I didn't go to Max's class today as student's were workshopping their first week's project. Instead, Rita and I did banking errands for the fieldtrip. Without undue hassle we managed to wire money to five hotels and then send the receipts to them by fax. Took only 2 hours.
We then went to the market to buy supplies for the afternoon gathering and also spent a lot of time looking for a small axe. They specialize in humungous axes here.
The afternoon event was a viewing of Apocalypto in order to critique it. The students were apalled, of course. I had read over 70 reviews so I knew a lot of what to expect and I knew that I wasn't going to watch the chase section (Instead I did some reading and listened to Philip Glass' violin concerto: the perfect antidote).
What surprised me, and Rita who knows a great deal about film, was the rather ignorant borrowings that make up the half of the movie I saw. Gibson's view of "primitive" is sub-Saharan Africa: the urban hairstyles are exaggerations of what I have seen on Mangbetu pottery for example, and his version of Maya dance is pure Hollywood Africa. His version of "decadent" is Rome with its couch-reclining elites and bloody ritualized games. Despite having an archaeologist on board from the start, he couldn't come up with anything either remotely Maya or remotely original. Satyricon and Quo Vadis (Rita's contribution) meet Tarzan and the Lost Safari. I also understood a subtle aspect of the ending. The pure hunting-and-gathering hero family that escapes the Spanish (and speaks Yucatec) represents the origin of the Lacandon, currently considered the most "pure" Maya and the people who have been granted stewardship of the Montes Azules Biosphere, to the exclusion of other settlements.
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