Race, Class, and Gender in ''Medieval'' Cinema [First Edition] 1403974276, 9781403974273

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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE Women in the Medieval Islamic World edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition by Sherry J. Mou The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W. Rosemann For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges

Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Amtower Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr. Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees

Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt

The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl

The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren

Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder

Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons

The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel

Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff

Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson

Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz

Medievalism and Orientalism by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska

Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell

Performing Women: Sex, Gender and the Medieval Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios

Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney

Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw

Visual Culture in the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel

On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula Rieder

Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen

Lonesome Words: The Vocal Poetic of the Old English Lament and the African American Blues Songs by M.G. McGeachy

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth-to-Twelfth Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500: Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen Sweeney The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Movement by Patricia Ranft

Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries by Anne Bagnell Yardley The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer by Robert R. Edwards Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?: The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles by Jeremy Jerome Cohen Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson

Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing by Lara Farina Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh

RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN “MEDIEVAL” CINEMA

Edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh

RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN “MEDIEVAL” CINEMA

© Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7427–3 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7427–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Race, class, and gender in “medieval” cinema / edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh. p. cm.—(New Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7427–6 (alk. paper) 1. Middle Ages in motion pictures. 2. Race in motion pictures. 3. Social classes in motion pictures. 4. Sex roles in motion pictures. I. Ramey, Lynn Tarte, 1964– II. Pugh, Tison, 1970– III. Series. PN1995.9.M52R33 2006 791.43’6552—dc22

2006044647

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

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Introduction : Filming the “Other” Middle Ages Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey

1

Part I

Multicultural Identities: A Lost Ideal?

1 Once, Present, and Future Kings: Kingdom of Heaven and the Multitemporality of Medieval Film Arthur Lindley

15

2 Chahine’s Destiny: Prophetic Nostalgia and the Other Middle Ages Don Hoffman

31

3 Reversing the Crusades: Hegemony, Orientalism, and Film Language in Youssef Chahine’s Saladin John M. Ganim

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4 Samurai on Shifting Ground: Negotiating the Medieval and the Modern in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo Randy P. Schiff

59

Part II Barbarism and the Medieval Other 5 Vikings through the Eyes of an Arab Ethnographer: Constructions of the Other in The 13th Warrior Lynn Shutters

75

6 Mission Historical, or “[T]here were a hell of a lot of knights”: Ethnicity and Alterity in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur Caroline Jewers

91

7 Inner-City Chivalry in Gil Junger’s Black Knight: A South Central Yankee in King Leo’s Court Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman

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CONTENTS

8 Queering the Medieval Dead: History, Horror, and Masculinity in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Trilogy Tison Pugh Part III

123

Romantic Values

9 In Praise of Troubadourism: Creating Community in Occupied France, 1942–43 Lynn T. Ramey 10 Sexing Warrior Women in China’s Martial Arts World: King Hu’s A Touch of Zen Peter Lorge 11 The Hawk, The Wolf, and The Mouse: Tracing the Gendered Other in Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke Angela Jane Weisl 12 Chaucer’s Man Show: Anachronistic Authority in Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale Holly A. Crocker 13 The “Other” Women of Sherwood: The Construction of Difference and Gender in Cinematic Treatments of the Robin Hood Legend Lorraine K. Stock and Candace Gregory-Abbott

139

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169

183

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 Eva Green’s Sibylla in the tradition of exotic Eastern female lead 2.1 Joseph (Fares Rahouma), nicknamed “Blue Eyes” 4.1 Heihachi explains the sign system he has used for the improvised Army’s Banner 6.1 Guinevere (Keira Knightley) as Xena and Madonna morphed 7.1 Jamal (Martin Lawrence) teaches the medieval court how to dance 8.1 Evil Ash emerges from a vaginal-like cavity in Good Ash’s shoulder 9.1 Gilles (Alain Cluny) and Anne (Marie Déa) return the spectator’s gaze 10.1 The Abbot points Miss Yang back to the monastery 13.1 Marian defends Robin Hood in front of Guisbourne and John

25 38 63 100 117 132 145 161 205

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INTRODUCTION: FILMING THE “OTHER” MIDDLE AGES Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey

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or over a century, filmmakers have struggled with representing societies, both past and present, on the screen. From the outset, with Georges Méliès’s Joan of Arc films in the late nineteenth century, the Middle Ages has served as a preferred setting for exploring on the silver screen some of society’s deepest concerns.1 But the marriage of film and history is frequently somewhat inharmonious because, as Vivian Sobchack observes, combining modern cinema with historical narratives confuses the very meaning of history: “In great part, the effects of our new technologies of representation put us at a loss to fix that ‘thing’ we used to think of as History or to create clearly delineated and categorical temporal and spatial frames around what we used to think of as the ‘historical event.’ ”2 Thus, when cinema meets history, the very meaning of “history” appears to crumble under the pressures to translate the truth of the past into the media of the present. Beyond the critical problems in uniting history and film, directors often deploy history—including the events and narratives of the Middle Ages— to advance their own contemporary artistic and political visions. By addressing critical issues confronting modern-day societies through the mythic and legendary past of the Middle Ages, “medieval” films further confound the difficulties of depicting history on the screen. The very phrase “medieval cinema” encapsulates this problem, as the term seems to denote films created during the Middle Ages, a patently obvious technological impossibility. Medieval cinema suggests a virtually oxymoronic generic classification, and one of the chief points of the chapters in this volume is to confront that incongruity, acknowledging that even when it is granted that medieval cinema refers to modern films depicting the Middle Ages, the possibility of paradox inheres in that few scholars would recognize the ostensibly medieval qualities of a given film as truly medieval, as successfully depicting the contours of medieval narrative and history.

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Recent scholarship within medieval studies, growing out of the New Historicist readings of the last quarter century, has focused on the particular and moved away from the totalizing histories that labeled the European Middle Ages as feudal, Christian, and chivalric. In an uneasy relationship between historicization and alienation, medieval studies mediates between a sense of insurmountable estrangement and a desire to understand the past through archival and archaeological research. Norris Lacy characterizes his work on Arthurian documentary as an attempt to bridge past and present: In my case, I have continued to offer unremunerated advice and, in two instances, to consent to be interviewed because I continue to hope that one of these films, one of these days, will turn out to be a superlative presentation— engaging yet authoritative, thoughtful, and correct—of the Arthurian legend. In other words, I hope a film will eventually get it right.3

We join Lacy in his disappointed desire for a film—any film—to “get it right.” But rather than patiently passing time until a chimerical vision of cinematic authenticity comes along—as we collectively metamorphose into the scholarly incarnations of Estragon and Vladimir waiting for a cinematic Godot—we argue that much can be gleaned from films that “get it all wrong,” especially since most of the films evince little or no interest in getting the Middle Ages “right.” Surely any work of literary or cinematic art must in some manner be evaluated according to the terms established for it, and if medieval cinema as a genre evinces little interest in historical accuracy by recklessly embracing anachronism, should critics not then respond with due awareness of the hermeneutic structures these texts create? While the Middle Ages can be used as a setting to achieve differing goals, the films addressed in this volume employ medieval themes as a pretext in which directors demonstrate “no real interest in the historical background; the Middle Ages are taken as a sort of mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters,” as Umberto Eco describes the ways in which the Middle Ages are artistically mediated in postmodern culture.4 When present-day figures act on the medieval stage, tensions are inevitably produced as postmodern tales of individuality and agency conflict with the received wisdom of the Middle Ages as a time of monolithic institutions and hegemonies. Viewing these films within the hermeneutical space of Eco’s pretext, it becomes apparent that the Middle Ages are used for purposes other than medieval mimeticism. In this manner, medieval films more accurately delineate postmodern concerns than any fidelity to medieval sources, reflecting the ways in which medieval studies is itself influenced by postmodern theory. Postmodern critical approaches to medieval culture attract the reader with the promise

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that past situations are relevant to current problems, but critics must often draw short of delivering on their promises, citing or implying postmodern concerns with presentism, or projecting our own values on the past: a qualm not shared by the directors of most medieval films. For example, exciting work by medievalists on postmodern concepts of the relationship between colonizer and colonized has significantly impacted medieval studies, as recent books and essay collections attest.5 However, the postmodern focus on the particular inherently conflicts with any attempt to draw parallels between the Middle Ages and our own society, the clear concern for the directors of the films analyzed here. While medievalists are justified in understanding the Middle Ages on their own terms, the very use of the Middle Ages as pretext implies presentism, and only by exposing and examining presentism can these dynamics be understood. For this reason, the chapters in this book directly address the “big three” contemporary concerns that are most likely to provoke charges of presentism: race, class, and gender. If for W.E.B. Dubois the central problem of the twentieth century was race6, questions of class and gender hold equal sway as we progress into the twenty-first century. When modern preoccupations with race, class, and gender are inserted into medieval films, a debate particularly pertinent to those who study the Middle Ages as an academic discipline is raised: what concepts of race, class, and gender did medieval people have, if any? To what extent should today’s films that raise these issues be held accountable to the actual historical situations that pertained in medieval societies? Medievalists energetically debate the degree to which modern notions of race, class, and gender existed in the Middle Ages. In regard to race, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies hosted a series of articles on the topic in 2001, but the findings of the six essayists were counterbalanced by William Chester Jordan’s compelling plea to leave the question of race out of discussion of the Middle Ages altogether: I have my doubts about the utility of “race” (an allegedly fixed category) as an analytic concept in the modern world. These doubts are compounded when “race” is applied to the Middle Ages. I cannot prove, but I do not believe that readers will sufficiently shed their modern notions of race simply because scholars redefine the concept against the modern grain.7

Medievalists studying the formation of ethnic identity should, according to this thinking, take into account both modern and medieval methods of defining self and Other. For instance, attitudes toward conversion indicate the ways in which racial and ethnic constructions could be—but were not always—remarkably fluid in the Middle Ages. If medieval Christians

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indeed believed in the universal brotherhood of believers, conversion of a nonbeliever would wash away all difference, resulting in a person indistinguishable from “old” Christians, fully and permanently integrated in Christian society.8 For the modern era, in contrast, biological notions of racism constructed a person as “colored” on account of even a drop of nonwhite blood,9 and conversion did little to help European Jews in Nazi Germany, where a Jewish grandparent qualified one for extermination. Thus, when modern films incorporate ideas of multicultural racial acceptance or project racism into the medieval past, they not only “do not shed their modern notions of race,” as Jordan feared, but they often exploit this shared cultural capital to comment overtly on modern racial and ethnic conflict. Not exempt from accusations of ahistoricity, historians of medieval social structures have increasingly found locating the emergence of a bourgeois or middle class to be contested ground.10 Medieval historians in the 1990s were witness to a groundbreaking debate about the use of “feudalism,” a term previously thought to differentiate the medieval past from our modern class system, to describe medieval social structures.11 In the wake of the death of feudalism, the class question has reemerged, demanding that scholars attune themselves to the local particularities of a given time and place of the past. While medievalists generally hold that our economic basis for class structure was likely not identical to medieval notions of social distinction, most also agree that something akin to our middle class emerged at some point in the thousand years designated as medieval. Class structures remain one of the least explored territories of medieval life, though questions of literary audience do scratch the surface of what medieval communities enjoyed and consumed in their leisure time.12 In regard to gender, scholars are often skittish about using modern lexicons to describe medieval gender roles. Can one describe Chaucer’s Wife of Bath as a “feminist,” since such a word implies a modern conception of identity politics? Can we use the term “homosexual” to refer to same-sex attractions and sexualities in the Middle Ages?13 To look at one example, John Boswell’s pioneering work on medieval homosexuality—notably in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe—raised heated debate in the national media, including a comment by Camille Paglia that Boswell’s work was “slippery, self-interested scholarship, where propaganda and casuistry impede the objective search for truth.”14 In discussing medieval gender and sexuality, scholars face the constant threat of solipsistic presentism. The struggle to bring a present-day understanding to a premodern text while simultaneously remaining sensitive to its unique cultural environment creates a balancing act that we face daily in our professional lives, but a challenge that is made both more and less difficult when we apply modern vocabularies to historical issues.

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In films where some element of this triad of modern anxieties is central to the narrative, the director is likely to suffer condemnation for being unrealistic, inaccurate, or even ahistorical. To look briefly at two examples, Alexander Nevsky (1938) has been excoriated due to its “scarcely credible, comradely commingling” created by the Soviet ideology evident in Sergei Eisenstein’s film, thus muddying its depiction of class within the medieval world.15 Likewise, in Kevin Reynolds’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), the combination of Robin’s egalitarian and multicultural “management style” generally breeds the sort of contempt among medieval historians epitomized by John Aberth’s dismissal of the film as merely “an excuse to push a modern, politically correct agenda, which includes multiculturalism and feminism.” Aberth finds that Morgan Freeman’s character Azeem strains credibility, as do the protofeminist Maid Marian, the whiney, maladjusted Will Scarlett, and the “historically implausible” sheriff who tries to usurp noble authority.16 The criticism directed at these two markedly disparate films—one a pioneering work by one of world cinema’s greatest directors, the other a fairly typical Hollywood summer blockbuster—represents much of the scholarship addressing medieval film in their rejection of any attempt to use the Middle Ages as other than the subject of researched docudrama. But narrative film is not documentary,17 and film directors often seek to create a Middle Ages that is sufficiently medieval to set the stage for the unfolding narrative yet nonetheless recognizably modern to its intended audience. In terms of creating the necessary semiotic system of the medieval, different directors rely on different methods, of course, but as Vivian Sobchack argues, the historicity of medieval film is often attested merely through the iconic deployment of “insistent dirt and squalor” that “comes to signify and fix the ‘real’ Middle Ages.”18 Sobchack’s argument discusses the means in which iconic shorthands create—and then fulfill— viewerly expectations of historical reality, but her analysis of how dirt and filth effectively construct the “truth” of the medieval past highlights the ways in which modern directors can create a medieval past plausible to their audiences with very little historical research.19 The Middle Ages thus frequently serves as a tabula rasa on which to project modern questions of identity, but if Sobchack is correct about the semiotic function of dirt in medieval film, the tabula rasa is nonetheless at least somewhat smudged. But this should not be surprising, as the Middle Ages serves as the temporal Other to modernity, and the human Other is likewise constructed as dirty and polluted by racist, classist, and sexist ideologies.20 Ironically, then, some directors attempt to ameliorate current cultural tensions over race, class, and gender by re-Othering the Middle Ages. By distorting and dirtying the Middle Ages, a truth can nonetheless be told, even if it does not address the medieval era at all.

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The medieval film genre is not, in general, concerned with constructing a historically accurate past, but much criticism of medieval film by medievalists nonetheless centers around highlighting anachronisms and inaccuracies. This volume aims to look differently at the popularity of medieval film to understand how the recreation of an often mythical past performs important cultural work for modern directors and viewers.21 By highlighting these tensions in the medieval film genre, we encourage deeper inquiry into the use of medieval settings in film. Rather than merely pointing out anachronistic inaccuracies in order to criticize the films, the essays in Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema demonstrate that directors intentionally insert modern preoccupations with race, class, and gender into a setting that would normally be considered incompatible with these concepts. The insertion of these concerns into medieval culture implies (perhaps incorrectly) that these categories serve eternal human interest, as the Middle Ages provides an imaginary space far enough removed from the present day to allow for critical analysis of race, class, and gender in today’s society. In considering the ways in which the Middle Ages is used to address modern concerns of race, class, and gender, three primary tropes seem to structure these cinematic discourses: the Middle Ages as lost ideal, as barbaric past, and as the site of timeless romantic values. We use these three concepts as the organizing principles of this volume.22 Thus, part 1 of our volume, Multicultural Identities: A Lost Ideal?, begins with four essays addressing the Middle Ages as a lost ideal of multicultural secular humanism and a space of boundless personal freedom and agency. In “Once, Present, and Future Kings: Kingdom of Heaven and the Multitemporality of Medieval Film,” Arthur Lindley demonstrates through a reading of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) that medieval films rarely construct a historically accurate—or even historicized—version of the Middle Ages. In fact, they more frequently hybridize time periods so that multiple historical periods interlace and interact to facilitate transhistorical “realities,” thus constructing metacommentary on these time periods; such maneuverings are especially apparent in regard to Kingdom of Heaven’s depiction of multicultural equanimity amidst the Crusades. Don Hoffman, in “Chahine’s Destiny: Prophetic Nostalgia and the Other Middle Ages,” argues that Chahine’s deployment of the philosopher Averroës allows the director to speak out against the past and present dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. John Ganim’s “Reversing the Crusades: Hegemony, Orientalism, and Film Language in Youssef Chahine’s Saladin” focuses on one of the few film versions of the Crusades to regard the Crusades through Arab eyes. Saladin serves as an answer to a range of popular Hollywood films featuring the Crusades, and Ganim explores these issues in relation to the always already

INTRODUCTION

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orientalization of the Middle Ages onscreen. Randy P. Schiff demonstrates in “Samurai on Shifting Ground: Negotiating the Medieval and the Modern in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo” that medieval films are often charged with a nostalgia that overrides a modern appreciation of socioeconomic complexity; director Akira Kurosawa, however, refuses to romanticize a class-stratified past, instead foregrounding liminal characters who reflect and participate in postwar Japan’s painful transition to a postmodern economic world order through their self-realization as heroic figures. In contrast to the construction of the Middle Ages as a lost ideal, other films depict the period as one of rampant barbarism and cruelty as seen in part 2 of this volume, “Barbarism and the Medieval Other,” which comprises four chapters. In “Vikings through the Eyes of an Arab Ethnographer: Constructions of the Other in The 13th Warrior,” Lynn Shutters examines how the Middle Ages operates as a site of both identification with and alterity to our own contemporary culture through the conflicting masculinities of East and West. In this retelling of Beowulf, masculinities are forged both through cultural interchange and through the violent conquest of a mutually denigrated Other. Caroline Jewers’s “Mission Historical, or ‘[T]here were a hell of a lot of knights’: Ethnicity and Alterity in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur,” assesses the way that the film reencodes the past through a vision of King Arthur as a postcolonial subject in a country torn between Saxon and Roman forces—England. In “Inner-City Chivalry in Gil Junger’s Black Knight: A South Central Yankee in King Leo’s Court,” Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman argue that the fantasy of the film draws upon the very real oppression of urban modernity in innercity communities such as South Central Los Angeles; through the reconstructive powers of medieval knighthood, issues of postcolonial oppression are flimsily constructed as empowering constituents of self-empowerment. The final chapter of part 2, “Queering the Medieval Dead: History, Horror, and Masculinity in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Trilogy,” explores questions of gender, sexuality, and class played out among the demonic and the Arthurian. Tison Pugh observes that, over the course of Raimi’s trilogy, the protagonist Ash becomes more and more masculinized, in a modern American sense; in medieval England, however, he finds a different measure of manhood that serves to nuance his modern, somewhat limited notion of masculinity, and these changes are aligned with generic shifts that encode narrative forms with varying degrees of masculinity and violence. The third part of this book, “Romantic Values,” addresses recreations of the medieval past as the site of timeless romantic values. In her essay “In Praise of Troubadourism: Creating Community in Occupied France, 1942–1943,” Lynn Ramey considers the ambiguous deployment of the medieval past in Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) and Jean

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Delannoy’s L’Éternel Retour (1943). During World War II, French medievalist Edith Thomas coined the word “troubadourism” to lambaste the ways in which the past could be used to create a sentimental present. However, must troubadourism intrinsically be viewed negatively? Ramey recasts troubadourism as a powerful and enabling metaphor for how medieval films speak to the present through the creation of a landscape of timeless love. In “Sexing Warrior Women in China’s Martial Arts World: King Hu’s A Touch of Zen,” Peter Lorge demonstrates that the female protagonist performs a female gender construction against the desexed poles of eunuchs and Buddhist monks, thus opening a clear path to Buddhist redemption. Romance is eschewed in the film, but the medieval past nonetheless offers a space to consider issues of female agency in relation to sexuality and gender roles. Angela Jane Weisl, in “The Hawk, the Wolf, and the Mouse: Tracing the Gendered Other in Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke,” demonstrates that the film creates a central core of destabilized gender identities that must finally be broken—like the curse that ensnares its animal protagonists—in order to return to the normative assumptions of contemporary romance. Holly Crocker’s “Chaucer’s Man Show: Anachronistic Authority in Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale” probes the film’s collaborative construction of knightly masculinity that connects the construction of Chaucer’s authorial identity with the fabrication of a persuasive model of the peasant protagonist’s “knightly” manhood. Ultimately Chaucer enables yet is effaced in his efforts to help the young peasant-cumknight win his fair lady’s hand. In the final chapter of Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema, Lorraine Stock and Candace Gregory-Abbot’s “The ‘Other’ Women of Sherwood: The Construction of Difference and Gender in Cinematic Treatments of the Robin Hood Legend” demonstrates that Robin Hood films consistently thematize the “Otherness” of women through their romantic relationships with Robin Hood and other men while reflecting the course of twentieth-century gender politics. Despite the geographical variety of films—from Hollywood to China— and the striking variety of themes—from possessed Michigan college students in the Evil Dead trilogy to oppressed Japanese peasants in Seven Samurai—the essays of Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema share a common concern with exploring the ways in which the medieval past is deployed to reflect the present. As Adrienne Rich observes, “Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”23 Rich is right to warn us of the propensity to find reconstructed falsehoods in our search through the past, but by combing through these falsehoods, we hope the the chapters of this volume will help us to discover some truths about our present.

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Notes 1. An extant copy of Méliès’s 1900 short film, and a fragment of an even earlier film on Joan by Georges Hatot, can be found at the Joan of Arc Center in New Orleans. For more clips and information on early adaptations of Joan’s story, see the media and film section of the International Joan of Arc Society, http://www.smu.edu/IJAS/index.html. 2. Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 5. See also Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3. Norris J. Lacy, “The Documentary Arthur: Reflections of a Talking Head,” King Arthur in Popular Culture, eds., Elizabeth sklar and Donald Hoffman (London: McFarland, 2002), p. 84. 4. Umberto Eco, “The Return of the Middle Ages,” Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pp. 59–85, at p. 68. 5. Such studies include Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6. W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903). 7. William Chester Jordan, “Why Race?” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 165–73, at p. 169. The other chapters in this special issue include Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” pp. 1–37; Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” pp. 39–56; Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk, “Black Servant, Black Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham Pentateuch,” pp. 57–77; Sharon Kinoshita, “ ‘Pagans Are Wrong and Christians Are Right’: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland,” pp. 79–111; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” pp. 113–46; and Linda Lomperis, “Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race,” pp. 147–64. 8. For a summary of recent studies of the effects of conversion, see Jordan, “Why Race?” p. 166. 9. The State of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 disallowed intermarriage of nonwhites and whites based on the one-drop classification.

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10. For representative studies of literature and class, see Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, eds. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), which includes such studies as David Aers, “Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers Plowman,” pp. 59–75; Harriet E. Hudson, “Construction of Class, Family, and Gender in Some Middle English Popular Romances,” pp. 76–94; Britton J. Harwood, “Building Class and Gender into Chaucer’s Hous,” pp. 95–111; and Clare A. Lees, “Gender and Exchange in Piers Plowman,” pp. 112–30. Additional studies include John W. Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190–1230 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 11. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Experience Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; reissued 2001). Reynolds takes her inspiration from an earlier article, Elizabeth Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1063–88. 12. For example, the debate about the audience and authorship of the fabliaux, artfully presented by Per Nykrog in Les fabliaux: étude d’histoire littéraire et de stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1957), continues to this day. 13. Studies of medieval sexuality include Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1997); and Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996). Studies of medieval homosexuality include William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anna Klosowka, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Tison Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres (New York: Palgrave, 2004), esp. pp. 7–15; Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, eds., Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Preand Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 14. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Villard, 1994); Camille Paglia, “Plighting

INTRODUCTION

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

11

Their Troth,” review of John Boswell, Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, The Washington Post, July 17 1994, p. wkb1. John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 123. Aberth, A Knight at the Movies, pp. 190, 192. Narrative film and documentary are, however, historically intermingled, and we would argue that in addition to being skeptical of documentarystyle truth value in narrative, we are also suspicious of truth claims in documentary, as noted by Norris Lacy (“The Documentary Arthur”). Vivian Sobchack, “The Insistent Fringe: Moving Images and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 4–20, at p. 9. As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, “It doesn’t matter if the historical details of the film are authentic. They just have to look authentic to the audience” (quoted by Martha W. Driver, “What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It? Historicity and Authenticity in Medieval Film,” The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, eds., Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004], pp. 19–22, at p. 20). Driver’s essay, from which this quotation is taken, also provides a strong introduction to the ways in which medieval film is manipulated to explore modern concerns. She observes that “movies are multivalenced, telling us simultaneously about the distant past and about more recent events and social attitudes” (p. 20). It would be an unnecessarily long footnote to document the ways in which racist, classist, and sexist ideologies cast the Other in a disparaging light. In terms of race and ethnicity in the construction of East and West, Edward Said notes that “if the Arab occupies space enough for attention, it is as a negative value” (Orientalism [New York: Vintage, 1978], p. 286). We see here what Carolyn Dinshaw labels “that space of abjection and otherness,” which, in her reading of Quentin Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction, serves as “the space where sodomy, sadomasochism, southernness, and blackness get dumped in the creation of a unified straight white masculinity” (Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999], p. 205). For all who bear the brunt of Otherness, despite the great variety of the ways in which this Otherness is constructed and culturally responded to, the overarching similarity among all Others is the ways in which their existence is viewed in negative terms due to a particular characteristic of their persons. The collapse between the historical and the mythological structures much medieval narrative, especially in regard to the Arthurian tradition. For studies of Arthurian film, see Kevin Harty, ed., Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays, rev. ed. ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002) and King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); Bert Olton, Arthurian Legends on Film and Television ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000); parts of chapter 8 of Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack, King Arthur in America (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999); and Rebecca A. Umland

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and Samuel J. Umland, The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film: From Connecticut Yankees to Fisher Kings (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996). 22. A more simplistic organizational schema for this volume might have entailed three units, one each addressing race, class, and gender. We decided against such an organizational principle due to the virtually inherent overlap between and among these categories. Issues of race, class, and gender are often inextricably interlinked, and assigning a film such as The Thirteenth Warrior to the category of gender (for its depictions of masculinities in contact and in contrast with one another) might occlude the ways in which the film addresses ethnic interplay (in its depiction of encounters between East and West). 23. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 15.

PART I MULTICULTURAL IDENTITIES: A LOST IDEAL?

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CHAPTER 1 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS: KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AND THE MULTITEMPORALITY OF MEDIEVAL FILM Arthur Lindley

Section 1: This Is Not a Medieval Film When, near the beginning of Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005), Godfrey of Ibelin, a sort of twelfth-century Horace Greeley, urges his French blacksmith son to join him in the Holy Land, he uses terms that will be familiar to any student of the frontier myth and its cinematic expression, the Western. There, he tells Balian, “a man can repair his fortunes”; there “you are not what you were born, but what you have it in yourself to be.” In the East you can, if you have no fortune to repair, be free of the crippling class constraints of the old world: “there a man that has not a house in France is master of a city.” He describes, in other words, a paradise of economic and social (not to mention, spiritual) individualism and invites us to imagine Balian the Frontiersman, an image that will be confirmed as much by the sight of Balian the well-digger bringing water to his parched settlement as by that of Balian the general defending Fort Jerusalem against the Saracen tribes. The Holy Land is—as Godfrey, Tiberias, and the corrupt priest of Balian’s village all will say—“a new world,” one clearly meant to link with our own New World but even more with our own Old West. It is, literally and figuratively, a land of opportunity, in which a bastard blacksmith can become not just a baron but a hero of Christendom. It is also an embodiment of a myth of progress imported from nineteenth-century America. In this manner, Kingdom of Heaven is as indebted to the frontier

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myths of Frederick Jackson Turner as the Star Wars films are indebted to the heroic myths of Joseph Campbell.1 Of course, Godfrey also describes Jerusalem, in terms that will startle any student of medieval cartography, as “the edge of the world.” A historical Godfrey would never have seen a map in which Jerusalem was not the center of the world, an image he could also have found in the floor of any number of cathedrals where “Jerusalem” is the center of the maze that stands for pilgrimage. However, this Godfrey is not historical; he is an entirely fictional substitute for Barisan of Ibelin, baron, descended of viscounts and father of the historical Balian of Ibelin, Italian by blood, who never, so far as we know, set foot in France, let alone practiced a trade there. This Godfrey, both a descendent of Magwitch in Great Expectations and a walking allusion to Godfrey of Bouillon, is an iconic, panhistorical figure who offers his son a dreamland more characteristic of nineteenth- or twentieth-century mythology than the twelfth-century variety. It is a Jerusalem where Christian, Muslim, and Jew live together in harmony: “a kingdom of conscience. . .a kingdom of heaven.” If this kingdom has also been built on a history of invasion, rapine, and butchery that have left Godfrey altogether disillusioned with the claims of Christian civilization, that reflects not only the tensions within Scott’s film but also those within our contemporary sense of the occupied and embattled Jerusalem familiar from the evening news. That history also reflects the evolution of the Old West in which “civilization” was built on a similar base. This is hardly accidental, since Kingdom of Heaven is, above all, a parable of modern problems, primarily, but not exclusively, those of the Middle East. As so often with films of the Middle Ages, for twelfth century we must read twenty-first. Given all this, it is a bit surprising that such a storm has built up over the film’s (failures of ) historicity that only begin with giving Balian an entirely fictional (and mysterious) lineage—not to mention an equally fictitious love life—and giving Jerusalem a government of enlightened secular liberals devoted to fostering a multiculturalism that would have been alien to any of the cultures involved. It is, of course, easy enough to kick holes in this construct, and any number of historians have rushed forward to do so, some even before the film began shooting. Besides not being French, the historical Balian of Ibelin, unlike his film counterpart, was neither a bastard nor a blacksmith. He was born, rather than co-opted, into the warrior aristocracy. The birth took place in Ibelin, not France, and he seems never to have left the Middle East. The father was Barisan (or Barzan) of Ibelin, and the paternal grandfather, Barisan of Naples. History’s Balian, so far as we know, never had an affair with Sibylla of Jerusalem who, at the time covered by the film, had three children and was notably and fatally devoted to her husband, Guy de Lusignan, following him into exile in Acre where she

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died of infection at about the time the film has her galloping across France with Orlando Bloom. (The film’s Sibylla, by contrast, is willing for Guy to be executed for the sake of Balian and the crown.) The actual Sibylla had been briefly intended for Balian’s elder brother Baldwin, who in the film has disappeared along with the rest of his family and his wife of ten years, Maria Comnena—widow of a previous king of Jerusalem, Amalric I— whose presence in the film might have inconvenienced the lovers. If the actual Balian became as disillusioned with war and crusading as Scott’s Balian does, it did not prevent him from fighting alongside Richard the Lionheart in the Third Crusade, precisely the chance that Balian rejects at the end of the film. In the film, he also refuses to fight alongside Guy and Reynald of Chatillon at Hattin; the historical Balian not only fought at but fled from Hattin, which is how he lived long enough to surrender Jerusalem, where he is not known to have knighted any, let alone all, of the commoners. The actual citizens of Jerusalem, far from rising up like lions in the city’s defense during the siege, refused to fight even when offered large sums of money to do so. In short, so far as I have been able to determine, the only things about the historical Balian to reach the screen are his name, his title, and the fact that he surrendered Jerusalem to Saladin. The tally for Sibylla is equally short: her name, her rank, and the facts that she was wife to Guy and sister to Baldwin IV of Jerusalem.2 In brief, both the film’s hero and heroine are almost entirely fictional. Ordinary viewers may not notice these discrepancies between fact and fiction, but historians certainly and predictably have. In what follows my purpose is not to do a reading of Kingdom of Heaven per se, but to use this film (and the controversy it has provoked) to show how medieval film characteristically works, even when—as here—it is making uncharacteristic claims to historical factuality. To do so, I first consider the confusions generated by assuming the film’s historicity and judging it accordingly. I then discuss the characteristically fabular and ahistorical nature of medieval film in general, and finally show how this particular film constructs a simulacrum of the Middle Ages out of other filmic simulacra, particularly the Western. The anachronisms and historical liberties we have just noticed are, in fact, put to creative purposes. Section 2: This Is Not a Historical Film Since before it was made, Kingdom of Heaven and its screenplay have been as embattled as Jerusalem, the attackers in this case dividing sharply into Muslim historians offended at the film’s purported misrepresentation of the Saracens and non-Muslim historians offended by misrepresentations of the Christians. What unites these two parties is the assumption that what they

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are judging is or ought to be a historical document combined, rather awkwardly, with the assumption that the film is all about the present. Only the second assumption is justified. As early as January 2004, before principal shooting of the film had begun, Charlotte Edwardes published an article in the British Daily Telegraph under the eye-catching headline “Ridley Scott’s New Crusades Film ‘Panders to Osama bin Laden,’ ” consisting almost entirely of denunciations from Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge) and Jonathan Philips (University of London) who appear to be reacting either to a pilfered script or to a summary provided by the reporter as well as to the producers’ quoted claim that the film is “ ‘historically accurate’ and designed to be ‘a fascinating history lesson.’ ”3 Professor Riley-Smith, whose spluttering outrage seems to have been provoked by these claims more than by the script, sees the film as a recreation of the Romantics’ view of the Crusades: “They refer to [Sir Walter Scott’s] The Talisman, which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilized, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. . . . There never was a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians,” adding that “Sir Ridley’s efforts were misguided and pandered to Islamic fundamentalism.” It is interesting in that regard that neither expert mentions one of the moves that heightens the contrast between civilized Muslims and barbaric Christians: the omission of Saladin’s slaughter of his Templar and Hospitaller prisoners after the battle of Hattin.4 When Sharon Waxman of the New York Times showed the script to Islamic and other religious scholars, she found a diametrically opposed reaction, based, however, on similar assumptions about the nature of historical film.5 Where the English experts see Islamic propaganda, intended or not, the Islamic ones see Christian propaganda. In a much quoted formulation, Khaled Abou el-Fadl (UCLA Law) says: I believe this movie teaches people to hate Muslims. . . . There is a stereotype of the Muslim as constantly stupid, retarded, backward, unable to think in complex forms. . . . In this climate how are people going to react to theses images of Muslims attacking churches and tearing down the cross and mocking it?6

Here again we should note how an understandable concern for historical accuracy intersects with an equally understandable concern with contemporary impact. Professor Abou el-Fadl quite rightly objects to the inaccurate portrayal of Saladin as a pragmatic and skeptical Muslim when in fact he was a notably devout one. On the other hand, he objects to scenes in the script of Muslims sacking churches or desecrating the cross because, while accurate, they may be dangerous in the present situation. He is more

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generally concerned by the way “our present concerns” distort the historical record.7 In all cases, like most of us, the disputants expect the film to be both an objective historical record and disguised political commentary, simultaneously “about” Reynald of Chatillon and Ariel Sharon. Perhaps more surprisingly, the filmmakers seem to agree with them. The film’s publicity does describe it as “a fascinating history lesson.”8 In interviews Scott lays emphasis on the amount of research that has gone into the film while admitting only that “we cheated a little bit.”9 The little bit includes inventing the characters of the hero and heroine out of whole and modern cloth, supplying the hero with an entirely fictitious father, significantly altering the character of Saladin, blackening the character of Guy de Lusignan, and making a hero of the ineffectual Baldwin IV.10 Why cheat in ways that can be detected not only by historians but also by anyone curious enough to run a Google search (myself, for example)? The answer, of course, is the weight of expectation that descends on a director the moment she/he chooses to portray historical events with “real people” in them. (This is why the overwhelming majority of medieval films deal with legendary material—King Arthur, Robin Hood—or with openly fictitious characters, such as William Thatcher of A Knight’s Tale [Brian Helgeland, 2001].) Research is what directors and screenwriters have to say they have done because the illusion of factuality validates whatever lesson or parable they have in mind and authorizes the expenditure necessary to film it. If directors tell the studio that they want to do a Brechtian parable about the dangers of religious fanaticism in the Middle East and elsewhere, the studio is liable to ask why they need to spend $140 million to construct such a parable. And fable, as most of the film’s critics and reviewers have sensed, is exactly what we are looking at, no matter how much the fabular mode may be obscured by Scott’s usual obsessive concern with realism of setting and presentation. The fairy-tale nature of the narrative is clearly signaled by its opening: in the course of a few hours, Balian buries his wife, meets and rejects his previously unknown father, murders his priest, and runs away to the Crusades. This is the kind of day that happens to Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; it is not the kind that happens in realist narratives. We will be reminded of the film’s real mode later when Balian is shipwrecked and cast alone on a desert shore—a motif that combines references to The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, and The Seventh Seal—there to be challenged for no rational reason by a Saracen with a sword—the reference now is to all those arbitrary duels between stranger-knights in the Morte D’Arthur. In the film’s final scene, of course, Balian and Sibylla enjoy a nostalgic look around the ruins of his ancestral smithy when Richard the Lionheart comes wandering coincidentally down the road, looking for

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Balian of Ibelin. The film’s opening titles, of course, explain the situation of Europe in 1184; a more informative opening title would simply say “Once upon a time.” As Scott repeatedly told interviewers, when not insisting on the film’s historicity, his real interest is in “iconic figures,” outsiders “who sit on the cutting edge of society,” not on a particular figure in a particular time. Of course, he was also developing it “in the shadow of 9/11.”11 Whatever “truth” the film offers is unlikely to be historical truth. Section 3: The Multitemporality of Medieval Film As I have argued elsewhere, medieval films are rarely set in or primarily concerned with the Middle Ages.12 More usually, the medieval material is lifted out of historical sequence to serve, in Barbara Tuchman’s famous phrase, “as a distant mirror of the present,” an analogue or distancing device that enables us to see ourselves from a position of estrangement. Thus, in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Sweden, 1957) the plague with its threat of universal extinction mirrors the 1950s threat of nuclear winter, just as the protagonist Blok’s concern with the silence of God and the emptiness of the heavens mirrors our anxieties, not the fourteenth century’s. Alternatively, the medieval is translated into the eternal present of myth, as in John Boorman’s Excalibur (United Kingdom, 1981), in which Arthur as a figure in a Jungian myth of adolescent identity formation is necessarily a past, present, and future king. What is built into this construct is a denial of historical sequence: the distant past mirrors us, but it does not lead to us; history repeats but does not develop. Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) ends with a triumphant announcement of Scotland’s liberation from England under Robert the Bruce, an announcement that only reminds us of the need to repeat that separation in the present. Kingdom of Heaven ends with a title that denies historical process even while seemingly asserting it: “Nearly a thousand years later peace in the Kingdom of Heaven remains elusive.” The intervening centuries are dismissed as a gap, empty of history: the route from square one to square one. Films of the more recent past, however, construct their subjects as existing in linear and causative, that is to say historical, relation to the present. The struggles of Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska to free themselves from the constrictions and inhibitions of nineteenth-century New York in Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence (United States of America, 1993) are part of a process that leads to what we like to think of as our liberated selves, a process emphasized by the contrast between the older Newland and his more modern son Ted in the film’s final section. Since the emergence of women from Victorian oppression is the most popular of our current myths of origin, much the same can be said of any number of

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Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films, such as A Room with a View (United Kingdom, 1985) and Howard’s End (1992), or even, God help us, Titanic ( James Cameron, 1997). It cannot be said of Sibylla, whose independence may foreshadow a modern condition but does not lead to it. While films of more recent history offer relevance by evolution, medieval films offer relevance by analogy. We are too conditioned by the idea of the Renaissance as a decisive break from the past and thus a point or origin for all things modern to think of the Middle Ages as anything but an exotic or appalling interval between two periods of civilization. It is virtually never shown as leading to us. The year 1492—as in Scott’s own 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (United Kingdom, 1992)—is virtually the sole exception to this rule. And 1187 is not 1492. We should expect Kingdom of Heaven, then, to function in fundamentally parabolic terms, as a simulacrum of the past that is also a simulacrum of the present. In what follows, however, I would like to complicate the model offered in my earlier essays. The simulacrum of the medieval past is, in fact, constructed from the simulacra of other periods—the Romantic Middle Ages of The Talisman, for example—and from related simulacra, especially that of the Old West. The inflection of those other models significantly shapes the parable the film presents, even if that parable takes the familiar modern form of a struggle between tolerant, secular moderates and religious fundamentalists. While science fiction extrapolates the future from the present, medieval film extrapolates the past. Like most medieval films, Kingdom of Heaven is first and last a parable, only disguised by a thin veneer of (mostly illusory) factuality. It addresses what the title says, a “kingdom of heaven,” but the one defined in that speech of Godfrey’s that I quoted earlier: “a kingdom of conscience . . . where Jew and Muslim and Christian live together in harmony.” It is the displaced hope of the disillusioned and skeptical—which is pretty much to say, the intelligent— that takes the place of heaven for those like Balian and Tiberias who feel that “God has left” them. While notionally identified with Jerusalem, it contrasts sharply with the iconic significance of the city for the religious fanatics on either side. In other words, it is a medieval version of a blue state, surrounded, as blue states tend to be, by the red menace. More literally, it is a fragile, imperfect, multicultural state defended, however uncertainly, by a clique of very recognizable secular humanists. It is the rebirth of the kind of 1950’s liberal melodrama represented by Twelve Angry Men or Inherit the Wind and resurrected more recently in Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998). And, of course, the mentality being celebrated is, as many reviewers have noted, profoundly anachronistic to the twelfth century.13 The relation of fable to history here is a matter of tenor and vehicle. One knows which is which because the needs of the parable consistently

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override the historical facts, such as they are. To see this process at work, we can look at one of the points where the film makes its closest approach to the record: the negotiations between Balian and Saladin, which were recorded or composed by Imad, Saladin’s chronicler.14 Up till now, Balian told Saladin, his men had been fighting halfheartedly, but if we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other sacred places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold—5,000 of them— and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honor, or win a noble victory!15

Faced with this extraordinary threat or bluff, Saladin and his advisers decided to grant the Christians safe passage in return for ransom. The film’s Balian, not surprisingly, omits any mention of slaughtering prisoners, wives, children or animals, and threatens only to tear down the shrines of all religions, “all the things that drive men mad.” That is to say, a threat of terrorism has been turned into a gesture of enlightened secularism and a blow for world peace. A similarly enlightened Saladin replies that “it might be a good thing” if he did. He then offers safe passage without ransom and without Balian having to ask for it. Thus, a confrontation in which Saladin gave in so as to protect Muslim holy sites and Muslim prisoners has been turned into a wink-and-nod agreement between two humane professionals to avert bloodshed. Our impression of these two as civilized men isolated in a sea of fanaticism is fostered by the omission of Saladin’s counselors and of the Patriarch of Jerusalem with whom the historical Balian collaborated. The process of turning the notably pious Saladin into a model of nondenominational tolerance has earlier been furthered by a conversation with his mufti in which Saladin, after being told that God alone determines victory, dryly asks “how many did He determine for the Muslims before I came?”16 Saladin, like Balian, has a healthy but modern contempt for what we might call faith-based initiatives. The film’s Saladin fights to repel foreign invaders and, like Balian, to protect the weak, the civilians preyed on by Reynald and Guy. His negotiations with Balian between their two armies echoes the earlier scene in which Baldwin and Saladin agree to abort a battle in return for Baldwin’s punishment of Reynald. Blessed are the diplomats! The film thus displaces the conflict between Christian and Muslim into one between the tolerant of both sides and the fanatical in ways that clearly

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reflect the priorities of 2005 more than the realities of 1187. As Professor el-Fadl pointed out to me, in that scene Saladin plays the part of “the ideal rational Arab” while Balian, the besieged occupier of Jerusalem, plays “the ideal rational Israeli.” Give the two of them five minutes apart from the nutters on both sides and they will make peace. The fable requires a party of moderates. If history fails to provide one, then fiction must. As the film’s Islamic history adviser Hamid Dabashi has written, it is “neither pro- nor anti-Islamic, neither pro- nor anti-Christian. It [is] not even about the Crusades.”17 Section 4: Kingdom of Heaven and the Western David Edelstein only slightly misstates the case when he writes that “Kingdom of Heaven is an epic about Christian Crusaders who happen to be liberal humanists willing to die for the sake of religious tolerance.”18 Actually, it is about a handful of ex-Crusaders plus a sultan, none of whom is particularly anxious to die for anything. Balian specifically and repeatedly distances himself from crusading, reminding Saladin of the 40,000 Muslims slaughtered when the First Crusaders took Jerusalem and reminding his citizen-soldiers in Jerusalem that “we fight for an offense we did not give,” though Guy, Reynald, and the Templars have been giving plenty. Also, this film is not an epic but a mock-epic about an action hero whose most heroic action is to surrender. It is thus a rewriting of a whole tradition of liberal Hollywood epics, like Braveheart, where heroism takes a more aggressive form. The film’s narrative builds to not one, but three anticlimaxes: (1) the battle for Kerak that is aborted by Baldwin, who has taken command of the army precisely to prevent its being used; (2) the decisive battle of Hattin that is omitted; and (3) the final battle for Jerusalem that, as we have seen, is prevented by Balian and Saladin. That adds up to two victories for the doves and one disaster for the hawks. Balian, of course, achieves military heroism only to renounce it and, in his final conversation with Richard, the identity and rank that goes with it. He is the latest in a distinctly American tradition of citizen-soldiers or citizen-heroes—think of Private Ryan in Saving Private Ryan or Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon—who melt back into civilian life as soon as their work is done. Balian melts so completely, in fact, that we have no idea where he and Sibylla are going at the end of the film or what social position they have chosen to occupy. They acknowledge their fictionality by vanishing, leaving the historical record to their originals. Because they vanish, however, they do not die. Like King Arthur and his Western avatar Shane, Balian is always liable to return: a once, future, and, by virtue of this film, present hero.19 “The knight,” Scott tells an interviewer, “was the cowboy of that era. He carried with him degrees of fairness, faith and chivalry.”20 Balian

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achieves knightliness through action, if not exactly through birth, while retaining many of the traits of frontiersman, remaking his fortunes, his identity, and his social destiny while coming to terms with the wilderness. The single most important function of Godfrey—more important even than being Frederick Jackson Turner’s representative on earth—is to free Balian of any stable social position. He is here the illegitimate son of Godfrey and a woman whose name and rank are never clarified. Godfrey is a knight and, de facto, baron of Ibelin, but we have no way of knowing whether that is an inherited title, a battlefield promotion or simply a successful act of selfassertion, though his praise of the opportunities for advancement in the Holy Land suggests the latter. Balian, as we have seen, is co-opted into the warrior aristocracy and thus remains detachable from it, as the original Balian was not. We see him first and last as a blacksmith—as indeed does Sibylla, who first meets him while he is shoeing a horse and mistakes him for one of his servants—and he remains a blacksmith to Guy. Throughout, Balian distinguishes himself from the aristocracy of birth by his willingness to join the workers and get his hands dirty digging wells and tending horses. Like the Westerner, he may become one of them, but he remains one of us. The mediating presence of the Western has the particular effect of Americanizing Balian and the film’s value structure. Classless himself, he operates persistently as a leveler and protodemocrat. “In France,” he tells Guy de Lusignan’s wife, “a few yards of silk make a nobleman.” And, yes, that is the lord of Ibelin down in the hole, sharing a winesack with the proles and solidarity with the audience. Balian, of course, achieves the defense of Jerusalem by knighting every able-bodied man in the city (though it does not appear that Jews and Muslims are included in this dispensation). Having “changed his stars,” like William Thatcher in A Knight’s Tale, from medieval to modern, he decides to change theirs too. “Does making a man a knight make him fight better,” sneers the bishop. “Yes,” answers Balian, as the bishop’s newly knighted servants grin. And, of course, the townsfolk rise to the occasion. The ethos of the classic Western could hardly be put more simply and unironically; no more could that classic type of the American hero—the common man of uncommon ability, modest ambitions, and democratic sympathies.21 At least two things happen to the Western material when it is thus appropriated. First, it receives an infusion of religiosity that is, generally speaking, absent from the genre, except in recent Westerns like Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) that take an interest in Native American spirituality. Balian is centrally concerned with his own loss of God and the process by which he develops a personal faith; John Wayne customarily is not. The traditional Western puts its faith—or, in the cases of Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah, its mockery—in progress. Second, the Western myth of actually or ostensibly benevolent conquest is here linked back to the original Crusades

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and forward to the current, Middle Eastern crusade of a president who fancies himself a frontiersman intent on bringing in evildoers “dead or alive.” In this case, we are not merely looking at the twelfth century through twenty-first century eyes; indeed, in an important sense, we are not looking at the twelfth century at all, but at a simulacrum made from contemporary materials for contemporary purposes. (Think of another invading force that comes to the Middle East from the West preaching liberation and Christian piety and stays on as occupiers and profiteers.)22 In fact, the situation is more complex than that. As Riley-Smith and Philips complain, the film’s version of the twelfth century has been polluted—I would say, inflected—by Sir Walter Scott’s version. Certainly the film’s conjunction of an urbane and noble Saladin, barbaric Crusaders and a hero who bonds with the former owes something to The Talisman, as its view of the Templars resembles Ivanhoe’s. As we have seen, any number of film traditions and models also intrude, including some fairly trashy ones. There is a long and dishonorable tradition behind the feisty, exotic, horseback-riding, sexually aggressive Asian babe that Eva Green (figure 1.1) is playing here (with the ghost of Isabelle Adjani in Ishtar [Elaine May, 1987] hovering over her shoulder). We see and construct the film’s subject through many different lenses from many different periods. That is, in fact, the normal condition of medieval film. Take, for example, the figure of Princess Isabelle (Sophie Marceau) in Braveheart, the one who is always referred to as “the Princess of Wales” to remind us that she

Figure 1.1 Eva Green’s Sibylla in the tradition of exotic Eastern female lead. Source: From Kingdom of Heaven (USA, Ridley Scott, 2005).

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is the prequel of Diana. That iconic character, the noble adulteress, of course has her archetypal roots in the figures of Isolde and Guenevere, making Wallace the analogue of Tristram and Lancelot, but she is also a historical figure, at least in the extremely notional way that Balian and Sibylla are. (Sibylla is virtually a rewriting, in fact, of Isabelle.) At the same time, the princess is a complex literary reference who necessarily invokes her other version in Marlowe’s Edward II and the more similar French princess in Henry V. One figure, in other words conjures up a range of references from Chretien de Troyes to 1995. Likewise, Welles’s Macbeth at once occupies a fanciful version of the Middle Ages, the Nazi-haunted 1940s of its making and its political subtext, and the permanent present of Freudian mythmaking. Boorman’s Excalibur occupies a fabular Middle Ages in which tenth-century knights ride into battle in fourteenth-century armor to the music of Carl Orff or Richard Wagner. The film’s visual world is derived at once from pre-Raphaelite painting and the world of timeless Jungian archetypes. A Knight’s Tale is almost unique in relying on a simple conflation of a pop-cultural present with a medieval past that it seems to be differentiated from almost exclusively by a rigid system of class distinction (and which in fact is dissolved by the ending of the film). The situation is customarily more complicated and, for those who expect historical film to be historical, more frustrating. What we customarily have in medieval film is not just a simulacrum of the medieval past that excludes the actual past and erases historical process— whatever might have happened to connect 1187 with 2005—displacing what the films claim to represent, as Ridley Scott’s desire for iconic figures and parabolic stories overwrites his desire for that largely mythical beast historical accuracy, but one that, as we have seen, is constructed primarily out of other simulacra from other historical moments. It is not, in other words, that The Talisman and the Western mediate the film’s historical subject, but that they create it. The historical Balian and Sibylla are what must be set aside to provide the medieval East with a Western hero and heroine. At the same time, of course, that simulacrum of the past is also an implied simulacrum of the present as well as of a notional Middle Eastern future. For all these reasons, medieval film is necessarily a hall of distant mirrors. Notes 1. See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1945); and Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949). 2. For this paragraph at least, I have intentionally limited my “research” to sources readily and easily available on the Web to William Monahan (the

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3. 4.

5.

6.

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scriptwriter) and Ridley Scott, as well as to myself and anyone curious about the subject. I have, of course, checked the facts against more authoritative sources, particularly Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jonathan RileySmith, The Crusades: A Short History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); and other scholarly sources given below. The primary sources for the above information are the Wikipedia entries for “Balian,” “Ibelin,” “Sibylla of Jerusalem,” and “Guy de Lusignan” available at http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/. The text of Ralph of Coggeshall’s account of the fall of Jerusalem, De Expurgatio Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, is available on the Medieval Sourcebook Web site, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/ 1187saladin.html. While the film’s account of Balian is pervasively fictitious, its version of Jerusalem as an island of tolerance in a sea of fanaticism seems to be based on that in Vol. 2 of Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–1954). That version is much disputed, most recently by Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2006). Daily Telegraph, January 18, 2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk. Imad ad-Din’s account of this can be found in Francesco Gabrieli, ed., Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans. E. J. Costello and Francesco Gabrieli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 138–39. The film, of course, represents the Hospitallers, particularly the nameless spokesman played by David Thewlis, as doves and the Templars as war-mongering hawks. Neither the chroniclers nor Saladin seem to have noticed any such difference. “Film on Crusades Could Become Hollywood’s Next Battleground,” The New York Times, August 12, 2004, http://www.scholarofthehouse.org/ necifoncrcob.html. When I spoke to Professor Abou el-Fadl by phone on May 17, 2005, he pointed to a number of inflammatory scenes in the original script which do not appear in the version of the film now in general release—desecration of the cross by Muslim soldiers after Hattin and the stripping and rape of Arab women by Reynald’s troops in the raid that ends with the killing of Saladin’s sister. While his reaction to the finished film was considerably milder than to Monahan’s earlier script, he remained disturbed by a number of surviving elements: the fact that the Muslims of Ibelin apparently do not have sense enough to dig a well in a drought until Balian shows them; the mythic “Eastern fatalism” attributed to a number of characters; the bizarre attack on Balian when he is shipwrecked on the shore of Palestine; and the slaughter of innumerable, undifferentiated Saracens. I should point out that, though it is easy to miss, we are told that the population of Ibelin is a mix of Muslims, Jews and Christians—it is a little version of Jerusalem, in other words—so I suppose we must assume that nobody has sense enough to dig a well until Balian comes along. This is the kind of effect that hagiography and the star system occasionally produce.

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7. Phone interview with the author, May 17, 2005. 8. Cited by Charlotte Edwardes, see note 3 above. 9. Bob Thompson, “Hollywood on Crusade: With His Historical Epic, Ridley Scott Hurtles into Vexing, Volatile Territory,” Washington Post, May 1, 2005, p. 1, p. 405. 10. According to the “Old French Continuation of William of Tyre,” Guy, not Baldwin, attempted to control Reynald rather than conspiring with him to provoke war. See Peter Edbury, ed., The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), p. 29. Baldwin’s benevolent and active character seems to be largely an invention of the film. 11. Thompson, “Hollywood on Crusade,” p. 405. 12. See Arthur Lindley, “The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film,” Screening the Past, 3 (May 1998), www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/ ALfr3a.htm; and Arthur Lindley, “Scotland Saved from History: Welles’ Macbeth,” Literature/Film Quarterly 29.2 (2001): 96–100. 13. For example, Todd McCarthy in his review in Variety, May 1, 2005, notes that the film bestows “the most sympathetic characters with an anachronistic, post-French Enlightenment, humanistic attitude that, while not denying God, at least suggests a desire on their part to take an extended vacation from doing his fighting.” This and many other reviews can be found on the Kingdom of Heaven page of the Internet Movie Database, www. imdb.com. 14. The French chronicler records instead elaborate negotiations between the two over the amount of ransom to be paid for the freedom of the Christian inhabitants of the city. See Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, pp. 140–42; cf. Edbury, Conquest of Jerusalem, pp. 59–61. 15. Imad ad-Din, in Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, pp. 140–41. 16. On Saladin’s religiosity, see Edbury, Conquest of Jerusalem, pp. 66–67, 87–88, 99–100; and Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, pp. 144–45. 17. Hamid Dabashi, “Warriors of Faith,” Sight and Sound 15.5 (May 2005): 24–27, at p. 27. 18. Slate, May 5, 2005, http://slate.msn.com/id/2118119. 19. The process that creates the film’s version of Balian is an extension of that American tendency to democratize and familiarize Arthurian material that has been studied at length by Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack. See, e.g., Alan Lupack, “The Figure of King Arthur in America,” King Arthur’s Modern Return, ed. Debra N. Mancoff (New York and London: Garland, 1998), pp. 121–36, as well as their full-length study, King Arthur in America (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999). Balian, like Arthur, is the illegitimate child of a loving rape who rises from obscurity, seeks out a fisher king, and winds up defending an idealized Jerusalem that bears more than a passing resemblance to Camelot. 20. Dabashi, “Warriors of Faith,” p. 26. The relation, of course, is usually stated the other way round: cowboys are knights errant, which may express Scott’s actual priorities. The first television Western I can remember watching was

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This Gun for Hire, whose hero was named Paladin, “a knight without armor in a savage land.” 21. Among the many critics who note in passing the film’s Western provenance is Philip French, who says that “the movie brings to mind those liberal Westerns from the cold war era in which the Indians are presented as cultured and peaceful, the European settlers as ameliorative and considerate, and all would be well were it not for a few headstrong braves going on the warpath and the whisky selling, gun-running renegades bent on corrupting native Americans” (The Observer, May 8, 2005). Dabashi offers Fort Apache ( John Ford, 1948) as an alternative model (“Warriors of Faith,” p. 27). 22. This game can be played more ways than one, of course. Maurice Timothy Reidy in the New Republic Online thinks that “Scott’s idealized depiction of Jerusalem—a classless, multi-ethnic society presided over by an enlightened Western ruler—isn’t all that different from Bush’s vision of a free and Democratic Iraq,” https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i ⫽ w050509&s ⫽ reidy051105, accessed May 11, 2005. One could point out, on the other hand, that most of the Western presence is presented as deplorable, that Jerusalem—Balian’s nonce army excepted—is anything but democratic, that the most enlightened ruler seems to be the sultan who conquers that ideal state, and that the hero in the end renounces the whole enterprise.

