of a victim’s leg.”68 In fact, it is the visualization of pain in juxtaposition with religious imagery that enables the violence to transcend physical injury into the realm of ritual. Film critics

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have differed in their reactions to this contiguous framework. Peter Rainer, for example, theorizes that the protagonist’s “valor is celebrated by Gibson as a spiritual offering; the film is replete with images in which Doss is deified, Christlike, for his sacrifice and courage.”69 However, many critics, including Rainer, note that “as in ‘Braveheart,’ ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ and ‘Apocalypto,’ [Gibson] piles on the carnage in an attempt to consecrate suffering and achieve a spiritual cleansing. What often comes through instead is bloodlust posing as religiosity.”70 Where is the line between violent fetish and spiritual embodiment, between man and God, between life and death? How much suffering is needed for recovery from the human condition? Hacksaw Ridge, as Lane critiques, “treads close to madness and majesty alike, and nobody but Gibson could have made it.”71 Barry Robison notes that “Mr. Gibson wanted ‘Hacksaw’ to look different from his other war films, ‘[Gibson] wanted a more visceral quality. Tight, chaotic. He said he wanted ‘the ugly intensity of war.’”72 This visualization, Gibson reinforces, depended on the “graphic violence [that] was needed to emphasize the courage Doss summoned to go into battle ‘with nothing to defend himself except his faith.’”73 Gibson’s relentless drive to visually capture the core features of the enduring human conditions of violence and religion becomes a repeated defense against a public courtroom, which prefers a more subtle defense and reflection of its own humanity. “But then, no one expects understatement from Mel Gibson,” Stephanie Zacharek emphasizes, “[a]nd if Hacksaw Ridge sometimes veers into overkill territory, at least it bristles with grim vitality.”74 The contrast of violence and deference provides a tension that allows for a logical equation between Gibson’s opposing sides and visions. Zacharek notes that Hacksaw Ridge “doesn’t absolve him of [anti-Semitic ravings]. But it’s still a movie that reaches out toward the idea of goodness in the world. And whether you or I like Gibson as a person, it’s no one’s place to deny his reach.”75 In denying Gibson his reach, we inevitably deny ourselves the same extension, as viewers composed of our own external and internal contradictions, and that same reach for virtue, as well. “The prayer [Doss] repeats,” Zacharek furthers, “‘Please, Lord, help me get one more’”—doesn’t even sound aggressively religious. It’s more an incantation, the automatic mantra of a man living desperately in the moment.”76 This desperate moment might well describe Gibson’s perpetual state, as visionary and religious crusader: a moment made up of many visual frames of moments, a reel repeating a prayer over and over: “Please, Lord, help me get one more.”77 The blurry bridge between savior and saved is clearly portrayed in Hacksaw Ridge, as well as in the characterization of Doss: the recovery from physical and mental wounds reliant on the service to others—to make up for past transgressions, for violent tendencies, and for man’s innately sinful state.

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Doss regularly repeats versions of his own scriptural verse, which validate his actions: “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don’t seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.” Richard Frank contends that “[t]hrough Garfield we see that Doss’s profound faith was much more than rote recitations of Bible passages; it was, above all, a relentless motor driving him in selfless service to others.”78 Doss is a man, and Gibson by extension, who must stay true to himself. Doss (and Gibson) must let the world know about this internal drive to share his personal Gospel: “I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself if I don’t stay true to what I believe.” After Doss’s final rescue, when the surviving soldiers ask him if he is wounded, he replies (with dramatic pause): “no.” Having completed a tour of duty, still standing after being a savior for so many men, through a miracle on a ridge, he has recovered from his mental wounds. His physical wounds, while painful, will eventually heal with time. Gibson teaches us that recovery is not possible without an acknowledgment of the flawed human condition. In addition, there is no word (at least in the English language) that easily depicts the opposite of recovery (only near antonyms). One must search into the past to recognize the factors leading to recovery in order to predict its future trajectories. The same can be said for Gibson’s directorial films, which catalog a world comprised of fictional characters, even if inspired by historical figures and events, struggling on internal and external fronts to capture the mortal experience in order to reclaim its moral capacity, even if that restoration is only possible while confronting death. Brian Johnson proposes that “Gibson appears to be a Hollywood Jekyll-and-Hyde. By day, he’s a serious actor, a charismatic star and arguably Hollywood’s most successful independent filmmaker. A charmer with an irreverent wit, he also knows how to work the room”;79 Gibson has learned how to navigate public civilization. “Then there’s full-moon Mel,” Johnson adds, the private civilian, “a nasty drunk capable of immolating his reputation in a tequila-soaked blaze of self-destruction. But maybe the split between auteur and martyr is no contradiction at all. Maybe the toxic rage that drives Mad Mel’s demons is exactly what possesses his filmmaking.”80 Gibson demonstrates the psychological pattern of so many suffering artists—the immediate and perpetual mourning of the future losses of the people and places he loves, including himself and his society, accelerating their decline through his own self-destructive actions; in turn, becoming his own oracle of sacrifice. Perhaps, a familiarity with this split existence is also what divides Gibson’s critics and viewers, with those who have spent significant time caught between “auteur and martyr,”81 being more willing to view the director’s films through a lens of vengeance, due to the societal indifference for the

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constant need of human recovery when one and one’s society are, or at least are perceived to be, in a perpetual spiral of mourning and decline. Gibson’s forthcoming directorial films include The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection and Lethal Finale, the fifth installment in the Lethal Weapon series. Previews for the films hint at Gibson’s continuing theme of recovery: from secular progress in The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection and from age in Lethal Finale. As Gibson edges closer to the numerical benchmarks where most men would retire from their careers, viewers and critics can surely expect further visceral visualizations of tragedy and comedy, the life-script that Gibson has sacrificed so much for, in its historical making. Moments of suffering, fear, passion, loss, anger, enlightenment, and humor collide when viewing the present and ongoing collection of Gibson’s directorial work. How do we find the words to describe the filmmaker’s directorial work, his life, and his impact on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Perhaps the director is so hard to define because he makes us admit our own need for recovery, too, even if from the lack of words available to capture our own flawed and human experiences within one lifetime. Yet, Mel Gibson also inspires us to move forward in that attempt: rehabilitation, comeback, healing. NOTES 1. Chris Nashawaty, “Is It Okay To Like a Mel Gibson Movie?” Entertainment Weekly (August 19, 2011): 94. https:​//​ew​.com​/article​/2011​/08​/12​/it​-okay​-mel​-gibson​ -movie/. Accessed September 10, 2022. 2. Yahoo Staff, “Mel Reveals ‘Worst Moment of His Life,’” Yahoo News (October 16, 2016), https:​//​au​.news​.yahoo​.com​/ive​-got​-10​-years​-of​-sobriety​-under​-my​-belt​ -mel​-gibson​-opens​-up​-32913951​.html​#page1. Accessed September 15, 2022. 3.3. Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, 4th edn. (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2002), 83. 4. Bart Mills, “Mel Gibson: Still Growing Up,” Saturday Evening Post 265 no. 6 (1993): 70. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. James Stolee, “Not Every Man Is a Monster—Even If He Looks like One,” Alberta Report/Newsmagazine 21 no. 14 (1994): 40. 8. Peter Travers, “The Melephant Man,” Rolling Stone 665 (September 1993): 75. 9. Sara Martin Alegre, “The Man Behind the Mask: Looking at Men’s Faces in Films,” Screen Studies Conference (University of Glasgow: 1999), 11. https:​//​ddd​.uab​ .cat​/record​/113504. Accessed September 10, 2022.

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10. Michael DeAngelis (ed.), “Identity Transformations: Mel Gibson’s Sexuality,” in Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, Keanu Reeves, 119–178 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 120. 11. Ibid., 121. 12. Alegre, “The Man Behind the Mask,” 11. 13. Ibid. 14. The Man Without a Face. Director Mel Gibson. Santa Monica, CA: Icon Productions, 1993. 15. James R. Keller, “Like to a Chaos,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 23, no. 1 (1995): 8. 16. Mary M. Dalton, “The Hollywood Curriculum: Who Is the ‘Good’ Teacher?” Curriculum Studies 3, no. 1 (1995): 29. 17. Dalton, “The Hollywood Curriculum,” 41. 18. Ibid. 19. Mel Gibson, “Interview with Mel Gibson,” by John Andrew Gallagher and Sylvia Caminer, Films in Review 47 nos. 5/6: (1996): 31. 20. Ibid. 21. Michael D. Sharp, “Remaking Medieval Heroism: Nationalism and Sexuality in Braveheart,” Florilegium 15, no. 1 (1998): 255. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 256. 24. Braveheart, dir. Mel Gibson (Santa Monica, CA: Icon Productions and The Ladd Company, 1995). 25. Sharp, “Remaking Medieval Heroism,” 256. 26. Caryn James, “Braveheart,” New York Times (May 23, 1995), https:​//​archive​ .nytimes​.com​/www​.nytimes​.com​/library​/filmarchive​/braveheart​.html. Accessed October 1, 2022. 27. Peter Travers, “Braveheart,” Rolling Stone (May 24, 1995), https:​ //​ www​ .rollingstone​.com​/tv​-movies​/tv​-movie​-reviews​/braveheart​-122937/. Accessed October 1, 2022. 28. Sid Ray, “Hunks, History, and Homophobia: Masculinity Politics in Braveheart and Edward II,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 29, no. 3 (1999): 25. 29. Peter Stack, “Macho Mel Beats His Chest in Bloody ‘Braveheart,’” SFGate (May 24, 1995), http:​//​www​.sfgate​.com​/movies​/article​/FILM​-REVIEW​-Macho​-Mel​ -Beats​-His​-Chest​-in​-3032546​.php. Accessed October 1, 2022. 30. Glenn Kenny, “Mel Gibson His ‘Braveheart’ Is Bloody Marvelous,” Entertainment Weekly (February 28, 1996): 108. 31. Tim Edensor, “Reading Braveheart: Representing and Contesting Scottish Identity.” Scottish Affairs 21, no. 1 (1997): 20, https:​//​www​.researchgate​.net​/profile​ /Tim​-Edensor​/publication​/265039511​_Reading​_Braveheart​_Representing​_and​_ Contesting​_Scottish​_Identity​/links​/553a08af0cf226723aba4635​/Reading​-Braveheart​ -Representing​-and​-Contesting​-Scottish​-Identity​.pdf. Accessed October 1, 2022. 32. Roger Ebert, “Braveheart,” RogerEbert.com (May 24, 1995), https:​//​www​ .rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/braveheart​-1995. Accessed October 1, 2022.

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33. ABC News Staff, “How Despairing Gibson Found ‘The Passion,’” ABC News (February 17, 2004), http:​//​abcnews​.go​.com​/Primetime​/Oscars2005​/story​?id​=132399​ &page​=3. Accessed October 15, 2022. 34. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, “A Bloodthirsty Salvation: Behind the Popular Polarized Reaction to Gibson’s The Passion,” Journal of Religion & Film 9, no. 1 (2005): 12. 35. Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner, “Critical Reflections on Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ,’” Logos 3, no. 2 (2004): 3. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 1. 38. ABC Staff, “How Despairing Gibson.” 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Becky Little, “How the Seven Deadly Sins Began as ‘Eight’ Evil Thoughts,” History (March 29, 2021), https:​//​www​.history​.com​/news​/seven​-deadly​-sins​-origins. Accessed September 20, 2022. 42. S. Scott Bartchy, “Where Is the History in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ?” Pastoral Psychology 53, no. 4 (2005): 313. 43. Ibid., 318. 44. Björn Krondorfer, “Mel Gibson’s Alter Ego: A Male Passion for Violence,” CrossCurrents 54, no. 1 (2004): 8. 45. William J. Brown, John D. Keeler, and Terrence R. Lindvall, “Audience Responses to The Passion of the Christ,” Journal of Media and Religion 6, no. 2 (April 2007): 91. 46. William Fulco, “From Gospel to Gibson: An Interview with the Writers Behind Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,” by David Shepherd, Religion & the Arts 9, nos. 3/4 (2005): 325. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Richard Hutch, “Mel Gibson’s Big Gamble: The Passion of Christ,” Pastoral Psychology 53, no. 4 (2005): 338. 50. Sandra Scham, “Hollywood Holy Land,” Archaeology 57, no. 2 (2004): 62–66. 51. ABC Staff, “How Despairing Gibson.” 52. Ibid. 53. Richard Schickel, “The Maya Are Us,” TIME Magazine 168, no. 24 (2006): 85. 54. Jesse David Fox, “Read Spike Lee’s ‘Essential Films for Filmmakers,’” New York Vulture (July 26, 2013). https:​//​www​.vulture​.com​/2013​/07​/read​-spike​-lees​ -essential​-films​-list​.html. Accessed October 1, 2022. 55. Martin Scorsese, “The Naked Prey (1966) and Apocalypto (2006)” Movie Chat (Forum). n.d., https:​//​moviechat​.org​/tt0472043​/Apocalypto​ /58c83c00b591530ffd610cfc​ / Martin​ - Scorsese​ - on​ - The​ - Naked​ - Prey​ - 1966​ - and​ -Apocalypto​-2006. Accessed October 22, 2022. 56. A. O. Scott, “The Passion of the Maya,” New York Times (December 8, 2006). 57. Richard Hansen, “Mel Gibson’s Maya,” Archaeology 60, no. 1 (2007): 16. 58. Ibid.

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59. Stephen Spence, “The Revelations of Mel,” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2007): 492. 60. Scott, “The Passion of the Maya.” 61. Schickel, “The Maya Are Us,” 85. 62. David Freidel, “Betraying the Maya,” Archaeology 60, no. 2 (2007): 36. 63. Ibid., 36–41. 64. Richard Hansen, “Relativism, Revisionism, Aboriginalism, and Emic/Etic Truth: The Case Study of Apocalypto,” in The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research, eds. Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (New York: Springer, 2012), 147. 65. Ibid., 173. 66. Richard A. Blake, “Apocalunacy,” America 196, no. 2 (2007): 35. 67. Anthony Lane, “Good Fights,” New Yorker 92, no. 36 (2016): 82–83. 68. Ibid. 69. Peter Rainer, “‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Often Has Blood Lust Pose as Religiosity,” Christian Science Monitor (November 4, 2016). 70. Ibid. 71. Anthony Lane, “Good Fights,” 82–83. 72. Barry Robison, “How War-Movie Veteran Mel Gibson Approached Directing ‘Hacksaw Ridge,’” by Don Steinberg. Wall Street Journal—Online Edition (October 26, 2016), https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20161027120357​/http:​//​www​.wsj​.com​ /articles​/how​-war​-movie​-veteran​-mel​-gibson​-approached​-directing​-hacksaw​-ridge​ -1477489398. Accessed October 28, 2022. 73. Mel Gibson, “How War-Movie Veteran Mel Gibson Approached Directing ‘Hacksaw Ridge,’” by Don Steinberg. Wall Street Journal—Online Edition (October 26, 2016), https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20161027120357​/http:​//​www​.wsj​.com​ /articles​/how​-war​-movie​-veteran​-mel​-gibson​-approached​-directing​-hacksaw​-ridge​ -1477489398. Accessed October 28, 2022. 74. Stephanie Zacharek, “A Leading Man Saves Hacksaw Ridge from Hackdom,” TIME Magazine 188, no. 19 (2016): 56. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Hacksaw Ridge, dir. Mel Gibson (USA and Australia: Summit Entertainment et al., 2016). 78. Richard B. Frank and Thomas Doherty, “Hacksaw Ridge/The Conscientious Objector/The Unlikeliest Hero: The Story of Desmond T. Doss, Conscientious Objector Who Won His Nation’s Highest Military Honor,” Journal of American History 104, no. 1 (2017): 301. 79. Brian D. Johnson, “Mad Mel’s Passion for Vengeance,” Maclean’s 119, no. 51 (2006): 50–52. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY ABC Staff. “How Despairing Gibson Found ‘The Passion.’” ABC News, February 17, 2004. http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Oscars2005/story?id=132399&page=3. A lcoholics Anonymous Big Book. 4th edn. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2002. Alegre, Sara Martin. “The Man Behind the Mask: Looking at Men’s Faces in Films.” Screen Studies Conference. University of Glasgow, 1999: 1-14. Bartchy, S. Scott. “Where Is the History in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ?” Pastoral Psychology 53, no. 4 (2005): 313-28. Blake, Richard A. “Apocalunacy.” America 196, no. 2 (2007): 34-35. Braveheart, directed by Mel Gibson. Santa Monica, CA: Icon Productions and The Ladd Company, 1995. Brown, William J., John D. Keeler, and Terrence R. Lindvall. “Audience Responses to The Passion of the Christ.” Journal of Media and Religion 6, no. 2 (April 2007): 87-107. Dalton, Mary M. “The Hollywood Curriculum: Who Is the ‘Good’ Teacher?” Curriculum Studies 3, no. 1 (1995): 23-44. DeAngelis, Michael. Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, Keanu Reeves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Denton-Borhaug, Kelly. “A Bloodthirsty Salvation: Behind the Popular Polarized Reaction to Gibson’s The Passion,” Journal of Religion & Film 9, no. 1 (2005): 1-21. Ebert, Roger. “Braveheart.” RogerEbert.com, May 24, 1995.https://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/braveheart-1995. Edensor, Tim. “Reading Braveheart: Representing and Contesting Scottish Identity.” Scottish Affairs 21, no. 1 (1997): 1-25. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/ Tim-Edensor/publication/265039511_Reading_Braveheart_Representing_and_ Contesting_Scottish_Identity/links/553a08af0cf226723aba4635/ReadingBraveheart-Representing-and-Contesting-Scottish-Identity.pdf. Fox, Jesse David. “Read Spike Lee’s ‘Essential Films for Filmmakers’.” New York Vulture, July 26, 2013. https://www.vulture.com/2013/07/read-spike-lees-essentialfilms-list.html. Frank, Richard B. and Thomas Doherty. “Hacksaw Ridge/The Conscientious Objector/The Unlikeliest Hero: The Story of Desmond T. Doss, Conscientious Objector Who Won His Nation’s Highest Military Honor.” Journal of American History 104, no. 1 (2017): 301-05. Freidel, David. “Betraying the Maya.” Archaeology 60, no. 2 (2007): 36-41. Fulco, William. “From Gospel to Gibson: An Interview with the Writers Behind Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.” By David Shepherd. Religion & the Arts 9, nos. 3/4 (2005): 321-31. Gibson, Mel. “How War-Movie Veteran Mel Gibson Approached Directing ‘Hacksaw Ridge.’” By Don Steinberg. Wall Street Journal—Online Edition, October 26, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20161027120357/http://www.wsj.com/articles/howwar-movie-veteran-mel-gibson-approached-directing-hacksaw-ridge-1477489398.

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 ———. “Interview with Mel Gibson.” By John Andrew Gallagher and Sylvia Caminer.  Films in Review 47, no. 5/6 (1996): 31. Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson. USA and Australia: Summit Entertainment, et al., 2016. Hammer, Rhonda and Douglas Kellner. “Critical Reflections on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.” Logos 3, no. 2 (2004): 1-15. Hansen, Richard. “Mel Gibson’s Maya.” Archaeology 60, no. 1 (2007): 16. ———. “Relativism, Revisionism, Aboriginalism, and Emic/Etic Truth: The Case Study of Apocalypto.” In The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research, edited by Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza, 147-90. New York: Springer, 2012. Hutch, Richard. “Mel Gibson’s Big Gamble: The Passion of Christ.” Pastoral Psychology 53, no. 4 (2005): 337-40. James, Caryn. “Braveheart.” New York Times, May 23, 1995. https://archive.nytimes. com/www.nytimes.com/library/filmarchive/braveheart.html. Johnson, Brian D. “Mad Mel’s Passion for Vengeance.” Maclean’s 119, no. 51 (2006): 50-52. Keller, James R. “`Like to a Chaos’.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 23, no. 1 (1995): 8-14. Kenny, Glenn. “Mel Gibson His Braveheart Is Bloody Marvelous.” Entertainment Weekly, February 28, 1996. Krondorfer, Björn. “Mel Gibson’s Alter Ego: A Male Passion for Violence.” CrossCurrents 54, no. 1 (2004): 16-21. Lane, Anthony. “Good Fights.” New Yorker 92, no. 36 (2016): 82-83. Little, Becky. “How the Seven Deadly Sins Began as ‘Eight’ Evil Thoughts.” History, March 29, 2021. https://www.history.com/news/seven-deadly-sins-origins. The Man Without a Face, directed by Mel Gibson. Santa Monica, CA: Icon Productions, 1993. Martín Alegre, Sara. “The Man Behind the Mask: Looking at Men’s Faces in Films.” Screen Studies Conference (1999): 1-14. https://ddd.uab.cat/record/113504. Mills, Bart. “Mel Gibson: Still Growing Up.” Saturday Evening Post 265, no. 6 (1993): 40-70. Nashawaty, Chris. “Is It Okay To Like a Mel Gibson Movie?” Entertainment Weekly, August 19, 2011. https://ew.com/article/2011/08/12/it-okay-mel-gibson-movie/. Rainer, Peter. “‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Often Has Bloodlust Pose as Religiosity.” Christian Science Monitor, November 4, 2016. Ray, Sid. “Hunks, History, and Homophobia: Masculinity Politics in Braveheart and Edward II.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 29, no. 3  (1999): 22-31. Robison, Barry. “How War-Movie Veteran Mel Gibson Approached Directing ‘Hacksaw Ridge.’” By Don Steinberg. Wall Street Journal—Online Edition, October 26, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20161027120357/http://www.wsj. com/articles/how-war-movie-veteran-mel-gibson-approached-directing-hacksawridge-1477489398. Scham, Sandra. “Hollywood Holy Land.” Archaeology 57, no. 2 (2004): 62-66.

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Schickel, Richard. “The Maya Are Us.” TIME Magazine 168, no. 24 (2006): 85. Scorsese, Martin. “The Naked Prey (1966) and Apocalypto (2006).” Movie Chat (Forum). n.d. https://moviechat.org/tt0472043/Apocalypto/58c83c00b591530ffd6 10cfc/Martin-Scorsese-on-The-Naked-Prey-1966-and-Apocalypto-2006. Scott, A. O. “The Passion Of the Maya.” New York Times, December 8, 2006. Sharp, Michael D. “Remaking Medieval Heroism: Nationalism and Sexuality in Braveheart.”  Florilegium 15, no. 1 (1998): 251-66. Spence, Stephen. “The Revelations of Mel.” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2007): 491-503. Stack, Peter. “Macho Mel Beats His Chest in Bloody ‘Braveheart.’” SFGate. May 24, 1995. http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/FILM-REVIEW-Macho-Mel-BeatsHis-Chest-in-3032546.php. Stolee, James. “Not Every Man Is a Monster—Even If He Looks like One.” Alberta Report/ Newsmagazine 21, no. 14 (1994): 40. Travers, Peter. “Braveheart.” Rolling Stone, May 24, 1995. https://www.rollingstone. com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/braveheart-122937/. ———. “The Melephant Man.” Rolling Stone 665 (September 1993): 75. Yahoo Staff. “Mel Reveals ‘Worst Moment of His Life.’” Yahoo News, October 16, 2016. https://au.news.yahoo.com/ive-got-10-years-of-sobriety-under-my-belt-melgibson-opens-up-32913951.html#page1. Zacharek, Stephanie. “A Leading Man Saves Hacksaw Ridge from Hackdom.” TIME Magazine 188, no. 19 (2016): 56.

Chapter 6

The Aretē of War Aristotelian Virtue in Braveheart Anneke Murley-Evenden and Adam Barkman

At least in the contemporary Western world, there is if not often outright hostility to the past often enough apathy toward it. In an effort to be progressive, older ideas—be they ancient or medieval—are rarely taken seriously as helpful instructors. The implicit claim is that modern human beings should learn from modern human beings, and to challenge some of the new ideas afloat from ancient or medieval principles and arguments is backward or worse. Whatever flaws Mel Gibson the man may have, Gibson the director is a man who undoubtably, and we think rightly, prizes many of the values held dear to those in the ancient and medieval past. In this chapter, we argue that the director’s medieval Scottish hero, William Wallace, is a kind of moral exemplar. Indeed, we think that Gibson’s Wallace is in many ways a very good embodiment of Aristotelian aretē or virtue, and especially the virtue of magnanimity, which, of necessity, entails a strong emphasis on human freedom and all that comes with it. GOOD PRIDE According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, magnanimity is a kind of “virtuous pride.” As a virtue, magnanimity is a kind of golden mean between two extremes of excess, on the one hand, and deficiency, on the other hand. Thinking higher of oneself than one ought to is called “vanity,” and thinking less of one’s actual standing is “servile humility.”1 Magnanimity or good pride is the middle, right state that a person ought to be in. The Greek philosopher says, “Now the [proud] man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy 121

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of great things and is worthy of them.”2 Consequently, while the Aristotelian idea of pride is not completely divorced from contemporary vernacular, Aristotle adds nuance and says that “proper” pride includes an accurate recognition of where one stands on the spectrum of “doer-of-great-things.” This closely follows another well-known Greek motto to “know thyself” (gnothi sauton), and it can be stated that to be magnanimous is to know oneself. Magnanimity is not arrogance. If anything, it comes down to an almost scientific, factual account of the truth of one’s abilities. Arrogance suggests a conflated understanding of one’s abilities and an overindulgent self-admiration. As a description of the magnanimous person, Aristotle states: [The proud man] does not run into trifling dangers, nor is he fond of danger . . . but he will face great dangers, and when he is in danger he is unsparing his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having. . . . He must also be open to his hate and in his love (for to conceal one’s feelings, i.e., to care less for truth than for what people think, is a coward’s part), and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth.3

Clearly, proper pride, or magnanimity, means to be able to be in tune with reality, both of a given situation and one’s own abilities, and then act accordingly. It is without a doubt, then, very easy to draw parallels between the ancient Greek heroes that Aristotle would have viewed as magnanimous and our Scottish one, William Wallace. Before bringing Braveheart (1995) into the discussion, however, it is also important to add that Aristotle sees the properly proud person, or the magnanimous person, as one who is both virtuous and deeply concerned with honor. István Bejczy affirms, “According to Aristotle, the correct attitude towards great things is consequent upon the magnanimous man’s greatness. Such a person need not make an effort to be magnanimous, precisely because he is great. He is realistic and sees things as they are: he understands his own value and consequently knows that he deserves being honored. Yet he does not covet honors.”4 Bejczy goes on to state that “Aristotle’s magnanimous persons remember what good they have done to others, but not the good they have received; they like to hear about the latter but not about the former.”5 Here, we see the importance of action, which is an important addition to the conversation. The magnanimous person is one who does good to others and, as such, is an honorable person. As stated previously, magnanimity understands where one is truly placed on the spectrum of self-worth and continues on. There is no overindulgent or excessive thinking about where one stands, but merely an acknowledgment followed by moving forward and outward. Arrogance



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looks in and stays there, but magnanimity glances inward and then purposefully looks to move out and reach out to others. It ought to be noticed that in this topic of the magnanimous person there is the understanding that the magnanimous person must be excellent—that is, a person who seeks to grow in virtue and sees the attainment of virtue as the ultimate good. This, in turn, is connected to the Aristotelian idea of telos, which states that every person and action is aimed at a specific end. This aspect of seeking to grow in virtue is also found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the topic of teleology. Here, the Greek philosopher begins his explanation by first pointing out that all actions are directed and aimed at some sort of good. He states, “The end of medical science is health; of military science, victory; of economic science, wealth.”6 Each of these activities is aimed at something else that one can easily agree to being good. Aristotle quickly moves from this and suggests that this is a crucial understanding because it shows a person that if all things aim at some good, this is something worth being aware of when it comes to the conduct of one’s life.7 Moving forward, he expands on this and points out that this can move from singular actions to the wider scope of a person’s life and that one can then see that the human life is but a longer journey meant to attain life’s greatest good. In doing so, Aristotle demonstrates the idea that an individual is a purposed one; a creature meant to attain something. Consequently, what is important to identify is that Aristotle views the human being and the life of a human being as something that is aimed in a particular direction and meant to attain something specific. Aristotle explains that what a human being is meant to attain is eudaemonia, or happiness. What he means is that the human being, in being a specific type of thing that has a specific aim or telos, is happy when he attains that end. Aristotle further expands and shows that to achieve the supreme good, this final end called eudaemonia, individuals must cultivate goodness within them.8 Taken into what was discussed previously regarding magnanimity, this shows how the human being, while a physical being, has an intrinsic, non-physical directive. Thus, according to Aristotle, human beings are meant to achieve the highest end by cultivating the highest end in themselves9 and are therefore considered excellent humans when acting in accordance with virtue. Quite simply, an individual not only has the capacity to become virtuous, but is in fact purposed to be virtuous. It is acknowledged that when using the word “purposed” it would suggest a divine being or beings’ involvement or agenda. This ancient teleological purposefulness and its strong connection to cultivating personal virtue can also, we maintain, be found in Gibson’s medieval Scotland.

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FREEDOM The ancient Greeks worshiped many gods while medieval Scottish culture was primarily Christian. The medieval church had adopted many of Aristotle’s philosophical thoughts, as they were easily transferable and one of the fundamental beliefs between both cultures was this idea that human beings were created with purpose; both cultures held a religious worldview, which stated that humanity had a purpose and was thus obligated to act a certain way. Often, religions are viewed with the idea that the lists of rules hold those who are part of them back from enjoying life, but frequently people who are part of a religious group state that embracing belief offers them a source of freedom. Consequently, it is important to move on and see how teleology and magnanimity lead to the notion of freedom and how true freedom is found in acting in accordance with what something was intended to be. A common contemporary view of “freedom” is the simple idea of being able to do whatever one wishes. Anthony Esolen says that freedom is “moral license” or the “permission guaranteed by statutory law.”10 However, Esolen instead suggests, in an Aristotelian-Christian or scholastic vein, that true freedom instead has to do with something higher than, and superior to, the permission to do something. True freedom is instead something much greater than being “allowed” to do something and is “the unimpeded capacity to attain to the perfection proper to the kind of creature you are.”11 What is important about this understanding is that it is largely action-oriented. This concept of freedom suggests that human beings bear some sort of capacity to become something specific. Instead of assuming that human beings hold a right to do whatever they wish, it suggests instead that human beings are inherently responsible creatures who are lacking in some way and must work to become something greater.12 Thus, we can see, based on the way Esolen describes freedom in addition to our understanding of magnanimity and teleology, that an Aristotelian understanding of freedom can be seen to be centered around conscious action in pursuit of goodness and honor—freedom and magnanimity are deeply interconnected. With these ideas in mind, we can turn to Braveheart and see how William Wallace exemplifies these truths. WILLIAM WALLACE Exactly one hour into Braveheart, William Wallace (portrayed by Gibson himself) and his followers enter into one of the English forts dressed as English soldiers. After quickly taking control of the fort and executing the commanding soldier, Wallace announces that the rest of the English soldiers



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will be spared and that they are to tell the others that “Scotland’s daughters and her sons are yours no more. Tell them that Scotland is free!”13 In one of the most famous quotes from the film he states, “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!”14 Even at the very end of the film, in his dying breath Wallace’s call is for freedom.15 The topic of freedom is a theme throughout Braveheart. What Gibson points out throughout his performance is the fact that the idea of “freedom” is an exceptionally different concept than the ideas the current culture ascribes to it and that, as a result, his concept of freedom reflects something about the human being as well. Wallace points out this skewed contemporary concept of freedom, mentioned earlier by Esolen, in a conversation with his good friend Hamish (Brendan Gleeson). The latter does not want to join with the Scottish lords and nobles as Wallace does, due to a prior betrayal and their apparent loyalty to the English King, Longshanks. Hamish sees this as a suicide mission and refuses Wallace’s idea because he does not want to be martyred. Wallace responds with, “Nor I! I want to live! I want a home, and children, and peace. . . . I do. I’ve asked God for those things. It’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom.”16 What is obvious to Wallace is that doing what one wishes is not necessarily true freedom. In his situation, Wallace could quite easily stop rebelling, find a small farm, get married (again), and raise a family. He could, in a sense, have that peace he wants so badly. However, he realizes that doing so and getting what he wishes should not be confused with freedom. Freedom, Wallace points out—true freedom—means freedom-with-thegood; freedom entails that he must fight against injustice. Indeed, in order to achieve freedom, Wallace feels he is compelled to fight and cannot bring himself to walk away from the injustices he has faced. This idea highlights Aristotle’s quotations earlier on that suggests that there are, indeed, some things worse than death. To walk away from injustice for a false idea of “freedom” is just not something Wallace would be able to live with. Through this, he suggests that proper freedom goes beyond the judicial permission from the English government to do something and reveals the higher calling to become something more than his present self. Of course, a viewer might argue that the freedom Wallace is fighting for is that of physical freedom, a life unconstrained by the English empire, and not necessarily the call to something beyond the immediate physical realm. In a sense, this is not an incorrect viewing, as there is a very physical component to freedom in Wallace’s context. However, the point at hand is that freedom, while perhaps including a physical element to it, is not restricted to the physical world and the written laws of the country, which state what a person may, or may not, do. If this were the case, Wallace already has his freedom, as quietly farming with a family is exactly what the English government wants him (and all his other fellow Scotsmen) to do. However, the protagonist is

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unsatisfied with this and wishes to fight back in order to attain something that is higher, and non-physical, in relation to freedom. If one looks back at the definition of freedom above, it can be seen that what Wallace is then looking for is the “unimpeded capacity” to fully become that which he is: a man. He is already one physically, but now looks to grow those characteristics that are intrinsic to the human person—and which are not so far remiss from those the ancient Greek philosophers advocate for as well. Again, we see the relationship between the inner workings of a person and the outward expression of them which show this interconnectedness between freedom and magnanimity. Paul Robinson states, Magnanimity appears at first sight to be entirely concerned with external honor. It describes a disposition of character which makes the magnanimous man seek the praise of others, without carrying this trait to excess. However, the magnanimous man seeks the acclaim of others not for its own sake but because of the self-respect this external validation gives him. External honour makes him feel, internally, that he is a man of worth.17

Of course, we now edge to the territory where the seeking of honor can be seen as a vice—being overly concerned about being honorable and finding one’s worth and identity in others’ view of how honorable one is. However, we must again see that the seeking of honor is an internal desire that finds its fulfillment in outward expression and action. The trick is staying within the mean, which Aristotle laid out, and remembering that magnanimity is not dwelling on the virtues one has but understanding one’s strengths and limits, and then acting in accordance with them. Central to the theme of magnanimity is the active seeking of honor through outward expression and action by being virtuous and bestowing good upon others. Robinson says on this point that “Honour must be displayed in action . . . You cannot win a medal for bravery, for instance, without undertaking brave actions. Those seeking to win honour, and to a lesser extent those seeking to avoid shame, must act. Moreover, they must act again and again. A reputation for virtue, and an inner sense of one’s own virtue, can be lost by a single unvirtuous act.”18 Again, our Scottish hero exemplifies this. Wallace was brave to the very end. He achieved his honor by acting, being brave, and being a man of integrity. In his final hours, we see his true colors all the more clearly. Just before he is to be tortured by the English with the purpose of having him to renounce his actions and beliefs, Wallace rejects medicine from Princess Isabella (Sophie Marceau). He claims that he fears he will not have his wits about him if he does take it19 and thus go against what he believes in, or fail to act in accordance with them, when he comes face-to-face with excruciating pain. And so he faces it, head on. His integrity tells him that



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avoiding pain is not worth the risk of compromising what he stands for and believes in, and in choosing to act this way, he is magnanimous. Robinson astutely points out that Those desiring honour, or wishing to avoid dishonour, cannot afford to take chances with their honour. If there is any doubt whether displaying a virtue, be it courage, loyalty, truthfulness, or any other, is appropriate in a given situation, it is better to show it than not, and if there is any doubt how much to show, better more than less. Many a man was killed by recklessness, but few were ever shamed by it.20

Wallace acts magnanimously and truly achieves honor. He is both a man of magnanimity and integrity. They walk parallel to one another and, while magnanimity seeks honor externally as something to achieve, it is held in place by integrity, which grounds the seeker and helps her to exercise “strength of will.”21 “The former is associated with the pursuit of honour, the latter with the avoidance of dishonour.”22 The themes we continue to find throughout the topics of freedom, virtue, teleology, and magnanimity are the cyclical relationships between oneself and outward expression, and it is here that we can see how they move on and also shed light on the relationship between rights and responsibility. What we see in Wallace is, simultaneously, a person who fights for rights, but is also beholden to responsibility. So often in the contemporary Western world the topic of rights and responsibilities is deeply divisive. The two are frequently seen as mutually exclusive entities and that either one or the other ought to take center stage. However, Wallace shows us throughout Braveheart that the two are deeply entwined with each other and that for a person to fight for one, he must also fight for the other. We see at the beginning of the movie that Wallace does pursue the quiet farm life with a family that he tells Hamish he wants, as discussed earlier on. He meets Murron and marries her secretly. Up until Murron is killed by the English, Wallace does not seek war, or start his campaign for freedom. It is only after her unjust execution that he comes face-to-face with the fact that his people hold no personal rights in the eyes of the English. It is here that Wallace begins his fight for freedom—and throughout the story we can see that there is a clear need for the English to bestow rights on the Scots. The way they treat the Scots is, without a doubt, unjust. It is standing in the face of injustice that often ignites peoples’ passions for justice, and it can be argued that “there is a universal need for justice that we are driven to reconcile and fight for”23 and that it is this universal need for justice, which directly leads to the topic of responsibility. Michael Ignatieff points out that “Rights create and sustain culture and by culture we mean habits of the heart. Rights create community. They do so

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because once we believe in equal rights, we are committed to the idea that rights are indivisible. Defending your own rights means being committed to defending the rights of others.”24 Ignatieff points out that the two are intertwined. Braveheart exemplifies this at the battle of Stirling where Scotsmen stand together against tyranny.25 To be concerned for one’s personal rights is also to be concerned about the rights of others. Within the topic of rights, we see that there is space to see each other as equals, but also the need to see each other as distinct beings,26 which brings back the ideas of proper freedom where each individual is given the equal opportunity to attain his or her own perfection. This should not be taken in the sense of every individual having his or her own subjective truths, but simply as the fact that while there are general and overarching virtues that are applicable to every person, the uniqueness of the individual person’s personality and situation offers flexibility and variety in application. In Wallace’s situation, he realizes that to seek for his own proper treatment and the freedom in which to be a true man, husband and Scotsman, he must fight for the freedom of all his own community. In a way, it could be said that rights are what are owed to you, but responsibility is what you owe. Getting granted what is owed to someone cannot be separated from what one owes—they are intrinsically connected. Wallace realizes that he has specific skills that make him the right man to fight for proper freedom; he is, as we have discussed, magnanimous. In order to attain what he is owed as a man, and more specifically a Scotsman under English rule, he realizes that he owes it to his own community to fight for their rights and sacrifice his own dream. Again, Michael Ignatieff sharply points out: All rights cost us something. Even when we don’t avail ourselves of our entitlements, others do, and we pay for their use. Belonging to a rights community implies that we surrender some portion of our freedom to sustain the collective entitlements that make our life possible. This idea of sacrifice is at the very core of what it means to belong to a national community: paying taxes, obeying the law, submitting disputes to adjudication and abiding peacefully by these decisions. Sacrifice does not stop there. The reason that war memorials occupy a central symbolic place in the national life of all nations, even though the wars remembered are now far away in time, is that they represent the sacrifice that all citizens make to keep a community free.27

Here, he points out that there are certain sacrifices that are owed, which Wallace and his fellow Scots would have also seen, such as taxes, laws, courts, legal system, etc., and these do not seem so bad to a contemporary viewer. However, as seen throughout Braveheart, the situation Wallace finds himself in is not simply the situation of taxes, laws, and legal systems.



