We Want Wall. We Want Knight. Not

We Want Wall. We Want Knight. Not. Medievalism and the Atlanta Super Bowl 

Richard Utz 

ricutz@me.com

In December, 2018, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen made a baffling statement during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. When pressed on her views on how to best protect the country’s borders, she stated: “From Congress I would ask for wall. We need wall.” While some observers read her statement as a moment of comic relief in the midst of a looming government shutdown and the resignation of the defense secretary, Nielsen’s perhaps stress-induced double elision of the definite article revealed how the “wall” had become a self-standing but extremely vague signifier for the larger political struggle about immigration.

During the ensuing discussion, various Democratic politicians denounced the wall as an ineffective “medieval” solution. President Trump countered that a medieval wall “worked then, and it works even better now.” As Paul Sturtevant commented in the Washington Post, this exchange about the medieval ‘nature’ of the wall showed how both political positions misread medieval culture from a an uninformed presentist perspective: “Critics of the wall used the term derisively. When they say something is ‘medieval,’ they are evoking the outdated image of the ‘dark ages,’ where everyone was muddy, bloody, backward and superstitious. … President Trump linked the wall to the Middle Ages, knowing that “for a significant portion of the American public, especially among his base, being ‘medieval’ is not a bad thing. Instead, it’s aspirational.” His invocation of “medieval” seems to speak directly to a white nationalist audience whose members have been coopting racist and masculinist readings of the medieval world for many years. Remember the violent demonstrations at Charlottesville, VA, in 2017?

I was struck by a similar intentional elision of historical specificity and dog whistle referentiality when, some days ago, the widely known ‘Bud Knight’ began to be projected onto the still only half-finished 101 Marietta Street Building in Atlanta as part of the city’s public celebrations for the Super Bowl LIII. [Thanks to medievalist © Daniel Kline for the photo] This year’s ‘Bud Knight’ is an extension of Anheuser-Busch InBev corporation’s “Dilly Dilly” trilogy of medieval-themed Super Bowl ads which, according to research done at Humboldt University, Germany, and Stanford University, continue to sustain companies’ branding and sales efforts long after the actual sports event for which they are produced. Thus, the 2018 medievalist ad investment may well have increased Budweiser sales by as much as 3.9 percent and revenues by as much as 4.7 percent as the Super Bowl ads continued to run during the post-event weeks. It is clear that these impressive 2018 numbers convinced Anheuser-Bush InBev that the campaign might work even across multiple years.

Megan Arnot has recently provided a revealing assessment of the ‘Bud Knight’ and several other medieval-themed ads by Capital One, Gillette, the U.S. Marines, INTEL, Miller Lite, and Pepsi for The Public Medievalist: She concludes: “Advertising sells you an image of yourself, improved by their product.” Therefore, in order to make the typical Super Bowl audience purchase more Bud Light, offering them an image of martial and virile manhood is a tried and proven option. Of course, the advertisers don’t want to exclude women entirely: “But the focus is still on masculinity, particularly a martial or virile masculinity. In [the case of the ‘Bud Knight’ ads], masculinity does not have to mean a life that women can’t participate in. But men are always the majority of the central figures: the heroes, the kings, the knights. Though women may be present, the focus is on male figures—when they are not objects, women should be participating as one of the boys.”

If advocates of the “We Want Wall” campaign use it to rally President Trump’s electoral base with the help of a medievalist reference, Anheuser-Busch’s revival of the ‘We Want [Bud] Knight’ for Super Bowl LIII seems to follow a similar strategy, one geared towards an audience with a similar image of a martial and virile Middle Ages. I wonder, however, if the company and its ad agency realize that the vague reference to the imagined continuities between medieval knights and 21^st century football players and their fans may dredge up some unintended associations. After all, this year’s Super Bowl doesn’t take place in Minneapolis, MN but in Atlanta, GA, and for the U.S. South the history of knighthood is invariably linked with the history of slavery. Southern political leaders and plantation owners in the nineteenth and early twentieth century anchored their practices with numerous specific references to the Middle Ages, and the Southern belle and the Southern gentleman constructed their identities based on those of the medieval (English or Scottish) courtly Lord and Lady. If you don’t believe me, here is what Mark Twain had to say about the influence of Walter Scott’s historical novels (for example Ivanhoe) as a ‘cause’ for the U.S. Civil War in his Life on the Mississippi:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner–or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it– would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

