Tristan S. Rapp

"Whenever I return to the Maasai country, on the marches of southern Kenya and Tanzania, I find it at once both a thrilling and unsettling experience... a remote frontier, an inaccessible highland of nomadic warriors in whose company one still sees spears and bows and the fluttering red shuka garments"

@SandyofCthulhu I suppose I would put it this way - the scene is obviously ambivalent, but people want to interpret it in extremely black-and-white ways. Most people discussing this scene just take it in isolation without even really considering the actual plot of the film.

@SandyofCthulhu Yes, but the movie is not about the conflict between those two perspectives. Gibson certainly leans more towards the latter perspective, but the scene has to be interpreted within the context of the themes of the film rather than our current cultural wrangle over colonialism.

People only struggle to 'interpret' this scene because they are trying to wring out some simple, straightforward didactic message. It's a piece of classical tragedy and nemesis - the cruelties and perversions of the Mayan civilization are finally going to come crashing down around their heads; all their temples, their rituals, everything the movie has centered on, are about to be swept away; at the same time, this process is going to be one of enormous destruction and bloodshed, between the diseases, the wars, everything that is to follow. This is, in a real sense, poetic justice against the Maya, but the human collateral will be enormous, plausibly including Jaguar Paw's own people. The final scene radically relativizes the entire movie.

And no, this is also not what the movie is about. The point of all this being that for everyone who insists the proper understanding of this scene is blindingly obvious, the internet does not quite evidence this. x.com/ZoubirDeter/st…

Considering that this movie was written and directed by somebody 'on that ship' (or a ship, at any rate, albeit headed to another continent), it seems rather unlikely too that this person has the privileged interpretive insight they think they do. x.com/ravensnthorns/…

@JacobAShell I don't think I've tweeted about this movie before?

@Hieraaetus Why is this exact same tweet going viral again

@MadSubrahmanyam No, the movie is about the post-classical Maya, not the fall of the Aztecs, though the portrayal is slightly anachronistic for the post-classical period

@Hieraaetus sorry, I have not seen the movie, so maybe it is explained in there, but shouldnt they be Aztec not Maya?

@wahrheitYTBE I did not

@Hieraaetus did you just mistake the Maya for the Aztecs

@JacopoPili Don't be daft

@Hieraaetus Knowing Mel Gibson, a stupidly simplistic apologetic framework is obviously what he had in mind.

@PnishdMythMason It's poetic justice *for the Maya,* or again I think 'nemesis' is probably the more apt term, but with the crucial hook that it is a retribution which will also inflect yet further suffering on the victims of the Maya.

@Hieraaetus So I guess it's simultanously: "poetic justice" and "there's always a bigger fish"

@DanDavisWrites This process is, incidentally, essentially my theory as to how the Turks were formed.

Europe may still have been... 20%, 30%, even 35-40% Palaeo-European speaking well into the Bronze Age, it was the subsequent movements of the descendent IE cultures - the Celts, the Germanics, not even the Italics but specifically the Latins - that served to really scrub out these languages.

Yes, Basques don't have especially high steppe ancestry but are overwhelmingly R1b Y-haplogroup. You see a similar genetic-linguistic disconnect in Etruscans. Language, ancestry, and material culture don't always align. How did it happen in practice? We must speculate...

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