When I found out that the director of A Ghost Story was making an adaptation of an epic English poem to be released by A24 I wasn’t suddenly just nude, I had never not been nude, and in this glorious state of wizened penile advancement began traveling the now-trivial corridors of time and space, where I visited history’s greatest thinkers at their precise moment of enlightenment like some kind of flailing homunculus, shepherding them with loud balls and harrowing thoughts onto the ferry of their own necessary expiration, holding their hand and watching with them the flowering of their culminating contribution to the collective consciousness, their brain-baby now so complete in its sensate ubiquity that it no longer required – no longer could fit inside of, no longer had any memory of – their incubating mind, leaving them behind as a child does the nest, a moth the cocoon.

“Thank you, nude and vaguely Jewish weirdo,” they called to me, at peace with their own smallness next to the thing they had created while I, their Charon, let the universe’s song summon me to begin work on another incipient and vital thread in the tableau.

“You’re welcome,” I called back to them, my children, who could all see my dick and balls, for they were uncovered to the fullest extent of the nude. “You’re welcome.”

The Green Knight

Death is, among other things, a mechanical failure. What’s that, your body suddenly can’t perform the same Podunk biological processes it had been pounding out for decades? What are you, an idiot? How hard is it to just keep breathing forever? Here’s a tip: instead of no longer doing the thing that you’ve been doing and that you need to keep doing in order to continue not dying, just keep doing the thing you’ve been doing. Bang, immortality. You’re welcome.

The above sentiment is incredibly stupid, and therefore, predictably, manifest to the point of scripture among our culture’s foremost connoisseurs of stupid, the young. But those useless and vile dumbasses have a point – death is so much scarier, so much more deeply steeped in a kind of primal foreboding, if you can only conceive of it from a purely physical standpoint, a pantsed-in-front-of-the-entire-class level of embarrassment during which the vital version of you is forever reduced to something approximating a potato, except somehow invited to even less parties. And this denial of agency, of meaning, to the big silly scythe-guy waiting for you somewhere down the line under a sign labeled The End doesn’t just grant that inevitable moment of dead-ness a pants-shitting unknowability, it also has consequences that reverberate within the walls of whatever life you try to lead before it’s all over. After all, how is the stuff before the buzzer goes off supposed to have any meaning when that clarion blast reduces everything to the null set, not just going forward, but backwards, too? The shedding of this benighted yoke is pretty much what puberty is for: the end of that squeaky-voiced, easily-forgiven and innocent version of you in order to make way for the cynical and probably hairy weirdo that you will shamble, increasingly bald and disillusioned, throughout the rest of your life as is like a death practice run.

Which brings us to David Lowery, and his masterful a-lot-of-movies-at-once-but-really-only-about-one-thing, The Green Knight. Lowery understands that mortality and coming-of-age are pretty much the same thing, even as one by definition means death and the other strongly implies some kind of birth. The squaring of this circle (and we’re going to be talking a fucking lot about fucking circles) comes in the interplay: the realization – and, more importantly, the acceptance – that neither of these things can be achieved without the other, and that both, even the being-dead one, are essential to a life not just well-lived but well-finished. Drawing upon his already-extensive history of saddling death alongside some selected component of the human experience, “American Gothic”-style, and stepping back to see how one side of the tableau recontextualizes the other, Lowery once again wills to the surface elements of life typically unseen, ones that range from a sad kind of song to a dumb kind of yearning, all thrown into sudden and lucid relief by virtue of being by placed in the milieu of something incalculably larger than they could ever hope to be.

Thanks for Explaining to Me in Excruciating Detail Your Opinions on Death and Mortality and the Fleeting Nature of Existence; I Don’t Suppose You Have a Second Hobby?

