The Green Knight: This is His Color

I put on my robe and wizard hat.

So the interest in Arthurian stuff has been in decline for a pretty long time now. I don’t think I need to qualify that. Off the top of my head I can only count 2008’s Merlin (which was beloved by shippers and shippers only) and the 2020 cancelled-after-one-season female protag/black Arthur Cursed among the unfortunate attempts at making round tables great again in this century. I haven’t watched either and I sure as hell am not going to just for the sake of another one of my spicy garlic mayo cold takes.

Frankly, I have to… agree with the general media watching public in that I could not have cared less if someone wanted to make another Arthur movie.

Then I saw the trailer for David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021).

Now listen here: the vibes are immaculate. The vibes are pristine. Isn’t a vibe enough to go on? Isn’t it enough of a joy to disappear into the lush canopy of an artistic vision? And Dev Patel! Where is the line I have to queue in to touch his face? Everyone else got a go. I want to touch Dev Patel’s face and if the belt stays on, daddy, the belt stays on.

What is it with me and men who look good in earth tones? Ignoring of course, that I am a pervert and a pig. These are among the least of things which are quite distinctly wrong with me. Two hours I spent watching Dev Patel’s face achieve myriad states of softness, be caressed by no less than 80% of the supporting cast, and you know what? I woulda watched more.

But for the people for whom the exquisite beauty of a man is not enough: I guess we’re gonna have to talk about metaphors. We’re gonna talk about allegory. We’re gonna talk about colors. And shapes. And by the end of this shit I’ll have you counting all the way to 10.

Full spoilers ahead, for those of you wildest of heart and boldest of blood. For real, I will presume you watched the movie.

Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square.

Sir Gawain and The Kingdom (Which is Unnamed but Everyone Knows is Camelot)

Let’s go over the play-by-play: Sir Gawain, not-yet-Knight, town himbo, and nephew to the legendary King Arthur by his sister, the witch Morgana Le Fay, is a dopebag good for nothing loser. The end.

Okay maybe more plays than that.

Young Sir Himbo (pronounced gar-wen apparently), after waking from a drunken slumber in a whorehouse, goes to the Christmas celebrations held by King Arthur and Queen Guinevere where he is invited to sit beside the monarchs and regale them with a noble tale of his own exploits. He has none to tell (yet) and so Arthur asks the rest of the room if they have anything they’d like to share with the class. This is interrupted by the arrival of the eponymous Green Knight, who is linked in some way with a spell that is cast by the witch Himbo’s Mom.

Calligraphy club is lit.

The Knight issues a challenge: hit me and gain my axe.

And of course, the catch: Whatever you give me, you must come to my house, and I’ll give you the same thing in turn on Christmas day. One year hence.

So what does Gawain do? He decapitates him. Cuz momma didn’t raise no pussy willow.

This, children, is called propagation.

The Knight picks up his head. And he fucking yeets outta there laughing. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

So this is more or less a prologue to the meat of the film and it is structurally the most easy to explain part. But I find myself already struggling to summarize and convey what is conveyed in this set of scenes, in part because this movie is extremely visual in its storytelling. The dialogue is carefully chosen and rarely outwardly expositional, which I understand is probably why this movie has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. With the exception of Gawain, it doesn’t really even name any of the characters. It just kind of expects you to know who they are.

This is Merlin. He is on screen for like 2 minutes total throughout the whole movie and has no dialogue.

But… that’s something I love about it?

There’s a scene in this early part where Arthur hands Gawain his sword and it choked me up actually. Something about Dev’s performance and that I understood the significance of it and how it contributed to his character to see him staring longingly at this object that was emblematic of everything he wanted.

Despite the liberties the film is taking with the source material (and we’ll get to that) it carries this sort of mythopoeic, larger than life quality especially in this early part. Arthur and Guinevere are just King and Queen. Morgana is Mother. Without it being named, here is The Round Table. Here is the Kingdom of Camelot. These are not people, these are Archetypes. Myths. Heroes. Legends. Religious Icons. And amongst them all, our focus is on Gawain, who is not archetypal, not saintly, not an icon. He’s just a dude.

Eyelashes on point tho.

And what are you supposed to do when you are a dude who everyone (yourself included) is expecting to someday be a Legend? What are you supposed to do when you’re the only person in the room without a story to tell and the King hands you his Sword, the Sword that was pulled from a particular Stone? Well, you start by cutting the tree guy’s head off to impress the bros and the brosephines, I suppose.

And as for the consequences… that’s for one year hence.

One Year Hence

So a year passes and believe it or not, Good Sir Gawain is… still a loser.

Let’s just pretend that smearing coal on Dev Patel makes him in any way unattractive.

This is probably where the movie really starts diverging from its source material. I don’t want to center the original poem too much because that’s a reading that everyone and their redditor uncle has done or will do, and I mean I do believe the film should stand on its own without needing a review of related literature, but it does deserve some acknowledgement.

