IN REVIEW
THE GREEN KNIGHT A TALE TRIED, TESTED,
& INVERTED
T
by Ted Giese
his eerie and foreboding retelling of the epic late 14 th-century Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a purposeful inversion of the long-studied and revered anonymous work. While it diverges at some points from the general narrative of the original poem—which Gawain purists will dislike—it goes even further, reversing almost all of the story’s elements. This raises the question: to what end? In this, The Green Knight presents an unanswered mystery. The general story of both the poem and David Lowery’s film is that of a beheading game and an exchange-of-winnings game. On Christmas, a mysterious Green Knight with a menacing ax comes to the court of King Arthur in Camelot. While all are seated at the round table celebrating the birth of Christ, the Green Knight challenges Arthur and his knights to a game. The Green Knight will allow a single blow from one of the assembled knights and then he will return that blow if he can. The Green Knight kneels and offers up his neck. Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, accepts the challenge and cuts off the Green Knight’s head, but to the surprise of everyone the Knight picks up his head and tells Gawain that one year hence he will return the blow at the Green Chapel. As the following year nears its close, Gawain sets out to find the Green Knight and the chapel. With
only a few days until the appointment, Gawain finds himself in the castle of Lord Bertilak who engages him in an exchange-of-winnings game. Each day the Lord goes hunting he will give Gawain the best of what he catches and in return Gawain gives to the castle’s Lord what he gains that day. The Lord’s wife daily tries to entrap Gawain sexually but he resists her advances. They exchange kisses and Gawain withholds from the Lord the last gift from the Lady of the castle—a green sash she claims will protect against any attack. With the sash about his waist, Gawain departs to face the Green Knight and his doom. The film follows the same general narrative of the poem, and yet it also inverts it. The poem, for example, is about a knight who despite having his virtue tested succeeds in remaining
a knight—albeit a repentant one. The film however is about a man who gains virtue through the testing process itself, only becoming a true knight in the end. In the poem Gawain is a courageous knight before the story begins; in the film, Gawain is dubbed a knight only after facing the prospect of death honestly. In the poem, Gawain is
generous, courteous, chaste, friendly, and devout; in the film he is agnostic at best, socially awkward, unchaste, discourteous, and covetous. He is selfless in the poem; in the film, he is generally selfish. He succeeds in the face of adversity in the poem; in the film, he is dragged along kicking and screaming by the plot until the film’s final frames. The film’s title—The Green Knight—in a sense then serves a dual meaning: it refers of course to the Knight whom Gawain is seeking. But it can also refer to Gawain as being “green” in terms of his personal experience as a knight.
INVERTED MYTH Lowery goes out of his way to obfuscate who the surrounding characters in the film are. He doesn’t give the audience any indications that the king is Arthur or that his queen is Guinevere. Gawain’s mother in the film is Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s halfsister and sorceress, but she is never referred to by name (in the poem she would be Gawain’s aunt not his mother). Merlin is there too but has no dialogue and no one says his name. On the one hand, this shifts attention onto Gawain and away from anything the audience knows about Arthurian legend. On the other hand, it creates a situation where only those in the know truly understand what’s going on. That last part is a kind of occulting: a purposeful hiding in plain sight. When someone in the know figures out who all these people are, they are confronted with the fact that Lowery has presented them differently than they appear in the poem. Is this a commentary on the danger of trusting myths? Or is it something else? W h y i s G a w a i n a n ov i c e knight in this film rather than one already tested and true? Putting the best construction on Lowery’s motivations, we might suggest this change in Gawain’s character is a
THE CANADIAN LUTHERAN September/October 2021
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