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Ignatieff rightly points out that these ought to be owed to governments, in exchange for freedom and rights, but Wallace had neither freedom nor rights, and so he sought them out and thus fulfills the latter part of Ignatieff’s point. What he, once again, points out is that rights come when one lives in some sort of community. However, in tandem with that, responsibility is also involved when living in community—one cannot stand alone and expect rights, one must go out and engage and be a part of the community as best as one can. Frankly, responsibility implies some sort of personal effort. Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings put it succinctly, “Freedom makes community possible. But taking care of each other, being a person in the fabric of such a community, is what gives freedom its point. Freedom and commitment, independence and dependence, rights and restraints—these are not, in the final reckoning, contraries.”28 Consequently, we can, once again, return to the idea of magnanimity and how the magnanimous person both seeks honor and seeks to bestow honor and goodness on others. This idea of living within a free community that bestows rights and entitlements on its people shows that there ought to a desire for magnanimity, and that true freedom is the best environment to allow magnanimity. If we return to Braveheart, we see that Wallace recognizes the need for freedom in order to provide proper rights and entitlements to his people and so, in his magnanimity, goes and seeks honor by providing good to his people. One of the themes that has been coming up throughout each of these aspects is the topic of action. At the heart of magnanimity, responsibility and freedom, is the idea of action. Proper freedom is seen as the environment in which one can go and attain his or her own perfection. Responsibility is seen as the accompanying feature to rights where in order to be granted rights, sacrifices of all sorts must be made. To be magnanimous, one looks outward and away from oneself and must bestow honor and goodness, through action, on others. This aspect of action in magnanimity is key, it is something that must be common practice. Without actually doing good, one cannot actually be honored for it. “Greatness and honour is something that must be earned. True greatness comes not by favoritism, but by fitness.”29 Writer Dean Brackley points out: Mohandas Gandhi took on the British colonial government with magnanimous freedom. His self-assurance enabled him to appreciate the humanity of his adversaries as much as he detested the injustice of colonial rule. From prison Nelson Mandela dealt with South Africa’s apartheid regime in a similar spirit. Magnanimity enabled Rosa Parks to hold her ground at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. . . . Magnanimity draws us out of in active complicity to take a stand when that is called for.30

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Wallace recognizes this and, like many other famous historical persons, chooses to act in the face of injustice. It is through acting virtuously and in line with his telos, that he is seen to be magnanimous. Here, we can see that responsibility and magnanimity go hand in hand, and magnanimity follows in line with the idea of telos. Through Braveheart we see that being responsible is fulfilling one’s telos. It is not simply stating something to be unjust or against someone’s rights, it is seeing the issue as something one must do something about; magnanimity is about exemplifying responsibility in daily life to the point where it becomes a way of life. In short, what we see in Wallace is conviction. Robert the Bruce (Angus Macfadyen) rightly points out that Wallace does not have an earthly status, he has no knighthood, but “he fights with passion and inspires.”31 In talking with him, Wallace pointedly asks what it means to be noble and states that “Men don’t follow titles. They follow courage.”32 Deeply intertwined throughout the story is the idea that William has a dream, and it is this dream, and the conviction that what is happening to his community is unjust, that pulls out these aspects of telos and magnanimity— the things that point forward and draw out action. Additionally, one of the most powerful aspects of characters who have conviction contains is hope. To dream and have conviction speaks of hope and the recognition that work needs to be done to achieve it, and this is where responsibility is brought out of a person. Wallace’s story teaches us that dreaming is so deeply important because it ignites the realization that a person can perhaps do something about the injustice, not just talk about how it is unjust.33 Simply put, a dream implies having a telos. As seen earlier on, telos implies purpose to be something, to go somewhere, and therefore also implies responsibility to direct oneself there. This in turn leads the topic back to hope because to dream for a specific thing and to see oneself as responsible for bringing it to fruition, it allows one to hope for a just and right ending. Hope indicates a desired trajectory because the one who hopes sees something of value in the destination their hope points to. It is the desired “good ending” for whatever the situation one is in. Hope is teleological because it states that there is a trajectory, and not only a desired one but one that ought to be the reality for a given thing. We see in Wallace a dream, and the hope of accomplishing that dream, and so it can be said that to hope is to be convicted—hope is not simply passive or silent. The greatest stories we love are stories that are centered around courageous individuals. What is at the heart of these courageous individuals is a drive that is aimed directly at something and a conviction that they bear some responsibility to head toward it. Dreaming is identifying and believing in the mountaintop and the promised land,34 the destination that is good, beautiful, and right, and doing one’s utmost to get there—and to bring others along. Hope is to keep on



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going, to keep moving forward toward the dream;35 hope does not lose heart but continues to believe when belief is right.36 When Wallace states “every man dies, not every man really lives,”37 he reveals his belief that humans are meant to be something. A person can live, but not be truly alive at the same time. Wallace sees that there must be a specific environment, an environment of freedom, that allows people to attend to their own perfection—a space where people can identify the fact that they have a telos and grow in magnanimity, through responsibility, by seeking honor and bestowing honor upon others. It is this seeking of honor through the bestowing of honor that is key to Wallace’s mission. While it was his own dream at the beginning, it moved beyond achieving simple peace and the ability to farm, and moved into a hunger for justice for all of Scotland. While the story of Wallace is the story about different issues in a vastly different time than we live now, he clearly demonstrates a concept we can still understand today by showing the power of dreaming and being satisfied only “when justice rolls down like water.”38 Braveheart shows the viewer that some human beings are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. In this chapter, we have argued, with Aristotle, that humans are born with the capacity for greatness, that action is essential to a person’s magnanimity, and when standing in the face of injustice we see that we have the responsibility to act on others’ behalf. It can also be understood that there is a cyclical relationship between magnanimity and freedom. The two of them go hand in hand, and with the further understanding of teleology, we can see that the human race can fulfill a higher calling by the inward action of seeking goodness as well as the outward action of seeking and bestowing honor. Finally, we can see that these ancient topics of magnanimity and freedom are connected to the more contemporary concepts of individual rights and responsibilities and can be powerful tools of hope in our own contemporary world; indeed, our contemporary world may not have a medieval Scottish battlefield where we can go champion William Wallace’s call for freedom, but there still remains injustices to fight. NOTES 1. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 1123b7-9. 2. Ibid., 1123b1-3. 3. Ibid., 1124b6-9. 4. Bejczy István Pieter, Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 113.

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5. Ibid., 114. 6. Aristotle, Ethics, 1094a8-9. 7. Ibid., 1094a23-4. 8. Ibid., 1098a14-9. 9. Ibid., 1097b25-8. 10. Anthony Esolen, “The Ugly and the Good: Why We No Longer but Still Could Have Beautiful Things,” Touchstone Magazine (2020): 30. 11.Ibid. 12. Aristotle also addresses this idea in The Politics, specifically in Book VII: Political Ideals. Throughout this book he works toward the argument that the best and ideal life for the human being is a life of goodness. 13. Braveheart, dir. Mel Gibson (USA: Icon Productions & The Ladd Company, 1995). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Paul Robinson, “Magnanimity and Integrity as Military Virtues,” Journal of Military Ethics 6, no. 4 (2007): 261. 18. Ibid., 265. 19. Braveheart. 20. Robinson, “Magnanimity and Integrity,” 265. 21. Ibid., 263. 22. Ibid. 23. Mari Ruti, The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 118. 24. Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2000), 125. 25. Braveheart. 26. Ignatieff, Rights Revolution, 120. 27. Ibid., 126. 28. Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings, The Perversion of Autonomy: The Proper Uses of Coercion and Constraints in a Liberal Society (New York: Free Press, 1996), 37–38. 29. Martin Luther King and James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 265. 30. Dean Brackley, Expanding [Sic] the Shrunken Soul: False Humility, Ressentiment, and Magnanimity (St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 2002), 20. 31. Braveheart. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. King, A Testament of Hope, 286. 35. Ibid., 257. 36. Braveheart. Here, Robert the Bruce realizes after betraying Wallace the damage he has done, not only to Wallace but to his capacity to be both a leader and a man.



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In betraying Wallace and making him lose hope, Robert the Bruce sees the power of hope and truly becomes a supporter of Wallace. 37. Ibid. 38. King, A Testament of Hope, 219.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J. A. K. Thomson. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Bejczy, István Pieter. Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 1200–1500. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, V. 160. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Brackley, Dean. Expanding [Sic] the Shrunken Soul: False Humility, Ressentiment, and Magnanimity. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 2002. Braveheart, directed by Mel Gibson. USA: Icon Productions & The Ladd Company, 1995. Esolen, Anthony. “The Ugly and the Good: Why We No Longer but Still Could Have Beautiful Things.” Touchstone Magazine (2020): 29–34. Flood, Anthony T. The Root of Friendship: Self-Love and Self-Governance in Aquinas. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Gaylin, Willard and Bruce Jennings. The Perversion of Autonomy: The Proper Uses of Coercion and Constraints in a Liberal Society. New York: Free Press, 1996. Ignatieff, Michael. The Rights Revolution. CBC Massey Lectures Series. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2000. King, Martin Luther and James Melvin Washington. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991. Paglia, Camille. Provocations: Collected Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 2018. Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2018. Robinson, Paul. “Magnanimity and Integrity As Military Virtues.” Journal of Military Ethics 6, no. 4 (2007): 259–69. Ruti, Mari. The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Chapter 7

It’s a Real, Real, Real Man’s World Sexy Martyrdom and Heroic Fortitude in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, and Hacksaw Ridge Josh Morrison, Todd G. Morrison, and Kandice M. Parker

After appearing in several Australian films, most notably Mad Max (1979), Gallipoli (1981), and Mad Max 2 (1981),1 Mel Gibson entered Hollywood in the early 1980s. His initial Hollywood efforts, such as The River and Mrs. Soffel (both 1984), were high-profile yet under-performed at the box office. Commencing in 1987, however, with the release of the first entry in the Lethal Weapon franchise,2 Gibson’s career ascended to the ranks of superstar status. According to the Quigley Publishing Company’s annual poll of motion picture exhibitors, the actor was voted one of the top ten “money-makers” thirteen times (1987, 1989–1996, 1998–2000, and 2002), underscoring his tremendous popularity with movie audiences.3 Indeed, based on calculations that are published in IMDb, it has been estimated that films featuring Gibson in a leading role have grossed over 4.6 billion dollars. Unlike many of his peers, Gibson has not confined himself to acting. In 1993, his directorial debut, The Man Without a Face, was released. It received mixed reviews and generated modest box office receipts.4 However, a mere two years later, Gibson’s second directorial effort, Braveheart (1995), garnered him Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. The film was also a sizeable commercial success. Worldwide box office earnings totaled approximately $209 million, which was 2.9 times the film’s production 135

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budget.5 Braveheart’s profitability was dwarfed by Gibson’s subsequent effort, The Passion of the Christ, which he directed and co-wrote. Released in 2004, The Passion, while polarizing film critics, grossed over 370 million dollars in North America alone.6 Professionally, things began to sour for Gibson in the summer of 2006, when he was caught speeding—going eighty-seven miles per hour (mph) in a 45 mph zone—and, subsequently, charged with misdemeanor drunk driving (his blood alcohol level was 0.12, which is above the legal limit of .08).7 The charge itself (likely) would have garnered little attention; however, it was the anti-Semitic and sexist comments that the director made to the arresting officers that were the subject of enormous controversy.8 His third directorial effort, Apocalypto, was released four months after his altercation with the police. It received fairly positive reviews9 but, unlike Braveheart and The Passion, was only a modest box office success.10 In a “town” where success is the currency that matters, Gibson’s subsequent efforts as an actor (Edge of Darkness [2010] and The Beaver [2011]), with their lackluster performance at the box office,11 did little to reassure filmmakers that the actor/director’s reputation had been redeemed in the eyes of moviegoers. It was official: Gibson had now entered the ranks of superstar-on-the-skids. Ten years following his last directorial effort, Apocalypto in 2006, an article appeared in the Hollywood Reporter announcing that Gibson was “no longer persona non grata” in Hollywood.12 His latest directorial effort, Hacksaw Ridge (2016), was receiving awards buzz and he was lining up work as an actor.13 Being nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director (both for Hacksaw Ridge) suggested that Hollywood had now forgiven Gibson for his “past” transgressions. The resurgence of Gibson’s directorial career suggests that it is a propitious time to evaluate his work in this arena. We direct our attention to three of the films for which he is most well-known as a filmmaker: Braveheart, The Passion, and Hacksaw Ridge. Prior to discussing our interpretations of these films, it is critical that we detail our “analytic process.” We share the viewpoint that traditional methodologies, while appearing to many scholars like a banal set of standardized practices, are “extremely political” and “enact pre-existing social and material relations.”14 In so doing, these methodologies serve to limit “our abilities to see/do research differently, to produce new, previously unthinkable knowledges” and blind us to the ways they “preload, preauthorize, and predetermine knowledge production.”15 Therefore, we opted for a post-inquiry approach—one that was not wedded to positivist traditions and their demands of “scientific rigor.” For our analysis, we engaged in the practice of diffractive watching.16 With this practice, films are viewed in relation to one another (i.e.,, through each other), creator and creation

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are “co-constituted,”17 and “our entanglement with external aspects such as objects, materials, environments”18 is acknowledged. As viewers, we similarly engage in a process of intra-action. In this context, intra-action may be seen as recognizing the absence of separation between ourselves as viewers and the films we viewed. Intra-action recognizes the entanglement between the audience and the filmic products they consume. Focusing on this chapter, intra-action highlights that, as viewers, we are not blank slates engaged in an “objective” and “impartial” assessment of Gibson’s films. Rather, our understandings of the director, based on his depictions in popular culture, have implications for the ways in which we “see” his work.19 Finally, diffractive viewing eschews interpretivism, with its myopic focus on establishing what an object of study “really means.”20 Thus, another set of researchers viewing the same set of films may reach conclusions that converge with, or diverge from, our own analysis.21 Braveheart, The Passion, and Hacksaw Ridge uphold a spiritual veneration of man that embodies three interconnected archetypes of masculine power: (1) The Hero, who is strong through his body, brain and relationship with God; (2) The Martyr, whose suffering works to fortify ethnocentrism and what we perceive as fanatical patriotism; and (3) The Erotic Man, whose flesh is centered, and desirability is emphasized. Each of these archetypes is briefly discussed, with relevant examples highlighted from each film. THE HERO Traditional masculinized archetypes of the hero are central to the three films we watched. In these productions, it is men who hold physical strength, demonstrate the power of intelligence, and are privileged with a connection to God—all necessary for these heroic men in their fight for “the greater good.” Gibson’s protagonist heroes are celebrated for their hegemonic masculine qualities;22 they are confident leaders that demonstrate their power through physical strength, endurance, and will. Further, the director’s protagonist heroes parallel a rebellious version of the traditional heroic archetype that Holt and Thompson describe as originating from “the first wave of American mass culture, . . . in which men relied upon their individual cunning, determination and brute strength not only to survive nature but also to conquer it.”23 While Holt and Thompson maintain that this rebellious heroic archetype is oft depicted as facing dire consequences for challenging the status quo, Gibson’s heroes are, ultimately, held to account through their relationship and communication with a Christian God. Braveheart centers around masculinized aggression and toughness. The film—set in late thirteenth-century Scotland—features boys and men that

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rely on their physical prowess to survive the brutal oppression of the English monarch, King Edward I (Patrick McGoohan). The narrative structure of the film begins with a depiction of the childhood of William Wallace (James Robinson), the film’s hero protagonist. Wallace’s childhood character works to naturalize stereotypical gender roles; he is a rambunctious boy, keen to fight the English alongside his father and brother. Child Wallace is shown practicing his physical skills with his friend, Hamish (Andrew Weir), as they play-fight one another and throw stones at imaginary enemies. The film repeatedly demonstrates how the physical strength and heroism of men are fortified by their intelligence. Before leaving to fight and be killed by the English, Wallace’s father, Malcolm (Sean Lawlor), stresses the importance of man’s mental capacity to his son: “I know you can fight. But it’s our wits that make us men.” After his father and brother are killed, William’s uncle, Argyle (Brian Cox), also demands that William develop his mind before he is taught to fight with weapons. Upon receiving his education abroad, Wallace (Gibson) returns home as an adult man and demonstrates his physical and mental superiority. The brute strength of Wallace’s old friend Hamish (Brendan Gleeson), who greets him by punching him in the face, is shown to be inferior to Wallace’s combination of brawn and brain. While the tall and muscular Hamish can throw large boulders farther than Wallace, the latter questions the usefulness of Hamish’s skill: “Can you crush a man with that throw?” The protagonist courageously risks injury by standing target for Hamish’s throw and, predictably, Hamish fails to hit him. Further affirming his superior brawn and brain, Wallace throws a small stone at Hamish with perfect accuracy, hitting him between his eyes and knocking him unconscious. Wallace’s superiority serves him well in his brutal revenge scene against the English that ensues when they execute his new wife, Murron (Catherine McCormack). Enraged and fearless, he skillfully exerts brute force, killing his way through the Englishmen, and leading the local clan into a rebellion. Throughout this first scene of brutal warfare, high-angle shots are used to emphasize the vulnerability of the English, while low-angle shots of Wallace work to indicate his dominance and heroism. Medium shots of Wallace, that frame the complete chest and headspace, work to draw attention to his bare, muscular arms, further establishing his power. Masculinized heroism, physical command and mental superiority also are featured in The Passion, a film that presents Jesus Christ (Jim Caviezel) as the hero protagonist, and re-enacts the story of Jesus’s crucifixion. The production portrays a Jesus that is rather muscular in contrast to the more popular conception of an emaciated ascetic. Courage and strength help Jesus to mentally and physically endure a brutal torture sequence that lasts for forty-five minutes and thirty seconds, beginning with Jesus’s flogging and continuing to the point where he is nailed to the cross. Medium close-up

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shots frame Jesus’s body, drawing attention to his physique—especially the muscles in his arms and chest—and his endurance, as he is subject to extreme pain, is made evident through his heavy breathing and shaky hands. At the beginning of the flogging sequence, Jesus stands up on his feet and looks at his mother. After the flogging, Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov) confronts him: “Speak to me. I have the power to crucify you, or else to set you free.” Jesus, who is standing upright next to Pilate, replies with strong conviction: “You have no power over me. But they who delivered me to you have the greater sin.” Further, in moments of extreme close-ups of Jesus, the film intercuts scenes from his past—in which he was worshiped by his followers—to demonstrate his ability to contemplate and maintain mental composure throughout his torture. Hacksaw Ridge features a hero protagonist, Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), who, like Jesus, demonstrates superior strength through steadfast determination and the ability to withstand extreme physical hardship. Doss is a Seventh-day Adventist and conscientious objector. During World War II, he enlists in the army to serve as a combat medic, but he refuses to carry or use any type of weapon. While Doss does not engage in aggressive behavior, he epitomizes hegemonic, masculine-typed traits. For instance, through his sexual prowess in courting his girlfriend Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), and through his toughness, as he endures beatings from his fellow army men and does not cave to peer-pressure when they insist that he carry a gun. Doss is accused of being skinny (Sergeant Howell compares his physique to “stalks of corn” during their first encounter), but he demonstrates excellent fitness and physical fortitude. For example, in their physical training session, Doss outperforms his strongman bully, Smitty (Luke Bracey). Ultimately, he successfully performs the grueling feat of rescuing injured American soldiers and evading attacks by the Japanese army in the Battle of Okinawa. Although he is obviously wounded after this task, Doss insists that “no,” he is not wounded— indicative of his ability to overcome physical and mental hardship. Further, he embodies María Lugones’s model of Western, masculinized reason, as evident in his contemplation of the Ten Commandments, and civility, which he demonstrates by attending to, and saving the lives of, Japanese soldiers.24 A relationship with God is essential to the heroism depicted in Gibson’s films. In Braveheart, this attribute in the hero protagonist, Wallace, is not nearly as notable as compared to the hero protagonists in The Passion and Hacksaw Ridge. Wallace does refer to conversing with God in his want for a life “with a home and children and peace,” but, more notably, his behaviors and demise are those of a Christlike figure. For instance, after his wife is killed by the English, he enters the scene on a horse, pretending to surrender, with his arms extended to his sides and palms facing upward. In this scene, Wallace, with his long hair, blue eyes, and arms open and reminiscent

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of Christ’s crucifixion, parallels Western, Catholic depictions of Jesus. His metaphorical alliance with Jesus, along with Murron’s unjustified murder, work to vindicate the rage and violence that ensue. Finally, at the end of the 1995 film, Wallace’s torture and execution are akin to the story of Jesus. The Passion features Jesus Christ himself, a divine figure—the son of (the Christian) God. In the film, he converses with God in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest (asking God for strength: “Save me, father. Rise up. Defend me. Save me from the traps they set for me”) and during his crucifixion (“God forgive them, they know not what they do”). The film suggests that only God’s power surpasses the violent force of man, bestowing on Jesus the strength to endure the torment inflicted on him and to serve as a vehicle for the redemption of all. In Hacksaw Ridge, Doss’s heroism is largely contingent on both his reason and his relationship with God. His devotion to God and the Sixth Commandment—“Thou shalt not kill”—provides Doss’s path to righteousness and heroism, helping him to withstand and resist pressures to engage in violence. Doss’s girlfriend gives him her Bible—which he refers to during basic training and in battle. While on the battlefield, as other American soldiers retreat and descend the ridge, Doss talks directly to God, asking Him “What do you want of me? I don’t understand. I can’t hear you.” After his plea, he hears a soldier screaming for help and takes it as direct communication from God. Doss answers God, “All right,” before he heroically runs back into the line of fire to rescue more American soldiers. Like Jesus, Doss receives strength and purpose through his conviction in God. We have outlined how the heroism in Gibson’s Braveheart, The Passion, and Hacksaw Ridge lies in the physical strength, reason, and godliness of white men protagonists. These heroic qualities further work to establish and complement a white masculinized status quo strength and superiority over racialized and gendered others. In Braveheart, masculinized superiority is emphasized through the derogation of an effeminate, gay-coded English prince, Prince Edward (Peter Hanly). The latter, despite having a man lover, marries the daughter of the King of France (Sophie Marceau). Prince Edward is portrayed as weak, incompetent, and unable to lead; his father, King Edward I, does not trust in his abilities. Even the explicit narration of the movie mocks the prince’s lack of heterosexual interest: “it was widely whispered that for the princess [Prince Edward’s new bride] to conceive, Longshanks [Kind Edward I] would have to do the honours himself.” The heterosexual incompetence of the prince parallels an incompetence in leadership. The prince’s ineptitude is evidenced in a scene where he sends his new wife to a strategic political meeting, and the King concedes that his new daughter-in-law will likely rule in his place. The prince, left in charge of England, further fails to stop the heroic Wallace from taking York; in anger at his son’s inability to exert control, the King throws Prince Edwards’s implied

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gay lover, Phillip (Stephen Billington), from the tower window to his death. In the same scene, as the prince lies on the ground mourning his loss, the king plots to send the princess to negotiate with Wallace: “I shall offer a truce and buy him off. But who will go to him? . . . not my gentle son. The mere sight of him would only encourage an enemy to take over the whole country.” Prince Edwards’s failure as a leader is aligned with his violations of hegemonic masculinity, in accord with the reverence for masculinized leadership, heterosexuality, and heroism in Gibson’s films. Meanwhile, women play a passive role, serving as incidental narrative objects that exist to justify the violence and redemption of men. For instance, in Braveheart, King Edward I reinstates the legal right of “jus primae noctis”—in which nobles gain sexual access to women subjects on the night of their wedding—to “breed out” the Scottish. This narrative detail in Gibson’s 1995 film is not historically accurate, but it serves to vilify the English and justify the Scottish rebellion. This type of justification parallels real-life examples such as the “War on Terror,”25 in which war is portrayed as driven by the misogyny of radical Muslims who strip women of their rights and freedoms. The women in Braveheart are victims and are subservient. For instance, the scene in which a wedding is interrupted by English nobles who intend to enforce “jus primae noctis,” or rape, on a young bride, portrays the latter interrupting the protests of her clan to cooperate with the nobles. Her subservient role serves to protect her clan. The murder of Murron positions her as an accessory to the subsequent war—justifying the drive to battle and violence in Wallace and the Scottish. The strongest woman character in the film is the French princess, Isabella, who betrays the king of England by warning Wallace about the coming English forces. Wallace, ultimately, “conquers” Isabella—and thus all of England—through her body when he eventually impregnates her. At the end of Braveheart, it is the ghost of Murron who witnesses Wallace’s suffering. Finally, women in Braveheart serve less as independent agents than as objects through which men negotiate, trade, or make decisions. This is an old trope in Western discourses and ideologies of masculinities, where women are treated as objects that mediate relations between men rather than as independent, agential people. It also allows for men to be in relations with each other based on sex(uality) without them crossing into the homoerotic, as might occur between Wallace and Longshanks, with their obsession with one another, had Murron and Isabella not served to shore up their masculinities.26 Murron barely speaks and serves as the locus of Wallace’s community’s doubts about him. At first, Wallace is treated with suspicion upon his return from abroad and Murron’s father is against their courtship, as either he is not valuable enough for Murron or she is too valuable to risk marrying to an unknown quantity. Isabella, despite having more lines than any other woman in the film (including a Murron

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who communicates mostly through glances or letting Wallace speak for her), is also represented as a transactional object: a princess married off to an effeminate prince to secure political alliance, she is then sent to Wallace as a valuable mouthpiece for the king. Finally, her and Wallace’s child allows him to conquer England, not her or France, as she serves as the embodied battleground between Wallace and Longshanks. Above all, Gibson’s films designate women as suffering witnesses, transactional non-agents and narrative objects instead of active agents. The Passion vilifies both androgyny and femininity in men. Most significantly in this film, Satan is played by an actress (Rosalinda Celentano). This Satan is slightly feminine, but mostly androgynous; she talks to Jesus and follows him throughout the film, watching him suffering alongside the women who are (weeping) witnesses to his pain: Mary (mother of Jesus) and Mary of Magdalene (Maia Morgensten and Monica Bellucci). While Satan is traditionally a masculinized figure, The Passion employs femininity in gender-mixing Satan, emulating the traditional patriarchal vilification of femininity. This further evokes more conservative, orthodox, and radical strands of Christianity that views women as the embodiment of temptation, following a particularly misogynistic reading of the creation story and Eve’s original sin. Gender-swapping Satan eliminates any ambiguity about Jesus’s purity and ability to withstand the ultimate, original temptress, Satan. An androgynous Satan also suggests denigration of the sacred androgyny found in Eastern religions and ancient Greece. As in Braveheart, women are passive entities in The Passion; they witness the redemptive suffering of men but do not engage in any actions that Gibson codes as constituting heroism. The derogation of femininity is then further underscored through the character of King Herod (Luca De Dominicis), who is hedonistic, effeminate, and coded as a stereotypical gay man27 and also reveals himself as a self-centered, indifferent, and irrational leader (in one scene he mocks Jesus, insisting that he perform a miracle and refusing to sentence him when he fails to comply). This is a theme that plays out through all three films, though in different ways, through invocations of “soft” men and homosexuality as evil and undesirable performances of masculinities. In Braveheart, the implicitly gay prince serves as the most obvious example, while in Hacksaw Ridge the other soldiers interpret the protagonist as weak and soft due to his pacifism and size. In that film, by shifting these fears of feminization to the main character, they become part of the hero’s struggle to accomplish his masculinity (to borrow a term from masculinities scholar Emily W. Kane) and have it properly appreciated and validated by his peers in the army.28 The Passion was widely critiqued for being anti-Semitic, and this is another avenue through which the film masculinized Jesus and, implicitly, Christianity compared to the “evil” Jews. In the film, Jewish people are

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portrayed as bloodthirsty, merciless, and barbarous, in contrast to the empathy and hesitancy that is expressed by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, in sentencing and punishing Jesus. Though propagating violence, this is not agential, thoughtful, or patriotic violence as we saw carried out by Wallace in Braveheart and the American army in Hacksaw Ridge—it is unthinking mob violence that can be swayed easily. Hegemonic and toxic masculinities define themselves against the feminine and gay, including through marking them as weak-willed and susceptible to outside influences. This also plays into stereotypes of women as moody and fickle. Furthering this point, the Jewish people are positioned as hypocritical and easily duped by the selfish and craven politics of the Pharisees. The film juxtaposes scenes in which Jewish people jeer and throw stones at Jesus with scenes from the past in which Jewish followers of Jesus are waving their hands in worship. In the torture half of the film, these juxtaposed scenes are also intercut with shots of the (feminized/woman) Satan and his mother, Mary. This collapses womanhood and femininity into the mob seeking to kill the hyper-masculine hero and savior, who is so perfect that he still forgives them for their feminized and ethnicized naivety and cruelty. Even Jesus’s Jewish disciples are portrayed as crazed and disloyal, particularly Peter when he thrice denies knowing Jesus and the Pharisees, who deny Jesus’s divinity to maintain their own power. All of this subtly evokes white supremacist and anti-Semitic gendered ideologies of superiority, which harken back to Nazi gender politics. In “Fascinating Fascism,” for example, Susan Sontag details how Nazi ideologies continued into mass media well beyond WWII through aesthetics which subtly call back to Nazi ideologies of masculinity and conquest, and she uses the colonial post-war photography of famed Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl (most known for Olympia [1938] and Triumph of the Will [1935]) as her case study.29 One of the core elements of fascist ideologies was the veneration of the masculine hero as a stand-in for the state and/or people;30 masculinization through a rejection of femininity and homosexuality31 and the relegation of women to the home and having children, as evidenced in films like Hitlerjunge Quex (trans. Hitler Youth Quex, 1933), La Habenera (notably directed by Detlaf Sierck/Douglas Sirk, 1937), and Wunschkonzert (trans. Request Concert, 1940). This signals the superiority of the Euro-Christian worldview where Jewish people are blamed for the death of Jesus, but with subtly gendered white supremacist ideologies coloring that blame as feminized and diametrically opposed to the hegemonic Christian masculinity espoused by Gibson in The Passion. Accordingly, Gibson cast a blue-eyed, European, devoutly Catholic man, Jim Caviezel, as Jesus. In Hacksaw Ridge, white, American, Christian men comprise the powerful status quo, which is juxtaposed to Orientalist (see Said, 1979) portrayals of Japanese soldiers as crazed and animalistic.32 The film represents scenes

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of war in which Japanese soldiers are wildly screaming and yelling with contorted, exaggerated expressions. The superior skill of the Americans, supported by Doss’s heroism, lends them to conquering the Japanese and taking Hacksaw Ridge. The Japanese commander is depicted performing seppuku— ritual suicide by disembowelment—highlighting the superior competence and skill of the Americans and the fatal failure of the Japanese state, who were supposedly disadvantaged in battle. Women are also conquerable in Hacksaw Ridge. Doss tells his family he is going to marry Dorothy, a nurse he met at the local hospital, before he has established a relationship with her. Ultimately, Dorothy always concedes to Doss. For example, in a scene where she slaps him for kissing her without permission, she walks on and says, “You coming?” with a soft expression, smiling. In contrast to Doss’s strong will, the women in Gibson’s 2016 film are weak. Dorothy is not fully supportive of Doss’s refusal to use a gun, and Doss’s mother passively accepts the domestic violence enacted on her by her husband. Tellingly, she notes that “. . . he don’t hate us. He hates himself—sometimes.” THE MARTYR In Gibson’s films, masculinized suffering functions as a necessary, desirable sacrifice that upholds a “greater good.” Violence serves as the means through which righteousness is achieved and, accordingly, the director’s films depict graphic scenes of violence and death.33 In Braveheart, the suffering of Wallace, through the loss of his family and his love, Murron, drives his heroism and culminates in his strength to surpass his fear of death in reverence for devotion to a greater cause—the freedom of the Scottish people. Jeffrey A. Brown argues that in Gibson’s films “ideal masculinity must incorporate both sides of the sadomasochistic continuum.”34 Here, suffering is masculinized and works to toughen men—their vulnerability is transformed into a means of power and the ability to achieve their goal through suffering in the name of a noble cause. In Braveheart, the hero’s suffering is akin to the torture of Jesus: he refuses to drink a tonic offered by Queen Isabella, which will “dull his pain” when he is to be tortured and denies the magistrate’s offer of a quick death in exchange for uttering the single word “Mercy” (Wallace utters “Freedom” instead and is beheaded for committing high treason). As Brown argues, Gibson’s redemptive narrative structure “proves the superiority of their manliness but also sanctifies the supposedly higher moral value of that manliness.”35 Furthermore, Braveheart depicts extremely violent battle scenes that are instrumental to a narrative arc that features prolonged suffering and ends in redemption. For instance, the battle scene following the death

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of Murron depicts impalement and spurting blood, nunchaku-like weapons, spearing (of people and horses), impalement with antlers, decapitation, beatings with mallets, the cutting off of limbs, head-butting, the smashing of heads with boulders, the tossing of skinny English soldiers onto fences to be impaled, the use of dead bodies as shields, and graphic throat slitting. Heightened sound effects accompany these episodes, including guttural war cries, gurgling, grunting, swords being drawn and clashing with shields and bodies, panicked horse sounds, and bodies being pounded by blunt objects. This emphasizes not just the violence, but that graphic violence in the name of an ordained cause is justified and valorized, making it morally right in contrast to the moral injustice of the unfairly targeted martyr. Violence is tied to masculinity as a crusade. The Passion is centered on the torment and physical suffering of Christ. Kent Brintnall argues that, in this film, Gibson’s Jesus is reminiscent of action heroes such as Rambo, evidencing masculinized competence and power through endurance.36 In the 2004 production, the suffering of man is prized and deemed to be heroic. Jesus’s submission to his torture signals and celebrates his virtuousness; his ability to endure extreme pain and ultimate death is necessary, providing a path for redemption. The mise-en-scène in the film focuses singularly on the protagonist’s blood and sweat and the brutality of the Jewish people and the Roman authorities. The lighting and the framing of the flogging scene accentuate the glistening sweat and blood on Jesus’s body. He is positioned as physically helpless—bound by iron cuffs on his wrists with his body painfully draped over a wood log. The cruelty of the Romans and the Jewish observers is demonstrated through close-ups that center the bloody wounding of the prisoner’s body. In one of the goriest scenes in the film, Jesus is flogged with a scourge (a whip that has thongs knotted with small pieces of metal). On this occasion, the Romans express maniacal, sadistic joy throughout their torture of their prisoner, grinning and laughing as he groans in pain in a sequence featuring many extreme close-ups of both the scourge rending flesh and the faces of the guards. Indeed, Gibson’s films idealize Jesus as the ideal “hero masochist.”37 In Braveheart and Hacksaw Ridge, Christlike depictions of Wallace and Doss allude to them as the exemplars of sacrificial virtue and devotion to God. In Hacksaw Ridge, indeed, while Doss insists that he is a pacifist, he also believes that “it isn’t right that other men should fight and die . . . that I would just be sitting at home safe.” He also indicates that he “took it personal” when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Ironically, while Doss does not believe in killing others, his nationalism draws boundaries that uphold his “American values” and provoke his championing of a violent war. The violence that he endures through his participation in the war as a medic redeems Doss by providing him with a path to righteousness and heroism. Violence and suffering

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constitute the chief narrative arc of the 2016 film, which begins with a scene from the Second World War that features dead bodies flying through the air while on fire. This level of brutality is maintained throughout the second half of the production. Extreme patriotism supersedes the condemnation of violence; the violent backdrops—which include Doss’s father, a veteran of World War I, physically abusing his family—provide a means through which Doss is able to evince heroic self-sacrifice and, like The Passion, demonstrates how Gibson’s Christian, patriotic, and anti-Semitic masculinity allows for violence in the name of the correct ideology.38 THE EROTIC MAN Gibson’s contentious relationship with queer people (in particular, gay men) has been well-documented,39 though, paradoxically, throughout much of his career as an actor, he has been featured as an object of desire.40 DeAngelis notes: Gibson’s “naturally” rugged body conforms to the stereotypical image of the working-class male heterosexual that was promoted to pre-Stonewall gay [men] as an ideal, and this image was integral in establishing the actor’s authenticity as well as his dissociation from the superstar image that was being imposed on him. . . . Gibson is strong but not maniacally aggressive, hard but not impermeable, masculine but not stereotypically masculine, a sexual object who never solicits his own objectification.41

It is unclear if the actor was cognizant of the spectatorial pleasure his body afforded many gay viewers, especially during the mid-1980s to early 1990s, a period in the American cultural landscape that was pre-Internet and conservative politically.42 Regardless, the emphasis on men’s flesh—evident, to varying degrees, in Gibson’s directorial efforts—raises the question: which spectatorial subject positions of fantasy is the filmmaker acknowledging here? Braveheart, for example, eroticizes Wallace in intimate scenes with Murron and the French princess. The film’s lighting in the sequence following the protagonist and Murron’s secret wedding draws attention to the former’s muscular arms and chest, while the woman’s bare breasts are less visible in comparison. Other scenes in the 1995 film maintain hegemonic masculine codes while flaunting the nudity of men; take, for instance, a sequence in which Scottish rebels lift their kilts to show off their genitals and bare bottoms to the English army. A sadomasochistic version of masculinity within Braveheart arguably lends to the eroticization of both sadistic and masochistic characters. For instance, Brintnall contends that Gibson’s films give prominence to extreme close ups of the facial expressions of heroes,

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which indicate “extreme pain, sexual ecstasy, or both.”43 While the eroticization of Wallace is surrounded by heteronormative cues, such as the sexual conquest of women and militarism, a sadomasochistic homoerotism is pervasive, reminding us of the un-agential, transactional nature of women in this film’s narrative. Throughout the film, men in battle are seemingly spellbound and exalted in the sadistic pleasure of attacking their enemy, and the guttural cries of masochistic tortured and dying masculine bodies indicates men’s erotic and desirable capacity to physically endure. The Passion is hyperfocused on Jesus’s nude body. While the Romans and Jewish spectators remain clothed, Jesus is largely depicted wearing only a perizoma (a loincloth) that covers his genitals. In this film, the heroism of the protagonist is masochistic as his sacrifice is (spiritually) alluring and desirable; Gibson stresses this through close-ups of the gleeful Roman torturers and of Mary, Mary of Magdalene and Satan, whose eyes are fixated on the body of a suffering Jesus. The film’s fixation on suffering has resulted in it being (controversially) described as “sadomasochism disguised as religion.”44 Notably, The Passion ends with a short scene in which Jesus is resurrected, which concludes with a zoom shot of Jesus’s bare bottom. Hacksaw Ridge eroticizes manliness through scenes set in the army barracks in which men engage in sadomasochistic rituals, both inflicting and enduring punishment (through strict physical regiments and physical bullying) and humiliation (the sergeant screams insults at his soldiers and the army men tease and prank one another) to establish their homosocial commitment. Within this setting, a nude army man doing pull-ups, Milt “Hollywood” Zane (Luke Pegler), is introduced to Doss. Hollywood, referring to his genitals, says “Gaze upon it in envy, my friend.” A conversation surrounding Hollywood’s testicles ensues. While gratuitous nudity of women may be passé, Hacksaw Ridge is somewhat unique in its gratuitous (and anachronistic) depiction of male nudity.45 This nudity complements the homoerotic, sadomasochistic elements that, somewhat paradoxically, enhance and celebrate heterosexual, hegemonic expressions of masculinity. Sontag reminds us that Nazi and fascist art and aesthetics paralleled conservative gender schemas by keeping women, figured as temptation, out of the important, vital sphere of men. Thus, vital forces like sexuality and eroticism needed to be contained and redirected into (violent), militarized masculinities that frequently lived in a homoerotic gray zone built around demonstrating strength.46 Whether the barracks scenes in Hacksaw Ridge or the extended sequence of half-naked German men washing each other, wrestling, and engaging in jolly gaiety before the Party Congress in Triumph of the Will, Gibson again parallels the gendered masculinity politics and aesthetics of fascist cinema through his transmutation of heterosexual desire into militarized masculinities and the fetishization of the torture of the morally correct hero.

