Read the previous piece in the series here.
Read the next piece in the series here.
As I note in "Thoughts about a Children's Program", I have the great pleasure of being a father to a young daughter, and I try to keep abreast of what media my daughter consumes. Recently, my wife, daughter, and I watched--for similar meanings of "watched" as before--Tomm Moore's 2009 The Secret of Kells. The movie dramatizes part of the production of the Book of Kells, following the theory that it was begun at Iona and taken through Kells amid Nordic raids on the British Isles. An illuminator, Aidan, arrives at the abbey at Kells, which is in the process of fortification under the guidance of Abbot Cellach; the abbot's nephew, Brendan, falls in with Aidan, violating his uncle's dicta to help Aidan work on the text and turn his own hand to the illumination. In doing so, he faces down and defeats Crom Cruagh, the dark pre-Christian deity whose stone altar remains nearby; he is aided by the fairy Aisling, who takes an interest in the boy and sacrifices much of herself to help him. With Aidan, Brendan flees a Viking raid on the abbey, venturing into the wilds with his tutor in the illuminator's art and completing much of the work on the Book of Kells before returning at length to his now-old uncle's bedside with the glorious book in hand. Despite some inaccuracies and some few oddities, The Secret of Kells is a solid, engaging presentation that points towards a more useful idea of the medieval than many other children's programs that pretend to partake of the medieval, one I am glad my daughter has gotten to see (and likely will again).
Any presentation of the medieval is bound to provoke complaints about inaccuracies, particularly from those of us who study the medieval in (something resembling) serious fashion. The Secret of Kells is not an exception. For one, the Vikings in the film, although bestial in accordance with prevailing impressions of them among Insular religious communities of the time, are depicted as horned. Although the horned Viking helmet is a fixture of pop-culture depictions of Nordic raiders--likely accounting for its inclusion in the movie--it is not attested by available physical evidence, and it would be impractical in any event, being likely to get stuck in doors. For another, the Book of Kells is treated in the film as a thing to be taken among the people; in truth, the kind of book of which the Book of Kells is among the most prominent examples was kept indoors and used little. It certainly was not taken out among the populace as the film suggests it was meant to be.
Several things in The Secret of Kells stand out as oddities. One that presents itself to my eye, as I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, is that Aidan evokes Willie Nelson in terms of his appearance and frequent association with strange smokes. Whether such a resonance is intentional or not, it is striking, and somewhat at odds with the medieval Irish milieu of the film--although it does amuse. Another is that there is relatively little overt prayer in the movie. It could be expected that a religious community--and an abbey is certainly a religious community--that makes much of religious artifacts and other places of worship would have more to do with the ritual exercise of faith. Yet aside from the occasional cross and the imagery deriving from the Book of Kells itself, there is not much in the way of observance. There are implications that such things happen "off-camera," but the centrality of faith to abbeys would suggest that it should be much more "on-camera" than it is.
Something that will likely strike many audiences as odd but is more accurate than many realize is the incorporation of multiple ethnicities into the community at Kells. Although there is something of the stereotype about them, such characters as Brothers Assoua and Tang point to the presence of non-white persons in medieval Europe. That they are among the few named characters in the work privileges them, and in their narrative privilege, they do serve to mitigate the idea of what Helen Young calls "the monochrome Middle Ages," the fallacy that there were not non-white people in Europe during the medieval period (see "Who Cares about Historical Authenticity? I Do" for more). Admittedly, the treatment is not as balanced or nuanced as it could or should be, given the aforementioned stereotyping and the isolation of the named brethren as representatives of non-white sympathetic characters, but it is a fair sight better than it could otherwise be.
Something else that comes out as accurate, although perhaps unlikely to be recognized as such, is the aforementioned smoke with which Aidan is associated. Notably, it is green, the result of an almost alchemical process--and green has overtones of magic and mysticism among the Insular medievals. The ink whose production occasions the smoke is itself lined with mystical overtones, both in the prevalent association of writing with salvation and preservation and in the lightening of darkness directly ascribed to the illuminator's art in the film. And the smoke serves to afford Brendan and Aidan the opportunity to escape the Viking raid on Kells, something that would doubtlessly have seemed a miracle to the characters. (Notably, too, the fairy-girl Aisling is green-eyed, reinforcing the connection of magic and greenness.) In using the green to connote the (helpfully) otherworldly, then, the film makes use of a medieval trope well, something that is refreshing to see in a work of near-contemporary children’s programming.
Other accuracies and invocations are perhaps more expected. In the film as in truth, Kells features a standing tower, although the film exaggerates its proportions. The layout of the abbey evokes any number of medieval mappa mundi, depicting a circle with a high tower at its center and seemingly divided into three parts, an eastern half and northern and southern quadrants, or Jerusalem surrounded by Asia, Africa, and Europe--much as medieval geographers conceived of the world. And the art in the movie as a whole is relatively faithful to its source material; there is much of the illuminated iconographic in the presentations of the characters in the film, and the beauty of the Book of Kells itself is clearly conveyed. The audience is left with a clear idea of the medieval world the film depicts as a place that has much to offer, a place where enduring glory could come to be, which is a useful corrective to prevailing ideas of the medieval as unmitigated squalor and dullness. It is a wholesome thing for children to see, something that can help them to proceed into their later lives with a better understanding of and appreciation for their long forebears.
There is more to plumb in the movie, to be sure. Much could be said of the emphasis placed on Pangur Bán, for instance, or the oceanic, non-Euclidian geometry--and concomitant invocation of the Lovecraftian--of Crom Cruach. But as a way to show children some of what the medieval has to offer, The Secret of Kells has much to recommend it; it will be a film I will encourage my daughter to watch again.