Walk the streets of Atlanta, and you can trace the remnants of the mentality Twain (admittedly exaggeratedly) laments: Visit Margaret Mitchell House, and you may understand how Mitchell’s famed 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind, and its 1939 movie version yearn back to “…a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind….” Or stop by Rhodes Hall on Peachtree Street, a now musealized former private residence modeled after a medieval castle in 1905. It romanticizes the Lost Cause, its generals, politicians, and slavery in a series of magnificently produced painted glass windows. Rhodes Hall’s massive Romanesque Revival stone walls were (aptly) constructed with boulders extracted from Stone Mountain, a commanding geographical presence, 1,686 feet tall and 3.8 miles in base circumference, only 16 miles outside of the center of Atlanta. In 1915, stirred by the nostalgic depiction of the nineteenth-century history of the (first) Ku Klux Klan in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film, Birth of a Nation, activist William Simmons, together with over a dozen other men, revived the Klan on Thanksgiving Day, 1915, by igniting a flaming cross on top of the mountain. Stone Mountain also features the well-known gigantic three-acre relief sculpture, 400 feet above the ground, and inaugurated as recently as 1970, of Confederate icons Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, together with these cavaliers’ favorite horses, “Blackjack,” “Traveller,” and “Little Sorrel.” While owned by the State of Georgia, Stone Mountain has been transformed into a theme park with various seasonal events that attract c. four million annual visitors, more than any other place in the state. Except for its street address, 1000 Robert E. Lee Blvd, and the stone relief, the company has almost completely cleansed the site of its unpleasant racist history. However, this hasn’t kept ever new groups of neo-Nazis, Klan members, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Neo-Confederate Leaguers, and members of the heavily armed Georgia Security Force III% from reviving, most visibly during the 2016 Rock Stone Mountain event, the Confederate history of Stone Mountain and invite “every able bodied soul of our race” to defend “these lands of green glens, rolling hills, and deep glades” from “being purposely flooded with hordes of raping scoundrels.” The 2016 event was thwarted by the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, All Out ATL, and other counter protest groups, who easily outnumbered the right-wing groups and reclaimed Stone Mountain’s symbolic presence.

Tonight, on the evening of the Super Bowl, the 3,600 acre amusement park section of Stone Mountain is closed because, as Atlanta’s WSB-TV 2 reports, the owners of the park felt they could not provide sufficient security at the site. Park officials had known since November that white supremacists were planning a rally close to the widely televised Super Bowl. “Officials had been considering closing the park for at least a week after the group vowed to hold the rally despite being denied a permit. On Thursday, that group announced they had canceled their rally amid infighting and fears for personal safety.” According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, a small group of left-wing activists showed up on Saturday, despite the park closure. As they marched, they shouted “Good night, alt right” and “Death to the Klan,” burned a Klansman in effigy, and sported signs with slogans like “Sandblast Stone Mountain,” “Death to the KKK” and “Dixie be damned.” As a medievalist, who sees the connections among the above medievalisms, my own sign would probably have red, “We Don’t Want Knight.”

This is the context within which the famed ‘Bud Knight’ is making its reappearance in the 2019 Atlanta Skyline and at Super Bowl LIII. Unlike the harmless pun that brought us the Knights Inn hotel chain, the ‘Bud Knight’ needs to be recognized for what he is, even if he masquerades as just another fun superhero to please ‘the boys’.

