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 Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on
edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly Medieval European and Heian Japanese
Women Writers
The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: edited by Barbara Stevenson and
On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics Cynthia Ho
by Gregory B. Stone
Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in
Presence and Presentation: Women in the Later Middle Ages
the Chinese Literati Tradition by Laurel Amtower
by Sherry J. Mou
Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of
The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Investiture
Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century edited by Stewart Gordon
France
by Constant J. Mews Representing Rape in Medieval and Early
Modern Literature
Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault
edited by Elizabeth Robertson and
by Philipp W. Rosemann
Christine M. Rose
For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth
Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in
de Burgh
the Middle Ages
by Frances A. Underhill
edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and
Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in Pamela Sheingorn
the Middle Ages
Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages:
edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela
Ocular Desires
Jane Weisl
by Suzannah Biernoff
Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon
England Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum
by Mary Dockray-Miller and the Formation of Religious Women in
the Middle Ages
Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a edited by Constant J. Mews
Twelfth-Century Woman
edited by Bonnie Wheeler Science, the Singular, and the Question of
Theology
The Postcolonial Middle Ages by Richard A. Lee, Jr.
edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to
Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies the Renaissance
of Discourse edited by Thelma S. Fenster and
by Robert S. Sturges Clare A. Lees
Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian
Tradition
by Catherine Batt
The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval
Religious Literature
edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski,
Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren
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
Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady
edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John
Carmi Parsons
Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile:
Critical Essays
edited by David A. Boruchoff
Homoeroticism and Chivalry:
Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the
Fourteenth Century
by Richard E. Zeikowitz
Portraits of Medieval Women: Family,
Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350
by Linda E. Mitchell
Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to
Joan of Arc
by Maud Burnett McInerney
The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative
Adventures in Contemporary Culture
by Angela Jane Weisl
Capetian Women
edited by Kathleen D. Nolan
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
The Middle Ages at Work
edited by Kellie Robertson and
Michael Uebel
Chaucer’s Jobs
by David R. Carlson
Medievalism and Orientalism
by John M. Ganim
Queer Love in the Middle Ages
by Anna Klosowska
Performing Women: Sex, Gender and the
Medieval Iberian Lyric
by Denise K. Filios
Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in
Medieval England
by David Gary Shaw
Visual Culture in the German Middle Ages On the Purification of Women: Churching in
edited by Kathryn Starkey and Northern France, 1100–1500
Horst Wenzel by Paula Rieder

Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Writers of the Reign of Henry II:

Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, Twelve Essays
Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon
edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy Meecham-Jones

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later
Middle English Literature
by Elizabeth Allen
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
Lonesome Words: The Vocal Poetic
of the Old English Lament and the African
American Blues Songs
by M.G. McGeachy
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

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the
“Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, Middle Ages
1350–1500 by Erin L. Jordan
by Kellie Robertson
Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in
Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles
The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500: Wife
by Jeremy Jerome Cohen
and Icon
by Holly S. Hurlburt Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s
Pandarus
Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, by Gretchen Mieszkowski
Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the
Absence of Things The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature
by Eileen Sweeney by Jeremy J. Citrome

The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in
Medieval Religious Movement the Canterbury Tales
by Patricia Ranft by Lee Patterson
Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre,
by Lara Farina and the Limits of Epic Masculinity
edited by Sara S. Poor and
Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature Jana K. Schulman
by Sachi Shimomura
Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval”
On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Cinema
Middle Ages edited by Lynn T. Ramey and
by Valerie Allen 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™
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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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
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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction : Filming the “Other” Middle Ages 1

Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey

Part I Multicultural Identities: A Lost Ideal?

1 Once, Present, and Future Kings:
Kingdom of Heaven and the Multitemporality
of Medieval Film 15
Arthur Lindley
2 Chahine’s Destiny: Prophetic Nostalgia and
the Other Middle Ages 31
Don Hoffman
3 Reversing the Crusades: Hegemony, Orientalism,
and Film Language in Youssef Chahine’s Saladin 45
John M. Ganim
4 Samurai on Shifting Ground: Negotiating the Medieval
and the Modern in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo 59
Randy P. Schiff

Part II Barbarism and the Medieval Other

5 Vikings through the Eyes of an Arab Ethnographer:
Constructions of the Other in The 13th Warrior 75
Lynn Shutters
6 Mission Historical, or “[T]here were a hell of a lot of knights”:
Ethnicity and Alterity in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur 91
Caroline Jewers
7 Inner-City Chivalry in Gil Junger’s Black Knight: A South
Central Yankee in King Leo’s Court 107
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman
viii CONTENTS

8 Queering the Medieval Dead: History, Horror,

and Masculinity in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Trilogy 123
Tison Pugh

Part III Romantic Values

9 In Praise of Troubadourism: Creating Community
in Occupied France, 1942–43 139
Lynn T. Ramey
10 Sexing Warrior Women in China’s Martial Arts
World: King Hu’s A Touch of Zen 155
Peter Lorge
11 The Hawk, The Wolf, and The Mouse:
Tracing the Gendered Other in Richard
Donner’s Ladyhawke 169
Angela Jane Weisl
12 Chaucer’s Man Show: Anachronistic Authority
in Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale 183
Holly A. Crocker
13 The “Other” Women of Sherwood: The
Construction of Difference and Gender in
Cinematic Treatments of the Robin Hood Legend 199
Lorraine K. Stock and Candace Gregory-Abbott

Notes on Contributors 215

Index 219
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Eva Green’s Sibylla in the tradition of exotic

Eastern female lead 25
2.1 Joseph (Fares Rahouma), nicknamed “Blue Eyes” 38
4.1 Heihachi explains the sign system he has used
for the improvised Army’s Banner 63
6.1 Guinevere (Keira Knightley) as Xena and
Madonna morphed 100
7.1 Jamal (Martin Lawrence) teaches the medieval
court how to dance 117
8.1 Evil Ash emerges from a vaginal-like cavity
in Good Ash’s shoulder 132
9.1 Gilles (Alain Cluny) and Anne (Marie Déa)
return the spectator’s gaze 145
10.1 The Abbot points Miss Yang back to
the monastery 161
13.1 Marian defends Robin Hood in front of
Guisbourne and John 205
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION: FILMING THE
“OTHER” MIDDLE AGES

Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey

or over a century, filmmakers have struggled with representing societies,

F 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 soci-
ety’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 his-
tory: “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 techno-
logical impossibility. Medieval cinema suggests a virtually oxymoronic
generic classification, and one of the chief points of the chapters in this vol-
ume 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.
2 TISON PUGH AND LYNN T. RAMEY

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 cin-
ematic 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 pre-
text in which directors demonstrate “no real interest in the historical back-
ground; 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
 INTRODUCTION 3

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 sim-
ply 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
4 TISON PUGH AND LYNN T. RAMEY

indeed believed in the universal brotherhood of believers, conversion of a

nonbeliever would wash away all difference, resulting in a person indistin-
guishable 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 non-
white 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 bour-
geois or middle class to be contested ground.10 Medieval historians in the
1990s were witness to a groundbreaking debate about the use of “feudal-
ism,” 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 dis-
tinction, 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 lexi-
cons 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 con-
stant 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.
 INTRODUCTION 5

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 tempo-
ral 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.
6 TISON PUGH AND LYNN T. RAMEY

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 bar-
baric 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 equa-
nimity 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 7

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 mas-
culinities 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 inner-
city communities such as South Central Los Angeles; through the recon-
structive 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 mea-
sure 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
8 TISON PUGH AND LYNN T. RAMEY

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 pro-
tagonist 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 per-
suasive model of the peasant protagonist’s “knightly” manhood. Ultimately
Chaucer enables yet is effaced in his efforts to help the young peasant-cum-
knight 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” demon-
strates 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 stu-
dents 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 jour-
ney 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 recon-
structed 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.
 INTRODUCTION 9

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.
10 TISON PUGH AND LYNN T. RAMEY

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, Pre-
and 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 11

Their Troth,” review of John Boswell, Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern

Europe, The Washington Post, July 17 1994, p. wkb1.
15. John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York:
Routledge, 2003), p. 123.
16. Aberth, A Knight at the Movies, pp. 190, 192.
17. Narrative film and documentary are, however, historically intermingled,
and we would argue that in addition to being skeptical of documentary-
style truth value in narrative, we are also suspicious of truth claims in docu-
mentary, as noted by Norris Lacy (“The Documentary Arthur”).
18. Vivian Sobchack, “The Insistent Fringe: Moving Images and Historical
Consciousness,” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 4–20, at p. 9.
19. 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 con-
cerns. She observes that “movies are multivalenced, telling us simultane-
ously about the distant past and about more recent events and social
attitudes” (p. 20).
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.
21. The collapse between the historical and the mythological structures much
medieval narrative, especially in regard to the Arthurian tradition. For stud-
ies 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
12 TISON PUGH AND LYNN T. RAMEY

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 eco-
nomic 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 settle-
ment 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 black-
smith 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
16 ARTHUR LINDLEY

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 cen-
ter 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 vis-
counts 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 acci-
dental, 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 liber-
als 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 aris-
tocracy. 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
 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS 17

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 deter-
mine, 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 con-
sider the confusions generated by assuming the film’s historicity and judg-
ing 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
18 ARTHUR LINDLEY

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 denun-
ciations 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 civ-
ilized 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 contem-
porary impact. Professor Abou el-Fadl quite rightly objects to the inaccu-
rate 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
 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS 19

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, signifi-
cantly 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 curi-
ous 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 nar-
ratives. 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
20 ARTHUR LINDLEY

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,” out-
siders “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 cen-
tury’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 nec-
essarily 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 exist-
ing in linear and causative, that is to say historical, relation to the present.
The struggles of Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska to free them-
selves 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 emer-
gence of women from Victorian oppression is the most popular of our cur-
rent myths of origin, much the same can be said of any number of
 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS 21

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 vir-
tually 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 fol-
lows, 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 funda-
mentalists. 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, sur-
rounded, 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
22 ARTHUR LINDLEY

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 profession-
als to avert bloodshed. Our impression of these two as civilized men iso-
lated 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
 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS 23

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 nut-
ters on both sides and they will make peace. The fable requires a party of mod-
erates. 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 anticli-
maxes: (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 vic-
tories 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 his-
torical 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
24 ARTHUR LINDLEY

achieves knightliness through action, if not exactly through birth, while

retaining many of the traits of frontiersman, remaking his fortunes, his iden-
tity, 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 self-
assertion, 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 oper-
ates 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 soli-
darity 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 appro-
priated. 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 tra-
ditional 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
 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS 25

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 mate-
rials 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, includ-
ing 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 exam-
ple, 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).
26 ARTHUR LINDLEY

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 ref-
erences 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 his-
torical 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
 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS 27

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 Riley-
Smith, 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).
3. Daily Telegraph, January 18, 2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk.
4. 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, repre-
sents 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.
5. “Film on Crusades Could Become Hollywood’s Next Battleground,” The
New York Times, August 12, 2004, http://www.scholarofthehouse.org/
necifoncrcob.html.
6. 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.
28 ARTHUR LINDLEY

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 anachronis-
tic, post-French Enlightenment, humanistic attitude that, while not deny-
ing 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
 ONCE, PRESENT, AND FUTURE KINGS 29

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 pre-
sented 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.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 2

CHAHINE’S DESTINY: PROPHETIC

NOSTALGIA AND THE OTHER MIDDLE AGES

Don Hoffman

oussef Chahine, Egypt’s most prolific and recognized auteur, is

Y 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 tra-
ditionally 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
32 DON HOFFMAN

up neatly by María Rosa Menocal, who pairs him with his Cordoban con-
temporary, 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 rea-
son 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 monu-
ments, the Arabian Nights palace of the Alhambra and the majestic solem-
nity 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 mysti-
cism 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 reminis-
cences 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 celebra-
tion of twelfth-century al-Andalus does not prevent him from confronting
the seeds of its destruction, as the monarchy threatens to sink into repres-
sive 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
 CHAHINE’S DESTINY 33

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 pro-
ceeding 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 sup-
pressed. Such arguments as “[e]verything that comes from divine law is
subject to interpretation” have put him in a dangerous position. Joseph col-
lects 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
34 DON HOFFMAN

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.
 CHAHINE’S DESTINY 35

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 sensu-
ality 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 fundamen-
talists. 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 rec-
onciliation accomplished by the death of the poet leads to Abdallah’s rec-
onciliation 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
36 DON HOFFMAN

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 diffi-
cult one for Chahine. His film The Emigrant, with its thinly disguised por-
trayal 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 al-
Jaza’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 con-
temporary 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
 CHAHINE’S DESTINY 37

