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Politics
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EditedEdited
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James
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Marg
Marg
ittaitta
Rouse,
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and Philipp
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THE MEDIEVAL MOTION
PICTURE
THE POLITICS OF ADAPTATION

Edited by
Andrew James Johnston, Margitta Rouse, and
Philipp Hinz
THE MEDIEVAL MOTION PICTURE
Copyright © Andrew James Johnston, Margitta Rouse, and
Philipp Hinz, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-11250-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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ISBN 978-1-349-29443-5 ISBN 978-1-137-07424-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137074249
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The medieval motion picture : the politics of adaptation / edited by
Andrew James Johnston, Margitta Rouse, Philipp Hinz.
pages cm—(The new Middle Ages)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Middle Ages in motion pictures. 2. Film adaptations—History and

criticism. 3. Middle Ages in literature. I. Johnston, Andrew James, editor
of compilation. II. Rouse, Margitta, 1970– editor of compilation. III. Hinz,
Philipp, 1973– editor of compilation.
PN1995.9.M52M44 2014
791.43⬘658—dc23 2013040004
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

List of Figures xiii

Acknowledgments xv
Notes on Contributors xvii

Introduction: Temporalities of Adaptation 1

Andrew James Johnston and Margitta Rouse
1. “Now Is the Time”: Shakespeare’s Medieval Temporalities
in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran 19
Jocelyn Keller and Wolfram R. Keller
2. Dracula’s Times: Adapting the Middle Ages in Francis
Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula 41
Cordula Lemke
3. Rethinking Anachronism for Medieval Film in
Richard Donner’s Timeline 57
Margitta Rouse
4. Otherness Redoubled and Refracted: Intercultural
Dialogues in The Thirteenth Warrior 79
Judith Klinger
5. Crisis Discourse and Art Theory: Richard Wagner’s Legacy
in Films by Veith von Fürstenberg and Kevin Reynolds 107
Stefan Keppler-Tasaki
6. Adaptation as Hyperreality: The (A)historicism of Trauma
in Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf 129
Philipp Hinz and Margitta Rouse
7. Perils of Generation: Incest, Romance, and the Proliferation
of Narrative in Game of Thrones 155
Martin Bleisteiner
xii CONTENTS

8. Arthurian Myth and Cinematic Horror:

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense 171
Hans Jürgen Scheuer
9. Marian Rewrites the Legend: The Temporality of
Archaeological Remains in Richard Lester’s
Robin and Marian 193
Andrew James Johnston

Bibliography 213
Index 229
FIGURES

1.1 Collapsing temporalities: Tsurumaru beholds the end of

time in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran 34
2.1 Passionate eternity: Dracula’s ascension in Francis Ford
Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula 51
3.1 Making history: intersection of past and present in
Richard Donner’s Timeline 74
4.1 Strange letters in John McTiernan’s The Thirteenth Warrior 87
5.1 “Nothing more to say”: communicative breakdown in
Veith von Fürstenberg’s Fire and Sword 117
6.1 Cursed object and indexical sign: “The Royal Dragon Horn”
in Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf 137
7.1 Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons: magic born from
incest in Game of Thrones 160
8.1 Cole Sear introducing the knight motif in Shyamalan’s
The Sixth Sense 174
9.1 The roman road with the High Cross and the blind beggars
in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian 195
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T he idea for this book originated during an international lecture series

on the politics of popular medieval film held at, and funded by, the
Freie Universität Berlin in 2009. Our heartfelt thanks goes first and fore-
most to our contributors who have been a joy to work with. Further, we
wish to thank our colleagues and friends who supported us during various
stages of the project: Anke Bernau, Ute Berns, Bettina Bildhauer, Valentin
Groebner, Thomas Honegger, Christoph Houswitschka, Elisabeth Kempf,
John M. Ganim, Werner Röcke, Andrea Sieber, Jennifer Wawrzinek,
Russell West-Pavlov, and Kai Wiegandt. We would also like to express
our thanks to Richard Rouse and Jessica Spengler, who helped translat-
ing two essays from German into English. Special thanks goes to our
graduate student assistants Martin Bleisteiner and Sven Duncan Durie,
who offered invaluable help in bringing the manuscript into a publishable
form. Finally, we wish to thank our editor at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull, as
well as her assistant Ryan Jenkins, for their commitment to this book.
The editors
Berlin,
October 2013.
CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Bleisteiner holds a BA in English and History from the Freie

Universit ät Berlin. He is currently working on his MA thesis on repre-
sentations of the medieval in contemporary popular culture and on the
Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical stage.
Philipp Hinz studied English Literature and Communication Studies
at the Freie Universit ät Berlin, Germany, and at Manchester University,
UK. After teaching at the Freie Universit ät he now works as a commu-
nication and exhibition consultant for museums. Having published two
essays on postcolonial Shakespeare screen adaptations, he curated a num-
ber of film retrospectives and published the DVD of Alexander Abela’s
Makibefo, a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth from Madagascar.
Andrew James Johnston is Chair of Medieval and Early Modern
English Literature at the Freie Universit ät Berlin. He studied there and
at Yale University and received his PhD from the Freie Universität in
1998. He has published several monographs, among them Performing the
Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (2008). He recently co-edited a spe-
cial issue of EJES (European Journal of English Studies, 2011) devoted to
the topic of medievalism. Though his research focuses mainly on medi-
eval and Renaissance literature he has also written essays on Thomas
Lovell Beddoes, Bertolt Brecht, J.R.R. Tolkien, and film-maker David
Fincher.
Jocelyn Keller studied Japanese Language and Literature at the University
of Georgia and Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan, as well as
Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University with an interdis-
ciplinary focus on Japanese literature, film, and painting. She is Lecturer
of English at the Centre for Modern Languages of the Berlin Institute of
Technology.
Wolfram R. Keller is Assistant Professor of English at the Humboldt-
Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses on late medieval and Victorian
xviii CONTRIBUTORS

literature as well as Canadian literature and film, particularly with a view to

theories of authorship and the transformation of antiquity. Recent publi-
cations include work on the transformation of Ovid in works by Charlotte
Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Canadian film, as well as Chaucerian har-
mony and cognition.
Stefan Keppler-Tasaki is Professor of German at the University of
Tokyo, Japan. He received his PhD from Würzburg University, Germany,
with a study on individuality in Goethe’s novels. He has published widely
on the relations between literature and film and is currently working on
a book on the reception of film in literary texts with a special focus on
the dialogic relationship between the literary business and Hollywood
film production.
Judith Klinger studied German and English Literature and is Lecturer
of German Medieval Studies at Potsdam University, Germany. She has
published a monograph exploring concepts of identity in the Middle
High German Prose-Lancelot; other publications focus on medieval
poetics, negotiations of gender and desire, the interrelations of text and
image within medieval manuscripts, and the transformations of medieval
motifs in modern literature and film.
Cordula Lemke is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Freie
Universit ät Berlin. She studied in Heidelberg, Edinburgh, and Oxford
and received her PhD from the University of Heidelberg with a study
contrasting concepts of world-making in novels by Virginia Woolf und
Jeanette Winterson. She has published in the fields of gender studies,
postcolonial studies and nineteenth to twenty-first century literature and
is currently working on a book on Dracula as a medieval popstar.
Margitta Rouse studied German and English Literature at the Freie
Universit ät Berlin and at Manchester University. She teaches English
Studies at the Humboldt-Universit ät zu Berlin after having worked as a
postdoctoral fellow on medieval ekphrasis at the Freie Universit ät. She
is currently preparing an edited collection on the same subject (with
Andrew James Johnston and Ethan Knapp), has published a monograph
on contemporary Scottish poet Douglas Dunn, as well as essays on
adaptation and the uses of (medieval) history in contemporary film and
television.
Hans Jürgen Scheuer is Professor of Late Medieval and Early Modern
German Literature at the Humboldt-Universit ät zu Berlin. He studied
Classics and German Philology at the Universities of Trier and of
Münster, Germany, and Literary Theory at Johns Hopkins University,
 CONTRIBUTORS xix

Baltimore. He received his PhD from Münster University with a study

on Goethe’s poetics. He has published widely on the traces of medieval
theories of imagination in historical semantics, poetry, epic, heraldry,
cartography, and murals, as well as the sustained presence of medieval
thought in opera, film, video art, and in the works of Heinrich von
Kleist, Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Bloch.
INTRODUCTION: TEMPORALITIES OF
ADAPTATION

Andrew James Johnston and Margitta Rouse

T his collection of articles is concerned with the intersection of medi-

eval film studies and adaptation theory. Both fields, medieval film
studies and adaptation studies, are among the most rapidly expanding
subdisciplines of an interdisciplinary mix within the humanities: of film
studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, musicology, art history,
theater studies, to name only a few. Within the last six to seven years the
number of publications in both fields has exploded, as has the sophistica-
tion of their approaches,1 and it is high time to assess the kinds of ques-
tions, problems, and issues that link both fields in order to gauge ways in
which advances in one may be put to productive use in the other.
Medieval film studies and adaptation studies have shared similar
problems in the past, in that an outspoken or merely implicit desire for
accuracy—be it for an “authentic” representation of the literary “source”
or of the historical “fact”—has led to the privileging of the “source text”
itself. However, long gone are the days when medievalists felt they had
to apologize for dabbling in medieval film or else when their principal
concern seemed to be to protest against the inaccuracies and anachro-
nisms they found in medieval motion pictures.2 Long gone, too, are
the days when literary source texts occupied center stage in adaptation
studies and when articles typically confirmed the supposed differences
between books and films. Essays are no longer motivated by the question
as to whether a film adaptation does justice to the book. Or are they?
As Thomas Leitch poignantly observes:

The challenge for recent work in adaptation studies . . . has been to wrestle
with the un-dead spirits that continue to haunt it however often they are
repudiated: the defining context of literature, the will to taxonomize and
2 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

the quest for ostensibly analytical methods and categories that will justify
individual evaluations . . . These contradictions between the desire to break
new ground in adaptation studies and the constraints of a vocabulary that
severely limits the scope and originality of new contributions are often
frustrating, especially to readers who think that they are encountering the
same essay over and over and over with only the names of novels and their
film adaptations changed . . . Absent the silver bullet that will free adapta-
tion studies from the dead hand of literature, taxonomies and evaluation,
the temptation to succumb to these orthodoxies is greatest in the essays
commissioned for collections because the orthodoxies are built into the
premise of each collection.3

And this is where the current volume takes its point of departure.
Meeting the challenge of questioning, as well as moving beyond, con-
straining orthodoxies within adaptation studies and medieval studies, it
employs the format of the edited collection precisely to show the variety
of approaches that medieval film studies twined with literary studies of
various national literatures has to offer for the study of adaptation and
vice versa.4

Layers of Temporality
Recent discussions of medieval film display a remarkable sensitivity
toward the most innovative advances in the kind of theory that informs
medieval studies and medievalism, on the one hand, and the theoretical
concepts that have shaped film theory, on the other. Within the study of
medieval film there is a powerful pull toward methods and theories that
conceptualize the complex relationship between the past and the present
and theories that explain the specific nature of cinematic vision and story-
telling. And these two developments are increasingly seen to converge,
with scholars frequently striving to derive a particular notion of medieval
film from the way that medieval film both encapsulates and problema-
tizes the typical ways in which film as a particular medium encounters,
shapes, and questions notions of the past. This has even led to attempts to
define “medieval film” as a distinct genre, a genre that need not exclu-
sively encompass films set in what we conventionally see as a medieval
time frame, that is films set in a (predominantly Western) historical time
frame between ca. 500 and ca. 1500.
One of the most daring of these recent stabs at completely re-defining
the idea of “medieval film,” indeed, at turning “medieval film” into a
theorized genre of its very own, is arguably Anke Bernau’s and Bettina
Bildhauer’s definition of medieval film:
 I N T RO DU C T ION 3

We . . . suggest a . . . theoretical definition of medieval films: as those char-

acterised precisely by their uncertain temporality. This definition comple-
ments generic and thematic definitions, enabling a more nuanced approach
to medieval films while also emphasising their relevance for film studies
and medievalism in general.5

Careful not to exclude the more conventional aspects of theme and genre,
this definition focuses on one of recent medievalism’s most important
issues: the role the Middle Ages have been made to play in establish-
ing ideologically entrenched systems of temporality. For Bernau and
Bildhauer, as for an increasing number of medievalists, whether engaged
in medieval studies proper or in medievalism,6 it is the notion of chronol-
ogy that lies at the very heart of this debate. Chronology, with its sup-
posed dependence on unidirectional linearity and its tendency to impose
a hierarchical order onto the successive stages of a time line, is thus seen if
not as the root of all evil, then certainly as a means of understanding time
that lends itself to all manner of colonizing the past.
That chronology has moved to the center of attention in medieval
studies should not come as a surprise, given that medievalists have long
been criticizing the ideological implications of, and gross falsifications
inherent in, what arguably constitutes the greatest chronological step in
Western historiography: the medieval/Renaissance divide.7 Though the
last decade has seen a spate of publications bridging this divide,8 pow-
erful forces still strenuously resist this movement as is evinced by the
latest books by Stephen Greenblatt and Jack Goody, respectively. In a
move that appears to have more to do with the religious right in present-
day America than with the time period he is actually concerned with,
through a most single-minded celebration of the Renaissance’s supposed
re-discovery of classical antiquity, Greenblatt viciously relegates the Middle
Ages to an abyss of religious superstition. According to Greenblatt’s nar-
rative, it is through an individual humanist’s heroic act that the original
text of Lucretius’s De rerum natura is re-discovered, thus paving the way
for an intellectual revolution directly leading to the United States’ con-
stitution with its famous proclamation of the individual human’s right to
the “pursuit of happiness.”9 Jack Goody by contrast seeks to undermine
the notion of a purely European Renaissance by spreading the concept
all over the world. To a certain extent, this may be seen as a specifically
postcolonial move attempting to decenter the West and critique its claims
to cultural exceptionality and superiority.10 But since Goody considers it
necessary simultaneously to buttress an extremely conservative concept
of the Renaissance, we find him undermining his own project even as he
seeks to wrest from the hands of Western historiography one of its most
4 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

powerful weapons in establishing the West’s superiority over the rest.

Thus, unwittingly, Goody reinforces Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s observation
that postcolonial theory

has neglected the study of the “distant” past, positing instead of inter-
rogating the anteriority against which modern regimes of power have
supposedly arisen. This exclusionary model of temporality denies the pos-
sibility that traumas, exclusions, violence enacted centuries ago might still
linger in contemporary identity formations. It also closes off the possibil-
ity that this past could be multiple and valuable enough to contain (and be
contained within) alternative presents and futures.11

How do these developments relate to the discussion of medieval film and

its intersections with adaptation theory? It seems obvious that the vast
majority of sophisticated discussions of medieval film center on issues of
temporality. At the same time many seek to link the issue of temporality
to something that is particular to cinema as an artistic medium.

Media-Determinism versus Media Multi-Vocalism

Laura Mulvey’s work, in particular, has attracted the attention of many
students of medieval film, since she argues that cinematic as well as pho-
tographic images have “a privileged relation to time” in that they not
only conserve the moment when an image was filmed, but also need to
be deciphered later, when the filmed event has already passed.12 In other
words, we witness a trend toward associating with the cinematic a capac-
ity for establishing specific notions of temporality, and this trend easily
tempts medievalists to claim for medieval film an especial status with
respect to these cinematic notions of time.
And this is where we believe a cautionary intervention may be in
order. Students of medieval film can profit here from the wider implica-
tions of the more recent approaches towards adaptation, since any form of
medievalism is a form of adaptation in the wider sense—and, especially
in the case of medieval film, often also in the narrower sense. Adaptation
theorists have criticized essentializing definitions of film as involving a
certain genre-specificity, whereby, say, the literary is simply “translated”
into the medium of film. As Leitch puts it: “There is no such thing as
a single source for any adaptation”;13 and, as Linda Hutcheon reminds
us, media “differ in the specific constraints and possibilities of each
medium’s conventions,”14 but “the creative transposition of an adapted
work’s story and its heterocosm is subject not only to genre and medium
demands, . . . but also to the temperament and talent of the adapter—and
 I N T RO DU C T ION 5

his or her individual intertexts through which are filtered the materials
being adapted.”15
It seems only natural that medievalists working on film should draw
on concepts developed in film studies. And it is equally natural that—
since film studies is about the motion picture—any attempt to theorize
film as opposed to, say, static images as in photography, must necessarily
impinge upon our understanding of the temporal in one way or the other.
This is all as it should be. Things look a little different though, as soon as
we attempt to canonize certain film-studies approaches as encapsulating
something like the aesthetic/generic essence of film and attempt to derive
a specific notion of temporality from these characteristics, or else as soon
as we attribute a particular concept of temporality to these characteristics.
Such an approach, we would argue, gets us into hot water.
First of all, any essentializing approach to film will in most cases focus
on issues such as the-camera-as-gaze or on editing as a form of narrative.
Obviously, both issues deserve considerable attention and in both cases
medievalists have learned a lot from film theorists and will doubtlessly
continue to do so. Nevertheless, any attempt to fix a certain type of cine-
matic device as predominantly crucial to the way that film creates mean-
ing or establishes a particular sense of illusion will inevitably run the risk
of aesthetic or generic essentialism.16 And this is especially the case when
such supposedly fundamental aesthetic characteristics of film are linked
to a specific perspective on questions such as chronology or temporality.
To argue that film, due to its basic technical and visual characteristics
by definition conveys this or that notion of the temporal not only leads
to an essentializing notion of the aesthetic of film, but will unavoidably
remove film from the field of temporality itself—however strong claims
to the contrary may be. Any stable notion of a purely cinematic aesthetic
or purely cinematic mode of storytelling that is primarily grounded in
the technological specificities of film production, threatens to result in an
ultimately atemporal concept of the cinematic, and this would result in a
denial of the historicity of film, since, as Laurie A. Finke and Martin B.
Shichtman have pointed out: “[T]echnology itself is thoroughly imbri-
cated in cultural, social, economic, and semiotic networks.”17
When such a stable view of cinematic temporality is applied to medi-
eval films, cinematic renditions of the Middle Ages will end up being
subjected to a rigid temporal grid that denies its own location in culture
and temporality. Such a temporal grid may well come in many shapes
and sizes, it might come packaged in the language of poststructural-
ism, or in that of psychoanalysis, or even in that of state-of-the-art cin-
ematic technology—or it may represent a combination of some or all of
these.18 To be fair, the critics who employ the approaches just sketched
6 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

are usually very much aware of the pitfalls of what Finke and Shichtman
call “technological determinism.”19 Yet the danger of the medieval being
overwhelmed by, or absorbed into, certain notions of cinematographic
technology is undoubtedly there. For example, shortly after warning their
readers of the ever-present threat of technological determinism, Finke
and Shichtman themselves embark on a rapturous celebration of present-
day DVD technology and the way it supposedly enables a (post)modern
audience to return to a form of viewing that mirrors the medieval manu-
script experience as described in the theories of Bernard Cerquiglini:20

In many ways a film text is becoming more like a medieval manuscript

than like a printed book. Rather than being a text fixed through the pro-
cesses of mechanical reproduction, the very technology that produces the
film text has rendered it, as Cerquiglini notes of the medieval manuscript,
variance itself.21

Here Bernard Cerquiglini’s essentializing and heavily romanticized

notion of the aesthetic freedom of the medieval manuscript experience
is projected onto modern DVD technology.22 The DVD thus becomes a
revolutionary break in the history of media technology, a revolutionary
break capable of directly connecting the postmodern to the premodern,
while bracketing the media experience of modernism, to which both
the printed book and a certain type of cinematic culture are thereby rel-
egated. Richard Burt has made similarly essentializing claims for digital
technology:

My mapping of medieval and early modern historical film onto the

uncanny transition from celluloid to digital film will take a psychoana-
lytic turn: I attend to reanimation, repetition, and doublings involved in
digital cinema, to various kinds of loops of cinematic and media history
from the past and present . . . The shift from celluloid to digital film has
what Freud calls an uncanny dimension not only in its reanimation of the
inanimate and blurring of the human and the mechanical but also in its
insistence on recognition as a delay, a rereading in which the distinction
between error and its recognition may also blur, in which recovery may
serve as a cover-up.23

Theoretical approaches that use the medieval artwork to define film,

or that use notions of film to characterize the essential character of the
medieval work of art, find their early precursor in Walter Benjamin’s
highly inf luential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” first published in 1936. According to Benjamin’s the-
ory of film, film is a specifically modern medium because it depends
 I N T RO DU C T ION 7

entirely on its exhibition value—film is thus conceived of as the opposite

of the auratic work of art embodied most perfectly in the medieval reli-
gious work of art.24 But, as Margitta Rouse has recently shown, medieval
film itself is capable of resisting such essentialist views of both film and of
the medieval artwork.25
The consequences that such essentializing ideas of a technology-driven
cinematic temporality may have for our understanding both of the Middle
Ages and of adaptations will become even clearer if we remind ourselves
of the familiar way that medieval studies has repeatedly been harried
by essentialist notions of the media supposedly governing and, hence,
delimiting the range and power of medieval artistic expression and nego-
tiation. How often have we been told that orality and literacy are linked
in a stable, indeed, essential relationship to be found all over the world
in different societies—which is why the epic traditions surviving in early
twentieth-century Yugoslavia were considered to provide an unmediated
access to the correct way of reading and interpreting Beowulf ? And how
often have we been told that preliterate cultures are incapable of enter-
taining complex notions of temporality whereas literacy, and especially
the printing press, has supposedly spawned all manner of sophisticated
forms of understanding historicity and subjectivity?
For supporters of the oral-formulaic theory and some—but not all—of
its more sophisticated successors, the specific nature of poetic composition
and the particular forms of reproduction and performance provide a para-
digm that governs not only how something is said within a given literary
culture but also what is actually sayable within that frame of reference.26
Hence, certain theories of the way medieval media were employed arro-
gated to themselves the power as to judge which interpretations of a given
medieval literary text were to be considered as historically valid and which
were not. Any reading beyond the boundaries of what a certain medium
or genre supposedly permits will thus be branded as anachronistic.
Similar effects can be observed with respect to the role linear perspec-
tive has played for art history. Here again, a whole world view is linked to
a specific artistic and (apparently) epistemological technique and a certain
way how a given artistic medium is developed and employed. This is not
to say that we ought to disregard topics such as the printing press or linear
perspective. On the contrary, orality and literacy, the printing press, and
linear perspective must all be seen as fundamentally important cultural
developments—but their role in cultural historiography has overwhelm-
ingly been to buttress totalizing and unidirectional narratives of artistic,
cultural, and epistemological progress.27 And since all these narratives
heavily rely on the principle of a revolutionary point of origin—the tri-
umph of literacy, the invention of the printing press, the discovery of
8 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

linear perspective—they combine their essentialist and hence a-temporal

notions of artistic genre, technique, and medium with a rigorous order-
ing of temporality following a strict before-and-after model, which
grants vastly superior powers and potentials to the side that comes after
the revolutionary rupture caused by the new discoveries. Simultaneously,
this approach to cultural history tends to fix what went before in a state of
immaturity or innocence or archaic primitivism or uncultured darkness,
and so on. In other words: Here we encounter a paradoxical link between
the supposedly a-chronic essentialism of a specific mode of artistic pro-
duction and a radically determinist and progressivist history of human
(media) culture.

Adaptation as Aesthetic Layering

In order to avoid treating medieval film in what might easily turn out to
be an essentialist and a-temporal manner, we wish, therefore, to proceed
from a perspective that makes it possible for us to draw on all the recent
developments in the study of medievalism, film studies, and adaptation
studies, without, however, privileging any notion of film that focuses on
any one of cinema’s supposed dominant aesthetic properties to a degree
that might amount to re-introducing the paradoxically ahistorical but
also deterministically historicizing essentialism of a particular medium
or genre.
Instead of offering an alternative definition of medieval film we wish
rather to propose that medieval film as a specific form of adaptation
ideally—though by no means necessarily—makes it possible to establish
dialogic relationships between various past(s) and present(s). Such rela-
tionships might well be seen in terms of an “uncertain temporality” as
Bernau and Bildhauer have put it, but they should not be understood
as diametrically opposed to the notion of chronological time. On the
contrary, we would argue that temporal relationships ought to be seen
as relying on chronology for the specific purpose of commenting on and
undermining notions of temporality. This is something that medieval
film does not perform simply through belonging to the medium of film.
Rather, we would argue, medieval film questions and explores notions of
temporality by exploiting cinema’s hybrid and multigeneric nature while
simultaneously drawing on, or alluding to, medieval forms of expression
and representation; an approach that works well within the adaptation
paradigm since the hybrid and multigeneric are ultimately typical prop-
erties of all forms of adaptation.
Medieval film at its best is capable of critically addressing and playing
with the fact that the motion picture as an artistic product cannot help
 I N T RO DU C T ION 9

but be a combination of various artistic elements. And each of these artis-

tic elements or layers must, to a certain degree, inevitably obey aesthetic
conventions of its own. Each of these aesthetic conventions derives from
an aesthetic history and tradition of its own, but in the context of film
they all coalesce in surprising and multidimensional ways in order to con-
tribute to the cinematic work of art as a whole. This multidimensionality
potentially—though not automatically—facilitates a sense of layeredness
which easily translates into a temporal experience of layeredness. This
layeredness results from the way different aesthetic levels in film interact,
levels such as the much-discussed gaze, the narrative editing, the set-
ting and decor, the actors and their public images, a film’s themes and
narrative structures, the music, the color or visual effects such as grainy
images as opposed to brilliantly contrasting black-and-white, or even the
conventions associated with a specific genre of film—and last but not
least, the expectations that an audience might bring to the material being
adapted.
All these elements combine in a form of aesthetic totality that may
constantly be shifting throughout a given film. It is this sense of aes-
thetic totality that Richard Wagner already theorized in the nineteenth
century, albeit in the context of the opera, long before actual motion
pictures came into being, as is discussed in Stefan Keppler-Tasaki’s con-
tribution to this book. But rather than seeing this aesthetic totality as
something that automatically overwhelms the viewer—as Wagner would
have preferred—we see it as something that can give expression to ten-
sion and conf lict, as it pits its individual elements against each other, none
of which will ever gain complete dominance over the others. It is adap-
tations’ general tendency to produce an inherent tension between their
different artistic layers that enables them to explore different notions of
temporality. It is with regard to these different layers that medieval film’s
capacity for drawing on and adapting aesthetic artifacts, cultural concepts,
and artistic practices from the Middle Ages becomes most volatile.
We are fully aware that, in purely logical terms, this multilayeredness
we claim not only for film but for adaptations of any genre may look
just as essentialist as do the concepts of film focusing predominantly on
technology-orientated or supposedly media-specific characteristics such
as montage or as the camera’s gaze. Nevertheless, we do believe that our
approach differs in at least two important respects. First, as opposed to
approaches that privilege one cinematic characteristic over all others, we
strive critically to preserve the independent play of film’s different aes-
thetic levels, rather than subject them to a unified form of artistic agency.
Second, we do not deny that any given film’s individual aesthetic layers
each may, indeed, be strongly shaped by their particular technological
10 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

conditions. But we do contend that the overall combination of these layers

will achieve a relative degree of autonomy from any individual technol-
ogy or medium, however dominant that technology or medium might
appear within a particular film’s aesthetic. As a composite medium, film
thus both brings together and opens up many approaches to the past. And
even if we do conceive of this notion of compositionality as a fundamental
characteristic of film, this sense of different artistic and aesthetic layers
simultaneously cooperating and competing can still be seen as a powerful
antidote against any kind of cinematic essentialism. Consequently, it must
also be considered a powerful antidote against the static idea of temporal-
ity any form of cinematic essentialism might entail. It is in dialogue with
specifically medieval forms of aesthetic expression and cultural under-
standing, we argue, that this combination of different layers is capable of
realizing its full potential.
Though it is true that not every medieval film will of necessity exploit
very actively the opportunities presented by film’s composite aesthetic
nature, we do think that this composite nature does lend itself particularly
well to explorations of complex temporalities, to dialogic interventions
into chronological time, to an archaeological structuring that juxtaposes
and keeps in play various and potentially conf licting approaches to tempo-
rality at the same time. Moreover, film’s compositionality makes it possible
to adopt and adapt, to frame and reconceptualize aesthetic ideas, structures,
and objects from the Middle Ages themselves. Precisely because for us, the
modern audience of medieval film, the Middle Ages survives only in the
form of material remains, aesthetic objects, archaeological artifacts, and
literary sources, the overwhelming majority of which we would classify as
“art” of one type or another, is it possible for medieval film, by exploiting
its own compositionality, to draw on, and comment on, a multitude of
different aesthetic traditions in the process of adapting them.
Thus we posit that, as a genre epitomizing processes of adaptation,
medieval film enters into a dialogic relationship to the Middle Ages rather
than simply appropriating objects from the medieval past. Through its
very archaeological layeredness the medieval experience as transmitted
to a modern audience through cultural relics always already poses the
challenging question of its own historicity. That the past might represent
itself as a historically laden archaeological site is not a modern discovery.
Medieval literature itself is full of hidden treasures, submerged objects,
and unexpected discoveries of the material remains of an unknown past.
Medieval objects of art and cultural artifacts frequently not only stage,
but actually problematize, this sense of historical layeredness in their own
compositionality. The medieval Gesamtkunstwerk —be it a cathedral, a
reliquary, a sarcophagus, a cycle play, or an illuminated manuscript—thus
 I N T RO DU C T ION 11

betrays a powerful tendency toward exposing the historical tensions

inherent in its own compositionality, a tendency toward encapsulating
what Carolyn Dinshaw has termed “multiple temporalities.”28
The archaeological nature of the medieval experience is mirrored
and commented on as it becomes subject to adaptation in the composite
aesthetics of film. This is not to say that a medieval aesthetic experi-
ence is similar to, or even prefigures, the modern experience of watching
films. Rather, as the historical objects present themselves as tension-
ridden already in the Middle Ages, they will often—though by no means
automatically—provoke tension-ridden adaptations in film, thereby con-
tributing further to the very aesthetic layeredness already present in films
of any genre. Moreover, what we do seem to observe is that medieval-
themed films frequently explore with an impressive degree of sophistica-
tion the provocative tensions historical objects create. It is important to
stress that such a sense of the past as embodied and dramatized in an aes-
thetic of layeredness generates a dialogic relationship between different
layers of the past as well as between various pasts and various layers of the
present as further, but not necessarily privileged, layers of temporality.
Medieval art and cinematic art easily enter into dialogue when it comes
to investigating the complex relations between the past, the present, and
the future. In this sense then, as in so many others, medieval notions of
the past help to shape our notions of the medieval, especially if they are
adapted by modern films, and this is a phenomenon that all the texts in
this collection seek to unravel in one way or another.
The following brief descriptions provide an overview of the way how
this book’s individual contributions each investigate the intersections
between the medieval and the cinematic, as well as explore the aesthetic
layering of cinematic adaptation: even in films that do not seem to be
recognizably medieval-themed at first glance. What unites all essays is
a strong concern with the temporalities of adaptation in various media.
Using a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches, the
essays collected in this book all demonstrate that the chosen films’ implicit
articulation of their poetics of adaptation is strongly linked to the cultural
practice of “doing time,”29 or to what Jocelyn Keller and Wolfram R.
Keller, in their chapter on Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), call “temporal-
izing.” Kurosawa’s Ran, they argue, ought to be treated as a medieval
film, where layers of temporality are themselves the focus of adaptation.
An adaptation of Shakespeare’s Lear, a play concerned with the transi-
tion from medieval to modern, the motion picture transfers Shakespeare’s
engagement with multiple temporalities into a medieval Japanese setting.
Zooming in on the transition period from a decentralized feudalism to
a unified version of feudalism, Kurosawa, like Shakespeare, scrutinizes
12 A N D R E W J A M E S J O H N S T O N A N D M A R G I T T A R O U S E

the imperial politics that bring about the ideologies of periodization.