Travels in Genre and Medievalism
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Thoughts about a Children's Program
Read the next piece in the series here.
I have the great pleasure of being a father to a young daughter. In trying to be good at it, I spend a fair amount of time reviewing the media my daughter consumes, whether that be in the form of children's books or television and movies. One such that I recently watched "with" her--meaning that it was playing while she moved among watching, playing with blocks, chasing the cats, eating strawberries, and begging for oranges--is Manuel Sicilia's 2013 Justin and the Knights of Valour. In the movie, the eponymous character leaves a home where his prominent father pushes him to go into the practice of law, choosing instead to become a knight in the image of his grandfather, the heroic knight Roland. Doing so sends him to a remote monastery for training under a retired knight and two markedly disparate monks; it also sees him return to his hometown, ostensibly rejected from candidacy for knighthood. While there, he learns that his putative lady, Lara, has been kidnapped, and he rushes out to retrieve her. In doing that, he comes not only to find companionship from the former bar-maid Talia and the schizophrenic magician Melquiades, but also to confront his grandfather's killer, who is plotting to take over the kingdom where Justin lives. After a brief battle, the takeover plot is thwarted, Roland is avenged, and Justin is elevated to the dignity of knighthood, the first in a generation to receive the honor. It is a movie that ostensibly celebrates the medieval, but it does so in an unfortunately inaccurate way that conduces to the continued transmission of wrong-headed ideas about how things were and what they mean now.
There are some things that the movie gets right about the medieval, or at least has in accordance with the records and literatures left by the medievals. For one, Justin takes an article of Lara's clothing (admittedly incorrectly and in a bit of humorous dramatic irony), a sock, as a token of her courtly affection--a commonplace of chivalric literature and one that could be read as particularly charged, following Evelyn Meyer. As an emblem of the exposed foot and leg, it would both come across as "masculine" forwardness and as an expression of particular intimacy, given courtly prohibitions against showing the (lower portions of) women's bodies. It also comes across to Justin as an endorsement of his endeavor, and in the finest knightly tradition, he vows to do particular deeds in honor of the award--they are done, and he returns the token to an unsympathetic, disdainful figure who is also in keeping with at least parts of the courtly-love model,* as N.M. Heckel succinctly outlines it. In at least motioning toward a major conceptual construct of the Western medieval, then, Justin and the Knights of Valour does well.
Additionally, the movie handles a fair bit of knightliness well, at least as measured against literary depictions. For one, the knights associated with the "good" kingdom in which Justin is raised and which his grandfather--whose very name evokes one of the most prominent exemplars of chivalry in medieval literature--ostensibly operate under the terms of a specific, reasonably simple oath, one that reads as a reduced form of the Pentecostal oath taken by the Knights of the Round Table in Malory (75-76). For another, when Justin seeks training as a knight, he finds it among isolated monks in a remote monastery,** one of whom was a knightly companion of Roland--something else that echoes Malory, in whose work knights retire into contemplative life and in which religious hermits work mighty acts of healing such as Justin comes to need. So there is another point at which the movie manages to remain in line with its medieval predecessors.
But although there are things that Justin and the Knights of Valour does well to represent, there are far more that it does less well to depict inaccurately. Some of the inaccuracies are understandable, given the direction of the movie towards children. For example, few if any characters actually die during the film. The only one that comes to mind is the usurping knight that slew Roland, and his death--by falling from on high--is not directly depicted; the corpse is never shown. Indeed, with little exception, combat in the film is bloodless. It is a marked departure from both the medieval antecedents--Malory's Arthur early grows "so blody that by hys shylde there myght no man know hym, for all was blode and brayne that stake on his swerde and on hys shylde" (22), and Lancelot slays Mellyagaunce with a blow that was "such a buffett that the stroke carved the hed in two partyes"(663), among many others--and from prevailing contemporary iterations of the "medieval" on film and television; it is one, however, wholly consonant with long-standing tropes of "children's" works. Others are accommodations to more modern storytelling sensibilities. Notably, the film ascribes agency to several female characters--Talia, Justin's grandmother, the queen--in ways not always or often attested in prevailing documentation of medieval conduct and behaviors but which are accepted or (rightly) expected as a matter of course in more recent storytelling.
Others, however, are not justifiable on such grounds. One such is the overwhelming whiteness of the milieu. Despite being a Spanish production and so deriving from a part of the world in which the medieval was decidedly multicolored and multicultural, Justin and the Knights of Valour shows few if any characters of color. The closest are "Sir" Clorex, voiced by Antonio Banderas in the English-language version, and Talia, voiced by Saoirse Ronan, and neither character is marked as coming from a separate or distinct culture; if they are characters of color, they are thoroughly colonized, so that their Otherness is a token inclusion rather than an actual engagement with the kind of multiculturalism Helen Young has been at great length to demonstrate was embedded in the medieval experience and should be embedded in re-creations and appropriations of the medieval (something she discusses in "'It's the Middle Ages, Yo!'" and "Who Cares about Historical Authenticity?" if not also elsewhere).
Another, and one particularly repugnant from a disciplinary standpoint, is the compression or conflation of the pre-modern. In the movie, medieval and medievalist ideas and presentations are yoked directly to later concepts of dress, decorum, architecture, and even governance. Knighthood not even a generation gone has been replaced almost wholly by a stultifyingly bureaucratic rule of law, an utter anachronism that grates. Building styles on display reflect Baroque, Georgian, and Augustan architectures rather than the medieval--save for the exaggerated Gothics of the castle, tower, and monastery--and the grounds of Justin's home reflect the English gardens of Jane Austen more than the brewery and mill of Margery Kempe. Matters of attire are similarly evocative of later periods than the medieval, the white powders reading more of the Hanoverians than the Cerdicingas or Plantagenets. Each part of the past is deserving of its own attention; for so much of the pre-modern to be condensed together devalues history, and the promulgation of such amalgamations serves to foreshorten what should be an enrichingly deep view of what the world has been.
