260729: An American Odyssey
Christian Lorentzen, for The Nation:
Nolan smuggles this theory in from Eric H. Cline’s book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which overturned the old thesis that the great Mediterranean cities of two millennia ago collapsed because of invasions by mysterious “sea people” and replaced it with the notion that they fell from within. As Penelope’s epiphany to Odysseus puts it after he recounts the war crimes he masterminded at Troy: “You are the sea people.”
The contemporary political analogies are obvious enough. The collapse of American imperial hegemony is because of a threat not from outside but from within. We have come to mistreat both strangers and the poorest among us all while waging endless wars that violate our ideals and leave our veterans maimed and traumatized. We are coming to the end of our civilization, and that is because of our own actions.
I had watched Gibson's Apocalypto the night before the Odyssey in IMAX. That film also depicts an odyssey, a there-and-back-again hero's journey in the jungles of prehistory. And it opens with a quotation from the historians Will & Ariel Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within."
The Maya of Apocalypto are pestilence-ridden, perhaps due to the piles of (anaculturally Aztec) decaying bodies that lie at the foot of their pyramids. They appear to be in the midst of an environmental collapse: their rivers are polluted; the areas surrounding their great cities, denuded of forest and quarried for lime, have all become wastelands. And they have brutally exploited their provinces for blood tribute. It is hard not to see Apocalypto as another American parable.
Relatedly: There has been much talk, lately, of the Bronze Age Collapse. The Berggruen Institute, whose first prize recipient was Charles Taylor—scholar of the Secular Age—has issued, as its annual essay contest theme, the prompt "A New Axial Age?"
Many versions of the Odyssey—originally Hyginus's (Fabulae 95), and now Nolan's—cast Odysseus as a reluctant soldier, wrenched from his home and his plow by the forces of Empire. Apocalypto leans into this tradition: its protagonist, Jaguar Paw, is kidnapped and forcibly extracted from his home by the forces of empire. In an inversion of the usual monomyth, he travels from country to city to country; his wilderness is the barbaric decadence and extreme income inequality of imperial urbanity. (A "place stone-built," read the closed-captioned Yucatec—a reference to Dante's Inferno. Hell is the city of man.)
Mythologically, it is the Mithraic parallelism (identification, empathy, etc) between predator and prey which I find most compelling, in Apocalypto. That is, every prey organism itself predates; every predator is itself preyed upon. The film reminds us of this constantly: The cinematography used when Jaguar Paw hunts a tapir reappears when Jaguar Paw is himself hunted by the Maya. Blunted's tormenting M-I-L becomes an object of pity.
And of course, the Spanish—a bigger fish—arrive in the Mayan pond, snapping up a predator with its belly still full of peripheral tribes. As if an alien spacecraft touched down in the midst of our metacrisis.