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Article Excerpt
This paper analyzes Mel Gibson's depictions of human sacrifice in Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ in conjunction with Georges Bataille's writings on sacrificial rituals in The Accursed Share, Inner Experience, and related texts. Gibson at the dawn of the twenty-first century, like Bataille in the middle of the twentieth century, contributes significantly to bringing sacrifice into our collective imagination. These two men share a fascination with rituals of blood letting, running throughout virtually the entirety of their careers, which they squarely put, through their writings or their films, on the proverbial cultural map.
The intersection of Bataille's and Gibson's interests in extreme violence is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in their portrayals of sacrifice in preColumbian Mexico. The filmmaker's depiction of such a ritual transposes onto the screen virtually image for image the account that Bataille proposes of Mesoamerican sacrificial rites in his writings. In both of their cases, moreover, the specter of sacrifice functions as a vehicle to present their views of the society in which they live. Both men allegorize pre-Columbian sacrifice, exploiting it to their own ends. These ends are, however, as we will see, quite different. More generally, one might note the fascination that the two men share with the graphic depiction of particularly gruesome acts of torture, evident in The Passion of the Christ, which Roger Ebert calls "the most violent film [he has] ever seen," and Bataille's obsession with the horrific photographs of the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li, a Chinese man sentenced to death by Leng-Tch'e (cutting into pieces) during the Boxer Rebellion, which communicate, the theorist says, "to [his] knowledge, the most anguishing of worlds accessible to us through images captured on film" (Tears 205). Here again, the two men's interests in depictions of extreme violence seem to converge. Yet, once again, this convergence renders all the more palpable the gap that separates the two men. Through a comparative analysis of Bataille's and Gibson's recourse to rituals of blood letting, the present essay brings into relief the specificity of the two men's projects, thereby enabling us to appreciate the uses and abuses to which the specter of sacrifice has been put in our time.
The Ongoing Fascination with Sacrifice
As Marina Galletti brings to light in a recent article, a concern with Mexico in general and Aztec sacrificial rites in particular "irrigates Bataille's entire corpus," from "L'Amerique disparue" (Vanished America), Bataille's first major article, published in 1928, to The Tears of Eros, the last book he writes, published in 1961 (Galletti 54; my translation). Bataille's investigations of Mesoamerican sacrificial practices are complemented throughout his career by meditations on other images of torture and ritual murder, including, most famously, the hair-raising photographs of the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li. Denis Hollier locates the latter images, called the "hundred pieces"--one of which was given to Bataille by his analyst, Adrien Borel, in 1925--at the origin of Bataille's literary endeavor: "One thing is sure: Bataille began to write with the image of the tortured Chinese man before him" (84). It is to the same images of dismemberment that Bataille returns in the closing section of The Tears of Eros, where he juxtaposes these photographs with an image of an Aztec human sacrifice dating to around 1500, which he had already included in the 1939 text of "The Sacred." Whether in the form of meditations on pre-Columbian sacrificial rites or through contemplation of photographs of a man being hacked apart alive, ritualized violence constitutes a particularly insistent obsession in Bataille's work, running through virtually the entirety of his career.
I therefore disagree with Patrick ffrench's affirmation that "the revelations of the existence of the Nazi concentration and death camps in 1944-45 give rise to a displacement in Bataille's thought from the anthropological terrain of sacrifice to questions related to poetry" (126). One might note, in this regard, some curious omissions from ffrench's article. Although he mentions in passing The Accursed Share--the first volume of which was published in 1949 and the title of which refers, Bataille states at one point, to the sacrificial victim--(1)it is surprising that ffrench does not pay more attention to this postwar study whose title evokes sacrifice. More problematically, ffrench fails to mention Bataille's last book, The Tears of Eros, which, as noted above, concludes with a meditation on the "hundred pieces"--"this photograph, "Bataille writes in 1961, that "had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain" (Tears 206). When ffrench says, then, that "despite the fact that the attention to the anthropology of sacrifice persists in the post-war writing, in La Part maudite and L' Erotisme for example, it is my contention that the war and the revelations of Nazi atrocities induce a crisis in this anthropological framework, which pushes this mode of thinking towards its collapse," he overstates the case to the point of distortion (127). Unless one were to take the "towards" of the final clause of ffrench's affirmation here in the sense of a vague indication, which subsequent thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben would then follow to its conclusion, ffrench's position appears hyperbolic at best. Bataille's work bears witness to an ongoing fascination with sacrifice, up to and including the closing paragraphs of his last book.
Gibson's career is also punctuated, from his first major role as an actor, in the 1979 Mad Max, to his most recent directorial project, Apocalypto, by images of torture and murder. One thinks, for example, of the penultimate scene of Mad Max, in which the eponymous hero, having tracked down the last surviving member of the marauding motorcycle gang that killed his wife and son, handcuffs the captured gang member's ankle to an overturned car, places a broken headlight under a leak in the gas line, sets a burning cigarette lighter to ignite the fuel once it overflows the headlight, and advises his victim that it would take him ten minutes to cut through the handcuffs with the hacksaw he hands him. "Now, if you're lucky," Max explains as he turns to walk away, "you could hack through your ankle in five minutes." This sadistic execution of Johnny Boy at the end of Mad Max anticipates the countless beatings, murders, and acts of torture that Gibson's characters suffer or inflict on others in such films as The Road Warrior, the Lethal Weapon movies, Braveheart, Conspiracy Theory, and Payback. Perhaps the most harrowing act of violence that a Gibson character performs is the "hundred pieces" into which Benjamin Martin and his fellow patriots cut British soldiers captured at Fort Wilderness in The Patriot. "We took our time," the Gibson character recounts. "We cut them apart slowly, piece by piece. [...]...
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