Artorius Rex
Rick Groen opens his review of King Arthur with a lament:
“May the gods protect us from modernists messing with our myths. First it was Troy, recasting Homer as a humanist and leaching all those annoying divinities right out of The Iliad. And now we have another gang of contemporaries performing a legend-ectomy on poor King Arthur. So what was fodder for everyone from Malory to Monty Python is thin gruel here. Sorry, but expect no power in the sword and no magic in the sorcerer — goodbye Excalibur, adieu Merlin. As for courtly romance, or chivalrous knights, or jagged love triangles, or even a certain place called Camelot, they apparently didn’t exist. Heavens, it’s almost enough to make you thank the Lord for Mel Gibson — at least he had a passion for The Passion, and treated his hero as more than just another frail man nailed to a workaday cross”. (The Globe and Mail 2004.07.07)
And once again, I am stunned by the zeitgeist which has stripped scripts of myth to begin with. As he said, first there was Troy, and to a certain extant The Passion, but even it strove to be realistic, using dialogue that was supposed to be Latin and Aramaic, although tongues not used to hearing it everyday didn’t do a good job pronouncing it (I mean, I don’t know Latin, but know enough phrases from here and there to know that it wasn’t pronounced properly).
Let’s grant that both films were recorded in 2003. By doing this we can say – human nature or what not – we can’t pretend that these are problems that lend themselves to the saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. What we can say is that for the purpose of selling tickets and making lots of money – a vice the even Shakespeare was subject to – writers and producers have concocted costume dramas to explore the problems that face us a human beings at the turn of the 21st Century. And what both Troy, The Passion, and King Arthur show is an attempt to link our problems with a past now dissolved under education, plastic, and the inevitable gains of a thousand years of culture. But to tune it to today’s audience, they have made it atheistic and as realistic as they thought best. What this shows us is that today’s people are historically sophisticated enough to want to experience things as they may have happened, and that for the most part, we’re a secular population. However, this last point also lends itself as to why these films – Bruckheimer’s record – are heavy on battles and violence; because that sells well. A film heavy on dialogue and character development doesn’t translate well, but if you want to open this film in foreign markets – which lend themselves to the idea of an inconsistent education (what they teach kids in France ain’t what they teach kids in the inner city of the United States, to say nothing of what is taught in non-Western markets) you make a movie that strips out the cultural referent of religion and that goes for the ‘wow’ of spectacular violence.
Having gotten that out of the way, I want to address critics who are lamenting the lack of fairy-tale, to something we already well know. (An addition to the above paragraph would be: by creating a new version of a tired tale – something even Shakespeare was subject to as well – you create a new demand by the market to experience it).
What the reviews of King Arthur are failing to acknowledge – for no other reason than the apparent ignorance of the critics (otherwise I feel they should clarify their criticism with this knowledge) is that any one who has looked into this story knows, it was made up in the late Medieval Era, and further, was made up as Kingly Propaganda. It would be as if the President of the United States, seeking to assert a dictatorship, had someone write a story connecting his bloodline to the throne of England, and somehow made it seem that the Revolutionary War ended in a treaty of peace with a country later renamed Airstrip One. Playing loose with the facts, and knowing full well that the public is probably ignorant of those facts to begin with – one could do this and convince many. (Critics of Michael Moore posit this is pretty much what he does to begin with).
We should be aware that the ‘fictionalization’ of history has for most centuries been exactly how that field was conducted. Based on hearsay and rumour, people would write down what they’d heard – and what they heard may have included heavy doses of speculation. An oral history got taken up by Homer and turned into the Illiad; Edward I, wanting to legitimize his reign, took up the oral history of Arthur and began the process that would lead to Malory. Fictional history has for centuries also served as ‘practical history’ that is, what most people are exposed to and use in their lives, to whatever extant that history proves useful. Shakespeare’s History Plays were not going to be cross-referenced and looked into by the 16th Century audiences. They paid their penny and left the theatre knowing more about the past then they had when they’d entered.
Having read these negative reviews, I was surprised by how good the movie actually was. By the end though, I was really sick of hearing the word “freedom” and it made me think that this – as King Arthur always has – was meant as Kingly Propaganda for the American’s war on terrorism, full of the bluster and bullshit that the terrorists are engaged on a war on freedom. But it also serves as a reminder that the Americans in Iraq are the Romans in Britain, and that the Woads are those chopping the heads off of the colonials.
Historians agree that King Arthur as we know him – sword in the stone and all that – was based on an historical figure. They think he was someone who united the Celtic tribes to fight against the colonial Saxons, a English Vergentorix. However, we cannot describe him as English at all, since English is what resulted from the mix of these two peoples – the Celtic inhabitants (represented in the film by the Woads) and the Saxon’s seeking new land and opportunities. Fifteen hundred years later, Northern Europe appears to be a socialist utopia, dreary weather producing a society that takes care of everyone and leaving them free to invent and market cellphones. But before technology came around to make life more bearable (centralized heating in the winter, refrigeration in the summer – you know, all those things that prevent a winter starvation) it was a hard life up there. No wonder the Saxons were later known as the Vikings. But whatever – what matters here is that the historical and archaeological record shows that in the 6th and 7th Centuries, Saxons were ‘invading’ or perhaps we should say, ‘liberating’ what we now call England and Wales, and that it is reasonable to assume that to counter the raping and pillaging the tribes gathered together under a leader to have great battles and what not. That leader most probably died in battle – which would further his memory – and for centuries his story would be told.
