Blood, Guts, Mel and Me

I just watched Apocalypto last night.  It's a subtitled Mel Gibson movie about South American natives.  It was slightly enjoyable, but overall I could have skipped it.  The thing that struck me about the flick was that I started noticing the "Mel Gibson trend" in flim-making.  Mel has an apparent obsession with violent death scenes.

In Braveheart, William Wallace leads the Scottish against the British in bloody battle scenes.  It has been a while since I saw it, but I distinctly remember a soldier getting knocked to the ground.  A Scottish warrior uses a pick-axe or hammer to bash the British victim's helmet, piercing it.  Blood instantly gushes down across the man's face. 

Gibson next fights the British again in The Patriot, a story of southern hero Benjamin Martin. Martin leads Continental military units in the American Revolution.  Who can forget Gibson's character hacking furiously over and over again into a British soldier's body, stirring up enough blood in a slurry to completely drench himself.

Next,we find Gibson's bloody handiwork in the blockbuster The Passon of the Christ.  I get really stirred up myself about this one, but not for the spiritual reasons that many people did during the initial presentation on the screen.  I truly feel that the portrayal of Jesus in this movie was gratuitously violent.  I do not in any way want to diminish the scourging that the Lord Jesus endured during his sufferings on the cross and immediately preceding.  However, the film seems totally obsessed with beating Jesus to a bloody pulp.  The focus of the movie did not seem to be on the substitutionary atonement provided by God as much as it was on the sheer volume of blood that one man carries within his veins.  Movie makers have for many decades re-enacted the events of Christ's Passion.  None of them that I have seen chose to focus so much on ribbons of torn tissue...and they made their point.  It just seems odd to me that so many parents I know think it appropriate to shield their children's innocent eyes from such brutality "until they are older."

Now I see Apocalypto.  Perhaps it is the logical next step in the progression of brutality.  In The Passion, God made a sacrifice for the benefit of mankind.  In Apocalypto, we see man making his own sacrifices.  Severed heads roll down Aztecan temple steps.  Men are impaled, bludgeoned, cut open.  There is even the old Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom bit where the pagan priest removes his victim's heart and shows it to him just before he dies.  Though dramatic, I found the film more disturbing that anything else. 

The reason I write all this is just to point out that the work a man produces tells something about him.  What do these films say about Mel Gibson?  He was called a hero by many Christians for The Passion.  But do the string of heads and rivers of staged blood demand a different verdict for the famed director?  Or do they simply reveal more about me, the one who watches every blood-splattered scene?