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Digital Divagations in a Hyperreal Camelot: Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur
“I am Arthur!” shouted one of the children, a bucket sitting on his head like a helmet.
“No!” shouted another small boy. “You are a Woad! I am Arthur!” (Frank Thompson, King Arthur, 2004)
HIC IACET ARTURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS. In the Bergsonian theory of Giles Deleuze, quondam and futurus are virtual moments that can only be actualized in the present (Deleuze 1986, 1989). Cinema screens the scandal of history, so that it is thoroughly presentist, like memory itself. Parsing the sources of the English imagination, Peter Ackroyd says that Arthur represents “the great national fount of myth and symbol,” “a legend of origin combined with a legend of revival” whose endurance stems at least in part from a seemingly limitless adaptability (Ackroyd 2002: 124, 118). The Arthur created by desires for origins and revivals has little to do with the dux bellorum who won the day – but not the war – against the Saxons at the Nennian battle of Badon Hill. That piece of the real only becomes significant because of the legends that accrue to it, from the earliest chronicles through the romances of the high Middle Ages and down to what Kevin Harty has dubbed “cinema Arthuriana” (Harty 2002; Higham 2002; Finke & Shichtman 2004). These Arthurs originate and stage periodic returns from a parallel universe that the myth itself calls the Isle of Avalon, but which I denote by the more prosaic title: the medieval imaginary (Haydock 2002, 2007, 2008). This chapter is concerned primarily with the ways in which Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) and its companion video game actualize this virtual Arthur.
The realist aesthetic of Siegfried Kracauer (2004) and his suspicion of both fantasy and historical cinema, which were for him much the same thing (1960: 77–91), represent one arm of my pincer approach to Arthurian cinémedievalism and digitization. With Kracauer, I view mass entertainment as the distilled expression of collective desires, which serve not merely to reflect but also to intensify ideals such as patriotism, nostalgia for charismatic leadership, or a belief in the historical destiny of nations. A central tenet of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis maintains that desire constructs its objects, not the reverse. As one of the West’s few remaining master myths, Arthur is capable of incarnating almost any desire – romantic, rationalist, or racist; nationalistic, nostalgic, or new age; fundamentalist, fascist, or futuristic; post-colonial, post-ideological, or even post-Twin Towers. Indeed, it is possible to take the temperature of almost any western age or society simply by attending to what it makes of Arthur’s story. Yet whether we seek him in the tomb like Henry II, and thereby seek to fix and control his influence, or lose ourselves within the selva oscura of hyperspace and multimedia, Arthur’s ability to survive repeated incarnations is a sure sign of his immortality.
The second pincer of my approach is what Baudrillard has called the “procession of simulacra” into the realm of hyperreality, where both reference and history are fatally attenuated in spasms of reproduction (1994: 1–42). The apparent contradiction in Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal rests in his insistence upon the erosion of reference to any reality whatsoever and, simultaneously, the postmodern obsession with technologies of its accurate representation. Many recent cinematic historical fantasies like King Arthur lavish money and attention on material details and egregiously verisimilar effects (like the kilometer-long Hadrian’s Wall built for the film and its computer-generated imagery [CGI] extensions) while treating the historical record with nothing like the same care. As Baudrillard maintained: “Concurrently with this effort toward an absolute correspondence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself … the cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent” (1994: 47, original italics). The reflexivity of Arthurian cinémedievalism is a theme in what follows, but so too is its specular ideology whereby we establish the reality of the present by fashioning its source in the past. If our desire for origins provokes us to seek him in the tomb, our desire for renewal proves that Arthur has always been a regent of the virtual.
The Desire for Origins: The Seven Sarmatians
Medievalists who analyze the products of cinémedievalism have often been reluctant to abandon the real/reel distinction in their rush to stake a claim in the realm of popular culture. This means that their use of sources can sometimes pander to popular appetites for knowing what “really” happened as a basis for the analysis and evaluation of historical films. In his discussion of King Arthur, Tom Shippey trenchantly remarks, “perhaps the least truthful part of the Fuqua film comes in the first two words of the opening credits, ‘Historians agree. … ’ On this subject, historians do not agree about anything” (Lupack 2004: 123; Shippey 2007: 314). Many critics find the ubiquitous appeals in such films to new evidence or to uncovering the truth behind the legend attractive, and perhaps justly so. Shippey certainly does not fall into this trap and, along with other critics of the film, such as Kevin J. Harty (2004), Alan Lupack (2004), Susan Aronstein (2005), and Caroline Jewers (2007), rightly identifies From Scythia to Camelot by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor (1994/2000) as the basis of the film’s depiction of Arthur’s knights as a band of Sarmatian cavalry. Yet despite its openly hypothetical stance, this work is also touted as the scholarly, albeit controversial, “source” to which the film’s director, screenwriter, producer, actors, and its paid historical consultant John Matthews unanimously refer in marketing the film. The film’s screenwriter David Franzioni (rather disingenuously, as will be demonstrated below) closes his interview with Matthews thus: “I’m so tired of seeing movies about movies.” He urges people not “to default to the images” but rather to “default to their experiences” (Franzioni 2004: 120). As we will see, Arthur may be “just a guy,” but he is a virtual guy made from other movies in nearly every detail. Franzioni’s affected, hyperspace vocabulary, urging audiences to “default to their own experiences,” also hints – perhaps unwittingly – at the fact that many traits of Arthur and his Sarmatian “knights” are ready-made elements designed to ease the marketing convergence of the film and its video game, where we are all invited to “play the legend.”
