On the Image

David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” (2021) does not romanticize the harmony of man and earth, instead illustrating this abstraction with two specters. The first is its titular entity—a lumbering, monstrous form which sits on a throne overgrown with vines that reach over its body much in the same way a peasant might vainly extend their hand to a king. Its voice booms, its joints creak with age—this is an old legend, made alive and standing before us. It revels in that human pursuit of satisfaction, playing games with the body as the sphinx does with the mind. On Christmas, as the story goes, its head is separated from its shoulders, its great axe falling with a terrible clatter, summoning moss between cracks in the stone floor.

In horror films, depicting the monster is often folly. This is not to say that few things are scarier than what the mind makes of the unknown, nor is it necessarily true that the abstract carries greater terrors than the descript. Rather, there’s a disarming quality to being seen. “The Green Knight” is not a horror film, but as the Knight rises to retrieve its head from the floor, so dawns the horror of an earth waiting eagerly, patiently, to swallow a man it was promised and reclaim his body, reuniting it with the very ground he’ll cross to fate.

Its head in-hand, the Knight’s eyes open.

---

One year, was the promise. In one year, the blow—the beheading—that Sir Gawain levied to the Knight would be repaid in full. The intervening days would play out all ‘too quickly,’ and as season rolled into season, the rumors of this promise grew among the populace. The details, of course, faded away with repetition; that Sir Gawain’s role in victory was more executioner than conqueror doesn’t seem to matter as his very own legend sprouts wings.

Funny, how malleable words prove to be.

A prism held to a beam of light spawns countless variants, each shooting defiantly from its original trajectory. Why follow one beam from conception to destination when you could instead step back and observe the divergences in their totality? Each is as true a continuation of the original ray as any other.

This is the core conceit that Lowery as writer and director understands and, in turn, commands with unblinking confidence. Stories, like light, can be refracted. An adaptation of an age-old tale bears with it the weight of its prior interpretations—the narrative has near-assuredly been picked at and prodded, gleaned from any and every angle. This matter both informs and complicates, but it doesn’t encumber, for a story is as delicate as its components are durable; that they can be renamed, rearranged, centered, or cast aside may very-well mean that they should be.

A knowing protagonist is key. To usher the viewer through Gawain’s journey isn’t enough—our storyteller has strewn the road with labels that promise structure but fade like the ephemeral markers they are—even the words scrawled upon the film’s title card, delivered to us with a wicked aplomb at its conclusion, fade while observed. As space breathes and time folds over itself like taffy, somebody needs to forge ahead, hacking through the mess of foliage and clearing a path.

Yet, Sir Gawain isn’t a remarkable man, and that’s the point, isn’t it? He’s somebody who, when given the chance, plays to win by circumventing the terms of a game, who sees helping another as simply one side of an exchange that will and should work to enrich him in turn, who quite simply does not know why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s for “honor,” he at one point purports as though trying to convince himself. We watch as he stumbles blithely forward towards destiny, and we notice that he seems most sure-footed when he’s not asked to interrogate his motivations—which, naturally, leads us do so.

In the penultimate stage of his travels, Gawain encounters his lover from back home. She has been recast, and now isn’t who he knows. She obviously is—but evidently is not. Still, something exists between them, and whether this is due to their shared experience in parallel lives or simply their newly-met mutual attraction is not expressed. Maybe it’s both, or neither. She tells him of her books, and that she likes to improve them, and that all it takes is a willingness to make a few fresh marks on a page.

---

The second specter is that of a man, his hands and legs bound, his body laid flat on the dirt and leaves, decomposing—his face weathered-through for his skull. This man isn’t dead; we’re merely seeing him so.

We’ve tugged too tightly on the threads of this particular moment and have revealed our poor Gawain lying dead, his temporal existence unspooled in front of us—his impermanence laid bare.

So we turn back around, where and when Gawain lives. He rises from his once and never grave and proceeds with his quest.

A crude mix of bones and soil defines the terrain over which Gawain passes on his way to the Green Chapel; dried and broken entrails left as the detritus of a vicious battle is all the same as gnarled roots and dead vegetation crunching under his boots. When he at last reaches this lonely haven, not a day’s walk from a place in which he briefly came to know the hospitality of an intimately familiar stranger, he sees the Knight—a slumbering, monstrous form which sits on a throne overgrown with vines that reach over its body much in the same way a frightened child might reach a silent hand for their parent.

Sir Gawain sets the Knight’s axe at its feet before retreating several paces and sitting down—still not fully believing in what he’s due, and yet still clutching tightly to his chance at an honorable escape—and there he stays as hours pass until Christmas day.

Once more, the Knight opens its eyes and beholds the man in its Chapel.

There’s a rather disarming quality to being seen.

---

Grade: A+

“The Green Knight” is in theaters now.