Sir Gawain and the Unification of Opposites

“The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth… The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth.” — Blaise Pascal

“Matter is entirely passive and in consequence entirely obedient to God’s will… In the beauty of the world brute necessity becomes an object of love.” — Simone Weil

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, like David Lowery’s wild art-house adaptation of it, is energized by contradiction.

As with much of Arthurian lore, it’s probably the product of Welsh pagan mythology transforming into legends about Christian heroes. Sorcerers exist alongside priests, often complexly. One of the ways the poem still engages the reader is in how well it illuminates the edges of this clash, even as it overall affirms the triumph of Christian virtue and chivalry.

David Lowery’s adaptation emphasizes and investigates these seeming contradictions. It doesn’t scrub out the ambiguous weirdness of the poem and reify its chivalric values without critique; nor, for all the extra weirdness it heaps on, does it simply do the opposite and one-notedly “subvert” its protagonists, mocking their naïveté. Instead, The Green Knight uses the path of its narrative to peel back the surface layers of these opposed frameworks, find the overlaps between them, and ultimately point to a third way which synthesizes and transcends both.

It begins its process by showing us the shadow-sides of Camelot. Merlin and Arthur are still legends in this world, but self-conscious and wrinkled ones. The good Christian King is sick, aging, and the proud killer of thousands of enemy soldiers. His city is bleak, crumbling on the heath, and what forests can be found nearby are nearly stripped bare from logging. Rigid class divides are painful and unjust. This is a conflicted society, justifying itself by the ideals of honor, approbation, and faith above all else.

In sober moments, Lowery’s Gawain aspires earnestly to such ideals of Christian restraint and reward, desiring the self-respect and status that comes with honor. In daily life, though, he acts in near total opposition to the knight’s Pentangle of friendship, generosity, chastity, courtesy and piety, instead spending his time chasing pleasurable distraction from the whirling fear of loss and pain that we consistently watch him dance on the edge of. When his peasant sweetheart Essel asks to be his lady, he goes silent, unable to commit or give her a straight answer. Neither can Gawain think of anything to offer when King Arthur asks for a character-revealing story about his life. Exactly how our protagonist has gotten to a place of such spiritual sickness isn’t spelled out for us — whether it be a guarded, privileged upbringing or a general accident of contact with the world. The point is he’s stuck.

Watching her son while observing an entirely different value system is Morgan le Fay, Gawain’s mother in this adaptation, who is something of an outsider at Arthur’s court. Secretly a pagan sorceress, she follows a pre-Christian worldview that still believes in the strength of natural powers, and turns to such elemental forces for practical help in her social world. As such, though not necessarily a believer in the mythologized symbols of knighthood or royalty as her ne’er-do-well son is, her concern for his social advance, maturation and happiness is more than enough to prompt her to summon the Green Knight on Christmas Day.

The towering treelike spirit responds immediately when she does so, crashing and challenging Arthur’s celebrating court with the bait of gallantry. As Lowery suggests in an interview, Morgan’s intention in the film may very well be to pull King Arthur into the spirit’s game, killing him and opening up the throne for Gawain.

But that plan doesn’t last long, for her self-resenting son suddenly finds himself full of enough liquid courage to step forward instead and behead the Knight in a showy attempt to attain honor. Of course, things go south: the creature is still alive, and now Gawain’s roped into a quest that will end, it would seem, in his own beheading. Everyone’s shocked and disturbed — Gawain most of all.

Essel, his lover, suggests he simply reject the obligation— why risk his life for an abstract code of honor? But though he flirts with that idea, it becomes clear to Gawain that he must go. He has to see if he can indeed face the Green Knight, and whether his ambition in the court wasn’t just a fluke. He has to see if greatness is possible for him, rescuing him from the life he feels he’s squandering.

And so, just before her son leaves on his quest, Morgan le Fay adjusts her plans and provides him an additional reassurance for the profitability of his journey, this one physical: a magically-enchanted green sash that will protect him from any bodily harm. With it he can be sure to survive his quest and return a hero, still next in line for the throne.

Ironically, this pagan gift thus makes literal the promise of the chivalric goal of honor — that one’s identity and sense of importance can be absolved from the threat of death, even as one walks into extreme danger for the sake of such absolution. Indeed, perfectly “selfless” knightly conduct actually protects the knight’s ego from the threat of destruction, just as magical manipulations serve the interests of the pagan who ostensibly bows to the way of the earth. It is these two worldviews’ mutual paradox, then, that first connects them.

Of course, as life will have it, Gawain’s assurances (and Morgan’s plans) are almost immediately destabilized when he gets robbed of the green sash and all of his knightly signifiers by a peasant boy he fails to show generosity towards. Bound and gagged, vulnerable to the elements, his protection suddenly in question, Gawain envisions himself a corpse. It terrifies him, and mobilizes his escape.

Now free but lost and exposed, with little knowledge of what to do, the bluntness of Gawain’s fearful self-absorption is slowly, steadily dulled as he is gradually forced to actually face the unknown — and, without intending to, organically grow in the various virtues of the knight’s Pentangle.