Postscript: I wrote this entry and published it intentionally right before the Super Bowl game began. And then I witnessed one of the smartest and surprising commercial mashups between the Budweiser and Game of Thrones brands: Sir Gregor Clegane of GoT fame entered the world of the Bud Knight and simply killed him off.  In GoT, Sir Gregor is known as "The Mountain," a giant of a man who serves the evil queen Cersei. The mashup may have delivered us from "Knight", but now we have "Mountain" instead. And here in Atlanta, in light of the history and symbolic heritage of Stone Mountain, the mashup feels more like a step back towards 1915 than progress toward a world with less violence and racism.     

Richard Utz

Aquaman, dir. James Wan

SPONGE ARTHUR ROUND PANTS?

Aquaman, directed by James Wan

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

Cinema arthuriana is not a film genre.  Rather, it is a form of film medievalism that lately can be found in more and more cinematic genres.  Cinema arthuriana had its beginnings at least as early as 1904 when Thomas Edison, with mixed success, brought a version of Wagner’s Parsifal to the screen for New York audiences, thereby not only establishing cinema arthuriana as a new form of medievalism, but also reworking an already established form of medievalism, opera arthuriana, into a new genre. 

Twain has remained the most frequent source for cinema arthuriana on both the large and on the small screen, with nods (often more alleged than real) to Malory informing any number of other Arthurian films.  And Arthurian films (and television programs) have at times proven to be fades, and the current decade seems no exception.  The 1950s, for instance, gave us The Adventures of Sir Galahad (a serial), The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (a television series penned by blacklisted Hollywood writers), The Black Knight, at least three television versions of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, Knights of the Round Table, Knutzy Knights (a Three Stooges’ vehicle), a Spanish Parisfal, and Prince Valiant.

More recently, Arthur, or Arthurian motifs, can be found in some unexpected films: in the Kingsman franchise, in Ready Player One, in Mad Max: Fury Road, in Transformers: The Last Knight, even in the latest (and supposedly last) installment of the Syfy Channel’s Sharknado franchise.  And now in James Wan’s 2018 Aquaman.

Like Arthur, Aquaman has had a complicated legacy.  The DC Comics’ hero first appeared in 1941 in a supporting role, but his character subsequently came into its own when Aquaman became a founding member of the American Justice League.  As his character developed, his appearance also changed from wimpy kid to wonder boy to buff, often overly so, super hero—sometimes blonde, sometimes not; sometimes bearded, sometimes not.  Originally, his foes were Nazi submarine commanders and other Axis villains.  Eventually, his identity was fleshed (fished?) out: he was Arthur Curry, son of a lighthouse keeper and of an outcast queen of the underwater world of Atlantis.  By either his mother or his father, he had a troubled, or trouble-some, half-brother, with whom he would eventually come into conflict. His super powers included an ability to communicate with marine life and to live both on land and under water.  Aquaman’s character has appeared not only in print, but also on television and on film, and as the butt of a long-running joke on HBO’s series Entourage, in which Adrian Grenier’s Vince Chase was cast in a fictional version of Aquaman directed by Titanic’s James Cameron, but not in its sequel. (For more on Aquaman’s development as a superhero across multiple genres, see Alastair Dougall’s The DC Comics Encyclopedia.)