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 audi-
ence 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 fascina-
tion 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, decid-
edly 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
38 DON HOFFMAN

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 gratu-
itous 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 every-
one 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.
 CHAHINE’S DESTINY 39

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 signif-
icance 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, under-
standably, 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 charac-
ters’ 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 assess-
ment, 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 par-
ticular 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 cos-
tumes 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
40 DON HOFFMAN

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 pre-
sent 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
 CHAHINE’S DESTINY 41

and the tyrants. While the fascination with eyes may stem from a personal
obsession, Chahine makes use of this obsession to comment on the univer-
sality 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 con-
trasts 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 for-
eigners, 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 mis-
take of identifying the Body with the Word (although the logos of the
Gospel of John may have provided the precedent). The Body is not, how-
ever, coterminous with the Word, so that, as the Christians learn, destroy-
ing 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
42 DON HOFFMAN

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 dis-
semination 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 success-
fully 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, how-
ever, 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 sur-
vive, 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
 CHAHINE’S DESTINY 43

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 enthusias-
tic 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, cit-
ing 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
44 DON HOFFMAN

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 extraordi-
nary example of how the world has changed that this interview praising a ter-
rorist 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.
14. There is also an historical reality behind this pairing, since the poets of al-
Andalus were as celebrated as their philosophers, and probably considerably
more popular.
15. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, p. 25. Fawal also points out that this painful
moment is the basis of a scene in Alexandria. . .Why?.
16. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, p. 25.
17. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, pp. 25–26.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. And a footnote it remained it seems for Condoleeza Rice until roughly
9AM EST on 9/11/2001.
21. 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.
22. Stephen Holden, “Philosophy as a Red-Hot Adventure in Twelfth-
Century Spain and France.” New York Times, 4 October 1997. Cited in
Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, p. 185.
23. 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.
24. 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

his chapter focuses on one of the landmarks of Arab, third world and
T 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 orig-
inal 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 resem-
bles 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 strat-
egy, which is as much to enter into dialogue with Western filmic represen-
tations 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
46 JOHN M. GANIM

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 includ-
ing 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 his-
torical record, at least cinematically, is constructed. The result, as expressed
in the conclusion of the film, is a highly provisional and in many ways fan-
tastic 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 incorpo-
rating the religious achievements of Judaism and Christianity and subsum-
ing 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.
 REVERSING THE CRUSADES 47

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 experi-
mental 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 qual-
ity is easy for Western viewers to categorize, and because the potential essen-
tialism 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 com-
plexity 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 govern-
ment’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
48 JOHN M. GANIM

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 cin-
ema, 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 num-
ber 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 featur-
ing 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 gen-
erally, 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
 REVERSING THE CRUSADES 49

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 rela-
tively 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 estab-
lished 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 pre-
ceded 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 sim-
ilar 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
50 JOHN M. GANIM

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 con-
cerned with correcting and interrogating previous versions as in establishing
a coherent statement of its own. If the various Crusade film narratives, par-
ticularly 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 invari-
ably 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 rein-
force each other. Instead, Lavagnino’s score has the same flexible quality
one hears in Cinecittà Studios’ films of the 1950s, with their loose rela-
tionship to the action onscreen, useful and adaptable to relatively rough
editing and uncertain postproduction conditions. None of this is as surpris-
ing 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
 REVERSING THE CRUSADES 51

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 par-
ticular 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 twentieth-
century 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
52 JOHN M. GANIM

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 new-
found 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 rever-
sal of the usual stereotypes, employs strategy and psychology, as well as mil-
itary 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 dis-
covery 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
 REVERSING THE CRUSADES 53

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 flam-
ing 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 delir-
ium, but still leads the Crusaders against Jerusalem. A Syrian chemist, how-
ever, 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 par-
allel between Richard and Saladin. The film ends with a self-consciously
54 JOHN M. GANIM

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 march-
ing 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 indi-
vidual 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 dra-
matic 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 excep-
tion 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
 REVERSING THE CRUSADES 55

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 ten-
sions 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 possibil-
ity of a multinational state, in which the rights of minorities would be pro-
tected, 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 char-
acter is certainly meant to reassure more than the Christian minority of
56 JOHN M. GANIM

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 sci-
entific 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 her-
self ably and maliciously engages in court intrigue and supports the most
fanatical interpretation of Christian mission. Richard’s own wife, by con-
trast, 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 nar-
rative 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
 REVERSING THE CRUSADES 57

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 deploy-
ment of representations of the Middle Ages, and particularly of the conflict
between East and West as symbolized by the Crusades, alongside its appar-
ent 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 al-
Jadidah 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,”
58 JOHN M. GANIM

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.
4. See Naomi Schor, “This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips
with Irigaray.” Differences 1.3 (1989): 38–58.
5. See Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London:
Routledge, 1990).
6. 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.
7. 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

ust as revisionist historians criticize the romanticized view of the

J 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 pop-
ular 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 romanti-
cized 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
60 RANDY P. SCHIFF

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
 SAMURAI ON SHIFTING GROUND 61

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, frus-
trated 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 man-
nerisms 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, how-
ever, 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 anom-
aly; 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 foun-
dations upon which it is built. With six samurai gathered at the inn and
62 RANDY P. SCHIFF

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 ulti-
mately acquires his name. Kikuchiyo claims that he can certify his samurai
status by unfurling before the samurai a scroll listing generations of individ-
uals 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 certifi-
cation 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 lim-
inal 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 appro-
priate 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
 SAMURAI ON SHIFTING GROUND 63

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, mirror-
ing the warrior caste’s own position in the social system. Worried that he
has been removed from the group, Kikuchiyo learns that Heihachi has cre-
ated 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 ban-
ner, 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 peas-
ant base thinning up to the top of the society’s elite, so does Kikuchiyo’s tri-
angle 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).
64 RANDY P. SCHIFF

the class division between farmer and samurai, which Kikuchiyo straddles.
For Kikuchiyo does not only appear to mediate between the worlds of peas-
ant 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 fol-
lowing 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 avail-
able 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 vil-
lage 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 aware-
ness of the bloody origin of the arms. Kikuchiyo thus has ignored class con-
sciousness 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 sta-
tus 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
 SAMURAI ON SHIFTING GROUND 65

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 spec-
tators 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 self-
loathing 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 self-
indictment, he ejaculates, “Farmers are stingy, foxy, blubbering, mean, stu-
pid, 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 atroci-
ties that he has himself experienced, furiously flinging some spears to punc-
tuate 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 condi-
tions 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 mus-
ing 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
66 RANDY P. SCHIFF