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CONCLUSION From superstar to pariah and, now, one of the “forgiven men” of Hollywood, the trajectories of Mel Gibson’s careers as actor and director have been unpredictable. Focusing on the latter, we targeted three of his films: Braveheart, The Passion, and  Hacksaw Ridge, each of which highlights a different point in Gibson’s career: beloved superstar (Braveheart); reckless, “mad” visionary (The Passion); and, following many years of being persona non grata in Hollywood, the redeemed man (Hacksaw Ridge). We used the process of diffractive viewing to identify and understand the interconnections among these films and the intra-actions between creator (Gibson) and created (the films) as well as viewer and viewed. Seeing these productions in relation to one another illustrated certain commonalities: namely, interconnected archetypes of masculine power that parallel Gibson’s known anti-Semitic, patriotic-militaristic, and white supremacist politics and aesthetics—the hero, the martyr, and the erotic man. The ethos of redemption through masculine suffering, evident in all three films, also is apparent in Gibson’s personal life. Journalist Allison Hope Weiner contends that, despite Gibson’s Australian bravado, in actuality, he is sensitive to criticism and has a “penchant for not hitting back [which] makes him the dictionary definition of a good punching bag.”47 Weiner asserts that Gibson has been pilloried for his public struggles with alcoholism, his “frightening temper” and the “wildness in his blue eyes.”48 He has made amends and should be forgiven. Those wishing to track down specific instances where the director has apologized for his homonegativity, misogyny, and racism must wait in vain. Perhaps Gibson’s comments in a recent interview best encapsulate the enlightened particularities of his redemption: “It’s never too late to fix stuff.”49 Comforting words, indeed. NOTES 1. In North America, Mad Max 2 was titled The Road Warrior. Released theatrically on May 21, 1982, it was a substantial box-office success (see: “The Road Warrior,” https:​//​www​.boxofficemojo​.com​/release​/rl1701611009​/weekend/). All Internet sources have been accessed on December 19, 2022. 2. Lethal Weapon was the 8th highest grossing film of 1987 (See Domestic Box Office for 1987, https:​//​www​.boxofficemojo​.com​/year​/1987​/​?ref​_​=bo​_yl​_table​_36). 3. Broadway World, Annual top ten box office stars (by year since 1932) . . . September 26, 2006. https:​//​www​.broadwayworld​.com​/board​/readmessage​.php​?thread​ =912000​&boardid​=2.

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4. For reviews, see: Rotten Tomatoes, The Man without a Face reviews. n.d. https:​//​www​.rottentomatoes​.com​/m​/man​_without​_a​_face​/reviews; Box Office Mojo, The Man Without a Face. IMDbPro. n.d. https:​//​www​.boxofficemojo​.com​/release​/ rl2120451585​/weekend/. 5. The Numbers, “Braveheart (1995),” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​ //​www​.the​-numbers​.com​/movie​/Braveheart​#tab​=summary. 6. Based on North American unadjusted box office receipts, The Passion of the Christ remains the highest grossing R-rated film of all time (https:​//​www​.the​-numbers​ .com​/box​-office​-records​/domestic​/all​-movies​/mpaa​-ratings​/r​-(us). 7. The Associated Press, “Mel Gibson charged with DUI,” The Denver Post. August 1, 2006. https:​//​www​.denverpost​.com​/2006​/08​/01​/mel​-gibson​-charged​-with​-dui/. 8. See Maureen O’Conner, “All the terrible things Mel Gibson has said on the record,” Gawker. July 8, 2010. https:​//​www​.gawker​.com​/5582644​/all​-the​-terrible​ -things​-mel​-gibson​-has​-said​-on​-the​-record. Gibson has denied making the “sugar tits” comment to the female officer at the scene of his 2006 DUI (see: “Mel Gibson—I Never Said “Sugar T**s,’ https:​//​www​.tmz​.com​/2009​/02​/23​/mel​-gibson​-i​-never​-said​ -sugar​-t​-s/). However, while he has apologized for the statements he uttered about ‘Jews [being] responsible for all the wars in the world,’ he has never denied making them. Gibson also has made homonegative comments about gay men (see ‘Mel Gibson’s GLAAD Handling,’ https:​//​ew​.com​/article​/1997​/02​/21​/mel​-gibsons​-glaad​ -handing/), misogynistic and racist comments (see Maureen O’Conner, "‘My Career is Over:’ Another Terrifying Mel Gibson Phone Call is Now Online,” https:​//​www​ .gawker​.com​/5584987​/my​-career​-is​-over​-another​-terrifying​-mel​-gibson​-phone​-call​-is​ -now​-online; https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=xfF7​_Xo83uA) and pled no contest to a misdemeanor battery charge in 2011. 9. Rotten Tomatoes, Apocalypto. n.d. https:​//​www​.rottentomatoes​.com​/m​/ apocalypto. 10. The Numbers, “Apocalypto (2006),” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​//​www​.the​-numbers​.com​/movie/Apocalypto#tab=box-office. 11. The Numbers, “Edge of Darkness (2010),” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​//​www​.the​-numbers​.com​/movie​/Edge​-of​-Darkness​#tab​=box​-office; The Numbers, “The Beaver (2011),” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​//​ www​.the​-numbers​.com​/movie​/Beaver​-The​#tab​=box​-office. 12. Tatiana Siegel, “Mel Gibson is no longer persona non grata in Hollywood,” The Hollywood Reporter. October 12, 2016. https:​//​www​.hollywoodreporter​.com​/ news​/general​-news​/mel​-gibson​-is​-no​-longer​-937208/. The belief that “Ultimately  .  .  . time heals” (see: Tatianna Siegel, “Mel Gibson is No Longer Persona Non Grata in Hollywood,” https:​//​www​.hollywoodreporter​.com​/news​/general​-news​/mel​-gibson​-is​ -no​-longer​-937208/) and that Mel Gibson has “spent enough time in the penalty box” (see: Allison Hope Weiner, “A Journalist’s Plea on 10th Anniversary of ‘The Passion of the Christ:’ Hollywood, Take Mel Gibson Off Your Blacklist,” https:​//​deadline​ .com​/2014​/03​/mel​-gibson​-career​-hollywood​-deserves​-chance​-697084/) are not held universally. See, for example, Amy Zimmerman, “Hollywood Officially Pardons Mel Gibson. For Shame.” https:​//​www​.thedailybeast​.com​/hollywood​-officially​-pardons​

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-mel​-gibson​-for​-shame; and Marina Hyde, “In Hollywood, Nothing Gets Resurrected More Often Than Mel Gibson,” https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2021​/ oct​/19​/hollywood​-mel​-gibson​-antisemitism​-domestic​-violence​-racism. 13. The years Gibson has spent in “career Siberia” seem to have triggered a willingness to accept any acting project. He has appeared in eleven films between 2020 and 2022, with the majority being limited release efforts, which have received abysmal reviews (such as Fatman [2020], Dangerous [2021], Force of Nature [2021], Agent Game [2022], Hot Seat [2022], On the Line [2022], and Panama [2022]). 14. Brian E. Kumm and Lisbeth A. Berbary, “Questions for Postqualitative Inquiry: Conversations to Come,” Leisure Sciences 40, nos. 1–2 (2018): 71–84, respectively 72 and 73. 15. Ibid. 16. Poppy Wilde, “Diffractively Watching Queer Eye: Difficult knowledge through critical posthumanism and neoliberalism,” Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism 1, no. 2 (2022): 25. 17. Vivienne Bozalek and Michalinos Zembylas, “Diffraction or reflection? Sketching the contours of two methodologies in educational research,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30, no. 2 (2017): 112. 18. Wilde, 25. 19. None of us viewed Gibson’s directorial efforts when they were released theatrically. Nor did we seek them out when they were available on VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray. Gibson, as an actor, was of brief interest to one of the contributors (TGM), courtesy of his Australian films and a unique willingness to show his butt (most notably, in Lethal Weapon [1987]) at a time when mainstream cinematic displays of male flesh were rare. 20. Vivienne Bozalek and Michalinos Zembylas, “Diffraction or Reflection? Sketching the Contours of Two Methodologies in Educational Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30, no. 2 (2017): 111–27. Importantly, diffractive viewing also recognizes that, as viewers, we can destabilize narrative linearity and traditional conceptions of time (indeed, we can watch certain scenes repeatedly, fast-forward other scenes, skip certain portions of a film, etc.). 21. In keeping with a post-inquiry orientation, we did not establish a protocol for viewing these films thereby preserving the alterity of our film-going experience. KMP: “My process involved watching each film (two were viewed on Amazon Prime [The Passion of the Christ and Hacksaw Ridge] and one was viewed on Apple TV [Braveheart]), periodically pausing to write extensive, handwritten notes. I re-watched the films to ensure that my notes, including timestamps, were accurate. I watched Braveheart and Hacksaw Ridge alone. I watched The Passion of the Christ with my spouse, who was raised as a strict Mennonite and, as I am less familiar with the story of Jesus, helped me to better engage with the film’s depiction of Christ’s crucifixion.” JM: “As a film scholar, my approach was to engage in a close reading of each text with a focus on identifying visual and aesthetic effects, choices and motifs that emphasized the films’ plots, themes and ideological positions. As a gender studies scholar, I was particularly attuned to how the films evoked gender and sexuality visually and interpretively. I viewed all three films through the Criterion

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Collection streaming service (accessed through the University of Saskatchewan library). TGM: “My process involved watching each film (two were viewed on Amazon prime [The Passion of the Christ and Hacksaw Ridge] and one was viewed on DVD [Braveheart]) and taking extensive, handwritten notes. I often rewound the films to capture dialogue that I perceived as interesting/evocative. I watched each film alone.” 22. Raewyn W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–59. 23. Douglas B. Holt and Craig J. Thompson, “Man-of-action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research 31, no. 2 (2004): 427. 24. María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, ed. W. Harcourt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 13–34. 25. See Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 26. This concept is not a new one in feminist theory, with some of the best-known explications of women-as-transactional-object coming from French poststructuralist Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One and Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women.” Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader, ed. Gayle Rubin, 33–65 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 27. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) offers a similar interpretation of “King” Herod as effeminate and polymorphously perverse (see: https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =NEmScsUkbo4). 28. Emily W. Kane, “’No Way My Boys are Going to be Like That!’ Parents’ Responses to Children’s Gender Nonconformity,” Gender and Society 20, no. 2 (Apr. 2006): 149–76. 29. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn, 73–108 (New York: Picador, 2002). 30. Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995 edn. 31. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.” 32. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 33. Apocalypto (2006) also was rated R for scenes of “graphic violence.” 34. Jeffrey A. Brown, “The Tortures of Mel Gibson: Masochism and the Sexy Male Body,” Men and Masculinities 5, no. 2 (2002): 124. 35. Ibid., 137. 36. Kent Brintnall, Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 60–62. 37. See Brown, “The Tortures of Mel Gibson.” 38. Once again, Gibson’s particular brand of hypermasculinity rubs up against fascist ideologies and practices. In “Ur-Fascism,” Eco discusses how fascist regimes must promote not just taking action for the cause but also the need to decry and vilify pacifism. This film, based loosely on a true story, threads this needle carefully,

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demonstrating how pacifism that supports the state can be acceptable as long as it also stands for the death and destruction of the enemy. See Eco, “Ur-Fascism.” 39. Michael DeAngelis, Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 119–22, 165–66. 40. Longsdorf notes that in Bird on a Wire (1990), Gibson, and not his female co-star, Goldie Hawn, is the “much adored, lovingly photographed sex object” (see Amy Longsdorf, “Beauty of ‘Sexiest’ Mel Gibson is he Just Lets his Acting Happen,” https:​//​www​.mcall​.com​/news​/mc​-xpm​-1990​-05​-13​-2744288​-story​.html). 41. DeAngelis, Gay Fandom, 141. 42. DeAngelis asserts that, beginning in the mid-1980s, “Gibson was actively closing off access to a variety of spectatorial subject positions of fantasy that his former image accommodated: the real man emerging from the star discourse is now blatantly heterosexual”; Gay Fandom, 164. However, despite his impeccable heterosexual credentials, the objectification of Gibson’s physique became more pronounced (in, for example, Lethal Weapon [1987] and Bird on a Wire [1990]). 43. Brintnall, “Ecco Homo,” 43. 44. Becky Howard, “The Passion of the Christ,” Evening Standard. April 10, 2012. https:​//​www​.standard​.co​.uk​/culture​/film​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-christ​-7230409​.html. 45. The actor playing Milt “Hollywood” Zane has a physique that embodies a contemporary gym-based aesthetic and not the type of body common in the early 1940s. Doss is instructed to gaze upon Milt “Hollywood” Zane’s penis “in envy.” However, in keeping with American films’ timidity in showing male genitalia, the viewer is not afforded any full-frontal shots. Indeed, “Hollywood” is surprisingly bashful about his penis; even when ordered by a superior officer to leave the barracks, he discretely covers his genitals with his hands. 46. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.” 47. Allison Hope Weiner, “A journalist’s plea on 10th anniversary of ‘The Passion of the Christ’: Hollywood, take Mel Gibson off your blacklist,” Deadline. March 11, 2014. https:​//​deadline​.com​/2014​/03​/mel​-gibson​-career​-hollywood​-deserves​-chance​ -697084/. 48. Ibid. 49. Jesse Watters Primetime, “Exclusive one-on-one with Mel Gibson #FoxNews,” Twitter. April 1, 2022. https:​//​twitter​.com​/jesseprimetime​/status​ /1510042179162591240.

BIBLIOGRAPHY The Associated Press. “Mel Gibson charged with DUI.” The Denver Post. August 1, 2006. https:​//​www​.denverpost​.com​/2006​/08​/01​/mel​-gibson​-charged​-with​-dui/. Box Office Mojo. Domestic Box Office for 1987. IMDbPro. n.d. https:​//​www​.boxofficemojo​.com​/year​/1987​/​?ref​_​=bo​_yl​_table​_36. ———. The Man Without a Face. IMDbPro. n.d. https:​//​www​.boxofficemojo​.com​/ release​/rl2120451585​/weekend/.

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———. The Road Warrior. IMDbPro n.d. https:​//​www​.boxofficemojo​.com​/release​/ rl1701611009​/weekend/. Bozalek, Vivienne and Michalinos Zembylas. “Diffraction or Reflection? Sketching the Contours of Two Methodologies in Educational Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30, no. 2 (2017): 111–27. Braveheart, directed by Mel Gibson. USA: Icon Productions & The Ladd Company, 1995. Brintnall, Kent. Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Broadway World. Annual top ten box office stars (by year since 1932) . . . September 26, 2006. https:​//​www​.broadwayworld​.com​/board​/readmessage​.php​ ?thread​=912000​&boardid​=2. Brown, Jeffrey A. “The Tortures of Mel Gibson: Masochism and the Sexy Male Body.” Men and Masculinities 5, no. 2 (2002): 123–43. Chilton, Louis. “The blood, the outrage and The Passion of the Christ: Mel Gibson’s biblical firestorm, 15 years on.” Independent. February 25, 2019. https:​//​www​.independent​.co​.uk​/arts​-entertainment​/films​/features​/passion​-of​-the​-christ​-15​-years​-mel​ -gibson​-jim​-cavieziel​-movie​-reaction​-christianity​-a8788381​.html. Cole, Alyson M. The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Connell, Raewyn W. and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–59. DeAngelis, Michael. Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism.” The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995 edn. La Habanera. Directed by Detlaf Sierck. Germany: UFA, 1937. Hacksaw Ridge. Directed by Mel Gibson. USA: Summit Entertainment, et al., 2016. Hitlerjunge Quex. Directed by Hans Steinhoff. Germany: UFA, 1933. Holt, Douglas B. and Craig J. Thompson. “Man-of-action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31, no. 2 (2004): 425–40. Howard, Becky. “The Passion of the Christ.” Evening Standard. April 10, 2012. https:​ //​www​.standard​.co​.uk​/culture​/film​/the​-passion​-of​-the​-christ​-7230409​.html. Hyde, Marina. “In Hollywood, Nothing Gets Resurrected More Often Than Mel Gibson.” The Guardian. Oct. 19, 2021. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2021​/oct​/19​/hollywood​-mel​-gibson​-antisemitism​-domestic​-violence​-racism. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jesse Watters Primetime. “Exclusive one-on-one with Mel Gibson #FoxNews.” Twitter. April 1, 2022. https:​//​twitter​.com​/jesseprimetime​/status​/1510042179162591240. Kane, Emily W. “'No Way My Boys are Going to be Like That!’ Parents’ Responses to Children’s Gender Nonconformity.” Gender and Society 20, no. 2 (Apr. 2006): 149–76. Kumm, Brian E. and Lisbeth A. Berbary. “Questions for Postqualitative Inquiry: Conversations to Come.” Leisure Sciences 40, nos. 1–2 (2018): 71–84.

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Longsdorf, Amy. “Beauty of ‘Sexiest’ Mel Gibson is he Just Lets his Acting Happen.” The Morning Call. May 12, 1990. https:​//​www​.mcall​.com​/news​/mc​-xpm​-1990​-05​ -13​-2744288​-story​.html. Lugones, María. “The Coloniality of Gender.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, edited by W. Harcourt, 13–34. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. “Mel Gibson’s GLAAD Handling.” EW.com. Feb. 21, 1997. https:​//​ew​.com​/article​ /1997​/02​/21​/mel​-gibsons​-glaad​-handing/. “Mel Gibson—I Never Said ‘Sugar T**s’.” TMZ. Feb. 23, 2009. https:​//​www​.tmz​ .com​/2009​/02​/23​/mel​-gibson​-i​-never​-said​-sugar​-t​-s/. The Numbers. “Braveheart (1995).” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​//​ www​.the​-numbers​.com​/movie​/Braveheart​#tab​=summary. ———. “Apocalypto (2006).” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​//​www​.the​ -numbers​.com​/movie​/Apocalypto​#tab​=box​-office. ———. “Edge of Darkness (2010).” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​//​ www​.the​-numbers​.com​/movie​/Edge​-of​-Darkness​#tab​=box​-office. ———. “The Beaver (2011).” Nash Information Services, LLC. n.d. https:​//​www​.the​ -numbers​.com​/movie​/Beaver​-The​#tab​=box​-office. O’Conner, Maureen. “All the terrible things Mel Gibson has said on the record.” Gawker. July 8, 2010. https:​//​www​.gawker​.com​/5582644​/all​-the​-terrible​-things​ -mel​-gibson​-has​-said​-on​-the​-record. ———. “‘My Career is Over:’ Another Terrifying Mel Gibson Phone Call is Online.” Gawker. July 12, 2010. https:​//​www​.gawker​.com​/5584987​/my​-career​-is​ -over​-another​-terrifying​-mel​-gibson​-phone​-call​-is​-now​-online. The Passion of the Christ. Directed by Mel Gibson. USA: Newmarket Films, 2004. Rotten Tomatoes. The Man without a Face reviews. n.d. https:​//​www​.rottentomatoes​ .com​/m​/man​_without​_a​_face​/reviews. ———. Apocalypto. n.d. https:​//​www​.rottentomatoes​.com​/m​/apocalypto. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader, edited by Gayle Rubin, 33–65. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Siegel, Tatiana. “Mel Gibson is no longer persona non grata in Hollywood.” The Hollywood Reporter. October 12, 2016. https:​//​www​.hollywoodreporter​.com​/news​ /general​-news​/mel​-gibson​-is​-no​-longer​-937208/. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” In Under the Sign of Saturn. 73–108. New York: Picador, 2002. Weiner, Allison Hope. “A journalist’s plea on 10th anniversary of ‘The Passion of the Christ’: Hollywood, take Mel Gibson off your blacklist.” Deadline. March 11, 2014. https:​//​deadline​.com​/2014​/03​/mel​-gibson​-career​-hollywood​-deserves​ -chance​-697084/. Wilde, Poppy. “Diffractively Watching Queer Eye: difficult knowledge through critical posthumanism and neoliberalism.” Interconnections: journal of posthumanism 1, no. 2 (2022): 24–38. Wunschkonzert. Directed by Eduard von Borsody. Germany: UFA, 1940.

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Zimmerman, Amy. “Hollywood Officially Pardons Mel Gibson. For Shame.” The Daily Beast. Dec. 13, 2016. https:​//​www​.thedailybeast​.com​/hollywood​-officially​ -pardons​-mel​-gibson​-for​-shame.

PART III

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Chapter 8

A Falling Comedy Star The Ascent, Descent, and Shift in the Comedy Film Career of Mel Gibson Peter Piatkowski

Public perception and assessment of Mel Gibson starting from the mid-2000s can be boiled down to essentially two camps: (a) gifted and devoted filmmaker and (b) damaged movie star. Although he was the epitome of the A-List Movie Star in the 1980s and up to the mid-1990s, his career has been derailed by his extensive personal travails as well as anti-social, racist, and sexist behavior. From 1991, Gibson’s star image has been under scrutiny for various offensive statements. Early in the 1990s, the director had made homophobic comments to the press, including an unfortunate interview with the Spanish publication, El Pais, in which he was quoted asking rhetorically, “Who might think that with this demeanor I could be gay? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?”1 In 2006, after being arrested for a DUI, Gibson exploded into an anti-Semitic rant against the arresting officer. In 2010, a leaked phone call to his partner Oksana Grigorieva included racist, sexist, and misogynistic slurs. While he received public support from some of his costars, actress Winona Ryder reported that Gibson uttered anti-Semitic and homophobic cracks to her at an industry party. As a result, the filmmaker’s public image has been irrevocably altered. Before his current state, Gibson was seen as an affable, genial performer. Part of this amiable image was bolstered by tales of good-natured pranks on film sets. He was also able to build an image defined by his likability because of a string of light comedies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Many of these comedies were action buddy comedies that capitalized on the actor’s good looks, easy charm, and charisma. His star ascended during what can be 159

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considered the last gasp of the traditional A-List Movie Star. In the 1980s, American mainstream cinema seemed to have reverted to the Golden Age of Hollywood when it came to box office actors. Performers like Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, Harrison Ford, and Sylvester Stallone were employed in star vehicles, with scripts tailored to their star personae in much the same way that stars like Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracey, and James Stewart were cast in films that affirmed their star images. Gibson was a movie star in the traditional, Golden Hollywood sense. Handsome, appealing, and very popular, the actor was able to parlay his gifts for a career of successful mainstream films that not only spoke to the Reaganera capitalism of the 1980s but to Gibson’s revival of a Cary Grant-like superstardom. In fact, Cary Grant is a clear predecessor of the filmmaker. The actor, like Gibson, was emblematic of Hollywood stardom and used his debonair good looks in light romantic comedies or comedic thrillers. With his success as a light screen comic, “Gibson will have proved himself a worthy romantic comedy successor to Cary Grant.”2 Gibson was seemingly created for American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, epitomizing a reassuring masculinity for viewers in an increasingly anxious time in American popular culture, one that sought assurance from traditional masculinity in American lore and mythology, especially in light of the anxieties resultant of the Cold War. As film scholar Douglas Kellner sums it up, And so it is that Hollywood film in the Age of Reagan enacts the rites of mythical redemption in narratives which attempt to manage social anxieties, to soothe and alleviate the sense of shame associated with defeat, and to smooth away the rough edges of history (i.e., U.S. atrocities in Vietnam as depicted in Platoon). The Fantasy of Ronald Reagan in his pré-détente incarnation is precisely the mindset of the classical Hollywood cinema in which Reagan dutifully performed, and which returned with a vengeance during his stay in office. Only an analysis of the contemporary political context of Hollywood film will fully capture its ideological effects.3

Because many of Gibson’s career-endangering behaviors are a result of the noxious cocktail of toxic masculinity, unfettered privilege due to race, gender, and wealth, a line could be drawn from his current image to that of the action star of the 1980s. But the actor’s work in films like Lethal Weapon or Bird on a Wire (1990) complicates that pipeline because his action comedies add lightness to the genre by utilizing his looks and charm. Instead of simply blowing things up or shooting people, Gibson graced the screen, equipped with a funny quip or witty one-liner. Instead of a tension, however, he had picked up the baton from Cary Grant and pioneered a style of performing in which a matinee idol with solid comic chops breezes through an action film,

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acting as a leavening agent for violent films. And as a romantic comedy lead, Gibson used that considerable charm, as well. Because most romantic comedies were marketed as escapist entertainment, his easy affability and movie star looks were employed to full effect, thereby recalling and alluding to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Gibson’s career in the 1980s gave him the opportunity to essay the different aspects of popular masculinity as defined by the decade’s pop culture, namely, the rakish playboy or the action hero. The popularity of male-driven comedies gave mainstream box office careers to comedians like Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Steve Martin. Although Gibson was not a comedian in the same sense—he did not start off as an improve or sketch comic nor was he a stand-up comedian—he was able to forge a career comparable to SNL or SCTV alumni who found success in the 1980s by playing to capitalist values that were enforced and propagated in these films. However, Gibson was arguably a more versatile actor as well as in possession of more traditional male beauty, which meant that his stardom had longer legs and was given more chances to make interesting choices in his career. The main exception to this assertion, of course, is Eddie Murphy, a bright and brilliant young talent who, like Gibson, became an extremely popular action-comedy actor in the 1980s, breaking box office records with a string of popular action buddy comedies (Murphy also starred in a number of straight comedies as well, like Trading Places [1983], though the action-comedy as a genre seemed to have been created for both Gibson and Murphy.) Along with his successful career as an action-comedy star, Gibson was able to stretch his comedic muscles in straight comedies: in 1994, he starred in the Western comedy Maverick opposite Jodie Foster; and, in 2000, he enjoyed a huge success in Nancy Meyers’s romantic comedy What Women Want. In both productions, Gibson’s impish, boyish charm carried the films, and his male beauty was exploited. After his career was derailed due to his off-screen behavior, the comedies he starred in engaged with his darker image. In Foster’s 2011 film, The Beaver, a dark psychological dramedy, he plays a damaged middle-aged man who uses a beaver hand puppet as a means of communication; in Daddy’s Home 2 (2017), the sequel to the successful Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg film, Gibson’s gnarled masculinity is heavily employed as he plays a character that is a paragon to the kind of toxic masculinity that he exhibited himself in his personal life; and in the odd 2020 black comedy action film, Fatman, he stars as a mercenary interpretation of Santa Claus. As seen in the progression of Gibson’s career from 1987’s Lethal Weapon (the first in a four-film franchise) to 2020’s Fatman, the actor went through a number of shifts in his film career as both shifts in public tastes change, as

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he aged, and as popular culture was looking at masculinity in a different way. He had his biggest, most sustained success as an action-comedy hero but was able to use his skills as an actor to portray lower-scale onscreen heroes in films such as What Women Want or Maverick. And when his public persona was seemingly irrevocably damaged, he turned to grittier characters, leaning into the public’s growing angst with his star image, as a “genuine star persona is a work without an author, belonging neither to the actor, nor to the publicist, nor to the directors of the films that employ it. It exists apart, somewhere in the space between a film and its audience.”4 Because of his off-screen behavior, the Gibson of the Lethal Weapon films, though not forgotten, has been overwhelmed and overshadowed by the grinning mugshot of the drunken man. Few stars of his magnitude had seen such a sharp decline in their careers, and one must go back to the time of performers like Fatty Arbuckle or his fellow 80s superstar, Bill Cosby, to see another major superstar whose career and star image has shifted and devolved so dramatically. It must be mentioned that Gibson’s career as a screen comic has not only been overshadowed by his offscreen antics but also by his successful emergence as a film auteur, though his directing efforts have been no less controversial as seen with the suggested homophobia in Braveheart (1995) and anti-Semitism in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Therefore, even though some of Gibson’s most successful efforts in his career were light entertainment, his image and star persona had changed notably in the years since his box office dominance into something far different. Gibson’s easy on-screen comedic persona was easily dismissed and ignored by film scholars in retrospect because his comedies were largely bigbudget box office affairs that were aimed to make money and to further him as a movie star. They also operated as propaganda for a traditional masculinity that seemed in ascendance in the 1980s. Though he received respectable notices in these films, few would think that he was being taxed as an actor. For the most part, he was cast as the comic foil, opposite an accomplished straight man, most notably Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon films. Interestingly enough, in Bird on a Wire and Air America (1990), Gibson is yet again headlining in crowd-pleasing action comedies, but he is cast opposite screen comics who have stronger comic personae than he: Bird has Gibson share the screen with Goldie Hawn, an Oscar-winning screen comedienne who is arguably the stronger comic presence of the two; and, in Air America, Gibson works alongside SNL alumnus, Robert Downey, Jr. Bird on a Wire does something very similar to Gibson’s other comedic work in that it remixes certain classic Hollywood tropes—this time the screwball comedy of the 1930s—but soups them up by resetting the classic screwball comedy as an early 1990s action comedy.

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LETHAL WEAPON FRANCHISE The introduction to film audiences of Gibson as a screen comedian was Lethal Weapon, which paired the actor with Danny Glover. The film, directed by Richard Donner and written by Shane Black, is a seminal production in the buddy cop genre. One important trope of the buddy cop comedy—which is tied closely to Gibson’s then-developing screen persona—is the classic comic duo that operates as a study of contrast. In the cliché of the “good cop, bad cop,” the buddy cop genre relies on the conflicting personalities of the two characters, often with casting one police officer as the strait-laced, by-the-books stickler for the rules, and the other being a loose cannon. Like the relationships depicted in romantic comedies, much of the narrative power that drives these films is the conflict of these personalities. Often these characters find themselves thrown together, initially unhappy with the pairing until their eventual bonding. In Lethal Weapon, Gibson portrays Martin Riggs and Glover is Robert Murtaugh. Riggs and Murtaugh are partnered with each other and their backstories highlight their contrasting personalities. Riggs is suffering from PTSD due to his wife’s death, becoming suicidal, yet his superiors are suspicious of his mental health, believing it a ruse to earn early retirement. Murtaugh, like many of Riggs’s colleagues is equally suspicious of his partner’s mental health. What is important to note with Lethal Weapon is that, despite its violence and grittiness—it deals with difficult themes of suicide, trauma, prostitution, and murder—the film combines that high-octane violence with comedy, something that was an emergent element in crime cinema. As Chris Newbould wrote, “It was in the 1980s, though, when the genre as we know it today really took shape, with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours setting the comedy/action template that would run and run.”5 Newbould further argues Up until then, cop movies had tended to play it straight, perhaps in part due to studios and agents that liked to give audiences what they expected from the stars. Straight actors were straight actors, and comedians were comedians, and never the twain would meet. The ’80s changed all that and produced some of the fines examples of the genre . . . Danny Glover and Mel Gibson . . . in Lethal Weapon, in which Glover’s conservative family man is reluctantly thrown together with Gibson’s psychotic loose cannon.6

Not only does Lethal Weapon and its three sequels worked to popularize and develop the buddy cop genre, but it also established Gibson as a movie superstar as well as contributed to the actor’s comedic persona. More so than most of his films, Lethal Weapon helped Gibson’s link to Cary Grant, another

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actor who combined good looks with an easy comic charm. Gibson and Grant were linked before as the classic film actor, like Gibson, essayed comic roles in a number of comic thrillers, such as North by Northwest (1959) or Charade (1963). Both Grant and Gibson are actors whose work in the comic thrillers relies on easy, natural charm that relied just as much on star quality, charisma, and charm as it had on genuine craft and skill. The major difference in the presentations of Grant and Gibson was that the former’s combined beauty and humor was packaged as debonair and elegant—the lingering images of Cary Grant will always be a man in an impeccable suit. The manifestation of masculinity with him was with far more elan. He was a matinee idol, coming from the Golden Age of Hollywood, in which studios churned out manufactured images like factories; in Gibson’s case, he came of age after the New Wave in Hollywood that rejected the stylized worlds of the Golden Age. But his image came of age during the Reagan era when conservatism and masculinity intersected during a particularly wrought time in contemporary history, at the tail-end of the Cold War. Reagan-era popular culture valorized a “return” to traditional masculinity and, therefore, Gibson embodied that kind of masculinity in his role as Riggs in the Lethal Weapon films. Like Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, Riggs became a cinematic emblem of American pop culture’s concession to the kind of patriarchal and paternalistic—not to mention nationalistic—conception of gender and masculinity. In Gibson’s case, though, the actor leavened that conception with a sense of comedy and humor. The action-comedy became one of the most potent ways of propagandizing these conservative values because “In the early 1980s, action movies emerged as Hollywood’s dominant product. By combining violence, throwaway one-liners, and an edge-of-your-seat tempo, action movies managed to capture the hearts, and dollars, of American audiences.”7 With the Lethal Weapon films, Gibson not only established himself as a potent leading man and superstar, but also as a reliable comic partner, creating a cinematic duo with Danny Glover, that is considered one of the most enduring and endearing in pop films of the 1980s. The comic duo always requires a straight man and the comic foil—someone to tell the jokes and someone to set the jokester up; Glover’s gravitas as an actor as well as his more serious persona made him the straight man of the duo, whilst Gibson’s youth made him the more exhibitive partner. The script also created that dynamic, specifically with Gibson’s Riggs being drawn as erratic and explosive. The two actors share a flinty and sly comic chemistry that harks back to other popular comic duos like Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, or Dean and Martin. In the aforementioned cases, the rhythm is established: one player is the more realistic, relatable character, who stands in for the audience, while the other character is the more extravagant member of the duo. In Gibson’s

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and Glover’s case, both roles are equally important because for Gibson’s character to “work”—for the comedy to come through—it is key that he has a grounding force off which to play. What is significant about Gibson’s casting and subsequent stardom from Lethal Weapon is that, before the film, he was seen as a serious actor who anchored films that were challenging. The film’s violence and action sequences worked in concert with his role in the Mad Max films, but those movies’ themes of post-apocalyptic narratives left little room for humor. Gibson became a comic leading man because of the Lethal Weapon films, and that slightly “dangerous” style of comedy that he displayed intersected with his public persona throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as he was depicted as a rascally prankster and knockabout. Writer Michael DeAngelis sees the progression of the actor’s image from Mad Max to Lethal Weapons and points out that “if a star persona develops through a series of films and extra-cinematic star texts progressively across the span of a career, [Lethal Weapon] signals a strategic point in the volving cross-project person(a) of Gibson . . . For Gibson, Lethal Weapon was . . . a crucial transitional work marketing the wildness of his ‘Mad Max’ persona for a broader audience.”8 What DeAngelis sees as the progression of Gibson’s “Mad Max” persona for a “broader audience” also means making the actor’s persona more palatable and likable, so that he would be accepted by comedy audiences. As paired with Glover, Gibson would dominate the comic scenes, even though his co-star was an accomplished and successful actor. But Glover was not known as a comedian—and, in fact, the appeal of his character was the weary, experienced voice of knowledge and intelligence. And as Gibson’s star grew exponentially, he would dominate the films in which he was cast, his costars often having to be written in deference to his star persona. There were exceptions to this practice, one of the most notable being his popular romantic comedy action thriller, Bird on a Wire (1990). SHARING THE SCREEN: BIRD ON A WIRE If Gibson’s pairing with Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon films highlighted a moment in which the actor was presented as a comedic foil to a more substantiative co-star, in the 1990 film Bird on a Wire audiences saw a far different exploration of his comedic persona, one that not only had to accommodate for his sense of humor, but also for the humor of his co-star, who was at the time arguably a more accomplished comedic performer than he. With the Lethal Weapon films, Gibson’s natural style of humor made him the comedically dominant figure in the stories, but when cast opposite Goldie Hawn, his comedic persona was forced to share the spotlight.

