Fellowship & Fairydust

“The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise of happy men between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.”

• C.S. Lewis, “The Necessity of Chivalry” (Present Concerns 1-2)

David Lowery’s The Green Knight is an odd film for many reasons. For one thing, it opens very differently than the poem it’s based on, with a young Gawain in a brothel. Scholars may point out that a lecherous Gawain fits the Post-Vulgate works, but it’s still unexpected when the poem sees him as Arthur’s most virtuous knight. From there, the movie follows the poem’s plot with some additions: the Green Knight appears at the Round Table and challenges anyone to chop off his head. Gawain takes the challenge, afterward the Green Knight picks up his head and reminds Gawain that the deal was for them to meet a year later so the Knight can return the blow. A year later, Gawain leaves his prostitute lover Essel for his quest, during which he meets thieves, a beheaded woman called Winifred, giants, and is propositioned by a noble Lady. When Gawain finally meets the Green Knight, the story does a twist similar to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, then goes into an ambiguous ending which suggests that maybe Gawain finally gets his head cut off. 

Stylistically, the film has interesting elements not often seen in mainstream Arthurian films. Like the 1970s French wave of Arthurian films (Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, Rohmer’s Perceval) it’s about a side character in the Arthurian narrative, rather than Arthur himself. Sometimes the film feels like a fever dream, with Gawain swimming through an impossibly deep pond and hallucinating on mushrooms. There are deliberate anachronisms – Gawain and his family are Asians in a medieval England populated by Anglo-Saxons, Camelot looks early medieval while another castle looks like it’s from the Italian Renaissance. Despite these unconventional elements, The Green Knight has something even stranger going for it: it’s an acclaimed film that tells the story in period without poking fun at Arthurian ideals. That kind of Arthurian film rarely happens anymore, and when it does, it rarely succeeds as a film. In recent years, there have been some failed attempts to give the story a new sheen like Antoine Fuqua’s Roman Arthur and Guy Ritchie’s proto-gangster Arthur. But since the 1960s, the truly great Arthurian films have tended to be deconstructions. They may satirize Arthuriana (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), may put its ideas in new settings (The Fisher King), or focus on the story’s tragic side (Lancelot du Lac). John Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur was arguably the last critically successful Arthurian film to “tell the story straight” and in period.

Something similar holds true for 1980s American fantasy films: many are well remembered, but only The Princess Bride and Dragonslayer were truly acclaimed by reviewers at the time. The Princess Bride is funny and romantic, but much of its humor comes from parodying swashbuckling adventure tropes. Dragonslayer inverts the “hero rescuing a kingdom from a dragon” story, with corrupt nobles who prefer the status quo and a half-trained sorcerer as the hero. Neither film is cynical per se, but on some level they both deconstruct the idea of a heroic warrior. Whether you’re talking about fantasy films in general or specifically Arthurian films, you’re faced with a messy problem: in a post-1960s world (post Vietnam, Suez Crisis, Watergate, and other events that damaged our trust in soldiers and government), can we tell a story about knighthood that doesn’t seem silly or retrograde?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is ideal for exploring that question, because the poem emphasizes how the ideal of knighthood can conflict with itself. Tolkien, in a 1953 radio talk for his translation of the poem, argues the poem is about “a man trying to work the ideal out, see its weaknesses (or man’s weaknesses)” (J.R.R. Tolkien: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo 4). An Arthurian knight must follow five virtues – friendship (or courtesy), generosity, chastity, piety and chivalry. When Gawain stops at a Lord’s castle on his way to meet the Green Knight, these knightly virtues create a problem. The castle’s Lady propositions him, and a knight must be courteous to a lady. But he must also be chaste, which means Gawain must reject the conventions of courtly love and turn the Lady down. The poem resolves the problem by Gawain staying chaste but accepting the Lady’s favor, a magic girdle. When her husband asks Gawain what he received that day in his house, Gawain hides the girdle and goes to meet the Green Knight. The girdle’s power keeps Gawain from being killed by the Green Knight’s axe, but the Green Knight calls out Gawain’s deception and he returns to Camelot humbled. When he tells the Round Table of his journey and mistakes, he declares he will wear the girdle as a mark of shame, but the other knights honor him and start wearing green baldricks, which becomes a mark of being on the Round Table. Thus, the poem allows Gawain to have it both ways: he can cheat at a test, but still be a hero in others’ eyes. This paradox of a failed man who is glorified can be compared to Frederick Buechner’s idea of sainthood. Buechner argues in his speech “Faith and Fiction” that sainthood is not something we achieve, because holiness “is not something people do but something God does in them” (The Clown in the Belfry 18). He goes further to say that “a saint is a human being with the same sorts of hang-ups and abysses as the rest of us, but if a saint touches your life, you become alive in a new way” (19). Buechner’s own novels (The Book of Bebb, Godric) are often about disreputable people who somehow enrich everyone they meet, and arguably Gawain does this. He returns to Camelot knowing his flaws, but after he confesses his flaws, he is honored and comforted. What he intended to be a mark of shame becomes a sign of community. Gawain may not achieve the saintly glorification that Galahad gets in the Grail Quest, but he enriches the Round Table. He becomes a saint in Buechner’s sense of an unexpected “life-giver.”