While Justin and the Knights of Valour does have some merits--and that my daughter enjoyed watching it is among them--it is emblematic of a larger problem. While I have noted elsewhere that misreadings and misrepresentations of the medieval can be "something other than mere mistakes," and there are some such things in the movie, there is far more that conduces to a view of the medieval not only ignorant but, given easily accessible emergent research and commentary, willfully so. Such movies as I watched with my daughter today contribute to a broader cultural current that drags down the necessary and proper nuances of the world as it was, hampering children's abilities to understand both it and the world as it now is even before they come to realize that there are subtleties for which to seek. What the adults those children will become will perceive, or not, can only be guessed at, but if they start out with the restrictions that already grow up around them, they will have a hard time with anything but the shallowest surfaces of a rich, deep world.
Notes
*Admittedly, Lara evokes the end of the medieval; her name is pronounced with the open, Continental "a," making it sound like the name of Petrarch's scornful beloved and so connecting the character and the work as a whole to the then-emergent Renaissance.
**Another of the monks deploys technologies that read as iterations of such modern things as remote controls. It seems almost a living backwards, something associated with wise figures in another prominent Arthurian work--White's Once and Future King.
Works Cited
I have the great pleasure of being a father to a young daughter. In trying to be good at it, I spend a fair amount of time reviewing the media my daughter consumes, whether that be in the form of children's books or television and movies. One such that I recently watched "with" her--meaning that it was playing while she moved among watching, playing with blocks, chasing the cats, eating strawberries, and begging for oranges--is Manuel Sicilia's 2013 Justin and the Knights of Valour. In the movie, the eponymous character leaves a home where his prominent father pushes him to go into the practice of law, choosing instead to become a knight in the image of his grandfather, the heroic knight Roland. Doing so sends him to a remote monastery for training under a retired knight and two markedly disparate monks; it also sees him return to his hometown, ostensibly rejected from candidacy for knighthood. While there, he learns that his putative lady, Lara, has been kidnapped, and he rushes out to retrieve her. In doing that, he comes not only to find companionship from the former bar-maid Talia and the schizophrenic magician Melquiades, but also to confront his grandfather's killer, who is plotting to take over the kingdom where Justin lives. After a brief battle, the takeover plot is thwarted, Roland is avenged, and Justin is elevated to the dignity of knighthood, the first in a generation to receive the honor. It is a movie that ostensibly celebrates the medieval, but it does so in an unfortunately inaccurate way that conduces to the continued transmission of wrong-headed ideas about how things were and what they mean now.
There are some things that the movie gets right about the medieval, or at least has in accordance with the records and literatures left by the medievals. For one, Justin takes an article of Lara's clothing (admittedly incorrectly and in a bit of humorous dramatic irony), a sock, as a token of her courtly affection--a commonplace of chivalric literature and one that could be read as particularly charged, following Evelyn Meyer. As an emblem of the exposed foot and leg, it would both come across as "masculine" forwardness and as an expression of particular intimacy, given courtly prohibitions against showing the (lower portions of) women's bodies. It also comes across to Justin as an endorsement of his endeavor, and in the finest knightly tradition, he vows to do particular deeds in honor of the award--they are done, and he returns the token to an unsympathetic, disdainful figure who is also in keeping with at least parts of the courtly-love model,* as N.M. Heckel succinctly outlines it. In at least motioning toward a major conceptual construct of the Western medieval, then, Justin and the Knights of Valour does well.
Additionally, the movie handles a fair bit of knightliness well, at least as measured against literary depictions. For one, the knights associated with the "good" kingdom in which Justin is raised and which his grandfather--whose very name evokes one of the most prominent exemplars of chivalry in medieval literature--ostensibly operate under the terms of a specific, reasonably simple oath, one that reads as a reduced form of the Pentecostal oath taken by the Knights of the Round Table in Malory (75-76). For another, when Justin seeks training as a knight, he finds it among isolated monks in a remote monastery,** one of whom was a knightly companion of Roland--something else that echoes Malory, in whose work knights retire into contemplative life and in which religious hermits work mighty acts of healing such as Justin comes to need. So there is another point at which the movie manages to remain in line with its medieval predecessors.
But although there are things that Justin and the Knights of Valour does well to represent, there are far more that it does less well to depict inaccurately. Some of the inaccuracies are understandable, given the direction of the movie towards children. For example, few if any characters actually die during the film. The only one that comes to mind is the usurping knight that slew Roland, and his death--by falling from on high--is not directly depicted; the corpse is never shown. Indeed, with little exception, combat in the film is bloodless. It is a marked departure from both the medieval antecedents--Malory's Arthur early grows "so blody that by hys shylde there myght no man know hym, for all was blode and brayne that stake on his swerde and on hys shylde" (22), and Lancelot slays Mellyagaunce with a blow that was "such a buffett that the stroke carved the hed in two partyes"(663), among many others--and from prevailing contemporary iterations of the "medieval" on film and television; it is one, however, wholly consonant with long-standing tropes of "children's" works. Others are accommodations to more modern storytelling sensibilities. Notably, the film ascribes agency to several female characters--Talia, Justin's grandmother, the queen--in ways not always or often attested in prevailing documentation of medieval conduct and behaviors but which are accepted or (rightly) expected as a matter of course in more recent storytelling.