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More so than any of his other starring comedy vehicles, Bird on a Wire is the film in which Gibson must concede some of the comic showcase to an on-screen partner who has a more established comedic persona than he. By 1990, Goldie Hawn was indeed a major female box office star and one of the few comediennes of that era to have established a consistent, commercially successful career as a bankable movie star. Comedy in the 1980s was seen as breaking new ground with exciting projects by stars like Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Steve Martin, but there were not as many female stars with comparable success, with the notable exception of Goldie Hawn. An Academy Award-winning actress and comedienne, she started her career in the late 1960s with the subversive comedy variety show, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, in which she duly established her comic persona: a daffy, fey kook. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hawn displayed a considerable range, though her comic work maintained a thread of flamboyant silliness. When cast in Bird on a Wire, she was forty-five years old and embarked on a new decade looking for a variety of work. The 1990 film would be her first action comedy. Bird on a Wire was directed by John Badham, whose most notable film was the 1977 gritty musical drama, Saturday Night Fever. His filmography also included the high-concept comedy Short Circuit (1986) as well as a pair of buddy cop comedies, Stake Out (1987) and its sequel, Another Stake Out (1993). In Bird on a Wire, Gibson stars as Rick Jarmin, a man in the witness protection program, whose cover has been blown. Hawn is Marianne, his ex-fiancée whom he left fifteen years earlier, before he disappeared after testifying against a crooked Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Plunged into a caper of intrigue and violence, Rick drags Marianne with him, the two fleeing the villain of the piece, the duplicitous DEA agent Sorenson (David Carradine). Like the Lethal Weapon films, Bird on a Wire relies on Gibson’s loose energy and slightly unnerving comic potential, but there is also another aspect to the film: romance. Given Gibson’s and Hawn’s traditional, Hollywood beauty, the film also operates as a romantic comedy, interspersing the violence of the action with the rekindling of the romance between the two lead characters. The romantic aspect of Bird on a Wire strengthens comparisons between Gibson and Cary Grant, especially when looking at Grant’s work in the Stanely Donen romantic comedy thriller Charade, which co-starred Audrey Hepburn. Like Gibson, Grant was paired with a star of equal star power and charisma (as well as comparable attractiveness), and the two of them were placed in a winding, convoluted tale of mystery and mayhem, all the while looking beautiful as they sprinted through the twisting plot. Bird on a Wire creates a vehicle for Gibson to not only act as a charismatic romantic lead,

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but, considering the character’s time hiding under the witness protection program, the actor was given a chance to stretch his comedic acting skills, donning various aliases—most notably, the effeminate hairdresser—that offered audiences a look at his range. (The hairdresser range has not aged well, especially given Gibson’s subsequent image as a conservative homophobe—though Gibson’s gay act is far more subtle and less cartoonish than its reputation would have readers believe.) Bird on a Wire can be considered what film critic Nathan Rabin would have called a “forgotbuster.” When writing for the now-defunct film site, The Dissolve, Rabin defined a “forgotbuster” as a commercially successful film that has “receded culturally” and “failed to endure.”9 The thing that makes the film notable for Gibson’s oeuvre is that it at once builds on the persona that the actor developed with his comedic work but also posited him as a romantic comedy lead. As Roger Ebert pithily summed up, Gibson’s character of Rick Jarmin, “[is] another of his likable, good-humored heroes who can get tough if he needs to.”10 Ebert further establishes a link between Gibson and Grant—particularly Grant’s work with Hitchcock—by arguing, “My guess is they screened a lot of Hitchcock movies before they made Bird on a Wire, and the parts they liked the best were where Hitch placed his couples in situations that were dangerous and picturesque at the same time.”11 The critic cited North by Northwest, saying there “was a delicate balancing act when Hitchcock did it.”12 The success of Bird on a Wire proved that Gibson was able to maintain his stardom throughout the 1980s and enter the 1990s with success. The screwball romantic comedy themes of the film would point at another aspect of his career, his move toward romantic comedy with the 2000 film What Women Want. The 1994 Western comedy Maverick operated as a bridge of sorts from the adventure comedy of Lethal Weapon and Bird on a Wire, progressing Gibson’s comedic film persona. From 1994 to 2000, the actor’s image was starting to shift slightly, his comments and conservative political leanings starting to influence his publicity. He also saw his film career hit a new high with his award-winning directorial effort, 1995’s historical epic, Braveheart. Though not his directorial debut (the modest 1993 drama Man Without a Face was his directorial bow), Braveheart would come to define his film career, signaling a new professional life as an auteur and filmmaker. The success of the genial romantic comedy What Women Want would be a huge popular hit and a return of sorts for the actor’s comic persona, but the film was only a temporary return, as Gibson’s career as a director would dominate his film work, and his personal travails would overshadow his screen image; once anti-Semitic and homophobic themes had been allegedly found in his films, discussions around Gibson’s films would focus on his prejudices.

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ROMANTIC LEAD: WHAT WOMEN WANT During the holiday season of 2000, Gibson released his first straight romantic comedy, the fantastical love tale, What Women Want. The story has the actor play a handsome but sexist cad, Nick Marshall, who prides himself on his work, but is suddenly confronted with his biases when faced with collaborating with a female colleague, Darcy Maguire (Helen Hunt). Nick is also nursing an estranged relationship with his teenaged daughter, Alex (Ashley Johnson). After falling in his bathtub and being electrocuted by a hairdryer, Nick regains consciousness only to discover that he can read women’s minds. With this new superpower, he begins to purloin Darcy’s work, but simultaneously he begins to fall for her; he also uses his new ability to steer his young daughter away from dating a boy with whom she may have sex. The film’s plot has Nick learn his lesson, understanding that his misogyny, a product of society’s misogyny, has had an adverse effect on the women in his life, and therefore he starts to mend these relationships. Inevitably, there is a conflict between Darcy and Nick because his unscrupulous theft of her ideas leads to her dismissal, but eventually—and predictably—both Darcy and Nick reconcile. Throughout this essay, we have looked at the various ways that Gibson has created—with the aid of his film work—a comedic persona that intersected with a lighter version of his action persona. The comedic energy he brought to the roles was evident in films that were emblematic of Cold War, Reaganite 1980s, when traditional masculinity and gender roles were ascendant and the Religious Right began to wage a series of Culture Wars against the opposing forces of progress that stemmed from the Civil Rights Era, the Women’s Movement, and the Sexual Revolution and the Stonewall Rebellion. The films also operated at a time when Reagan’s “trickle down” economics championed a neo-liberal, laissez-faire approach to policy, prioritizing free markets, unregulated business, low taxation, and slashing of public spending, as well as a championing of smaller government. By the time that 2000’s What Women Want was released, the USA had gone through two more presidents—Reagan’s vice-president, George W. Bush, whose one-term presidency led to Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms, from 1993 to 2001. In November 2000, Bush’s son George W. Bush won twenty-nine states, including Florida, although his victory against Clinton’s vice-president, Al Gore, was so close that a recount took place, starting a series of court battles between the two campaigns that were eventually settled in December with Bush being declared the winner and becoming the fortyfirst president of the United States. What Women Want was released in that strange and somewhat tumultuous political atmosphere (which would pale

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in comparison to the 2020 presidential election), offering a diverting escapism, which is seemingly the artistic and aesthetic signature trademark of the film’s director, Nancy Meyers. The notion of masculinity had seen several shifts from the post-Regan years, when his successors Bush and Clinton were presidents. As David Greven notes, With films from the Bush 41 era onward, however, a profound shift occurred. Masculinity became self-conscious as never before. Hollywood films began to subject manhood to a different kind of light—the light of ironic knowledge. Although rarely discussed in these terms, the vaunted irony of the 1990s has deep implications for gendered identity. In this era, masculinity became aware of itself as both monolith and joke. Masculinity now performed its own iconic, chiseled status in the awareness that it did so as a performance: manhood became meta-manhood. In its post-Reagan New Man, Hollywood produced a split masculinity, which performed traditional roles of gendered identity while also acknowledging its ironic, meta-textual status.13

By the year 2000, Gibson had starred in over thirty films and had only been directed by a woman once before, in the 1984 drama Mrs. Soffel by Gillian Armstrong. (He would be reunited in 2011 with his Maverick co-star, Jodie Foster, who would direct him in the dark psychological dramedy The Beaver.) For the bulk of his career that led to What Women Want, the actor/director starred in a variety of action films, terse dramas, or sprawling epics. His comedic work was largely contextualized in his action work, and therefore remained safely ensconced in a persona that was largely set by 2000. As a director, Meyers presented a new setting for Gibson—a mainstream, frothy romantic comedy—but she also worked with an oversized film persona that had a storied history. The film explores Gibson’s star image—particularly the rakish, masculine matinee idol—yet, Meyers’s film also sought to bring softer, more nuanced edges to that image, by having Gibson’s character confront prejudices, specifically gender-based prejudices. What Women Want also further subverts Gibson’s comedic persona by placing it in a glossy, highly manicured production that is far removed from the grittier settings that housed Gibson’s other roles (even the funny roles). It is also important to note that there is also a class distinction in What Women Want. As is consistent with Meyers’s filmography, the characters in What Women Want are professionals and largely middle-class, if not upper middle-class. The reason this is significant is because it is one of the few roles in which Gibson portrays someone who does not rely on his physicality or brute strength in his profession (There are some exceptions to this claim—his gentle teacher in Man Without a Face, for example.) Throughout most of his films, the actor/ director portrayed a series of cops or soldiers, and despite the character’s

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chauvinism, there is a deliberate shift in the way that his masculinity is presented in Meyers’s film. Because of that shift, Gibson himself admitted during the press for the film that he was reticent to take the role (even if his vanity production company, Icon Productions was producing the film): “[Romantic comedies] don’t get steered at me very often,” he said in an interview, explaining why at that point, over twenty years into his career, he never starred in a straight romantic comedy.14 Meyers, a veteran of comedy, reportedly told Gibson during filming, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” highlighting the point that Gibson’s comedy past has always been married to his action past.15 But the concerns in What Women Want, namely Nick’s relationships with Darcy and Alex required that Gibson recalibrate his acting and expanded on his crinkly-eyed charm and charisma. More importantly, Gibson’s character was created at a time when there was a growing discomfort with narrowed views of traditional masculinity. The conceit of the film allows for a man to “enter” a woman’s mind, thereby empathizing with her. It is a startling premise: the only way a man like Nick can empathize with the women in his life is to be magically induced to do so by a potentially fatal accident. However, the film’s script positions Nick in a world that is not male-dominated as Gibson’s other characters would be. This female-centered and female-centric universe is another aspect of Meyers’s films as well as of romantic comedies in general (which is why they are often dismissed as light and trite by traditional male critics who will often eye commercial products targeted toward women warily). There are some superficial comparisons that could be made between What Women Want and Bird on a Wire (the critical indifference of the latter is what made Gibson so reluctant to star in the former), and, as with Bird, Gibson is yet again paired with a co-star who is as accomplished and established as he is. By the time of What Women Want, Helen Hunt was indeed an Emmy-award-winning television actress, starring in the NBC sitcom Mad About You for seven seasons (1992–99), as well as an Oscar-winning actress for the 1997 comedy, As Good as It Gets. Unlike Gibson’s Bird co-star, Hawn, Hunt was not an established comedic persona (despite her work in comedy) and so she was largely the straight man to Gibson’s comic foil in the film (as opposed to sharing the goofy antics with Hawn, a master physical comedienne). The critical and commercial reception to What Women Want was warm and Gibson was successfully remade as a romantic comedy lead. That promise was left unfulfilled, however. His career as a filmmaker became dominant, with three directing credits to his name including The Passion of the Christ (2004), Apocalypto (2006), and Hacksaw Ridge (2016). As an actor, he pivoted back to action films and dramas, though his very public fall from grace

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contributed to his current state of movie stardom, in which his public persona and his seeming private life had become irrevocably intertwined. AFTERWARDS In 2006, Gibson was arrested in Los Angeles for a DUI. Upon his arrest, Gibson denigrated the arresting office with anti-Semitic slurs. His smirking mug shot went viral (Gibson reportedly did a quick makeover at a drinking fountain to avoid Nick Nolte’s infamously bedraggled mug shot), and he went on the obligatory apology media tour, interviewed by Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. Confirming that he did utter those slurs, he admitted that what he said, “It sounds horrible, and I’m ashamed of that. That came out of my mouth.” He then insisted, “I’m not that. That’s not who I am.” When Sawyer pondered a hypothetical in which the arresting cop was Black, Gibson answered, “I’d have to get loaded and tell you.” He went on to say, “it’s unpredictable what’s going to come flying out.”16 In 2010, Gibson’s violent and racist rant against his partner was released. In what could be considered an early example of “cancel culture” (the term and its existence is still in dispute), Gibson was reportedly faced with a Hollywood backlash, his career seemingly devoted to lower profile, b-film projects. The public image of the debonair wit was replaced by a disturbing and dark persona. During his career tundra, he appeared with Jodie Foster in the dark, brooding dramedy The Beaver. The film was released early into his backlash and though it—and he—received respectable notices, it was ultimately ignored by audiences. In what could be seen as a comeback of sorts, Gibson then enjoyed a success with Daddy’s Home 2, a broad holiday comedy in which he joined the franchise as an overbearing and rough father to film lead, Mark Wahlberg. The film—directed by Sean Anders—did some work in engaging with Gibson’s cinematic past, specifically because his character (Kurt Myron) is a fighter pilot and astronaut. Co-star John Lithgow is cast as the father of the film’s other lead, Will Ferrell, and is posited as an extreme contrast, being overly affectionate and jolly as opposed to the blunt and dysfunctional Kurt. Gibson’s role as the unpleasant Kurt is a seeming logical conclusion for his comedic persona and would be a fitting end to his comedy career. Richard Dyer opined that the construction of stardom and star personalities were a result of “the role and/or the performance of a star . . . taken as revealing the personality of the star.”17 So much of star personality and star persona is a combination of publicity, tabloid/press coverage and film work, and therefore, by 2016, when Daddy’s Home 2 was released, Gibson’s image was that of a troubled, angry, and sometimes violent individual. His matinee idol days

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of the 1980s and early 1990s were past him, and his image became somewhat grizzled in his late middle age. Satire is an excellent indicator of pop culture. In the fifth season of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock (2006–13), the fictional TV executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin, another popular performer whose comic persona has been forever altered by his personal life) hatches a scheme to pre-tape a fundraising benefit for a natural disaster to scoop competing networks. To Donaghy’s great satisfaction, a disaster strikes, and he pools considerable resources and talent, not realizing that the disaster is a hurricane that destroys Gibson’s private island. Because Gibson was so unsympathetic then, Donaghy’s scheme backfired. For the plot to work, Gibson’s fall from grace had to be fully established and unquestioned. It is 2022 at the time of this writing, and Gibson’s career seems to have embarked on a new stage—smaller than his blinding success in the 1980s and 1990s, but sizable, nonetheless. Starting with the critical success of 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge, which scored six Oscar nominations, including one for Gibson as Best Director, the actor/director has kept a steady pace of film work, starring in fourteen films between 2016 and 2022. He is no longer a dominating presence at the box office, which is not only due to his advancing age and the changing tastes in cinema but also to the death of monoculture, which made ubiquitous celebrity like the kind possible in the 1980s and 1990s rare. But the light comedian of What Women Want is seemingly gone. When assessing Gibson’s work as a screen comedian, we are also grappling with the quality of that work: his comedies, though popular and commercially successful, were still largely formulaic commercial endeavors that did little to progress or challenge the genre. Except for the first Lethal Weapon, Gibson’s work as a screen comic is confined mainly to middle-of-the-road efforts. That is why his work as a screen comedian has largely been ignored or rarely assessed profoundly. His directing efforts, most notably Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, were far more impactful and lasting, both because of their artistic and critical achievements but also because of the cinematic scholarship that emerged due to the films’ controversies, as well as Gibson’s growing reputation as a filmmaker. Essentially, Gibson’s comedy career could be seen as inconsequential when stacked up against the weightier work represented by his films as a director. His comedy is essential to look at in the greater context of his film career because it, unlike his directing career, is a direct result of a cinematic environment that is, at once, very much timestamped in the 1980s but also a call back to the studio system of the 1940s. Gibson’s star was on the ascent during his salad days because his celebrity meant he was gifted with starring vehicles, much like the actors in the Golden Age of Hollywood (though a significant distinction lies in Gibson’s autonomy as a performer, as he was not yoked by a studio system with star-making

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contracts). Mel Gibson’s comedy is as much about 1980s cinema and 1980s pop culture as it is about his lengthy filmography. Just as important, though, is the eventual descent of his light comedic persona, which exposes a persona that has been irretrievably altered by his behavior. NOTES 1. Maureen O’Connor, “All the Terrible Things Mel Gibson Has Said on the Record,” Gawker, 8 July 2010, https:​//​www​.gawker​.com​/5582644​/all​-the​-terrible​ -things​-mel​-gibson​-has​-said​-on​-the​-record. Accessed on November 30, 2022. 2. Jess Cagle, “Cinema: A Softer Side of Mel.” Time, Dec. 11, 2000, https:​//​content​ .time​.com​/time​/subscriber​/article​/0​,33009​,998731​-3​,00​.html. Accessed on October 15, 2022. 3. Douglas Kellner, “Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan,” The Velvet Light Trap 27 (Spring, 1991): 9–24. 4. Davis Kehr, “A Star Is Made,” Film Comment 15, no. 1 (1979): 7–12. 5. Chris Newbould, “The Rise and Surprising Appeal of the Buddy Cop Movie,” The National, June 16, 2021, https:​//​www​.thenationalnews​.com​/arts​/the​-rise​-and​ -surprising​-appeal​-of​-the​-buddy​-cop​-movie​-1​.192075. Accessed on October 15, 2022. 6. Ibid. 7. Jeffrey Brown, “Bullets, Buddies, and Bad Guys,” A Journal of Popular Film & Television 21, no. 2 (1993): 79–87. 8. Michael DeAngelis, “Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise: Rebellion and Conformity,” in Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s, ed. Robert Eberwein (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2010). 9. Nathan Rabin, “Features / Forgotbusters,” The Dissolve, 2015, https:​//​thedissolve​ .com​/features​/forgotbusters/. Accessed on October 15, 2022. 10. Roger Ebert, “Bird on a Wire Movie Review & Film Summary (1990),” Roger Ebert.com, May 18, 1990, https:​//​www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/bird​-on​-a​-wire​ -1990. Accessed on October 25, 2022. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020). 14. Hollywood.com Staff. “What Women Want: Mel Gibson Interview,” Hollywood.com, May 28, 014, https:​//​www​.hollywood​.com​/general​/what​-women​-want​ -mel​-gibson​-interview​-57162256. Accessed on November 30, 2022. 15. Sherri Sylvester, “Mel Gibson Knows ‘What Women Want,’” CNN, December 18, 2000, http:​//​edition​.cnn​.com​/2000​/fyi​/teachers​.offcampus​/12​/17​/mel​.gibson​ .interview/. Accessed on November 25, 2022. 16. Stephen M. Silverman, “Mel Gibson Admits He Drank after Arrest,” Peoplemag, October 12, 2006, https:​//​people​.com​/celebrity​/mel​-gibson​-admits​-he​-drank​ -after​-arrest/. Accessed on October 22, 2022.

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17. Richard Dyer, Stars (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Jeffrey. “Bullets, Buddies, and Bad Guys.” A Journal of Popular Film & Television 21, no. 2 (1993): 79–87. Cagle, Jess. “Cinema: A Softer Side of Mel.” Time, December 11, 2000, https:​//​content​.time​.com​/time​/subscriber​/article​/0​,33009​,998731​-3​,00​.html. DeAngelis, Michael. “Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise: Rebellion and Conformity.” In Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s, edited by Robert Eberwein, 77–98. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Dyer, Richard. Stars. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ebert, Roger. “Bird on a Wire Movie Review & Film Summary (1990).” Roger Ebert.com, May 18, 1990, https:​//​www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/bird​-on​-a​-wire​ -1990. Greven, David. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Hollywood.com Staff. “What Women Want: Mel Gibson Interview.” Hollywood.com, May 28, 2014, https:​//​www​.hollywood​.com​/general​/what​-women​-want​-mel​-gibson​ -interview​-57162256. Kehr, Davis. “A Star Is Made.” Film Comment 15, no. 1 (1979): 7–12. Kellner, Douglas. “Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan.” The Velvet Light Trap 27 (Spring, 1991): 9–24. Newbould, Chris. “The Rise and Surprising Appeal of the Buddy Cop Movie.” The National, June 16, 2021, https:​//​www​.thenationalnews​.com​/arts​/the​-rise​-and​ -surprising​-appeal​-of​-the​-buddy​-cop​-movie​-1​.192075. O’Connor, Maureen. “All the Terrible Things Mel Gibson Has Said on the Record.” Gawker, July 8, 2010, https:​//​www​.gawker​.com​/5582644​/all​-the​-terrible​-things​ -mel​-gibson​-has​-said​-on​-the​-record. Rabin, Nathan. “Features / Forgotbusters.” The Dissolve, 2015, https:​//​thedissolve​ .com​/features​/forgotbusters/. Sylvester, Sherri. “Mel Gibson Knows ‘What Women Want.’” CNN, December 18, 2000, http:​//​edition​.cnn​.com​/2000​/fyi​/teachers​.offcampus​/12​/17​/mel​.gibson​ .interview/. Silverman, Stephen M. “Mel Gibson Admits He Drank after Arrest.” Peoplemag, October 12, 2006, https:​//​people​.com​/celebrity​/mel​-gibson​-admits​-he​-drank​-after​ -arrest/.

Chapter 9

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto “Not the Maya We Know” Brett A. Houk

Before Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto premiered in 2006, Mayanists—archaeologists who study the ancient Maya—shared a collective sense of nervous anticipation. The trailer hinted at authentic costumes, adornment and locations, and an Indigenous cast speaking a Mayan language. Richard Hansen, a well-known Mayanist, served as a technical adviser on the film, providing Gibson and his crew with details about Maya culture, architecture, and history. However, following the film’s release, the archaeological community widely condemned it for its portrayal of the ancient Maya as ultra-violent savages whose civilization deserved to fall. Many prominent scholars published reviews of the film or conveyed their reactions in interviews, detailing their complaints and refuting Gibson’s portrayal of ancient Maya culture. The titles of the reviews—“Orcs in Loincloths,”1 “Maya in the Thunderdome,”2 and “Betraying the Maya,”3 for example—encapsulated the common reaction to the film. The Washington Post published a story entitled “Culture Shocker: Scholars Say Mel Gibson’s Action Flick Sacrifices the Maya Civilization to Hollywood.”4 One Mayanist called for the Society for American Archaeology to revise its ethics guidelines to address the issue of the commercialization of the past since Hansen reputedly received a large donation to his foundation in exchange for his services,5 and the American Anthropological Association featured a presidential session at their 2007 annual meeting entitled, “Critiquing Apocalypto: An Anthropological Response to the Perpetuation of Inequality in Popular Media.”6 The negative reviews share a few common threads. While the Mayanist-reviewers generally acknowledge that they understand the movie is a work of fiction (“not a documentary”7) and that artistic license is to be 175

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expected (“No one really expects historical dramas to be accurate”8), most struggled to reconcile the people, places, and events depicted on the screen with their scholarly view of the ancient Maya. The reviewers wrestled with the painstaking details portrayed in the film, on one hand, and the obvious geographical, chronological, and “factual” inaccuracies, on the other hand. The notable exception to the backlash is Richard Hansen’s archaeological defense of the film.9 He described Apocalypto “as is a fictional film which told the story of a chase scene, utilizing certain components of the Postclassic Maya cultural behavior as the setting for the drama which was unfolded.”10 This rather simplistic statement, while true at face value, glosses over the major questions other Mayanists raised with while watching the movie. Where is this? When is this? Who is this? And, most importantly, why is this? This chapter explores the criticisms and defenses of Apocalypto from the archaeological community considering those questions. Written by Mel Gibson and Farhad Safina, Apocalypto (2006) tells the story of a Maya man named Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) who is captured by marauders in a raid, taken to a late Postclassic Maya city to be sacrificed, is spared that fate and ultimately escapes the city while being used for target practice by Zero Wolf (Raoul Max Trujillo) and his warriors. From that point on, the movie is a chase as Jaguar Paw flees the city, trying to return to his pregnant wife (Dalia Hernández) and child (Carlos Emilio Báez), who escaped the raid on their home by hiding in a sink hole. Remarkably, the actors speak Yucatec Mayan, one of the ancient and surviving languages spoken by the Maya peoples. Gibson reportedly became interested in the Maya after watching the National Geographic documentary Dawn of the Maya (2003).11 Gibson and his production team invited Richard Hansen, who is featured prominently in the documentary, to a series of meetings to discuss Maya culture, history, and civilization.12 These discussions and visits to Maya ruins culminated in Gibson’s and Safina’s collaboration on the script for Apocalypto, a film that “they wanted . . . to serve as a reminder to today’s world that the precursor to the fall of a civilization is always the same: widespread environmental degradation, excessive consumption and political corruption.”13 In an interview with Diane Sawyer, Gibson explained the film’s title: “‘Apocalypto’ . . . means a new beginning or an unveiling—a revelation.”14 ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE ANCIENT MAYA Archaeology as a science is deeply concerned with time and place. In fact, defining “archaeological cultures” based on the geographic and temporal limits of shared cultural traits—ceramics, architecture, agricultural methods,

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burial practices, and so on—was a major concern of archaeology for the first six decades of the twentieth century.15 While archaeology has advanced beyond the cultural history approach, time and place remain central to our study of the past. The ancient Maya are one of the most intensively studied Pre-Columbian cultures of the Western Hemisphere, but they are still, fundamentally, an “archaeological culture” in the sense that archaeologists have defined their temporal and geographic limits, bounding the ancient Maya spatially from their neighbors and temporally from their predecessors and descendants, based on a suite of cultural traits, including their hieroglyphic writing system, their vigesimal math system with the concept of zero and positional notation, and their spoken languages. The Maya developed distinctive architectural styles, ceramic types, art styles, and a political system based on divine kingship. Of course, these distinct ways of being Maya changed and evolved over the long course of Maya civilization. The ancient Maya occupied all of the modern nations of Guatemala and Belize, parts of western Honduras and El Salvador, and parts of eastern Mexico, including all of the Yucatán Peninsula. This area, which is roughly the size of New Mexico, is highly diverse topographically and includes a narrow band of coastal plains along the Pacific Ocean, rugged volcanic and metamorphic mountains in the south and predominantly karstic lowlands extending from the foothills of the mountains to the Caribbean Sea on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the north and west. Researchers usually subdivide the lowlands into the central lowlands and the northern lowlands. Both occupy the same limestone platform, but the central lowlands have more elevation change—most notably the Maya Mountains in the east and the hilly and rugged eastern flank of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas in the west—than the northern lowlands. Rivers flow across the central lowlands, draining from the highlands to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. The gently sloping terrain makes for generally slow-moving rivers and streams, but steep canyons and dramatic waterfalls drain portions of the Maya Mountains in Belize and the hills in Chiapas. In a vivid contrast, there are no rivers in the northern lowlands. However, the flat limestone platform is dotted with thousands of natural sinkholes known as cenotes. Rainfall is not uniform across the lowlands; it generally decreases from southeast to northwest.16 In southern Belize, over 4,000 millimeters of rain typically falls in a year, while the extreme northwestern corner of the peninsula receives less than 1,000 millimeters per year.17 While the vegetation of the lowlands is primarily tropical rainforest, the height of the canopy decreases from south to north, mirroring rainfall and soil thickness. As one moves from south to north across the lowlands, the vegetation changes from

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tropical forest, to subtropical forest, to dry tropical forest, to very dry tropical forest.18 The first people considered to be Maya based on their pottery, settlement patterns, and subsistence system, which relied heavily on maize agriculture, occupied this area roughly 3,000 years ago, during what archaeologists call the Preclassic period. Recent discoveries in Tabasco, Mexico, on the western edge of the Maya region, demonstrate that the earliest Maya in the area began using pottery around 1200 BC and constructing large artificial platforms by 1000 BC.19 By the end of the Middle Preclassic, around 400 BC, Maya farmers had colonized most of the lowlands, but the overall population density was low.20 The process of colonization and expansion continued into the Late Preclassic period, and more, larger villages with public architecture indicate social complexity continued to rise, as well. El Mirador, where Richard Hansen has worked for decades, became one of the largest Maya sites of any time period. The Maya developed hieroglyphic writing and the concept of divine kingship during the Late Preclassic period. These two traits are exemplified in the polychrome murals from San Bartolo, Guatemala, which depict a coronation scene from about 100 BC showing an early Maya king’s coronation.21 The end of the Preclassic period witnessed not only the development and spread of the concept of divine kingship, but also the collapse of several significant Maya centers including the site of El Mirador.22 Theories for the rapid and puzzling abandonment of the Mirador Basin include warfare and reduced agricultural productivity due to increased sedimentation, which choked once productive fields with clays.23 Significantly (for Apocalypto), Hansen attributes much of this erosion and sedimentation to lime plaster production, which required large amounts of green wood for fuel.24 The Classic period, beginning around AD 250, saw the emergence of Maya kingdoms across the central lowlands. Although the individual fortunes of Maya cities waxed and waned over the course of the Classic period, the overall pattern of growth continued until the population of the central lowlands peaked around seven to eleven million people by AD 800.25 The Classic period saw the elaboration of the use of hieroglyphic writing and the Long Count calendar system—a count of days from a creation day, which we can correlate to our own calendar—as well as sculpture, lapidary work, stucco adornment, pottery, and mural painting. The Classic period also witnessed increased competition between kingdoms, major battles between rivals and signs of stress on the agricultural, economic, and political systems of the lowlands.26 During the last century of the Classic period, a time known as the Terminal Classic, the system of divine kingship failed, the Maya abandoned almost every major center in the central lowlands, and the countryside in the core

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area of the Maya lowlands was depopulated in a series of events collectively known as the Maya collapse.27 Decades of research have shown that problems with high populations and declining agricultural yields, intense competition and frequent warfare between kingdoms, and the rejection of the divine kings and the ideology that supported them all worked in concert to trigger the collapse.28 As the central lowlands went into decline, the focus of Maya civilization transformed and re-centered to the northern lowlands during the Terminal Classic period.29 Chichén Itzá in the northern Yucatán became a powerful regional state exerting control over most of the northern lowlands around AD 1000–1100.30 The city’s architecture reflects a new style of rulership based on shared rule.31 Chichén Itzá’s grip on the peninsula weakened about AD 1100, when the last great Maya city, Mayapan, supplanted it.32 For approximately 260 years, Mayapan controlled much of the northern Yucatán Peninsula using this system of shared rule.33 This style of government differed radically from the rule of divine kings in the Classic period, and it allowed Mayapan to exert control over a vast territory. When Mayapan collapsed, the peninsula fragmented into at least sixteen independent provinces, a situation that persisted until the Spanish arrived in the Maya area in the sixteenth century.34 To drape a layer of complexity on this necessarily bare-bones summary of Maya culture history, it is important to note that Maya culture, political structure, architecture, art, language, diet, agriculture, and religion varied geographically and temporally. For example, while they shared common construction methods, the architecture of Late Preclassic El Mirador differed dramatically from that of Postclassic Mayapan, and even during a given century distinctive architectural styles arose across the Maya area. This brief background into Maya geography and chronology lays the groundwork for an analysis of the reaction to the film shared by most Mayanists. WHERE IS THIS? The movie’s poster offered few clues about the plot but hinted at a place and a time. It shows a backlit Maya warrior, knife, dripping blood, in one hand, with torch bearing figures behind him. In the background, a vaguely Castillo-like temple35 dominates the poster, with two similar structures behind and to either side of it. At the bottom of the poster, the tagline, “No one can outrun their destiny,” portends not only the film’s central chase but also, perhaps, Gibson’s underlying message. Plot elements aside, the poster signaled to scholars of the ancient Maya that the film was set in the Yucatán, perhaps around AD 900 to 1000.

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The opening scenes of the film, however, take place in a decidedly non-Yucatán forest. The trees are massive, indicative of a tropical rainforest, not the dry tropical forest of the northern lowlands. The main characters, having been captured in a violent raid, are marched by their captors along steep cliff faces and across raging rivers; again, clearly not the Yucatán with its table-top geology and lack of streams. Near the end of the movie, Jaguar Paw emerges from the forest on a sandy beach, another “clue” about where the action is taking place. In her review, Andrea Stone commented, “Though beautiful, misty mountains and high rocky cliffs overlooking roiling rivers, all near the ocean, are not Mayaland.”36 The architecture in the city created more confusion for Mayanists. The temple-pyramids surrounding the plaza are clearly modeled after Temple I at Tikal, a style found far from the coast and not near any waterfalls. However, closer inspection of the temples themselves reveal hook-nosed Chaak-masks on the facades along with other elements found in the Chenes and Puuc architectural styles, far north (and a little later in time) of Tikal, a conceit Hansen attributes to “artistic license.”37 Despite what the scenery and architecture suggest, the historical anchor—the arrival of the Spanish—places the action somewhere on the northeastern coast of the Maya area.38 WHEN IS THIS? Returning to the movie’s poster and the pre-release expectations about the film, the common assumption was that the film would be about the Late Classic collapse, and the opening quote in the movie—“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”39— aligned with that misconception. For archaeologists, the depiction of the city and its inhabitants, however, created tremendous temporal confusion, what Andrea Stone called “chronological mayhem” in her review.40 Despite the arrival of the Spanish at the end of the film, Stone remarked, “The film’s Late Classic setting is evident in the costumes of royalty and priests echoing the splendor of Classic Maya art.”41 She dismissed the Spanish as a “spectral vision of the future.”42 James Aimers and Elizabeth Graham asked, “why this huge historical conflation?”43 The infamous human sacrifice scene, which is addressed later in this chapter, features elaborately attired members of the elite class witnessing the assembly-line-like heart sacrifice and beheading of captives. Foremost among the witnesses are the royal family, evidenced by the king and queen, adorned in elaborate backracks festooned with quetzal feathers. To a Mayanist watching the movie for the first time, the presence of a divine king, dressed in formal ritual attire, once again signals that the action is taking place in the Late

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or Terminal Classic period, before the demise of that system of rulership. The Postclassic system of governance, built on shared rule, did not have divine kings such as the one shown in Apocalypto. Marcello Canuto noted, “This final scene tells us that the movie focuses on Maya society on the eve of Spanish contact in the 16th century. Yet the Maya city portrayed in the movie, central to its plot, dates roughly to the 9th century.”44 Indeed, the dominant buildings on the set and in the film are the temple-pyramids, which are clearly Classic-period, Tikal-inspired structures (with a bit of Terminal Classic Puuc adornment). Hansen commented that the temples are Classic period in style because “they generally were larger structures than those of the Postclassic period” and that Tikal was chosen as the template “because of the obvious manifestations of splendor and cultural achievement.”45 What is not as evident to the viewer of the film, given the hectic activity in the city when it is on the screen, is that the Classic-period temples are being remodeled into Postclassic buildings. According to Hansen, “to accommodate the ‘reality’ of the setting, several of the larger Classic period structures were undergoing ‘remodeling’ into architecture more characteristic of the Postclassic period.”46 Indeed, Hansen provides numerous photos of the set in his 2012 defense of the film that show details not apparent while watching the movie.47 The set includes Postclassic-style colonnaded buildings, a skull rack modeled after one at Chichén Itzá, evidence of wear and tear on the temples, and ongoing renovations to several structures. WHO IS THIS? In the opening scenes of the movie, Jaguar Paw and his group occupy extremely non-Maya huts in an extremely non-Maya setting. As maize agriculturalists, most Maya lived in small villages. They often built their houses on low earthen or stone platforms to help with drainage and perhaps to catch a breeze. Ethnohistoric accounts, as well as observations of modern Maya villages, suggest that their houses were some distance from the edge of the jungle, their agricultural fields creating a buffer between forest and house. The Maya did not build their pole-and-thatch structures in the jungle; they built them in the open where the sun could quickly dry thatched roofs, walkways, and clothes after a rain. Andrea Stone, reacting to Jaguar Paw’s village, said, “I would never have identified this place as the hometown of Classic Maya corn farmers, who lived in a dispersed settlement pattern . . . Practically lying in the dirt, they look like a merry band of hunter-gatherers.”48 Aimers and Graham similarly wondered: “who are these people?”49 Hansen’s explanation for this setting is that it represents not a village but a hunting camp.50 Hansen

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uses a variety of ethnographic sources to support the hunting camp setting as culturally accurate, noting that Bishop Diego de Landa commented on companies of hunters numbering around fifty people who would visit towns to distribute their haul to the lords and townsfolk.51 In this way, hunting camps and the villages and towns are part of the larger system of subsistence and trade. If, however, the ancient Maya extracted resources from the forest in the same way their historic descendants did, they likely constructed simple lean-to structures rather than “permanent” houses. For example, chicleros who seasonally worked in the forest to harvest chicle in Central America and southern Mexico constructed “temporary [huts] of upright poles in the ground roofed over with palm leaves” and “rarely return[ed] to the same camp in successive years.”52 Part of Hansen’s own ethnohistoric support for the hunting camp breaks down under the film’s plot: Jaguar Paw and his people have never heard of the city to which they are marched, so they are clearly not trading meat there, nor are they trading meat with intermediate groups, from whom they would have learned of the city. The viewer, then, is left with the impression that this is a separate society, not part of the city’s realm. That the characters are speaking Yucatek Mayan signals some connection to the culture of the city, but they seem to dwell in a state of innocence or ignorance, unaware of the horrors they are about to experience firsthand. The main issue the Mayanists had with the depiction of the city-dwelling Maya in Apocalypto was the degree to which Gibson exaggerated what Western society would see as “negative” aspects of Maya culture. William Booth’s description from an article in the Washington Post summed up the typical Mayanist’s reaction well: “‘Apocalypto’ depicts the Maya as a supercruel, psycho-sadistic society on the skids, a ghoulscape engaged in widespread slavery, reckless sewage treatment and bad rave dancing, with a real lust for human blood.”53 Phrases used by Mayanists to describe Gibson’s movie included “a gore-fest,”54 “a disgusting feast of blood and excess,”55 and “violently grotesque and surreal,”56 with one reviewer particularly disturbed by “the graphic Maya-on-Maya violence.”57 Neither Jaguar Paw’s band nor the city dwellers fit into the scholarly community’s consensus view of the Ancient Maya. As Freidel noted, “no such people existed in the Maya world.”58 Rather, the two groups of Maya represent two old film tropes,59 which Gibson sets in opposition to one another to make his point that Maya civilization is doomed: the Noble Savage and the Bloodthirsty Savage. Jaguar Paw and his group are portrayed as the former.60 David Freidel wrote, “the people of the forest in Apocalypto, the defenders of nature, are funny, wise, handsome, beautiful, and profoundly naive. They are primitives, innocent of the corruptive influences of civilization and urban society.”61 Stephen Houston and David Stuart describe them

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as “humble and tranquil forest dwellers who live in the most rudimentary fashion imaginable.”62 In contrast, Gibson relies on the Bloodthirsty Savage trope to depict the city Maya. In the opening raid scene, we witness sadism, brutality, torture, murder, and (implied) rape. The “crazed and blood-thirsty city-dwellers, eager for cruel sacrifice by cynical kings,”63 live in an orgy of excess surrounded by disease, flowing sewage, fields of dying corn, and a pit of rotting human corpses. At the heart of this is the king: “a Maya ruler sits silently as his priests butcher captives in the fashion of the Aztecs of highland Mexico. He has no words, no songs, no history, no name. He is a rich, powerful, sadistic brute.”64 While the Maya did engage in warfare, did practice human sacrifice, and did have slaves, the film’s themes of excess and conspicuous consumption required that all of these traits be magnified to the point of absurdity. Apocalypto portrays the ancient Maya as willing to, and capable of, sacrificing countless captives in a riotous public spectacle and dumping the headless corpses in a giant open pit, something almost all Mayanists find out of character with what we know about the ancient Maya. The fear, the reviewers expressed, was that the movie-going public would not be able to separate artistic license/hyberpole from archaeological fact. Stone indeed commented, “this concoction . . . will become the popular conception of the ancient Maya.”65 Houston and Stuart cautioned that “Gibson has transformed the ancient Maya, for decades to come, into a people given to capricious sadism and cruelty.”66 As Houston further stated in an interview with the Washington Post, “For millions of people this might be their first glimpse of the Maya. This is the impression that is going to last. But this is Mel Gibson’s Maya. This is Mel Gibson’s sadism. This is not the Maya we know.”67 The scale of sacrifice in the heart-extraction/beheading scene, most Maya scholars agree, actually reflects Aztec68 ritual behavior. Hansen notes that by the terminal Postclassic, Aztec cultural practices (including human sacrifice and human consumption) had influenced the Maya,69 but scholars disagree on the level of that influence. Does trading for gold ornaments from another culture automatically require the recipients to adopt all aspects of that culture, including sacrificing hundreds or thousands of captives at a time? Of course not. Archaeologically, we have not discovered evidence for mass graves of sacrificed victims in the Maya area like that depicted in Apocalypto, nor have we found racks of perforated skulls like those excavated beneath Mexico City70 at the site of the tzompantli.71 Houston and Stuart note that “the scale and fury of the violence” shown in the film “are unlike anything ever documented for this civilization [the Maya].”72 From an archaeological perspective, one of the more troubling distortions of reality is Gibson’s use of actual Maya murals from San Bartolo (dating to the Late Preclassic period) and Bonampak (dating to the Late Classic).