The chief source of King Arthur’s plot, characterization, and even its “ideology” has very little to do with Arthur, historical or legendary. It is based quite closely on Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (1954) and the reinscription of that classic jidai-geki in a franchise of American westerns, beginning with Preston Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960). What we have in Fuqua’s film, then, is yet another in a long line of medievalized westerns, issuing from a genealogy that includes the masterpiece of a widely recognized auteur and its commercially successful formula. It is this genealogy, not the putative Sarmatian ancestry of Arthur’s knights, that most influences what happens in the film. To recall the earlier citation of Baudrillard, the postmodern desire for origins is commonly doubled in film, calqued by cinema’s nostalgia for its own past. In addition, the film’s focus on ethnicity, explored thoughtfully by Shippey (2007), Jewers (2007), and Aronstein (2005), takes on a slightly different coloring when viewed through the prism of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), which provides not only the source for an important scene but also the model for the film’s erotic, Manichean nationalism. In short, the Littleton–Malcor hypothesis is a pretext in both senses of the word, one that allows Franzioni and Fuqua to cloak their Russian samurai cowboys in plausibly historical garb.
What seems to have taken place here is a by turns intriguing and absurd synthesis that rather nicely demonstrates how historical film and film history become entangled. Whatever one thinks of the Littleton–Malcor hypothesis of the breadth and influence of Ossetian culture, one cannot but be astonished by the ways in which King Arthur adapts it. According to Littleton and Malcor, some half million contemporary Ossetians living in southern Russia and on the steppes represent the survivors of a nomadic culture whose influence is said to have been vast. The western boundary of their ancient influence was supposedly Britain, where Sarmatian cavalry perhaps fought for the Roman leader Lucius Artorius Castus in the second century AD against the Picts and Scots. It is from this Sarmatian culture that Littleton and Malcor believe many elements of the Arthurian legends derive. In an idea taken up more popularly by Harold Reid in Arthur the Dragon King (2001: 223–6), Littleton has also traced the Sarmatian influence eastward from the steppes all the way to Japan, where he has found Arthur’s double in the hero Yamoto-Takeru (1983, 1995). For Littleton, both Arthur and Yamoto-Takeru derive from a “heroic tradition [that] has managed to span the Eurasian landmass from one end to the other” (1995, 259). Both are thought to have descended from the Sarmatian hero Batraz, whose adventures loom large in the Ossetian Nart Sagas. In attempting to do justice to the breadth of territory encompassed by the legendary descendants of Batraz, the film-makers seem to have wanted their own recuperation of this monomyth to be equally expansive. They include large-scale elements drawn from Japan and Russia in a syncretic version of the Arthur story, yet these elements are drawn not from medieval folk tales but rather from the films of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and the Soviet Sergei Eisenstein.
Kurosawa’s influence, both direct and filtered through the screen of Hollywood westerns, is ubiquitous and sometimes profound. In the first action sequence of King Arthur, Arthur and his knights ride down to the rescue in the V-formation that was the trademark shot of the Magnificent Seven franchise, which the screenplay’s novelization cutely dubs “the dragon formation” (Thompson 2004: 30). Throughout the film the knights crowd the cinemascope screen, pulled into close proximity by the use of a telephoto lens. Their horses are positively frenetic, shifting and snorting their way through every sequence. These features of the cinematography are trademarks of Kurosawa’s jidai-geki. But rather than pile up disconnected references, let us look first of all at an extended sequence that rather pointedly confirms the pastiche nature of the film’s Campbellesque monomyth. The extended tour of duty forced upon Arthur and his knights surely sets up resonances with the extended and repeated tours of American soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, who were also being hounded by determined guerilla warfare (Aronstein 2005: 205–13). And as Tom Shippey reminds us, the “final mission” topos has been a staple of post-Vietnam film-making for some time (2007: 316–26). The unexpected placing of Marius’s Roman villa in the north of Britain beyond Hadrian’s Wall has troubled many reviewers but is explicable in terms of the film’s hybrid historical and filmic antecedents. In their journey into southern Scotland, Arthur and his knights, located in the Sarmatian second century, are attacked by the Woads (Picts), directed by Merlin. One engagement that, according to medieval battle lists, did take place above the Wall was the Battle of Celidon Wood, which Geoffrey of Monmouth lists as the seventh of Arthur’s battles and which Littleton and Malcor, following Jackson (1953: 48), place in the moorlands near the upper Clyde and Tweed valleys (2000: 330, n.10). Unlike the earlier chronicler Nennius, Geoffrey makes the northern Picts and Scots Arthur’s adversaries in a number of engagements, and Littleton–Malcor read back from this “evidence” to postulate that all twelve of their second-century hero’s battles were against the Picts and Scots in the north of Britain, the tenth occurring in Celidon Wood.
In the film, as in Geoffrey’s account, an entrapment is orchestrated by fencing off exits from the wood, and just as in Geoffrey the result is not a slaughter but rather a benign gesture of allowing the trapped soldiers to escape. Geoffrey claims that Merlin’s mountain in Scotland was “encircled by hazels and thick thorns” (precinctus corulis densisque frutectis), making access difficult. This detail perhaps inspired the strategy of Merlin’s ambush in the film, which entraps the knights within a labyrinth of barbed ropes that cut off their retreat. The Scottish location and the Pictish foes are certainly indebted to the Littleton–Malcor hypothesis, but most of the details are drawn not from “new evidence” but directly from that much-maligned source, Geoffrey of Monmouth.