In James Wan’s Aquaman, Jason Momoa plays the title.  Momoa began his entertainment career in 1998 as a swimwear model.  At 19, he was chosen for the part of Jason Ioana, one of the lifeguards in the television action series Baywatch Hawaii.  After repeated trips to the gym and to the tattoo parlor, Momoa’s career blossomed, and he was cast in (literally) meatier roles including that of the title character in a remake of Conan the Barbarian and, perhaps more famously, that of Khal Drogo in HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Aquaman opens in Maine in 1985 as lighthouse keeper Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison) rescues a woman who has washed ashore.  She is Atlanna (Nicole Kidman, who adds much needed gravitas to the film), the princess of Atlantis, fleeing a forced marriage.  Thomas and Atlanna fall in love, and have a son, Arthur.  Atlanna is kidnapped and returned to Atlantis where she is executed for having a half-breed son by being sent into the ominous sounding Trench.  Flash forward to the present when that half-breed son Arthur, who has been secretly trained in Atlantian ways by Nuidis Vulko (Willem Dafoe), single handedly defeats a group of pirates attempting to hijack a Russian nuclear submarine.  When their leader, Jesse Kane (Michael Beach), is killed during the unsuccessful hijack attempt, his son David (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) vows revenge—David it turns out is a mercenary in the employ of Orm (Patrick Wilson), Arthur’s younger half-brother and the King of Atlantis.  Orm has David engineer an attack on Atlantis as a pretext for declaring war on the surface world.  To succeed in such a war, Orm must unite the kingdoms under the sea.  His attempts are thwarted by Princess Mera (Amber Heard), originally Orm’s fiancée, who soon falls in love with Arthur.  

 

Amber Heard as Mera

Arthur, Mera, and Vulko team up to find the long lost Trident of Atlan, which can only be secured by the rightful King of Atlantis.

The Trident is, of course, not easily found, and the search for the mythical talisman drives the plot of the middle of film which sees David Kane return as Black Manta—a potential super villain counterpart to Black Panther—to hinder Arthur and Mera’s quest.  After multiple adventures that include a trek across the Sahara and a visit to Sicily, the two end up beneath the surface of the ocean, defeating a legion of amphibious creatures in the Trench, and facing down the Karathen, a gigantic monster who guards the trident.  Arthur claims the Trident and astride a seahorse leads an army of sea creatures to defeat Orm.  Along the way, he discovers his mother is still alive.  Atlanna returns to Thomas.  Orm is imprisoned, and Arthur agrees to become King of Atlantis. 

Aquaman (Jason Momoa) on the left confronts his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson)

As superhero comics films go, Aquaman is nothing spectacular.  The plot wastes no time establishing a complicated backstory for its title character.  The film’s tone is uneven.  At times, the tone is serious; at times, tongue in cheek.  There are some throwaway lines of dialogue that are potentially funny, but both verbal and visual gags fall flat more often than not.  In one scene early in the film, when Arthur is confronted by three burly bikers in a bar, we expect the usual brawl that destroys the bar, but the three simply want to pose with Arthur for a selfie—which they incongruously snap using a shocking pink iPhone.  Arthur comes off as more than a bit thick; Mera is the brains of the duo.  Costumes hypersexualize the characters.  Momoa’s Aquaman seems to own no shirts; until he retrieves the Trident, he only wears waterproof form fitting vests to complement his skin tight waterproof jeans.  Heard’s outfits as Princess Mera are a study in aqua colored spandex. The pace of the film, which is too long by about half an hour, drags on and on until Arthur retrieves the Trident.  Then the action becomes a riot of CGI on overdrive as Arthur suddenly becomes Aquaman in a green and gold leaf costume, designed to leave nothing to the imagination, riding his seahorse and wielding the Trident to defeat a dizzying array of underwater enemies—so dizzying is that array that it is at times difficult to figure out who is fighting whom—or what.

The Arthurian elements are established by the title character’s first name, and by a variation on the traditionally problematic or unusual Arthurian parentage: for Ygraine and Uther read Atlanna and Thomas.  Aquaman, like Perceval in multiple versions of the Arthurian legend, initially defeats a knight in red armor—here, of course, a sea knight. While King Arthur’s last battle is usually with his illegitimate son Mordred, Aquaman’s last battle with his half-brother Orm is a close enough parallel.  Mera is part Guinevere, part good Morgan le Fay.  Vulko serves as Aquaman’s Merlin, and the Trident is, of course, the film’s Excalibur.  Malory has it that "whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born.”  In Aquaman, the ability to retrieve the Trident similarly guarantees who is “rightwise king born” of Atlantis. Aquaman’s interrogation by the Karathen at times recalls that of Arthur and his knights by Mighty Tim in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  In John Boorman’s Excalibur, Arthur learns that the secret of the Grail is that the land and the king are one.  In Aquaman, the title character declares that the land and the sea are one. 