Kurosawa’s Ran constitutes what we could call a multi-temporal and
multi-spatial adaptation, in that the motion picture not only adapts a
European stage play to Japanese film, but also an early modern take on
English transitions from medieval to modern into a historical Japanese
setting accessible to a present-day Japanese (and by extension present-day
international) audience.
Cordula Lemke, too, explores various layers of temporality, and the
ways in which the subject of time seems central to a cinematic poetics
of adaptation. Frequently scorned as a more than disappointing adap-
tation of Stoker’s classic, among other things because it introduces a
clichéd romance plot between medieval lovers, Francis Ford Coppola’s
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) adapts not only the novel, but also offers the
director’s own version of the Middle Ages—which is shown as encroach-
ing on the present in the figure of Dracula as a “quintessential anachro-
nism.” Coppola’s adaptation, too, is multi-temporal and multi-spatial: As
Lemke shows, it is precisely the clichéd entanglement between Dracula
and Jonathan Harker’s fiancé Mina, redoubling and reanimating a past
love between the undead Count and his deceased wife Elisabeta, which
makes it possible for medieval and present-day notions of time to con-
verge through a notion of eternal love.
In her chapter on Richard Donner’s 2003 film adaptation of Michael
Crichton’s science fiction novel Timeline, Margitta Rouse explores the
critical potential of cinematic anachronisms further. If they are not
regarded as mere “errors” or “liberties” in the service of present-day
concerns, anachronisms are typically thought of as adding little to our
understanding of the Middle Ages, especially in films making abundant
use of medieval-themed clichés. Both Lemke’s engagement with the fig-
ure of Dracula, as well as Rouse’s close reading of Donner’s strategic
deployment of anachronisms however show that cinematic anachronisms
provide glimpses of the past that open up new perspectives on history and
blur the well-worn boundaries between past and present. In approaching
anachronisms from various temporal perspectives, Timeline stages an ulti-
mately futile search for a historically “accurate” past, while it simultane-
ously envisions a multi-temporal model of history where alternative pasts,
presents, and futures not only exist side-by-side but actually intersect.
Judith Klinger investigates the poetics of adaptation as an intercultural
and inter-period exchange in unpacking the various cultural exchanges
taking place in The Thirteenth Warrior (1999), another screen adaptation of
a novel by Michael Crichton. Film and novel are in turn chief ly based on
two medieval sources: the Old English epic Beowulf, and the tenth-century
travel narrative of the Arab poet-cum-diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan. When
 I N T RO DU C T ION 13

cultured Ibn Fadlan meets the barbaric Viking leader Buliwyf, an unusual
dialogue unfolds between an enlightened Oriental world and a Northern
“heroic” medieval culture. Although The Thirteenth Warrior, too, is not
free of the well-known stereotypes of movie medievalism, it presents this
dialogue as a multifaceted and laborious process of translation and inter-
pretation, confronting in complex ways concepts such as religion, gender,
rulership, and power. Instead of seeking to reveal “eternal truths” behind
the medieval masquerade the movie underscores cultural difference by its
redoubling of historical distance.
Whereas Klinger discovers in The Thirteenth Warrior what could be
called a Bakhtinian poetics of adaptation allowing voices of different
periods and cultures to exist side-by-side, Keppler-Tasaki contrasts two
very different adaptations of the Tristan material in the light of Richard
Wagner’s lesser-known medievalist theory of adaptation, which drew
on the Middle Ages as an inspiration for the “artwork of the future.”
Wagner insisted that his operatic adaptations did not simply derive from
the high medieval sources but were actually closer to their “true” but lost
“origins”—origins Wagner felt he was in fact reconstructing. In his analy-
sis of Veith von Fürstenberg’s Feuer und Schwert [Fire and Sword ] (1982)
and Kevin Reynolds’s Tristan & Isolde (2006), Keppler-Tasaki examines
the ways in which cinematic adaptations purport to reinstate the multi-
medial and synaesthetic force of medieval modes of expression in radi-
cally diverse forms. He argues that both films paradoxically break free,
as well as depend on, the proto-cinematic authority of the composer’s
all-pervasive legacy. Arguably, film adaptations are no further removed
from their origins than Wagner’s operas; in fact, such apparently different
films as Fürstenberg’s and Reynolds’s can be understood as the continu-
ation of a cultural work that not only precedes and forestalls opera, but
also Wagner’s high medieval source material.
Philipp Hinz and Margitta Rouse likewise investigate a fantasy of
adaptation as capable of reconstructing the “true” artwork beneath the
medieval source text: Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007), an animated
adaptation of the Old English epic based on a script by Roger Avary and
Neil Gaiman. Beowulf is a cinematic landmark in terms of its use of novel
film-technology: Live actors’ appearances as well as movements were
transposed into digital images, and transferred into computer gener-
ated sets to create an entirely digitized performance animation. Insisting
on having recreated a version of Beowulf much closer to the supposed
pre-Christian, pagan origins of the Anglo-Saxon epic, the filmmakers
use the so-called hyperrealist aesthetics of computer generated images
(CGI) to re-interpret the Beowulf myth psychoanalytically as a myth of
a never-ending family trauma, a trauma, which is potentially banned by
14 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

the advent of Christianity. On the one hand, CGI stakes a claim to rec-
reating the medieval aesthetic experience, and on the other it visualizes
the aesthetics of trauma as aesthetics of historical recursivity. Exploring
the film’s poetics of hyperrealism, Hinz and Rouse unearth the contra-
dictions between the film’s interpretation of history as a psychoanalytical
trauma narrative on the one hand, and its teleological understanding of
history as a narrative of linear progress on the other.
Martin Bleisteiner, too, is concerned with disruptions of lineage and
linearity in his investigation of incest narratives in HBO’s television series
Game of Thrones (2011 to present) and the associated series of novels by
George R. R. Martin. Sexual relationships between siblings, mother and
child, as well as between father and child not only constitute a powerful
plot-generating device in Game of Thrones, but also illustrate the nov-
els’ and TV series’ poetics of adaptation. Just like the results of incestual
relationships complicate notions of ancestry, parentage and progeny, the
multi-medial publishing and broadcasting phenomenon that is Game of
Thrones essentially thwarts any clear-cut hierarchical distinction between
“source” and “target” medium. What is more, in ever proliferating epi-
sodic entanglements Game of Thrones showcases incest in a manner similar
to medieval romance, a literary genre which likewise refuses to be sub-
jected to neat taxonomical classification.
Romance excesses loom large also in Hans Jürgen Scheuer’s inves-
tigation of M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster The Sixth Sense (1999).
The chapter takes as its point of departure the film’s reference to King
Arthur in which the nine-year-old Cole Sear plays a young Arthur as
part of a school stage production, pulling the sword Excalibur from its
famous stone. Whereas previous studies of the film hardly focus on the
sixth sense as an actual sense of perception, Scheuer expands on Kevin J.
Harty’s little known observation that The Sixth Sense constitutes a fully
valid film adaptation of the Arthurian legend, arguing that Shyamalan’s
concept of the sixth sense adapts for modern film what is essentially a
premodern notion of image perception. The Sixth Sense explores a pre-
modern concern with the contact between the living and the dead, in the
medium of a narrated and imagined “common sense,” albeit seen from
the perspective of a modern director and screenwriter, and brought to life
through the genre of horror.
Finally, Andrew James Johnston’s chapter on Richard Lester’s film
Robin and Marian (1976) takes the Robin Hood legend as an example to
show how adaptation is persistently preoccupied with the traditionality
of its own traditions. By focusing on the trope of archaeological remains,
on medieval processes of mythmaking, and on the religious and spiri-
tual notions explored in the film, Johnston shows that Robin and Marian
 I N T RO DU C T ION 15

demonstrates a particular understanding of the political complexities of

tradition and temporality which are already an essential part of medieval
literature’s cultural legacy. Not only does the film draw on medieval
source material for a critical reassessment of the cinematic tradition of
Robin Hood, but it also conveys a sensibility for the political nature of
temporality already communicated in the film’s medieval source texts.
In strategically alluding to premodern cultural and artistic practices and
artifacts as well as to specifically medieval forms of religious experience,
the film underscores the type of multilayered temporality that medieval
texts and artifacts share with a (post-)modern perspective on the Middle
Ages. Thus, the film actually visualizes a dialogic interchange between a
meta-cinematic ref lection on the history of the Robin Hood legend, and
medieval ways of constructing tradition, thereby drawing on typically
medieval negotiations of the political nature of temporality.

Notes
1. To name only a few examples of books on medieval film: Bettina
Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011); Richard
Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010); Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds., Queer
Movie Medievalisms (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009); Anke Bernau and
Bettina Bildhauer, eds., Medieval Film (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2009); Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, The Medieval Hero on Screen:
Representations from Beowulf to Buffy ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004);
Andrew B.R. Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema
and History in Portraying the Medieval World ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2011); Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations.
The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2010); Nickolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden, eds., Hollywood in
the Holy Land: The Fearful Symmetries of Movie Medievalism ( Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2009). The advent of adaptation studies is marked especially
in that Oxford University Press has dedicated a new journal, Adaptation,
entirely to the subject; important recent monographs include: Sarah
Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002); Simone Murray, The Adaptation
Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (New
York: Routledge, 2011); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, with
revised edition epilogue by Siobban O’Flynn, 2nd revised edn. (London:
Routledge, 2013).
2 . For a recent account of how the issue of accuracy matters for discussions
of medieval film see Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London:
Reaktion, 2011), pp. 18–22. Ironically, the most sophisticated recent stud-
ies of medieval film all seem to find it necessary to begin their attempts
16 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

at theorizing medieval film by first driving out the specter of historical

accuracy in one way or the other.
3. Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads,” Adaptation 1.1
(2008): 65 [63–77].
4. On the potential of medieval film studies to inspire adaptation studies, see
also Laurence Raw’s review article “Imaginative History and Medieval
Film,” in which he argues that the “writings of medieval film theorists
can prove useful in analyzing the processes of textual reconstruction, as
well as encouraging the kind of interdisciplinary research that might free
adaptation studies from the confines of the literature/media/film/theatre
paradigm” (Adaptation 5.2 [2012]: 263 [262–67]).
5. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, “Introduction: The A-chronology
of Medieval Film,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina
Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 2 [1–19].
6. For heuristic reasons, it is often helpful to posit a distinction between
“medieval studies” in the traditional sense and “medievalism.” In practice,
however, that distinction is not at all easy to uphold since there is an ele-
ment of medievalism at work in every scholarly investigation into medi-
eval culture—any study of the Middle Ages must in one way or other be
informed by some notion of the “medieval.” At the same time, since medi-
evalism discusses the construction of the Middle Ages, it must evidently
inf luence the way scholars see the Middle Ages themselves. As Laurie A.
Finke and Martin B. Shichtman state: “‘Medievalism’ . . . may be as old as
the medieval itself ” (Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, p. 11).
7. See Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to
Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 1–12.
8. To name only a few examples: James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary
History Vol. 2: 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004); Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Andrew James
Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2008); Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Curtis Perry and John
Watkin, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009); David Matthews and Gordon McMullan, eds., Reading the
Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2009); Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London:
Methuen, 2010); Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland, eds.,
Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
9. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (London: The
Bodley Head, 2011), esp. p. 263.
10. Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 7–42.
11. Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, Medieval Cultures 35
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 19.
 I N T RO DU C T ION 17

12 . Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London:
Reaktion, 2006), p. 9.
13. Leitch, “Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads,” p. 64.
14. Hutcheon, Theory, p. 49.
15. Ibid., p. 84.
16. This is a problem Finke and Shichtman seek to tackle in the context of
medieval film by introducing a Bakhtin-inspired notion of “sociological
stylistics” (Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, p. 23).
17. Ibid., p. 24.
18. For an especially sophisticated approach of this kind see Nickolas
Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages ( Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2008), pp. 7–12.
19. Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, p. 29.
20. In Cerquiglini’s eyes “medieval writing does not produce variants; it is
variance. The endless rewriting to which medieval textuality is subjected,
the joyful appropriation of which it is the object, invites us to make a
powerful hypothesis: the variant is never punctual” (Bernard Cerquiglini,
In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing
[Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999], pp. 77–78).
21. Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, p. 34.
22 . Incisive critical remarks on Cerquiglini’s romantic-cum-postmodern
apotheosis of the medieval manuscript are to be found in Richard Utz,
“When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth: A Short History of Chaucerphilologie
in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” Philologie im Netz 21
(2002): 58 [54–62], available at: http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin21
/p21t4.htm.
23. Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media, pp. 3–4.
24. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–55.
25. Margitta Rouse, “‘Hit Men on Holiday Get All Medieval’: Multiple
Temporalities and Media Theory in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges,” in
Medievalism, ed. Ute Berns and Andrew James Johnston, special issue of
European Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2011): 171–82.
26. For a recent discussion of the problematic impact some theories of orality/
literacy have had on the interpretation of medieval English texts, see
Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages, pp. 26–45.
27. For an important discussion of the ways in which Heidegger, Blumenberg,
and Foucault all contributed to the philosophical underpinnings of this
form of cultural history firmly grounded in the epistemologies and tech-
niques of representation, see Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, “Outside
Modernity,” in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History
of Theory, ed. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), pp. 2–36.
18 A N DR E W J A M E S JOH N S T ON A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

28. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 122 [107–23].
29. Doing Time is the title of Rita Felski’s investigation of the ways in which
notions of time are central to constructions of gendered identities, which
in turn lead to gendered perspectives on periodization. Rita Felski, Doing
Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York
University Press, 2000).
CHAPTER 1

“NOW IS THE TIME”: SHAKESPEARE’S

MEDIEVAL TEMPORALITIES IN
AKIRA KUROSAWA’S RAN *

Jocelyn Keller and Wolfram R. Keller

T he decision that sets the tragedy of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran ( Japan:

Toho, 1985) in motion is prefaced by the main protagonist’s
announcement: “Now is the time!” In its immediate context, the “now”
marks the moment when the old Lord Hidetora Ichimonji transfers his
power to his oldest son, Taro, making the latter the “head of the House
of Ichimonji, the lord of the land.” Hidetora himself plans to keep only
a few retainers and “the title and forms of lordship,” leaving to his other
sons the (smaller) castles he once obtained from his neighbors by brutal
conquest (p. 13).1 Hidetora’s decision results in the eponymous chaos of
Kurosawa’s film. Hidetora’s “now,” however, has much wider implica-
tions, highlighting how time, how temporalities are constructed. More
precisely, the film ref lects on the politics of constructing temporalities
and attendant representational, aesthetic concerns. Adapting William
Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play crucially concerned with the transition
from the medieval to the modern, Kurosawa’s medieval Japanese setting
transfers Shakespeare’s engagement with temporalities into a different
cultural framework, multiplying and transforming further Shakespeare’s
already multiple temporalities.
It may seem odd to discuss Ran in the context of medieval film, given
its temporal setting in sixteenth-century Japan, more concretely in the
Sengoku or Warring States period (1392–1568), which precedes the Edo
period, the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868). Unlike the earlier
20 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

period, the Edo era was peaceful and prosperous, but also isolated Japan
from the West; ironically, historians often argue that it was the introduc-
tion of European firearms in 1543 that made possible the period of pros-
perity. Ran, then, is set in a transition period, which Western audiences
might easily construe as Japan’s development from medieval to (early)
modern; but for audiences versed in Japanese history, the film rather
depicts the transition from a decentralized kind of feudalism to a more
unified version of the same.2 Engaging with a transition from one histori-
cal period to another, Ran replicates Lear ’s temporal structure—and, we
would add, the complications attendant upon chronology and teleology,
upon periodization.
Shakespeare’s Lear, we argue, self-consciously addresses the problems
and politics of constructing temporalities. Written and first staged at a time
that asserted its modernity against a medieval Other, Lear, while ostensi-
bly set in pre-Christian days, represents a form of medieval feudalism as
it transitions rapidly into Machiavellian modernity, as critics frequently
observe. On closer inspection, Lear emerges as exposing the illusions of
periodization insofar as the play consistently unveils the presence of the
medieval in the modern and the modern within the medieval. The play
interrogates the strategies through which the modern constructs itself as
an inversion of values, through which it claims to be what the preced-
ing period was not, thereby exposing as ill-advised a nostalgia for a feu-
dalism that never existed, while simultaneously rejecting Machiavellian
dissimulation as a desirable means to an end. Moreover, Lear reveals the
constructedness of the aesthetic valuations implicit in temporalities, espe-
cially the supposedly related shift from (medieval) poetry to (modern)
theater. Ref lecting the advancement of Shakespearean authorship, this
shift is epitomized in the poet-playwright’s, that is, the Fool’s “mer-
linesque prophecy” at the play’s center, which encapsulates succinctly the
play’s juggling of multiple temporalities.
Their common interest in constructions of temporality and related aes-
thetic concerns, we believe, marks the strongest link between Lear and
Ran, a connection scholars have been reluctant to discuss in terms of
adaptation,3 since Ran’s plot is not particularly “faithful” to Lear. Kurosawa
himself observed that the plot’s broad outline only accidentally resembles
Shakespeare’s play.4 Once aware of the connection, though, Joan Pong
Linton surmises, Kurosawa “had questions about the play that he tried to
work out in his film. The result . . . is an ongoing conversation with King
Lear, one that never becomes explicit but that informs his engagement
with history.”5 Anthony Dawson concurs: Just as Shakespeare did not read
his sources primarily for the story, Kurosawa reads Shakespeare “from the
inside, responding to the complex dynamics of the original work.”6
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 21

It is especially the complex dynamics of time, we argue, that the

film interrogates by using a medieval setting in order to come to terms
with the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust, marking the beginning of a
nuclear age of fear. Ran is a “King Lear for and of the eighties, when the
world seemed poised on the brink of nuclear destruction.” 7 In “feudal-
izing” the nuclear threat, Ran also comments on revisionist tendencies
in 1970s Japanese historiography and the nostalgia for Japanese medieval
samurai culture. Ran intervenes in such debates—and it does so by engag-
ing with and transforming Lear ’s multiple temporalities.

King Lear ’s Multiple Temporalities

Shakespeare’s representation of time and construction of history are fre-
quently studied, but the underlying interpretation of temporalities has only
received critical attention recently. In the last decade or so, Shakespeare’s
use of the medieval and questions about periodization (especially within
medieval studies) are on the verge of becoming a veritable field of research.8
Our reading of Lear and Ran takes its cue from Andrew James Johnston’s
argument that medieval texts self-consciously construct their “medieval-
ness,” which, in turn, invites the temporal Othering of the medieval.
Shakespeare’s plays often appear to chart (teleological) chronologies—from
the medieval to the modern—that ultimately serve to veil continuities with
and dependence on medieval precursors,9 including the medieval advance-
ment of new modes of authorship, which literally (albeit obliquely) emerge
in the interstices between the medieval and the modern.10 It is precisely the
construction of such temporalities—of the nostalgia for a well-ordered,
collective premodern world of transparent loyalty pitted against a dis-
simulative, capitalist modernity seemingly conducive to individualism—
that concomitantly ref lects questions of artistic (self-)presentation, which
crucially play into Kurosawa’s aesthetics and politics of adaptation. What
looks like a medieval kingdom’s straightforward transformation into a capi-
talist one, ultimately complicates reductive (teleological) constructions of
temporality, exposing the constructedness of both the medieval and the
modern. Moreover, Lear renders palpably transparent the syncretism of
medieval and modern forms of artistic expression so carefully hidden in
other Shakespearean works, a syncretism that characterizes Shakespearean
authorship in fundamental ways.
Obviously, Lear is not set in late-medieval England. The play’s sources,
most of which depend on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae
(ca. 1136), place Lear’s tragedy in pre-Christian times.11 Critics, however,
usually identify Lear’s world as medieval. Grigori Kozintsev argues that
Shakespeare blends “periods and locales,” enabling him to “compare,
22 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

emphasize, generalize.” Many scholars perceive the “ancient” characters’

mindsets as being feudal and scholastic, placing the well-being of the col-
lective above the individual. Edmund’s ideology strikes this universe like
the “fire of lightening,” bringing in its wake the rule of “Dame Avarice”;
a world governed, as Jan Kott argues, by “huge Renaissance monsters,
devouring one another like beasts of prey.”12 Charting Lear ’s chronology,
John Danby is not quite as horrified by Edmund’s nascent capitalism,
characterizing him as “a normal, sensible, reasonable fellow: but emanci-
pated,” a fusion of the “politic machiavel and renaissance scientist.” Like
Shakespeare himself, he is a “careerist on the make.” Edmund challenges
medieval collectivism, advancing a new kind of individualism. Pitting
the “medieval vision” against “nascent capitalism,” Shakespeare may have
preferred Lear’s world, and yet, says Danby, he portrays the “New Men”
sympathetically.13
A cursory glance at the way the characters envision their own time
seems to validate the play’s linear movement from medieval to modern. In
the feudal world everything is as it seems—as opposed to the new world,
where, Cordelia asserts, the “glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not”
reigns supreme (1.1.226–27). Edmund’s capitalist enterprise is associated
with dissimulation, rationalized as the means to an end. The play’s depic-
tion of the old and the new worlds generates a poetological and meta-
theatrical dimension frequently linked to the opposition of a “medieval”
poetry pitted against “modern” theater; a generic shift often ref lected in
interpretations conceiving of Shakespeare primarily as “the working
dramatist.”14 The nexus of play-writing and modernity is most obvious in
Edmund, a Machiavellian modernist who embodies Time itself,15 insofar
as he times himself and others. He is able to do so, because he is “superbly
adept at fooling others by his ability to don roles as a skilled actor does,”
he is the “master plotter of King Lear, fulfilling the role of dramatist.”16 It
is Edmund’s rhetorical dissimulation that lies at the heart of this acting-
playwriting enterprise. At the play’s beginning, Edmund shares with the
audience his sense of entitlement to “Legitimate” Edgar’s land. Musing on
his illegitimacy, he discusses himself as a person “Who in the lusty stealth
of nature take[s] / More composition and fierce quality” than those born
legitimately. Edmund’s self-assertion generates transgressional agency, his
scheming, captured suitably by reference to his thriving “invention” with
which he will “top” his half-brother (1.2.11–12, 19–21, emphasis added).
The transition from the medieval to the modern is thus associated with a
playwright’s dissimulative abilities (see esp. 1.2.181–82).
Persuasive though this staged transition from medieval to modern and
the concomitant inversion of values seems, scholars have begun to challenge
such teleological readings. Danby himself notes that Lear offers alternatives
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 23

to a “simple either-or.” In a nuanced revaluation of the medieval-modern

binary, Richard Halpern acknowledges that Lear “is at least partly ‘about’
the transition from feudalism to capitalism,” while emphasizing that the
“transitional thesis enfolds a number of implicit assumptions, many of them
contestable.” An analysis of Edmund’s supposedly proto-capitalist charac-
teristics brings feudal remnants into view, prompting Halpern’s argument
that as much as Edmund evokes “the Renaissance new man,” he ultimately
drives this conception back “to a culturally anterior form.” Extending this
line of argument, he sees Lear as charting a “fantastic” counter-chronology,
“the transition from capitalism to feudalism.”17
The play’s undermining, indeed, reversal of the simplistic binary
between medieval poet and modern dramatist becomes most evident in
what some Shakespeareans refer to as “poet-playwright” figures. Poet-
playwright characters poignantly expose the “period divide” as a construct
with repercussions for questions of both nationhood and authorship, the
latter especially in the light of what Shakespeareans discuss as Shakespeare’s
new conception of authorship in terms of the poet-playwright. Shakespeare,
Patrick Cheney argues, represents his new form of authorship obliquely,
that is through poet-playwright characters on stage. They pursue careers
as poets and playwrights, an authorial model that, in its inexplicitness,
amounts to a form of counter-authorship, a tacit, but nevertheless critical
response to the claim for national fame poets such as Edmund Spenser artic-
ulated openly. For the context of Kurosawa’s adaptation of Shakespearean
temporalities, the important poet-playwrights in Lear are Edgar and the
Fool.18 Their temporal and artistic syncretism not only ensures their sur-
vival, but encapsulates multiple temporalities, which Ran alludes to and
multiplies at important junctures. The poet-playwrights’ merging of tem-
poralities in Lear is tangible not only in the Fool’s prophecy in the middle
of the play, but also in Edgar’s evident transformation from poet to poet-
playwright, most impressively when he stages Gloucester’s “suicide” at
Dover cliff. Crucially, premodern Edgar adopts Edmund’s modern stage-
craft. Speaking largely in blank verse, Edgar annexes Edmund’s theatrical
expertise when he masquerades “in peasant clothing and with a staff,” leading
blind Gloucester, and with him the old order he represents, to the top of a
hill. Pretending they are standing at the edge of a cliff, he exclaims: “how
fearful / and dizzy it is to cast one’s eyes so low . . . You are now within
a foot / Of th’extreme verge.” Gloucester jumps and Edgar changes his
voice to assume yet another role to convince his father he has survived
miraculously (4.6.11–12, 25–26).19
Since Edgar is, as Bloom puts it, “Edmund’s unintended creation,”20
the former learns the playwright’s craft from a Renaissance man—
though with the aim of “re-medievalizing” the new order. Lear ’s Fool,
24 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

even more than Edgar, is able to un-write himself into the obliqueness
characteristic of Shakespearean author-characters. He erases “the distinc-
tion between theatre and poetry.”21 The same goes for the distinction
between medieval past and Renaissance future. The Fool’s prophecy,
positioned mid-way through Lear, succinctly recreates, exposes, and col-
lapses the multiple temporalities the play so carefully stages.22 A sche-
matic summary of the prophecy’s four parts vis-à-vis temporalities would
look like this: (1) the deplorable conditions of seeming rather than being:
that is, the Edmundian Renaissance; (2) the laudable conditions of a well-
ordered hierarchy, envisioned only as a utopian future; (3) the conse-
quences of the conditions as outlined in (1) (it would follow logically):
confusion in Albion; (4) the consequences of the conditions as described
in the second part: people walk on their feet again.
At a first glance, the Fool charts a deceptively simple progression
from a deplorable present to a glorious future. But when one takes into
account the sources the first part of his speech draws on, a consider-
able intertextual complication arises: the situation identified as Edmund’s
Machiavellian, modern present borrowed from a text attributed to a
thoroughly medieval authority, Chaucer.23 Moreover, by virtue of the
Fool’s rhetorically separating the conditions of the times from the effect
they must logically have, temporal distinctions are further dissolved. This
intricacy is exacerbated by the fact that the Fool, somewhat in keeping
with the play’s pre-Christian setting, announces that Merlin will make
this prophecy in the future; in other words, Merlin will rearticulate this
prophecy (in Arthurian times), “for I [the Fool] live before his [Merlin’s]
time” (3.2.81–96). In purely generical terms, one might explain this jum-
bled chronology merely as a “merlinesque prophecy,” forecasting, inter
alia, the “downfall for a state.”24
In our view, though, the Fool’s speech chief ly serves to deconstruct
the play’s temporalities. Through uttering a prophecy in pre-Christian
times that will have to be rearticulated in, and hence apply equally to,
Merlin’s Middle Ages, and by means of severing the logical connection
between a cultural condition and its political effects, the Fool actually
doubles the doubling of chronology. By thus implying that each of the
two sets of conditions could result in either of the two conclusions, the
Fool generates a structure of before and after in the same way the effect
of the conditions themselves construct a before and after. As the pre-
eminent poet-playwright, the Fool not only constructs and inhabits mul-
tiple temporalities, but also spotlights the problematic circularity of the
transitional trajectory the play ostensibly charts: a chivalric and poetic
medieval world of poetry descending into a Machiavellian chaos of self-
interested stagecraft. According to the Fool’s logic of time, a medievalist
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 25

feudal order is yet to come—and problematically, it is a medieval world

described by Chaucer (post-Merlin) and backdated (even further into the
Middle Ages) to Merlin. Yet Merlin himself already complains about the
loss of order that will, following this logic, become manifest only to fall
into immediate decay or never to materialize anywhere, save for a uto-
pian nowhere that, the Fool aside, no one in King Lear is able to imagine,
much less achieve. Consistently unraveling any sense of an ordered chro-
nology, the Fool renders impossible the stable medieval-modern divide
that drives the play’s action on the surface level.
The Fool’s deconstruction and hybridizing of temporalities thus
exposes the politics of mapping history and time in terms of novelty and
change. His particular version of time warp draws attention to the inher-
ent contradictions attendant upon “temporalizing” as discussed by mod-
ern scholars—for instance, through Halpern’s counter-chronology—and
as constructed within the play itself. Instances within the play where
the politics of temporalizing is at work are, for instance, Edmund’s self-
fashioning as “Renaissance Man” advanced in medieval poetry and his
belated conversion to the old order; the nostalgia already within the old
order for something that never existed; Lear’s acknowledgment that his
daughter’s scheming is part of himself in 2.2. Most importantly, Lear
acknowledges the dissolution of literary-historical temporalities that
authors and directors like Kurosawa need to deconstruct and manage.

Ran’s Shakespearean Temporalities

We have witnessed how Lear exposes and subverts the construction of
progressive temporalities: What appears to be a straightforward transition
from a feudal medieval world to an individualist-capitalist modernity
eventually emerges as an ideological construct, as does the representation
of seemingly successive generic temporalities (poetry to drama). Ran,
too, seems to depict a feudal society on the brink of modernity, a culture
moving from the (decentralized, feudal) Sengoku period to the (central-
ized, feudal) Edo era. Like Lear, Ran exposes the myth-making involved
in constructing a glorified medieval—here: samurai—past where a uni-
fied collective was held together by honesty and loyalty.
Through overlayering as well as showcasing the construction of pre-
modern and modern temporalities, Ran complicates Japan’s 1970s nation-
alistic nostalgia for a past that never existed, insisting that the cultures of
individualism and political deception—associated with the West—cannot
be undone simply by a return to feudal loyalty and unity; in fact, in decon-
structing and simultaneously fusing medieval and modern temporalities,
the return to “feudal times” is implicitly recast as a return to the modern.
26 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

In what emerges to be a cyclical construction of temporality, supposedly

typical facets of Western modernism are transposed to, or seen as already
inherent in, medieval Japan itself. Like the Fool’s juggling of multiple
temporalities in Lear, Ran not only brings into focus Kurosawa’s aesthetics
and politics of adaptation, but, through the lens of an illusionary Middle
Ages, pivotally intervenes in the problematic political constructions of
temporalities in general and the medieval in particular at a time when
Japan was about to be overtaken by its own economic dominance.
Like the construction of temporalities in Lear, the dissolution of vari-
ous layers of temporalities in Ran has a poetological correlative inso-
far as the film also juggles various artistic temporalities, chief ly (though
not exclusively) different genres associated with different periods, from
medieval Japanese theater (noh, kyôgen, kabuki, and bunraku) via English
Renaissance drama to modern Japanese jidai-geki, that is, samurai film
(literally period film).25 While Ran features intertextual/intermedial ref-
erences to all medieval forms of Japanese theater (which tend towards
generic intertextualities anyway), Kurosawa’s adaptation of Shakespearean
temporalities complicates Ran’s most ostensible generic affiliation, the
film’s gesture toward samurai film.
Jidai-geki was a problematic genre in postwar Japan, deemed dangerous
(and consequently forbidden) by the American Occupation on account of
the films’ nationalistic nostalgia for feudal Japan.26 Nostalgic depictions of
Japan’s warrior past along with historiographical revisionism began to flour-
ish around the time Kurosawa was writing and shooting Ran. Throughout
the 1970s, Japan’s GNP had become the second largest in the world and,
although there were some economic setbacks (the US recognition of China,
the abolishment of a fixed exchange rate, the OPEC oil embargo), Japan
still remained ahead of other nations. National self-confidence soared, and
“typically” Japanese qualities were extolled, as evidenced by the “Discover
Japan” campaign in the early 1970s and the popularity of nihonjinron (liter-
ally theories of Japanese-ness). Nihonjinron attributed Japan’s continued success
to a national “uniqueness,” portraying

Japanese culture, people and society as harmonious and homogeneous,

bound together by a long history of racial purity, common language and
identity with the islands of Japan. In defining who and what was Japanese,
these writings differentiated Japan and the Japanese from other peoples and
cultures, including domestic minorities. They asserted Japanese unique-
ness and, implicitly or explicitly, its superiority. 27

According to ancient myth, the unique Japanese race was born from the
sun goddess, Amaterasu, from which the Japanese emperors descended.
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 27

Given that the Emperor is seen as extending the sun goddess’s “time”
onto earth, he “incarnates the Eternal Now (naka-ima).”28 Revisionists
naturally rejected the idea that the Japanese were descendants of the
ancient Chinese people who had moved through present-day Korea and
later settled in Japan. Moreover, distinctly Japanese qualities were pitted
against an inverted Western value system and seen as best exemplified in
the feudal Japan Ran appears to depict.29
Ran questions samurai ideals from the outset, despite being inspired by
Japanese history, especially stories about the medieval warlord Motonari
Mo-ri, who had three sons, conquered neighboring castles, and provides
the source of the film’s parable of the three arrows.30 While Motonari’s
sons were supposedly virtuous, Kurosawa entertains the question of what
would have happened had they been competitive and jealous.31 In Ran, it
is the 70-year-old Hidetora who reenacts the parable as part of his deci-
sion to retire and divide his kingdom between his three sons Taro, Jiro,
and Saburo. First he asks his sons to break an arrow each, which they eas-
ily accomplish. Hidetora surmises it is impossible to break three arrows
together, which would illustrate that the sum is greater than its parts.
However, Saburo breaks the bundle of three arrows over his knee, demon-
strating that the collective might not be unbreakable (p. 16), marking not
only Kurosawa’s modification of the source, but signaling also the film’s
skepticism vis-à-vis idealized representations of feudal Japan.
Significantly, in its depiction of samurai the film undermines its own
genre: Hardly any of Ran’s warriors are paragons of virtue, but greedy and
brutal demons, whose internal strife seals the collective’s self-destruction.
The film indicates, as does Shakespeare’s play, that the feudal samurai
code was a rarely realized ideal, always already fraught with individualist
self-assertion. In Ran, the youngest son Saburo and Tango, the Kent-like
loyal retainer, both of whom Hidetora banishes at the start of the film, are
the only samurai to uphold the ideal. Ran thus takes on the “whole issue
of ‘national identity’ and its expression through the medium of film.”32
What is more, the film’s syncretic handling of eastern and western genres
with their associated temporalities is then complicated through further
layering with Buddhist temporalities, which are deconstructed as soon as
they are introduced.
Ran is set in the age when shinshū, the True Sect of the Pure Land,
was founded, soon becoming one of the leading forms of Buddhism.
As Kenneth D. Nordin observes, Buddhist symbolism runs deep in
Kurosawa’s film. Symbols such as “[s]croll images of Amitabha, the oldest
and most important of the five celestial Buddhas,” Buddhist calligraphy,
or Lotus f lowers, “all point to the Buddhist path of enlightenment. At
the same time, they stand as powerful counterpoints to the chaos and
28 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

destruction upon which the movie is built.”33 For Nordin, the contrast
between spiritual enlightenment and destruction serves as a reminder
that chaos ensues when the Buddhist path to enlightenment is ignored.34
By contrast, we argue that the film engages with (medieval) Buddhist
temporalities, ultimately to deconstruct both Buddhist and secular tem-
poralities as part of Kurosawa’s Shakespearean project to expose the poli-
tics of “temporalizing.”
The crucial overlapping of secular and Buddhist time is introduced
at the film’s beginning during the boar hunt. We see Hidetora’s arrow
suspended in the bow (a moment arresting temporality); then, as we
watch him kill the boar, we cannot be sure whether, in a moment of
secular sanity, he decides to shoot or whether the decision was prede-
termined. Right after the boar hunt, Hidetora falls into a silent sleep,
which Saburo, Hidetora’s youngest son, emphasizes by noting worriedly
that his father “is not snoring loudly today” (p. 11). Again, time seems
to stand still, and Hidetora’s silence, in analogy with Japanese theatrical
traditions, indicates the importance of the event or transformation. In
Buddhism, human destinies are predetermined, and human existence is
chief ly characterized by suffering. In the light of collapsed temporalities,
the killed boar represents Hidetora’s own animal self, yielding his own
life of power,35 and it seems that Hidetora is on a spiritual path beyond
human suffering.36 Individuals who are finally enlightened gain access to
a paradisiacal Pure Land. In contrast to a secular (temporal) existence, in
which individuals are seen as being somewhat in charge of present and
future—and, to a certain extent, their pasts—shinshū constructs a cycle
of six different realms of incarnation: heaven, humans, Asura [demon-
gods], hungry ghosts, animals, and hell.
In Buddhist philosophy, “He who believes himself stainless is either
mad or an idiot.”37 Given such a view of madness, Hidetora certainly
qualifies as mad. In the secular world he lives in, however, madness has
a different valuation. In Ran, every bout of his madness fuses secular and
Buddhist temporalities, simultaneously offering a glimpse of enlighten-
ment. Hidetora’s madness first manifests itself after he awakens from sleep
to immediately proclaim his intention of making his oldest son, Taro, the
sole ruler of the realm. This decision is not only prefaced by his exclama-
tion “Now is the time!” but more concretely by a reference to Buddhist
temporalities, the transition from one realm to another. Upon his awak-
ening the transformation has taken place: Hidetora passes on his status
to Taro. While Hidetora nominally invests Taro with his authority, it is
Taro’s wife Kaede—who recalls Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Edmund—
who actually takes over Hidetora’s power, insofar as she enters the realm
of animals. Hidetora’s collapse (signified by the dead boar) marks the
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 29

beginning of Kaede’s rule: She continues his bloody conquests and, at a

later point, is suitably represented as a fox (p. 74).38
Hidetora continues to live in other Buddhist realms at the same time.
For example, he dies again (metaphorically) during Kaede’s attack and
destruction of the second castle,39 descending into the Buddhist hell. It is a
silent hell, though, characterized as the realm of the demon-gods (Asura):

Hidetora, his strength drained from his body, slips and tumbles down
the stairs like a dead man falling into Hell. A terrible scroll of Hell is
shown depicting the fall of the castle. There are no real sounds as the scroll
unfolds like a daytime nightmare. It is a sense of human evildoing, the way
of the demonic Asura, as seen by a Buddha in tears. (p. 47)