In fact, both histories – medieval and modern – are really only raw materials contributing to a scene that owes less to the constructed career of Lucius Artorius Castus than to Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth. The sequence restages a justly famous scene from Shakespeare’s “Scottish tragedy,” as reinterpreted by Kurosawa. In Throne of Blood (alternative title, Spider Web Castle, 1957) the Japanese reflexes of Macbeth and Banquo dash with increasing fear and frustration back and forth through “Spider Web Forest,” only to come upon dead ends that appear out of thin air. In King Arthur the spider webs are fashioned from rope studded with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s thorns, which the Woads shoot across the paths of the knights, weaving a web to trap their prey like so many spiders. In both films the riders finally conclude that they are trapped by supernatural forces: “Evil spirits,” says Kurosawa’s Washiro; “Inish, devil ghosts,” says Fuqua’s Dagonet.
More important for the film’s imaginary convergence of feudal Japan with Dark Age Britain is its uncanny structuration of identity, class, and ethnicity in terms of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Upon their release from indentured servitude in the Roman legion, the Sarmatians become in effect masterless samurai, like Kurosawa’s ronin, free to do as they like but alienated by their long service from home and family. Pace Tom Cruise, almost every great chambara is about “the last samurai.” Initially Arthur’s knights treat the Woads with the same contempt that Kurosawa’s samurai at first display for the farmers who “hunt” them. In Seven Samurai the scene that brings class conflict to the fore and for a time allays it comes when the samurai discover a cache of weapons and armor hidden in the village that the farmers have despoiled from ambushed warriors. The seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo, himself a hybrid mixture of samurai and farmer, gives the ronin a lesson in class resentment:
Farmers are stingy, foxy, blubbering, mean, stupid, and murderous! God damn! That’s what they are! But then, who made them such beasts? You did! The samurai did it! You burn their villages, destroy their farms, steal their food, force them to labor, take their women! And kill them if they resist. So what should the farmers do? Damn … Damn! (Kurosawa, Seven Samurai)
Like Kurosawa’s ronin, the Sarmatian knights were to begin as the scourge of the people they come to defend. When they arrive at Marius’s villa they discover with disgust the reality of exploitation that their military service to Rome has supported, a colonial regime of forced labor, stolen food and women, murder, and torture.
The recurrent scenes of grave mounds with swords plunged into them would seem to allude to the “Sarmatian hypothesis” but again visually at least these scenes descend directly from Kurosawa. Both the screenplay and its novelization, in line with Sarmatian archaeology, call for the swords to be plunged to the hilt into the earth, leaving what would appear to be a small cross as a kind of headstone. The film, however, embeds the sword in the tumuli only a few inches, creating a marked citation of Kurosawa’s film. In both films, after the first of the deaths, we are shown scenes in a graveyard on the outskirts of a village where Arthur/Kikuchiyo sit mourning a death for which they deem themselves responsible and where wine/sake is spilled onto a tumulus. These graves become an iconic marker in both films, an image to which the films repeatedly return. As Caroline Jewers remarks, these “echo the ubi sunt topos so beloved of epic” (2007), but this particular visualization of the topos is distinctly Kurosawan. In fact Fuqua’s original cut – minus the happy ending – ended in more elegiac register similar to that of Seven Samurai, contrasting the grave mounds and their sword markers with the solemn survivors.
In Seven Samurai all four dead heroes are killed by matchlock rifles, weapons that Kurosawa typically puts in the hands of his villains. In King Arthur this rather anti-heroic imbalance is served by arming the Saxons with armor-piercing crossbows that take the lives of Dagonet and Lancelot. Tristan, like the sword-master in Kurosawa’s film, goes on a scouting mission and brings back an example of this questionable technology as a trophy. Ultimately he is killed not by a crossbow but by a seax in a duel with Cerdic. Yet as in Kurosawa’s film, these characteristic weapons of the enemy (crossbows and seax) are used to stigmatize their fighting styles as both figuratively and literally underhanded. Likewise, Arthur’s knights are associated with their horses in a proleptic nod to the etymology of chivalry (Old French cheval, “horse”) but with a nod as well toward the reincarnation and animism of Shinto Buddhism.
The notorious battle of Mount Badon, wherever it took place, was almost certainly not a siege but a pitched battle on an open plain. Franzioni’s decision to site the battle in a fortified town on Hadrian’s Wall allows the detailed imitation of Kurosawa to be completed. The opening of the sequence shows the Sarmatian knights abandoning the town to its fate in order to take the freedom that has been given them. The scene is based closely on Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven, where the gunfighters leave the town before the final battle, though slowly change their minds as they again strap on their side-arms – an act which seems to recall them to their noble natures. The scene in King Arthur is vastly superior: there is no talking or debate, only confusion followed by stiffening resolve as they finally submit to their horses’ unwillingness to continue along this rather selfish path. When they line up alongside Arthur on the hill overlooking the battlefield, Fuqua cannot resist another cinematic citation: in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner’s Robin and his Saracen friend (Morgan Freeman) converse beneath a tree in the Sycamore Gap, known locally as “Robin Hood’s Tree,” one of the sites offered on marketed tours of Hadrian’s Wall. The Saxon spy is commanded by Cerdic to climb the tree for a better vantage point from which to view the slaughter of his own people. From an impossible distance hundreds of yards away and from within the fort, Tristan draws first blood in the battle by killing the traitor with a miraculous display of marksmanship worthy of Robin himself.