Aquaman wears its eco-politics lightly. The counterattack that Orm leads against earth deposits back on land all the garbage that has been dumped into the world’s oceans to pollute them.  But there is no real green agenda to the film, hidden or otherwise.  The slow pace of the film’s middle is partially compensated for by the dizzying pace of its ending.  While Orm is imprisoned at the end of the film in a room with a view (a running joke from earlier in the film), we know enough about the fate of surviving film villains that he will inevitably return, especially since, as the final credits roll, a snarling, and wounded, David Kane reappears still vowing to kill Aquaman for the death of his father—thereby laying the groundwork for a sequel—one has already been greenlit—if not for a cinematic franchise.

The Arthuriad has proven attractive to writers and illustrators of comics for a very long time, perhaps most famously in the case of Hal Foster’s comic strip, Prince Valiant, where the title character, a banished Nordic Prince of Thule, starts out as squire to Sir Gawain.  The comic strip premiered in 1937 and inspired two feature-length films, an animated television series, multiple comic book and bande dessinée series, and a role-playing game. 

Aquaman’s characterization as a modern-day King Arthur does nothing to diminish the Arthuriad, rather it attests to its continuing elasticity.  Aquaman moves the Arthuriad into the world of comics and film superheroes.  And it won’t be the only film to do so.  This Spring promises another Hellboy film, with Milla Jovovich (who played Joan of Arc in the 1999 film The Messenger) as Nimue and Brian Gleeson as Merlin.  And, as if to prove further the prescience of Umberto Eco’s famous understatement in Travels in Hyperreality, “people seem to like the Middle Ages,” the “reel Middle Ages” as juvenilia will again soon be on display in Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King, in which a group of young boys joins forces with Patrick Stewart’s Merlin to defeat Rebecca Ferguson’s Morgana and save the world, and in Dean DeBlois’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third installment in the animated Viking film franchise. 

Aquaman, directed by James Wan from a screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McCormick and Will Beal; story by Geoff Johns, Will Beall and James Wan, based on characters from DC Comics’ Aquaman by Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger; edited by Kirk Morri; music by Rupert Gregson-Williams; cinematography by Don Burgess.  With Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Temuera Morrison, Ludi Lin, Michael Beach, Randall Park, and Graham McTavish.  Co-produced by DC Films, Cruel and Unusual Films, the Peter Safran Company, and Mad Ghost Productions. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.  Running time: 143 minutes. Release dates: November 26, 2018 (UK); December 21, 2018 (US).

Robin Hood, dir. O. Bathurst (2018)

Robbing the Hood:

Robin Hood, directed by Otto Bathurst, 2018.

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty

La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

The legend of Robin Hood celebrates transgressive behavior.  King Arthur is authoritarian—the focus of a structured legend rooted in long foundational medieval texts by the likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Sir Thomas Malory.  Robin Hood is anti-authoritarian—the focus of an unstructured legend rooted in popular culture and shorter anonymous texts.  In literature, the Hoodian legend begins as what Roman Catholics used to call an occasion of sin.  In the B-text of Piers Plowman, William Langland in the late fourteenth century presents an idle priest, a figure of sloth, who has failed to learn his prayers but who knows instead the “rymes of Robin Hood.”  Those “rymes” mark the literary beginning of a legend that would grow by bits and bobs and cross genres for centuries, adding along the way characters and incidents with which we have become more than familiar, and, at one point, resituating itself in the time of King Richard I, some two hundred or so years earlier than when it sprang up.