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In the former case, a scene of an animal sacrifice has been altered to show a sacrificed human, painted blue to foreshadow the fate of the captives. In the latter case, a Late Classic Maya warrior grasps a decapitated human head where in the original his hand held a captive by the hair. To the right of that scene, Gibson’s artists added another warrior holding a bleeding human heart, its former owner recently sacrificed. That these murals date to roughly 1,700 years and 800 years before the story, respectively, does not rob them of apparent authenticity to the average movie-goer. The second concern voiced in reviews and interviews is what modern Maya people would think of the depiction of their ancestors. Arthur Demarest commented to the Washington Post, “What I’m very worried about is how the Maya themselves will perceive the film.”73 In the same article, even Hansen is quoted as saying the film does “give the feeling they’re [the Maya] a sadistic lot. I’m a little apprehensive about how the contemporary Maya will take it.”74 Similarly, Canuto lamented, “Gibson’s feverish vision of a childish Maya society sacrificing itself to extinction is more than inaccurate, it works against the progress of decades of diligent scholarship to restore to present-day Maya people a heritage of which they are proud.”75 WHY IS THIS? The final question most Mayanists struggled with is “Why is this?” Why this story about the Maya, or why the Maya to tell this story? The film is an allegory for modern Western society; Gibson acknowledged in interviews that he wanted to address the excesses of America, including the war in Iraq, and explore themes of environmental degradation, political corruption, and conspicuous consumption, and he saw certain parallels in the collapse of the Ancient Maya.76 Many of the details in the film are drawn from ideas Hansen, the film’s technical advisor, has studied and published, including the Late Preclassic collapse of El Mirador caused by the effects of excessive consumption of lime plaster and deforestation; the scene of slaves burning and crushing limestone on the edges of the city riffs on a clip in Dawn of the Maya, although the workers in the National Geographic version are not coughing up blood. If the goal, though, were to explore these particular themes, the end of the Classic period seems like the obvious time to set the story. With the Maya at their height and warfare rampant around AD 800, actual Maya history would have provided a fascinating backdrop for Gibson’s story. Perhaps, then the answer to “why” is not in the collapse, but in the new beginning. More than one reviewer concluded that the answer to “why is this?” was the historical anchor point we mentioned before: the arrival of the Spanish. The chase for

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our protagonist shows no sign of ending—his tormentors are relentless even after their leader has been slain—when Jaguar Paw and his pursuers burst from the jungle onto a beach where they witness the arrival of the Spanish. The scene, which is brief but profoundly important to the plot, shows four Spanish ships off the coast and three boats of soldiers, sailors, and priests rowing to shore. Jaguar Paw returns to the forest, while his pursuers numbly walk forward to meet their future conquerors. The arrival of the Spanish literally ends the chase, sparing Jaguar Paw and allowing him ultimately to save his family. This moment is the apocalypto for the Maya, their new beginning.77 To return to the sacrifice scene, the king is a witness to the carousel of sacrifice, but he is passive; a Maya priest is the executioner. At the center, then, of this rotten civilization is Maya religion, not Maya politics. The ultimate effect of the powerful dichotomy of Noble Savage versus Bloodthirsty Savage is to convince the viewer that the Maya and their native religion “belong to a civilization that deserves to die, soon to be reborn with the arrival of the Spanish and Christianity.”78 Aimers and Graham ask, “Could it be that a Maya society that is collapsing on itself in an orgy of decadence and violence will in fact be saved by the arrival of Christianity?”79 If we buy into that answer to “why is this?,” then it is a short leap of logic to view the mishmash of time and the confusion of geography as part of this same message. The cityscape with its Preclassic murals, Classic period temples, Terminal Classic facades, and Postclassic colonnades may be viewed not as artistic license or storytelling device but as representing the Maya throughout time. Similarly, the local geography, which includes waterfalls, high rainforest, and the coast, all within a day’s walk of the city, represents all of the Maya world compressed into an impossible locale. A more cynical view of Gibson’s message could be that all the Maya, throughout the history of their civilization and across the breadth of their homeland, needed to be rescued. Perhaps that was their destiny, alluded to on the movie’s poster. DISCUSSION How do we reconcile the two contrasting views of the film held by the larger community of Mayanists versus that of Hansen? The latter suggested it “is likely that much of the resistance was created by Gibson’s anti-Semitic statement during an arrest about six months previous to the release of the film.”80 Hansen elaborated on this idea in his 2012 publication, commenting, “It is clear that many of the criticisms were a direct reflection of the disapproval of Gibson’s previous behavior,81 as well as a standing resentment because of the film Passion of the Christ, a movie which seemed to serve

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as a ‘pebble in the shoe’ for many liberal, atheist, and in particular, Jewish people.”82 However, none of the reviews by Mayanists that we have relied on for this chapter mentioned Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and “drunken anti-Semitic outburst at a police officer,”83 although news articles and reviews by movie critics frequently did, or The Passion of the Christ (2004), other than to mention its use of an ancient language. The closest any reviews come to mentioning those issues is the one by Aimers and Graham, who note, “One explanation [for the arrival of the Spanish] is dramatic effect, but this is where Gibson’s authorial intent . . . becomes entangled with what we know about Gibson as a person.”84 Regardless, Gibson’s anti-Semitic remark and any lingering feelings about Gibson’s previous film cannot account for the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Apocalypto by Maya scholars. Rather, at the core of the disagreement is a profound difference in the way the film’s detractors and Hansen are interpreting the archaeological record. All of the Mayanist-reviewers cited here were established and respected experts in Maya archaeology, epigraphy, or art history when they wrote their reviews; they were not random graduate students or freshly minted PhDs. They, on one hand, and Hansen, on the other, are looking at the same data and constructing wildly different views of the archaeological culture that is the ancient Maya. Hansen commented in 2012: “It would be difficult to assert that all the scholars who spoke out against Apocalypto were ignorant or incompetent, but why did they make claims that were fallacious or inaccurate in the face of overwhelming data? Why was the response so vehement when many of the issues and situations portrayed in the film were accurate?”85 Hansen suggests that, in addition to just not liking Gibson for his anti-Semitic remarks and previous film, “scholars wittingly or unwittingly may have ascribed to a ‘revisionist’ and/or ‘relativist/aboriginalist’ perspective.”86 Such perspectives, Hansen argues, “ignore the vast amounts of data that have accumulated over periods of time, and seek to promote that which is ideologically expedient or politically ‘correct’ or convenient within the bounds of ‘language.’”87 The Mayanist-reviewers cited here, however, all acknowledge that the ancient Maya warred against one another, engaged in slavery and/or practiced human sacrifice. Houston and Stuart note that “some decades ago, the ancient Maya were perceived as peaceful, and that was wrong. As in all human societies, violence was present and real.”88 However, they also comment that the violence “operated within reverential systems of belief about the need to feed and tend gods and to test the honor of noble captives. Violence, a controlled, constrained violence, had purpose and meaning, however unpleasant those beliefs may seem today.”89 They and other reviewers take issue with the portrayal of Maya ritual as a sadistic activity performed more as a spectacle of violence than as an act of religious obeyance.

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Another source of the disagreement between the two camps appears to reflect personal ideology (and the increasing polarization of twentyfirst-century politics in the United States). It is clear from interviews that Hansen’s personal views do not align with those of many Mayanists. In an article published in the Washington Examiner in 2017, ten years after most of the reviews came out in print, Charlotte Allen quotes Hansen as saying, “In the liberal mentality of our liberal colleagues, the Maya were star-gazing, poetry-reciting, peace-loving people in harmony with their forests. It’s a crock.”90 None of the Mayanist-reviewers cited here identify their social or political leanings in their reviews, but it is safe to assume they fall to the left of Hansen. For his part, in the Washington Examiner article Hansen worries that speaking out against political correctness will get him labeled as a “rightwing, gun-slinging . . . Bible-toting . . . pencil-neck geek.”91 Hansen, who is more direct in his criticisms of the film’s detractors in his 2012 publication than they are of him in their reviews, has a personal investment in the film, as its technical advisor and the source for many of the ideas that informed the script. The film’s detractors, on the other hand, feel they have a personal investment in how the ancient Maya are perceived. Finally, Traci Ardren offers up an interesting explanation for the powerful, negative reaction most Mayanists had to the movie: Classicists have nearly a hundred years of film history with which to explore popular depictions of ancient Rome or Greece, and in turn they are accustomed to the vagaries of distortion, manipulation and contestation that such media demand. Mayanist scholars were unprepared for the assault on our relatively small body of scholarship, still in its infancy, which this film represents . . .92

The body of scholarship on the ancient Maya is not really in its infancy— serious exploration of the Maya area began in the mid-nineteenth century, before archaeology was even a field of study in the United States.93 While each Mayanist has an idiosyncratic view of the archaeological culture that is the ancient Maya, most of us share a similar understanding of the culture’s achievements, history, and traits, built on over a century and a half of research. What is in its infancy is Hollywood’s making movies about the Maya. Whereas big-budget releases about the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians are quite common, films about the Maya are exceedingly rare.94 Apocalypto represents the first major motion picture about such a civilization. That is why so many Mayanists hoped that Gibson would get it right.

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NOTES 1. Andrea Stone, “Orcs in Loincloths,” Archaeology, January 3, 2007, https:​//​ archive​.archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto2​.htmlhttps:​//​archive​.archaeology​ .org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto2​.html. 2. Marcello Canuto, “Maya in the Thunderdome,” Salon, December 15, 2006, https:​//​www​.salon​.com​/2006​/12​/15​/maya/. 3. David A.Freidel, “Betraying the Maya,” Archaeology, no. 2 (2007): 36–41. 4. William Booth, “Culture Shocker: Scholars Say Mel Gibson’s Action Flick Sacrifices the Maya Civilization to Hollywood,” The Washington Post, December 9, 2006, https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp​-dyn​/content​/article​/2006​/12​/08​/ AR2006120801815​_pf​.html. 5. Jon C. Lohse, “Letters to the Editor: Apocalypto,” The SAA Archaeological Record 7, no. 2 (2007): 3. 6. Richard Hansen, “Relativism, Revisionism, Aboriginalism, and Emic/Etic Truth: The Case Study of Apocalypto,” in The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research, ed. Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (New York: Springer, 2012), 148. 7. Canuto, “Maya in the Thunderdome.” 8. Traci Ardren, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” Archaeology, December 5, 2006, https:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto​.html. 9. Hansen, “Relativism.” 10. Ibid., 183. 11. Charlotte Allen, “King of the Jungle: The Mayan Empire of Archaeologist Richard Hansen,” Washington Examiner, November 29, 2017, https:​ //​ www​ .washingtonexaminer​.com​/weekly​-standard​/king​-of​-the​-jungle​-the​-mayan​-empire​-of​ -archaeologist​-richard​-hansen. 12. Hansen, “Relativism,” 149. 13. Robert W. Welkos, “In ‘Apocalypto,’ fact and fiction play hide and seek,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2006, https:​//​www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2006​ -dec​-09​-et​-apocalypto9​-story​.html. 14. ABC News, “Lost Kingdom: Mel Gibson’s ‘Apocalypto,’” ABC News, December 11, 2006, https:​//​abcnews​.go​.com​/Primetime​/story​?id​=2670750​&page​=1. 15. Matthew Johnson, Archaeological Theory, 3rd edn (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2020), 80–82. 16. Don S. Rice, “Eight-Century Physical Geography, Environment, and Natural Resources in the Maya Lowlands,” in Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D., ed. Jeremy A. Sabloff and John S. Henderson (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), 23. 17. Jorge A. Vivó Escoto, “Weather and Climate of Mexico and Central America,” in Natural Environment and Early Cultures, Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 1, ed. Robert C. West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), Fig. 11. 18. Rice, “Maya Lowlands,” 23. 19. Takeshi Inomata, et al. “Monumental Architecture at Aguada Fénix and the Rise of Maya Civilization.” Nature 582 (2020): 531.

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20. Robert Sharer and Loa P. Traxler, The Ancient Maya, 6th edn. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 219. 21. Saturno et al., “Early Maya Writing,” 1282. 22. Francisco Estrada-Belli, The First Maya Civilization: Ritual and Power Before the Classic Period (New York: Routledge, 2011), 119; David Webster, The Fall of the Ancient Maya (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 189. 23. Estrada-Belli, First Maya Civilization, 128; Sharer and Traxler, The Ancient Maya, 295. 24. Richard Hansen, “The Beginning of the End: Conspicuous Consumption and Environmental Impact of the Preclassic Lowland Maya,” in An Archaeological Legacy: Essays in Honor of Ray T. Matheny, ed. Deanne G. Matheny, Joel C. Janetski and Glenna Nielson (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University 2018), 262. 25. Marcello A.Canuto, et al., “Ancient lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala,” Science 61, no. 6409 (2018): 3. 26. David Webster, The Fall of the Ancient Maya (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 327–48. 27. Ibid., 213–14. 28. Ibid., 327–28. 29. Arthur A.Demarest, Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 274–76.; Sharer and Traxler, Ancient Maya, 525–87. 30. Rafael Cobos, “Chichén Itzá: Settlement and Hegemony During the Terminal Classic Period,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation, ed. Arthur A. Demarest, Prudence M. Rice and Don S. Rice (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2004) 537; Sharer and Traxler, Ancient Maya, 559. 31. Sharer and Traxler, Ancient Maya, 580. 32. Ibid., 592. 33. Susan Milbrath, and Carlos Peraza Lope. “Revisiting Mayapan: Mexico’s Last Maya Capital.” Ancient Mesoamerica 14 (2003): 32; Sharer and Traxler, Ancient Maya, 595, 601. 34. Joyce Marcus, “Ancient Maya Political Organization,” in Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D., ed. Jeremy A. Sabloff and John S. Henderson (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2003), 117. 35. El Castillo is an iconic temple at Chichén Itzá, in the northern lowlands. 36. Stone, “Orcs in Loincloths.” 37. Hansen, “Relativism,” 158. 38. Ibid. 39. The opening quote, attributed to historian Will Durant, refers to the Roman empire. 40. Stone, “Orcs in Loincloths.” 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid.

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43. James J. Aimers and Elizabeth Graham, “Noble Savages Versus Savage Nobles: Gibson’s Apocalyptic View of the Maya,” Latin American Antiquity 18, no. 1 (2007): 106. 44. Canuto, “Maya in the Thunderdome.” 45. Hansen, “Relativism,” 158. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., Figures 8.2–8.8, 8.20–8.24. 48. Stone, “Orcs in Loincloths.” 49. Aimers and Graham, “Noble Savages,” 105. 50. Hansen, “Relativism.” 51. Hansen, “Relativism,” 171. 52. John S. Karling, “Collecting Chicle in the American Tropics,” Torreya 42, no. 2 (March-April, 1942): 41. 53. William Booth, “Culture Shocker: Scholars Say Mel Gibson’s Action Flick Sacrifices the Maya Civilization to Hollywood,” The Washington Post, December 9, 2006, https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp​-dyn​/content​/article​/2006​/12​/08​/ AR2006120801815​_pf​.html. 54. Stone, “Orcs in Loincloths.” 55. Ardren, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” 56. Freidel, “Betraying the Maya.” 57. Ardren, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” 58. Freidel, “Betraying the Maya.” 59. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), xvii. 60. Aimers and Graham, “Noble Savages,” 105. 61. Ibid. 62. Stephen Houston and David Stuart, “An Old Unpublished Review of ‘Apocalypto,’” Maya Decipherment, November 18, 2007, https:​//​mayadecipherment​.com​ /2007​/11​/18​/an​-old​-unpublished​-review​-of​-apocalypto/. 63. Ibid. 64. Freidel, “Betraying the Maya.” 65. Stone, “Orcs in Loincloths.” 66. Houston and Stuart, “Unpublished Review.” 67. Booth, “Culture Shocker.” 68. The Aztec empire dominated the highlands of central Mexico from about 1427 until 1521, when Hernán Cortés conquered them. See Richard F. Townsend, The Aztecs, 3rd edn. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 92, 237. 69. Hansen, “Relativism,” 173. 70. Livia Gershon, “The Aztecs Constructed This Tower Out of Hundreds of Human Skulls,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 14, 2020, https:​ //​ www​ .smithsonianmag​.com​/smart​-news​/new​-find​-brings​-skulls​-discovered​-aztec​-tower​ -over​-600​-180976543/. 71. The tzompantli, or skull rack, reported by the Spanish, was discovered in 2015 near the remains of the Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, now largely buried beneath Mexico City. See Gershon, “The Aztecs.”

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72. Stephen Houston and David Stuart, “An Old Unpublished Review of ‘Apocalypto.’” 73. Booth, “Culture Shocker.” 74. Ibid. 75. Canuto, “Maya in the Thunderdome.” 76. Welkos, “Fact and Fiction.” 77. Canuto, “Maya in the Thunderdome”; Houston and Stuart, “Unpublished Review.” 78. Houston and Stuart, “Unpublished Review.” 79. Aimers and Graham, “Noble Savages,” 106. 80. Hansen, “Relativism,” 180. 81. Hansen cites a 2006 review by Sonny Bunch, published online by The Weekly Standard, a politically conservative publication that ceased operations in 2017, to support this statement, but that review is no longer available. See Hansen, “Relativism,” 179. 82. Hansen, “Relativism,” 149. 83. ABC News, “Lost Kingdom.” 84. Aimers and Graham, “Noble Savages,” 106. 85. Hansen, “Relativism,” 180. 86. Ibid, 180–81. 87. Ibid. 181. 88. Houston and Stuart, “Unpublished Review.” 89. Ibid. 90. Charlotte Allen, “King of the Jungle: The Mayan Empire of Archaeologist Richard Hansen,” Weekly Examiner, November 29, 2017, https:​ //​ www​ .washingtonexaminer​.com​/weekly​-standard​/king​-of​-the​-jungle​-the​-mayan​-empire​-of​ -archaeologist​-richard​-hansen. 91. Ibid. 92. Ardren, “Twenty-First Century Reinventions of Alexander, Xerxes and Jaguar Paw: A Critique of Apocalypto and Popular Media Depictions of the Past.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 12, no. 1 (April 2009): 150. 93. Stephen L. Black, “Field Methods and Methodologies in Lowland Maya Archaeology,” PhD thesis, Harvard University (1990): 45. 94. Prior to Apocalypto, the only American studio release with a story based on the ancient Maya was the 1963 film Kings of the Sun, directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Yul Brenner. The film explored the notion of Maya sacrifice as a metaphor for capital punishment in the United States. See John C. Waugh, “Thompson earns messenger role,” The Christian Science Monitor (May 18, 1963), https:​//​www​.proquest​ .com​/historical​-newspapers​/thompson​-earns​-messenger​-role​/docview​/510492107​/se​ -2​?accountid​=7098.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY ABC News. “Lost Kingdom: Mel Gibson’s ‘Apocalypto.’” ABC News, December 11, 2006. https:​//​abcnews​.go​.com​/Primetime​/story​?id​=2670750​&page​=1. Aimers, James J. and Elizabeth Graham. “Noble Savages Versus Savage Nobles: Gibson’s Apocalyptic View of the Maya.” Latin American Antiquity 18, no. 1 (2007): 105–06. Allen, Charlotte. “King of the Jungle: The Mayan Empire of Archaeologist Richard Hansen.” Weekly Examiner, November 29, 2017. https:​//​www​.washingtonexaminer​.com​/weekly​-standard​/king​-of​-the​-jungle​-the​-mayan​-empire​-of​-archaeologist​ -richard​-hansen. Ardren, Traci. “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” Archaeology, December 5, 2006. https:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto​.html. Ardren, Traci. “Twenty-First Century Reinventions of Alexander, Xerxes and Jaguar Paw: A Critique of Apocalypto and Popular Media Depictions of the Past.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 12, no. 1 (April 2009): 149–58. Black, Stephen L. “Field Methods and Methodologies in Lowland Maya Archaeology.” PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1990. Booth, William. “Culture Shocker: Scholars Say Mel Gibson’s Action Flick Sacrifices the Maya Civilization to Hollywood.” The Washington Post, December 9, 2006. https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp​-dyn​/content​/article​/2006​/12​/08​/ AR2006120801815​_pf​.html. Canuto, Marcello. “Maya in the Thunderdome.” Salon, December 15, 2006. https:​//​ www​.salon​.com​/2006​/12​/15​/maya/. Canuto, Marcello A., et al. “Ancient lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala.” Science 361, no. 6409 (2018): 0137. Cobos, Rafael. “Chichén Itzá: Settlement and Hegemony During the Terminal Classic Period.” In The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse. Transition, and Transformation, edited by Arthur A. Demarest, Prudence M. Rice and Don S. Rice, 517–44. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Demarest, Arthur A. Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Estrada-Belli, Francisco. The First Maya Civilization: Ritual and Power Before the Classic Period. New York: Routledge, 2011. Freidel, David A. “The Monumental Architecture.” In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Volume 1, edited by Robin A. Robertson and David A. Freidel, 1–22. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1986. Freidel, David A. “Betraying the Maya.” Archaeology 60, no. 2 (2007): 36–41. Gershon, Livia. “The Aztecs Constructed This Tower Out of Hundreds of Human Skulls.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 14, 2020. https:​//​www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/smart​-news​/new​-find​-brings​-skulls​-discovered​-aztec​-tower​-over​-600​ -180976543/. Hansen, Richard. “Relativism, Revisionism, Aboriginalism, and Emic/Etic Truth: The Case Study of Apocalypto.” In The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian

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Research, edited by Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza, 147–90. New York: Springer, 2012. Hansen, Richard. “The Beginning of the End: Conspicuous Consumption and Environmental Impact of the Preclassic Lowland Maya.” In An Archaeological Legacy: Essays in Honor of Ray T. Matheny, edited by Deanne G. Matheny, Joel C. Janetski and Glenna Nielson, 243–91. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 2018. Houston, Stephen and David Stuart. “An Old Unpublished Review of ‘Apocalypto.’” Maya Decipherment, November 18, 2007. https:​//​mayadecipherment​.com​/2007​/11​ /18​/an​-old​-unpublished​-review​-of​-apocalypto/. Inomata, Takeshi, et al. “Monumental Architecture at Aguada Fénix and the Rise of Maya Civilization.” Nature 582 (2020): 530–33. Johnson, Matthew, Archaeological Theory, 3rd edn. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2020. Karling, John S. “Collecting Chicle in the American Tropics.” Torreya 42, no. 2 (March-April, 1942): 38–49. Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Lohse, Jon C. “Letters to the Editor: Apocalypto.” The SAA Archaeological Record 7, no. 2 (2007): 3. Marcus, Joyce. “Ancient Maya Political Organization.” In Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D., edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and John S. Henderson, 111–83. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2003. Milbrath, Susan and Carlos Peraza Lope. “Revisiting Mayapan: Mexico’s Last Maya Capital.” Ancient Mesoamerica 14 (2003): 1–46. Rice, Don S. “Eight-Century Physical Geography, Environment, and Natural Resources in the Maya Lowlands.” In Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D., edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and John S. Henderson, 11–63. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993. Saturno, William A., David Stuart and Boris Beltrán. “Early Maya Writing at San Bartolo, Guatemala.” Science 311, no. 5795 (2006): 1281–83. Sharer, Robert and Loa P. Traxler. The Ancient Maya, 6th edn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Stone, Andrea. “Orcs in Loincloths.” Archaeology, January 3, 2007. https:​//​archive​ .archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto2​.htmlhttps:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/ online​/reviews​/apocalypto2​.html. Townsend, Richard F. The Aztecs, 3rd edn. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009. Vivó Escoto, Jorge A. “Weather and Climate of Mexico and Central America.” In Natural Environment and Early Cultures, Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 1, edited by Robert C. West, 187–215. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. Waugh, John C. “Thompson Earns Messenger Role.” The Christian Science Monitor (1908-), May 18, 1963. https:​//​www​.proquest​.com​/historical​-newspapers​/thompson​-earns​-messenger​-role​/docview​/510492107​/se​-2​?accountid​=7098. Webster, David. The Fall of the Ancient Maya. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

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Welkos, Robert W. “In ‘Apocalypto,’ fact and fiction play hide and seek.” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2006. https:​//​www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2006​-dec​-09​ -et​-apocalypto9​-story​.html.

‌‌‌C hapter 10

Film Adaptation, Depoliticization, and The Man Without a Face Douglas C. MacLeod Jr.

Adapting a novel into film is never an easy task. Although film adaptation has been taking place since the early days of cinema, to provide a full understanding of the originating text while filming is still virtually impossible. One perceived reason for this is because the written word is linguistic while the filmed image is visual.1 With that said, it is hard not to recognize that films, a form of communication, indeed do have a language, one that oftentimes is quite different than written works. It is at this point that adapting the written word into a film becomes problematic, as when a person attempts to perfectly translate an Italian novel into an American film. Something will always get lost in the translation, or, in this case, the adaptation. One thing that regularly is lost is the political agenda of the original writer, what we can call depoliticization, an inevitable process that dilutes the intent of the novelist (or a nonfiction writer, for that matter) to create a more commercial version of a work that may have dealt with difficult subject matters such as racism, sexism, LGBTQUIA+ rights, etc. This chapter examines Mel Gibson’s 1993 directorial debut, The Man Without a Face, and confronts it with Isabelle Holland’s controversial 1972 novel with the same title the film derives from. Holland is a prolific author who wrote young adult works before Young Adult was considered a commercial genre, and delved into issues that were considered taboo and polarizing. Her work, The Man Without a Face, specifically addressed gay culture and pedophilia, which, according to a 1977 interview for The English Journal, was an issue because libraries and schools banned the novel from being read.2 Those having these issues are primarily right-wing Conservative politicians, pundits, and parents who perceive that soon, after reading these 195

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books, their children will somehow become indoctrinated or sexual deviants because of the so-called salacious content being presented. This essay addresses the above issues using a textual analysis of both Holland’s novel and Gibson’s directorial debut, but not without a discussion of what depoliticization is and how it pertains to adaptation. After an examination of depoliticization and adaptation, we will analyze how the film perpetuates the political and religious concept of a child’s fundamental need for “traditional family values,” thus stripping away the controversy surrounding Holland’s novel. ADAPTATION AND DEPOLITICIZATION It has been over sixty-five years since George Bluestone wrote his most important contribution to cinematic study, Novels into Film (1957), and his work is still regarded by film adaptation scholars as influential and respectable. More contemporary writers like Phebe Davidson, Keith Cohen, Gabriel Miller, and Geoffrey Wagner adhere to Bluestone’s philosophy that adapting literature into film has several limiting factors. According to Bluestone, the most limiting factor is: the novel is a “linguistic medium” while film is primarily “visual.”3 He then examines the “different origins, different audiences, different modes of production, and different censorship requirements”4 that have taken place, and will take place, when one writes or produces a film adapted from literature. Unfortunately, according to him, a harmonious collision of literature and film can never happen because of films’ “abandonment of language,” which leaves behind “characteristic contents of thought which only language can approximate: tropes, dreams, memories, conceptual consciousness.”5 In other words, since language is not used comprehensively by film, literary texts can never be accurately reproduced, always already being “overtly compatible, secretly hostile.”6 Bluestone also places more importance on the original piece of literature, claiming that novels have more social significance than film, a medium that is a “kind folk appropriation of Protestant ethics in which self-reliance, perseverance, pluck, and individual prowess are the keys to, but not the warranties of, personal luck and which fortuitous grace is bestowed by a fate over which the individual, finally has no control.”7 Bluestone concludes his paragraph by arguing: “every American novelist, from Herman Melville to William Faulkner, has had to fly in the face of such popular myths. And now, in muted or modified form, the film has hardened these conventions into a governing tradition.”8 Bluestone’s analysis is especially important, as are his thoughts on the commercial nature of the cinema, when he proclaims that motion pictures are Hollywood commodities produced and created in order to make a profit.9 He indicts the film industry for its obliteration of a politicized,

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revolutionary, imaginative literary language, and for adapting cinema to perpetuate and fuel neo-colonial, patriotic, Protestantism. Bluestone’s analysis of film adaptation was certainly innovative; however, over the years, his work, although influential, has become dated in that he only recognizes these problems without commenting on or trying to find solutions. Instead, he focuses on the “inevitable” changes that take place when “one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium.”10 According to Bluestone, most cinematic spectators go to the movies to be entertained and to escape from the world; and, for the film producers to provide that entertainment, they must choose literary narratives that are visually interesting and have been marketable to the masses. Therefore, the narrative, the characters, the plot, etc. always have and forever will take precedence over literary authors and their intentions. Bluestone’s analysis of film adaptations, as surface-level as it may be, does find itself in the later works of such writers as Phebe Davidson. In her preface to Film and Literature: Points of Intersection (1997), Davidson affirms that Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949) depicts race relations, but calls taking this approach toward the film suspect at best.11 Instead, she argues, as film adaptation scholars, “we” must speak on and write about such issues in translation as “[d]uration of time,” which “often dictates simplification of plot and character development, directorial point of view [that] is frequently at odds with that of the author of an earlier literary version, and audience response [as it] may vary simply because of the sensory channels utilized by the very different modes of expression we know as literature and film.”12 Film theorist Geoffrey Wagner (1975) looks at adaptation with a more detailed eye, equating film to the novel by claiming that cinema is like a form of literature; that writing is visual not only physically, but visual in that it conveys images. Also, like the novel, as it was produced and studied originally, the film “shares a dependence on commerce which, in turn, links it closely with a commercial society.”13 Although claiming that one must study the similarities between the two art forms,14 Wagner does see a distinct difference between them: the technological component. Film is a technologically advanced art form, which differs from the novel in that the latter is language-based, which makes it a complete entity. Later in his text, Wagner examines the evaluation of a filmic text and its original work by critics and theorists: when assessing a film, even more than when evaluating a novel, the critic must be permitted the liberty of what one can call the achieved intention, and the work must have symbolic objects within the text. These symbols communicate a message, which is transmitted using a form of language: for literature, the written word; for film, the image. Wagner’s points lead to his views on adaptation, or more specifically on how Hollywood adapts original works. He claims there are three modes of

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adaptation: (1) transposition or adaptation “in which the novel is directly given on the screen, with the minimum of apparent interference.”15 This is the most dominant and pervasive in Hollywood, according to Wagner, as well as being the least satisfactory; (2) commentary or a type of adaptation that re-emphasizes or re-structures or alters the original purposely or inadvertently;16 and (3) the analogy or the “analogous attitude,” which uses the same type of rhetorical techniques the original author used, but can be and may be totally different in content.17 When discussing the third mode (analogy), Wagner raises an important question: is film adaptation a violation? He states that since the director is attempting to create a new work of art, analogy is not always a violation; however, there could be occasions when adaptations are a violation of the original. Unlike Wagner, this chapter takes the standpoint that adaptation is a violation if the original political agenda of the author is discarded or reduced to an analogous attitude. In his work Adaptations as Imitations: Films from Novels (1997), James Griffith critiques Bluestone’s formalist emphasis by opposing the Neo-Aristotelian stance on adaptation that claims that a work of art is a simple joining of form and content (or medium and message, or signifier and signified), by insisting that the elements of the work are matters of factual artistic choices that are purposeful rather than matters of abstract definition that are necessary, and by making evaluative judgment a statement of comparison that views the work in relation to the realization of inherent possibilities in those factual choices rather than in relation to consistency with inherent necessities of those abstract definitions.18

Griffith’s emphasis is on how one judges adapted films, how a screenwriter makes a judgment as to what to add or subtract from his or her screenplay, and on how theorists or audience members should not base their judgments upon how closely the film resembles the book. He writes: Of course, in setting out to adapt a novel to the screen, a filmmaker usually makes many choices along the same lines as those of the novelist. For all the changes people can cite in a host of adaptations, a novel and its adaptation rarely share no more resemblance than the title—and one could argue such an ‘adaptation’ exemplifies no more than a hastily purchased property.19

Griffith believes that the fidelity of an adapted film is not in “the kinds of choices made, not the number of choices that match the author’s.”20 He affirms that adapted works are imitated rather than copied; therefore, the film and the novel that precede it must be judged as two separate entities. Griffith’s views, however, are, in a much more Kantian sense, formalist in that his focus is still on form, how content is affected by form and how one

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judges this form. He also makes a mistake in dismissing film theorists like Bluestone, who claim that films, and even more specifically film adaptations, are products of the filmmaking industrial complex, created for the masses rather than the cultural elite, which is very much associated with the art of literature. All aforementioned theorists are right to importance on the aesthetic nature of film adaptation from fictional and nonfictional literature. What is picked, what is used, what is discarded, what is useless visually as well as the story, the characters, the time, and space occupied in these texts, all play major roles in literature, film, and adaptation. It is also valid to claim that many of the decisions when adapting a piece of literature onto film are made because it is more economically beneficial for the writers, directors, and producers to do so. Things are borrowed, intersected, transformed, etc., enough so that writers like Bluestone make a compelling argument. What seems to happen, however, is that when the aesthetic nature of both literature and film are under examination, the political nature of those texts becomes either significantly or completely ignored. There may be glimpses of a political spin in literary and filmic texts detected by writers like Geoffrey Wagner, Phebe Davidson, and George Bluestone. However, those glimpses are ultimately fleeting, leaving the reader with only the study of a text from the surface: the science of language, the narrative, the problems of converting the written word into a moving image, the mood or style, etc. What this chapter does is look past the aesthetic to study those same discarded glimpses; it examines the glimpses that lie behind an ever-present and dominating formalist ideology in mass-mediated and film adaptation studies. All modes of discourse are political, political being defined as the use of language-based rhetorical persuasion through one or several channels of mass-mediated communication, which creates communities and will allow those communities to understand, converse, and criticize within, and outside, of those said communities. Whether it stems from the dominating ideological standpoint or from the political movements trying and fighting those same ideological regimes—all is political. Novelist Geroge Orwell agreed when he claimed serious writers have a “political purpose” to their writing; they have a desire “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after . . . no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”21 When examining literature and film as separate entities it is easier to recognize each one’s political agenda, but when literature gets translated or adapted into a film, the lines become blurred. Not only do storylines and characters disappear or can be disregarded, but so does the political stance of the original author and the text itself. In other words, depoliticization takes place when the film version of the original text is left

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lacking. Depoliticization occurs when the interpretation of language-based rhetorical persuasion becomes somehow distorted or discarded, leaving the political message improperly communicated. This distortion or discarding takes place when the channel of mass-mediated communication in which the message is sent is changed. That is not to say, however, that adapted films are apolitical or literature loses its political agenda once adapted. By looking at films as commodity, one can see that cinema follows ideological patterns of dominance and oppression against the written word; thus, the work must be political, if one were to agree that ideology is comprised of the dominating political agenda. Scott Forsyth writes that Hollywood in particular is representative of cultural imperialism, in that all other film industries are not rivals but “branch plants for Hollywood productions, suppliers of cheaper skilled labour, sources of capital, inspirations for innovative styles, exporters of new talent and stars.”22 Conversely, what occurs is a suppression of what was once an overtly political and fictional piece of literature, a depoliticization that affects the authorial intentions, the contents and, in most cases, the aesthetics of both forms of media. Depoliticization also takes place when one political component (rhetoric, mass-mediated communication, or communities) is eliminated. Without rhetoric or argumentative persuasion, a political agenda cannot be clearly stated, conversation becomes limited to facts and routine musings, and criticism disappears, leaving only agreement. Without mass-mediated communication, the rhetoric of those projecting a particular argument cannot be heard by the masses, cannot persuade and will eventually destroy the political agenda sought out by the rhetor. Finally, without a community, there would be no conversation at all, no use of mass-mediated communication and the political movement of that community would stop and disappear. In all instances, depoliticization is inevitable. How does depoliticization pertain to literature, film and film adaptation? Politics is the use of rhetorical persuasion through one or several channels of mass-mediated communication, which will create communities and will allow those communities to comprehend, converse, and criticize within, and on the outskirts, of those newly created communities. Politics, thus, must affect the mass-mediated communication discussed. Literature is an example. Like Wagner, while speaking specifically on the novel, Maureen Whitebrook states: Both the content and form of the novel contribute to political understanding. The novel’s capacity for allowing reflection, and the refinement of discrimination and judgment, has a potentially political relevance inasmuch as politics is concerned with judging and choosing. Novels present choices, the implications and

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consequences of choices . . . Individuals making choices, in so far as they are political agents, are faced with political dilemmas involved with those choices, problems of responsibility. And novels also contribute, by way of their depiction of character, to consideration of the way in which the individual constructs and maintains identity, including the political implications and outcomes of that process.23

Films are also examples of mass-mediated communication used for political purposes. As Mike Wayne aptly says in Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (2001), “All films are political, but films are not all political in the same way.”24 Wayne specifically focuses on three cinematic communities: the First Cinema (the dominant films of commercial success), the Second cinema (art-house films), and the Third Cinema (which is “primarily defined by its socialist politics”).25 Whether or not they have the same political agenda, what Wayne recognizes is that all three forms of cinema are in communication with each other and their audiences, thus building communities and placing emphasis on established communities. Now, considering that these two forms of mass-mediated communication are political, it stands to reason that both literature and film should be communicating with each other, especially when linked by the same text. Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case. Both the literary text and the cinematic adaptation are not necessarily conversing; depoliticization becomes inevitable in that the political agenda sought out by the original author is eliminated, and the political agendas sought out by the screenwriter(s), the director, the producer(s), etc. are placed to the fore. Therefore, one must look at depoliticization as a process. First, an author’s literary work has a political agenda conveying a message through the written word. Then, that message is received by multiple people belonging to the film industry, and it is sent from person-to-person, the agenda changing with each passing individual during the realization of the cinematic product. Finally, the film is distributed and the audience watches while feeding into capitalism by buying the tickets, popcorn, and soda, all the time interpreting those images that the filmmakers want them to receive. The film thus becomes the final product of an industrial complex that wants consumers to spend money and to be entertained; the studios’ ultimate political agenda is capital. But the literary author may be lost during such a process. THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE Isabelle Holland’s The Man Without a Face (1972) has a controversial history because the novel deals with sensitive sexual subject matters, most especially