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 self-
defeating 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 advan-
tageous 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, com-
plaining 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
 SAMURAI ON SHIFTING GROUND 67

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 engen-
der 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 Bush-
evidently 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” any-
way.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 ori-
gins, 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 iden-
tifies himself as Tsubaki (Camellia) Sanjuro, again foregrounding the slip-
page 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
68 RANDY P. SCHIFF

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 good-
natured 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 manipu-
lator 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 transi-
tion 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
 SAMURAI ON SHIFTING GROUND 69

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 comport-
ment, 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 meticu-
lously 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 conserv-
ative 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 threat-
ened 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, signi-
fying the wandering warrior, prove to have a class-crossing history. Sansom
70 RANDY P. SCHIFF

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 dis-
tinction 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 sym-
bolism 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.
 SAMURAI ON SHIFTING GROUND 71

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 install-
ment, the protagonist abstains from alcohol, explaining that any intoxica-
tion 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 grand-
mother’s self-pity, saying he despises “wretched” people, while also pas-
sionately 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.”
72 RANDY P. SCHIFF

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

This page intentionally left blank
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

he portrayal of Arabs in Western film tends to be highly unfavorable.

T Appearing as lascivious sheiks, religious fanatics, and cold-blooded ter-
rorists, Arabs on the silver screen are caricatures, not characters. Jack
Shaheen’s study of the vilification of Arabs on film reveals “cinema’s sys-
tematic, 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 stereo-
types, 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,
76 LYNN SHUTTERS

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 dif-
ferent 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 king-
dom and witnesses the devastation of the Wendol, who appear to be bear-
like 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
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER 77

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 fol-
lowing 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 reaffirma-
tion constitute the resolution of the film’s conflict. Redemption entails
either the rescue of a Western hero or heroine or, in terrorist films, the res-
cue 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 pre-
vailing 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 attrib-
utes of the “eastern” are usually experienced by a Western point-of-view
character through whom the film audience is allowed to experience the
78 LYNN SHUTTERS

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 sep-
arates these conflicts from any actual historical content that might help to
explain them (p. 74). Third, “easterns” employ a sense of Western superi-
ority 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 popular-
ity 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 politi-
cal 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 charac-
ters serve as foils through which Western masculinity is reinforced. In True
Lies Harry Tasker, the American agent who thwarts Arab attempts to deto-
nate 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
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER 79

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 post-
September 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. anti-
Arab 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 ini-
tially 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 narra-
tive 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 experi-
ences with the Vikings, Ahmed becomes a better man (also a moment of
redemption and revelation), and he returns to his Arab culture (reaffirma-
tion). 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 audi-
ence would seem positive, even if the film is not a historically accurate por-
trayal 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
80 LYNN SHUTTERS

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 cul-
tural 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 ini-
tiation; 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 non-
Western 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 vio-
lent 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 mobi-
lizing 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 sug-
gest 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
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER 81

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 con-
text, 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 associa-
tions 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
82 LYNN SHUTTERS

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 suc-
cessfully 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 unlet-
tered “native.” The closing shot of the final language acquisition scene
focuses on Buliwyf contemplating the Arab who suddenly speaks his lan-
guage. 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,
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER 83

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 cul-
tural 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 sig-
nificant 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
84 LYNN SHUTTERS

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 lan-
guage 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 com-
ments, “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 vio-
lent Vikings with the peaceful Ahmed. Yet the film ultimately swaps one
stereotype regarding Arab cultures for another: instead of an irrational terror-
ist, Ahmed is effeminate. The Western tradition of associating Eastern cul-
tures 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 stereo-
types 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 bear-
like monsters. Eaters of the Dead specifies that the Wendol are Neanderthals,
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER 85

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 can-
nibalistic 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 there-
fore 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 associ-
ate it with death, and this statue insistently connects the violence and irra-
tionality 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
86 LYNN SHUTTERS

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 bat-
tlements, 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 for-
eign and barbarous in Viking culture, and Ahmed’s shocked reaction rein-
forces 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 dif-
ferent 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
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER 87

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 sim-
ilar to those governing late 1990s cultural exchange under globalization and
free trade in which the West provides the model of modernity and develop-
ment 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 charac-
ters, 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 twenty-
two 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,
88 LYNN SHUTTERS

plunged this country [Iraq] into a bloodbath of medieval proportions”

(“The World: How Many People Has Hussein Killed?” New York Times,
January 26, 2003).
6. All references to the film are to The 13th Warrior, directed by John
McTiernan (Touchstone Pictures, 1999).
7. 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 rela-
tion 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 pos-
itive 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).
8. 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.
9. John C. Eisele, “The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in
the Hollywood Eastern,” Cinema Journal 41 (2002): 68–94. Subsequently
cited parenthetically.
10. True Lies, directed by James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox, 1994); The
Siege, directed by Edward Zwick (Twentieth Century Fox, 1998).
11. 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.
12. Ella Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire,” pp. 27–28.
13. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-
Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds., Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 90–104.
14. Shohat writes, “Not only has the Western imaginary metaphorically
rendered the colonized land as a female to be saved from her environ/men-
tal disorder, it has also projected rather more literal narratives of rescue,
specifically of Western and non-Western women.. . .The figure of the Arab
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE OTHER 89

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

A 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 mat-
ter 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 prod-
uct of twenty-first century trans-Atlantic cultural politics. The fundamen-
tal 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 des-
tiny, 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 sub-
ject, poised between ideology and reality, his struggle thrown into relief
against the violent conflict of the fifth century, and the forging of a new
92 CAROLINE JEWERS

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 offi-
cer 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 ideolog-
ical “nature versus culture” dialogue between an ecologically sound, spon-
taneous, 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 leader-
figure 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
 MISSION HISTORICAL 93

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 anachro-
nizes Arthur, rendering him such a specific yet universal figure that the
very act of demystification risks effacing the man and the myth. As a con-
sequence, 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 render-
ing 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 impor-
tance, 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 ele-
ments 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 inten-
tional 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 reg-
ister 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
94 CAROLINE JEWERS