Others, however, are not justifiable on such grounds. One such is the overwhelming whiteness of the milieu. Despite being a Spanish production and so deriving from a part of the world in which the medieval was decidedly multicolored and multicultural, Justin and the Knights of Valour shows few if any characters of color. The closest are "Sir" Clorex, voiced by Antonio Banderas in the English-language version, and Talia, voiced by Saoirse Ronan, and neither character is marked as coming from a separate or distinct culture; if they are characters of color, they are thoroughly colonized, so that their Otherness is a token inclusion rather than an actual engagement with the kind of multiculturalism Helen Young has been at great length to demonstrate was embedded in the medieval experience and should be embedded in re-creations and appropriations of the medieval (something she discusses in "'It's the Middle Ages, Yo!'" and "Who Cares about Historical Authenticity?" if not also elsewhere).
Another, and one particularly repugnant from a disciplinary standpoint, is the compression or conflation of the pre-modern. In the movie, medieval and medievalist ideas and presentations are yoked directly to later concepts of dress, decorum, architecture, and even governance. Knighthood not even a generation gone has been replaced almost wholly by a stultifyingly bureaucratic rule of law, an utter anachronism that grates. Building styles on display reflect Baroque, Georgian, and Augustan architectures rather than the medieval--save for the exaggerated Gothics of the castle, tower, and monastery--and the grounds of Justin's home reflect the English gardens of Jane Austen more than the brewery and mill of Margery Kempe. Matters of attire are similarly evocative of later periods than the medieval, the white powders reading more of the Hanoverians than the Cerdicingas or Plantagenets. Each part of the past is deserving of its own attention; for so much of the pre-modern to be condensed together devalues history, and the promulgation of such amalgamations serves to foreshorten what should be an enrichingly deep view of what the world has been.
While Justin and the Knights of Valour does have some merits--and that my daughter enjoyed watching it is among them--it is emblematic of a larger problem. While I have noted elsewhere that misreadings and misrepresentations of the medieval can be "something other than mere mistakes," and there are some such things in the movie, there is far more that conduces to a view of the medieval not only ignorant but, given easily accessible emergent research and commentary, willfully so. Such movies as I watched with my daughter today contribute to a broader cultural current that drags down the necessary and proper nuances of the world as it was, hampering children's abilities to understand both it and the world as it now is even before they come to realize that there are subtleties for which to seek. What the adults those children will become will perceive, or not, can only be guessed at, but if they start out with the restrictions that already grow up around them, they will have a hard time with anything but the shallowest surfaces of a rich, deep world.
Notes
*Admittedly, Lara evokes the end of the medieval; her name is pronounced with the open, Continental "a," making it sound like the name of Petrarch's scornful beloved and so connecting the character and the work as a whole to the then-emergent Renaissance.
**Another of the monks deploys technologies that read as iterations of such modern things as remote controls. It seems almost a living backwards, something associated with wise figures in another prominent Arthurian work--White's Once and Future King.
Works Cited
- Elliott, Geoffrey B. "About a Popova Piece...and a Bit of Rebuttal." Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism. Tales after Tolkien Society, 17 June 2014. Web. 15 March 2016.
- Heckel, N.M. "Sex, Society, and Medieval Women." University of Rochester River Campus Libraries. U of Rochester, n.d. Web. 15 March 2016.
- Justin and the Knights of Valour. Dir. Manuel Sicilia. Arc Entertainment, 2013. Netflix, n.d. Web. 15 March 2016.
- Malory, Thomas. Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. Second ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.
- Meyer, Evelyn. "Undercutting the Fabric of Courtly Love with 'Tokens of Love' in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival." Academia.edu. Academia.edu, n.d. Web. 15 March 2016.
- White, T.H. The Once and Future King. New York: Ace, 1987. Print.
- Young, Helen. "'It's the Middle Ages, Yo!': Race, Neo/Medievalisms, and the World of Dragon Age." The Year's Work in Medievalism 27 (2012). Georgia Tech, n.d. Web. 15 March 2016.
- ---. "Who Cares about Historical Authenticity? I Do." Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism. Tales after Tolkien Society, 16 June 2014. Web. 15 March 2016.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
About "Heroes and Demons"
It should not come as a surprise that I am a long-time fan of the Star Trek franchise, having watched the various series with some regularity since 1987 and the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That watching has most recently been through streaming video services rather than catching the various series and movies in syndication and theaters, and that streaming video watching turned not long ago to Star Trek: Voyager. One of the less-popular Star Trek properties, it ran from 1995 to 2001 (per IMDB.com) and follows Kathryn Janeway and the crew of the eponymous ship through abduction into the Delta Quadrant and travel back to the Federation space from which they came. Suffering the effects of franchise fatigue and, perhaps, a reaction to the darker atmospherics of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Voyager languished on minor networks through its initial run and now attracts attention primarily as a negative example (if not so much as Star Trek: Enterprise). Its deployment of medievalism in the early episode "Heroes and Demons" is one encapsulation of the phenomenon; it serves in some ways to underscore its utility as an image of what not to do.
In the episode, the eponymous starship comes across an unusual photonic phenomenon and stops to investigate it. Meanwhile, one of the senior bridge crew, Ensign Harry Kim, is taking recreation in the holodeck, the illusory suite that will replicate a number of experiences for its users. When he is summoned to duty and does not appear, his crewmates begin to search for him; they find that he has vanished amid his holodeck program, an adaptation of an adaptation of Beowulf. In the event, the photonic phenomenon encountered by Voyager is a home for photonic life forms who interact uncomfortably with the holographic constructions of the holodeck; those life forms had used the cover of Grendel in the holodeck program to abduct ship's crew in retaliation for the (admittedly inadvertent) abduction of their own from the phenomenon by the starship's investigation. The ship's holographic doctor is able to carry out what amounts to a prisoner exchange, returning the abducted photonic life forms and retrieving the stolen ship's crew.