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when, at the end of the work, Charles, the book’s fourteen-year-old protagonist, and Justin McLeod, the teenager’s forty-seven-year-old tutor, sleep together. One can argue that the book is similar to other young adult novels published at the time that address young adult males and their conflicted sexual feelings (as is the case of Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint [1972]), while others may look at this as pure pedophilic smut that, in the epilogue, glorifies an extremely inappropriate and illegal relationship. This essay, however, is not going to pass judgment on Holland as it pertains to the subject matter, in that these sorts of conversations can spiral into dangerous subjective commentary and religious hyperbole. Rather, we are going to focus on the novel’s adaptation into Gibson’s The Man Without a Face (1993), a film that depoliticizes Holland’s original text into a more sanitized, Conservative-leaning work that places emphasis on “traditional family values.” Much of this change-up has to do with the director’s strong religious and political background as both a Traditionalist Catholic and as a Republican, which are generally considered both the religion and the political party that adhere to the theories that marriage should be only between a heterosexual man and a woman, that divorce is never an option, that sex is for procreation, and that homosexual behavior is sinful or against the “traditional family value” doctrine. Gibson, as the director and star of the film, takes control over Holland’s story to make it a more marketable and more “family-friendly” film, thus eradicating the writer’s original agenda. Depoliticization starts right from the beginning when Chuck (Nick Stahl) recounts in voiceover a dream he regularly has, where he is on the shoulders of soldiers, waving to a crowd. He gestures to them as patriotic music plays and American flags adorn the stands where the audience is cheering. Charles is saluting and his family is exaggeratingly proud of his accomplishments. The film thus starts with an idyllic dream, where the “man of the family” receives accolades for his militaristic graduation. This is quite different than Holland’s Charles, who is an angst-ridden teenager more than willing to speak to his audience about his disdain for his somewhat dysfunctional family. The film starts on a more positive note to show that the young protagonist wants “normalcy” and is like all other kids his age who want nothing more than love, respect, and attention. The book, however, makes Charles eager for attention, but also more of a pessimistic loner who hates his sister, Gloria, and tolerates his mother, whose hobby, according to the boy, is marrying men. Holland’s protagonist is more sarcastic and nihilistic than Gibson’s Chuck, who is more optimistic. Gibson’s main character has hopes and desires, whereas Holland’s prefers to be left alone with his dirty stray cat, Moxie, and he wants to go to St. Matthew’s, a boarding school far away from his current world. Gibson’s Chuck has women fawning all over him, and he proudly states that, in his

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dream, he would be happy to live a John Wayne/Hugh Hefner “philosophy of life,” which speaks to his desire to be hyper-heterosexual. However, Chuck is not a man, and his dreams are not reality. The next scene presents him and his family trapped in a car, arguing with each other about the music on the radio among other random things. There is something missing in Chuck’s life, we are told, and spectators are unsure of what that is. We do know, though, that he lives with three females, all of whom do not seem to take him seriously, and we soon learn that he wants to retake an exam to get into a boarding school—the Holyfield exam—because that is the school his absent father went to (spectators are not aware of where his father is, and they learn all three kids have three different fathers). In Holland’s book, Charles has similar wants and needs, but, in Gibson’s film, Chuck’s mother (Margaret Whitton) sees the boarding school as “fascist.” This charged word is not used in the book, but it is by now obvious that Gibson’s Chuck is the protagonist, the one the viewer is going to connect with most, who wants to go to a “fascist” institution. This sequence is set on a ferry and, contrary to the novel, we are first introduced to McLeod (Gibson) here, after Chuck viciously stabs the tires on his mother’s car. It is established early on that McLeod is a man’s man with his German shepherd, his truck, and a disfigured face. Although he is a pariah (called “Hamburger Head” by Gloria), he is quietly intimidating. This point is important because, later in the film, Meg (Gabby Hoffmann), Chuck’s ten-year-old sister, says to him, “Don’t be such a boy!” after Chuck makes fun of her braces. McLeod is the man’s man; Chuck is the boy’s boy. Their roles as masculine figures are established early on, while, in Holland’s text, this is not as openly apparent. One can argue that Charles (as opposed to Chuck) is stereotypically feminized in the book because he is more emotionally invested in what he is doing: he has more outbursts, he has more of a motherly way with his cat, and he is more secretive and skittish. There is more of a role reversal happening in the book as opposed to the film, where the traditional roles of the man and the woman are embraced and demarcated. Chuck’s masculinity is reestablished in Gibson’s The Man Without a Face when the boy unconsciously phases out—which occurs frequently throughout the film—and remembers, in his mind’s eye, his time with a psychiatrist, presenting him with inkblots. Chuck sees John Wayne in them. In his dream-state, he also sees a memory of him being thrown up in the air by his father, whom his mother claims, in voiceover, was her third husband and worst mistake. This all happens soon after he and his male friends go to the edge of McLeod’s property to smoke cigarettes and converse about girls. Chuck wants to study but his boyhood desires to be with his friends take over. He later leaves his study materials floating in the lake after the boys run away from McLeod’s snarling and barking watchdog. While Chuck

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stares out into the pouring rain, McLeod, on a black stead, comes out to take him inside; in the book, Charles comes to see McLeod by choice and sleeps outside of McLeod’s house, scared to ask for the latter’s help, whereas in the movie Chuck is there by chance and unwillingly but is not afraid to invade McLeod’s private spaces, which ultimately includes the inside of his house. Audiences are then introduced to McLeod’s home, which is brimming with patriotic masculinity: taxidermy, skulls, binoculars and maps, a small American flag. The color scheme is brown and black, dark and menacing. There is a Gothic quality to the place, which is filled with ornate tokens of McLeod’s past, including a cuckoo clock he won in 1958 as the Master of Debates at Barrett Academy. Although the moments are uncomfortable, there is no indication that a sexual relationship is about to build; the Chuck in Gibson’s work is “prepubescent,” as McLeod states, even younger than Holland’s Charles. After the boy dries off, he has an epiphany while leaving: he wants McLeod to tutor him. This is much different from the novel, in which he is told by Meg that McLeod was a former teacher and he should go and ask him to be tutored by him. Chuck takes agency here and has no nerves in asking for the assistance, whereas Charles, in the novel, is scared to even speak to McLeod, let alone immediately ask him to tutor him. This is a complete shift: in the book he is led by his younger sister’s hand, whereas in the movie he takes it upon himself to obtain the information he needs to propel him forward. Chuck is bold enough to go back sometime later to ask McLeod to tutor him. This time, Gibson’s character is outside, repairing a boat: he has his tools around his waist, stares stoically at Chuck, jumps down straight-legged from the edge of his craft, and stays silent until he walks away from the boy, who is persistent in his desire to work with him. McLeod seems resolute but, instead, he grabs a shovel and hands it to Chuck, asking him to dig a 3-cubic-foot hole in the woods of his property. The tutoring begins but with physical labor. In the book, Charles and McLeod are more introverted, studying inside without much in the way of physical labor. Charles’s education comes from books and theories; Chuck’s work comes in the form of going out-of-doors to build character and to make the boy more resourceful. After he is finished, Chuck steps into McLeod’s home and is told by the adult to sit and write an essay. The boy protests there are no essays on the exam, but McLeod does not care and berates him. He asks Chuck why he is there and the latter states he needs help. At one moment, McLeod forces Chuck to call him “sir,” an expression of respect for one’s teacher as well as for the adult as the man in this situation, the elder. In Holland’s text, Charles calls him “sir” almost immediately, and McLeod is not hesitant in wanting to help Charles. The process is easier in the book, and it is because of McLeod’s interest in young men; in the movie, the character development is different, because the man is interested in making

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sure Charles gets tutored. There is no explicit motive for Gibson’s McLeod, whereas, in Holland’s work, based on the ending, there is seemingly more of a grooming mechanism at play. In the film, there is a brief discussion about McLeod’s possible homosexuality. During a party, a conversation focuses on how McLeod came to have his scars: murder-suicide attempt is mentioned as one theory, implying that he was injured whilst killing his boyfriend. Carl (Richard Masur), Chuck’s mother’s new boyfriend, has his theories about McLeod, but they are usurped by his diatribe about the fact that Americans should not be in Vietnam (the film is set in 1968). Carl wants Chuck to stay out of military school to avoid being drafted in the future and the boy, in a moment of defiance, states there is nothing more satisfying than dropping napalm on the innocent. His mentality is placed more to the forefront than Carl’s is, the latter acting like an annoying intellectual hippy who gives the peace sign and allows Chuck to call him by his first name, unlike McLeod who forces to call him “sir.” This shows that Chuck, although rebelling, wants and needs structure; in essence, he needs a father figure to provide some direction. Carl, the liberal, is not going to give him the structure he needs; McLeod, the Conservative-minded, will. The bond between McLeod and Chuck begins to deepen after the boy, while hiding in another room, secretly sees through the halfway opened door that his tutor is burned all over half of his body. As opposed to Holland’s work, where Charles is fascinated by McLeod’s body—which is shown to the boy after they take off their clothes, swim, and lay on the rocks together— Chuck is shocked by what he experiences. In the film, as McLeod is now willingly tutoring a more receptive Chuck, the boy keeps gawking at him until the adult places himself in front of the boy’s face and tells him to have a good look before they can continue. With that, Chuck tells the adult it is okay to move on, and they solve a complex geometry question. Chuck appreciates the militancy and the directness; he has a fighting spirit. In Holland’s book, Charles is the exact opposite. He is nervous, scared, emotional, more inquisitive, more introverted; he is skittish of his surroundings and is beholden to the girls and the woman he lives with. There is even a moment in Gibson’s work where Chuck’s mother asks him if she should marry Carl, which certainly does not happen in Holland’s novel. A sequence that does happen in both Holland’s novel and Gibson’s movie is McLeod’s gifting of a book of poems that includes “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. to the young protagonist. After the tutor reads it to Charles in the novel, the boy significantly affirms: “It was queer, what it did to me. There were little explosions in my head and stomach and a tingling down my back. My throat was dry.”26 Holland portrays this as a moment of ecstasy and the use of the word “queer” is very telling: she makes the connection clear, and it becomes a foreshadowing of the novel’s end. In Gibson’s case, instead,

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McLeod suggests Chuck to read the poem himself to see what it means to him. He asks him prior what kind of plane his father flew, thus equating the poem to his father’s profession rather than having an ulterior motive. Chuck, after arguing with his sister Gloria (Fay Masterson), runs into the bathroom and reads the work. Viewers hear the boy’s voiceover, not McLeod’s, in this moment; again, Chuck has agency over his own education and his intellect, and he is not being led by the hand, as Charles is in Holland’s work. Also, the reading of poetry as well as of Shakespeare is not portrayed as feminine. Chuck can do this with McLeod, like a son working or being at play with his father. The Merchant of Venice becomes the play of choice and, while McLeod recites, Chuck is seemingly in awe of him. This bond leads to another important conversation in the film. After seeing a pretty girl and a Playboy magazine in his local supermarket—a detail absent in the novel—Chuck asks McLeod, “Do you ever wonder why men and women are attracted to each other?” The boy’s tutor tries to squelch the conversation, but provides a “short answer” to the question, which entails the presence of 5 percent more water in females as opposed to males. The conversation is awkward, but it is very much an indication that Chuck is looking for fatherly advice from McLeod, who is becoming more of a father figure. We learn during this conversation McLeod does not write pornography, but he is an artist drawing covers for magazines. One of the covers shown is from Harper’s, and it refers to Nixon’s prediction of a decisive victory and his claim he has the solutions to America’s problems. Again, this is a brief moment where the current political situation of the United States is mentioned, even though politics is not as prominent a discussion in the novel. It is in this sequence that viewers also learn that McLeod was injured in a car accident in which a boy that was with him died. This detail is also in the novel; the stigma attached to such a tragedy needs to be presented to place McLeod into the illusion that he may be a pedophile. In the novel, this is a true assumption; in the movie, it is not. The bond between Chuck and McLeod becomes instead more parental. The boy tries to soothe McLeod by telling him the accident was not his fault, but the adult angrily grabs the boy’s hand and tosses it away. In such an emotional moment no physical contact is allowed between the two protagonists, a stark contrast from the book. McLeod tries to apologize after Chuck comes back to the house, but the boy just wants to leave the matter alone. He learns his mother is going to marry Carl, another stepfather he does not want and, when Carl goes off to find a home for all of them in Connecticut, Chuck is left with a friend of the family who quickly gives him and his friend a beer (another sign of impending manhood). Charles and Chuck both betray McLeod by saying that his burns are due to an accident, but, in both cases, it does not seem to matter. McLeod does not mind, stating the past should stay in the past, and it is hard to convince

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others of that: he is becoming more open and honest, and so is Chuck, who tells him that he is not sure how his father died (he had previously told him that it happened in combat). They start to have real conversations with each other, which also takes place in the novel. However, in Holland’s work, they are very much in close proximity with each other on the rocks during those moments. In Gibson’s film, there is a certain distance between them: McLeod makes sure to do it, and they never swim together. Instead, he hikes with Chuck, a strenuous exercise to help build character while Chuck learns Latin. McLeod has time to provide Chuck with a practice exam, which he passes with an 84 percent. Chuck is then rewarded with a plane ride on a puddle-jumper, a scene not present in the book; Chuck wants to go into the air force, so this is a perfect gift, one that any father would acquire for his son. The boy even gets a chance to fly the plane for a few minutes. This leads him, in the following sequence set in the truck (noticeably, an American-made GMC), to ask McLeod to marry his mother—he certainly does not want his mother to marry Carl. The adult asks Chuck if his mother can cook, a statement that does not seem unreasonable in the context of the film in that traditionally and misogynistically women prepared the meals for the family while the men went to work outside of the home. In Holland’s novel, these sorts of conversations never come up; rather than a plane ride, McLeod and Charles have a moment together on the rocks where the boy caresses his tutor’s skin. There is no indication that sexual feelings are in play in Gibson’s film: the relationship between two protagonists represents that between a father and a son, or, certainly, just a friendly bond between two “guys.” McLeod takes Chuck home where the catalyst to the climax takes place. Both the book and the film represent Chuck finding Gloria in the middle of a heavy make-out session with her boyfriend. An altercation takes place during which Chuck’s cat, Mac (not Moxie, like in the novel), is thrown against a wall, with the boy becoming irate. During the following fight, viewers learn that Chuck’s father was in a psychiatric hospital and committed suicide. In the book, instead, Charles’s beloved Moxie is killed by Gloria’s boyfriend, which sends Charles back into the arms of McLeod. The changes in the film are drastic and there can be multiple reasons for this; however, the primary one is that Gibson, to make the production more marketable, more Conservative, and more audience-friendly, eradicated any indication that a pedophilic homosexual takes advantage of a young boy. Also, Gibson, cinematically representing himself as an uber-male when making this film, avoids any scenes involving homosexuality, as that would have been antithetical to his persona. In a novel, discussion surrounding these issues is more accepted because Hollywood studios are not involved; in film, however, it is not as easy to talk about such problematic material. Gibson realized and embraced this decision in his film (and in many of his other works). Chuck, thus, does not fall in

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love with McLeod; he is the child of a suicidal parent, who needs love from a male parental figure that is more stable than his real father ever was. He runs to McLeod’s house not because his cat was murdered, but to tell his tutor that his father was a drunk and mentally ill. He spends the night at McLeod’s, but no sexual intercourse takes place; instead, he sleeps it off and ends up leaving with the chief of police, who has his suspicions about McLeod’s relationship with the young boy. While going back to his home, and after the police officer verbally wonders if Chuck likes his “teacher,” Chuck defines McLeod as his best friend. In the book, there is no doubt that McLeod and Charles have a sexual encounter and, subsequently, the boyfriend of Charles’s mother (named Barry in the book)—who is good friends with McLeod and knows that the boy is seeing him for tutoring—personally collects Charles. The book ends soon after this when Charles takes the exam, passes it, goes to school, and comes back to find an empty house. Barry informs Charles that McLeod moved away and died soon after—the novel making it relatively clear that Charles fell in love with McLeod. The film is different in that, once Chuck leaves the house, it is revealed that McLeod was in prison for three years, although he did not voluntarily kill the boy in the car accident, but was merely taking him home after a debate competition. In spite of the rumors, Gibson’s McLeod is just a kind recluse who meant no harm. Rather, he is being accused of something he did not do, which causes the audience to sympathize with him. Sympathy for McLeod is again stimulated later on, when Chuck steals his mother’s car to drive over to his tutor’s house to ask him whether he actually abused the boy. Instead of replying with directness, McLeod asks the boy what he thinks. The scene is a powerful moment that ensures the happy ending of the film. Simultaneously, it is also a way for the audience to officially know that the adult protagonist was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, which he was guilty of, but he was not guilty of child molestation. Chuck hugs him and, being the stellar teacher McLeod is, he calls Chuck a good student; however, there is more underlying the hug and conversation: a father-son bond has grown and has become stronger than ever. At the end of the film, there is an inquiry into the relationship between the two protagonists, and McLeod makes it clear that he is very fond of the boy, but sees him only as his student. He admits that the boy that was killed in the accident had developed feelings for him, and he recognizes that he was unsure as to how to handle the situation, but nothing did take place between the two of them (viewers even learn that the boy was troubled and wanted to take his own life). The end of the film presents Chuck going back to the house but, as in the novel, no one is there; the boy finds a painting of the two them looking over the rocks, and a letter (mentioning trust, grace, and love) that encompasses all that they went through. Chuck enters the school and graduates. The

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graduation has all the family there, as in the initial dream; and McLeod, in spite of the prohibition to have any close contact with Chuck, decides to be present. At a distance, he waves to Chuck, who waves back, the bond being therefore presented as still intact. CONCLUSION Is depoliticization a problem? Certainly. Once a literary work is adapted into a screenplay, the loss of a community to an industry such as Hollywood is unacceptable. We need communities to be diverse and eclectic, to show the range of human spirit and creativity. The motion picture industry should truly embrace the concept of community rather than work against it or, at most, exploit community for its need for capital. In essence, the motion picture industry should become a community, or a series of communities, that easily converse with not only people within their own circles, but outside to other forms of media. If that were to take place, the adaptation of literature into film would be an easier and more creatively lucrative one, more apt to converse with the original work rather than becoming a separate, more economically lucrative endeavor. As one can see, based on this textual analysis of both Holland’s and Gibson’s The Man Without a Face a shift in agenda took place during the process of adaptation/depoliticization: Holland shows a bond between a young boy and his teacher that ends in romantic love, whereas Gibson shows a bond of love and trust between a teacher and his pupil, a pseudo-son to a pseudo-father. It must be again recognized: depoliticization is not a positive or negative concept; it is just done to ensure that a film can be marketed to a wider audience. The novel, published in 1972, is a product of its time, dealing with issues that evoke controversy and conversation. The same can be said about the film, which was, however, released in the early 1990s, soon after a Republican administration that touted the importance of traditional family values. One can therefore see that Gibson’s work needed to be changed, not only for the obvious reasons concerning pedophilia, but also for it to be successful (considering also that it was his directorial debut). Although the filmmaker’s ideologies and religious background were not overtly known at that point in his career, The Man Without a Face shows his audiences that he stayed true to himself and what they wanted from him, so much so that he continues to make films today, even if he does have a sketchy past. The 1993 film and its director have their own agenda, one that deters greatly from the original, but, in the end, the film works for what it is: a movie about the need for a strong family unit.

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NOTES 1. George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 2. Paul Janeczko, “In Their Own Words: An Interview with Isabelle Holland,” The English Journal 66, no. 3 (March 1977): 14–16. 3. Ibid., vi. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 2. 7 Ibid., 41. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 34. 10. Ibid., 5. Bluestone examines specifically the surface areas of adaptation such as time and space constraints, story, addition or subtraction of material, and the aesthetics of adapted cinema. He also provides readers with an historical context, which involves the comparing and contrasting of film adaptations during the Great Depression—including The Informer (1935), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), Madame Bovary (1949), and Pride and Prejudice (1940)—and an analysis on the possible reasons why these works, along with the novels, were so marketable. 11. Phebe Davidson (ed.), Film and Literature: Points of Intersection (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), viii. 12. Ibid., xviii-xix. 13. Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 26. 14. Ibid., 29. 15. Ibid., 222. 16. Ibid., 223. 17. Ibid., 226. 18. James Griffith, Adaptations as Imitations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 39. 19. Ibid., 41. 20. Ibid. 21. George Orwell, “Why I Write,” The Orwell Foundation, https:​//​www​ .orwellfoundation​.com​/the​-orwell​-foundation​/orwell​/essays​-and​-other​-works​/why​-i​ -write/. 22. Scott Forsyth, “Hollywood Reloaded: The Film as Imperial Commodity,” Socialist Register 41 (2005): 108–09. 23. Maureen Whitebrook, “Taking the Narrative Turn: What the Novel Has to Offer Political Theory,” in Literature and the Political Imagination, eds. Andrea T. Baumeister and John Horton (London: Routledge, 1996), 33. 24. Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 1. 25. Ibid.

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26. Isabelle Holland, The Man Without a Face (New York: Harper Trophy, 1993), 70.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Cohen, Keith. Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Davidson, Phebe, ed. Film and Literature: Points of Intersection. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Griffith, James. Adaptations as Imitations. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Forsyth, Scott. “Hollywood Reloaded: The Film as Imperial Commodity.” Socialist Register 41 (2005): 108–23. file:///C:/Users/cinem/Downloads/titusland,+SR_200 5_forsyth%20(1).pdf. Holland, Isabelle. The Man without a Face. New York: Harper Trophy, 1993. Miller, Gabriel. Screening the Novel: Rediscovered American Fiction in Film. New York: F. Ungar, 1980. Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” The Orwell Foundation, https:​//​www​.orwellfoundation​.com​/the​-orwell​-foundation​/orwell​/essays​-and​-other​-works​/why​-i​-write/. Wagner, Geoffrey. The Novel and the Cinema. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975. Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Whitebrook, Maureen. “Taking the Narrative Turn: What the Novel Has to Offer Political Theory.” In Literature and the Political Imagination, edited by Andrea T. Baumeister and John Horton, 32–52. London: Routledge, 1996.

Chapter 11

Apocalypto and the Ancient Maya To Entertain or to Educate? Heather McKillop

Is it possible to entertain and educate at the same time in a movie? Does education need to be historically accurate, as one might hope in a documentary? As Maya archaeologists, we can evaluate the public knowledge created about the ancient Maya in the film Apocalypto (released December 8, 2006). When Mel Gibson’s film was released in DVD, its impact had the potential to be more pervasive, and perhaps accessible to children, who were excluded by the “R” rating from the movie theaters. As a thriller, Apocalypto has tremendous audience appeal, but the lack of historical accuracy begs the question as to whether movies can or should also educate. Will the movie send viewers to the Internet or libraries for more information? Will attendance in university archaeology classes escalate, as was the case with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? If the statement “medium is the message”1 is correct (following Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s 1967 argument), then the images created about the ancient Maya in Apocalypto will permeate popular knowledge far more than the messages created in journals, books, and the Internet by Maya archaeologists. Apocalypto does not purport to be a documentary. There is no statement of any intent about historical accuracy. Gibson uses the ancient Maya as an allegory to present his views, as evident from a quote at the beginning of the film by Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” On the other hand, the advertisement for the DVD on the official Apocalypto website quotes movie critic Jason Buchanan’s 2006 affirmation that “world-renowned archeologist and Mayan culture expert Dr. Richard D. Hansen—whose services as a special 213

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consultant on the film—lent the production an unprecedented degree of historical accuracy.”2 Apocalypto is creating the public’s knowledge of the ancient Maya. Unfortunately, this media-created knowledge is historically inaccurate, both in the chronology and the life ways of the ancient Maya. The film does not follow the chronology of such a civilization and culture. Initially, the story in the movie appears to take place at the end of the Classic period civilization circa AD 900, but the arrival of the Spaniards at the end of the narrative moves the date six hundred years later. At the beginning of the film, viewers see a tiny Maya village and the people’s lives in the jungle, hunting tapir and wearing few clothes. Archaeological research has shown that the ancient Maya lived in settlement of various sizes, with buildings arranged around plazas. Although the royalty and elite lived in stone buildings on stone platforms, most of the commoners lived in more modest buildings of vertical poles with thatched roofs. There is no evidence that ancient Maya houses were small, domed structures constructed of stretched horizontal poles with wide gaps as depicted in Apocalypto. They were farmers who also hunted deer and other animals (as shown in scenes painted on pottery vessels and by the bones in garbage at Maya sites), but rarely did they hunt tapir—a large, wild herbivore which is highlighted in a dramatic chase scene at the opening of the film. Furthermore, depictions on painted pottery vessels and carved stone building facades and monuments show elaborate woven cotton clothing, in contrast to the almost naked actors in the film. Dental inlays and modification, as well as head-shaping were common, but labrets, sticks piercing the sides of the nose, or beads strung across a cheek were not used by the ancient Maya. We could then wonder whether viewers will go to the film’s official website or to other sources to see an accurate chronology or description of the lifeways of the ancient Maya. Gibson’s film has audience appeal because it is a good guy-bad guy action film, set in the jungle, with allegedly dangerous animals attacking and killing the characters. The movie creates a fast-paced, dramatic story of a man separated from his family (Jaguar Paw, interpreted by Rudy Youngblood) and enslaved by ruthless captors, and his quest to escape and return to his wife and young son. The storyline is linear and the audience quickly identifies with a hero and his family and the other villagers. The latter witness a mass-exodus of Maya people from another area, and soon their own village is attacked at night. Following a bloody battle, some villagers are violently killed, with the rest taken captive. They are walked on a journey through the jungle, across a river, through a mountainous area, and ultimately to a city under construction—or perhaps when lime plaster is being applied to the exterior of buildings, as was regularly done.

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It is not possible to actually retrace the tribes’ steps as the journey depicted by Gibson was created from various geographies and time periods. On the one hand, the movie was filmed in the state of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, in which there still is a tropical rainforest similar to the Petén District of Guatemala (where the Classic Maya civilization was centered). The city under construction or renovation is in more open, scrub vegetation similar to the Postclassic city of Chichén Itzá, but the temples and palaces resemble Tikal, and painted murals in a tunnel resemble earlier paintings at San Bartólo, near Tikal. There are no mountains in between these cities, which makes Gibson’s depiction of the tribe’s forced journey geographically inaccurate. After the prisoners arrive at a city, the women are auctioned in a marketplace as slaves, whereas most of the men are painted blue and taken to the top of a temple, where they are sacrificed. Blue is a color that was rarely used by the ancient Maya, so its widespread use as body paint on captives in Apocalypto is startling to anyone with knowledge of the ancient Maya, but certainly a visually dramatic way to demarcate captives in the film. Furthermore, although sixteenth century eyewitness accounts by the Spaniards of the Aztecs of central Mexico indicate that slavery was widespread among the Aztecs, evidence of slavery among the much earlier Classic Maya some six hundred miles distant is debatable. Art historian Mary Miller believes that figurines of women from the island site of Jaina off the west coast of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico were slaves, because she views the necklaces they wear are ropes.3 There are depictions of naked or barely clothed captives under the feet of kings in scenes portrayed on Maya painted vases, on the facades of buildings, and on carved monuments in the central plazas in front of large temples.4 The ancient Maya captured people in wars with neighboring city-states, which is definitely in contrast to the raids by small waring groups on an isolated camp depicted by Gibson. The Maya captured kings and other nobles to humiliate them and their city-state, and to inflict fear among the attacked city. Sometimes, captives were forced to play the Maya ball game in courts at city centers, and then they were killed. The painted murals on interior rooms at Bonampak, Chiapas (Mexico), for example, include a large scene where captives have blood dripping from the ends of their fingers where their fingernails were ripped off.5 One person had been decapitated. There is no evidence of the Aztec practice shown in Apocalypto of the scene of endless captives splayed across an altar at the top of a temple, their hearts ripped out and their bodies thrown down the steps to the cheering crowd. When our hero in Apocalypto is about to be sacrificed, there is an eclipse of the sun, and the king takes this event as a sign of the arrival of rain, so he stops the blood sacrifice and orders his entourage to take the remaining

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captives away and kill them. They are released in what resembles the great ball court of Chichén Itzá and are told to run, while the captors shoot arrows and spears to kill them. Although dramatic and thrilling as a story, there is no evidence that ball courts were used as killing fields in this way. Instead, the courts were used for the ball game, which was closely tied to ritual and the story of creation, in which the hero twins play ball against the gods of the Underworld and win, as told in the Popol Vuh.6 After winning the ball game as told in the Popol Vuh, human sacrifice is no longer allowed and only incense is burned. The Popol Vuh has great antiquity since it was depicted in scenes dating to the Classic period and earlier on the murals at San Bartólo and stone monuments at Ixtápa, Guatemala.7 The antiquity of the Popol Vuh story is also documented in a film released in 2006 by Patricia Amlin in which pictorial scenes on painted pots and on carved stone monuments are animated.8 While thrilling to the movie viewer, the ball court scene in Apocalypto lacks any semblance of historical accuracy. Jaguar Paw escapes the spears and arrows of his captors, killing one of the sons of the raiders’ leader. This event enrages the latter and sets in motion one of the best (and longest) chase scenes in cinematic history. Our hero is both running from his attackers and to his village to rescue his pregnant wife and infant son whom he left hidden in a below-ground shaft. He evades a jaguar who attacks the captors, killing one in a gruesome scene that includes screaming, the crunching sounds of the victim’s head in the jaguar’s mouth, and a lot of blood. The hero kills the captors one by one in different ways, including the use of a blowgun containing what appears to be poison from the Bufo marinus frog. While gripping as a movie, there is no historical accuracy. The Classic Maya hunted with spears, not bows and arrows (which were used later), and certainly not blowguns. Gibson’s film does not present the rainforest the public has learned to appreciate, full of “Fair Trade” and organic chocolate. Indeed, the 2006 film cannot be considered as taking place in the place someone would want to take his/her children for an ecotourism vacation. This is the jungle, which is depicted accurately with a canopy of mature trees, monkeys, jaguars, and poisonous snakes. It is, therefore, a dangerous and possibly lethal environment, where, as the film demonstrates, lives can be decimated suddenly (and painfully) by either the resident creatures or the territory itself (one of the villagers falls from a precipitous high; one of the raiders dies after jumping down a waterfall and smashing his head on the rocky bottom). When a black jaguar attacks, we hear the crunch of bone, see the mangled human head, and then witness the killing of the jaguar by the victim’s friends and relatives. This is, however, another inaccuracy on the part of the filmmaker, as jaguars do hunt smaller animals, but usually at night, and attacks on humans are

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virtually nonexistent,9 although there is certainly a public fear of this large, carnivorous jungle cat that Gibson successfully uses in the film. The natural violence of the jungle is depicted in graphic, explicit visual terms, and the director does not hesitate to portray both creatures and human beings dying in front of the camera. Indeed, blood gushes from the mouth of the dying jaguar, and a close-up lingers on the moment it ceases to live, almost halting into a still of its immobile head. Simultaneously, blood sprays from the human victim’s wounds, close-up clearly showing spectators his face as it has been chewed and mangled by the jaguar. Later on, another escapee foams from his mouth after being bitten by a poisonous snake and is left to die by his companions (by cutting his veins to alleviate a painful and slow death). In this latter scene, what seems to be all the more cruel is the apparent indifference of his fellow Maya when they realize their companion is about to die; it is a sort of resignation to the inevitability of death and the possible occurrence of it in the jungle. Such a representation of nature as a hostile environment is however partly exaggerated in Apocalypto. Indeed, the choice of a tapir charging the hero and his friends at the beginning of the film is surprising since tapirs are large, solitary herbivores, and reclusive animals that spend 90 percent of their time foraging on leaves and grass, and they are rarely seen in the jungle.10 Furthermore, they are not the typical animals that were hunted by the Maya, which instead preferred hunting deer, peccaries, and other small animals—as is witnessed by the fact that these hunting scenes are depicted in Maya art, and the bones of deer and peccary are commonly recovered at Maya sites. The cinematography is stellar, with camera angles providing the viewer with a close-up of a head smashing on a rock underwater, and another head bouncing down the temple stairs during the sacrifice sequence. The fast pace is accentuated by jarring music and shocking images of Maya we have come to know in the film, suddenly splayed over a sacrificial stone, their chests ripped open, hearts ripped out, and heads cut off and thrown down the temple stairs to the cheering crowds in the plaza below. The visual and auditory appeal of the movie makes the historical inaccuracies appear factual. However, this Aztec depiction of human sacrifice witnessed by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century is not characteristic of the ancient Maya. Certainly, ritual blood-letting by Maya kings and queens as exemplified by the ruler in the film is documented for the Classic Maya, but widespread human sacrifice, throwing bodies down temple steps and fields of headless bodies was not.11 Maya archaeologist Traci Ardren12 was horrified by the violence portrayed in Gibson’s production and noted that the chase scenes through the jungle are beautifully filmed and “look authentic” but bear no resemblance to historical reality.

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Our hero arrives in time to rescue his wife and son before water completely floods the shaft where they took refuge. As they walk out of the forest to a beach, they see large wooden ships anchored offshore. The presence of the ships indicates the time period is European contact, which was suggested by earlier images of people with the scars of small pox. Our hero suggests his wife and sons return to the rainforest, although his wife is curious about the ships. Certainly, encounters between the Maya and Spaniards happened many times, and Apocalypto’s treatment includes the fear and awe of the unknown invaders that surely occurred. However, the Maya did not return to the jungle to lead a simple life, since they were farmers who lived in villages, towns, and cities. The soundtrack of Apocalypto intensifies, anticipates, and exaggerates the entertainment value of the visual storyline. In fact, the music plays a significant role in shaping the film. The silence at the beginning of Apocalypto underscores the calm of the rainforest. This calm is suddenly broken by the close-up image of a large horse-like animal—in fact a tapir, accompanied by thundering sounds of hooves and cracking branches. This clever juxtaposition of visual and auditory stimuli by Gibson also occurs with the stillness of the morning in the camp, with silence and motionless views of the huts and their sleeping occupants. This quiet morning is punctuated by barking dogs as Jaguar Paw surveys the camp. Suddenly, this quiet still dawn is broken by screaming villagers and images of torches as invaders attack, violently killing some and capturing others. The music, however, is not authentic Maya. Ancient Maya music is indeed known from clay figurine whistles (ocarinas), flutes, drums, and shell trumpets that are also visually depicted on a painted mural at the Late Classic city of Bonampak, where a procession of musicians play their instruments.13 Instead, the film uses symphonic Western music, drums, and synthesizers, broken by silence and the sounds of nature, including jungle birds, butterflies, and monkeys. Other sounds of crunching bone effectively horrify viewers. Sounds of a skull cracking open in the jaws of a jaguar showcase violence as a major part of the Maya way of life as erroneously depicted in sound and images in Apocalypto. ANCIENT MAYA SOCIETY ACCORDING TO APOCALYPTO Apocalypto will end any lingering view among the public of the ancient Maya as peaceful stargazers, contemplating mathematics and the calendar—a dominant view of Maya archaeologists until the 1960s, but perhaps not the public view. The last thirty years of Maya archaeology have demonstrated that the ancient population was engaged in a variety of battles, with raiding

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for captives escalating to more endemic warfare to take prisoners to sacrifice as part of empire buildings among competing city-states. The painted murals at the Classic Maya city of Bonampak show war captives brought bound to the king, their fingernails ripped off and bleeding, one victim with his head cut off and the boy and head on the stairway. Stone facades at the Classic Maya city of Yaxchilán, Chiapas, show a Maya queen pulling a thorn-studded rope through her tongue, with blood dripping on bark paper. In the next scene, a vision serpent rises from the smoke of the burning blood-spattered bark paper: the queen has reached the gods and has their power. The geopolitics of the ancient Maya revealed by archaeologists are more sophisticated than the bloody landscape created in Apocalypto. What is known about ancient Maya geopolitics comes from decipherment of hieroglyphs on carved monuments called stelae placed in front of the temples of kings and queens at city centers. The glyphs included a sophisticated calendar system that accurately recorded dates, along with a phonetically-based writing system used on carved monuments, facades of buildings, and on pottery, stone, and paper books. The stelae record the dynastic histories of birth, marriage, accession to the throne, battles won, and city-states conquered as well as the death of the ruler. They are public records for viewing and reading by the public, much like billboards, and they often exaggerate feats of the rulers.14 The Classic Maya society was an urban civilization supported by people from towns and villages surrounding each of the about eighty city-states who owed labor and tribute to the dynastic Maya. The Maya were farmers who engaged in a variety of part-time crafts and other types of subsistence including fishing, extraction of stone from quarries and trade. The common Maya were, therefore, integrated into a regional economy of marketplace trade and tribute to dynastic rulers. None of this artistic expression, nor the complex lives of the dynastic and common Maya, is shown in the film, which instead presents the dichotomy of the peaceful Maya living in huts and barely clothed in contrast to the elaborate costumes and excesses of the dynastic Maya living in cities with enslaved Maya working fields, burning lime, and being sacrificed Aztec-style. Instead of dental inlays of jadeite or head-shaping that were widely practiced as forms of beauty by the ancient Maya and shown by human remains in graves and depicted in art, the films focuses on bones piercing the face, tattoos, and scarification. The rich tradition of spinning and weaving cloth for tribute payment and for personal clothing that is depicted on painted pottery vessels and carved monuments is absent in Apocalypto, where the common Maya are barely clothed. The movie omits the ball game, which was central to the ancient Maya’s story of creation, their views of people’s place in the world, and relations with the gods. Archaeology tells us captives played the ball game and that some people were sacrificed. In Apocalypto, many people die violently, if not

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from human sacrifice, then from wild animals, various weapons, or wrenching disease. Fields of putrid, headless bodies, and the sacrifice of some of the villagers give the viewers the idea that human sacrifice was extensive. In reality, there are rare cases of mass burials, including a skull pit at Colha in northern Belize and a mass burial of royalty at Cancuén in Guatemala. There are no examples of the remains of bodies strewn on the ground as shown in the movie. The ancient Maya buried their deceased relatives under the floors of houses, and, in the case of royalty, in the foundations of temples.15 APOCALYPTO AND THE CLASSIC MAYA COLLAPSE How does Gibson’s model of the collapse of the Maya civilization fare? There is much scholarly work in archaeology on the rise and fall of ancient civilizations and on the nature of cultural change indicating that the director’s view is incorrect. According to anthropologist Julian Steward (1955), culture is a conservative system whose equilibrium is disrupted by internal pressures (such as population increase) or external pressures (such as invasion, disease, or external environmental catastrophes).16 Subjected to such external or internal pressures, the people in a society adapt to the new conditions. Otherwise, the culture is absorbed or disappears. An example of an external pressure is the catastrophic hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Steward’s ecological views of culture change have been incorporated into more recent theories of the Classic Maya collapse.17 There are three dominant theories for the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization that are now under consideration by archaeologists: drought, endemic warfare, and ecological disaster.18 The message we can perceive in Apocalypto is that the ancient Maya were a bloodthirsty, quasi-sadistic, and violent society who resorted to war, torture, and human sacrifice in a desperate attempt to save their culture, under conditions of environmental degradation and disease. The Spaniards are off the hook for the destruction of the ancient Maya civilization since it self-destructed before European contact, as we are told by the introductory quote by Will Durant. Maya archaeologist Elizabeth Graham19 points out that this view is an example of the justification of the European conquest of the Maya. Traci Ardren (2006) notes that Gibson’s message is that the Maya needed saving by the Spaniards since “Maya elite culture was a disgusting mix of excess and gore.”20 She finds this justification of colonial attitudes unconscionable. That the Classic Maya civilization collapsed before the arrival of the Spaniards is not new information: history tells us it was six hundred years earlier.21 History also informs us that the Spaniards caused devastating damage to the sixteenth-century Maya culture and that European-introduced smallpox decimated Maya

