This is the second essay in a series on “Modern Transcendence in Movies” that interrogates how the search for meaning transforms within a disenchanted (and possibly re-enchanted) world. What does the search for transcendence look like in our contemporary society? And how do movies express facets of this longing?
The first essay looked at David Lowery’s new film, Mother Mary, which stages a conflict between the modern “buffered” self and the mystical, spiritual forces that invade its characters’ lives. The lurking presence that spirits through Mother Mary reveals that the modern, “buffered” self, as outlined by Charles Taylor, is more porous than it cares to admit.
The spiritual has a habit of breaking through in unexpected ways, and to understand how people (and protagonists) changed from being “open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and power” to modern, rationalistic, buffered individuals, we must also consider how the world around us changed.1 As it turns out, Lowery is once again a suitable guide here. His 2021 film, The Green Knight, thrusts the viewer into “the strangeness of the enchanted world,” revealing that humanity’s rational mastery over the earth is a self-satisfied illusion.2
The Green Knight thrusts the viewer into “the strangeness of the enchanted world,” revealing that humanity’s rational mastery over the earth is a self-satisfied illusion.
That’s a bit of an odd claim for a film set in medieval England. Lowery’s film adapts the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem of Arthurian chivalry that foregrounds the virtues of knighthood. There’s something unsettling beneath its surface, though, no matter how heroic Sir Gawain demonstrates himself to be. As the tale begins, it’s Christmastide in Camelot, a time of gifts and games and feasting, and the festivities are carrying on as they do every year. Until, that is, a colossal, green figure wielding an axe and a holly bough intrudes to offer a game of his own: A brave soul may strike him once, unguarded and submissive, on the agreement that the Green Knight will be allowed to return like for like, delivering his blow a year and a day hence.
Gawain gallantly claims the opportunity and, with the Green Knight’s axe in hand, severs the behemoth’s head from his body. A game quickly played and easily won—until the Green Knight grasps his uncoupled head from the floor and rides off, letting Gawain know that he looks forward to their reunion in a year. After its adventurous setup, the poem becomes strangely misty and melancholic as Gawain dutifully sets out on his quest as the fateful day approaches. Along the way he is tested in the five points of chivalry (symbolized by the pentangle crest on his shield): friendship, generosity, courtesy, chastity, and piety.
The Gawain of The Green Knight, however, represents a significant departure from the knight of the poem. Whereas the latter is a recognizable knight whose failures are even accepted into his code of honor, the Gawain we meet in Lowery’s movie is pretty far from our idea of a knight. Lowery’s Gawain is a bit of an outsider in Arthur’s court, as emphasized by the casting of Dev Patel, who gives a wonderful performance. He is visibly distinguishable from the otherwise white and older men and women attending Camelot’s feast. Patel’s Gawain is not yet a knight and hardly brave; when he takes up the Green Knight’s challenge, it’s mostly in desperation to be accepted as a knight after his mother’s urging. His sense of chivalry is loose, his relationship to destiny motivated by what he would gain. This is a man looking to write his own story, to claim his own vision of fate. He is, in Taylor’s terms, a proto-buffered self: “In short, the buffered identity, capable of disciplined control and benevolence, generate[s] its own sense of dignity and power, its own inner satisfactions.”3
Gawain wants the dignity and power he believes is rightfully his, the rewards that can be claimed through his own discipline and control. This is a characteristically modern impulse, understandable to all of us who’ve considered picking a major or a career, thought about climbing the ladder, or dreamt about the next big milestone in life, be it home ownership or some measure of notoriety. We can relate to The Green Knight’s Gawain to the exact degree that he diverges from the knight of the medieval poem.
Both the poem’s and the film’s heroes are products of their world. Lowery’s depiction of Camelot is certainly not exclusively humanistic or scientific, but it shows an inclination toward those modern influences in its attempt to wrest control of the land from nature and external forces. Such a division is exposed as soon as Gawain departs on his journey. In a sustained tracking shot, Gawain exits the walls of Camelot on horseback and wanders across the plains to the north. Initially the fortress appears impressive and imposing, confirming our assumptions about Arthur’s realm. But as the shot continues, the walls appear in full, yet smaller than they felt a few moments ago. Within a minute or two, Camelot seems dwarfed by the land around it, a tiny island in a sea of hills and grassland.
