Whats The Green Knight Really About

What’s The Green Knight Really About?

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Like its 14th century source, The Green Knight is beautiful and enigmatic. While there’s room for interpretation, the film addresses four key themes.

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Whats The Green Knight Really About

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Green Knight, in theaters now.

A24’s The Green Knight surpassed box office expectations and fared well with critics, but its C+ Cinemascore suggests not every moviegoer got what they expected out of the movie. David Lowery — who wrote, directed, edited and produced The Green Knight — is known for films that are as atmospheric as they are difficult to parse. This one is a mostly faithful adaptation of the Arthurian legend, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an epic poem from the 14th century, interpretations of which are still debated amongst scholars today. The film version, which is as enchanting as it is challenging, is already inspiring similar conversations.

The plot is deceptively straightforward. Gawain (Dev Patel) spends his time and money at taverns and brothels, to his mother’s shame and disappointment. When he’s invited to sit alongside his uncle, King Arthur, at a Christmas celebration, he realizes that, unlike many of the other noblemen in the castle, he has no grand story to tell as evidence of his valor. Just then, the titular Green Knight materializes, a character who resembles Groot with a better vocabulary. He challenges someone to join him in a game. Whoever accepts can land a blow, but he’ll return it just as he took it in one year’s time. Gawain volunteers and, misunderstanding the point, beheads the Green Knight, who does not die.

Over the next year, Gawain’s story spreads and mutates, and he must decide whether to face the Green Knight, with the date of their fated second meeting fast approaching. Most of the film’s runtime depicts Gawain’s grueling, magic-tinged journey to the Green Chapel and, likely, his death. Along the way, he encounters scavengers, a fox, a ghost, giants and a mysterious unnamed Lord and Lady, each potentially helpful or harmful and each presenting him with a test of his character. But what does it all mean? The film, like the poem, doesn’t provide definitive answers, but it does explore four key themes.

A Flawed Man’s Quest to Become Honorable

Whats The Green Knight Really About

Since The Green Knight is based on a centuries-old story, it makes sense to interpret it through the lens of the morality of that time. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is often classified as a chivalric romance, the point of which was to emphasize a knight’s heroic qualities.

At the start of the film, Gawain (who is not yet a knight, in a change from the source material) lacks those qualities. He drinks too much and carries on a relationship with his lower class girlfriend, Essel, that he knows can come to nothing since he’s in the line of succession. He fails the Green Knight’s test; a cleverer combatant would’ve only inflicted a scratch and received a scratch in return. When he finds a scavenger on the battlefield, he is neither observant enough to detect his trap nor generous enough to pay him for his information. When he’s attacked, he’s unable to defend himself. Next, he encounters the ghost of a lady who has been raped and beheaded. Rather than help her for chivalry’s sake, he expects a favor. Finally, at the Lord and Lady’s castle, he can’t resist the Lady’s sexual temptation and he doesn’t hold up his end of the bargain he makes with the Lord.

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Gawain is self-interested and weak, and his word is practically worthless. Though he does meet the Green Knight at the chapel in the film’s climax, he escapes, afraid to die. Minutes later, it’s revealed that a flashforward in which he becomes King but suffers mightily was just a vision. He takes off his magical green sash and acts as a knight would for the first time. Whether the Green Knight actually deals the final blow isn’t shown on screen and is for the viewer to decide. But the moral of this version of the story is, being a consistently good person is hard and not always rewarding.

The Pointlessness of Old World Chivalry

Whats The Green Knight Really About

Even if Gawain ultimately chose honor, it still (probably) cost him his head. Though The Green Knight nails the gritty feel of 1300s England, the film itself has a distinctly modern sensibility, and one that might be meant to subvert knightly notions. Early on, Essel (Alicia Vikander, who also plays the Lady) asks Gawain why he must strive for greatness instead of goodness. He doesn’t reply; Gawain isn’t a good man, and his attempts to become great only bring ruin upon him.

Gawain only played the game because of his bruised ego. He missed the solution to the riddle because of it, too. He could’ve declined to finish the game. The Green Knight never mentioned a price to be paid; the consequence may have been a mere wound to his pride. When Gawain encounters the ghost of Winifred, she tells him that it was a knight who ravished and killed her. This detail is, perhaps, meant to remind us that greatness is not synonymous with goodness. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not Gawain’s cowardice that curses him in his vision, but his continued dishonesty and hubris. Had he been content with goodness, or had he even been willing to admit to mistakes, he may not have (theoretically) doomed the kingdom and lost his life.

A more nihilistic take: an honorable death (perhaps even honor itself) is pointless. When Gawain asks The Green Knight if “this is all there is,” he laughs and says, “What else would there be?”

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A Cautionary Tale About a Mother’s Ambitions for Her Son

Whats The Green Knight Really About

The most consequential update to this literary classic is the repositioning of Morgan le Fay. Historically, she’s a witch and apprentice of Merlin who is Gawain’s aunt, not mother. Here, they’ve been converged into one character who sets events into motion. It’s Morgan who summons the Green Knight, frustrated by her son’s inability to distinguish himself, but it’s unclear why and to what extent she’s involved after he appears and the deal is made. She could have wanted to test his mettle, to see if he’d show mercy in the game, or any of the other attributes of a true knight on the quest that followed. Or maybe she just wanted to give her son an opportunity to rise within the ranks, to gain power by proxy.

Some fans believe that she is the Green Knight, and that she created the obstacles along the way. Winifred tells Gawain that the Green Knight is someone he knows. Morgan accesses magic by covering her eyes with a sash, as other women do throughout the film. If she doesn’t have a hand in the outcome, she at least has an eye on her son throughout. Others believe she regrets the spell and intervenes by possessing the fox. Either way, this was a time in which women had little agency and were only remembered by the reputation of their sons. By creating the conditions for Gawain to ascend, she may have unwittingly sentenced him to death.

Climate Change

While chivalric interpretations of The Green Knight could go either way, the film is unabashedly a dire warning to humanity about our treatment of the natural world. The creature is the personification of a tree, and he essentially tells Gawain that he’ll treat him as he is treated. Gawain could’ve been easy on him and lived in peace. Instead, he went for the kill. The not-so-subtle message is that we’ve abused the planet and will get what we deserve in return.

As he embarks on his journey, Gawain witnesses a forest being felled. When the scavengers abandon him, a dreamlike shot shows the seasons changing and nature reclaiming his body. But the most damning scene is the Lady’s monologue, in which she passionately laments that green is the color of rot, and that after the violence of humans, green overtakes red. For all of civilization’s advancements, both in the 14th and the 21st centuries, nature was there before, will be there after, and is stronger, more magical and patient than we’ll ever be. Viewed this way, The Green Knight is a parable meant to teach us that nature can be our ally or our enemy, and we make it our enemy at our peril.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/green-knight-movie-meaning/

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