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CHAPTER 2 CHAHINE’S DESTINY: PROPHETIC NOSTALGIA AND THE OTHER MIDDLE AGES Don Hoffman

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oussef Chahine, Egypt’s most prolific and recognized auteur, is inalienably implicated in Otherness. While thoroughly embedded in Egyptian and Islamic culture, he is profoundly marked by his own situation as a Christian and the descendant of a Lebanese rather than an Egyptian family. Above all, although he embraces Cairo and is thoroughly identified with it, he is indelibly a son of the city of his birth, the multicultural and traditionally suspect Mediterranean city of Alexandria, a city equally noted for sensual excess and the ascetic exertions of its saints. It is a city at the crossroad of West and East, too easily accepting both and embracing neither. This cosmopolitan background intersects with Chahine’s understanding of the character of the medieval philosopher Averroës, the hero of his most recent medievalist film, al-Massir/Destiny (1997). Like Chahine, the twelfth-century philosopher engaged in the ongoing debate between faith and reason, which raged with equal ferocity among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. In particular, Averroës responded to The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a defense of the faith by the revered philosopher Al-Ghazali (1058–1111). With his rebuttal of Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Averroës aroused the animosity of Ash’arites, Hanbalites, and Mu’tazilites.1 While the details of the controversy are best left to specialists in post-Aristotelian philosophy, the outlines of the debate attracted Chahine, who found parallels between his situation and that of the philosopher whose devotion to his discipline led him into conflicts with an entrenched fundamentalist opposition. What is most attractive in Averroës is summed

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up neatly by María Rosa Menocal, who pairs him with his Cordoban contemporary, Moses Maimonides: The monumental works of each—curiously, more influential as philosophers in later Christian Europe than within their own religious cultures—shared a basic vision that can be characterized as the defense of human freedom. Each focused unflinchingly on the paradoxes that must be embraced in order for faith and reason to flourish in their respective domains. Neither faith nor reason was to have precedence (this would necessarily lead to a tyranny of one over the other), but rather each was to have a generous and uncompromised place at a table where both could share in the banquet of truth.2

The necessary conditions for this banquet were set in Andalusia during the reigns of the Almohad and Almoravid caliphs. While both dynasties were repressive regimes, they allowed for the creation of what María Rosa Menocal has called “the ornament of the world” and has praised as the unique creation of a “culture of tolerance in medieval Spain.”3 Even the most casual visitor to al-Andalus is struck by the splendor of its monuments, the Arabian Nights palace of the Alhambra and the majestic solemnity of the mosque at Cordoba, iconic incarnations of the beauty and luxury of the life of the caliphs, on the one hand, and the sublime mysticism of the Islamic contemplatives, on the other. Averroës, in the waning days of the Almoravid dynasty, developed, via Plato, not only an idea of democracy, but also saw how “the multitude is plundered by the mighty and the democratic state degenerates into tyranny or despotism.”4 According to Fakhry, Averroës saw this process being reenacted during his lifetime and shortly before, when “democracy degenerated into tyranny during the reign of the grandson of the founder of the Almoravids dynasty, ‘Ali Ibn Yusuf, between 1106 and 1145 in Cordoba. That dynasty was overthrown in 1146 by ‘Abd al-Mu’min, founder of the successor Berber dynasty Almohads.”5 Chahine portrays an Andalusia highly inflected by the positive reminiscences of philosophers and exiles.6 The citizens of his al-Andalus celebrate love and learning, music and philosophy, but there is a clear threat from religious intolerance and the caliph, admirable as he is, is all too capable of unwise judgments and, as a result, brutal punishments. Chahine’s celebration of twelfth-century al-Andalus does not prevent him from confronting the seeds of its destruction, as the monarchy threatens to sink into repressive tyranny and religion tends toward the more and more fanatical and irrational. For Chahine, this destructive tendency is still dangerously alive in the present, so that Averroës’s call for a rational faith and a tolerant humanism is not presented as a look back to the quaintness of the Middle

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Ages, but as a reminder of a danger that remains and a warning that still requires our attention. At this point, a brief synopsis of Destiny may be in order before proceeding to a closer examination of four particular aspects of the film: the music (which underscores the secular and spiritual Otherness of the Andalusian people); the role of the poet (who, like Chahine, is Othered by his refusal to reject either the spirit or the body and finds the oppositions reconciled in reason); Chahine’s eye fixation (which confronts issues of racial Otherness, but also begins to hint at the unaddressed homoerotic Otherness embedded in all of Chahine’s work); and the implications of the fires that open and close the film, which underline the mutual Otherness of medieval and Christian cultures, while finding in the end an all too disturbing similarity. Synopsis Destiny opens in twelfth-century Languedoc, where a heretic is about to be burned alive in the town square for the sin of translating the works of the Arab philosopher, Averroës, into Latin. The camera follows the preparations and, as the herald reads the indictment, focuses on the face of a horrified young man, who turns out to be his son Joseph (Fares Rahouma).7 Abandoning France in fear and horror, Joseph and his mother flee. His mother dies on the journey, but Joseph arrives in Andalusia and joins the circle of Averroës (Nour El Cherif ). The plot then turns to the Caliph Al Mansour (Mahmoud Hemeida) and his sons, Nasser (Khaled El Nabaoui) and Abdallah (Hani Salama). Both sons are great disappointments to their father, one devoted to women, and the other addicted to wine, song, and gypsies. When the dissolute Abdallah comes under the influence of a radical sheik, he allies himself with forces that oppose both his mentor, Averroës, and his father. When the radicals assault the poet Marwan (Mohamed Mounir), who had been Abdallah’s mentor and companion among the gypsies, his separation from both the sensuous world of the gypsies and the rational world of Averroës is complete. Meanwhile, Averroës, fighting against religious intolerance and political tyranny, begins to feel vulnerable, although he remains firm in his beliefs. His students and friends begin to copy his books to ensure the survival of his thoughts, if his books are suppressed. Such arguments as “[e]verything that comes from divine law is subject to interpretation” have put him in a dangerous position. Joseph collects a number of manuscripts to take to France, which he remembers as “the land of humanism and love,” while the gypsies, playing with Alhazen’s new invention, the telescope, discover Abdallah in the sheik’s compound.8 They determine to rescue him, although he adamantly does

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not want to be rescued. When Marwan is attacked again and this time killed, Abdallah seeks a kind of absolution from Averroës and is reunited with his brother Nasser. Joseph leaves Andalusia to try again to smuggle Averroës’s manuscripts into France, while Nasser plans to transport copies into Egypt. As the Christians attack, the caliph blames Averroës and joins forces with the sheik. As fanaticism and tyranny spread in Andalusia, Nasser arrives with the books in Egypt, while Joseph returns to Andalusia and is reunited with Averroës and his gypsy girl. Abdallah rejects the fanatics and confronts his father. Averroës prepares to leave Andalusia and, memorably, as he packs an old bench on his cart, reminisces with his wife about the moment when they consummated their love for the first time on that very bench.9 Preparing to face the future in a new land, and knowing his books have reached Europe and Egypt, he smiles with a fatalistic joy and throws his last copy of The Incoherence of the Incoherence on the pyre. The scene fades to black and Chahine’s epigram appears: La pensée a des ailes Nul ne peut arrêter son envoi [“Thought has wings; nothing can stop its flight.”]

Music It seems improbable that a film dealing with medieval philosophers, heresies, inquisitions, religious fundamentalism, politics, and tyranny would also be a musical. Nevertheless, Chahine’s functional use of Gregorian chant, Sufi hymns, and gypsy dances serves both to entertain and to underscore thematic oppositions and to destabilize the Otherness of the Other, as unfamiliar tonalities come to be the norm.10 Chahine’s interest in the musical was long-standing. His favorite film was Duviver’s The Great Waltz; he loved Busby Berkeley, and even wanted to dance like Gene Kelly.11 While many of his earlier films may have an odd, but intentional, disorienting effect in their mixture of styles (the Alexandria trilogy may be the best example), Destiny, a much more sophisticated work technically, manages this melange almost seamlessly, although Chahine’s incorporation of Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, and Bertholt Brecht remains a challenge to genre purists. However, music is not mere ornament. It serves to anchor a scene in a particular place, as with the warm tones of the Gregorian chant that welcome Joseph back to France, or the darker harmonies of the music that drive him away from his father’s execution. Music also operates thematically and underscores the first statement of the major theme of the film, the conflict of sensuality and repression.

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Chahine revels in the rhythms of the gypsy music to which Abdallah dances wildly and a bit narcissistically with the gypsy girl Manuela. The erotic tone is maintained as Abdallah moves from the gypsy camp to the hammam to interact with his almost naked companions, where the sensuality of the dance takes on a pansexual dimension. Soon Abdallah is seduced by the fundamentalists, and his transformation is again underlined by dance, as the heads-up bright-eyed stance of his gypsy celebration is replaced by the abject downcast attitude as he dances with the fundamentalists. Even here, however, Chahine cannot divorce his characters from the sensual; the religious dance is not only beautiful in its somber way, but also manages to incorporate a move in which Abdallah and the sheik’s agent who lured him into the sect are intertwined in an abortive embrace. Abdallah is literally seduced into the fundamentalist cult. The incarnation of gypsy music, poetry, and the love of life is the poet Marwan, who as Abdallah’s guide to gypsy life had been his surrogate father, just as Averroës was Nasser’s surrogate father. (Note that both the caliph’s sons require substitute fathers.) Abdallah doubly denies his father, as he rejects the caliph for the gypsies, and rejects Marwan for the sheik and stands with the cult even when Marwan is attacked by a fanatic. Music particularly serves to elucidate the conflict in Abdallah’s heart when he is rescued and taken to the gypsy camp. Chained (painfully but for his own good) while the gypsies dance, we see him writhe in a parody of dance movement as he struggles not to be drawn into the ecstasy of the dance. As he struggles and sweats to free himself from these chains, we see that for Chahine even abnegation is sensual and Abdallah cannot escape rejecting eroticism erotically. It requires the sacrifice of the surrogate father, Marwan, to reconcile Abdallah to a reintegration into the wordly joys of secular society. The reconciliation accomplished by the death of the poet leads to Abdallah’s reconciliation with his brother and the oddest use of music in the film. As Abdallah and Nasser meet for the first time since the former’s deliverance from the cult, they eye each other from opposite ends of the courtyard; as music swells, slightly Arabic but with unmistakable overtones of Hollywood romances and lush soap commercials, the beautiful brothers rush into each other’s arms in what looks like a campy reinvention of a Hollywood cliche of a lovers’ reunion. Perhaps Chahine is trying to undercut the emotional reunion with a kind of Brechtian verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), or, perhaps, he is indulging in a momentary gay fantasy censored and successfully reframed for an Islamic audience; it is a strange moment that remains moving despite the suspicion of parody and, perhaps, because of its subversive eroticism. Finally, mention should be made of the beautiful Arabic lament that

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concludes the film. As Averroës bids farewell to al-Andalus and consigns his books to the flames, the music suggests both the sorrow of farewell, the hope of a new life, and the immortality of ideas as the music continues to swell onto Chahine’s concluding homage to la pensée (thought). And for the Westerner the Andalusian strains strike a note of nostalgia for the loss of a tonality that at the beginning of the film might have seemed essentially Other. Chahine has, thus, effectively “Othered” the West, while persuading us to share the music as well as the values of the lost Andalus. The Poet While music operates on the senses, the figure of the poet accomplishes the feat of domesticating Otherness, of revealing how much of what we think of as Western ideals (reason, free inquiry, etc.) were normal in the advanced thinkers of the Andalusian golden age. Marwan is, in fact, the Other who is us, before we even were. Marwan the poet plays a pivotal role in the film and is, in a way, its inspiration. The year 1994 was a difficult one for Chahine. His film The Emigrant, with its thinly disguised portrayal of the prophet Joseph, led to his prosecution for blasphemy. A week before the trial was to begin, Cairo’s Nobel-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, on his habitual evening stroll to his favorite café (which now bears his name) in the Khan el-Khalili, was assaulted by a fanatic and stabbed several times in the neck.12 Although he survived the attack, the eighty-year-old novelist, who was already in ill health, never completely recovered. The assault shocked the people of Cairo, but particularly affected Chahine, who had collaborated with Mahfouz on several projects, including what may be his most “radical” projects, Jamila alJaza’iriyya/Jamila, the Algerian (1958), based on the true story of one of Algeria’s foremost fighters in the anticolonial struggle,13 and al-Nasr Salah al-Din / Saladin (1963), an idealized portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser. While Marwan, the poet of Destiny, is not a portrait of a true-life model in the way Jamila and Saladin were, the attack on Mahfouz inspired the figure of the poet as the victim of fundamentalists. (The fatwa pronounced against Marwan also has obvious reference to contemporary history in the fatwa pronounced in 1988 by the Ayatollah Khomeini against the novelist Salman Rushdie.) The attack and the fatwa serve to make clear the contemporary relevance of Chahine’s medieval film. In addition to bringing the dangers of fundamentalism to the forefront, and acting as a tribute to Mahfouz, both as an artist and as a victim of intolerance, Marwan also serves as the opposite and complement to Averroës. Just as Averroës incarnates the love of learning, so also Marwan incarnates the love of music and poetry, and both are presented as life-affirming, exuberant loving

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men.14 Marwan, however, also allows Chahine to introduce themes that would have been impossible or unseemly if attributed to Averroës. Most obviously, he could not invent a death for Averroës, so that Marwan’s fate allows Chahine to portray the immediate danger of fundamentalism vividly and with unmistakable contemporary relevance. Marwan also presents a kind of class alternative to Averroës. While one is an adviser to princes and a judge, the other can sing and dance with the gypsies and celebrate a more untrammeled way of life. He can also, oddly and subtly, suggest the power and intensity of homoerotic bonds. His final words (“It would have been bliss had you been the one to kill me”) are almost a Liebestod (love-death); they express a devotion to friendship that Chahine’s primarily Islamic audience might not have been able to accept from Averroës, especially in view of the fact that his sentimental reminiscence of sex on the bench created such a stir. Thus, Marwan and Averroës—though opposites—are linked. To suggest they are a kind of Andalusian counterpart to the Manchegan duo, Quixote and Panza, would be going a bit too far, but a similar kind of complementary duality operates here: philosophy and art, reason and emotion, the court and the gypsy camps, propriety and excess. Both are, however, brothers in humanism, generous of heart and spirit, and both are champions of freedom who remain constant in the face of threats, and faithful, in Marwan’s case, unto death, willing to lay down his life for his friend and betrayer (a nice Gospel allusion from the Melkite Christian). As Marwan prefigures Western Enlightenment values, he even manages to outdo Christians in acting out a willingness to sacrifice his life for love.

Black Eyes Chahine opens Destiny with sweeping camera movements through the crowd and a grand mise en scène of the masses gathered to witness a heretic’s incineration. The first close-up, however, is on the face of Joseph and what we are most likely to notice about Joseph is his eyes (figure 2.1). This shot is the first instance in the film of Chahine’s notorious fascination with dark eyes, although it raises a peculiar problem that is addressed (and thus made a problem) later in the film. At one point, the gypsies tease Joseph about his blue eyes, and there is another close-up on him. I am not particularly attuned to subtle color variations, so it may be a defect of my own, but Joseph’s eyes look black to me. The chances are good that my eyes do not deceive me, since Joseph is played by Fares Rahouma, decidedly not a French actor. It is an odd moment and one that I would attribute to Chahine’s sly deconstruction of his own obsession. While Rahouma may look more Arabic than French, there is no particular problem in

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Figure 2.1 Joseph (Fares Rahouma), nicknamed “Blue Eyes.” Source: From Destiny (France and Egypt, Youssef Chahine, 1997).

accepting him as a Mediterranean type as appropriate to the south of France as to the north of Africa (or Moorish Spain). It is, therefore, oddly gratuitous for Chahine to include a scene that calls attention to Joseph’s black/blue eyes. As the gypsies lightheartedly tease Joseph, Chahine may be gently teasing himself, calling attention to his obsession with dark eyes in a context in which everyone else sees (or pretends to see) blue eyes. Thus, the scene may just be a peculiar in-joke. It does, nevertheless, have a thematic resonance with a subtle byplay of the same and the different. If the Frenchman is played by an Arab who can only be distinguished from other Arabs by his blue eyes, and, if his eyes are blue only because others say they are, what are his distinguishing characteristics? What makes a Frenchman different from an Arab? Chahine implies that racial distinctions are merely a matter of convention: Joseph is French mainly because everyone agrees to identify him as French. What is interesting about Chahine’s game here is that it is the black eyes that are normative; everyone has black eyes, but people call the eyes of the French blue. It is a delicious moment of racial “queering” in which the normative is inverted and black eyes (like gay people, like Arab people) are effortlessly assumed to be the norm in contrast to the foreign and peculiar (like blue eyes, straight people, and Europeans). It is a nifty little game, and it may not matter whether Chahine is merely playing with himself or making a larger point. While Joseph’s eyes are particularly problematic, beautiful black eyes recur throughout this film and throughout Chahine’s oeuvre. Ibrahim Fawal presents an intriguing argument about the source of this obsession.

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When Chahine was nine years old, his older brother, Alfred, died of pneumonia. Children that age tend to feel responsible for any tragedy that occurs in their households, but that sense was surely heightened by his grandmother’s chilling reaction: “Why did he have to die? Why didn’t the young one die instead?”15 Fawal goes on to point out that what “Chahine recalls most about Alfred was that he was a dark boy with big eyes. Since then most of his male actors have eyes that resemble Alfred’s. They do not necessarily have to be beautiful eyes, but they must be interesting just like his brother’s were.”16 Fawal stresses that the eyes do not have to be beautiful, just interesting, but makes a suggestive shift a few lines later, when he points out that “[a]ll great directors regard eyes as important, but Chahine attaches extra significance to them on account of his brother’s beautiful eyes.”17 Fawal tries to substitute “interesting” for the more highly charged “beautiful,” but he cannot escape the fact that Chahine presents us with a virtual anthology of beautiful young men with beautiful eyes. This obsession has led, understandably, to questions about Chahine’s sexuality (despite his marriage of more than fifty years to colette Favaudon Chahine). As Fawal delicately states, “One only finds polite and oblique references to some of his characters’ undefined inclinations.”18 Fawal’s subtle shift from Chahine to his characters is symptomatic of the general treatment of Chahine’s sexuality, which, most typically, results in praise of his pansexual celebration of all sexes and all sex. Essentially, there is no reason to quarrel with this assessment, except that it seems to be implicated in a strategy of refusing to confront the extent of male-male relationships in Chahine’s films in general and Destiny in particular, relationships that virtually define how ample is the borderline territory between the homosocial and the homoerotic. There are indeed beautiful women in Destiny, especially the gypsy girl Manuela and her companions. But the men are exceptional and attract particular attention. Besides Joseph, there are the brothers, Nasser and Abdallah, but even their father, the caliph, is a fine, mature man with, as one would expect, piercing eyes, an attractive face, and who wears costumes designed to prove that his ample chest is as chiseled as his face. Even the villains, the wide-eyed fanatic and the fantastically manicured sheik, while their faces suggest madness, cruelty, and vanity, nevertheless, have faces, and especially eyes that are compelling, and if beautiful are so in a very disturbing way. Eyes, naturally, lead to bodies. There are some attractive females, indeed, in Destiny, but there are moments when the camera lingers or perhaps teases with its glimpses of the male body. Note has already been taken of the caliph’s chest. The scene in the hammam has already been mentioned; it is not a long scene, but the mere fact that it exists as a coda to a decidedly

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heterosexual dance is suggestive in itself. If there is such a thing as gratuitous (semi-)nudity, this is a prime example. The scene is memorable, in part, because it is so unnecessary, but however brief it glorifies the delights of the gymnasium with a straightforward joy in the male body rarely seen since the era of Grecian black figure vases. There is also the erotic scene between Nasser and the gypsy girl. With all the flair of a Playboy photographer, Chahine makes use of water and drapery and a body emerging from the waves. It is, however, a male body, as Nasser approaches the girl on the shore. In a reversal of usual models, the girl reclines lazily eyeing the display before her. As the camera zooms in, the girl reclines in the background, while the foreground is occupied by a carefully framed and carefully cropped shot of Nasser’s thighs in short, wet drapery. The scene is (possibly intentionally) a homoerotic inversion of Laura Mulvey’s famous analysis of Hollywood’s voyeuristic camera that eroticizes the female body as it gazes upon it.19 Khaled El Nabaoui is no Lana Turner, but Chahine’s camera treats him in the same lascivious way. It is a moment that does indeed present the male body as the object of desire, but the more it is read as an inverse of cheesy cheesecake precedents, the more it exposes itself and turns into parody, an example of eroticism deployed and deflected. These teasing moments are of a piece with Chahine’s presentation of episodes more saturated with desire. Most of the scenes have already been mentioned, but recall the reunion of Nasser and Abdallah. Like Nasser’s display, this scene also recalls a Hollywood cliché, the music, the rhythm, the smiles of recognition, the rush to embrace is the stuff of romantic cliché. After the shock (surprise? delight? horror?) of seeing this cliché enacted by two attractive men rushing into each other’s arms, the scene turns into a parody, the romanticism is parried, and we realize that they are, after all, “only” brothers. Still, it is a lushly romantic moment that I can imagine some conflicted young Cairene treasuring in his heart for some time. There is also Marwan’s profession of love, the not so subtly eroticized seduction of Abdallah into the fundamentalist (and intensely repressive) cult, and, on the most spiritual level, the love of Averroës for the men and women who have joined together to serve learning and justice and joy. There is certainly enough gypsy love (Nasser and Manuela), married love (Averroës and his wife), and generally lusty romping (Marwan and his gypsy girl) to provide Destiny with a healthy dose of heterosexuality. Chahine’s introduction of homoerotic scenes, sensual or comic, or both at the same time, have the effect of including a sense of the varieties of life and love in the film and a sense of embracing all loves without judging any. It is, then, perhaps less an issue of Chahine’s sexuality than of his generosity. His black eyes see beauty in all varieties of loving human experience, and this is what separates him (and his hero Averroës) from the fundamentalists

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and the tyrants. While the fascination with eyes may stem from a personal obsession, Chahine makes use of this obsession to comment on the universality and complexity of desire and to situate even physical beauty in a mise en abyme of signs of racial identity. Fire Chahine’s film begins and ends with fire. This dramatic image both contrasts and links Languedoc and Andalusia, and is a major sign of Chahine’s confronatation of East and West, furthering his dislocation of the other and destabilizing the assumptions of the cultural norm. While four years after Destiny’s release, Islamic fundamentalism became a serious concern in the West, in 1997 it was barely a footnote in Western history.20 For Chahine, however, the attack on Mahfouz presented a profound example of the danger.21 Nevertheless, he significantly situates the origin of oppression in the Christian, not the Islamic, world. In part, this opening serves to show that the hero of free thought is under attack not only by strangers and foreigners, but also eventually and more immediately by his presumed friends and allies. If Islamic fires end the film, it is the Christian conflagration that begins it. Thus, the danger of inquisitions, anathemas, and fatwas link the dangers of fundamentalisms, while implying that the problem begins with Christians. It prepares the ground for an Islamic claim that, in the immortal words of Billy Joel, “We didn’t start the fire.” A more chilling contrast lies in the objects of the conflagrations. While Averroës ends the film slyly tossing his book on the fire, Gerard Breuil, the heretic burned in the opening sequence of the film, ends not in smiles, but in ashes. Averroës can participate in his own condemnation because he knows that he and his thoughts will survive. Implicitly, Chahine here sets up another set of oppositions, the obvious one between the body and the book and the other between modes of immortality. With respect to the first, the Christians are more brutal than the Andalusians, since they burn the body, not merely the words. Breuil is in physical danger in a way that Averroës never is. Both punishments, however, raise issues of the status of the word. The Christians make the obvious and obviously heretical mistake of identifying the Body with the Word (although the logos of the Gospel of John may have provided the precedent). The Body is not, however, coterminous with the Word, so that, as the Christians learn, destroying the body does little to destroy the word, although it may put an end to the speech embodied in a particular speaker. The caliph and his cohorts may be more direct in attacking the book rather than the body, but they are no more effective. Prior to the age of mechanical reproduction, there was, nevertheless, reproduction. Chahine lovingly films some beautiful

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scenes of Averroës’s students carefully and joyfully copying his books. The joy and care lavished on this scene and the theme of ideas and their dissemination have led one critic to argue that this film “expresses a deeper reverence for books than any film since Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451.”22 Despite the conflagration, the word is not destroyed and the books are copied and disseminated courageously in France and Egypt. More successfully in Egypt than in France, the film suggests, although, in fact, Averroës in Latin translation had more influence on Christian philosophy (via his influence on Aquinas) than he did on Islamic philosophy. Chahine, however, seems to want to praise Egypt (more as a hope than a fact, perhaps) as the tolerant host for progressive ideas. Finally, the contrast of the two scenes implies divergent concepts of immortality. Although Breuil’s condemnation implies damnation as well as death, it does not negate the possibility that his resurrected body is both immortal and subject to a more generous judgment from the deity than from the mortals. There is the option of hope for a different judgment in another world. Averroës, on the other hand, is condemned philosophically, but his immortality resides in his words not his body and it is only his words and not his body that are threatened. (This sort of humane fatwa may be Chahine’s attempt to persuade his contemporaries to be more restrained in their condemnations.) Because his work is threatened but will clearly survive, and his body not really threatened at all, Averroës can happily throw one copy of an immortal and copied and recopied book on the flames, a sly and ironic gesture revealing the absurdity of the fires. He survives, brave and smiling. The film then has a comic ending, but the contrast of the opening and closing scenes of the film implies that a comic ending is possible only in the Islamic world; Christian judgments remain final and tragic.23 Conclusion Chahine’s Destiny can never again be read the way he intended in 1997. The events of 2001 imposed a more horrific dimension on the issue of Islamic fundamentalism than Chahine could ever have anticipated.24 Although he foresaw its dangers in 1997, he could not have imagined or suspected the full horror unleashed on 9/11. In the aftermath of that event, it is difficult to hold on to Chahine’s joyful and optimistic faith that reason and love will prevail and ideas will endure. Just as Chahine could not have anticipated the attack on the World Trade Center, neither could he have anticipated the Western response. For the Islamic world, Chahine’s film presents a challenge and a hope that may or may not be able to prevail. For the West, however, it also presents a challenge. Chahine reminds us that modern techniques of repression began with the Inquisition, so that the

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West can only in a monumental expression of existentialist mauvaise foi maintain a pose of innocence. Both cultures are at risk of succumbing to political tyranny and ideological intolerance, and mutual expressions of terror and hypocritical assumptions of righteousness doom us both. However difficult it may be to maintain Chahine’s hope, it is more urgent than ever to heed his warning. Notes 1. See an account of the entire controversy in Majid Fakhry, Averroës (Ibn Rushd): His Life, Works, and Influence (Oxford: One World, 2001), pp. 16–23. 2. María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little Brown, 2002), pp. 208–09. 3. María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World, p. 209. 4. Majid Fakhry, Averroës, p. 113. 5. Majid Fakhry, Averroës, p. 114. 6. Chahine’s qualified idealization of al-Andalus is considerably less enthusiastic than the collective memory of families whose roots lie in the land from which they were exiled five hundred years ago. Indeed, it is rumored that some of the families of Fez still possess the keys to their houses in Granada and anticipate an eventual return. See Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 52. The incident is also recalled in Amin Maalouf’s account of the fall of Granada in Leo Africanus, tr. Peter Sluglett (Chicago: New Amsterdam Books, 1992). See esp. p. 124. 7. Fares Rahouma, who plays Joseph (Youssuf), has a beautiful and expressive face that fully repays the close-up when the camera discovers him in the crowd. He does, however, look decidedly Arabic, which distracts a bit from the point that Christians first suffer to preserve Averroës’s work. On the other hand, the fact that intolerance begins among Christians in a Christian land remains clear. 8. Just to remind us that Galileo did not invent the telescope. 9. This scene caused a bit of a scandal in the Egyptian press, who thought it was indecent to present such a notable scholar thinking of nothing better than sex at such a poignant moment. (See Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine [London: British Film Institute, 2001], p. 184, n. 28.) 10. Despite the importance of music to the film, the credits are relatively thin, citing only Kamal El Tawil as the composer and Muhamed Mounir as the singer. 11. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, pp. 34–35. 12. This incident has been told many times, but the details are outlined in Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, p. 50 and referred to several more times throughout the book. 13. There is no question that in today’s world, Jamilah would be labeled a “terrorist.” In interviews she gave in 1971, she quite candidly describes her

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

activities: “My job was to plant bombs. I carried death with me in my handbag, death in the shape of time bombs. One day, I was supposed to put a bomb in a café managed by a Frenchman. I did it. I was unlucky. I fell into their hands. They arrested me. They locked me in a cell” (Walid ‘Ahwad, “Interviews with Jamilah Buhrayd, Legendary Algerian Hero,” Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, eds., Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Basima Qattan Bezirgan [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977], p. 252). It is an extraordinary example of how the world has changed that this interview praising a terrorist was once printed without qualification in a mainstream academic publication. Jamila is especially piquant, of course, because she is a woman, and a remarkably beautiful one at that (see the photograph on p. 250), and because of her suffering at the hands of her French torturers. Nevertheless, it is unimaginable that today a positive report of a Muslim freedom fighter could be published in any but the most radical, and thoroughly investigated, venue. There is also an historical reality behind this pairing, since the poets of alAndalus were as celebrated as their philosophers, and probably considerably more popular. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, p. 25. Fawal also points out that this painful moment is the basis of a scene in Alexandria. . .Why?. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, p. 25. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, pp. 25–26. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, pp. 188–189. His summary review of critics, such as Christian Bosséno, David Kehr, and Bérénice Reynaud are informative, particularly for the way they praise Chahine for his courage and then proceed to avoid the issue. See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). See especially the argument presented far more subtly in the essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” pp. 14–26. And a footnote it remained it seems for Condoleeza Rice until roughly 9AM EST on 9/11/2001. The activities of the Brotherhood, since its founding in Alexandria in the 1930s, had assured that the threat of fundamentalism never entirely vanished from Egyptian consciousness. The Alexandrian origins of the movement may as well have given it a special urgency for Chahine. Stephen Holden, “Philosophy as a Red-Hot Adventure in TwelfthCentury Spain and France.” New York Times, 4 October 1997. Cited in Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, p. 185. Averroës did, in fact, believe in immortality, but only in the immortality of the soul, not, like the Christians, in the immortality of the body. See Majid Fakhry, Averroës, pp. 22–23. It is, of course, as unfair and erroneous to assume that all believers in Islam are terrorists as it is to assume that all Southern Baptists go about bombing family planning clinics.

CHAPTER 3 REVERSING THE CRUSADES: HEGEMONY, ORIENTALISM, AND FILM LANGUAGE IN YOUSSEF CHAHINE’S SALADIN John M. Ganim

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his chapter focuses on one of the landmarks of Arab, third world and political cinema, Youssef Chahine’s Saladin (1963).1 Sponsored in part to celebrate Nasser’s consolidation of power, it was directed by one of the leading figures in modern Egyptian cinema, whose lifetime achievement in film has been complex, critical, and resistant. It is often cited as one of the few film versions of the Crusades from the point of view of the Saracen leader, and one of the few to regard the Crusades through Arab eyes. The geographic and medieval Other, that is, seems to be filming itself. The screenplay was partly written by Naguib Mahfouz, who later won the 1988 Nobel Prize for his novels. Chahine was appointed to replace the original director, Ezzeldine Zulfiqer, who fell ill in an early stage of the planning. Given Chahine’s reputation in world cinema, it is surprising how—at least superficially—conventional Saladin turns out to be, and how much it resembles in some respects the Hollywood versions of the Crusades that it seeks to answer. I will argue that this impression is in fact a result of the film’s strategy, which is as much to enter into dialogue with Western filmic representations of the Crusades as it is to set the historical record straight. Its status as a historical film depends more on its “film” than its “historical” nature. My inquiry depends heavily on David James’s important description of the inescapable hegemony of industrial cinema in his classic study Allegories of Cinema, which argues that even the most resistant and critical cinema cannot avoid the terms set by Hollywood.2 Chahine, while critical of most of the

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products of the Egyptian film industry, nevertheless never rejects it entirely in an effort to construct an art cinema, and even the most widely distributed of his films remain puzzling to Western viewers partly because of that conscious allegiance. Viewed in isolation, Saladin may appear to be a straightforward, even mythic treatment of its hero and its subject. However, its apparent transparency is not as clear when the film is viewed in larger contexts including the director’s career, the rapidly changing political scene of the years of its production, and the relationship of the film to other films about the Middle Ages, especially films about the Crusades. The complex relations of these contexts to each other is in fact the argument of this chapter. I will first consider the apparently anomalous relation of Saladin to the other more obviously complex and self-reflective films of Chahine’s oeuvre. I will then discuss some of the ways that Chahine references some Hollywood stereotypes about the Crusades, stereotypes that, because of the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s novels on Hollywood directors and writers, turn out to be more unstable than they first appear. I will argue that Chahine adapts what is always already a postcolonial narrative. After describing the film’s dramatic structure and visual technique in terms of its attempt at coherence, I will then point to the ways that this coherence is undermined, partly intentionally, by conflicting representations of gender, race, and national identity. Saladin’s depiction of the Middle Ages is not so much an attempt to set the historical (filmic) record straight as it is a questioning of how the historical record, at least cinematically, is constructed. The result, as expressed in the conclusion of the film, is a highly provisional and in many ways fantastic mirror of the past as a portal through which we may imagine a more humane future, but in its very provisionality and ironizing of its own means, it exposes the limits of how much of the present, or the future, we can see in the past. By emphasizing its cinematic medium, Saladin admits the limits of its own historicization. In so doing, it also questions what the basis for Otherness or identity can be. Like the character Saladin himself, the film depicts both Otherness and transhistorical and transnational humanism dialectically and by example. Just as Islam sees itself as incorporating the religious achievements of Judaism and Christianity and subsuming them into its own starting point of development, the film Saladin subsumes within itself the filmic narratives of Otherness, revealing the degree to which the West is its own Other, and the East as embodied by Saladin is the future medium of the values ostensibly cherished by the West. By emphasizing the degree to which Saladin enacts not only the ideals of his own culture, but those of the West, Chahine’s film reveals the degree to which American and European film has been filming itself when it is ostensibly filming its medieval Other.

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Chahine has recently been the subject of several major restrospectives, including the New York Film Festival in 1998, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in 1996, and a lifetime achievement award at Cannes in 1997. Cahiers du cinema devoted an issue to his work, and in recent years his films have been coproduced with French backing.3 He was born in 1926, to a Lebanese family of Christian background in a multicultural Alexandria that has been a recurrent theme in his own work. In the early 1950s, he came to the United States to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. Returning to Egypt, he began his long career, soon directing the first of his over forty films thus far. These cover a far wider range of genres than most directors attempt in their working lives, at least since the heyday of Hollywood. His first film Baba Amin (1950) was a small-scale character comedy, and he followed it with a series of realistic dramatic portraits of Egyptian life, some of them crossing generic boundaries to reflect the influence of Orson Welles and American film noir, as well as various musicals, an important staple of the Egyptian film industry and a genre that Chahine never abandons. In the late 1950s, however, he directed two films often cited in surveys of world cinema during the experimental years of the 1950s and 1960s: the dark Central Station (1959), in which Chahine himself plays the lovesick train station vendor tragically obsessed with a local beauty, and the remarkably prescient Jamila, the Algerian, which predicts the political docudramas of Costas Garvas and Pontecorvo. Following the success of Saladin, however, political differences with a Nasser regime sensitive to even internal criticism found him making a series of films in Lebanon and North Africa. Returning to Egypt, he directed The Earth (Egypt, 1973), equivalent to an Egyptian Grapes of Wrath and often cited by Egyptians themselves as the high point of their industry. The films that have attracted most attention in the West are his autobiographical trilogy: Alexandria. . .Why? (1978), Memory (1982), and Alexandria Again and Always (1989), perhaps because their highly individualistic, Fellini-like memoir quality is easy for Western viewers to categorize, and because the potential essentialism of his social realist films gives way here to postmodern manipulations of memory, desire, and technique. In addition, the self-revelations of these films, including explicit allusions to homosexual and bisexual experiences, are themselves revelations to Western viewers who may not be aware of the complexity of what they assume are closed societies. In fact, far more controversial in Egypt have been his version of Joseph and his brothers, The Emigrant (1994), for which he was sued in court by fundamentalist Islamicists and Chahine’s Cairo (1991), which appeared to criticize the Egyptian government’s support of the U.S.-led forces in the First Gulf War. Chahine, very much part of the emerging generation of world cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, would have been keenly aware of his cinematic heritage. Italian and French filmmakers had produced films in North Africa

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for decades. He was obviously influenced by the Italian neorealists, de Sica and especially Roberto Rossellini, whose classic Rome: Open City (1946) would soon be reprised in a new form in Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966), a film that in turn was influenced by Chahine’s own Jamila, which was itself indebted to the earlier Rossellini film. By the late 1950s, Sergei Eisenstein’s films had been canonized as the origin point of modern cinema, and Eisenstein’s aesthetic reigned especially in third world cinema, partly because of his formal and technical achievements, and partly because of his role in the film culture of the Soviet Union, which supported a number of the new nationalist left regimes. Chahine’s film career was well underway before Soviet cultural connections with the United Arab Republics resulted in the training of several Middle Eastern directors in Moscow. Eisenstein’s legacy, moreover, was an unstable one, not least of all because of his tenuous relation to official Soviet artistic policy. Eisenstein’s own complex relation to official policy is most evident in his “medieval” films, including the antifascism of Alexander Nevsky, the story of the great Russian prince who fights off both the Tartar yoke from the east and south and the threat from newly aggressive Teutonic knights from the west, and who through charisma and patriotism unites a disparate people. In Ivan the Terrible (1944 and 1958), a long two-part account of the life of the once promising czar, Eisenstein comes very close to a Shakespearian critique of the powers that be, and no one can view the film today without filtering it through the lens of the Stalin years. That is, Eisenstein’s films project a Middle Ages that is a point of origin of modern liberty on the one hand, and a figure for modern tyranny on the other. The past is not a parable with a simple lesson, but an urgent interlocutor of a complex present. At the same time, a film about the Crusades could see itself as answering Hollywood versions of the same material. Saladin can be viewed as an answer to a range of popular Hollywood (and Italian Cinecittà) films featuring the Crusades, several of which significantly are based on Sir Walter Scott’s ambiguously sympathetic account of Saladin. In 1935, Cecil B. De Mille released The Crusades (1935), based on a novel by Harold Lamb, whom De Mille recruited for the screenplay. The historical clash is represented as a love triangle, though Richard eventually sees his role as a higher ideal. As with the representation of Saladin in Western culture generally, Saladin is played as noble and honorable, though his armies and his followers are not. Lamb’s novel was influenced in many ways by Walter Scott’s various novels involving the Crusades, such as Ivanhoe or The Talisman. With their cross-cultural humanism layered onto their aristocratic noblesse oblige, Scott’s novels allowed sufficient tension to produce film narratives that could present the Crusades as more than a contrast between

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good and evil through use of exceptional individuals, rather than a blurring of categories.. Two films more or less based on Scott’s Crusade novels were produced in the 1950s. Ivanhoe (directed by Richard Thorpe, 1952) starred Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor (who also starred in Thorpe’s 1954 Knights of the Round Table), but the Crusades are only a background to its Norman and Saxon intrigues, and its message of Western multiculturalism. Ivanhoe, of course, protects Isaac against anti-Semitism, and he is assisted at the end by Robin Hood and company. If its politics are less clearly articulated than the United Front agenda of Robin Hood, to which it alludes in its ending, Ivanhoe is nevertheless a relatively coherent and successful translation of Sir Walter Scott. Partly because of the commercial and critical success of Ivanhoe, other medieval films were planned in the following years, including, as mentioned above, The Knights of the Round Table. In 1954, Hollywood nominally placed the Crusades front and center, with King Richard and the Crusaders (directed by David Butler, 1954), based loosely on Scott’s The Talisman, and clearly as much interested in Scott as in the Crusades. Here too Saladin’s humanity is established by his love interest in Richard’s sister Lady Edith (Virginia Mayo), who in turn longs for the Lawrence Harvey character. As with Cecil B. de Mille’s Crusades, emphasis is placed on the treachery and infighting of the Christian allies, so that this theme, which one would think of as unique to Chahine’s film, in fact is an elaboration of a motif already embedded in the narrative of Western cinematic accounts of the Crusades. Two major films dealing with the history of Arab and Western conflict, though not specifically about the Crusades, appeared a few years before the release of Saladin, and it is possible that Chahine may have known about them. Lawrence of Arabia (directed by David Lean, 1962) has now become the most famous Western film about the Middle East, not least of all because of its uneasy status of both reflecting and criticizing Orientalism. Lawrence of Arabia was unlikely to have had sufficient time in release to influence Saladin, even though Chahine must have known about the conditions of production from Omar Sharif, whom he earlier had helped make a star, as well as other crew members from the Egyptian film industry. Lawrence of Arabia was preceded by the star-heavy El Cid (directed by Anthony Mann, 1961). Starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, the film has Heston’s Rodrigo Diaz uniting both Christian and Moslem princes (though mostly Christian) in Northern Spain against invading Moors. What we see in these and other similar films is a marginally (and I emphasize how marginally) more complex view of the Other than one might expect; indeed, the plots of these films often represent the ideals of Western Civilization as most profoundly expressed in those who are not ostensibly part of that culture. Nevertheless, what one finds implicit in the films of medieval East-West conflict is as much

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orientalization of the Middle Ages as Orientalism. The Middle Ages, in their colorful excess, emphasis on the heroic pride of the protagonists, regressive social conditions, autocratic and aristocratic rule, are represented in these films as if themselves orientalized. It remains only for Chahine to shift the perspective by a few degrees, rather than invert the picture entirely, to destabilize an already unstable ideological point of view. Chahine’s Saladin, then, enters a field that is created as much by Hollywood industrial cinema as it is by its indigenous roots and perspective, partly because that perspective has been shaped by a simultaneous attraction to and critique of the dominant film industry. It proceeds by dialogue with previous models, almost as if concerned with correcting and interrogating previous versions as in establishing a coherent statement of its own. If the various Crusade film narratives, particularly in the character of Saladin, project outward ideal Western values onto the “Other,” thereby, in Naomi Schor’s important formulation, “saming” them,4 Chahine suggests that those ideal values in fact originate with Saladin and his culture. Western viewers expecting an absolute and authentic difference invariably are surprised by how many aspects of Saladin are less a surprise than they wish them to be. Perhaps the first surprise is the music, even before the film is very much underway. The popularity in the West of such hybrid forms as rai or knowledge of such popular singers as ‘Umm Kalthoum would lead one to expect a musical setting for the film that would be more, well, authentic. Instead, the score turns out to be largely by Angelo Lavagnino, one of Italy’s most prolific and best known, along with Nino Rota and Enno Morricone, film composers. Unlike the tight correlation of score to shot found in such films as Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, with its famous score by Prokofiev, the music dramatically highlights certain scenes, or builds up or releases tension, on a more or less general level, though the battle scenes are particularly successful. David Lean’s iconic Lawrence of Arabia, with its score by Maurice Jarre, was released the year before, and demonstrated how powerfully music and visuals could reinforce each other. Instead, Lavagnino’s score has the same flexible quality one hears in Cinecittà Studios’ films of the 1950s, with their loose relationship to the action onscreen, useful and adaptable to relatively rough editing and uncertain postproduction conditions. None of this is as surprising as the fact that the music is what it is at all. But an Egyptian audience, and by extension an Arabic audience given the dominance of the Egyptian film industry from the 1930s onward, would not have been at all surprised. The foundation of the Egyptian film industry was in fact its recording industry, which impressed its singers under contract into service as film actors and actresses, so that, as with other popular cinema industries around the world, including Hollywood in the 1930s, music and dance were as

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important as other aspects of film production. While many of these employed more traditional sounding Arabic music (though in fact heavily influenced by European music models), many more had scores influenced by traditionally Western big band, jazz, and even Latin beats through the 1940s and 1950s. The Egyptian commercial film industry, that is, saw itself as part of a world film industry, with its own special sphere of influence. It may seem as if I am privileging the Western influences and themes in Chahine’s Saladin by emphasizing its responses to Hollywood and European films, or making it into the sort of postmodern performance that Chahine’s later films achieve. In fact, in so doing, I am describing its particular moment in Egyptian cultural history, and, indeed, its Egyptianness, as it were. First, these critical and intertextual responses are framed within a heroic, largely modern frame, one that aspires to epic stature and scale, and that is consistent with national narratives from the Middle Ages onward, though Saladin takes pains to present itself as a Pan-Arab statement. Second, while certain aspects of Egyptian twentieth-century culture were traditional, like many third-world nations, its modernization was inescapably connected to its colonial heritage, but in ways that are more complex than they might initially seem. The British Occupation, which ended with Nasser, had begun in the nineteenth century not in response to Egypt’s refusal to move forward, but to what the British regarded as its independence and its premature modernity. The aura of tradition and antiquity conferred on Egypt, indeed, its “medieval” state, disguised the forces of modern national identity already in motion. As with early twentiethcentury Arab nationalist movements and Young Turk movements, Egyptian national identity saw itself as a modern society with ancient roots whose modernity was being suppressed by colonial paternalism.5 If Europe persisted in seeing the present state of the Middle East as somehow “medieval,” then Saladin projects a medieval moment in which the East was more modern than the West, and in which a cosmopolitan humanism would serve as a model for the next moment in human progress. To emphasize the debt of Saladin to industrial cinema is no more to disparage its Egyptian identity than to emphasize, say, the impossibility of Mahfouz’s novels without the model of Zola or Mann. The film opens with scenes of Arabs being attacked by Crusaders, and envoys arriving at Saladin’s court imploring him to defend them and to reclaim Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Streams of Arabs exiles are shown in an obvious allusion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A scene of an Arab village, suddenly silent, and the wind stirring a pool of water, as if waiting for an attack, instead announces the appearance of Saladin’s forces in the distance. The credits are shown over an extreme close-up of Saladin’s face, which becomes full screen. In one of many declamatory scenes of political

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ritual in classical Arabic, Saladin calls together his allies and commanders, including one Issa, who turns out to be a Christian Arab, and to whom he entrusts his son Ismael as a knight. The modesty and fidelity of Saladin’s allies will be contrasted to the bombast and intrigue of the Crusaders in the next scenes. The Crusader Reynaud plans to attack a Muslim pilgrimage (while at prayer and unarmed) to raise money for the defense of Jerusalem, despite protests from the king of Jerusalem, who warns that this violates the treaty with Saladin, who himself protects Christian pilgrims. A remarkable scene of the Muslim pilgrims at prayer in their white robes against the deserts and follows, with its symmetries suddenly cut through by the attacking Crusaders, who kill men, women, and children indiscriminately and then are seen, less remarkably filmed, gloating like pirates at their newfound booty. To communicate the violence in a stylized image rather than mimetically, Chahine emphasizes the artificiality of the cosmetic blood, and, then, famously, dramatizes the slaughter by filming a spinning cloth disk splattered with red. The slaughter of the pilgrims both appalls and motivates Saladin. His advisers urge an attack on Reynaud’s hilltop camp, but Saladin, in a reversal of the usual stereotypes, employs strategy and psychology, as well as military technology, against the rage and pride of Reynaud. Issa, the Christian commander, comes upon a lake, and discovers a woman bathing discreetly behind some brush. She announces herself as Louise, a Knight Hospitaller, whom we know has been assigned to guard the Crusaders’ water supply, but in a ruse, wounds him with an arrow and rides off. After a comic scene in which Issa pretends to have fought off a platoon of Crusaders, the discovery of the lake and the water supply leads to Saladin’s strategy. He sends commandos to destroy the Crusaders’ water tanks, in a scene in which this time, Issa spares Louise’s life. Driven to desperation by thirst and spurred on by Reynaud’s Roland-like pride, the Crusaders, far outnumbering Saladin’s troops, ride into the valley, where they are decimated by Saladin’s tactics, which include strategically spaced spikes and barrages of flaming arrows. Reynaud’s wife, Virginia, flees to Acre, where she plots with the traitorous Arab ruler of the city and then leaves for Europe, where she urges Phillipe and Richard the Lionheart to revenge the outrages visited upon Christians, outrages that, of course, she has fabricated, and that her husband had in fact visited upon the Arabs themselves. Meanwhile, in the newly liberated Jerusalem, Saladin has the Crusader commanders appear before him, symbolically allowing them to have a drink of water, except for the hateful Reynaud, who grabs the bowl for himself. In a scene straight out of Hollywood, Saladin accepts Reynaud’s challenge to a duel, and despite Reynaud’s playing fast and loose with the rules of combat, slays him then and there. The parallel scenes in Richard’s court, complete with a

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somewhat expressionist-style round table, emphasize the intrigue being planned by King John, in cahoots with one of Richard’s lead commanders, one Arthur, who, again in a Roland-like move, encourages Richard on the mission in the hopes that he meet his end. Meanwhile, Princess Virginia, who emerges as the Lady Macbeth of the plot, conjures up a separate set of promises with Philippe of France. With Richard’s arrival in the Holy Land, the film alternates between battle scenes, suggesting the ebb and flow of victory and defeat on both sides, and court dramas, especially involving the intrigues in the Crusader camps. Richard retakes Acre, thanks to a fifth column arranged by the treacherous Arab prince of the city, which opens the gates and disperses the weapons needed by the citizens to fight the invasion, and again, the Crusaders are merciless in their slaughter. Saladin rides into the Christian camp with a small retinue, urging peace, but is rebuffed by Richard. In one battle, Richard employs fearsome moving towers, impervious to the flaming arrows of the Arabs, to take a city. In another, Saladin employs his knowledge of the landscape and countryside to lead the Crusaders into a marsh, perhaps reflecting the famous battle on the ice from Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Saladin’s son is killed in battle, and Richard is appalled at the loss of so many of his troops. An uneasy truce results, though intrigue continues on both sides to break it. In the last third of the film, human motivations and political intrigue dominate, and the film resembles a stage play as much as a cinematic narrative until the spectacle of the end. On the way to a planned meeting in Jerusalem with Saladin, Richard is shot with a poisoned arrow. The Crusaders blame Saladin, but in fact it was arranged by the devious Arthur, in conspiracy with the even more devious and fanatical Virginia. As Richard appears to be dying, Arthur stirs the crusading army into a frenzy of vengeance. Then, in one of the most remarkable scenes in the film, Saladin, led by Louise (who has put down her arms and become a nurse), appears in Richard’s tent and administers an antidote. Richard recovers from his delirium, but still leads the Crusaders against Jerusalem. A Syrian chemist, however, has discovered a substance that could indeed burn Richard’s fearsome siege engines, and the battle ends in something of a draw, though Virginia is badly burned and dies, after confessing her perfidy to Louise. The news of the plot comes to Richard, who realizes that his own people, rather than Saladin, are the enemies of Christian principles, and agrees to peace. An alternation of striking court scenes—with Richard absolving Louise at the last moment after she has helped Issa escape, and Saladin forthrightly condemning the traitorous betrayer of Acre—takes place on the same set, with lighting used to shift from one court to the other, and therefore underlying the parallel between Richard and Saladin. The film ends with a self-consciously

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ahistoric pageant that owes more to musicals than to historical epics. Saladin, instead of destroying the Crusader armies on Christmas Eve, invites Richard into Jerusalem. A series of phantasmagoric images—snow falling on an almost postcard-like image of Jerusalem, a choir singing a Christmas carol that had not yet been written alternating with a muzzein calling to prayer at an entirely inappropriate time of night—ends with Richard’s army marching home to the acclaim of the citizens of Jerusalem waving what appear to be olive branches. At the very end, Richard allows Louise to remain in Jerusalem with her now beloved Issa, and the Hollywood ending pairs individual romance with political destiny. But the narrative is more interesting for the way it breaks down than the way it holds together. Saladin has been criticized, even by Egyptian and Arab critics, for its relatively hagiographic characterization of its hero, who starts out good and ends up perfect, hardly a movement conducive to dramatic conflict and development. In fact, if the intertextual strategy I have identified above is valid, the “hero” of the film is not so much Saladin as it is a “character” that is developed through the interaction of Saladin and Richard the Lionheart, and dramatic conflict is developed as much through Saladin’s “directing” of Richard, who becomes Saladin’s double. Saladin is necessary for the full development of Richard’s heroism, the film seems to say, just as Richard’s own pride and the disunity and treachery of his forces serve as an admonitory lesson to the Arabs themselves. Although the film was seen by Arab viewers as presenting an Arab defense of Saladin against Western crusading propaganda, in fact, Saladin has always been the “good Saracen” in Western literature, from Dante (where he is in limbo with other virtuous non-Christian classical and medieval heroes) and Boccaccio (where he is a wise and self-aware leader in contrast to narrow Italian nobles) through Sir Walter Scott. Saladin appears in the film simultaneously as an opposite figure of the fanatical Crusaders, as the enlightened exception found in Western accounts themselves, and as the legendary military hero of Islam. Indeed, it can be argued that the nature of heroism in Saladin, and its treatment of history, owes as much to Shakespeare as to medieval chronicles, either Christian or Moslem. Sir Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V (1946) and his Richard III (1956) offered versions of both heroism and villainy that Chahine could access, and given the central importance of Hamlet as a metaphor for dramatic constructions of the self in Chahine’s later films, it is entirely possible he borrowed or alluded to these films, as almost certainly the staged filming of the trial scenes of Issa and Conrad in the second third of Saladin, and some of the battle scenes throughout, are Shakespearian in inspiration. Nevertheless, the film’s version of heroism is embedded in double coding. For if the representation of Saladin himself can be seen as part of this Shakespearian pageantry from a Western

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perspective, from a non-Western point of view Chahine is conflating the versions of charismatic leadership practiced in the Middle East, that of mahdi, mystic, sheik, and sultan, into one figure. In so doing, the film pays tribute to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the partial triumph, for Egypt at least, of the Suez Crisis.6 Saladin’s Muslim biographers assert his tolerance toward Jews as well as Christians. Indeed, there are a number of ethnic ironies implicit in Saladin’s own career, not least of all the fact that he was himself a Kurd, and that his own rise to power was subsequent to the dominance of the first wave of Turkish invaders after their conversion to Islam. It is also relevant to some controversies about Chahine’s representation of Jews in the concluding satiric fantasy sequence in which the autobiographical protagonist is met in New York by an angry group of Hassidic Jews collocated with a Statue of Liberty done up as a whore (Alexandria. . .Why?). If Chahine was attempting to satirize intolerance wherever he found it, the image came dangerously close to traditional anti-Semitic propaganda. Elsewhere in his films, Chahine presents sympathetic portraits of Jews in the Alexandria of his past, and uses their departure as a way of lamenting the passing of the cosmopolitan Alexandria he increasingly idealized. The missing Jewish presence in Saladin thus requires explanation. It is possible that Chahine was aware of the delicate and simmering internal tensions in Egypt itself, and simply avoided mention of the Jews as a way of preventing unintended consequences, much in the same way that he claimed to have resorted to the stylized representation of violence in the early scenes of Saladin to prevent potential violence from breaking out among Christian and Muslim audiences. It may also have been that he, and the scriptwriters, wanted to focus on themes of unity and progress rather than vengeance, a theme underscored in the dialogue. One way of reading this absence is to consider displaced references to the Jews in the film. Consider, for instance, the peculiar signification of Issa, the Christian Arab commander under Saladin. Given the multitude of possible Christian rites in the Middle East, his “Christian” status is strangely generic. Is he Roman Catholic, Maronite, Chaldean, Armenian Apostolic, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, or Coptic? As nearly as I can read the close-up of the cross by which Louise identifies him as Christian, he is probably one of the first two, which would suggest an identity between Issa and Chahine himself. The inclusion of Issa in the society forged by Saladin suggests the possibility of a multinational state, in which the rights of minorities would be protected, and in at least some circles, the idea of a binational Palestinian and Jewish state was still seriously entertained as a peaceful solution to what for over half a century has been referred to as the Middle East crisis. Issa’s character is certainly meant to reassure more than the Christian minority of

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a possible place in a future peace. And in one of the strangest scenes in the film, Saladin himself infiltrates the Crusaders’ encampment to administer an antidote to Richard. In so doing, he demonstrates his humanity and his superior knowledge. He also embodies the more advanced medical and scientific knowledge of the Islamic Middle Ages. Saladin’s own health was in fact seriously questionable during the actual historical events covered by the film, so his knowledge of medieval practice becomes yet another link in the chain of identities between Richard and Saladin. Yet it was widely recognized in the Islamic Middle Ages that the greatest doctors were in fact Jewish. By taking on the role of healer and physician, Saladin himself fills one of the roles of the missing Jewish presence in the film. In assuming the role of literal healer, Saladin promises, with a very generic prescription, the healing of political and religious difference. Gender is as erratically modulated as race and religion in the film. By assuming the role of forgiving healer, Saladin both nurtures and leads, exhibiting both paternal and maternal traits. Such a portrait was in keeping with the ideals of heroism in the West in the 1950s, as reflected in the biographies written by Erik Erikson, who ascribed the charisma of leaders such as Gandhi to their ability to bring both traditionally masculine and feminine qualities to their tasks. Heroism is defined in Saladin, especially in its hero, as a matter of wisdom, modesty, and humility, as well as courage, and the Crusaders are, by contrast, motivated by a pride and a bombast that is farcical in Reynaud’s portrayal and tragic and limiting in Richard’s. Masculinity is defined according to the code of Islam, while the excessive and aggressive masculinity of the Crusaders is Othered, even caricatured. This pattern extends to the female characters. As mentioned above, Princess Virginia operates as the Lady Macbeth of the plot, falsely riling the princes of Europe with tales of helplessness and exploitation, while she herself ably and maliciously engages in court intrigue and supports the most fanatical interpretation of Christian mission. Richard’s own wife, by contrast, is retiring, comforting and relatively silent. Saladin’s harem, or even his principal wife, is nonexistent in the film, further emphasizing his maternal and paternal qualities, and he is advised and comforted himself by paternal or fraternal figures. The most dramatic female role is that of Louise, who begins the film as a Knight Hospitaller warrior. Louise gives up her armor and weapons and becomes the traditional nurse of war movies, engaging in intrigue and romance simultaneously. Her transition, that is, charts the spiritual path urged by the film’s message, so that she becomes, especially in her return to Jerusalem and embrace of Issa, the narrative figure who most closely acts out the didactic intention of the script. Like Richard, Louise must learn the limits of a crusading religion and learn a larger and broader truth about her religious belief. Since Saladin seems

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already to have arrived at this higher state, Richard and Louise turn out to be the most dramatically complex characters in the film. In contrast to the Middle Ages of Hollywood film, which sets historical costume dramas in a more or less interchangeable past, Chahine’s Saladin not only presents an Arab view of the Crusades, it presents a cosmopolitan and humane Middle Ages that can stand as a model for the present. It takes care to frame its own vision as utopian, and it is sufficiently aware of the provisional and temporary nature of apparent historical triumph, so that the film seems almost prescient in its sense of fragile hope. In his important book The Myth of Nations, Patrick Geary takes to task nationalisms from the nineteenth century to the present day for tracing their origins to medieval beginnings that turn out to be entirely imaginary, and that ignore or belie the historical record.7 Geary suggests that even benign internationalist ideologies that turn to the Middle Ages as inspiration or justification are, if less sinister, equally fictionalizing. If Saladin escapes from that accusation, it is on the basis of its own acute awareness of representation, and its deployment of representations of the Middle Ages, and particularly of the conflict between East and West as symbolized by the Crusades, alongside its apparent recreation of a moment in history. If the West has framed the East as a region in which time becomes place, in which the “medieval” has never ended, Saladin answers by imagining a Middle Ages to which we can return to retrace and reinvent modernity itself.