We are so used to the technologies of memory and the whims of hearsay we don’t put much thought into what that means. I would say that for one thing, the oral tradition was probably a bit more refined than ours, decimated by our recording devices. But corruption of the account must have slipped in, and the next thing you know you’re dealing with Ring-Around-the-Rosy. We all know how that nursery rhyme goes, but it takes some effort to learn that it’s inherited from the time of the Plague. A pocket full of posy was supposed to help, but in the end, it’s “ashes ashes … we all fall down”.
A population used to experiencing the simulacrum of the time on a screen may be a little taken aback by such a direct connection to a past that really happened. I’m amazed that Hollywood – and Jerry Brukheimer for christ’s sakes – wants to give us a version of the Arthur story as if ‘this is what really happened, what the legend is based on’. That Troy too would strip the gods and ‘the magic’ from the story I think is a good thing. I think that it’s the best thing. I question why anyone would want to watch fairy-tale razzle dazzle. Perhaps this is one of the better things that a twenty-five year investment in deconstructive theories has brought us; a willingness to explore source material, and an impatience with mystical nonsense. What can one learn from watching either film? One, that there are no gods and there is no magic – two important things that every one of us should resign ourselves too. Psychologists are busy trying to figure out why we’d ever believe in such nonsense to begin with, and while each of us perhaps has a personal story to tell on why Faith in whatever exists for them I think it’s much more important if we agree to ignore it in public. (My position is that while I may believe in such-and-such, and while I may attend a church/similar to congregate with other believers, I should acknowledge the strong possibility that such beliefs are delusions, and if I’m unwilling to do that, as is my right, than I should at least agree to disagree with atheists and accept the position that “For all intents and purposes, these things don’t exist”). That being accepted, we have to find solutions and positions based on the dirt of reality, something much more able to accept sculptural forces than ephemeral hocus-pocus. As the transaction goes, ‘You may believe in Shiva, and I may believe in Allah, but neither will help us get this water pump built, so let’s put that aside and focus on our human problems’.
King Arthur balances the role the Church had in education in the Dark Ages with their freakishness. This itself plays into a contemporary bigotry toward practicing Christians, but it is also a fair and historical representation. Arthur goes on about a Palagius, who teaches all people are born free and are imbued with free will. The Bishop sent to the Wall refuses to tell Arthur that Palagius had been deemed a heretic and been killed a year earlier, only concerned with using Arthur’s knights to rescue the Pope’s favorite nephew, born into a Church aristocracy wherein he is meant for the Papacy, rather than having to work for it. The Bishop clearly displays the power politics of the Church at that time. It is the official religion of the Empire, and it has begun it’s relationship with governance and power that will last for the next thousand years until cultural stagnation inspires interest in what will emerge from the territorial battles with Muslims – forgotten knowledge and learning. We live in a time where the Catholic Church has divested itself of political power, but Christianity still pollutes secular governance, especially in the United States.
In one scene, Lancelot tells Arthur that the world he believes in – one without wars – will never exist. This line seems to be there for our ears, in 2004. I’ve come to believe that conflict is inevitable, but we shouldn’t accept that about violence. We could achieve a world without war, but there will always be a need for negotiation. And while there is a certain acrobatic appreciation for this blood and swords stuff, it is far better to watch it knowing it’s fakery, rather than accepting a need for war.
The world as we know as it is human; it is made up of human problems. The war in Iraq is one of the latest manifestation of a human problem, and for many of us, it is only an abstract injustice. If I had to walk kilometres for water in Africa for day to day survival, I don’t think I’d give a shit about the Mid East. Sure, the idiots who brought us this newspaper-CNN-Fox News-CBC Newsworld war have dressed it up in religious rhetoric, but if there is one thing studying the history of the Popes shows, is that God is a convenient lieutenant to the ambition of vain-glory. Achilles resented being such an instrument to Agamemnon, an example which shows how often being human, or specifically, being a male human bent on achieving and maintaining status, involves getting others to the dirty work. Donald Trump may be the king of his castle, but I bet he hasn’t licked a stamp or cleaned a toilet in years.
We need to films like Troy and now King Arthur to remind us that all we have is our humanity, and that the problems humans face are consistent with a human nature which our culture hasn’t dealt with. Some would say that myths were the narrative technology by which certain aspects of our nature were tamed; I would say that such technology is obsolete and now ineffective. We can’t return to anything, we can only acknowledge that each one of us is capable of great good things and great evil things, and being aware of precedents, examples from the past, is perhaps the only safeguard we have. Men will seek status and kill; other men will be the instruments of this action; others will be disgusted by it; a poet will be entranced enough to tell it to others, and as always, children will be eager to hear the stories that add that much more the newness of the world.