Apocalypto

Summary of the Reading

Apocalypto revolves around the story of a young Mayan villager named Jaguar Paw.
Jaguar Paw’s pastoral, hunter-gatherer life in the forest is adjourned by the ransacking and
ravaging of the village by a band of warmongering marauders. He then manages to hide his
pregnant wife and young son in a nearby pit. After, Jaguar Paw is seized and is brought to the
marauder’s nearby city. There, he and other captives from his village are made ready to be
sacrificed. At the top of a monumental pyramid, Jaguar Paw is forced to watch as a lot of his
companions have their hearts pulled out and incinerated and their decollated heads are thrown
down the long frontal flight of stairs. The priest leading the proceedings tells the cramming
masses below that the sacrifices will keep their people strong and will serve as their protection
from plague, illnesses, and frailty. When it is finally Jaguar Paw’s turn on the altar, a solar
eclipse adjourns the events, and he is saved, although only momentarily. Next, the priest tells
Zero Wolf, who is the leader of the warriors, to get rid of the prisoners. However, Jaguar Paw,
with his wits, get the better of Zero Wolf in a death-dealing game and manages to flee from the
group of warriors, who give pursuing back into the jungle. The events that follow, from just a
little over the halfway mark of the film, is just simply perfect action-adventure sequence, as
executed by Mel Gibson: the fast cutting of frames between running hunters and hunted, slow
motion takes of the body blows, the swerving of zipping arrows, the bumping into dangerous
animals in the wild, jumping over huge waterfalls, and finally, Jaguar Paw turning the tables on
his attackers and, outwitting them using his advantage on the homecourt. On the one hand,
Jaguar Paw successfully gets away from his pursuers and manages to save and rescue his family
in the end.

Apocalypto incorporates almost all the controversial and perplexing attributes of horrible
portrayal and characterization of Native Americans or indigenous people in Hollywood films,
many of which take shape as the movie progresses and seen in the presumptuous style in which
the film is manufactured and put together. The movie is such a formularized and foreseeable
compendium of overused allegory and tropes, executed both in the plot and style of the film but
also in the attempt to participate in discussion about representation and Native Americans, while
dismissing it altogether. Positive responses to the film, however, are not hard to find since most
of these focus on Gibson’s expertise and genius in the action-adventure department and not this
form’s relationship to non-White people, the film’s poor execution of themes in combination
with Gibson’s public character necessitate further comment and critique.

Application

The four types of society in Lenski’s sociocultural evolution is presented in the movie. The
tribe Jaguar Paw belongs to is a hunter-gatherer society. However, in the movie, it is in its way to
transitioning to a horticultural-pastoral society. Jaguar Paw’s tribe is considered a hunter-
gatherer society because they rummage and hunt for their food. We see this in the very onset of
the film at which point they seized and captured a wild boar in the forest. Jaguar Paw’s tribe,
additionally has a shaman, who is the father of Jaguar Paw, namely Flint Sky. There is also a
sense of family-centeredness within their tribe. This is seen in the way they treat each other as
brothers and sisters. In the film, Jaguar Paw’s dad told him that he must never publicly display
his fear. This fear will negatively affect the tribe. In the same way, Jaguar Paw’s tribe is also
considered a horticultural-pastoral society because they exhibit the concept of settlements. They
resided in a small village. Also, they had an advanced and systemic way of hunting animals. This
is shown in the way they already well-versed in formulating traps. We see this in the beginning
when they hunt the wild boar. The other society presented in the movie are the Aztecs. In the
film, we see that people in the Aztec community are poverty-stricken however the rulers of
remain idle and do not do anything. As a result, the people were experiencing a famine. The
rulers were misleading their people. We also see that their women were sold as slaves or
entertainment pieces. Basically, women in their society were heavily objectified. However, they
were advanced in a way they had some kind of technology. In the movie, we see them making
use of machines to produce cements out of the rocks. The Spaniards in the film were an
industrial society. They had huge ships which they used for transportation.

In Emile Durkheim’s ‘functionalism’ theory, he used “society and function” as the two
primary ideas. Durkheim explained that the human beings’ communal/social bonds affects the
social changes in a certain society. For instance, in the film, we see that the people in Jaguar
Paw’s tribe lived by a uniform set of norms and belief systems. Hence, every person in the tribe
was collaborating and doing their own part in collecting and seeking food for the survival of their
tribe, most especially his family. The secure and sturdy social tie can also be observed within the
early Aztecs. Humans who belong to that tribe were compelled to detain and murder humans as
sacrifices. They were taught this was the way to please God. Killing was a moral act to them. On
the other hand, the Spaniards had the poorest social bond. They had to be away from their
families and country for a long period of time due to all the travelling and sailing. 

REFERENCE/S:

Bussat, F., & Bussat, M. A. (n.d.). Apocalypto | Film Review | Spirituality & Practice.

Spirituality & Practice.

https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/reviews/view/16374/apocalypto

Little, W. (2014, November 6). Chapter 4. Society and Social Interaction – Introduction to

Sociology – 1st Canadian Edition. Pressbooks.

https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology/chapter/chapter4-society-and-social-

interaction/
Pope, W. (1975). Durkheim as a Functionalist. The Sociological Quarterly, 16(3), 361–379.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1975.tb00954.x