Notes 1. Yusuf Shahin, Al-Nasir Salad al-Din/Saladin (San Francisco, CA: August Light Productions, 1997). I have spelled Chahine’s name in the most commonly accepted English spelling. Citations to his films appear as “Shahin” according to international transcriptions of Arabic used by most libraries. 2. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). 3. The most widely available study of Chahine in English is Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, World Directors Series (London: British Film Institute, 2001). Most writing about Chahine in Arabic, as with films in the West, appears in newspapers and magazines. For examples of some untranslated books, see Walid Shamit, Yusuf Shahin: Hayah Lil-Sinima (Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis lil-Kutub wa-al-Nashr, 2001); Ahmad Jum ah, Sinima al-Tahawwulat Ru Yah Fi Sinima Yusuf Shahin (Kuwait: Sharikat al-Rubay an, 1986). Muhammad Sawi, Sinima Yusuf Shahin Rihlah Aydiyulujiyah (Beirut: Dar al-Matbu at alJadidah Dar Azal, 1990). For an extraordinary series of articles on Middle Eastern and Egyptian film in general, often focusing on Chahine, see the issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 15 (1995), a bilingual journal in English and Arabic, entitled “Arab Cinematics: Toward the New and the Alternative,”

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4. 5. 6.

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especially Raymond Baker, “Combative Cultural Politics: Film Art and Political Spaces in Egypt,” pp. 6–38; Walter Armbrust, “New Cinema, Commercial Cinema, and the Modernist Tradition in Egypt,” pp. 81–129; Susannah Downs, “Egyptian Earth between the Pen and the Camera: Youssef Chahine’s Adaptation of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s al-Ard,” pp. 153–77; and Nouri Bouzid, “New Realism in Arab Cinema: The Defeat-Conscious Cinema,” pp. 242–50. See Naomi Schor, “This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray.” Differences 1.3 (1989): 38–58. See Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990). See the excellent discussion of the Suez background of the film in John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 103–05. Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

CHAPTER 4 SAMURAI ON SHIFTING GROUND: NEGOTIATING THE MEDIEVAL AND THE MODERN IN SEVEN SAMURAI AND YOJIMBO Randy P. Schiff

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ust as revisionist historians criticize the romanticized view of the medieval knight in Hollywood depictions of the Western Middle Ages, so too critics take to task the idealized image of the samurai in films set in premodern Japan.1 Thomas D. Conlan, for example, undermines the popular myth of the samurai by exhaustively detailing the realities of warfare in feudal Japan, demonstrating that the filmic emphases on unswerving loyalty, sword worship, and rigidly ethical behavior all fly in the face of historical evidence.2 Within his own works in the samurai film genre (the jidai-geki,3 [period drama]), the director Akira Kurosawa makes his own use of such revisionist energies, deploying cinematic samurai to present a premodern Japan marked by a fundamental social instability.4 Eschewing the static social model of the majority of samurai films, in which the class origins of the individual transcend the fluctuations of a modernizing world, Kurosawa sets his wily warriors upon a shifting socioeconomic stage that keeps questions of identity continuously in play. I would like here to explore the ways in which Kurosawa deploys the socioeconomic liminality of two samurai figures (each played by Toshirô Mifune) in the films Seven Samurai and Yojimbo to appropriate the romanticized image of the elite warrior for a revisionist view of the cultural history of Japan.5 These films are set in very different periods: Seven Samurai takes place in the chaotic Sengoku period (roughly corresponding to the sixteenth century), while the world of Yojimbo is set in the 1860s, in the twilight of

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the age of samurai, before their disappearance as a class after the Meiji Restoration of 1867.6 Despite their distance in historical time, the settings are structurally analogous, insofar as each offers Kurosawa the opportunity to present a crisis in class identification. The Sengoku age of civil wars allows Kurosawa to explore the fundamentally blurred nature of the line between bandit and samurai, while the last years of the shogunate enable the director to meditate upon the final efforts of the samurai swordsman to maintain the ethos of his class. Kurosawa is thus able to put forth a sustained study of the dynamic nature of samurai identity, detaching it from the timeless world of loyal service and honor assumed by a typical samurai film such as Chushingura, to instead engage this cinematic mainstay with the trend of loosening class divisions tied to the modernization of Japan.7 Although there were always gradations within each class, the traditional social system of premodern Japan was divided hierarchically into four castes: at the top of the social ladder was the samurai, followed by the farmer, the artisan, and, finally, the merchant. As George Sansom makes clear, the discrepancy between social theory and reality was always marked.8 Despite their theoretically second rank, for example, peasants typically bore the brunt of oppression by the ruling class, while also being regularly exploited by merchants manipulating the rice market. Meanwhile, the merchant class, supposedly at the bottom of the social scale, gradually became the most powerful caste, draining the samurai of much of their wealth through credit transactions.9 That the Japanese population understood itself as divided by a caste system that did not accord with socioeconomic reality is made clear in the disparaging comments of an artisan observing the farmers weeping over their ill luck in hiring impoverished warriors in Seven Samurai: “I’m glad I wasn’t born a farmer!” says the worker. “A dog is luckier!”10 In Seven Samurai, which relates the story of a village of farmers who hire samurai to wage a war against marauding bandits, the seventh samurai’s social status figures the sociocultural chaos of the Sengoku age—a transitional period in which “new energies were released, new classes formed, new wealth created.”11 Kikuchiyo, as he comes to be called, has made himself into a samurai, despite having been born into the farming caste. As we shall see, Kikuchiyo’s liminal social status allows him to mediate between the class-stratified worlds of the samurai and the farmers, allowing the impromptu army ultimately to triumph in its campaign against the bandits, even as his ambiguous status calls into question the supposed stability of the caste system of medieval Japan. In Yojimbo, we follow another unclassifiable rônin (a masterless samurai, who would wander in search of buyers for his military services) in a town in which the credit economy threatens to end the age of the samurai. In a

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town overrun by gangs of gamblers, the disruption of traditional caste distinctions is figured in a world of currency, where origins and clear lines of descent are destabilized by an economy in which “you cannot tell whose money is whose,” as a frustrated farmer observes. Whereas Kikuchiyo makes himself a samurai and so can mediate between his current class and his peasant origins in Seven Samurai, the nameless samurai of Yojimbo makes himself seem more like a merchant, deploying the tools of the gamblers’ trade to bring down their modern system of exchange. The Ascending Triangle: The Blurring of Caste in Seven Samurai The arbitrariness of the caste system is foregrounded by the initial actions of Kambei Shimada, the leader of the seven samurai, whose status as a rônin itself marks the socioeconomic flux of Sengoku era Japan. The farmers, frustrated by their lack of success in the samurai market in the nearest town, finally find a prospect when they witness the rônin rescue a child held hostage by a thief. In the rescue, Kambei shocks all spectators (including a fascinated Kikuchiyo) by literally removing from himself the mark of his social standing: the rônin razes his topknot, a hairstyle restricted to samurai, to pass himself off as a priest and thus to gain the opportunity to slay the unsuspecting thief. Kambei here performs what de Certeau would call a “tactical” operation, making do with the dominant discourse of the caste system by deploying the garb of another class (the priest’s robe and mannerisms that he puts on), even as he exposes the arbitrariness of that system through his imposture.12 More critical than the connection Kambei makes with the farmers, however, is the mutual curiosity generated between the resourceful rônin and another impostor. Kambei intuitively senses that one spectator, who has staked out a front-and-center seat for the rônin’s shocking public display of his willingness to put moral ends above his own class standing, is also an anomaly; he stares at him three times, while putting on his disguise. The anomaly is a young man who is clearly drawn to Kambei, and yet is unable, when he awkwardly confronts the rônin on the road to town, to express his admiration properly. Kambei, aware that the awkward stranger occupies no clear position in the rigid social order, asks a question that will plague the self-fashioned samurai with many sleepless nights: he asks whether the young man who will come to be called Kikuchiyo is a samurai, responding to the stranger’s impassioned affirmative answer with a pointed “I wonder. . .” Kikuchiyo’s later attempt to prove his samurai status to Kambei further exposes the arbitrariness of the class system by revealing the anxious foundations upon which it is built. With six samurai gathered at the inn and

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Kambei having determined that exigencies of time require they forget about recruiting a seventh, a drunken Kikuchiyo approaches, summoned there by an artisan. When the artisan protests that it is not fair that Kikuchiyo will be tested by being attacked by a hidden member of the group, Kambei appeals to the idealized image of the samurai prevalent in films such as Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy:13 Kambei claims that a “real” samurai would never get so drunk as to be unable to parry the blow. After being walloped, the drunken Kikuchiyo informs Kambei that he has been obsessed with finding him since he dared question his caste, and says that he will show them documentary proof that he comes from a respectable samurai family. In a bold statement that plays upon the distinction between reality and illusion that is key to so many of Kurosawa’s films, Kikuchiyo states as solemnly as his drunkenness will allow that they will see that “though clad in rags, I am a real samurai.” Through his ensuing attempt at documentary fraud, Kikuchiyo ultimately acquires his name. Kikuchiyo claims that he can certify his samurai status by unfurling before the samurai a scroll listing generations of individuals in a single samurai bloodline, toward the end of which he claims his own identity is registered. The samurai soon burst into laughter, as Kambei, having examined the document, remarks that the Kikuchiyo the young man claims to be would now be only thirteen years old. A factitious identity becomes instantly associated with Kikuchiyo: Thirteen becomes Kikuchiyo’s first name in the film, as the samurai mock the drunken would-be trickster. The immense length of the poached scroll figures the crucial cultural role of ancestry in samurai culture, with pride of name regularly tied to the antiquity and rank of samurai blood. That the certification of samurai status has been appropriated from an authentic samurai by a self-fashioning peasant also foreshadows further blurring of social lines that will come with the advance of a credit economy in Japan. For, by the eighteenth century, cash-strapped samurai would in great numbers adopt the sons of wealthy commoners, allowing those below the rank of samurai in effect to buy samurai blood.14 Kikuchiyo’s name itself comes to signify the fundamental arbitrariness of the social-class system of medieval Japan, calling into question the stable relation between signifier and signified in such a world of socioeconomic flux. When later asked what his “real” name is, Kikuchiyo reveals his liminal status—his transcendence of the old order that he risked when he chose to leave the peasant identity into which he was born and to appropriate the status of a samurai. Claiming that he has forgotten his name, he asks the samurai to give him one. The samurai Heihachi decides that he will be called Kikuchiyo, saying that the name “suits” him well. That Kikuchiyo is assigned the very name of the samurai whose identity he so

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ineptly sought to steal functions as a constant reminder of the challenge to impermeable class divisions that his character represents.15 Kikuchiyo’s marginal status allows him to mediate between the castes of farmer and samurai, who must learn to fight as a team. His occupation of the space between classes is figured in the banner Heihachi makes for the improvised samurai-farmer army. At the bottom of the banner, Heihachi places the kanji symbol for farmer, explaining that it is meant to represent the village, thus equating the community itself with its class. Heihachi places six circles representing the samurai at the top of the banner, mirroring the warrior caste’s own position in the social system. Worried that he has been removed from the group, Kikuchiyo learns that Heihachi has created a special symbol to represent him—a triangle placed between the worlds of the peasant and the samurai (figure 4.1). To make clear that his unclassifiable social identity is at the heart of his special position on the banner, Heihachi then jokingly addresses him as if he were a noble, calling him Kikuchiyo-sama (a deferential suffix equivalent to “Sir” in English). The very shape of the triangle figures Kikuchiyo’s own social mobility as fixed: just as the social world is often figured as a pyramid, with a wide peasant base thinning up to the top of the society’s elite, so does Kikuchiyo’s triangle begin at the base, in the village, ascending toward the realm of the samurai. The very abstraction of the figures further marks the arbitrariness of

Figure 4.1 Heihachi explains the sign system he has used for the improvised Army’s Banner. Source: From Seven Samurai ( Japan, Akira Kurosawa, 1954).

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the class division between farmer and samurai, which Kikuchiyo straddles. For Kikuchiyo does not only appear to mediate between the worlds of peasant and samurai, but in very practical ways also manages to defuse crises that threaten to rip apart the two components of the army Kambei forms. Indeed, it is the social anomaly—he whose “real” name is lost and who has become the mere name on the ancestry scroll—who ends up being the glue that keeps the farmer-samurai cooperative from falling apart. Kikuchiyo’s mediation saves the group from disintegrating during two key class-based crises, each of which is marked by the anxious village elder, called in for assistance by the alarmed farmers, being told that everything is now “all right.” The first crisis occurs upon the arrival of the six samurai (with Kikuchiyo, not yet having been accepted into the group, simply following them) into the village. They find the village vacated—for the farmer Manzo has stoked peasant fears that the samurai will seduce their women. A meeting with the village elder is called, when the sound of an alarm is heard, resulting in hordes of peasants pouring out from their homes, pleading for the samurai to help them. Amidst the chaos, Kikuchiyo—who, having grown up in a farming village, knows its available tools—reveals that it was he who sounded the alarm, in order to teach the inhospitable peasants a lesson about not mistreating guests from whom they will ask for aid in times of crisis. Kikuchiyo’s ability to mediate between farmer and samurai in fact wins him his spot as the seventh samurai— for, as Heihachi notes cheerfully, he has proven “useful,” after all. Kikuchiyo’s second moment of class mediation defuses a far graver crisis—one that threatens to dissolve the army in open class war—and also presents the most profound meditation on the effects of the caste system itself on individuals. Having noticed that Yohei, one of the peasants assigned to him for military training, has an actual spear (unlike the makeshift bamboo weapons borne by the others), the self-fashioned samurai, well versed in village ways, asks where the farmers have hoarded other weapons that they have pillaged from defeated samurai escaping from battle. Kikuchiyo, now dressed in a full suit of samurai armor, brings a large cache of weapons to the other samurai, proud of this contribution to their cause and shameless in his awareness of the bloody origin of the arms. Kikuchiyo thus has ignored class consciousness and made do with the tools available to him—just as Kambei who fascinated him had done when he publicly divested himself of his samurai status to achieve the practical goal of rescuing the kidnapped boy. Far from being pleased by such a valuable haul, the samurai display open hostilities toward the peasants, closing class ranks as Kambei reminds Kikuchiyo of his outsider status, by saying that one who has never been “hunted” could not understand their rage. The normally mild-mannered samurai Shichiroji, after excoriating Kikuchiyo, throws a spear at the peasants

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outside the hut, sending the terrified farmers off to the village elder at this sign of class crisis. When Kyuzo states that he would like to kill every farmer in the village, Kikuchiyo, brooding over the situation, suddenly laughs and begins a passionate declamation on class that leaves both the samurai and peasant spectators stunned. For only Kikuchiyo—the farmer-turned-samurai, figured in Heihachi’s banner as the triangle insofar as he mediates between the peasant base and the samurai apex because he has lived in both of these social worlds—can offer a perspective that transcends class consciousness, thereby exposing the common ground upon which each constructs its identity. Kikuchiyo opens by appealing to the traditional samurai contempt for farmers, asking them, “What do you all think of farmers?” Stating that they are “foxy beasts” rather than “saints,” he takes advantage of the selfloathing that is the engine of his own will to rise above his peasant origins. Kikuchiyo exposes the duplicity of farmers’ claims that they are indigent even as they horde manifold goods under the floorboards and in hidden farms, and excoriates them as cowards for only hunting down wounded warriors in their pursuit of plunder. Finally coming to a crescendo of selfindictment, he ejaculates, “Farmers are stingy, foxy, blubbering, mean, stupid, and murderous.” However, after confirming the samurais’ prejudiced view of farmers, Kikuchiyo rhetorically turns the tables, asking, “But, then! Who made them such beasts? You did! You samurai did it!” He now holds up the social mirror to the samurai themselves, shouting a litany of atrocities that he has himself experienced, furiously flinging some spears to punctuate his impassioned monologue: “You burn their villages! Destroy their farms! Steal their food! Force them to labor! Take their women! And kill them if they resist!” With a final rhetorical question—“So what should farmers do?”—Kikuchiyo succeeds in grounding the actions of peasants not in some inherent quality of caste, but in the harsh socioeconomic conditions in which the samurai too are involved. Muttering “Damn,” Kikuchiyo collapses in tears, leaving the samurai previously ready to massacre peasants not only speechless but also instructed. Only at this moment of class mediation do Kikuchiyo’s caste origins become clear: Kambei, his eyes filled with tears, now asks him gently whether he is a “farmer’s son.” Storming off, Kikuchiyo spends the next night apart from the samurai, sleeping in the stable with Rikichi and musing that it feels like “old times.” In the stable, Kikuchiyo urges Rikichi to stand up for himself and not make himself “small” by immediately vacating the premises for him, revealing that his self-fashioning as samurai is rooted in a disgust with those who meekly submit to class limitations.16 Kikuchiyo’s cathartic journey back to his origins goes even further back to “old times” when he sees himself in the baby saved by a peasant mother speared by the bandits: “it is me,” the weeping Kikuchiyo explains to

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Kambei, clasping the baby in his arms, as he explains that he too was orphaned by marauders. Having steadfastly refused to be trapped in a selfdefeating sense of class limitations, Kikuchiyo instead chooses to live in the liminal space between classes—to become the special case, the triangle undoing rigid class barriers by mediating between them. The Rônin With and Without a Name: Class Chaos in Yojimbo Although Yojimbo is set some three hundred years after Seven Samurai, it continues Kurosawa’s undoing of fixed class distinctions by placing the samurai in the context of a credit economy that has advanced nearly to the point where it will destroy the social role of the samurai itself. As we have seen, despite their low rung on the social ladder, the merchant class rose in power in large part by sapping the samurai of their wealth through advantageous transactions involving the conversion of rice to coin. Kurosawa connects capitalism with class instability in the protagonist’s first encounter in the town: as a farmer bemoans his son’s decision to flee his class for the fast life of a gambler, he rails against the current state of a society, complaining that “you can’t tell whose money is whose.” Just as money passes from one hand to another in this provincial town overrun by gamblers and their bourgeois backers, so too does the status of the rônin of Yojimbo shift according to circumstances, as he tactically employs the tools of this market economy only to destroy it. Yojimbo is set in a provincial town beset by two warring gangs of gamblers, each seeking to gain economic control of the territory. The town of Yojimbo, as David Desser argues, represents a “break from Japanese tradition” and an “alignment with Western industrial” capitalism.17 The advance in the capitalist economy is evident from the complex financial background to the conflict: Tazaemon, a silk trader and the town mayor, has invested in Seibei, the owner of a brothel and formerly the sole boss of the town; Takuemon, the brewer, has put his money on Ushitora, who broke from Seibei and now has competing hired hands in a struggle to control the town. Gang warfare has led to a stagnant economy, threatening the silk fair, the town’s main moneymaking event. The only remotely uncorrupt outsider we see profiting from the turf war is the cooper, who sells coffins to each side—and who turns to sake for solace either when there is a lull in the killings or when the fight gets so big that, he complains, they “don’t bother with coffins.” There are further signs of urban corruption. Country officials arrive and are bribed throughout their stay by the main businessmen, with women being included among the commodities when Seibei presents the officials with geisha wares from the brothel. The corruption of the warrior class by

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the credit economy is embodied by the character Hansuke, the town official. The most obsequious figure in a town brimming with cowards and flatterers, Hansuke signals the debased state of the samurai by wearing his hair in the topknot reserved for this social class. Into this economic minefield steps a rônin who, like Kikuchiyo, proves to be a mediator; however, whereas Kikuchiyo uses his special status to engender understanding between classes in Seven Samurai, the rônin of Yojimbo concocts the plan of destroying the gangs by setting one side against the other. Rather than stepping outside the system, the rônin uses the tools of the gamblers’ trade to bring down the system they have set up in the town. He is only able to do this by going against the grain of the idealized samurai, expertly negotiating the modern economy as he offers himself for hire. Much as Kikuchiyo prioritized practical needs over the theoretical ideal of the samurai in appropriating murdered samurai’s weapons, the Rônin in Yojimbo is one who, despite the cooper’s worries that he can only offer a taboo “dead man’s sword” for the final showdown, immediately accepts it in the pursuit of his idiosyncratic ends. Like the Derridean bricoleur, the Rônin will put in play whatever tools he finds without concern for origins or any fundamental ground, poaching from the system in order to undo it.18 I refer to this rônin simply as the Rônin, insofar as his relative namelessness is key to the identity play within Yojimbo. When the Rônin is first asked his name after having been hired by Seibei as a yôjimbo (bodyguard), he makes a joke of the process, choosing as his surname Kuwabatake (Mulberry Bushevidently because this vegetation was the most interesting element in his immediate environment).19 The Rônin also destabilizes the personal name Sanjuro (Thirty-Year-Old) that he gives himself, by adding that this “Thirty-Year-Old” is “going on forty.” After being told that surely he is joking, the Rônin claims that it does not matter, for he is a “nobody” anyway.20 That his identity is constructed on a fundamental absence clearly connects him with Kikuchiyo: both foreground the arbitrariness of social status through acts of self-naming. Traditionally, samurai proved obsessed with lineage, often identifying themselves by making recourse to their origins, listing the many names of their ancestors before their own personal names. But the Rônin sees himself situationally, as unstable insofar as he is tied to the present, unwilling to participate in the samurai obsession with lineage. That such playful self-naming is central to his character is made clear by the repetition of this ironic practice in the film’s sequel Sanjuro. When asked his name by the courtly woman he rescued and for whom he offered himself as a footstool, he again searches the environment and identifies himself as Tsubaki (Camellia) Sanjuro, again foregrounding the slippage between sign and referent by noting the he is “going on forty.”21 Much as Kikuchiyo resists easy classification in the social world of Seven

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Samurai, so does the trickster Rônin introduce identity play through acts of self-naming in Yojimbo. The socioeconomic status of this self-naming Rônin reflects the hard times felt by nineteenth-century samurai trapped in the credit economy that long ago drained them of the wealth they generated from feudal payments in rice. The Rônin comes into town penniless, unkempt, and wearing rags, unable to pay for the rice first served to him by Gonji, the cynical but goodnatured innkeeper who becomes the confidant and later the co-conspirator of the Ronin. Gonji has clearly served other cash-strapped samurai, for he serves the samurai despite sensing that this wandering mercenary is broke. The Rônin soon strikes Gonji as nontraditional in his participation in the economy of the town: “A samurai—and always harping about money,” he says, remarking on the Rônin’s disappointing class of expectations that he also effects in Sanjuro, when one of the young samurai objects to this rônin who will not, as “true” samurai of the old ideal do, starve before he will beg. Throughout the film, the Rônin indeed proves himself a masterful manipulator of money. For example, he expertly negotiates a high salary from Seibei when he hires himself out as a yôjimbo, succeeding as he almost always does in his transactions with the town’s players. First and foremost, the Rônin offers himself as merchandise: “I’ll start some trouble and pay you,” he assures the innkeeper, figuring the transition from medieval rice currency to the modern coinage by staking himself as credit for his rice.22 For the Rônin [literally, “wave-man”], like currency, essentially wanders in search of exchanging the self for more currency. One particular transaction supports this view of a samurai having made himself into currency for the mercantile economy. After having used trickery to gain hire as a yôjimbo by Ushitora, the boss offers him a moneybag and, nervous that the feud has heated up again, tells him to take as much as he wants. The Rônin here proves that, while using the modern exchange system, he is no slave to it: he takes only some coins and says that this is “enough for now,” just as in Sanjuro, when offered a moneybag by the nine samurai-youths he has saved, he only takes enough for a few days. The value of currency he takes in Yojimbo proves to link him with currency by a pun on his name: for it is sanjû ryô (thirty ryo) for Sanjuro. He has become, as it were, currency.23 This thirty ryô transaction stands out among his dealings because it shows that there is something of the romanticized image of the medieval samurai still left in this financial trickster. Again, it involves a woman as commodity, showing the dehumanizing force of the town’s current economy. The Rônin frowns as he hears the tale of a farmer who “lost” his wife gambling with Ushitora, who in turn exchanged her as a kickback to his financial backer, the brewer: the farmer suffers beatings for choosing to

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watch his wife in another man’s control, even as their child is kept by force away from his mother. After the woman, kidnapped by Seibei’s gang, is again offered in exchange for Seibei’s son (whom Ushitora’s gang holds), the Rônin stages a fake raid and, killing all the guards, rescues the woman and sets her free, giving the family the thirty ryô he had just taken from Ushitora. With this exchange of currency charged with the echo of his own factitious name, the samurai performs a chivalrous action that would please the samurai-youths of Sanjuro who idealize proper samurai comportment, even as he would disappoint them through his shiftless dealings with the criminal elements within the town. Despite the Rônin’s resistance to classification either by name or by samurai stereotypes, he proves to deliver a fundamentally conservative message in Yojimbo.24 After killing the only gangsters remaining in the town, the economy of which has been ravaged by the feud he so meticulously stoked, the Rônin reencounters the farmer’s son who, at the beginning of the film, had left his caste for the chance of making it as a gambler. Sparing only this class-skipping farmer, the Rônin barks at him to go home, echoing his own words of class loathing by saying that “a long life eating porridge is best.” In Sanjuro, the Rônin offers a similarly conservative message to the young samurai of the town, for whom he has become a hero after his “splendid” killing of the samurai Muroto before their impressionable eyes:25 echoing the words of the youths’ aunt, who stated that a good sword “should be kept in its sheath,” the Rônin warns them not to follow him and tells them to stay home, saying that they are “good” swords, whereas he, the wanderer, is a naked sword, ever-drawn and hard. He sends the samurai-youths back to the peaceful life of their clan, led by a chamberlain who hoped in vain to settle peacefully that film’s conflict about clan corruption. Ironically, the Rônin who destroys the economy of the town of Yojimbo also acts to conserve the value of the caste system, breaking with traditional samurai conduct in order to preserve the threatened class system according to which such conduct acquires meaning. Though the Rônin leaves a swathe of destruction in the town that seems bent upon undoing the capitalist economy itself, he also must be seen as furthering this system by making it again “quiet” enough to allow wealth to be distributed evenly—and not just to the gangsters and to the cooper building coffins for their deadly rivalry. After the Rônin cavalierly bids good-bye to Gonji and the cooper, we can imagine that, with some rebuilding, all will be able to profit from the silk market disrupted by the competing bosses he has brought down. Just as the actions of Kikuchiyo and the Rônin blur class distinctions, even as they play upon their differences, so too does the word rônin, signifying the wandering warrior, prove to have a class-crossing history. Sansom

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notes that rônin “originally meant fugitive peasants” and only “later was applied to unemployed members of the warrior class.”26 The self-naming, self-making samurai of Seven Samurai and Yojimbo reveal the very modern notion of a world of blurred lines between classes, even as their behavior acquires meaning only through the medieval traditions of rigid class distinction that they undo. Spanning from the class-conflicted Sengoku age to the final years before the Meiji Restoration that would make the samurai obsolete, Kurosawa’s self-fashioning samurai negotiate inherited class distinctions upon the shifting socioeconomic ground pointing toward modern Japan. Notes 1. For a recent survey of the gap between historical reality and cultural symbolism in Western films depicting the medieval knight, see John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2003). 2. Thomas D. Conlan, State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2003). 3. I place all Japanese words in italics and in rômaji, the standard system for transcription from Japanese into English. The only adjustment I make is the use of the symbol ô to symbolize the long o sound. 4. For a general survey of the samurai film (often referred to as the chambara, though this term is usually reserved for the more exploitatively bloody examples of the genre), see Alain Silver, The Samurai Film (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1983). 5. Seven Samurai, DVD, directed by Akira Kurosawa, written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni (1954; Japan: Toho International and Classic Collection, 1998); and Yojimbo, DVD, directed by Akira Kurosawa, written by Ryuzo Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa (1961; Japan: Toho International and Criterion Collection, 1999). 6. On the Sengoku period, see George Sansom, A History of Japan: 1334–1615 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 240 ff. On the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration, see George Sansom, A History of Japan: 1615–1867 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), pp. 207–42. Sansom’s texts remain the standard general source for the history of Japan. 7. Chushingura, DVD, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, written by Toshio Yasumi (1962; Japan: Toho International and Image Entertainment, 1998). Chushingura is one of many versions of the seminal story of the Forty-Seven Loyal Retainers, which uses as its base a historical incident of 1703 in which the dispossessed retainers of an assassinated lord avenge his mistreatment by a shogun official. On the figure of the loyal retainer as the standard samurai of Japanese cinema, see Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (New York: New American Library, 1984), pp. 150–66.

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8. For a broad view of the Japanese caste system and its correspondence to socioeconomic reality, particularly as regards the growing power of the merchant class, see George Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1962), pp. 463–70. 9. Sansom notes that “nearly all” of the “gold and silver” of the samurai class was in the hands of the merchant class “by about the year 1700” (Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History, p. 469). 10. All quotations from Seven Samurai and Yojimbo derive from the translations in the Criterion Collection editions cited above. 11. Sansom, A History of Japan: 1334–1615, p. 217. 12. For this concept of “tactical” operations, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 12–37. 13. The Samurai trilogy consists of a highly idealized recounting of the life of the sixteenth-century samurai Miyamoto Musashi. In the second installment, the protagonist abstains from alcohol, explaining that any intoxication would distract him from his endless pursuit of training. See Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, written by Tokue Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki, based on the novel Musashi by Hideshi Hojo (1955; Japan: Toho International and Criterion Collection, 1998). 14. On the increasing confusion of class divisions in Japan, see Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History, pp. 519–24. 15. Class-crossing moments can be found throughout Seven Samurai, such as the young samurai Katsushiro eating millet for the first time in his affair with the peasant girl Shino, while the samurai Shichiroji has come to town dressed as a peddler. Romance and class crossing are also linked when Kikuchiyo departs from the merely supervisory samurai role during harvest, offering to sickle for a pretty peasant girl, so that they might become “good friends.” 16. Kikuchiyo elsewhere reveals his disgust with the abandoned peasant grandmother’s self-pity, saying he despises “wretched” people, while also passionately urging the mourners at Heihachi’s funeral to stop crying. For Kikuchiyo, to wallow in self-pity is ignoble because it is better to fashion for oneself a future. This same contempt of self-pity is evidenced by the Rônin in Yojimbo, who barks his contempt for the dejected gambler who has lost his wife. 17. David Desser, The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), p. 99. 18. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278–93. Derrida adapts the figure of the bricoleur proposed in 1962 by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 16–20. 19. In Japanese culture, the surname is regularly recited first in formal greetings. 20. The Rônin is here alluding to the statement by Seibei’s double-crossing wife that they should not offer so much money to a “nobody.”

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21. Sanjuro, directed by Akira Kurosawa, written by Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, and Akira Kurosawa (1962; Japan: Toho International and Criterion Collection, 1999). In Seven Samurai, the false name “Kikuchiyo” may create a further, vegetative connection between these nameless characters, through a pun on the word for “chrysanthemum” (Kiku), though a number of interpretations of the name are possible. 22. See Sansom, A History of Japan: 1615–1867, pp. 166–68. 23. This identification of the Rônin’s self with currency can perhaps account for the naming of a rônin as Yôjimbo in what seems to be an exploitative appropriation of the character for the Zatoichi series: Mifune’s character is named only by his occupation. Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, directed by Okamoto Kihachi, written by Okamoto Kihachi and Yoshida Tetsuro (Japan: Toho International and AnimEigo, 1999). 24. David Desser sees this “conservative” message as presenting a fundamental ambiguity to the film (The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa, pp. 98 ff.). 25. On the idealism of the samurai-youths of Sanjuro as buying into the romanticized image of the samurai because they are naïve enough to “believe in jidai-geki,” see Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 160. 26. Sansom, A History of Japan: 1334–1615, p. 427.

PART II BARBARISM AND THE MEDIEVAL OTHER

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CHAPTER 5 VIKINGS THROUGH THE EYES OF AN ARAB ETHNOGRAPHER: CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER IN THE 13TH WARRIOR Lynn Shutters

I’m trying to train the Arabs to be less effeminate. . . . Attributed to Hank (last name undisclosed), an American working in Iraq under the employment of a private contractor.1

T

he portrayal of Arabs in Western film tends to be highly unfavorable. Appearing as lascivious sheiks, religious fanatics, and cold-blooded terrorists, Arabs on the silver screen are caricatures, not characters. Jack Shaheen’s study of the vilification of Arabs on film reveals “cinema’s systematic, pervasive, and unapologetic degradation and dehumanization of a people.”2 Shaheen also identifies a “best list” of twelve exceptional films that represent Arab cultures favorably.3 What interests me as a medievalist is that three of these films are set in the Middle Ages: King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and, the film I will discuss, The 13th Warrior (1999). All three films feature intellectually sophisticated Eastern characters who appear more “modern” than their Western counterparts.4 While unfavorable cinematic representations of Arabs in medieval settings are in ample supply and even the “good” Arab characters whom Shaheen identifies conform to some Orientalist stereotypes, I find it suggestive that medieval settings might enable more positive representations of Arabs, especially given the pejorative use of “the medieval” in contemporary political discourses. Here I refer to the pervasive tendency, post-September 11, 2001, to conflate terrorism with medievalism,

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an analogy that only obscures contemporary world politics.5 In this chapter I explore the potential for more positive associations of the medieval and the Arab world, associations that both allow for a reconsideration of the manner in which terms such as medieval and modern are mapped onto different cultures and provide an opportunity for American film viewers to reimagine East/West relationships in a nonantagonistic fashion. The 13th Warrior invites its viewers to identify both with a band of Vikings who, on account of their barbarity, appear culturally “medieval,” and with Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, an Arab character who, in terms of cultural sophistication, appears “modern.”6 The film’s depiction of Ahmed has, according to Paul Halsall, gained it the support of medievalists: “For all the pans the movie received from film critics, it was treated much more kindly by medievalists. . . . ‘Accuracy’ is not the issue, but it was very interesting to see the ‘civilized’ point of view presented as that of a cultured Muslim from Baghdad.”7 While I agree that the film begins by encouraging its Western audience to identify with the civilized Arab Ahmed, I contend that gradually the audience, like Ahmed, is led to identify with a Western construction of masculinity. The manner in which The 13th Warrior presents culture and gender as mutually constitutive suggests that Arab cultures, however “civilized,” remain insufficient without the acquisition of Western manliness. Consequently the film ultimately reinforces notions of Western superiority. Reversing the Eastern The 13th Warrior, based on the Michael Crichton novel Eaters of the Dead, is a loose retelling of Beowulf as narrated from the point of view of Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan (Antonio Banderas), an Arab poet who is exiled from Baghdad and encounters a group of Vikings.8 An emissary from King Hrothgar arrives at the Viking encampment to ask the band’s leader, Buliwyf (Vladimir Kulich), to aid his people in defeating a terrible evil, the “Wendol.” An oracular woman informs Buliwyf that this quest must be undertaken by thirteen warriors, including one foreigner. Ahmed is then forced to join the expedition. Buliwyf’s party arrives at Hrothgar’s kingdom and witnesses the devastation of the Wendol, who appear to be bearlike monsters. Echoing Beowulf, Buliwyf and his men stay the night in Hrothgar’s hall, where they are attacked by the Wendol, whom the Vikings drive off. The next day the Wendol attack again, and in this battle Ahmed discovers that they are actually men. The Vikings barely survive this battle, and afterward another oracular woman informs Buliwyf that to defeat the Wendol, he must kill their matriarch and their lead warrior. Buliwyf’s band infiltrates the Wendol lair, and Buliwyf is poisoned as he kills the Wendol matriarch. In the final battle the dying Buliwyf kills the lead Wendol warrior, vanquishing the Wendol threat. Ahmed, now

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friendly with the Vikings, returns to his homeland and fulfills Buliwyf’s dying request that the hero’s life be commemorated in writing. Throughout The 13th Warrior, Ahmed is portrayed sympathetically; he is the point-of-view character who plays an indispensable role in the quest by contributing “Arab” intellect to Viking might. By creating a favorable impression of Ahmed and the Arab culture he represents, The 13th Warrior reverses the narrative tropes of the “eastern,” a term coined by John Eisele to describe Hollywood films set in the East.9 Eisele claims that “eastern” films tend to maintain some if not all of the following narrative attributes: “(1) transgression, (2) separation, (3) abduction, (4) reduction, (5) induction, (6) seduction, (7) redemption, (8) revelation, (9) reaffirmation, and (10) mutilation” (p. 73). Transgression and separation are prominent in foreign legion films, in which the Western hero’s transgression precipitates his entrance into the foreign legion and causes his separation from his homeland (p. 74). Abduction and reduction are, according to Eisele, “two of the most persistent attributes in the eastern genre” (p. 74). Here “the focus is on the manipulation of the subjective identification of the audience with the abducted Westerner, powerless and impotent, who is ultimately rescued or empowered to escape” (p. 74). Induction typically involves a Western hero or heroine temporarily adopting Eastern cultural attributes, a transformation often signified by the donning of Arab clothes (pp. 74–75). Seduction is more typical of early “easterns” and often involves the overtures of a lascivious sheik who attempts to force himself on his beautiful Western captive (p. 75). Redemption, revelation, and reaffirmation constitute the resolution of the film’s conflict. Redemption entails either the rescue of a Western hero or heroine or, in terrorist films, the rescue of Western culture at large. Regarding revelation, Eisele notes that “[m]ost significant. . .is the idea of revelation in this Oriental context, in which the image of the veil has been placed in front of the ‘truth’ ” (p. 76). Revelation can manifest itself as a reversal of the earlier induction, as the Western hero reemerges from his Eastern disguise to regain his old identity, often in a somehow improved way. Similarly, reaffirmation typically entails acceptance or affirmation of Western cultural identity. Eisele remarks, “[T]he reaffirmation almost always can be understood as reflecting the prevailing cultural, social, and political values” (p. 76). Finally, mutilation is less an “event” than a “subsidiary motif that lends a certain atmosphere to the film” (p. 76). In Hollywood films, violence prevails in the Eastern world, where Arab henchmen wield menacing scimitars and criminals are punished with amputation. The deployment of these narrative attributes has led to a number of developments in film representations of the East. First, the narrative attributes of the “eastern” are usually experienced by a Western point-of-view character through whom the film audience is allowed to experience the

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Eastern “Other.” Thus it is a Western hero or heroine who experiences the abduction, induction, revelation, and so forth mentioned above. In the past three decades, Eisele contends, “the development has been away from identification with Arab characters as heroes, heroines, or love interests toward ‘disidentification’ with them as antagonists, or ‘unseen’ enemies” (p. 71). Second, through their depiction of Western heroes versus Eastern enemies, “easterns” reference contemporary political conflicts between Western and Eastern cultures, but they do so in a fashion that abstracts or separates these conflicts from any actual historical content that might help to explain them (p. 74). Third, “easterns” employ a sense of Western superiority to reinforce what are perceived to be normative gender roles. All three of these developments are prevalent in terrorist films, a subgenre of the “eastern” that first developed in the 1970s and maintained its popularity into the late 1990s, when The 13th Warrior was produced. In films such as True Lies (1994) and The Siege (1998), Americans are threatened by Arab terrorists, whose Arabness is associated with their violent acts.10 Although The Siege depicts the chaos that results when Americans fail to distinguish a handful of Arab terrorists from a majority of law-abiding Arab-American citizens, such gestures cannot efface the film’s vivid visual equation of Islamic faith and violence. To give one example, terrorists purify themselves in what is presumably intended to be Islamic fashion before executing grisly attacks. The second development in “easterns,” abstraction, is also aptly displayed in terrorist films, in which terrorists are not motivated by contemporary political events but rather by vague notions of religious belief. In True Lies the Islamic terrorist organization that threatens the United States is the “Crimson Jihad,” a ridiculous appellation that associates terrorism with religious mandate. The Siege makes greater efforts to acknowledge the tangled web of political relationships between the Western and Middle Eastern worlds, and the terrorists of this film are the product of CIA training. Nonetheless, religion often trumps politics as the motive for terrorism. When FBI agent Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) insists on having a warrant before he apprehends suspected terrorists, CIA agent Sharon Bridger (Annette Bening) retorts, “They’ve also got a warrant, okay, a warrant from God. They’re ready to die.” Finally, in both True Lies and The Siege, Arab characters serve as foils through which Western masculinity is reinforced. In True Lies Harry Tasker, the American agent who thwarts Arab attempts to detonate atomic bombs in American cities, is played by hypermasculine Arnold Schwarzenegger. As the film opens, Tasker’s marriage to Helen ( Jamie Lee Curtis) is on the rocks, but as the estranged couple is forced to cooperate to save the country their relationship is rekindled, and American superiority is linked to heterosexual gender roles. In The Siege, Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis play an American FBI agent and general, respectively, who

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attempt to apprehend Arab terrorists. Washington performs manly feats like somersaulting into a schoolroom where children are held hostage and shooting a startled terrorist. The general’s machismo, however, is excessive, and he is ultimately arrested for his cruel treatment of Arab Americans. Willis and Washington nonetheless provide a striking comparison with the Arab characters of the film. Arab terrorists fight with surreptitious bombs, not guns or tanks, and other Arab characters sit through demeaning interrogations during which they weep or scream before their American assailants. Interestingly, while 1990s terrorist films precede the events of September 11, 2001, they nonetheless circulate attitudes of anxiety and suspicion regarding Arabs that would become all the more pervasive after September 11. This is not to say that American attitudes toward the Arab world pre- and postSeptember 11 were identical; it is merely a reminder that the September 11 terrorist attacks should not be viewed as a simple or single cause of U.S. antiArab sentiment, which has its own long and complicated genealogy. I have described Eisele’s taxonomy of the “eastern” and the terrorist film at length because they delineate the film representations of Arabs that The 13th Warrior apparently counters. It is specifically through the film’s medieval setting that a reevaluation of East/West cultural values appears possible. The 13th Warrior conforms to all of the narrative attributes of Eisele’s classification system, but, significantly, the Arab Ahmed occupies the position typically held by the Western point-of-view character. Ahmed engages in an inappropriate relationship with a married woman (transgression), is exiled from Baghdad (separation), forced to join the Vikings (abduction) who initially marginalize him (reduction). The fainthearted Ahmed gradually acquires Viking valor (induction), and, as when a Western character is inducted into the East, a change of appearance marks this cultural shift: Ahmed swaps his flowing robes, headdress, and black eyeliner for less makeup and more armor. Ahmed also has a brief liaison with a Viking woman (seduction). The narrative attributes of redemption, revelation, and mutilation relate to the Wendol threat: Hrothgar’s people are liberated from the cannibalistic Wendol, whose identity and secret lair are revealed by Ahmed. Finally, through his experiences with the Vikings, Ahmed becomes a better man (also a moment of redemption and revelation), and he returns to his Arab culture (reaffirmation). This reversal of strategies for denigrating Arabs and the fact that an Arab character is presented as a point-of-view character for a Western audience would seem positive, even if the film is not a historically accurate portrayal of a medieval Arab Muslim. The film opens in medias res, with Ahmed and the Vikings sailing to Hrothgar’s kingdom, but then it immediately flashes back to relate how Ahmed came to find himself in such unlikely company. The scene shifts to Baghdad, and Ahmed’s voiceover establishes him as the film’s point-of-view

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character. The film’s brief glimpse of Baghdad partakes of Orientalist stereotypes. A lush setting complete with a beautiful veiled woman, the city is a place where “[l]ife was easy, and I [Ahmed] lived without care.” Yet the film also suggests that the medieval Arab world was one of sophisticated cultural achievements. These achievements extend to the political realm, as the Arabs of The 13th Warrior send out emissaries such as Ahmed to negotiate with foreign cultures. This depiction of a politically engaged Arab culture departs significantly from other Western film representations of the East in which Easterners reside in a “passive, static space,” to quote Ella Shohat, where they await their discovery by a Western explorer who initiates their first contact with modernity.11 The Arabs of The 13th Warrior need no initiation; their culture occupies the center, not the periphery, of the civilized world. The most striking indication of Arab centrality occurs when Ahmed embarks upon his journey north. Here the film cuts to the image of a map, narrowly focused upon Baghdad. The camera pulls back to reveal Europe, designated “Europa,” as an outline uninterrupted by national boundaries or geographic designations. This shot relegates Europe to the undifferentiated, marginal site that the Arab world usually occupies in Western films. Shohat notes that map shots subtend a sense of Western mastery over the nonWestern world in terms of both knowledge and empire.12 The reversal of this trope in The 13th Warrior suggests that it employs its medieval setting to reverse rather than perpetuate stereotypes of Western imperialism. The map shot’s invitation to view the Arab perspective as normative and the European as Other is further entrenched when Ahmed encounters the Vikings. Ahmed stares in disapproving wonder at the Northmen, a violent people who drink copiously and practice repellent grooming habits. The contrast between the refined Ahmed and barbaric Vikings encourages the audience to identify with Ahmed as a fellow “modern,” indicating that terms such as “modern” and “medieval” are cultural as well as temporal constructs. The film cements this identification between Western viewer and medieval Arab by having Ahmed and his translator/companion Melchisidek (Omar Sharif) speak English while the Vikings speak Norwegian, rendering them incomprehensible to the film audience. The 13th Warrior also reimagines East/West cultural dynamics by mobilizing stereotypes regarding the maltreatment of women. At the Viking encampment Ahmed witnesses the funeral of a Viking king, which involves burning the king’s body in a ship. During the ceremony, Viking men lift up a young woman dressed in white as she chants a prayer; they then place her in the boat to be consumed in flames along with the king. While Ahmed does not comment on this ritual, his facial expressions suggest discomfort and disapproval. Today such practices are more often associated with Eastern cultures. The burning of a bride-like woman evokes reports of Hindu bride burning and sati, or widow burning. The

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need for white men to protect brown women from brown men, to cite Gayatri Spivak’s well-known phrase, is a concept commonly employed to justify the Western occupation of non-Western cultures, and it has been used as a rationale for occupations ranging from the British colonization of India to the current American presence in Iraq.13 As Shohat comments, this trope is also a prevalent motif in American film.14 Given this cultural context, the scene in The 13th Warrior of a white woman immolating herself in flames accompanied by Ahmed’s disapproving reaction reverses Western preconceptions regarding cultural standards for the treatment of women. An Arab Ethnographer in a Viking King’s Court The most complex reversal of Western tropes in The 13th Warrior involves Ahmed’s proficiency as an ethnographer who observes, interprets, and records the customs of his Viking companions. Ethnography works quite differently in The 13th Warrior than it does in contexts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism. Specifically, Ahmed’s ethnographic skills do not allow him to appropriate his Other but rather allow him to be appropriated by it. Ahmed’s ethnographic ability enables him to learn the Viking language, the initial step toward his induction into Viking culture. Furthermore, Ahmed’s skills as an ethnographer allow him to play a crucial role in the Viking quest, as Ahmed’s interpretations of the Wendol provide the key to their defeat. Ahmed acquires the Viking language solely through observation. This process of language acquisition is presented in a montage of three campfire scenes in which the film cuts between the faces of the conversing Vikings and that of the silent but attentive Ahmed. In the first scene the Vikings speak Norwegian, and occasionally after a Viking speaks Ahmed repeats his words more slowly, thus conveying the sense that he is acquiring certain sounds and phrases. In the second scene the Vikings speak a mixture of Norwegian and English, the introduction of English words indicating Ahmed’s increasing comprehension of the language. In the third and final campfire scene, the Vikings speak English, indicating Ahmed’s full comprehension of their language. From this point onward in the film, English no longer represents Arabic but rather the language of the Vikings. Ahmed’s act of language acquisition creates a complex web of associations in which various connecting lines are drawn between the Arab, the Vikings, and the audience. Just as Ahmed overcomes the language barrier between himself and the Vikings, so too does the audience, as English becomes the native tongue of the Northmen. Yet by bringing the Vikings closer to the audience, Ahmed is slightly distanced. First, Ahmed is no longer the only character in the film whom the audience can comprehend. Second, when the Vikings begin speaking English, their English is closer to the accent of U.S. Standard English than Ahmed’s because Banderas

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performs his role with an “Arab” accent (although it often sounds Spanish). Furthermore, by having Ahmed literally decipher the Vikings, The 13th Warrior reverses the Orientalist trope of a highly educated, detached Western observer deciphering the intricate workings of Eastern cultures. Yet this does not amount to a reversal of Orientalism. Said argues that Orientalism developed in response to the particular needs and desires of Western cultures in relatively recent history.15 By revealing the cultural contingency of Orientalist practices, Said punctures the truth-claims of Orientalist discourses. Conversely, by depicting a medieval Arab who successfully applies Orientalist practices to a foreign culture, The 13th Warrior suggests the universal applicability of such practices. Ahmed’s ability to acquire foreign languages soon leads to another, related ethnographic performance: the presentation of writing to an unlettered “native.” The closing shot of the final language acquisition scene focuses on Buliwyf contemplating the Arab who suddenly speaks his language. In the next scene, Buliwyf asks Ahmed, “You can draw sounds?” When Ahmed answers affirmatively, Buliwyf demands a demonstration, and Ahmed traces Arabic letters in the sand while reciting the first of the five pillars of Islam: “There is only one God, and Muhammad is His prophet.” The fetishization of writing on the part of an unlettered native is a well-established Western trope extending back to Caliban’s coveting of Prospero’s books in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The 13th Warrior reverses such cultural dynamics, as both the form (the Arabic alphabet) and content (Islam) of Ahmed’s demonstration mark the technology of writing as a specifically Eastern skill. While Ahmed is the representative of ethnography and modernity, the Vikings are, insofar as history is construed as written record, literally prehistoric. Considering that Ahmed writes in a language incomprehensible to the majority of the film’s Western audience, the audience also occupies the place of the ignorant native. In considering Ahmed’s proficiency in acquiring and writing languages, we can note that both instances of ethnographic performance mark Ahmed’s induction into Viking culture. Ahmed’s language acquisition causes the Vikings to gain respect for him and treat him more kindly. At the end of the film, Ahmed uses his writing ability to glorify Viking values. Ahmed similarly puts his ethnographic ability to work in service of the Vikings when they encounter the Wendol. The Vikings perceive the Wendol as a mysterious, supernatural threat so fearful that the Vikings dare not utter their name. In such a climate of irrationality, Ahmed must render the Wendol comprehensible. It is telling that, despite his relatively short exposure to the Wendol, Ahmed is the first to identify them as men, and Ahmed’s ability to treat the Wendol rationally provides the Vikings with a crucial piece of strategic data. Upon first arriving in Hrothgar’s kingdom,

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Buliwyf’s band visits the site of a recent Wendol attack, and one of the Vikings finds a carved stone image of a headless female body. The Viking derisively refers to it as “the mother of the Wendol” and discards it, but Ahmed, like a good ethnographer, retrieves the artifact, examines it closely, and keeps it. Later Ahmed provides a prophetic crone with the Wendol carving so that she can reveal the secret to their defeat. She informs the Vikings that they must kill the “mother of the Wendol” who “is the earth. Seek her in the earth.” Ahmed, recollecting the details of the Wendol disguise, solves the riddle: Ahmed: The claws. The headdresses. Bears. They think they are bears. They want us to think they are bears. Hey, how do you hunt a bear? Herger: Chase it down with dogs. What— Ahmed: How do you hunt a bear in winter? Herger: Go in his cave with spears. Ahmed: Where is a cave? Another Viking: It’s in the earth.

Following Ahmed’s suggestion, the Vikings seek the Wendol in a cave and soon locate their foe. In acknowledging Ahmed’s intellect as a useful and crucial element to the Viking quest, the film suggests that the Arab and Vikings can enter into a cultural exchange that is mutually beneficial. Indeed, in the context of this film, Ahmed represents a different sort of hero, one who contrasts with but nonetheless complements the fearless fighting ethos of the Vikings. Yet, while the Vikings make use of Ahmed’s abilities, exchange is not the right word for the dynamics between them. First, Ahmed’s ethnographic abilities ultimately serve not as a means of evaluating or critiquing the Vikings but rather as a set of skills that makes him serviceable to the Viking quest and thus enables his induction into the Viking band. Second, although Buliwyf shows interest in writing, he is first and foremost a warrior, and he is presented as a character in no need of alteration. Ahmed, in contrast, must undergo a significant transformation before he can emerge as a properly developed man. Manly Vikings and Feminine Terrors I have thus far considered the process by which Ahmed, the eastern ethnographer, is inducted into Viking culture; I now wish to consider what he gains from his interactions with the Vikings. On this point The 13th Warrior is clear: Ahmed gains manliness, which the film depicts in terms of bravery and martial ability. The Vikings of The 13th Warrior inculcate these values through deed and word: remarks such as “[h]urry to meet death before your place is taken,” “luck often enough will save a man, if his courage

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hold,” and “fear profits man nothing” pepper the film. The greatest exemplar of the Viking ethos is Buliwyf, who speaks little but fights well, defeating both the mother and lead warrior of the Wendol. At the beginning of The 13th Warrior, Ahmed, the Arab poet with lined eyes and brocaded clothing, is the antithesis of Viking manliness. As the film progresses, however, the peace-loving poet must learn to fight. The Vikings give Ahmed no choice in this matter: when Ahmed claims that he cannot lift a heavy sword, Herger, Ahmed’s closest Viking companion, drolly replies, “Grow stronger!” Similarly, when Hrothgar’s hall is on the verge of attack, the frightened Ahmed states, “I am not a warrior,” to which Herger responds, “Very soon you will be.” If Ahmed’s acquisition of the Viking language is the first step that marks his induction into the Northmen’s culture, then his competency at fighting is the second. Ahmed’s decent performance during the first battle with the Wendol inspires pleased Viking comments such as “Well, he didn’t run!” and “Even the Arab gutted one.” At this point Ahmed stops wearing Arab garb and adapts his clothing to the conventions of Viking masculinity. Yet Ahmed’s masculinity is still a work in progress; he whimpers when Olga, his brief love interest, checks his wounds. Olga comments, “That’s a woman’s sound.” Equally unmanly is Ahmed’s remark, “I think my nose is ruined,” to which Olga replies with typical Viking sentiment, “A small price.” That Ahmed is not essentially violent but must be inducted into violence by his Western companions is an interesting twist on film representations of Arabs, particularly terrorist films, which tend to equate violence and Arabness. The 13th Warrior initially inverts this pattern by contrasting the violent Vikings with the peaceful Ahmed. Yet the film ultimately swaps one stereotype regarding Arab cultures for another: instead of an irrational terrorist, Ahmed is effeminate. The Western tradition of associating Eastern cultures with effeminacy extends back to classical antiquity and continues in our own age, as the epigraph to this essay makes clear. Nor are these two stereotypes regarding Eastern cultures, violence and effeminacy, necessarily opposed. Western cultures associate Eastern violence with terrorism, attacks against civilians and women, and a disregard for traditional rules of military engagement; therefore Eastern combatants appear irrational, cowardly, and in a word, unmanly.16 In The 13th Warrior, the Arab Ahmed is spared any association with chaotic, unmanly violence first, because his violence is the result of his training by Western warriors, and second because the film provides another outlet for undesirable violence: the Wendol. Like modern-day terrorists, the Wendol appear in the eyes of their Western foes to be irrational, asocial, and nonhuman: early encounters between Buliwyf’s band and the Wendol suggest that the Wendol are bearlike monsters. Eaters of the Dead specifies that the Wendol are Neanderthals,

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and some details of The 13th Warrior seem to follow the novel: the Wendol live in caves, and the Wendol figurine that the Vikings find resembles the Venus of Willendorf. The Wendol are played, however, by human actors costumed and groomed to look “primitive.” This combined with their cannibalistic practices and strange rituals evokes stereotypes of non-Western natives who kill and eat the Westerners who cross their path.17 The violence of the Wendol, characterized by mutilation and cannibalism, both justifies Viking violence and distinguishes their noble, martial deeds from those of their primitive counterparts. Furthermore, it is in response to the Wendol atrocities that the timid Ahmed transforms himself into a fierce warrior. Ahmed’s first berserker outburst is inspired by his discovery that the Wendol are not monsters but human. “They are men,” he murmurs repeatedly before attacking. Later in the film, upon entering the Wendol lair and seeing the piles of bones of their victims, Ahmed reconsiders the Wendol identity: “I was wrong,” he whispers in horror, “these are not men.” Men who are not men—this is the solution The 13th Warrior offers to the identity of the Wendol, and it is also the solution offered to the cultural dynamics of the film. A people whose behavior falls so far outside the standards that all human communities supposedly share is more terrifying than any monster and therefore has the power to bind together people of different cultures and different historical eras. Thus Wendol violence renders “medieval” Vikings and an enlightened Arab the same, and the late twentieth-century film audience is likewise encouraged vicariously to join this band of brothers. Gender distinctions reinforce the cultural lines that the film seeks to draw: Ahmed, no longer effeminate, becomes a trusted member of Buliwyf’s band; conversely, the matriarchal Wendol society is increasingly associated with femininity. The film’s second oracular crone makes this association explicit through her interpretation of the woman-shaped Wendol figurine: “This is the mother of the Wen. She they revere. She is the will.” Thus the Wendol’s will to commit horrific acts is attributed to a feminine source. In the Wendol lair the Vikings discover another stone image of a headless female body, this time a towering statue that presides over a room full of human bones. The maternal statue with its exaggerated breasts reinforces the perversity of the Wendol; instead of associating the female body with fecundity, they associate it with death, and this statue insistently connects the violence and irrationality of the Wendol to the feminine. At this point in the film, Ahmed denies the Wendol humanity:“These are not men.” Given the presence of the female statue, Ahmed’s comment suggests both the inhumanity of the Wendol and their unmanliness insofar as they are associated with a feminized perversity. The fullest and final manifestation of such perversity occurs with the appearance of the Wendol mother herself. When Buliwyf discovers her in the Wendol caves, she is dirty, with matted hair and a live snake encircling

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her neck, crouching on the ground in a “primitive” posture. She attacks Buliwyf with a claw-like object dipped in poison—an underhanded and unmanly mode of combat. If the initially effeminate Ahmed represents one mode of the non-Western feminine in this film, then the Wendol mother represents another, and by closing with her gruesome image, The 13th Warrior suggests the consequences that could occur if a society fails to adopt Western masculinity. Ahmed’s final incorporation into the Viking brotherhood occurs after Buliwyf slays the Wendol matriarch but before the film’s final battle. In a gloomy scene Ahmed and the surviving members of the band prepare Hrothgar’s hopelessly outnumbered people for combat. Ahmed engages in his own preparation, sinking to the ground to pray in what is presumably intended to be a Muslim fashion. Yet this prayer is not the only one that he offers. At the last moment, the poisoned Buliwyf makes his way to the battlements, and, as the Wendol gather their troops for attack, Buliwyf utters the same Viking prayer that the girl sacrificed at the Viking king’s funeral earlier intoned. “Lo, there do I see my father,” Buliwyf begins. As he continues, the other Vikings join in one by one. Last to join is Ahmed, who, appropriately enough considering his own induction into Viking culture, joins in the prayer on the line, “They bid me take my place among them.” The contrast between this moment and the earlier moment in the film when this prayer appears is remarkable. In the scene of the Viking king’s funeral, this prayer, uttered by a girl on the verge of being sacrificed, symbolized all that was foreign and barbarous in Viking culture, and Ahmed’s shocked reaction reinforces this idea of the Viking as Other. At the end of the film, Ahmed is no longer a superior ethnographer but a full participant. He himself recognizes that his adventures with the Vikings have changed him, and the voiceover that closes the film specifies how. This voiceover begins as Ahmed leaves the Vikings to depart for his homeland and continues as the film shifts to a different scene of an older Ahmed writing in Arabic what appears to be the close of a book, which suggests that the voiceover is in fact the book’s final words. Ahmed states, “Praise be to Allah the merciful and compassionate. May his blessing be upon pagan men, who loved other gods, who shared their food, and shed their blood, that his servant, Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, might become a man and a useful servant of God” (my emphasis). What then to make of the film’s final implication that even an intellectual Arab from what was one of the medieval world’s most sophisticated cities is incomplete without the acquisition of Western manliness? First we can say that the film’s opening gesture of using a medieval setting to encourage a Western audience to reflect upon the sophistication of the Arab world and to identify with an Arab character is significantly revised: by identifying with the Arab Ahmed, the film audience is led to admire and endorse Western

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masculinity, which, in this film, is practically synonymous with Western violence. The film not only educates its Arab protagonist in the ways of Western manliness but also links the acquisition of Western gender roles to cultural development: Ahmed’s closing remarks imply that his newly acquired masculinity helps him contribute to his own Arab culture. Consequently, instead of opening up multiple possibilities for occupying the present and therefore, too, for being “modern,” The 13th Warrior suggests that only certain types of cultures, those that can be deemed masculine, can fully enter into a modern state. If there is exchange here, it follows rules similar to those governing late 1990s cultural exchange under globalization and free trade in which the West provides the model of modernity and development to be exported to the rest of the world. Given the film’s progressively narrower construction of what counts as culture, it is fitting that the closing shot of Ahmed writing retrospectively suggests that the entire plot of The 13th Warrior was actually his promised written tribute to Buliwyf. Western masculinity, not intercultural exchange, is indeed the true subject of the film. Notes 1. Hank was interviewed on the following radio program: “I’m From the Private Sector and I’m Here to Help,” interview by Nancy Updike, from the series This American Life, National Public Radio, episode 266, originally broadcast June 4, 2004. Interview accessed at http://www.thislife.org. 2. Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001), p. 1. 3. Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, p. 550. 4. I use the term “Eastern” as opposed to “Arab” because two of the characters, Saladin of King Richard and the Crusaders and Azeem of Robin Hood, might not be considered Arab, depending on one’s definition of the term. The historical Saladin was of Kurdish descent. Azeem of Robin Hood is a Moor. Shaheen defines “Arab” as “the 265 million people who reside in, and the many more millions around the world who are from, the twentytwo Arab states,” according to which definition both a Kurd and a Moor could be referred to as Arab (Reel Bad Arabs, p. 2). Shaheen’s “Arab states,” however, were first codified in 1945 with the establishment of the Arab League. Therefore who counts as an Arab in a Western film of the twentieth century set in the Middle Ages is debatable. 5. Many comments can be found attesting to the linkage of terrorism and the medieval in the post-9/11 American mindset. To give a few examples, shortly after September 11 U.S. Senator Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) commented: “The Taliban were and are medieval in their words, in their world view, and their religious view” (“Guest Commentary: September 18, 2001: Was U.S. Aiding the Taliban?” PoliticsOL, http://www. politicsol.com/guest-commentaries/2001-09-18.html). John F. Burns has similarly claimed that “Saddam Hussein, in his twenty-three years in power,

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

plunged this country [Iraq] into a bloodbath of medieval proportions” (“The World: How Many People Has Hussein Killed?” New York Times, January 26, 2003). All references to the film are to The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan (Touchstone Pictures, 1999). Paul Halsall, “Medieval History in the Movies,” Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/medfilms.html#vikings. Hugh Magennis also reviews the film favorably in “Michael Crichton, Ibn Fadlan, Fantasy Cinema: Beowulf at the Movies,” Old English Newsletter 35 (2001): 34–38. John M. Ganim comments that he views both The 13th Warrior and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves “as critical to postmodern orientalism and to the relation of heroism to advanced and refined civilization” (“The Hero in the Classroom,” The Medieval Hero on Screen ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray [ Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2004], p. 243). The reviews of professional movie critics are more severe. Stephen Holden refers to the film as “a slaughter-by-numbers swashbuckler” (“ ‘The 13th Warrior’: Tearing Off a Head or Two? What Fun!” [New York Times, August 27, 1999]). Roger Ebert similarly comments, “To extract the story from the endless scenes of action and carnage is more effort than it’s worth” (“The 13th Warrior,” Chicago Sun Times, August 27, 1999). In a more positive vein, Stephen Humphries lists The 13th Warrior as one of ten films “that have portrayed Islamic characters that defy stereotypes” (“Islam in the Movies,” Christian Science Monitor, September 26, 2001). Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976, repr. 1992). Ahmed Ibn Fadlan was a historical personage. His Risala, a tenth-century account of Fadlan’s travels including descriptions of the Rus, a people of Swedish origins, provides the imaginative framework for Crichton’s novel. John C. Eisele, “The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern,” Cinema Journal 41 (2002): 68–94. Subsequently cited parenthetically. True Lies, directed by James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox, 1994); The Siege, directed by Edward Zwick (Twentieth Century Fox, 1998). Ella Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,” Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, eds., Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 27. Ella Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire,” pp. 27–28. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, eds., Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 90–104. Shohat writes, “Not only has the Western imaginary metaphorically rendered the colonized land as a female to be saved from her environ/mental disorder, it has also projected rather more literal narratives of rescue, specifically of Western and non-Western women.. . .The figure of the Arab

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assassin/rapist, like that of the African cannibal, helps produce the narrative and ideological role of the Western liberator as integral to the colonial rescue fantasy” (“Gender and Culture of Empire,” p. 39). 15. Said associates the rise of Orientalism with the rise of western imperialism and colonialism around the eighteenth century (Orientalism [New York: Vintage, 1979], p. 123). 16. Along these lines, Lieutenant General James Mattis remarks: “You go into Afghanistan. You got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. . .you know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway” (Quoted in Patricia J. Williams, “Power and the Word,” The Nation, February 28, 2005, p. 10). 17. Magennis also makes this point in “Michael Crichton, Ibn Fadlan, Fantasy Cinema,” p. 36.