As Hidetora descends into hell and the realm of Asura, he falls into a
mad trance, which yields a different perspective on the world of war.
This transformation is again underlined by silence. In this simultaneous
incarnation of three realms, Hidetora is confronted with the hell of his
former life, a world of ruthless violence and samurai warriors murdering,
raping, and pillaging.
Crucially, Hidetora’s anthropogenic demon-filled hell approximates
visually the human-made nuclear holocaust of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The (nuclear) carnage of Kaede’s battle is already anticipated at the begin-
ning of the film when the camera focuses on a large cumulonimbus cloud
that resembles atomic mushroom clouds, and the film ends with Hidetora’s
view of scattering altocumulus clouds, which betoken change.40 To fur-
ther war-like associations, the mushroom cloud scene is accompanied by
the sounds of airplanes and helicopters. At such moments, Ran exploits
modern cinematographic technology in the service of layering several
temporalities: the ordered (i.e., feudal) and picturesque landscape/sky with
the sounds and images of modern warfare and an attendant, cold-war fear
of nuclear apocalypse; Kaede’s self-interested conquest with the nuclear
holocaust; the simultaneous experience of what are otherwise distinct
Buddhist temporalities. As Kyoami, Hidetora’s androgynous entertainer
observes, “[h]uman beings are always lost. Human beings have walked
the same way again and again from the earliest times” (p. 82). Kyoami’s
epiphany is marked by the end of Kaede’s cycle of power: Her blood
splatters on a wall, echoing the lettering of the film’s title at the outset,41
sprayed onto the screen with the boar’s blood (Hidetora’s power).
Ran depicts both secular and Buddhist temporalities as ultimately falling
back on their own constructions, resulting in a cyclical pattern in which
individual and collective history is destined to repeat itself, as emerges in
Ran’s intertextual references and in the collapse of the Buddhist cycles of
30 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

incarnation. In portraying how characters are caught in all six realms of

the Buddhist cycle simultaneously, the film self-consciously deconstructs
the temporalities attendant upon reincarnation. It is important to note
that Buddhism does not construct these temporalities in terms of progres-
sion, with the exception of the attainment of enlightenment, when faith-
ful persons ascend into the Pure Land of Amida, the Buddha delivering
people from sin and ignorance. Ran merges the six temporal realms and
the Pure Land within the characters’ human existence, rejecting the idea
that another time and space (the Pure Land) is a progression from another
state of being. In intertwining and deconstructing Buddhist and secular
time and space, temporal and spatial finiteness—that is, the belief in a
marked beginning and clear end—are exposed as illusionary constructs.
In Ran, enlightenment, which is the only stage of teleological
advancement within Buddhism, is demoted to a status equal to the other
six realms, which means that characters who do attain enlightenment
(i.e., are awakened from sin and ignorance), are destined to fall back into
chaos: Sué, who stands for complete Buddhist enlightenment in Ran,
eventually becomes involved in Kaede’s war and is decapitated; Hidetora
experiences bouts of (secular) enlightenment throughout the film instead
of Sué, about whom the screenplay wonders, whether “the golden west-
ern sky [is] illuminating [Sué’s] figure that gives her the very appearance
of a weeping Buddha?” (p. 35) In the case of Sué, Buddhist enlighten-
ment does warrant paradisiacal conditions, as she is sorrowful both before
and after her awakening. Sué’s sadness transcends temporalities, revealing
the constructedness of the ascension into the Pure Land even for a pure
and faithful being like herself. In the case of Hidetora, the unfaithful
sinner, emotions also transcend temporalities. While for Sué, sadness is
omnipresent, Hidetora undergoes periods of enlightenment character-
ized by feelings of guilt and remorse, which bring him back to the chaos
of his existence, with the exception of a short excursion via madness into
heaven upon his reunification with Saburo.
By and large, Hidetora’s enlightened moments, which exclusively
occur during moments of madness and when he simultaneously expe-
riences other Buddhist realms of existence, provide him with a cause
for, rather than an alleviation of, human suffering. Each time Hidetora
enters one of these states, he sees himself from a different perspective,
and this enlightenment as to the atrocities he inf licted as warlord are so
overwhelming that his guilt even produces physical pain leading to his
death. The new perspective Hidetora gains is emphasized by the fact that
when he experiences enlightenment, temporalities collapse. During the
hell scene, for example, Hidetora has a vision in which Jiro and Taro
attack him (p. 54). In envisioning a future that in fact materializes, and in
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 31

feeling guilt for surviving their attacks, while simultaneously empathiz-

ing with the powerless who die, he experiences an instant of clarity. This
clarity is unbearable for him, however, because the vision simultaneously
depicts his own past and future, both of which visualize dramatically the
horrors of his existence.42 Ultimately, in thus deconstructing temporali-
ties, the film emphasizes that while Buddhist enlightenment is possible,
it is not a matter of temporal progression—just as there is no progress
inherent in the progression from medieval warfare to modern nuclear
apocalypse, Buddhist conceptualizations of temporal progression emerge
as equally constructed.
Critics have drawn attention to Kurosawa’s subversion of jidai-geki as
well as to his references to medieval Japanese theater. Rachel Hutchinson
observes that “[i]n his appropriation of kabuki and noh sources, his self-
reflexive use of intertextuality, and his deconstruction of the conventions of
jidai-geki, Kurosawa demonstrates an awareness of film as a medium within
which to experiment and ask questions about genre and convention.”43
Insofar as the film extends meta-theatrical and cinematographic inter-
textualities to include Renaissance drama and Western film, while high-
lighting the generic and temporal multiplicity inherent in Japanese theater
itself,44 Ran, just like Lear, self-consciously welds into place the artistic and
aesthetic questions faced by Japanese cinematographers.45
Questions of temporality and periodization are problematized in partic-
ular by Ran’s syncretic references to jidai-geki and traditional Japanese the-
ater. The two “poet-playwright” characters in Ran, the ‘Fool’ Kyoami and
the f lute-player Tsurumaru, are depicted with reference to all traditional
genres of medieval Japanese theater, suggesting, through the handling of
temporalities within these theatrical genres, that their temporalities are
f luid. Kyoami at first glance seems to represent kabuki, the original ideo-
graph meaning slant, used to describe someone’s strange behavior or dress;
later, the ideographs were changed to ka - [song], bu- [dance], ki [art].46
Although actresses originally acted female roles, they were replaced in the
mid-seventeenth century by onnagata (cross-dressed male actors). Kyoami’s
androgyny certainly alludes to the kabuki onnagata, and his use of song and
dance ref lects kabuki. On further investigation, however, Kyoami appro-
priates the dramatic and poetic elements of noh, the comedy of kyôgen, and
the central role of the chanter-narrator from bunraku puppet theater. This
is illustrated by Kyoami’s adaptation of a noh play about sibling rivalry,
Funa-benket, during a bout of Hidetora’s madness:

How strange! On withered fields I see an entire

clan destroyed by my hands, each one of them
f loating up before me. (p. 54)
32 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

Kyoami’s succinct representation of Hidetora’s story thus combines all

Japanese theatrical genres, breaking up the Shakespearean tragedy with
kyôgen -like comic relief by parodying verse.47 In this scene, as in all of his
comic scenes, Kyoami narrates the plot. Kyoami’s revealing interpretation
parallels the chanter’s narration of the drama in bunraku puppet theater,
the chanter being the central figure of the play.48 What also points to bun-
raku in Kyoami’s parody of the noh play is that he narrates the plot from
Hidetora’s point of view, prompting Hidetora to express “the extreme of
madness” (p. 54), gesturing towards the “madness play,” a subgenre of
noh.49 Finally, Kyoami’s parody mirrors the “merlinesque prophecy” of
Lear’s Fool. In predicting the end of Hidetora’s world, Kyoami prophesies
both the end of Japan’s economic power as well as the cold-war fear of the
nuclear apocalypse. By means of overlayering the already multiple tem-
poralities of all forms of Japanese theater with Shakespearean prophecy,
Ran not only draws attention to the constructedness of temporalities, but
also, by means of its intercultural generic intertextualities, highlights the
aesthetic underpinnings of the film itself.
Like Kyoami, Tsurumaru authors temporality in the film. While
Kyoami’s character acts as a playwright who simply appears on film,
Tsurumaru becomes a cinematographic author-figure, transcending tem-
porality in a way that Kyoami cannot. Tsurumaru assumes the author-
role when Kyoami, Hidetora, and Tango enter Tsurumaru’s hut. Upon
beholding Tsurumaru’s androgynous, onnagata-like figure, Tango mis-
takes Tsurumaru for a woman. At this exact point, the role of chanter
passes from Kyoami to Tsurumaru. Tsurumaru becomes the “star” chanter
who narrates the conclusion of the bunraku play, sharing the role with the
younger or less experienced chanters who narrate the play’s beginning and
middle, represented by Kyoami (p. 59). Tsurumaru achieves this, however,
not in Kyoami’s fashion with song, dance, and speech; instead, he appro-
priates elements of noh through minimalistic movements and gestures,
through his association with Buddhism (Sué), and in playing the nohkan
(the noh-f lute). Moreover, in “The Noh transcription of Shakespeare’s
sounds in Ran,” the dramatic use of silence as well as the importance of
the nohkan are discussed at length. Tsurumaru “authors” his tears with
his f lute, “the tears we never hear him shed.”50 As the screenplay puts it,
“[T]he clear sound of the f lute expresses Tsurumaru’s deep sorrow and
lament. It moves Hidetora . . . He clutches at his chest like a man shot with
an arrow” (p. 62), representing another “merlinesque prophecy” that por-
tends Hidetora’s fatal heart attack upon Saburo’s death; Hidetora’s heart
literally breaks.
That it is Tsurumaru and not Kyoami who stirs Hidetora’s soul indi-
cates that, in Ran, the sense of hearing is more important than sight (as
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 33

it is in Lear). Despite the film’s vast panoramas and its detailed atten-
tion to colors, it is arguably sound and silence that are of greatest sig-
nificance in Ran. With his music, Tsurumaru reaches Hidetora in a way
that Kyoami’s observant narration of the present, whatever “present” this
might be, does not. Like his enlightened sister Sué and the loyal samurai
Saburo, Tsurumaru is the catalyst for an episode of Hidetora’s enlight-
ened moments. Just as Hidetora tells Sué that her forgiveness breaks his
heart, Tsurumaru breaks Hidetora’s heart by means of his music (p. 62).
Thus, Tsurumaru attains a level of artistic expression unreachable for
Kyoami. In the authorial act of playing his f lute, Tsurumaru recreates the
past for Hidetora and concomitantly has Hidetora experience his future
death, again marking multiple temporalities, this time within a more
explicit cinematographic context.
The aesthetic multiplication of temporalities reaches a climax as
Gloucester’s attempted suicide is reconfigured in various ways by Kyoami,
Hidetora, and Tsurumaru. After the third castle is destroyed, Hidetora
is expected to commit seppuku, but cannot, since his sword is destroyed.
When, after their reunification, Kyoami tells Hidetora to jump from the
castle wall in order to break the cycle of humanity’s repetition of history,
Hidetora follows suit (p. 82). Kyoami is rather shocked that Hidetora has
indeed jumped, perhaps because Kyoami’s narration has not brought about
change before now. Here, Kyoami’s authorship, once narrating the plot
either simultaneously or following the action, has penned the action before
it happens. Immediately after Hidetora survives his fall from the wall, he
looks up to see Sué, and then the blind Tsurumaru, swinging his cane while
standing on the fortification of his family’s castle, which was destroyed by
Hidetora. The blind Tsurumaru, the playwright-cinematographer stands
on the same wall Hidetora jumped from a moment before. While the
focus of the camera is static during Hidetora’s fall from what seems to be a
boulder (it is a small cliff with all the appearance of a theater prop), when
Tsurumaru and Sué stand on the cliff, the camera pulls back creating a
dramatic panorama.
Tsurumaru is at once the blind Gloucester holding his staff, making
the distinction between theater and film no longer visible. Upon seeing
him, Hidetora cries for Tsurumaru’s forgiveness and then runs off (p. 83).
Hidetora, who takes Kyoami’s previous speech literally, becomes lost
until the end of the film, completing Kyoami’s prophecy. The past, pres-
ent, and future of Hidetora’s real and imagined worlds conf late in allu-
sions to a real and imagined medieval Japan at war, to the actual nuclear
catastrophes of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to the imagined impending
nuclear chaos of cold-war mentality, as well as to the future reincarnation
within the Buddhist realms.
34 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

When Hidetora becomes lost, humanity is lost as all major characters

die in the chaos of the final battle. At the end, the film focuses on the
survivor, the blind poet Tsurumaru, who stands alone on the castle wall,
which suddenly seems to have risen above the earth. The world is silent.
As Tsurumaru walks to the edge of the fortress wall, he stumbles and
drops the Buddha, Amida, suggesting that The Pure Land has fallen. The
sound of a noh -f lute, the same sound that occurred simultaneously with
the splattered blood of the boar,51 immediately fills the silence. It is the
sound of Tsurumaru’s f lute, which he actually lost but is now metaphori-
cally played for him in the film score. Tsurumaru’s f lute transcends time
and space, and by completing the cycle of the film that the death of the
boar began, it is the ultimate symbol of Ran’s deconstruction and multi-
plication of temporalities. On the edge of the wall, high above the valley,
into which he has dropped the Buddha, Tsurumaru, stands at the end of
the world (figure 1.1). The cinematographer-poet looks at himself in his
own monumental panorama that he cannot see, as Ran’s audience hears
the sound of Tsurumaru’s f lute. This final moment, in which the film’s
cycle is complete, marks the end of time.
By means of the meta-cinematographic representation of multiple,
deconstructed, cross-cultural temporalities, Ran’s medievalism appears
to suggest that “now is the time” for acknowledging that the epony-
mous chaos of the film necessarily must have as a correlative an aes-
thetic chaos through which alone the politics of temporalities comes into
view. The depicted handling of temporalities becomes the sine qua non
of cinematographic work. Ran’s interrogation of the politics of time is

Figure 1.1 Collapsing temporalities: Tsurumaru beholds the end of time in

Akira Kurosawa’s Ran.
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 35

deeply embedded in medieval film. It emerges with particular force in

the depiction of Buddhist temporalities, which the film deconstructs and
overlayers with the nuclear threat. Similarly to Lear, the film aesthetically
ref lects the deconstruction of temporalities in a network of intertextual
and intermedial references to medieval Japanese theater, early modern
theater, as well as Japanese period and Hollywood film.

Notes
* We would like to thank Andrew James Johnston and Margitta Rouse for their
stimulating and generous feedback and their help in focusing our ideas.
1. All parenthetical references to the screenplay are to Akira Kurosawa,
Hideo Oguni, and Ide Masato, Ran, trans. Tadashi Shishido (Boston,
MA: Shambhala, 1986).
2 . For the introduction of firearms as a turning point see, for example,
Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (2000; repr. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap, 2002), kindle edn.
3. See, for example, Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The
Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa
(1988; repr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
pp. 152–53, but cf. Samuel Crowl, “The Bow Is Bent and Drawn:
Kurosawa’s Ran and the Shakespearean Arrow of Desire,” Literature Film
Quarterly 22.2 (1994): 110–11.
4. For the film’s historical precedent, the history of Motonari Mo-ri and
the Tale of the Heike, see esp. Robert Hapgood, “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare
Films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep, and Ran,” in Shakespeare and the
Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television, ed. Anthony Davies and
Stanley Wells (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
pp. 234–49.
5. Akira Kurosawa, “Kurosawa Directs a Cinematic Lear : Interview with
Peter Grilli,” New York Times, December 15, 1985, 2:1; Joan Pong Linton,
“Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and King Lear : Towards a Conversation on
Historical Responsibility,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (2006):
341–51.
6. Anthony Dawson, “Cross-Cultural Interpretation: Reading Kurosawa
Reading Shakespeare,” in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen,
ed. Diana Henderson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 158 [155–75].
7. J. Lawrence Guntner, “Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on Film,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 2nd edn.
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 137 [120–40].
In an interview Kurosawa stated that the “secret subject of Ran . . . is the
threat of nuclear apocalypse” (Michael Wilmington, “Ran: Apocalypse
Song,” The Criterion Collection, available at: www.criterion.com/current
/posts/402-ran-apocalypse-song).
36 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

8. James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2002) raised vexing questions about the current ways of peri-
odizing the medieval and the Renaissance, in turn prompting fur-
ther analyses of literary-historical discontinuities, inter alia: Carolyn
Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 107–23; Jennifer Summit and David
Wallace, eds., Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization, special issue of
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007); Gordon McMullan
and David Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kathleen Davis,
Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization
Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008); and, more recently, Brian Cummings and James Simpson,
eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Carolyn Dinshaw, How
Soon Is Now: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
9. Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to
Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), esp. pp. 225–312. For Shakespeare’s
medievalism generally, see esp. Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds.,
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: A & C Black,
2010); Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland, eds., Medieval
Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2013); Christina Wald, ed., Medieval Shakespeare, special issue of
Shakespeare 8.4 (2012).
10. For Shakespeare’s “medieval” authorship, see Wolfram Keller’s
“Shakespearean Medievalism: Conceptions of Literary Authorship in
Richard II and John Lydgate’s Troy Book,” in Medievalism, ed. Ute Berns
and Andrew James Johnston, special issue of European Journal of English
Studies 15.2 (2011): 129–42, and “Arrogant Authorial Performances:
Criseyde to Cressida,” in Performing the Politics of Passion, ed. Andrew James
Johnston, Elisabeth Kempf and Russell West-Pavlov (forthcoming).
11. The familiar tropes utilized to medievalize the Middle Ages, however,
might be seen as rendering the “medieval” somehow coterminous with
a general premodern “everywhen.” For Shakespeare’s sources, see R. A.
Foakes, ed. and introd., King Lear (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson,
1997), pp. 92–110; parenthetical references are to this edition.
12. Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce
Vining (London: Dobson, 1967), pp. 61, 67; Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our
Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1964), p. 110. See further Edwin Muir, The Politics of King Lear (Glasgow:
Jackson, 1947), pp. 19–24; Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of
Man, 2nd edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1949). For an overview of post-
war Lear-criticism, see R. A. Foakes, Hamlet vs. Lear: Cultural Politics and
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 37

Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993),

pp. 51–54.
13. John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear
(1949; repr. London: Faber, 1951), pp. 34–35, 41, 46, 52. For the inf lu-
ence of Danby’s reading, see esp. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive
Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 216, 305–6 n. 5.
14. Stephen Greenblatt, “General Introduction,” in The Norton Shakespeare:
Based on the Oxford Edition, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, ed. Walter
Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York:
Norton, 1997), p. 1; cf. Patrick Cheney, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s
Poetry in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), pp. 6–10 [1–13].
15. Kozintsev, Shakespeare, p. 94; Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of
the Human (1998; repr. New York: Riverhead, 1999), p. 488.
16. David Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theatre: Shakespeare in
Performance, Then and Now (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2007), p. 160; for Edmund’s acting and stage management, see John
Reibetanz, The Lear World: A Study of King Lear in Its Dramatic Context
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 58–59.
17. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine, pp. 47–48; Halpern, Poetics, pp. 216, 243,
247. For the contradiction within Danby’s account, see Foakes, Hamlet vs.
Lear, p. 54.
18. See Patrick Cheney’s Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for the poet-
playwrights in Lear, see esp. pp. 34, 205–6 in the former and p. 103
in the latter; for summary of Cheney’s argument in the context of
Shakespeare’s recourse to medieval conceptions of literary authorship,
see Keller, “Shakespearean Medievalism.”
19. “When he does sustain the pressure, no one disappears so darkly into his
authorial role, complete with mad snatches of ruined song, borrowed and
invented” (Cheney, Shakespeare, pp. 205–6, with reference to 3.6.29–30).
20. Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 489. For Edgar’s medievalism (his knowledge of
Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostors and quotation from
Bevis of Hamtoun), see Cooper, Shakespeare, p. 168; for the religious dimen-
sion, see Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and
Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 271–93.
21. Cheney, Shakespeare, p. 205, with reference to 1.4.144–47. Edgar eventu-
ally returns to the “nothing” with which Cordelia sets the plot in motion
(1.1.87–90), by declaring himself “nothing” in the end; the Fool literally
achieves such a nothing without articulating it.
22 . Aptly, Bloom describes the Fool as “free of time” and “drift[ing] out of
the play into another era” (Shakespeare, p. 499).
38 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

23. The lines closely approximate verse by Thomas of Erceldoune, but were
included in William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer (1532) and labelled as
Chaucerian by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589; repr.
Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), pp. 187–88. See also Cooper, Shakespeare,
p. 167; Foakes, King Lear, 268–69nn.
24. Terence Hawkes, “The Fool’s ‘Prophecy’ in King Lear,” Notes and Queries
7.9 (1960): 331–32. For a brief discussion, see also Foakes, ed., King Lear,
268–69nn. It is worth noting that the literary genealogy of the Fool him-
self is medieval. See Siegfried Wenzel, “The Wisdom of the Fool,” in The
Wisdom of Poetry, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo,
MI: Medieval Institute, 1982), pp. 225–40.
25. Without commenting on issues of temporality, Rachael Hutchinson men-
tions that the intertextuality in Kurosawa’s films, namely the appropria-
tion of noh, kabuki, and jidai-geki, destroys binaries of East/West as well
as Hollywood/national cinemas. See her “Orientalism or Occidentalism?
Dynamics of Appropriation in Akira Kurosawa,” in Remapping World
Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and
Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallf lower, 2006), pp. 182–83 (173–87); we
extend her thesis to all four medieval theater genres.
26. Hutchinson, “Orientalism or Occidentalism,” p. 177.
27. Elise K. Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (2002; repr.
London: Routledge, 2008), kindle edn.
28. Jean Herbert, Shintô at the Fountain-Head of Japan (1967; repr. London:
Routledge, 2011), p. 390.
29. See Jansen, Modern Japan, who, inter alia, points out that increasing rights
for women recalled a time “when samurai wives became the center of
family and communal life while men were off on distant ceremonial
duty in Edo to accompany their lords.” The above is a reductive view of
nihonjinron’s opposition of groupism (interpersonalism, contextualism),
verticality, and dependence against western individualism, horizontality,
independence, and self-autonomy. For a more nuanced view, see Kosaku
Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan (London: Routledge,
1992), pp. 9–38.
30. See Robert Hapgood, “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films,” p. 236. For the
historical Japanese background, see also Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa:
Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000), p. 355.
31. Cf. Hapgood, “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films,” p. 237.
32 . Hutchinson, “Orientalism or Occidentalism,” p. 177; see also Sato Tadao,
“Kurosawa und seine Zeit,” in Akira Kurosawa und seine Zeit, ed. Nicola
Glaubnitz, Andreas K äuser, and Hyunseon Lee (Bielefeld: Transcript,
2005), pp. 27–28.
33. Kenneth D. Nordin, “Buddhist Symbolism in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran: A
Counterpoint to Human Chaos,” Asian Cinema 16.2 (2005): 242 [242–54].
34. Nordin, “Buddhist Symbolism,” 242.
 “NOW IS T H E T I M E” 39

35. For the boar as representation of Hidetora’s animal self, see Julie
Kane, “From the Baroque to Wabi: Translating Animal Imagery from
Shakespeare’s King Lear to Kurosawa’s Ran,” Literature Film Quarterly 25.2
(1997): 149 [146–51].
36. In “Buddhist Symbolism,” Nordin claims that Hidetora follows a path
toward enlightenment that continues after his death, which we believe to
be unlikely in view of the centrality of the Amida in Ran. In shinsh ū (The
True Sect of the Pure Land) and in its predecessor, jodo- (the Pure Land
Sect), the sects dedicated to Amida, enlightenment could be achieved
in only one way: by reciting Amida’s name with complete faith and
love, that is, experiencing enlightenment in one moment, the pure way
( jodomone), rather than progressing gradually by following the “way of
the wise” on earth (shodomone); for the latter, see E. Steinilber-Oberlin
and Kuni Matsuo, trans. Marc Logé, The Buddhist Sects of Japan: Their
History, Philosophical Doctrines and Sanctuaries (London: Allen & Unwin,
1983), pp. 208–9. In our view, Hidetora’s bouts of enlightenment thus do
not lead to his eventual ascension to the Pure Land.
37. Steinilber-Oberlin, The Buddhist Sects of Japan, p. 210.
38. See Kane, “From the Baroque to Wabi,” 150.
39. For the destruction of the second castle, see also Crowl, “The Bow is
Bent and Drawn,” 112.
40. For Buddhist cloud symbolism, see Nordin, “Buddhist Symbolism,”
242–43.
41. Crowl, “The Bow Is Bent and Drawn,” 115.
42 . Episodic enlightenment occurs on other occasions, too, for example,
when Tsurumaru plays music that metaphorically stabs Hidetora’s heart
with the high-pitched sounds of his f lute (p. 62), when Hidetora sees
Tsurumaru together with Sué at the castle that he took from them (p. 83),
when Saburo forgives Hidetora just before they both die (p. 97), and
finally, when his own guilt and pain literally kills him (p. 98).
43. Hutchinson, “Orientalism or Occidentalism,” p. 177; for the inf luence
of the American Western film on Kurosawa’s samurai films, see Stephen
Prince, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). For the noh elements in the film,
see Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965; repr. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1996), p. 217.
44. Story lines and theatrical techniques are frequently lent by and borrowed
from each of the traditions: noh (a poetic and minimalist theater that
incorporates Buddhist and Shinto elements), kyôgen (a light and comic
“mad speech” staged between each noh play in Japanese all-day theater),
kabuki (secular dance-drama), and bunraku (high-culture Chinese- and
Korean-inf luenced puppet theater often dealing with the Confucian
conf licts between duty and human compassion). For an overview, see
Martin Banham, Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 560–62.
40 J O C E LY N K E L L E R A N D WO L F R A M R . K E L L E R

45. There are other films, like Itami’s The Funeral, which also expose the
constructedness of Japaneseness in nihonjinron, although without engag-
ing with the medieval, historical dimension. See, for example, Chris
Payne, “Burying the Past: Nihonjinron and the Representation of
Japanese Society in Itami’s The Funeral,” Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific
Studies 1 (2003): 13–20. The noh -intertextualities also problematize
Yoshimoto’s argument that Ran is virtually without close-up shots of
any one individual, leaving spectators as “distant observers of a drama
of massive destruction,” focusing on the collective rather than individu-
als (Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, pp. 356–57). According to Yoshinobu Inoura
and Toshio Kawatake, however, stillness and poses in noh theater are
analogous to cinematic close-ups, ref lecting individual agency. One
example of the highlighting of individuality through length of focaliza-
tion is the presentation of severed heads for inspection. Here, “the head is
uncovered, and then the protagonists react to the revelation one by one.
Theatrical time is expanded to allow the audience to understand more
fully the significance of the event” (The Traditional Theatre of Japan [New
York: Weatherhill, 1981], p. 29). Ran doubles the presentation of severed
heads on account of Kaede’s demand for Sué’s head. First, Kurogane,
Jiro’s retainer, subverts this demand by returning with a head of a Shinto
sculpture of a fox. The presentation of the fox head is accompanied by a
long dialogue about the fox as trickster figure, meaning Kaede (p. 74).
Later, Kurogane appears with a package wrapped in Sué’s kimono fabric
that can only be Sué’s head. Thus, the murder of Sué is twice frozen in
time, as a noh -inspired close-up of Sué: once in anticipation of the act
and again as proof of the act.
46. Karen Brazell, “Japanese Theater: A Living Tradition,” in Traditional
Japanese Theatre: An Anthology of Plays, ed. Karen Brazell (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 13 [3–43].
47. Throughout the first half of the film, Kyoami’s comic relief functions like
kyôgen -interludes that break up the dramatic action of the film. At the
end, however, Kyoami no longer provides light entertainment. Perhaps,
he even transforms into a tragic figure in the latter half of the film.
48. Banham, Cambridge Guide, p. 140.
49. In bunraku, characters often played the roles of other characters, a tech-
nique that was then adopted by kabuki. For a summary, see Banham,
Cambridge Guide, p. 562.
50. Saviour Catania, “Wailing Woodwind Wild: The Noh Transcription of
Shakespeare’s Silent Sounds,” Literature Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 89
[85–92].
51. Crowl, “The Bow Is Bent and Drawn,” 109.
CHAPTER 2

DRACULA’S TIMES: ADAPTING THE

MIDDLE AGES IN FRANCIS FORD
COPPOLA’S BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA

Cordula Lemke

C ritics hardly ever agree. But in the case of Francis Ford Coppola’s film
version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula1 the verdict is almost unanimous: It
is one of the worst adaptations in film history. Critics do not tire to point
out how often Coppola gets Stoker wrong 2 and even those who enjoy the
film still criticize it for its lack of fidelity to the novel.3 Coppola’s film has
lured critics back into a heated and all-encompassing debate on the issue
of faithfully translating literary texts into filmic versions; and Coppola’s
own claim to having presented the first accurate adaptation of Stoker’s
novel—hence the title Bram Stoker’s Dracula —has merely exacerbated the
problem: “Just as Dracula sucks (as is in his nature), so does this motion
picture as an adaptation.”4
Yet the current vogue in adaptation studies stresses very different
issues, for example, the necessity to adapt to the particular aesthetics of
various media.5 If at all, the question of sources and origins is posed in
a more Derridean way leading to a truly intertextual approach.6 Thus
Fredric Jameson states: “Identity or difference: such is now the philo-
sophical form of our adaptation debate” 7 before he goes on to make a
strong case for the difference of the media. And Coppola does show an
acute awareness of many of these aspects in his adaptation of Stoker’s
Dracula.8 He plays consciously with the idiosyncratic aesthetics of films
and handles Stoker’s novel mainly as an intertext from which he quotes
just as he refers to previous cinematic adaptations of the novel, such as the
inf luential versions of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau or Tod Browning.
42 COR DU LA LEM K E

At the same time, Coppola is attentive to the interpretations of literary

critics, especially in regard to the characterizations of Lucy and Mina.
Consequently, he overemphasizes Lucy’s affinity to the much-feared
New Woman of the late Victorian era9 and starts off with the by now
widely supported reading that Mina is considerably more independent
in Stoker’s novel than literary critics were long prepared to admit10 —
even though Coppola then presents a rather traditional reading of the
romantic love story between Dracula and Elisabeta/Mina across the
ages.11 Furthermore, the director succeeds in unearthing one of the nov-
el’s much-neglected structures: the medieval Dracula, an aspect which
informs his whole interpretation. Thus I will argue that in Coppola’s
Dracula the process of adaptation is twofold. He adapts Stoker’s novel and
previous film versions, but he also adapts the Middle Ages for a twenti-
eth-century audience; his adaptation addresses both the history of media
and the history of ideas.
For those looking for fidelity, Coppola’s adaptation of Stoker’s novel
begins with a disturbing introduction. The film offers an insight into
Dracula’s late medieval past as Vlad Tepes, a Romanian magnate whose
fame rests both on his success as a freedom fighter against the Turks
and on his reputation for excessive violence. The gory violence of early
depictions of Vlad Tepes is, however, subdued in the film. Instead, the
movie’s focus lies on a rather clichéd love story between Dracula and his
wife Elisabeta, which is taken from folklore.12 At the end of Coppola’s
introduction to the late medieval world, Dracula cannot cope with
Elisabeta’s death—as a suicide, she was denied a Christian burial—and
runs his sword into the very heart of the huge cross in his church. After
an extended blood bath, the scene is cut and the opening credits appear in
red: “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” This is where, five minutes into the actual
film, Coppola’s adaptation of Stoker’s novel really begins. We witness
the same interpretive twist at the end of the film. This time, it is Mina,
Elisabeta’s supposed reincarnation, who looks down on her dying lover
Dracula in the same church where Dracula saw Elisabeta for the last time.
Mina ends his life by finishing Harker’s deed of staking him. By contrast,
Stoker’s novel culminates in Quincey and Harker’s heroic act of finishing
Dracula off.
Like Coppola’s film, Stoker’s novel has a frame narrative. The begin-
ning shows a disclaimer typical of gothic novels where the readers are
reassured as to the authenticity of the following story. Stoker’s disclaimer
is, however, more intricate: He states that the unreliability of memory
does not taint his documents as they were all written while the events
were still fresh in the characters’ minds, but he also points out that, due
to the different perspectives, the documents are highly biased. Although
 D R A C U L A’ S T I M E S 43

Stoker thereby emphasizes that his documents are true to the facts, the
readers are thus also made aware of the created and thus fictional aspect
of the texts—just as Jonathan Harker is at the end of the novel. In his
epilogue, a year after his heroic deed of staking Dracula, Harker actually
doubts the veracity of the accounts:

It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with
our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace
of all that had been was blotted out. The castle stood as before, reared high
above a waste of desolation.13

