--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <authfriend@...> wrote:
> I'll have more to say this evening about Barry's hysterical meltdown, but in > the meantime, here's a post I made back in 2007 after Barry had brought this > up again. The Maya expert in the Salon article I quoted was, um, not exactly > the only knowledgeable person to have been upset by the movie: > A few selections from articles discussing the historical inaccuracies in > "Apocalypto"... Barry is just doing what he always does, so why is this an 'hysterical meltdown'? As for Apocalypto, a rather brutal film, it's fiction. Even documentary films have very selective viewpoints, are assembled from secondary material, like old film prints (of which the original negative would be the most primary source), recollections, etc., so such a film has many elements of fiction, a retelling of a tale. The original event, say World War II, is long gone, it happened once, and fragmented memories of the event in the minds of people, and the shards of physical remains, military reports, news accounts, films, photos, are reassembled in what one thinks is a likeness of the event. For example the current film 'Lincoln' is not what happened, it is a representation of what happened and historically, if one looks at details, it has a skewed viewpoint compared with a consensus view (also skewed) of 'what happened'. I recall the end of 'Apocalypto' and if I make an interpretation of it, it is just as skewed as the film is skewed in relation to any original event concerning the Maya. To put it simply my fictional account of the finale of the film is this: * The Mayan family hides in the forest as the Spaniards come. Now to this I can layer on additional interpretations from my own mind, based on rather poor memories of reading history books and from school. I can then project that the Mayan civilisation will fall, that the Spaniards are bringing the true Catholic faith to these poor savages because I remember that Spain was Catholic, and Gibson is Catholic. But I have never been to Spain, let alone in the 16th century. I have never met Mel Gibson. My 'knowledge' of Gibson rests entirely on non-primary sources, does not rest on any actual experience of the purported existence of Gibson. I watched 'Apocalypto' on a DVD. If I had to, say, prove anything on the basis of direct experience about that DVD, where it came from, how it came to be, and how it related to an actual world, it would be an impossible task. Only if I were very general, and adopted what I would term a conventional viewpoint about reality would this even be thinkable, and the result would be entirely derivative, would be just as much a fiction as what I was investigating.