Lowery’s movie explores questions about conflicting knighthood virtues in its own way. The plot additions are set up so that Gawain faces tests of almost every one of the five virtues. He’s standoffish to a scavenger who gives directions, then robbed by the scavenger and his friends; the courteous thing to do would be reward the scavenger immediately (or recognize from the start that the scavenger was no friend). Winifred asking Gawain to retrieve her head from a pond tests his generosity (she offers nothing in return when he asks what he will receive). His encounter with the Lady is a test of chastity (which in the movie, he fails). His final meeting with the Green Knight can be seen as a test of chivalry, which C.S. Lewis defined as meekness in private and boldness in battle. In Lowery’s version, Gawain drops all deception and takes off the magic girdle, boldly exposing himself to danger. Lowery makes it clear in a July 2021 interview with Vanity Fair that he wanted the ending to be positive: Gawain rises to this challenge, showing that he’s grown as a person.

Both poem and film consider how Gawain can be flawed and yet a hero, but the poem does it by having Gawain live even though he technically fails the test. His willingness to admit his mistakes and wear the girdle to remember his failures arguably makes him a glorified figure – in his repentance, there is unexpected beautification. In the film’s ambiguous ending, Lowery apparently aims for Gawain becoming a hero by accepting death; in other words, he’s a martyr, perhaps a Christ figure. Throughout the film, Lowery plays on Christ imagery. The Lady’s portrait of Gawain is reminiscent of The Shroud of Turin. Like Christ in the later parts of the Gospels, Gawain is an adult male whose mother figures prominently in his life, but his father is absent from the narrative. Like Christ in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Gawain desires a woman but his higher obligations keep him from truly having her (and like Mary Magdalene in that film, Essel is a prostitute). In one of the film’s best scenes, Gawain apparently flees the Green Knight and becomes a failed king of Camelot; this turns out to be a vision of a possible future, which Gawain rejects by taking off the girdle and staying. The scene parallels the end of Last Temptation, where Christ envisions a future where he fled crucifixion and raised a family, then abandons that future to die on the cross. Both men reject the easy path and choose the one that leads to death.

However, Gawain is not dying for the sins of the world: he is dying for himself. Early in the film, Gawain asks Arthur why he holds him to a standard which requires facing the Green Knight. Arthur replies, “Is it wrong to want greatness for you?” When Essel asks him why he’s going to meet the Green Knight, Gawain says, “this is how good men become great.” When the Lord asks why Gawain will meet the Green Knight, Gawain says he will gain honor. Gawain puts his life on the line not to destroy something evil like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, nor in anyone’s place like Christ; he does it for his own glory. One could argue that in a medieval context, knights performed tests of valor to show they would do anything for their lords (who represented Christendom). Thus, tests of valor become tests of willingness to serve Christendom. However, Gawain never has a test of the fifth virtue, piety, nor does he ever operate like a servant. Thus, the Christian overtones to knighthood are lost; Gawain is doing this task for selfish reasons.