Some background on indie filmmaker and America’s leading Wyatt Earp cosplayer David Lowery would probably be useful. I won’t say that Mr. Lowery is obsessed with mortality, but he’s definitely figured out that one day he’s going to stop breathing forever and that the delicate homeostasis of his body will respond negatively to this development. The towering, silent, guiding and indeterminate meaningfulness of the big period at the end of the sentence can be felt through multiple movies in his filmography, oftentimes going scenes-long stretches in which it is never directly acknowledged, but sure as shit is there all the same. Essential, though, is that Lowery never seem too interested in pontificating on death itself but rather on investigating how the various components of the human experience can be thrown into different and more elucidating relief when viewed in immediate proximity to the big no-breathy-no-more moment (this is kind of like John McLean’s approach in Slow West, which I have reviewed before!). When you look at Lowery’s work it’s not so much death, death, death as it is love and consciousness and time as viewed against the backdrop of death (A Ghost Story), enjoying the simple things in life even more as you approach death (The Old Man and the Gun), the realization that changes in time and milieu are unreturnable and thereby represent a certain type of death (Pete’s Dragon). Lowery is (thankfully) not some nihilist but more like a photographer taking pictures of his favorite things in life and developing them in different solutions of mortality to see how the composition is changed in the subsequent reaction – which details fade to irrelevance, which ones dominate the frame.

And the examples of this preoccupation are many. As the opening shot of the movie pulls back from that grimy street we hear – and then pass by – water dropping from an unseen crack in the ceiling with a tattoo that borders on impatience. It’s a sign that we’re in a cheap-o building, sure, but it’s also our first instance of a pendulum hurriedly counting the seconds, of sand falling from an hourglass. And it’s not just falling, it’s falling fast, trying in vain to remind our snoozing whore-connoisseur Gawain that he has perilously little time to add meaning, narrative to his otherwise forgettable existence. Continuing the water theme, Gawain is also constantly splashing pretty much any liquid he can find on his face – from a practical standpoint, it’s because he’s usually either shitfaced or fresh from an ass-kicking, but with Lowery’s focus in this movie being what it is it’s hard to not see this as a play on purification, of preparing yourself for your material end, when you sure as shit better have some cleaner part of you that will survive your mostly-meaningless physical finale and keep on keeping on after your body falls useless to the ground. Right from the jump in this delightfully-focused-even-as-it-seemingly-includes-every-idea-anyone-has-ever-had feature film we see the “death” side of Lowery’s go-to equation written as loudly as those deliciously ostentatious title cards.

I Don’t Want the Fact That a Forest Spirit is Going to Cut Your Fucking Head off Next Christmas to Stop You From Enjoying Your High School Years

Alright, so we’ve got the death part down (it’s everywhere, really, just look at all the skulls and corpses), so what’s the thing being butted against it, the part of the human experience being thrown into both scathing and sensitive relief by virtue of death’s constant presence on its borders? Well, I didn’t mention the dumb young a few paragraphs ago by accident: it’s coming-of-age, and a specific age-coming at that. As we see throughout the movie Lowery defines growing up as accepting both the relative unimportance of the part of you that physically lived your story and the newfound primacy of the story itself, left ghost-like and honest in your body’s wake. The two can’t continue concurrently forever, and a sunderin’ is a comin’ regardless of if or how you try to run. All you can hope to do is transfer all dignity to the memory of your actions and be cool with the fact that the imprints of the actions themselves are going to be grown over, quite dispassionately, with moss and time. That’s easier said than done, and bumps in this process come from exactly where you would expect them to come, especially when our focus is young people: by liking the physical so much – because the physical can whore it up, skateboard, speculate about different kinds of pie, jump really high, try on cool shirts, eat roast beef for breakfast, sing along to “Mambo #5” even though “The Sound of Silence” is playing on the radio, and other things, too – that they try to preserve that more materially delicious part of their existence at the expense of the far more esoteric “they’ll write poems about me one day, which I guess is cool.”