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CHAPTER 6 MISSION HISTORICAL, OR “[T]HERE WERE A HELL OF A LOT OF KNIGHTS”: ETHNICITY AND ALTERITY IN JERRY BRUCKHEIMER’S KING ARTHUR Caroline Jewers

A round table? What sort of evil is this?1

fter seeing Jerry Bruckheimer’s 2004 King Arthur, many irreverent subtitles spring to mind: “101 Sarmatians,” “The Last of the Sarmatians,” “All Woads Lead to Rome,” and, of course, “Bend It Like Guinevere,” to name but a few. But in the following excursus, I would like to offer with less levity an exploration of the film’s construction of the Middle Ages, focusing on the complexities of portraying the diverse ethnic groups of the period. I argue that although this latest recreation of the matter of Britain sets out to portray the legendary Arthur in something like an accurate reconstruction of the fifth century in which he probably lived, these efforts to create an authentic vehicle for his story run counter to the ideological thrust of the film, which reveals at every turn that it is the product of twenty-first century trans-Atlantic cultural politics. The fundamental questions the film poses concern identity, and how an individual constructs a sense of self, and of meaning: where do we belong, what is our relationship to place, to our culture, to nation, and to belief? Is there destiny, and what of free will? The search for answers triangulates Arthur with transfigured notions of homeland and freedom and has him develop a renewed sense of what the battle for them means: he is a very modern subject, poised between ideology and reality, his struggle thrown into relief against the violent conflict of the fifth century, and the forging of a new

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idea of what being a Briton means in the wake of empire. Because of the layering of the contemporary and medieval, my analysis of necessity entails addressing the unwitting presence and, on occasion, deliberate—and even seemingly strategic—use of anachronism, since it is the film’s modern vision of ethnicity that delineates how the peoples of the fifth century are portrayed. The film is directed by Antoine Fuqua, whose credits include Training Day (2001) and Tears of the Sun (2003). Writer David Franzoni, who worked on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), had some assistance from The Alamo’s (2004) John Lee Hancock in bringing this new vision of Arthur to the screen. This conceptual pedigree becomes clear as the film unfolds. Its central narrative premise is the controversial theory—first mooted by Kemp Malone with casual panache and deliberate provocation in the 1920s, and then fleshed out with great earnestness by C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor in their book From Scythia to Camelot—that Arthur was Lucius Artorius Castus.2 In King Arthur, this Romano-British cavalry officer mans a vital section of defenses near Hadrian’s Wall (close to modern Ribchester) with a band of Sarmatian horsemen hailing from an idealized prelapsarian warrior culture that retains all of the family values and integrity that imperial Rome has apparently lost. The film underscores this ideological “nature versus culture” dialogue between an ecologically sound, spontaneous, organic knighthood and an industrialized, overprocessed Roman military code. In book and film, this second-century Castus morphs into a more familiar and archetypal Riothamus/Ambrosius Aurelianus leaderfigure of the fifth-century sort, and so a hero is reborn, initially as or even more Roman than before—determined to resolve his own troubled ethnic identity and forge the disparate post-Roman, non-Roman, and non-Saxon peoples into a nation whose commonalities outnumber their differences.3 Of course, the legendary Arthur became synonymous with the expression of nationalistic ideals. Whether a fifth-century Arthur had quite that breadth of vision, we cannot know: but in any case, the underlying philosophy in Fuqua’s film is one of precocious e pluribus unum, the story of underdog groups uniting against a common unprincipled foe, and simultaneously throwing off the yoke of empire, rather more in the style of colonial and postcolonial America, in order to forge a brave, new world. In Fuqua’s rescripting, Arthur (Clive Owen) is primarily a Roman with a troubled British streak, whose secondary cultural context is exotically Sarmatian rather than directly Celtic. This film is original in foregrounding a Sarmatian element and causes us to reflect on the idea of ethnic identity, its positive and negative consequences, and how mediating it constitutes a polarizing and distorting factor undermining the film’s determination to reenvision Arthur. In mapping him as a universal figure, somewhere

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between Roman and Briton, with that Sarmatian buffer in between, a sense of distancing results that estranges Arthur both from history and the legend. Reconfiguring national/ethnic boundaries alienates and anachronizes Arthur, rendering him such a specific yet universal figure that the very act of demystification risks effacing the man and the myth. As a consequence, what appears to restore and reveal him ironically obscures both hero and legend. The story opens as the Roman Empire falls. From the first formulaic, panoramic images of maps bursting into flames as the Empire waxes and then wanes, we are meant to see Rome as ideologically burnt out, an imposing, hegemonic state engrossed by its own survival and heedless of the economic and political vulnerability of its subjects and allies, something like the disquieting relationship of the first and third worlds in our own times. Attention then turns to Sarmatia and the story of a subdued people rendering unto Caesar their adolescent sons for military service as cavalrymen. These first few minutes, seen first through a wide-angled, and then more narrowly focused distorting lens that lends Sarmatia an exaggerated importance, establishes the pattern of selective historical sampling and rewriting that characterize this King Arthur. The film has other compelling and less compelling components—particularly the aforementioned striking use of anachronism, all too often present in historical movies. Anachronistic elements inevitably seep into modern historical films, as they are by definition anachronistic: the format and technology, the needs of narrative with its inevitable compression, the semiotic exigencies of providing verbal and visual interpretations for the audience—all of these factors potentially hinder as they help convey a sense of the past. Films are made and modified to fit a screen such that even in cinemascope their scope is perforce limited. Anachronism can be not a sin of omission, but commission; it can be intentional and have a positive, shorthand function for the audience, but like the longswords wielded by so many heroes, it also has a potentially trenchant double edge that can cut away at the very essence of a film’s conceptual integrity. Most often, it expresses itself as a sense of incongruity that rips the spectator from his engagement with the narrative, refusing to allow the vital suspension of disbelief to take place. It also reveals itself in lackluster dialogue that does not match the desired décor and atmosphere. Fuqua’s King Arthur is no exception, as when one of the knights asks Tristan how he manages to throw a knife dead-center, to which his artful reply is “I aim for the middle.” Bors, alert to the encroaching enemy army, declares, “The Saxons are so close behind, my arse is hurting.” Indeed, there is a consistent posterior-fixated register reserved for non-Romans and light moments, about which enough is perhaps now said. Perhaps because epic storytelling demands a wide-angled approach to narrative, and thus perhaps less time for the construction of fully

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three-dimensional characters, it is these smaller-scaled moments that are the making and breaking of historical film, and in this version, the script does not allow them to work. In attempting to recreate Arthur, and in doing justice to the Sarmatian theory, as David Franzoni states was the aim, we see the most heavily anachronized Arthur yet.4 Despite the production’s scrupulousness—the fabulous section of Hadrian’s Wall, for example—there are jangling elements that should cause us to ponder, even though, as John Matthews has said, this is “an entertainment, rather than a documentary.”5 The film also declares itself to be “the untold story behind the legend,” and it is rarely possible to have it both ways. The film should either soften historical claims or put up with critique of the inaccuracies that detract from its effectiveness. Some of these elements are tinged with modern references: Arthur learns at one point that the Saxons have armor-piercing arrows (medieval “cop killers”—perhaps a tribute to Fuqua’s Gangsta’s Paradise video?), and Merlin’s Woads use barbed wire. In a piece of modern, wisecracking dialogue that invites discussion of the film’s treatment of gender issues, Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd) says to a girl-power Guinevere (Keira Knightley): “There’s a large army of lonely men out there,” to which she replies, “Don’t worry, I won’t let them rape you!”6 Some view such intrusions like these as a direct and programmatic attempt to convey a sense of remote, dangerous times for a modern audience. For others, the registral intrusion provides more thin ice for the characters and the film. One should frame the question of King Arthur’s approach to ethnicity in the light of comments made by Fuqua and the film’s historical adviser, John Matthews, regarding this new Arthurian vision. Popular culture’s fascination with celluloid history never allows it to tire of imbuing medieval myth with the imprimatur of the Zeitgeist: the last century provides a rich dialogism between cinematic past and political present, and the distortions of this celluloid mirror are as fascinating as they are legion. Take Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), pulling off the impossible feat of making a feudal prince look like a communist son of the soil, standing in solidarity with the proletariat against square-headed Teutonic knights. Released when Soviet fear of German fascism was at its height, withdrawn the following year after the Non-Aggression Pact, it only flickered again in gloriously ideological black and white in 1941. Kevin Harty is not alone in comparing the ice battle in King Arthur and in Eisenstein’s epic.7 As effective as the new version is, it cannot hold a candle, or even an oversized battle helmet (inspired in Eisenstein’s film by the fabulous illustrations of the early fourteenthcentury German Codex Manesse), to its predecessor. The latest King Arthur follows in this politicizing tradition, but in a jaded, more postcolonial way. John Matthews advertises the integrity of the

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production: “Here was no light-hearted, entertainment-first-historicalaccuracy-afterwards approach. Rather, I found everyone. . .very determined to do justice to the Arthurian legends.”8 The director and producers had already decided to pursue the Sarmatian theory, and Matthews evidently relishes the opportunity to validate this approach, one with which many still take strenuous issue.9 First, Kemp Malone’s historical Artorius locates him in the secondcentury A.D. Malone says that “we know of only one British Artorius, and we know of only one Arthur. It calls for no great exercise of fancy, then, to conflate the two.”10 The flaw in this Ockhamist nominalism is its assumption that we know of all possible Artorius-es: deducing full knowledge from the tatters of history is as obvious as it is risky. Malone dismisses the gap in time between the second-century and fifth-century Saxon invasions by observing that “if in later centuries a legend actually developed about Artorius, it is easy to see how the wild Saxons. . .might take the place of the wild tribes of the second century, enemies too remote to interest the legend-makers of the new day.”11 True, the fifth century knew the menace of both Saxon and Pict, but surely closer to the time, and even after, people knew how to distinguish them. Malone’s reductive reading becomes a sandy foundation on which other theories have been built. Picts, Saxons, it is all the same thing: those barbarian peoples look so alike! The film also thrusts Arthur into the fifth century, a necessary move if Fuqua and Franzoni want Arthur to follow Pelagius (fl. 380–418) and thus construct a moral dilemma for him, since his free will dominated personal philosophy/liberation theology is entirely informed by this particular brand of heretical Christian Stoicism. However, it is still too early for the major mid-century Saxon invasions.12 Jumping/compressing centuries results in a historical bifocalism, with the imperial outlook and Romanitas of the second century set alongside the decay, chaos, and change of the fifth. The presence of Sarmatian cavalry in the fifth century is also late. Archaeological evidence shows them arriving in Ribchester (south of Hadrian’s Wall, rather than on it), then Bremetenacum Veteranorum, around 175 AD, when they probably replaced units of Spanish soldiers from the Astures.13 No doubt they or their descendants stayed on, perhaps as late as the fourth century, when times were turbulent near the borders, and left some local legacy there beyond inscriptions and tablets, but even so we have little concrete evidence—even if they were there in strength, and not subject to the cultural dilution of the hybrid, diverse borderlands—to support the thesis that they are at the undiluted heart of the Arthurian legend.14 There may be a limit to what we can construe from the extant historical record. The importance the film lends to Sarmatia and its knightly diaspora weakens instead of strengthens our understanding of the Romano-British and Celtic

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world and Arthur’s connection to it, seen as it is from the standpoint of displaced characters whose worldview is one of disconnected, rootless alterity. The Sarmatians have the effect of alienating Arthur from the context in which most of us place him, and are part of the film’s agenda to make him a more universal figure. The connection is supposed to help Arthur bridge the divide between his Romanity and his humanity by loosening his adherence to the rule of order, and giving him a transcendent more literally organic comitatus bond that links him with a different concept of homeland and freedom, so he can overcome his cultural estrangement and experience a rapprochement with his other, and more authentic, self. By the fifth century there was already a heavy Germanic presence in Britain, some of it at the behest of Rome, such that there would have been Germans on the Wall guarding parts of it, and others resident as mercenaries for Rome or at the invitation of tribal factions, as well as regular pillaging and settling—creating not a simple us-and-them situation, but complex mutable networks evolving in an ever-changing landscape of local and regional politics. Archaeological evidence, place names, coin hoards, and chronicles attest to the diverse ethnic map of the late Empire, and the film’s minimalist view of what the settlement patterns of Britain meant is too simplistic. Culturally polarized Romans and Britons/Celts are still looking for their divergent ethnic roots, and there is pan-Celtic Woad rage that passes over differences between any/all tribes of Britons and Picts (“native fighters from the north”), eliminating the many shades of difference and the many territorial frictions those categories implied. The even more unkempt Saxons, using a Blitzkrieg style of warfare, constitute a swaggering war machine in premature search for extra Lebensraum, jealous of their racial purity, and in no mood to “water down their blood,” made clear when the Saxon leader Cerdic, motivated not by compassion but disgust, stops the rape of a Woad woman, only to kill her instead. Perhaps they are so moody because they are almost completely lacking in self-irony, and Stellan Skarsgård stumbles about moodily as if he is coming off a three-day alcoholic binge. Even so, father and son Cerdic and Cynric are deliciously bad, and perfect uncivilized adversaries for the more urbane Arthur. Why are they invading from the far North? What would be the advantage of landing north of Hadrian’s Wall and having to cross it before going anywhere else? These somewhat enigmatic Saxons are portrayed as outsiders and intruders, when the reality surely was that in spite of undoubted cultural resistance the Germanic presence on and south of the Wall was already much heavier, whether in the form of uneasy allies, settlers, or foes. Waves of conquest and settlement were still to come in the fifth century—but it is important to remember that the idea of nation, and of regional identity, was a complex proposition. Fuqua’s film minimizes the intricate network

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of ethnic groups in order to present a reduced model accentuating a cultural dialogism of the most basic and Manichean kind to better fuel the minimalist inner and outer conflict he seeks to represent through Arthur’s story. And equally illustrative of this, we find the homesick Sarmatian “band of brothers” pining for the Steppes and clinging to the fringes of a dubious empire, after their not-so-Easy Company, fifteen-year tour of duty. With Arthur, they form a kind of fifth-century Magnificent Seven, and here the film’s characterization of well-known stock figures of French romance is deliberately provocative in the imaginative way they are reassigned: more Southend than Sarmatia, Bors (Ray Winstone), a chaste third-in-line to the Grail in the Queste del Saint Graal, is a lovable womanizer proud of all his equipment, and not just the military kind. Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen) becomes a more exotic, almost Samurai figure, rather like a cross between Jet Li and Keanu Reeves’s Neo in The Matrix; Gawain ( Joel Edgerton) resembles a scruffy biker; Dagonet (Ray Stevenson) wields a distinctive axe and is a somber variant of the character of the same name first appearing in the French Vulgate cycle, then in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, where he is Arthur’s fool; and Galahad (Hugh Dancy), former grail hero, comes across as a combination of savage (beard) and civilized (short hair, and a dislike of gratuitous killing). They are more down-to-earth knights, with none of the romantic luster of later romances. Along these lines, Lancelot, the very essence of a Sarmatian knight and the embodiment of the eternal code of chivalry, has more swashbuckling dash as well as a handy fighting technique with two swords, and expires before he can do more than admire Guinevere from afar. We first discover Lancelot as a boy living in a yurt out on the Steppes, a land without boundaries, called up to the army as part of a tribute his people must yield to repressive Rome. His voice provides the framing narration of the film, as witness to his boyhood and origins at the beginning, and voicetrack to his own afterlife, as he evokes the souls of fallen knights who have been transformed with him into horses at the end. From the yurts of Sarmatia, we cut to the Wall and a split-second vision of the boys seeing each other for the first time, and then fifteen years later Lancelot and Arthur are grown-up comrades-in-arms, however much their views of the world and cultures differ. War-weary and reflective, shaved and well groomed, Arthur aspires to Roman peace and civilization, while a frustrated, bearded, and visibly more barbarian Lancelot perceives the world as a perpetual battlefield, a classic example of the two complementary sides of the heroic coin, sapientia et fortitudo. Lancelot the Sarmatian represents fierce, instinctive loyalty to one’s culture in all its familiarity and alterity, and the model that Arthur must follow as he embraces his destiny, and nature must win over culture. As the narrating voice, Lancelot also stands for the eternal and timeless code of the

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warrior, triumphant in death as in life. The visual rendering of the heroic code is one of the more successful parts of the film: it is seen in the mix of long, medium, and close-up shots of battle, with fast-paced action, cutting, and editing, along with slower motion (reminiscent of Michael Mann’s 1992 Last of the Mohicans) that emphasizes each stroke of the sword, and the intensity of both general melee and single combat; there is also the lingering focus on the heroic body in motion, on the agony of each wound, and on each reaction to loss (Arthur has at least two scenes that echo the ubi sunt topos so beloved of epic). Such diegetic shots are enhanced by the use of camera angles: high-angle shots that give a wide perspective on the action and a bird’s eye view, while the low-angle shots, and particularly those of Arthur, have the effect of aggrandizing him in a literal way that reinforces his narrative superiority as the character whom we are supposed to look up to, and with whom we are meant to be primarily involved. The film concentrates on the interface between Arthur, the exigencies of the heroic code, and the other main characters. Close-ups are meant to convey the conflict or closeness and understanding that binds them, and while there is little room in this film for deep character development, the lingering closeup is used to convey a character’s depth of field, his/her inner life, and the complicity or opposition to others. A good example of this would be the relationship between Arthur and Guinevere, whose exchanges are characterized by heavy use of eyeline matching, reverse angles, and head shots. King Arthur uses conventional techniques to render the conventions of epic, and there is a coherence in the way that this is achieved in visual terms. However, when it comes to narrative, questions regarding continuity and logic linger: why must the Sarmatian knights wait for discharge papers and safe conduct just as the Romans are pulling up stakes and abandoning their outer colonies? Why have they had no reinforcements for fifteen years, such that all but a few sitting at the capacious Round Table have died? And are there not still other parts of the defenses and Wall left manned? Why has a bishop replaced the Roman high command? Why does Bishop Germanus consider a round table with no head a challenge to authority, rather than, say, a good choice of furnishing in a big, square hall? Assuredly, we know comparatively little about this period and can only conjecture a state of decay, a loss of infrastructure, and confusion, yet in narrative as well as historical terms, there are loose ends and a few non sequiturs. Fuqua’s aim is to isolate the Sarmatians from everything and everybody, and to underline the complete sense of cultural isolation they and most other characters in the film experience. They are part of a category of “not belonging,” as is Arthur; in contrast, the only ones with a true connection to their ethnic identity and the land are the ambiguously named Woads.

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As well as the polarizing of ethnic identities and the blurring of other historical lines, it is also interesting how the film conflates some of the features of later feudalism into the hierarchy of the Roman army. It is no great stretch from cavalry officer to knight, but in addition, Camelot is calqued onto the garrison as a fortress hall, with Arthur as a hereditary commander of cavalry (presumably how the film accounts for the second- to fifthcentury issue), leading his men until he becomes king of united Britons, crowned by Merlin, who conveniently announces that Britain needs a dux bellorum. N. J. Higham summarizes succinctly the Romanity and Britishness of the late Roman Empire: The Brittani were rediscovering themselves, therefore, as a sub-Roman people defined by a common colonial history, common occupation of space, elite secular and clerical networks which spanned much at last of the old diocese, and some degree of common, Christian, culture and language—be it bilingual in Latin and British. This sense of ethnicity was presumably inclusive of many residents in Britain whose antecedents were from elsewhere. . .and so it should be thought of as situationally constructed.15

Not really so different from postcolonial Britain today, where diverse postimperial cultures are engaged in the challenging process of analyzing what Britishness means. So what of Arthur and the Sarmatians? Littleton and Malcor’s book is filled with suggestive material purporting to settle the question of the origin of such familiar objects as the Round Table, Excalibur, the dragon banner, the Lady of the Lake, the Grail, the sword in the stone, and give radical genealogies for Lancelot, Arthur, and King Ban. This period spawns many horse-obsessed warrior cultures, and there are plenty of emblematic dragons, and probably round tables as daring alternatives to square ones. But are we dealing with genealogy here, or with polysemy and coincidence? Despite the universals of the Arthurian myth, the differences seem more important than these putative samenesses. The Sarmatian theory hypothesizes a transmission of folkloric elements via a huge cast of cultures from the Steppes to northeast Iran. It is more dizzyingly complex than Arthur’s Celtic roots and requires more contortions in transmission than hitherto seen in order to derive familiar household names from these alternative sources. Littleton’s reading of the French material is creative, but it will take more to convince hardcore Arthurians to deduce Lancelot from Alanus à Lot. But after all, the thrust behind the book is comparative Indo-European anthropology, and those who embrace this kind of theory and develop even more exotic transcultural ones (like Graham Anderson) are universalizers vested in globalizing myth, as are Fuqua, Franzoni, and Bruckheimer.16 Theirs is a flesh-and-blood Arthur

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Figure 6.1 Guinevere (Keira Knightley) as Xena and Madonna morphed Source: From King Arthur (USA, Antoine Fuqua, 2004).

before the Camelot years, although the trite final scene heralds them, when, as Kevin Harty bemoans, a sadly conformist Guinevere marries Arthur, with her father Merlin officiating, in the kind of kitschfest that derails much of what her character builds up (figure 6.1).17 Guinevere survives imprisonment and torture at the hands of Marcus Honorius, battles clad in a kind of leather Jean-Paul Gaultier outfit still not practical for a stay in Scotland, endures a series of ridiculous gowns and freezing sponge baths, and takes charge of the scene when she has her energetic way with Arthur, only to end as white-frocked cliché. Merlin is no longer a sorcerer, but a politically active druid engaged in bringing about a judicious regime change, with all the brooding menace of Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s Tim the Enchanter. Guinevere’s value is to help Arthur and the viewer discover his identity and to catalyze his change from brooding, maverick Romano-British commander to brooding, maverick British warlord. She calls him the “famous Briton who kills his own people,” reminds him that their peoples are the same, and inspires him to fight for a higher purpose. Challenging the ethnic identity of others, as Guinevere does, displaces the weather as the favored topic of conversation among the film’s characters, and the mode in which the matter is discussed is always frictional and oppositional—never an issue of compromise or hybridity. This is rather like the film’s visual separation of primary colors: notice the distinct use of red and yellow versus blue and green in most scenes in the film, balancing and contrasting cool and warm tones and creating a strong sense of spectrum. These warmer colors are often associated with battle and violence, and the cooler ones with the Woads and nature. Even the love scene between Arthur and Guinevere, which is surely meant to generate a little onscreen heat, is shot in subdued blue shadow. On the

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subject of color, we should also note the suitably atmospheric way in which Fuqua paints the sky: it is often brooding and cloudy, heavy with snow and danger, or filled with pitch-black smoke during battle scenes, where it throws the metallic grey of armor and sword into almost three-dimensional relief. The land itself is often white and frozen or on fire, and there is a clear delineation between places of settlement (the Wall, its garrison) and the wildness of the land, with its refusal of geometry and taming—clearly, even the landscape has to be a place of dialectic extremes. This is a story imagined and told using filters and mise-en-scène that intensify the characters and story, and while they lend a sense of polarization that echoes the narrative, sometimes with the secondary effect of making artificial what they seek to render more vivid. Gawain defines the Woads as British rebels who hate Rome: Galahad as “men who want their country back,” and this is the essence of Arthur’s dilemma, as he reassesses the distinction between insurgent and freedom fighter. From the very beginning he is much more a universal soldier: here is an Arthur who transcends national boundaries to embody a troubled, modern subject. Simply put, Arthur is suffering from postcolonial stress disorder: Who is he? A lover of a sort of civilized pax romana, or a more earthy Brit who wants to walk on the wild side? Additionally, he has been associating with all those pagan, maverick Sarmatians. Can he overcome the loss of his mother by embracing his motherland?18 Can Arthur cast off Rome, whose ideals have been stepfather to him (along with Pelagius) since his father died and left him only Excalibur? He is clearly an idealizing democrat who has identified with the positive aspects of imperial ideology, only to find himself disillusioned by a Roman version of the industrial-military complex and the compromised imperatives of politicized Christianity. Embracing a philosophy of free will and chivalric individualism, he confronts his inner Briton as a result of having to carry out a last unsavory “special ops” missions first to protect Bishop Germanus and then to rescue the pope’s godson and future replacement Alecto, the son of a Roman noble who has a large estate north of Hadrian’s Wall. In doing so, he must evacuate the family of the nasty landowner Marius Honorius, who is the worst kind of colonial bully, modeled on the bad plantation owner of the Deep South—only this is the Deep North, and the blacks are depicted as Pictish Celts, including poor Guinevere, who has suffered torture at the hands of her master. Perhaps Fuqua and Franzoni deliberately try to connect the audience to colonial Britain via the evocation of readily identifiable modern race problems—or perhaps this is symptomatic of the fact that from our perspective the easiest, but not always the most accurate, way of reconfiguring the past is to make it an image of the present: as a future leader of his people, Arthur seems to bear the ideological weight of two

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thousand years of history. King Arthur portrays white-on-white (perhaps more accurately, white-on-blue) repression in white-on-black terms. Moreover, Kevin Harty is right to signal the connection between this film and Fuqua’s previous war movie, as there are other ways that King Arthur recalls Tears of the Sun, which features an intervention by Bruce Willis’s character in an environment where Africans repress other Africans. Arthur’s knights will similarly try to preserve a refugee column from certain attack, and they as hunters become the hunted, until they find a place to make their final seven-samurai style stand—not in the African jungle, but first on the frozen lake and then at Badon Hill, a sort of National Trust version of the Alamo. In interviews, Jerry Bruckheimer, Keira Knightley, and Clive Owen all get it wrong when they talk about how the English are facing down the Saxons at this period. Keira Knightley has claimed that all the English were Picts.19 Frank Thompson’s tie-in novel, based on Franzoni’s script, has some of the same kind of errors: when Arthur tells the knights that they are going to head out on a suicide mission, they look at him as “if he had been speaking French.”20 Their puzzlement is natural, as French would not exist for another four hundred years. Best of all, the afterword to the novelized version reveals the following: “The victory of Arthur at Badon Hill was so complete and so devastating that the Saxon army retreated forever from Britain,” an unexpected surprise for anyone reading his book or this chapter in good old Anglo-Saxon English.21 Looking back through a badly distorting lens is one side of anachronism, one that leads to a misrepresentation of people and complex cultures as they were. The other involves using the foreshadowing kinds of anachronism that layer the basic material too heavily with modernity. Globalizing the Arthurian myth and taking him beyond the borders of Britannia has perhaps the analogous effect that spinning hundreds of romances in various cultures did in the later Middle Ages, but also serves to erase the specific figure that the film tries to construct. Writing post-Gladiator, David Franzoni says he had the fall of Saigon in mind when he wrote the script: Merlin becomes a kind of Ho Chi Minh, Arthur has one more raid into Viet-Cong territory.22 He has likened Arthur to a GI engaged in a guerrilla war, and in universalizing Arthur, he uses him primarily as a vehicle for contemporary issues. This film portrays the effects of crumbling imperial ideology on the moral order, shows fear of chaos, and foregrounds the uncertain individual struggle to find purpose. It is also about the relationship of the individual to the collective: Franzoni calls Arthur the national leader of the world, a George Washington and a Leonides, and wants to honor what he sees as an underrated hypothesis about his

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identity.23 In the same interview he sums up his view of their history: Now of course we know about Marcus Aurelius defeating the Sarmatians and sending them over to Britain. That was the part that interested me, but it was reading Ovid, the Roman poet, how when he was exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus, lived right next door to the same tribe from which our Sarmatians evolved. It was like some Truman Capote from Rome living next to the Hell’s Angels and describing in exquisite detail how horrible it was. So you had this wonderful irony—that these gallant, polished knights, who were cruising round Britain solving inscrutable mysteries and rescuing bored Beverly Hills housewives, were actually descended from the Hell’s Angels!24

One barely knows where to begin with this statement, it is so truly awful. Ovid’s much earlier proximity to the Sarmatians/Scythians (and thus a juxtaposition between civilized and “barbarian”) seems remote from the fifthcentury frame, and converting the polished knights of legend, or even the “real” fifth-century fighters, into a Hell’s Angels chapter obscures the film’s purpose, as well as doing injustice to Arthur and what the legends subsequently created in his image. Every reference makes the knights the product of twenty-first century American attitudes, using a “pick-and-mix” approach to the historical record to serve much more contemporary ideological and narrative ends. What of Arthur’s Celtic heritage, and the French legends in all of this? Perhaps the French knights are now freedom knights! In making them relate to our own times, Franzoni has a point. But in reinventing them and restyling them, he has grown no closer, I think, to the elusive figures that Arthur and his knights were, if they existed. As Guinevere and Arthur sit by his father’s burial mound, Arthur states that it is a family tradition to die in battle. Guinevere replies, as if prescient of what was to happen to the Arthurian legend, “You and I are not the polite people that live in poems.” Perhaps indeed they were not—but polite people in poems are certainly what they became, and there is still room for that story to be translated successfully to the cinema, for there is more truth in that fiction than in most attempts to date to discover the “real” Arthur and demystify the myth. In finding, as Franzoni describes, a GI experience, with knights who are “strangers in a strange land, killing to stay alive and hating doing it,” he has really given us something quite different, and something that smacks of now and not necessarily then.25 He claims that any similarity to the Iraq war is purely coincidental, as he wrote the script before it broke out, and yet that does not prevent this movie from being sui temporis regarding reflection on the nature of empire—as is The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the final panel in the Star Wars series, Revenge of the Sith. How unlike the United Nations Arthur of First Knight, this tired postcolonial Arthur, waiting to transition into something, and

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someone else, who cannot escape his nation-building destiny. Poised between cultures and conflicting systems of belief, we relate to him on a universal level, but we are still far from the “real” Arthur, and Clive Owen’s character seems somewhat lost in this translation. This is an Arthur for the mid-Atlantic twenty-first century—all about Jerry Bruckheimer’s vision of history, one that understands the reuniting of the British tribes in terms of e pluribus unum, imbued with the values of contemporary America—a country that too forged itself on the corrupt fringe of empire, and from the fusion of different peoples who redefined what homeland meant. Look at the ideology behind National Treasure (2004), where Nicholas Cage steals the Declaration of Independence in order to access a treasure map leading to a storehouse of world history, sublimated into museum-loads of ancient artifacts. What are we to make of world cultural history, presented as a subset of U.S. history? At the heart of Fuqua and Bruckheimer’s Arthurian vision is a very much similar American sense of manifest destiny, made clear when Lancelot (who wants his ashes cast into “a strong East wind” that will take them home), describes Sarmatia as “oceans of grass, from horizon to horizon, further than you can ride . . . the sky—bigger than you can imagine. No boundaries,” a description that then makes itself synonymous with freedom, destiny, and self-determination. “Some would call that freedom,” retorts Guinevere. Indeed, this overworked word and the doctrine it represents permeate the film: Arthur defines Rome as “one sacred place to make mankind free.” Pelagius’s code of the miles Christi emphasizes that free will, the wild imperial frontier, like the American West, is “the last outpost of freedom.” Then there is Arthur’s battle address: “Knights, the gift of freedom is yours by right, but the home we seek resides not in some distant land, it’s in us, and in our actions on this day. If this is our destiny, then so be it. But let history remember that as free men we chose to make it so.” King Arthur examines notions of freedom, identity, and home, erases the differences between peoples to create a strong vision of a new order: it does so by linking freedom and identity, and by making the notion of home an abstract concept pendant to it, something rooted in a sense of place, but first in a sense of self-determination. Its treatment of fifth-century peoples is inaccurate: clearly they have been pressed into service for another purpose. This works against the historical authenticity of the film, as it articulates the importance of ethnicity to deemphasize it later, and perhaps fittingly, as the flaming arrows shoot out to sea at Arthur’s clifftop wedding/coronation, the assembled new Britons look hopefully across the Atlantic.26 Notes 1. Horton, Bishop Germanus’s assistant, to Jols, who is Arthur’s, in Antoine Fuqua and Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur (Touchstone Pictures, 2004).

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2. Kemp Malone, “Artorius,” Modern Philology 22.4 (1925): 367–74, and C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor, 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, 2000). 3. Riothamus and Ambrosius are both shadowy historical figures mentioned by chroniclers, and often cited as prototypes/substitutes for Arthur. Ambrosius Aurelianus was, as Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe summarize, “[t]he only fifth-century Briton whom Gildas [the chronicler] names, and one of the few at any time whom he singles out for praise. Described as a Roman, a word probably implying a pro-imperial stance, Ambrosius was the son of important parents who died in the Saxon devastation. Perhaps in the 460s, after the Saxons in Britain had ceased raiding and withdrawn to their settlements, he launched a counter-offensive that led to a phase of fluctuating warfare. This rose to a climax in a British triumph at the siege of Mount Badon, about the year 500, which more or less stabilized the situation” (The Arthurian Handbook, New York: Garland, 1988, pp. 296–97). Riothamus, whose name means “supreme king” is a fifth-century monarch of the Britons “whose career seemingly underlies parts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur” (Lacy and Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 391). 4. See “The Round Table: The 2004 Movie King Arthur,” Arthuriana 14.3 (Fall 2004): 112–125. This anthology comprises John Matthews, “A Knightly Endeavor: The Making of Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur,” pp. 112–15, Matthews’s interview with screenwriter David Franzoni, pp. 115–20, and reviews by Kevin Harty and Alan Lupack, pp. 121–25. 5. John Matthews, “A Knightly Endeavor,” p. 115. 6. See Virginia Blanton’s excellent article, “ ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let them rape you’: Guinevere’s Agency in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur,” Arthuriana 15.3 (2005): 91–112. 7. Kevin J. Harty, Review of King Arthur, p. 122. 8. John Matthews, “A Knightly Endeavor,” p. 113. 9. In King Arthur: Dark Age Warrior and Mythic Hero (New York: Random House/Carlton Publishing Group, 2004), John Matthews mentions the Sarmatian theory as one of many, claiming to find it plausible, pp. 22–23. 10. Kemp Malone, “Artorius,” p. 373. 11. Kemp Malone, “Artorius,” p. 373. 12. See Richard Fletcher, Who’s Who in British History: Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England, 55 B.C–A.D. 1066 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1989), pp. 11–12. In the film’s chronology, Lancelot is recruited in 452 and his military service ends in 467. 13. See David Shotter’s Romans and Britons in North-West England (Bristol: Arrowsmith/Center for Northwest Regional Studies, University of Lancaster, 2004), pp. 40–42. His assessment of archaeological remains confirms the presence of cavalry at the fort, which first came to prominence in the second century. His earlier The Roman Frontier in Britain (Preston, Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 1996) summarizes the historical record and early sources: “Dio

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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Cassius. . .records the sending to Britain in A.D. 175 of 5,500 Sarmatian Iazyges; we have little indication of how these reinforcements were used, although a unit of them did serve at Ribchester, and finds at Papcastle of characteristically eastern European metalwork suggests that some may have been there too” (p. 98). While an early presence is likely, there is little we know about the later Sarmatian presence. Coin evidence apparently stops at c. 378 A.D., and pottery in the late fourth century. For a summary, see the excellent website, www.roman-britain.org, which also contains records of inscriptions, sources, and listings for the fourth- to fifth-century Notitia Dignitatum, which lists a cuneus Sarmatarum (a smaller Sarmatian detachment or “wedge” of cavalry). On Hadrian’s Wall, see Guy de la Bédoyère, Hadrian’s Wall: History and Guide (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 1998; repr. 2001). In the film Arthur points out to Bishop Germanus that the Sarmatians are still pagan and have preserved the religion of their forefathers. St. Germanus is also a historical figure: bishop of Auxerre from 407 A.D. until his death thirty years later. Richard Fletcher summarizes the major events in his career (Who’s Who, p. 13). On one of his two stints in Britain, he apparently led an expedition in 429 A.D. against Pelagian heretics, and was involved in organizing forces against Saxons and Picts. Much is known about religion and cults on the Wall—and the polytheistic evidence points to the mixing and matching of religious practice in the multi-ethnic border culture. At Ribchester, for example, there is evidence of cults devoted to such diverse deities as Apollo Maponus, Mars Pacifier, Matres, Mithras and Victoria. See Guy de la Bédoyère’s website at www.romanbritain.freeserve.co.uk/Rbgods, based on R. G. Collingwood and R. P. Wright’s Roman Inscriptions of Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). N. J. Higham, King Arthur: Myth-Making and History (London: Routledge, 2002), at p. 43. Higham also dismisses and briefly discusses the Sarmatian theory (p. 35). Graham Anderson, King Arthur in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2004). Kevin J. Harty, Review of King Arthur, p. 123. Incidentally, this Arthur as vulnerable orphan recalls the similarly bereaved Lancelot in First Knight (dir. Jerry Zucker, 1995), in which Richard Gere’s character is another estranged loner. In publicity interviews, such as the one given to the London Daily Mail of July 3rd, 2004, or the French Cinélive no. 81, Summer 2004. Frank Thompson, King Arthur (New York: Hyperion, 2004), p. 85. Frank Thompson, King Arthur, p.349. References to John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni are once again drawn from Arthuriana 14.3 (2004): 115–20. See note 4. John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni, p. 117. John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni, p. 116. John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni, p. 116. I am grateful to the unnamed reviewer of this article, who confirmed that this hackneyed final scene was not planned in the original script, but included as a result of the response from test audiences to the more bleak battlefield ending. Its bouyant note apparently helped achieve a PG-13 rating.

CHAPTER 7 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY IN GIL JUNGER’S BLACK KNIGHT: A SOUTH CENTRAL YANKEE IN KING LEO’S COURT Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman

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he desire to use the experience of the Middle Ages to relieve the trauma of urban modernity provides the foundation for Black Knight’s use of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee formula.1 Though universally panned by critics, Gil Junger’s 2001 comedy offers an intriguing postcolonial fantasy that draws upon and transforms the very real oppression of urban modernity in inner-city communities like South Central LA by transporting the ghetto to the Eurocentric Middle Ages. At first glance, nothing could seem a less appropriate—and hence less realistic—setting for a time-travel movie about the Middle Ages than the inner-city ghetto. The first thing everybody notices (or perhaps does not even need to notice) about films set in the Middle Ages is that the characters are usually white. The fantasy of the Middle Ages has always been the exclusive province of European colonialism, representing the historical legitimation of white, Christian, European domination. A nonwhite character in such a landscape would surely seem “unrealistic” and need explaining.2 The real point of interest in Black Knight is to see how this unlikely mélange of Martin Lawrence hip-hop comedy and medieval swashbuckling connects the twentieth-century urban black man with the “black knight” of chivalric fantasy and so realizes the pun in the title. To make this connection, it is necessary to explore more fully the ways in which cultural difference, as Homi Bhabha notes, troubles the binary opposition between “past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level

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of cultural representation and authoritative address.”3 We need to understand more fully how, “in signifying the present,” twentieth-century black urban culture “comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic.”4 For Black Knight, this entails asking what meanings of the past that filmmakers designate as the Middle Ages carry for modern audiences, both scholarly and popular. If the academy has increasingly marginalized the Middle Ages, this film suggests that popular culture has not. It has become virtually a commonplace among medievalists to decry the indifference of our students, our colleagues, and our publishers to our work. Doubtless, reasons for this inattention are many, but for our purposes we might point to the function of the Middle Ages as “an enabling premise in the construction of a distinctive character and destiny for Western Europe.”5 In the academic imaginary, the Middle Ages is sandwiched between the glories of the classical world and the discoveries of the Renaissance; it is the “dark ages,” perhaps because it does not lend itself easily to the narratives about progress and Enlightenment that are major themes in Western historiography.6 It is our name for what is yet to be modern, the antithesis of the modern. Perhaps for this very reason, however, the Middle Ages has occupied a significant place in popular culture. In his essay “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco describes the importance of the Middle Ages in the popular imagination: in books, music, films, television, medieval fairs, Societies for Creative Anachronism, even in the names of Las Vegas hotels, housing developments, shopping malls, and dry cleaners.7 In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages has become virtually synonymous with fantasy and with a distinctly modern form of nostalgia for a past organic society. One can hardly call to mind a fantasy work in any genre or media without calling up the medieval. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Wars, Dr Who, Highlander, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Shrek, Dungeons and Dragons, the Wicca practiced by teenage girls, and the sword and sorcery genre particularly popular among adolescent males all mobilize fantasies about the medieval even when, as in Buffy or Star Wars, their settings are modern or futuristic.8 Many of these fantasies are about the rejection of technology (Star Wars, Highlander, Buffy) in favor of a more organic connection with nature (Star Wars’ “the force”) and suggest considerable anxiety about the break effected between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, a belief that the progress promised by the Enlightenment comes at too high a cost and that the cure can only be found through regressing to a simpler, more organic past. Perhaps the academic rejection of the Middle Ages has to do with the perception that,

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because this period is so closely associated with fantasies such as these, it can say nothing about history, can contribute nothing to an institution whose reputation is based on rationality and critique. But this nostalgia for organic wholeness does not by any means exhaust contemporary popular fantasies about the Middle Ages. As Carolyn Dinshaw illustrates, in many cases the word “medieval” is also associated in both popular and academic fantasies with the barbarity, superstition, and violence from which civilization is supposed to have rescued us: “[I]t is ritualized sexual torture, it is dark and perverse, and it must be met by a personal vengeance that is itself ritualized, torturous, dark and perverse.”9 For modern film audiences who consume films like Black Knight, the Middle Ages are as often savage and atavistic as they are nostalgic. They represent superstition in opposition to reason, dogma opposed to inquiry and critique, magic opposed to science, myth and legend opposed to history. It has become the name, as David Lloyd argues, for “an archaic that may indeed be still lodged in the recesses of the modern psyche and to which the latter at times regresses.”10 Whether the medieval in popular culture represents a break from a barbaric past or the loss of an organic one, it also contains temporally the seeds of the modern. Lloyd argues that we can understand the Middle Ages created by the modern mind as “the antithesis between a figuration of backwardness and a narrative of always incipient transition.” He continues, “This must be so if the Middle Ages are to contain the seeds of transition to capitalism.. . .[T]he elements of individualism, rational inquiry and critique must be presumed already at work for the fullness of their later historical emergence to be at all possible.”11 Perhaps Black Knight, for all its silliness, recognizes the persistence of this dual orientation of the medieval toward the archaic and the modern. Or perhaps it doesn’t and simply reproduces the cultural imaginary of colonialism, as Bhabha would suggest. Whichever explanation we accept, the inhabitants of Black Knight’s South Central, and most especially, its central figure, Martin Lawrence’s Jamal Walker, inhabit what Anne McClintock calls the “anachronistic space” of colonization. Excluded from the history of modernity, they are the “prototypes of anachronistic humans: childlike, irrational, regressive and atavistic, existing in a permanently anterior time within modernity.”12 For this very reason, they are ideally situated to realize the colonial and postcolonial elements present in the Connecticut Yankee formula. Analyses of such formulae in films like Black Knight illustrate the ways in which the development of the formal features of film depends not upon the existence of abstract synchronic units (as Christian Metz argued) but upon filmmakers’ and viewers’ diachronic experiences of film and other narrative texts. As Mikhail Bakhtin has argued, any sign is a site of ideological

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contestation;13 if Bakhtin’s formulations may be extended to film (and we think they can), then this must be true for its formal features—like formulae— as well. The dream vision (usually the result of a knock on the head) is a common formula for medieval fantasy films, especially time-travel films that draw loosely on the plot of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. This formula usually functions as the frame tale for the medieval part of the film and produces certain predictable plot and character developments. We know, even if we have never read Twain’s novel, that the film’s humor will derive from the exploitation of anachronism: Jamal Walker, the hero of Black Knight, mistaking the drunken knight Knolte (Tom Wilkinson) for an urban homeless man or his appropriation of the knightly appellation “Skywalker” (a knowing wink at the persistence of the medieval in George Lucas’s futuristic Star Wars series). We know that he will succeed in this alien world by introducing technological marvels (or the music of Sly and the Family Stone) to the ignorant primitives. Our pleasure as viewers derives not from the plot’s originality (it is utterly formulaic), but from the variations worked on the theme, for instance, in Walker’s confusion of the real and hyperreal, the cause of much of the humor in the early sequences of Black Knight. The link between the main character and the primitive past is established from the opening credits that feature Walker, only marginally distanced from comic Lawrence portraying him, mugging in front of the camera as he performs simple acts of grooming—brushing, flossing, combing, cleaning. The film offers cleanliness as a mark of modernity; the Middle Ages is identified by the prevalence of filth, particularly excrement.14 Walker’s toilette, his obsessive efforts to remove or control physiological surplus— hair, tartar, earwax, body odor—connect him to the market commodities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that hold out the promise that humanity’s animal nature can be repressed, perhaps even denied. His selffashioning as a modern man is established by his use of grooming aids: toothpaste, dental floss, Q-tips. This scene, along with a later scene in which Walker offers the drunken knight Knolte money to purchase soap and Tic Tacs, establishes hygiene as that which separates the medieval from the modern. But it is, after all, more than just hygiene that separates the historical periods; it is how hygiene falls under the sway of the commodity. Walker is, if nothing else, a child of the contemporary marketplace. His toilette is determined by the commercials he watches on television, determined by his viewing of films, like Black Knight, which derive at least a portion of their initial investment from product placement. Black Knight suggests that if the Middle Ages were filthy, it is because capitalism had not yet made cleanliness a desirable commodity.

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But Black Knight suggests that, even as we live in our bodies, we necessarily live in the Middle Ages, a Middle Ages figured as bodily surplus. While the strong beat of a rap song fills the sound track, no language issues from Walker/Lawrence; only various animalistic noises punctuate his performance. There are shots, particularly one in which Lawrence inserts Q-tips into his ears and another in which he raises a leg like a urinating dog, in which it would take an act of self-will not to imagine the bestial. In this sequence we are encouraged to see Walker not as a mature black man (perhaps too threatening for a mainstream Hollywood comedy) but as a childlike innocent, a primitive. In this simple scene, which does nothing to further the plot and everything to overdetermine the ways in which viewers perceive the central character, we can read the denial of modernity and of its complexities to the characters in this film. The denizens of Walker’s world are “urban primitives,” occupying anachronistic space, the space of the past. In short, they are everything represented by the term “medieval,” because what else does the term connote except that which is not modernity? As Dinshaw notes in her reading of Pulp Fiction, the medieval is “that space of abjection and otherness—the space where sodomy, sadomasochism, southernness, and blackness get dumped in the creation of a unified straight white masculinity.”15 Black Knight’s Walker is underemployed at an amusement park called Medieval World. Like the restaurant Medieval Times in Ben Stiller’s The Cable Guy (1996),16 Medieval World is a tawdry recreation of the past in which the Middle Ages becomes a commodity just like any other, so much junk. However, there is very little medieval about this battered and graffitied ersatz castle surrounded by a moat filled with the detritus of modern urban life. The illusion of a romanticized and perhaps simpler past is undercut by the broken-down rides and derelict batting cages inside. Medieval World is a failing institution, unable to provide either an idealized history for its customers or economic sustenance for a community alienated both by culture and poverty. This situation is sketched out with remarkable economy and little dialogue in the first scene, in which Walker and his boss Mrs. Bostick (Isabell Monk) trade the tired clichés of a liberal capitalism that has mostly failed African-American communities. She claims she has provided “quality jobs” for the community for twenty years. “Cash out” Walker counters. “Look outside yourself and buckle down,” she says. He parries,” [H]elp yourself, forget about the community.” Mrs. Bostick’s bootstrap approach to combating the economic adversity of inner-city life—“I had high hopes for you”—is unintelligible to Jamal’s cynical despair: “Take what money you got—and jet.”