In the end, it is unclear whether any of the events are authentic or whether
the story is simply a piece of fiction written by Mina.14 The novel ends by
contesting everything: Dracula’s death, Lucy’s vampirism, Mina’s bond
with Dracula, Jonathan Harker’s experiences at the castle, and his aston-
ishing heroism—in essence, Dracula’s very existence.15
Coppola’s film does not allow such openness, but in its lengthy intro-
duction sets out to explain two of Stoker’s novel’s major lacunae: the rea-
son for Mina’s elevated position among Dracula’s victims and the origin
of the vampire. In Stoker’s novel, Mina is singled out by Dracula when
he shares his blood with her. Although the novel does not go into detail
about Lucy’s mode of becoming a vampire, Van Helsing assumes that she
is turned into a vampire simply by being bitten. The film introduces the
mutual sharing of blood as a key feature of becoming a vampire, as can be
seen in the cross-cutting between the Harkers’ marriage and Dracula and
Lucy’s union. Yet, Mina is still singled out due to her close resemblance
to Elisabeta. Staged as Elisabeta’s reincarnation, she reminds Dracula of
his true love and has access to Elisabeta’s memories. As Dracula’s newly
found love she is then presented with the choice of either sharing his
vampirical state or of remaining human.
The origin of Dracula’s vampirism is closely connected to this love
story. Dracula’s rage at the injustice of the late medieval church, which
denies Elisabeta an honorable burial and thus salvation, leads to his vam-
pirism. However, this framing of Dracula’s vampirical origin dramati-
cally reduces the potential contagiousness of vampirism. In contrast to
Stoker’s novel, we are presented with a vampire who is most probably
the only one of his kind. Dracula’s vampirical state is caused by a sin-
gular event unlikely ever to be repeated by any other human being. He
himself assuages all fears in his initial meeting with Harker when he
proclaims: “I am the last of my kind.” This recourse to the “last of the
race” motif 16 can be seen as a reduction of the horror elements that are
often perceived as the essence of Stoker’s Dracula.17 With Dracula’s death
44 COR DU LA LEM K E

at the end all traces of vampirism disappear from the earth. Thus, we may
leave the cinema with the reassuring feeling of having witnessed a beauti-
fully moving story of undying love that is set in the late Middle Ages but
speaks to us all the same due to its universal claim for truth.
Here, the specific thrust of Coppola’s adaptation of the Middle Ages
becomes visible. His notion of a medieval origin for Dracula is indebted
to general folklore rather than to Stoker’s novel. Although Stoker created
his vampire with the infamous Vlad Tepes in mind, the Middle Ages only
feature covertly in the novel. Dracula’s story of his heroic ancestors breaks
off with this feared late medieval leader, but his own narrative does not
acknowledge the connection. It is up to Van Helsing to speculate about
the link between the vampirical count and the brutal Vlad Tepes.18
Aspects of the Count which at first look like an exoticist rendering of an
older and less civilized form of society can also be read as allusions to his
medieval background: Dracula’s way of trading, his use of old-fashioned
money, his preference for the ship as a mode of traveling, or the numerous
references to Catholicism as a way to keep Dracula in check.19
By contrast, the film openly uses the Middle Ages as a backdrop. The
frame narrative’s late medieval setting introduces Dracula as a wronged
freedom fighter. He is tricked by the defeated Turks who are held
responsible for the death of his beloved wife Elisabeta. In her final letter,
Elisabeta writes: “May God unite us in heaven.” Her hope for eternal
love ref lects the common stereotype that the concept of true love is an
invention of the Middle Ages.20 Here, the Middle Ages are deployed for a
discussion of the topic of true love; a topic which is still en vogue today and
which is depicted in a way that seems to eradicate the difference between
the Middle Ages and the present-day world. In his pursuit of eternal love,
Dracula turns into an ideal lover across the ages: We empathically feel
with him when he loses Elisabeta in the Middle Ages, and once again
when he finds Mina in the Victorian age. The Middle Ages are adapted
to today’s needs and feelings.
As soon as ostensible difference rears its head, the film resorts to exces-
sive stylization far surpassing the already highly stylized atmosphere of
the film in general. Dracula’s feats in war are presented as an abstract
silhouette colored in black and red, reminiscent of the puppets in a
shadow play later in the film.21 The shadow play is part of a historical
exhibition of the early stages of cinematic art, and thus we reencoun-
ter the war scenes’ savage butchery from the frame narrative not only
as an obsolete way of solving conf licts but also as a long-gone artistic
medium. The scenes are medieval and pre-cinematic, a “medieval” art
form before the beginnings of cinematic technology. Another instance of
difference that the film stages as idiosyncratically medieval is the role of
 D R A C U L A’ S T I M E S 45

the church. Dracula’s rage at the priest’s verdict on Elisabeta is stylized

through its excessive violence: the blood bath Dracula enacts in church
tinges our perspective in an unnatural red. The excessive stylization of
the Middle Ages only stops short at the topic of eternal love, that is, at the
one instance where the film seeks to construct a sense of identity between
the medieval and our world.
In Coppola’s film the progression of romantic true love from the
Middle Ages through the Victorian setting of his version of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula to the postmodernist world of the film’s screening in the early
1990s suggests that Dracula and Elisabeta’s eternal love is indeed close
to being eternal—if it were not for Mina who by staking Dracula puts
a violent stop to the earthly manifestation of this mode of love. By kill-
ing Dracula, she subjects his undying, eternal love to the process of time
and, as the final image of Dracula and Elisabeta’s secularized ascension
in the ceiling of Dracula’s church shows, returns it to where it belongs:
to the transcendental sphere of heaven and to the cultural imagination of
the Middle Ages. At the same time, however, their love is turned into a
universal truth that remains in the ceiling for everyone to see across the
ages. Love becomes immortal by being aestheticized in art, and Coppola’s
film itself can also be perceived as working towards this self-ref lexive
moment of rendering love immortal by art. This concluding emphasis on
the topic of eternal love certainly supports many critics’ impression that
the film’s main interest lies in its depiction of love.22
Although Dracula and Elisabeta’s undying true love is usually at the
centre of critical attention, it is my contention that this focus is itself
merely an effect of the underlying topic that the film retrieves from
Stoker’s use of the Middle Ages as a bygone epoch: the topic of time. In
Stoker’s novel, the fascination with Dracula lies not simply in his exotic
Romanian background but mainly in a constant engagement with the
subversive workings of time: Jonathan Harker’s early entries in his diary
depict Romanian society as backward, whereas the Count himself comes
across as highly civilized and at the height of the times. As Harker begins
to perceive Dracula as a monster, he feels the need to define him as the
Other by pointing to the old-fashioned coins he finds in the castle. Van
Helsing refers to Dracula’s age in order to explain his knowledge and
strength as a teleological process of accumulation, whereas Dracula’s own
time seems to consist of a cyclical succession of growth and decline, of
aging and rejuvenation steered by the amount of blood he manages to
secure for his daily diet. Here the Count is perceived as an antithesis to
the enlightenment order of time. The novel plays with different aspects
of time—and so does the film. Rejuvenation is beautifully staged in the
film when the white-haired Count with his old-fashioned mock-papal
46 COR DU LA LEM K E

robes is transformed into a dandy in love with Mina. Yet the film con-
trasts notions of the progress of time with a strong focus on eternity, on
the eternal love between Dracula and Elisabeta and on Dracula’s eternal
wanderings on earth in search of blood. Thus, I would argue that the
film’s underlying structure rests not on love, but on a specifically medi-
eval notion of time and eternity.
The discourse of time in medieval theology put forth by Boethius and
taken up by Thomas Aquinas23 can be traced back to St Augustine’s dis-
tinction between eternity and time. In the eleventh book of his Confessions,
Augustine tackles the problem of how divine eternity and human time
may intersect, of how we may grasp the qualitative difference between
eternity and time. Augustine’s rather elaborate answer shows that eter-
nity differs categorically from human time. He observes:

[A] long time is only long because constituted of many successive move-
ments which cannot be simultaneously extended. In the eternal, nothing
is transient, but the whole is present. But no time is wholly present . . . all
past time is driven backwards by the future, and all future time is the
consequent of the past, and all past and future are created and set on their
course by that which is always present.24

Eternity is pure presence, whereas time consists of a succession of two

states. Future, the event to come, is almost instantly followed by the
past where it is over. The elusive presence in between is hardly notice-
able by human beings. Presence is in God, in his exclusive state of eter-
nity. Hence, all things and events are always already there for God to see
simultaneously. We may get a glimpse of this state of eternity when we
ponder the workings of our mind: We can predict the future up to a point
from our experience and we hold memories of the past. Both states can be
accessed at a present moment, however f leeting.25 But eternity categori-
cally surpasses this heuristic attempt at explanation and Augustine warns
us against overestimating our grasp of eternity. Eternity is not the f leet-
ing moment we can glimpse, but a boundless state outside and beyond
temporal succession.
The problem, however, lies in the intersection. How can God inf luence
time, and how can he possibly speak to human beings? Here, Augustine’s
explanation becomes bolder. God has decreed with his eternal will that
time will be created and the act of creation in itself is simply an effect of
his eternal decree.26 Once created as part of the earth’s master plan, time
takes its course and creation progresses in a surprisingly independent way.
Augustine does not envision the kind of all-encompassing divine plan,
which is at the heart of stricter theories of predestination. He is in need of
 D R A C U L A’ S T I M E S 47

his intricate explanation of God’s eternal presence in order to allow room

for the possibility of human free will. And free will is part of Augustine’s
explanation of how evil could enter the world without being part of God
and his all-encompassing creation. According to Augustine, evil is a pri-
vatio boni, a human being’s free decision to turn away from God’s truth
and choose an allegedly easier path through life.27
The concept of privatio boni is at the center of Coppola’s introduc-
tion to Stoker’s Dracula. In an ostensibly willful act, when he stakes the
cross, Dracula turns not only against the openly unjust laws of the church
but against Christ himself. This supreme act of evil turns him into an
inverted figure of Christ: In a fit of desperation he stakes the cross and
drinks the blood of life which turns him into the undying figure of the
death-bearer rather than the life-bearer. In contrast to Christ who shed
his own blood for the sins of humanity and thereby gives eternal life,
Dracula is eternally in need of more blood, killing his victims on the way.
Unlike Christ, his aim lies in desire leading to death not in love leading
to life. Yet, Dracula’s vampirical state as an undead roaming the earth
can also be seen as parallel to the role of Christ, the son of God on earth,
even if he is more of an “Anti-Christ.”28 There are a number of instances
where Dracula’s resemblance with Christ becomes visible. Like Christ,
Dracula creates a bond between himself and his followers by letting them
partake of his blood—an act which, of course, does not turn them into
Christians but into vampires. Before his death at the end of the film he
utters the famous last words from the gospel of John: “It is finished.”29
We then witness Dracula’s ascension in the central image of his church’s
ceiling. Thus, Dracula remains part of the realm of eternity. Like Christ,
Dracula partakes of both divine eternity and of human temporal succes-
sion. As a proponent of both time and eternity, he is an incarnation of the
medieval theory of time and eternity, albeit a fallen one.
After the opening credits, Dracula is staged as the one and only repre-
sentative of eternity. Not only is he turned into a vampire, an undead, the
film also portrays him as part of the divine scheme of eternity as he shares
the iconographic image of God as an eternal eye. It is with a single eye
that Dracula observes Harker progressing towards his castle by train. Like
the only permissible depiction of the divine presence in art, Dracula’s eye
appears in the sky without an accompanying face or any other body part.
Later we see both eyes, which clarifies the difference between Dracula
and God and ensures that the audience is aware of the fact that there is
no benign power watching over Harker. The running of the train has
been emblematic for progress and the f leeting nature of time since the
Victorian age. Thus, Harker opposes measured time to Dracula’s eter-
nity. It could be argued that this quotation of the image of the divine
48 COR DU LA LEM K E

eye does not ref lect on an eternal state of Dracula, but refers to a magic
power which allows the vampire to watch Harker on the same level of
time as the progressing train. Yet, the fact that Dracula’s presence literally
overshadows Lucy and Mina in England while his body still resides with
Harker in Transylvania shows his share in divine eternity. Later, on his
way to England, Dracula’s ever present eyes again watch Lucy and Mina,
while his body is changing shape on a ship.
Dracula’s act of changing shape on his way to England can be attrib-
uted to his capacity for rejuvenation and points towards Dracula’s entan-
glement with time. His ability to change shape is an indication of his
participation both in the divine dimension of eternity and in time. It
is reminiscent of the divine presence becoming visible as a pillar of fire
or as a burning bush in the Old Testament and, according to the notion
of transubstantiation, of Christ’s presence during communion. Dracula’s
existence in time allows his nature to unfold in various forms and his
shape-shifting can be perceived as an expression of the different aspects to
his substance in time. Likewise, his first encounter with Harker visualizes
aspects of his connection to both time and eternity when his shadow is
shown to move independently from his body. These instances of link-
ing time and eternity are, however, not simple acts of magic. Indeed,
when Dracula wishes to bewitch Mina—“see me”—his attempt at magic
fails miserably. Recalling the battle of minds between Van Helsing and
Dracula in Tod Browning’s version30 with Bela Lugosi commanding Van
Helsing to “come here,” Coppola’s Dracula tries his luck with Mina. Yet
unlike Van Helsing in Browning’s version, Mina is completely unfazed
and Dracula has to resort to common and distinctly nonmagic chat-up
techniques. He deliberately bumps into her and tries to persuade her
to accompany him to the movies. After some initial indignation Mina
comes with him and the melodramatic love story takes its course.
In Coppola’s film the different modes of time and eternity are not
allotted to specific characters, but can be found in the characters in vary-
ing forms. As an inverted figure of Christ created by his own act of forc-
ing the blood of eternal life to f low from the cross, Dracula, like Christ,
is both eternal and part of history. Like Christ, he shares aspects of the
human condition, such as memory and destiny, which are incompatible
with the notion of divine presence, that is, with Augustine’s claim that
“[i]n the eternal, nothing is transient.”31 He reiterates his family history
for Jonathan Harker on their first evening at the castle, drawing up a long
line of ancestors.
Although Dracula shows features of eternal presence, he still feels that
he is part of a bigger picture. Like Christ, he recognizes his existence
in time by referring to a predetermined master plan that includes even
 D R A C U L A’ S T I M E S 49

his fallen existence. Dracula’s time on earth is determined by what he

calls destiny. After his first glance at Mina’s portrait, he asks Harker:
“Do you believe in destiny?” This feeling that he is still encompassed by
God’s predestination leads to Dracula’s cautious behavior toward Mina.
He is unable to bite her when she confirms his suspicion that she is a
reincarnation of his beloved Elisabeta with the words “I know you.” Her
recognition makes him abandon the path of privatio boni. In line with his
reformed character he then allows Mina to decide whether she wants to
share his eternal existence or not. Here, Dracula is not the common rap-
ist of Stoker’s novel, but an erring human being on his way back into the
divine fold. Simultaneously, time becomes more important than eternity
when Dracula replies to Mina’s “I know you” by saying “I have crossed
oceans of time to find you.” Van Helsing’s observation that Dracula
“fears time” is no longer true. Time supersedes eternity as the impor-
tance of progress is put into the foreground in Dracula’s reunion with
his lost love.
In Mina’s case, the situation is reversed. Although she is an ordinary
human being living within the progress of time, she is allowed to catch
a glimpse of eternity even before Dracula shares his blood with her. In
her act of recognition, Mina not only shares Dracula’s memories of their
common past, but, in accordance with Augustine’s teachings, she also has
a taste of eternity. The first indication of Mina partaking in Dracula’s state
of eternity lies in the color symbolism, which the film already deploys in
the frame narrative.32 While Dracula’s deeds are painted in red, Elisabeta’s
color is blue. In the beginning, Dracula is a representative of time. He
deals in matters of life and death and his main currency is blood. His
aim in life lies in war, as emphasized by his blood-red armor. Dracula
makes history, inf luences the course of time, by reducing his enemies
to oblivion. Yet the frame narrative also suggests that his success in war
foregrounds his passionate nature. His recklessness in his war against the
Turks is repeated when he hears the priest’s verdict on Elisabeta. Dracula’s
immediate response is to draw blood from his enemy and in an act of pas-
sion bordering on madness he bathes in the blood of the cross. The red
color with which he is associated during the late medieval period does
not change throughout the film.
Both in the novel and in the film Dracula refers to his late medieval
past as a better time for blood as it used to f low in abundance, while in
the Victorian age “[b]lood is too precious a thing.”33 His first meeting
with Harker plays on this color symbolism. Dracula welcomes Harker
in a red robe f lowing behind him like the trail of blood from the cross.
He then seals his contract with blood-red wax and his first glance at
Mina’s portrait shows the trail of blood engulfing Elisabeta in the frame
50 COR DU LA LEM K E

narrative. In London the color symbolism is repeated in Dracula’s eyes

turning red during his fits of bloodlust that marks him as different: He
belongs both to a different species and to different times. In his desire
to colonize London he succeeds in coloring red those Londoners who
encounter him not just with blood but with passion. Dracula infects the
grey Victorian ambience of the first image of London with his medieval
red and thereby replaces the rational atmosphere of the grey enlight-
enment with his medieval passion. Lucy’s bright red negligee matching
her natural red hair, her suitors’ red riding jackets, Mina’s red dress at
her date with Dracula and Van Helsing’s reddish-brown cape all point
toward Dracula’s reign of passion. In the end, Harker only manages to
kill Dracula at sunset, when the world is again painted red. It allows him
one f leeting moment of passion. Here, passion anchors Dracula in time.
By contrast, Elisabeta’s colors are green and blue. The Virgin Mary’s
color blue denotes purity and clarity and indicates holiness in medi-
eval art. Blue symbolizes a connection with the divinity and thus with
eternity. In Elisabeta’s case, the link to eternity is of course her eternal
love for which she renounces her life. In keeping with Elisabeta’s colors,
Mina wears a blue dress when, in the beginning, she is overshadowed by
Dracula. At their first meeting her dress is green before she finally sheds
her color of eternity and dons Dracula’s red. At the end, the lining of her
black Victorian cape is once more tinged with blue when she looks up
toward the image of the ascension of Dracula and Elisabeta. And as she
does so, the painting itself changes from Dracula’s passionate reddish to
Elisabeta’s eternal blue as it is lit by the light of the divine grace encom-
passing Dracula in the end. The lost son is back in the fold and reunited
with his eternal love. The laws of the church on earth, depending as they
do on a historical context, are overruled by God’s eternal light. However,
Dracula’s armor remains a speck of red in the painting indicating that his
passion as an essential part of his life has always already been included
within divine eternity (figure 2.1).
Mina’s connection to eternity on earth is only borrowed. The clear blue
of her first dress indicates that she could be a reincarnation of Elisabeta
but a reincarnation into different times. In her desire to be a working
woman, she is part of the movement of the New Woman, although
Stoker’s novel is wary of allotting her the whole set of characteristics.34
In Coppola’s film, however, instead of splitting the features with the
libidinous Lucy, Mina is independent both in her wish to work and in
her bodily desires. Like Lucy, she does not stop at one husband, but takes
Dracula as a lover and willingly decides to become part of his world. 35
However, Elisabeta’s unconditional trust in eternal love does not come
into the equation. Mina’s last gaze at the painting of the ascension of
 D R A C U L A’ S T I M E S 51

Figure 2.1 Passionate eternity: Dracula’s ascension in Francis Ford Coppola’s

Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Elisabeta and Dracula is more a gesture of letting go of her love than of

following.
Mina’s interest in eternity is secularized. She does not strive for eter-
nity herself but is infected by it when she falls in love with Dracula. With
him, she has access to deeper memories of former times and places; or
in an Augustinian reading, her mind catches a glimpse of the meaning
of eternity. Yet, Dracula’s mere presence is not enough for her to leave
her own world and enter his. He has to dance her into this new state.
Waltzing with Dracula whirrs Mina out of time and into eternity at
their first meeting that takes them to the cinema. There, she recognizes
him as someone familiar. At their next date, Dracula’s stories easily take
her back to her former self, but it is the dancing which leads to her next
step, to the final consummation of their bond by their mutual act of
sharing blood. With Dracula, Mina feels a passionate connection which
transcends time. Yet after the consummation she immediately has second
thoughts: “unclean . . . unclean,” a clear indication of abating passion and
the return of time. Mina looks for passion as a form of love she does not
find with her prude Victorian husband. She is not searching for pure,
almost holy eternal love where women do not hesitate to die for their
lovers in ever new versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
However, with her passion for a being that transcends time, she also
becomes part both of the late Middle Ages and of the medieval notion
of time and eternity. As Carolyn Dinshaw shows for the time structure
that underlies the thoughts of Margery Kempe, in a mystic’s excessive
52 COR DU LA LEM K E

emotions the course of time can be transcended. “For Margery . . . the

point is immediate access to Christ now.”36 Margery Kempe’s denial of
Christ’s historical pastness lets her relive her emotional response to the
passion of Christ over and over again. By exclusively living and feeling
in the present, she conf lates the course of time, past, present, and future,
into a semblance of eternal presence: “In Margery’s world, past-present-
future times are collapsed into a very capacious now.”37 Thus she creates
a connection with the object of her mystic vision.
From Margery Kempe’s life Dinshaw deduces a question that again
transgresses time: “What does it feel like to be an anachronism?”38 She
concludes that we are all anachronisms as soon as we seriously engage with
the past. Her example is of course the scholarly infatuation with historical
periods, especially her own with Margery Kempe. But as Kempe herself
shows, this commitment to previous times does not have to be academic
but needs to be caused by a strong passion for an entity, an event, a person
in the past—a passion that leads us to include the past into our present
moment and, in Augustine’s words, reach a glimpse of eternity.
Dinshaw’s question is immensely pertinent to Coppola’s film. His
Dracula certainly is the quintessential anachronism. Walking the earth
since the late Middle Ages, Dracula crosses “oceans of time” in order to
find his eternal love. His now is extended in such a manner that he even
exhibits features of eternity. Yet he is not the only character in the film
depicted as an anachronism. Mina, the alleged reincarnation of Elisabeta,
also lives as an anachronism. Yet, she also displays features resembling
Margery Kempe. Her passion for Dracula takes her out of her own world
and lets her welcome the medieval Count into her life with his memories
and his capacity to extend the present moment of now into forever, into
an eternal presence.39 Like Dinshaw’s Margery Kempe, she almost dies to
her world in order to become part of the other world, of eternity, in her
case part of the eternal wanderings of the undead. Thus Mina shares the
mystic’s ability to create an extended now, a semblance of eternity, in her
own times that includes the object of her passion.
Mina and Dracula’s anachronistic lives are taken up by the film’s self-
ref lexive engagement with the past. Their first meeting is emphasized by
a filmic return to times long gone. The clacking noise of an old projec-
tor and the different number of frames per minute typical of early films
accompany their first encounter. Moreover, the reunion of the ancient
lovers, of the past in the present, takes place in a cinema that also includes
a museum of film art. We are presented with one of the first films, the
famous approach of a train by the Lumière brothers, which is of course a
piece of contemporary art in the late Victorian setting of Mina’s world.
But we also encounter older forms of projection like the shadow play,
 D R A C U L A’ S T I M E S 53

which was already outdated by then and belongs in a manner of speaking

to the Middle Ages of cinematic history.
For the first date between Mina and Dracula, Coppola resorts to the
possibilities of the studio. In correspondence with their first meeting
Mina and Dracula dance out of time. The impression of timelessness
is achieved by chroma keying where the dancing couple is only sur-
rounded by myriads of candles. While the blue screen takes the dancers
out of their fixed location in space, the spinning movement of the dance
creates a vertigo that suggests the timelessness of black holes. Only the
dancers count in this loss of time and space. Their present moment, their
now, is all-encompassing. They live eternity. However, the film takes its
course and Mina and Dracula are thrown into time once again. Mina has
to dance with Van Helsing and Dracula has to watch the hunters make
a bonfire from the caskets filled with his native soil—his link to the
Middle Ages.
In the end, Dracula seems to recognize that although Mina might be a
mirror image of Elisabeta, she is not Elisabeta. With his last words “Give
me peace” he prays her to finish Harker’s deed. Rather than spending
eternity on earth with his newly found love, he prefers to be at peace
with God and with his eternal love Elisabeta. Stripped of Dracula’s mark
and free from the bond, Mina complies. Her love for him is already on
the verge of becoming a memory, a passion from the past. And Dracula
seems to long to be turned into a memory of the past himself. He has
finally accepted his own entanglement with time, quenched his rage
which had denied time, and renounced his share of eternity on earth. He
only remains eternal as a memory in art.
And Coppola’s film? Coppola’s treatment of the Middle Ages is
ref lected in his engagement with the history of film. Here, we encoun-
ter a love affair with the early stages of film—a medium that surprisingly
enough does not figure in Stoker’s novel.40 The restrictions of film-
ing exclusively in a studio have resulted in a film that revolves around
its own medium in a highly self-ref lexive way. Camera techniques and
special effects of previous film versions of Dracula are resurrected,41 the
createdness of old film sets is put into the foreground and the color sym-
bolism is reminiscent of the excessive contrasts of the silent films. Thus,
the film itself is also an example of Dinshaw’s notion of the medieval
form of anachronisms: It conf lates past and present. Yet instead of creat-
ing an extensive now, it seems to create a prolonged memory of bygone
times. Although the film deploys a decidedly postmodernist mode of
narration, the highly stylized rendering of its subject constantly reminds
the audience of the unbridgeable gap between the times presented in the
film and their contemporary world. While Coppola’s adaptation shows
54 COR DU LA LEM K E

the possibilities that arise in the process of translating one medium into
another, it also proves an example of Jameson’s notion that adaptations
are about the struggle between two media and the erasure of one of
them.42 It seems that in this case, Stoker’s novel is almost erased in the
translation and, like its protagonist, relegated to the past as a memory of
previous times.

Notes
1. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Love Never Dies, dir. Francis Ford Coppola (US:
Columbia Pictures, 1992).
2. See Lyndon W. Joslin, Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker’s Novel
Adapted, 1922–2003 ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2006), p. 123; Iain
Sinclair, “Invasion of the Blood,” in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and
Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: bfi Publishing, 2001),
p. 102 [101–4].
3. See Norbert Borrmann, “Auf der Suche nach dem Original: Francis
Ford Coppolas Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992),” in Der Vampirfilm: Klassiker
des Genres in Einzelinterpretationen, ed. Stefan Keppler and Michael Will
(Wü rzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), p. 151 [137–51]; Jean
Marigny, “Dracula: Tradition and Postmodernism in Stoker’s Novel
and Coppola’s film,” in Post/Modern Dracula: From Victorian Themes to
Postmodern Praxis, ed. John S. Bak (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2007), p. 103 [95–106].
4. James M. Welsh, “Sucking Dracula: Mythic Biography into Film,
or Why Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula Is Not Really Bram Stoker’s
Dracula or Wallachia’s Dracula,” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of
Adaptation, ed. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2007), p. 172 [165–73].
5. Sarah Cardwell, “Adaptation Studies Revisited: Purpose, Perspectives,
and Inspiration,” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, ed.
James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007),
p. 59 [51–63].
6. Thomas M. Leitch, “Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?” in
The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and
Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), p. 332 [327–33].
7. Fredric Jameson, “Afterword: Adaptation as a Philosophical Problem,”
in True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed.
Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), p. 230 [215–33].
8. O’Flinn points out that all anger at the authenticity, which Coppola’s
title suggests is simply a misunderstanding as Coppola could not use the
title Dracula for copyright reasons. Paul O’Flinn, “‘Leaving the West
and Entering the East’: Refiguring the Alien from Stoker to Coppola,”
 D R A C U L A’ S T I M E S 55

in Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction, ed. Deborah

Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan (London:
Pluto Press, 1999), p. 77 [66–86].
9. See Marigny, “Dracula,” p. 103.
10. See Carol A. Senf, Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1998), p. 55.
11. The role of women in the film has been perceived as traditional or lib-
erating. See Michael Meyer, “Die Erotik der Macht und die Macht der
Erotik: Bram Stokers und Francis Ford Coppolas Dracula,” in Der ero-
tische Film: Zur medialen Codierung von Ä sthetik, Sexualität und Gewalt,
ed. Oliver Jahraus and Stefan Neuhaus (Wü rzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2003), p. 132 [131–51].
12 . Joslin, Count Dracula, p. 123.
13. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 2008), p. 378.
14. Senf, Dracula, p. 34.
15. See Christoph Houswitschka and Michael Meyer, “Vampir und Voyeur:
Zur selbstref lexiven Inszenierung der Angst- und Schauerlust,” in Kontext
Film: Beiträge zu Film und Literatur, ed. Michael Braun and Werner Kamp
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2006), p. 181 [172–94].
16. For the “last of the race”motif, see Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race:
The Growth of Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
17. Welsh, “Sucking Dracula,” p. 169.
18. See Marigny, “Dracula,” p. 104.
19. Coulardeau shows that in the film all religious paraphernalia fail as pro-
tection against vampires. Jacques Coulardeau, “The Vision of Religion
in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Post/Modern Dracula:
From Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis, ed. John S. Bak (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 132–33 [123–39].
20. See Sarah McNamer, “Feeling,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 243 [241–57].
21. Burt goes even further and claims that the stylized war scenes of the
frame narrative are the scenes from the shadow play we encounter later.
Richard Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 30.
22. See Meyer, “Die Erotik der Macht,” p. 131; Marigny, “Dracula,” p. 106.
23. Harm Goris, “Interpreting Eternity in Thomas Aquinas,” in Time and
Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-
Ria ño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), p. 194 [193–202].
24. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2008), pp. 11, 11, 13.
25. Augustine, Confessions, pp. 11, 18, 23–24.
26. Ibid., pp. 11, 30, 40.
27. Ibid., pp. 7, 16, 22.
56 COR DU LA LEM K E

28. Richard Dyer, “Dracula and Desire,” in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight

and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: bfi Publishing, 2001),
p. 95 [91–97].
29. See Stephenson Humphries-Brooks, “The Body and the Blood of Eternal
UnDeath,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 6 (2004): n.p.
30. Dracula, dir. Tod Browning (US: Universal Pictures, 1931).
31. Augustine, Confessions, pp. 11, 11, 13.
32 . Dyer focuses mainly on the color red which he reads as “engorgement”
(“Dracula and Desire,” p. 93).
33. Stoker, Dracula, p. 30.
34. Friedrich Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften (Leipzig: Reclam
Verlag, 1993), p. 39.
35. This scene becomes more ambivalent if it is read with the AIDS aware-
ness of the early 1990s in mind. On Coppola and AIDS awareness, see
O’Flinn, “Leaving the West,” p. 79.
36. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 108 [107–23]; original
emphasis.
37. Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” p. 109.
38. Ibid., p. 107.
39. Dracula and Mina are anachronisms who “destabilize and support the pre-
modern/(post) modern divide,” which, according to Margitta Rouse, is
typical of anachronisms in medieval film (see p. 64 of the present book
[original emphasis]).
40. See Ronald R. Thomas, “Specters of the Novel: Dracula and the
Cinematic Afterlife of the Victorian Novel,” in Victorian Afterlife:
Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Kucich and
Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), p. 303 [288–310].
41. See Borrmann, “Auf der Suche, ” p. 143.
42 . Jameson, “Afterword,” p. 232.
CHAPTER 3

RETHINKING ANACHRONISM FOR

MEDIEVAL FILM IN RICHARD
DONNER’S TIMELINE *

Margitta Rouse

M edievalists have, albeit reluctantly, learnt to accept that literary and

cinematic depictions of the Middle Ages frequently take liberties
with historical accuracy. There seems to be a consensus that such liber-
ties do little to refine our understanding of the Middle Ages, but mirror
modern concerns and desires, instead.1 Three clichés, in particular, serve
modern-day agendas: the Middle Ages as “lost ideal,” as “barbaric past,”
and as “the site of timeless romantic values.”2 Some theorists suggest that
medievalists should embrace inaccuracies, anachronisms, and clichés pre-
cisely because these “indicate the ways in which contemporary filmmak-
ers infuse their work with modern concerns.”3
Although I do not question this approach, my discussion here follows
a different path: I examine how anachronisms, often dismissed as mere
errors betraying a lack of historical accuracy, can be interpreted as serious
challenges to clichéd views of the past. I show that anachronisms play a
vital role not only in appropriating, but also in reorienting the past. And
this is a cultural work they perform even in films that make gratuitous
and seemingly uncritical use of medieval-themed stereotypes. To put it
differently, it is my aim to uncover anachronism’s potential as an effective
aesthetic strategy contributing to adapting our views of the past; anach-
ronisms perform adaptive work even and especially in films frequently
regarded as incapable of adding anything to our understanding of the
Middle Ages.
58 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

My analysis centers on Michael Crichton’s novel Timeline (1999)4

and particularly on Richard Donner’s cinematic adaptation of the book
(2003),5 both of which are particularly conducive to anachronistic analy-
sis as they transport cultural artifacts, practices, or beliefs from one his-
torical period to another. Rather than offering a classic adaptation studies
cross-textual reading of book and film, I examine the role anachronisms
play within adaptive processes. I understand adaptation here as a process
of (re)making history, in which anachronisms provide a resource for con-
structing alternative histories. In juxtaposing distinct periods of time,
anachronisms are capable of considerably disrupting any clear-cut sense
of historiographical periodization, as they blur, and involve in complex
dialogue, different layers of time; in the case of Timeline, the medieval
past and the postmodern present.

The Future of the Past in Timeline

Richard Donner’s cinematic adaptation of the novel Timeline accentuates
the perennial theme of the scientist’s hubris. It is concerned with the way
commercially driven scientific interests are pitted against those of the com-
munity in general. In the movie, ruthless scientists cause a public disaster
on a grand scale, while notoriously underfunded scholars must overcome
their initial enchantment with novel technologies to save the world from
the excesses both of scientific research and of venture capitalism.
Medievalist historian Edward Johnston and his team of Yale graduate
students are excavating a fourteenth-century fortified town in Southern
France. They are funded by a research corporation (International
Technology Corporation [ITC]), which specializes in quantum technol-
ogy and claims to be developing a new technology for dating archaeo-
logical objects superior to carbon dating. The supposed dating technology
turns out to be a machine enabling time travel. Professor Johnston dis-
covers the company’s secret and travels to the year 1357, where he finds
himself caught up in the turmoil of the Hundred Years War. He remains
trapped in the Middle Ages until his students rescue him.
Wormhole access to another universe, the scientific method Crichton’s
fiction uses to make possible his characters’ time travel, may go some
way to revealing his insights regarding our everyday assumptions about
past and present.6 Crichton is aware that theoretical physics has recently
undergone a fundamental change: The idea of the Multiverse, long taken
seriously by a mere handful of theorists, yet gratefully adopted by sci-
ence fiction and fantasy writers, is now regarded a genuine possibility.
First formulated in 1895 by philosopher William James, the notion of the
Multiverse suggests that our universe is not the only one of its kind, but
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 59

one of many parallel worlds. The theory’s recent impact on the scientific
community has been described by some physicists as similarly “profound
as the one which displaced the Earth from the notional centre of the
Universe.” 7 Timeline highlights precisely this paradigm shift: “Now that
we stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century,” Crichton claims
in the introduction to his novel, “physicists believe [once again that] the
physical world has been explained, and that no further revolutions lie
ahead . . . But just as the late nineteenth century gave hints of what was to
come, so the late twentieth century also provides clues to the future.”8
For Crichton it is crucial not only to challenge our expectations of sci-
ence in the near future, but also to fundamentally question established
notions of the past.
In Timeline, quantum time travel allows historians to explore the four-
teenth century firsthand, encountering a past that is potentially radically
different from the way it is usually imagined. The journey serves to paint
a picture of the Middle Ages that contradicts established ideas of the medi-
eval in much the same way as the novel disturbs our acceptance of the idea
of a single universe. This agenda gains support as the novel is not only
prefaced with Crichton’s quasi-academic introduction titled “Science at
the End of the Century,” but also features an impressive scholarly bibliog-
raphy, detailing only 10 works on theoretical physics, but a further 81 on
the Middle Ages (some of them annotated). The novel’s acknowledgments
page outlines a change in medievalists’ view of their period:

Our understanding of the medieval period has changed dramatically in

the last fifty years . . . An age that was once thought to be static, brutal
and benighted is now understood as dynamic and swiftly changing: an
age where knowledge was sought and valued; where great universities
were born, and learning fostered; where technology was enthusiastically
advanced; where social relations were in f lux; where trade was interna-
tional; where the general level of violence was often less deadly than it is
today. As for the old reputation of medieval times as a dark time of paro-
chialism, religious prejudice and mass slaughter, the record of the twenti-
eth century must lead any thoughtful observer to conclude that we are in
no way superior. (Crichton, Timeline, p. 490)

Crichton claims that our modern misconception of the medieval was

“an invention of the Renaissance,” promoting the belief “that our spe-
cies always moves forward to ever better and more enlightened ways of
life.”9 This articulates an objection to a totalizing view of the Middle
Ages that resembles what Bruno Latour describes as an effect of the prac-
tice of “purification.”10 He means that the concept of modernity rests
on the “purifying” claim that we can distinguish between nature and
60 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

culture, humans and non humans, sciences and the humanities, some-
thing which premoderns supposedly failed to do. According to Latour,
“we have never been modern,” because to be modern must inevitably
entail a continuous adaptation and reworking of premodern practices;
societies, including ours, have always been hybrid. In Crichton’s words,
it is “especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our mod-
ern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the pre-scientific
period.”11 He claims instead a complexity for the medieval period similar
to our own, and rejects a view of the Middle Ages as a period which, to
quote Lee Patterson, provides “an all-purpose alternative to whatever
quality the present has wished to ascribe to itself.”12

Anachronism and Science Fiction’s Resistance to

Medievalists’ Desires
Given Crichton’s critical approach toward established notions of the dis-
tant past, an approach entirely consistent with many recent medievalist
studies, it seems surprising that neither the novel nor its cinematic adapta-
tion were able to strike a chord with medievalists.13 Although a bestseller,
the book “is not regarded as one of his best.”14 Richard Donner’s adapta-
tion f lopped, both in the eyes of academics and at the box office, recover-
ing a mere half of its production costs.15 The few scholarly responses to
both film and book agree with early reviewers both on and off line, that
the “screenplay . . . kept in the violence but threw out the imagination
and what little wit resided in the novel.”16 One medievalist was quick to
dismiss the book as, admittedly clever, “kitsch,” effectively mixing sci-fi
high-tech jargon with well-worn narrative paradigms such as romance
and quest, to portray various clichéd views of the Middle Ages.17 The
only in-depth medievalist discussion of the film to date similarly suggests
that the movie conveys a sinister view of the Middle Ages, depicting it as
our “dark and chaotic past.”18
Did Crichton and Donner fail because they wanted the best of both
medieval worlds—the “academic” and the “popular”? One answer
would be that despite claims to the contrary, neither lived up to their
own stated desire for historical accuracy and authenticity. Despite their
stated intention to deliver an account of the medieval past more in line
with recent academic research, they betray their agenda by resorting to
typical adventure and romance excesses: broadswords, secret passage-
ways, and damsels in distress. Yet some caution should be taken before
condemning the genre’s license to exaggerate, since, from a medieval-
ist’s perspective, the resulting conf lict with historical accuracy may still
carry some merit. Despite medievalist complaints about its use of clichés,
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 61

the novel has also been interpreted as questioning the search for histori-
cal authenticity.19 The film, by contrast, failed to please both academics
and non-academics—and the reason may actually have been a lack of
anachronism. As Nickolas Haydock points out:

Contrary to what is widely supposed, mainstream movie medievalism’s

failures typically stem not from its infidelity to history, literature, or leg-
end, but rather from the lack of any thorough-going commitment by
directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers to provocative anachro-
nism and compelling idiosyncrasy. 20

If we accept that a lack of historical accuracy, or an abundance of anach-

ronisms may actually fuel the commercial success of medieval-themed
films, how do we judge what is a “thorough-going commitment” to
“provocative” anachronism?