Having been shown what malice underlies purely transactional help by the peasant boy, Gawain first successfully shows courtesy to St. Winifred by retrieving her severed head from a lake for her ghost, all without promise of reward. Not long after this, he extends friendship to a refuge-seeking fox during a brutal trek through the wilderness, apparently truly understanding its suffering from the cold for the first time —despite such a creature only being considered a game prize by peers like the hunter Lord Bertilak. Each of these feats is accomplished not by the assertion of some sort of personally-inherent merit, but as the result of life circumstances bringing Gawain into new feelings and understandings. He himself doesn’t see this yet, as demonstrated by his clumsy insistence to Lord Bertilak that honor will satisfy him, but in this section of the film Gawain is actually beginning to touch something beyond the frameworks that jostle him to and fro.

What pulls our hero clean out of dalliance with this new way of being, though, is his encounter with Lady Bertilak, who Morgan le Fay conjures up to test his virtue of chastity and return the lost green sash before Gawain faces the deadly Green Knight. Made to look nearly identical to Essel, the Lady is significantly a noble where Essel is a peasant, and lusts after the aesthetic of Gawain’s knightly persona in a way that Essel does not. At the same time, she doesn’t really believe in the tenets of their chivalric world, instead waxing poetic about the inevitability of humanity’s natural ruin much in the way of Morgan’s practical, self-interested paganism.

Gawain is petrified by the Lady’s advances — on the one hand provoked and tempted by her disregard for social code, on the other hand afraid to be unfaithful with her and dash the knightly persona she finds compelling. Ultimately, though, the “choice” she ends up offering him between dishonorably breaching rules of chivalry and re-accepting the green sash is a false one, as we again see the paganism-Christianity binary in this world display a mutually contradictory denial of death — and, now, the clear failure of such a denial. For, internally trapped as he is between two impossible options, Gawain just ends up ejaculating on the sash and fleeing with his desperately reaffirmed assurance in hand, the way he always has.

With his new experiences and perspective, though, Gawain seems more irritably aware of this reaction’s deep insufficiency than ever. When his (magically talking) fox companion questions his choice to cling to the girdle as they approach the Green Chapel, Gawain rejects their budding friendship and covers the remaining distance alone, escaping more desperately than ever back into his dreams of liberating greatness, of finally fulfilling his obligation and reaping rewards. After all, what other solution exists?

It is in this desperate state that Gawain waits at the Knight’s feet in the Green Chapel for his time of beheading to arrive, miserable and hoping against hope that his prospects will pay out. When the moment actually arrives, though, the risk and suspense become unbearable. Gawain flinches before the Knight’s swing, and pleas for him to wait for one moment.

“Wait, wait — is that all there is?” He asks.

“What else ought there be?” The Knight calmly counters.

Stricken with terror, Gawain does the only life-saving thing that he’s ever been able to do, the thing that got him out of the door in the first place and allowed him to grow on his journey: he stops squirming long enough to see what’s right in front of him. In this case, it’s his future.

He sees the life ahead of him where he runs away from his fate, continuing to cling to the belief that there ought to be something else — control, indefinitely sustained life, success — and how utterly hollow and unsatisfactory it is.

How, in such a framework, virtue and care for others only truly matter in so far as they support his assurance that things will be okay — beyond which function, anything can be (and is) sacrificed. He sees how this compromise poisons and hollows out every lovely, uncontrollable thing that actually does exist in his life — like his love for Essel, which his noble peers and mother would have the gall to condemn — even as it can never quite protect him from decay and death. Because nothing can.

This is all to say that Gawain sees how such a basic denial of the facts of life takes goodness — that force in us which sees the real and submits to bow humbly and harmoniously before it, even the executioner’s ax — and exchanges it for suffering in pursuit of something that cannot be.

Suddenly flooded with insight, Gawain requests that the Green Knight refrain from offering his stroke one more time — this time in order to tear the green sash from his waist.

In doing so, he also releases the yoke of fear and contradiction that has burdened him his entire journey. And when Gawain tells the Green Knight that he’s “ready now,” he fully embraces all of life as it exists: in the reality of virtues like courtesy or faithfulness, as discovered on his quest, but also in the reality of the people outside the castle doors, and of the foxes and trees, and all the things within and without his heart that others may not see or accept. That is, Gawain unintentionally becomes “great” in a way that no one one, not even the he himself, might recognize.

No, he doesn’t have any guarantee that he’s not still about to have his head lopped off after tearing off his sash. But whether he does or not is at this point irrelevant, because Gawain has made it down to accepting the person he is.

That being said, if the post-credits glimpse we get of a little girl playing with the King of Camelot’s discarded crown means something glad, it is further confirmation that what Gawain has learned on his inward journey home will follow him for the rest of life — in who and how he loves, in his passion and his living, in how he treats the people around him and the world he is inseparably intertwined with.