And this is where Gawain comes in. Lowery, as well as the anonymous poet who presumably wrote the story as a subtle reminder to his kids that they were all a bunch of selfish pricks, wants Gawain – out of all the possible knights in Camelot – as his protagonist for a reason. Just look at him. He’s a putz! It’s played up more in this movie than in the poem itself, which given Lowery’s prerogatives makes perfect sense, but the details are manifest either way. Let’s look at all the impressive feats performed by our big, strong movie lad. His journey consists of no less than: getting tricked by Barry Keoghan, a man who only exists in movies to be suspicious; losing all of his shit and responding to this conflict by screaming like a sociopathic toddler; being a dick to a fox; encountering a restless spirit who desperately needs him to put her to rest and immediately asking what’s in it for him; almost drowning in multiple puddles; falling down a hill; falling down a second hill, but this time while tripping balls; entering into a competition in which all he must do to be declared victor is not accept a handy from some guy’s wife and then immediately accepting the handy (while grandma is watching, no less); having a forest spirit lay down arms before him and instead of realizing the fairly obvious point being made about desperation and cooling his hot blood instead goes full Mel Gibson on the fucker, doing everything short of screaming “Wu-Tang!” before cutting Jolly Green’s head off. This is not knightly – sorry, squirely – behavior, it’s the action of a dumb fucking kid! And that’s fucking great, because by having such a solid lattice of stupid, oftentimes contemptible behavior already laid down Lowery can embellish – just as he embellishes the coming-of-age aspects of the original poem – the more esoteric commentaries on death, narrative, flight, and acceptance with ease and aplomb. But while these esoteric commentaries on death, narrative, flight, and acceptance are fascinating in their own right I will not expound upon them for fear of wasting too much time and getting too far up my own ass in analysis.

The More Esoteric Commentaries on Death, Narrative, Flight, and Acceptance

Fucking sike! Of course we’re going to talk about those things in stupid, obnoxious amounts of detail. Concerned about getting too far up my own ass? I live inside of my own ass. I have an entire paragraph outlined about circles, you assholes. See, here it is:

Circles in this story are pretty much a middle finger to the concept of agency. Circles, you’ll be interested to hear, travel exclusively in a circle, always delivering you somewhere predictable, circumscribing your movement and, most importantly, stressing the finite nature of your journey. When you squirm, then crawl, then walk, then hobble your way away from the oblivion you came from you’re just moving right back towards that oblivion again. Unlike our friend the ray, who just shoots off into eternity, a circle is a submission to the fallibility of your movement, which of course dovetails nicely with Lowery’s conception of coming-of-age, and his choice of Gawain’s story to elucidate that conception. And boy-fucking-howdy do those roundy-round images bedeck this movie: Arthur’s crown is a circle; he and his silly boys meet about the round table; when Arthur is performing his Christmas-day grandpa ramble about the fleeting nature of time he looks up at a round window in the ceiling, filled with light because the legendary king himself is nearing the end of his revolution; the puppet show illustrates the changing of the seasons with a rotating wheel; the camera work has multiple 360° movements; sometimes the camera rotates about another axis 180° to show the inversion of Gawain’s reality compared to the story he would prefer to leave behind… these aren’t the idle observations of a man reduced to eggplant-levels of cognizance during his viewing of the movie and just kind of pointing at the screen while yelling, “look! shapes!” and then clapping his hands – much like water and purification, Lowery makes sure to steep his telling of the story in reminders that the physical is always approaching its end, that one end of the circle will always collide with its origin. It’s the terminable nature of the physical that must be acknowledged in order to continue on in any capacity when the end has met with the beginning again, when you can finally see if you really did manage to come of age in time to turn that end into a different kind of beginning, even if your fucking head still gets chopped off, regardless.

So what’s the counterpoint to all this hot round-boy action? Well, I hope you like your insurgence infinitely thin, because it’s lines (isn’t old English literature fun, you get to engage in debates over whether or not the author was prioritizing circles or lines in their imagery and then WHERE ARE YOU GOING). Because both Lowery and the anonymous poet whom I proved early in this essay hated his children are both scamps, “lines” in this context means both the actual, geometric line and lines from a story. Lines are shuttered space – manipulatable, filled with the promise of control and escape even though they offer nothing of the sort. At the beginning of Gawain’s journey, for instance, during that nifty camera pull back through the window and into the brothel we pass through a narrow slit, losing in our passage context and continuity and settling in on a snoozing Gawain dominating the frame. Anyone who has ever watched any movie starring a teenage since the invention of film knows this as the classic introduction to our endearingly-lazy hero, but that particular framing also stresses Lowery’s take on this category of film: Gawain is introduced after having passed through a vector that elides everything from view except for sweet, glorious him, awash in the deliciously-sweaty aftermath of all those physical indulgences he loves so much. He is dumb, indulgent, completely obsessed with himself, incapable of viewing life as anything more than a series of physical pleasures, and will require the entirety of the story, a hero’s journey worth of watching lines bend into circles, to appreciate that he needs to offer something else up at the end of it all, something that will endure when he will invariably fall.