Rival Views of Anachronisms

Anachronisms have been theorized in contradictory ways, yet provoca-
tion has consistently played a part in their conceptualization. They have
been conceived like the dominant everyday concept of anachronism, as
undesirable errors of temporality, as “the erroneous reference of an event,
circumstance, or custom to a wrong date.”21 As early modernist Margreta
de Grazia observes, “as presently historicized, nothing could be worse
than being accused of anachronism.”22 Many academics see anachronism
as the present illicitly inf licting itself on the past through concepts that did
not exist “then,” but do “now.” This view is fundamental to understand-
ing the periodizing qualities of anachronism.
Early modernists, especially, have claimed that, unlike the Renaissance,
the Middle Ages possessed no sensibility for anachronism. Since the term
“anachronism” first appeared in the Renaissance, some argue that the
Middle Ages could not have had a working concept of it. They conclude
that the Middle Ages produced anachronisms unwittingly, in turn sup-
posedly illustrating the period’s general lack of historical consciousness.
A definitive example for this is the ancient God Apollo depicted in a
medieval tunic, an anachronism which Erwin Panofsky interpreted as
proof that the Middle Ages was incapable of distinguishing its own time
period from that of antiquity.23 Similar examples of medieval anachro-
nisms were regarded as indicating the period’s historical naivety com-
pared with the superior understanding of historical alterity as supposedly
displayed by later periods. For Panofsky, the Renaissance made classical
references consciously, demonstrating its sense of history by deliberately
62 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

imbuing its anachronisms with semiotic significance. Building on his

work, many early modernists saw the capacity for recognizing anach-
ronisms as an essential marker of historical consciousness, supposedly
existing only from the Renaissance onwards. For certain early modern-
ists, the heightened awareness of anachronisms as demonstrated in the
Renaissance thus signals the inception of modernity.24
Though this view has not been completely superseded, it has been
powerfully challenged by medievalists who portray the Middle Ages as
capable of sophisticated historical thinking. As part of this challenge,
anachronisms are assigned a crucial role not as signifiers of a given or
absent historical consciousness, but as signifiers of a so-called multi-
temporality. Concepts of multi-temporality relate to a second everyday
notion of anachronism, which the OED defines as “[a]nything done or
existing out of date; hence, anything which was proper to a former age,
but is, or, if it existed, would be, out of harmony with the present.”25 The
notion of multi-temporality endows anachronism with a positive evalu-
ation by insisting that different experiences of time can coexist—what is
out of date for some, might be fresh or valid for others.
Multi-temporality is not clearly defined: It is an umbrella term for
various modes of historical analysis which resist the notion that histori-
cal time moves as a single, one-directional evolutionary progression.
Instead, multi-temporal approaches emphasize their desire for anti-tele-
ological and pluralistic notions of history. In Doing Time: Feminist Theory
and Postmodern Culture, Rita Felski formulates the need for concepts of
historical time, which recognize the distinct and contradictory histories
of individual groups, their “rhythms and temporalities, quite apart from
traditional forms of periodization.”26 Andrew James Johnston has argued
that some of the clichéd notions of periodization informing the modern
concept of the Medieval/Renaissance divide derive from narrative tropes
through which the medieval already contemplated its own temporality.27
Alternatively, by asking “What does it feel like to be an anachronism?”28
Carolyn Dinshaw has stressed the affective role of anachronisms for a
medievalist concept of “queer history,” which in her view must ask “what
it feels like to be a body in time, or in multiple times, or out of time.”29
Similarly, Aranye Fradenburg stresses that “different times live on in us
and our practices.”30 Such concepts of multi-temporality address the cul-
tural politics of time in an attempt to free the Middle Ages from the mar-
ginalizing project of teleological periodization.
Students of medieval film, too, are becoming increasingly aware of
these issues. Views dominate which either deny the possibility of recon-
structing a more accurate past, or consider the project to be f lawed in
the first place.31 As opposed to “mere” historical records with their
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 63

truth claims, works of fiction, including film, must actually profit from
anachronisms or structurally similar, “necessary” deviations from what
an audience might expect to be a historically accurate, a point György
Lukács has made for the historical novel. 32 William D. Paden claims that
it “is not necessary to ferret out particular anachronisms in a medieval
movie in order to demonstrate that it is not faultlessly authentic, because
by definition, the entire film is an anachronism . . . [T]he filmmaker is not
a historian but an artist.”33
Andrew Elliott stresses the inevitable discrepancy between histori-
cal accuracy as presented in academic accounts of the medieval period,
and what film audiences will accept as having the right medieval “feel.”
According to him, historical accuracy in the cinema “is based less on facts
known in the scholarly domain, but must conform to the medieval imag-
inary, which is often at several removes from this domain.”34 Stephanie
Trigg has drawn attention to this rift in contemporary perspective by
applying the concept of “convergence culture” to medievalist studies of
film. She moves beyond a seemingly simple and inevitable dichotomy
of academic versus popular attitudes towards the medieval. The term
“convergence culture,” originally coined by Henry Jenkins, refers to the
intermedial migration of narrative, visual, and informational knowledge.
For Trigg, the concept of convergence is capable of describing cultural
shifts as consumers are persuaded to use the resources of different media
and to make connections between them. She argues, “[i]nformation and
knowledge about the Middle Ages is circulated much more readily than
for previous generations, and this is affecting traditional hierarchies of
knowledge and expertise.”35 Thus knowledge about the Middle Ages can
be challenged in ways which use and simultaneously resist traditional aca-
demic responses to popular medievalism.
However, the desire to identify factual “truth” in historical film still
remains: Martha W. Driver argues that authenticity “is a convention of
costume drama, part of the visual language in the recreation of history on
screen,” but also claims that this convention can be a “starting point for
the recovery of the true elements underlying the fiction, if one wishes to
explore them.”36 Resisting deconstructionist claims to the contrary, her
view suggests that such “true” elements could actually be uncovered—
in turn implying that there are “errors” now, where there was “truth”
then, and that there are such things as dependable facts before fiction
usurps them.
This brief, and by no means complete, overview of current academic
positions on anachronism in medieval films demonstrates how paradoxical
the discussion on cinematic anachronisms is: There is clearly a desire to
measure accuracy or authenticity in medieval film, also communicated by
64 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

those who doubt the possibility that the past can ever be portrayed accu-
rately. Elliott, the most recent theorist mentioned above, proposes that
we speak of “degrees of inaccuracy” as well as “acceptable inaccuracy”37
to be able to “objectively . . . go about deconstructing what is wrong or
right with a given medieval-themed film.”38 Perhaps this is not surprising,
given that “cinema offers a quintessentially postmodern position, oscillat-
ing between the desire for plenitude, for total transparency and knowledge
of the past, and the impossibility of ever achieving that goal,” as Laurie A.
Finke and Martin B. Shichtman have argued.39
Contradictory notions of anachronism have given rise to several pre-
vailing tensions: the assessment of anachronisms as undesirable historical
impossibilities or as possible truths; their roles in revealing instances of
marginalized historical period(s), or in reconstructing alternative histo-
ries; and their role as inducing competing views of history itself. Finally,
these tensions inf luence the contradictory ways in which film audiences
interpret historical accuracy. Such interpretations both depend on, and
actively produce, the assumptions and judgments audiences make about
the medieval. These active and opposing sympathies would present a seri-
ous challenge to medievalists who chose to confine their concern to their
desire for knowledge of the pre-cinematic past, especially if they held
that such knowledge was unknowable and that their desire for it was far
removed from the typical viewer’s interest in watching medieval films.
Film audiences’ judgments of what should be rejected as erroneous or
impossible, or what ought to be applauded as part of the filmmaker’s strat-
egy for showing an alternative view of history, are just that—judgments,
and therefore open to dispute. The conceptual landscape provided by
rivaling views of anachronism suggests that a productive identification
of anachronisms is possible but cannot be achieved without due consider-
ation of the underlying notions of, and attitudes toward, temporality.

Evaluating Anachronisms
Anachronisms may both destabilize and support the premodern/(post-)
modern divide, as becomes evident if we regard them neutrally as cultural
artifacts, practices, or concepts perceived as jarring with various layers of
time—as temporal anomalies that do not seem to belong to the period(s)
in which they occur. They do not constitute “errors” but strategically
placed markers of temporality, manifested by diverse entities relating
to all audio-visual aspects of film (dialogue, modes of speech, objects,
costumes, make-up, settings, postures, soundscape, etc.). In order to
be effective, they require a minimal knowledge of the past. Cinematic
anachronisms are therefore either active, or inactive with regard to the
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 65

viewer. They acquire increased significance if the aesthetic medium (or

film) makes a certain claim to authenticity, which need not suit the his-
torian’s idea of historical accuracy or credible realism.
Especially in films that resist the desire to represent the past “faith-
fully,” anachronisms highlight the fictive nature of historical representa-
tion: Filmmakers may use them humorously to point toward the spectacle
of history on screen. For example, when the knights in Monty Python and
the Holy Grail approach Camelot, Patsy says: “It’s only a model,” where-
upon Arthur answers, “Shhh!”40 Such anachronisms mock the attempt to
represent the pre-cinematic past “accurately.” Through visibly display-
ing coconut shells whose sound stands in for “real” horses and similar
absurdities, the film further emphasizes the artifice of historical film.
Cordula Lemke shows in the present book how a truly fantastic figure
like Dracula, a “quintessential anachronism,” can likewise serve the cin-
ematic medium to self-ref lexively engage with the (medieval) past.41
As a science fiction film, Timeline is situated on the fuzzy border
between fantasy and realism. Using the idea of time travel it upholds the
illusion that cinema can provide us with a glimpse of the past as it really
was. Timeline promises a realistic view of the Middle Ages, while simul-
taneously presenting a fantasy world in which anything could be possible.
The film’s “science fiction” is less concerned with the future than with
providing an opportunity for approaching anachronisms from different
temporal perspectives. Science fiction here employs anachronisms as stra-
tegic devices that intensify and complicate the issue of temporality.
Although the Battle of Castleguard is a fictive event, Timeline’s plot has
a clearly defined setting in the Hundred Years War, and audiences’ desire
for historical accuracy is certainly elevated, making anachronism all the
more conspicuous. The more provocative the anachronism, the more
likely it is to register as active, as well as intentional, with the viewer.
Rather than being provocative about its anachronisms however, Timeline
employs them subtly and ambivalently. Repeatedly, the film deceives
viewers into suspecting that a certain concept—such as lovers holding
hands—might actually be anachronistic for the period. They will then be
surprised to learn that, within the conditions determined by the film’s
plot, the concept can be historically verified. In this way even a false
anachronism can contribute to a deeper understanding of the Middle
Ages, since this strategy elicits an awareness of the effects of anachronism
on how we view the past.
A fine example is the film’s use of Greek Fire, which contests the
seemingly clear-cut division between “premodern” and “modern” mili-
tary technology. When one of the ITC security men pulls the pin out of a
hand grenade in Castleguard, weapons of different periods are introduced
66 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

and contrasted for the first time in the movie. The use of a hand grenade
constitutes a breach of the company rule that nothing alien to the period
must be taken to Castleguard. Before he can throw it, the ITC offender
is pierced by several arrows, and retreats into the time machine where
he dies, still holding the live grenade in his hand. On arriving back in
the present-day world, the grenade explodes, destroying the time travel
machinery and leaving the remaining time travelers temporarily trapped
in 1357.
Through the contrast of arrow versus grenade, the divisions between
scientific and prescientific, modern and premodern, large-scale destruc-
tion and individual combat, appear to be firmly in place—consequently,
the anachronisms of grenades in the premodern world and arrows in the
postmodern one actually stabilize conventional views of the differences
between past and present. But these divisions are later challenged through
the introduction of Greek Fire, which we learn is a magic incendiary
weapon that cannot be extinguished with water, and is something of
which the English Lord Oliver (who holds the Professor captive), is much
in awe. It is this highly prized military commodity that the Professor has
promised to provide in order to save himself. Lord Oliver calls Johnston a
“Magister,” but corrects this to “magician” in the scene in which he first
sees the weapon in action.
The reference to magic could, theoretically, lead viewers to consider
Greek Fire to be on the same level of reality as, say, a mythological beast,
a supernatural entity in which some medieval people believed, but that
did not exist outside the realm of fantasy. Especially if we accepted the
conventional cliché of the medieval mind being less rational than our
own, our natural assumption would be that Johnston uses his twenty-
first-century scientific knowledge to create a mythical weapon—some
prochronistic gunpowder that will easily impress the natives. He would
thus appear to be following in the footsteps of A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court. With a little simple research viewers could, however,
learn that Greek Fire was a well-kept military secret of the Byzantine
state whose origins go back to antiquity; very similar incendiary weap-
ons were also known in China. Although it must be regarded as a “lost
secret,” plenty of sources confirm widespread knowledge of Greek Fire
from the twelfth century onwards.42 Viewers would then realize that
Greek Fire constitutes an element of medieval technological reality, a
reality which did not draw the same distinctions between the magical and
the scientific as we do.
In the novel, Crichton uses the Greek Fire episode to present the
Middle Ages as an age more technically and militarily advanced than
conventionally thought, and he deftly employs his readers’ awareness
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 67

of the basic problem of anachronism to achieve this effect. The follow-

ing extract from the novel describes the Professor making his gunpow-
der, which he declares to be even better than Greek Fire, while postdoc
André Marek assists him. Marek is not as well informed about this aspect
of medieval technology as the Professor:

Marek said, “I don’t see a sieve. Are you going to corn it?”
“No.” Johnston smiled. “Corning’s not discovered yet, remember?”
. . . Corned powder was much more powerful than dry-mixed powder . . .
But Johnston was right; corning was only discovered around 1400—roughly
forty years from now.43

Naturally, a film adaptation is not likely to go into such detail to explain

the history of gunpowder. Donner’s version simply has the Professor pro-
duce it. Significantly, in the film the episode is given the feel of the
anachronistic, since there is no medieval gunpowder expert present to
verify the existence of fourteenth-century gunpowder and the military
chemistry that made it possible. We do, however, learn that the Professor
is readily supplied with the ingredients and tools required to make Greek
Fire, and we might suspect that the Middle Ages could have produced
such “magic” gunpowder independently, without the need for know-
ledge imported from 2003.
Some viewers clearly care strongly about historical accuracy, as “entire
websites are frequently created to identify so-called ‘goofs,’ anachro-
nisms and historical inaccuracies on the level of details and objects.”44
Even quality newspapers have blogs dedicated to assessing the historical
accuracy in recently made period dramas, such as the Guardian’s regular
“Reel History” blog, where readers are invited to pinpoint and comment
on “errors” and “liberties.” In the case of Greek Fire, easily accessible
sources (as made possible by convergence culture), would quickly clear
the weapon of the suspicion of anachronism. Viewers unaware of Greek
Fire and thus suspicious of the film’s depiction of incendiary weapons
would then experience a revision of the popular view of a prescientific
and technologically static Middle Ages.
At the same time, such a revision might result in a na ïve defense of the
Middle Ages merely replacing one popular view, the “simple” Middle
Ages, with another, the “awesome” Middle Ages. Disregarding the
period’s other cultural achievements, such a view credits the Middle Ages
with being “advanced,” only because technological progress is one of
the achievements through which modernity tends to celebrate its sup-
posed superiority. Nonetheless, the film’s use of Greek Fire as hovering
between fantastic/anachronistic and realistic/authentic prompts audiences
68 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

to rethink their view of the Middle Ages and the period’s relationship to
modernity. Elliott points out the implications inherent in this approach to
anachronism: “We might also, perhaps, begin to ask whether . . . betray-
als in the name of authenticity . . . might actually help to understand the
medieval period for those who would not necessarily be likely to con-
duct any academic research on it.”45 His question gains even more rel-
evance once we accept that our perspective on the medieval period can
be changed not only by inaccuracies serving to create a medieval “feel,”
but also by ostensible anachronisms that cannot be validated on further
inspection.

Ambivalent Anachronisms in Richard Donner’s Timeline

Whether we see anachronisms as communicating a desire for histori-
cal accuracy or as a form of resistance to it, whether they support or
challenge a linear view of history, or whether they might even establish
a multi-temporal model of history, Donner’s adaptation of Timeline is
replete with anachronisms capable of serving any of these purposes. In
the film, anachronisms help to draw the dividing line between past and
present, but also blur the boundaries between them.
For films like Timeline it is useful to distinguish between anachronisms
that are acknowledged or identified by the characters in the storyworld,
and anachronisms apparent only to the audience. In the most sophisti-
cated of instances, the validity of an anachronism is negotiable, or may
even change over the course of the film for viewers and characters alike,
with the effect that attitudes towards temporality are thrown into relief.
Timeline’s discussion of anachronism centers on one high-profile
anachronism in particular, a sarcophagus, which provides an oppor-
tunity for the characters to offer changing and widely diverging judg-
ments about their relationship to the past. The sarcophagus encapsulates
highly contradictory concepts of history simultaneously. In the film, the
Professor has a son, Chris, whose initial dislike of his father’s occupation
is reinforced by his parents’ broken marriage and his amorous pursuit
of graduate student Kate, a workaholic historian of architecture, who
rejects his advances. The character of Chris, then, provides an identifica-
tory basis for non-academic/non-medievalist viewers who know little
about the Middle Ages and are more interested in romantic plots than in
studying the past (in the novel, Chris is not related to the Professor and
is himself a historian).
Although markedly uneducated in matters of the past, Chris voices
strong opinions on the Middle Ages’ pedagogical value. In contrast, André
Marek, a postdoc working at his father’s dig, epitomizes the dedicated
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 69

archaeologist who even devotes his free time to medieval studies. Marek
is practicing medieval archery near a chapel ruin when Chris arrives on
his motorbike to visit him. They discuss their contrasting attitudes. Chris
explains how little the past matters to him, since it denotes the time when
his parents split up. Marek objects: “It’s the past where it’s at. I mean the
people, they cared about each other. Men had honor, you know?”46 Chris
denounces this as “romantic warrior crap,” whereupon Marek shows him
a “romantic” sarcophagus depicting a French knight and his Lady.

Marek: And look at this, they’re holding hands; that’s incredibly unusual
for the period.
Chris: That is kind of unusual . . .
[Marek points out that the knight was carved as having one ear missing.]
Chris: So, who do you think they were, anyways?
Marek: Why would somebody who doesn’t give a shit be concerned with
that?
Chris: Because I am intrigued! [Both laugh.] That’s what you wanted to
hear, eh?

According to what the film tells us, a knight and his wife holding hands
and thus demonstrating their affection for one another constitutes a
prochronism in art historical terms, since there are no known medi-
eval sarcophagi carved in this way. At least this is what the film claims,
thereby consciously introducing the issue of anachronism into its plot.
Nevertheless, at this point of the plot, Marek has no reason to doubt the
authenticity of his find and therefore labels the artifact as “unusual.” Even
Chris is “intrigued” and concludes that the past may not have been quite
as different from the present as he had first assumed. Only later do we
learn that the earless knight carved in stone is Marek himself who will
spend the rest of his life in the past.
Within the film’s plot structure Marek’s changing awareness of anach-
ronism actually saves his life. Fighting in the Castleguard of 1357, Marek,
on the brink of defeat, loses his ear. He realizes that he himself must be
the earless knight depicted on the sarcophagus and understands that he
will survive. Thus he proves able to collect all his strength and overcome
his opponents at the crucial moment in battle. Now he knows that he will
win a certain Lady Claire’s heart and begin a happy life together with
her. Marek, and with him the audience, understand that the sculpted
anachronism was deliberately introduced into the past by a modern time
traveler. It was Marek himself who had introduced into medieval fune-
real art the supposedly modern custom of holding hands. From a purely
historicizing view, the linearity and strict chronology of past and present
seem to have ultimately been confirmed. The anachronism turns out
70 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

to be a mere anomaly that can be explained through time travel or the

mutual interference of two periods: Within the logic of the film’s sci-fi
plot there is no “real” anachronism at all—though as the anomaly’s status
as anachronism is negotiated over the course of the narrative, the theme
of temporality in the film is heightened.
With regard to the view of the medieval it conveys, the sarcophagus
episode is highly ambivalent. Ironically, it is skeptical Chris who implic-
itly voices a historicizing critique of medieval film, when he initially
rejects as “romantic warrior crap” Marek’s yearning for men who lived a
life of honor and loyalty. But then Marek convinces Chris of the legiti-
macy of his perspective by showing him the image of the married couple
portrayed as “authentically” and “unusually” loving in a modern way.
Chris is intrigued by what he—and the audience—imagines to be the
historical artifact’s unmitigated realism. It is only later that the audience
will understand that it has been deceived into this assumption and that it
is Marek himself who, through time travel, has bestowed his own nos-
talgic conception of medieval knighthood and courtly love onto the past.
Marek has, in fact, succeeded in introducing into the real Middle Ages an
element of his own yearning for a romantic past.
Does this twist in the plot erase our newly acquired insight that the
past might not have been so radically different from the present? Not
necessarily, since it seems that Marek’s sense of the past is more complex
than a simple romantic yearning:

Marek: We’re all intrigued by this . . . It’s about these people. Who were
they; what were their stories. It helps us to understand where we came
from, and where we are going. You know, I like to say—
Chris: I know, I know, “you make your own history.”
Marek: Do I say that often?
Chris: All the time. [They laugh.]
Marek: Well, whoever they were, they made theirs—together.

Here we see that Marek conceives of history as a necessary tool to under-

stand the present, as well as the future. His view that insight into the past
helps us to know “where we are going,” is mirrored in the plot structure.
A closer look shows that the film’s exact relation to time travel is not
entirely clear. In a lecture he gives before he travels into the past, Marek
claims that Lady Claire had been killed during the siege and that her
death had provided the incentive the French needed to beat the English at
Castleguard. If the plot were simply linear through time, then her death
could not have been mentioned in Marek’s lecture. It could never have
taken place since Marek saved her, thus changing her fate in the future
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 71

past. So, either Marek was mistaken in his lecture—as historians of the
Middle Ages will inevitably and frequently be, given the scarcity and
particular nature of medieval sources—or else the film conceives of time
travel in a slightly more complex form than merely going back into the
past and taking it from there. If Marek did change a past that had already
happened, as opposed to entering the past at a point in time when Lady
Claire was still alive and hence available to be saved, he would have cre-
ated an alternative past and hence an alternative future—in effect shaping
what one might call a different Middle Ages. This would explain why
Crichton is so interested in the idea of the Multiverse and its relation to
time travel.
In terms of sheer plot logic, the “wormhole” allowing time travel in
the first instance could be identified as a disappointing “plot hole”—
evidence of the filmmaker’s carelessness vis-à-vis the fundamental epis-
temological problems of time travel. For example, scientists in the ITC
lab explain that the wormhole always connects our present with the same
point in our past: April 4, 1357. Yet the past moves on in a relative dimen-
sion to our present: The Professor gets trapped on that day; the students
rescue him after he has already spent two days in the past; but the rescuers,
too, are arriving on April 4. The film never explains these inconsisten-
cies. If we are prepared to take the sarcophagus anachronism seriously
however, we might see the film as f luctuating between a linear and a cir-
cular concept of time. On the one hand, the sarcophagus would turn out
to be the kind of anachronism that ultimately tells us that we can never
truly know the past, but only ever be sure that our perceptions of it (and
the ideas we invest in them) will change. On the other hand, the film
would be communicating a nonlinear view of history positing different
pasts existing side by side as in different worlds. Aesthetically, this idea
of parallel worlds connected in circular fashion is further supported by
the visual design of the time machine. The machine consists of revolving
mirrors arranged in a circle which, when in motion, juxtapose images of
present-day scientists and the medieval versions of the young academics
side by side. Rather than simply representing A Distant Mirror (Donner’s
research of the film leans heavily on Barbara Tuchmann’s well-known
history of the fourteenth century),47 the machine here visualizes the idea
of two periods mirroring one another closely in several moving mirrors
with multiple ref lections.
But regardless of how we interpret the film’s view of time travel, the
anachronism of Marek, a modern knight in a medieval setting, inevitably
complicates our notion of the Middle Ages. In purely historical terms,
the audience learns that depictions of medieval couples holding hands
are supposedly anachronistic. Even in this fairly conventional view of
72 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

anachronism, the suspected anachronism of the sarcophagus contributes

to modifying and enhancing a popular image of the medieval.
Significantly, the film depends on both ideas simultaneously: of
anachronisms as narrative strategies creating multi-temporality, and of
anachronisms as a means for establishing chronology. The archaeolo-
gists only learn the details of Professor Johnston’s already conspicuous
absence because they unearth his aged but modern-day bifocal glasses in a
600-year-old medieval monastery. A dramatic scene in which the young
scholars examine their find ensures that viewers understand the bifocals’
anachronism: We learn that the students know that bifocals were invented
no earlier than the mid-seventeenth century and they are certain they are
the first people to have entered the site for 600 years. They are sure that
they have neither contaminated their site with modern artifacts, nor made
a mistake in dating the object. In other words, this anachronism is inex-
plicable in a world without time travel. Again skeptical Chris defends the
logic of linearity and uses the anachronism to reinstate a sense of realism:
He insists that his father is playing a practical joke on his students. As soon
as all doubts about the authenticity of the find are removed however, there
is only one possibility: Like the sarcophagus, the glasses are a historical
anomaly resulting from the interaction of two time levels. Any remain-
ing doubts are soon dispelled by the discovery of the Professor’s plea for
rescue, “Help me,” written in modern script on a piece of 600-year-old
parchment wrapped in oilskin. Unlike the sarcophagus episode, the bifocal
spectacles clearly serve to cement the difference between past and present.
The Professor is well and truly trapped in the past, but obviously wants
to, and will, return. Marek, however, will stay—taking with him his own
twenty-first-century image of the period that he had excavated only a day
before he set out to travel into the past.
The questions as to who travels to the past, who stays, who returns, and
who actually dies are of great importance with regard to the image of the
medieval the film conveys, and are also politically charged to a high degree.
The film’s enlightened view of the medieval demands that we accept liv-
ing in the past as a viable alternative to living in the present, which is why
Marek must stay to be happily married to Claire. Chris must return, so
that he can take his newly modified perception of the Middle Ages back to
the present and thus stand in for the viewer’s own experience. That Chris
has actually altered his view by the end of the film is proven by the fact
that he has finally succeeded in winning archaeologist Kate’s heart. Kate’s
change in attitude toward the past is significant too, as it provides a stark
contrast to Marek’s decision to remain behind. Faced with the brutality of
the war raging in Castleguard, she declares that there “is one thing worse
than dying here, and that is living here, and I refuse to do either.” Although
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 73

no less obsessed with her academic subject than Marek, she is disillusioned
with the period’s reality, making it easy for her now to withstand the pull
of the past. This contrast in “professional” reactions toward the “authen-
tic” past precludes both a romantic glorification of the Middle Ages and a
superficial condemnation of the period. Instead, viewers are presented with
a carefully calibrated spectrum of complex responses to the medieval, none
of which is permitted to dominate absolutely.
There is a further requirement to be met if the past is to seriously
impact on the present: The past must claim an unfortunate casualty from
the present. It does not suffice merely to kill off the villains whom the
audience expects to be punished anyway, but the innocent, too, must
suffer at the hands of the past. This is the shy and fretful graduate student
François. François, whose character has no equivalent in the novel, has no
particular interest in experiencing the past firsthand—he enters the time
machine only because he knows that the Professor would have done the
same for him. On their arrival at medieval Castleguard, the time travelers
are promptly caught by Lord Oliver’s men, instantly recognizable as vio-
lent rogues. Lord Oliver identifies François as a Frenchman because of his
accent and declares that he is at war with the French. François is suspected
of being a spy and immediately executed. His unheroic death suffered for
the Professor demonstrates that the past is actually full of dishonorable
men and that men care about one another also in the present. In others
words, it serves to further establish the past and the present as parallel
worlds. François dies, as it were, as a sacrifice to an enlightened view of
the Middle Ages, one that takes the Middle Ages seriously as something
more than merely the all-purpose Other of modernity.
Lord Oliver himself will eventually be killed by his worst enemy:
Arnod de Cervole, Claire’s brother. As he makes the fatal thrust Arnod
screams in a heightened fit of patriotism: “This is for France!” Timeline’s
treatment of the medieval portrays the English and the French as bit-
ter enemies, as well as the politically inferior Scots as winning over the
dominant English. This obviously ref lects the historical conf lict between
England and its former colony of America—in a way that is present
in other historical blockbuster movies such as Rob Roy and Braveheart
where Celtic heroes beat the oppressive English. Hollywood’s treatment
of Timeline (the novel does not display national sentiments to the same
degree) may be charged with an irreverence for the medieval by making
gratuitous use of such enmities, in the knowledge that film audiences will
be reliably entertained by the resulting conf lict.
There is, however, yet another aspect to the fact that it is Marek,
the Scotsman, who ends up staying in the Middle Ages. In the novel,
Marek is Dutch; in the film he embodies the nostalgic stereotype of the
74 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

romantic, reckless, and somehow archaic Celt who possesses a natural,

ethnic link to the past that is denied to his more modern contemporaries.
The Celt represents a living bridge to the past, a walking anachronism,
whose decision to remain behind in the Middle Ages must actually be
read as something like a return to the past.
It seems no coincidence, that at the close of the film “reformed” Chris
is wearing a green “Ireland” T-shirt adorned with symbols of Celtic
art when he, Kate, and his archaeologist father take another look at the
sarcophagus—acknowledging that it really is Marek who died in 1382
and is buried here. As the Professor translates the inscription on the sar-
cophagus, we learn that he had three children with Lady Claire: François,
Katherine, and Christopher. Ironically, each of the friends after which
his children are named represents one of the clichés that beget medi-
eval film: François’ death metaphorically stands for the Middle Ages as
the “lost ideal,” Kate must confront the “barbaric past,” and Chris gains
access to “timeless Romantic values” by engaging with a medieval past he
formerly dismissed as irrelevant. His Celtic T-shirt confirms that he has
indeed become a “child of the Middle Ages.”
The film’s very last scene has the camera swerve from the hands on the
sarcophagus to the Celtic symbols on the T-shirt, eventually zooming in
on Chris and Kate’s locked hands (figure 3.1). As this image stresses the
idea of the medieval and the modern as parallel worlds, we are left with
a feeling of uncertainty. We can no longer tell with any certainty from
where the anachronism of the lovers holding hands was transported: from
the earlier to the later period, or the other way round, as both directions
seem plausible. Through the use of anachronism, the strict boundaries
between the medieval and the present have become porous—for a brief
moment on screen, at least.

Figure 3.1 Making history: intersection of past and present in Richard

Donner’s Timeline.
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 75

Why is the film’s use of anachronism relevant to this book’s focus on

the politics of adaptation? It appears that through its aesthetic blending
of different layers of time, the film allegorizes the dynamic relation-
ship between “original” and “adaptation” as explored by recent theorists
of adaptation. These scholars have stressed the interchangeability of, or
rather the dialogic interaction between, “source” and “target” medium.
Travelling to the Middle Ages, that is, the supposed “source,” Marek
evidently creates the period according to his own preconceptions. As
modern artifacts are taken into the Middle Ages and back to the present
again, Marek’s sense of the period, the “adaptation,” is also presented to
the viewer as the “authentic Middle Ages.” The hierarchies of authentic-
ity between “original” and “adaptation” are contested. The Middle Ages
thereby turns into the fantasy of originality: into a fiction created by the
archaeologist through adaptation.
In conclusion: My interpretation of anachronisms in Timeline has
attempted to trace both their strategic use as well as their nonstrategic
occurrences and effects. Anachronisms, whether intentionally employed
or not, typically prompt a desire to verify or falsify initial suspicions of
historical inaccuracy. Especially when anachronisms are used strategi-
cally in a medieval film, audiences may find their views of the medi-
eval challenged: Even ostensible anachronisms may achieve this effect
if they are confirmed or denied by further inquiry. I have demonstrated
that a popular medieval film can prompt revisions of established views
of the period regardless of whether an anachronism is valid or not.
Anachronisms have a particular potential to alter our interpretation of
the past, as well as refining our understanding of the past/present divide.
It seems that a strategic use of anachronisms, as well as the articulation of
our attitudes toward them, enables an understanding of what we mean
by “history” in the first place. As my analysis has shown, this is a critical
potential anachronisms can unfold even in films that indulge in lavish use
of medieval-themed clichés, films that intellectual critics might all too
easily dismiss as uninteresting—and films that might even be deemed
mediocre. Timeline presents anachronisms not so much in a “provocative”
way, but in a subtle manner that communicates an awareness of medieval
history as a retrospective, often nostalgic, interpretation rather than a
given, stable, and authentic reality. Timeline challenges our knowledge
of the Middle Ages in ways which exploit and simultaneously resist tradi-
tional academic, as well as popular, responses to the medieval.
In rethinking the concept of anachronism for medieval film, I have
sought to embrace the full and ambivalent spectrum of responses to tem-
poral anomalies: Anachronisms can have historicizing power, challenging
established views of the past even in films medievalists reject for their
76 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

ostensible conventionality and use of cliché. Anachronisms may even

contribute to alternative views of history. Medievalists might thus be
advised to continue exploring anachronism as part of a multilayered rela-
tionship between the medieval and the postmodern, and also between the
popular and academic film communities.

