Arthurian Obscura

A modern retelling of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is apt given that the source is a 14th-century romance of medieval Christian chivalry set in the supposed antiquity of Arthurian legend and assuming the modern retelling is nothing like the trailer I've seen for "Sword of the Valiant" (1984). Remarkable of such Camelot literature is when it reflexively refers to its own construction. As here, this tends to involve a magician or other character endowed with supernatural abilities as the surrogate writer of and within the story. Moreover, as the fantasy of the past itself was written in the future, so the future is conjured or foretold by these characters from the past. All the more self-allusive that the poem alternates between rhyme and alliterative verse--and for the allegory. Trying, from page to screen, to transliterate a visual allusion is the trick and ultimately the motion picture's triumph--its "bob and wheel" being based on sight.

Chivalry turned environmentally green
Mother Nature deflowered by the knight
Becomes the mythopoetic to be seen
Nay, a play of light

Or, something like that, but in the dead language of Middle English. Anyways, I'll drop the rhyme while it's at its prime and temper the alliteration before it becomes illiteration. Point is, the amusement aside of a barked primate, giants, a spirit, a haunted house, a talking fox, and games involving decapitation and sex, the name of the game here is the story referring back to itself. Thus, when the king asks to hear a tale of adventure and Morgan le Fay performs a magic ritual, a tree man enters the circle of the round table to begin the beheading game that sends Gawain on a hero's journey a year later to complete it. Besides an adventure for the king's amusement as conjured by a witch's sorcery, the mythological story is all about how a legend is spun and of a not-quite-a-knight out to realize his own fairy tale. The first scene is framed as--literally framed by a window revealed as the camera pans back to reveal it's--Gawain's dream of a chivalrous action, of a knight rescuing a damsel in distress via horseback and as Gawain actually awakens from his drunken stupor in a brothel, no less. By the way, I love how this scene even obscures the fire by framing it off-center and in the background; it sets the tone early for an Arthurian tale that even obscures the king's name.

True to revisionist form, chivalry becomes largely a dream construct, Christianity may be marginalized and ambiguity introduced beyond the chiaroscuro effects of the imagery, women are no longer mere temptresses and tricksters, the Green Knight becomes the tree-like Green Man chopped with the blade like the glade we see loggers make of cleared forest, Arthur and Guinevere are unnamed and decrepit king and queen, and the protagonist Gawain through whom we wholly see the highly-subjective and individualistic revisionist diegesis is played by an Englishman of Indian descent, Dev Patel, his difference further reinforced by casting Sarita Choudhury as his mother, le Fay. Again, apt, although that itself, granted, may be a modern or postmodern reading, but that's the era of David Lowery and company's "The Green Knight."

Visually lyrical, if fitfully underlit, musically striking, yet seldom grandiose, and finely acted, albeit irregularly casted and dressed, it's a fascinating cinematic transmutation. I don't adore every alteration to the original poem, but, to a degree, they tend to make sense, and I do adore the reflexivity--especially the cinema-adjacent sort. There's a puppet show reenacting the beheading game, a misdirecting magician, a mini-quest also involving decollation and a redheaded spirit turned redheaded fox, mushrooms-induced hallucinated giants, tarrot card prophecies, an ultimately homoerotic hunting game, and dreamed futures--including that wonderful time-lapse 360-degrees-revolving shot of human decay and ecological regrowth. Moreover, the importance of the telling over the story itself is emphasized by stylized chapter titles and panel paintings inspired by the poem's history as an illustrated book. Heck, there's not only a book within this book, but a library.

Speaking of which, something that beguiles me concerning such fairy tales and that is especially prominent here is all the beheading. Of two of the most popular children's books, one, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," is surprisingly full of them, and the other, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," surprisingly includes none despite much talk of, "Off with their heads!" One may see it, too, in the films of the first cine-magician, Georges Méliès, who oft removed his or others' heads as both the magician making the movie and by playing the magician within the film's diegesis, such as with the stop-substitution splice in his early trick film "The Four Troublesome Heads" (1898). The same cine-magician would produce the earliest film féeries, including "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), where even the Moon is but a bodiless face.