As the battle begins in earnest, it is clear that Arthur owes his art of war to Kurosawa’s Kambei. One would expect that the officer of a Roman legion, whatever his name, would be reluctant to open a fortified position to the enemy. Cerdic realizes early on that “he’s got a plan, this Roman.” Indeed he has, as Seven Samurai’s Kambei puts it: “We’ll let them in, not all of them at once. As soon as they enter, we shut the rest off and trap them. They’ll be helpless. … They must be lured in.” Though Fuqua’s film employs more pyrotechnics and many more extras, Arthur’s plan proceeds in exactly the same fashion. He allows the first wave through the gate and then has it closed behind them, only to open it again once they have been dispatched. Here as in Kurosawa’s film the battle plan relies upon the coordination of different groups to attack the enemy from all directions at once. Even the now (in)famous shot showing Guinevere and a group of women taking down a wounded man has its source in Kurosawa, though Fuqua’s version also nods in the direction of Boudicca, valkyries, and vampires.
Where Fuqua’s film does finally diverge from Kurosawa’s, particularly in the PG-rated version generally released, is in its happy ending. Like Kurosawa’s samurai or Sturges’ gunslingers, Fuqua’s Sarmatians begin the film on the cusp of a social change that obviates their place in society. This identity crisis is momentarily bridged in all three films as the samurai/cowboys/Sarmatians heroically accept their role as protectors of the weak. In Kurosawa’s version, however, this sense of belonging is cruelly foreshortened when, after the battle, the remaining samurai realize that only the farmers have really won anything and the three survivors leave the village just as they had entered it: alone, feared, and without a home. The Western remake of the film retains this sense of a rootless, vanishing breed in the two gunslingers but cushions the blow for audiences by allowing the Mexican ephebe to turn from the hired guns and to marry a native of the village. After an unsuccessful trial screening Fuqua was pressured into giving his film a softer ending, which ultimately concludes, like The Magnificent Seven, with a marriage, but also with a triumphant celebration of ethnogenesis.
Seven Samurai Meets Alexander Nevsky
While Seven Samurai certainly provides a key to Arthur’s hybrid identity in Fuqua’s film, the conflicts both internal and external in Kurosawa’s work are based on class and the economic realities that underlie them. The Magnificent Seven goes some way toward recasting these conflicts in terms of ethnicity, wherein white gunslingers from the north aided by their own hybrid figure – a young Mexican wannabe gunslinger – intervene in a conflict between bandits and villagers south of the border. However, neither in Kurosawa’s film nor even in his epigones is the moral nature of the conflict so clearly a matter of right versus wrong, of good versus evil, as it is in Fuqua’s King Arthur.
Earlier I invoked Siegfried Kracauer’s notion that “collective desires” are manifested and indeed encouraged by historical fantasies. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in King Arthur’s imaginary reconstruction of Dark Age ethnicity in the Manichean binary of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Perhaps the greatest propaganda film ever made, Eisenstein’s masterpiece pits a nation uniting under a charismatic leader against a Teutonic invasion in league with a cynical and opportunistic Catholic Church. Sound familiar? Eisenstein’s Manichean fantasy certainly deserves our respect: it is a superb film made in the shadow of Nazi Germany’s rise to the status of an international menace, while Eisenstein’s next work, Ivan the Terrible, devastatingly undermines the authoritarian streak of the earlier film in its evocation of Tsarist cruelty and paranoid suspicion. But King Arthur’s deployment of Eisenstein’s Nevsky represents what I see as a dangerous trend in contemporary cinémedievalism, which might be dubbed Manichean nostalgia. With no disrespect to critics who have seen the film’s ideology as reflecting current or more recent wars such as those in Vietnam (Jewers 2007; Shippey 2007) or the Persian Gulf (Aronstein 2005), I see the film as profoundly nostalgic for the ethical clarities of World War II. Such nostalgia for Manichean clarity is also evident in the recent film versions of the post-War fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
Eisenstein’s film was originally entitled Rus! – the rallying cry of the Russian forces in his film. The same cry is adopted by the Sarmatian knights in King Arthur to express solidarity with the ancient Ossetian culture from which they putatively derive. The cry echoes throughout King Arthur, particularly from the character Bors, who typically makes the connection explicit by screaming “Artorius!” and then “Rus!” After the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere has united the Sarmatians with the native peoples of Britain, Bors again bellows “Artorius!” and then sheepishly omits the “Rus!” as no longer appropriate. His silence signals a recognition of the difference this marriage makes, the imaginary unification of Britain under a single leader. Against this in both films are posed the mute synecdoches of a proto-Nazi salute: open, extended hands adorn the helmets of the Teutonic hordes in Nevsky, while the Roman Marius in King Arthur receives a Nazi salute from a soldier whose body remains outside the frame. The twentieth century is proleptically signified as that which gave body and voice to these truncated gestures of unquestioned obedience.
