“Is this all there is?”
“What else ought there be?”
David Lowery’sThe Green Knightis a lavish chivalric feast steeped in the dirt, grime, and sweat—there is so much sweat—of its medieval time period, a dreamy Arthurian tale of honor and blood and sacrifice that absolutely, 100% should not make you think of internet memes. And yet. As the credits rolled onThe Green Knight,my unwell mind wandered immediately to a popular meme that sloppily edits a line by Thanos fromAvengers: Infinity War.It’s a photo you’ve probably seen hundreds of times beneath anybody who just made a complete ass of themselves for a little attention online, a common act of dickishness in an age where dignity is gladly traded for likes and impressions. It’s Thanos, smug and unbothered, with the caption: “All that for a drop of clout.”
RELATED:‘The Green Knight’ Is a Sumptuous, Surreal Exploration of Honor’s Value in the Face of Death | ReviewThe meme andThe Green Knightare two incredibly different things that are both driving toward a thoroughly modern aspect of the human condition—especially familiar to post-crash millennials and the TikTok generation who came after us—our tendency to grind and scrape and kill ourselves in pursuit of a self-fulfillment we couldn’t even describe, young people who aren’t scientists but could damn sure tell you why social media alerts lead to a boost of serotonin. It’s only relatively recently that we’ve put a name to our various anxieties, but asThe Green Knightdemonstrates, imposter syndrome has been around since King Arthur literally pulled a sword out of a stone instead of seeing a therapist.
Of all the changes Lowery made to the original poem, the most vital is to the central character, Gawain (Dev Patel). No longer is Gawain the picture of chivalric knightly grace, “to whose name was attached all glory and fame for refinement of virtue,” asBernard O’Donoghue’s translation of the poem puts it. He’s not even aknight. Patel’s Gawain is Arthur’s cocksure nephew, all swagger and anxiety in equal measure, not much more than an ambitious kid in King Arthur’s court. Patel is remarkable in the role, somehow occupying a state of confidence and anxiety at all times, the two emotions constantly battling across his bearded, permanently soaking wet face. We meet him in a brothel, all loose-limbed charm, all easy charisma, the camera following him through a den of sin and he couldn’t look more at home. Contrast that with the way Patelcontractsas he sits next to Arthur (Sean Harris) and Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie), a place of honor, in a room full of men whose accomplishments have become legend. He feels small; feelsscared. And when Arthur asks Gawain to regale him with a tale of his own—my man asked for a cover letter on thespot—you won’t find a more relatable expression than the crumbling of Patel’s face. He’s arrived at the nightmare scenario of the young and aimlessly ambitious: That someone will notice he doesn’t belong, that his confidence is of the fake-it-til-you-make-it variety, that despite what it may seem, he stills has no actual stories to tell.
Until a story walks into the room. When The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) presents his offer to the Round Table—anyone who lands a blow against him gets his weapon, but he gets to return the exact same blow one year later—Gawain leaps at the chance, an opportunity to be the center of attention outweighing the fact an actual Ent-monster just rode into the party. Lowery’s second most crucial change to the source material is to Arthur. This isn’t the robust adventurer of legend; Harris plays the character like a myth at the end of its rope, throat hoarse and body shrunken, and with a lifetime’s worth of having seen and done some serious shit in his eyes when he looks to Gawain and says, “remember, it is only a game.” Gawain nods, but he isn’t listening. His meal ticket is before him, bowing his great green head. The fast track to fame. Where a simple poke or prod would end this Christmas game with a laugh, Gawain strikes with all the fury of an intern being asked to Tweet from the company account for the first time, beheading the Green Knight and signing his own death warrant in the process. The Green Knight picks up his head and promises the same blow in one year, leaving a doomed Gawain to his 365 days of anxiety and loneliness.
All that, for a drop of clout.
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What I particularly love about the epic, phantasmagorical journey that follows is that for not one moment does Gawain know why he’s doing it. He crawls through mud and rain, dives to the bottom of supernatural wading pools, collides with scavengers and ghosts and giants and talking foxes, descends further and further into a world where reality melts into allegory all for the vaguest definitions of honor and duty, for the unfounded hope that reaching Point B will make him a happier person than he was at Point A. Lowery purposely keeps Gawain’s North Star ambivalent, and Patel’s performance offers mostly resigned sorrow; Gawain looksmiserablefor every step of the journey—wearing a face familiar to anyone whose ever waited for a commuter train at 6 AM on a Monday—but he keeps going because he must, hemust, there’s a promise ofsomething more than thisat the end. When asked outright by The Lord (Joel Edgerton) what that something might be, the answer is “honor?” with an emphasis on the question mark, arguably the most illuminating moment of the film. That’s a peek at the truth behind the journey; Gawain is grasping at straws, hoping that the next accomplishment will be the one to finally make him feel whole. “Honor” is just a stand-in; “honor” is the lies we tell to make sure no one knows we’re hanging on by a thread.
It’s not the most devastating exchangeThe Green Knighthas to offer, though. That comes at the end, after Gawain has dragged himself through pain and debasement, through mud and shit, to finally reach the Green Chapel and kneel before the great, final answer to the questions he doesn’t know how to ask. The Green Knight awakes, gets off his perch, and tells Gawain to get ready for the beheading he has coming for him. That’s the conclusion. That’s the prize. His voice a childlike quiver, Gawain asks: “Is this all there is?”
“What else ought there be?” Five words delivered in Ralph Ineson’s bass rumble that recontextualizes a life, that puts into perspective the choice to grind and scrape and kill yourself in search of contentment that never comes. You don’t reach an end, you just reach the end. There’s such a brutal, cold finality to the question “what else ought there be?” Something so unfair, and so true. Lowery launches us into one of the most effective endings in recent memory, a vision of what Gawain’s future could be like if he continues to live solely for an empty goal, if he flees the Green Knight with his promise unfulfilled and returns home to bask in accolades he didn’t earn. He gets the titles, the power, the heir, all of it hollow, all of it carving out what made him human and leaving him not much more than a stone statue on a throne, a husk left for the poets to aggrandize. He would have gotten everything he wanted and asked, every step of the way, “Is this all there is?”
We return to the Green Chapel to see Gawain remove any magical safety nets he’d been carrying, lower his head, and accept the end he brought on himself, and what happens next—whether he lives or dies—doesn’t matter. Gawain has completed a deeply modern version of the hero’s journey, just by recognizing the power of a single moment’s mindfulness. He’d already met giants, but even they couldn’t drive home the point he needed: You keep your head by occasionally pulling it out of the clouds.
