Note: This piece contains spoilers for ‘The Green Knight’
It’s the final moments of David Lowery’s medieval fantasy The Green Knight and, geographically speaking, our hero’s quest is complete. The headstrong but easily overwhelmed knight-in-training Gawain (Dev Patel) has travelled from the cold stone of King Arthur’s Camelot to the luscious calm of the green chapel, a journey roughly six days north, although with all he’s seen it undoubtedly felt longer. Now comes the real task; he must face the lumbering sequoia who lends the film its title, whose head he lopped off in a game last Christmas, and who will now deal Gawain the exact blow that was dealt unto him. From the moment of decapitation, Gawain’s fate was sealed, and now, kneeling in front of his challenger, it will be realised.
After some understandable trepidation, Gawain tells his executioner he is ready to die. “Well done, my brave knight,” the oaken monolith softly growls. “Now, off with your head.” Death has been on Gawain’s mind non-stop since he chopped that neck a year ago, a fear that has expanded, crystallised, and encompassed him throughout his journey. As was forewarned, we know his death is inevitable; it’s how he faces it that matters most. Especially because Gawain, and what he thought he stood for, has died many times before he got here.
Gawain is, as a friend of mine put it, a himbo with something to prove. He loves brothels and skipping mass, and yet his bullish charisma completely evaporates under the piercing gaze of Uncle Arthur (Sean Harris) and Auntie Guinevere (Kate Dickie). It’s about time he starts proving himself, and there’s one way to do that in the royal court; by doing knightly shit. They come pre-packaged with a chivalric code, a doctrine of honour, respect and chastity that is as protective as any chainmail. But Gawain, remember, loves brothels and skipping mass, and the more these tendencies are preyed upon on his quest, the more gaps appear in his chivalric armour. In the scenes that show his purgatory-like wait between Christmases in Camelot, we come to understand his twin fears: dying without amounting to anything, and not living up to the standard set by the knights before him. Within each is a flickering anxiety; what if the ideals we ascribe our purpose to are limited, and don’t offer us the protection we think?
The first demonstration of this, and the first death that befalls young Gawain, is the bluntest. After being robbed by bandits who stole his horse, supplies, and even an enchanted sash of protection bequeathed by his sorceress mother, Gawain lies gagged and bound in a forest clearing, completely exposed and helpless. It’s been signposted that his ambushers are godless; a shot of a bishop blessing Gawain’s shield is mirrored by a close-up of a bandit breaking it into pieces. He’s left to the elements, but Lowery’s camera doesn’t rest on him struggling in the clearing. In a move that seemingly signals the camera’s disinterest in our incapacitated hero, we turn a full circle and land back on what remains of Gawain, as he has been reduced to a skeleton. A moment’s rest passes before the camera turns back the other way; when the pan is complete, Gawain has been resurrected, his full-blooded vigour back on display as if nothing has happened.
Gawain’s worst fear — a dishonourable, meaningless death that doesn’t speak to any strength of his character — is instantly realised, and is reversed even quicker by the subversive, pagan forces at play. This raises the stakes for his quest, but communicates something more unsettling for our hero — what you’re most scared of doesn’t operate the way you’ve been taught. Here, a worse alternative to death is proposed; an undoing of his Christian, knightly values. These unseen powers who can command life and death are seen here mischievously, a playful bunch of sadists who mock the values of Christendom by invoking a death-and-resurrection whenever they feel like it, as if it means nothing. It makes Gawain’s inherited ideologies seem suddenly small, and the ground on which he now walks feel not as stable as the stone of Camelot.
Even if the chivalric code offered him complete protection, Gawain’s next, more abstract death proves he is not worthy of it. After floundering in wild, hilly plains, Gawain reaches a castle, where an inviting Lord (Joel Edgerton) and Lady (Alicia Vikander) bid him to take rest in their warm hearth. The air is thick with a prickling intimacy, and when the enchanting Lady finally visits Gawain in bed, she shows him the thought-lost sash, and implores him to take it from her. Her intentions would be considerably less suspicious were her hand not, during this, stimulating his penis. Gawain has been avoiding such an encounter his entire stay, not wanting to disrespect the Lord’s hospitality or his vow of chastity — this is a married woman of nobility, and because Gawain is neither wedded nor knighted, any sexual act would be a severe transgression. But the temptation of the sash, and its assured powers, is too much for Gawain, and as he rips it from her in the moment of climax, the Lady snidely tells what he already knows from his post-orgasm comedown, “You are no knight.” We are then shown Gawain’s hand on the sash, coated in semen. He has suffered what the French call le petit mort, the little death.