Film began its fascination with Robin Hood at least as early as 1908; television, in 1950 in the United States, and three years later in England.  Rarely, it is safe to say, no matter what genre or media is employed, does someone retell the story of Robin Hood without nodding to earlier versions of the tale and to contemporary politics.  In the case of cinema, arguably the three best Robin Hood films react to world conflicts past (the 1922 Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.), present (Richard Lester’s 1976 Robin and Marian starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn), and future (the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn).  The Robin Hoods of television have similarly been used for political purposes: opposing the Hollywood Blacklist (the 1950s’ The Adventures of Robin Hood), opposing pollution and attacks on the environment (the 1980s’ Robin of Sherwood), and opposing the policies of Mrs. Thatcher (the 1990s’ Maid Marian and Her Merry Men).

Film’s latest foray into the Greenwood—Otto Bathurst’s 2018 Robin Hood—nods to earlier versions of the legend and to contemporary politics.  We have some of the usual suspects—Marian, Little John, Friar Tuck, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Gisborne, Will Scarlet (identified in the final rolling credits as Will Tillerman).   Prince John, Queen Eleanor, and King Richard, along with a number of the usual merry men, are AWOL.  Parts of the plot seem familiar enough.  The Sheriff, here in cahoots with the Church, is taxing people to death.  Robin is intent on stopping him.  Robin’s weapon of choice is a bow and arrow—his archery skills unmatched.  But as familiar as all this may sound, the film as a whole takes a decidedly different course with already well-known Hoodian naremes, and not with total success.  Indeed, it is fair to say of the film that its whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

As the film opens, Robin of Loxley (Taran Eggerton) is leading a devil may care life comfortably ensconced in ancestral family home.  He stumbles on a horse thief, the not very well disguised Marian (Eve Hewson), who advocates a sort of income-inequality-is-bad philosophy light.  Marian’s costumer designer for this scene seems to have decided for some unknown reason that she needs to display as much of her breasts as it is possible to do so.  To be fair, the camera’s cinematic gaze here knows no gender prejudices.  Later in the film, Robin is wounded in the thigh by an arrow but must remove his shirt, and thereby display his twelve pack, to receive treatment.

In this Hoodian cinematic enterprise, Nottingham seems at the center of all things England, as the Crusades are being waged off in the East and need conscripts, so Robin receives, in a wonderfully retro scene, what else but a draft notice, duly signed by the Sheriff (a wonderfully dastardly Ben Mendelson).  But that notice sends Robin off not to the Holy Land but to the Arabian Peninsula, where there are medieval versions of weapons of mass destruction (a Gatling gun-like weapon that fire arrows), snipers (Arab and English), and extra-judicial killings of POWs (Abu Ghraib meets My Lai) under the command of Gisborne (Paul Anderson, who will later return to England as a member of a medieval Black Ops team).  A wounded Robin, who has challenged Gisborne’s actions, is shipped back home after having been away from Nottingham for two years, accompanied by the film’s version of Little John (Jamie Foxx, playing an Arab who has watched his son be killed by Gisborne).  Ever since Kevin Reynold’s 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, we have come to expect that Robin will have a Muslim sidekick, though here Foxx merges the 1991 Morgan Freeman role of Azeem with the character of one of the Hoodian legend’s original merry men.

While Robin has been away, all has not been well at Loxley Hall.  Indeed, the Sheriff has declared Robin dead and confiscated his lands.  Marian, who had pledged undying love to Robin when he set out on Crusade, has found consolation in the arms of Will (Jamie Dornan, late of The Fifty Shades of Grey franchise who, in a wonderful visual joke, only wears grey costumes throughout the film).  Dornan’s Will is some sort of labor organizer as Nottingham is not only the center of all things England, but the city also sits atop a huge mine into which workers are sent at their peril.  Exactly what is being mined is unclear, but the working conditions seem to have been inspired by those in any number of sci-fi intergalactic prison films (think Judge Dredd).