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populations.22 However, millions of descendants of the ancient Maya still live in Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras, and there is a diaspora of Maya in the United States and beyond. The sixteenthcentury Maya people changed in the face of the conquest and colonization, but they endured. PRETENDING TO BE AUTHENTIC The use of Yucatec Mayan exclusively, with English subtitles, provides an illusion of authenticity about the ancient Maya in the film. The living Maya in the Yucatán of Mexico do speak Yucatec Mayan, as did their ancestors. However, the Maya of the Classic period spoke Chol Maya, the language of the hieroglyphs.23 On the other hand, the lavish costumes of the Maya royalty and the stone weapons are, for the most part, authentic. However, they are ornaments to a story that is driven more by a modern message of the consequences of overuse of the rainforest and ecological disaster intertwined with endemic warfare than by what is known from historical texts and dirt archaeology about such an ancient population and culture. The credits acknowledge the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico and Maya archaeologist Richard Hansen. The film captures Hansen’s ideas about ecological disaster from cutting down the rainforest to burn limestone to re-plaster buildings. The archaeologist suggests that the collapse was triggered by the Maya cutting down trees to burn limestone to make plaster that, he affirms, was needed to constantly whitewash the stone buildings in city centers. Hansen has expressed these views in documentary-style movies about the ancient Maya, including Dawn of the Maya (2003).24 Viewers of Apocalypto see deforestation, burning lime, and its transportation to the city portrayed in the central part of the film. The problem with presenting this view of deforestation for making lime plaster for plastering buildings is that the movie seems authentic since we see lime-burning, plastering, and deforestation by actors who are engaged in activities and speaking a Mayan language. The story is compelling, but it is only a reflection of Hansen’s hypothesis about the collapse of Maya civilization. In Gibson’s narrative, the viewer is not presented with other hypotheses based on climate change, especially droughts, or endemic warfare among kings at lowland city-states. MAYA ARCHAEOLOGISTS’ VIEWS OF THE FILM The 2006 release of Apocalypto resulted in criticism by Maya archaeologists, although it was well-received by at least one movie critic as “a minor

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masterpiece of cinematic bravado.”25 In contrast, Traci Ardren points out that the authentic look to the film masks egregious historical inaccuracies.26 Along with Andrea Stone,27 Ardren finds the film more about the excesses Gibson sees in modern Western society than about the ancient Maya. Elizabeth Graham finds the simplistic portrayal of the ancient Maya in the film a justification for their conquest by Europeans.28 Finally, David Freidel interprets the film as a “slanderous misrepresentation of an entire civilization,”29 which is important because we look to the past to learn about the present and future. These and other Maya archaeologists are featured in documentarystyle films, which have smaller audiences, which can lead us to wonder how do the documentary-style movies about the ancient Maya then compare to Apocalypto. National Geographic films such as Christine Weber’s Lost Kingdoms of the Maya (1993)30 and Graham Townsend’s Dawn of the Maya (2003)31 include on-site interviews with Maya archaeologists (whose research is funded by the National Geographic Society) and show real archaeological sites, with historically accurate reenactments. Spectators see the discoveries reenacted by the archaeologists who made the findings themselves and share in their excitement. In Dawn of the Maya, the audience sees the early painted murals at San Bartólo, Guatemala, with a king ascending to the throne—evidence that the institution of kingship predated the Classic period. In Lost Kingdoms of the Maya, the camera leads the viewer through a tunnel inside a Maya temple, revealing the red painted façade of an earlier temple. Maya archaeologist William Fash is given an offering of “eccentric flints” (elaborating chipped stone tools) by his colleague Ricardo Agurcia. Lost Kingdoms of the Maya, a NOVA film,32 follows the National Geographic format of reenactments of discovery by Maya archaeologists: Robert Sharer is shown in the tomb of the dynastic founder of Copan, Yax Kuk Mo, rediscovering burial vessels in the style of the distant highland city of Teotihuacan, central Mexico. The film has a web page with video clips and text by experts, notably epigrapher David Stuart. Other documentary films show a broader view of Maya archaeology than National Geographic-funded research. In contrast to the focus on hunting in Apocalpyto, Max Holecheck’s Maya Lords of the Jungle (1981)33 captures a wide array of field research on intensive forms of farming such as the raised fields in wetlands investigated by geographer B. L. Turner and Maya archaeologist Peter Harrison at Pulltrouser Swamp, Belize. In Apocalypto, there is a false dichotomy between the Maya depicted as living in small hunting camps in the jungle at the beginning of the film and the stone temples and palaces of royalty in the city in the central part of it. In fact, as Eleanor M. King argues in her 2015 collection of essays The Ancient Maya Marketplace, there were cities, towns, and villages of various sizes with Maya farming families integrated into a complex economic network of marketplaces, trade and

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tribute.34 The ancient Maya had more diverse and complex ritual and religion than the bloodletting and human sacrifice shown in Gibson’s production. In Popol Vuh (1989), Patricia Amlin uses images from pictorial painted pots from the Classic period to animate the story of creation and the adventures of the hero twins—who descend into the underworld, outsmart its gods, and resurrect their father as the maize (corn) god.35 The importance of corn to Maya ideology (and in their diet) is underscored in the Popol Vuh by the creation of people from corn. Last Days of the Maya,36 released on November 27, 2005, departs from the format of previous National Geographic films by adding a focused story line accentuated by graphic reenactments of violence, odd camera angles, and fast-paced action. Viewers look into the open eyes of a dead human floating face down in a pond. An interview with a forensic anthropologist shows a series of close-up shots of the anthropologist and camera angles from below. A reenactment of the deathblow follows. Several times spectators are shown the same rose-tinted clip of a naked Maya woman, with a man’s hand running down her side. The film is based on Arthur Demarest’s National Geographic-funded research on an ancient Maya massacre at the city of Cancuen, Guatemala. Last Days of the Maya arguably has more “audience appeal” than earlier National Geographic documentaries, but arguably less authenticity as well. The narrator tells the story, with short statements by Demarest and others working at the site. The film parallels popular television shows of the same era that popularize forensics as a key to solving crimes. Indeed, the skeletal specialists at Cancuén who are featured in the film are the forensic anthropologists who discovered, excavated, and identified the “disappeared” Maya killed during the genocide in the 1980s and 1990s in Guatemala. Phrases such as “cold case,” “bones that once were people,” and “too much death” along with reenactments of bodies floating in a water-filled pit with their eyes open sensationalize the past. The film keeps the viewers’ attention through its rapid pace, strange camera angles, and jarring sounds. The focus on violence in Apocalypto is mirrored in Last Days of the Maya, but the latter film is founded on historical accuracy, whereas Gibson’s production is not. Last Days of the Maya also highlights the unusual burial of the royalty of Cancuén in a shallow pit, instead of elaborate stone tombs inside the foundations of stone temples that was typical at Maya cities.37 The film shows the forensic specialists examining bones that have cut marks or were broken, which is accurate. Where the film becomes sensational is in the reenactments of the burial and reenactment of the possible chase, capture, and killing of one of the interred whose bones were viewed. Historically, the demise and rapid burial of the royalty of Cancuén occurred, and it differs from typical Maya burials of royalty. However, it may be a rare glimpse of an uprising by the people or an invasion. The violence in Apocalypto has no

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historical references, except for the incorrect use of Aztec sacrifice, the simplistic explanations of the collapse due to deforestation that support Richard Hansen’s views, and the unrealistic viewers’ fears of the rainforest full of allegedly dangerous jaguars and tapirs. History Channel as well has created documentary-style films about the ancient Maya that are both entertaining and educational. In addition to a narrator who sets the stage, many of the History Channel films have a host who travels to ancient Maya sites and leads tours. This strategy allows the viewers to live vicariously through the experiences of the host. Viewers see and hear Peter Weller as the host of the 1997 film The Maya: In Search of History38 breathing heavily as he walks up the steep temple staircase at Palenque. He is talking about the site, but the historical accuracy is underscored by short clips of interviews of Maya archaeologists. Maya art historian Mary Miller sits on the stairs of another building at Palenque talking with Peter Weller, which allows the viewers to listen to their discussion. Other Maya archaeologists speak in short clips from their offices. Occasional reenactments serve to document the story, such as the discovery of King Pacal’s tomb down an interior staircase in the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque. We see Maya archaeologist David Freidel walking down the interior staircase and discussing the discovery and possible scenarios about the death of Pacal and the coronation of his successor, which is preceded by Freidel’s statement “in my imagination.” Archaeologists rarely venture beyond the discoveries, descriptions, and interpretations, so his story is refreshing, while still guarded. Freidel’s story mirrors his stories at the beginning of each chapter of his 1990 book A Forest of Kings39 with epigrapher Linda Schele. The viewer of the film and reader of the volume are told what is “fact” and what is “imagined.” Unfortunately, Apocalypto does not do that. OTHER MEDIA PRESENTING THE ANCIENT MAYA What are the links between what is presented by various media and the ancient Maya past? Maya archaeologists construct links between the patterns of material remains of artifacts, burials, buildings, and settlements, and the behavior and culture of the ancient people. These links are used to build a logical argument to interpret and/or explain the patterning of material evidence and are subjected to peer-review by colleagues before publication in academic journals and books, which usually have restricted distribution among academics and academic institutions. Some journals release articles “of possible media interest” to the press, under publication embargo, in advance of publication of the journal article, providing the media with several days to contact journal authors and other experts in order to develop a

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story for publication. In this way, the archaeologists’ findings and the comments by experts are reported in the media. Journals such as Science, Nature, Antiquity, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others, sometimes release articles about the ancient Maya. The media also report finds by Maya archaeologists at academic conferences. Some conferences and workshops are directed explicitly for the interested public, including the Maya weekends at UCLA, Tulane, and The University of Pennsylvania, events at Dumbarton Oaks, The Precolumbian Society of Washington, and the University of Texas Mesoamerican meetings. Museum exhibits focus on artistic objects with display value and often includes artifacts that were not excavated by archaeologists but legally belong to public or private collections. The display of objects of unknown provenance evokes ethical questions by Maya archaeologists, since the objects have no cultural context and their exhibition may promote unlicensed looting of archaeological sites as well as the illegal and legal trade in antiquities. Although some Late Classic Maya painted pots depict scenes and events not otherwise available from excavated sites, there are no links between the objects and their ancient context.40 These various kinds of print and digital media provide more accurate views of the ancient Maya way of life than Apocalypto. Certainly viewers of Gibson’s production would learn more about the Maya but, realistically, the film was made to entertain and spectators may prefer to look for other Gibson movies that also entertain instead of National Geographic, History Channel, or NOVA documentaries. David Freidel notes that “how modern people depict the ancient Maya matters because we use the past to reflect on the present and future.”41 Contrasting the horrors of Maya civilization with the simple life of the common Maya in nature is both wrong and contrary to anthropological views of cultures. Anthropologists assert that people are normally well-adapted to the physical and cultural landscapes and only change when there is an internal pressure (such as population increase) or an external pressure (such as disease or a hurricane). According to Freidel, Apocalypto misrepresents the Classic Maya civilization by focusing on the Maya royalty as “rich, powerful, sadistic brutes.” The viewers of the film identify with the hero and his family who live a simple life of hunting in the jungle, have pole structures and have few possessions. Identifying the simple life of hunters in the untamed jungle as good and Maya civilization in cities as bad provides an incorrect view of such a culture and people. In fact, the common Maya were farmers and engaged in various crafts for trade, and they lived in permanent villages, towns, or cities. Their houses were sturdy pole and thatched buildings, often with stone foundations, multiple rooms, and organized around plazas in a more modest replica of stone temples and palaces at cities. They had pottery vessels, stone tools made from local and imported materials obtained at marketplaces, and

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they spun and wove cotton for clothing and for tribute. The Classic Maya village of Ceren, El Salvador—which was preserved by the volcanic tephra that blanketed the community after an eruption—indicates that households produced a variety of goods and obtained other goods and resources with exchanges with other householders in the village and from regional marketplaces.42 Excavations at Late Classic Caracol, Belize, underscore the access to nonlocal goods and services at marketplaces within the city.43 Instead of capturing slaves for construction and sacrifice, the urban Maya exacted tribute from people living in the region in the form of labor duty and goods. Warfare was a central part of the political economy of the Classic Maya, but not as shown in Apocalypto. Classic Maya warfare was integrated with marriage alliances, tribute and feasts by kings and queens of the various lowland Maya city-states.44 For example, royal princesses from the Snake dynasty at Calakmul married royalty at El Perú-Waka, thereby forging ties between the two city-states and setting the stage for significant influence from Cakalmul over El Peru.45 City-states such as Calakmul, Naranjo, and Tikal conquered other city states, as recorded in glyphs on stelae, in part to increase tribute.46 The common Maya people were incorporated into the rituals, ideologies, and economy of the royalty, founded on the story of the creation of people from corn and the adventures of the hero twins. The common Maya people visited cities for festivals, markets, and labor duty. They had nice possessions, just not in the quantity or quality of exotic jade or highly crafted goods as the royalty: figurine whistles, imported serving vessels for feasts and rituals, exotic obsidian, and other goods and resources were typical of Maya residences of both the rich and the poor.47 Apocalypto will intensify the public’s interest in the ancient Maya, while providing a false sense of historical fact. The outrage by Maya archaeologists about the film focuses on factual inaccuracies, depictions of a simple lifestyle justifying the Spanish conquest, and a high level of violence not characteristic of such a culture. Archaeologists uncover evidence about the ancient Maya that is available in books, magazines, newspapers, films, and other media. Films produced by National Geographic, the History Channel, NOVA, and various independent filmmakers provide documentary information, while at the same time engaging and even entertaining the audience to various degrees. Apocalypto has succeeded as a cinematographic masterpiece and a thriller but does an injustice to the millions of descendants of the ancient Maya and to how we view the past as a lesson for the future. NOTES 1. All the Internet sources were accessed on February 28, 2023.

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2. Jason Buchanan, “Apocalypto (2006),” 2006. https:​//​www​.allmovie​.com​/movie​/ apocalypto​-v332343​/review. 3. Mary Miller, “Jaina Figurines: A Text without a Text.” Paper presented at the 81st annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, FL. https:​//​ core​.tdar​.org​/document​/403670​/jaina​-figurines​-a​-text​-without​-a​-text. 4. Heather McKillop, The Ancient Maya (New York, Norton, 2006), 215. 5. Mary Miller, The Murals of Bonampak (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 6. Dennis Tedlock, The Popol Vuh (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 7. McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 211. 8. Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya, dir. Patricia Amlin (USA: Berkeley Media LLC, 1989). 9. Alan Rabinowitz, Jaguar: One Man’s Struggle to Establish the World’s First Jaguar Preserve (New York: Arbor House, 1986). 10. Victoria Schlesinger, Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 11. McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 215. 12. Traci Ardren, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” Archaeology, December 5, 2006 https:​//​archive​.archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto​.html. 13. Jared Katz, “Digitized Maya music: The creation of a 3D database of Maya musical artifacts,” Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage 6 (2017): 29–37; Heather McKillop and E. Cory Sills, “Briquetage and Brine: Living and Working at the Classic Maya Salt Works of Ek Way Nal, Belize,” Ancient Mesoamerica 34 (2023): 24–46, Figure 16; Mary Miller, The Murals of Bonampak (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 14. McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 8. 15. Ibid., 263. 16. Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1955). 17. See T. Patrick Culbert, ed., The Classic Maya Collapse (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1973); David Hodell, Jason Curtis and Mark Brenner, “Possible Role of Climate in the Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization,” Nature 375 (1995): 391–94; David Webster, The Fall of the Ancient Maya (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 18. See McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 97–100. 19. Elizabeth Graham, “Press cutting: Maya archaeologist Elizabeth Graham on ‘Apocalypto,’” The Guardian, January 8, 2007 https:​//​www​.ucl​.ac​.uk​/news​/2007​/jan​/ press​-cutting​-maya​-archaeologist​-elizabeth​-graham​-apocalypto. 20. Ardren, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” 21. See T. Patrick Culbert, ed., The Classic Maya Collapse (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1973); Grant D. Jones, The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); McKillop, The Ancient Maya (New York: Norton, 2006), 105–08. 22. See Elizabeth Graham, Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Keith Jacobi, Last Rites for

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the Tipu Maya: Genetic Structuring in a Colonial Cemetery (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000); Grant D. Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Alfred M. Tozzer, trans., Landa’s “Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatán,” Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). 23. McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 288–91. 24. Dawn of the Maya, dir. Graham Townsend (USA: National Geographic Society, 2003). 25. Christopher Orr, “The Movie Review: ‘Apocalypto,’” Atlantic, May 27, 2007 https:​//​www​.theatlantic​.com​/entertainment​/archive​/2007​/05​/the​-movie​-review​ -apocalypto​/69234/. 26. Ardren, “Is ‘Apocalypto’ Pornography?” 27. Andrea Stone, “Orcs in Loincloths,” Archaeology, January 3, 2007 https:​//​ archive​.archaeology​.org​/online​/reviews​/apocalypto2​.html. 28. Graham, “Press cutting.” 29. David Freidel, “Betraying the Maya,” Archaeology 60, no. 2 (2007). https:​//​ archive​.archaeology​.org​/0703​/abstracts​/maya​.html. 30. Lost Kingdoms of the Maya, dir. Christine Weber (USA: National Geographic Society, 1993). 31. Dawn of the Maya, dir. Graham Townsend (USA: National Geographic Society, 2003). 32. Lost King of the Maya, dir. Gary Glassman (USA: PBS, February 13, 2001). 33. Maya Lords of the Jungle, dir. Max Holecheck (USA: The Pacific Arts Corporation, 1981). 34. Eleanor M. King, ed., The Ancient Maya Marketplace: The Archaeology of Transient Space (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015). 35. Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya, dir. Patricia Amlin (Berkeley: Berkeley Media LLC, 1989). 36. Last Days of the Maya, eds. K.M. Kral and Melanie Soich (USA: National Geographic Society, 2005). 37. McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 264. 38. In Search of History: The Maya, ed. Lillian Benson (USA: The History Channel, 1997). 39. David Freidel and Linda Schele, A Forest of Kings (New York: Morrow and Co., 1990). 40. See McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 316–18 for a discussion of the illegal trade in Maya antiquities. 41. David Freidel, “Betraying the Maya.” 42. Payson Sheets, et al., “The Sociopolitical Economy of an Ancient Maya Village: Ceren and Its Sacbe,” Latin American Antiquity 26 (2015): 341–61. 43. Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, “Ancient Maya Markets and the Economic Integration of Caracol, Belize,” Ancient Mesoamerica 25 (2014): 239–50. 44. McKillop, The Ancient Maya, 186–99.

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45. Navarro-Farr, Olivia, Griselda Pérez Robles, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón and Keith Eppich, “A Forest of Queens: The Legacy of Royal Calakmul Women at El Perú-Waka’s Central Civic-Ceremonial Temple,” in A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kinship, eds. Travis Stanton and M. Kathryn Brown (Boulder: The University Press of Colorado, 2020), 67–87. 46. Simon Martin and Nicholai Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 47. McKillop and Sills, “Briquetage and Brine,” 24–46.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ardren, Traci. “Is “Apocalypto” Pornography?” Archaeology December 5, 2006 https://archive.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html. Buchanan, Jason. “Apocalypto (2006).” 2006. https://www.allmovie.com/movie/ apocalypto-v332343/review. Chase, Diane Z. and Arlen F. Chase. “Ancient Maya Markets and the Economic Integration of Caracol, Belize.” Ancient Mesoamerica 25 (2014): 239-50. Culbert, T. Patrick (ed.). The Classic Maya Collapse. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1973. Dawn of the Maya, directed by Graham Townsend. USA: National Geographic Society, 2003. Freidel, David. “Betraying the Maya.” Archaeology 60, no. 2 (2007) https://archive. archaeology.org/0703/abstracts/maya.html.  Freidel, David and Linda Schele. A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. New York: Morrow and Co., 1990. Graham, Elizabeth. “Press Cutting: Maya Archaeologist Elizabeth Graham on ‘Apocalypto.’” The Guardian, January 8, 2007. www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2007/jan/ press-cutting-maya-archaeologist-elizabeth-graham-apocalypto. ———. Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. Hodell, David, Jason Curtis and Mark Brenner. “Possible Role of Climate in the Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization.” Nature 375 (1995): 391-94. In Search of History: The Maya. Edited by Lillian Benson. USA: The History Channel, 1997. Jacobi, Keith. Last Rites for the Tipu Maya: Genetic Structuring in a Colonial Cemetery. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. Jones, Grant D. Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. ———. The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Katz, Jared C. “Digitized Maya Music: The Creation of a 3D Database of Maya Musical Artifacts.” Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage 6 (2017): 29-37.

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King, Eleanor M., ed. The Ancient Maya Marketplace: The Archaeology of Transient Space. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015. Last Days of the Maya. Edited by K. M. Kral and Melanie Soich. USA: National Geographic Society, 2005. Lost King of the Maya, directed by Gary Glassman. USA: PBS, 2001. Lost Kingdoms of the Maya, directed by Christine Weber. USA: National Geographic Society, 1993. Martin, Simon and Nicholai Grube. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Maya Lords of the Jungle, directed by Max Holecheck. USA: The Pacific Arts Corporation. 1981. McKillop, Heather. The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives. New York: Norton, 2006. McKillop, Heather and E. Cory Sills. “Briquetage and Brine: Living and Working at the Classic Maya Salt Works of Ek Way Nal, Belize.” Ancient Mesoamerica 34 (2023): 24-46. McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1967. Miller, Mary. The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. ———. “Jaina Figurines: A Text without a Text. Paper presented at the 81st annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, FL. https://core.tdar.org/ document/403670/jaina-figurines-a-text-without-a-text. Navarro-Farr, Olivia, Griselda Pérez Robles, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, and Keith Eppich. “Forest of Queens: The Legacy of Royal Calakmul Women at El Perú-Waka’s Central Civic-Ceremonial Temple.” In A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kinship, edited by Travis Stanton and M. Kathryn Brown, 67-87. Boulder: The University Press of Colorado, 2020. Orr, Christopher. “The Movie Review: ‘Apocalypto.’” Atlantic, May 27, 2007 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2007/05/the-moviereview-apocalypto/69234/. Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya, directed by Patricia Amlin. USA: Berkeley Media LLC, 1989. Rabinowitz, Alan. Jaguar: One Man’s Struggle to Establish the World’s First Jaguar Preserve. New York: Arbor House, 1986. Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1981. Schlesinger, Victoria. Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Sheets, Payson, et al. “The Sociopolitical Economy of an Ancient Maya Village: Ceren and Its Sacbe.” Latin American Antiquity 26 (2015): 341-61. Steward, Julian. Theory of Culture Change. Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1955.

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Stone, Andrea. “Orcs in Loincloths.” Archaeology, January 3, 2007 https://archive. archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto2.html. Tedlock, Dennis. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Tozzer, Alfred M., trans. Landa’s “Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatán.” Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 18. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941. Webster, David. The Fall of the Ancient Maya. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

Chapter 12

Mel Gibson’s Unarmed War Hacksaw Ridge Andrea Mancini and Antonio Sanna

Hacksaw Ridge (2016) is a film which, like others in Mel Gibson’s oeuvre, could be considered as pure religious propaganda, even with a sort of fanaticism amplifying the determination of the protagonist. This is indeed the case of Braveheart (1995) and The Passion of the Christ (2004) as well, both films dictated by a radical choice about the person who leads the game: in The Passion, James Caviezel is Christ, who sacrifices himself for the salvation of humanity; in Braveheart (nominated for ten Oscars and winner of five of them, including Best Film and Best Director) the hero is instead less famous, but Gibson’s interpretation of him led to the audience’s rediscovery of the thirteenth-century Scottish patriot and hero William Wallace (who fights against the tyranny of the English government), making him again an icon in the enduring tension between Scotland and England. In both cases, Gibson’s is a re-reading of history that often lingers toward a sort of spectacularization (in The Passion the spectacle is what many people considered as a gratuitous excess of violence), which can frequently misinterpret a verified reality. This is precisely the relative innovation of these films, that is, the will not to renounce—in spite of everything—the search for consensus, considering that both productions made a “stellar” profit surpassing tenfold their initial budgets, and were therefore extremely successful according to the public, each of them in his own genre (The Passion for historical religious films, Braveheart for the historical film). Finally, there is Hacksaw Ridge, a film about the Second World War in which violence is presented as rather realistic and possibly disturbing for the spectator, as is the case of many recent films—from Steven Spielberg’s 1998 Saving Private Ryan to the last two films by Clint Eastwood, specifically 233

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on the war between the Unites States and Japan, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Ivo Jima, both 2006 (though the list could be much longer). Simultaneously, these films provide room for the interior conflicts of the protagonist, who is never out of sight, even in the cruelest sequences, those that can be appreciated by war film fans as well as by fans of the action movie at large, a genre in which Gibson excelled as an actor (from the Lethal Weapon franchise [1987–98] to the Mad Max films [1979–85]). Hacksaw Ridge, a film about Desmond Ross, the first conscientious objector in the American army, is very similar to the aforementioned Gibson’s productions: each of these films favors “men of peace,” but places them in a war context, and therefore of violence (even pushed to the highest levels). Specifically, in both the 2004 and the 2016 films, the persecution of the protagonist becomes the narrative plot, the reason for the film’s structure. This is maybe the most interesting innovation: the war film is turned upside down as the “heroic act” is somehow contrary to tradition, but not because viewers are provided with the point of view of the enemies (as in the first tragedies, such as in Aeschylus’s The Persians (472 BCE)—which depicts the war between Greeks and Persians from the perspective of the defeated—or in the aforementioned Letters from Iwo Jima by Eastwood). In Gibson, the hero is not the killer, but the savior of others, maybe just in the physical sense. Desmond (Andrew Garfield) decides to enlist to support a war he believes to be right, even though he is not willing to handle a weapon and kill the enemy, which is something that goes against the principles of any army, not only the American one. The narrative winds through punishments, abuses, and trials until the final moment when Desmond behaves as a hero, saving seventy-five fellow soldiers and earning a Medal of Honor. The sequence of events overturns indeed the sense of the story: Desmond’s behavior initially perplexes the spectator, but finally appears more than justified, especially in front of a blind violence—which is not only the enemy, the Japanese army, but also Desmond’s own comrades, the violence of an army that often seems to have no humanity, a kind of Moloch, unmodifiable. Exemplary is the sequence in which Desmond saves Sergeant Howell (Vince Vaughn), who has been wounded in the leg. The scene is even “funny”: Desmond grabs the rifle, the sergeant looks at him, thinking that he will now finally use it against the enemy, but the protagonist actually turns it into a first-aid tool. He puts the rifle down (while the Japanese are shooting at him), wraps it with a blanket, and uses it to glide his comrade over the ground. What happens next is the most singular moment: Desmond makes the improvised stretcher toward salvation with difficulty, but Sergeant Howell is not merely a passenger of it confiding in luck and in his friend; he sits on the stretcher and starts restlessly firing at the adversaries. This is a kind of “best

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scene,” with no single morals, as Desmond’s antimilitaristic message wins as much as Sergeant Howell’s rifle (which has a specific role, at least in order to stop the enemies). The latter are the traditional enemies of American war films, wordless, almost with no face, lacking any dramatic depth, as they were in classic Western films such as John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939).1 As Roy Menarini argues, All in all, the image of the enemy predictably follows what public opinion thinks—or, even better, the point of agreement between the democratic propaganda demands and oriented public opinion. We need to remember the war cinema “during” World War II . . . , involved in a patriotic and interventional (usually isolationist) repositioning of the American public. Then the more complex war cinema of the fifties, in which a minimal revision appears, at least in the representation of the Other (Germans become, rather than the Other, desperate men sent away blindly by their superiors’ folly, whereas the Japanese and the Koreans take upon themselves the metaphor of bestiality), until the disappearance of war films during the seventies. Vietnam, according to a widely-renowned interpretation, satisfied the hunger for images because it invades the domestic space—via TV, radio, etc.—and cinema treats such a conflict since the end of it, as is demonstrated by the two waves, the first one beginning in the late seventies (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home . . .), the second one during the eighties, as a form of opposition against the Reaganite rehabilitation (Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket). Here the enemy is internal; according to Stone there is the projection of a silent civil war that is cast from the United States into Vietnam. Only today, a film like We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson has been able to re-read Vietnam as a heroic story without triggering any excessive polemic—a sign that the interest in that conflict is by now vanished.2

The enemy assumes different facets only in recent years, with very different wars, conflicts often much more technological, where he/she/it is not visible anymore (as in Full Metal Jacket).3 As Menarini further argues, Spielberg reads the American intervention as the last possible right war and exhumes the image of the sadistic and sneering German with no humanity. It is the iconography of the helmet lowered down to the nose, which occludes the eyes to the spectator’s view, but shows the whitest, sharp teeth (as if they were thirsty for blood), a clear reference to the enemy’s feral being . . . This confirms that the image of the enemy in American films is intimately connected to the historical (social and cultural) moments in which every genre or single film is born, and is developed by the various directors in tight connection with the narrative and figurative context of such a time.4

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What is most interesting is that Hacksaw Ridge is focused on a representative of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and treats him respectfully as well as makes him the hero, the one everyone depends on. In this sense, Gibson’s film is similar to Peter Weir’s Witness (1985), which focuses on an Amish community, whose life and beliefs are examined with interest. Gibson has chosen the difficult path of exploring an out-of-time religion, precisely like Weir, who could be considered as one of the filmmaker’s teachers. One of the first productions directed by Weir is indeed Gallipoli (1981), a film about a series of events that are peripheral to the Great History (about the 9000 ca. Australian and New Zealander soldiers who were slaughtered in a bloody battle during WWI). In Gallipoli, Gibson acted as one of those soldiers and, after thirty-five years, he directed Hacksaw Ridge, in which Desmond’s fiancée, Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer), looks like Rachel Lapp (a lovely Kelly McGillis), who is the protagonist, along with Harrison Ford, of Witness. Gibson’s film can also remind spectators of Richard Eyre’s The Children Act (2017), in which Emma Thompson interprets the role of a magistrate who happens to decide between life and death for a boy who belongs to a family of Jehovah’s witnesses refusing blood donations. The film, adapted from Ian McEwan’s 2014 novel, dramatically and (apparently-) realistically examines the ethical issues of the main characters, torn between those who believe (and ask for) the safety of the human being and those who follow other dictates— in this case the religious minority that demands not to mingle the human and civil value of the act of blood transfusion with faith and their religious choice. This is similar to what happens to Desmond Doss in Hacksaw Ridge: he risks derision, the gratuitous violence aroused in his fellow soldiers and the many years of prison he could be sentenced to. There is, naturally, a deus ex machina, embodied in the figure of Tom Doss (Hugo Weaving), Desmond’s drunkard and violent father, who is a veteran of the previous global conflict. In one of his rare moments of sobriety, Tom wears his old uniform and visits an old friend from the front who has become an army general in the meantime. Viewers see the latter only from behind, but he saves the boy and has him accepted as a conscientious objector. This is basically the plot of the film; half of it narrates the childhood of the young man in an atmosphere typical of a specific American province, where Desmond’s father exercises his power over his wife and children through strength. The children themselves do not have a healthy relationship with their own bodies and those of others: Desmond strikes his brother with a stone, putting his life at danger. The entire adolescence of the protagonist is lived in such an atmosphere, until he experiences a key existential moment during a quarrel against his father while defending his mistreated mother and threatens his parent with a gun. This is the last time he bears a weapon—a scene that is repeated more than once during the film to underline its narrative

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importance. The subsequent passage deals with Desmond doing a part-time work in the local church and his relationship with the women of an improvised chorus his mother belongs to. The sequence is amusing: Desmond asserts that the women look like angels and, after his mother reminds him that lying is a sin, he replies that he did not affirm “singing angels,” but only referred to angelic creatures! Such a scene is interrupted by the external noises and cries of an accident. Desmond immediately runs out and manages to save a wounded man’s life by tying a belt in the leg where an artery has been torn and by taking him to the hospital without waiting for the ambulance. There he is complimented by the doctor on call, but, most importantly, he meets his future life companion, the nurse Dorothy. It is love at first sight; Desmond donates his blood and decides about his future, even though the girl is not aware of it yet. The next sequence is quite predictable, as it includes excursions in the woods, afternoons spent at the cinema, and the affection blooming between the two of them. In the meantime, however, WWII begins, Desmond’s brother leaves and his father (who, like many veterans, hates the war and admits to his wife having been “a completely different person” before the conflict in which he lost many of his friends) bursts from anger because he is not able to stop both of his sons from leaving to the front. This is the first condemnation of war, a war that stands as an unavoidable destiny, capable of destroying those who die in the various conflicts and does not spare those who are left behind, lost in remembrance of the dead and in the atrocities they bore witness to. Hence, the desperation, the abuse of alcohol, and the suicide. Cinema and literature indubitably contribute enormously to the repertoire on war.5 Halfway through the film, Desmond meets his father at the cemetery, the place where the man maybe lives the most and where the latter gives vent to his desperation. His comrades in arms are buried there; Tom speaks to them, pours some alcohol over their tombs—almost as if they needed something to forget or wanted to get drunk once more before going into battle, before fighting a last, absurd conflict. Desmond’s father is not as violent as usual and accepts his son’s decision to leave as a volunteer; he can only say his son is “different,” because he thinks and prays before doing anything (“Look at you. You’re doing it right now!”). That with the dead is essentially the only relationship that Tom Doss still has, even though he demonstrates, later on in the film, that there is still a sparkle of life in him, a remaining of humanity (when he wears his former uniform and attempts to defend his son). This is a key scene for Desmond as well, which further reveals his true nature. Up to this moment, his character had been sketched only approximatively, but, in the sequence of the cemetery, viewers can finally comprehend him as a conscientious objector, his simultaneous acceptance and denial of the war—an internal conflict of his that becomes more evident as the story progresses.