Many avenues of critique of the episode and the series of which it is part present themselves, and they are well worth exploring. That most relevant to the work of the Society, however, attends to how the episode presents the purported milieu of Beowulf. That there will be changes to the work for its representation is understandable and even necessary; the original work, cast in Anglo-Saxon verse, would necessarily need alteration to suit the in-milieu new medium of the holodeck (particularly with its interactive elements), as well as the narrative medium of the television series. Too, the program Kim runs is explicitly labeled as "based on" the Anglo-Saxon epic; it is overtly a derivation and deviation within the milieu, rather than a re-creation of the poem. Some "inaccuracies" in the presentation are therefore to be expected and to be "forgiven," if such changes are indeed to be regarded as erroneous (and there are good arguments why they should be, to be sure, such as Helen Young's "Who Cares about Historical Accuracy? I Do").
That some changes are to be expected and set aside as necessary to translations across media does not mean that all of the present changes are good, however. The insertion of the character Freya into the story serves as an example of a less-than-ideal alteration. While there are certainly accounts of shieldmaidens in legends and contemporary "historical" reports (which are not always accurate in the sense that we commonly understand accuracy), and there were certainly warriors who happened to be women among the people of the time and place depicted in Beowulf, the replacement of the unnamed coast-warden--who is explicitly labeled in masculine terms (and who is not unaccompanied, having retainers to order to hold Beowulf's ship against his return [ll. 293-300])--with Freya comes across as an imposition of a female character for the express purpose of having a female character in a more active role than the poem presents (much like the "enhancement" of Arwen's role in Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies or the insertion of Tauriel into his Hobbit films). That she seemingly exists as a love interest whose death inspires heroism from the male protagonist reinforces the impression of Freya as a sop to particular interests, an inclusion made to fill a particular diversity slot rather than as an important part of an amended story. The name, as well, betrays a sense of "oh, this sounds medieval and female; it fits a hole we need." While the overtones of the name--it is one of a goddess of love and war, among others--are perhaps appropriate to the character's function, the relative ineptness of the character herself suggests that the name was chosen for ease of speaking rather than authenticity of depiction. As a change to the source-text, is it one one that responds to prevailing misconceptions about what it true and what needs "fixing" in one medieval culture, making it a model of what to avoid in medievalism.
Problems inhere in matters that are less "change" and more "typical presentation," as well. The problem of the "monochrome Middle Ages" that Young decries in "Who Cares about Historical Accuracy? I Do" and elsewhere is painfully present in the episode (although the argument could easily be made that the relative remoteness of Heorot and the poem-stated identification of the Danes sworn to Hroðgar could make for homogeneity in the population). Aside from the Voyager crew who enter the holodeck and the photonic life form that is regarded as villainous, the characters in the program are white, almost exclusively male, and bearded (with little-kept beards)--fitting a common and ultimately inaccurate image of the medieval. The architecture of Heorot in the episode accords little with what is known of mead-hall building, but it fits the half-timbered construction associated with "lesser" buildings in common understandings of the medieval--a style of building common to later periods than that discussed in Beowulf. As with the half-hearted inclusion of Freya, the depiction of Heorot and its inhabitants seems more calculated to accord with generic medieval ideas than with the best information available at the time about how the early medievals lived. It is something that is not to be expected from the demonstrably scholarly Starfleet personnel depicted across the Star Trek franchise, and it is not something that should be taken as a model of medievalist storytelling.
There are other problems to be found with "Heroes and Demons" and Star Trek: Voyager, to be sure, and some that are far worse than the mis-depiction of the medieval in a single episode of a series that has an interesting premise and the ultimately unrealized possibility of excellent storytelling. The particular issue of the inept handling of the medieval, though, serves as a useful indicator of what else is wrong with it, one of many flaws that has led to prevailing disdain for the show. That disdain does much to argue against the value of a franchise that has offered much to many across decades, which is saddening to see, even if, in such a case, deserved.
In the episode, the eponymous starship comes across an unusual photonic phenomenon and stops to investigate it. Meanwhile, one of the senior bridge crew, Ensign Harry Kim, is taking recreation in the holodeck, the illusory suite that will replicate a number of experiences for its users. When he is summoned to duty and does not appear, his crewmates begin to search for him; they find that he has vanished amid his holodeck program, an adaptation of an adaptation of Beowulf. In the event, the photonic phenomenon encountered by Voyager is a home for photonic life forms who interact uncomfortably with the holographic constructions of the holodeck; those life forms had used the cover of Grendel in the holodeck program to abduct ship's crew in retaliation for the (admittedly inadvertent) abduction of their own from the phenomenon by the starship's investigation. The ship's holographic doctor is able to carry out what amounts to a prisoner exchange, returning the abducted photonic life forms and retrieving the stolen ship's crew.
Many avenues of critique of the episode and the series of which it is part present themselves, and they are well worth exploring. That most relevant to the work of the Society, however, attends to how the episode presents the purported milieu of Beowulf. That there will be changes to the work for its representation is understandable and even necessary; the original work, cast in Anglo-Saxon verse, would necessarily need alteration to suit the in-milieu new medium of the holodeck (particularly with its interactive elements), as well as the narrative medium of the television series. Too, the program Kim runs is explicitly labeled as "based on" the Anglo-Saxon epic; it is overtly a derivation and deviation within the milieu, rather than a re-creation of the poem. Some "inaccuracies" in the presentation are therefore to be expected and to be "forgiven," if such changes are indeed to be regarded as erroneous (and there are good arguments why they should be, to be sure, such as Helen Young's "Who Cares about Historical Accuracy? I Do").