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Medieval World is threatened by the opening of a better, more “real,” amusement park called Castle World. The film explicitly links economic viability and cultural verisimilitude in what Umberto Eco has called “hyperreality.” The imagination and taste of the “average American” participates in the philosophy of the hyperreal, a philosophy that “demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake, where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred.”17 Reproduction in the mode of hyperreality attempts to improve on the real, to make it better, all in the interest of selling something. Castle World comes as a threat from outside the South Central community; it represents corporate interests that appropriate all authentic culture. Corporate interests alone can bring together and indeed level the difference between the hip-hop culture of the inner city and that of medieval England. All cultural pasts are reduced to the same process of commodification and so become interchangeable. Indeed the film itself mimics that very process as the corporate interests represented by Regency Enterprises and Twentieth Century Fox have brought these worlds together with the help of Martin Lawrence, the film’s executive producer and an “authentic” representative of hip-hop culture. Ironically, Castle World is never shown in the film, except as an ad in a newspaper. Instead the film consciously deconstructs the binary between real and fake, as it does between past and present, both critiquing and participating in the cultural appropriations outlined above, as Walker is magically transported back in time and space to fourteenth-century England, where he finds himself in the real thing (a castle world) that he mistakes for the reproduction (Castle World). Walker reacts to the “real” fourteenth century as if it were its twentieth-century reproduction. He can only understand his experiences through the philosophy of hyperreality, which dictates that this castle world must be a truly authentic reproduction of the real Middle Ages. This is the basis of all the jokes in the scene in which Walker first finds himself in fourteenth-century England. His encounter with the intoxicated, outcast knight Knolte can only be understood by Walker as the aftermath of the “opening party for Castle World.” The knight who nearly runs him over must be a “dumb ass actor taking their job way too seriously.” As Walker notes, “Castle World got it goin’ on— horses, costumes, smells.” It is an authentic medieval world right down to its gross smells, because to the hyperclean Jamal, the medieval must invariably smell. It is made of “real brick, none of that fake stuff.” Walker concludes, “Miz Bostick, you in trouble.” At the same time, Walker finds the fourteenth century, as measured by the yardstick of hyperreality, somewhat disturbing. It threatens his conviction, which he undoubtedly shares with the film’s target demographic, that contemporary appropriations of the Middle Ages (like Castle World) must

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necessarily be Disnified, must be brought within the hygienic regime of commodity culture. Mistaking the medieval castle of King Leo for a modern theme park hotel, for instance, he insists, “You think you gonna charge people money to stay here and wipe their asses with straw? No. Seriously.” Walker longs to be an accidental tourist in the fourteenth century. He longs not for an authentic Middle Ages but a hyperreal one, where, like the Middle Ages of the Medieval Times restaurant chain, he can order a Pepsi from some “serving wench.” Black Knight spoofs the cultural industries that turn everything they touch into a reproduction of reality, yet at the same time it participates in that very enterprise. The castle world of Black Knight is, in fact, not the real Middle Ages but an authentic reproduction of a medieval castle—the film was shot in North Carolina—complete with actors and extras in authentic looking costumes. It is a movie set (although unlike Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the film never breaks its diegesis to reveal that), and it is represented with all of the cinematic “signs” of medievalness. The “Middle Ages” appears in this scene virtually out of nowhere, as a sharp, deep-focus, and well-lit scene shifts suddenly to smoky mists that part to reveal knights on horseback galloping into the frame in slow motion. The moment is meant to create some drama as it imitates the conventions of countless scenes from both medieval movies and Westerns. The time shift is revealed as much by the technological apparatus of the film as by any content. These characters can easily be mistaken for movie actors “playing” at the Middle Ages because they are. Here we have the mise en abyme of reproduction and reality, except all is reproduction, all hyperreality. There is no accessible real. Black Knight’s appropriation of the Connecticut Yankee formula, as we suggest, frames a contrast between a superior “modern” technology and a benighted and atavistic past, linking certain elements in contemporary culture, the homeless for instance, to a primitive past. The film offers an interesting and somewhat contradictory take on that ideology. After connecting Jamal (and by extension African Americans) early in the credits with the primitive, the film then transports him to a medieval past where, ultimately, as a representative of a superior, more advanced “race,” he is able to solve their problems—and coincidentally his own—through the application of his wits and superior technology. Walker’s transformation into the redemptive Black Knight does not, however, come easily or, it would seem, naturally. Junger’s Black Knight draws its inspiration less from Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court than from the 1949 Tay Garnet film of the same name— replicating, at times, the Garnet film almost shot-by-shot. The Junger project, however, casts its protagonist in a very different role than either of its two intertexts. Arriving in the Middle Ages, Hank Morgan, the hero of Mark

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Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, is more than a product of the Industrial Revolution, more than a representative from a technologically advanced culture. He possesses the astonishing self-assurance of a successful, free, white, nineteenth-century American man who enjoys the luxury of being simultaneously disgusted with, and yet undeniably profiting from, both genocide against Native Americans and the institution of slavery. He sees himself as, and has himself knighted, “Sir Boss.” At least a portion of Twain’s critique of American society is directed at Morgan’s arrogance: “I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easily as rolling off a log.”18 Tay Garnett’s film completely strips away Twain’s critique of American exceptionalism, leaving a supremely confident protagonist, Hank Martin (the subtle name change was originally made in David Butler’s 1931 film version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court starring Will Rogers) to work his desires on medieval England. As Sam and Rebecca Umland note, Martin, as played by Bing Crosby, embodies certain characteristics that would have been regarded by post–World War II America as “cool”: “A refusal to sentimentalize, self-deprecation, and self-effacement, wisecracks, emotional distance and restraint, and self-reflexivity.”19 These qualities, the Umlands suggest, were racially encoded to the postwar generation: “The word ‘cool’ emerged from 1940s American jazz culture known as ‘bebop,’ a form of jazz which jazz historians claim developed in the 1940s.”20 But in Garnett’s film, this African American “cool” has been almost seamlessly merged with the Bing Crosby’s star persona to represent the power and authority of America’s dominant, white, middle-class culture, a culture that can co-opt African-American language and styles as effortlessly as it can its own medieval past. The casting of a black man in this role pushes the formula even further in the direction of what Bhabha defines as “hybridity” in which “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.”21 Jamal Walker, unlike Hank Martin, proceeds among the white people of fourteenth-century England with the caution of the marginalized. He is twice an outsider in medieval England, black and from another time. Hailing from the corner of Florence and Normandy in South Central Los Angeles, where black men like Rodney King are routinely beaten by the authorities, Walker is hypervigilant about his status as an African American. Mistaken for the Norman ambassador to the court of King Leo, Walker receives a warm welcome, thanks in no small part to the fortunate geographical pun realized in his South Central neighborhood. But he remains anxious, distrustful of the agendas of the Eurocentric world into which he has fallen. Walker hears, for instance, in the constant reiteration of the

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descriptor “Moor,” the potential for a racial epithet, which he proclaims to like “less and less.” Walker’s response to his cultural alienation in the Middle Ages jarringly coalesces with stereotypes taken on by African Americans to alleviate some of their suffering in contemporary society. He plays the clown, identifying himself as both an ambassador and a court jester. Bhabha locates in this behavior—“in enigmatic, inappropriate signifiers” such as stereotypes and jokes—“colonial doubling,” a “strategic displacement of value” where we get a “sense of a specific space of separation,” of what he means by hybridity.22 This reversion to ethnic stereotype, this recollection of the black man as minstrel, suffering a series of humiliations to amuse walker’s white audience, garners only a grudging approval from King Leo: “I have to admire his commitment. It is no longer funny, but he refuses to give up on the joke.” Perhaps because it defines his cultural hybridity as well as his cultural insecurities. Jamal Walker (the name itself suggests hybridity) does not participate in the romantic belief in American exceptionalism and its promise of limitless possibilities that motivates Hank Morgan and Hank Martin. Morgan and Martin carry with them a sense of entitlement, the privilege enjoyed by white American males. Walker possesses no such motivation and his selffashioning is decidedly tragic, at least initially. When Victoria, a young black woman wildly out of place in the court of King Leo, asks Walker a perfectly reasonable question, given that she lives in the fourteenth century, “You can read and write?” Walker’s response highlights the sad state of education among America’s urban poor: “Yeah. Who you been datin’? You got to raise the bar.”23 When King Leo inquires, “What news from Normandy,” Walker replies, remarking on the desperation of America’s inner cities, “What news? A couple of drive by’s. Other than that, same old, same old.” In fact, Junger’s film seems to make the case that Walker may be better suited to the time-travel adventure of returning to the Middle Ages than either Morgan or Martin. With its dehumanizing treatment of women, with its ultraviolence—so extreme, in fact, that even Walker is unnerved while witnessing an execution—with its brutality toward the working poor, Junger’s medieval England does not seem as alien to America’s inner cities as it first appears. By learning to negotiate the problems of the past, therefore, Walker, at least in the film’s fantasy, learns to address the problems of his violent and impoverished present. To accomplish his transformation from urban primitive to American capitalist, Walker must summon a deeply repressed sense of racial identity, which begins to emerge as he calls upon his expertise in African-American popular culture to negotiate the dangers of King Leo’s court. Lawrence’s Walker survives—and even thrives—in this alien environment not because he possesses some kind of authentic blackness, but precisely because of his

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skill in forging hybrid cultural forms. This tactical use of hybridity is demonstrated by the film’s advertising poster, which shows the star, Lawrence, centered in front of a castle, sporting a bewildering array of mismatched cultural signs. His backward baseball cap, football jersey, sunglasses, baggy pants, and Nike shoes identify him with a hip-hop culture whose appeal has crossed over from the inner-city bad boy to white suburban wannabe. At the same time he carries a sword and helmet, while his arms and legs are encased in medieval armor. Lawrence’s name dominates the top of the poster, while beneath it in smaller letters there is a caption that reads “He’s about to get medieval on you,” a reference to the medieval in Quentin Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction. The same cultural hybridity marks every nuance of Lawrence’s performance in this film. Through the herald’s introduction, he refashions his character’s identity: “Starting at small forward from Inglewood High, twotime, all-county, conference player of the year, the messenger from Normandy, Jamal ‘Sky’ Walker.” The allusion immediately calls to mind George Lucas’s groundbreaking 1977 movie Star Wars that, telescoping time, offers a future in which Jedi knight Luke Skywalker battles enemies with a light saber and a mystical power called “the force.” But the introduction has an Afrocentric referent as well. In 1974, North Carolina State University won the NCAA basketball tournament, putting an end to the dynasty of John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins. NC State was lead by forward David “Skywalker” Thompson, who, along with the likes of Julius Erving, would ultimately redefine the game of basketball. Thompson, Erving, and a number of other young African American basketball players seemed to fly above their peers, bringing to the game an extraordinary athleticism and the sense of razzle-dazzle showmanship that would ultimately reach its apotheosis in the figure of Michael Jordan (who was an admirer of Thompson and whose number 23 Jamal sports on his jersey). When Walker walks into—onto—King Leo’s “court,” the identity he assumes with the name “Skywalker” is that of a black man, a champion, an NBA Hall of Famer, a founding father of the kind of basketball that has become an integral part of hip-hop culture. The scene in which Walker teaches King Leo’s court how to dance parodies almost shot-by-shot a similar scene of cultural hybridity in Garnet’s Connecticut Yankee. In that film, Martin/Crosby, impatient with medieval music and dance—which, as they are portrayed in the film, have very little in common with historically medieval music and dance—instructs King Arthur’s musical ensemble on how to create a twentieth-century big band sound and shows the court the pleasures of couples dancing. Martin/Crosby’s gesture is one of dominance, imposing a “higher”—or at least “cooler”—cultural standard on plodding primitives. The primitives—King Arthur’s knights

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Figure 7.1 Jamal (Martin Lawrence) teaches the medieval court how to dance. Source: From Black Knight (USA, Gil Junger, 2001).

and their ladies—attempt to adopt this standard, but their efforts prove awkward at best, demonstrating that only the most exceptional whites can achieve true “cool”. The pleasure of the scene derives from the twentieth-century audience feeling superior to the fumbling medievals. Perhaps a portion of the pleasure also comes, as it certainly does in Twain’s novel, from the fantasy of an American reversing the history of English colonialism, forcing the culture of the onetime colonized down the throats of former oppressors. Such an appreciation of this scene would require Garnet’s audience conveniently to forget America’s sorry history of colonialism, a bit of amnesia that Twain resists. Black Knight seems less concerned with dominance than with the display of cultural hybridity, whether in the service of racial conciliation or assimilation is less clear. The dance scene begins nervously, as King Leo comments to Walker, “I’m interested in learning more about your culture. It is my understanding the Normans are excellent dancers.” Walker, reading Leo’s inquiry through the eyes of a twenty-first-century African American, assumes that he has been patronized and responds, “No offence, king, but, you know, that thing about dancing, that is a very stereotypical thing you said.” Walker is ultimately intimidated into a performance. Unlike Martin/Crosby, who whistles a melody for the medieval band to learn, Walker racially marks his pedagogical moment, laying down a bass line, nudging King Leo’s group toward improvisation, with the caveat “Now this is a pretty white crowd, so nothing too crazy. My life depends on it” (figure 7.1). The song that emerges from the collaboration between Walker and the medieval musicians is Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music.” For the audience of moviegoers, ages eighteen to twenty-five, who are

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Black Knight’s primary demographic, this song from the late 1960s is just one more piece of history thrown into the cinematic blender, along with the Middle Ages and Mark Twain. All pasts are indistinguishable, able to be fused and confused. But the choice of “Dance to the Music” does not seem all that arbitrary to an audience that came of age in the 1960s. As the 1960s drew to a close, rock audiences were becoming increasingly segmented by race. With their brand of psychedelic soul, Sly and the Family Stone bridged the divide, offering a musical mix popular to both white and African-American audiences. At the 1969 Woodstock music festival, despite the scarcity of nonwhite faces both in the audience and on stage, Sly and the Family Stone were a huge hit. Walker conjures this spirit of racial harmony, simultaneously saving his own life and making the court of King Leo just a bit hipper. The politics of Walker’s dance extend beyond his musical choice. The performance was choreographed by Paula Abdul, a multiracial performer whose credits include, but are by no means limited to, teaching dance moves to the Los Angeles Laker’s cheerleaders, Janet Jackson, and ZZ Top. Abdul, both Canadian and Syrian by birth, had a short but highly successful career as a singer/dancer, merging, at times, a pop sensibility with hiphop grooves. She has since become hugely successful sitting between African-American Randy Jackson and white, Englishman Simon Cowell as a judge on the television phenomenon American Idol. Whereas Martin/ Crosby teaches Arthur’s court a dance that emphasizes their inadequacy, that humiliates them, the dance that Abdul provides for Walker, though filled with little hip-hop moves, is one that King Leo and his followers take to quickly and easily. It is a dance that gives them pleasure. Walker emerges as a figure who can solve problems, even those as complicated as race in twenty-first century America, or so the film suggests. Black Knight would have us believe that the encounter with a culture more barbaric and lawless than that of twentieth-century South Central Los Angeles ultimately resituates Jamal. On the one hand, Walker’s Middle Ages are savage and atavistic, a place of violence, betrayal, foul actions and foul odors, but perhaps no more so, the film suggests, than Walker’s neighborhood. On the other hand, in the Middle Ages, Jamal finds the organic, precapitalistic communitarianism he earlier mocked. In his efforts to restore a medieval queen—a surrogate for his own Mrs. Bostick—to her throne, he struggles to reimpose the very sort of centralized, organized, and just governance missing from his inner-city experience. Since, as Lloyd argues, the Middle Ages contains “seeds of the transition to capitalism,” Walker must return there to receive the enculturation he lacks. In the Middle Ages, he is not just another passive consumer of a throwaway commodity culture. Like his Connecticut Yankee antecedents, Walker has to apply what he knows about his own world to the problems he encounters in the medieval. As he assembles his medieval

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army to restore the queen, he argues, contra Rodney King, “[S]ometimes we can’t just get along; sometimes we’ve got to take up arms.” Walker finally can put to use the lessons twentieth-century capitalism has taught him. Because he does not know how to be a medieval warrior, he is at a decided disadvantage in the climactic single combat against the movie’s villain Sir Percival, but he can draw on the stereotype that makes black men sports prodigies—in certain sports. While Percival mocks walker for his ineptitude with a sword, Walker defeats his opponent by calling on his skills first in baseball and basketball— sports that African Americans have dominated for the past half century. Finally, he uses his knowledge of golf—perhaps the most Eurocentric of all contemporary sports—to finish Percival off. “You can thank Tiger for that,” he sneers, invoking the most visible symbol of cultural hybridity for sports audiences at the turn of the century—Tiger Woods. Bending to the pressures of both the Connecticut Yankee formula and the expectations of its audience that Black Knight deliver a fantasy of the American dream’s promise of limitless possibilities, the film’s conclusion attempts to repress, to smooth over, Walker/Lawrence’s gestures toward hybridity. The conclusion repudiates the rest of the film by asking us to believe that Walker returns from the Middle Ages rehabilitated, no longer a self-fulfilling ethnic stereotype, no longer a member of the marginalized, deploying signs of hybridity but, rather, an American capitalist, confident, powerful, responsible, filled with middle-class values. Calling upon the whole ideology of Americanness that Hank Morgan—and Hank Martin— represents in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Junger’s film asks its viewers to consider Jamal Walker no longer as an African American, but as an American. The Medieval World to which Walker returns, however, is as much a fantasy as the “real” medieval world to which he was transported. In a mere six weeks, the film tells us, working with no money and a still largely recalcitrant crew, Walker and Mrs. Bostick transform a seedy and empty theme park in the middle of the ghetto into a going concern—a profitable investment in the hyperreal. Even more remarkable, after the revitalization, this inner-city enterprise seems to be patronized almost exclusively by white people; Medieval World has been gentrified, its previous African-American patrons relocated. The Middle Ages have been reclaimed for whiteness. The film promises its audience a happy ending that is, of course, impossible. Walker cannot bring the organic, precapitalist communitarianism of the Middle Ages back to South Central. He cannot really save Mrs. Bostick’s inner-city Medieval World from its inevitable decay any more than he can rehabilitate his neighborhood. He continues to live in white America, which requires hybridity, not dominance, from African-American men. He may be a better man for his excellent medieval adventure, but he is still black, poor, underemployed, and living in the hood.

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Notes 1. Black Knight, dir. Gil Junger, perf. Martin Lawrence, Marsha Thomason, Tom Wilkinson (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2001). While Caroline Jewers sees this film as mostly without redeeming value—“a bland plot that increases in banality as it limps along” (205), Susan Aronstein finds it “surprisingly political” (183). See Jewers, “Hard Day’s Knight: First Knight, Knight’s Tale, and Black Knight,” in Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, eds., The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), pp. 203–208 and Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 183–189. 2. This is not the first film to introduce a black character into a medieval setting; for other examples, see John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 44 and Elizabeth Sklar, “Twain for Teens: Young Yankees in Camelot,” King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema, ed. Kevin J. Harty (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 97–108. 3. Homi Bhaba, “The Commitment to Theory,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 2394. 4. Homi Bhaba, “The Commitment to Theory,” p. 2394. 5. Anne Middleton, “Medieval Studies,” Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), pp. 12–13. 6. Arthur Lindley makes much the same point in “The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film.” Screening the Past 3 (1998): http://www.latrobe.edu. au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/ALfr3a.htm. 7. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983); see also Elizabeth Sklar, “Marketing Arthur: The Commodification of Arthurian Legend,” King Arthur in Popular Culture, eds. Elizabeth Sklar and Donald L. Hoffman ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002), pp. 9–23. 8. Several of the essays in Driver and Ray, eds., Medieval Hero on Screen examine this phenomenon. 9. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 185. 10. David Lloyd, “The Medieval Sill: Joyce, ‘Medieval Ireland’ and Postcolonialism,” unpublished paper presented at “Medieval Temporalities and Colonial Histories,” Princeton University, May 16, 2003, p. 8. 11. David Lloyd, “The Medieval Sill,” pp. 10, 13. 12. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 40 and 42. 13. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 272–73.

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

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Bakhtin’s colleague V. N. Volosinov similarly writes: “Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value” (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislaw Matejka and I. R. Titunik [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], p. 10). See Vivian Sobchack, “The Insistent Fringe: Moving Images and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 4–20, at pp. 6–7. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 205. Medieval Times is an actual chain restaurant with franchises in major cities throughout the United States. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, p. 8. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 7. Rebecca A. Umland and Samuel J. Umland, The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film: From Connecticut Yankees to Fisher Kings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 43. Umland and Umland, The Use of Arthurian Legend, p. 41. Homi Bhabna, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 114. Homi Bhabna, The Location of Culture, p. 120. In 2001, according to United Way Los Angeles, 63% of adults in South Central L.A. tested at the lowest literacy level (http://www. unitedwayla.org/pages/news/releases/archive2001/030101literacy.html; accessed March 27, 2005).

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CHAPTER 8 QUEERING THE MEDIEVAL DEAD: HISTORY, HORROR, AND MASCULINITY IN SAM RAIMI’S EVIL DEAD TRILOGY Tison Pugh

n Army of Darkness, the third installment of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, the dramatic action moves from a small cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee, where the protagonist Ash (Bruce Campbell) fights his possessed friends in a desperate bid for survival, to the battlefields of Arthurian England in 1300, where the conflict takes on an epic scope.1 Time traveling back through history functions as an antidote to the modern-day emasculation of Ash, who is feminized in his very position as a horror film protagonist, a role typically assigned to female characters. Within the historical trajectory of the trilogy, Raimi posits the Middle Ages as a historic utopia (albeit one with a menacing army of skeletons) in which social promotion through chivalric heroism allows the worthy to literally become kings—in contrast to the film’s depiction of modern-day America, where Ash toils for a parodic version of Wal-Mart. In this revisioned medieval past, Ash realizes the masculinity denied him in his role as a horror film protagonist. But as Ash asserts a more forceful masculinity over the course of the trilogy, his body paradoxically becomes more alien. His nascent masculinity is undercut by the uncontrollability—the queerness—of his increasingly muscular and heroic body, a body that refuses to act in accordance with his desires.2 The utopian medieval past of chivalry also allows Ash to fight this somatic queerness, as evil forces threaten to destroy the unified male body he must preserve. Furthermore, the nascent queerness of Ash’s masculine

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body is linked to the trilogy’s shifts in genre from the unnerving horror of Evil Dead to the raucous comedy of Army of Darkness. The narrative arc of the Evil Dead trilogy thus consists of three intersecting evolutions: Ash’s developing masculinity, his body’s unsettling queerness, and the films’ generic transitions from horror to comedy. The Evil Dead trilogy comprises Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness. Within the realm of horror films, the trilogy belongs to the specific subgenre of the “splatter film,” which Michael Arnzen defines as “a filmic text that promotes itself in the marketplace as one of ‘horror,’ and self-consciously revels in the special effect of gore as an artform.”3 The trilogy begins with five college friends—Ash, Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss), Linda (Betsy Baker), Shelly (Sarah York), and Scott (Hal Delrich)— vacationing in a ramshackle cabin in the mountains of Tennessee. After inadvertently unleashing demonic forces by playing a tape recording of a powerful incantation, Cheryl, Shelly, Linda, and Scott are possessed, and Ash must kill them to save his life. In Evil Dead II, Ash remains at the cabin as four new characters—Annie (Sarah Berry), Ed (Richard Domeier), Jake (Dan Hicks), and Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley)—unsuspectingly arrive to face a similar nightmarish experience of possessions and deaths.4 The eponymous Evil Dead (also known as “Deadites”) include Annie’s deceased mother, Henrietta Knowby (Ted Raimi), wife of the archeologist who brought the Book of the Dead back from an excavation and infortuitously tape-recorded its evil incantations.5 Annie dies as she opens a rift in time to expel the evil, but Ash—again the sole survivor—is caught in the time/space vortex and travels to Arthurian England in the year 1300 AD. Army of Darkness finds Ash fighting exponentially more incarnations of Evil Dead, as he seeks the lost Book of the Dead in order to return himself to his proper time period. This time, however, Ash’s primary nemesis is his evil self, a skeletal Deadite that splits off from his own body. Thus, as the trilogy traces Ash’s adventures fighting Deadites, the move from twentiethcentury America to the medieval past allows the viewer to consider the ways in which historical settings affect masculinities both modern and medieval. Indeed, the medieval past was almost written into the very title of Army of Darkness, as alternate titles considered for the film included Medieval Dead and Evil Dead 1300 AD.6 In the modern America depicted in Evil Dead, Ash is forced to fight his possessed friends, but his masculinity hardly reaches the heroic levels later attained in the medieval settings of Army of Darkness. From his very position as the protagonist of a horror film, Ash’s character is effeminized. The macho bravado encapsulated in his nickname Ash cloaks the effeminizing truth of his full name Ashley, an appellation culturally applicable to either sex. Ash is male in body, but he must nonetheless function as a female character, as one

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of the more consistent tropes of the horror genre is its deployment of female protagonists. As Carol Clover observes, “[I]t is not only in their capacity as victims that these women appear in [horror and slasher] films. They are, in fact, protagonists in the full sense: they combine the functions of suffering victim and avenging hero.”7 This female protagonist of horror films is known as the Final Girl, and she has become an archetype of the genre:8 The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified.9

Within the generic framework of the slasher/splatter film, the Final Girl foregrounds a feminine gender as virtually a prerequisite of the horror genre. In Evil Dead, we thus view a male actor playing a male character, but this character is nonetheless gendered female in terms of narrative structure. The gendered dynamics of the horror movie were well known to the makers of Evil Dead when they wrote and filmed it. Bruce Campbell notes the primacy of female protagonists in horror movies: “One of the many constants in horror films of [the late 1970s and early 1980s] was the lead had to be a woman and she had to be terrorized.”10 Indeed, in Raimi’s Within the Woods, a precursor to Evil Dead, Cheryl Sandweiss and Campbell play the horror roles typical of their respective sexes in a reversal of their roles in Evil Dead: she is the protagonist, and he is the antagonist. As Campbell reports, altering the protagonist’s sex in Evil Dead was primarily designed to increase the film’s terror: Sam [Raimi] felt that [changing the protagonist from female to male] could make it even more horrifying; if you could reduce a man to scrambling and screaming and yelling and being tormented, it would be even more horrifying than a woman doing that. We figured in our own borderline chauvinistic way, that would be worse, scarier for the audience.11

Through the gender play of the Evil Dead trilogy, Raimi and Campbell ostensibly desire to add more horror to the genre, to evoke more terror in their viewers by breaking with generic conventions and audience expectations. The decision to cast their protagonist as a male bears repercussions on how the creative forces behind the Evil Dead trilogy and the audience see Ash. Within the standard construction of the horror film, the Final Girl is typically admired for the way in which she transcends her gender; by fighting the monstrous antagonist, she surpasses the cultural limitations accorded to femininity. As a male character, however, Ash is frequently ridiculed for

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what is commonly perceived as his distressed masculinity. Sam Raimi and producer Robert Tapert deride Ash, calling the character “worthless” and remarking of the scene in which he retreats from his possessed friends that there are now “less things for him to cower under.”12 Likewise, Campbell mocks his character: “[M]y character Ash is basically king of the losers at this point. He’s a nebbish, he’s a schmo, he’s worthless.”13 Inhabiting the liminal position of a male Final Girl, Ash’s masculinity is under great duress; his creators’ humorous disdain for him in Evil Dead points to the ways in which gender structures viewers’ expectations of a character’s actions. Since this Final Girl is male, the expectations for his behavior shift as well. And these cultural expectations are linked to historical perceptions: a male hero in twentieth-century America should not act like a woman, and thus early in the trilogy—before any hint of the medieval past appears on the screen—the audience knows that Ash’s masculinity needs rehabilitation. Because Ash is often mocked for his faltering masculinity, this masculinity—and its recuperation—becomes a focal point of the trilogy. In addition to mocking Ash, Campbell describes the ways in which the character’s nascent masculinity structures the narrative arc of the trilogy: Evil Dead II required my character, Ash, to grow from “cowardly wimp” to “leader of men.” This was the first time I ever had to do any kind of longterm weight-training. Bulk wasn’t so much the issue—it was more about creating a sturdy physique that would work in harmony with the hero-in-atorn-shirt concept.14

Campbell’s body, the framework upon which the character of Ash is erected, needed to be re-formed through a weight-training regimen in order to register the character’s burgeoning masculinity. If muscles bespeak masculinity in Hollywood cinema, Campbell’s body thus serves as a touchstone of Ash’s transition from Final Girl to Last Man Standing. Revealing more flesh and muscle through a torn T-shirt in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, Campbell’s body provides the ultimate Hollywood semiotic shorthand for greater masculinity. In regard to Ash’s development, Campbell also declares, “Ash is no longer the whimpering moron he was in the first [film]. He progresses from being sort of ‘with it’ to being more of a movie hero, ‘I’ll save you now,’ that sort of stuff. It’s a whole new character.”15 From puling putz to hip hero, Ash’s development throughout the trilogy is predicated first upon the embodiment of the female protagonist endemic to the horror genre in modern-day America and then upon his apotheosis into muscular masculinity in the medieval past. Ash’s heroic self-fashioning through his burgeoning masculinity is a reaction against forces outside himself rather than an internal and organic

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metamorphosis. As Stephen Greenblatt observes of the creation of identity, “Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange or hostile. The threatening Other—heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist—must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed.”16 Greenblatt’s words here refer to the literature of early modern England, not to horror films, but they nonetheless apply with uncanny precision to the travails of horror film protagonists, who must overcome a threatening Other to define themselves as the narrative’s sole survivor. In terms of the gender dynamics of the horror genre, the threatening Other is typically male. By far the majority of monstrous antagonists in slasher and splatter films are men: some of the most iconic examples include Michael Myers in the Halloween series, Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th series, and Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.17 But as the Evil Dead trilogy plays with the gender of its protagonist, it likewise upsets the traditional gender dynamics of the horror film by casting the majority of its possessed antagonists as women. In Evil Dead, the three female characters are Ash’s primary foes (though Scott joins their ranks as well), and in Evil Dead II, the foremost monstrous antagonist is the possessed Henrietta. Even in the Arthurian landscape of Army of Darkness, when Ash battles an army of skeletons with his evil self as their leader, all of the possessed characters are female. In sum, Ash must become a man by battling women, despite occupying the narratival space of the horror film’s Final Girl. In the beginning of the Evil Dead trilogy, Ash is, quite simply, too virginal, gentle, and feminine to battle his demonic adversaries. As the protagonist of a horror film is typically female, she also tends to be sexually naïve, in contrast to her sexually adventurous friends whom the monstrous antagonist dispatches: “In the slasher film, sexual transgressors of both sexes are scheduled for early destruction. The genre is studded with couples trying to find a place beyond purview of parents and employers where they can have sex, and immediately afterward (or during the act) being killed.”18 In a manner consistent with this gendered troping of the horror genre, Ash is marked as sexually innocent. Cheryl is his sister, and their familial relationship bears no gothic and incestuous undertones common to the horror genre.19 Ash’s relationship with his girlfriend Linda is depicted as wholesome, innocent, and loving, notably in the scene when he presents her with a symbol of his affection—a pendant encased in a jewelry box with two hearts painted on it. Their innocent love is contrasted to Scott and Shelly’s more carnal relationship: although we never see Scott and Shelly in bed together, they share a room in the cabin, and here the camera captures them as they nonchalantly undress in front of each other. Not surprisingly, then, neither Scott nor Shelly survives the onslaught of the

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Evil Dead, in part due to the ways in which horror films punish sexually active characters. In Evil Dead the gendered contrast between Scott (sexually aware and thus gendered masculine) and Ash (sexually naïve and thus gendered feminine) extends to the ways in which they confront their possessed girlfriends who are now determined to kill them. In this sequence, Ash looks away squeamishly and stands helplessly aside when Scott grabs an ax and dismembers the possessed Shelly. If Scott is not altogether marked for death due to his sexual relationship with Shelly, his selfishness likewise points to his imminent demise because the Final Girl, as Reynold Humphries argues, “is more altruistic and socially responsible” than her murdered friends, who frequently display less concern for the safety of other characters than she does.20 When Scott decides to run away from the cabin in an egotistically desperate attempt to save his life while Ash resolutely remains with Linda, who has been stabbed in the ankle and cannot walk, Scott tells Ash, “She’s your girlfriend. You take care of her.” The twofold implication of these lines indicates the gendered differences between Ash and Scott: Scott “takes care of” Shelly by killing her possessed body while Ash “takes care of” Linda by trying to nurture her back to health. Only when Ash is capable of aggressively “taking care of” the possessed Linda will his masculinity be assured. In the scenes in which Ash must confront the possessed Linda, his love for her—as metaphorically represented by the pendant he gives her earlier in the film—cripples his masculinity. The pendant motif, in effect, stifles Ash’s nascent masculinity and thus protects his status as Final Girl. Realizing that dismemberment is the only means of halting her attacks, Ash binds Linda to a table in the cabin’s workshed and prepares to sever her head and limbs with a chainsaw. Seeing the pendant, however, Ash cries over her body and determines to bury her instead. Through cross shots, the viewer realizes that the possessed Linda is toying with Ash, allowing herself to be buried only to attack him once more by surprise. In the burial scene, as in the workshed scene, the pendant stimulates Ash’s weakness. He ponders over it once again, and Linda thrusts her hand out from under the earth and attacks him. The ensuing battle reaches its literal and metaphorical climax when Ash swings a shovel at Linda’s head and decapitates her; her body then falls on top of him in a simulated sex act, with the blood from her neck ejaculating on his face and with her legs frenetically spasming in a frenzy of orgasmic passion. Campbell describes the scene as depicting the moment when “my headless girlfriend is humping me” before ironically commenting, “That’s high art, folks.”21 Here Ash, in effect, loses his virginity, the ultimate hindrance to his heroic rebirth as a masculine character. Perhaps it is a bit surprising that Ash does not suffer for

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his sexual awakening, as is typical of the horror genre, but that Ash loses his virginity through the collapse of a dead girlfriend on his body in a simulated sex act exposes the liminality of the sex act in question. Throughout the trilogy, this scene with Linda’s corpse represents the apex of Ash’s sexual experiences, aside from a few kisses in Army of Darkness. Thus, Ash’s sexual development is both stunted (he remains a virgin throughout the trilogy) and provocatively sophisticated (he survives a sex act and actually prospers as a result of it). In the continuing carnage of Evil Dead II, the viewer immediately sees a more aggressively sexual and masculine Ash, one who is more brash and direct, less hesitant and virginal. Again, we never see Ash and Linda in bed together, but she dances for him in her panties while alive (and after she dies, her naked corpse pirouettes provocatively). In the revised depiction of his romance with Linda, Ash displays more machismo in their courtship, as he offers her champagne and an awkward bit of flirtation: “After all, I’m a man and you’re a woman, at least last time I checked.” Ash is correct in his assignment of their sexes, but his closing phrase (“at least last time I checked”) highlights the ways in which gender warrants continual analysis throughout the Evil Dead trilogy. Ash is more of a man in Evil Dead II, but only because he was so much less of a man in Evil Dead until his simulated sex act with his dead girlfriend finally stimulated him to action, if not orgasm. When Linda’s decapitated head lands in Ash’s lap in Evil Dead II, she snarls, “Hello, Lover,” before biting him and infecting him with evil. In the hint of sexual intimacy between Linda and Ash in this reference to him as her lover, it appears that Ash will now be punished for his increased sexual knowledge. Certainly, Ash no longer suffers from the squeamishness and hesitancy that retarded his masculine development in Evil Dead. He is now a man of action, and he begins to resemble more the masculine protagonist of action films—along the lines of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo or Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry—than the Final Girl of a horror film. When Ash equips himself with a sawed-off shotgun and prosthetic chainsaw, the short cuts focusing on the various stages of his transformation call to mind a similar scene in Rambo. Action heroes often have catchphrases, such as Dirty Harry’s “Do you feel lucky?” and “Go ahead, make my day,” and Ash’s laconic and pithy dialogue establishes his newly active and masculine persona. Approving of his self-transformation into cyborg warrior with shotgun and chainsaw, Ash tersely comments, “Groovy,” and this tagline is repeated in a matching scene of Army of Darkness when Ash builds and equips his mechanical hand in a medieval blacksmith’s shop.22 In a similar vein, when Ash dispatches the possessed Henrietta (who taunts him with screams of “I’ll swallow your soul! I’ll swallow your soul!”), he retorts, “Swallow this” as he blasts her head off with his shotgun. In contrast to the Ash of Evil

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Dead, who is characterized by inaction and fear, the Ash of Evil Dead II realizes and embodies the necessity of aggressive and violent action. From the beginning of Evil Dead to the beginning of Army of Darkness, though a mere forty-eight hours of narrative time elapse, Ash’s masculinity grows exponentially. He is no longer a virginal and slightly awkward college student but a macho man who suffers from no hesitation in his flirtations with women. “Gimme some sugar, baby,” Ash demands of Sheila (Embeth Davidtz), his ostensible love interest in Army of Darkness. Little of the tenderness that previously characterized Ash appears in his relationship with the female characters of Army of Darkness, and his masculinity is now unchecked. The medieval past of Army of Darkness thus appears to be a historical landscape in which knightly masculinity provides ipso facto protection from effeminacy. Indeed, with Ash’s bravado in his amatory affairs, this vision of knightly masculine heroism appears unimpeded by the stifling constraints of courtly love that, for example, hamper Lancelot’s alpha male masculinity in service of Guinevere’s every whim in Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot.23 Since Ash’s heroic masculinity is so firmly established in Army of Darkness as he battles Deadites throughout his adventures, it is more instructive to look at the one scene in which his masculinity is again under duress rather than the many scenes in which it is unassailable. After Ash returns to King Arthur’s court with the Book of the Dead, he wants to leave the Middle Ages immediately, despite the fact that he has unleashed the titular Army of Darkness by reciting an incantation incorrectly. With great reluctance, Arthur agrees that the Wise Man will return Ash to the twentieth century because the medieval men value honor as one of their defining characteristics: Ash: We had a deal. You wanted the damn book. I got it for you. I did my part, now you send me back. King Arthur: Very well, as we are men of our word, we shall honor our bargain. The Wiseman shall return you to your own time. Ash: Yeah? Man in the Crowd: I thought he was the One. Ash (fumbling for words): Yeah right, because. . .that was the deal. So? When do you think we can start with all the thing. . .and the. . .course. When do you think we can start with all the. . .ceremony and the. . . Wise Man: Wretched excuse for a man. King Arthur: The Wisemen were fools to trust in you.

King Arthur, the man in the crowd, and the Wise Man all register their disdain for Ash because he lacks sufficient honor to see the war with the Deadites through to its conclusion. From fighting demons in Tennessee, Ash

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learns that masculinity is predicated upon action, but Arthurian England teaches him that masculinity is predicated upon honor as well. (Indeed, Ash’s selfish actions in this scene mirror Scott’s selfish decision to save himself above all others in Evil Dead, an act that led to his destruction.) Sheila further attempts to stir Ash to action, recalling the “sweet words that you spoke in private,” which Ash attempts to dismiss: “Oh well. . .Oh, that’s just what we call pillow talk, baby. That’s all.”24 Sheila then offers the final assault on Ash’s masculinity, as she spits out a label directly antithetical to heroic masculinity, whether modern or medieval: “coward.” A Deadite then kidnaps Sheila, and Ash’s hesitations disappear. He is now fully masculine in that he is a man of modern action and of medieval honor. Subsequent scenes depict him training Arthur’s men for battle; with the moment of hesitation past, Ash reclaims his position as the film’s alpha male and, in so doing, surpasses the heroic and chivalric masculinity of Arthur himself. As Ash’s masculinity develops throughout the trilogy, however, his body becomes more queer, alien in its form, and alienating in its actions. Certainly, the trilogy foregrounds Ash’s uncertain reactions to himself and his body through a recurring motif in which he looks at himself in a mirror.25 In Evil Dead, Ash reaches into a mirror, but it turns into a pool of water. It is a moment of disjuncture between self and image, but ultimately an unthreatening moment. In Evil Dead II, Ash looks into a mirror and says, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” but his image disagrees: “I don’t think so. We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw. Does that sound fine?” The image then chokes him, until the camera pulls back and we see that Ash is actually choking himself. In this scene, Ash’s image registers the ways in which he is threatened by both Deadites and his own body—especially his possessed hand that he must dismember to save himself from demonic possession yet that nonetheless succeeds in killing Annie. In the mirror scene of Army of Darkness, the queer disjunction between self and reflection highlights that the greatest threat to Ash comes from within himself. Ash looks in a mirror and the mirror breaks; the shards of glass each replicate a miniature and malignant Ash, who collectively grab a fork and stab him in his buttocks.26 This parodic sodomy is insufficient to impregnate Ash, but after he inadvertently swallows one of his evil selves, he gives birth to this evil self out of his shoulder. The shot of his shoulder is eerily grotesque, as an eye opens out of a vaginal cavity. The mirror scenes thus represent the increasing queerness and unknowability of Ash’s body, as they progressively foreground the threat that this body poses to Ash (figure 8.1). Ash’s queer body ties in with the trilogy’s generic evolution from horror (Evil Dead) to comic horror (Evil Dead II) to comic adventure (Army of Darkness). As Ash’s body slips from his control, its chaotic actions create humor as he responds to its threats. The scene of Evil Dead II in which Ash

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Figure 8.1 Evil Ash emerges from a vaginal-like cavity in Good Ash’s shoulder. Source: From Army of Darkness (USA, Sam Raimi, 1993).

battles his possessed hand is a masterpiece of slapstick humor, as he flails around the kitchen and ultimately severs his hand while shouting at it, “Who’s laughing now?” The bizarre incongruities of the scene—a man laughing in triumph and pain as he attacks his own body with a chainsaw and thus parodically “castrates” himself—underline the ways in which Ash’s queer body derails the trilogy’s horror. Likewise, when the queerly engendered miniature Ashes attack Ash in Army of Darkness and he ultimately gives birth to his Deadite self, the scene is simply too funny to register as horror. It is extremely difficult to maintain a narrative both fully horrific and fully comic, and Ash’s queer body thus signals the generic transitions that drain the trilogy of its horror as it becomes increasingly humorous.27 As Ash’s queer body subverts his growing masculinity, his social class registers further limitations to this masculinity. Between the first two Evil Dead films and Army of Darkness, Ash’s social class is transformed. In Evil Dead, Linda’s Michigan State University sweatshirt constructs the five characters as college students.28 Indeed, a notable consistency between Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, despite the problems in continuity, is that Linda still wears her MSU shirt (although now it is a T-shirt, not a sweatshirt). In Army of Darkness, however, Ash and Linda (now played by Bridget Fonda) are no longer depicted as college students but as blue-collar employees of S-Mart, an easily recognizable and parodic incarnation of Wal-Mart or K-Mart, where Ash’s domain is Housewares. If Ash is effeminized as a college student, a somewhat namby-pamby protagonist whose heroism is forced upon

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him in Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, he is still emasculated through his bluecollar job in service of corporate America, zealously defending his Housewares Department—with a shotgun when necessary—but with little hope of the upward mobility metaphorically incarnated in his girlfriend’s MSU garb. This theme was to be developed further in the film, as Raimi describes scenes cut from Army of Darkness that depicted Ash’s discontent with his dead-end life at S-Mart: “We had a whole scene there talking about his banal life. How the boss was really mean to him, and how the stock boy was someone Bruce was mean to. But it took too long, and we want the kids to get to the goods, so there’s now only a passing flash of him in his former element.”29 Even without this scene, Ash’s life at S-Mart emphasizes the conflict between medieval heroic masculinity and twentieth-century American consumer values, in which his brute force, sufficiently heroic to lead Arthur’s forces into battle against evil in the Middle Ages, can do little to escape the stultifying circumstances of his social position. The Evil Dead trilogy, as it self-consciously plays with the gender of the horror film protagonist in modern America and medieval England, paradoxically solidifies the gendered conservatism of the genre. As Ash’s queer body checks his developing masculinity, the films become less horrific and more comic. The final vision of Ash—declaring in voiceover “Sure I could’ve stayed in the past. Could’ve even been king. But in my own way, I am king” before stating aloud to the woman draped over his knee, “Hail to the king, baby”—bespeaks a humorously chivalric masculinity, an exaggerated and hyperbolic vision of maleness sufficient to fight Deadites in medieval England but one that merely serves to protect corporate interests in twentieth-century America. Ash’s masculinity, puffing out with increasing bombast through the trilogy, preserves his life but can neither alter his social circumstances nor control his queer body. And in so doing, it punctures the necessary femininity of the Final Girl for the horror genre as well. An increasingly masculine Ash is a less intriguing character, and Raimi comments on the connection between Ash and his (Raimi’s) disappointment with Army of Darkness: “I’m not as interested in him anymore.. . .I don’t want to see him as a competent guy.”30 As a macho man fighting monsters in medieval England rather than a feminized man clinging desperately to his life, Ash is a less compelling figure. A male and masculine actor in a horror movie thus appears, at least in this instance, to derail the tensions of the genre. At the trilogy’s end, Ash’s masculinity may still be standing, but it is merely a hollow statement of gendered bravado. The truth of his masculinity is the provocative and moribund truth of his queer body and of his name Ash. He survives the Deadites’ endless attacks, but he can never escape death in the narrative’s afterlife. The truth that Ash faces is that his name foreshadows his own—and everyone else’s—eventual demise. As

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Ash’s body rejects femininity and embraces masculinity to stave off its inevitable decay, his name and queer body promise what the future holds. Death is the subject of all horror films, and it can only be delayed, never destroyed. The name Ash thus exposes the queerness of all human bodies, male and female, in that they are ultimately beyond our control, ultimately returning us to ash. Notes 1. Descriptions of the Evil Dead trilogy refer to the theatrical releases of the films as recorded on the following DVDs: Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead: Special Collector’s Edition, directed by Sam Raimi, perf. Bruce Campbell (Renaissance Pictures, 1982); Evil Dead II, directed by Sam Raimi, perf. Bruce Campbell (Renaissance Pictures, 1987); and Bruce Campbell Versus Army of Darkness: Boomstick Edition, directed by Sam Raimi, perf. Bruce Campbell and Embeth Davidtz (Renaissance Pictures, 1993). 2. I analyze Ash from a queer theory perspective not to locate a submerged homosexuality in the character but to examine the ways in which his body and his masculinity refuse to mesh. As Lee Edelman argues, “[T]he queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests. . . .[Q]ueerness exposes the obliquity of our relations to what we experience in and as social reality” (No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004], pp. 6–7). In such a manner, Ash’s troubled masculinity queerly exposes the tenuous link between a male body and masculinity. For a study of homosexuality in horror films, see Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 3. Michael Arnzen, “Who’s Laughing Now? The Postmodern Splatter Film,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 21.4 (1994): 176–84, at p. 178. For studies of the horror film as a genre, see Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000); and Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2004). 4. Although Evil Dead II is billed as a sequel to Evil Dead, continuity problems disrupt the narrative’s linearity. For example, Evil Dead II begins by redramatizing some key events of Evil Dead, but the film only depicts Ash and Linda (Denise Bixler plays the role of Linda in the sequel); Cheryl, Scott, and Shelly are never seen. Furthermore, a significant discrepancy in continuity exists between Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness in that the former ends with medieval knights hailing Ash as a hero, whereas the latter begins with Ash as a slave. 5. In an essay addressing the gender dynamics of the Evil Dead trilogy, it is worth noting that the possessed Henrietta Knowby—a female character—is

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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played by a male actor, Ted Raimi. Henrietta’s body is so monstrously deformed in her Deadite incarnation, however, that the viewer receives no real indication that gender play between character and actor is afoot. See Bill Warren, The Evil Dead Companion (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), pp. 124–26 for a description of the latex costume necessary to create Henrietta, as well as a photo of Ted Raimi semiclad in the costume. In the few scenes when Henrietta is shown as nonpossessed, she is played by an actress, Lou Hancock. John Kenneth Muir, The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (New York: Applause, 2004), p. 163. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: British Film Institute, 1992), p. 17. Randy Loren Rasmussen identifies six archetypal characters of the classic horror genre: heroines, heroes, wise elders, mad scientists, servants, and monsters. The Final Girl develops historically from heroines, but it is intriguing to note that even in some classic horror films, heroes are somewhat flatter characters than their female counterparts: “Horror film heroes of the 1930s and ‘40s are generally less interesting than heroines because they have a narrower range of character traits and dramatic functions” (Children of the Night: The Six Archetypal Characters of Classic Horror Films [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998], p. 45). Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, p. 35. Bruce Campbell, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor (New York: L.A. Weekly, Thomas Dunne, and St. Martin’s, 2001), p. 69. Campbell’s autobiography shares his behind-the-scenes memories of filming the Evil Dead trilogy. See also John Kenneth Muir, “Army of Darkness: Well Hello, Mr. Fancy Pants!” The Unseen Force, pp. 147–70 (see note 6). Bruce Campbell quoted in Warren, The Evil Dead Companion, pp. 36–37. Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert commentary track, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead DVD. Bruce Campbell commentary track, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead DVD. Campbell, If Chins Could Kill, p. 173. Campbell reports that the workout regimen was quite strenuous and required his commitment for a period of two hours a day, six days a week, for twelve weeks (p. 173). Bruce Campbell, quoted in Warren, The Evil Dead Companion, p. 118. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 9. The notable exception to the male antagonists in these slasher films is Jason’s mother, who is the killer in the first installment of Friday the 13th. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, p. 33. In the DVD commentary of Evil Dead, Bruce Campbell acknowledges this popular trope of the horror genre: “No hanky panky in this movie, folks. Kids who have sex in horror films will die.” See David J. Hogan, Dark Romance, pp.1–30, for an analysis of family dynamics in horror films.

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20. Reynold Humphries, The American Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 151. 21. Bruce Campbell commentary track, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead DVD. 22. For an analysis of Ash and his weaponry, see Carl James Grindley, “The Hagiography of Steel: The Hero’s Weapon and Its Place in Popular Culture,” The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, eds. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), esp. pp. 162–64. 23. For an analysis of the sadomasochistic tensions enacted in Lancelot and Guinevere’s relationship, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Masoch/Lancelotism,” Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 78–115. 24. These words allude to sexual intimacy between Ash and Sheila, but the scene portraying this intimacy was cut from the film. 25. These moments when Ash gazes into mirrors appear particularly appropriate for a Lacanian analysis, as they highlight the disjunction between self and internalized Other. For recent Lacanian studies of film, see the essays in Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, eds., Lacan and Contemporary Film (New York: Other Press, 2004). 26. This scene recalls the moment in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale when Absolon brands Nicholas’s buttocks with a hot iron. Although there is insufficient evidence to establish an exact parallel between the Miller’s Tale and Army of Darkness in their shared depictions of parodic sodomy, this sequence of Army of Darkness certainly plays with moments of other literary classics, as its location in a windmill is reminiscent of Don Quixote and its shot of Ash tied to the ground by the miniature incarnations of himself alludes to Gulliver’s Travels. Certainly, the entire film can be seen as an update of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It should also be noted that Army of Darkness contains many visual references to other medieval films, including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Joan of Arc (1948, starring Ingrid Bergman and directed by Victor Fleming), and shorts of the Three Stooges, including Restless Knights (1935) and Squareheads of the Round Table (1948). See Muir, The Unseen Force, pp. 152–70. 27. For an analysis of the generic overlap between comedy and horror, see William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 409–30. 28. Bruce Campbell’s audio commentary on the Evil Dead DVD confirms that the characters are college students: “[Ash] hasn’t gone through the rite of passage yet; he hasn’t become a man yet. He’s still just a sniveling college student like most of you.” In this statement, it appears that the creative forces behind Evil Dead believe that, similar to their characters, most of their viewers are college students as well. 29. Sam Raimi, quoted in Warren, The Evil Dead Companion, p. 151. 30. Sam Raimi commentary track, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness DVD.

PART III ROMANTIC VALUES

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CHAPTER 9 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM: CREATING COMMUNITY IN OCCUPIED FRANCE, 1942–43 Lynn T. Ramey

I

n 1942, French medievalist Edith Thomas wrote in her personal diary a scathing review of Marcel Carné’s film Les Visiteurs du soir/The Devil’s Envoy coining the word “troubadourism” to describe the appropriation of the medieval past to create a sentimental present.1 While for Thomas troubadourism held dangerous implications of filmic collaboration with Hitler’s Germany, her argument that the Middle Ages is easily misused as a farremoved, imaginary space in which to address contemporary problems still holds sway. One year later, Jean Cocteau’s 1943 retelling of the Tristan and Isolde legend in L’Éternel retour (Eternal Return) that was directed by Jean Delannoy also met with mixed reviews, as Cocteau’s leading man and lady were criticized for being too “Aryan.”2 Rather than casting troubadourism in an inherently negative light, this chapter considers the ambiguous use of medieval characters and settings in Les Visiteurs du soir and L’Éternel retour, claiming that the recreation of a mythical past performs important cultural work for these filmmakers as well as for the Occupation French audience who viewed the film. While the chapters in this volume ask important questions about how modern directors use medieval settings to infuse their works with modern preoccupations about race, class, and gender, this chapter will address a parallel question in order to better understand filmic medievalism. What happens when a director uses medieval themes or settings but does not directly ask social questions, particularly when these issues are literally of vital importance, as was the case in Occupied France in 1942–43? Is there a kind of medievalism that would allow for social criticism, or is medievalism inherently conservative? I will explore these questions through Carolyn Dinshaw’s notion of medieval and modern

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communities and identities, suggesting that there are in fact two separate communities created in the viewing of medieval film: one within the theater and the other, as Dinshaw might propose, stretching back to the medieval past. Debate about these two French Occupation films has been at times heated and largely centers on the question of whether the filmmakers were espousing pro- or anti-Nazi sentiment in their films. Neither film is overtly political, but both have been read variously as escapist, fascist, or participating in the French Resistance. With so unclear a consensus about the “meaning” of the films, either in their screenplay or in their filmic aesthetics, I would suggest that the key to interpreting these films is to return to Edith Thomas’s accusation of troubadourism. Medievalism is at the heart of the controversy in both films.

The Role of the Artist in the “Republic of Silence” French filmmakers, following the drôle de guerre that led to the German Occupation of France in May 1940, found their industry in turmoil. Soon after the French Occupation began, German technocrats addressed the financial problems of the French film industry and set up a new regulatory agency to control production. According to Alan Williams, French film production had been in serious decline for years,3 and the French Occupation led to a new administration that created an “almost miraculous consensus within the film community” and “rescued the French film industry from near-collapse.”4 However, this turnaround came at a cost. Filmmakers had to fire any Jewish members who were part of their crew; all film industry personnel had to obtain professional identity cards from an overseeing board that stated, among other things, that they were not Jewish. Anti-Semitic propaganda films like those found in Germany before and during World War II were almost entirely absent from France, according to François Garçon: Unique among their contemporaries [dramaturges, fiction writers, and journalists], and even before instigators of political racism had set up shop in Paris and in Vichy, film directors had opted for silence. . . .If we cannot see it as a deliberate refusal on the part of non-Jewish [film] authors to adopt the official and collectively shared racist ideology, then nothing will allow us to understand the fact that filmmakers alone were virtuous on this point.5

Despite Garçon’s claim, there were many French citizens other than filmmakers who participated in this “virtuous” silence. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “République du Silence,” an immediately postwar essay about the relationship

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between silence and resistance, makes this point quite clearly. Sartre begins his 1944 essay, “Never were we more free than under the German Occupation. We had lost all of our rights, and above all, the right to speak. . . .”6 Sartre draws on this apparent contradiction as a model for showing how the forced lack of speech made every speech act crucially important and potentially subversive. For Sartre, small acts of resistance, such as not speaking to Germans or giving them unclear directions when asked on the street, served as proof that the majority7 of French citizens were indirectly members of the Resistance and could thus retain pride in their wartime activities. Echoing Sartre’s claim of resistant status for silence, many in addition to Edith Thomas opined following the war that the only true resistance would have been categorical refusal to work under Nazi cinematic control.8 Some French directors in fact did not work during the French Occupation, and others such as Jean Renoir worked in Hollywood. What Thomas, Sartre, and Garçon have in common, however, is a sense of dualism: silence versus speech, virtue versus vice, and collaboration versus resistance. This construction of an either/or dialectic gives little room for alternate experiences within the theater and forces French Occupation films into uncomfortable signifying practices. Writing about the commonplace in film criticism of setting up easy dichotomies, Judith Mayne calls into question just this sort of characterization of the effects of films on spectators: “[T]he insistence upon a binary opposition can distill a simplistic dualism that does not do justice to the historical complexity of the era.”9 While Mayne is not speaking of French Occupation or medievalist film, her argument is equally valid for these genres. If we are to understand more fully the way that filmic medievalism functions, then we must explore the dichotomies typically forced upon medievalist film and suggest alternate, if not monolithic, explanations for the dynamics at play. Collaboration or Resistance? Moviemaking in Occupied France An established filmmaker before his 1942 film, Marcel Carné’s previous work was not charged with conservatism or nationalism but had in fact suffered from accusations of decadence and “Jewish influence.” Lucien Rebatet, fascist critic for Je suis partout, wrote the following in 1941: Marcel Carné is an Aryan. But he has been impregnated with all sorts of Jewish influence: his success is entirely due to the Jews; they coddled him.. . .He was, in France, the most accomplished representative of that Marxist aesthetic that is everywhere one of the fruits of the proliferation of the Jews who spontaneously engender political, financial, and spiritual delinquency that always leads to the “Judaization” of a state.10

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One of his most famous films, Le jour se lève (Daybreak) (1939), is perhaps emblematic of Carné’s earlier aesthetic, as he focuses on one fatal day in the life of a factory worker. Carné’s use of smoke-filled sets, locales including a factory, bars, and hotel rooms, and a general appearance of darkness on the set, to the point where it is at times difficult to see exactly what is going on, led critics like Rebatet to lament the pessimism they saw as inherent in the “poetic realism” of the period, a movement of which Marcel Carné was the undisputed head. Jean Delannoy and Jean Cocteau, director and screenwriter (respectively) for L’Éternel retour suffered a fate similar to Carné’s, with Delannoy’s 1942 film Pontcarral being seen as patriotic,11 while L’Éternel retour made the following year lent itself to accusations of collaboration, mainly on the part of postwar English critics who objected to the “Aryan” appearance of the main characters as well as the “Germanic-Teutonic atmosphere.”12 These two key films of the Occupation era are remarkable in many ways, and not the least being their ability to give their filmmakers a reputation diametrically opposed to their renown before the films’ release. With Edith Thomas’s criticism in mind, the accusation of troubadourism seems a likely culprit for this about-face. Brian Levy rightfully underlines the fact that Les Visiteurs du soir is a “medieval film. . .composed by a poet who. . .has much of the medieval tradition in him.”13 Levy goes on to enumerate what he considers to be the medievalisms of the film: the “bestiary” of animals, the theme of the “faraway,” a dream motif that provides a “parallel state of non-reality,” the “medieval. . .association of pleasure and pain,” the image of the heart, and the paradox of love as both tender and dangerous.14 Whether the use of animals or the dream-like quality of the film is actually medieval in its thematics is less important than the fact that for Levy, these are the elements that make the film “medieval.” What Levy never tries to explore, however, is why Carné and Prévert would want to evoke the medieval in the first place. Beyond that, Levy does not explore why the foray into medievalism, at this time and place, creates a split reading of the films as either fascist or coded resistance. In his analyses of Les Visiteurs du soir and L’Éternel retour, Gregory Sims draws fascinating conclusions about the medievalist aesthetics of these two films.15 Whereas the changes that Cocteau makes to “the” Tristan legend create a “watered-down quality of the fantastic,” for Sims this is precisely what makes the film “so ideologically acceptable, that is, dubious.”16 His criticism of Les Visiteurs du soir is even more unequivocal. First, he notes that known fascist critic Maurice Bardèche encouraged filmmakers to create “fairy tales. . .that keep a national character, a national and even. . . regional difference. . . .Our legends, our old stories all hide beautiful

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allegories. It’s the very genius of our race.”17 Sims goes on to relate the aesthetics of Les Visiteurs to a fascist political project:18 It seems to me that Les Visiteurs du soir is, wittingly or not, heavily implicated in precisely this kind of regressive, explicitly nationalist optic: a purifying renewal through return to myths and legends in the framework of a specifically French, “primitive” cinema. . . .Rather than an allegorically coded message of “resistance” as critics habitually claim it to be, Les Visiteurs du soir must, I think, be seen as a film that conforms all too readily to, indeed cinematically incarnates, brings into existence, the regressive, nationalist vision of the cinema advocated by the French conservative and fascist right.19

Thus not only is Carné’s film refused resistant status, but also both form and content imply collaboration. Since Carné gazes back to France’s past for the setting of his film, for Sims this automatically implies dangerous nationalism. Sims puts medievalist film into quite a bind and creates an anxiety for the aficionado of these films. If all gesture to the medieval past is necessarily regressive and nationalist, clearly no film set in the Middle Ages could possibly escape Sims’s totalizing condemnation of the impulse to look toward the past. Not all critics see medievalism as inherently negative, though other readings of the film reinforce Sims’ notion that the film promotes nationalism. While Sims sees Carné and Cocteau embedded in the collaborative atmosphere of the Occupation, Edward Baron Turk reads Les Visiteurs du soir as quite the opposite: a film with a hidden critique of Nazi control of France, and in particular France’s torpor and military unpreparedness.20 Turk notes that a certain aesthetic emerged from Occupation film, termed elsewhere “the cinema of isolation,” including a tendency to turn away from the realities of everyday existence and embrace escapism. While Turk’s reading certainly soothes the conscience of fans of medievalist film, he falls prey to the duality of medievalism. Whereas for Sims the medieval setting smacks of nostalgic nationalism, for Turk medievalism provides a space for safely criticizing the present. Medieval France, Turk implies, did offer a coherence and integrity not found since, but he makes a distinction between the High Middle Ages, where culture flourished, and the fifteenth century when Les Visiteurs du soir is set. Turk goes on to pronounce, [I]n choosing 1485 as the setting of their film, the creators of Drôle de Drame, Le Quai des Brumes, and Le Jour se lève did not plan their escape to the past in order to extol France’s heritage. As in their earlier works, Carné and Prévert sought to capture and indict the failings of a society gone amuck.21

According to Turk, then, Carné’s brand of medievalist nationalism serves to unite the country in an attempt to remember France’s past autonomy,

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free of Nazi control. Positing France’s medieval past as a time of nostalgic heroism and purity, as Sims does, can rightfully be seen as fascist or collaborationist. But seeing strength of culture and conscience as endemic to France’s origin, as Turk advocates, can be read as patriotic in a positive, resistant sense. The Turk-Sims medievalist paradox is a curious replay of the rhetoric of the Occupation era when Joan of Arc was ironically claimed as a symbol for both Vichy France and the Resistance. Medievalism and Escapism One of the oft-repeated tenets of film reception is that mainstream, commercial (and therefore inherently conservative) film invites the viewer to enter the world of the film and lose any sense of individual identity for the duration of the film.22 New Wave filmmakers, Godard in particular, sought to link the film’s cinematography to the filmmaker’s politics or, as he puts it, “not to make a political film, but to make a film politically.” Godard and the New Wave, however, are remarkable precisely for the fact that they put into words and practice their theories of filmmaking. Part of their agenda was to distance themselves from the “cinéma à papa” that they saw as characteristic of the old guard of French filmmakers. While Godard’s jump cuts and direct address to the audience (the infamous breaking of the fourth wall) do, in fact, serve to remind the spectator that he or she is not actually living in the film world, not all pre-New Wave cinema espouses a group-like loss of individuality that can be equated with fascist film. Carné and Delannoy/Cocteau both challenge this dualism of pre- and post-New Wave cinematography, as they use certain distancing techniques and ways of creating communities of spectators that do not result in a crowd mentality. Cinematically, both Les Visiteurs du soir and L’Éternel retour invited viewers to enter together into a land beyond normal time and space, a technique that resulted in the derisive accusations of escapism characteristic of Thomas and Sims. In Les Visiteurs du soir, the melding of fifteenth-century France and a fantastic Otherworld begins with the entrance of Dominic (Arletty) and Gilles (Alain Cuny), two troubadours that we later find to be envoys of the devil, into a peaceful, walled medieval town. Immediately, Gilles shows his power by reviving a dead performing bear, and shortly thereafter he and Dominic flex their considerable spatiotemporal muscle by literally stopping time to allow them to seduce the betrothed celebrants of this prenuptial feast. In the first two scenes, the limited dialogue continually repeats the words “s’amuser” (to have fun), “se divertir” (to amuse or distract oneself ), and “distraire” (to distract). This hermetic, walled court seeks to forget the problems of the outside world in its festive community. When problems attempt to creep in as embodied by the disfigured dwarfs proposed as entertainment

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for the court, Anne (Marie Déa), the bride-to-be, shows her horror and disgust, stopping the human spectacle by requesting a love song. Carné highlights the magic of the troubadours’ song, a song that completes Gilles’ seduction of Anne, as he moves from medium shots involving more than one actor to progressively closer shot reverse shots of Gilles and Anne, finishing with a close-up on Gilles as he sings of the “waves that drown him.” Within the film, a quiet community of two has been formed within this walled society. Carné repeats this progressive close-up at the end of the film, eliminating the devil from the frame just as the director had cinematically removed the rest of the court from the feast frame. Carné zooms in on the faces of the two lovers, Gilles and Anne, now turned to stone, clearly as strongly bonded as the moment that Gilles sang his first song. In Les Visiteurs du soir, love creates a community of two that brings happiness, whereas being single or alone leads only to sorrow. In the scene where the demon troubadours have suspended time, Gilles points out loving couples to Anne as proof that togetherness brings relief from the sorrows of life: “Look at those two. . .Are they suffering?. . .No. . .They are marvelously alone. . .alone with the moon that shines on their love.” They are alone, even as they share the space with other loving couples and observers both on- and offscreen, in this private, forever suspended moment (figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Gilles (Alain Cluny) and Anne (Marie Déa) return the spectator’s gaze. Source: Les Visiteurs du soir (France, Marcel Carné, 1942).