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 ele-
ments 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 dia-
logue 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 fascina-
tion with celluloid history never allows it to tire of imbuing medieval myth
with the imprimatur of the Zeitgeist: the last century provides a rich dial-
ogism 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 ver-
sion is, it cannot hold a candle, or even an oversized battle helmet (inspired
in Eisenstein’s film by the fabulous illustrations of the early fourteenth-
century 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
 MISSION HISTORICAL 95

production: “Here was no light-hearted, entertainment-first-historical-

accuracy-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 second-
century 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 knowl-
edge 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 inva-
sions 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
96 CAROLINE JEWERS

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 adher-
ence 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 mercenar-
ies for Rome or at the invitation of tribal factions, as well as regular pillag-
ing 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 sim-
plistic. 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 alco-
holic 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 land-
ing 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
 MISSION HISTORICAL 97

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 minimal-
ist 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 bound-
aries, 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 trans-
formed 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 clas-
sic 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 fol-
low 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
98 CAROLINE JEWERS

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 con-
centrates 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 close-
up 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 charac-
terized 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 com-
paratively 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 com-
plete 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.
 MISSION HISTORICAL 99

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 fea-
tures 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 fifth-
century 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 famil-
iar 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
100 CAROLINE JEWERS

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 ener-
getic 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 brood-
ing, 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 cre-
ating 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
 MISSION HISTORICAL 101

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 imag-
ined 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 nar-
rative, 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 dis-
order: 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 associ-
ating 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 democ-
rat 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 con-
fronts his inner Briton as a result of having to carry out a last unsavory “spe-
cial 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 evac-
uate 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
102 CAROLINE JEWERS

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 cer-
tain 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 anachro-
nism 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
 MISSION HISTORICAL 103

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 juxta-
position between civilized and “barbarian”) seems remote from the fifth-
century 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 nar-
rative 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 bat-
tle. 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
104 CAROLINE JEWERS

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, sub-
limated 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 man-
ifest 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 synony-
mous 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 his-
tory 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 iden-
tity, 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).
 MISSION HISTORICAL 105

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 fluctu-
ating 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 pres-
ence 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
106 CAROLINE JEWERS

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).
14. 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 expedi-
tion 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).
15. 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).
16. Graham Anderson, King Arthur in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2004).
17. Kevin J. Harty, Review of King Arthur, p. 123.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. Frank Thompson, King Arthur (New York: Hyperion, 2004), p. 85.
21. Frank Thompson, King Arthur, p.349.
22. References to John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni are once again
drawn from Arthuriana 14.3 (2004): 115–20. See note 4.
23. John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni, p. 117.
24. John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni, p. 116.
25. John Matthews’ interview with Franzoni, p. 116.
26. 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

he desire to use the experience of the Middle Ages to relieve the

T 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 postcolo-
nial 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
108 LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

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 common-
place among medievalists to decry the indifference of our students, our col-
leagues, 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 dis-
tinctive character and destiny for Western Europe.”5 In the academic
imaginary, the Middle Ages is sandwiched between the glories of the clas-
sical 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 fan-
tasy and with a distinctly modern form of nostalgia for a past organic soci-
ety. 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 aca-
demic rejection of the Middle Ages has to do with the perception that,
 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY 109

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 rit-
ualized 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 bar-
baric 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 cre-
ated by the modern mind as “the antithesis between a figuration of back-
wardness 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 cri-
tique must be presumed already at work for the fullness of their later his-
torical 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 “pro-
totypes of anachronistic humans: childlike, irrational, regressive and atavis-
tic, 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
110 LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

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 charac-
ter 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 mar-
vels (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, clean-
ing. 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 self-
fashioning 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.
 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY 111

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 view-
ers 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 graffi-
tied ersatz castle surrounded by a moat filled with the detritus of modern
urban life. The illusion of a romanticized and perhaps simpler past is under-
cut 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 dia-
logue 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.”
112 LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

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” par-
ticipates 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 par-
ticipating in the cultural appropriations outlined above, as Walker is magi-
cally 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 invari-
ably 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 convic-
tion, which he undoubtedly shares with the film’s target demographic, that
contemporary appropriations of the Middle Ages (like Castle World) must
 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY 113

necessarily be Disnified, must be brought within the hygienic regime of

commodity culture. Mistaking the medieval castle of King Leo for a mod-
ern 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 gal-
loping 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 technologi-
cal apparatus of the film as by any content. These characters can easily be mis-
taken 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 con-
necting 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
114 LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

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 charac-
teristics 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 gen-
eration: “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 cul-
ture, 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 geo-
graphical 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
 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY 115

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 separa-
tion,” of what he means by hybridity.22 This reversion to ethnic stereotype,
this recollection of the black man as minstrel, suffering a series of humilia-
tions 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 cul-
tural 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 self-
fashioning 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
116 LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

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 mis-
matched cultural signs. His backward baseball cap, football jersey, sun-
glasses, 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 subur-
ban 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 perfor-
mance in this film. Through the herald’s introduction, he refashions his
character’s identity: “Starting at small forward from Inglewood High, two-
time, 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 intro-
duction 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 paro-
dies 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
 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY 117

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 appre-
ciation 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 under-
standing 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 ulti-
mately intimidated into a performance. Unlike Martin/Crosby, who whistles
a melody for the medieval band to learn, Walker racially marks his pedagogi-
cal 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
118 LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

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 success-
ful career as a singer/dancer, merging, at times, a pop sensibility with hip-
hop 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 sav-
age 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 con-
tains “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
 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY 119

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, impos-
sible. 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.
120 LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

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 set-
ting; 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.
 INNER-CITY CHIVALRY 121

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).
14. See Vivian Sobchack, “The Insistent Fringe: Moving Images and Historical
Consciousness,” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 4–20, at pp. 6–7.
15. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 205.
16. Medieval Times is an actual chain restaurant with franchises in major cities
throughout the United States.
17. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, p. 8.
18. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York:
Modern Library, 2001), p. 7.
19. 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.
20. Umland and Umland, The Use of Arthurian Legend, p. 41.
21. Homi Bhabna, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 114.
22. Homi Bhabna, The Location of Culture, p. 120.
23. 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

I 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 lit-
erally 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 masculin-
ity 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
124 TISON PUGH

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 spe-
cific 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 epony-
mous 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 twentieth-
century 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
 QUEERING THE MEDIEVAL DEAD 125

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, cor-
nered, 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 horrify-
ing 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 fight-
ing the monstrous antagonist, she surpasses the cultural limitations accorded
to femininity. As a male character, however, Ash is frequently ridiculed for
126 TISON PUGH