That some changes are to be expected and set aside as necessary to translations across media does not mean that all of the present changes are good, however. The insertion of the character Freya into the story serves as an example of a less-than-ideal alteration. While there are certainly accounts of shieldmaidens in legends and contemporary "historical" reports (which are not always accurate in the sense that we commonly understand accuracy), and there were certainly warriors who happened to be women among the people of the time and place depicted in Beowulf, the replacement of the unnamed coast-warden--who is explicitly labeled in masculine terms (and who is not unaccompanied, having retainers to order to hold Beowulf's ship against his return [ll. 293-300])--with Freya comes across as an imposition of a female character for the express purpose of having a female character in a more active role than the poem presents (much like the "enhancement" of Arwen's role in Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies or the insertion of Tauriel into his Hobbit films). That she seemingly exists as a love interest whose death inspires heroism from the male protagonist reinforces the impression of Freya as a sop to particular interests, an inclusion made to fill a particular diversity slot rather than as an important part of an amended story. The name, as well, betrays a sense of "oh, this sounds medieval and female; it fits a hole we need." While the overtones of the name--it is one of a goddess of love and war, among others--are perhaps appropriate to the character's function, the relative ineptness of the character herself suggests that the name was chosen for ease of speaking rather than authenticity of depiction. As a change to the source-text, is it one one that responds to prevailing misconceptions about what it true and what needs "fixing" in one medieval culture, making it a model of what to avoid in medievalism.
Problems inhere in matters that are less "change" and more "typical presentation," as well. The problem of the "monochrome Middle Ages" that Young decries in "Who Cares about Historical Accuracy? I Do" and elsewhere is painfully present in the episode (although the argument could easily be made that the relative remoteness of Heorot and the poem-stated identification of the Danes sworn to Hroðgar could make for homogeneity in the population). Aside from the Voyager crew who enter the holodeck and the photonic life form that is regarded as villainous, the characters in the program are white, almost exclusively male, and bearded (with little-kept beards)--fitting a common and ultimately inaccurate image of the medieval. The architecture of Heorot in the episode accords little with what is known of mead-hall building, but it fits the half-timbered construction associated with "lesser" buildings in common understandings of the medieval--a style of building common to later periods than that discussed in Beowulf. As with the half-hearted inclusion of Freya, the depiction of Heorot and its inhabitants seems more calculated to accord with generic medieval ideas than with the best information available at the time about how the early medievals lived. It is something that is not to be expected from the demonstrably scholarly Starfleet personnel depicted across the Star Trek franchise, and it is not something that should be taken as a model of medievalist storytelling.
There are other problems to be found with "Heroes and Demons" and Star Trek: Voyager, to be sure, and some that are far worse than the mis-depiction of the medieval in a single episode of a series that has an interesting premise and the ultimately unrealized possibility of excellent storytelling. The particular issue of the inept handling of the medieval, though, serves as a useful indicator of what else is wrong with it, one of many flaws that has led to prevailing disdain for the show. That disdain does much to argue against the value of a franchise that has offered much to many across decades, which is saddening to see, even if, in such a case, deserved.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
About _Labyrinth_
Early in October 2014, there was a great deal of online hubbub about a proposed sequel to the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth. While it seems, according to Lindsey Bahr, that the excitement is unjustified, its presence suggests that the nearly-thirty-year-old film remains a current concern in mainstream popular culture. Certainly, it prompted me to re-watch the movie (a belated continuation of something I describe as begun in the summer of 2014), which my wife and I did with great joy. As we did, I was reminded that medieval, and particularly Arthurian, references appear throughout the piece; Sarah's favored bear is named Lancelot, her dog's name is Merlin, and another "character" played by that same dog is named Ambrosius (a name connected with Arthuriana through some of its older instantiations such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae). And there is Sir Didymus, who rides Ambrosius (humorously, usually away from battle) and is himself much in the mold of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and similarly extreme examples of the perceived trappings of later medieval chivalry. But while his behavior evokes the Arthurian, and his name sounds like something that would appear in Arthurian legend, he is not an explicit figuration of a character from Malory or other Arthurian works. Instead, the name partakes of the religious, which, although certainly embedded in the medieval, is not necessarily consistent with the medievalism other figures in the movie convey.
The disjunction is not something most moviegoers would likely notice, admittedly, although those who caught the Arthurian references might be prompted to look (case in point, this essay). Its insertion might therefore be indicative of a belief of the producers, tacit or explicit, that the audience would need nothing more than a veneer of the medieval in its fairy-tale-like entertainment--and, indeed, Labyrinth does not seem to set out to be medievalist so much as a play upon fairy-stories. The medievalism that it deploys can be read, therefore, as a nod to the conventions of the genre and the popularity of medievalist films as Labyrinth was initially released. Yet such a reading seems disingenuous; given the care which Henson and his colleagues usually take with their work (as witness, for instance, The Dark Crystal), merely making a nod to prevailing conditions (rather than making a joke of them explicitly) is out of place. It is more likely that there is another explanation for the name as applied to the character to which it is given than simply reinforcing a veneer of medievalism not strictly necessary to the movie and which would be equally well served by calling the character by another medievalist name such as Galahad or Roland.