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Desmond kisses Dorothy before getting on the bus that will take him to the military camp. She almost forgets to give him a small Bible containing a picture of her, which keeps him company in the following months. His fellow soldiers steal it from him during one of the many scenes of violence they commit: naturally, they cannot understand Desmond’s point of view and react by teasing him, but also blackmailing and beating him up—scenes that are not edifying at all. The more all of this becomes harsh, the more we sympathize with Desmond, although we might still be surprised for his behavior. Indeed, we might want him to change his mind, even in front of the faceless Japanese, who die by the lot, but also kill, break, and abuse with extreme cruelty (these images are continuously alternated to those of the torn, mutilated soldiers). We hope for some kind of reaction on the part of Desmond, that he might avenge the injustice he suffers or the dead comrades. This is apparently suggested by the Western film style, as in John Ford’s films, with heroes (the white people) and the villains (the Native Americans), where there would be no place for a Desmond Ross, who forces his presence in Gibson’s film instead, up to saving even two enemies (who die later on anyway).6 In this way, the soldiers’ training at the beginning of the film’s second part appears to be justified: Desmond is a young man raised among the beauties of Blue Ridge Virginia Mountains, a place still largely uncontaminated nowadays, where survival is given by life’s harshness. During his training, Desmond still easily obtains excellent results, even in the face of his comrades taking advantage of him and attempting to overpower him with less-than-heroic actions. The protagonist’s abilities are significant nonetheless and even Sergeant Howell must recognize his superiority for a moment (Howell is clearly inspired by Sergeant Major Hartmann [R. Lee Ermey] from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Full Metal Jacket, who has become an archetype of the inhumanity of war and the training for it, especially among American soldiers, but also evident in other countries’ armies). As Giuseppe Ghighi argues, The instructor has the duty to build the nineteenth-century mass soldier [and] has little to do with the “real world,” but rather much to do with the literary and cinematographic imaginary. He works narratively, but settles in the imaginary as what has been, must be, and will be forever a military instructor. Gibson resumes the archetype, maybe for lack of imagination, but also to raise Desmond to the position of angel of the Good: during the battle he saves Howell and Captain Glover, in spite of the vexation he has suffered because of them . . . The two of them are not cowards, but, in the moment of weakness, they are saved by one whom they considered as such, which is the “irony of the whole thing,” as the real Glover affirms in the ending. The narrative antihero, Desmond, needs these weak models to build, in this case, the heroism gifted by faith.7

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Both Sergeant Howell and Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) had attempted in any way to have Desmond declared unfit for war, even for psychiatric reasons, up to a key scene near the end of the training, when all of them are sent into leave. Desmond tries to get his documents, but Colonel Stelzer (Richard Roxburg) asks him again to handle the rifle and, after the protagonist’s sharp refusal, has him arrested (while, at home, his marriage had already been planned and his girlfriend was waiting for him with the bridal gown on, without being informed about it at all). Desmond is sent to prison where he has an outburst of violence and wounds himself by punching the wall and flinging the camp bed—an action without sense at all, though understandable. Even the meeting with the military lawyer ends on this tone: he says that Desmond will be discharged with dishonor rather than being incarcerated indefinitely. The protagonist refuses again (naturally) and faces a martial court. The outcome is still the same, until Desmond’s father arrives and manages to access the court and leave his friend’s letter (his former comrade, the general we almost cannot see, but bearing much importance in this dramatic context). Thomas Doss replies to the judge, affirming he knows the law: “and I know my son is protected by those laws. They are framed in our Constitution. And I believe in them as he does. They are why I went and fought to protect them. At least that’s what I thought I was doing, because, if that wasn’t for that, then I have no idea what the hell I was doing there, sir.” The judge asks now for the letter, and, after Thomas Doss leaves, he reads the following words: “the defendant’s rights as a conscientious objector are protected by an act of Congress and he cannot be compelled to wave those rights. That includes, in this case, his disobeying orders to bear arms. Signed Brigadier General Musgrove, war service commander, Washington D.C.” This is a fundamental turning point, which can inspire an important reflection on the “unarmed war,” as the individual—Desmond, in this case—is risking his integrity, he faces a crossroad and spectators may think he will not be able to get out from such a situation and he will maybe be forced to change his mind radically. This scene is actually more dramatic than the later ones on the battlefield: our hero is alone with himself, about to surrender unconditionally; maybe he will not be won over by accepting the disastrous consequences, at least regarding his personal freedom. These are fundamental ethical issues, and we imagine a tragic spiral, ending only with imprisonment or, even worst, execution for cowardice. Perhaps this is the right moment to uphold a contrary thesis, to have the idea of an “unarmed war” triumph, a debate that many organizations around the world promote today in favor of laws that protect such a way of thinking.8 The intervention of Desmond’s father and the general’s letter determine a positive resolution of the issue. The rest of the film, apart from the brief parenthesis of the marriage ceremony, is a terrible story of war, with torn

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bodies and flames passing through the frame; we can almost smell the burnt bodies, their horribly melted arms and legs. Unfortunately, we are more and more used to such images and they might not disturb us, but, in the middle of them, a young man, a sort of Christ decides to sacrifice himself for those who are not men anymore, but only remains of men, passages from a novel or short lyrics torn from life. Desmond’s work is extraordinary: he lowers down Hacksaw Ridge seventy-five men, each time praying God to find another one. His comrades have left; he stays on this rock of death alone, fighting against the extermination of the American soldiers, but also hiding from the Japanese, who shoot him, but miss him, cannot find him, even when he enters their bunker and the tunnels that hide them well. These are mass scenes, action sequences (the film indeed also won as Best Action Movie in 2016), accompanied by a very engaging editing (which brought an Oscar to John Gilbert as Best Editor in 2017) and frequent slow motions representing the lug and tying of bodies as well as Desmond’s lowering them down with superhuman exertion. Such an epic action is not initially noticed by Desmond’s regiment, which has left the post. When they do realize it, they come back to help the protagonist from down below with a miraculous force, because this is the opinion of friends and perhaps of the director as well, who wants us to look at Desmond as a man touched by God, who can accomplish heroic deeds, simply because he has a neat faith, devoid of the many distractions and superfluous elements we are used to. Captain Glover changes his judgment of Desmond by declaring he has accomplished a fundamental act: “All I saw was a skinny kid. I didn’t know who you were. You’ve done more than any other man could have done in the service of his country. And I’ve never been more wrong about someone in my life. I hope one day you can forgive me,” before confessing him the reason why he met him. The following day the soldiers have to return to the ridge and, maybe for a sort of superstition, Captain Glover affirms: “Most of these men don’t believe the same way that you do. But they believe so much in how much you believe. What you did on that ridge cliff is nothing short of a miracle and they want a part of it and they they’re not going to go up there without you.” There is but one problem: that day is a Shabbat, which, as is the case for the Jewish people, is celebrated with inactivity, with rare exceptions. This is a very amusing scene. We do not know what is happening, all the soldiers are in attack formation, ready to move on, and the commander calls on them: “What the hell is your delay, Captain? You were supposed to begin that assault ten minutes ago!” Glover replies: “We’re waiting, sir.” “Waiting for what?” “For private Doss to finish praying for us.” This is followed by another war scene, focusing on different kinds of details. There are less burnings and flamethrowers and a major visibility to the actions of the Americans, who effectively defeat the enemy this time. Also, the viewer can finally see

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the faces of the Japanese and the ritual scene (depicted respectfully by the director), when their captains perform the hara-kiri through all the specific practices required by this traditional suicide. Later on a group of more generic Japanese soldiers apparently come out from the underground bearing a white flag. They, too, allegedly belong to the ritual, though they are not understood by the Americans, as they are dressed only in rags tied around their waist, keep their hands over their heads, and have nasty faces. Indeed, they are carrying bombs and throw them against their unprepared enemies. Therefore, Gibson’s is apparently a double evaluation of the Japanese army: on the one hand, the officials are linked to the tradition of the ritual suicide performed by the Samurai, which disturbs the American soldiers. On the other hand, the director depicts a kind of death that does not respect the enemy, but attempts to persevere in absolute evil, enacted by private soldiers, who try to offend their enemies as far as possible by becoming weapons of death themselves (which may remind us of the Japanese pilots of the divine wind, the Kamikaze, who committed suicide to destroy the enemy ships). For the civilized Western men this is inexplicable, though also fascinating as a glorification of the war ideal. In this case as well, it is Desmond who saves many of his comrades, thanks to his quick reflexes, by throwing the bombs away with his hands and feet, in spite of being wounded in his leg. Desmond’s transport toward the medical treatment in the field hospital, down below the ridge, is depicted in slow motion and looks like a ritual, as his fellow soldiers feel they are saving a sort of Christ nailed to the cross. Indeed, he is not lowered down as his comrades were, but as something far more precious than a human body: he is laid down on a bed, affectionately covered and brought down in a sort of elevator that glides over the air—as a savior (rather than exterminating) angel. This is the very scene the film begins with, which is repeated at its end with more dramatic weight. Hacksaw Ridge, however, does not end with these heroic images, but lingers on the true characters of the story: there are some documents fundamental to fully comprehend the plot, including an interview to the real Desmond Doss, his brother Harold and Captain Jack Glover, who bear their testimony to the events narrated in the film. Gibson’s 2016 work is an important film, with high-level results, as its forty million dollar budget was compensated by a world income of $180 million ($70 million only in the United States). The critical and historical reviews of the film have been equally approving, as almost everybody has spoken favorably about the production and its actors, even in spite of an always-controversial director such as Gibson is. According to Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle, Hacksaw Ridge “is one of the best films of 2016. And the victory is all the more sweet for Gibson in that he succeeds on his own weird terms. After almost a decade of being a Hollywood pariah,

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he comes back with a film that represents not even a hint of compromise. This is pure, unadulterated, go-for-broke Gibson, and what do you know? He makes us all like it.”9 Roberto Nepoti describes the film as “the story of a miracle, and Gibson narrates it by respectfully investing the protagonist with Christological traits. The film is divided into two equal parts—the preparation and the baptism of fire—as the most classic among ‘war movies.’ In the first part . . . it leads you to believe you are watching a conventional enough product. In the second part, however, it hurls you into hell; in a fight of radical brutality with exploding bodies, pierced flesh, torn-apart limbs: that is, war.”10 Roy Menarini wonders how “Mel Gibson managed to make a non-pacifistic film on a pacifist, a film of biblical violence refusing violence, a heroic film on a person who is almost a suicide, an irrational film on a person who can rationally measure the limits of his own belief; it is perhaps the most cinematically-satisfying enterprise of the year.”11 In the aforementioned (American and European) reviewers and critics, there is a sort of suspicion toward Gibson that we sincerely would like to overlook. Maybe we cannot speak of a masterpiece in the case of Hacksaw Ridge, but this is indubitably a very interesting film, with competent actors (all of whom have been well directed), which is what matters most. Many reviewers have compared Desmond to another pacifist figure, played by Gary Cooper in Howard Hawks’s 1941 film Sergeant York, but, in that case, the Kentucky farmer and conscientious objector finally decides to enter the war and performs a series of heroic deeds. He is mild-mannered, but also a great hunter and shooter and, as Pino Farinotti affirms, “a military who acquires a conscience—fighting is necessary to shorten and win a war and save therefore many lives. He performs humanly-impossible actions by killing forty enemies with his rifle and capturing two entire companies with the help of a few subordinates. All metaphors were there: the painful decision, the conversion, the superhuman heroic gesture that flashes his grace and alludes to a higher intervention. Gary Cooper, the magnificent father of all boys, the perfect husband for all women, the trustworthy friend for all men, took America by hand to war.”12 Sergeant York is one among those American films of pure war propaganda, a masterpiece. In the case of Gibson’s hero, instead, we are dealing with an opposite level: the denial of weapons becomes a raison d’être, as the last images of an elder and fragile Desmond Ross demonstrate by showing him as a man with no protection in front of the horror of war. As Rex Reed affirms, the film is “Shot entirely in Australia, though set in Virginia and Japan,” with Rachel Griffiths and Hugo Weaving, “two of Australia’s best actors, playing with perfect backwoods American accents. . . . [Andrew Garfield] is so good in both the quiet, human moments and the chaotic battle sequences that it’s hard to believe he’s the same callow youth who played Spider-Man a few years

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back.”13 The relationship with Australia could be explained by considering Gibson’s own biography: he was born in the United States and moved with his entire family to the other side of the Pacific when he was still very young. There, he began his acting career (in Peter Weir’s film). This is confirmed by Justin Chang when pointing out: “As a filmmaker, Gibson has a certain genius for the familiar: even when tackling ancient settings and foreign dialects, his command of the Hollywood blockbuster idiom is such that all cultural differences are effectively rendered nil. That’s very much the case with ‘Hacksaw Ridge,’ a thoroughly American concoction (despite all the top-notch Australian and British acting talent) that eases before long into the sturdy, straightforward rhythms of the platoon picture.”14 Reed is also quite astonished by the fact that the actor of Spider-Man could give life to a character with such a high spiritual merit, but he does not consider that, in both films, the two heroes are linked to a sort of “moderation.” Spider-Man does indeed possess a superhuman strength, which associates him to Desmond as well—at least, according to his comrades in arms—but does not use it immoderately; Spider-Man’s relationship with violence is always relatively restrained, as is the case with Desmond, who rather applies his mantra, his destiny, the beginning of a sort of coaction to repeat a gesture (“Please, Lord, help me get one more” are the words of his prayer, the poem he keeps reciting while saving one soldier and looking for another one). In both films, moreover, there is a weave of ropes that corresponds to the plot of the film itself: in Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) the eponymous protagonist moves among New York’s skyscrapers through his embroidery of intertwined ropes. The same action is performed by Garfield in Hacksaw Ridge, whose structure seems to be made of a weave of big ropes leaned against the mountain. With such ropes, the American soldiers climb the ridge and Desmond saves his comrades by lowering them down with them. The ropes are, literally, the support of the final image, when the wounded body of the hero is lowered down the ridge in a sequence of great effect and value, even spiritual value. This is illustrated at length by Stephanie Zacharek: But I don’t think you could tell this story properly or honestly without being forthright about the horrors of the Pacific Theater, and as Gibson dramatizes them, they put Doss’ actions in jaggedly sharp perspective. Garfield’s Doss, at first a scrawny, guileless farmboy, becomes as relentless as a terrier. Even after his battalion retreats, he keeps pushing forward to drag as many wounded men as possible to safety, lowering them down one by one from a 100-foot ridge on a rope knotted into a series of dubious-looking loops. The prayer he keeps repeating—‘Please, Lord, help me get one more’—doesn’t even sound aggressively religious. It’s more an incantation, the automatic mantra of a man living

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desperately in the moment. (The movie’s closing credits are preceded by footage from an interview with Doss himself—conducted before his death, in 2006—in which he states plainly that this is the prayer that kept him going.)15

“Get one more” is indeed the sentence symbolic of the whole film: these words recur frequently and demonstrate how strong Desmond’s relationship with his faith is. He is a man like us, with the same contradictions, with the contradictions of Gibson, who has often been won by alcohol and violence, but has also always managed to rise up again. Little Desmond decides not to use weapons anymore after a stone almost killed his brother and a gun threatened his father. At that point, he was a boy on a bad path, as he was following the example of his father, a man destroyed by war (WWI), a master of violence and alcohol. Nevertheless, he learns from his mistakes, or, at least, this is the moral of a great part of American cinema, and certainly Gibson’s moral. And this is the moral of an entire spiritual world, which always prefers the sinner, the thief, and the prostitute over the others. The episode of the assault against Desmond’s brother is thus described by Owen Gleiberman, “Early on, Desmond gets into a fight with his brother and hits him in the head with a brick, and that incident, which leaves him reeling in sorrow, is the film’s version of one of those ‘Freudian’ events that, in an old Hollywood movie, form the cornerstone of a person’s character.”16 This is the metaphorical first stone leading to the building of an entire cathedral, the exception that makes up the real quality of a group, even when such group merely has to cause death and destruction. Gleiberman concludes his argument by affirming: The real story that Hacksaw Ridge is telling, of course, is Desmond’s, and Gibson stages it in straightforward anecdotes of compassion under fire, though without necessarily finding anything revelatory in the sight of a courageous medic administering to his fellow soldiers (and, at certain points, even to wounded Japanese), tying their blown-off limbs with tourniquets, giving them shots of morphine between murmured words of hope, and dragging them to safety. In a sense, the real drama is a nobility that won’t speak its name: it’s the depth of Desmond’s fearlessness, and his love for his soldier brothers, which we believe in, thanks to Garfield’s reverent performance, but which doesn’t create a combat drama that’s either scary or exciting enough to rival the classic war movies of our time. This isn’t a great one; it’s just a good one (which is nothing to sneeze at).17

Certainly, we could sneeze at a film like this, which uses terrible images with noble ends, but also moves over a convincing plot to examine the absurdity of war. The Japanese, like the Native Americans, do not recognize international conventions, they follow other rules (they use the white flag to blow

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their noses); they are represented with satanic sneers and powerfully built bodies (while throwing bombs at their enemies who repel them back). We know which side to take, the side of the white, good characters. The other, more positive images of the ritual sacrifice, the hara-kiri (when the Japanese commander commits suicide by fatally wounding his own belly and asking his subordinate to cut off his head), become a sort of counterpoint, but they are not enough to balance the malignity of the Japanese. Such a ceremony of violence is not out of tune with the rest of the film (it even closes the film in a good way), which begins with the scenes of war—when Doss is carried toward “salvation,” while a Bible-inspired voiceover recites: “Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary and young men stumble and fall. But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint.” What is interesting is the sound in the background (the team of Kevin O’Connell, Andy Wright, Robert Mackenzie, and Peter Grace, the composer, won an Oscar), consisting in both the music and, more in the background and lower, the sound effects of war, including the last words, which are almost incomprehensible until the end and are pronounced by an out-of-focus, unrecognizable face: “Hang on, Desmond. We’re going to get you out of here!” This is the way for the director and his team to say that they are not interested in war, as it stands behind everything else, but what counts is the biblical text and the auditory comment that outdistances war. Gibson is suggesting: be careful, this is not a violent film, a film about the people who have been killed (or, if possible, who have been resuscitated), but it is a reflection on life and death, a parable with a contemporary Christ as its protagonist, who is finally brought to heaven by angels. Watch closely the film, do not be distracted by the most brutal sequences and what they contain. We are reading a page of the Bible, which uses violence, Jacob’s sacrifices, to help those who have faith to see better and save themselves. NOTES 1. See Giame Alonge, Roy Menarini and Massimo Moretti, Il cinema di guerra americano: 1968–1999 (Recco, IT: Le Mani, 1999). 2. Roy Menarini, “L’immagine del nemico nel racconto cinematografico americano,” Storicamente. Laboratorio di storia 1 (2005): n.p.

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3. See Roberto Giacomelli, Nemici dell’America. Nemici dell’umanità. Il nemico nel cinema fantascientifico americano (Roma: Sovera, 2014). See also Elena Pirazzoli, “Full Metal Jacket: guerra alla città,” Rifrazioni 16 (May 2016): 128–41. 4. Menarini, “L’immagine del nemico.” 5. See Giuliana Muscio, “Hollywood va in guerra,” in Storia del Cinema Mondiale V, parte III, Gli Stati Uniti, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta, 1049–88 (Torino: Einaudi, 2000); Stefano Pisu (ed.), War Films. Interpretazioni storiche del cinema di guerra (Milano: Acles, 2015); and Paul Virilio, Guerra e cinema: logistica della percezione (Torino: Lindau, 2002). 6. See Marcello Perruca, I Nativi Americani nei film. Ombre Rosse, incubo bianco e il genocidio di un continente visto attraverso il cinema. ilgenocidio-dei-nativiamericani-visto-attraverso-il-cinema.html. Accessed on August 16, 2022. 7. Giuseppe Ghighi, “Ceci n’est pas une historie,” Cineforum 562 (March-April 2017): 32. 8. A contemporary example is the recent proposal for the institution of the civil, unarmed and non-violent Defense Department by the “Movimento Nonviolento,” founded in Italy in 1962 by Aldo Capitini. 9. Mick LaSalle, “Amid much gore, Mel Gibson achieves an antiwar triumph,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 2, 2016. 10. Roberto Nepoti, “Mel Gibson va alla guerra ma combatte in nome del pacifismo,” La Repubblica, February 2, 2017. www​.mymovies​.it​/film​/2016​/hacksawridge​ /rassegnastampa​/756433/. Accessed on November 5, 2022. 11. Roy Menarini, “La battaglia di Hacksaw Ridge: una folle convivenza di opposti,” mymovies.it, February 4, 2017. www​.mymovies​.it​/film​/2016​/hacksawridge​ /news​/folleconvivenzadiopposti/. Accessed on November 5, 2022. 12. Pino Farinotti, “La battaglia di Hacksaw Ridge, l’eroe senza fucile di Mel Gibson,” mymovies.it February 13, 2017. www​.mymovies​.it​/film​/2016​/hacksawridge​ /news​/leroesenzafuciledimelgibson/. Accessed on November 5, 2022. 13. Rex Reed, “Mel Gibson’s ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Is the Best War Film Since ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” Observer, February 11, 2016. 14. Justin Chang, “Review: Andrew Garfield goes to war in Mel Gibson’s pacifist bloodbath ‘Hacksaw Ridge,’” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2016. 15. Stephanie Zacharek, “Mel Gibson Reaches Toward Redemption with Grisly, Effective Hacksaw Ridge,” Time, September 6, 2016. 16. Owen Gleiberman, “Hacksaw Ridge,” Variety, September 4, 2016. 17. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alonge, Giame, Roy Menarini and Massimo Moretti. Il cinema di guerra americano: 1968–1999. Recco, IT: Le Mani, 1999. Chang, Justin. “Review: Andrew Garfield goes to war in Mel Gibson’s pacifist bloodbath ‘Hacksaw Ridge.’” Los Angeles Time, November 1, 2016.

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Farinotti, Pino. “La battaglia di Hacksaw Ridge, l’eroe senza fucile di Mel Gibson.” mymovies.it February 13, 2017. www​.mymovies​.it​/film​/2016​/hacksawridge​/news​/ leroesenzafuciledimelgibson/. Ghighi, Giuseppe. “Ceci n’est pas une historie.” Cineforum no. 562 (March-April 2017): 32–33. Gleiberman, Owen. “Hacksaw Ridge.” Variety, September 4, 2016. LaSalle, Mick. “Amid much gore, Mel Gibson achieves an antiwar triumph.” San Francisco Chronicle, November 2, 2016. Menarini, Roy. “La battaglia di Hacksaw Ridge: una folle convivenza di opposti.” mymovies.it, February 4, 2017. www​.mymovies​.it​/film​/2016​/hacksawridge​/news​ /folleconvivenzadiopposti/. ———. “L’immagine del nemico nel racconto cinematografico americano.” Storicamente. Laboratorio di storia 1 (2005): n.p. Muscio, Giuliana. “Hollywood va in guerra.” In Storia del Cinema Mondiale V, parte III, Gli Stati Uniti, edited by Gian Piero Brunetta, 1049–88. Torino: Einaudi, 2000. Nepoti, Roberto. “Mel Gibson va alla guerra ma combatte in nome del pacifismo.” La Repubblica February 2, 2017. www​.mymovies​.it​/film​/2016​/hacksawridge​/ rassegnastampa​/756433/. Perruca, Marcello. I Nativi Americani nei film. Ombre Rosse, incubo bianco e il genocidio di un continente visto attraverso il cinema. ilgenocidio-dei-nativi-americani-visto-attraverso-il-cinema.html. Pirazzoli, Elena. “Full Metal Jacket: guerra alla città.” Rifrazioni no. 16 (May 2016): 128–41. Pisu, Stefano (ed.). War Films. Interpretazioni storiche del cinema di guerra. Milano: Acles, 2015. Reed, Rex. “Mel Gibson’s ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Is the Best War Film Since ‘Saving Private Ryan.’” Observer, February 11, 2016. Virilio, Paul. Guerra e cinema: logistica della percezione. Torino: Lindau, 2002. Zacharek, Stephanie. “Mel Gibson Reaches Toward Redemption with Grisly, Effective Hacksaw Ridge.” Time, September 6, 2016.

Index

Academy Award, 9, 105, 135–36, 166 adaptation, 5–6, 8, 15, 71, 195–209, 210n10 Air America (1990), 5, 162 The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), 243 anti-Semitism, 9, 14, 18n30, 27, 45, 47, 51, 54n11, 64, 82, 102, 108–9, 112, 136, 142–43, 146, 148, 159, 162, 167, 171, 185–86 Apocalypto (2006), 9–10, 15–16, 19n35, 25, 36, 37nn2–3, 63–75, 77n29, 109– 12, 136, 175–87, 191n94, 213–26 archaeology, 16, 66, 89, 111, 175–87, 213–26 Ardren, Traci, 67, 187, 217, 220–21 Aristotle, 121–26, 131, 132n12 Australia, 1–3, 148, 236, 242–43 Aztecs, 66, 76n16, 183, 190n68, 190n71, 215, 217, 219, 223 The Beaver (2011), 11, 136, 161 Bible, 49, 53, 85, 113, 140, 187, 238, 245 Bird on a Wire (1990), 5, 17n17, 152n40, 152n42, 160, 162, 165–67 Black Robe (1991), 63, 70, 73, 75 Bluestone, George, 196–99, 210n10

body, 1, 9, 15, 26, 28–29, 32–36, 81, 83, 86–91, 108, 137, 139, 141, 145–47, 152n45, 205, 241, 243 Braveheart (1995), 6–7, 14, 15, 18n25, 25–37, 37nn2–3, 38n4, 38n9, 63, 101, 104–8, 112, 121–31, 135–48, 150n21, 172, 233 Catholicism, 1, 19n32, 41–53, 82, 140, 202 Christ, 8–9, 18n30, 19n32, 27, 28, 36, 39n16, 41–52, 64, 81–91, 107–8, 138–47, 150n21, 233 colonization, 7, 72, 129, 178, 220–21 comedy, 5, 6, 7, 13, 15–16, 109, 114, 159–73 controversiality, 1, 16, 41, 54n14, 64, 75, 82, 101, 106, 109, 136, 147, 162, 172, 195–96, 202, 209, 241 Creed, Barbara, 87, 90, 107 crucifixion, 9, 18n30, 42, 46, 50, 52, 64, 83, 88–90, 107–9, 138–40, 150n21 Daddy’s Home 2 (2017), 13, 161, 171 Davidson, Phebe, 196–99 Dawn of the Maya (2003), 176, 184, 221–22 Decline of a civilization. See end of a civilization 249

250

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depoliticization, 195–210 deus ex machina, 63, 67, 70–71, 73, 236 Disney, 1, 109 documentaries, 16, 16n2, 65, 176, 213–26, 251 Doss, Desmond, 11–12, 20n38, 111– 13, 139 dreams, 15, 29, 63, 72–75, 128, 130–31, 196, 202–3, 209 Ebert, Roger, 17n19, 82, 91, 106, 167 end of a civilization, 10, 66–69, 78n44, 109, 175–82, 185, 213, 220–21 Evangelicalism, 19n33, 41, 44, 47, 51, 75, 91, 108–9 Fatman (2020), 12, 150n13, 161 forest, 10, 66–71, 75, 78, 177–87, 214–25 freedom, 6, 15, 25–26, 105, 121, 124– 31, 141, 144, 239 Full Metal Jacket (1987), 235, 238 Gallipoli (1981), 3, 17n11, 135, 236 gender, 25, 27, 31–33, 48, 84, 138, 140, 142–43, 147, 150n21, 160, 164, 168–69 Gibson, Hutton, 2, 50, 52 Gibson, Mel (as actor), 1–16, 20n37, 101–4, 113, 135–36, 146, 148, 150n13, 150n19, 159–73, 234, 236, 243 Grant, Cary, 160, 163–64, 166–67 Griffith, James, 198–99 Hacksaw Ridge (2016), 11–12, 16, 20n38, 101, 111–13, 144, 172, 233–45 hagiography, 14, 25–28, 32–36, 39n16 Hansen, Richard, 66, 77n31, 110, 175– 87, 191n81, 213, 221, 223 Heartbreak Ridge (1986), 20n38 heroism, 11–12, 14, 25–36, 37n1, 67, 83, 85, 91, 121–22, 126, 135–48,

161–62, 167, 214–18, 223, 225, 226, 233–43 historical (in)accuracy, 7, 9–10, 16, 26–27, 37n2, 49, 52, 64, 76n16, 106, 108, 110–11, 141, 176, 184, 186, 196, 213–17, 221–26 Holland, Isabelle, 5, 16, 103, 195–96, 202–9 Hollywood, 1, 18n25, 64, 68–70, 81, 84–86, 91, 102–4, 108, 110, 113, 135–36, 148, 160–66, 169, 171–72, 187, 196, 198, 200, 208–9, 241, 243, 244 Holocaust, 48, 50 Holy Mary, 9, 88, 139, 142–43, 147 homophobia, 18n25, 27, 38n9, 102–3, 106, 159, 162, 167 homosexuality, 2, 6–7, 16, 17n13, 103, 140, 142–43, 146, 149n8, 159, 167, 195, 202–8 hope, 9, 36, 109, 130–31, 132n36, 203, 244 horror, 29, 33, 36, 49, 81, 86–91, 107–8, 218, 225, 241, 243 human sacrifice, 10, 66–67, 70, 76n16, 78n51, 111, 176, 180, 183–86, 191n94, 215–20, 222–23, 226, 245 Icon productions, 1, 5, 38n5, 170 interfaith dialogue, 15, 41–53, 54n9 Jaguar Paw, 10, 19n34, 68–70, 176, 180–85, 214–18 Japanese (portrayal of the), 3, 12, 17n10, 139, 143–45, 234–35, 238, 240–45 Jews, 2, 15, 18n30, 27, 38n8, 41–53, 54nn11–12, 55n23, 56n41, 64–65, 87, 108–9, 142–43, 145, 147, 149n8, 185, 240 John Paul II, 48, 56n41 Jungle. See forest King Edward I, 7, 18n21, 18n25, 30, 38n12, 105, 125, 138, 140–42

Index

King Herod, 9, 87, 142, 151n27 Last Days of the Maya (2005), 223 The Last of the Mohicans (1992), 63, 70–71, 75, 78n48 Lethal Weapon franchise, 4–5, 7, 13, 17n16, 106, 114, 135, 148n2, 150n19, 152n42, 163–65, 172, 234 Lost Kingdoms of the Maya (1993), 222 Mad Max films, 3–4, 13, 84, 91, 106, 108, 135, 148n1, 165 magnanimity, 121–31 The Man Without a Face (1993), 5–6, 14, 16, 17n19, 101, 103–4, 106, 135, 195–210 martyrdom, 7, 15, 25–37, 37n1, 39nn17–18, 39n21, 39n30, 43, 83, 103, 113, 125, 135, 137, 144–48 Mary Magdalene, 9, 50, 88, 142, 147 masculinity, 11, 15, 25–26, 39n29, 106, 137–48, 152n38, 160–64, 168–70, 203–4 Maya: chronology, 16, 176, 179–80, 214; clothing, 181, 214–15, 219, 225; geography, 16, 176–80, 185, 215, 222; language, 10, 66, 110, 175–77, 179, 182, 186, 221; temples, 66, 179–81, 185, 189n35, 215–25; villages, 10, 70, 178, 181–82, 214, 218–19, 222, 225–26; warfare, 66, 178–79, 183–84, 186, 214–15, 218–21, 226 The Maya: In Search of History (1997), 224 Maya Lords of the Jungle (1981), 222 McLeod, Justin, 5–6, 103–4, 202–9 messianic tropes, 15, 44, 46, 48, 50, 81, 83–87, 90–91 Middle Ages, 7, 15, 18n30, 25–37, 32, 37n3, 38n4, 42, 52, 106, 108, 121–24, 131 migratory premonition, 15, 63–75 Murphy, Eddie, 160–61, 163, 166

251

Murron, 6, 31–35, 105–6, 127, 138, 140–46 Native Americans, 10, 63–75, 77n29, 110, 175, 238, 244. See also Apocalypto, Aztecs, Maya Nazism, 47, 143, 147 The New World (2005), 63, 65, 70, 72, 75, 78n49 Norstadt, Chuck, 6, 17n19, 103, 202–9 nudity, 16n3, 19, 38n11, 146–47, 214– 15, 223 The Passion of the Christ (2005), 8–9, 10, 14, 15, 18nn29–30, 19nn32–33, 25, 36, 37nn2–3, 41–53, 63–64, 81–91, 101, 107–9, 111–12, 114, 136–48, 172, 185–86, 233 passion plays, 42, 50 The Patriot (2000), 1, 8, 84 patriotism, 6, 105, 137, 143, 146, 148, 197, 202, 204, 233, 235 Pilate, Pontius, 9, 18n30, 27, 50, 87–89, 139, 143 Popol Vuh (1989), 216, 222–23 Prince Edward II, 7, 27, 30, 106, 140–41 Princess Isabelle of France, 7, 30, 33–35, 105, 126, 141, 144 rape, 6, 29–34, 38n11, 105, 141, 183 Reagan, Ronald, 16, 160, 164, 168– 69, 235 reason, 89, 139–40, 242 recovery, 15, 101–14 redemption, 104, 108, 140–48, 160 rights, 124, 127–31, 141, 168, 195, 239 Robert the Bruce, 7, 36–37, 130, 132n36 Romans, 9, 18n30, 27, 30, 50, 87, 89, 143, 145, 147, 187, 189n39 Satan, 9, 18n30, 27, 37, 142–43, 147 Schutte, Dorothy, 139, 144, 236–38

252

Scotland, 6–7, 27–37, 38n4, 38n13, 39n26, 105, 106, 121, 123, 125–26, 131, 137, 141, 144, 146, 233 self-sacrifice, 25–37, 83, 91, 106–7, 112–13, 128–29, 140, 145–47, 233, 240, 245 Sergeant York (1941), 20n38, 242 Shakespeare, William, 3, 6, 206 Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, 8, 49, 64 Sontag, Susan, 143, 147 soul, 35, 44 soundtrack/music, 31, 145, 202–3, 217–18, 245 Stagecoach (1939), 235 trauma, 6, 11, 26, 29–30, 33, 111, 163 Vatican II, 41–43, 46, 50 Vietnam, 5, 8, 160, 205, 235

Index

violence, 3, 8–10, 12, 14–16, 25, 30–31, 35–36, 38n7, 64, 67–68, 81–82, 86–91, 101–2, 105–12, 140–47, 161– 66, 171–72, 175, 180, 182–86, 214, 217–20, 223, 226, 233–39, 242–45, 246n8 virtue, 112, 121–31, 145 Wagner, Geoffrey, 196–200 Wallace, William, 6–7, 15, 25–37, 37nn1–3, 38n4, 38n14, 39n16, 39n26, 39n29, 84, 105–6, 121–31, 132n36, 138–47, 233. See also heroism What Women Want (2000), 8, 162, 168–71, 172 World War I, 11, 146, 236, 244 World War II, 3, 11, 45, 47, 50, 111, 139, 143, 146, 233, 235, 237

About the Contributors

Yaakov Ariel is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A graduate of the Hebrew University and the University of Chicago, Ariel’s research has focused on Christian attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, the Holy Land, Zionism, and Israel; history of missions to the Jews; Jewish responses to Christianity; Jewish conversions to other faiths; and religion in Israel. His book, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews, won the Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History. Sarah Baker is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication at Auckland University of Technology. She is the co-founder of the AUT Popular Culture Centre and a member of JMAD and the AUT Media Observatory Group. She is a senior fellow and a member of the AUT Academy, and the Communication for Social Change Research Centre. Her research interests include television and film in mediated popular culture focusing on the Gothic, horror, sexuality, and gender. Adam Barkman (PhD, Free University of Amsterdam) is professor of philosophy at Redeemer University and, with Antonio Sanna, is the editor of the Lexington Books series “Critical Companions to Popular Directors.” He is the author of five books, including Making Sense of Islamic Art & Architecture (Thames & Hudson 2015), and the coeditor of seven books, including, with Antonio Sanna, A Critical Companion to Steven Spielberg (Lexington 2019). Barkman is internationally recognized for his work on C. S. Lewis, world philosophies, superheroes and popular culture, and philosophy in film. Katherine Cottle is the author of The Hidden Heart of Charm City: Baltimore Letters and Lives (Nonfiction/2019), I Remain Yours (Creative Nonfiction/2014), Halfway (Memoir/2010), and My Father’s Speech (Poetry/2007), all published by Apprentice House/Loyola University 253

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About the Contributors

Maryland. Some of her other scholarly work includes essays in the Critical Insights (Salem Press) series: Zora Neale Hurston and Social Justice and American Literature, and in the NEH/NIH Collaboration, Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History (VT Press). Cottle is an assistant professor of writing at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, and a regular writing instructor in the college’s prison education partnership. Eileen M. Harney (PhD, University of Toronto) is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as well as the Coordinator of the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies program and a faculty member in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her research interests include the treatment of gender in Early Christian and medieval traditions and texts, contemporary depictions of female bodies, and portrayals of the contemporary heroic female character in comics, television series, and films. Brett A. Houk is a National Geographic Explorer and professor of archaeology at Texas Tech University. He has over thirty field seasons of archaeological experience working in the Maya area, primarily in western Belize. Houk is the author of Ancient Maya Cities of the Eastern Lowlands (2015) and coeditor of Ritual, Violence, and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings (2016) and Approaches to Monumental Landscapes of the Ancient Maya (2020). At Texas Tech, he developed “Anthropology at the Movies,” a tremendously popular course that examines the portrayal of anthropology, archaeology, and archaeological cultures in mainstream films. Graham Lee has been the Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center Graduate Fellow for the past two years with the Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership of the Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston. She is the vice chair of the Graduate Student Council of the American Philosophical Association (APA), prior to which she was its chair and a member of the APA Board of Officers. Graham has a master of arts in philosophy from the University of Houston, a master of divinity from Wake Forest University, and a bachelor of arts in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. She expects to receive a Master of Theological Studies degree from Emory University by summer’s end (for which she has completed degree requirements). She has four forthcoming book chapters (three co-authored) on film in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy (Carus Books), The Godfather and Philosophy (Carus Books), and Theology, Religion, and Dune (Fortress Books).



About the Contributors

255

Douglas C. Macleod Jr. (DA, SUNY) is an associate professor of Composition and Communication at SUNY Cobleskill. He is an interdisciplinarian whose specific interests are in film studies. He has written articles and book reviews for multiple academic and commercial venues, and he has spoken around the country on a variety of subject matters such as Oliver Stone, Alfred Hitchcock, the use of comedy in the classroom, and digital empathy. Andrea Mancini (PhD, University of Bologna) taught Iconography of Performance at The University of Siena from 2002 to 2009. He currently works as a playwright, actor, and director (including the “Teatro stabile di innovazione” in Verona). He wrote dozens of books and articles on the history and development of cinema and theatre—including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poet of Ashes (City Light Books 2007), several volumes on Italian directors and screenwriters Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (which have been published in Italian, German, and French), and Il cinema di Robert Zemeckis (La conchiglia di Santiago 2010) as well as the exhibition catalogue Bread & Puppet. La cattedrale di cartapesta (Titivillus 2002). Andrea has indeed also worked as a curator for over one hundred exhibitions in many venues across the globe, including the Lincoln Center in New York. Heather McKillop is the Thomas & Lillian Landrum alumni professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. She is a 2020 recipient of the Research Master Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Louisiana State University. She earned her BSc and MA in anthropology at Trent University (Canada) and her PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She teaches courses in archaeology, the ancient Maya, including “Ancient Maya in the Media” about documentary-style films on the ancient Maya. She has carried out fieldwork on the coast of Belize since 1979, focusing on the ancient Maya economy. She has focused on the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize, since the 2004 discovery of the only known ancient Maya canoe paddle and wooden buildings preserved in mangrove peat below the sea floor. Survey in a coastal lagoon includes discovery, mapping, and excavation of wooden buildings and associated artifacts, with funding from the National Science Foundation and teams of students and collaborators. She is interested in how salt was produced and labor organized to supply the biological needs of the nearby inland Maya for this scarce commodity. She has published many journal articles and books, including Maya Salt Works (2019), In Search of Maya Sea Traders (2005), Salt: White Gold of the Ancient Maya (2002), The Ancient Maya (2004), and Coastal Maya Trade (with coeditor Paul F. Healy). She was interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday about her article with Kazuo Aoyama in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Her current National Science Foundation

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About the Contributors

grant with E. Cory Sills includes excavation of multiple buildings at large underwater sites to identify salt kitchens, residences, and the organization of production. Josh Morrison is a lecturer in Women’s & Gender Studies and English at the University of Saskatchewan whose teaching and research specialize in critical masculinities studies; queer and trans theory; media theory and aesthetics; and camp and kitsch studies. He holds a PhD in film, television, and media as well as two MAs in Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies and a bachelor of music performance (classical saxophone). Todd G. Morrison, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. His interests include cultural representations of minoritized groups (e.g., LGBTQ+), homonegativity, gay male pornography, masculinities, and psychometrics. He has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Body Image, Porn Studies, Psychology of Men and Masculinities, Sexuality & Culture, International Journal of Transgender Health,  Journal of Sex Research, and Journal of Homosexuality. Professor Morrison is currently co-editor of Psychology & Sexuality and serves on various editorial boards including Journal of Social Psychology, Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, and Journal of Sex Research. He is also a fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association. Anneke Murley-Evenden is a graduate of Redeemer University and previously published alongside Adam Barkman in A Critical Companion to Robert Zemeckis  (2020). While currently working as the operations manager for a high-end painting company, she is an artist and scholar interested in the intersections of religion and philosophy and, more specifically, how these areas of study can engage with the modern person. She lives and works in Muskoka, Ontario, with her husband. Kandice M. Parker is a PhD candidate in the Psychology of Culture, Health, and Human Development Program at the University of Saskatchewan. She has previously acquired a BSc in biology (UVic), a BA in psychology with honours, and MA in applied social psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research interests include men and allyship, woke performativity, gender equality, and post-feminism. Kandice has published in numerous outlets including Psychology & Sexuality, Porn Studies, and Journal of Bisexuality. Peter Piatkowski is a UK-based writer. He has written for a variety of publications, both online and print, and has a blog on cinema, A Seat in the Aisle. His interests include film, literature, television, popular culture, music, and



About the Contributors

257

food writing. Along with writing, Peter has also taught for the City Colleges of Chicago. He graduated from the University of Illinois, Chicago, with a BA in English, later earning his MA in English literature from DePaul University, and an MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University. Amanda Rutherford works in the School of Language and Culture at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Her interests lie in mediated popular film and television culture, religion in popular culture, and popular horror. She is a member of the Communication for Social Change Research Centre, the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia, the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand, International Gothic Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and the Pacific Modern and Ancient Language Association. Antonio Sanna completed his PhD at the University of Westminster in London in 2008. His main research areas are: English literature, Gothic literature, horror films and TV series, epic and historical films, superhero films, and cinematic adaptations. In the past sixteen years he has published over one hundred articles and reviews in international journals. Antonio is the coeditor of the Lexington Books’ series “Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors,” which includes his volumes focused on Tim Burton (2017), James Cameron (2018), Steven Spielberg (2019), Robert Zemeckis (2020), and Julie Taymor (2023). He has also edited the volumes Pirates in History and Popular Culture (McFarland 2018), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave 2019), Arthur Machen: Critical Essays (Lexington 2021), and Alice in Wonderland in Film and Popular Culture (Palgrave 2022). Antonio has been appointed as a teaching assistant at the University of Sassari and is now employed as a teacher of English literature in Sassari.