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 cre-
ators’ 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 long-
term 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-a-
torn-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 touch-
stone 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 protago-
nist 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
 QUEERING THE MEDIEVAL DEAD 127

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, adulter-
ess, 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 threat-
ening 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 like-
wise 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 pos-
sessed 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 try-
ing 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 rela-
tionship 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 sur-
prisingly, then, neither Scott nor Shelly survives the onslaught of the
128 TISON PUGH

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 girl-
friends 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 pon-
ders over it once again, and Linda thrusts her hand out from under the
earth and attacks him. The ensuing battle reaches its literal and metaphori-
cal 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 spas-
ming 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
 QUEERING THE MEDIEVAL DEAD 129

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 assign-
ment 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 him-
self with a sawed-off shotgun and prosthetic chainsaw, the short cuts focus-
ing 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
130 TISON PUGH

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 mas-
culinity 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 dis-
dain for Ash because he lacks sufficient honor to see the war with the
Deadites through to its conclusion. From fighting demons in Tennessee, Ash
 QUEERING THE MEDIEVAL DEAD 131

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 train-
ing 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 unthreaten-
ing 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 dis-
member to save himself from demonic possession yet that nonetheless suc-
ceeds 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 collec-
tively grab a fork and stab him in his buttocks.26 This parodic sodomy is insuf-
ficient 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 shoul-
der 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
132 TISON PUGH

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 engen-
dered 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 reg-
isters 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 stu-
dent, a somewhat namby-pamby protagonist whose heroism is forced upon
 QUEERING THE MEDIEVAL DEAD 133

him in Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, he is still emasculated through his blue-
collar 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 for-
mer 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, paradox-
ically 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 feminin-
ity 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 fig-
ure. 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 mas-
culinity 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
134 TISON PUGH

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 stud-
ies 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 redra-
matizing 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
 QUEERING THE MEDIEVAL DEAD 135

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.
6. John Kenneth Muir, The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (New York:
Applause, 2004), p. 163.
7. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(London: British Film Institute, 1992), p. 17.
8. 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).
9. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, p. 35.
10. 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 film-
ing 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).
11. Bruce Campbell quoted in Warren, The Evil Dead Companion, pp. 36–37.
12. Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert commentary track, Sam Raimi’s The Evil
Dead DVD.
13. Bruce Campbell commentary track, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead DVD.
14. 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).
15. Bruce Campbell, quoted in Warren, The Evil Dead Companion, p. 118.
16. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 9.
17. 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.
18. 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.”
19. See David J. Hogan, Dark Romance, pp.1–30, for an analysis of family
dynamics in horror films.
136 TISON PUGH

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 appropri-
ate 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

n 1942, French medievalist Edith Thomas wrote in her personal diary a

I 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 trou-
badourism held dangerous implications of filmic collaboration with Hitler’s
Germany, her argument that the Middle Ages is easily misused as a far-
removed, 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 ques-
tions about how modern directors use medieval settings to infuse their
works with modern preoccupations about race, class, and gender, this chap-
ter 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 criti-
cism, or is medievalism inherently conservative? I will explore these
questions through Carolyn Dinshaw’s notion of medieval and modern
140 LYNN T. RAMEY

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 partici-
pating in the French Resistance. With so unclear a consensus about the
“meaning” of the films, either in their screenplay or in their filmic aesthet-
ics, 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 indus-
try 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 jour-

nalists], 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 delib-
erate 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
 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM 141

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 sub-
versive. 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 fol-
lowing 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
142 LYNN T. RAMEY

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 trouba-
dourism 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 cre-
ate “fairy tales. . .that keep a national character, a national and even. . .
regional difference. . . .Our legends, our old stories all hide beautiful
 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM 143

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 specifi-
cally 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 cine-
matically 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 regres-
sive 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 national-
ism. 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,
144 LYNN T. RAMEY

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 collab-
orationist. 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 character-
istic 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 indi-
viduality 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 view-
ers 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 prob-
lems of the outside world in its festive community. When problems attempt
to creep in as embodied by the disfigured dwarfs proposed as entertainment
 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM 145

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).
146 LYNN T. RAMEY

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 sur-
rounding 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 intro-
duction 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 quo-
tation 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
 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM 147

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 pre-
sent reality:

Patrice doesn’t live in our world; our laughter irritates him; our lightheart-
edness 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.
148 LYNN T. RAMEY

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 sum-
mer 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, phys-
ical 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 leg-
end 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 cin-
ematic 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.
 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM 149

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 commu-
nity, 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 anti-
German. Later in the war, young French men feared attending movies
because rumors spread that the Germans were rounding up shiftless, unem-
ployed 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 atti-
tude 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 coali-
tion 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 soli-
darity 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 cat-
egorized as negative, perhaps in some cases even fascist. But, as Dinshaw’s
150 LYNN T. RAMEY

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 mod-
ern 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 undeni-
able, 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
 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM 151

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 interpret-
ing 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.
152 LYNN T. RAMEY

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 tan-
tamount 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 specta-
torship 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
 IN PRAISE OF TROUBADOURISM 153

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, incom-
préhensible 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).
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 10

SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN IN

CHINA’S MARTIAL ARTS WORLD: KING HU’S
A TOUCH OF ZEN

Peter Lorge

owerful female characters in films typically face difficulties in

P 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 cri-
tique of the problems of powerful women by evading, rather than con-
fronting, 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 contempo-
rary 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
156 PETER LORGE

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 aston-
ishing 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 cul-
ture. 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 high-
lighted, 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 power-
ful warriors. While this practice is consistent with traditional Chinese liter-
ature, 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, mar-
tial 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.
 SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN 157

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 portrait-
painting 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 track-
ing. 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 fortune-
teller. 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 cin-
ematically 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 paral-
lel 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 reli-
gious professionals. At the same time, popular culture also drew heavily
upon the written historical tradition for stories of heroic generals and offi-
cials, and evil ministers. The written high culture in turn transcribed pop-
ular 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.
158 PETER LORGE

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 pop-
ular 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 prob-
lem of a woman becoming desexed by achieving warrior status. The the-
ater 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 some-
one while so disguised a credible plot device. The usual sparseness or
 SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN 159

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 tradi-
tion depicted clever scholars whose intellect and knowledge of military
thought allowed them to outwit the merely physically powerful. The epit-
ome 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 nat-
urally 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 dis-
cussed 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.
160 PETER LORGE