One possibility arises in the religious resonance of the name; Didymus is another name accorded to the Doubting Thomas of Scripture. His entry in the online Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he is reputedly among the furthest-traveled of the Apostles, having been sent to India and encountering "strange adventures from dragons and wild asses" in his ministry there--not out of line with the kind of encounter typical of the chivalric figure the movie's Didymus embodies. Alternately, the Didymus being referenced could be one noted in the Reverend Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints; the Didymus of Butler's piece appears in the guise of a soldier who substitutes himself for Theodora in a successful attempt to preserve her chastity and an ultimately unsuccessful gambit to save her life. Butler claims to be working from older records and the writings of St. Ambrose, both of which would have been nearly as well known to the medieval mind (insofar as such a construction can be asserted to have existed) as Thomas the Apostle. And in that theoretical medieval mind, Didymus would have exhibited characteristics that came to typify the knight of chivalric romance: valor and extravagance in the defense of a woman's sexual integrity. As such, for its resonance with the wide-ranging, dragon-meeting, extravagantly lady-saving Didymi of medieval lore, it is an appropriate name for the hyper-chivalric caricature that is Sir Didymus of Labyrinth.
Yet even that explanation does not wholly suffice. The references are markedly obscure; the journey of Thomas to India is apocryphal, and Butler's commentaries were buried in older printings before the advent of the internet. How accessible they would have been to Henson and his colleagues as they put together their film is questionable; it seems to me to be fairly unlikely they would have reviewed the texts in question as they would have existed in the middle of the 1980s (although I will admit that I may be mistaken). Too, their fit to the chivalric tradition Sir Didymus seems almost to satirize (almost because he is a character of some effect in the film; a true satire would have had him bluster wholly impotently) is somewhat tenuous; they partake of the medieval chivalric, but they are not themselves medieval or chivalric in fact. The religious resonances alone cannot account for the applicability of the name to the character, although they may well influence it in some way. Something else has to be at work in the choice to name the character Didymus (perhaps a pun through the evocation of Thomas the Apostle of the Sir Thomas Malory through which readers of English typically encounter the Arthurian), although what it is likely lies outside the scope of this paper to ascertain wholly.
What is of more importance, at least for this piece as it appears in this venue, is what the context of Sir Didymus reveals. He is himself a medievalism, albeit a somewhat tangled one that calls back to the late Roman Imperial / Late Antique, and he is surrounded and accompanied by other medievalisms. Their collected popularity nearly thirty years after their appearance in film suggests that there continues to be an avid thirst for figurations of the medieval, not only among scholars who delight in seeing what they study continue to enjoy relevance (even as and if they may seethe at what they see as inaccuracies in the presentations), but also among the general public. Helping to slake that thirst offers some hope for those scholars that they can find some use in working at the wells to draw up histories that are yet beneath the present surfaces of things.
Works Cited
The disjunction is not something most moviegoers would likely notice, admittedly, although those who caught the Arthurian references might be prompted to look (case in point, this essay). Its insertion might therefore be indicative of a belief of the producers, tacit or explicit, that the audience would need nothing more than a veneer of the medieval in its fairy-tale-like entertainment--and, indeed, Labyrinth does not seem to set out to be medievalist so much as a play upon fairy-stories. The medievalism that it deploys can be read, therefore, as a nod to the conventions of the genre and the popularity of medievalist films as Labyrinth was initially released. Yet such a reading seems disingenuous; given the care which Henson and his colleagues usually take with their work (as witness, for instance, The Dark Crystal), merely making a nod to prevailing conditions (rather than making a joke of them explicitly) is out of place. It is more likely that there is another explanation for the name as applied to the character to which it is given than simply reinforcing a veneer of medievalism not strictly necessary to the movie and which would be equally well served by calling the character by another medievalist name such as Galahad or Roland.
One possibility arises in the religious resonance of the name; Didymus is another name accorded to the Doubting Thomas of Scripture. His entry in the online Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he is reputedly among the furthest-traveled of the Apostles, having been sent to India and encountering "strange adventures from dragons and wild asses" in his ministry there--not out of line with the kind of encounter typical of the chivalric figure the movie's Didymus embodies. Alternately, the Didymus being referenced could be one noted in the Reverend Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints; the Didymus of Butler's piece appears in the guise of a soldier who substitutes himself for Theodora in a successful attempt to preserve her chastity and an ultimately unsuccessful gambit to save her life. Butler claims to be working from older records and the writings of St. Ambrose, both of which would have been nearly as well known to the medieval mind (insofar as such a construction can be asserted to have existed) as Thomas the Apostle. And in that theoretical medieval mind, Didymus would have exhibited characteristics that came to typify the knight of chivalric romance: valor and extravagance in the defense of a woman's sexual integrity. As such, for its resonance with the wide-ranging, dragon-meeting, extravagantly lady-saving Didymi of medieval lore, it is an appropriate name for the hyper-chivalric caricature that is Sir Didymus of Labyrinth.
Yet even that explanation does not wholly suffice. The references are markedly obscure; the journey of Thomas to India is apocryphal, and Butler's commentaries were buried in older printings before the advent of the internet. How accessible they would have been to Henson and his colleagues as they put together their film is questionable; it seems to me to be fairly unlikely they would have reviewed the texts in question as they would have existed in the middle of the 1980s (although I will admit that I may be mistaken). Too, their fit to the chivalric tradition Sir Didymus seems almost to satirize (almost because he is a character of some effect in the film; a true satire would have had him bluster wholly impotently) is somewhat tenuous; they partake of the medieval chivalric, but they are not themselves medieval or chivalric in fact. The religious resonances alone cannot account for the applicability of the name to the character, although they may well influence it in some way. Something else has to be at work in the choice to name the character Didymus (perhaps a pun through the evocation of Thomas the Apostle of the Sir Thomas Malory through which readers of English typically encounter the Arthurian), although what it is likely lies outside the scope of this paper to ascertain wholly.
