Finally watched The Green Knight

The Green Knight looked beautiful in all the images and trailers, so we were pretty excited for it in advance, but typically enough, we then let a ton of time lapse before we got around to watching it like... two weeks ago. By then I knew, vaguely, that people who cared about Arthuriana and medieval literature were at least in part disappointed by it, but I didn't know any details.

• The Green Knight still is really beautiful. Cinematographically speaking, everything is lovely.



• On the evidence it would be totally reasonable to conclude that the director's main motivation was pictures of people touching Dev Patel's face.



• The whole quest feels a great deal like katabasis (the journey to the underworld), or alternatively a bit like another spirit quest, but really more like katabasis, because besides everything feeling allegorical or symbolical, it's all primarily concerned with death in the movie.



• I like Arthuriana but I have not actually read the poem, I just know about it second hand. This is my level of acquaintance with a lot of Arthuriana. I haven't read any genuine medieval romances longer than a couple of pages, or the Mabinogion, and I got Le Mort d'Arthur for a holiday when I was like... ten or eleven... because I was so into the stuff in theory (and at the level where it appears in more recent, like second-wave onward, fantasy literature), but I only managed a few chapters of endless battle descriptions before giving up in boredom. I have looked at it later to make sure my memory of the content was mainly accurate. I've read The Mists of Avalon but I haven't even read TH White. So, anyway, I don't have any expert opinions, or even like hobbyist/'that's my fandom' opinions. I'm more of a casual Matter of Britain enjoyer. That said...



• There's an extent to which the movie's themes and ideas feel to me like they ARE about the things that the poem is about, even though not necessarily about the poem. The poem is about chivalric honor, specifically honor in sexual politics and the relations of an honorable knight with women, and the code of honor that has to do with battles, and conflicts between the obligations of honor to fellow knights and the obligations of honor and chivalry towards women (when the requirements of honor come in conflict with each other). Almost Talmudic, really. (I don't say this is ALL that the poem is about - this impression is just from Wikipedia/summaries/etc about it.) And also about death and facing the possibility of it bravely and, obviously, the lack of wisdom of youth. The poem is also about desire and homosexual desire though.



• The movie, meanwhile, is more about... the creator's thoughts on (arguments with, philosophical critiques of?) the system of chivalry and the notion of honor and the contradictions therein. It's not just what honor demands and what is right and fair in sexual relations with women and random interactions with women, it's also the class system and the injustices to the women who weren't the objects of chivalry, and perhaps the way privilege shields knights and nobles from knowledge of the way the actions of those with power harm those without it unjustly. Chivalry in practice, and the rules of society around it, were codes for relations between members of the upper class, and for the most part, therefore, honor and justice and all that stuff was for the upper classes (goes the argument. It's one I've seen before, and it isn't without truth either, but perhaps not entirely that simple). Gawain in the film is an earnest protagonist who means no harm and starts by doing it out of cluelessness, strives to do his best for honor and all that stuff against his fear, but is trapped by convention and the apparent demands of honor and doing his best into a life that seems perhaps hollow.



• It's PRETTY funny that a guy driven so hard by his obsession with Dev Patel's face and touching it significantly reduced the queer content of the poem though, isn't it? The tie between Lady Bertilak's seduction and Gawain's kisses with Bertilak is clearer when it appears in three separate scenes as in the poem. Reducing all that to a single kiss at the last moment before Gawain gets to the Green Chapel disconnects it from the central theme relevance of the sexual content between Gawain and Lady Bertilak, particularly when the movie casts the same actress for his lover in his previous life.



• The end of the movie makes clear why Lowery wanted to elide the end of the Green Chapel encounter, but leaving the Green Knight NOT to turn back into Bertilak also makes the whole Castle Hautdesert episode, rather than tied into the central motive of the quest, into another episode along the dream quest. Also I guess the old lady is Morgana Le Fay if you know about it and otherwise you're maybe meant to just conclude that all the magic being done was done by Gawain's mother? I do see an implication that there was magic behind the quest, but with no particular implication that the Green Knight himself was enchanted, he seems more like an incarnation of Herne the Hunter or another forest god, presumably acting for his own reasons.



• So in summary I guess it feels like the source material didn't interest Lowery that much and the main substance - apart from the main visual substance of Dev Patel's face being touched in various states of bewilderment and pain - is more a critique of the over-sanitised and -simplified pop culture notions of honor and chivalry than anything else. And as such is a bit, well, joyless and narrow, which is a very funny thing to be for the thematic ideas behind a story played out in a fantasy world that also includes multiple hallucinogenic drug trips.



• Did I say it seems like he really wanted to make a music video? Much like the guy who made Legend with Tom Cruise, it seems like he really wanted to make a long music video and this work could've held up much better as a music video than as a movie.

What if...

...a browser extension that replaced the word of your choice (say, "wordle") with a randomly generated piece of surreal text.

Like perhaps one of those AI generated character descriptions or obituaries, which are essentially slightly more complex Mad Libs.

Of course, at this point one might think it's better not to give AI any more encouragement, so perhaps just a random word or phrase from a simple set.

I'm not ready for the end of the long winter's nap

I'm stressed out about the idea of going back to work tomorrow, a little bit because I'm always still mentally and executive functionally unready to un-hibernate during the entirety of January, but also because Anubis hasn't really settled in that much yet.

Wax will be working from home this next week and while Anubis was free today, he may have to be locked back in the isolation room (the dining room) while she's working. The guy wants affection and attention, not just from us but from the cats, who are still avoiding him, but he's also still walking around crying and he is trying to get us to go sit in the dining room where he feels secure enough to snuggle. (He doesn't feel safe to snuggle in the living room, because one of the other cats might come up.) But he's so sad! He was crying in his sleep yesterday! He was nervous and picking at the new wet food (when we bought some of the raw food he's used to this afternoon, he tried to eat it while it was still frozen solid, and then as soon as it was soft - still cold - he wolfed about 100 grams, then conked out immediately in the papasan).

When I say I'm apprehensive about managing work again when I'd rather hibernate: it's not really enough time to be physically exhausting, even now; it's more that I want to cry thinking about the possibility of having to put on a public/social face (although with any luck I'll be by myself most of the time this week, since the weather is so abysmal that the question of what to wear to walk to work is genuinely a puzzle) and leaving the house.

I ordered a new calendar to use for work this year with fountain-pen friendly paper (a Hobonichi) but it hasn't arrived yet. I have been working without an actual calendar all of this time, so it's not like I need it, but I have been looking forward to that.

And also: I was intending to investigate Mastodon a bit more and maybe create an account somewhere this past week, but I did not get around to that.