We watched most of "King Arthur" on TV the other night and were once again struck by the universal tendency to recast heroes of the ancient past as forerunners of Patrick Henry. I got the feeling that Arthur would have been less comfortable at the Round Table than sitting around with the Founding Fathers drafting the Bill of Rights. Even the abysmal "Alexander" recast the conquering general as another civil libertarian yearning to breathe free.
I don't pretend that I know what Arthur was really like, but I suspect that Monty Python got closer to the truth than this movie: a rousing combination of duty to God, divine right, chivalry, ego, valor and superstition. Arthur, I suspect, would have been as dumbfounded by the Magna Carta as by a jumbo jet. Every time a peasant showed up in the movie, I was tempted to shout, "Come and see the violence inherent in the system."
Modern movies do a great job of capturing the feel and look of the old days, but they don't even try to get inside the heads of those characters. They just recast them all with a powderhorn and musket, spouting good old American values.
I can't help but wonder whether our inability to imagine people who truly don't think the way we do hasn't led us into an ill-considered war or two.
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3 comments:
I agree with you that 98 percent of American movies fall into that fatal mistake. But there are grand exceptions. "Black Robe" perfectly captured the mindset of the 16th- and 17th-century Jesuit pioneers in the New World. Another, similar movie, whose names escapes me, did so as well. It starred Robert DeNiro and dealt with the overlapping of conquistadors and missionaries in ... Brazil? And come to think of it, the movie might have been called "The Missionary." You've probably seen them both, but if not, get them.
Ed, you are right. I would have mentioned "Black Robe," in fact, except that I couldn't remember the name. That movie not only got the Jesuits right, it also nailed the Indians pretty well too, I think.
I think the DeNiro movie was "The Mission," but I saw it too far back to remember how will it fits here.
You bring up an interesting point about the already-curious project of trying to de-mythologize King Arthur-
Though the film claimed to make use of the best scholarship on who the actual figure behind the arthur myth was, it fell back on hollywood myths instead.
I for one would love to see a treatment of King arthur that leaves the messy, mysterious myth intact. John Boorman came close with Excalibur, but that was made in the days when nobody would try releasing a 3-hour film, which would be the bare minimum needed to do justice to Arthur.
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