And later, when that kinky seductress sets in on Gawain she tries to tempt him to break his pledge in more obvious ways (two tugs and a sparkling green sash, am I right, fellas) but her much cleverer attempt comes in the library, that glorious House of Lines. It’s there that she shows him all the stories he could possible hide in to better escape his destiny, his turning from flesh to memory, even telling him that she sometimes improves upon a story, actually rewrites a book in her own library when she sees the opportunity. And Gawain takes the opportunity, feverishly trying to escape into a linear narrative of immortality when kneeling before the Green Knight at the end, but the fantasy fades as his dreams of grandeur crack under reality’s undilutable presence. He really goes full Masterpiece Theatre with his desperate head-canon, telling himself that he’ll be king, that the round crown somehow won’t look silly, that he’ll age like Clooney, but the linear narrative being penned by his own hand falls apart all the same. And what’s one of the final camera movements in that long escape sequence, the one culminating in Gawain realizing he has escaped nothing, that even after hiding for decades as the king he is still destined to be head-circumcised by the Green Knight? A fucking circle.

Your Argument Isn’t Bad, but Could You Make it Again With Fingerpaint?

And there are even more visual cues that illustrate Lowery’s intentions. Let’s take his use of color, for instance. Colors are just shapes for people who are bad at math, but they still fit into the same schema as the circle/line dynamic. Repping Team Circle is green, which makes sense and I could probably just point to the fucking title of the movie and call it a day but we’re stroking, here, so let’s go a little deeper: if Lowery’s conception of coming-of-age is predicated on the end of the physical and the submission to forces greater than yourself, ones that are – and this is pretty important – so much larger than you as to be apathetic to your entire journey, just viewing you as another thing to grow over, then green is pretty much the “the light at the end of Daisy’s dock represents the American Dream” of choices, here. Your falling into myth and physical ruin as the price paid to unloose the eternal version of yourself is green as hell: the chapel in which Gawain is undergoing his own transformation is materially falling apart but doing just fine as far as growth, nature, and green are concerned because they have the run of the place. The Green Knight’s own axe causes the spontaneous growth of moss wherever it is laid, an almost anthropomorphizing of eternity’s hunger, as it climbs over and dominates whatever it is allowed to touch. And remember Gawain’s ‘shroom trip? Hand got a little fungus-y there, didn’t it, which unless that scene was trying to tease a Swamp Thing spinoff was almost certainly Gawain’s sub-conscious brain trying to warn his much stupider waking brain about what is going to happen to his beloved physical existence upon offering up his head at the chapel.

And in the other corner we have blue, the color of artifice and pretension and superficial safety. Lady Two-Pumps, One Sash is always seen decked out in resplendent, immaculate blues, and the library-seduction scene is characterized by a blue-dominated frame. And when Gawain is dreaming of fleeing his destiny we see images of him marrying someone from his own social class, a subconscious storytelling choice that he of course thinks will build up even more classy artifice and protect him from the realities of life. What colors are he and his entourage, as well as the new bride and her entourage, wearing? Blue, baby. Organic colors of growth and nature and inevitability are thrown out in favor of desperately grasping at the apparent safety of, well, bullshitting yourself with placating stories. Oh, and as long as I am drilling threes from half-court, here, what’s the last thing that Gawain does in this same final dream sequence before being forced to accept that he is always going to be offered up to the Green Knight’s axe, one way or the other, either now or decades from now (this is right after the 360° I mentioned earlier in the steamy-hot circle/line section)? He pulls out the green sash, which is the first time we’ve seen that color in quite some time. Don’t worry about congratulating me on noticing things, I am never not congratulating myself on noticing things.