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For another man, one whose “lover must surely have left him,” Gilles points to his total despair: “the moon, the stars, the birds, the trees in this garden, nothing exists anymore for him. . . .He hears nothing, sees nothing, he is alone, his lover is gone.” When Anne and Gilles look at the lonely lover, they look directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall, as if asking who those lonely people in the audience might be. Alone, but very much not alone, the lovers and the audience share a physical space. They are connected in the dark without words actually speaking, communicating feeling by simply sharing space and a quiet knowledge of their private connections. The film invites the viewer to leave the space of everyday life, along with the very real concerns surrounding the Occupation, and join the imagined community of onscreen lovers. Cocteau’s L’Éternel Retour too insists upon the isolation of the main characters, situating them in an imaginary time and place while making clear reference to the medieval past. Georges Charensol writes in his introduction to Jean Cocteau’s journal on film, “As with Carné and Prévert’s film, [L’Éternel retour] testifies to a tendency to evoke a mythic past in order to escape the difficult anxieties of the time.”23 The film begins with a quotation in the opening credits: “Eternal Return: this title, borrowed from Nietzsche, means here that the same legends can be reborn without their protagonists knowing it. Eternal return of very simple circumstances that make up the most famous of all the great love stories,”24 followed by Cocteau’s distinctive, handwritten signature. According to the published screenplay, Cocteau begins the film with an intended sense of dislocation and disorientation: “At first there are no indications that we are in the twentieth century.”25 The setting is French, beginning with the opening shot of Marc’s castle. As Patrice (Jean Marais) enters the courtyard riding on horseback, the exact date of the film’s setting is open. Clothing and the eventual use of cars in the film indicate that the setting is a modern period, and the language is consistently French, but yet the location does not correspond to 1943 France. For one thing, the feudal system is in full swing, as shown by the unusual amount of power Marc ( Jean Murat) wields over his subjects. When Patrice jokes that he is going to another island to “torment your serfs,” Marc replies in all seriousness, “I only ask them to pay what they owe”; he does not deny participation in a feudal society. The characters continually emphasize their strangeness and dislocation. After Patrice defeats Natalie’s boorish fiancé, Morolt (Alexandre Rignault), Natalie (Madelaine Solonge) underlines the fact that Patrice is a visitor from another world. At the same time, Patrice notes that Natalie herself is

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a foreigner to the island: Natalie: You’re not from the island. You’re well now. You’ll go home and this affair with the knife will seem like a bad dream. Patrice: You’re not from the island either. Natalie: Oh! me. . . . Patrice: Wouldn’t you like to leave the island, Morolt, the bad dream? Wouldn’t you like to escape from all this, on the quiet? Cross the water, marry a man worthy of you, and live? You’re not really living here; you’re dead. You would have a castle, a car, servants, trees, roads, animals, money, love.

The sense of suspended disbelief continues as Natalie leaves the island and makes a new, dream-like home with Marc. After the marriage, Marc asks Natalie if she regrets anything, and her response is “What is there to regret, Marc? For me it is just unbelievable, let me get used to it.” The dream-like state lived by the two lovers is put into words by Natalie when Patrice finds her sleeping in their mountain hideaway: Patrice: You were sleeping without me, like a little girl. Were you dreaming? Natalie: Since we ran away, I’ve been dreaming of all this, and when I’m awake, I think I’m still dreaming.. . . Patrice: I don’t like the people in your dreams. I don’t know them and they don’t know me. Natalie: Oh, but the people in my dreams know you.

Both Natalie and Patrice are well known in this alternate dreamworld, even though Patrice is initially uncomfortable with his participation in Natalie’s alternate reality. Others notice Patrice’s lack of engagement with the “real” world, particularly after the romantic interlude in the mountains comes to an end. Natalie II (Junie Astor), the equivalent of Isolde of the white hands, recognizes that Patrice’s existence is unconnected with present reality: Patrice doesn’t live in our world; our laughter irritates him; our lightheartedness kills him; and when he doesn’t avoid us, he’s even further away. It’s not me he’s looking for here; it’s not my name he speaks. He’s looking for a ghost, Lionel. Do you want to know the real Natalie? Here she is. (She shows him the photo of the other Natalie.) It’s his uncle’s wife. I’m just the shadow of that Natalie.

As the opposite of Natalie, Natalie II physically embodies the real world. She is dark-haired and hearty, while Natalie is golden-haired and extremely fragile.

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Natalie is ethereal while Natalie II is worldly. The women stand in for the opposition between dream and reality, absence and presence, past and present. Geographically, as well, the different locations in the film challenge any attempt to ground the story in reality. After Natalie and Patrice are discovered and Marc sends Natalie back to the island, she sets off with her escort in a car to the home that was originally accessible only by boat. Likewise, when Patrice—her “knight in shining armor”—rescues her, they continue by car to a snowy mountaintop retreat. Whereas they had been dressed for the hot summer sun when they set off, the snowy peak is unusually close, heightening the sense that this is a symbolic place, a place that makes no sense geographically but that somehow functions seamlessly in the story. Again mysteriously or even marvelously (in the medieval sense), Marc finds them in this out-of-the-way retreat, and when he spirits Natalie away, Patrice quickly finds his way back to the real world, the town near his uncle Marc’s chateau. These alterations to space and time, like those in Les Visiteurs du soir, serve to distance the viewer and prevent total identification. They are not as revolutionary as the jump cut or obvious acknowledgment of the filming process, but they serve as an early recognition that the filmmaker can create a fantasy world that does not entail a unified community onscreen and offscreen. The film’s world clearly functions under a different set of rules than the “real” world. The closing scene of L’Éternel retour takes place in an abandoned chapel that serves as a boathouse. When Natalie expires next to Patrice, Marc notes, “No one can reach them now.” The screenplay explains, “The two bodies are lying next to each other. Death has sculpted them, enfolded them, lifted them onto a royal shield. They are alone, enveloped in glory.. . .AND SO BEGINS THEIR REAL LIFE. The End.”26 At this point, marvelous geography and personal disassociation with the real, physical world become merged, as Patrice and Natalie leave the world. Alone in the boathouse, they are together in their future Otherworld. To underscore the timelessness and Otherworldliness of the scene, the very walls of the boathouse disappear, appearing to dissolve onscreen. What was the dark, dingy, and closed space of an abandoned-looking boathouse has turned into an open, light, and airy space that appears to be a funeral monument to the two lovers suspended in the clouds. They have completed the medieval legend of two fated lovers, as predicted by Nietzsche’s opening quotation, without ever being aware of their repeating the past. Not only must the audience wonder if it too is unwittingly repeating the past, but viewers are also invited to join this community of two as the walls disappear and the cinematic audience finds itself in the same ethereal space that holds the two lovers. Significantly, the spectator is indeed escaping the “real,” Occupied world, but he or she is doing so not to join another community with shared, fascist values, but to join with a small group of select lovers.

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Cinematic Communities in Occupied France In 1940s Occupied France, moviegoing provided a place for people to go to escape the difficulties of wartime. However, this moment of community, where the audience members came together for relatively brief moments in time, was never seen as harmless by the Occupying forces. Decrees and laws specified that there were to be no comments, jeers, or even applause during the news reels because it could be interpreted as antiGerman. Later in the war, young French men feared attending movies because rumors spread that the Germans were rounding up shiftless, unemployed young Frenchmen to send to workcamps.27 Nonetheless, the mere gathering together of groups of people, not allowed in other contexts, gave the cinema a special role during the Occupation. United linguistically, the audience of French films could know that in the darkened room there was no doubt some other viewer who shared a similar history, culture, and attitude to his or her own. Upon leaving the theater, filmgoers relived that moment of community, adopting Natalie’s hairstyle and the sweater worn by Patrice in L’Éternel retour. For Occupation France where free assembly was not permitted, bonds were forged via cinematic technique and an invitation to another, different space where, like screen lovers, the audience could vicariously become a part of a group. Given that Occupation forces prohibited any unauthorized gathering, clearly censors in Occupied France would never have approved the intentionally timeless L’Éternel retour and Les Visiteurs du soir had they overtly engaged in oppositional community building. Filmmakers resorted to fashioning gatherings of people that were both subtle and ambiguous, and troubadourism was the ideal tool for shaping this imagined community. Carolyn Dinshaw notes the important role that medievalism can play in the construction of modern communities and self-identities: [T]he medieval, as well as other dank stretches of time, becomes itself a resource for subject and community formation and materially engaged coalition building. By using this concept of making relations with the past we realize a temporal dimension of the self and of community.28

Just as certain films create a sense of solidarity within some segments of the audience, so does the use of medieval themes. While this creation of solidarity has been seen as antidemocratic or anti-individualistic, it can serve the positive function of creating communities across time and space, as Dinshaw would allow. If, in employing the Middle Ages, one creates a community that espouses hate or violence, this would indeed be fairly categorized as negative, perhaps in some cases even fascist. But, as Dinshaw’s

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articulation of gay community formation attests, not all communities formed in such a way are inherently negative, though they might rightly be entitled conservative: conservative, in the sense that there is an attempt to assert a set of shared values and history. But to paint all such communities, particularly during the highly charged period of the Occupation, as reactionary or fascist would not do them justice, for it presumes that all audience members experience the same response and remember identical histories. This presumption would in fact privilege a heteronormative, masculine system of power, more in line with Nazism than with the filmic community created for a brief moment when French citizens bonded in theaters across the country in 1942 and 1943. The community that these films created during the Occupation was one that was both specific and yet transcended time. It was an attempt to reach to the medieval past to draw out similarities and connections for the modern period. But as much as the medieval has functioned as a space against which modernity has been constructed in the works of Michel Foucault and Homi Bhabha,29 the Occupation has been used as a moment against which another conception of modern society defines itself. The undeniable, insurmountable break that provoked Theodor Adorno’s declamation that poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric renders opaque a film produced from within that very moment of rupture. The dualism and rupture of before and after that are epitomized by the medieval/modern and pre-/ post-Holocaust split find their echo in the insistence that these two Occupation films must be either collaborationist or resistant, just as for Sartre (practically) all French were resistant and in Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974) all French were at least capable of collaboration. As Dinshaw rightly points out, the medieval is often misappropriated in order to create a “transcendent, essential identity,”30 precisely the danger pointed out by critics of Carné’s and Delannoy’s films. Whatever the goals of the directors may have been, the communities that were created and are continually recreated upon viewing these films are clearly heterogeneous and shifting. The near impossibility of recreating or even understanding the filmic communities of 1942 and 1943 is expressed by Jacques Siclier, who recalls his own boyhood fascination with film under the Occupation: “The event that was Les Visiteurs du soir is, in many ways, incomprehensible outside of the time in which it was produced.”31 By evoking medievalism, the directors and writers took a chance that the communities they created would either embrace their differences and profit from a momentary and fleeting solidarity, or, at the other extreme, that their viewers would use this reaching back through time to create a community based on exclusion and elimination of those who did not belong to this imagined group. As films that could participate in either of

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these two extremes, they suffered equally under accusations of resistance and fascism. While it is perhaps a truism that the films fell somewhere between these two poles, crucially they provoked the rise of different types of communities, exclusionary and inclusive. As such, these two Occupation films illustrate perfectly the dangers and ambiguities of troubadourism (or medievalism, in general), and serve as a cautionary tale to those interpreting the impact of medievalism on community—namely that there is no one monolithic community created by any instance of filmic medievalism. The warning applies equally to those who seek to employ such medievalism, for quite clearly any intended social commentary can easily have the opposite impact to the one desired. While medieval films may not necessarily imply conservatism, the link to the past may wittingly or unwittingly encourage bonds among people who seek to exclude others based on race, class, or gender—a danger, I would argue, inherent to medievalism. Notes 1. Cited by Dorothy Kaufmann in “Against ‘Troubadourism’ in Vichy France: The Diaries of Edith Thomas,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.3 (1997): 507–19, at p. 509. 2. Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, French Cinema: From its Beginnings to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 140. 3. Following World War I, the French film industry rapidly lost ground due to its lack of industrial complex and competition from the United States. See Alan Williams, “Decline and Mutation,” Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 77–100. 4. Williams, Republic of Images, p. 250. 5. François Garçon, De Blum à Pétain: cinéma et société française (1936–1944) (Paris: Éditions du cerf, 1984), p. 192 (translation and emphasis mine). Garçon’s assertion is called into question by Claude Chabrol’s collection of French propaganda shorts and newsreels entitled Eye of Vichy (1993). The extent of filmmakers’ involvement in spreading Nazi propaganda clearly needs further study. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, “La République du silence,” Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 11. 7. Sartre goes as far as to claim this status for all French citizens “at one time or another” (“La République du silence,” p. 12). 8. Lanzoni, French Cinema, p. 137. 9. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 29. 10. As cited in Gregory Sims, “Démons et merveilles: Fascist Aesthetics and the ‘New School of French Cinema’ (Les Visiteurs du soir, 1942),” Australian Journal of French Studies 36 (1) (1999): 66 (translation mine). 11. Lanzoni, French Cinema, p. 140.

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12. Gregory Sims, “Tristan en chandail: Poetics as Politics in Jean Cocteau’s L’Eternel Retour,” French Cultural Studies 9 (1998): 19–50, at p. 35. 13. Brian J. Levy, “Medieval Literary Technique and the Cinema of Occupied France,” Romance Languages Annual 4 (1992): 103–111, at p. 104. 14. Levy, “Medieval Literary Technique,” 104–10. 15. Sims, “Démons”; and Sims, “Tristan.” 16. Sims, “Tristan,” p. 49. 17. “des contes de fées. . .qui gardent un caractère national, une différence nationale et même. . .régionale. . .Nos légendes, nos vieux récits cachent tous de belles allégories. C’est le génie même de notre race” (Sims, “Démons,” p. 87; translation mine). 18. It should be noted that, however reprehensible his politics undoubtedly were, Bardèche was not overtly calling for a fascist cinema aesthetic. 19. Sims, “Tristan,” p. 88. 20. Edward Baron Turk writes, “I would suggest that this reluctance to approve of the film’s pace is tied to the unwillingness of so many French critics to acknowledge the film as an allegory of current events. To do either is tantamount to conceding the uncomfortable fact that Les Visiteurs du soir is an extraordinary expression of the military unpreparedness, political weakness, and, above all, national torpor that contributed to France’s defeat by Germany” (Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], pp. 200–201). 21. Turk, Child of Paradise, 205. 22. Judith Mayne eloquently explores the history of this theory of film spectatorship as well as the dangers of assuming a unified, monolithic response to any film: Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship. 23. Georges Charensol, “Jean Cocteau et le cinématographe,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 11. 24. L’Eternel Retour—ce titre, emprunté à Nietzsche, veut dire, ici, que les mêmes légendes peuvent renaître sans que leurs héros s’en doutent. Éternel retour de circonstances très simples qui composent la plus célèbre de toutes les grandes histoires du cœur. Jean Cocteau, “L’Éternel retour,” directed by Jean Delannoy (Home Vision, Chicago, IL, 1943). 25. Jean Cocteau, Three Screenplays: L’Éternel retour, Orphée, La Belle et la bête, trans. Carol Martin-Sperry (New York: Grossman, 1972), p. 3 (translation mine). 26. Cocteau, Three Screenplays, p. 99. 27. One of the most engaging and colorful accounts of cinema culture during the Occupation can be found in André Bazin’s French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Critical Esthetic (New York: Federick Ungar, 1981). In his introduction to this collection of Bazin’s critical essays, François Truffaut remembers the movie theaters as a refuge for the French until the roundups for workcamps began (p. 8). 28. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 21. 29. This is true of much of Foucault’s work, including his History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish, as he sets up histories of modern power structures

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that for him must be differentiated from the past. Dinshaw rightly takes to task Bhabha’s reading of the medieval as the opposite to modernity in Bhabha’s DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation (London: Routledge, 1990). See Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 18. 30. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 191. 31. “L’événement que fut Les Visiteurs du soir est, à bien des égards, incompréhensible hors de l’époque où il s’est produit” ( Jacques Siclier, La France de Pétain et son cinéma [Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1981], p. 144; translation mine).

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CHAPTER 10 SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN IN CHINA’S MARTIAL ARTS WORLD: KING HU’S A TOUCH OF ZEN Peter Lorge

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owerful female characters in films typically face difficulties in maintaining cinematic believability while integrating their sexually defined gender roles with physical or intellectual prowess. In A Touch of Zen (1969), director King Hu (Hu Jinquan) offers a Buddhist and feminist critique of the problems of powerful women by evading, rather than confronting, the issues in question, and presenting a solution that breaks free of the Confucian role definitions that he believes circumscribed traditional Chinese society. Most obviously, Hu adapts a story by Pu Songling (1640–1715) that is set outside the modern world during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and allows him to attack indirectly the traditional conventions of modern Chinese society by targeting past society. The heart of the movie’s solution and critique is not, however, the integration of a powerful woman’s roles, but rather in presenting those roles as stages along a path leading to a desexualized Buddhist enlightenment outside of society. Pu Songling ranks as one of the best fiction writers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). His most famous work, Strange Stories from the Leisure Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi) is remarkable for both its supernatural stories of ghosts and fox spirits, and its unique use of dialogue for characterization.1 Most of the work was completed by 1679, and it has remained popular since then. Quite fittingly, as the subject of an article on the projection of contemporary values onto the past, the first serious studies of the text in the 1950s immediately saw in it anti-Manchu and nationalistic threads because the Qing dynasty’s ruling house was ethnically Manchu, not Chinese. King

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Hu’s cinematic versions of several of Pu Songling’s stories interjected not only a filmic interpretation of the text, but also a Buddhist and late twentieth-century feminist critique of traditional Chinese society as well. In A Touch of Zen, one of his best-known works, King Hu uses the medium of the martial arts film to elaborate on a simple tale of vengeance and justice, infusing his otherwise straightforward commentary with astonishing visuals. But it is not just the need for action that makes the martial arts film an appropriate vehicle for King Hu’s critique; women have a much broader range of action in the genre. Pu Songling’s original story is much simpler and entirely lacking in either Buddhist influence or specific historical and political events. In A Touch of Zen, the basic plot remains similar, but King Hu changes the tale in order to consider the place of women within Buddhist and martial culture. For example, rather than in the border town of A Touch of Zen, Pu Songling’s story is actually set in Nanjing, a major metropolis, and Miss Yang decides to have sex with Gu Shenzhai to provide an heir for such an upright and filial man. Her pursuit of her father’s political enemy in the city explains her otherwise strange behavior. But having accomplished her revenge, she leaves, telling Gu that, although he will not have a long life, their son will be a success. Pu concludes by explaining to the reader that her prediction did, in fact, come true. For Pu Songling, the point of the story is primarily the recounting and explication of a mysterious anecdote, but one that ultimately reinforces traditional Chinese values. The story centers on Gu Shenzhai as an upright Confucian scholar, and secondarily on his mother, who is rewarded with a successful son through odd, and vaguely supernatural, means. King Hu shifts the focus to Miss Yang, using Gu as the means to contextualize her struggle away from traditional social values and toward Buddhist enlightenment. Her martial skills are highlighted, as is their Buddhist source, making her unconventional in the Confucian sense. King Hu took a tale with only the most marginal connection to martial arts and brought it fully into the genre of the Chinese martial arts film. Chinese martial arts films are remarkable, at least in comparison to Western action films, for their regular depiction of women as effective and powerful warriors. While this practice is consistent with traditional Chinese literature, the cinematic expression of physically powerful women is not identical. Whereas traditional Chinese literature places these warrior women in the conventional social roles of daughter, wife or mother, martial arts films just as often allow warrior women to be single and unattached. This modern expression of a historically inaccurate past, the “Martial Arts World” ( jianghu), thus brings contemporary sensibilities into an imagined “medieval” diegesis.

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Enter the Warrior Woman A Touch of Zen begins near the abandoned Jinglu Fort, where Gu Shenzhai, a poor scholar, lives with his mother. Gu runs a letter-writing and portraitpainting shop in a small nearby frontier town. Despite his mother’s admonitions, Gu refuses to take the civil service exams that might lead to government service. A disguised government agent, Ouyang Nin, engages Gu to paint his portrait and begins asking him questions about the people in the town, particularly the herbalist, Mr. Lu. Shortly thereafter, the mysterious woman, Miss Yang, moves into the deserted mansion across the lane from Gu. Gu’s mother decides that he should marry Yang, but the proposal is subsequently rejected. Ouyang Nin arrives at Gu’s house for another sitting, allowing him to look around for the fugitives he is tracking. He attacks General Shi, disguised as a blind fortune-teller, outside Gu’s house, but leaves when Shi’s cries attract Gu and his mother. Gu learns that Miss Yang knows the “fortune-teller”; more importantly, Gu’s mother catches a cold when she goes to get the doctor for the injured fortuneteller. This event then leads to Miss Yang coming over the following day to take care of her. Mrs. Gu laments the fact that her son will not take the exams, just like his father, and so will not be able to get married, thus bringing an end to the Gu line. Despite several departures from the historical past, however, even a cinematically credible representation of a powerful woman must tread uneasily between traditional and modern roles. It is a rare film that manages to create a character who is both physically powerful and entirely female, and such a combination is only even remotely conceivable in the “Martial Arts World.” The Martial Arts World of Chinese cinema is a sort of parallel universe vaguely connected to the historical past, where martial arts skills trump strength, sex, and class background. In this “medieval” setting, battles between good and evil are played out against a backdrop of tropes, destabilized by the modern world’s concerns. Traditional Chinese high culture centered on the civil educated elite male and his cloistered passive female counterpart. Popular culture, by contrast, drew in the otherwise culturally dispossessed active nonelite women, generals, eunuchs, and religious professionals. At the same time, popular culture also drew heavily upon the written historical tradition for stories of heroic generals and officials, and evil ministers. The written high culture in turn transcribed popular culture and usually moralized it. Indeed, this was exactly what Pu Songling did so well—he wrote down the popularly circulating tales in Classical Chinese, making them available to the literate. Chinese martial arts cinema thus stems from both popular and high culture, and its depiction of gender roles is thus likewise multivalent.

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The moral aspect of traditional literature was probably not wholly an invention of elite authors in the sense that good manners and ethical behavior were not confined to the elite. Popular culture provided the main source for the modern cinematic expression of traditional China, however, while nonetheless incorporating certain moral conventions defining good women. In this manner, women heroes had to conform somehow to both their popular and high culture norms, particularly as reflections of modern women. How could a woman be fully female and fully a warrior? In modern terms, how can a woman be a good wife and mother, and a good businesswoman? The conflict between Miss Yang’s moral roles, in that she serves as a model of a modern woman while occupying the narrative space of a medieval woman (who would never actually face a similar situation), only comes to a head in the movie after nearly thirty minutes of buildup. Ouyang Nin is revealed to be an agent of the Eastern Depot, the dreaded eunuch-run secret police force of the Ming dynasty. Gu’s perceptiveness and unwillingness to take up government service in evil times convinces Miss Yang that he is an extraordinary man. She invites him to her place, where she plays the lute and sings for him, ultimately seducing him. They wake up the next day together, and her affectionate attempt to block the sunlight from disturbing Gu’s sleep is interrupted by Ouyang Nin’s arrival. A sword fight erupts between Ouyang and Miss Yang that ranges over and out of the mansion, as Gu struggles to follow. Yang is well on her way to trouncing Ouyang, who flees. Gu trips and falls trying to keep up. When he awakens, he stumbles to his market shop, where he is immediately taken to see the magistrate. The magistrate initially wants Gu to make ten copies of a death warrant for Miss Yang, and Gu learns that she is the daughter of an official who offended the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian. Her father and entire family were sentenced to death. Ouyang Nin then arrives and tells the magistrate not to put out copies of the death warrant, as this will alert them. He and his men plan to attack them now that he knows where they are. Gu is sent away, and he hurries home to send his mother to safety, before going to the abandoned mansion to alert Miss Yang. Yang has now stepped into the Martial Arts World, where women can be powerful not as women, but as warriors. This transition raises the problem of a woman becoming desexed by achieving warrior status. The theater tradition, at least in the form of Peking Opera, adds to this problem through the practice of men portraying women. Men did not pretend to be women, or even try to dress as women in the transvestic sense, but rather male performers portrayed women theatrically to dramatize certain aspects of women in fiction. This gender switching made stories based around disguised sex and the attendant complications of falling in love with someone while so disguised a credible plot device. The usual sparseness or

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complete absence of facial hair in Chinese men, and less pronounced sexual dimorphism, helped too. In Chinese fiction it is most frequently the construction and performance of gender that distinguishes characters, rather than gross physical descriptions. Despite the regularity of women functioning as warriors, martial pursuits were still a primarily male pursuit. To further complicate this already complex mix, an equally vibrant tradition depicted clever scholars whose intellect and knowledge of military thought allowed them to outwit the merely physically powerful. The epitome of the strategy-capable scholar is the scholar-general, who leads armies and campaigns. While in reality such men were exceptionally rare, they maintained an inordinately prominent place (not surprisingly) in the minds of scholars and civil officials in their considerations of military affairs. Confucianized officials maintained that civil officials were rightfully and naturally dominant over military officials and generals. At the same time, they also believed that men were naturally dominant over women, that men were naturally more martial than women, and that northerners were more martial than southerners.2 To my knowledge, no one acknowledged the glaring contradiction of martial men, who were clearly more masculine, being placed under civil, and thus less masculine men, in the bureaucracy, or discussed whether a martial woman was more masculine than a civil man. A Touch of Zen manages to incorporate and “solve” this problem as well, but only through the multiple transformations of its female lead, and perhaps through Gu’s power to amplify Yang’s martial prowess through strategy. With Miss Yang’s entrance into the Martial Arts World, the action picks up and the importance of sex-defined gender roles, particularly sexless men like eunuchs and Buddhist monks, comes to the fore. At the mansion, General Shi dispatches the first wave of Ouyang Nin’s men and then duels with Ouyang himself. He initially defeats Ouyang, but Ouyang wounds him. Yang arrives and Ouyang flees. Gu says that he wants to help, since Yang and he are virtually married. She initially rebuffs his aid since she intends to fight to the death where she is and he will be no help in such a battle. Gu responds with several military sayings, at least one from Sunzi’s Art of War, to the effect that fighting to the death is stupid when one could win using strategy. Miss Yang reluctantly concedes that he is right and, as per his request, recounts how General Shi, General Lu, and she found themselves in their current predicament. Miss Yang’s father, a high official, sent a memorial to the emperor detailing the corruption of the eunuch Wei Zhongxian. The memorial was intercepted and her father tortured to death. Generals Shi and Lu helped her escape, and they fled to the frontier. The fugitives were almost captured by Ouyang Nin and his men, but Abbot Hui Yan saved them and brought them back to his Buddhist monastery. There they remained for two years, where the abbot trained Miss Yang in martial arts.

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The action then shifts back to the present, where the heroes must now stop Ouyang Nin from communicating with the approaching high official Mun Da and his two hundred men. Yang manages to mortally wound Ouyang Nin, and then General Shi and she defeat two of Mun Da’s personal bodyguards in a justifiably renowned battle in a bamboo forest. Under Gu Shenzhai’s expert strategic advice, Yang, Shi, Lu, and their assistants lure Mun Da to Jinglu Fort at night and dispatch him and his men through clever traps and deception. General Lu is killed in the fight, but Miss Yang poignantly kills Mun Da in front of an altar with her father’s spirit tablet on it. Gu did not see this climactic battle (presumably he was in a different part of the fort), and he begins to survey the aftermath the following morning. His pleasure at the success of his schemes is soon undermined by the carnage and the disappearance of Miss Yang. Abbot Hui Yan then arrives with dozens of monks to clean up the bodies. Gu’s mother also returns, with a message from Miss Yang not to look for her. Leaving aside the confusing, and perhaps inconsistent, matters of time and space between the end of the fight and Yang’s trip to Hui Yan’s monastery, her departure returns us to the role of sex in defining the warrior woman. Sex itself is very much at the center of the problem and the solution to the warrior woman. This brings us to two further categories of men who are also regular participants in the Martial Arts World—Buddhist monks and eunuchs. These sexless men are often extremely powerful martial artists and represent two idealized poles of good and evil. Eunuchs have a long history in China and were the subject of regular condemnation by government officials. As desexed men, eunuchs were feminized without becoming female and notorious for their corruption (Wei Zhongxian being a paradigmatic example). Buddhist monks, on the other hand, were not desexed men, but men who abstained from sex and other worldly pleasures. Combined with the long tradition of martial arts at the Shaolin Temple, the pure, martially capable monk was the ideal martial artist.3 A martial woman who has sex thus fits awkwardly into this context. It is therefore not surprising that our heroine, Miss Yang, both literally and figuratively travels throughout the film, though now pursued by Gu. The defeat of the initial danger to Miss Yang would appear to be a good ending to the movie were it not for her pregnancy, which further establishes the physical liminality of the warrior/woman. This is not only a narrative loose end, but also a premature termination of Miss Yang’s Buddhist path to enlightenment. The clash between good and evil has not been fully resolved, nor has the Confucian hold over her in the person of Gu Shenzhai been broken yet. Gu promptly sets out for the Buddhist monastery. Just as he nears it, a monk lays a baby before him with a message from Miss Yang. Abbot Hui Yan, watching from above with Miss Yang, tells her that she and General Shi must

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Figure 10.1 The Abbot points Miss Yang back to the monastery. Source: From A Touch of Zen (Taiwan, King Hu, 1969).

go and save Gu, who is in danger. Only after they tend to this situation will they be able to leave the outside world behind completely for the monastery. Yang and Shi arrive in a forest in time to save Gu and the baby, but this leads them into conflict with Commander Xu and his men, who have been sent by the evil eunuchs of the Eastern Depot to find them. Commander Xu is too strong for Yang and Shi, and Abbot Hui Yan once again intervenes to save the day. The abbot defeats Xu, but rather than kill him, which would have been contrary to Buddhist beliefs, he talks with him privately for a few moments and releases him. On the way back to the monastery, the abbot, Yang, and Shi come upon Commander Xu, kneeling and praying for forgiveness. This is a ruse, and Xu fatally stabs the abbot. Despite this death wound, the abbot touches Xu’s forehead, sending him into a delirium where he kills his two aides and throws himself over a cliff. Bleeding gold, the abbot then ascends to a hill where the sun forms a penumbra around him in perfect Buddha iconography and points Miss Yang toward the monastery (figure 10.1). The journey of Miss Yang, the warrior woman in A Touch of Zen, is thus a sequence of shifts from role to role without balancing those roles into a stable whole. She moves from warrior, to lover, to mother, back to warrior, and finally is pointed to the path of desexed Buddhist martial (presumably) monasticism. King Hu does not solve the problem of modern women’s conflicting roles, but he does present a way out. This lack of a solution is “realistic,” if we may call it that, and does not force the viewer to accept a new formulation of what it is to be a powerful woman. Ultimately the director presents a Buddho-feminist critique of traditional, and thus modern, Chinese culture that undercuts the Confucian construction of women and requires a powerful woman to retreat to the Buddhist monastery to realize herself fully.

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The Cinematic Transformation King Hu’s cinematic and Buddhist transformation of the original story brings Miss Yang directly into the modern age through the Martial Arts World. A mysterious woman who has sex with a neighbor is scarcely interesting in a major urban center, nor is the freedom of action required for such a large-scale martial arts battle credible within the close ambit of the authorities. It is also hard for a woman to be anything but the tightly constrained civilized ideal of a woman when she is acting in a center of civilization. On the border, a woman can be free, powerful, and physical, and make personal choices about whom she will sleep with, without completely undermining her gendered self. Yet it is Buddhism that truly empowers Miss Yang, and Buddhism offers her a way out of her troubled life. Yang has no real prospect of a peaceful life outside of the monastery. She cannot regain her previous life, nor even rejoin society. The prognosis for a powerful woman is thus not positive. When she was weak, she was beset by troubles, but transforming herself into a strong woman able to confront those troubles only moves her further away from mainstream society. The attachment to the mundane world is ultimately a dead end, as any good Buddhist would attest, and sex is one of the main desires that leads to the endless cycle of suffering, death, and rebirth. King Hu has taken a straightforward story of strange behavior tinged with the supernatural and surrounded it with a Buddhist ethic. In so doing, he radically changes the focus of the story as well as its moral. Pu Songling recorded stories that he heard from his contemporaries; King Hu tells a modern parable in the utopia of the past. Their sensibilities are thus not surprisingly different, and Hu’s shift of the story to the frontier, and into a martial arts/Buddhist realm, reflect his concerns. The filmmaker is also not seeking merely to recount a curious tale. In creating a Buddhist story, King Hu moves Miss Yang out of the strict Confucian world into a seemingly more egalitarian and open world. Yang is effectively doomed under the Confucian system, since she could not meet society’s expectations and remain out of the reach of the government. At the same time, to give up sex and motherhood, at least to the extent of producing a child, would undermine her identity as a woman in the Chinese construction of gender. Had Yang entered the monastery and become a martially capable nun, the story would lose all emotive force. Our heroine is victimized because she is the daughter of a righteous Confucian official and wishes to avenge her father’s unjust murder. The movie therefore begins with the first Confucian role for a woman, that of a daughter. Inherent in the role of daughter is that she will be married off, out of her father’s household, and into her husband’s household. Sex and

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procreation are intrinsic to this movement and necessary for the transformation of a daughter into a woman, wife, and mother. A girl becomes a woman through sex, preferably within marriage and resulting in male offspring. It is therefore necessary for Yang to go through this transformation in addition to avenging her father’s death, if she is to fulfill her Confucian duties and society’s expectations. Yet it is difficult for her to find a suitable husband. General Shi would seem to be the obvious choice, since he is about her age and obviously a good man of noble character. Even the older General Lu is a possibility. But these men are disqualified precisely because they traveled with her for two years and knew her when her father was alive. Since her father did not betroth her to either man while he was alive, he did not choose them. Sex with either man would also compromise the selflessness of their efforts to save her. As is made clear in the movie, that in traditional (and even modern) China there is no ceremonial or religious requirement for marriage, and having consensual sex essentially brings a marriage into being. Gu Shenzhai states that they are “virtually married” when Yang tries to send him away, though Ouyang Nin chastises her when he finds the two of them the morning after their sexual encounter since she is a woman from a good family. Nevertheless, it is made clear that Yang’s seduction of Gu is not motivated by lust, but by the desire to provide an heir for such a good man. She respects him and admires his uncorrupted spirit, as well as his resolutely filial treatment of his mother. Gu’s mother’s lament to Yang that his lack of spouse will bring their lineage to an end inspires Miss Yang to have sex with him. In a single stroke, Yang transforms into a woman/wife and rewards Confucian values. Her transformation into a mother is almost derailed by her intention to stand and fight to the death against overwhelming odds. This clash between wanting to produce an heir for Gu, avenge her father’s death, and resolve her fugitive status is averted by Gu’s injection of strategy into the confrontation with the government troops. Gu is then forced to pursue Miss Yang to the Buddhist monastery, his trip taking long enough for her to gestate and give birth to a boy. Yang becomes a mother, fulfilling her duty as a wife and rewarding Gu’s righteous character. She does not, however, need to raise her child in order to fully legitimize her status as mother. Gu takes the child and leaves, but Abbot Hui Yan must send Yang and General Shi out to protect Gu from impending danger. Yang is now a fully fledged warrior woman in the sense that she has fulfilled every female role that Chinese society could expect of her, and she has successfully avenged her father’s death by fighting a climactic hand-to-hand battle against his persecutors. She must now fight to protect her husband and son, and to face down another, stronger, attempt to destroy her by the government.

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Buddhism returns for the resolution of the final struggle, pointing Yang away from the mundane world rather than synthesizing her many transformations into a satisfying whole. Evil, in the form of Commander Xu, proves impervious to the blandishments of even the obviously enlightened Abbot Hui Yan. The abbot’s attempt to turn Xu from his evil path not only fails but also results in his own death. Of course, as a Boddhisatva, Hui Yan cannot really be “killed,” though his corporal body may be destroyed. Commander Xu is not so fortunate and dies after killing his own henchmen. If much of the body of the movie is a sort of Confucian bildungsroman for Miss Yang, it is still embedded in a Buddhist framework. Sex carries Yang through her Confucian progression; it is the means of that transformation but it does not reveal her true character until the end. In choosing to provide Gu with an heir and then leaving the child with him, she becomes the Songzi Guanyin, the Guanyin (Buddhist Chinese goddess of mercy) who provides sons.4 This short-circuits the entire Confucian value system, with the merciful Buddhist response not to Gu’s goodness, but to his mother’s plea to Yang for offspring. An underlying thread of womanto-woman interaction, at the mechanistic level a request that Yang have sex with Gu, is now revealed. Pu Songling’s original story was a supernaturally tinged account of a good man being rewarded for his upright behavior. King Hu has undermined the Confucian morality play and replaced it with a Buddhist morality play. The sex that is so fundamental to Yang’s progression through Confucian roles, and that is ordinarily frowned upon in the Buddhist world, is empowered by King Hu into a means of religious mercy. Sex leading to procreation is portrayed here as a female power used at the behest of another female. While not, perhaps, a fully acceptable feminist perspective, since Gu’s mother is asserting the patriarchal Confucian society’s point of view, it is nonetheless a decisive move away from the passive construction of sex as something done to women, or that a girl must do in order to become a woman. A single female can choose to have sex and provide an heir to a man without compromising her independence. This is an empowering act in A Touch of Zen. We should not, however, abandon entirely a more balanced view of the relationship between Gu and Yang. While it is true that Yang is the physically powerful protagonist and that she provides Gu with a son, it is also true that Gu’s intellectual prowess in planning the ambush at the fort allows Yang to survive. Gu is not merely a good man, but also a clever strategist. He is worthy of Yang’s love by virtue of both his character and his intellectual abilities. Once again, King Hu has added to Pu Songling’s story, this time through the Chinese trope of the scholar made capable general/strategist by virtue of his readings in military texts. Gu is now established as the intellectual counterpart to Yang’s physical power.

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Having now created a balanced, if not necessarily equal, relationship between the lead female and male characters, King Hu can now juxtapose Confucianism with Buddhism, and women’s traditional roles with modern roles. Confucianism and the intellect are contrasted with Buddhism and the body/emotion, with the former ultimately proving much weaker than the latter. By extension, the Confucian social construct of traditional roles is similarly less good than the Buddhist concept in modern roles. King Hu’s Buddhist critique of the problem of modern women in traditional roles is clear: they must let go of those roles since they neither empower women nor enlighten them. Gu Shenzhai is a worthy spouse for Yang, representing the best of a Confucian or traditional man. Yet if Yang were to take up that traditional role, she would be diminished by it and her promise as a warrior woman destroyed. The spiritual side of her physical powers obtained through Buddhism cannot permanently coexist within the straitjacket of Confucian intellectualism. Yet Abbot Hui Yan also understands that she cannot see her Buddhist road clearly until she first fulfills all of her Confucian roles. Miss Yang is allowed to accomplish everything she has been brought up to believe she should in order to free her from that mindset. When she is sent back down from the monastery in the end to protect Gu and their child, she is not doing it from love of either, but as a Buddhist warrior woman selflessly saving them from evil, emphasized by the dying abbot in pointing her back to the monastery at the end. Even if the government forces are defeated, her future lies in the monastery, not in the Confucian world. Conclusion: Confucian Versus Buddhist Views on Women The role of sex is crucial to understanding the place of women in King Hu’s imagination of the past. Confucianism provides women with a set of roles distinguished by the incidence of sex/marriage and giving birth. Buddhism, by contrast, rejects the importance of family and posits that marriage and the production of children is pointless if not counterproductive. Sex is forbidden for the Buddhist religious professional, and in the Martial Arts World some of the most powerful fighters are Buddhist monks. It is not lack of sex per se that makes Buddhist monks powerful, but the spiritual strength and singlemindedness of purpose, discipline in some sense, that this indicates. In shorthand though, power is achieved through eschewing sex. Miss Yang does not, at first, appear to make the case that giving up sex is empowering. She has been physically empowered by learning martial arts from Abbot Hui Yan without any requirement to change her attitudes or lifestyle. Yang is resolutely Confucian in her attitudes and therefore

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resolutely tied to sex as a means and marker of progression in a Confucian society. Her desire to revenge herself on her father’s persecutors is wholly consistent with that view of the world, though Confucianism itself is silent on questions of revenge. But with her response to Gu’s mother’s plea for an heir, Yang advances to a crossroads of the Confucian and Buddhist path. She chooses the latter over the former and frees herself to be a powerful and independent woman. The sex of the Chinese warrior woman, at least for King Hu, is none of the above. She puts aside sex from the informed and mature view that it diminishes her person, her role in the world, and her actual power. King Hu’s Buddhist critique of women’s roles in the modern world has some strong parallels with modern feminism, including the pitfall that a strong woman must eschew married life. It even veers close to Rey Chow’s idea of “primitive passion” with respect to the notion of woman as emotional repository for China’s ills.5 Yet this Buddho-feminist position neither objectifies women nor sees the intellectual male perspective in a positive light. It is the Confucian patriarchal intellectual stance that is misconceived and fundamentally wrong. King Hu is by no means guilty of the masculine fantasy of women so prevalent in China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers.6 Approaching the place of women from a Buddhist perspective, King Hu realizes a very differently founded feminism that is not antimale but narrowly opposed to the traditional patriarchal worldview. It is also much to the director’s credit that he presents a reasonable path to enlightenment in addition to his social critique. Yang does not achieve a sudden wisdom beyond the reach of the audience. Instead, she progresses along a path of life and experience entirely in keeping with the modern viewer. Her concerns are modern concerns that would scarcely be conceivable for an elite woman of the late Ming dynasty. Through the fantasy of the Martial Arts World and the misty historical past, King Hu dramatizes the problems of a modern system of values. And if King Hu’s Buddho-feminist critique of the problems of traditional society is only comprehensible to a modern audience, his conclusion is similarly contemporary. A woman cannot reconcile the roles of wife and mother with being personally powerful. The traditional path to maternal power was through the success of her son. As Miss Yang shows us, a woman must give up her husband and son to be powerful herself in the modern world. Notes 1. Marlon Hom, “Liao-chai chih-I,” The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H. Nienhauser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), at p. 563. For a translation of selected stories from

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3.

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the text, see Denis C. and Victor H. Mair, Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989). “A Chivalrous Woman” (Xianu), upon which A Touch of Zen is based, is translated on pp. 106–15. For a discussion of these cultural stereotypes, see Richard Davis, Wind against the Mountain: The Crisis of Politics and Culture in Thirteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University Press, 1996). For a brief background on martial arts and the Shaolin Temple, see Lin Boyuan, Zhongguo Wushushi (Taibei: Wuzhou Chubanshe, 1996), pp. 181–83. Meir Shahar is currently writing a monograph on Shaolin, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. As far as I have seen, no other work on Shaolin in English is accurate. I owe this particular insight to Professor Tracy Miller. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). The so-called “Fifth Generation” filmmakers in China include Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang. They were the fifth class of students to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy, a school that only accepts students every four years. The Fifth Generation was the first class to graduate after the school resumed operations after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). For the history of Chinese cinema on Mainland China, see Chris Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991) and Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchak and Esther Yau, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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CHAPTER 11 THE HAWK, THE WOLF, AND THE MOUSE: TRACING THE GENDERED OTHER IN RICHARD DONNER’S LADYHAWKE Angela Jane Weisl

ichard Donner’s 1985 film Ladyhawke offers a medieval landscape richly distant from our own time.1 Although the film’s promotional materials claim it is based on “a thirteenth century European legend,” like many medieval truth-claims, this one turns out to be the product of invention, one of the few genuinely medieval qualities the work displays. Edward Khmara, the film’s scriptwriter, dispels this myth, suggesting instead that the story came to him while walking around Paris at night looking at gargoyles and old churches.2 That said, this sense of the medieval period as the stuff of legends and art informs the entire film, which traces the narrator, Phillipe Gaston (Matthew Broderick), also known as “The Mouse,” as he escapes the bishop’s prison in Aquila and ends up joining two cursed lovers: by night, Captain Etienne Navarre (Rutger Hauer) is a wolf; by day, his beloved Isabeau d’Anjou (Michelle Pfeiffer) is a hawk. After a variety of adventures, Phillipe finally helps the lovers return to Aquila, both to kill the evil bishop who has cursed them and to break the enchantment, allowing them to coexist in their human forms. Essentially a film about transformations, Ladyhawke imagines a series of liminal borderlands, both literal and figurative, representing multiple worlds. Just as the landscape itself is so fluid that in some scenes it is autumn and others winter, moving between sunny, semiverdant days alternating with snow-covered ice floes, so too does the film move between a number of discourses, engaging both their binary assumptions and the gray areas

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between them. Most vital among these are court and wilderness, animal and human, and male and female. In their complex settings and identities, Phillipe, Navarre, and Isabeau inhabit multiple positions en route to their final restoration. Given the film’s title and content, it is no surprise that Ladyhawke offers a milieu inhabited by human animals. Phillipe’s ability to pass through impassible spaces makes him less than human; he is called a “rat” and a “mouse,” and these rodentious sentiments are confirmed by the Ladyhawke repeatedly biting him. As these three amorphous—or anthropomorphic—figures occupy center stage, the background mirrors them: a bird girl dances before the bishop; Goliath the horse appears to understand human speech, becoming affronted when Phillipe calls him “old girl”; and Cezar, the wild man employed by the bishop to catch Navarre, is closer to the wolves he hunts than the people he works for, snarling, spitting, and finally dying when his head is snapped in his own wolf trap. The city, Aquila, represents both the Eagle of Empire and the rapacious qualities of its inhuman, predatory, and, perhaps demonic, ruling bishop, while also reflecting the hawk herself. Ladyhawke engages a tense paradigm in its understanding of animals as simultaneously qualitatively different from humans and fundamentally like them.3 Their bodies “converted into the limbs and features of animals by the craft and power of demons,”4 Navarre and Isabeau (and their less important counterparts) maintain their human souls; despite their inability to speak to each other, they nonetheless continue their love connection in animal form, keeping each other company, stroking and embracing each other, and protecting each other from harm, often by joining in each other’s fights. The arrival of Phillipe finally permits the transmission of messages between them. This dichotomy demonstrates a level of liminality that creates fluctuating boundaries between the supernatural and the real, the self (as defined by romance society) and the other, engaging the slippery divide between what is human and civilized and what is bestial or outside (although those do not always turn out to be what we think they will be), tying the codifed conventions of courtly romance to their roots in violence and sexuality. Because Ladyhawke is a romance, it is particularly bound up both in explorations of gender and in the final reinscription of hierarchies of gender power, regarding which Sharon Farmer points out, [O]ther categories of difference—social status, sexualities, religious difference—were, and are, always in the process of reconfiguring gender, and those other categories are themselves always in flux. And yet, in the end, differences always seem to reinscribe hierarchies, and gender, however, fluid and malleable, always seems to matter. Gender is and was one of the fundamental categories of difference affecting hierarchies of power.5

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If the romance genre’s own tension is between gender possibility and gender normativity, the film’s “categories of difference” delineated above, in particular the animal/human division, reconfigure gender in interesting and complex ways, while simultaneously questing for the happy ending with its rigid definitions of power. The blurred boundaries between human and animal are entangled with multivalent gender inscriptions that help delay the inevitable ending, but also question its primacy by complicating and questioning the traditional constructions of gendered space and agency. The liminal, private, feminine space the film constructs simultaneously amplifies the projection of woman as Other while literally enacting a romance role reversal that empowers the woman. If Navarre’s lupine masculinity is fairly obvious, Isabeau’s inhabiting of an equally masculine space creates as many insuperable impediments to their union as the curse itself. In a sense, by failing to understand its medieval origins, the film creates its own irresolution; in many medieval romances, such as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Marie de France’s lai of “Guigemar,” the hero accommodates female agency by becoming feminized himself, wallowing in and lamenting the pains of love and his lady’s power to save or destroy his life. This gender exchange reflects a system of coercion in which the lady is provided with subjectivity and mobility in service to her ultimate capture and reinscription by male power. Navarre never engages this particular courtly convention (presumably his weeping and composing of bad poetry are in the past)—he is instead controlled primarily by anger and hell-bent on returning to Aquila so that he can kill the bishop who cursed them. Ladyhawke thus creates a central core of destabilized gender that finally must be broken like the curse, to return to the normative assumptions of the romance. The first image of Etienne Navarre is a hypermasculine one: he appears on his large, black horse, with a giant hawk on his hand, carrying an enormous, iconic sword. Reading the wolf into which he is nocturnally transformed as a masculine figure is perhaps no stretch either; as Captain Navarre is a man, so is his avatar, and so are his medieval parallels, Marie de France’s Bisclavret, the werewolf in William of Palerne, and Sigmund and Sinfjotli in the Old Norse Volsunga Saga, among others. Indeed, apart from the mother of Romulus and Remus, mythology’s wolves and werewolves are all male. His modern film parallels are equally masculine; from Lon Chaney’s character in the Universal horror series to An American Werewolf in London, the balance of these figures are male. “Wolf ” remains a synonym for an overly aggressive male pursuer of feminine conquests. Although wolves have become something of a cause celebre for conservationists, medieval ideas about them are rather less beneficent. In T. H. White’s famous translation of a twelfth-century Latin bestiary, the wolf is categorized with those that “rage about with tooth and claw” and are called beasts

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because “of the violence with which they rage, and are known as ‘wild’ ( ferus) because they are accustomed to freedom by nature and are governed ( ferantur) by their own wishes.”6 Driven by desire to kill the bishop, Navarre rages with tooth and claw by night and with sword and doublebarreled crossbow by day. Tied equally to violence and danger, wolves are the most iconic inhabitants of the borderlands. The Volsunga Saga, for instance, begins with Sigi, son of Odin, killing Bredi, a thrall who outdoes him in hunting. As a result, he becomes “an outlaw, a wolf in hallowed places.”7 The Old Norse word vargr means both “wolf” and “outlaw,” and in Old Norse law, outlaws could be hunted like wolves. This understanding of wolves plays out both in Navarre’s nighttime actions (such as killing the farmer) and in the portrayal of the wild man Cezar, a wolf hunter, who appears as an outlaw himself and finally receives the wolf’s fate. The Volsunga Saga offers a wolf episode that leaves no doubt of the inherent violence and power of these creatures: Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli live in the woods in hiding, “to accustom the boy to hardship” while “killing men for booty.” One day [t]hey went again into the forest to get themselves some riches, and they found a house. Inside it were two sleeping men, with thick gold rings. A spell had been cast upon them: wolfskins hung over them in the house and only every tenth day could they shed the skins. Sigmund and Sinfjotli put the skins on and could not get them off. And the weird power was there as before: they howled like wolves, both understanding the sounds. Now they set out into the forest, each going his own way.8

As wolves, Sigmund and Sinfjotli kill many men; “under the magic spell,” the Saga notes, “they had performed many feats in King Seggeir’s kingdom.”9 It is unlikely that the Volsunga Saga was on Khmara’s or Donner’s radar screen, yet this story suggests the way wolves function as objects of fear, and indeed, Phillipe, hearing Navarre in the woods for the first time cries out in fear, “Captain, sir, Captain! Sir, sir, sir, wolf, wolf, wolf! Sir! Sir! Wolf, wolf! Don’t go out there, don’t go out there! There’s a wolf, a big wolf, the biggest wolf you’ve ever seen, and a dead man.”10 That Isabeau, who lurks behind him in the barn, shows no fear, suggests that this wolf is something more than he seems, but the film does not yet divulge what that might be. Our suspicions are confirmed when Phillipe reunites with the human Navarre in the morning and declares of the wolf, “The wolf would have killed me, it was horrible. But he tore the farmer’s throat out, and left me alone.” Phillipe’s abandonment by the lupine Navarre, and Isabeau’s fearlessness, which stems from the wolf’s loyalty and devotion, are also not unprecedented

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in medieval narrative. Marie de France’s lai “Bisclavret” at first describes the werewolf in similar violent terms, yet in the end he is something very different. Bisclavret’s humanity remains with him in his bestial form; hunted by the king’s hounds like Navarre is by Cezar, Bisclavret saves himself by running to the king and pleading for mercy he took hold of the king’s stirrup, kissed his leg and foot. The king saw this and was terrified; He called his companions. “My Lords,” he said, “come quickly! Look at this marvel— This beast is humbling itself to me. It has the mind of a man, and it’s begging me for mercy!”11

Bisclavret’s human qualities make him a favorite, since he appears “so noble and well behaved / that he never wished to do anything wrong.”12 Like his medieval antecedent, Navarre is a good werewolf, protective of his friends and vicious toward his enemies; as a human, he is essentially the same, taking care of Isabeau (sending her off with Phillipe to be cured by Imperious after she is wounded), but never relenting in his revenge quest for the bishop. Even as a lover, he is essentially silent. His only comments, once he finds that Phillipe knows the truth are “Take care of Ladyhawke. Tell her I love her,” and “Did you know that hawks and wolves mate for life?” Thus, instead of fulfilling the gender dichotomy of the courtly lover, who fights by day and laments by night, Navarre remains the fighter in both forms. Beyond White’s Bestiary, Marie de France’s lais, and the Volsung Saga, other lupine influences on Ladyhawke include “Little Red Riding Hood,” to which the film certainly makes reference. In this fairy tale the wolf, with his large eyes, claws, and rapacious hunger, stands for a kind of masculine violence and threat, consuming the grandmother and ready to snatch and eat little Red Riding Hood herself, before salvation comes in the form of the “good” woodsman. Deceptive and tricky, he lures Little Red into his clutches by impersonating her grandmother as he digests her. Numerous films about werewolves, ranging from The Wolf Man (1941) to the more parodic Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), all present the wolf as a tortured figure of inhuman violence, a “vargr in the high places” destined to exist outside of the society that it seeks relentlessly to destroy. Later movies, including The Werewolf (1956) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), offer similarly dangerous transformations; although the wolf’s violence is

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often balanced by rational and generous humanity in the creature’s “real” life, the gypsy Maleva suggests the inevitable possibility of lupine rapacity in Wolf Man: “Even the man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the moon is pure and bright.”13 Although the werewolf’s human conscience often leads to his search for a cure in films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), these efforts prove almost as fruitless as Navarre’s. Thus the film’s medieval antecedents and its modern influences suggest a similar picture of hypermasculine power, realized in both human and wolf form, that defines Navarre, a power with potential both for moral goodness and dangerous force. One might expect this extreme lupine masculinity to be matched with a helpless and passive damsel in distress. A medieval German lyric of Der von Kürenberg confidently states, “Women and hunting birds are easy to tame. If one knows the right way to entice them, they seek out their man.”14 In discussing this lyric, Mark Chinca comments that “whereas women are contained within a past they cannot change, men use the past to illustrate their ability to determine events, then, now, and in the future.”15 This formulation almost seems to be a maxim that Donner sets out particularly to disprove; Isabeau, the woman and the hunting bird, neither proves herself tamed nor as contained by the past as Navarre. While he clearly feels trapped by the curse, driven only by the revenge that will cement it forever, Isabeau, through her two free spirits, avian and human, seems more ready and able to effect and accept change. As a result, she embodies a complex rhetoric of gender. To borrow from Chinca on gender again, “[R]educed to categorical oppositions, we may say that men are defined as active and mobile, their field of operation covering past, present, and future, whereas women are defined as passive and fixed to their past.”16 These definitions are indeed as reductive as he suggests, yet they are useful in encapsulating assumptions that drive both medieval love poetry and contemporary romance. These interplays of activity and passivity set a stage of operation that speaks to the past and future while inhabiting the present that Ladyhawke offers. Yet, while Navarre apparently occupies the field of operation Chinca assigns to his gender, it is contemporary ideas of birds (perhaps stemming from Shelley’s “To A Skylark”) as symbols of freedom that liberate Isabeau, at least in part, from her passivity. When we first meet Isabeau in hawk form, she attacks two guardsmen at the gates who attempt to block Navarre’s progress. She is nominally fettered by her jesses and hood (although she only wears the hood in one scene, near the end of the film, as it moves toward gender normativity), yet they do not seem to limit her action, as we see her soaring and swooping through the air the vast majority of the time she appears onscreen. As a lady, she is pursued by the bishop’s guard, yet falling from the precipice as

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dawn breaks, she flies away and saves herself, to Phillipe’s amazement. Indeed, the choice of hawk resonates with medieval images of masculine strength almost as much as that of the wolf. Noting that “Accipter the Hawk is a bird which is even better equipped in its spirit than in its talons, for it shows very great courage in a very small body,” White’s Bestiary adds that “it is an avid bird at seizing upon others” and is called “the ravisher, the thief.”17 Chaucer uses hunting birds twice in Troilus and Criseyde as images of male power in love; once in Criseyde’s dream, in which an eagle tears out her heart with its “longe clawes,” replacing it with her own, and later in the same vein, writing “What myghte or may the sely larke seye, / Whan that the sperhauk hath it in his foot?”18 Both figurations of the male lover cast the raptor as a symbol of aggressive and sexual domination, overpowering the woman, who in both images is a small songbird. Marie de France’s “Yonec” provides another male hawk/knight who flies through the lady’s window and rescues her from despair. In Volsunga Saga, Guthrun sees Volsung, her future husband, himself appear in the form of a golden hawk. Beryl Rowland points out that in medieval literature and art, the hawk often symbolized the pleasures of the chase and the secular life; it occasionally appears as a symbol of pride and is sometimes associated with life in allegories of life and death.19 None of these add up to anything but an image of inherent mastery and predatory strength, and if that power is more associated with love than the wolf’s, it is no less masculine than his. In fact, it is not until Phillipe calls her “Ladyhawke” that she is gendered in her bird form at all; previously she was called “the bird” or “the hawk” by Navarre, her ostensible lover. Isabeau’s two forms mirror each other somewhat less than do Navarre’s, yet her first appearance in human form shows her wearing men’s clothing, running after a rabbit and trying to use her nails as if they were her hawk claws to get her dinner. Even her name takes a masculine form, the traditional feminine version being Isabelle. She is only dressed as a woman in two scenes, and when Navarre finally sees her in human form, he remarks, “You’ve cut your hair,” suggesting that a vestige of her masculine attire survives. In one of the film’s more harrowing scenes, she stalks Cezar into the woods; as he drops rocks into the wolf traps to make her think he has caught Navarre, she sneaks up behind him and stabs him with her dagger, finally pushing his head into one of his own traps. Emphasizing Cezar’s animalistic nature at the same time as it shows Isabeau’s ability to act in traditionally masculine ways, the moment also presages Navarre’s entrapment that she effects to allow the film’s resolution to take place. What is interesting in this gendered rhetoric is that the absent feminized place is often filled by the Mouse, Phillipe Gaston. Played by a very young Matthew Broderick, his hairless, childlike face registers the fear, anxiety,

