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| The Green Knight, Dir. David Lowery, 2021 |
In The Green Knight, nature and the religion of medieval Europe are uneasy bedfellows. Christianity comes to signify all of civilization in a negative-conceptual sense- in the sense that human society is an organism that exists at variance with the earth, like something feebly transposed over the vastness of the world. This feeling is realized in Camelot, a loose confederation of squalid pastures and masonry, ruled by a monarch whose infirmity* reflects the ailing character and fallibility of his realm. Structures that conceal their own decrepitude, a host of ineffectual symbols, a world that has entered upon a long senescence. We are ushered in by an image of Gawain as saint, scepter and globe in hand, head flanked by the solar disc, consumed in fire. This is a twin image: Gawain will enter the flame and die to the world and live and be transformed, but under the auspices of a self-conscious iconoclasm.
