The Green Knight

The Green Knight (David Lawery, 2021) is the first film that I have seen in a movie theater since February 2020.  (I am writing on July 31,2021.)  The experience was disappointing because I was unable to see the movie.  Either my eyes have failed in a serious way in the intervening 18 months or the projection system at the theater in which I saw the film was inadequate or the movie is one of the most astonishing exercises in self-destructive experimental film-making ever accomplished.  The Green Knight is shot with very dim, low-key lighting.  Images are organized pools of amber light and outdoor scenes feature grey clouds and haze with tints of lambent twilight in the sky.  The film is full of dark bogs, ill-lit forests, and crypt-like enclosures.  I understand that the pictorial texture of the movie is densely shadowed, Rembrandt-lit, and crepuscular.  But the Coming Attractions also seemed very faint to me, projected as if by candle-light, and, when I left the picture to complain, I first ventured into an adjacent theater showing a family comedy Space Jam to venture a comparisoon-- the screen was bright and the colors distinct and, although comedies are generally, over-lit, the difference between the murk with which I was struggling in the next door screening room was remarkable.  Of course, the people employed at the movie are merely concessions staff and they, presumably, trigger projection with a switch somewhere and there is no one in the booth (maybe there isn't even a booth at all) to adjust brightness and contrast.  The situation reminds me of the Italian horror film written by Dario Argento, Demons.  In that movie, a film spawns an infestation of demons in a theater and, when the besieged audience breaks into the projection room, they are confronted by two large sepulchral boxes apparently casting the movie on the screen without the intervention of any human hands, or worse, human eyes at all.  This was apparently the case in Albert Lea where I saw the film.  (In the Covid-interim, Austin's movie theater failed and is now closed.)  The Green Knight, as I saw it, was about 25% unintelligible, a well of darkness in which faces were mostly blackened by shadow and in which scenes shot at night were simply blue-black voids -- in one scene, Gawain (pronounced "Gar-wahn") who is drunk and disorderly is thrown out of a ninth century saloon and a brawl ensues on the street.  I couldn't tell who was beating whom, how many people were involved in the fight, or how things turned out for our hero.  All reviews that I have read of the film praise its subtle and brilliant photography.  I can't believe that the illegible murk displayed in the theater where I saw the picture is what the director or his D. P. intended.  

The Green Knight is being marketed as a super-hero movie.  I presume people who attend on that premise will want their money back -- assuming they are able to see what is on screen at all.  The picture is extremely opaque, difficult to understand or interpret, and -- this is the kiss of death to a movie aimed at a popular audience -- thought-provoking.  In an eerie way, the movie mirrors its source material the 13th century poem Gawain and the Green Knight.  The narrative verse features an extraordinarily complex and intricate form, a precursor I think to Spenser's Rime Royale and the poetry also growls at you with dense alliterative patterns.  Although written in Middle English, the language is nothing like Chaucer's suave and urbane diction that elegantly invokes Italian and French verse; the Gawain poet uses a guttural north English dialect leavened with outlandish Gaelic and Irish sounding words.  Furthermore, the poem is very obscure -- more suggestive than declarative -- and seems to be constructed from a peculiar combination of laborious if complex Christian allegory and pagan mythology.  Parts of the poem are extraordinary -- in particular, there's an account of the Gawain's winter trek to the Green Chapel to meet his nemesis that represents an astonishing poetic accomplishment, but much of the narrative is very hard to understand or interpret.  The film is similarly dense with meaning that doesn't ever quite cohere -- the story suggests any number of things but remains indeterminate and, in fact, isn't sure how the tale should end.  (This is also true to my fading memory of the poem -- I can always recall the Green Knight's challenge and the wager with Gawain the winter journey, and the chastity test in a bewitched castle near the end of the poem; but I can't recall how the damn thing turns out.)

Lawery grasps that the narrative invokes two principles:  there is a straight-forward Christian allegory in which the wintry march to the Green Knight's abode is conceived as the hero's progress toward salvation; but there is also a deeper cyclical plot that subverts the Christian allegory.  Nature doesn't need Christ because Nature doesn't sin and can't die -- every death is just a threshold for new rebirth:  the cold and death of Winter always is followed by the flowers of Spring.  And so, the circular patterns of vegetal life, death and rebirth, contrast with the linear one-way progress of Gawain (and the soul) towards salvation.  Lawery shows us this literally in several scenes.  In the middle of the movie,  Gawain encounters a feral kid who knocks him out and ties him.  We see Gawain abandoned in the forest -- the camera tracks around the landscape executing a 360 degree loop and, when the image returns to Gawain, he is dead and decomposed into a skeleton.  But nature is "green" and doesn't abide death and so the camera continues through another 360 degree tracking motion to come back to Gawain, now very much alive, and wriggling out of his bonds.  Very late in the movie, Gawain who is now king of the realm is besieged in his castle -- the walls are being battered down around him.  Again the camera embarks on a 360 degree tour of the dim baronial hall beginning with the throne and returning to it.  On the basis of the previous camera movement, we expect the throne to be empty and Gawain to be vanished or dead -- but he's still there, brooding over the ruin of his kingdom.  But, unbeknownst to Gawain himself, he is, in fact, dead and has, perhaps, been dead for many years since his final encounter with the Green Knight -- he just isn't aware of it.  Another enigmatic earlier episode in the film prepares us for what happens next:  during his Quest, Gawain encountered the virginal St. Winified.  She is like a figure from Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatori, a woman who has been long dead but who haunts the dark catacomb where Gawain meets her.  The woman demands that Gawain dive into a murky fen to retrieve her head -- she was beheaded ages ago whilst defending her honor against a rapist.  Gawain says that her head is very much attached to her body.  She tells him that he's wrong and just doesn't see things the way that they are.  Toward the end of the movie, this motif returns:  Gawain is also dead, but just doesn't know it.   There's another 360 degree camera movement that I don't know how to interpret.  During his Quest, Gawain encounters huge wraith-like giants, taller than sequoias, migrating across a wilderness of glaciated rock.  The giants are nude, male and female, all moving in one direction and they seemed to me to be the equivalent of refugees -- for some reason, the image made me think of Syrian refugees or immigrants at the southern Border.  After Gawain sees the migrating giants, the camera executes a turn around its axis -- the sky turns to become the bottom of the image and Gawain seems to hang upside down from a lid of striated stone that has now become the heavens.  I don't know exactly what this bizarre camera movement is supposed to mean -- but it clearly signifies in general terms that the Quest has turned the hero's world upside-down.  