Given this lack of piety, we might say that The Green Knight explores knightly virtues but doesn’t celebrate them. The film deals with how knighthood codes conflict, uses interesting Christ figure overtones, but doesn’t understand martyrdom and sainthood well enough to make its ending positive. As Hannah Long put in an August 2021 article for The Dispatch, the movie has no chest. By chest, Long refers to Lewis’ idea in The Abolition of Man about “men without chests,” no source of honor or virtue. The lack of piety keeps Gawain from being a virtuous warrior like Tolkien’s Aragorn or a virtuous man in training like Lewis’ Eustace. Thus, at least from one level, The Green Knight doesn’t work as a pro-Arthurian film. One could argue that it works much better if seen as a different kind of film, one that combines Arthurian fantasy with an obscure horror-fantasy tradition. 

David Perry suggested in his 1973 book A Heritage of Horror that perhaps the next step for British Gothic horror cinema would be something based on Arthurian material, since Gothic and Arthurian literature intersect at points (166-167). He specifically argued that Witchfinder General was a step in that direction, since it had chivalric undertones (167). While no one seems to have done a Gothic horror take on Tennyson or Malory, Witchfinder General has been cited as an important part of “folk horror,” films using rural settings and pagan overtones to create scares. Mark Gatiss argued in his 2010 BBC documentary A History of Horror that Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, and Blood on Satan’s Claw are seminal folk horror films (sometimes called “the unholy trinity of folk horror”). Shakespeare scholar Rebekah Owens argues in her 2017 study of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth that the film’s high emphasis on natural settings makes it a folk horror film (Owens 80-84). Newer examples of folk horror include films like Midsommar and A Field in England. 

Many folk horror tropes appear in The Green Knight. Like Blood on Satan’s Claw, it juxtaposes spiritual opposites – Morgan le Fay’s incantations over the magic girdle are intercut with priests saying a mass for Gawain. Like A Field in England or Polanski’s Macbeth, some scenes appear to be illusions possibly caused by drugs – Gawain hallucinates after eating mushrooms, apparently turns into a skeleton when he’s tied up in the woods and then turns back again. Like The Wicker Man, there’s a conflict between Christianity (portrayed as dominating nature) and witchcraft or neopaganism (portrayed as embracing nature). Morgan le Fay uses witchcraft to summon the Green Knight, who looks like a forest god and whose axe makes moss grow on surfaces. Gawain meets people dressed like animals (scavengers wearing animal furs, a bear carrying a lantern greets him at the Lord’s castle). The Lord talks about how a man’s home should keep out the world’s wild weirdness, while his Lady talks about how green (plant life) will overcome red (human lust and violence). Overhanging the story is the sense that Morgan le Fay is working behind the scenes – summoning the Green Knight, guiding her son as the fox, posing as a blind woman who watches him copulate with the Lady. Neopaganism sometimes depicts pre-Christian religion as matriarchal and Christianity as patriarchal, in which case dubious controlling mothers can be seen as pagan figures.

Perhaps most importantly, folk horror tends to be ambiguous. A Field in England features people using occult means to find a treasure and devolves into them hallucinating and fighting, with little sense what is gained. The Wicker Man’s conflict revolves around nature worshippers who introduced non-native plants to a Scottish island, so they’re arguably imposing on nature rather than revering it. The final scene in Polanski’s Macbeth suggests the bloodlust will begin again, raising questions about whether the tragedy of Macbeth is a tragedy in the classical sense. Seen as a folk horror-fantasy, the ambiguous ending of The Green Knight makes more sense. The movie raises questions about what knights live for, but the ending doesn’t give clear answers.

Ultimately, it’s hard to say how The Green Knight will age. Like the original poem, it raises interesting questions about chivalry and Christlike martyrdom. But, to quote a character from The Wicker Man, Lowery doesn’t seem to understand the true nature of sacrifice. The film fails to see how piety is central to sainthood (even those who become saints by accident) and service is central to martyrdom; this problem keeps the film from being as compelling as it wants to be. Given the way it posits a “nature/witchcraft versus Christianity” conflict, it may best be described as a fusion of Arthurian fantasy and folk horror. In that light, it shows that David Pirie was right: horror and Arthuriana can work together, although the results can be opaque. While The Green Knight deserves credit for taking knighthood seriously, it lacks the heroic touch it needs to celebrate those ideas. An Arthurian film exploring the virtuous warrior that Camelot represented and that Lewis and Tolkien both praised, still needs to be made.