Notes
* I thank Alistair Hogg for many conversations about Timeline; his commentary
on earlier drafts of this chapter, too, has been immensely helpful for the coher-
ence of my argument. I am indebted also to Andrew James Johnston for his
valuable comments.
1. Cf. Arthur Lindley, “The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film,” Screening the
Past 3 (1998), Latrobe.edu.au, available at: www.latrobe.edu.au/screen
ingthepast/firstrelease/fir598/ALfr3a.htm.
2. Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey, eds., Race, Class, and Gender in
“Medieval” Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 6.
3. Kathleen C. Kelly and Tison Pugh, “Introduction,” in Queer Movie
Medievalisms, ed. Kathleen C. Kelly and Tison Pugh (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009), p. 4 [1–18].
4. Michael Crichton, Timeline (New York: Knopf, 1999).
5. Timeline, dir. Richard Donner (US: Paramount Pictures, 2003).
6. For a discussion of the scientific background of the novel, see Joel N.
Shurkin, “Crichton Travels in Time,” in The Science of Michael Crichton:
An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science behind the Fictional Worlds
of Michael Crichton, ed. Kevin Robert Grazier (Dallas, TX: BenBella
Books, 2008), pp. 85–105.
7. John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse: Parallel Worlds, Hidden Dimensions,
and the Ultimate Quest for the Frontiers of Reality (Hoboken, NY: Wiley,
2009), p. xii.
8. Crichton, Timeline, pp. x–xi.
9. Ibid., p. 490.
10. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993), p. 11.
11. Crichton, Timeline, p. 490.
12 . Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 8.
13. Apart from Shurkin’s contribution there is only one in-depth study of the
book, Jenny Adam’s “Marketing the Medieval: The Quest for Authentic
History,” The Journal of Popular Culture 36.4 (2003): 704–23.
14. Shurkin, “Crichton Travels in Time,” p. 85.
15. The film had a production budget of roughly $ 80 million, yet only
grossed $ 43,935,763 worldwide (Boxofficemojo.com, available at: www
.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=timeline.htm).
16. Shurkin, “Crichton Travels in Time,” p. 86.
 R E T H I N K I NG A N AC H RON I S M 77

17. Valentin Groebner, Das Mittelalter hört nicht auf (Munich: Beck, 2008),
p. 145.
18. Zuleyha Cetiner-Oktem, “Dreaming the Middle Ages: American
Neomedievalism in A Knight’s Tale and Timeline,” Interactions (Spring
2009), available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7014/is_1_18
/ai_n32149058.
19. Cf. Adams, “Marketing the Medieval.”
20. Nickolas A. Haydock, “Homeland Security. Northern Crusades through
the East-European Eyes of Alexander Nevsky and the Nevsky Tradition,”
in Hollywood in the Holy Land: The Fearful Symmetries of Movie Medievalism,
ed. Nickolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2009), p. 48 [47–96].
21. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “anachronism, n.” available at: www
.oed.com/view/Entry/6908?redirectedFrom=anachronism.
22. Margreta de Grazia, “Anachronism,” in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and
Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 13 [13–32].
23. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascenses in Western Art (New York:
Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 202–5.
24. De Grazia, “Anachronism,” p. 29.
25. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “anachronism, n.”
26. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 3.
27. Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to
Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 1–22, 312–17.
28. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 107 [107–23].
29. Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” p. 109.
30. Aranye Fradenburg, “(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming,” in The
Post-Historical Middle Ages, eds. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Frederico (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 87 [87–115].
31. See, for example, Richard Burt in his Medieval and Early Modern Film and
Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), or Nickolas A. Haydock
in “Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness
of Cinematic Pastiche in First Knight and A Knight’s Tale,” in Film and
Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages, ed. Tom A. Shippey (Cambridge, UK:
D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 5–38.
32. György Lukács introduces the concept of “necessary anachronism” on
the basis of Hegel’s use of the term in The Historical Novel (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 61–63.
33. William D. Paden, “I Learnt It at the Movies: Teaching Medieval
Film,” in Postmodern Medievalisms, ed. Richard Utz and Jeese G. Swan
(Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2005), p. 92 [79–98].
34. Andrew B. R. Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema
and History in Portraying the Medieval World ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2011), p. 206.
78 M A RG I T TA ROU S E

35. Stephanie Trigg, “Medievalism and Convergence Culture: Researching

the Middle Ages for Fiction and Film,” Parergon 25.2 (2008): 100
[99–118].
36. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations
from Beowulf to Buffy ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), pp. 20–21.
37. Elliott, Remaking, p. 214.
38. Ibid., p. 217.
39. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations. The
Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2010), p. 6.
40. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, dir. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones (UK:
Columbia Pictures, 1974).
41. Cordula Lemke, p. 52.
42 . On military technology in the medieval period see for example Jim
Bradbury’s The Medieval Siege (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992), p. 9, or
more recently, Helen J. Nicholson’s Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice
of War in Europe, 300 –1500 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
p. 96. Crichton cites several works on this subject in his bibliography.
43. Crichton, Timeline, p. 415.
44. Elliott, Remaking, p. 214.
45. Ibid., p. 220.
46. All quotations from the film are my transcriptions from the DVD release
of Timeline, dir. Richard Donner (US: Paramount Pictures, 2003).
47. Cf. Interview with Richard Donner, “Richard Donner on Timeline,”
IGN Movies, available at: http://movies.ign.com/articles/441/441900p3
.html. Barbara Tuchmann, A Distant Mirror. The Calamitous 14th Century
(New York: Knopf, 1978).
CHAPTER 4

OTHERNESS REDOUBLED AND REFRACTED:

INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUES IN
THE THIRTEENTH WARRIOR

Judith Klinger

Disconcerting Alterity
Portrayed as darkly savage or brightly innocent, the cinematic Middle Ages
have long operated as a mirror highlighting both modernity’s advances
and its failings. Frequently, this ambivalence is mitigated by the notion
of an unchangeable human “nature”—such as the longing for love and
freedom or an innate morality—hidden beneath the historical costumes.1
The dialogue between periods that each medieval movie initiates is thus
often trapped in a dichotomous pattern. Some films celebrate emanci-
pated enlightenment vis-à-vis brutal medieval primitivism, others paint a
romantic image of medieval artlessness and integrity in stark contrast with
modern decadence and alienation. Since these films juxtapose familiarity
and otherness to allow for both recognition and dissociation, the degree
of medieval alterity a given film is willing to tolerate necessarily depends
on the categories supposedly defining modern identity. As a bottom line,
the medieval Other often presents contemporary viewers with a suitably
recognizable mirror image: a rough stranger nonetheless conforming to
our standards of identity.
This framework may explain why, at its initial release, The Thirteenth
Warrior2 was a failure both at the box office and with the critics.3 Despite
adhering to the aesthetic standards of mainstream historical cinema, in
certain key respects Warrior disregards the conventional limits of tolerable
alterity. To quote an exasperated reviewer: “The film is fascinating to
80 JU DITH K LINGER

watch, but I can hardly say what it’s about, other than people killing each
other.”4 The movie’s perspective on the European Middle Ages is cer-
tainly unusual. Viewers encounter a “barbarian” Viking world through
the eyes of a supremely educated Arab, Ahmed ibn Fadlan, who gradu-
ally learns the language and customs foreign to him.5 As the eponymous
“thirteenth warrior,” the Arab traveler reluctantly joins King Buliwyf
and his band of Vikings for a quest into a misty North where uncanny
monsters threaten King Hrothgar’s realm. Fighting a tribe of anthropo-
phagous bear-people called the Wendol, the Vikings learn that they must
kill their enemies’ “mother,” the tribe’s matriarch. After a final victorious
battle, Buliwyf dies, and Ibn Fadlan, his mission achieved, returns home
to record his adventures.
Although such a story may seem fantasy-inspired and evidently shares
many predictable characteristics of the action-and-adventure genre, its
basic premises derive from authentic medieval source material. The movie
adapts Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead (1976), itself an adaptation of
the Old English poem Beowulf, but also a reworking of a tenth-century
Arabic travelogue, a so-called Risala. Crichton specifies his prime medi-
eval source in the novel’s subtitle: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating
His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922. The historical Ahmed ibn
Fadlan, a learned diplomat, relates observations made on a mission from
the Caliph al-Muqtadir to the Volga Bulgars. His Risala contains detailed
descriptions of various peoples and their customs; a particularly intriguing
section describes the Rus’, Varangian-Viking settlers in the Volga region.6
Despite his “cultural chauvinism,”7 Ibn Fadlan portrays his sojourn among
the Rus’ as a captivating encounter with profound cultural difference—an
encounter that Crichton builds upon to reimagine the characters, mon-
sters, and happenings in Beowulf as observed by a stranger.
In the twentieth-century adaptations of the Risala, the element of oth-
erness is inevitably redoubled by historical difference. The Arab’s foreign
gaze refracts and intensifies the bewildering strangeness of medieval cul-
tures and their specific mode of imagination. Neither is he “one of us,”
nor does he (at first) belong to the ragged representatives of a brutal medi-
eval world, the Vikings. The movie’s choice of protagonist thus precludes
immediate identification. As one critic observed:

Warrior stands out for presenting an Islamic Arab not only as heroic but as
the spectator’s avatar as a model of faith and civilisation through which to
approach the rough, grotty, pagan forebears of . . . European society.8

Arab role models are certainly rare in mainstream cinema.9 Jack Shaheen
lists a mere dozen favorable portrayals of Arab characters in more than
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 81

900 movies, Warrior being among the few exceptions.10 He traces the
prevailing portrayal of Arabs as (lecherous, fanatic) villains to a variety
of political, economic, and cultural factors at work within the American
movie industry.11
Edward Said’s seminal study Orientalism provides a broader framework.
“[A] Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority
over the Orient,” Orientalism is inseparable from “the idea of European
identity as a superior one in comparison with all other non-European peo-
ples and cultures.”12 The Orient figures as Europe’s “cultural contestant
and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addi-
tion, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrast-
ing image, idea, personality, experience.”13 With minor modifications,
Said’s definition could easily be applied to mainstream movies’ image
of the Middle Ages, too. In the character of Ahmed ibn Fadlan, I argue,
Warrior merges the medieval and oriental Other, so that the boundaries
between contested identities intersect: Orient and Occident as well as
the medieval and modern are engaged in complex negotiations, and the
result is by no means predictable. The degree of alterity The Thirteenth
Warrior imposes on its audience is not limited to the provocation of an
Arab hero; Ahmed ibn Fadlan embodies a storyline that reconfigures the
dichotomies underlying countless medieval movies such as nature versus
culture, primitivism versus civilization, or superstition versus faith.
Warrior ’s reconfiguration of the conventional dichotomies put forward
by much of Hollywood’s output gains in complexity through the film’s
other protagonist, the Viking warrior—King Buliwyf. He constitutes
the “barbarian” and pagan counterpart to Ahmed’s sophistication and
serves as a second prominent figure of demarcation. Like the oriental, the
barbarian traditionally provides an antithesis to the normative ideals of
European culture.14
While Buliwyf and his companions appear unkempt, fond of heavy
drinking, and, above all, excessively brutal (they engage in ritual kill-
ings), the audience may feel inclined to empathize with Ahmed whose
first-person narrative invites identification. However that possibility is
immediately subverted by Ahmed’s extravagantly oriental appearance.
From initial seraglio images down to Ahmed’s kohl-shaded eyes, every-
thing suggests an effusive sensuality—one of movie orientalism’s major
tropes.15 The viewer’s potential avatar, though rational and enlightened,16
is stereotypically marked as the effeminate oriental Other.17 Yet the alter-
native seems no more comfortable.
As a figure of identification, the white, blond-haired, and manly
Buliwyf may seem more accessible to Western audiences than the dark-
skinned and feminized Ahmed, but Warrior resists providing viewers with
82 JU DITH K LINGER

a consistent perspective on cultural values and meanings. If viewers are

likely to share the Vikings’ amusement at Ahmed’s “effeminate” sensibil-
ities, they will also sympathize with Ahmed’s disgust at the Norsemen’s
evident lack of hygiene. Identification by self-recognition is repeatedly
thwarted.18
With both of its protagonists representing marginal cultures, the film’s
identity-defining center appears to be open to shifting assignations—a
rare occurrence in medieval movies. Ironically, the very bewilderment
the film caused is in fact its primary theme: the unlikely “clash of civiliza-
tions” between Viking and Arab world. Beneath a veneer of action-packed
swashbuckling, Warrior ’s real adventure is an unsettling experience of
otherness and the attendant loss of certainty about all things familiar.
I therefore suspect that the film’s widespread rejection is not so much due
to the film’s transgression of various generic boundaries or its supposed
“inherent weaknesses” as part of a novel-to-screen adaptation, as some
critics argue,19 but more to a highly self-conscious poetics of adaptation
generating this sense of cultural uncertainty.
My analysis delves into the deep-seated ideological potential of the
adventure paradigm, exploring how the film employs adaptation to
enable unsettling experiences of otherness and to initiate both an inter-
cultural and an interperiod dialogue. The exchange between Ibn Fadlan,
champion of civilized learning and rationality, and Buliwyf, the barbaric
protagonist of an irrational “heroic age,” unfolds as a laborious process of
translation, interpretation, and adaptation. Religious beliefs, concepts of
masculinity, and notions of rulership are involved in the ensuing process
of negotiation, moving from disconcerted rejection to gradual apprecia-
tion. Even as Warrior invokes the stereotypes of cinematic medievalism, it
examines the possibilities of communication between cultures. Moreover,
by casting an Arab as the advocate of modern views and achievements,
Warrior questions the Eurocentric system of knowledge.

Ambiguous Translations and Awkward Dialogues

Ibn Fadlan’s Risala, Crichton’s Eaters, and Warrior all share a pointed inter-
est in encounters with profound otherness and the issue of entering into
dialogue with a foreign culture. In his travelogue, the historical Ahmed
ibn Fadlan employs “passably ‘ethnographic’” descriptive patterns.20 His
account typically features a foreign people’s physical appearance, charac-
teristic clothing and weaponry, and describes religious customs and modes
of social interaction. He frequently distinguishes between his own obser-
vations and information from other sources;21 he separates factual report
from commentary and interpretation. His own culture provides him
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 83

with a stable frame of reference whenever he contrasts superior Islamic

knowledge of god with foreign practices of religious worship.22 Ritual
purification operates as a particularly powerful indicator of difference,
prompting the traveler emphatically to proclaim his sense of superiority.
He describes the Rūsiyyah (Vikings living in present-day Russia) as

the filthiest of all Allā h’s creatures: they do not clean themselves after
excreting or urinating or wash themselves when in a state of ritual impu-
rity (i.e., after coitus) and do not <even> wash their hands after food.
Indeed they are like asses that roam <in the fields>.23

For all his harshness, Ibn Fadlan also records his own lack of comprehen-
sion, specifically addresses problems of translation, and even questions
the validity of his own interpretations.24 His description of a king’s ship
burial involving the burning of a slave girl, is, for instance, confined
to the actions, gestures, and utterances observed and provides no com-
mentary. A conversation with one of the Rūsiyyah concludes his account
of the funeral ceremony. His interlocutor launches into a critique of the
visitor’s faith and exclaims “You Arabs are a foolish lot!”

Because you purposely take those who are dearest to you and whom you
hold in highest esteem and throw them under the earth, where they are
eaten by the earth, by vermin and by worms, whereas we burn them in the
fire there and then, so that they enter Paradise immediately . . . Because of
the love which my Lord feels for him [the deceased], he has sent the wind
to take him away within an hour.25

Ibn Fadlan’s account not only accommodates a pronounced objection to

his own religious convictions, but also implicitly confirms the correct-
ness of the other’s assertion: “[I]t took scarcely an hour for the ship, . . . the
slave-girl and her master to be burnt to a fine ash.”26
As his remarks on ritual purification demonstrate, the author’s imported
system of meaning clearly informs his portrayal of foreign cultures—yet
without completely overwriting his interest in the otherness of social
structures and customs. Since the supremacy of Ibn Fadlan’s religion is
never in doubt, the resulting dialogue remains profoundly asymmetrical.
At the same time, it is precisely his sense of superiority that enables him
to permit foreign voices to articulate their discrepant world views.
Crichton’s novel considerably amplifies the dialogic potential inherent
in Ibn Fadlan’s travelogue. First, the story is narrated as a commentary
of a medieval source complete with academic introduction, translated
manuscript, footnotes, as well as bibliography, and is supplemented
with Crichton’s afterword. A panorama of competing voices unfolds as
84 JU DITH K LINGER

a complex dialogue between editor/narrator, a blend of historical Ibn

Fadlan and fictional Ibn Fadlan, and author-persona Crichton. Moreover,
as part of this illusion of authenticity, the editor-narrator points out that
the extant text may depart from an earlier “original” and may contain
scribal errors.
Second, Crichton leaves room for unresolved questions and indepen-
dent voices even on the plot level, rather than aiming at their conclusive
integration into a single system of meaning. For example, here, an occa-
sionally ironic exchange about the nature of god and religious customs
unfolds between Herger, Buliwyf ’s retainer, and Ahmed. At one point
Herger remarks that one of their warrior companions must be bewitched,
and elaborates: “If he is not bewitched, he may be turning Arab, for he
washes his undergarments and also his body each day.”27 Ahmed, in turn,
extols the nature of Allah but the Viking proves unwilling to embrace
Islam as he fears the hazards of monotheism:

“The risk is too great. A man cannot place too much faith in any one thing,
neither a woman, nor a horse, nor a weapon, nor any single thing.”
“Yet I do,” I said.
“As you see best,” Herger replied, “but there is too much that man
does not know. And what man does not know, that is the province of the
gods.”28

Elizabeth Sklar suggests that the novel’s “skillful manipulation of voice,”

which for her is a “purely writerly strategy,” cannot be successfully recre-
ated in a film, which, to a certain degree, accounts for Warrior ’s aesthetic
shortcomings and subsequent failure.29 I argue, by contrast, that the movie
effectively exhibits the interplay of distinct voices as the embodiment of a
form of cultural adaptation, whose central aesthetic strategies are failures,
false starts, strategic and unwitting (mis)appropriations as well as deliber-
ate reinterpretations.
Warrior ’s opening scenes establish the parameters for a substantial
reconfiguration, or adaptation, of “self ” and “other.” Accompanied by
Ahmed’s offscreen narration, a series of shots discloses the hero’s past
and identifies him as an outsider. Banished from the Caliph’s court for
adultery, Ibn Fadlan embarks on a dangerous mission. Yet his new role as
ambassador is immediately undermined. While Ahmed insists that he is
“supposed to talk to people,” his initial encounter with the “Northmen” is
marked by failures of linguistic communication and cultural understand-
ing represented by a confusing jumble of languages and a labored process
of translation. Whereas Ahmed’s Arabic is rendered as English, Buliwyf ’s
“Norse” remains incomprehensible. Like the audience, the bewildered
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 85

hero must rely on two interpreters: Buliwyf ’s retainer, Herger, trans-

lates Norse into Latin, which Melchisidek, Ahmed’s mentor, renders in
English.
Thus the story is a translation of a translation, just as it is the adapta-
tion of various adaptations—beginning with Ibn Fadlan’s tenth-century
account translating foreign signs and rituals into another language and
familiar system of meaning. Instead of staging a fully comprehensible
historical spectacle, Warrior exposes the procedures of translation and
adaptation—and the fallible nature of such processes. When Buliwyf
demands a “song of glory,” Ibn Fadlan recites a creation hymn remi-
niscent of the biblical Genesis: “In the beginning, the earth was void.”
Ahmed’s performance does not seem to match Buliwyf ’s expectations
since the Viking interrupts the recital by killing a kinsman without
apparent cause. As Buliwyf is proclaimed king immediately afterwards,
we realize that the victim was his rival for the throne.
The following scene increases the sense of an immense cultural gap.
Herger, Melchisidek, and Ahmed watch the old king’s ship burial we
already encountered in Ibn Fadlan’s Risala, a ritual which here, too, cul-
minates in burning a Viking girl. Melchisidek’s comment, “you will not
see this again, it is the old way,” implies that they are witnessing an
archaic past about to vanish. Although the interpreters translate the girl’s
concluding invocation, its meaning remains opaque. Ahmed’s shocked
expression mirrors a modern response to such a barbarian practice,
whereas Herger seems hardly moved.
These opening scenes offer a dense and provocative depiction of cul-
tural and historical difference. The murmured f low of “Norse” and Latin
running beneath the English dialogue serves as a reminder of the lin-
guistic past and underlines the difficulties of communication. Cultural
customs and symbols prove precariously ambiguous. The Vikings’ bois-
terous feasting turns out to be part of a funeral ceremony and the burning
of a ship equals a journey to “paradise.”
As the narrative unfolds, the troubled cultural exchange between
Viking “barbarity” and Arab “modernity” is explored in full: King
Hrothgar’s plea for support summons a female oracle who proclaims that
the king’s monstrous enemy must be confronted by thirteen men. Since
the thirteenth warrior “must be no Northman,” Ahmed joins the Vikings
and they accept his company. Despite initial ethnic prejudice, a slow pro-
cess of increasing mutual understanding temporarily assimilates Ahmed
into the Northmen’s community. As they journey north, Ahmed listens
intently to the Vikings’ conversations and gradually begins to under-
stand their language. The process is captured by an elaborate montage.
Individual English fragments emerge from the “Norse” and coalesce into
86 JU DITH K LINGER

comprehensible units.30 This widely noted scene foregrounds the neces-

sity of translation itself and introduces a shift in perspective as viewers
gain direct access to Viking speech.31
Learning the Norsemen’s language, Ahmed acquires a new under-
standing of their codes of conduct. When one of the warriors insults
Ahmed’s mother, the Arab retaliates verbally, which almost leads to a
punch-up. However, the tension soon dissolves into baff led laughter,
since Ahmed’s response marks a significant departure from his previ-
ous attitude of detached observation. Adapting the Northmen’s codes of
communication for his own purposes, he makes himself understood for
the first time.
As the next scene reveals, comprehension is becoming reciprocal.
Watching the Arab writing “there is only one god and Mohammed is
his prophet,” Buliwyf inquires about Ahmed’s ability to “draw sounds.”
A later scene shows that the illiterate Viking has memorized both the
precise shape of the letters and their exact meaning. Thus a profitable
exchange is initiated between different systems of cultural transmission
and religious faith.
The unlikely dialogue between Arab and Viking extends beyond the
issues of linguistic, cultural, and religious difference. Adhering to a dia-
logic principle, as theorized by Bakhtin, the film incorporates a plurality
of independent perspectives and a polyphony of unmerged “voices,”32
instead of hinging on a single authoritative viewpoint. As events progress,
the clear-cut oppositions of the movie’s introductory scenes are differen-
tiated and diffused and implicit valuations gradually modified. But the
film’s dialogue between Arab and Varangian is not, unlike the novel’s,
overtly motivated by a quasi-academic interest in ethnographic possibili-
ties. In Bakhtin’s terminology, the exchange between distinct “voices,”
viewpoints, ideologies, or systems of meaning is also emphatically pro-
pelled by topical issues which shape the movie’s imagined Middle Ages.
Buliwyf ’s fascination with literacy illustrates the point, as it denotes
the subject of history and recollection, which reliably speaks to modern
sensibilities.
As we have seen, Buliwyf displays his fascination with Ahmed’s abil-
ity to “draw sounds” early on in the film. He watches Ahmed carefully,
but remains silent. His ostensible lack of response appears to indicate
lack of comprehension, yet a subsequent scene corrects that impression.
As soon as the Vikings reach their destination, he asks Ahmed to “speak
what I draw,” and writes into the sand the very sentence Ahmed had
written earlier: “There is only one god and Mohammed is his prophet”
(figure 4.1). Although the movie does not explain Buliwyf ’s motivation,
his impressive mnemonic abilities serve to valorize the achievements of
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 87

Figure 4.1 Strange letters in John McTiernan’s The Thirteenth Warrior.

oral cultures, disproving the prejudice that equates illiteracy with uncul-
tured primitivism.
Religious implications in particular lend additional significance to this
brief scene. As the Vikings approach the Northern coast through dense
fogs, Buliwyf repeatedly calls the name of Odin from the ship’s prow:
both an invocation of the god and a navigation technique—a premodern
form of echolocation. Buliwyf ’s reproducing an article of faith as soon
as the travelers land, suggests that writing, to him, is no arbitrary matter.
Apparently, “drawing sounds” makes sense to Buliwyf only in this specific
context, where the writing is bound up with familiar land, invocation,
and sacred signs, and thereby gains memorable meaning.
Later events emphasize both the general theme of historical memory
and Buliwyf ’s personal interest in it. As he approaches his death, the Viking
leader is preoccupied with the future memory of his achievements:

Buliwyf: I have only these hands. I will die a pauper.

King Hrothgar: You will be buried as a king.
Buliwyf: A man might be thought wealthy if someone were to draw the
story of his deeds, that they may be remembered.
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: Such a man might be thought wealthy indeed.

Buliwyf ’s concerns evoke images of royal tombs and rich grave goods
serving the deceased in the afterlife. Yet for Buliwyf the higher good is
lasting fame. His encounter with Ahmed has taught him that a written
text can lend greater range and permanence to the memory of his heroic
exploits than oral transmission.33
The film’s closing sequence showing Ahmed chronicling his adven-
tures bridges the gap of more than a thousand years and meditates on the
88 JU DITH K LINGER

transmission of history. The last shots juxtapose Ahmed’s manuscript and

a Viking ship in the distance, emblems of the two cultures pitting the
permanence of the written text against a vanishing memory. Whereas
the Vikings’ culture relies on oral transmission alone, Ahmed can use the
(more modern) technology of writing as a repository of knowledge and
recollection.
Crucially, cultural and historical difference overlap. Certainly, the
movie’s final close-up of the manuscript forms one of the genre’s stock
motifs. Frequently featured in opening scenes, the medieval manuscript
usually gestures toward historical authenticity. But in Warrior the manu-
script does not only stand for history but also for Ahmed’s newly gained
respect for “pagan men who loved other gods,” as evinced in his willing-
ness to write down Buliwyf ’s history.
Concerns about posthumous reputations clearly also belong to a
premodern warrior culture.34 What Buliwyf ultimately gains from his
intercultural exchange with Ahmed is immortality through a more per-
manent form of the “sang om aere,” the song of glory, he demanded at
their first encounter. His desire for lasting fame in the face of certain
death may appear strange to modern viewers, but in the movie it drives
the making of history. Through Ahmed’s written record, Buliwyf ’s
desire is transformed into history and shown to engender the very text
surviving until the present day.
It has to be noted that not only the movie’s preoccupation with history
and recollection, but also its portrayal of a peaceful religious pluralism ges-
ture towards modern rather than medieval ideals. The tolerance displayed
and the monotheism emphasized are sure to appeal to a modern, Western
audience. However, the missionary zeal propelling many a crusade movie
is notably absent from Warrior. Here, religious differences cause neither
dissent nor competition, nor quarrels about “true” or “false” gods. Once
he has joined the Vikings, Warrior ’s Ahmed sheds the disdainful sense of
superiority the historical Ibn Fadlan displays.
The cinematic Middle Ages habitually present obsessive Christianity
as one of its major tropes. Na ïve or fanatic piety, burning heretics and
witches, and a ruthless church keeping simple-minded believers in a state
of revolting superstition are among the genre’s recurring stereotypes. Yet
these motifs are conspicuously absent from Warrior. Crucially, there is not
a single reference to the Judaeo-Christian God or the Catholic Church,
nor does anything resemble the conventional image of the Christian
Occident. Instead, it is Islam that fulfills the function of the monotheistic
scripture-based religion providing a contrast to the Vikings’ pagan faith.
As emphasized through Ahmed’s frequent invocations and prayers, Allah
constitutes the highest divine authority within the movie’s religious
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 89

panorama—closely followed by Odin, the “All-father.”35 This empha-

sis on a single pagan god, rather than a multitude of deities, seems to
signal a basic proximity between the different religions. Yet the movie
advocates neither an easy blending of religious experience nor the possibil-
ity of a final reconciliation. Religious difference remains clearly marked
throughout. Muslim faith is characterized by commandments the indi-
vidual must obey, whereas “Germanic” religious observance consists in
following the oracles’ enigmatic commands. While Ahmed recalls his
past merits and transgressions, the Northmen believe in an unchangeable
fate. Only in the face of death do religious attitudes converge, since both
Muslims and Pagans believe in an afterworld. Nevertheless, the two par-
ties retain their previous convictions, as the parting exchange between
Herger and Ahmed shows:

Herger the Joyous: We shall make prayers for your safe passage.
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: Prayers to who?
Herger the Joyous: In your land, one god is perhaps enough, but we have
need of many. I will pray to all of them for you. Do not be offended.
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: I’ll be in your debt!

Incidentally, this exchange reverses the conversation on religious faith as

presented in Crichton’s novel already discussed above. Instead of rejecting
the risks of monotheism, Herger’s cheerful promise underlines the merits
of polytheism. At the same time, he courteously acknowledges Ahmed’s
religious sensibilities. Ahmed, too, includes the Vikings in his prayers.
If the film’s treatment of questions of faith and memory culture seems
to suggest sophisticated ways of weighing premodern and specifically
modern interests in a Bakhtinian sense, it ought to be noted that Warrior
also (necessarily) subscribes to the heavily clichéd conventions of its
genre. The portrayal of Buliwyf as textbook barbarian is pertinent here.
Personifying Western civilization’s primitive past, he is firmly grounded
in twentieth-century discourses of barbarity. Manfred Schneider has pin-
pointed the stereotype’s significance especially for concepts of cultural
renewal.36 Precisely because the barbarian occupies a site beyond the
boundaries of civilization, he can play the part of a fundamental critic,
the voice of human “nature,” whose uncontaminated perspective is pit-
ted against modernity’s confusion and decadence.37 Re-envisioned as the
product of a “state of nature,” the barbarian’s single-minded destructive-
ness becomes the precondition for cultural rebirth. A deadly threat to civi-
lized order, he figures as a catalyst of rejuvenation, countering (modern)
apocalyptic moods.38 Buliwyf thus epitomizes a cathartic notion of war, a
function that accounts for his increasing charisma in Warrior —witnessed
90 JU DITH K LINGER

not least by Ahmed himself, whose transformation into a warrior is mod-

eled on Buliwyf ’s self-denying courage and bravery.
As we have seen, Warrior opens in a starkly binary mode, contrasting
Arabs and Vikings as representatives of opposed cultural systems. If the
film succeeds in gradually modifying these oppositions, this is due not
only to an exchange between the two parties themselves, but also to
the encounter with the representatives of a third culture: the Wendol.
In their quest to rid king Hrothgar of the terrors plaguing his land, the
Vikings suffer heavy losses in fighting the uncanny mist monsters, and are
almost defeated by them. A second oracle suggests the way forward: The
Wendol’s (male) leader and their “mother” must be killed. Rationalizing
Beowulf’s monsters (Grendel, his mother and the dragon) as “a group of
remnant Neanderthals,”39 Crichton’s novel has the Wendol appear from
the mists of prehistory. In Warrior, they are modified as “primitive”
humans, and a slightly altered triangular constellation realigns the film’s
notions of cultural and historical difference.40
Ahmed’s transformation depends on intercultural negotiations; it
involves the questioning of previously uncontested convictions, and
thereby refers back to the film’s focal dialogic aspect, namely its frame-
work of adaptation. Adaptation carries the film’s central areas of inter-
cultural dialogue. The dialogic strategies employed by the tenth-century
sources and Crichton’s novel, that is, the particular strategies of cultural
and textual adaptation, not only animate the movie aesthetically but are
crucial in terms of its ideological project of negotiating otherness. As
will become apparent, the film’s treatment of the Wendol epitomizes the
movie’s promotion of intercultural and interperiod exchange.

Anachronistic Monsters between the

Natural and Supernatural
Using the novel’s afterword to explain his motivation and the novel’s
evolution, Crichton discusses his source texts to detail his poetics of
adaptation. Here, he indicates that a specifically modern interest in lit-
erary archaeology, in a centuries-long chain of adaptations, propels his
narrative. Challenged to demystify the Old English Beowulf, he began to
reimagine the historical event behind the literary text:

That event had been embellished over centuries of oral retelling, produc-
ing the fantastic narrative we read today. But I thought it might be possible
to reverse the process, peeling away the poetic invention, and returning
to a kernel of genuine human experience—something that had actually
happened.41
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 91

Ideally, an eyewitness testimony would strip off Beowulf ’s “fantastic”

surface—an account that ought to be written by someone yet unaware
of the events’ significance.42 Based on the distinction between genu-
ine history and poetic invention (or “embellishment,” i.e., adaptation),
Crichton’s commentary contrasts “fantastic” literature with factual reality—
an antagonism entirely foreign to the medieval heroic epic. The “most
desirable” narrative, according to Crichton, would be delivered by an
outsider: “someone not part of the culture, who could report objectively
on the events as they occurred.”43 His pronounced desire for a neutral
observer eventually led him to Ibn Fadlan’s Risala.
Ibn Fadlan’s foreign gaze is thus defined as an advantage and a precon-
dition for ethnographic, historical accuracy. Conceiving his poetics of
adaptation as a poetics of “verisimilitude,”44 Crichton presents his novel
as a poetic readaptation of the medieval “fantasy” into the register of
the factually real. Ultimately, this paradoxical venture overturns the dif-
ference between “fantastic” and “genuine”—not least because Crichton
does not, in the name of modern rationality, eliminate Beowulf ’s monsters.
Within the textual universe of Eaters, monstrous enemies are as real as the
Vikings and Ibn Fadlan themselves. At the same time, Crichton reinvents
the monsters as a living anachronism: the “Neanderthal” Wendol. In the
service of verisimilitude, Crichton’s novel applies a modern evolutionary
paradigm. The man-eating Wendol belong to a primeval stage of human
history inaccessible to both medieval and modern cultures. According to
their own world view, which does not distinguish nature from culture,
the Wendol are both bears and men—and sometimes transform into the
Korgon, the “glowworm dragon.” Their terrifying strength stems from
their double nature as men and not-men and its power to undermine
cultural systems of differentiation. The parameters of evolutionary rea-
soning help resolving this paradox: The novel’s editor/narrator identifies
them as primeval men.
Because they belong to an archaeologically established reality and
are thus rooted in modernity’s scientific paradigm, the monstrous
Neanderthals of the novel marshal greater credibility than dragons.
Likewise, it is Ibn Fadlan’s outsider’s perspective’s firm grounding in
history that makes it easily adaptable to Crichton’s modern poetics of
verisimilitude. Using various strategies of textual and cultural adapta-
tion, Eaters thus succeeds in transforming an intercultural exchange into
a dialogue between periods.
If Crichton’s own comments cast doubt on the polyphonic nature of
this dialogue, the novel itself proves to be more complex than the author’s
theoretical outline would suggest. If the definition and experience of a
“genuine reality” emerges as the contested boundary between “medieval”
92 JU DITH K LINGER

and “modern,” this boundary shifts notably in the course of the novel. Not
only does the novel’s Ibn Fadlan adapt to the Northmen’s habits and codes
of conduct, his own perception also begins to approximate their under-
standing of reality. After initially dismissing their pagan “superstitions”
with skeptical rationality,45 he eventually realizes: “[I]f all those around
you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in
that belief.”46 Finally he notes: “I felt as one of them, having spent much
time in their company.”47 An exchange with Herger about the dragon’s
impending attack discloses the defining parameters that make possible
Ahmed’s gradual approximation to the Viking’s world view:

He said: “They [the Wendol] will return as Korgon.”

