A24 studios has recently released a new trailer for the film The Green Knight, an adaptation of the wonderful medieval Arthurian poem Gawain and the Green Knight. Along with the trailer – which revealed much more about the film than previous teasers – was a promised release in July. (The studio delayed sending the film to theaters last year due to Covid disruptions.) Partly because of this building anticipation, and partly because A24 has gained a reputation as a studio producing unorthodox and interesting films, the trailer has created a bit of buzz online in recent days. Personally, I’m excited to see it, and have been for quite some time. ‘Gawain’ is one of my favorite texts I’ve read for my studies this past year, and Simon Armitage’s alliterative translation is a pure joy to read.

After watching the trailer though, as any nerd typically feels about page-to-screen adaptations, I was also somewhat wary about what they’ve done with the tale. There’s a talking fox in the trailer?! What’s that all about??? (We’ll get to that later…) Either way, this skepticism leads us to some interesting conversation. 

The first thing to note is that director David Lowery obviously has made the story significantly darker. The trailer has a sinister feeling about it, the cinematography and figures flashing across the screen reminiscent of an unsettling, violent and supernatural dreamscape. While much of this is certainly there in the text, it doesn’t seem to be the dominant tone of the original telling. In fact, at many points, the poem is hilarious. If nothing else it is self-aware, poking fun at itself and the chivalric genre it inhabits.

The week before I read the poem in preparation for an essay earlier this year, I mentioned the upcoming film to my medieval literature teacher. I told him with glee how dark and foreboding the film looked, and he shook his head and let out a scholarly lament. “They’re probably going to miss the humor in it...” he said. “It’s a funny poem.” As I read it that following week, I understood precisely what he meant. When describing Arthur’s court feasting, for example, the narrator gets tired of listing the food. King Arthur’s few lines in the poem paint him as silly and immature. The Green Knight arrives and pokes fun at Arthur’s legendary court. When he’s beheaded, an impromptu keep-away game breaks out with his head, much of the crowd getting in on the macabre joke (the image of a beheaded Green Knight scurrying after his own head is just ridiculous). When Gawain goes out into the wilderness in search of the Green Knight, the expected chivalric account of his exploits is passed over by the narrator with a few lines amounting to “He did some cool stuff.” (This open space in the narrative seems to be a big place where they’ve innovated and expanded on the story.) There are innuendos left and right in the latter portion of the poem… Well, you get the picture. There’s a lot of jokes in the poem that are geared toward its contemporary listeners familiar with Arthuriana. 

And now, to undercut my argument above: I’m not quite sure I care about this darker departure from the original. It seems like Lowery has some pretty good reasons for doing so.

This brings us back to the fox… At first glance, I was quite confused by its appearance in the film. Just… Why?! Yet as I reflected a bit more, I realized that there were elements here that made sense, and could even be signs that Lowery is alert to some of the subtler elements of the story, particularly patterns of medieval storytelling and symbolism coinciding with the original historical context of the poem. Who knows, perhaps when I eventually watch the film I’ll leave the theater laughing at how corny a talking fox turned out to be. Still, there may be something here. While it doesn’t have a soliloquy in the poem, the figure of a fox does show up in one of the hunting sequences. Not just any fox, but Reynard the fox, a popular figure in medieval tales, unsurprisingly an elusive and devious character. Like a good Cambridge English student, I went straight to Wikipedia for answers. Apparently, besides the Gawain Poet, Chaucer, Goethe and Freud all wrote about Reynard in some capacity, along with poets in many European cultures over the centuries. Needless to say then, there’s a serious precedent for this figure appearing in tales, and its appearance often indicates some kind of significant meaning in the text.

Once I got here, everything else started to fall into place. The entire tale pivots around cunning and subterfuge, after all. Most of the main characters in the poem are engaged in some form of deceit and concealment, and the entire poem is predicated on the playing of games and the ways in which these games can be contorted to suit the players. In fact, Reynard shows up in the poem when Gawain pulls his biggest stunt of the poem, something that never had dawned on me until about five minutes ago… On top of this, as I mentioned briefly above, there’s plenty of mysterious, unsettling, magical, dark and inexplicable features of the original poem. So, similar to the fox, Lowery has taken aspects of the tale that are indeed there in the text, and adapted them to fit his own creative vision. I for one am interested to see what else he’s done with the tale.

A final thought: while we understandably lament the hordes of Peter Jacksons at the gates of our beloved tales, we have to admit that almost every single classic we cling to is in some way adapted from another source. For my skeptical readers here, see: The Canterbury Tales, The Aeneid, almost the entire Shakespeare canon. We like to think that our favorite stories were gifted to Moses on stone tablets, but frankly, they’re usually produced by some sacrilegious artist trying to make a name for themself. In fact, the original Gawain poem is itself a kind of deviation from (or at least elaboration upon) Arthurian myth, which is itself a hodge-podge of tales and sources and interpretations and retellings and translations… Admittedly, I’m far from an expert here, but it almost feels like the entire point of the Arthurian myth is that it’s supposed to be retold, again and again and again. Some retellings just turn out darker than others.

So in July, a few days before I go to the theater, I plan to pick up Armitage’s magical translation of the poem and laugh at the tight green pants the Green Knight wears to Arthur’s court. After that, I’m happy to be scared of the dark for a few days when I leave the movies.