By Alexis Forss.
The Green Knight, an adaptation of the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous, directed by David Lowery, 2021
‘Bring young Gawain here.’ The King’s first utterance is spoken not in cold command. His tone is soft and his diction antique (rhyming Gawain not with Tremain but rather the old English name Garmon, meaning spearman: priapic and supernumerary). In that voice we hear the warmth and calm of true authority. Nine minutes in and it’s the kindest we’ve heard, its benevolence not just relative but absolute. From the auditory panic attacks of Uncut Gems to the unseen hellscapes of The Zone of Interest, A24’s best productions have demanded viewers who listen to their films.
We open with a harsh and demonic voiceover: ‘Look, see a world that holds more wonders than any since the Earth was born. And of all who reigned o’er, none had renown like the boy who pulled sword from stone. But this is not that king, nor is this his song.’ The film’s first image is Gawain as a hieratic figure in tableau vivant: an icon throned and crowned, bursting into flames, fit for a tarot card. But what of his uncle, the famous Arthur? By the time we meet the wielder of Excalibur we find his boyhood long behind him. The Green Knight takes place in a belated time, and a world grown old and weary, but we’ve been promised ‘an adventure brave and bold.’
The opening credits intercut with shots of a quiet barnyard. A peasant lies beside a doorway. The mythopoeic and the quotidian cheek-by-jowl. Geese and goats snap and bicker. We meet our protagonist once again, not as graven chivalric image but as flesh and blood wastrel: our Gawain is a whoremaster, a callow youth in no rush towards knighthood, chided by his mother for the hours and company he keeps. ‘I’ve got time,’ he wheezes. ‘I’ve got lots of time.’ This will evidently be the story of a humbling. So far, so gritty. So A24, if you will. But then we come to the castle, for the Christmas feast, into the kingly presence.
‘The King would speak with you,’ a servant whispers at the ninth minute. The lad downs his drink, steels himself, and makes the slow walk up to the highest seat. The moment is lingered over. Distended. Allowing himself a dreamy cut to bring us into Gawain’s apprehension of the approach, director David Lowery pedals his keynote: the body of the King is sacred, but Arthur wears it easily in his approaching dotage, his aged Queen by his side.
The tone is sombre, yet wistful. The King’s nephew bows before the royal pair, whom we glimpse only blearily beyond his hunched shoulders. Lowery lowers Gawain, sees him from above, frames him tight and lonely. The boy knows his place. And then there’s Arthur, shot Kane-like from below, in full splendour and regalia, his crown haloing him like some Byzantine saint. That voice again, so wan and mournful.
‘Where is thy mother?’
‘She was not feeling herself, my lord.’
‘Then come. Sit here, besides us. Besides me and my Queen.’
‘But that is not my place.’
‘No. Let it be, today.’
Minute Nine, then, is about the gravity and grace of kingship, without which there is no last temptation of Gawain. This Arthur is building bridges. Having never held his nephew upon his knee, he yearns now to know him as a man. The childless monarch faces his end by cultivating his heir.
And yet, as reverentially as Lowery approaches his material and themes, he must also revise. We look around. Gawain sees legends, but Lowery shows us only the most general carousing: posed in stiff Rembrandt compositions drained of warmth and light, the knights are a thuggish-looking bunch. For all his tired, saintly poses, this Arthur is still the ruler who vanquished the Saxons. The mythical foundation of the realm is always violence.
The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives us not a fading Tennysonian monarch, but an Arthur in his prime: a ‘stern king’ (J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation), but at Yuletide ‘his youth made him so merry with the moods of a boy, he liked light-hearted life, so loved he the less either long to be lying or long to be seated, so worked on him his young blood and wayward brain.’ Kingship isn’t solemnified by the anonymous Gawain Poet because it required no suspension of disbelief in Edward III’s England, while it’s as though we can only accept a vision of royal benevolence at the cost of vitality and vigour. Lowery brings many modern emphases to his adaptation — not least an eerie posthuman vision of a world reclaimed by nature — but his most suggestive invention is to insist upon sacred kingship, to make it crucial to his ultimate moral form.
The story is set in motion by the entrance of the Green Knight, and his challenge to the assembled warriors of Camelot: in return for the prize of his arm — ‘the mother of all axes, a cruel piece of kit I kid you not’ (Simon Armitage, who Frank Kermode thought was ‘enjoying himself a bit too much at the expense of the poem’) — a brave volunteer may deal any blow he wishes upon him. The champion must only agree to receive the same blow a year hence, at the Green Chapel. Gawain picks up the axe, takes his swing, and beheads the Green Knight. Because this is a fairy tale and moral instruction, the visitor picks his head back up, reminds Gawain of his pledge, and rides off into the winter dark. A too quick year passes, and Gawain is sent off to his appointment with all due pomp and circumstance.
In the original telling it’s smooth sailing to the Green Chapel, with only one stop: the castle of Lord and Lady Bertilak, where Gawain’s knightly virtue is tried by the folkloric device of the exchange of gifts. This turns out to be the true challenge: once he eventually kneels before the Green Knight, he’s let off with the lightest of nicks — a slap on the wrist, as it were, for less than fully honest dealing in his sport with the married couple. Sir Gawain is sent home with his head, his honour, and his renown.
For Lowery, the Castle Bertilak is only the last of several hallucinatory intervals on a fraught and harrowing journey. The diminished Arthur is a Fisher King, for the weakness of his body is reflected by a land in profound disarray. Gawain’s fate at the hands of the Green Knight does not hinge on his knightly comportment in some quaint exchange of pledges and trinkets. He’s tested, bested, and humiliated by common thieves, restless ghosts, and uncanny doubles, his shortcomings relentlessly exposed.
And yet the ordeal of the Green Chapel turns out to be the thing itself: no mere jest, audition, or moral shadow play; no more and no less than his inescapable fate. The challenge lies in the meeting of this brute reality, embodied by a Knight depicted not as jolly green giant but a hulking sprite of moss and bark and earth, warm of humour but hard in resolve. Gawain finds neither succour nor reprieve: just a heart of stone and a mind of winter, patient and unyielding. No amount of courage on the path — no variety of courage — would have spared him this ending.
After kneeling to receive his appointed blow, Gawain flees. He returns to Camelot, he licks his wounds, he lives his life. The throne: Arthur passes — not into Avalon, but in the quiet of his bed. Fatherhood: he takes his child and turns his back on the common woman who would have been his lady. Marriage: his royal bride is arranged in a union of convenience. Kingdom: the tedium of peacetime and the horrors of war; his son lost in battle. Decline and fall: his people turn on him, his enemies surround him, his family abandons him. Finale: alone, he faces his long-delayed end.
But he never left the Chapel. He prepares himself for the axe: better to die than to live as such a man, to rule as such a king. ‘I’m ready.’ He earns his place at the royal table by failing to return to it.
‘Its owner is away,’ Arthur told Gawain of his seat at dinner. ‘Who knows when he will return?’
*
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
4. Emma Jones
5. Des Barry
6. Lindsay Lerman
7. Joshua Glenn
8. Jessica Sequeiro.
9. Christine Hume
10. Jeff Wood
11. Alexander B. Joy
12. Des Barry
13. Marcel Krueger
To pitch a submission, contact Nicholas Rombes at nrombesudm@gmail.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexis Forss lives in London, where he was born. Raised in Frankfurt and Mallorca, he is a British-German writer of Greek and Swedish heritage. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Brunel University, where he lectured for a number of years. His thesis was a critical biography of Norman Mailer, and he has written for The Guardian, Prospect Magazine, Fortnight Magazine, and Review 31.