Gawain is not doing bar brawls in the original romance. He’s a knight, and he fulfills pretty much every stereotype that that word implies. They mention this briefly in the movie, but knighthood has five virtues: friendship, generosity, chastity, courtesy, and piety. I copied these from Sparknotes. What you basically need to know is that in the original romance, he’s Mr. Good Guy until he fucks something up right at the end, and you might guess what it is because the film’s climax is centered around that fuckup.

Is it me or is the scale of this painting really weird?

I’m gonna make like the original poem, and just gloss over the journey and skip to the end. Not like we made any friends along the way.

Romance!Gawain is in the manor house and the Lord asks him to make a promise.

It goes like this: I’m going out hunting. You stay in my house with my beautiful wife. You can have the spoils of my hunt. But whatever you get while I am away, give me the same thing in turn.

Kinda sounds familiar.

But anyway, Gawain keeps the promise for the most part. And he mostly does this by kissing the Lord a lot, cuz the Lady is horny, and whatever she’s giving Gawain, he’s giving her husband.

He breaks his promise when the Lady offers him a magic green sash that will protect him from all physical harm. He takes it and some sugar, but when he’s locking lips with daddy later on, he keeps the sash a secret.

And when he goes to meet the Green Knight, and the quest is revealed to be a trial of his virtue, it is only because of this deception that he is wounded at all. His goodness is boundless, inherent, and effortless, and his human failure is a nick on the neck. A single moment of cowardice and deceit which stains and otherwise spotless man.

Okay, back to loserville.

Goodness, Greatness

Lowery’s Gawain is not the Gawain of the original romance. Obviously. He’s a reluctant (if not unwilling) hero. He doesn’t give to the poor and when he does it’s a pittance. He can’t fight for the life of him and he’s definitely not smart enough to avoid the fight in the first place. He thinks it’s a clever idea to ask ghosts what he’ll get in return for doing them kindnesses. He wants to stand on the shoulders of figurative and literal giants, so that he doesn’t have to do the hard task of finding his own way.

I feel like maybe this would have worked if he showed some more leg.

He is not someone who is great to begin with. And when his mettle is tested, he doesn’t turn out to secretly be someone whose greatness was hiding just beneath the surface of a rough exterior. He is someone who knows he is not great, but wants to be. Expects to be. Even when he does not even really know what that would look like. And if I’m going with the number of people who quote this line on twitter, I kind of believe most people have picked up that there’s quite an important line in the first third of the film that pierces into the want vs. need dynamic of Gawain’s relationship to the concept of Greatness.

Spoken of course by the one character who has no systemic power or magic on her side.

Why does Gawain want to see the Green Knight? Yes, he is reluctant at the start but by the final stretch of the film he’s fighting off a last warning by a talking fox that he is going to his doom. He wants to meet the Knight. Genuinely and truly. Why?

What is he expecting to find?

This screenshot was too funny not to use.

And what he finds instead is:

Death. And in trying to escape Death, he finds Greatness. And then Death.

It’s A Christmas Movie Because of the Color Scheme

This film talks about color. And people who talk about this film talk about how this film talks about color. Here is a video essay by Thomas Flight that came out as I was writing this. Because I’m a slowtack person who cannot organize my thoughts in an expedient enough fashion for them to be relevant to the moment.

There’s a whole speech that the Lady of the house gives about color and what it means.

Veganism gives you superpowers.

Red is lust, human life, blood. Red is also the color of men in this film. The color of rulers. The color of Arthur and Merlin’s magic. Of bravery that is momentary and then falters, and then is not seen again.

This is the first appearance of “red magic” in the film when Arthur turns to Merlin when the Green Knight arrives.

Gawain swimming to retrieve Winnifred’s skull is the only time he seems to be able to access this same color palette.

Green of course, is death and inhuman life. Verdigris. Rot. The bodies of war turned to fertilizer. The inhospitable wilds, which vastly outstretch the speck that is civilization. It is the color of the Witches. It is the color of the Knight.

One fish, two fish, red magic, green magic.

So yes, like Thomas Flight says in that video essay, one of the big themes of the film is Gawain coming to terms with death. Not just death at the hands of the Green Knight, but the death that will come no matter what he does. Facing death courageously has been what everyone has told him and what he comes to believe will grant him greatness and honor, but then comes a moment where the romanticism of that notion falls away, when it’s just him in the woods about to get his head chopped off to an audience of no-one. In a film that is based on a Christian mythos, it seems quite fitting that the horror of this moment —

— is the horror that death is all there is. The horror of atheism. Of nihilism. That there will be nothing else but a severed head and a bleeding stump. That Gawain, and all of us, live ignominiously, and then disappear.

Gawain runs from the Knight, presumably lies and invents a story of his great quest, inherits the crown, becomes a despot, steals a child from his commonfolk lover and marries politically, loses his stolen child in a war, and then, with revolutionaries knocking at his door, he dies.

The world is green. There is no escaping.

Dev Patel Looks Good in Mustard Yellow

A lot of the time I spent watching this movie, I spent thinking about how Dev Patel looks so motherhuffing good in mustard yellow.