The extended sequence in the colonial villa of the aristocratic Marius is a devastating depiction of a monster realized as a Roman Catholic. The episode, I would argue, is a euhemerized interpretation of the monstrous “saint” of Mont-Saint-Michel in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the fifth book of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, inspired by the equally barbarous slaughter of the innocents in Nevsky. Euhemerism is a common tactic in postmodern movie medievalism, activated to offer rational explanations for medieval myths. Fuqua’s Marius is not the giant cannibal of medieval legend, merely a fat, petty despot who thinks himself a “saint” and who starves the native populace to death in order to enrich himself. Like the monster of Mont-Saint-Michel, Marius signifies the inhumanity of Rome’s boundless acquisitiveness. His colonial villa has, like Malory’s Lucius, an egle displayed on loffte (Shepherd 2004: 126). But like the giant of Mont-Saint-Michel, the dark secret of his perversity can be discovered by following one’s nose “to the source of the reek” of rotting flesh (Alliterative Morte Arthure, line 1041). If the giant is a grotesque parody of the Catholic Eucharist, Marius parodies the devotion of anchorites by entombing the disobedient in an anchorhold and slowly starving them to death, while his monks chant masses for their souls. The alleged complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in the Nazi “final solution” thus gains an imagined analogue in Dark Age Britain, inspired by a Stalinist reading of thirteenth-century Russian history.
The eroticization of nationalism is an important theme in Nevsky, and Fuqua’s film assiduously follows suit. Lancelot loses the contest of smoldering glances to Arthur simply because the latter is the more selfless defender of Britain. The love triangle is resolved in different ways in the two films, but crucial to each is the introduction of the Bolshevik idea of the woman warrior. Like Eisenstein’s Vasalisy and Besson’s Joan of Arc, Guinevere goes to war less as a gender warrior than as an embodiment of nationalism itself. Rather disappointingly for many, including Caroline Jewers (2007) and myself (though perhaps for different reasons), the Bacchic exploits of Guinevere (played by Keira Knightley) are soon complete. She discards her leather-thong bikini and paint-on tattoos for a white wedding gown. Having played her part as the Arthurian counterpart of the woman warrior Vasalisy, she humbly assumes a role equivalent to the more docile Olga, a prize that goes to her nation’s staunchest defender.
The “battle on the ice” of Lake Chudskoe is rightly regarded as one of Eisenstein’s most accomplished set pieces and the homage to it in King Arthur is a more than adept stylization. Like the “Odessa Steps” sequence in Battleship Potemkin, the ice battle has become a cinematic tour de force. Fuqua here rises to the challenge by producing some remarkable shots, like the camera tracking the cracking ice or the memento mori shot of the Saxon Cynric, who sees the face of a drowned comrade beneath the ice. The sequence was shot in a green valley in County Kildare, Ireland, seeded with gravel and fake snow, employing dozens of cameras. The snow-capped mountains and gray sky were added later by CGI and the footage intercut with shots filmed in studio water tanks (figure 35.1). While the result achieved never quite lives up to Eisenstein, who was working with a much smaller toolbox, it too is a splendid set piece. We will take up below the virtual nature of cinémedievalism and how its production of immediacy and realism relies upon the ever more complicated pastiche of multiple simulations.
Figure 35.1 King Arthur (2004). The battle on the ice, before and after CGI.
Image not available in this digital edition
Here though I want rather to focus on the elemental nature of the battle itself as an example of what Frantz Fanon (1991) dubbed “Manichean delirium” to denote the paroxysms of binary thinking that are a stubborn inheritance of colonialism. Arthur, his mounted Sarmatian knights, and a long caravan of serfs and wagons travel along the ice, eliciting little more than a few ominous creaking sounds. Their combined weight would be many times that of the small force of foot-soldiers led by Cynric which finally catches up to them on the frozen river. Since neither of the opposing leaders thinks to hug the shoreline, the two armies face off and prepare for battle on (relatively) thin ice. The first clue that we have entered an imaginary world of moral physics comes when Cynric’s archer fires an arrow that skids to a stop a hundred feet or so before reaching its target. Tristan and Gawain respond in kind, the former shooting three arrows at once, all of which find their marks in Saxon chests with such force that they are knocked over backwards. There is no wind in the scene; the success of the Sarmatians clearly points to an abundant superiority, but of what kind exactly? As the Saxons advance, Arthur instructs his archers to “make them cluster,” employing, mutatis mutandis, the pincer tactics of Eisenstein’s Alexander. When the ice refuses to break, Dagonet runs into the breach and chops a hole in the ice, which does not fracture radially but rather beats a direct path for the Saxons and explodes into large fragments. There are accomplished shots of Saxons sliding down vertical planes of ice into the cold water, shots that directly imitate those of Eisenstein. The cracking ice takes some time to turn back in the other direction and threaten the Sarmatians, but none falls through the ice except for Dagonet, who is already dead before he hits the water. The ice weighs in balance the fates of the two sides and evil is plunged into the depths. Only when most of the Saxons have already fallen into the water does the balance shift and the miraculous crack turn in the opposite direction. This strange physical world is only explicable in Manichean terms. The Sarmatians’ arrows fly further and their feet tread more softly than those of the Saxons: the spirit riseth up and the flesh presseth down.
