50 new things in 2023, part 14/50

[kindkit]

This week's new-to-me thing was 2021's The Green Knight, starring Dev Patel. I badly wanted to watch this in the cinema when it came out, but . . . 2021. I'd still like to see it on a big screen sometime, because visually it deserved better, or at least bigger, than my phone.

It's a very, very, very weird movie, based (loosely) on a 14th century poem that was already quite weird. I think I see what filmmaker David Lowery, who wrote and directed, was trying to do, and I understand why he didn't choose to make a closer adaptation of the original. But I still wish somebody would make one, because it would be awesome in a very different way.

Spoilers ensue

The poem, to me, is about the impossibility of chivalry and its reconstitution as a kind of social fiction. Gawain, having failed to live up to proper knightly behavior, wears the green girdle forever after as a mark of shame--but the whole court takes to wearing the same out of love for him. It's . . . nice? Critical, but fundamentally gentle towards human weakness.

The movie, by contrast, gives us a much bleaker world. It's devastated by war, haunted by magic past human comprehension, deeply tragic. Human connection, the love and friendship that save Gawain in the poem, are unreachable here; the best choice is to die bravely. In some sense, you're already dead anyway. (Hanging is one, and heading is the other, and death is all; this is a Marlovian world.)

The darkness of the story does a little to reconcile me to how the movie handles the whole kiss exchange plot. On the one hand, it's more explicitly erotic in the movie than the poem; on the other hand, Gawain rejects the movie kiss, while in the poem he's happy to pay those debts. In the world of the movie, sexuality and desire don't make much difference; love, if it even exists, will not save you. It might get you a bit of tenderness at the end, right before your head comes off.

To be clear, I did like The Green Knight. I think it's a good movie, an interesting movie, and enjoyable to watch even if ultimately it's kind of harrowing.

I still want to watch something closer to the original poem, though.

Comments

[delphi]

That was largely how I felt about this movie. It was interesting, beautifully made, and certainly had a strong point of view, but kind of harrowing. I finished it a little unsure how that point of view developed and whether its departure from the original (or at least the main inspiration) was just based on the loss of that age from a modern perspective or if something else had inspired the changes.

[lilliburlero]

I came to the conclusion that it was more a film of/about the beheading-contest tale-type than an adaptation of your actual Cotton Nero A.x., though I do think in some sense it is about chastity in the sense 'sexual ethics' too. I read the closing vision as a cautionary tale about the dangers of heterosexuality patriarchy? But I don't think it gets close to being as queer as the poem.

What I really missed was the poem's vivid sense of warm hospitable interiors opposed to the bleak and cruel wilderness outdoors, which I think a cinematic treatment could have done so much with! But it would require medieval people to appear clean, happy and brightly-dressed, a thing no director has seemed willing to depict these 30 years or more. Bertilak's castle looked like the worst New England B&B in existence.