The film makes a big stink about the two colors of red and green and you think then that red, being representative of human struggle in a world where the green of time’s decay consumes all, would be the color that would be emblematic of the lead character, the bloodied battered insignificant life who unwittingly agrees to a game of death against the forces of time and nature.

But red isn’t his color. This is his color.

He is bee-oo-ti-ful. Have I said that already?

There is no speech in the film about the virtues of yellow. Among other things that are left uncommented on.

Yup.

So it’s wholly up to the viewer to interpret a color that is unarguably a large part of the film’s visual language, when the meaning of two others has been drawn attention to and then more or less laid bare within the text of the screenplay.

Pulling from outside the film’s context and from wider culture, there’s obviously the association of yellow and cowardice. Yellow-bellied. Chicken. Gawain’s most cowardly moment, running away from the destiny that he’s spent the whole film running towards is sickly in his signature color.

I mean he’s pretty pathetic, but he’s good with animals, and that’s always a plus.

Yellow has also been the color of insanity in some notable literature. The Yellow Wallpaper. The King in Yellow. Certainly there is an aspect of Gawain’s journey which is a descent into madness.

You spin me, right, round, baby.

There’s association with wealth. Gold. Coin. Greed, as a result of its association with wealth. The sun. Ye old life giving star. Yellow is also the color that leaves turn when they die. The destruction of greenness.

Leaving the yellow to enter the green.

I think those readings are all valid and they add dimension and texture to a film that allows the same ambiguities to resonate with the colors it does discuss explicitly, bringing to mind red’s association with warbringing and spilled blood, and green’s with the natural world and poisons.

But I think the thing about yellow that is important, is that it is his color.

Being A Loser Is Good, Actually

The thing I really like about Gawain in this movie is that he’s just a dude.

Gawain has two portraits of himself painted over the course of the film. The first features his prominent yellow cloak and the scene in which it is painted has no dialogue and is so early in the film you forget that it even happened by the time you get to the second.

The artist’s rendition of the Knight in the bottom right is kinda nightmare fuel.

The second is entirely green. It’s a photograph taken through a camera obscura. The Lady takes it when Gawain stays at their manor and then mysteriously it shows up in Camelot when Gawain has become King.

Portrait of Dorian Gray Vibez.

Earlier on I pointed out that Gawain’s cowardice was color coded in yellow. Now the thing about that is, when he sees into his shitty future where he becomes a man who is Great but not Good, the color yellow starts gradually disappearing from the film until we are left with the all green of his inevitable demise. And then of course, he snaps out of it.

Bit more subtle than the yellow fog, but it ain’t nothing.

Yellow is Gawain’s color. Not just him in his worst aspects but him in his best. Him when he is just him. Him when he is looking at a portrait of his idealized self and imagining not “what he could have” but “who he could be.” The return to yellow from green in this climactic moment is a return to himself, to the person he left behind when he decided that living as a Great Man was the only thing that mattered.

This is one of the most notable scenes where yellow creeps into his future vision.

And I think it matters that he isn’t red. That yellow is not spoken of. That it is not an acceptable option within the framework of this world for him to just be himself. For him to love his poor girlfriend. For him to drunkenly fight for his witch mom’s good name. For him to make mistakes like shooing away the fox or asking the dead girl for a favor and then, with regret in his heart, try his best to fix his fuckups. For him to be a father, loving and kind, crying over a son who went to war for him. It is not enough for him to be Good, because when someone is Good they are good in ordinary, everyday, mundane, human ways. It is only in Greatness that one can be extraordinary.

When you say you’re looking for honor or greatness, it always implies that those things are outside of you. That you get them somewhere. Maybe down at the 7–11? Maybe if you commit an act of extreme violence towards a group of people you have chosen to be the source of all your problems? It’s cheesy but I think that when Gawain returns from the vision of his own death, he’s a changed man. He, for the first time, understands what he really agreed to.

“Take whatever you want, and when the time comes, you must pay the same thing in kind. And if you will not pay willingly, it will be taken from you.”

That is life. That is death.

Gawain in the finale knows no matter how far he travels, how high a height he aspires to, whatever greatness he acquires, whoever he beheads, the same fate awaits him. And what is a dude supposed to do when the life of greatness he thought he wanted is not really what he wanted? What is a dude supposed to do when faced with the frightening reality that he was always going to die, even before he stepped up to be the boldest of blood and the wildest of heart?

He throws off the magic cum rag. He does the one good thing even his literary counterpart could not. He keeps his promise. So that he can be good and honorable. Even though no one might ever know that about him. No one will sing songs. No one will paint portraits. No one will put a crown on his head. He is good only for himself, in the face of an inescapable death.

Green never really disappears. If it isn’t there, it will be. Rot, moss, and overgrowth. Time, nature, entropy, death. All the things beyond our understanding. All of us will die. But in this moment —

We are the color of ourselves. And we can choose what that means.