Romancing Genetics
There is a better chance that the Saxon leader Cerdic was actually the historical Arthur than that he and his son Cynric were killed at the battle of Mount Badon. Cerdic went on to found the West Saxon dynasty, which his son continued. He is certainly the prototype of the salt-of-the-earth Cedric the Saxon in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. In King Arthur, the character of Cerdic despotically enforces genetic purity among his soldiers: the brief witena gemot on the rights of victors to the spoils of war ends abruptly when he executes a soldier attempting to rape a native – and then shocks the grateful damsel in distress by ordering her death as well. “Don’t touch their women. We don’t mix with these people. What kind of offspring do you think that would yield? Weak people, half people. I will not have our Saxon blood watered down by mixing with them.” Cerdic’s anti-miscegenation policy in many ways takes its clue from the now discredited Anglo-Saxonism or Aryanism of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, which judged the British Isles overwhelmingly Germanic once the native inhabitants had been geographically marginalized, exterminated, or bred nearly out of existence. A number of recent books trace the rise and obsolescence of what Hugh A. MacDougall calls “racial myth in English history,” which conceived Germanic peoples as marked by their unmixed heredity and the English as the especially favored descendants of these tribes, pioneers of personal liberty and political freedoms (MacDougall 1982; Frantzen 1990; Geary 2002; Higham 2002). Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction and connections are routinely drawn between Anglo-Saxonism and Victorian imperialism. The rise of historical linguistics in the nineteenth century eventually challenged underlying assumptions about connections between race and language. And the advent of Nazi Germany demonstrated the horrors that grow not simply from racism itself but from attempts to connect race and nationality.
From the perspective of contemporary advances in genetic mapping, such as the work of Brian Sykes (2006), Cerdic’s quest for Saxon purity has been dealt a mortal blow. Sykes puts the total genetic inheritance of Germanic peoples in the British Isles at no more than 30 percent and attributes the lion’s share of that to the later Viking/Norman incursions. For our purposes, what most fascinates in Sykes’ approach are his meditations on how gender differences are expressed in the gene pool of Britain. He expresses a clear preference for mitochondrial DNA, which records the female line, and a more ambivalent attitude toward the weak and unstable Y-chromosome, which leads men toward violence:
The first conclusion, blindingly obvious now I can see it, is that we have in front of us two completely different histories. The maternal and the paternal origins of the Isles are different. … On our (i.e., British) maternal side, almost all of us are Celts. (Sykes 2006: 279–81)
In Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky the Teutonic warlord orders a holocaust: “Wipe them off the face of the earth.” Cerdic in King Arthur is equally unequivocal: “Burn it all. Never leave behind you a man, woman or child that can ever bear a sword.” Indeed, like the German commander in Alexander Nevsky, Cerdic is a Nazi calque. The novelization of the screenplay has him exclaim, “We must cleanse the earth!” (Thompson 2004: 97). Later, he recalls the clansmen of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) when he raises a burning cross in front of Hadrian’s Wall: “The massive flame cracked and roared. No one had encountered such a thing before, but they all knew what it meant. The Saxons were promising total defeat, absolute annihilation” (Thompson 2004: 258). Not surprisingly, this needlessly provocative image was left out of the film.
On the other hand, Fuqua’s Guinevere represents the Celtic bedrock, a daughter of one of Sykes’ seven daughters of Eve, probably Jasmine, whose descendants appear to have migrated after the Great Ice Age over the course of many generations from the Near East through Portugal and Spain to settle eventually in “Cornwall, Wales and the west of Scotland” (Sykes 2001: 209). Early on in King Arthur, Guinevere tells Arthur, “I belong to this land,” and then goes on to equate Arthur’s father having chosen a native Briton as his wife with an affection for Britain itself in an erotically charged piece of dialogue. The ethnic components of Arthur’s identity are parsed; she detests his Roman side and appeals both sexually and politically to his Celtic side. Arthur’s hybridity highlights the structure of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2000) has dubbed “the postcolonial Middle Ages” quite distinctly. Guinevere chips away at his collaboration with the Roman oppressors of a people he will belatedly accept as his own. In the rationalist euhemerism of the film, Arthur as a child pulls Excalibur from the ground in a failed attempt to save the life of his Celtic mother. As Merlin tells him: “It was love of your mother, Arthur, not hatred of me that freed that sword.” The pulling of the sword from the earth, then, signifies that Arthur’s legitimacy to rule comes not from Rome but from his “feminine,” Celtic side. Personal liberties and political freedoms are shown to descend not from ancient “democracies” or the “English Constitution” so touted by traditional classicism or Anglo-Saxonism, but rather from the oppressed, blue-faced but red-blooded Celtic fringe of Braveheart. Even the reincarnation central to the Arthurian myth of a once and future king is given a politically correct twist. Boudicca-like, Guinevere is entombed by the Romans but revived by Arthur to lead her people in their time of need against a new enemy, the Saxons (figure 35.2).
Figure 35.2 King Arthur (2004). Keira Knightley as Guinevere, woad warrior queen.
Image not available in this digital edition
Playing (with) the Legend
One thing that perhaps helps to account for our frustration with the fantasy history of cinémedievalism is the promise that the medium once held out to many to have the capacity to deliver faithful representations of reality. Discussing Andre Bazin’s comment on the advance of cinema technologies that “every new development must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins,” Robert Burgoyne (2003: 234) remarks that this has in fact come true, though in a very different sense from that which Bazin anticipated. Although Bazin may have meant that cinema would eventually arrive at a perfect replication of the real, CGI in fact pushes cinema’s origins back beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dream of the mechanical or electronic reproduction of reality, all the way to pre-modernity, to medieval or mythic times when the lines between fantasy, fact, and speculation were not yet clearly drawn. We are now just at the outset of a technology that, like the recent 300 (Snyder 2006), can represent history and legend almost exclusively by computer-generated animation.