The Sheriff is intent upon exploiting the citizens of Nottingham to raise as much money as possible, supposedly for the Crusade. In his endeavors, he is aided and abetted by the local clergy who attach themselves to a huge cathedral that seems the center piece of Nottingham, though the cathedral doesn’t look all that medieval, nor do the costumes of the clergy, of the Sheriff, or of the other characters in the film.  My guess is that the Sheriff shops at Kenneth Cole; Robin, at Alexander McQueen; and Will, at Abercrombie & Fitch.  Even Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin), who functions as an agent provocateur within the church, sports a bright green tunic, which seems as far removed as possible from what we might expect for a medieval clerical habit—the same is true of the costumes of his clerical superiors.  Indeed, the film’s costumes and the sets are at times designed consciously not to be medieval.  The costumes in particular remind me of the wonderful exhibit last year at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art called Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic, which displayed papal regalia along side nearly 150 contemporary ensembles inspired by them.  The film’s costumes resemble the contemporary ensembles more than they do the vestments which inspired them. And Nottingham Cathedral seems modelled on the Temple of the High Sparrow from Game of Thrones more than on any genuinely Romanesque or Gothic structure.

Tuck, Will, Marian, and Robin are convinced that the Sheriff is up to no good—when is he ever in a Hoodian narrative up to anything but no good?—but the Sheriff’s aims and motivation escape them, so Robin pretends to ally himself with the Sheriff against the peasants who in the film are—bad pun à la Mel Brooks coming here—always revolting.  We soon learn the Sheriff was an orphan cruelly reared by abusive clergy—nod here to the ongoing clerical abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church—but he himself is the creature of the film’s true villain simply called the Cardinal (played by an oleaginous, snarling F. Murray Abraham).  What the two are up to is raising great amounts of money to support the Arab efforts in the Middle East, so that, once the Arabs win, the Cardinal can basically rule the world with the Sheriff at his side.

Robin, after some training by Little John in a sequence that nods to, of all cinematic predecessors, Rocky, then springs into action to defeat the Sheriff and the Cardinal—Will advocates a less confrontational response, which only exacerbates the tension between Robin and Will over the affections of Marian.  Robin, Tuck, and Marian manage to hide all the wealth that the Cardinal and Sheriff have accumulated in Sherwood, but Will becomes a casualty in the final battle. Wounded and horribly disfigured, he appears in the film’s final scene as the Sheriff’s new sidekick intent upon opposing everything we previously advocated, think Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.

As I indicated earlier, this latest Hoodian film is, in the final analysis, less than the sum of its parts.  The film’s opening and closing graphics are borrowed from Arrow, the popular Hoodian television series on the CW channel. Familiar characters appear in unfamiliar situations—not unheard of in previous Hoodian films.  Bathurst’s film gives us Robin Hood before he took to Sherwood and began to rob from the rich and give to the poor—but so did the last Robin Hood film, Riley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood with Russell Crowe in the title role, and Cate Blanchett as a Marian modelled, it would seem, on Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc in Victor Fleming’s 1948 film. Throughout the 2018 film, there are nods to earlier films, Hoodian and otherwise.  Contemporary political and social issues get thrown into the mix higgledy-piggledy.  Bathurst’s film even presents a Hoodian bad-boy parallel to the King Arthur whom we had from Guy Ritchie in his 2017 film, and, like King Arthur, it was clearly filmed with a series of sequels in mind—in neither case, however, will such sequels be forthcoming, so badly have both films tanked at the box office.  But to be fair, the Ritchie film offers a fresh take on the Arthuriad, as I have argued earlier in Medievally Speaking, and deserves a better critical reception and more appreciation than it has received.  The same can’t be said for Bathurst’s film—here the legend of Robin Hood gets robbed!

Robin Hood, directed by Otto Bathurst. Screenplay by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly.  Summit Entertainment, Appian Way, Pixoloid Studios, Safehouse Pictures, and Thunder Road Pictures. 2018.  Running time: 1:56.