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 assis-
tants 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 fol-
lowing morning. His pleasure at the success of his schemes is soon under-
mined 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 govern-
ment officials. As desexed men, eunuchs were feminized without becom-
ing 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 plea-
sures. 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 enlight-
enment. 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
 SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN 161

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 war-
rior, and finally is pointed to the path of desexed Buddhist martial (pre-
sumably) 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 construc-
tion of women and requires a powerful woman to retreat to the Buddhist
monastery to realize herself fully.
162 PETER LORGE

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 inter-
esting 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 con-
strained civilized ideal of a woman when she is acting in a center of civi-
lization. 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
 SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN 163

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 char-
acter. Even the older General Lu is a possibility. But these men are dis-
qualified 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 treat-
ment 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 cli-
mactic 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.
164 PETER LORGE

Buddhism returns for the resolution of the final struggle, pointing Yang
away from the mundane world rather than synthesizing her many transfor-
mations 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 transfor-
mation 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 woman-
to-woman interaction, at the mechanistic level a request that Yang have
sex with Gu, is now revealed. Pu Songling’s original story was a supernat-
urally 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 empow-
ered 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 com-
promising 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 phys-
ically 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 intel-
lectual 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.
 SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN 165

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 single-
mindedness 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
166 PETER LORGE

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 con-
ceivable 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 sim-
ilarly 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
 SEXING WARRIOR WOMEN 167

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.
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. I owe this particular insight to Professor Tracy Miller.
5. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
6. 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 stu-
dents 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

R 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 inven-
tion, 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
170 ANGELA JANE WEISL

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 impas-
sible 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, becom-
ing 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
 THE HAWK, THE WOLF, AND THE MOUSE 171

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 accommo-
dates 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 pro-
vided 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 enor-
mous, iconic sword. Reading the wolf into which he is nocturnally trans-
formed 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 conserva-
tionists, medieval ideas about them are rather less beneficent. In T. H. White’s
famous translation of a twelfth-century Latin bestiary, the wolf is catego-
rized with those that “rage about with tooth and claw” and are called beasts
172 ANGELA JANE WEISL

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 double-
barreled 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, out-
laws 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 morn-
ing 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
 THE HAWK, THE WOLF, AND THE MOUSE 173

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 him-
self 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, tak-
ing 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
174 ANGELA JANE WEISL

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 hypermas-
culine 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, nei-
ther 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 gen-
der 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 con-
temporary 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 fet-
tered 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
 THE HAWK, THE WOLF, AND THE MOUSE 175

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 occasion-
ally 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 tradi-
tional 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 ani-
malistic nature at the same time as it shows Isabeau’s ability to act in
traditionally masculine ways, the moment also presages Navarre’s entrap-
ment 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,
176 ANGELA JANE WEISL

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 sor-
row,” hearing the story of the lovers from Imperious, it is Phillipe who
weeps, saying, “always together. . .eternally apart.” As the lover’s go-
between, 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 sug-
gestive; Navarre is trapped by his anger and cannot see the redemptive pos-
sibility in Imperious’s promised disenchantment. That he is without his
family sword and believes it lost is significant; as a symbol of his true mas-
culinity, 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
 THE HAWK, THE WOLF, AND THE MOUSE 177

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 post-
pones 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 lan-
guage 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
178 ANGELA JANE WEISL

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 wonder-
ful 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,
 THE HAWK, THE WOLF, AND THE MOUSE 179

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 sto-
ries 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 her-
mitage, 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 myste-
rious 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 sym-
bolic 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 under-
standable 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
180 ANGELA JANE WEISL

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 sug-
gesting, 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 ele-
ments of romance are familiar, their setting serves to mystify and distance
them. By making humans into animals, by shifting conventions and under-
standings of gender, and by creating a Middle Ages that stands for all that is
 THE HAWK, THE WOLF, AND THE MOUSE 181

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 meta-
morphosed 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.
182 ANGELA JANE WEISL

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

T 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 masculin-
ity. 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
184 HOLLY A. CROCKER

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 con-
struction 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 var-
ied 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 spe-
cific social moments.
Like earlier renderings, the shooting script, theater cut, and DVD appa-
ratus of A Knight’s Tale suggest that Chaucer is made and remade during
the film’s production to authorize a fiction of identity. Although consoli-
dating 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 con-
temporary 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
 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW 185

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 titu-
lar authority. We might say that Helgeland relies on his audience’s familiar-
ity 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 illiter-
ate 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 delib-
erately 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 posi-
tion 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
186 HOLLY A. CROCKER

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, noth-
ing 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 pub-
lic 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 spec-
tators 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
 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW 187

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 habit-
ual 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 per-
formance, 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, how-
ever, 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 founda-
tional truths surpassing their cultural particularity. Authorship is a shifty posi-
tion, 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
188 HOLLY A. CROCKER

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 egali-
tarian 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
 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW 189

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 sev-
eral 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 com-
position 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 render-
ing 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 neces-
sitates the limitation of Chaucer’s character. Chaucer is connected to his-
tory, 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 con-
sists of a pastiche of tried masculine traits, including prowess, honor, guts,
and humility, his ability to give this conglomeration visible presence sug-
gests 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, how-
ever, 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.
190 HOLLY A. CROCKER

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 com-
pany 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 col-
lective 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 mas-
tery 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 par-
ticular human encounters to his larger creative power. The party’s disgust
at what they perceive to be evidence of Chaucer’s gambling quickly con-
verts 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 sur-
prises 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, how-
ever, 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
 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW 191

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 any-
more and it was just kinda taking away from the momentum.”20
As a result, authorship does not appear as a transcendent fiction, the provi-
sional humility of which Chaucer may don to further his mobility and
enhance his craft. Instead, his creativity is visibly subjected to the cultural stric-
tures 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 pres-
ence 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 defamil-
iarizes 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.
192 HOLLY A. CROCKER

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 partic-
ularized 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.
 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW 193

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 eleva-
tion 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 sepa-
rating 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 dis-
covered he is descendent from an ancient royal line” (p. 119). Edward’s affir-
mation 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 alto-
gether. 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 nobil-
ity. 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.
194 HOLLY A. CROCKER

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, glam-
orizing 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 “reduc-
tive 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 mas-
tery, 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 anachro-
nized 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 anachro-
nistic, 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 collabora-
tive 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 con-
text 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
 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW 195

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 con-
clusion 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 mas-
culinity. 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 mas-
tery 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
196 HOLLY A. CROCKER

