Turning Legend into Fact, Myth into History
In 1519, Hernan Cortes sailed from Cuba, landed in Mexico and made his way to the Aztec capital. Along the way, he founded the city of Veracruz, defeating several local, coastal tribes, as he and his soldiers made their way inland. From these tribes he reportedly learned of King Moctezuma and rumors of a “City of Gold.” Whether these stories were the origins of the famous legend of El Dorado is unknown, but it is likely that, on hearing them, Cortes and his men expected to find plentiful treasures when they reached the Aztec capital.
Drawing on both the myth of the “City of Gold” and the historical Cortes’ arrival in Mexico, The Road to El Dorado, the newest animated feature from Dreamworks who brought us The Prince of Egypt last year is a fast and furious tale of two Spanish con men who are unwitting stowaways on Cortes’ ship and end up locating the mythical city of El Dorado, defeating its villainous high priest and saving the city from discovery (and plundering) by the Spanish conquistadors. The entire film is a feast for the eyes, with gorgeously painted backgrounds, dynamic camera movement and character animation, and some brilliantly rendered ocean scenes. However, the story itself, set in this pseudo-historical context, is flippant and vacuous (appropriately enough, I suppose, for a “family entertainment”), while ignoring the implications it raises by resurrecting the tale of fantastically wealthy paradise, inhabited by so-called “savages,” in the “New World,” a world, of course, just waiting to be “discovered.”
As I sat in the darkened theater before the film began, surrounded by small, roving bands of sugar-smacked children, I overheard one parent tell his son, “This is a movie about history.” Just why any parent, who should at least know the skeletal details of the conquest of the “New World,” would mislead his child thus is beyond me. In fact, The Road to El Dorado might seem relatively responsible, in that it is not being advertised as a “movie about history”; instead, and rather more unpretentiously, posters call it a “comedic tale of friendship and adventure.” And yet, while friendship and adventure abound in this “tale,” why such an oddly glossy retelling of Cortes’ landing in Mexico is the context for these general themes is another question entirely.
The film uses many elements of Cortes’ actual meeting with Moctezuma in the story of Miguel (Kenneth Branagh) and Tulio (Kevin Kline), our two “friends and adventurers,” while omitting the wholesale slaughter that followed los conquistadores’ welcome in Moctezuma’s court. It opts instead for a moral lesson, in which the comic duo renounce paradise and their own worldly desires in order to save the inhabitants of the city from Cortes and his mirror-cuirassed thugs. Not to say that Cortes is missing entirely from the narrative. He shows up periodically as a menacing, square-jawed clod, striking momentary fear into the audience and implying the real danger posed by Spanish “explorers.” But the archetypal conquistador is not the primary villain here, just a historical signifier.
The primary villain in The Road to El Dorado is a scheming, deceptively obsequious high priest, Tzekel-Kan (Armand Assante). Tzekel-Kan, the representative of the native religious beliefs (which are caricatures of Aztec religion), is portrayed as a misanthropic zealot with an overwhelming bloodlust for human sacrifice, not, it seems, as an offering to the gods, but just for the sheer pleasure of it. In this paradise, religion is the oppressor, and the representative Europeans, Miguel and Tulio, are heroic liberators who rid the city of their psychotic priest and his black magic. Cortes is also identified with religion, proclaiming to Miguel and Tulio as he towers and glowers over them that, “My crew was as handpicked as the disciples of Christ.” Cortes as a stand-in, handpicking, scary Christ here embodies some superficial awareness of the use of Christianity as a mechanism of colonial conquest and slavery. But this hardly ameliorates the troub