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Notes Towards a Close Reading of David Lowery’s 2021 Film The Green Knight

Notes Towards a Close Reading of David Lowery’s 2021 Film The Green Knight AbstractThis essay offers a close reading of David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight suggesting that the director has consciously subverted the text of his source to produce an always intriguing film whose debts to the medieval are many. Unlike previous directors whose ‘Gawain’ films failed even to engage with their medieval source, Lowery follows details in his source when it suits his purpose, but, more often than not, he adds scenes to, or deletes scenes from, the fourteenth-century Middle English poem. His additions are especially noteworthy in how they offer an alternate, perhaps even a queer, reading of the poem. Lowery’s goal seems to be to retell a basically linear tale in a more convoluted and circular manner thereby calling into question viewers’ thematic and narrative expectations. At the same time, Lowery’s film can be read as an antidote to the toxic masculinity found in so many other Arthurian texts across multiple genres. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the International Arthurian Society de Gruyter

Notes Towards a Close Reading of David Lowery’s 2021 Film The Green Knight

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2196-9353
eISSN
2196-9361
DOI
10.1515/jias-2022-0004
Publisher site
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Abstract

AbstractThis essay offers a close reading of David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight suggesting that the director has consciously subverted the text of his source to produce an always intriguing film whose debts to the medieval are many. Unlike previous directors whose ‘Gawain’ films failed even to engage with their medieval source, Lowery follows details in his source when it suits his purpose, but, more often than not, he adds scenes to, or deletes scenes from, the fourteenth-century Middle English poem. His additions are especially noteworthy in how they offer an alternate, perhaps even a queer, reading of the poem. Lowery’s goal seems to be to retell a basically linear tale in a more convoluted and circular manner thereby calling into question viewers’ thematic and narrative expectations. At the same time, Lowery’s film can be read as an antidote to the toxic masculinity found in so many other Arthurian texts across multiple genres.

Journal

Journal of the International Arthurian Society – de Gruyter

Published: Sep 1, 2022

Keywords: The Green Knight (2021 film); David Lowery; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Arthurian film; adaptation; Gawain; Morgan Le Fay; gender issues

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