I did not know the sense of the word. “What is Korgon?”
He said to me, “The glowworm dragon, which swoops down through
the air.”
Now this seemed fanciful, but I had already seen the sea monsters just
as they said that such beasts truly lived, and also I saw Herger’s strained
and tired countenance, and I perceived that he believed in the glowworm
dragon.48

On the one hand, Ibn Fadlan adheres to a firm distinction of “real” and
“fanciful”; on the other, this distinction is undermined by the empirical
evidence of his personal experience, while special emphasis is given to
Herger’s perception of reality.
Ahmed’s discriminating awareness of these factors paves the way
toward a conclusive moment of assimilation. At Buliwyf ’s ship burial,
he participates in the ritual already discussed above. A slave girl willing
to follow her master into the afterlife engages in sexual intercourse with
his men and then is strangled aboard the ship.49 Without apparent qualms
the novel’s Ibn Fadlan sleeps with the girl and later assists in the killing.50
He comments: “I felt no revulsion at any of the deeds of that day, nor was
I faint, or light of head”—an accomplishment of which he is “proud in
secret.”51 At this point, Ibn Fadlan seems to completely accept the Vikings’
perception of reality. He shares the slave girl’s certainty of her imminent
journey to “paradise” to the extent that he even entrusts her with a mes-
sage for Buliwyf.52 Thus Crichton’s stated epistemological dichotomy of
fact versus fantasy collapses already in the novel. Ibn Fadlan’s experience
demonstrates that an imaginative recuperation of the “genuine human
experience”’ underlying Beowulf is possible through entering into a mode
of perception that is culturally and historically foreign.
Warrior undermines the fiction of historical factuality throughout. As
opposed to the novel’s sober Neanderthal-Wendol, the movie embellishes
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 93

its altogether more human Wendol with multiple marks of “primitiv-

ism.” The movie understates their primeval character (they are never
labeled “Neanderthal”), and has them command an astounding range of
cultural skills—from riding horses to constructing suspension bridges.53
The movie’s Wendol exceed the Northmen in monstrosity by far, render-
ing the Vikings less foreign by comparison. Terrifying and uncanny, the
“eaters of the dead” represent an extreme otherness that seems real and
unreal at the same time.54
In Warrior, this basic uncertainty of what is real or unreal is visually
encapsulated by the motif of the mist, which the Northmen fear as an
abode of spirits and demons.55 In the fantasy genre, the motif of the mist
frequently operates as an indicator of all things ominous and uncanny,
conventionally signaling fictionality. The motif is introduced very early,
when Hrothgar’s messengers arrive by ship. Instead of disembarking,
Hrothgar’s son Wulfgar remains poised at the prow for hours, plain for
everyone to see. The custom helps onlookers to distinguish the real from
the unreal:

They do not know if what they see is real. Something to do with the
mist . . . Apparently, they find dangerous things—spirits—in the mist. The
boy was being polite, giving them time to decide if he’s real.

A quickly rising fog invariably heralds the Wendol’s attacks.56 When,

after the final battle, the monstrous Others vanish, they literally dissolve
into the mist—a powerful visual sign indicating unresolved questions:
Whether the Wendol belong to ordinary reality or a supernatural sphere
remains a matter of debate. Warrior provides evidence for both views, but
leaves the final decision to the viewer.
The Wendol’s radical strangeness in Warrior is not limited to canni-
balism or their ambiguous epistemological status. As bear-people, they
transgress the line between human and animal. And when their masses
adopt the shape of the Korgon, they erase the difference between indi-
vidual and community—a notion embodied by the tribe’s matriarch as
their collective will. Their shape-shifting implies the blurring of distinc-
tions crucial to cultural orientation.
The triangular configuration of Arabs, Vikings, and Wendol pro-
duces heroic violence, rather than cognition and rational insight, as the
dominant mode of interaction. Just as the terror of the Wendol serves to
legitimize Buliwyf ’s leadership, it lends plausibility to his world view.
At the same time, in Warrior a capacity for understanding the monstrous
becomes a crucial issue, allowing Ahmed to prove his talent for adopting
a “foreign” perception of reality.
94 JU DITH K LINGER

At first he insists that their enemies must be men, contradicting the

Vikings’ assertion that the mist monsters are demons and changelings:
“both man and bear” or the offspring from “a mating of a man and some
beast.” Yet when the warriors set out to find the Wendol’s lair, Ahmed
begins to enter their mindset: “They think they are bears. They want
us to think they are bears.”57 This conclusion allows him to infer their
whereabouts and unravel the second oracle’s enigma. Logical deduc-
tion here combines with Ahmed’s willingness to engage with foreign
subjectivities.
By emphasizing the Wendol’s mystery and monstrosity, the movie
reapproaches the medieval imagination at work in Beowulf, which does not
require a scientific explanation for monstrosity. Whereas these monstrous
Others present a particular epistemological challenge to Ahmed’s sense
of rational classification, the Northmen remain largely untroubled by the
Wendol’s threat to the rationalist principle of unequivocal distinction.
Compared to Ahmed’s civilized enlightenment and the Wendol’s utter
primitivism, the Vikings occupy an intermediary position. Unimpaired
by enlightened skepticism, their system of knowledge accepts the reality
of dragons, demons, and changelings. Excluded from cultural dialogue
themselves, the Wendol unwittingly promote the dialogue between the
other two cultures. Poised between the monstrous and the primitive
Other, Ahmed acquires a new f lexibility in his approach towards other
cultures. Warrior’s approaches to radical otherness thus range from uncom-
promising exclusion to a recognition of the Others’ self-perception.

Polyphonous Notions of Leadership and Masculinity

Novel and film stage Ahmed’s experience of cultural assimilation through
a particularly memorable scene. Preparing for the final battle in which
he expects to die, a barefooted Ahmed first observes his own religious
customs, performing the obligatory prostration (sajdah) and praying to
obtain Allah’s forgiveness for his sins.58 But when Buliwyf and his com-
panions chant the traditional invocation first heard at the ship burial,
Ahmed joins in, echoing the words as if he had long known them by
heart, thereby adopting the Northmen’s beliefs:

Buliwyf: Lo, there do I see my father. Lo, there do I see . . .

Herger the Joyous: My mother, my sisters, and my brothers.
Buliwyf: Lo, there do I see . . .
Herger the Joyous: The line of my people . . .
Edgtho the Silent: Back to the beginning.
Weath the Musician: Lo, they do call to me.
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 95

Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: They bid me take my place among them.

Buliwyf: In the halls of Valhalla . . .
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: Where the brave . . .
Herger the Joyous: May live . . .
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: . . . forever.59

Whereas previously this invocation denoted (religious) otherness and

“barbarian” inhumanity, now the visionary words mark an emotional
reality that manifests itself in the liminal space between life and death.
The film’s audience is invited to share the emotion and follow Ahmed
into the other culture’s imagination. While the novel, in an early chapter,
merely quotes the ritual formula as part of Ibn Fadlan’s “ethnographic”
descriptions, the movie employs it to good dramatic effect, since Ahmed’s
acceptance of “Germanic” beliefs prepares the ground for the warriors’
joint heroism.60
It is in this scene, too, that we witness a crucial turning point in
Buliwyf ’s portrayal. Here, the savage “barbarian” is finally recast as a
great king rightfully commanding loyalty and reverence. Authority and
power constitute another important area of intercultural dialogue and
here the movie departs significantly from the novel’s perspective. There,
Ibn Fadlan’s acceptance of the foreign world view culminates in his vision
of Buliwyf as Odin:

I saw this: Buliwyf, pale as the mist itself, garbed in white and bound
in his wounds, stood erect . . . And on his shoulders sat two black ravens:
one to each side; and at this sight the Northmen screamed of his coming,
and . . . raised their weapons . . . and howled for battle.61

The allusion to Odin and his messenger ravens endows the novel’s Buliwyf
with superior wisdom and insight, signaling the point where he attains
his full power of fascination. His brutal violence is complemented by a
mythical integrity legitimizing his claim to power. The vision thus dis-
solves the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, between
king and god. Buliwyf now embodies a sacred kingship and even Ibn
Fadlan is willing to follow him to certain death.
While Warrior shares this basic tendency, it places greater emphasis on
Buliwyf ’s death-defying tenacity than on his near-divinity. Although
the poisoned Buliwyf enters the climactic battle a dying man, the only
thing that concerns him is his conduct as a warrior and his posthumous
fame. His warrior ethic defies the hopelessness of fighting against supe-
rior numbers and turns him into an exemplar for Ahmed’s private hope:
“to live the next few minutes well.” True to his heroic self-perception,
96 JU DITH K LINGER

Buliwyf confronts his doom. When the battle is over, having killed the
Wendol’s leader, he dies enthroned as a warrior-king. Even in death do
his eyes remain open. A visual reminder of the ritual invocation (“Lo,
there do I see . . . ”), his unfaltering gaze points to a reality beyond death.
At the same time, a huge dog significantly replaces the novel’s ravens.
It follows Buliwyf into battle, joins the fray, and, in a pose of homage,
finally announces his death. The symbolic animal identifies Buliwyf as a
natural leader who, through his personal example, commands the fealty
and faith of men.
The film’s conclusion constitutes a complete revision of its initial
impressions. Before Ahmed first meets Buliwyf, Melchisidek jokes that
the local chieftain will surely call himself “emperor at the very least.”
The foreigners’ primitive concept of rulership is a matter of derision to
the sophisticated Arabs. While political intrigues appear to dominate the
Caliph’s court, the Northmen simply seem to obey the strongest and
otherwise bow only to the oracle’s spiritual authority.
Buliwyf ’s leadership conforms to this notion of primitivism, though in
a later scene his lack of sophistication is valorized, when King Hrothgar’s
oracle explains how she knew him: “‘Warrior,’ says the wind, ‘chieftain,’
says the rain.” Nature itself recognizes the Viking leader. The oracle’s
words underline Buliwyf ’s close association with an unrefined state
of nature and extend his integrity beyond mere physical assertiveness.
A veritable “force of nature,” his compelling charisma stresses his role
as catalyst of renewal. Overall, Buliwyf personifies a cathartic experi-
ence of war; a concept of war that erases the trappings of a “decadent”
civilization to leave only essential qualities. According to Hrothgar’s
oracle, “wars are won in the will,” not on the battlefield, and therein
lies Buliwyf ’s ultimate triumph. His courage and integrity command
Ahmed’s respect, and the elaborate choreography of his heroic death is
designed to inspire similar admiration among the audience. Even so, the
cathartic event does not produce a renewed social order. Such a conclu-
sion is impossible, for Buliwyf ’s type of excessive medieval heroism can
only culminate in death or defeat. In fact, the Viking warriors’ overall
characterization stresses inaccessible foreignness. They remain psycho-
logically opaque and lack recognizable private emotions. The informa-
tion they volunteer about themselves and their culture sounds unfamiliar:
“Your fate is fixed,” Herger counters Ahmed’s understandable fear of the
Wendol: “Fear profits a man nothing.” This response remains the single
explanation for Buliwyf ’s unrelenting heroism. Even in a medieval con-
text does such a degree of heroic exorbitance clash with the requirements
of a social role model—especially when the hero battles monsters on the
fringes of human culture and sometimes returns contaminated by their
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 97

monstrosity.62 Hence, Buliwyf can never be more than a dead king, and
his ship burial recalls Melchisidek’s words: “[Y]ou will not see this again,
it is the old way.” The pagan hero is ultimately removed into an unfath-
omable historical distance.
As the barbarian king falls victim to his own destructiveness, his civi-
lized counterpart departs to resume his place within his own culture. Yet
Ahmed’s closing remarks assert that his cathartic experience has left its
mark. Appropriating the Vikings’ heroic world view has taught him to
“become a man and a useful servant of god”—a notion that also seems
to imply a revised concept of masculinity. Indeed, as part of her recent
reappraisal of the film, Elizabeth Sklar claims that Warrior stands out posi-
tively for its apparent “rejection of the masculine competitive impera-
tive and . . . performance of the affective component of masculinity.” For
her, masculinity in Warrior is about “teamwork and bonding” without
violence.63
However, a closer look at gender relations reveals the extent to which
the movie adheres to a heteronormative paradigm.64 The male characters
bleed and sweat profusely, and the mud on their faces stresses the ani-
mal nature of their violence. Ahmed participates in this bellicose—and
competitive—display of virility. He proves that his delicate horse is faster
and more agile than the Vikings’ mounts, and when he fails to wield
the heavy Viking longsword, he reforges it into an elegant scimitar he
handles expertly. Step by step, he sheds his feminizing oriental attributes,
and when he discards his f lowing robes, he displays a suitably muscu-
lar body. Women, on the other hand, retain cleanlier looks and appear
youthful and attractive.65 Yet even as these gender markings encode
the body, they remain without emotional resonance and psychological
extension. Masculinity is provided with a greater range of articulation—
from Ahmed’s intellectual refinement and civilized sensibilities to raw
belligerence—but it is striking that Warrior does not provide anything
like a private sphere for displaying emotional subjectivity, a gap that runs
against the grain of conventional romance and becomes most conspicuous
during Ahmed’s sexual encounter with a nameless slave girl.66 Reduced
to stark outlines, an emblematic contrast of feminine beauty with mascu-
line strength sustains the notion of an ontological gender difference and a
natural attraction between genders, while homosocial interactions domi-
nate the plot dynamics. However, the movie draws the line at depict-
ing identifiable homoerotic attractions; all the male characters display
“proper” heterosexual behavior at one time or another.
Simultaneously, the movie is careful to accommodate the gender sen-
sibilities of modern audiences. For instance, the historical Ibn Fadlan
comments with disgust on the Rūsiyyah’s habit of publicly copulating
98 JU DITH K LINGER

with female slaves, his abhorrence responding to the lack of shame, not
the absence of female self-determination or equal rights. Even more than
the novel, Warrior modifies the Risala’s outlook on women to def lect
notions of sexual exploitation and abuse. Although Warrior ’s female char-
acters mostly occupy subservient positions, they are never called slaves;
they engage in sexual relations voluntarily and their pleasure is empha-
sized. Moreover, the film refrains from depicting the collective sexual
intercourse with the slave girl that is part of the funeral rites in both the
Risala and Crichton’s novel. Participation in something that a modern
audience could only classify as gang rape and murder would obviously
compromise Ahmed’s part as potential avatar.
While the film’s basic parameters do echo a premodern context, it
is apparent that in terms of gender, the movie is less open to historical
difference. After all, heteronormative gender distinctions are central to
modern constructions of identity.

The Politics of Adaptation

As mentioned above, Warrior originally elicited a variety of disconcerted
reactions. Critics complaining of a lack of coherence and consistency may
very well have been responding to the way the film’s shifting perspec-
tives challenge common viewing conventions. But is there any political
dimension to the confusion the movie provokes? Obviously, the topics
discussed above—such as masculinity, the legitimacy of power or inter-
cultural dialogue—are inherently political. And on a more fundamen-
tal level, the systems of knowledge that inform cultural representations
are necessarily tied up with ideological formations. Said emphasizes
the “highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining
when knowledge is produced.”67 I argued above that Warrior questions
a Eurocentric knowledge regime by disrupting conventional patterns of
identification and by reconfiguring received notions of cultural superi-
ority. Yet as a medieval motion picture, Warrior stands out for allowing
viewers to reconsider the modern perception of reality itself, a reality
refracted through adaptation—both in the wider, cultural, and the nar-
rower, textual, senses.
The cultural distinctions that divide the real from the unreal form a
fundamental ingredient of any ideology. Once again, the conceptions
of the real employed in Warrior explore historical otherness. In contrast
with the modern idea of a uniform empirical reality, the movie’s premod-
ern universe comprises both a natural and a supernatural sphere. Neither
Ahmed nor the Vikings would dream of questioning the existence of their
respective gods. The Northmen’s culture in particular provides mental
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 99

concepts and rituals that make possible transfers and transitions between
the two spheres. However, the boundaries between them are not always
clearly discernible or predictable. As Herger declares in Eaters of the Dead:
“[W]hat man does not know, that is the province of the gods.”68
Mediating between “civilized,” “barbarian,” and “primeval” per-
ceptions of reality, the movie’s poetics of adaptation does not frame an
explicit critique of the individual world views, yet does invite criti-
cal ref lection. On these grounds, fundamental principles undergirding
Western modernity’s supposed superiority are put into perspective. The
movie’s epistemological ambiguities do not, however, foreclose a differ-
ent, simpler reading. Viewers may easily approach Warrior as conventional
entertainment and associate the “mist monsters” with the countless fan-
tastic creatures inhabiting popular movies. Yet Warrior encourages a sub-
tler mode of reception, and the Wendol’s epistemic hybridity contributes
to complicating the equally unstable figurations of “self ” and “other”
throughout the movie.
When, at the end of the movie Ahmed asserts that he has “become a
man and a useful servant of god,” one may wonder at the implications.
Does Warrior present a straightforward tale of initiation into manhood
that erases the remaining marks of oriental otherness and results in a
hegemonic—Western—ideal of masculinity? Alternatively, are view-
ers encouraged to accept as a figure of identification a devout Muslim
with a newly developed capacity for violence? In the light of 9/11, the
latter notion must be disturbing to an American audience, and indeed it
seems doubtful whether a mainstream American movie could still feature
a civilized, yet martially experienced Arab hero with similar approba-
tion today. Ultimately, the movie’s negotiations of cultural and historical
otherness appear to be even more complex than the two interpretations
just sketched.
By the time the movie ends, the initial, orientalizing portrayal of
Ahmed has been revised, but his identity as a Muslim Arab is by no
means diminished. The last shot closes in on a hand writing Arabic script
a Western audience cannot read.69 But Ahmed’s process of “becoming
a man” hinges on his immersion in a premodern warrior culture. This
particular aspect warrants a concluding look at the meaning of violence
for the construction of heroic masculinity in Warrior.
On the level of its action-and-adventure plot, the movie suggests that
even the refined representative of a “decadent” civilization can learn to
defy his fears and heroically fight uncanny monsters. As Ahmed acquires
his experience of violence, the depictions of violence themselves change.
Physical violence at first appears primitive and pointless; later scenes por-
tray the Vikings as courageous defenders of helpless peasants. If this lends
100 JU DITH K LINGER

increasing glamour to the gory sword-fighting and identifies violence as a

constituent part of male identity, it is not without difficulties that Ahmed
adapts to his new warrior role, as is illustrated by the fight with the
“dragon.” The Korgon’s attack unleashes Ahmed’s violent potential and
he erupts into berserk aggression. But the realization that his adversary
is a man jolts him from his fury into bewilderment. His open-mouthed
daze contrasts effectively with Herger’s cheerfully focused attitude. Long
after the assailants have disappeared, the confused Ahmed stabs at thin air
with his sword. Shortly afterwards, he explains to Herger that his Muslim
faith forbids the consumption of alcohol. Foregrounding cultural norms
as if they were rational distinctions, he appears to be compensating for his
previous loss of civilized control. It seems, therefore, that the Wendol’s
dragon incarnation imposes a battle rage on Ahmed that undermines
his sense of identity. The civilized diplomat must fight, but the movie
does not stage this as the liberation of an inherent, ultimately violent
“nature.” 70 Rather, we witness Ahmed having to deal with the unsettling
necessity of becoming Other—an experience, however, that is limited to
moments of crisis.
The closing scene shows how he finally commits to posterity both
his own experiences and Buliwyf ’s heroic exploits. Both Vikings and
Wendol belong to a separate, historically bounded world—at long last,
this world is also bounded by the text Ahmed writes. Heroic violence
certainly gains significance within the confines of its specific cultural
setting; but from a “civilized” point of view, it makes sense only as his-
tory and literature. Ahmed’s final gesture of appreciation shows that it
is possible to understand and respect foreign cultures—including their
emphatic approval of violence. Yet it is only on the level of the text,
within the story Ahmed relates, that civilized learning and heroic vio-
lence coalesce to produce joint meaning.
But this does not suggest that Warrior presents “culture and gender as
mutually constitutive” in a way that “Arab cultures, however ‘civilized,’
remain insufficient without the acquisition of Western manliness” as Lynn
Shutter concludes.71 When Ahmed prepares to return to Baghdad, he
dons his f lawless (“effeminate”) Arabian attire. His scars are remind-
ers of his violent encounters, but there are no conclusive signals that he
will import heroic violence to his native culture. The film’s poetics of
polyphonous adaptation allows for the exchange to be temporary and for
its voices to remain distinct.
Granted, cultural difference—a foreign gaze that realigns and adapts
history—is written into the closing scenes from which the Occident as
normative center is still conspicuously absent. The very conspicuousness
of this gap can be read as an invitation to replace, redefine, or remodel the
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 101

West. Yet the changing configurations of otherness do not lend themselves

to simple inversion, for the shifting positions of oriental and medieval
Other prevent a straightforward positioning on the viewer’s part. Instead
of a single, suitably distinct mirror image, the movie presents hybrids,
fragments, and variable options. Only at the last moment does a point
of convergence emerge. As the “heroic past” fades from view, memory
frames its simultaneous absence and presence, and the final glance at the
Viking ship in the distance implicitly joins Ahmed’s perspective to the
viewer’s. With this conciliatory gesture, The Thirteenth Warrior invites
engagement with the perspective of an Other who can never be one—or
a simple ref lection of the self.

Notes
1. Cf. Roland Barthes, “The Romans in Films,” in Mythologies (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 26–28.
2 . The Thirteenth Warrior, dir. John McTiernan and Michael Crichton (US:
Touchstone Pictures, 1999).
3. For a detailed review of Warrior ’s reception, see Elizabeth S. Sklar, “Call
of the Wild: Culture Shock and Viking Masculinities in The 13th Warrior
(1999),” in The Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle
Ages, ed. Kevin J. Harty ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), pp. 121–34.
In medievalist quarters opinions are divided. Sklar reappraises the film;
for a sterner analysis see Lynn Shutters, “Vikings through the Eyes of an
Arab Ethnographer: Constructions of the Other in The 13th Warrior,”
in Race, Class, and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema, ed. Lynn T. Ramey and
Tison Pugh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 75–89.
4. “The 13th Warrior (1999),” Rotten Tomatoes.com, available at: http://
uk.rottentomatoes.com/m/13th_warrior.
5. Throughout this paper, I use the conventional Latinized spelling “Ibn
Fadlan,” rather than the movie’s “Ibn Fahdlan.”
6. “Cf. Wladyslaw Duczko, Viking Rus. Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians
in Eastern Europe, The Northern World 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Birgit
Scholz, Von der Chronistik zur modernen Geschichtswissenschaft. Die Warägerfrage
in der russischen, deutschen und schwedischen Historiographie, Forschungen zum
Ostseeraum 5 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000). While the identifica-
tion of Ibn Fadlan’s Rūsiyyah with the Varangians has been contested
(cf. James E. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa lā n and the Rūsiyyah,” Journal of Arabic
and Islamic Studies 3 [2000]: 2–5 [2–26] for an overview), both Crichton’s
novel and the movie adaptation identify the Rus’ as Vikings.
7. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa  lā n,” 3.
8. Roderick Heath, “The Thirteenth Warrior (1999),” This Island Rod —
Cinematic Waste Storage, available at: http://thisislandrod.blogspot.com
/2010/03/13th-warrior-1999.html.
102 JU DITH K LINGER

9. In medieval movies, Arabs usually appear as Saracens in crusade-themed

films. The Saracen typically serves as a foil to the heroic Christian knight.
These depictions do not necessarily result in starkly negative images of
the Saracen. Discussing the character Azeem in Robin Hood: Prince of
Thieves (1991), Lorraine Stock identifies an orientalizing stereotype of
Arab/Muslim characters, drawing on their “reputation . . . for skills in
medicine and science . . . and in the practice of hygiene and sanitation
superior to that of the West” (Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Now Starring
in the Third Crusade: Depictions of Richard I and Saladin in Films and
Television Series,” in Hollywood in the Holy Land. Essays on Film Depictions
of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes, ed. Nickolas Haydock and
Edward L. Risden [ Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009], p. 118 [93–122]).
10. Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New
York: Olive Branch Press, 2001), p. 482.
11. Cf. Ibid., pp. 29–33. Published in 2001, Shaheen’s survey could not
include the balanced portrayal of Saladin in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of
Heaven (2005) who, interestingly, shows “the Crusaders how they really
should behave” ( John M. Ganim, “Framing the West, Staging the
East. Set Design, Location and Landscape in Movie Medievalism,” in
Hollywood in the Holy Land. Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and
Christian-Muslim Clashes, ed. Nickolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden
[ Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009], p. 42 [31–46]).
12 . Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 3 and p. 7.
13. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
14. Northern “barbarians” occupy a particularly prominent place in
medieval discourses of the Other; cf. David Fraesdorff, Der barbarische
Norden. Vorstellungen und Fremdheitskategorien bei Rimbert, Thietmar von
Merseburg, Adam von Bremen und Helmold von Bosau, Orbis Mediaevalis,
Vorstellungswelten des Mittelalters 5 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005),
pp. 68–82.
15. Beginning with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheikh (1921), exotic sen-
suality dominates Hollywood’s representations of the Oriental Other
(Matthew Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in
Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar [New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1997], p. 3 [1–18]).
16. Ahmed’s characterization as rational counters the cultural stereotypes of
Orientalism. As Said shows, oriental cultures are habitually linked with a
“pre-Newtonian view” that lacks comprehension of empirical reality and
values neither objectivity nor rationality (cf. Said, Orientalism, pp. 47–48,
57, 102–3).
17. Cf. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1
(1985): 103 [89–107]: “the Orient was routinely described as feminine, its
riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and the
despotic—but curiously attractive—ruler.”
18. Although my inference has a generalizing tone it does not preclude
diverging identifications among actual viewers.
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 103

19. Sklar, “Call of the Wild,” pp. 122, 126.

20. Cf. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa  lā n,” 26.
21. Ibid., 13; Richard N. Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia: A Tenth-century
Traveler from Baghdad to the Volga River (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener
Publishers, 2005), p. 66; A. Zeki Velidi Togan, Ibn Fadlans Reisebericht.
Abhandlungen f ü r die Kunde des Morgenlandes 24,3 (Leipzig: Deutsche
Morgenlä ndische Gesellschaft, 1939), p. 88, 16–20.
22 . Cf. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa lā n,” 12; Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey, p. 66;
Togan, Ibn Fadlans Reisebericht, p. 87, 19–28.
23. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa lā n,” 8–9; Cf. Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey, p. 64;
Togan, Ibn Fadlans Reisebericht, p. 84, 6–10.
24. Cf. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa lā n,” 19–20; Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey, pp. 67,
69; Togan, Ibn Fadlans Reisebericht, pp. 90, 10–13 and 93, 12–94, 20.
25. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa lā n,” 21; Cf. Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey, p. 70;
Togan, Ibn Fadlans Reisebericht, pp. 96, 19–97, 6.
26. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa lā n,” 21–22; Cf. Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey, p. 70;
Togan, Ibn Fadlans Reisebericht, p. 97, 7–9.
27. Michael Crichton, The Thirteenth Warrior ( formerly titled “Eaters of the
Dead”): The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the
Northmen in A.D. 922 (London: Arrow Books Limited, 1997), p. 114.
28. Ibid., p. 173.
29. Sklar, “Call of the Wild,” p. 123. According to her, “by its very generic
constraints film cannot replicate one of the most crucial features of the
novel: a type of verisimilitude that can be achieved only in a print text”
(p. 122).
30. Language consultant Juta Kitching comments: “This scene required
knowledge of second language acquisition processes and of Socio- and
Psycholinguistics. It was prepared step-by-step, that is, with gradual
changes of phonetics (accent), cognates of vocabulary, syntax (word
order) and intonation. The text, as it was being slowly modified from
Norwegian to approach English, was practiced intensely for several
campfire scenes and also filmed several times, gradually introducing
English cognates and making the conversation slowly comprehensible to
an English-speaking audience, inserting more English words and adjust-
ing pronunciation and word order so that the listener began to under-
stand, first bits and pieces and finally the whole conversation (when all
conversation became English). This process aimed to imitate the lin-
guistic and psychological development and change that really take place
when a person learns another language” (Eaters of the Dead, available at:
http://eaters.ifrance.com/interviews/kitching.htm).
31. As “Norse” is replaced with English, marked differences in pronunciation
and intonation remain: There is no sudden transformation of Northmen
into native speakers of (American) English.
32 . Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays and Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1981).
104 JU DITH K LINGER

33. In Eaters, Ibn Fadlan makes the promise to write only after Buliwyf ’s
death. He tells the slave girl about to follow Buliwyf into the afterlife:
“Tell your master when you see him that I have lived to write” (Crichton,
Eaters of the Dead, p. 167).
34. Crichton’s novel emphasizes the theme of recollection by putting some
famous lines from the Old Icelandic Edda into Herger’s mouth: “Animals
die, friends die, and I shall die, but one thing never dies, and that is the
reputation we leave behind at our death” (Crichton, Eaters of the Dead,
p. 86); “Deyr fé, deyia frændr, / deyr siá lfr it sama; / ec veit einn, at aldri
deyr: / dómr um dauðan hvern” (Hávamál 77).
35. An appellation derived from Old Icelandic Allf ǫðr in the Poetic Edda. As
Herger explains: “The All-Father wove the skein of your life a long time
ago. Go and hide in a hole if you wish, but you won’t live one instant
longer. Your fate is fixed. Fear profits a man nothing.”
36. Cf. Manfred Schneider, Der Barbar. Endzeitstimmung und Kulturrecycling
(Munich: Hanser, 1997), pp. 14–15.
37. Cf. Schneider, Der Barbar, pp. 37–38, 135–43. Manfred Schneider,
“Barbaren zwischen Poesie und Politik. Erneuerungskonzepte im 20.
Jahrhundert,” Festspiel-Dialoge, available at: www.festspielfreunde.at
/deutsch/dialoge2005/dia03_schneider.pdf, p. 13 [3–19].
38. Cf. Schneider, “Barbaren,” p. 5.
39. Crichton, Eaters of the Dead, p. 185.
40. Warrior retains an interest in Beowulf, however, the names echoing the
Old English nomenclature (e.g. Beowulf/Buliwyf, Heorot/Hurot), topi-
cal allusions, and structural parallels will be noted only by viewers already
familiar with the poem. In the novel, the allusions are explained.
41. Crichton, Eaters of the Dead, pp. 182–83.
42 . Cf. Ibid., p. 183.
43. Ibid., p. 184.
44. Ibid., p. 185.
45. Ibid., pp. 55–56, 69–70, 81, 87–88, and esp. 56: “One night I heard a
grumbling that I took to be thunder, but they said it was the growl of
a dragon in the forest. I do not know what is the truth, and report now
only what was said to me.”
46. Ibid., p. 99.
47. Ibid., p. 143.
48. Ibid., p. 97.
49. Cf. Montgomery, “Ibn Fa lā n,” 18–20; Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey,
pp. 68–69; Togan, Ibn Fadlans Reisebericht, pp. 92, 18–21 and 94, 20–95,
3.
50. Crichton, Eaters of the Dead, p. 167.
51. Ibid., p. 167. In Warrior ’s abridged portrayal of the ceremony, Ahmed is
shifted back to the observer position he occupied during the first ship
burial, yet the mingled blood and rain on his face communicate intense
emotional involvement.
52 . Ibid., p. 167.
 OT H E R N E S S R E DOU BL E D A N D R E F R AC T E D 105

53. Some critics have objected to their portrayal as reminiscent of clichéd

depictions of Native Americans; cf. Sklar, “Call of the Wild,” p. 131.
54. Cannibalism has been a Western/European trope of monstrosity since
Early Modernity. As a means of demonizing the Other, the “cannibal
myth” plays an important role for justifications of colonialism. See espe-
cially Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of
the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, The New Historicism: Studies
in Cultural Poetics 37 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1997).
55. The mist motif may be loosely based on the Norse concept of a primor-
dial “abode of mist” (Niflheimr), as described in the Gylfaginning, the first
part of the Prose Edda.
56. The novel explains the Wendol’s name thus: “the name of ‘wendol’ or
‘windon’ is a very ancient name . . . and it means ‘the black mist.’ To the
Northmen, this means a mist that brings . . . black fiends who . . . eat the
f lesh of human beings” (Crichton, Eaters of the Dead, p. 87).
57. When the group discovers a heap of human skulls and bones in the
Wendol’s caves, Ahmed admits: “I was wrong. These are not men.”
58. The Thirteenth Warrior : “Merciful Father, I have squandered my days with
plans of many things. This was not among them. But at this moment,
I beg only to live the next few minutes well. For all we ought to have
thought, and have not thought; all we ought to have said, and have not
said; all we ought to have done, and have not done; I pray thee God for
forgiveness.” With the address “merciful father,” the prayer alludes to
the Qur’an’s opening surah, Al-Fatiha, that precedes the salah, or formal
prayer: “In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful”
(Al-Fatiha 1.1).
59. The movie dialogue modifies Crichton’s text (“Lo, I see here my father
and mother . . . ; Lo, now I see all my deceased relatives sitting . . . ; Lo,
there is my master, who is sitting in Paradise. Paradise is so beautiful, so
green. With him are his men and his boys. He calls me, so bring me to
him” [Crichton, Eaters of the Dead, p. 37]). With its reference to Valhalla,
the movie clearly alludes to pagan conceptions, whereas Crichton’s text
remains open to a Christian interpretation.
60. Ahmed’s growing comprehension of the Northmen’s culture and subjec-
tivity also emerges earlier, when he describes the dying Buliwyf ’s mind-
set to Herger: “He’s travelling to the other side. He grips his sword as if
afraid he will not wake.”
61. Crichton, Eaters of the Dead, p. 164.
62 . Cf. Klaus von See, “Was ist Heldendichtung?” in Edda, Saga,
Skaldendichtung. Aufsätze zur skandinavischen Literatur des Mittelalters
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1981), pp. 154–93. Walter Haug, “Die Grausamkeit
der Heldensage. Neue gattungstheoretische Ü berlegungen zur herois-
chen Dichtung,” in Studien zum Altgermanischen. Festschrift für H. Beck, ed.
Heiko Uecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 303–26.
63. Sklar, “Call of the Wild,” pp. 128–29.
106 JU DITH K LINGER

