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It occurred to me while watching Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto that if the indefatigable padre ever made a film of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, he’d give us shot after shot of Madame Defarge knitting as tumbrels roll and the guillotine falls: chop, chop, another name for the embroidery, our summary witness to massacre. So what’s the equivalent here, the iconic ur-cliche? Obviously the lopped-off heads skipping down temple steps, which remind you somehow (or at least remind me) of the sinister basketball in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend bouncing along the subdivision asphalt: double dribble, anyone? … or maybe it’s only a traveling violation. Or the “still-beating hearts” (and what’s with the ritual rubric? is everyone quoting from the same pulp authority?) yanked from the innards of newly dispatched corpses, a bloody figuration that Father Mel’s presumably imbibed through countless boy’s life fictions and potted histories of the Maya (H.G. Wells et al), the Argosy magazine serials of his youth … But that’s how it is, more often than not, with Gibson and the bloodletting: not as connotatively focused as one might hope or expect, meanings ramifying in every which direction. (Like that flying squirrel Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, limbs splayed in agony as he soars above the stationary camera in absurdly extended slo-mo: the product of knotted whips and chains or some tres hip variant of electroglide in red?)