In Lowery’s vision, Arthur’s castle represents an anachronistically disenchanted space: Gawain believes he has mastery over the world because that’s how Camelot has shaped him to engage with the world Taylor finds the seed of disenchantment in the progressions of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. Those momentous revolutions and the social streams which flowed out of them “did, of course, hasten the disenchantment of the world, helping to split spirit from matter.”4 When the world becomes disenchanted, “we lose contact with the natural world surrounding us, and at the same time, with a higher dimension in our own world.”5
The emphasis of A Secular Age is to articulate the transformed conditions of belief. The loss of the enchanted world—“the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our ancestors lived in”—is one of those conditions.6 Prior to these transformations, “the natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imagined, testified to divine purpose and action”; but humanity’s perception now divides the natural world from the divine cosmos.7 Such a separation also extends to human society, which comes to view itself as wielding control over nature and any remnant cosmic powers.
Despite being set well before both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, these transformed conditions are expressed in The Green Knight’s society. The strength of magic early in the film is symbolized by Gawain’s mother (played by Sarita Choudhury, and strongly implied to be the sorceress Morgan le Fay). Magic is still present in Arthur’s realm, but it is distanced, sidelined. The main means of mastery are the more immanent human abilities. So when the Green Knight arrives, he breaks into their world—there is a sense of shock and unease. Or consider the oppositional force: it is not modernity or societal progress that threatens Camelot’s reign, but the strange powers that pervade everything outside the castle walls.
The world shapes the subjectivities of the people within it—”world” here meaning something beyond (but inclusive of) the natural world and the earth itself. But “world” also means the social imagination that forms the horizon of possibility for each person. This horizon marks the limit of conceivable beliefs, values, and practices. The buffered identity can thus be understood as “the self-understanding which arises out of disenchantment. Otherwise put, it is a social and civilizational framework which inhibits or blocks out certain of the ways in which transcendence has historically impinged on humans, and been present in their lives.”8
This is epitomized in Gawain himself. He isn’t confident, but he is self-affected. He views his fate as something he holds fully within his hands. Unlike the poem’s knight, Lowery’s Gawain comes nowhere close to any of the five chivalric virtues. He is selfish and uninterested in the needs of others, and pays the price. He views friendship as transactional and takes what he desires with little concern for the rightness of his actions. And it’s doubtful chastity has ever really crossed his mind. All of which are the result of a life lived, up until now, within the anachronistically disenchanted walls of Camelot.
Gawain’s center cannot hold, however, for the world is a far more dangerous and far stranger place than he imagined. As soon as he ventures out into the world of nature, he realizes not everything is in his grasp. It begins with other people, as Barry Keoghan arrives in full rapscallion mode to entreat Gawain and, upon Gawain’s stingy response, waylay the hopeful knight. Even though this is an exclusively human episode, Lowery and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo start inserting supernatural imagery. One shot frames Gawain tied up on the ground before slowly rotating horizontally, sweeping across the forest floor, eventually resting on a skeleton tied up just like Gawain—perhaps it is Gawain?—before panning back to Patel. It’s odd and eerie, and no further comment is made on the image.
The world only gets weirder from that point on. The martyred Saint Winifred pleads for him to rescue her head from the bottom of a nearby spring. Once he’s completed the quest, he finds that the axe previously stolen by the marauders is suddenly by his side. There is likewise no explanation for how this mysterious recovery occurs. Later, Gawain meets a talking fox, witnesses giants migrating across the land, and eventually confronts the mystical power of the Green Knight himself. The accumulation of these encounters shatters Gawain’s sense of self and his sense of the world, and as they crumble, he’s plagued by “the fears, anxieties, even terrors that belong to the porous self.”9 The strangeness of the world—represented by powers that are variously human, spiritual, inhuman, and natural—cannot be mastered.
The film’s formal relationship to the original poem is equally strange. Instead of providing a straightforward adaptation or taking a single approach to the poem, Lowery constructs a film through an interpretive constellation. Scholars and critics have reflected on a staggering breadth of possible meanings in the medieval poem, from a straightforward chivalric romance to an ecological parable, from an emphasis on festive games to readings that emphasize subtexts of female power or homosexual desires. The Green Knight gestures toward all of these interpretations across its episodes, adding to those themes the existential fear of death, desire for power, and self-deception. There is not a singular meaning to be found in The Green Knight. Instead, meaning is refracted into dozens of possible interpretations, leaving it up to the viewer to decide for themselves.
The film’s very structure echoes what Taylor called “the nova effect, the steadily widening gamut of new positions… which have become available options for us.”10 We’ll explore these novae in more detail as the series continues, but one thing is undeniable for now: In The Green Knight, like in Mother Mary, Lowery is reviving the sense of awe within the world. Both films portray rational, self-contained characters who suddenly find themselves encountering spirits, mystical forces, and inexplicable powers. Because maybe those really are out there, despite our disregard for them.
The next installment will consider a journey into an even more bizarre realm that’s potentially more dangerous, as we venture into the Zone in Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