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.
4. Régis Debray, “The Three Ages of Looking,” trans. Eric Rauth, Critical
Inquiry 21 (1995): 529–55, at p. 532.
5. 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).
6. 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).
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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 shoot-
ing 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.”
 CHAUCER’S MAN SHOW 197

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 week-
end 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

ilms about the legendary hero Robin Hood mirror the social and sexual
F 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 fruit-
ful 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 shift-
ing roles experienced by women in the past century within family, work-
force, society, and state.
200 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 perfor-
mance, 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 emp-
tied 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 peas-
ant, 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, shoulder-
holding, 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 competi-
tor then body wrestle atop the table. Seeing this physical display provokes
 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD 201

Richard to proclaim it “more befitting that he try his love for a maid.”
Pointing to other knights posed in physical embraces with their sweet-
hearts, 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, ini-
tiating 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, espe-
cially 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 kneel-
ing 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 pre-
outlaw 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
202 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 feign-
ing 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 permis-
sion to return to England, Richard once again holds him firmly by the shoul-
ders, 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 spe-
cial “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-under-
duress by successfully convincing John’s search party of Marian’s (false) sui-
cide, 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.
 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD 203

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 flamboy-
ance 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 accompa-
nied 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 tor-
tured. 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
204 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 sweet-
heart.
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, wan-
dered 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 turn-
ing 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 discus-
sion 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 other-
wise 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).
 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD 205

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 tradi-
tionally 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
206 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 con-
structed 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 crit-
ics. Although one of few lower-class women in Annakin’s movie, this sig-
nificant 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 periph-
ery. 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
 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD 207

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, companion-
able, 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, notwith-
standing 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 cross-
dressing or wrestling with him. At least Todd’s Robin, unlike Fairbanks,
wrestles with a female, not a male! Yet Robin’s unawareness that the gender-
bending 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 com-
pelled 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
208 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 nos-
talgia 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 inti-
mate 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 (represent-
ing the state) to whom she willingly submits, indicates private scruples rather
 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD 209

than civic duty. This older, clearly nonvirginal Marian needs no nurse-
protectress. In other Robin Hood films, Robin functioned in their relation-
ship 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 annoy-
ance 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 indepen-
dence mirroring the position of postfeminist, rather than medieval, women.
If Marian’s gender role has changed, so has Robin’s, although his inabil-
ity 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 rab-
bit for dinner. While he cannot successfully enact his former role of res-
cuer, 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 ulti-
mately 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
210 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 daugh-
ter. 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 indepen-
dent 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 expe-
riences 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 sud-
denly 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
 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD 211

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 badi-
nage 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 mar-
riage 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 dis-
guise. When “Martin” lustily kisses a nonplussed but aroused Robin Hood,
the homoerotic dynamic of Fairbanks’s film is reprised.20
212 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 sym-
bolize 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 imag-
ine, 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 vel-
vets, but in tattered homespun; Robin is a cowardly but trendy royal cloth-
ing 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 “holi-
day cottage” to camping out in Sherwood. Marian waxes eloquent about
robbing from the rich and giving to the poor and surrounding herself “with
 THE “OTHER” WOMEN OF SHERWOOD 213

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.
214 STOCK AND GREGORY-ABBOTT

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 incor-
poration 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 collab-
oration 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
216 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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 pub-
lished 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 numer-
ous 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).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 217

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 Anglo-
Scottish 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 representa-
tions 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).
This page intentionally left blank
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
220 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 221

Charensol, Georges 146, 152 n.23 Cuny, Alain 144–45

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
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 223

Green, Eva 25 Hutchings, Peter 134 n.3

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
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
 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
225
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
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
INDEX
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 227

Solonge, Madelaine 146 Toplin, Robert Brent 9 n.2

Songling, Pu 155 Touch of Zen, A 8, 155–66
Songzi Guanyin (goddess of mercy) Travers, Peter 183
164 Trigg, Stephanie 184, 196 n.5
Sossamon, Shannyn 195 n.1 Tristan and Isolde 139, 147
Spivak, Gayatri 81, 88 n.13 Troilus and Criseyde 171, 175, 182
Star Wars 16, 103, 108, 110, 116 n.18
Stevenson, Ray 97 “troubadourism” 7, 8, 139–40, 151
Stiller, Ben 111; see also The Cable True Lies 78–79, 88 n.10
Guy Truffaut, François 42, 152 n.27
Stock, Lorraine 8 Tuchman, Barbara 20
Story of Robin Hood, The 205–206, Tudor, Andrew 134 n.3
213 n.8 Turk, Edward Baron 143–44, 152
Strange Stories from the Leisure Studio n.20 and n.21
155 Turner, Frederick Jackson 16, 24, 26
Suez Canal 55 n.1
Sunzi 159 Twain, Mark 107, 110, 113, 117,
Sybilla of Jerusalem 16–17, 19, 24, 121 n.18, 136 n26; see also A
26 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court
Talisman, The 18, 21, 25, 26, Tyerman, Christopher 27
48–49
Tapert, Rober 125 Ullman, Tracey 210
Tarentino, Quentin 11 n.20, 116, Umland, Sam and Rebecca 11 n.21,
211; see also Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and 2 114, 121 n.19 and n.20
and Pulp Fiction Updike, Nancy 87 n.1
Taylor, Elizabeth 49 utopia 123
Taylor, Robert 49
Tears of the Sun 102 Verkerk, Dorothy Hoogland 9 n.7
Thatcher, Margaret 212, 214 n.23 Vikings 76–77, 80–81
Thewlis, David 27 Les Visiteurs du soir/The Devil’s Envoy
Thomas, Edith 8, 139–41, 144, 151 7, 139–53
n.1 Volosinov, V. N. 121 n.13
Thomason, Marsha 120 Volsunga Saga 171, 172, 175, 181
Thompson, Bob 28
Thompson, David “Skywalker” Waggner, George 181; see also The
116 Wolf Man
Thompson, Frank 102, 106 n.20 and Wagner, Richard 26
n.21 Wallace, David 10 n.10
Thorpe, Richard 49; see also Ivanhoe Wal-Mart 123
and Knights of the Round Table warrior women 155–66
Three Stooges, The 136 n.26 Washington, Denzel 78–79
Thurman, Uma 211–12, 214 n.19 Washington, George 102
Titanic 21 Waxman, Sharon 18
Todd, Richard 206–207, 213 n.8 Wayne, John 24
228
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
INDEX
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