One of the only times we’re as vulnerable as we are when we climax is in our moment of death. And similar to dying, Gawain’s sexual pleasure is rooted in something largely outside of his control. His arousal, stimulation, and ultimate climax was something the brash sinner wanted, but it wasn’t up to him how he responded to the Lady’s touch, even if she was preying on preexisting desires.
But sexual desire is a natural facet of life, and something Gawain didn’t punish himself for in his brotheling days. It’s only now something is expected of him, and he’s attempting to live up to ironclast standards, that the shame comes pouring in. In the view of knights, Gawain is a man in spite of his sexuality rather than because of it, the reminder of which is now shamefully stuck to his hands. It makes him feel pathetic, weak, and subservient to his carnal urges.
But what Gawain sees as a weakness — succumbing to a domineering force — others find exciting. Submission to a partner can be a key way to enjoy sex. The idea of dropping your guard down with someone, and in return making a passionate connection, can be thrilling. But relinquishing control is antithetical to being a knight, an order that sees this excitement as corruptive, and it’s their religious and social ideology that imposes the moral judgements on Gawain’s pleasure. To a man of honour, the human body is a weakness.
His post-orgasm shame is a condemnation of his natural urges, a burial for his hopes of being an honourable knight, but it’s a death he gets to freely walk away from. Pain wasn’t inflicted on him, his body remains intact, no motor functions impeded. But to a knight, this is worse than suffering a normal fatality. Continuing your journey knowing how you failed is much more shameful than leaving this earth with your soul intact. Through dying-but-living, Gawain knows himself to a substantial degree better, for there is nothing more harmful than a death you impose on yourself, a death you have to live with.
It’s from this that Gawain makes it to the green chapel; his worldview undermined, his faith in himself ruined. This is the only way to face his fate; open, exhausted, vulnerable. He waits for the Green Knight to awaken from a slumber that could have started last Christmas, and readies his neck when asked. The Knight takes his axe. Gawain flinches; once, twice, he even asks for the meaning of life. But no stalling is permitted in front of his fellow gamesman. It’s decapitation time.
Except, in the final second, Gawain scrambles to his feet, apologises profusely, and races back home to Camelot. We then watch a montage of Gawain being attended to, in bed with his sex worker lover, becoming a knight, becoming a king, watching his son die, all before his castle is sieged, death imminent. As the doors are pounded, about to break, Gawain realises what he’s been clinging to this entire time; the sash, hidden under his robes, maybe even under his skin. He pulls it out; his head, pre-sliced, falls off his shoulders and rolls to the floor. Suddenly we are back in the green chapel. Gawain has seen all we have. He takes off the protective sash, says he’s ready. “Well done, my brave knight.”
Gawain’s penultimate death is a spiritual one, a ruinous draining of all that makes life commendable. Through the vision, he learns that prospering as a knight does not necessarily denote a life well lived. In this projection of an imagined future, Gawain does not act with honour. He takes a baby from its mother’s arms, he sends his son to his death in battle, he loses the faith of his subjects. His sunken eyes and grave expressions tell us he has died long before his head fell off his shoulders.
Throughout the film, Gawain has been fighting the fear that his death will define his life. He thinks he will be protected by his knight’s code, despite his fears he can’t bear its impressive mantle. But by having gone through death and lived a final time, Gawain learns that, regardless of his life’s purpose, he has the ability to be torn apart and become whole again. It is not as a knight, as a Christian, or even as a lustful youth that Gawain faces his death. It is simply faced by himself: alone and without meaning. Death does not respect us for being able to confront it. But Gawain can respect himself for doing so.
Being a knight does not automatically prepare you for the world, but lessons can be taken from antiquated systems to make us better people. We just don’t need to punish ourselves for not meeting their standards or contributing to their proliferation. Lowery’s take on the chivalric romance offers something more compelling than admiration for a story; it’s an understanding of its mechanics and effects on the psyche. Calling Gawain a knight before his final, actual death is another part of the Green Knight’s cruel game, as it’s said in the moment Gawain has accepted that he’ll never live as one. As he’s found out, being a knight does not prepare you for death. His three prior deaths, regular and merciless, are each a thundering attempt to crack through Gawain’s ideological fear to show him the truth of life and the meaning of death. Do you get it? they each ask of him. It’s only at the very last moment that he does. You can have all the external validation you desire and still be a coward, and if cowardice is left unchallenged, if it’s clung to and made a creed, it will rot you to the core. There are better ways to live, Gawain’s many deaths tell him. And there are finer ways to die.