The film's premise closely follows the medieval poem.  At a Christmas banquet, a floral giant, a green Knight on a green horse invades King Arthur's castle.  The Green Knight is a robust, rude and bellicose monster.  He proposes a "game" as it is called in the movie.  One of Arthur's knights shall deliver a blow to the Knight with the proviso that a year later, also on Christmas, the knight must meet the Giant at his lair, the Green Chapel and submit to a similar blow in recompense.  Gawain is impetuous and recklessly foolhardy.  He seizes Excaliber from Arthur and beheads the Green Knight, thinking in this way to end the wager decisively.  But the Green Knight just picks up his head, laughs derisively, and, then, departs vowing to meet Gawain a year in the future.  Gawain, in Lawery's interpretation, is terrified, takes to drinking and whoring.  He has become famous -- a  puppet show measures the passage of time with the little figures repeatedly clashing and Gawain beheading the vegetal giant, but in the final iteration of the comedy, the Knight hacks off Gawain's puppet head.  Unwilling to renege on his vow, the frightened knight sets forth on his Quest, riding to the North where the Green Knight's chapel is located "six days distant."  Before he leaves, the prostitute that Gawain is patronizing (who apparently loves him) responds to his vow that the trek will make him "great" with an important rejoinder:  "Why do you want to be 'great" when you can just be good?"  The scenes involving the quest are similar in some ways to Bergman's Seventh Seal -- Gawain encounters a horrible battlefield with the dead soldiers left to rot because they "killed each other off with no one left to bury the dead."  The feral kid, whose brothers have died in the battle, entraps Gawain and steals his horse, leaving him to die in the forest.  Gawain escapes encounters the ghostly Saint Winifried and restores her skull to her.  He suffers through cold and dangerous mountain heights accompanied by a friendly (supernatural) fox.  In a castle near the Green Chapel, he spends several nights with a Lord obsessed with hunting.  When the Lord leaves the castle to chase game -- we see that he has killed an elephant-sized boar -- the Lord's wife attempts to seduce Gawain and, apparently, succeeds in having him ejaculate all over her hand.  (It's not clear that the seduction goes beyond that emission.)  The Lord is playing a game similar to the Green Knight's wager -- he says that whatever Gawain receives from him, the knight must give him in return.  As Gawain departs the castle, the lord kisses him passionately on the lips.  The huntsman has captured the red fox who is Gawain's companion but he releases the beast.  With the little animal, Gawain reaches the threshold to the Green Chapel.  The fox, who can talk now, warns him from the encounter.  But Gawain pushes forward, across a spectral river, to a half-fallen arch in the woods.  He keeps vigil until Christmas dawn when a inert mass of battered wood and tendrils gradually comes to life and seizing the enormous axe that Gawain has brought to him raises the blade to behead the hero.

Spoilers now follow:  Gawain is terrified and begs the Knight not to kill him.  But the Knight persists and, about to hack off Gawain's head, is stymied by the hero fleeing madly through the thickets and escaping back to Arthur's court.  Many years pass and Gawain becomes King of the realm -- he seems to be married to the sinister witch Morgan le Fay.  The kingdom collapses and an enemy army besieges the castle and is tearing it down.  (These developments are all signaled very elliptically -- Lawery is interested in the passage of time, indeed, sometimes great expanses of time as in his film Ghost and this part of the movie is very well-done.)  As the castle collapses, Gawain realizes that he never escaped from the Green Knight, that he was beheaded long ago, and, then, his head drops off his shoulders onto the paving stones.  The film flashes back to the encounter with the Green Knight.  This time, Gawain accepts his fate and kneels to be behead, relinquishing a girdle with magical token that he has been wearing.  He doesn't flinch when the monster raises the huge axe.  The Green Knight  then, tells Gawain that he has shown true virtue and blesses him.  The idea seems to be that to achieve true knighthood, one must relinquish the quest for glory and, even, renounce the idea of chivalry -- instead, one must accept the verdict of Nature that all men must die and meet this ultimate fate with calm equipoise and a glad heart.  Ultimately, I think this is what the movie proposes, although it is, as I have noted, very obscure and undoubtedly the ambiguous ending is subject to other interpretations.

The film is excellent if you can see it in a theater where the images are visible.  I think the ending of the movie can be argued in various ways.  I have omitted many interesting and thought-provoking details:  the witch who tries to seduce Gawain at the castle takes his picture using a camera oscura (pinhole camera); beneath Arthur's throne room, there are female figures like Norns who seem to be casting runes to decide the fate of the characters in the film.  In some scenes, there is a seer woman whose eyes are blindfolded -- like the viewer she doesn't know how the quest (or the film) will turn out.  And the blindfold on her eyes signified my difficulties in even deciphering the gloomy images on the screen.