The flawless capstone to all of this use of color is King Arthur’s perpetual appearance in saintly whites. Played by Sean Harris, who you order from a catalogue whenever you want a character’s dialogue to flex with gravitas even as nobody has any idea what the fuck he’s saying, this version of the king is decrepit, liver-spotted, dark around the eyes for lost sleep that can never be recovered, and comporting himself with what little grace his failing body still has the fight to show out in. It is of course a massive and deliberate irony that in this story about stories and their immortalizing qualities that the greatest legend of them all is the most physically human, worn down to the brink of physical ruin and mental helplessness by the very same adventures that have rendered him eternal in the eyes of those who will never see him. But this is also the source of his grace: Arthur does not hide in his stories, doesn’t wrap them about his waist like a green sash. His stories are, rather, the preserving medium of what he believed in, and by making that distinction between two different kinds of survival – in understanding that the cleaving of the body and memory into two unreturnable entities is only to be feared if the body is valued that much more than the memory – he approaches (really slowly, while constantly pronouncing “Gawain” like a drunk) his material end without fear. That he’d be draped by the director in angelic whites as a reward should be a hint to Gawain (sorry, I mean gERRRwIn) and the audience of what their prerogatives should be in life.

Kill My Evil Twin, Everybody Hates That Guy!

Hey, when you combine circles and lines and colors together what do you get? Alright, you get a lot of things, but one of those a lot of things that you get are paintings. Paintings in this movie might be the ultimate physical representation of artifice and the necessity of accepting the truth of your story. They’re so direct, in fact, that the two relevant paintings are only shown once each, because any more than that would be like if Lowery just placed a laminated copy of his director’s notes on each seat in every theatre in the world showing the film. First up is the painting that Gawain commissions before leaving on his adventure-but-it’s-more-like-the-Griswalds-going-on-vacation-than-anything-worth-writing-a-poem-about: it is monolithic, stately, incurious and rote – basically ye olde version of Photoshop, with all the blemishes (and that motherfucker Gawain is pretty much nothing but blemishes) airbrushed out and replaced with a generic and undeniable ubiquity. This makes sense given it’s the beginning of his journey. Gawain wants a flawlessly heroic image of himself immortalized somewhere, some lie of a story that he can endure the ravages of time with, martini in hand, while everybody else falls to shit and loam and is grown over by time’s indefatigable need for more things over which to consume. And when Lord Man-Smooch and Lady Doublepump provide him with a real portrait of himself later in the movie, upside down and steeped in darkness, an image about as far away from Arthur’s perfect white as humanly possible, isn’t an accident (there are no accidents in fiction, except casting Clint Howard in anything). We’re seeing what they see, why the feel the need to test and educate him – someone who is so ass-backwards from the chivalric ideal that he needs to be portrayed the wrong fucking side up, just to stress that he’s really bad at this.

The End

“Is this all there is?”

“Oh, get fucked.”

This approximation of pre-acceptance Gawain’s final encounter with the Green Knight is about as explicit as Lowery’s editorial voice ever gets. Gawain, who apparently hasn’t noticed all the fucking green circles everywhere, still doesn’t understand the schema that is body and memory are subject to, and that there’s no way to save the former, so he should be far more concerned with the latter. He’s still a kid. It’s only after the elaborate dream sequence, in which Gawain reveals his continued ignorance by thinking he can make himself an adult by simply imagining himself as an older and fancier Gawain, only to still see everything fall to shit around him, that he finally comes of age, realizing that it is a moment, a choice, and an acceptance that brings about adulthood, and not just living for a really long fucking time. Obviously it’s a bummer that he’ll never be able to get freaky with pixie-cut Tomb Raider again, but rules are rules, time is time, and if you have to become an adult the hard way, which is apparently the only way, you might as well have your luggage ready, and at least do something that makes that romanticized portrait of yourself back at the castle have some claim of having been drawn from life.