Apocalypto

I found it fitting to make Apocalypto the last movie I watched in 2010. If I wanted to get rid of a full year's worth of aggression and violence, Apocalypto could channel it all away. I suppose it's fitting of its maker in that respect.

In many ways, violence defines this movie. Much of it is unnecessarily graphic and seems to be placed in there only for the sake of making the audience squirm. Nonetheless, it excels at painting a vivid image of the human nature to subdue and conquer. The Mayans understood raping and pillaging just as well as the Huns, the Romans, the British imperialists, and the American colonists. By graphically revealing the violent tendencies of a civilization often held to be the victim of outside aggression, Gibson has highlighted the fact that all civilizations have been, at some point, capable of dehumanizing others and committing atrocities. The good, therefore, lies in whomever has the courage to oppose these atrocities.

While I expected our protagonist, Jaguar Paw, to take down the entire Mayan civilization in two hours, I was satisfied that his battles stayed personal. Though he didn't take a particularly active role in most of the story, being bound to a slave pole, the world through which he traveled, more than compensated. The costume design was extraordinary. The piercings, tattoos, and fantastic feather and skeletal attire were worth every second to behold, though I snickered when I realized that the women and children were dressed according to Christian modesty. I enjoyed the prop design as well. The tapir trap made me cringe, and the ridiculous puppet jaguar made me laugh out loud. Oh wait, that wasn't supposed to happen. Nonetheless, our hero managed to survive it all, despite a soon-to-be-badly-infected set of wounds, though the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the final moments leaves us less than hopeful for their long-term well being.

Through the despair and violence, anyone who views the aptly named Apocalypto is compelled to sit back and take two things into mind: that there is no final solution and that there is no choice, when faced by utter destruction, but to move on. For its fantastic production design, engrossing plot, and thought-provoking elements, I'd give Apocalypto four stars.

Beyond Good and Evil (Part 5)

Further quotes that led me to think. Damn them and their intellectualism!


186: “And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute—the laede neminem morality— what? Is that really—a pessimist?”


189: “Industrious races find it very troublesome to endure leisure; it was a masterpiece of English instinct to make the Sabbath so holy and so boring that the English began unconsciously to lust again for their work- and week-day.”


192: “Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and ‘guesses’ at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its ‘inventors.’ All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows."


193: "What we experience in dreams—assuming that we experience is often—belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced 'actually': we are richer or poorer on account of it, have one need more or less, and finally are led a little by the habits of our dreams even in broad daylight and in the most cheerful moments of our wide-awake spirit."


194: "Among helpful and charitable people one almost regularly encounters that clumsy ruse which first doctors the person to be helped—as if, for example, he 'deserved' help, required just their help, and would prove to be profoundly grateful for all help, faithful and submissive. With these fancies they dispose of the needy as of possessions, being charitable and helpful people from a desire for possessions. One finds them jealous if one crosses or anticipates them when they want to help.

"Involuntarily, parents turn children into something similar to themselves—they call that 'education.' Deep in her heart, no mother doubts that the child she has borne is her property; no father contests his right to subject it to his concepts and valuations."


199:: "Inasmuch as at all times, as long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of men (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many people who obeyed, compared with the small number of those commanding— considering, then, that nothing has been exercised and cultivated better and longer among men so far than obedience—it may fairly be assumed that the need for it is now so innate in the average man, as a kind of formal conscience that commands: "thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something else," in short, "thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. According to its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes upon things as a rude appetite, rather indiscriminately, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ears by someone who issues commands—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, public opinions."

Beyond Good and Evil (Parts 2-4)

Rather than go into long, elaborate detail about my perceptions of what I have read thus far in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (translated by Walter Kaufmann), I will rather share directly some of the content that has most struck me.


25. "...beware of martyrdom!  Of suffering 'for the truth's sake!'  Even of defending yourselves!  It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags...you have to pose as protectors of truth upon earth--as though 'the truth' were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors!"


26. "Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty, and the higher man must listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him."


30. "Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them."


39. "Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous--except perhaps the lovely 'idealists' who become effusive about the good, the true, and the beautiful and allow all kinds of motley, clumsy, and benevolent desiderata to swim around in utter confusion in their pond.  Happiness and virtue are no arguments.  But people like to forget--even sober spirits--that making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments."


40. "Whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable... A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life.  Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends.  And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there--and that this is well.  Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives."


41. "One has to test oneself to see that one is destined for independence and command--and do it at the right time.  One should not dodge one's tests, though they may be the most dangerous game one could play and are tests that are taken in the end before no witness or judge but ourselves."

"Not to remain stuck to a person--not even the most loved--every person is a prison, also a nook.  Not to remain stuck to a fatherland--not even if it suffers most and needs help most--it is less difficult to sever one's heart from a victorious fatherland.  Not to remain stuck to some pity--not even for higher men into whose rare torture and helplessness some accident allowed us to look.  Not to remain stuck to a science--even if it should lure us with the most precious finds that seem to have been saved up precisely for us.  Not to remain stuck to one's own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who flees ever higher to see ever more below him--the danger of the flier.  Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is in danger of the flier.  Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is the danger of dangers for superior and rich souls who spend themselves lavishly, almost indifferently, and exaggerate the virtue of generosity into a vice.  One must know how to conserve oneself: the hardest test of independence."


43. "One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many.  'Good' is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it.  And how should there be a 'common good!'  The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value."


46. "From the start, the Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation."


49. "What is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude it exudes: it is a very noble type of man that confronts nature and life in this way."

"Later, when the rabble gained the upper hand in Greece, fear became rampant in religion, too--and the ground was prepared for Christianity."


55. "Finally--what remained to be sacrificed?  At long last, did one not have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices?  Didn't one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing?  To sacrifice God for the nothing--this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this."


76. "Under peaceful conditions, a warlike man sets upon himself."


90. "Heavy, heavy-spirited people become lighter precisely through what makes others heavier, through hatred and love, and for a time they surface."


99. "The voice of disappointment: 'I listened for an echo and heard nothing but praise.'"


119. "There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day."


120. "Sensuality often hastens the growth of love so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up."


146. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."


149. "What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good—the atavism of a  more ancient ideal."


160. "One no longer loves one’s insight enough once one communicates it."