What is of more importance, at least for this piece as it appears in this venue, is what the context of Sir Didymus reveals. He is himself a medievalism, albeit a somewhat tangled one that calls back to the late Roman Imperial / Late Antique, and he is surrounded and accompanied by other medievalisms. Their collected popularity nearly thirty years after their appearance in film suggests that there continues to be an avid thirst for figurations of the medieval, not only among scholars who delight in seeing what they study continue to enjoy relevance (even as and if they may seethe at what they see as inaccuracies in the presentations), but also among the general public. Helping to slake that thirst offers some hope for those scholars that they can find some use in working at the wells to draw up histories that are yet beneath the present surfaces of things.
Works Cited
- Barh, Lindsey. "Labyrinth Sequel in the Works? Not Exactly." Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Weekly, 10 October 2014. Web. 30 October 2014.
- Butler, Alban. "April 28. SS. Didymus and Theodora, Martyrs." The Lives of the Saints. Bartleby.com. Bartleby.com, 2010. Web. 30 October 2014.
- The Dark Crystal. Dir. Jim Henson and Frank Oz. Sony, 2006. DVD.
- Elliott, Geoffrey B. "About a Trope of Medievalist Movies: Empty Countrysides." Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism. Tales after Tolkien Society, 28 July 2014. Web. 30 October 2014.
- Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. and ed. Michael A. Faletra. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2008. Print.
- Gildas. On the Ruin of Britain. Trans. J.A. Giles. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, 4 February 2012. Web. 30 October 2014.
- Labyrinth. Dir. Jim Henson. Perf. David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly. Sony, 2006. DVD.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. Perf. Graham Chapman et al. Sony, 2001. DVD.
- Thurston, Herbert. "St. Thomas the Apostle." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Kevin Knight, 2012. Web. 30 October 2014.
Monday, July 28, 2014
About a Trope of Medievalist Movies: Empty Countrysides
My wife and I have recently been rewatching a number of movies set in analogues of medieval Europe, movies such as 1982's The Last Unicorn and The Dark Crystal and 1988's Willow. As we watched the last, the thought occurred to me that there appears to be a trope of setting among them, a trope seen in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, as well, and in others I could name but have not watched recently enough to discuss. In each, the populations appear to be quite low to sustain the military forces seen; there do not appear to be enough people to feed all of the fighting folk, and there seems not to be enough housing to hold them all in the structures that are in place. (For the most part; there are, of course, individual exceptions within each milieu.)
I have to wonder if the persistence of medievalist milieu as largely empty has to do with a concept of the European Middle Ages as really being after the Black Death, when much of the population of Europe had succumbed to disease. David Whitton notes in his contribution to The Oxford History of Medieval Europe, "The Society of Northern Europe in the High Middle Ages, 900-1200," that forests were cleared, marginal agricultural land put into production, and the sea driven back to make room for a burgeoning population, and trade among the various people increased greatly during the period. For some of the European medieval, at least, there were more people about than films that echo or try to recreate the broader concept of the time display. Military technologies tend to be more advanced than to fall before the High Middle Ages; Willow, for instance, shows a number of weapons that smack of the later Middle Ages (not to mention an interesting combination of mail and plate on Madmartigan), and Lord of the Rings features gunpowder at Helm's Deep. Thus, such films appear to work from a view of the medieval as following the Black Death.
I am aware that Tolkien's mythic history accounts for a plague. I am also aware that following Tolkien is a thing to do. So perhaps that is part of the why such choices are made. And part also is the need to keep costs in line--and populating a place requires people, who must be paid. (Or, more recently, CGI artists, who must be paid.) But it is telling even so that the vision of the medieval/ist as taking place in a depopulated world is one that persists with abundant cultural force. It surely says something about the expected audience that the trope would continue as it does in major multimedia projects that attract significant attention from mainstream audiences. Perhaps it points to an assumption of feelings of isolation among the expected audience, and while many people feel cut off from others at various times, it must be considered that stereotypes of certain populations perceived as enjoying the medieval/ist are at play. Perhaps it points to other things entirely. But it points to something in enduring, and teasing out what it signifies that medieval/ist works tend to feature milieus of low population density would be worthwhile.
I have to wonder if the persistence of medievalist milieu as largely empty has to do with a concept of the European Middle Ages as really being after the Black Death, when much of the population of Europe had succumbed to disease. David Whitton notes in his contribution to The Oxford History of Medieval Europe, "The Society of Northern Europe in the High Middle Ages, 900-1200," that forests were cleared, marginal agricultural land put into production, and the sea driven back to make room for a burgeoning population, and trade among the various people increased greatly during the period. For some of the European medieval, at least, there were more people about than films that echo or try to recreate the broader concept of the time display. Military technologies tend to be more advanced than to fall before the High Middle Ages; Willow, for instance, shows a number of weapons that smack of the later Middle Ages (not to mention an interesting combination of mail and plate on Madmartigan), and Lord of the Rings features gunpowder at Helm's Deep. Thus, such films appear to work from a view of the medieval as following the Black Death.
I am aware that Tolkien's mythic history accounts for a plague. I am also aware that following Tolkien is a thing to do. So perhaps that is part of the why such choices are made. And part also is the need to keep costs in line--and populating a place requires people, who must be paid. (Or, more recently, CGI artists, who must be paid.) But it is telling even so that the vision of the medieval/ist as taking place in a depopulated world is one that persists with abundant cultural force. It surely says something about the expected audience that the trope would continue as it does in major multimedia projects that attract significant attention from mainstream audiences. Perhaps it points to an assumption of feelings of isolation among the expected audience, and while many people feel cut off from others at various times, it must be considered that stereotypes of certain populations perceived as enjoying the medieval/ist are at play. Perhaps it points to other things entirely. But it points to something in enduring, and teasing out what it signifies that medieval/ist works tend to feature milieus of low population density would be worthwhile.
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