journey to the country where I live
before the Europeans conquered it
The vlogger who made this film with A.I. is right: Hollywood has shied away from the Conquest of Mexico because it’s a story that frankly demonstrates the superiority of the Spanish psychoclass over that of the Mesoamerican Indians.
But the filmmaker could have been more careful. For example, in one scene he portrays the papas—that is, the Amerindian priests wearing black capes—with Caucasian features. And in the case of the Spaniard Gonzalo Guerrero, in one scene he’s racially portrayed as European, and in another as Indian. A huge mistake in the film’s production!
The film is based on the historical account of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the most important chronicler of the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. But it interpolates an apocryphal account by the chronicler Francisco López de Gómara: that Saint James appeared riding a horse to help the Spaniards in a battle. Unlike Díaz, Gómara wasn’t with Cortés’s troops during the Spaniards’ expedition from Veracruz to the great Aztec capital. Gómara’s interpolated account, although brief, is pure fiction.
Furthermore, in the film many of the indigenous people, including Emperor Moctezuma, appear to be mestizo Mexicans, not purely indigenous. In the pre-Columbian world, like Asians, Mesoamericans had wider skulls. In other words, it’s not enough to simply tell your A.I. program to portray brown skin; physiognomy doesn’t always correspond to how these Amerindians must have looked in the 16th century.
Despite its obvious flaws, the home-made film is worth watching to get a visual idea of what I explain on pages 63-129 of Day of Wrath: an “encounter of psychoclasses”.
3 replies on “A visual”
See also this 4-minute scene from Mel Gibson’s 2006 Apocalypto.
The movie isn’t based on the Aztec world but on the Mayan. To date, Hollywood hasn’t filmed the conquest of Mexico.
Sorry if I phrase this sloppily, I’m about to go to bed and quite tired tonight:
It occurred to me watching the 4-minute Apocalypto clip… that’s what you get – that’s the consequence of taking abuse of children to its ‘zenith’ in a society. A nation of sadistic, heavily traumatised, serial-killer freaks, mutilated psychologically by cruelty and mutilating themselves further, locked into the primitive, sealing their own downfall as a society. I see the same signs, to a lesser degree in both modern self-harmers, and punks, goths, leftist countercultures, etc. (I think it’s fair to say that leftism is a consequence of abuse, not ideology)
It’s not a shock somehow that so few Spaniards could conquer them (although a resounding shame that their Christianity prevented a proper conclusion to this matter: they should have wiped them out utterly, purging that grotesque, evil people from the face of the planet for all time).
Indeed, but the problem with the American who created with A.I. the above-embedded film is that he didn’t research the topic thoroughly.
In another film, starting at this point for example, he mentions for a minute a “holy man” who spoke of the atrocities committed by the Spanish against the indigenous people: that they set dogs on them, tortured them, and burned them alive. The creator doesn’t mention that the supposed “holy man” was in fact an ethnic Jew who became a Dominican friar: Bartolomé de las Casas.
This ethnic Jew created, with his book, the Black Legend against Spain. Las Casas’ book is full of lies, as modern historians have demonstrated (I mention them in my trilogy).
Anyone interested in the debunking of Bartolomé de las Casas’ Black Legend by a contemporary Mexican can watch Juan Miguel Zunzunegui’s videos on YouTube. There are many, but I recommend this one, where Zunzunegui is interviewed by a Spaniard.