A24 has released an official trailer for The Green Knight, the David Lowery film starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, and Sean Harris. A fantasy adventure based on Arthurian literature that looks like a fresh take on the mythos. The film is scheduled to hit theaters on July 30th. Until then, a quick primer on the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
In a nutshell:
The Green Knight simply came for a “game” on Christmas (“Strike me in whichever way now, and I’ll give you the same strike in a years time”). On his journey a year later to meet the Green Knight (for the conclusion of the “game”), Gawain came upon a castle where the Lord of the castle’s wife tried to seduce Gawain over the course of multiple days. In the end, it turns out that the whole event was a trick played by Morgan le Fay (the Green Knight was the aforementioned lord of the castle under magical disguise), who was testing King Arthur’s Knights and trying to scare Guinevere to death.
Now, I think the appeal of the story is its weirdness and ambiguity – and the masses of buildup paired with unsatisfying anticlimax is kind of part of that.
Some exploration of the tale:
– The Knights of the Round Table are supposed to be brave, but other than Arthur and Gawain, they’re all too afraid to strike the knight in any way.
– Gawain straight-up attempts to murder the knight. Since he was asking for it, and it’s the sort of thing knights do, this isn’t treated as a problem, but could be seen as the cause of all Gawain’s problems from this point on.
– Gawain is warned that there will be repercussions – the knight will strike him back the same way – but his hubris leads him to believe he can easily kill this obviously supernatural visitor and thus not have to worry about any consequences. Given the author’s Christianity, this can probably be seen as a lesson about eternal justice.
– Gawain then knows he’s going to die if he goes to meet the knight, but he still attempts to do his duty and keep his promise.
– Gawain has to not just refuse the Lady’s advances, but do so in a way that doesn’t offend her, since as a knight it’s his duty to obey any woman’s requests. He attempts to find compromises (being kissed a few times), even though this puts him in a weird position (kissing the woman’s wife and not being able to explain why).
– But in the end, while he’s able to deny sex, he can’t deny his own fear. Despite having come all this way to die, he doesn’t want to, and he breaks his promises by accepting her allegedly magic girdle and not telling her husband about it.
– The Green Knight mocks Gawain’s fear, but chooses not to actually kill him.
– The Knight decides that a visible neck wound is sufficient punishment for Gawain’s oath breaking. But Gawain himself nonetheless recognizes that he has dishonored himself.
– The Knight reassures Gawain that he’s the most honorable knight in the kingdom, but since we’ve seen him break his oath this is really more a commentary on the inadequacy of Camelot than on Gawain’s virtue. Gawain (and hence Camelot) may officially pass the test, but they know that they don’t really.
– The tester is Morgan le Fay; theoretically it’s Morgan who’s the Bad Guy and Arthur and his mates who are the Good Guys, but here it’s Morgan who is holding the knights up against their own impossible standards of virtue and finding them wanting (it’s only the Knight who decides to be friends with Gawain because he did well enough in the test, not Morgan herself). Morgan often has an ambiguous role in these stories.
– Interestingly, Gawain underestimates Morgan completely because she’s taken the form of an ugly old woman, not worth paying attention to; the Green Knight and his court, however, do her appropriate honor. It’s another example of the (chauvinist) hubris of Camelot.
– Speaking of the Knight and his house honoring Morgan, it’s interesting that his wife is seducing Gawain just because Morgan told her to. On the one hand, her actions are justified by Morgan’s moral purpose. On the other… what would she have done if Gawain had accepted more of her ‘gifts’?
– On which note: the Knight and his family by serving Morgan in this way – violating conventional norms and seeming to act against their king – are servants of what Morgan represents, which is generally some sort of pagan, uncontrollable world outside of Arthurian civilization.
– I don’t think the explanation that this was to frighten Guinevere to death is really a serious explanation. It’s probably there in part just to tie the story into the canon. But there’s an obvious undertone: although Gawain doesn’t yet know it, Guinevere herself is, or will be, unfaithful, and this will bring down Camelot. Morgan’s sending a message to Guinevere, and it’s not just the severed head that’s meant to frighten her, but the whole of Gawain’s adventure, with its themes of unfaithful wives and inescapable consequences.
It’s a story that everyone can see what they want to see in.
-Dagobot
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