These are issues too large to unpack in any further detail here, but instead I want to focus briefly in the conclusion of this chapter on how the reality effects of film serve to anchor further excursions into the virtual space of video games through the cinematic device par excellence, montage. My argument is that virtual representations are often posed as hidden or spiritual realities beneath, behind, or beside the world as we have been led to know it. This spiritual reality is animated like the classical moving picture itself by rendering continuity through an erasure of the boundaries between discrete images. In the video game Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: Legend (2006), in Glastonbury, the city of glass, Lara Croft watches through a glass darkly as her mother in a parallel universe makes the fatal mistake of pulling the sword from the stone, urged on by a doltish Eve-figure, Amanda, ensuring that the past is repeated. In the made-for-TV mini-series Mists of Avalon, Morgaine learns to part the mists of Glastonbury to gain access to the hidden world of Avalon, which also seems to exist in a parallel space–time continuum. These games and films actualize virtual spaces that one could argue are present in the legend from the outset, the spaces of an imaginary archaeology, typically gendered feminine, which invite descendants to participate in their recovery while exposing them to the dangers of compulsive repetitions.
Ideally, video games made to accompany digital cinema would be crystalline images of the worlds they supplement, allowing players to deterritorialize films, to actualize what is only virtual in them, to render the opaque transparent. Recent franchises like The Matrix, Stars Wars, and Harry Potter spread their stories across a series of media, encouraging the audience to participate in what Henry Jenkins (2006) calls “transmedia storytelling.” Certainly the economic motivations of such a marketing strategy are paramount, creating multiple points of access to a franchise and encouraging brand loyalty by the dispersal of information across old and new media. Saturation marketing invites audience participation as nominal co-creators of a franchise through a “fan culture” of merchandising, internet chat, fan fiction, and even fan cinema. King Arthur in many ways represents a much less successful attempt to capitalize on this “culture of convergence.” Yet its strategies of convergence do represent a trend with which critics of movie medievalism will increasingly be forced to reckon.
The King Arthur video game itself begins with an extended “cut scene” which reproduces the opening of the film up to the point when the kagemusha “bishop” looks out of the window at the invading Picts and three bolts smack the carriage next to his head. Here a match cut takes us to this same shot in virtual reality, easing our integration from film to game world. In fact the cut scenes in their low-density resolution closely resemble the pixelation of the game’s virtual world. Interestingly, the transition between film and game takes place at a window, the metaphor par excellence for hyperspace: part screen, mirror, and window (Friedberg 2006). Like the mists of Avalon and the glass of Glastonbury in the examples discussed above, the window in the film/game is the threshold that marks an ontological cut, a window within a window whose mise-en-abyme is charged with a titillating hint of scopophobia.
Unfortunately, things through the looking glass are pretty much the same. The goal of the game interspersed with cut scenes is to reproduce precisely what happens in the film. Failure to do so results in death and an invitation to restart the challenge. The game maps the film as a quest along a circular path through the English midlands and the north of Britain, punctuated by six rabbit holes into virtual space, proceeding roughly due north and returning on a parallel road south. Killing sufficient numbers of the enemy endows one with a shining aura that, as in the Homeric aristeia, invests the warrior with superhuman powers. Passing through the various levels, one earns tokens such as increasing strength or experience until, fully charged with all available powers, one meets Cerdic in a final showdown at Mount Badon. Indeed, to reach the level of this duel one has to have killed something very close to the nine hundred and sixty enemies Arthur himself is credited with killing in the early histories.
The synergy between film and game begins in fact to look like part of an original strategy rather than something added post hoc. One would expect a Roman legion to fight with spears and gladii and to dress in the same uniform, but in both film and game each of Arthur’s Sarmatian knights is distinguished by his weaponry, dress, and movements. For instance, Tristan wears what appears to be a Sarmatian pointed cap and sports a Saracen sword and re-curved bow; Gawain’s weapon of choice is a giserne; Lancelot is the knight of two swords; and Bors wields a ninja-like configuration of brass knuckles and forearm blades. All this paraphernalia can be a bit distracting in the film, but along with the individuated fighting styles of different characters the details seem to stem from a planned convergence with the world of the video game where such means of individualized characterization are a staple of game programming, encouraging players to identify with separate characters and to be able distinguish one from another. Thus in both film and game Arthur’s “signature moves” include a slashing pirouette and a kill-shot performed with the sword held overhand below shoulder level, Lancelot turns his two swords into a pair of scissors to cut off the heads of his victims, and Tristan has a rapid-fire feature allowing him to loose three arrows in machine-gun-like succession. Conversely (and absurdly) the ice battle sequence in the game recalls an arcade game where sheets of ice stand on end and one must shoot through the gaps to kill the Saxons on the other side. Albeit rarely, one does get to walk through doors the film does not open, as in figure 35.3 within the walls of Marius’s palace. The game and the film seem part of a single overall design where both convergence and divergence are deliberately planned to compose variegated worlds.
Figure 35.3 Inside Marius’s villa in the King Arthur video game.
Image not available in this digital edition
Finally, from my discussion of King Arthur, it is possible to draw at least three generally applicable lessons for the study of contemporary cinémedievalism. First, while medievalists will always be tempted to compare these films to medieval sources or academic scholarship, cinema too has a history through which it interprets and reconstructs the past. This particular film’s convergence of speculative scholarship with auteur cinema is remarkable, but the phenomenon of such mixtures is not. Second, we must be attuned not simply to the risible rhetoric of “the truth behind the legend” but also to the popular science that underwrites this endless production of a more “authentic” past. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we must not re-erect the wall that used to separate film and written documents between film and newer media. The texts that increasingly engage students of cinémedievalism are perhaps best described by Jenkins’ term “world-making,” which includes not only the imaginary ontology of such texts but also their desire to produce a sustainable and multivalent media franchise, coherent in itself but remaining open to future development.
