All the Wars In the World

From A.O. Scott’s review of Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s new movie about the Mayan end times:

A man’s face is chewed off by a jaguar. Another’s neck is pierced by darts tipped with frog venom. Most disturbing, perhaps, is the sight of hundreds of corpses haphazardly layered in an open pit: a provocative and ill-advised excursion into Holocaust imagery on this director’s part.

I don’t mean to be macabre, and I’m certainly not defending Mel, but this strikes me as an incredibly depressing connection for Scott to make.  Every tragedy of the past century has involved corpses and pits.  I don’t think Jews have a monopoly on that image—but more importantly, I don’t think we want a monopoly on it.   I mean, do you?