No children's bedtime story, though, my favorite reading of decapitation in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is psychoanalytical, of the penetration of beheading equated with castration (see, for instance, "Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'" by David L. Boyd). This makes more sense in the original poem, I assume, with its defense of Christian chivalry against the perceived twin threats of feminization and homosexuality. Note, too, that originally it was le Fey behind the entire narrative trick for apparently petty reasons and that the exchange game involving the Lord and Lady of the castle is a more protracted affair of the Lord hunting animals as the Lady attempts to seduce Gawain, the result being Gawain homoerotically returning the Lady's kisses to the Lord. Although seemingly odd that a 21st-century movie would largely sidestep the homoeroticism of a 14th-century poem, I understand this was surely to avoid the text's implicit homophobia--such sexual taboos as with the Lady and the Lord being one of the hero's tests of honor, or whatever, on his quest. Still, Gawain returning the handjob that was added to the movie would've been an attention grabber.

Another addition to the movie not found in the poem, of Winifred, would also seem to undermine the decapitation-as-castration theory, as Winifred is a woman who has lost her head, so to speak, but in psychobabble talk of the castration complex, women are already marked by the lack of a phallus--whether a penis or the symbolic axe the male characters like to swing around (and as opposed to the feminized green girdle). All allegedly Oedipal, I'm sure. (Edit: The already decapitated (i.e. lacking phallus) Winifred could be said to represent "penis envy," with the reflective pond in her scene representing Gawain's "mirror stage" of supposed child development in psychobabble theory.)

Plus, there's the other addition of Essel, who as his prostitute-girlfriend wishes Gawain not to be castrated-decapitated at all--providing the feminine counterweight to the also feminine defense of patriarchy in the movie provided by le Fay. Regardless, in the poem, as opposed to Christmas in the movie, the beheading game was played on New Year's Day, significant to Christian tradition as the Day of Circumcision of Christ. Thus, when the Green Knight merely nicks the neck of Gawain in the religiously-symbolic Green Chapel, the implication is that this allegorical circumcision puts relief to his castration anxiety, or, as Boyd vividly put it, "the image of the Green Knight's large axe coming down on the submissive and girdled Gawain and creating a gash-like wound from which blood flows suggests both a loss of maidenhead and a figurative castration threat." This is partly lost on the movie's altered ending and thematic additions and subtractions.

The only other slight qualm I might have here is that the blind woman may not be emphasized enough, as I consider blind characters to have demonstrable potential for reflexivity spotlighting the visual nature of cinema. Then again, that she is all but ignored, an unacknowledged presence, until her final moment on screen may be said to reflect the blindness of the usual cinematic diegesis in being blind to the spectator watching it. Like the puppets in the play-within-the-play not breaking the fourth wall with their on-screen audience. My favorite reflexive device here, though, is the camera obscura, which, as opposed to the portrait painted of Gawain earlier at the height of his unearned celebrity, is photographic, indexical. This is in addition to the doubled roles played by Alicia Vikander, the doubled green gifts of protection, a magician and a witch, the dual knights, the blow for a blow upon two Christmases, books-within-books, plays-within-plays, games-within-games--painting and photography within a painted and photographed motion picture.

Partly in place of what's lost as far as a castration complex, there's also a "The Seventh Seal" (1957) sort of analogy here, albeit one more ecological than ecclesiastical, of film as akin to death, of one made still as if posing for the camera obscura as their likeness is transferred from lens and light from their body and onto the framed canvas. Winifred's addition, too, adds the Shakespearean reference to "Hamlet," as in "To be, or not to be." Admittedly, it's a bit upside down, as with life and death, Christianity and paganism, man and nature, or hell and earth, but the image of death follows Gawain throughout his journey, whether real or imagined skeletons and ghosts, or perhaps alluding to the decapitated nature of movie editing with the story's motif of the removal of heads from bodies. The altered ending makes sense in this deathly light, too. Why shouldn't the deconstruction of myth also be decollated.