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and desire we would expect to find in Isabeau. He is afraid of the hawk until they make friends at Imperious’s hermitage, which is confirmed by her repeatedly biting him, even as he is carrying her to aid after she is wounded in battle. Hawks eat mice, we are reminded. He often appears from underneath the floor, escaping the jail “like escaping mother’s womb” through the drains and sewers, and emerging from under the floor in the cathedral after poking one of the monk’s feet to get him to move off the grating. Three times he is immersed in water, a traditionally feminine symbol. He is often shown trapped and in positions of submission—tied to a tree by Navarre to keep him from escaping (where, he says, “a Giant Owl examined me closely”), enclosed in small spaces, and slung over Goliath’s saddle. Phillipe also embodies most of the film’s emotion for us; unlike the stony Navarre and mysterious Isabeau, he experiences the wide range of feelings they seem to eschew. Although it is Isabeau who says, “I am sorrow,” hearing the story of the lovers from Imperious, it is Phillipe who weeps, saying, “always together. . .eternally apart.” As the lover’s gobetween, he is even embraced by Navarre twice near the end of the film in decidedly unmasculine ways; that is, they do not look like a pair of baseball players who have just won the World Series—instead, Navarre cradles the weeping Phillipe softly against his shoulder. Like everything in the film, however, this homoerotic moment is qualified by its own duality; Navarre’s embrace comes upon discovering from the wolf scratches on Phillipe’s chest that Phillipe rescued him from the ice, once again reversing their romance gender positions. At the end of the film, by leaving the lovers and going off with the older Father Imperious, who calls him “little thief,” Phillipe remains a perpetual child, a feminized figure who may fantasize about adult situations but will never engage in them. Straying from its medieval models into the world of fairy tale, Ladyhawke offers a final image of gender reversal as the lovers enter the city. As Imperious drives his cart into Aquila, Isabeau sits in the front seat, shrouded in a red cloak over her men’s clothing. In the back seat, the wolf is caught in a cage; big eyes and big teeth aside, this time Little Red Riding Hood has captured the wolf.20 As the final, full-fledged reversal, this is suggestive; Navarre is trapped by his anger and cannot see the redemptive possibility in Imperious’s promised disenchantment. That he is without his family sword and believes it lost is significant; as a symbol of his true masculinity, it can only reappear when he has dedicated himself to breaking the curse. Rescued from the frozen water and rendered immobile, he must be transported to face the final encounter. In contrast, Isabeau’s faith—and her ability to put it into action—renders her powerful. This power sustains her; instead of being killed by Imperious when the bells begin to ring (which are assumed to celebrate Navarre’s death at the bishop’s hands), she

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manages to escape and appear in the church, stopping the action with a single “Navarre.” She then walks up to the trembling bishop and drops her jesses in his hand, indicating both that she has freed herself from her animal shape and from all other kinds of domination and control that the bounds symbolize. Imperious may determine how to break the curse, and Phillipe may open the door, but Isabeau catalyzes the film’s resolution. However, the story must return to its origins as romance and reconstruct normative gender roles. This film is ultimately a romance, and romance for all its possibilities is directed toward reuniting the cursed lovers and allowing them to live happily ever after. Patricia Parker suggests that “romance” is characterized primarily as a form that simultaneously “quests for and postpones a particular end, objective, or object;. . .romance, from the twelfth century, necessitates the projection of an Other, a projet which comes to an end when the Other reveals his identity or name.”21 Romance can be “that mode or tendency which remains on the threshold before the promised end, still in the wilderness of wandering, error, or trial. When the posited Other, or objective, is the terminus of a fixed object, ‘romance’ is the liminal space before that object is fully named or revealed.”22 In constituting others and the liminal space in which those others move and interact with the “real,” romance allows for the dissolution of boundaries, and thus create reversals and hybridities that challenge and reflect the real in multiple ways. In a sense, for all Isabeau’s avian freedom, the film has anticipated this return all along. In their human selves, Navarre and Isabeau engage the stories we expect them to: simply put, he is day, she is night; he is war, she is love; he is epic, she is romance. Etienne Navarre’s story is about revenge; Isabeau D’Anjou’s is about love.23 If the narrative question they pose as a couple is “Will they be disenchanted and live together happily ever after in human form?” the question Navarre’s story asks is “Will he kill the bishop and put his own jewel into the sword of his ancestors?” while Isabeau’s is “Will she or won’t she commit adultery with Phillipe?” Even if the audience actually knows the adultery will not occur, because in a romance the romantic couple must succeed, the film flirts with the possibility throughout. It is apparent that Phillipe is in love with Isabeau. When Imperious begins to tell her story, he says “I shall never forget the first time I saw her. It was like looking at. . .” to which Phillipe responds, “The Face of love.” Phillipe, not Navarre, sees her naked under furs; he steals her dress from Navarre’s saddle bags and gives it to her to wear, and he dances with her in the barn before Cezar arrives. More vitally, however, he “speaks” to her for Navarre; ostensibly their go-between, his love language is his own. Sending Phillipe to Imperious with the hawk to save her, Navarre says, “Take her, find help. . .Get on my horse now! Careful. And know this—if you fail, I will follow you the length of my days and I will

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find you. Go.” His revenge motive is paramount even here, but Phillipe translates these words to Isabeau as follows: “ ‘You must save this hawk,’ he said, ‘for she is my life, my last and best reason for living.’ And then he said, ‘one day we will know such happiness, as two people dream of, but never do.’ ” Isabeau, who apparently knows Navarre well enough to doubt this effusion of courtliness, says, “He said that?” The optimism about their future is entirely Phillipe’s, not Navarre’s, who persists in his plan of destruction, yet these words ultimately give Isabeau the hope and its concomitant drive to save them. This moment is repeated when Phillipe translates Navarre’s “Tell her I love her” as “He’s full of hope, like you. . . .He said, ‘tell her that we speak as one, and she will follow your instructions as my own.’ ” Isabeau again expresses some skepticism, saying “Really? No don’t swear.” However, she goes along with his instructions, putting on the dress Phillipe stole from Navarre and dancing in the barn. The next morning, after their adventure of killing Cezar, Isabeau the hawk seems reluctant to leave Phillipe, who urges, “It’s a good hawk, nice bird. Go on now, go to your master. Go on, Ladyhawke.” And then, when she remains on his arm, he repeats, “Go on now, go on” and then finally, “Fly to your master, fly to the one you love.” When these words fail to persuade Isabeau to leave, he pries her off his arm, saying, “Take her, take her. She is the most wonderful woman that ever lived, and I can’t say I haven’t had my fantasies, but the truth is, all she did was talk about you.” In a sense, Phillipe must then confirm Isabeu’s fidelity to Navarre, saying, “She was sad at first. She talked about the day you met, and she cursed it. But then I saw her remember how happy you were together, before the bishop’s curse. And her eyes glowed. No, she glowed. She loves you more than life, Captain. She has to.” Despite Navarre claiming, “I will know if the words are hers,” he accepts Phillipe’s deception while still rejecting the scheme that will bring them together. Once Phillipe and Imperious begin to put into motion the plan that entraps Navarre and leads to the story’s normative conclusion, Phillipe tells Isabeau, “[T]his may be our last evening together.” And it is. From this point forward, the love triangle resolves itself—Phillipe has merely been its placeholder (as, in a sense, he was on the other side for Navarre)—as do all the dichotomies in the film. All that has been unconventional about Ladyhawke finally submits to expectation in the film’s final moments. Although the requisite romance delays impede them, Isabeau and Navarre appear together in human form before the dying bishop during an eclipse, and the curse is broken. His sword restored, Navarre then kills the bishop. The black knight turns out to be the hero we always expected him to be, and the prince of darkness casts off his white robes as he is taken to hell (although that is implied,

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rather than shown). With no remaining purpose, Phillipe and Imperious are thanked for their parts in the resolution and walk out of the frame. All the film’s questions, implied and overt, have been answered, and all the stories have been concluded. The lovers are together as man and woman; in casting off their animal forms, they have returned to expectation. Isabeau no longer flies; she must be lifted into the air by Navarre. He is the hero and she is the heroine of Ladyhawke’s romance narrative. As a powerful knight, he impales the bishop by throwing his sword across the room; as the silent and beautiful lady, she stands at the center of the screen without occupying any real space. As Martha Driver notes, Medieval films’ appropriation of the Middle Ages to impose what is often a conservative ideology on the present is easily accomplished in depictions of ideal masculinity (and I would add, femininity) where whiteness, heterosexuality, youth, strength, and entitlement rule.24

In their return to idealized notions of gender, the two lovers’ competing narratives have finally been driven by convention, co-opting the film’s other characters and making them recognizable. And yet, the ending is not exactly what we expect from a romance, for the film’s true other is the Middle Ages itself. Catherine Brown contends that “there’s no question that the Middle Ages is an other, perhaps even a foreign place, someplace, as the etymology indicates, beyond our doors.”25 In describing the world of the Middle Ages, Brown calls it “exotic in its half-lit and seductive abstruseness,” a description that fits the exotic and half-lit seductiveness of Ladyhawke.26 The film provides almost no access to Navarre and Isabeau; they are essentially allegories, barely allowed to speak. When Phillipe finally makes the connection between the hawk and the mysterious nighttime lady as Isabeau recovers from her arrow wound at Imperious’s hermitage, and asks her who she is, she responds, allegorically, “I am sorrow.” For Brown, the Other is “figured as a veiled woman, mystical and enticing” (a reference to Edward Said’s Orientalism), a virtual description of the mysterious and often half-lit Isabeau, veiled both in her bird form and her human clothes that often obscure her face. Navarre, the black knight with his symbolic sword standing for a variety of histories and curses that the film fails to share with its viewer, may be even less physically present, although he takes up more screen time. The film holds the medieval world at a distance. In place of Brown’s medievalist who stands “before a distant, barely understandable civilization or cultural moment,” and serves to reduce “the obscurity by translating sympathetically portraying, inwardly grasping the hard-to-reach object,”27 Ladyhawke offers Phillipe Gaston, a borderline medieval/modern figure who does the interpreting for and speaking to the audience, mediating

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as Brown’s scholar does between the medieval text and its contemporary audience. The lover’s story is established as a kind of readable, narrative text; if we doubt that textuality, Imperious assures Phillipe while revealing the truth to him, “You have stumbled onto a tragic story, Phillipe Gaston. And now, whether you like it or not, you are lost in it, with the rest of us.” Phillipe is the spectator, a stand-in for the viewing audience (which is by nature modern, as we are watching a film), his youthful qualities suggesting, at some level, that the Middle Ages is a type of children’s story, the 1980s equivalent of A Boy’s King Arthur. Yet Phillipe is also a talker in a very quiet film: he speaks to God, to himself, to Isabeau, to Navarre, to Imperious, and to us. Unintentionally expressing the disconnection between the medieval and modern worlds when he first sees Isabeau in human form, he says, “I’ve not seen what I’ve just seen. I do not believe what I believe, Lord. If these are magical or unexplainable matters, then I beg you not to make me a part of them.” Phillipe remains both a part of and separate from the legend, as evidenced by the end of the film. Although he essentially makes the breaking of the enchantment possible, working to trap Navarre in his wolf form and bringing him to Aquila, slipping into the Church and opening the doors, and throwing Navarre his family sword at the crucial moment in his battle with Marquet, he is rapidly dismissed with Navarre’s embrace and Isabeau’s: “You’re the truest friend we could ever have. Thank you.” He and Imperious exit the cathedral—the potent image of the medieval world—leaving Navarre and Isabeau to a final half-lit and symbolic scene. As the romance hero lifts her into the air (after several repeated “I love you’s”) the camera pans back, leaving the lovers bathed in lambent light from the broken glass dome. While speaking to their ability to remain in their human forms despite the return of the sun after the eclipse, itself a symbol for the darkness of the now broken enchantment, Isabeau also throws out her arms, and in the indistinct atmosphere appears as a double image of the crucifix and of Navarre’s Crusader sword, both of which have been restored by the breaking of the curse. The bishop, “[a]n evil man, a powerful man, hated and feared; rejected even by Rome itself,” has been vanquished, and true religion has been restored, just as Navarre puts the final jewel into the sword’s hilt. On the VHS box of Ladyhawke, Richard Donner is quoted as saying, “[M]ovies should take people into landscapes, emotional and visual, where they haven’t been before.”28 Ladyhawke provides such emotional and visual landscapes by constructing the past as mystery and legend. If the film’s elements of romance are familiar, their setting serves to mystify and distance them. By making humans into animals, by shifting conventions and understandings of gender, and by creating a Middle Ages that stands for all that is

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distant and strange, Ladyhawke is finally about disconnection, suggesting, as Catherine Brown does, that in visiting the past, we visit a “Land of Unlikeness,” an “all purpose alternative” against which to define ourselves.29 Notes 1. I am extremely grateful to Robert Squillace for his insightful suggestions and crackerjack editing and to Philip Schochet for his invaluable comments on this essay. 2. J’Amy Pacheco, March general meeting with screenwriter Edward Khmara, March 2002, http://scriptwritersnetwork.com/previous/previous_03_2002.asp. 3. See Joyce Salisbury, “Introduction: What is an Animal?” The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Joyce Salisbury (New York: Routledge, 1994). Salisbury notes that while Augustine sees an adamant separation between the human and animal, suggesting that humans cannot be metamorphosed even by demons, that Gerald of Wales, in the twelfth century, believes in permeable boundaries once his girlfriend turns into a beast in the middle of an embrace (p. 1). 4. St. Augustine, City of God, quoted in Salisbury, “Introduction,” p. 1. 5. Sharon Farmer, “Introduction.” Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, eds., Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternak (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. xxiv. 6. T. H. White, ed. and trans., The Book of Beasts (1954; New York: Dover, 1984, reference is to the 1984 edition), p. 7. 7. The Saga of the Volsungs, trans. Jesse L. Byock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 35. 8. The Saga of the Volsungs, p. 44. 9. The Saga of the Volsungs, p. 45. 10. Ladyhawke, directed by Richard Donner. 121 minutes, Technicolor (Warner Brothers, Los Angeles, CA, 1985). Ladyhawke transcript, available at http://www.fable.com/transcript.html. Citations of the film refer to this version and transcript. 11. “Bisclavret,” The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. R. W. Hanning and Joan M. Ferrante (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1982), ll. 144–54. 12. “Bisclavret,” ll. 179–80. 13. The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggner. 70 minutes. Black and White (Universal, Los Angeles, CA, 1941). 14. Der von Kürenberg, Lyric XV, quoted in Mark Chinca, trans., “Women and Hunting Birds Are Easy to Tame: Aristocratic Masculinity and the Early German Love-Lyric,” Masculinities in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999), p. 202. The German reads, “Wîb unde vererspil, die werdent lithe zam. / Swer si ze rehte luket, sô suochent si den man.” 15. Chinca, “Women and Hunting Birds,” p. 202. 16. Chinca, “Women and Hunting Birds,” p. 203. 17. White, The Book of Beasts, pp. 138–39.

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18. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Criseyde’s dream of the eagle is in 2.925–31; the sparrow hawk metaphor appears in 3.1191–92. 19. Beryl Rowland, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), pp. 61–63. 20. I would like to thank Tison Pugh for calling this image to my attention. 21. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 4. 22. Parker, Inescapable Romance, pp. 4–5. 23. I would like to thank Robert Squillace once again for this observation. 24. Martha Driver, “Introduction,” The Medieval Hero on Screen, eds., Martha Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), p. 9. 25. Catherine Brown, “In the Middle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 547–74, at p. 548. 26. Brown, “In the Middle,” p. 549 27. Brown, “In the Middle,” p. 549 28. Ladyhawke, directed by Richard Donner, video box copy (Burbank, CA, Warner Brothers Video, 1991). 29. Brown, “In the Middle,” p. 547.

CHAPTER 12 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW: ANACHRONISTIC AUTHORITY IN BRIAN HELGELAND’S A KNIGHT’S TALE Holly A. Crocker

I got hold of a picture of Chaucer and it turns out he’s an enormously fat, bald, bearded dwarf, so. . .I threw out any pretension of doing any research whatsoever and made it up. —Paul Bettany, “Geoff” Chaucer To me, what this movie is all about is, “You got Chaucer on my Queen.” “No, wait. You got Queen on my Chaucer.” —Brian Helgeland

he 2001 movie A Knight’s Tale prompted Peter Travers to invent a new exclamation: “Holy Anachronisms!”1 Yet its gleeful wallow in a medieval past that equally recalls fantasies of the 1970s and the 1370s unthinks historicist fidelities in a fashion that recognizes what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen characterizes as the “temporal interlacement” of the Middle Ages, “the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity” as a critical model for contemporary scholars.2 By mistaking elements of the past for tactical use in the present, Brian Helgeland’s anachronistic rendering of Chaucer’s corpus challenges notions of authority staked on visible control.3 As I argue, A Knight’s Tale consolidates a version of Chaucerian authority visually calibrated to promote a fiction of identity, here a type of masculinity. Although through the construction of the protagonist William’s knighthood Chaucer’s presence in the film is ultimately diminished, the mobility that accompanies his increasing invisibility finally invests Chaucer

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with an “underground” appeal that reveals canonical authority’s inherent anachronism. Affirming Régis Debray’s observation that eras of image making “become superimposed upon and interwoven with one another,”4 I begin this look at Helgeland’s Chaucer by acknowledging that the anachronistic production of “Geoff’s” identity in A Knight’s Tale overlaps with the construction of Chaucer’s corpus in the centuries following the poet’s death. Critics including Seth Lerer, Stephanie Trigg, and Kathleen Forni trace the ways in which Chaucer’s reputation was established through a series of poetic and textual constructions.5 The modern scholarly enterprise focuses on the lasting effect of this making and remaking of Chaucer. Yet the varied Chaucers that emerge from manuscript compilations, folio productions, and readers’ annotations suggest that consolidating Chaucer’s poetic corpus is not the chief aim of these renderings. At different historical junctures Chaucer appears to be a proverbial moralist, a courtly exemplar, and a protestant sympathizer.6 Chaucerian makings from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, therefore, reveal that Chaucer’s artistic body has always been an anachronistic creation, suggesting the ways that a historical production of authorship continually serves tactical purposes fitted to specific social moments. Like earlier renderings, the shooting script, theater cut, and DVD apparatus of A Knight’s Tale suggest that Chaucer is made and remade during the film’s production to authorize a fiction of identity. Although consolidating Chaucer’s identity is important early in the film because it authorizes Helgeland’s creative agency, the film prioritizes its version of knightly manhood by reducing Chaucer’s visible control over this creation in the final cut. As the deleted scenes and Helgeland’s commentary demonstrate, Chaucer’s identity must be flexible so that the masculinity William comes to animate can appear to be stable. The adaptive capacity of Chaucer’s authority, I suggest, speaks to his reputation’s durability, showing in a contemporary context that it is the anachronistic ability of receivers to fit his identity to their historic circumstances that, strung together, forms a diachronic account of Chaucer’s canonical authority. Readers well versed in Chaucer’s poetry may cringe at the notion that Helgeland uses his “Geoff” as a stage prop for a version of masculinity, particularly a “Ferris Bueller Goes Medieval” formulation.7 This film’s appropriative use of Chaucer nevertheless shows that an author’s canonical status is less about the timeless content of the writer’s literary work and more about that figure’s authorizing potential in a particular cultural moment. In a move that recalls those of early Chaucerian adaptors, Brian Helgeland’s conception of himself as a filmmaker is crucially connected to his manipulation of the Chaucerian corpus. Early in the film, Chaucer’s

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frangible authority allows Helgeland to construct a masculinity that his medievalized writer authorizes for him. Helgeland strips his Geoff for entry into the film, practically announcing his intention to make free with the historical Chaucer’s poetic authority for his own creative purposes: “Indeed, we’re looking at the 29-year-old GEOFFREY CHAUCER. The first rainbow of English writers. Buck solid naked.”8 When Geoff “trudges” into the frame, his naked body signifies a corpus that is blank except for its titular authority. We might say that Helgeland relies on his audience’s familiarity with Chaucer’s poetic body for this authority to attach to the denuded lineaments he frames, except that Geoff’s initial pitch for recognition flatly fails with its immediate audience. Moreover, when Chaucer asks the illiterate band of jousters who subsequently become his companions if they have read his book, The Book of the Duchess, their shrugging gestures and unresponsive stares can equally, if not more likely, be imagined as the most predictable reaction for a majority of the film’s audience. Helgeland thus depends on viewers to recognize Chaucer, but only the contours of authorship that his film connects through its visual composition. Helgeland’s conception of authorship, it should be emphasized, is deliberately anachronistic. When Geoff introduces himself as a “writer,” he does not acknowledge that a vernacular notion of authorship was a nascent concept during the late fourteenth century; rather, this position is aligned with Helgeland’s own outlook in a transhistoric identification that reveals authorship’s fundamentally anachronistic framework.9 In explaining his motivations for writing A Knight’s Tale, Helgeland defines the writer’s position as a fugitive one, claiming that he “wrote [the film] to save [his] own ass” (p. vii). After two disappointing directorial forays, Helgeland characterizes this film as his chance to “make [his] own break” (p. vii). Compared to directing, then, writing is a more anonymous and provisional task motivated by a desire to survive in an environment where artistic control is connected to the visible production of identity: “I did not want to return to my days of writer for hire, and I did not want to write original scripts for other directors to direct.”10 Writing may have lasting impact, as Helgeland acknowledges, but he also suggests that it is the process of a work’s incorporation—the way that a script is made—that gives it ultimate meaning. Though Helgeland explicitly connects his personal ambition to that of his peasant-knight—“I had found a way to tell my story: the story of a screenwriter who wanted to be a director”—he uses Chaucer to make manifest his idea of authorship (p. viii). Geoff arrives on the scene as a writer for hire: he is in desperate need of provisions, so in exchange for clothing and food Chaucer offers to assist humble William in his effort to enter the tourneying arena. Chaucer’s literate skills are simply presented as a means to gain entry into the public space where identities become

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legible; in his insolvent state Geoff is not able to authorize anything, potentially suggesting writing’s supporting role in this visual economy. It is nevertheless clear that William needs Chaucer, for when William initially fabricates himself a knightly identity as “Ulrich,” Chaucer responds with an incredulous and sarcastic pseudonym of his own: “And I am Richard Lion Hearted” (p. 18). Chaucer’s anonymous role as writer is thus crucial to William’s assumption of knighthood, because providing “patents of nobility” for William means that Chaucer fabricates “Ulrich’s” chivalric body in a domain where appearances confer substance. Chaucer’s documentary certification of the fictitious Ulrich is therefore represented as the most tangible requirement for William’s transformation from peasant to knight. Fulfilling his role as writer, Chaucer produces a genealogy that gains credibility from its ability to order the flesh that it writes in its graphic display of generational lineage, and the skin upon which it is written through its ornamented inscription on antiqued vellum. Geoff’s construction of Ulrich’s textualized corpus, however, is insufficient to allow William to assume this knightly ensemble. When he forges the documents William supposedly needs to compete in a tournament, Chaucer performs half of his authorial task, for as Helgeland remarks of his own craft, “the screenplay is the center. If the center does not hold, nothing does” (p. viii). Despite the foundational role accorded to writing, the film suggests that writing alone cannot create a persuasive identity because it cannot guarantee its visibility. As Chaucer’s role in the jousting scenes demonstrates, authorship in Helgeland’s rendering is equally related to directing, for it is the success with which Geoff brings Ulrich’s masculinity into the public eye that verifies his creative credentials. Focusing on the visual aspects of identity formation, the film moves Chaucer beyond the anonymous task of writing by casting him as the public promoter of William’s noble persona. With his verbal embroidery, which initially makes William’s companions wince from its excessive affect, Chaucer outlines the contours of knightly identity that will enliven Ulrich’s textual body. In an introduction intended to recall John Lennon’s appeal to the crowd during the Beatles’ Royal Command Performance in 1963, “The people in the cheap seats clap your hands, and the rest of you rattle your jewelry,” Bettany as Chaucer mesmerizes the tournament spectators by suggesting their like ability to certify Ulrich’s nobility: “My lords, my ladies, and everybody else here not sitting on cushion! Today, today, you find yourselves equals, for you are all equally blessed, for I have the pride, the privilege, nay the pleasure of introducing to you a knight sired by knights.”11 Characters Roland and Wat fear that Chaucer undermines William’s quiet claim to legitimacy through his showy display, but Geoff’s verbal dexterity demonstrates that authorship in this arena is about the

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ways in which fictions of identity are visibly legitimated. Chaucer tells William, “I got their attention. Now you win their hearts” (p. 40), acknowledging that his task is to create space for William to show the truth of the noble identity he impersonates. Authorship, then, emerges as an enunciative position that heralds the identity on show. Consolidating Chaucer’s canonical authority, however, is not the primary aim of Helgeland’s film. After his perilous run-in with an oily Summoner and a slithery Pardoner, Chaucer attributes his dissolute gambling and his habitual lying to his profession, differentiating the rogue savvy that galvanizes his craft from the wide-eyed honesty that signifies William’s nobility with his impertinent confession: “Of course I lied! I’m a writer! I give the truth scope!” (p. 31). It seems more accurate to say, however, that Chaucer’s authorial function requires him to give scope to the truth of William’s performance, providing a fictional frame within which William can verify his innate merit. While Chaucer’s skill as a herald remains important to William’s assumption of knighthood, it becomes clear that William’s identity exceeds a calibrated association of lineage and prowess. The film first focuses on Chaucer’s role in entitling William’s nobility; as the film progresses, however, its frame shifts to emphasize William’s inherent value, revealing him as an exemplar of a masculinity that is supposedly a timeless model of worth. The movie therefore recognizes the performative demands incumbent upon identity in a world where appearances are paramount. But it accounts for these contingencies by asserting authorship’s ability to uncover foundational truths surpassing their cultural particularity. Authorship is a shifty position, but only because it finesses unstable surfaces to affirm Helgeland’s gut conviction about the continuity of heroic masculinity and the familiarity of the medieval past: “[P]eople back then were probably a whole lot like we are” (p. viii). This attempt to assert the permanence of a model of masculinity, however, deeply defamiliarizes canonical notions of authorship, and drastically remakes the medieval setting in which Chaucer is deployed. The film includes “tournaments resembling crypto-Glastonbury grungefests,” and William’s love interest Jocelyn “dresses like Jackie-O at a rave, in sexed-up retro suits, or like one of the Go-Go’s in ragged punk.”12 Helgeland’s conception of the medieval as a time radically akin to his nostalgic reminiscence of youth—“I thought that the 70’s were always the 70’s”—fragments any notion of Chaucer’s elevation as an “enduring writer” since he mainly illustrates “his worth by forging the equivalent of a fake ID.”13 With a “cheerful effrontery that you can’t help indulging,”14 this movie puts together its cinematic Chaucer only to give the masculinity it erects a lasting appearance. This means that Chaucer’s authority can be dismantled as quickly as it can be constructed, all in the service of promoting the masculinity that William animates. As Roland’s outfitting, Kate’s arming, and even Wat’s

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assistance of William in courtship demonstrate, the construction of knightly masculinity that will confirm William’s nobility is a collaborative, cross-gendered enterprise. William learns from Jocelyn that a chivalric masculinity often requires disavowal of martial might, and the group’s collective composition of a love letter to regain Jocelyn’s affection affirms her demand that William recognize her desire as an independent shaping influence over his masculinity. Chaucer’s part in all of this is that of poetic “face-man,” giving legitimating cover to the group by providing the literary frame within which this masculinity can emerge. When Chaucer writes down the group’s poetic effort, he makes William’s masculinity visible, but only as that masculinity falls into step with a long line of knightly heroes, from Sir Perceval to Luke Skywalker. Chaucer’s authority is therefore visually contingent, insofar as his visible presence is proportionally scaled to promote the transcendence of William’s masculinity. In a scene that consolidates William’s nobility, actor Paul Bettany delivers a speech that also affirms Chaucer’s future canonical stature. Bettany as Chaucer moves the crowd to his will, using yet another egalitarian appeal to convince spectators of William’s true claim to nobility, despite his humble origins: And what are the knightly virtues? And who may possess them!? My Lord was born poor in Cheapside London! And so what? For he is as true as steel!. . .He is gold and we are merely iron. And you people would come here and see him rust. For shame. For shame. For if gold would rust, what should iron do? The words echo across the silence. Indeed, they do feel shame. Chaucer may have saved him. (pp. 117–118)15

When Chaucer takes center stage in this scene, his identity becomes visible as that which organizes others, establishing him as the unseen maker behind the manhood to which William may finally lay public claim. This version of identity suggests that Chaucer creates William’s masculinity, even giving him space to occupy a literary model that his accomplished “makinge” enlivens for the crowd. Yet this scene is nowhere to be seen in the film’s final cut. Patrons who went to the theater to see this movie would recall that when William is in the stocks, his knightly masculinity is not validated by Chaucer. Instead, Edward the Black Prince frees William, indicating a shift in the movie’s priorities that disperses Chaucer’s poetic authority. In his introduction to the shooting script of A Knight’s Tale, Helgeland affirms the moviemaking wisdom that a film is “written three times. Once at your desk. Once while it’s being shot. And, finally, once in the editing room” (p. ix). Noting that the first cut was three hours long, Helgeland accounts for some of the omissions from the

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film’s theater version by pointing to budgetary and time constraints, concluding “Oh well, thank God for DVDs” (p. x). But he also suggests that editing a film makes its priorities clearer, prompting changes that bring into focus the principle concerns of a particular narrative sequence. Though Helgeland’s Middle Ages is anachronistic right down to “the smell of the place” (p. viii), his Chaucer carries a historical authority that Helgeland uses but then discounts. As the theatrical cut plays it, William’s masculinity is not a product of poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century literary imagination; rather, this model of identity is posited as timeless, to the extent that Geoff’s future stature as a writer is guaranteed because he has enough good sense to hitch his creative aspirations to this ideal. At several points the film suggests that Chaucer finds lasting success as a poet because he follows the supposedly ageless authorial adage, “[W]rite what you know” (p. vii).16 Indeed, the appearance of Simon the Summoner and Peter the Pardoner looks forward to Chaucer’s concluding intention to “write some of this story down.”17 But unlike theories of Chaucer’s composition that connect his literary creations to actual persons and historical events, this rendering of that which is true emerges from history and exceeds temporality.18 Geoff does not vow to produce an accurate rendering of the events he witnesses; even his threat against his future pilgrims, to “eviscerate [them] in fiction” (p. 51), affirms his ability to adapt historical circumstances to capture larger truths. Perhaps ironically, then, Geoff expresses the film’s version of historicity even as its anachronistic representation of a “medieval” masculinity necessitates the limitation of Chaucer’s character. Chaucer is connected to history, but only so that his cultural particularity will allow the masculinity he authorizes to claim transcendence. William is also secondary to the film’s construction of a manly ideal, yet since his character from first to last consists of a pastiche of tried masculine traits, including prowess, honor, guts, and humility, his ability to give this conglomeration visible presence suggests this masculinity’s independent truth. Accordingly, Chaucer’s agency over William’s production is effaced in the theatrical cut, making the kind of masculinity that William has clearly learned over the course of the film look like an innate reflection of a preexistent identity. By suggesting that Chaucer is less important to William’s identity in the final version of the film, Helgeland passes off the particular fiction of masculinity that his film constructs as a larger parable of manly identity. It should be added, however, that by obscuring Chaucer’s authority, Helgeland also effaces his own, since he uses Chaucer’s identity to situate his creative control. But the way in which Helgeland obscures his Chaucer, I submit, ultimately seeks to associate the poet with an empowered invisibility that floats free of this film’s particular rendering of his corpus.

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Helgeland’s investment in invisibility’s artistic power is most evident in another deleted scene, which features Chaucer and his wife Philippa. When the traveling band of tournament competitors returns to London for the World Championships, Chaucer once again slips away from the company of which he has become a central part. Earlier he disappears to indulge his gambling habit, losing his clothes to the unscrupulous Pardoner and Summoner, subjecting William to a pledge that places their chivalric collective at risk. William and the others thus assume that Chaucer must have returned to his old ways when a naked Geoff is spotted hurrying into a tent the night after their arrival. When the group confronts Chaucer, however, they discover another side of the poet, one that connects his creative mastery to his cultivated invisibility. It is not so important that this scene reminds or informs the film’s audience that Chaucer was an actual person with particular social connections, including a wife. Rather, it is the way in which the film links its introduction of Philippa to Chaucer’s literary practice that is significant. Chaucer answers the accusations of his fellows by revealing Philippa, unfolding a sensuous scene of artistic creation that connects Chaucer’s particular human encounters to his larger creative power. The party’s disgust at what they perceive to be evidence of Chaucer’s gambling quickly converts into stammering embarrassment when Geoff explains his naked errand as an effort to satisfy his hungry wife. When she peers from behind the bedclothes to have a look at her husband’s companions, Philippa surprises the group even further because she recognizes each member: “You must be Wat. Your [sic] Roland. Kate. And you? Will—Ulrich. Geoff’s told me all about you” (p. 100). Chaucer’s writing is connected to his experience, as Philippa’s approving evaluation of his new cohorts indicates: “So much nicer than the pilgrims you traveled with last year” (p. 101). The itinerant position that Chaucer has inhabited for much of the film, however, is recast here: by suggesting that Chaucer seeks worldly ventures to provide matter for his writing, authorship becomes a social masquerade over which Chaucer exercises complete control. The theatrical version of A Knight’s Tale redefines Chaucer’s artistic mastery by cutting this scene. Taken together with Chaucer’s stock speech, this episode suggests that Helgeland focused more of his creative efforts on the visible power of authorship when he wrote and shot the movie, since neither of these scenes fell victim to pressure to throw out pages in the interest of keeping a production schedule. Indeed, Helgeland put in some effort to film the sequence featuring Philippa, explaining that he convinced actress Olivia Williams to fly in for a day to shoot the scene as a personal favor to him.19 Helgeland realized, however, that his focus on Chaucer threatened to undermine the fiction of masculinity William is meant to

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exemplify. As he explains regarding his decision to cut the scene with Chaucer’s wife, “If something wasn’t really about driving us towards the final joust between Adhemar and William. . .it didn’t belong there anymore and it was just kinda taking away from the momentum.”20 As a result, authorship does not appear as a transcendent fiction, the provisional humility of which Chaucer may don to further his mobility and enhance his craft. Instead, his creativity is visibly subjected to the cultural strictures of Helgeland’s Middle Ages: no matter how accomplished a poet Chaucer may be, he cannot formally elevate William in this social realm. For that, a prince is needed. Assigning Edward the Black Prince the task of elevating William makes Chaucer’s creative effort simply one part of authorizing a masculinity that is posited as antecedent to its construction, even in this film. To consolidate the transcendence of this masculinity, Helgeland replaces his mythic Chaucer with a homosocial fiction that Edward locates. In the same manner in which he uses Chaucer, Helgeland deploys Edward’s anachronized historicity to suggest William’s timeless masculinity. Edward’s historical resonance is invoked to suggest that the collection of manly traits that William exudes had a real, live medieval exemplar. Perhaps fittingly, Chaucer delineates this historic ideal of martial prowess when he identifies the disguised Edward: “He has never met the enemy without victory, never attacked a town he did not take; he is feared as another Hector by Pagans and Christians alike” (p. 68). Yet Chaucer’s explication of Edward’s reputation smacks too much of glorified fiction when directed to an audience who is supposed to be of the Middle Ages, prompting the usually irreverent Wat to counter “We’re English, Geoff; we know who he is!” (p. 68). The characters’ deference for Edward’s presence affirms his power, suggesting to a modern audience that this historic figure represents the genuine article of nobility to which William aspires. Yet William’s reaction to Edward’s masquerading performance defamiliarizes the Black Prince’s reputation, thereby insisting that the ideal of manhood he actualizes is independent of his royal rank. Social status, finally, is presented as an accident of history. Masculine nobility, by contrast, appears as a transcendent set of features uniting men across the partitions that birth erects. According to the scene in which Chaucer extols the Black Prince, Edward’s nobility springs from his deeds rather than his lineage. While Chaucer rattles off a formulaic representation of Edward’s prowess—which is consonant with the connections between arms and ancestors that Susan Crane traces in chivalric display—William shows up this fiction as a particular rendering of the Middle Ages, refusing to yield to the codified association of worth and lineage that it implies.21 William instead tries Edward’s merit, showing his respect for the Black Prince by fighting the disguised royal.

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Unlike the other knights—who withdraw from the competition as soon as they realize Edward’s identity—William sees Edward’s true identity through the disguise, which means that William focuses on the masculine merit that the Black Prince displays instead of the social accouterments he possesses. Edward’s royalty supposedly hides his nobility, for it is only when he disguises himself as Colville that the Black Prince can show his mettle against other men. William’s decision to fight Edward thus undoes the heraldic model of masculinity that Chaucer services, making homosocial respect the arbiter of manly worth in this context. William’s willingness to risk his social position to fight Edward confers a sort of honor and expresses a kind of deference, for his assertion of similarity between the two men, “Like me. He disguised himself so he could compete” (p. 68), indicates that there is a more lasting model of masculinity, one that outdoes the standards of nobility posited for this medieval setting. The timeless privilege of this model of masculinity, however, becomes evident because the film decenters Chaucer’s authority. While the deleted scenes stage Chaucer’s mounting power over making identities in a realm of public appearances, the final cut of the film demonstrates William’s increasing association with a masculine nobility that universally dismantles superficial social divisions. Helgeland claims that he eliminated Chaucer’s stock scene because “it diminished the Black Prince saving William,” showing his desire to make masculinity into a mode that surpasses a particularized setting.22 More telling, however, is the effect that this creative decision has on the film’s representation of the relationship between William and Edward: preventing Chaucer from saving William recasts the earlier scenes featuring the peasant and the prince, solidifying their sameness in a way that makes inflexible distinctions of social rank an antique feature of the medieval past. In an apologetic commentary accounting for the omission of Chaucer’s speech, Helgeland expresses his awareness that reducing Chaucer’s presence brings William’s masculinity more closely into focus: By the end of this speech, [Chaucer’s] saved—he’s completely saved—Heath, and the Black Prince is really only there to knight him. And it felt that if we just had the Black Prince saving him it would also enrich the Black Prince because he’s saving him, and it would also enrich what Heath did before he knows the Black Prince is the Black Prince and he allows him to finish the tournament with honor. It’s more of a payoff for that deed as well.23

The Black Prince’s intervention interweaves all three scenes featuring the two fighters, suggesting that William has earned his knighthood first through his mercy, then through his strength, and finally through his humility.

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Instead of suggesting that knighthood is yet another transient fixture of visible identity—one just as fictional as the patents of nobility that Chaucer fabricates—this ritualization is presented as an enduring certification of William’s innate nobility. Though the affinity William earlier forges with Edward recasts knighthood as a marker of merit instead of lineage, his elevation nevertheless grants the masculinity uniting these men a visible legitimacy that exceeds any representational frame, no matter how fictional, no matter how historical. Anachronism, because it defies the tenuous boundary separating artistic and factual representation, allows Edward to invest William with a claim to masculine nobility that appears to be historically authentic: “He may appear to be of humble origins, but my personal historians have discovered he is descendent from an ancient royal line” (p. 119). Edward’s affirmation is designed to be transparently bogus, for it is the continuing identification of William as a man of the people that makes him a favorite amongst the tournament crowds. Chaucer’s final introduction reveals William’s “true” heritage: “Born a stone’s throw from this stadium and here before you now! William Thatcher! Son of John Thatcher!” (p. 123). Just as Edward invokes his royal authority to bolster his documentary validation of William’s nobility, “This is my word and as such is beyond contestation!” (p. 119), the historic frame may be widened to include William in a domain of knightly masculinity that surpasses temporality altogether. An anachronistic mistaking of history, therefore, can authorize competing realities within a single shot. In other words, though Helgeland’s film undermines the basis of social rank through its promotion of a transcendent masculinity, it nevertheless endorses visible distinctions of station for the purposes it recasts. Anachronistic historicity like Helgeland’s contains within it multiple narrative possibilities, all of which can come into focus through its provisional narrative structure. In this chapter I have pursued the thread running through this film that appears most constant, its consolidation of a transcendent masculine nobility. At the same time, because A Knight’s Tale shows the makeshift process of collaborative assembly required to give this masculine nobility a claim to timeless authority, I must acknowledge that the legitimacy of this ideal is compromised by its very articulation. Indeed, the obvious flimsiness of this model’s authority gives it wider appeal, far outdoing any claim to cultural authenticity that somber sincerity or empirical certitude might posit. USA Today’s review of the film (straightly) remarked in its best critique pique, “Same Old Story: Think Braveheart—Without the Social Commentary— for Teens.”24 While I am tempted just to end this essay with that comment, I think that briefly unpacking “McPaper’s” superiority about the film’s emptiness offers perspective into larger critical resistance to anachronistic representation.

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Critics who objected to this film’s use of anachronism generally agreed that its witty defamiliarization was wasted on a “draggy follow-your-dream theme,” which Kathleen Forni identifies as a “vulgar capitalist myth.”25 Forni captures common critical opposition to the film when she invokes Hans Robert Jauss to insist that A Knight’s Tale “should offer us a valuable new perspective, altering our ‘horizon of future aesthetic experience.’ ”26 In other words, she has no problem with the film’s remaking of Chaucer, as long as there’s good reason behind it. Because Helgeland’s hero wears Nike armor, the anachronism of A Knight’s Tale exclusively promotes bad reason, glamorizing a transcendent myth of masculine mobility that masks the oppressive stasis of consumer capitalism. This complaint is valid but irrelevant, since the movie is unabashed about the mythical status of its masculinity, and the social mobility that goes with it. Though this film indeed stands as another “reductive appreciation of [Chaucer’s] work,” it suggests that canonical authority always entails just this sort of visible implication.27 In particular, it is Chaucer who shows the fragility of authoritative mastery, making personal authority contingent upon the social myths that an individual’s identity furthers. Moreover, in promoting the most banal set of characteristics for its masculine ideal—toughness, respect, honesty, tenacity— the film practically heralds the loss of individuation that accompanies universalized modes of identity. Like Edward’s invocation of an anachronized authority, A Knight’s Tale acknowledges that its ideal of masculinity is phony in order to suggest its enduring appeal. Because knightly masculinity can continually be remade to suit changing cultural fantasies, it exceeds temporality in its fleeting permanence. This film is not, then, “half anachronistic, in ways that don’t make sense.”28 Rather, it is fully anachronistic, animating a medievalized masculinity so capacious that it accommodates modern fantasies of identity. A Knight’s Tale admits, even exploits, the ways in which cultural mythologies remain appealing despite their temporal belatedness. Its fiction of knightly masculinity is an old-fashioned relic of moviemaking, but the film’s brash acknowledgment of its untimeliness invigorates this model nonetheless. Indeed, by suggesting that masculine nobility is the collaborative product of a band of social misfits, this film reveals that genders are hodgepodge formulations that often serve as cultural cover for individual identities. That William’s identity turns out to be “true” in the elite context that Edward represents simply makes William the poster boy for this superficial masquerade. Gaining transcendence in this arena is, finally, a small triumph, for it just means that William’s character fits the most stereotypical version of masculinity imagined in the film. Even the movie’s poster, which subjects its viewers to Heath Ledger’s handsome gaze with its caption “HE WILL ROCK YOU,” foregrounds

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the absurdity of its masculine ideal. It seems fitting, therefore, that ads promoting A Knight’s Tale used quotes from a fake critic, David Manning, who was really the ill-conceived brainchild of Sony marketing executives.29 The studio undoubtedly could have found a writer to herald Heath Ledger as “this year’s hottest new star!”30 But their unwillingness to do so, or their assumption that writing’s value resides in its ability to market the absurd fictions of the powerful to newer and wider audiences, is probably the most damning commentary on the fiction of canonical authorship that Helgeland pursues through his portrayal of Chaucer. Making Chaucer more anonymous in this production of masculinity, therefore, preserves something of his creative mystique. Certifying William’s masculinity through the circuits of royal power, in other words, makes Chaucer less canonically authoritative in this context. Chaucer resolves at the end of this story to write about common human experience, not just “the part about the prince, and the knights.”31 This movie’s conclusion disconnects Chaucer from elite fictions of identity, suggesting his interest in William’s narrative lies not in the peasant’s ultimate ascension to nobility, but in the shaggy alliance that gave wider “truth” to this masculinity. The position of author in the film’s final cut retains much of the itinerant mobility that originally gave it power, outfitting Helgeland’s Chaucer with a mantle of invisibility that allows him to stand apart from fictions of identity that are figured as transparently artificial in this medievalized arena. Because Chaucer’s authority goes underground, finally, he retains his anachronistic appeal as a writer who promotes fantasies of youthful identity for all ages. Notes 1. A Knight’s Tale, directed by Brian Helgeland, perf. Heath Ledger, Paul Bettany, Mark Addy, Rufus Sewell, and Shannyn Sossamon (Columbia, 2001); Peter Travers, “A Knight’s Tale” (review of A Knight’s Tale), Rolling Stone Magazine, May 15, 2001, www.rollingstone.com /reviews /movie /_/id/5948387. 2. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), pp. 1–17, at p. 5. 3. Though Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995) unnecessarily and inaccurately periodizes correspondences between visibility and power, his medieval and modern specular economies similarly equate mastery of the subject with mastery of the visual field. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), who differentiates a tactic from a strategy by arguing that “a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus.. . .The space of a tactic is

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power” (pp. 36–37). Certeau’s idea of a tactical mobilization of time, the ability to “make-do” even with those temporal structures of the other, underlies my analysis in this essay. Régis Debray, “The Three Ages of Looking,” trans. Eric Rauth, Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 529–55, at p. 532. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). Besides the valuable studies by Lerer, Forni, and Trigg, see also Julia Boffey’s and A. S. G. Edwards’s article, “ ‘Chaucer’s Chronicle,’ John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 201–218, which discusses proverbial renderings of Chaucer in several manuscripts, particularly Additional 16165, as part of what they describe as “the gradual establishment, through the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Chaucer’s reputation for gnomic wisdom” (p. 213). Anthony Breznican, “Knight’s Tale” Sort Of “3 Stooges for Dark Ages,” AP Entertainment: At the Movies, May 8, 2001. http://www. canarsiecourier.com/News/2001/0517/Arts_Entertainment/21.html. Brian Helgeland, A Knight’s Tale: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2001), p. 17. Unless there is a difference between the shooting script and the final cut, all further citations refer to the shooting script and are noted parenthetically in the text. See Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (1984; Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1988), pp. 190–210, who argues that Chaucer hides his authorizing potential behind the trope of compiler, or “maker(e).” See MED s.v.: “maker(e)”: 3. (a)–(c); s.v.: “maken”: 5. (a)–(f ); s.v. “makinge”: 5. (a)–(c). All of these terms give a sense of ordinatio and compilatio as central components of the production of medieval texts. Glending Olson, “Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 272–90 usefully traces the relationship between making and craftsmanship in medieval vernacular literature. Brian Helgeland, “A Write Knight Takes on Hollywood—and Lives to Tell the Tale,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2001, www.latimes.com. Also see Helgeland, Shooting Script, p. vii. This rendition of John Lennon is actually Paul Bettany’s (the actor who plays Chaucer) paraphrase, included in Judy Sloane’s “Film Bytes” column, Film Review, 609 (2001). Chaucer’s introduction is altered from the shooting script, so I quote directly from the film dialogue. See also Helgeland, Shooting Script, p. 39–40, where Helgeland inserts his own aside, “(medieval Jimmy Lennon),” to make an explicit connection between this speech and Lennon’s legendary impertinence: “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”

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12. Peter Bradshaw, “Knight Fever” (review of A Knight’s Tale), The Guardian, August 31, 2001 ⬍www. Guardian.co.uk⬎; Anthony Breznican, Associated Press, Entertainment News, May 8, 2001, At the Movies: “A Knight’s Tale.” 13. “A Bright and Sunny Knight—Modern and medieval mesh in jousting ‘Tale,’ ” New York Post, May 11, 2001, www.nypost.com. 14. Bradshaw, “Knight Fever.” 15. While I have attempted to avoid “(in)accuracy-spotting” in addressing this film’s use of Chaucer’s life and works, it should be noted that this speech riffs on Chaucer’s portrait of the Parson in the General Prologue. See Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997), I.500. 16. Helgeland invokes this adage to explain his decision to write about medieval jousting. 17. Cited from the film dialogue; see also Helgeland, Shooting Script, p. 127. 18. John Matthews Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (London, 1926) follows this approach. 19. Helgeland, DVD commentary, deleted scenes, “Chaucer’s Wife.” 20. Helgeland, DVD commentary, deleted scenes, “Chaucer’s Wife.” 21. Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 107–139. 22. Helgeland, DVD commentary, deleted scenes, “Stock Scene.” 23. Helgeland, DVD commentary, deleted scenes, “Stock Scene.” 24. USA Today, April 27, 2001, Friday, final edition, review of A Knight’s Tale, www.usatoday.com. 25. Kathleen Forni, “Reinventing Chaucer: Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 37 (2003): 252–64, at p. 254. 26. Forni, “Reinventing Chaucer,” p. 255. 27. Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 27. 28. Elvis Mitchell, “ ‘A Knight’s Tale’: In Merrie Olde England, Waving His Banner All Over the Place,” review of A Knight’s Tale, The New York Times, May 11, 2001, www.nytimes.com. 29. John Horn, “The Reviewer Who Wasn’t There; Sony resorts to some questionable marketing practices to promote new movies,” Newsweek, June 2, 2001, www.newsweek.com. 30. As Horn pointed out, the studios pamper critics with all-expense paid weekend getaways, often to encourage critics to review their movies favorably, even asking them to use the terms they wish to highlight among potential viewers. David Manning supposedly worked for the Ridgefield Press, a small Connecticut newspaper. In 2001 Connecticut filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony, which the media giant settled in 2004 for 1.5 million dollars. 31. Cited from the film dialogue; also see Shooting Script, p. 127, which focuses on Chaucer’s decision to write his tales in English rather than Latin.

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CHAPTER 13 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD: THE CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE AND GENDER IN CINEMATIC TREATMENTS OF THE ROBIN HOOD LEGEND Lorraine K. Stock and Candace Gregory-Abbott

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ilms about the legendary hero Robin Hood mirror the social and sexual mores of their contemporary audiences more successfully than they reflect the Middle Ages. Because their original medieval and Tudor literary sources are obscure, plot points and characters in Robin Hood films are familiar-but-fluid, resulting in a body of self-referentially “reel” versions of the greenwood legend that reflect major social developments of the past century as much as they represent historically “real” or literary Sherwood outlaws. Since cross-dressing, provocative homosocial behavior among (sometimes feminized) male characters, and compelling female characters whose behavior and appearance often “perform” masculinity are endemic to the corpus, the films about the Robin Hood legend are especially fruitful for examining constructions of gender and sexuality. As the greenwood cohort’s familiar male characters have received more critical attention,1 we highlight instead pivotal women in the Sherwood film canon, not only the obvious Maid Marian, but also other and Othered female figures— Marian’s serving woman, Queen Eleanor, men performing female roles, women performing male roles—whose depictions reflect the course of twentieth-century gender politics. The depictions of these marginalized female archetypes in movies about a famous male outlaw reflect the shifting roles experienced by women in the past century within family, workforce, society, and state.

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Tracing the chronological trajectory of constructions and gender performances of “femaleness” by females and males, the present essay surveys how this dynamic operates in representative Robin Hood films, as the women of Sherwood metamorphose from aristocratic damsels in distress and royal wards traded between men to women who control their own bodies and sexuality and even at times assume leadership of the outlaws. Finally, the films’ nonlinear development of gender roles reflects the perennial uncertainty and fluidity of relationships between men and women. Fearsome Women and Damsels in Distress The earliest major film of the legend, Alan Dwan’s 1922 silent Robin Hood, introduces complicated issues of gender construction, identity performance, and conflicted sexual desire that resurface repeatedly in the canon. After the Earl of Huntingdon (Robin Hood, played by Douglas Fairbanks) wins a joust, Richard I (Wallace Beery) instructs him to claim his prize from a girlishly smitten Maid Marian (Enid Bennett), to which Robin Hood protests, “Exempt me sire, I am afeard of women”—the first inkling of the homosociality that characterizes relations “between men” and the ambiguously nontraditional gender constructions in Robin Hood films.2 Physically pushed to Marian by Richard, Fairbanks’s body language expresses extreme anxiety at even being touched by a female as Marian attempts to crown his squirming head with laurel. Tumbling backward down steep stairs to escape her touch, Fairbanks is surrounded by eagerly swarming female admirers who chase him, running toward a laughing Richard, who represents the safety of men yet who physically tosses him back into their midst. Women represent an alternative world to that of men, one in which cinematic Robins are never completely comfortable.3 Overwhelmed by the women, Robin jumps into the moat. If medieval garderobes truly emptied into the moat, then this knight prefers immersion in sewage to facing a horde of “fearsome” females. As he surfaces, he faces an old female peasant, at whom he cries in dismay, “Another woman!” Fairbanks’s look of abject fear in the presence of women tellingly contrasts with the pure joy he flaunts while acrobatically skipping through the forest with men. Throughout the tournament scene, Richard indicates his fellowship with Huntingdon in an excessively physical way: backslapping, shoulderholding, arm tapping, and all but hugging Robin. At the subsequent feast, mimicking royal gestures that exceed traditional male camaraderie, Huntingdon himself engages in extensive physical contact with fellow knights. Arm wrestling over a flagon, Robin Hood and his male competitor then body wrestle atop the table. Seeing this physical display provokes

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Richard to proclaim it “more befitting that he try his love for a maid.” Pointing to other knights posed in physical embraces with their sweethearts, Richard asks, “Why has thou not a maid?”4 The king’s behavior suggests that Richard prefers Huntingdon to be with anyone, even a woman, rather than with a man other than himself. Richard orders the sheepish and discomfited Huntingdon to be bound to a pillar; promising a castle and lands to the winner, he beckons the court’s ladies to compete for Robin’s favors. Surrounding him again, the “fearsome” women poke and prod his body in increasingly suggestive ways, turning him into the objectified “woman” requiring rescue. A shot of Marian looking on admiringly, if wistfully, cuts to Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisbourne plotting Guy’s intended sexual possession of Marian. When the frightened damsel flees in distress from Gisbourne’s unwanted groping, Huntingdon breaks his bonds and rescues himself and Marian, initiating a dynamic of distress and rescue that will become a standard part of the Robin Hood canon. The theme of the homosocial—nearly homoerotic—physical gestures between Richard and Huntingdon reasserts itself throughout the film, especially in its puzzling conclusion. After Robin rescues Marian again, obtains royal pardon, and secures blessing on their marriage, a caption proclaims, “The bride and groom escape the wedding revels.” Exiting another feast reminiscent of the post-tournament one, they pass through a massive door into an ominously dark and cavernous bridal chamber. The scale of the set dwarfs both figures, rendering them like children playacting in their parents’ bedroom. With Marian sitting at the edge of the large bed and Robin kneeling at her feet, the postures are less suggestive of ardent newlyweds, eagerly anticipating the long postponed consummation of sexual desire, than of a mother with child at her knee. Many critics note the “boyish” quality of Fairbanks’s portrayal.5 Here boyishness suggests arrested development, and Marian plays the roles of dangerous siren, little girl, and mother. Interrupted by the king knocking ever more insistently at the huge door, shouting not “Robin Hood” but “Huntingdon,” Robin and Marian do not even share a connubial kiss. The king’s reversion to the hero’s preoutlaw identity registers his desire to recapture their pre-Marian homosocial/ homoerotic alliance. Audiences never know whether the marriage was consummated, unlike later films such as Robin and Marian (1976), in which the title characters share an obvious sexual past and John Irvin’s Robin Hood (1991), which depicts the relationship’s consummation. Although Robin Hood regularly exhibits loyal fealty to Richard in the legend’s films, their relationship is never quite so problematically touchy-feely as in this early avatar. Contributing to the homoeroticism of this relationship is that Bennett’s Maid Marian is the quintessential Othered female. With her

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sexuality tidily repressed (choosing an idealized, perhaps chaste, relationship with Robin over an overtly sexual union with Gisbourne), she provides almost infantalized romantic temptation and distraction from crusading, and personifies the damsel in distress, her most assertive act being passively feigning suicide. Ultimately, chivalric “fellowship” between Huntingdon and Richard is charged with more sexual tension than Robin’s wedding night.6 The issue of female community was initiated in Fairbanks’s version in that an unnamed “serving woman,” played by Billie Bennett, accompanies Marian (said to be “One woman braver than the rest”) when, on behalf of England’s oppressed subjects, she begs mercy from wicked Prince John, who replies condescendingly, “Fret not your pretty head for such as they.” Despite John’s attempt to relegate Marian to passive damselhood, when Marian verbally spars with him over his authority in Richard’s absence, John notes, “That Maid bears watching.” The nameless servant also accompanies Marian when she sends a secret message through Little John to Huntingdon, requesting his return from Jerusalem to thwart Prince John. In another homosocial-homoerotic moment, when Huntingdon requests royal permission to return to England, Richard once again holds him firmly by the shoulders, demanding whether the motive is “the Maid.” When Huntingdon silently demurs, Richard angrily taunts, “You, turned chicken-hearted for a wench!” Despite a plea for royal trust, Richard refuses him leave. When Huntingdon nonetheless departs, Gisbourne accuses him of desertion, a crime meriting execution. Richard’s conflicted anguish about losing this special “friendship” is palpable in silent cinema’s exaggerated body language, especially his restlessly fidgeting hands. They pat and soothe the wounded Huntingdon’s body, which Richard relegates to prison, not the gallows, ordering his “friend’s” tender care. Meanwhile, in Nottingham, Marian’s maidservant is subjected to repeated torture. In her only speeches in the film, she ruefully admits to Prince John her mistress’s attempt to solicit Huntingdon’s aid and then warns Marian to flee John’s wrath. Marian’s other ladies-in-waiting silently refuse cooperation with John’s vengeful pursuit of their mistress. The serving woman compensates for her betrayal-underduress by successfully convincing John’s search party of Marian’s (false) suicide, thereby engineering her escape. Thus, in Fairbanks’s film a community of nameless, mostly silent women facilitate Marian’s resistance against John’s cruel oppression. Without them, her “pretty head” would achieve little “bravery.” Like most early screen versions, Enid Bennett’s Marian requires rescuing, whether by her female community or the male hero. Owing much to the Fairbanks model, Errol Flynn’s 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, also ends with Richard blessing the intended marriage of Robin and Marian.