Increasingly, these franchises and not simply the films in isolation will become objects of study. All three lessons fit neatly under a single rubric: convergence. But of course convergence has been the defining if not enabling trait of medievalism as well as Arthurianism all along, at least since the moment Caxton decided to merge Malory’s tales into a printed book and thereby created the single most successful franchise in storytelling history.
Primary Sources
Benson, L. D. (ed.) (1994). King Arthur’s death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, rev. edn (ed. E. D. Forster). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications.
Franzioni, D., with Matthews, J. (2004). Interview with David Franzioni. Arthuriana, 14(3), 115–20.
Shepherd, S. H. A. (ed.) (2004). Malory. Le Morte Darthur. New York: Norton.
Thompson, F. (2004). King Arthur (novelization of David Franzioni’s screenplay). New York: Hyperion.
Thorpe, L. (trans.) (1966). Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the kings of Britain. New York: Penguin.
References and Further Reading
Aberth, J. (2003). A knight at the movies: Medieval history on film. New York: Routledge.
Ackroyd, P. (2002). Albion: The origins of the English imagination. New York: Anchor.
Aronstein, S. (2005). Hollywood knights: Arthurian cinema and the politics of nostalgia. New York: Palgrave.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (trans. S. F. Glaser). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Burgoyne, R. (2003). Memory, history and digital imagery in contemporary film. In P. Grainge (ed.), Memory and popular film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 220–36.
Cohen, J. J. (ed.) (2000). The postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave.
Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-image (trans H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image (trans H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fanon, F. (1991). Black skin, white masks (trans. C. Farrington). New York: Grove Press.
Finke, L. A. & Shichtman, M. B. (2004). King Arthur and the myth of history. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
Frantzen, A. J. (1990). Desire for origins: New language, Old English and teaching the tradition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Friedberg, A. (2006). The virtual window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Geary, P. J. (2002). The myth of nations: The medieval origins of Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harty, K. J. (ed.) (2002). Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Harty, K. J. (2004). Review of King Arthur. Arthuriana, 14(3), 121–3.
Haydock, N. (2002). Arthurian melodrama, Chaucerian spectacle, and the waywardness of cinematic pastiche in First Knight and A Knight’s Tale. In T. Shippey & M. Arnold (eds), Film and fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 5–38.
Haydock, N. (2007). Shooting the messenger: Luc Besson at war with Joan of Arc. Exemplaria, 19, 243–69.
Haydock, N. (2008). Movie medievalism: The imaginary Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Higham, N. J. (2002). King Arthur: Myth-making and history. London: Routledge.
Jackson, K. H. (1953). Language and history in early Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.
Jewers, C. (2007). Mission historical, or “[T]here were a hell of a lot of knights”: Ethnicity and alterity in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur. In L. T. Ramey & T. Pugh (eds), Race, class, and gender in “medieval” cinema. New York: Palgrave, pp. 91–106.
Kracauer, S. (1960). Theory of film: The redemption of physical reality. London: Oxford University Press.
Kracauer, S. (2004). From Caligari to Hitler: A psychological history of the German film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Originally published 1947.)
Landy, M. (1996). Cinematic uses of the past. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Landy, M. (ed.) (2001). The historical film: History and memory in media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Littleton, C. S. (1983). Some possible Arthurian themes in Japanese mythology and folklore. Journal of Folklore Research, 20, 67–82.
Littleton, C. S. (1995). Yamoto-Takeru: An “Arthurian” hero in Japanese tradition. Asian Folklore Studies, 54, 259–74.
Littleton, C. S. & Malcor, L. A. (2000). From Scythia to Camelot: A radical reassessment of the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. New York: Garland (originally published 1994).
Lupack, A. (2004). Review of King Arthur. Arthuriana, 14(3), 123–5.
MacDougall, H. A. (1982). Racial myth in English history: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Reid, H. (2001). Arthur the dragon king: The barbaric roots of Britain’s greatest legend. London: Headline.
Rosenstone, R. A. (2006). History on film/film on history. New York: Pearson Longman.
Shippey, T. (2007). Fuqua’s King Arthur: More mythmaking in America. Exemplaria, 19(2), 310–26.
Sykes, B. (2001). The seven daughters of Eve: The science that reveals our genetic ancestry. New York: Norton.
Sykes, B. (2006). Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The genetic roots of Britain and Ireland. New York: Norton.
Filmography
300 (2006). Dir. Zack Snyder. Warner Bros Pictures.
Alexander Nevsky (1938). Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfilm.
Battleship Potemkin (1925). Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Goskino.
The Birth of a Nation (alternative title The Clansman) (1915). Dir. D. W. Griffith. David W. Griffith Corp.
Braveheart (1995). Dir. Mel Gibson. Icon Productions.
Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1944). Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Alma Ata Studio.
Ivan the Terrible, Part Two (1958). Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Alma Ata Studio.
King Arthur (2004). Dir. Antoine Fuqua. Touchstone Pictures.
King Arthur video game (2004). Krome Studios.
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: Legend video game (2006). Eidos Interactive.
The Last Samurai (2003). Dir. Edward Zwick. Warner Bros Pictures.
The Magnificent Seven (1960). Dir. Preston Sturges. Mirisch Corporation.
Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991). Dir. Kevin Reynolds. Warner Bros Pictures.
Seven Samurai (1954). Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Toho Company.
Throne of Blood (alternative title Spider Web Castle) (1957). Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Toho Company.