BODIES OF ESTRANGEMENT

Abstract:

The bulk of Mel Gibson's output as filmmaker consists of a trilogy on historical subjects: Braveheart, The Passion and Apocalypto. This article points to a degree of imaginative consistency underlying Gibson's work. It seeks to acknowledge a personal vision of the nature and significance of human events – a vision articulated through the choice of recurring cinematic techniques and visual-thematic motifs. All three films inculcate a sense of history as fundamentally dependent on acts of ritualization, at the centre of which lies the sacrifice of the individual. They share an authorial vision which hinges upon the question of death and transcendence (equated either with the resurrection of the individual or with the continuity of a family or an ethnic group). Gibson's oeuvre foregrounds the conviction that human experience is patterned in accordance with archetypal narratives whose seemingly universal validity is suggested by the presentation of cross-cultural analogues in successive films.

Keywords:

• Mel Gibson
• sacrifice
• violence
• history
• religion

Notes

1 On Gibson's upbringing and his family's values, see Pendreigh 25–28; Clarkson 15–17, 30–38, 194–201.

2 The attention paid by critics to the imaginative continuities and the reciprocal imbrications of Gibson's three films has been scarce. Mitchell and Plate (345) and Ortiz (117) are exceptions.

3 If one may resort to a pun that has become familiar, atonement entails at-one-ment.

4 In the context of Christianity, however, Girard's general points on sacrifice as a pillar of the social imaginary need to be qualified in light of Easter. David Bentley Hart aptly remarks that

Christ is condemned to death by the duly appointed authorities of his age, whose verdicts are no more than proper exercises of political prudence and responsible governance. And the crucifixion is an expression of a particular sort of social equilibrium; it is a perfect epitome of the legal, religious, and political rationality by which human society sustains and justifies itself. Yet God's verdict entirely reverses that of Christ's judges […] Easter reveals that divine justice is on the side of the particular, the rejected, the victim we are willing to offer up to the greater good. (486)

5 This ambivalence is close, but not exactly identical, to the one Girard phrases like this: “Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him – but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed” (Violence 1).

6 One may hazard the interpretation that one element of Maya mythology in particular is layered into the story. According to Karl Taube, “[t]he name of the ancient sun god was Kinich Ahau, Sun-Faced Lord, a powerful being closely identified with the jaguar. It seems that this god transformed into a jaguar during his nightly journey through the underworld” (53). It may be deemed paradoxical, however, that Jaguar Paw is spared ritual sacrifice because of a solar eclipse.

7 The rain god Chaach of Maya mythology, on whose behalf it is believed that the bodies of the slain were ritually placed in cenotes, is also connected with the jaguar (see Meletinsky 195).

8 The descent into the underworld is a motif shared by many strands of mythology. It is connected with initiation or immortality (namely metempsychosis) or both. According to Mircea Eliade, “to descend into hell amounts to undergoing ‘initiation death’, an experience that may found a new mode of being.” The cave is the place of divine epiphany par excellence, “the place where, after a period in hiding, there is the apparition of a saviour god, a prophet or a cosmocrat” (36, 38; my translations). For examples of this motif in film, see Holtsmark.

9 In the documentary By His Wounds, We Are Healed: Making The Passion of the Christ, included in the Passion DVD, Gibson asserts that there is “very little deviation from the synoptic Gospels.”

10 This was noticed of Wallace in Braveheart by Pendreigh (213–14) even before the release of the other two movies.

11 In the case of Apocalypto, this displacement of the visual idiom of the Crucifixion is paralleled by the appropriation of a Christian referent in the title.

12 Mark Goodacre points out the originality of this strategy in the context of Christ biopics (43).

13 According to Robert K. Johnston's assessment, Gibson's goal in The Passion “was to deglamorize events that have become idealized by providing a visceral experience of their horror” (Reel Spirituality 154).

14 Through such shots, it may be argued as well, The Passion replicates the schemata of the imitatio Christi by means of its own technical devices, and opens up new territories to the “revered gaze” which Alison Griffiths connects with a tradition of seeing the Crucifixion that harks back to medieval iconography.

15 The question is discussed by Stephen Prince with regard to the presentation of violence in The Passion.

16 As has already been noted by commentators of The Passion (see Apostolos-Cappadona 107–08; Wright 167) and as acknowledged by Gibson in the documentary By His Wounds, We Are Healed.