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Considered the paradigmatic Robin Hood film, Adventures also fails to address the transformation of the hitherto chaste Maid Marian into a fully sexualized woman. The film merely flirts with this topic, especially in scenes developing the relationship between Marian and her nurse Bess, the only sexualized female in the film. Similar to the Fairbanks film, in Flynn’s Adventures Olivia de Havilland’s Maid Marian is the essence of a Norman noblewoman who knows her place in the gender hierarchy. Like her 1922 predecessor, as the royal ward of Prince John (Claude Rains), she is an object to be traded between men. John intends that she be traded to the oily and, importantly, Norman Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone), whose goodwill is needed to abet John’s seizing the kingdom in Richard’s absence. For her acquiescent admission that she might accept Gisbourne, John declares her a “very wise young woman.”7 At her first encounter with Robin Hood, when he interrupts Sir Guy’s feast by flinging a poached stag onto the dais, Marian’s facial expressions betray her distaste for this ill-bred Saxon, who climbs over a table, eats with his hands, spits out his food, and calls Prince John a “traitor”—thus himself speaking treason “fluently.” As Robin Hood, played with saucy flamboyance by Flynn, trades flippant, but in her opinion politically dangerous, banter with John and Sir Guy about the harsh treatment of the tax-bled Saxons, Marian, as the only female at the main table, registers her Otherness within this group of important, scary males. Instinctively rising to leave this site of the business of men, she is waved back by Prince John, who assures her that “he’ll not harm you.” Despite her marginal status as a royal ward who might believably be sent offscreen to her room, de Havilland’s Marian continuously, if passively, shares screen space with the men who matter in the kingdom. However, significant only for being an object of barter, this Marian, like Bennett earlier, lacks agency. This is even true in the famous segment when the forest outlaws ambush the royal entourage. Marian is accompanied by her now more vocal serving woman, Bess (Una O’Connor), who further develops the role of Marian’s servant or nurse, a female figure even more Other than Marian herself. Upon the party’s capture, the protective Bess charges forward from the background warning Robin, “You’re not going to harm my lamb, my honeysuckle.” Later, to Much the miller’s son, she admonishes, “You just harm one hair of my lady’s head and that ugly head of yours will be walking around with no neck under it; now mind!” It is hard to imagine this servant betraying her mistress, even when tortured. In contrast to the lower-class Bess’s feisty spirit, her aristocratic charge is aloof, passive, and manipulated by men. Walking at ground level far below her on horseback, the diminutive Much gazes at Bess, as they

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exchange innuendo-charged dialogue: Bess: What are you staring at? Much: Well I ain’t never been out walking with a female before. Bess: What female? Much (shyly): You. Bess (pleased but feigning indignation): Well, of all the impudence. . .I suppose you say that to all the women who tickle your fancy. Much: I’ve never tickled a woman’s fancy before; Ah, I’ve never had a sweetheart. Bess (warming to him): You mean to say you’ve never had one single sweetheart in all you life? You don’t know what you’re missing, my lad. I’ve had the banns on five times.

Bess reveals how sexually experienced she is, having enjoyed a variety of sexual partners. It is as if Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, between husbands, wandered into the employ of a virginal Norman noblewoman. We get no such sexual awareness from De Havilland’s Marian, whose famous kiss with Flynn in the balcony scene conveys chastity rather than lust. Although Bess’s maiden charge initially rebuffs Robin Hood as being a “Saxon hedge robber,” the scene in Sherwood in which Robin exposes Norman injustice is both an ideological epiphany for her and a sexual turning point in her iconicity as Maid Marian. When Robin arranges to have Marian escorted to a safe abbey, Much volunteers to escort Bess; accepting, Bess proudly takes his hand as they exit the greenwood with new romantic passions stirred in both servant and mistress. This is illustrated in the discussion in Marian’s chamber between maid and Maid about recognizing the signs of being in love: inability to think of anyone else, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, goosey prickly feelings, wanting to be with him all the time, and as Bess—the voice of sexual experience—insists, “When he’s with you, your legs is as weak as water.” This interlude of “girl talk” in a film that is otherwise full of male interchanges prepares Marian to take action. She sends lower-class Bess to the Merry Men’s favorite tavern—Bess’s knowledge of which registers the development of her sexual relationship with Much—to warn Robin of Gisbourne and John’s treachery. Despite this large step in the evolution of this Marian from Norman supporter to Saxon sympathizer, compared to later cinematic Marians, De Havilland’s portrayal is rather inert. Contrasted with the sexual experience and physical bravery of Bess, even her eloquent speech to John and Gisbourne defending Robin Hood’s Saxon ideology is only talk, not real action. While predictable for 1938, later Robin Hood films would present far more physically intrepid, sexualized, and ideologically feminist Marians (figure 13.1).

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Figure 13.1 Marian defends Robin Hood in front of Gisbourne and John. Source: From The Adventures of Robin Hood (USA, Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938).

Savvy Servant, Cross-Dressing Marian, and Powerful Queen Although in the new medium of television rather than the large screen, the 1950s was a veritable renaissance of filmic treatments of the Robin Hood legend, with vital but critically undernoticed female characters in all versions. The Story of Robin Hood (1952), directed by Ken Annakin and broadcast on Walt Disney’s popular television series, and the hugely popular The Adventures of Robin Hood television series (1955–58), starring Richard Greene, reflected mid-century postwar optimism, anxieties about political oppression, and uncertainties about postwar shifting gender roles.8 Women had achieved autonomy by successfully filling the jobs vacated by men off at war, thus exacerbating the sense that men and women inhabited separate gendered spheres, which when they collided, often produced awkward, uncertain relationships. After working effectively in such traditionally nonfemale workplaces as munitions factories, postwar women were suddenly expected to model themselves on feminine television icons like pearl-chokered homemaker June Cleaver, who baked cookies and vacuumed wearing the full-skirted dresses of the postwar “New Look” in the television sitcom Leave It to Beaver. This abrupt shift of roles for women is reflected in mid-century Robin Hood films, which dramatize the tension

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between women’s desire to remain active and their society’s desire to restore their passivity. From its onset, The Story of Robin Hood [and his Merrie Men] makes clear that women will play a substantial role.9 Its female characters—Marian ( Joan Rice), her nurse, and Queen Eleanor (Martita Hunt)—successfully remove themselves from the margins of society, thus becoming all the more dangerous and a new kind of womanly Other. The opening scene establishes this centrality of women: Marian is being discussed and Robin (Richard Todd), the eponymous hero, has yet to be mentioned. Despite Todd’s ample screen time, it is Marian’s film. If Fairbanks’s film constructed women’s roles as dangerous within their traditional milieu, these 1950s Sherwood women are even more perilous to men for abandoning that milieu and not acting like women. The film’s opening dialogue features Marian’s father and her nurse discussing her future service to Queen Eleanor. The nurse contributes to the prior and future tradition of strong female supporting characters in Robin Hood movies—the nameless servant in Fairbanks’s Robin Hood, Bess in Flynn’s film, Nanny in the Greene TV series, Clucky the nurse in the animated Disney Robin Hood (1973), Sarah in Reynolds’s Prince of Thieves (1991), and Broomhilde, her parodic counterpart in Mel Brooks’s 1993 Men in Tights—guardians of Maid Marian’s chastity usually ignored by critics. Although one of few lower-class women in Annakin’s movie, this significant if minor character speaks early and quite forcefully, quickly establishing the general tone of all women in the movie: straightforward, determined, lacking any gender-based or class-based subservience. The only person to whom the servant acquiesces is Marian herself. Clearly this film’s women defer not to other men, but only to other women, rendering them problematic to the patriarchy. This is also reflected in the most important female-to-female relationship, between Marian and her guardian, the charismatic historical character Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, in her first cinematic appearance.10 As in Fairbanks’s film, in this Sherwood, women create their own community. The film’s temporal setting of England in 1190 eerily mirrors 1940s England and America, just before the film’s production: the men are away at war (Crusades/World War II); the women are in charge and accustomed to a world in which men are effectively marginalized, allowing the women to control the discourse while men exist at a geographically distant periphery. As King Richard rides off to the Crusade, flanked by his weak brother John and his forceful mother, Eleanor declares, “The woman who has reared two sons like you can look after herself.” This serves as a motto for all of this film’s women. When Eleanor, escorting the ransom money to rescue Richard, learns that Prince John took Marian hostage, she willingly

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supercedes her duty to Richard (as mother and coregent) with duty to another woman. Moreover, when Marian’s father joins Richard’s royal party preparing for the Crusade, he asks a “boon from your mother [Eleanor],” not from the king. The boon: to place Marian under Eleanor’s guardianship, and not Prince John’s as might be expected. Such submission to women indicates the power these women have claimed. This empowerment is also reflected in Marian’s flirtatious, companionable, but nonsexual relationship with Robin. Like Fairbanks’s portrayal, Todd’s boyish Robin Hood seems most content in the homosocial forest world merging military barracks with boys’ summer camp. Unlike the Flynn or Costner versions of antiestablishment community, these Merry Men have no noticeable wives, women, or families. Therefore, notwithstanding a few obligatory mild hugs and vaguely romantic double entendres, the sexual tension between Robin and Marian is most noticeable when she has in some way “unwomanned” herself by crossdressing or wrestling with him. At least Todd’s Robin, unlike Fairbanks, wrestles with a female, not a male! Yet Robin’s unawareness that the genderbending Marian is female exacerbates the sexual confusion. These scenes, which recall the homoerotic tension of Fairbanks’s film, underscore how women must Other themselves—adopting unexpected gender roles, concealing their actual difference—to attract Robin’s attention. Notably, compared to earlier and later films, here only Marian cross-dresses (twice, and not nearly as convincingly as in Reynolds’s and Irvin’s 1991 films). Making herself visibly an “unwoman,” Marian doubly transforms her class and gender by disguising herself as a man/servant in a borrowed cloak. By adopting a public voice, Marian and Eleanor similarly “unwoman” themselves in their dutiful fidelity to the state. Significantly, in the film’s political scheme, Eleanor and Marian represent justice and honor, values not in themselves Other to the film’s moral universe. Rather, the justice and honor that they defend embraces not only familial and personal honor, expected to be the concern of women, but also national, public, and civic honor, nominally the sphere of men. To neutralize John’s corruption, Eleanor becomes the state itself in Richard’s absence. Defending the dishonesty she committed in disguising herself and running away, Marian proclaims, “I did not act from willful disobedience. Love of England compelled me to seek out the king’s real friends and prove to you their loyalty.” Although such a speech is intrinsic to every Robin Hood film, it is usually articulated by the male hero and not the heroine. In sum, just as Marian represents the Other, domestic world to boyish Robin (who would rather, like Fairbanks, play in the forest with his fellow merry, womenless men), Eleanor represents the Other, honorable world to the dishonorable John (who would rather plunder the lower class than dispense true justice).11

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Murderous Nuns, Witches, and Sexually Emancipated Marians Recent Robin Hood films have introduced interesting new variations of Sherwood women to the corpus. Richard Lester’s 1976 Robin and Marian, reflecting the deconstructionist, antiwar radicalism of the 1970s, illustrates shifting, uncertain gender roles emerging from the feminist movement.12 It combines a pessimistic view of future gender relations, in which men and women have uncertain expectations about male-female behaviors, with nostalgia for the supposed clarity about gender roles of the medieval past. Although appearing to enjoy easy familiarity with one another, Robin (Sean Connery) and Marian (Audrey Hepburn), as they soon realize, have led such separate and independent lives that they apparently no longer need one another. Robin admits to Will and Friar Tuck that he has not “thought of [Marian] in years.” Upon reuniting, neither recognizes the other initially. The film constructs atypical versions of the legend’s usual characters: Robin, feeling too old to fight Prince John or the Sheriff, has become disenchanted with royal authority; Marian, now a nun, resists following Robin, as before. Unlike Annakin’s Marian-dominated film, Robin and Marian features less of Marian, absent in the plot’s first third, than the title suggests.13 Often mentioned, she nevertheless remains offscreen while Robin and Little John perform acts of male derring-do, constructing another filmic universe that separates and isolates male and female spheres. Once again, homosocial relationships between the Merry Men are more developed and more intimate than heterosexual affiliations. Before Marian appears, the film has fully established the homosocial bond between Robin and Little John (Nicol Williamson), who have lived companionably crusading and fighting in France for two decades devoted to another man, Richard I. John’s admission to Marian, “[Robin and I] have always been together,” indicates his incapability of refusing Robin anything. The Robin-John dyad is more successful than Robin and Marian’s relationship. Marian even seeks John’s advice about dealing with Robin, tacitly accepting John’s stronger claim to intimate knowledge of Robin than her own, past or present. Enviously, she complains “you had him with you. . .you had him for years.” No other important women exist in the film, except for a few nameless nuns, serving as token objects to be rescued, offering Robin the opportunity to fulfill his expected service to women, a function Marian flatly rejects. Because this post-Watergate film trusts nobody possessing power, Marian is denied the civic authority she assumed in previous or subsequent films. Although an abbess, her abbey is small and insignificant, boasting more chickens than nuns. Her trouble with the Sheriff of Nottingham (representing the state) to whom she willingly submits, indicates private scruples rather

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than civic duty. This older, clearly nonvirginal Marian needs no nurseprotectress. In other Robin Hood films, Robin functioned in their relationship as rescuer; it is as if this Robin Hood has learned—incorrectly, he soon realizes, for now she refuses to accept rescue—how to be “Robin” from previous films. After being “saved” from the sheriff, she declares her intention of turning herself in the next day, which confuses Robin mightily. Responding to Robin with a mixture of exasperation and mild annoyance that he has failed to move on, mature, or change, Marian insists, “I am not your Marian anymore.” He has changed, of course, now recognizing the futility of crusading, but around Marian, a negative catalyst for him, he reverts to his old, needlessly chivalrous habits. Setting off for Nottingham, he brusquely tells her “you’ll have to ride with me,” implying that upon his return, she must resume her traditional female role of follower. After Robin interferes in her altercation with the sheriff, Marian tells him, “I wish I were a man, I’d knock you down.” She suggests here that, if she were a man, Robin would know how to relate to her. He is stymied by her changed gender role—still affectionate but definitely independent of him, an independence mirroring the position of postfeminist, rather than medieval, women. If Marian’s gender role has changed, so has Robin’s, although his inability or unwillingness to recognize that change is disastrous. Robin claims that, retaining his traditional male role of rescuer, he does not mean her harm, though he cannot seem to avoid causing it, as his bungling rescue of her captured nuns shows. In contrast, Marian easily reverts to old roles by rebuilding their former domestic life in the forest, capably skinning a rabbit for dinner. While he cannot successfully enact his former role of rescuer, she seamlessly resumes her previous nurturing gender role, increasing Robin’s confusion. More than any other film in the canon, Robin and Marian presents gender roles as fluid. In another ironic gender reversal, at film’s end, Marian rescues Robin from the violence of the battlefield only then to kill him. Recognizing (as he seems incapable of doing) that the aging Robin no longer has a viable place in his own heroic world, she takes his life (and her own). Without giving orders or appearing to take charge, Marian subtly assumes the role of the outlaw band’s leader as she engineers Robin’s death. Even Robin ultimately considers her act a sensible and necessary intervention, as he himself would not have recognized when to retire from geriatric heroism. This represents the final, though hardly uncanonical, Othering of Marian in Lester’s version. Reflecting the medieval ballad tradition that Robin’s death was caused by excessive bloodletting by his kinswoman, the Prioress of Kirklees Abbey, scriptwriter Goldman assigns the task of killing Robin to a woman even closer than kin, whom he has characterized as a prioress, a cinematic interpretation of Marian unique to this Robin Hood film.14

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Rejecting Lester’s unorthodox interpretation, Kevin Costner harked back to the Flynn archetype with 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, directed by Kevin Reynolds.15 Together with the rival 1991 film Robin Hood directed by John Irvin, it revived the cinematic Robin Hood legend, inspiring Mel Brooks’s 1993 spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights and a 2001 television movie, Peter Hewitt’s Princess of Thieves, about Robin’s daughter. In spite of the script’s serious narrative flaws, Costner’s film offers a more assertive Maid Marian and a new female character, the witch Mortianna (played by Geraldine McEwan and ably spoofed by Tracey Ullman as Latrine in Men in Tights). Reynolds’s 1991 Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is an independent woman who has come to despise war, speaking bitterly about men (namely Robin) who return from combat expecting to take up where they left off, pushing aside the women who have managed quite well in their absence (thus reprising themes from 1950s versions). In 1976, when Robin decides to rescue Marian, he simply punches her, drags her off, and later sheepishly apologizes. Attempting to “rescue” Marian, Costner’s Robin declares to her, “I have sworn to protect you.” Nevertheless, she fights him in one of several scenes wherein she adopts the warrior role and ably defends herself from friend and foe.16 Indeed, rather than submit herself to the authorities (as Lester’s Marian does), she threatens to turn Robin in to the sheriff. Like Hepburn’s Marian (whose confessions of past sexual experiences with Robin were the envy of the convent’s nuns), Mastrantonio’s Marian is also sexualized. Rather than being merely the object of Mulvey’s cinematic “male gaze,” the beautiful Marian herself gazes with undisguised sexual curiosity at Robin’s body, showering naked under a waterfall.17 Mastrantonio’s independence has limitations, which are most evident in her initial combat with Robin in an obligatory Marian-dresses-as-man scene. Yet unlike Rice’s 1950s character, who is simply overpowered and carried off by Robin Hood, the 1991 Marian successfully defeats Robin. Yet at the film’s end, Marian’s fierce, problematic female status must be tamed and the character de-Othered to the safe parameters of the 1938 Marian, rescued and married off to Robin. Nearly raped by the Sheriff of Nottingham, Mastrantonio, like Bennett’s 1922 distressed damsel, is suddenly incapable of self-defense, requiring an antiquated swashbuckling Costner’s rescue. The most innovative female character in Reynolds’s film is the witch Mortianna.18 Whereas earlier films presented women as subtly dangerous and Othered when they stepped out of their “normal” subservient roles, Mortianna is dangerously Othered to the point of monstrosity. Despite the tremendous power Mortianna wields in this largely patriarchal world, she is forced to implement it in the shadows of her spider-web-covered and

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rat-infested lair below Nottingham Castle. The Sheriff seeks her advice and aid, rather than the reverse, notably signifying her power. Ultimately, her defeat by the equally mysterious and exoticized figure of Azeem (Morgan Freeman), the inscrutable Muslim who follows Robin to England from the Crusade, restores traditional gender balance. If Costner’s film offered a fairly assertive heroine, she nevertheless was still a bride traded “between men” from king to redeemed outlaw. In contrast, John Irvin’s 1991 Robin Hood developed a fully emancipated postmodern Maid Marian, played with verve by Uma Thurman, a role eerily anticipating her later success as the violently vengeful “Bride” in Quentin Tarantino’s 2003–04 Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2.19 Besides the usual Robin Hood plot points, the film introduces Baron Roger Daguerre, Marian’s avuncular guardian, and Sir Miles Folcanet, her intended husband, replacing the usual Norman villains, John or Gisbourne. However, many elements, especially the construction of Marian’s character, fundamentally subvert previous versions. Daguerre (Jeroen Krabbé) arranges a personally advantageous marriage between his well-dowered niece and Folcanet (Jürgen Prochnow), who takes his chastely wimpled intended on a ride through Sherwood Forest. There, Folcanet is humiliated and dispatched by Robin Hood (Patrick Bergin), previously outlawed by Daguerre. Robin’s sexually charged badinage with the “captive” Maid Marian ramps up the double entendres of the now innocent Bess-Much flirtation in Flynn’s film: Marian: So, what are you going to do with me? Tie me up? Robin: Could be a lashing. Marian: How many strokes? Robin: As many as are necessary. Marian: And then it’s finished? Robin: That depends. Have you ever been lashed before? Marian (suggestively): I’ve never had someone beg me to make them stop. Robin (leering ): Then you’ve never had a proper lashing before.

Now sexually attracted to Robin, Marian attempts to avoid her dreaded marriage to Falconet, whom she bluntly tells, “I don’t want you!” Desperate, she crudely cuts her luxuriant, waist length hair, a symbol of female sexuality, dirties her face, dons rags, and escapes to the forest, cross-dressing as page Martin Pride, to infiltrate the outlaw band. Unlike earlier cross-dressed Maid Marians, Thurman hardly looks human, much less female, and her utterly successful disguise further Others her. When Daguerre tries to trap Robin, he and Martin escape by jumping into a river, which dissolves Martin’s disguise. When “Martin” lustily kisses a nonplussed but aroused Robin Hood, the homoerotic dynamic of Fairbanks’s film is reprised.20

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Marian is “rescued” from objectification in an enforced marriage by a swashbuckling Robin and Merry Men infiltrating the wedding, but not before she establishes her own subjectivity, declaring firmly to the bishop, “I will not marry [Falconet], not before God or anyone else.” No longer the damsel in distress, in her “rescue,” as Bergin’s rope swinging, sword wielding, equally swashbuckling partner-in-arms, Thurman’s Marian is as much perpetrator of her own liberation as recipient, even “saving” Robin from Falconet’s fatal blow by her distracting scream, the only “feminine” aspect of her performance of usually male-gendered heroism. The film concludes with the obligatory wedding uniting Saxon and Norman, which Daguerre proffers “provided, of course, that she agrees.” To everyone’s surprise, Marian firmly declares, “I will not marry to symbolize a peace or to ratify a treaty. But, this man I will take because he makes the May tree blossom, and the bees buzz in my breast; I will take this man because he brings springtime to my heart.” No longer the objectified peace-weaving bride traded between men, this Marian is autonomous and unabashedly sexualized. As Friar Tuck unites the couple by encircling their kissing faces with a May garland, the sun, which had been obscured by winter cloud cover throughout the film, emerges. As trees burst into bloom, promising future fruit, a leafy Green Man, mythic avatar of fertility standing behind Tuck, exclaims and smiles benevolently on the marveling crowd. With Marian’s expression of personal sovereignty about whom she would take as a husband, not once, but twice, and the explicit references to the medieval May Games over which Robin and Marian presided as May king and queen, Irvin himself effects the perfect thematic “marriage” between the medieval Robin Hood myth and postfeminist ideology.21 A more liberated cinematic Marian than Thurman’s is difficult to imagine, excepting Kate Lonergan’s truly subversive characterization in the British television series, Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (1989–94).22 Every premise of this series deconstructs the Robin Hood legend: Marian is a plucky, working-class wench dressed not in de Havilland’s satins and velvets, but in tattered homespun; Robin is a cowardly but trendy royal clothing designer who “can’t handle violence”; the usually giant Little John is the midget “Little Ron” whom Marian simply sidesteps—women are much too busy for such time-wasting—when he tries to engage her in the bridge quarterstaff fight traditionally fought between him and Robin Hood. Most audacious of all, paralleling the coterminous career of Margaret Thatcher as Britain’s first female prime minister,23 Lonergan’s Marian handily assumes leadership of the band of Merry Men, delivering a ditzy but inspirational speech to the tentative Robin, who prefers a “holiday cottage” to camping out in Sherwood. Marian waxes eloquent about robbing from the rich and giving to the poor and surrounding herself “with

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a highly attractive band of respectable men who are just a little bit rough,” attracting fame so that “people will name pubs after us.” The only element of the plan attractive to Robin is their costumes, which he will design. Here the Robin Hood legend and twentieth-century gender expectations are, as Chaucer might say, turned “up so doun.” Notes 1. See Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 218–61; Rudy Behlmer, “Robin Hood on the Screen,” Films in Review 16 (1965): 91–102; Stephen Knight, “Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Fitting the Tradition Snugly,” Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide, eds., Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan (London: Pluto Press, 1996), pp. 125–33; Scott Allen Nollen, Robin Hood: A Cinematic History of the English Outlaw and His Scottish Compatriots (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); Kevin Harty, “Robin Hood on Film: Moving Beyond a Swashbuckling Stereotype,” Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 87–100; John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 149–95; and Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 150–210. 2. See the classic study on homosocial desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 3. Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, p. 225. 4. Robin Hood, DVD, directed by Allan Dwan, perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Enid Bennett, and Paul Dickey (1922; Image Entertainment, 1999). 5. Jeffrey Richards notes Fairbanks’s portrayal of Robin Hood as a “grown-up schoolboy” (Swordsmen, p. 196); Scott Allen Nollen notes his “Peter Pan” quality (Robin Hood, p. 95). 6. Scott Allen Nollen interprets Robin and Marian’s not answering the knocking as a sign of probable consummation (Robin Hood, p. 96). 7. The Adventures of Robin Hood, DVD, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, perf. Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Una O’Connor (1938; Warner Home Video, 2003). 8. The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, VHS, directed by Ken Annakin, perf. Richard Todd, Joan Rice, and Martita Hunt (1955; Walt Disney Video, 1994); and The Adventures of Robin Hood, DVD, directed by Danien Bert, perf. Richard Greene (1955–58; Hep Cat Records, 2006). 9. The British title included the bracketed words. 10. Behlmer, “Robin Hood on the Screen,” p. 101; Nollen, Robin Hood, p. 131.

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11. The same themes occur in the 1955–58 television series The Adventures of Robin Hood, containing episodes exclusively devoted to Marian and Eleanor. The unique emphasis on the queen in 1950s versions suggests that another recent powerful “Eleanor,” Eleanor Roosevelt, inspired the incorporation of a medieval “Eleanor” into Sherwood. 12. Robin and Marian, DVD, directed by Richard Lester, perf. Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (1976; Sony Pictures, 2002). 13. Scriptwriter William Goldman’s original title was The Death of Robin; see Aberth, A Knight at the Movies, p. 178. 14. See “A Gest of Robyn Hode” and “The Death of Robin Hood,” Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, eds., Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1997). 15. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, DVD, directed by Kevin Reynolds, perf. Kevin Costner and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (1991; Warner Home Video, 2003). 16. Stephen Knight notes the resonance of this episode with their fight in the ballad “Robin Hood and Maid Marian” (Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, p. 167). 17. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. 18. Mortianna resembles the supernatural female characters appearing in Richard Carpenter’s 1984–86 television series Robin of Sherwood. 19. Robin Hood, DVD, directed by John Irvin, perf. Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman (1991; 20th Century Fox, 2004). 20. Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, p. 169. 21. W. E. Simeone, “The May Games and the Robin Hood Legend,” Journal of American Folklore 64 (1951): 265–74. 22. Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, DVD, directed by David Bell, perf. Kate Lonergan, Wayne Morris, and Tony Robinson (1989; Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2006). 23. Thatcher was the longest consecutively serving prime minister in 150 years (1979–90). The series ran 1989–94.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Holly A. Crocker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Her articles and essays appear in Chaucer Review, Shakespeare Quarterly, New Perspectives on Criseyde, Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems, and “Seyd in forme and reverence”: Essays in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr. She has edited an essay collection entitled Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave, 2006) and is completing a manuscript entitled Seeing Chaucer’s Manhood. Laurie A. Finke is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Kenyon College. She is the author of Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing (Cornell 1992) and The Longman’s History of Women’s Writing :The Middle Ages (Longman, 1999), as well as an editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton, 2001). Martin B. Shichtman is Professor of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. He is co-editor of culture and the king (SUNY Press, 1994) and author of more than twenty articles on medieval literature, contemporary theory, and film. In a collaboration that has spanned twenty years, they have written King Arthur and the Myth of History (University Press of Florida 2004), articles that have appeared in Signs, Arthuriana, and Arthurian Literature, and edited collections of essays, including a special issue of Arthuriana on “Symbolic and Sexual Economies in Arthurian Literature” (1998) and Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Cornell University Press, 1987). John M. Ganim is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. The author of Medievalism and Orientalism (Palgrave, 2005), Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton University Press, 1990), Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton University Press, 1983), and a contributor to The Medieval Hero on Screen (MacFarland, 2004), he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is currently President (2006–2008) of the New Chaucer Society. Candace Gregory-Abbott is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches courses on the history of

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medieval women and the Middle Ages on film. She has made conference presentations on the Reel/Real Crusades and filmic depictions of women on Crusade, and she has published essays on Lady Alice Kyteler and mothers and daughters in fifteenth-century England. Don Hoffman is Professor Emeritus of English at Northeastern Illinois University. He has published widely on topics in medieval and popular culture, especially the Arthurian tradition. Most recent publications are King Arthur in Popular Culture (MacFarland, 2002), coedited with Elizabeth Sklar, and “Seeing Things,” an essay on contemporary African fiction published in the proceedings of the African Literature Association conference held in Fes, Morocco in 1996. Caroline Jewers is Associate Professor of French at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Her main areas of focus are medieval French and Occitan literature, comparative medieval literature, and medievalism. She has published a book titled Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel (University Press of Florida, 2000), numerous articles on lyric and narrative poetry, and two essays on the Middle Ages on film: “Hard Days’ Knights: First Knight, A Knight’s Tale, and Black Knight,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen and “Heroes and Heroin: From True Romance to Pulp Fiction,” in Journal of Popular Culture, 33.4 (Spring 2000). Arthur Lindley, is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Research, University of Birmingham (UK). He was formerly a Senior Fellow in English at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, as well as previously at the National University of Singapore, where he founded the Film Studies program. He is the author of “The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film” (Screening the Past, 1998) and “Scotland Saved from History: Welles’ Macbeth” (Literature/Film Quarterly, 2001) as well as Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse (Delaware University Press, 1997), a study of Augustinian theology in late medieval and Renaissance literature. Peter Lorge teaches Chinese history and film at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900–1795 (Routledge, 2005) and the Reader in International Military History: Pre-1600 China (Ashgate, 2005). His next project is a history of Chinese martial arts. Tison Pugh is AssociateProfessor at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Queering Medieval Genres (Palgrave, 2004), as well as numerous articles on medieval literature and sexuality. He coedited Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems with Angela Jane Weisl (MLA 2006).

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Lynn T. Ramey is Associate Professor of French at Vanderbilt University, where she is an affiliate of the film studies program and teaches a course on the history of French film. Her publications include numerous articles on East-West relations in medieval Europe as well as a book titled Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Routledge, 2001). Randy P. Schiff is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo. He completed his dissertation, “Alliterative Revivalism: Oppositional Poetics in Late Medieval Britain,” at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Schiff has presented an analysis of regional militarism with “Romantic Dispossession: Sir Gawain and the Negotiation of Lordship in the AngloScottish Marches” (2003), and has also analyzed clashes between Western and Eastern cultures, with “Learning from the Conquered: Images of Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem” (2002). He recently presented a paper entitled “The Variant Voice: Aestheticized Politics in the Piers Plowman Tradition” (2006). Lynn Shutters is Assistant Professor of English at Idaho State University. Her research interests include representations of gender and non-Christian cultures in medieval texts as well as medievalism in modern-day film and politics. She has published on Lydgate’s Troy Book and Floire et Blancheflor, and her current book project considers representations of femininity and time in late medieval literature. Lorraine K. Stock is Associate Professor of medieval literature at the University of Houston. She teaches a popular course on the Reel/Real Middle Ages and has presented papers on film and television representations of the Arthurian legend, the Robin Hood legend, Joan of Arc, and the Crusades. She has been featured as an authority on the filmic versions of King Arthur and the Third Crusade in the A&E television documentary series History Vs. Hollywood in programs about the 2004 film, King Arthur, and the 2005 film, Kingdom of Heaven. Author of numerous articles on various aspects of medieval literature and culture, she is completing an interdisciplinary book, The Medieval Wild Man: Primitivism and Civilization in Medieval Culture, to be published by Palgrave. Angela Jane Weisl is Associate Professor of English at Seton Hall University. She is the author of Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer’s Romance (D. S. Brewer, 1995) and The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave, 2003). With Cindy Carlson, she edited Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (St. Martin’s, 1999); with Tison Pugh, she edited Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems (MLA, 2006).

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INDEX

13th Warrior, The 7, 12 n.22, 75–89 1492: The Conquest of Paradise 21 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein 173 Abdul, Paula 118 Aberth, John 5, 11 n.15 and n.16, 58 n.6, 70 n.1, 120 n.2, 213 Abou el-Fadl, Khaled 18, 23, 27 n.6 ad-Din, Imad 27 n.4, 28 n.15 Addy, Mark 195 n.1 Adjanik, Isabelle 25 Adorno, Theodor 150 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley) 136 n.26, 202–205, 213 n.7 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (television series) 205, 213 n.8, 214 n.11 Aers, David 10 n.10 Age of Innocence 20 Alexander Nevsky 5, 48, 50, 53, 94 Alexandria 31 Alexandria Again and Always 47 Alexandria . . . Why? 47, 55 Al-Ghazali 31 al-Massir see Destiny Almoravid dynasty 32 Altman, Robert 24 Ambrosius 105 n.3 American Werewolf in London, An 171, 173 anachronism 6, 102, 189, 193–94

Andalusia 32 Anderson, Graham 97, 106 n.16 Annakin, Ken 205, 208, 213 n.8; see also The Story of Robin Hood Aquinas, Thomas 42 Arabs, cinematic portrayal of 11 n.20, 75–76 Arletty 144 Armbrust, Walter 58 n.3 Army of Darkness 123–136 Arnzen, Michael 124, 134 n.3 Aronstein, Susan 120 n.1 Art of War 159 Arthur, King 19, 23, 92–93, 130 Ashe, Geoffrey 105 n.3 Astor, Junie 147 Augustine 181 n.4 authorship 185–86, 187 Averroës 31–36, 44 n.23 Baba Amin 47 Baker, Betsy 124 Baker, Raymond 58 Bakhtin, Mikhail 109–10, 120 n.13 Baldwin IV 17, 19, 22, 23 Baldwin, John W. 10 n.10 Balian of Ibelin [historical figure], 16, 17, 26; [character], 15–29 Banderas, Antonio 76, 81–82 barbarism 7 Bardèche, Maurice 142–43, 152 n.18 Bartlett, Robert 9 n.7 Battle of Algiers 48

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INDEX

Bazin, André 152 n.27 Beery, Wallace 200 Behlmer, Rudy 213 n.1 Bell, David 214 n.22; see also Maid Marian and Her Merry Men Bening, Annette 78 Bennett, Billie 202 Bennett, Enid 200–202, 210, 213 n.4 Benshoff, Harry M. 134 n.2 Beowulf 7, 76 Bergin, Patrick 211, 214 n.19 Bergman, Ingmar 20; see also The Seventh Seal Berkeley, Busby 34 Berry, Chris 167 n.6 Berry, Sarah 124 Bert, Danien 213 n.8; see also The Adventures of Robin Hood Bettany, Paul 186, 188, 195 n.1, 196 n.11 Bhabha, Homi K. 58 n.5, 107–208, 115, 120 n.3 and n.4, 121 n.21 and n.22, 150, 153 n.29 “Bisclavret” 171, 173, 181 Bixler, Denise 134 n.4 Black Knight 7, 107–21 Blanton, Virginia 105 n.6 Bloom, Orlando 17 Boccaccio 54 Boffey, Julia 196 n.6 Book of the Duchess 185 Boorman, John 20, 26; see also Excalibur Boswell, John 4, 10 n.14 Bouzid, Nouri 58 n.3 Boy’s King Arthur, A 180 Boyuan, Lin 167 n.3 Bradshaw, Peter 197 n.12 and n.14 Braveheart 20, 23, 25 Breznican, Anthony 196 n.7, 197 n.12 Broderick, Matthew 169, 175–76, 196 n.7 Brooks, Mel 206, 210; see also Robin Hood: Men in Tights

Brown, Catherine 179, 180, 181, 182 n.25, n.26, n.27 and n.29 Brown, Elizabeth 10 n.11 Browne, Nick 167 n.6 Bruckheimer, Jerry 7, 91–104, 97, 102 Buddhism and gender 161–66 Buddhist monks 160 Burger, Glenn 10 n.13 Burgwinkle, William 10 n.13 Burns, John F. 87 n.5 Buruma, Ian 70 n.7 Bush, George 29 Butler, David 114; see also King Richard and the Crusaders Cable Guy, The 111 Cage, Nicholas 104 Cameron, James 21, 88 n.10; see also Titanic and True Lies Campbell, Bruce 123,125, 126, 135 n.10, n.11, n.13, n.14, and n.15, 136 n.21 and n.28 Campbell, Joseph 16, 26 n.1 capitalism 66 Carné, Marcel 7, 139–53; see also Le Jour se lève/Daybreak and Les Visiteurs du soir/The Devil’s Envoy Carpenter, Richard 214; see also Robin of Sherwood caste 59–70 Castus, Lucius Artorius 92 Central Station 47 Chabrol, Claude 151 Chahine, Alfred 39 Chahine, Colette Favaudon 39 Chahine, Youssef 6, 31–58 Chahine’s Cairo 47; see also Alexandria . . . Why?; Alexandria Again and Always; Baba Amin; Central Station; Chahine’s Cairo; The Earth; The Emigrant; Jamila, the Algerian; Memory; and Saladin Chaney, Lon 171

INDEX

Charensol, Georges 146, 152 n.23 Chaucer, Geoffrey 4, 8, 136 n.26, 171, 175, 182 n.18, 183–95, 204, 213; see also Book of the Duchess; Miller’s Tale; Troilus and Criseyde; Wife of Bath Chaucer, Philippa 190 Chinca, Mark 174, 181 n.15 and n.16 Chow, Rey 166, 167 n.5 Chrétien de Troyes, 26 Christians, depictions of 22–23 Chushingura 60 Cid, El 49 class 4–5, 59–70, 107–21, 132–33, 151, 186–89 Clover, Carol 125, 135 n.7 and n.18 Cocteau, Jean 139, 142–44, 146, 152 n.25 and n.26 Codex Manesse 94 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 9 n.5, 9 n.7, 10 n.13, 136 n.23, 183, 195 n.2 Collingwood, R. G. 106 n.14 Confucianism and gender 159 Confucianism vs. Buddhism 165–66 Conlan, Thomas D. 59, 70 n.2 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (novel by Mark Twain) 107, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 136 n.26 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (film by Tay Garnet) 113–14, 115, 116 Connery, Sean 208, 214 n.12 Costner, Kevin 24, 206–207, 210, 214 n.15; see also Dances with Wolves Crane, Susan 191, 197 n.21 credit economy 66–68 Crichton, Michael 76, 88 n.8 Crocker, Holly 8 Crosby, Bing 114, 116, 118 Crusades 6, 17–18, 23–25, 45, 48, 51–54, 206 Crusades, The 48–49

221

Cuny, Alain 144–45 Curtis, Jamie Lee 78 Curtiz, Michael and William Keighley 202, 205, 213 n.7; see also The Adventures of Robin Hood Dabashi, Hamid 23, 28 n.17 and n.20 Dances with Wolves 24 Dancy, Hugh 97 Dante 54 Davidtz, Embeth 130 Davis, Richard 167 n.2 de Certeau, Michel 61, 71 n.12, 195 n.3 de Havilland, Olivia 203–204, 212, 213 n.7 de la Bédoyère, Guy 106 n.13 Déa, Marie 145 Deadites 124, 130–31, 133 Debray, Régis 184, 196 n.4 Delannoy, Jean 8, 139–53; see also L’Éternal retour/Eternal Return and Pontcarral Delrich, Hal 124 DeMille, Cecil B. 48–49; see also The Crusades Derrida, Jacques 71 n.18 Desser, David 66, 71 n.17, 72 n.24 Destiny 6, 31–44 Dickey, Paul 213 n.4 Dinshaw, Carolyn 10 n.13, 11 n.20, 109, 111, 120 n.9, 121 n.15, 139–40, 149–50, 152 n.28, 153 n.29 and n.30 documentary 5 Domeier, Richard 124 Donner, Richard 8, 169, 172, 174, 180–81, 182; see also Ladyhawke Downs, Susannah 58 Driver, Martha W. 11 n.19. 88, 120, 179, 182 n.24 Dubois, W. E. B. 3 Dwan, Alan 200, 213 n.4; see also Robin Hood

222

INDEX

“easterns” 77–79 Earth, The 47 Eaters of the Dead 76, 84, 88 n.8 Ebert, Roger 88 n.7 Eco, Umberto 2, 108, 112, 120 n.7, 121 n.17 Edbury, Peter 28 n.10 Edelman, Lee 134 n.2 Edelstein, David 23 Edgerton, Joel 97 Edward II (by Christopher Marlowe) 26 Edwardes, Charlotte 18, 28 n.8 Edwards, A. S. G. 196 n.6 Egypt 45, 51, 55 Eisele, John 77–79, 88 n.9 Eisenstein, Sergei 5, 48, 94; see also Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible El Cherif, Nour 33 El Nabaoui, Khaled 33 El Tawil, Kamal 43 n.10 Eleanor of Aquitaine 206–207, 214 Ellis, Steve 197 n.27 Emigrant, The36, 47 Erikson, Erik 56 L’Éternal retour/Eternal Return 8, 139–53 ethnography 81–83, 86 eunuchs 160 Evil Dead 127–29 Evil Dead II 124, 129, 131, 134 n.4 Evil Dead trilogy 7, 123–36 Excalibur 20, 26 Fadlan, Ahmed Ibn [historical figure] 88; [character] 76–87 Fahrenheit 451 42 Fairbanks, Douglas 200–202, 206–207, 211, 213 n.4 Fakhry, Majid 32, 43 n.1, n.4, and n.5 Farmer, Sharon 170, 181 n.5 fatwa 36, 42 Fawal, Ibrahim 38, 39, 43 n.9, n.11, and n.12, 44 n.15, n.16, n.17, n.18, and 57 n.3

femininity 83–87, 169–82, 199–214 feminism 4 Fifth Generation filmmakers (Chinese) 166, 167 n,6 Final Girl 125–28, 133 Finke, Laurie 7 First Knight 106 n.18 Fletcher, Richard 105 n.12 Flynn, Errol 202–204, 207, 213 Ford, John 29 n.21; see also Fort Apache Forni, Kathleen 184, 194, 196 n.5, 197 n.25 and n.26 Fort Apache 29 n.21 Foucault, Michel 150, 152 n.29, 195 n.3 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man 174 Franzoni, David 92, 94, 97, 102 freedom 104 Freeland, Cynthia 134 n.3 Freeman, Morgan 5, 211 French, Philip 29 n.21 Friday the 13th 127 fundamentalism 41 Fuqua, Antoine 92, 97 Gabrieli, Francesco 27, 28 Ganim, John M. 6, 9 n.5, 88 n.7 Garçon, François 140, 141, 151 n.5 Garnet, Tay 113–14, 116, 117; see also A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Garvas, Costas 47 Gaultier, Jean-Paul 97 Geary, Patrick 57, 58 n.7 Gellner, Ernest 43 n.6 gender 4–5, 37–41, 83–87, 123–36, 151, 15–67, 169–82, 199–214 Gerald of Wales 181 n.3 Gere, Richard 106 n.18 Germanus, St. 106 n.14 Gibson, Mel 20; see also Braveheart Gladiator 92 Godard, Jean-Luc 144 Goldman, William 209, 214 n.13 Greeley, Horace 15

INDEX

Green, Eva 25 Greenblatt, Stephen 127, 135 n.16 Greene, Richard 205, 213 n.8 Gregory-Abbot, Candace 8 Grindley, Carl James 136 n.22 Gruffudd, Ioan 94 “Guigemar” 171 Guy de Lusignan 16–17, 19, 22, 23 Hahn, Thomas 9 n.7 Halloween 127 Halsall, Paul 76, 88 n.7 Hamlet 54 Hancock, John Lee 92 Harty, Kevin 11 n.21, 94, 102, 105 n.7, 106 n.17, 213 n.1 Harwood, Britton J. 10 n.10 Hauer, Rutger 169 Helgeland, Brian 8, 19, 183–95; see also A Knight’s Tale Hell’s Angels 103 Hemeida, Mahmoud 33 Henry V 26, 54 Hepburn, Audrey 208, 210, 214 n.12 Heston, Charlton 49 Hewitt, Peter 210; see also Princess of Thieves Hicks, Dan 124 Higham, N. J. 97 history and film 1–2, 17–20 Hoffman, Don 6 Hogan, David J. 135 n.19 Hojo, Hideshi 71 n.13 Holden, Stephen 44 n.22, 88 n.7 Hom, Marlon 166 n.1 homoeroticism 37, 39–40 homosexuality 4 Horn, John 197 n.29 and n.30 horror films 124–27 Hu, Jinquan 155 Hu, King 8, 155–66 Hudson, Harriet E. 10 n.10 Humphries, Reynold 136 n.20 Humphries, Stephen 88 n.7 Hunt, Martita 206, 213 n.8

223

Hutchings, Peter 134 n.3 hyperreality 112–13 Inagaki, Hiroshi 62, 71 n.13 Incoherence of the Incoherence, The 33 Incoherence of the Philosophers 31 Irvin, John 201, 210, 211–12, 214 n.19; see also Robin Hood Ishtar 25 Ivan the Terrible 48 Ivanhoe 25, 48 Ivanhoe 49 James, David 45, 57 n.2 Jamila, the Algerian 36, 44 n.13, 47, 48 Jarre, Maurice 50 Jauss, Hans Robert 194 Jerusalem 16, 17, 21, 24, 27, 29, 53–54 Jewers, Caroline 7, 120 n.1 Joan of Arc 1, 9 n.1 Jordan, Mark 10 n.13 Jordan, William Chester 3 Le Jour se lève/Daybreak 142 Junger, Gil 7, 107–21; see also Black Knight Kelly, Gene 34 Khmara, Edward 169, 172 Khomeini, Ayatollah 36 Kikushima, Ryuzo 72 n.21 Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and 2 211 King Arthur 7 King Richard and the Crusaders 49, 75, 87 n.4 King, Rodney 119 Kingdom of Heaven 6, 15–29 Kinoshita, Sharon 9 n.7 Klosowka, Anna 10 n.13 Knight, Stephen 213 n.1 and n.3, 214 n.16 Knightley, Keira 94, 102 Knights of the Round Table 49 Knight’s Tale, A 8, 19, 24, 26, 183–95

224

INDEX

Krabbé, Jeroen 211 Kulich, Vladimir 76 Kürenberg, Der von 174, 181 n.14 Kurosawa, Akira 7, 59–72; see also Sanjuro, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo Lacombe, Lucien 150 Lacy, Norris 2, 11 n.17 Ladyhawke 8, 169–82 Lamb, Harold 48 Landy, Marcia 9 n.2 Lanzoni, Rémi Fournier 151 n.2, n.8, and n.11 Lavagnino, Angelo 50 Lawrence of Arabia 49, 50 Lawrence, Martin 107–21 Lean, David 49, 50; see also Lawrence of Arabia Ledger, Heath 194, 195 n.1 Lees, Clare A. 10 n.10 Lennon, John 186, 196 n.11 Leonides 102 Lerer, Seth 184, 196 n.5 Lester, Richard 208, 214 n.12; see also Robin and Marian Lévi-Strauss, Claude 71 n.18 Levy, Brian J. 142, 152 n.13 and n.14 Liaozhai Zhiyi 155 Lindley, Arthur 6, 28 n.12, 120 n.6 “Little Red Riding Hood” 173, 176 Littleton, C. Scott 92, 97 Lloyd, David 109, 118, 120 n.10 and n.11 Lomperis, Linda 9 n.7 Lonergan, Kate 212, 214 n.22 Lord of the Rings 103 Loren Sophia 49 Lorge, Peter 8 lost ideal 6–7 Lucas, George 110, 116; see also Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Lupack, Alan 105 n.4 Lupack, Alan and Barbara Tepa 11 n.21, 28 n.19

Maalouf, Amin 43 n.6 Macbeth (directed by Orson Welles) 26, 28. n12 Magennis, Hugh 88 n.7, 89 n.17 Mahfouz, Naguib 36, 45, 51 Maid Marian and Her Merry Men 212–13, 214 n.22 Maimonides, Moses 32 Malcor, Linda 92, 97 Malle, Louis 150; see also Lacombe, Lucien Malone, Kemp 92, 95, 105 n.10 and n.11 Mancoff, Debra N. 28 manifest destiny 104 Manly, John Matthews 197 n.18 Mann, Anthony 49; see also El Cid Manning, David 195, 197 n.30 Marais, Jean 146 Marceau, Sophie 25 Marie de France 171, 173, 175, 181; see also “Bisclavret,” “Guigemar,” and “Yonec” Marlowe, Christopher 26; see also Edward II Martial Arts World 156, 157, 160, 162 masculinity 83–87, 123–36, 169–82, 185, 187–88, 200–202 Mastrantonio, Mary Elizabeth 210, 214 n.15 Matthews, John 94 105 n.5 and n.8, 106 n.23, n.24, and n.25 Mattis, James 89 n.16 May, Elaine 25; see also Ishtar Mayne, Judith 141, 151 n.9, 152 n.22 Mayo, Virginia 49 McCarthy, Todd 28 McClintock, Anne 109, 120, n.12 McEwan, Geraldine 210 McTiernan, John 88 n.6; see also The Thirteenth Warrior Méliès, Georges 1 Memory 47 Menocal, María Rosa 32, 43 n.2

225

INDEX

Metz, Christian 109 Middleton, Anne 120 n.5 Mifune, Toshirô 59 Mikkelsen, Mads 97 Miller, Tracy 167 n.4 Miller’s Tale 136 n.26 Ming dynasty 155–66 Minnis, Alastair 196 n.9 Mitchell, Elvis 197 n.28 Monahan, William 26 n.2 Monk, Isabell 111 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 100, 113 Moors 49, 87 n.4, 115 Morricone, Enno 50 Morris, Wayne 214 n.22 Morte D’Arthur 19 Mounir, Mohamed 33, 43 n.10 Muir, John Kenneth 135 n.6, 136 n.26 Mulvey, Laura 40, 44 n.19, 210, 214 n.17 Murat, Jean 146 Musashi, Miyamoto 71 n.13 music 34–36 Muslims, depictions of 15–16 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 36, 45, 51, 55 National Treasure 104 Nazism 4, 139–44 New Wave Cinema 144 Nietzsche, Friedrich 146, 148 Nightmare on Elm Street 127 Nollen, Scott Allen 213 n.1 Nykrog, Per 10 n.12 O’Connor, Una 203, 213 n.7 Oguni, Hideo 72 n.21 Ohlgren, Thomas 214 Olivier, Sir Lawrence 54; see also Henry V and Richard III Olson, Glending 196 n.9 Olton, Bert 11 n.21 Orff, Carl 26 Owen, Clive 92, 102, 104

Paglia, Camille 4, 10 n.14 Parker, Patricia 177, 182 n.21 and n.22 Paul, William 136 n.27 Peckinpah, Sam 24 Pfeiffer, Michelle 169 Philips, Jonathan 18, 25 Pleasantville 21 Pontcarral 142 Pontecorvo, Gillo 47, 48; see also Battle of Algiers presentism 3 Princess of Thieves 210 Prochnow, Jürgen 211 Prokofiev, Sergei 50 Pugh, Tison 7, 10 n.13 Pulp Fiction 11 n.20, 116 queerness

7, 131–34, 134 n.2

race and ethnicity 3–5, 7, 15–58, 91–121, 151 Rahouma, Fares 33, 37–38 Raimi, Sam 7, 123–36 Raimi, Ted 124, 134–35 n.5 Rains, Claude 203 Ralph of Coggeshall 27 n.2 Ramey, Lynn 7 Randall, Steven 195 n.3 Rasmussen, Randy Loren 135 n.8 Rathbone, Basil 203, 213 n.7 Ray, Sid 11 n.19, 88, 120, 182 n.24 Rebatet, Lucien 141–42 Reidy, Maurice Timothy 29 n.22 Renoir, Jean 141 Revenge of the Sith 103 Reynauld of Chatillon 19, 22, 23 Reynolds, Kevin 5, 206, 210, 214 n.15; see also Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Reynolds, Susan 10 n.11 Rice, Condoleeza 44 n.20 Rice, Joan 206, 210, 213 n.8 Rich, Adrienne 8, 12 n.23 Richard III 54 Richard the Lion-Hearted 17, 19, 52–54, 56

226

INDEX

Richards, Jeffrey 213 n.1 Richie, Donald 72 n.25 Rignault, Alexandre 146 Riley-Smith, Jonathan 18, 25, 27 Riothamus 105 n.3 Robert the Bruce 20 Robin and Marian 201, 208–209, 214 n.12 Robin Hood (directed by Alan Dwan) 200–202, 213 n.4 Robin Hood (directed by John Irvin) 201, 210, 211–12, 214 n.19 Robin Hood 8, 19, 49, 199–214 Robin Hood: Men in Tights 206, 210 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves 5, 75, 87, 206, 210–11, 214 n.15 Robin of Sherwood 214 Robinson, Tony 214 n.22 Rogers, Will 114 Rohrabacher, Dana 87 n.5 Roman Empire 93 romantic values 7–8 Rome: Open City 48 Roosevelt, Eleanor 214 n.11 Rosen, Philip 9 n.2 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 11 n.19 Ross, Gary 21; see also Pleasantville Rossellini, Roberto 48; see also Rome: Open City Rota, Nino 50 Rowland, Beryl 175, 182 n.19 Runciman, Steven 27 Said, Edward 11 n.20, 81–82, 89 n.15, 179 Saladin 19, 22–23 Saladin 6, 45–58 Salama, Hani 33 Salisbury, Joyce 181 n.3 samurai 59–60 Sandweiss, Ellen 124, 125 Sanjuro 69, 72 n.21 Sansom, George 60, 69; 70 n.6, 71 n.8, n.9, n.11, and n.14, 72 n.22 and n.26

Sartre, Jean-Paul 140–41, 151 n.6 and n.7 Sawi, Muhammad 57 n.3 Schiff, Randy P. 7 Schor, Naomi 58 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 78 Scorsese, Martin 20; see also Age of Innocence Scott, Ridley 6, 15, 18, 20, 23, 26, 27 n.2, 92; see also 1492: The Conquest of Paradise; Gladiator; and Kingdom of Heaven Scott, Sir Walter 18, 25, 46, 48–49, 54; see also Ivanhoe and The Talisman Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 213 n.2 Seven Samurai 7, 59–72 Seventh Seal, The 19, 20 Sewell, Rufus 195 n.1 Shahar, Meir 167 n.3 Shaheen, Jack 75, 87 n.2 and n.3 Shakespeare, William 26, 54, 82; see also Hamlet, Henry V, Macbeth, and Richard III Shamit, Walid 57 Shaolin temple 160, 167 n.3 Sharif, Omar 80 Sharon, Ariel 19 Shichtman, Martin 7 Shohat, Ella 80, 81, 88 n.11, n.12, and n.14 Shotter, David 105 n.13 Shutters, Lynn 7 Siclier, Jacques 150, 153 n.31 Siege, The 78–79, 88 n.10 Silver, Alain 70 n.4 Simeone, W. E. 214 n.21 Sims, Gregory 142–44, 151 n.10, 152 n.12, n.15, n.16 and n.17 simulacra 21, 25 Skarsgard, Stellan 96 Sklar, Elizabeth 120 n.2 Sloane, Judy 196 n.11 Sly and the Family Stone 117–18 Sobchack, Vivian 1, 5, 11 n.18, 121 n.14

INDEX

Solonge, Madelaine 146 Songling, Pu 155 Songzi Guanyin (goddess of mercy) 164 Sossamon, Shannyn 195 n.1 Spivak, Gayatri 81, 88 n.13 Star Wars 16, 103, 108, 110, 116 Stevenson, Ray 97 Stiller, Ben 111; see also The Cable Guy Stock, Lorraine 8 Story of Robin Hood, The 205–206, 213 n.8 Strange Stories from the Leisure Studio 155 Suez Canal 55 Sunzi 159 Sybilla of Jerusalem 16–17, 19, 24, 26 Talisman, The 18, 21, 25, 26, 48–49 Tapert, Rober 125 Tarentino, Quentin 11 n.20, 116, 211; see also Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and 2 and Pulp Fiction Taylor, Elizabeth 49 Taylor, Robert 49 Tears of the Sun 102 Thatcher, Margaret 212, 214 n.23 Thewlis, David 27 Thomas, Edith 8, 139–41, 144, 151 n.1 Thomason, Marsha 120 Thompson, Bob 28 Thompson, David “Skywalker” 116 Thompson, Frank 102, 106 n.20 and n.21 Thorpe, Richard 49; see also Ivanhoe and Knights of the Round Table Three Stooges, The 136 n.26 Thurman, Uma 211–12, 214 n.19 Titanic 21 Todd, Richard 206–207, 213 n.8

227

Toplin, Robert Brent 9 n.2 Touch of Zen, A 8, 155–66 Travers, Peter 183 Trigg, Stephanie 184, 196 n.5 Tristan and Isolde 139, 147 Troilus and Criseyde 171, 175, 182 n.18 “troubadourism” 7, 8, 139–40, 151 True Lies 78–79, 88 n.10 Truffaut, François 42, 152 n.27 Tuchman, Barbara 20 Tudor, Andrew 134 n.3 Turk, Edward Baron 143–44, 152 n.20 and n.21 Turner, Frederick Jackson 16, 24, 26 n.1 Twain, Mark 107, 110, 113, 117, 121 n.18, 136 n26; see also A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Tyerman, Christopher 27 Ullman, Tracey 210 Umland, Sam and Rebecca 11 n.21, 114, 121 n.19 and n.20 Updike, Nancy 87 n.1 utopia 123 Verkerk, Dorothy Hoogland 9 n.7 Vikings 76–77, 80–81 Les Visiteurs du soir/The Devil’s Envoy 7, 139–53 Volosinov, V. N. 121 n.13 Volsunga Saga 171, 172, 175, 181 Waggner, George 181; see also The Wolf Man Wagner, Richard 26 Wallace, David 10 n.10 Wal-Mart 123 warrior women 155–66 Washington, Denzel 78–79 Washington, George 102 Waxman, Sharon 18 Wayne, John 24

228

INDEX

Weisl, Angela Jane 8 Welles, Orson 26, 47; see also Macbeth Werewolf, The 173 Wesley, Kassie 124 westerns 15, 17, 24, 29 n.21 Wheeler, Bonnie 10 n.13 White, T. H. 171–73, 175, 181n.6 and n.17 Wife of Bath 4 Wilkinson, Tom 110, 120 n.1 William of Palerne 171 Williams, Alan 140, 151 n.3 and n.4 Williams, Olivia 190 Williams, Patricia J. 89 n.16 Williamson, Nicol 208 Willis, Bruce 78–79, 102 Winstone, Ray 97

Within the Woods 125 Wolf Man, The 173–74, 181 n.13 Wooden, John 116 Woods, Tiger 119 World Trade Center 42 Wright, R. P. 106 n.14 Yasumi, Toshio 70 n.7 Yojimbo 7, 59–72 “Yonec” 175 York, Sarah 124 Zatoichi 72 n.23 Zeikowitz, Richard E. 10 n.13 Zucker, Jerry 106 n.18 Zulfiqer, Ezzeldine 45 Zwick, Edward 88 n.10; see also The Siege