#with the caveat that I don't understand film and pretty much refuse to learn.

[notbecauseofvictories]

this story brave and bold

A lot of virtual ink has been spilled about different aspects of The Green Knight---the New Yorker has an article about the movie’s focus on time (both seasonal and mortal) and another (from Slate or the Atlantic, I think) focuses on how the original poem’s tension between chivalry and courtly love gets translated into the modern day. My favorite drew a straight line through the strange tensions and ambiguity of the poem to the ambivalent themes introduced and left unsettled by the film.

(That was the thing that most struck me, watching it---the absolute refusal, start to finish, to resolve this strange story into anything moralistic or easily digested; it felt like an Arthurian legend, with all the winding asides and opaqueness.)

Since those essays all exist and are better than anything I’ll write here, I wanted to point at something else, that really only occurred to me today.

See Gawain and the Green Knight is not my native habitat when it comes to Arthurian legend. I’m a Le Morte d’Arthur girl with some T.H. White on the side, so it’s strange to think of Gawain not running around the countryside with Gaheris in tow, losing jousts and being denied the Siege Perilous and the Grail quest, only to watch his brothers and sons die, one by one, at Lancelot’s hands. Nevertheless, even stripped of most of the things I love about Arthurian legend, The Green Knight (2021) captured something inherent in it.

Namely, that the world is full of strangeness and chaos, that you are only in control of your own actions, and even then, the frailty of man is great.

It’s a pretty consistent theme for Malory---I’ve read more than my fair share of academic articles talking about the influence of the Wars of the Roses on his chaotic, entropic depiction of Camelot. From the very title (“The Death of Arthur”) you know this will be a tragedy, and there’s an air of Greek drama to it all as knight by knight, the Round Table fails to meet the ideals set out for it. Whether it’s Kay’s pride or Gawaine’s bloodlust and eagerness, or Bors/Percival’s temptation or Lancelot’s love for Guinevere, every single knight is shown to be a fallible, frail human.

(Well, except Galahad, who after attaining the Grail, is assumed to Heaven. So he doesn’t count.)

And yet, despite this, the world occupied by the Knights of Camelot is one of strangeness, violence, mercy, visions, mysticism, ladies strangely dressed who show up out of nowhere, and other things inexplicable. When you live in that world, there are a very limited number of things you can control---mostly who you kill, and who you deal with honestly. You can’t control the strange deer, questing beasts, or prophetic dreams, but you can still choose. 

(Malory’s Gawain only attains his knighthood after suffering for refusing to show mercy to a knight pleading for his life, and killing the knight’s lady by mistake. Integral to his oath of knighthood is swearing to ever after respect and honor all ladies.)

Even though TGK was taken from a very different context I could feel this sense of overwhelming strangeness/essential human weakness/necessity of choice moving in and throughout the film. 

It was in Garwain’s journey into the north, the civilized and recognizable world peeling back as he encountered spirits, giants, and eventually the murky lands of Bertilak and the Green Chapel; it was in his flinching from sharing what he ‘’won’’ at Hautdesert, and then again when he encountered the Green Knight and asked for a minute more, not yet. The sustained meditation on who Gawain is/will be if he refuses to choose, continues deflecting blows rather than accept the consequences of his choice.

It was all there. The movie didn’t settle on an answer, any more than the original poetry does, because that’s not the really the point. The point is the negotiation between the world, our own weakness, and our will. It’s there, translated expertly into film---I don’t think it was by accident that Gawain sets out wearing yellow, stumbles increasingly into blues, and then ends up in lurid yellow again as he makes his final choice; then bleeding into the green moss of the final title card. 

Yellow and blue make green, and green---as Alicia Vikander tells us---is the color of life and rot and mortality and immortality. And that’s what you get when the human will clashes with strangeness and chaos of the world: more life, and more rot, but mostly wildness.