64. For detailed discussions of gender relations in Warrior see Shutters,

“Vikings through the Eyes of an Arab Ethnographer,” and Lisa DeTora,
“‘Life Finds a Way’: Monstrous Maternities and the Quantum Gaze in
Jurassic Park and The Thirteenth Warrior,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze
and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block and Jean-Michel
Rabaté (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 2–26.
65. Afforded by the genre’s conventions, there are exceptions to female
beauty in Warrior : The face and body of the monstrous matriarch appear
dirty (cf. DeTora, “Monstrous Maternities,” pp. 22–23).
66. The closing credits call her Olga.
67. Said, Orientalism, p. 10.
68. Crichton, Eaters of the Dead, p. 173.
69. The text on the page echoes Ahmed’s offscreen narration with a request
for god’s blessings—for “those who shed their blood on this journey”—
and concludes with his signature (I wish to thank Fady Maalouf for this
translation from the Arabic).
70. Cf. Shutters, “Vikings through the Eyes of an Arab Ethnographer,” p. 84.
71. Shutters, “Vikings through the Eyes of an Arab Ethnographer,”
p. 76 [emphasis added].
CHAPTER 5

CRISIS DISCOURSE AND ART THEORY:

RICHARD WAGNER’S LEGACY IN FILMS
BY VEITH VON FÜ RSTENBERG AND
KEVIN REYNOLDS

Stefan Keppler-Tasaki

J ust as the history of cinema is haunted by the Middle Ages, the history
of medieval cinema is haunted by the works of Richard Wagner. The
symbiotic relationship between the medieval and the cinematic, as encap-
sulated in the compound “medieval cinema,” finds its early parallel in
“Wagnerian medievalism.” After all, Wagner’s operas are drawn almost
exclusively from medieval sources, characters, and stories, and recent
research has confirmed one of the long-standing topoi of the debate on
cinema’s origins, that is, that his works’ aesthetics is proto-cinematic.1
The present chapter offers a fresh look at Wagner’s theoretical writings
in support of Jeongwon Joe’s claim that Wagner’s operas prefigure and
develop a “cinematic imagination.”2 Curiously, the academic discourse
on “Wagner and cinema” has paid much less attention to his theoretical
writings than to the libretti and their various examples of dynamic image
sequencing. The theoretical writings suggest, however, that the cinematic
aspect of Wagner’s work is merely one part of the larger concept of a “true
and living art,” as he called it in Art and Revolution in 1849.3 Stemming
as it does from the March Revolution of 1848, Wagner’s theory of art is
highly political, calling for universal cultural reform in the face of a most
acute social crisis.
As I argue in this chapter, the specifically Wagnerian media utopia
is animated strongly by medieval forms of imagination as the composer
108 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

perceived them. While he did not believe that a media utopia had been
fully realized in the Middle Ages, he was nevertheless convinced that the
period was the last to offer a glimpse of the “living artwork.” Hence, it is
my task to shed some light on the utopian thrust articulated not only in
his theoretical writings but also in selected operatic scenes; scenes which
previous research has neglected entirely in terms of their relevance for
Wagner’s proto-cinematic aesthetics.
In a further step, I examine the legacy of Wagner’s utopian thinking
in medieval film. Profound crises and historical turning points, I argue,
are also the subject of two Tristan films, Veith von Fürstenberg’s Feuer und
Schwert [Fire and Sword ] (Federal Republic of Germany/Ireland: Cinefox,
1982) and Kevin Reynolds’s Tristan & Isolde (US/Germany: 20th Century
Fox, 2006). The first stages a late medieval cultural catastrophe, the sec-
ond portrays the foundation of an early medieval culture. Although both
films seek to free themselves from Wagner’s overpowering inf luence, they
relate back to him in significant ways. The two films engage with the
Wagnerian legacy in political terms as well as in specific moments of artis-
tic and communicative practice. Finally, this chapter examines whether
the affinities between Wagner and Hollywood are as strong as one might
expect considering Wagner’s actual inf luence on American film.4

Political Anthropology and Film Aesthetics:

Richard Wagner’s “Living Work of Art”
Wagner believed the mid-nineteenth century to be a “civilization which
disowns all manhood [humanity].” Therefore, he expected the “Art-work
of the Future” to “embrace the spirit of a free mankind” and rehabilitate
the human senses.5 To do so, it had to escape from the “impassable waste
of stored-up literature.”6 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Béla
Balá zs voices similar hopes expressly for the cinema:

The discovery of printing has gradually rendered the human face illeg-
ible . . . In this way, the visual spirit was transformed into a legible spirit,
and a visual culture . . . into a conceptual one . . . Now another device is at
work, giving culture a new turn towards the visual and the human being
a new face. It is the cinematograph.7

Not only does Balá zs here contrast a conceptual culture with a visual one,
but he also distributes these two cultures on opposite sides of the divid-
ing line between the premodern and the modern. From early on then,
medievalism is clearly an integral part of a media theory that does not
limit itself to media alone, but instead aims at an overall cultural reform,
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 109

or even a revolution touching on all aspects of life, including the political.

In this context, the Middle Ages and its media are called on to provide
modes of expression capable of vanquishing the printed word’s cultural
hegemony.8 The view that medieval art might provide a basis for the sen-
sual transformation of a society supposedly out of touch with the sensual
was extensively developed in the prehistory of cinema, the very period to
which Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk belongs. Crucially, the desire
for film and the conceivability of the cultural work film is capable of
performing, predate the actual invention of cinema.
The Art-Work of the Future [Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft] is the title of
Wagner’s important treatise published as early as 1850. The text envis-
ages an artwork that combines and integrates the individual arts—as film
would do later. Moreover, the treatise proposes the use of sequential,
highly suggestive images that would entrance the masses.

Now let us figure to ourselves the painter’s and sculptor’s model passing
into continuous movement and action, representing at each moment the
very model of the situation, and at last possessing itself [or “himself ”] of the
words and accents of the real incident—that life-incident which the poet
labours to relate and, through a process of crystallising his abstractions,
to bring home to his reader’s Phantasy; further, let us figure this model as
finally turning itself into a corporation of such, and reproducing its local
surroundings with as realistic an illusion as its gestures and its speech,—
and we may easily conclude that this will . . . carry away the mass, no matter
what the subject chosen: the mere charm of the machinery for duping,
with its imitation of some living incident, sets everybody in that agreeable
amazement which takes the forefront of our pleasure at the theatre.9

Wagner here reconceptualizes theater on the basis of the visual arts, as a

sequence of images evolving from one moment to the next and, through
an intensification of theater’s suggestive and mechanical aspects, breaks
with a stage tradition that—from the classical theater through Shakespeare
to the Weimar stage style—shunned technology, relying instead on the
audience’s active imagination.
The aesthetics of the ecstatic experience Wagner employed in Bayreuth
entailed a general assault on the senses and thus required the artwork of
the future, in which the audience is supposed to live and breathe. While
Wagner considered his specific form of opera to be this type of artwork,
in hindsight it appears that film (which, even in its infancy, was not silent
but rather accompanied by music) is its actual historical realization.
When viewed in the light of Wagner’s extensive theoretical writings,
his operas must actually be considered film’s next of kin. It is in fact only
a short distance of time that separates the late phase of Wagner’s creative
110 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

output—the Parsifal premiere of 1882 and the accompanying theoreti-

cal texts—from the first film screenings in 1897. Theodor Adorno has
drawn attention to the conceptual proximity of Wagner’s opera to film.
Though he does not mean it as a compliment, Adorno gets to the heart
of the matter when he declares that in the extreme tension between the
forces of language, music, and action “so suggestive of the [sic] film,”10
Wagner’s “artwork of the future” signals “the birth of film out of the
spirit of music,”11 hence heralding a culture industry that devours vast
resources, focusing on superficial effects and aiming to overpower its
audiences emotionally.12
In his treatise Opera and Drama [Oper und Drama] (1850/51), Wagner
explains why his thinking is inspired by the sensuality of medieval art:

The poetry of the Middle Ages had already brought forth the Narrative
poem and developed it to its highest pitch. This poem described men’s
doings and undergoings, and their sum of moving incident, in much the
same way as the painter bestirred himself to present the characteristic
moments of such actions.

The “vision” of these poets “embraced an ever wider horizon of outward

actions.”13 Wagner does not celebrate this type of outwardness to the same
degree as Balá zs does the cinematic culture of visibility. Nonetheless,
there is a clear connection with the cultural demands Wagner had
already expressed in The Art-Work of the Future: “But that alone is true
and living which is sentient, and hearkens to the terms of physicality
(Sinnlichkeit) . . . [T]hen steps the Art-work into life, then first is it a real
thing, a self-conditioned and immediate entity.” He continues:

The actual Art-work, i.e. its immediate physical portrayal, in the moment
of its liveliest embodiment, is . . . the confident determination of what was
hitherto a mere imagining; the enfranchisement of thought in sense; the
assuagement of the life-need in Life itself.14

This is in opposition to, among other things, the selfishness of poetry that
refuses to align itself with its sister arts, as manifested in the writtenness
of the printed word. The written word as a mediator can, at most, be a
part of the artistic process, but it cannot be the complete artwork itself,
which requires instead the “living breath of fair, immortal, nobly-feeling
Human Voice.”15 “Man’s nature,” Wagner writes, “is twofold, an outer
and an inner. The senses to which he offers himself as a subject for Art,
are those of Vision and of Hearing: to the eye appeals the outer man, the
inner to the ear.”16
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 111

When Wagner declares that he wrote Tannhäuser out of “loathing of

the modern world,”17 he was referring to his disgust for the “unnatural
distortions of our modern life,”18 that is, what Balá zs rejects as moder-
nity’s “conceptual culture.” Wagner believes that the premodern period
provides support for his living artwork, for a picture of the “purely-
human motives”19 which, for him, are the essence of myth. But Wagner’s
Middle Ages is not the Romantics’ backward-looking utopia, but rather
a period of decline, at least where the arts are concerned.
In his eyes, the way the “fragments of the lost Nibelungen-lieder ” were
supposedly dealt with “in the Hohenstaufen times” is positively aca-
demic. He contrasts the literary practices of 1200, in which “the gathered
heap” was “pieced together . . . for reading service,” with the supposedly
authentic form of the heroic epic: “But before these epic songs became
the object of such literary care, they had f lourished mid the Folk, eked
out by voice and gesture, as a bodily-enacted Art-work.”20 Wagner’s
paradoxical medievalism evokes the Middle Ages, only to dismiss its
achievements. In the “doubtful nature” of their medieval versions,
Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Siegfried, and Parsifal fill Wagner “with . . . that
haunting feeling of repugnance with which we look upon the carved
saints and martyrs . . . in the churches . . . of Catholic lands.”21 For Wagner,
Tristan and Isolde are the heroes of “an old, old tale, exhaustless in its
variations,”22 one which had simply been retold in medieval Europe as it
was retold in the modern age, by Wagner himself.
Wagner does not regard himself as adapting a work in the sense of
establishing a relationship between a source text and his own interpreta-
tion of it in a target medium. Rather, he sees himself as an artist whose
enhanced artistic gift allows him to afford both a personal and a universal
access to the myth’s fundamental humanity. He does not consider the
medieval Tristan-authors such as Thomas de Bretagne and Gottfried von
Stra ßburg to be any closer to the “ur-poem” than he is himself. On the
contrary, he feels the need to purge the “ur-heroes” from the inf luence of
Christianity and elite culture in order to identify the characters’ “purely
human” manifestations.23 Only in the form of “real naked man”24 are they
suitable for “an artwork that presents itself in fullest physical show” con-
veyed “with due insistence” on the “emotional faculty” of the public.25
Wagner’s Tannhäuser is set during the High Middle Ages. This opera
recreates a scene of medieval artistic practice whose theme is Christian
in outlook but whose form reanimates supposed pagan forms of orality,
presenting minstrels realizing their art through voice and gesture as they
perform their songs in response to the question “What is love, by what
signs shall we know it?”26 Wagner expresses an idea associated with the
Gesamtkunstwerk as his poets extemporize without the use of written aids.
112 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

It is not that there is a lack of dramaturgical opportunity to send Wolfram

von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide, and Tannhäuser to their
desks; rather, the minstrels’ performances represent an invigorating lib-
eration from the shackles of literacy. “Up then, arouse ye, sing, oh gallant
minstrels! / Attune your harps to love, great is the prize”; “What has been
sung shall spring to life for thee!”27 With such commands, the Landgrave
of Thuringia articulates the agenda for a type of art that, in accordance
with Wagner’s theoretical ideas, is “decisive and palpable,” is the “actual
physical deed.”28 In its spontaneity and actionality, the singers’ tourna-
ment transforms into an artistic arrangement of a highly personal and
profoundly sensual nature. The appeal to the senses involves not only the
ear through the “nobly-feeling Human Voice,”29 but also the eye:

Without addressing the eye, all art remains unsatisfying, and thus itself
unsatisfied, unfree. Be its utterance to the Ear, or merely to the combining
and mediately compensating faculty of Thought, as perfect as it may—
until it makes intelligible appeal likewise unto the Eye, it remains a thing
that merely wills, yet never completely can.30

Paradoxically, the Wartburg singers’ artistic practice is ideologically com-

promised by Christianity’s condemnation of sensuality, which Tannhäuser’s
competitors share. The “purely human” “ur-art” has a freer—albeit
brief—moment in the music drama Tristan und Isolde. Its temporal setting
is comparatively vague. Castles, swords, and fealty indicate a generalized
medieval ambience, while references to the magical powers of Isolde’s
grandmother point to a more archaic period. In the first act, on the jour-
ney from Ireland, Kurwenal quarrels with Isolde and insolently improvises
a powerful song, the refrain of which is picked up by the sailors on board.
The song taunts Isolde’s first fiancé, Morold, while praising Tristan, and it
is a snub to Isolde, who had shouted at Tristan.31 Here, too, art becomes a
deed, and, moreover, a deed turns into art.
Again, Wagner argues that his version of Tristan (1857/59) is not sec-
ondary to the versions from around 1200 but is, in fact, much closer to
the original in its “purely human” content and its audiovisual perfor-
mance, supposedly reconstructing the myth in its entirety. This style of
reasoning could easily provide the basis for an apologia for medieval film.
Viewed in this light, the cinematic appropriation of medieval material
should not be seen as the final stage in a long process of decline and cor-
ruption in which the original’s strength wanes and is increasingly diluted
by historical background noise.
According to Wagner, the history of art’s reception is no more linear
than the history of the media through which reception takes place. Film
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 113

versions of premodern literature, in particular, are no more alienated

from their source material than are nineteenth- and twentieth-century
printed editions of the same literature. In fact, film restores the voice
with which this literature was once read aloud and the visuality it pos-
sessed in illuminated manuscripts and a rich decorative culture (murals,
tapestries, everyday objects).32
Wagner’s medievalism thus entails valuable impulses for the theory
and practice of adaptation, since his theoretical thinking and operatic
output seem a far cry from tiresome constructions of binary oppositions
between the literary “original” and its supposed cinematic “derivatives.”
His work eschews binaries in that his operas are, as is film, animated
by the “combination of various artistic elements.”33 Further, Wagner’s
cultural philosophy also allows for the idea of the modern artwork being
more “correct” than its highly canonical literary pre-texts. Nor do his
operas easily support the notorious differentiation between elite culture,
on the one hand, and mass culture, on the other. Wagner perceives his
work as a democratic project intended to reach the widest audience pos-
sible, which, indeed, it still does. His work has greatly inspired script
writers and film directors in terms of plot and dramaturgy, while simul-
taneously urging artists to self-confidently resist their pre-texts’ cultural
authority—including that of Wagner’s own oeuvre.
Wagner was pursuing profound cultural reform with his “artwork of
the future,” and Balá zs expected the same from film. “Art [will] not be
the thing she can and should be, until she is or can be the true, con-
scious image and exponent of the real Man,”34 Wagner declares, while
Balá zs says that a culture of film will make human beings “visible once
more.”35
The following sections of this essay put Wagner’s theories to the test
by presenting two film adaptations of the Tristan material that provoke
a comparison with both Wagner’s opera and the Bayreuth version of
medievalism. The two films each draw on the Middle Ages to envision
political anthropologies of their own, yet they reach very different con-
clusions regarding the social meaning behind the medieval myth.

State Failure and Anti-Esotericism:

Veith von Fürstenberg’s Feuer und Schwert
Feuer und Schwert—Die Legende von Tristan und Isolde [Fire and Sword—
The Legend of Tristan and Isolde] was released in 1982 as the German and
international cultural scenes were preparing to commemorate the one
hundredth anniversary of Richard Wagner’s death in the following year.
Werner Herzog, the most Wagnerian among the auteurs of New German
114 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

Cinema, had already used the Rheingold prelude in Nosferatu (1979) and
was to use the Wesendonck-Lieder in Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen [Where
the Green Ants Dream] (1984). Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal film (1982)
set the unabridged opera on a stage dominated by Wagner’s giant death
mask. John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), which was shot at the same loca-
tions in Ireland shortly before Feuer und Schwert, made excessive use of
music from both Sieg fried and Tristan. In 1981, Richard Burton played
King Mark in Lovespell, an adaptation of the Tristan tale, and in 1983 he
played the title role in the four-part TV-biopic Wagner. It was within this
well-defined context that Fürstenberg released Feuer und Schwert, his first
independent work—a film he wrote and produced himself in accordance
with both the model of the auteur filmmaker and Wagner’s aspiration to
take total responsibility for his art.
Germany’s Board of Film Classification, a nationally accredited
organization for the artistic evaluation of films, acknowledged von
Fürstenberg’s “considerable stylistic acumen and high degree of artistic
taste.”36 Von Fürstenberg had already made a valuable contribution to
New German Cinema as a collaborator with Wim Wenders and as a
cofounder and managing director of Filmverlag der Autoren, a rather more
intellectual German version of Hollywood’s original United Artists. In
his later efforts to produce high-quality German television, Fürstenberg
again referred to Wagner in the crime drama Fliegender Holländer (2001)—
using the title satirically for a film about a Dutch drug runner.
His Tristan film Feuer und Schwert certainly does not bow to Bayreuth.
Instead, as the title indicates, it is a declaration of war. Just as Boorman
lays to rest Arthur’s greatness as well as Wagner’s pathos, and just as
Syberberg casts a critical light on the Wagner cult through his portrayal
of the veneration of the Holy Grail, Fürstenberg takes Wagner to task for
his aesthetic and political metaphysics. In doing so, Fürstenberg rejects
the demands of both mainstream cinema and of Wagnerian aesthetics, a
fact which is ref lected in the film’s lack of the opulence usually associated
with historical films as well as in its refraining from imitating Wagner’s
assault on the senses.
The film sets are sparse and symbolically charged: A wooden chair
transforms a blank white room into King Marke’s throne room. A cross
indicates a convent, a sword identifies a knight. Further, the film’s dis-
tance from both popular genre cinema and from Wagner’s opera can
also be seen in the absence of the typical forms of empathy and expres-
sion Wagner recommended to inf iltrate the audience’s emotional
faculties. The performances of 15-year-old amateur actress Antonia
Preser, who also played a f lower maiden in Syberberg’s Parsifal, and pro-
fessional actor Christoph Waltz, whose perplexing acting style acquired
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 115

notorious fame in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), deny

viewers any insight into the characters’ inner lives and maintain an
anti-psychological reserve through sparse gestures and declaimed dia-
logues. The appearance of well-known Fassbinder actor Kurt Raab as
the straight-faced traitor Ganelon hints at the origin of this concept. In
reference to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s directorial style, film scholar
Hermann Kappelhoff writes:

Gestures are presented like masks, and characters are assembled in tableaux
vivants which break up the f low of the storyline into a series of structural
diagrams illustrating social constellations; sentences are spoken as if in an
unfamiliar language, and acts of the greatest cruelty are in contrast with
facial expressions of cool indifference [my translation]. 37

These are precisely the techniques Fürstenberg applies to Wagner’s subject

matter. In particular, Christoph Waltz as Tristan is given ample oppor-
tunity to gaze at the wartime atrocities that he himself commits with an
expression both impassive and uncomprehending.
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had pointedly pared down the medieval
tale: Three main characters (Tristan, Isolde, Marke) take part in three
carefully calculated situations (the love potion, the night of love, the
Liebestod [love-death]). In contrast to this, Fürstenberg confronts the
old myth’s large number of characters and scenes by using violence as a
thread running throughout the narrative. Feuer und Schwert starts with
Tristan’s duel with Morolt, but the film also recounts the tragic tale of
the hero’s parents Rivalen and Blanchef lor as well as Tristan’s hostilities
with Duke Morgan of Brittany and the Irish king Gumrun. The number
and names of the barons, knights, and squires caught up in the civil war
(Andret, Ganelon, Gondoin, Denavolin, Dinas, Perinis . . . ) demand the
viewers’ full attention while denying them the opportunity to fully grasp
the world that is portrayed. Whereas Wagner’s few protagonists explain
their psychological states over the course of more than four hours, in the
film, characters appear and disappear again before viewers have a chance
to get to know them. Of the Tristan material radically cut by Wagner,
the film indulges in abbreviated versions of Isolde drawing a sword on
Tristan, undergoing trial by fire and being banished to the leper colony.
The film also shows the fugitive couple living in the forest and Tristan’s
betrayal by the second Isolde. The cast of characters and sequence of
scenes indicate that Feuer und Schwert is based on the French philologist
Joseph Bédier’s Tristan compilation published in 1900. Fürstenberg uses
Bédier’s philological sobriety as an aid against Wagner’s multi-sensorial
and emotionally spellbinding power.
116 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

Unlike Syberberg,38 Fürstenberg apparently does not believe that film

is the “artwork of the future” foreseen by Wagner. In an early treatment
for his Tristan film, Fürstenberg states that the tale’s traditional versions
are “more suited to literature than to the medium of film” [my transla-
tion], as the latter demands an explanation of the “political background”
and requires an analysis of the material instead of high ideals.39 In this
sense, Alexander Kluge comments with regard to German auteur film
theory that only film is capable of “creating a Gesamtkunstwerk that is not
esoteric like Wagner’s operas”40 [my translation].
Kluge chooses the term “esoteric” because Wagner expects the living
work of art to lead to human revelations—revelations that Germany’s
auteur filmmakers of the 1970s viewed skeptically. Thus Fürstenberg
draws attention to the social, political, and economic factors motivating
the events his film depicts. Unlike Wagner, Fürstenberg aims not merely
to reach the myth behind the story transmitted, but to reach the imag-
ined social reality behind the myth. The focus is not, however, on the
specific reality of the Middle Ages; the era could be exchanged for any
other, and the minimal costumes and props make no effort to create an
illusion of historical accuracy.
Feuer und Schwert—Die Legende von Tristan und Isolde [Fire and Sword —
The Legend of Tristan and Isolde]: Subordinating its two main characters to
images of war and destruction, the film’s title already signals that the pro-
tagonists are caught up in a violent conf lict that—contrary to Wagner’s
version—does not end with Tristan’s victorious duel. Instead, the war
plows on in pursuit of its own political and economic aims. In Cornwall,
civil war has broken out between King Marke’s supporters and those of
his uncle Andret, who receives assistance from Ireland. Marke’s advisors
put pressure on the king because they fear inf lation and negative effects
on trade. Isolde erroneously believes that the hostilities will end if she
returns to Marke. Her private sacrifice proves politically futile: The war
is not about her, nor about people, it is about structural factors. The sparse
dialogue indicates that all social communication has effectively broken
down. There is nothing more to say, so faces can be unreadable, and ges-
tures can be inexpressive (figure 5.1).
Surprisingly, Marke is depicted as a physically powerful man in the
prime of his life who is also a fatalist suffering because of his father’s
policy of conquest. Marke no longer believes in political control and,
intoxicated with death, sends his knights to their destruction. His advi-
sors claim no longer to understand the world, nor want to understand
it. Against the fitting backdrop of a spectacular sunset, Marke rejects his
knight Dinas’s wise advice to ally himself with neighboring tribes against
Ireland. Besieged by Duke Andret and King Gumrun, Marke attempts a
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 117

Figure 5.1 “Nothing more to say”: communicative breakdown in Veith von

Fü rstenberg’s Fire and Sword.

sortie and manages to kill Andret himself, without succeeding, however,

to encounter Gumrun. Wagner’s Marke, on the other hand, discourages
the traitor (Melot) from further violence (Act 2, Scene 3), and above all,
forgives the lovers. Fürstenberg’s Marke, by contrast, rages at the adulter-
ers. Representing an unstable order doomed to collapse, the king focuses
entirely on increasing the level of violence. The fact that he outlives the
political strategist Andret does not benefit public order but rather dam-
ages it. His glittering army of knights is brought down by Irish archers
and lands on the scrap heap of history. The final image of Tristan and
Isolde’s funeral pyre adds the finishing touches to the film’s apocalyptic
overtones and “sophisticated historical despair,”41 which, according to
Hermann Glaser, was typical of West Germany’s intellectual climate in
the early 1980s.
Fürstenberg treats us to a sumptuous view of the wide sky above the
Irish landscape only to emphasize its metaphysical emptiness. Broad hori-
zons continually open up in Wagner’s Tristan, too, described in stage
directions such as: “The setting appears to be on rocky cliffs; through
openings, the sea and the distant horizon can be seen.”42 From the start,
however, Wagner is presaging a metaphysical escape route for his heroes.
In Fürstenberg’s film, on the other hand, the lovers are not weightless
figures f loating “in the immensity of the world’s breath,”43 but rather
the spoils of petty fortune. Tristan’s “victory” over Morolt is an absurd
118 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

spectacle in which his aged opponent stumbles to the ground, uses his
last strength to pull himself up again and stands before Tristan, defense-
less, only to be run through. Tristan’s greatest feat consists in crashing
through a window as he f lees from Tintagel. In doing so, he destroys the
glass image of Saint George, the splinters of which f ly through the air, an
act of iconoclasm directed in equal measure at England’s patron saint and
the ideal of Christian chivalry.
From the outset, the film is clearly critical of religion. The Irish nuns
want to leave the English patient to die on the road; one nun says that
they have no room and the only thing they could do for him was pray. It
is Isolde, more a pagan than a Christian, who persuades them to take him
in and heal him. At one point, Marke tenderly holds a wooden cross in
his hand, but after Isolde rejects his courtship he pointedly puts it aside.
Death has no meaning here. Tristan receives his mortal wound not, as
Wagner has it, by suicidally submitting to his opponent’s sword, but in
a lowly brawl over booty between his mercenaries. He is finished off by
his disappointment with Isolde after the second Isolde deceives him into
believing the first has abandoned him. Even though this might still be
considered as a form of Liebestod, the situation is presented in a different
light: Since Isolde manipulated her lover with the love potion, his death
is the unintended consequence of her intentional act. It is the very magic
she employed to win Tristan that ultimately causes her to lose him.
Another attempt at magic, designed to erase Marke’s memory of their
wedding night, goes awry, too. The supernatural finally seems to come
to Isolde’s aid when she carries the hot iron from the brazier and throws
it into the sizzling water without complaint—but then she faints and we
see that her hands have been hideously burned. The concept of magic
is based on the idea of a world order constituted by elements arranged
according to a certain structure, a structural arrangement that makes
them manipulable. But in Feuer und Schwert this very world is coming to
an end, which is why it is rarely encompassed in long shots and frequently
cut up into fragments instead. The harsh, almost discontinuous editing
emphasizes the impression of political, social, and epistemological frag-
mentation. In the opera, Isolde mourns the passing of an age in which her
ancestors had the sea and storms at their command, but the potion and
the love still offer her privileged access to a cosmological order. While
Wagner does split the continuous storyline into three separate, sharply
defined situations, within this triptych he does create a symbolic totality
by reducing the empirical to what is most meaningful.
In Fürstenberg’s film, neither the esotericisms of love nor art offer
salvation. The film’s anti-emotional aesthetic goes hand in hand with its
decisive rejection of a metaphysics of love. In the beginning, as they sit
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 119

in the grass of an Irish convent’s cemetery, Tristan and Isolde indulge in

fantasies of escaping society: They want to live a life of self-fulfillment,
playing the harp and listening to the stars sing. After becoming embroiled
in the political conf lict, Tristan decides to give up Isolde—an idea that
never occurs to him in Wagner’s opera, but which Reynolds’s film intro-
duces in conjunction with the civil war motif. Isolde prepares the love
potion in order to bind her lover to her. Under these circumstances, love
itself constitutes an act of violence and offers no protection against suffer-
ing or further violence. Tristan supports Isolde and himself by marauding
and plundering. He burns villages, captures a woman and forces her to
take the name of the first Isolde, who has returned to Marke. Meanwhile,
Marke’s desire, too, turns into sadistic cruelty expressed in Isolde’s abuse
and humiliation.
The film’s beginning evokes high expectations for the redemptive
power of art, but these are systematically demolished as the film pro-
gresses. The opening credits are shot against the very stained-glass depic-
tion of Saint George Tristan will eventually destroy. The first dialogue
revolves around Tristan’s harp, a constant companion he even brings to
his duel with Morolt so that he can take it with him to the underworld if
he falls. The instrument is at his side on the ship to Ireland and in his sick-
bed in the convent, but he abandons it (intentionally or not) immediately
after kissing Isolde for the first time. Thereafter, the harp disappears from
the story, and Tristan dies without its comforting presence. Love leaves
no room for art, but on the other hand, neither can love compensate for
art. The lovers never have the chance to listen to the singing of the stars.
Robert Lovas’s film score substitutes the harsh sounds of electronic music
for the harmony of the spheres. Seen through the lens of media theory,
the film heightens the myth’s self-ref lexive potential, as already present
in the medieval pre-texts, by showing Tristan not merely as a loving
knight but also as an artist and musician (though perhaps a failed one).

Nation-Building and the Mobilization of Art:

Kevin Reynolds’s Tristan & Isolde
A comparison of the Tristan films from 1982 and 2006 appears to confirm
rather than undermine the distinction between the critical perspective of
auteur films, on the one hand, and the conventional ethics of mainstream
cinema, on the other.44 Feuer und Schwert, the story of the end of an era,
envisions disastrous social catastrophes and highlights the irrelevance of
the individual within the structures of power. Tristan & Isolde, a popular
tale of how a nation is united, confirms the power of the individual to
shape history and thus proclaims the desirability and viability of states and
120 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

nations. Feuer und Schwert cuts its characters off from the viewers’ sympa-
thy and empathy, while Tristan & Isolde programmatically announces in its
press kit: “We wanted the audience to relate to the people on screen.”45
At first glance, Wagner’s legacy appears to have been invested in
Hollywood. The German Board of Film Classification awarded both
Tristan films its highest rating, besonders wertvoll [highly recommended],
but for very different reasons. While the sparseness of the first film is
attributed to its fidelity to the Middle Ages and the “old legend,”46 the
second film’s opulence enables it to practically pass itself off as an adap-
tation of Wagner: “Classic opera is brought to the screen as a great
romantic drama.”47 This description is misleading. In her film score,
British composer Anne Dudley deliberately avoids Wagnerianisms; solo
violins, harps, and pianos play simple melodies with a vaguely Celtic ring
evoking an early medieval atmosphere.
In an interview with Creative Screenwriting, scriptwriter Dean
Georgaris comments on his use of sources: “I read the opera libretto, read
Housman’s poetry, read some of the versions, and quickly realized every-
one told their own version. So I decided with a fist full of blasphemy that
I was going to do my own interpretation.”48 Like Fü rstenberg, Georgaris
attempts to distance himself from Wagner. The only scene in which
the film resembles Wagner is when King Marke pours forth a veritable
rhetorical “catalogue aria” of disbelief in reaction to Tristan’s betrayal
(Wagner, Act 2, Scene 3).
A closer comparison between the films reveals further differences
with regard to their relationships with Wagner. While, at the risk of
dilettantism, a single person bears overall artistic responsibility for
Feuer und Schwert, there is a whole collective of specialized professionals
behind Tristan & Isolde. Both Georgaris and Reynolds graduated from
the University of Southern California’s film school and are intimately
familiar with the Middle Ages as a film subject, Georgaris through
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) and Reynolds through
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), while the producer, Ridley Scott
(1492 —Conquest of Paradise [1992], Gladiator [2000], Kingdom of Heaven
[2005], and Robin Hood [2010]), is notoriously well versed in histori-
cal film. Following the conventions of realistic character psychology,
Reynolds’s lead actors proficiently play out their emotions. James Franco
and Sophia Myles are talented young stars who make it easy for viewers to
identify with their characters. Rufus Sewell gives a striking performance
as Marke, following previous roles as Fortinbras in Kenneth Branagh’s
Hamlet (1996) and the Duke of Anjou in A Knight’s Tale (2001). The slick
professionalism evinced in all aspects of the production betrays a highly
commercialized artistic scene traditionally frowned upon by German
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 121

intellectuals. However much Adorno may attribute the ills of the cul-
ture industry to the Bayreuth idea, it must be said that Wagner himself
denounced theater, with its brand-conscious purchase of production val-
ues, as an “industrial workshop” and “an inf luence that may calm the
passions, absorb the excitement, and divert the threatening agitation of
the heated public mind.”49 Hence, Wagner’s aesthetic and social critique
of the nineteenth-century entertainment industry is astonishingly close
to Adorno’s analysis of Hollywood.
For all the differences between Feuer und Schwert on the one hand and
Tristan & Isolde on the other, we can safely assume that Georgaris paid
close attention to Fürstenberg’s film. A few details shared exclusively by
these two versions of the Tristan story (as far as I am aware) may serve
as evidence. In both films, international conf lict between England and
Ireland coincides with an English civil war, and the Irish king besieges
Marke’s castle. In both films, Isolde conceals her identity as she nurses
Tristan back to health, thereby amplifying the effect when Tristan recog-
nizes her as the princess of Ireland. In both films, there is a secret passage
leading into the keep of Marke’s castle and a final battle in which Marke
rides out against his enemies. But the decisive factor is the underlying
anthropological and sociological attitude that links these details: In both
films the characters remain subject to political forces and material cir-
cumstances from which Wagner’s heroes “esoterically” free themselves.
Wagner’s Tristan is political in that it celebrates the triumph of the human
over the social and seeks to “[restore] the Purely-human itself to its pris-
tine freedom.”50 Fürstenberg’s and Reynolds’s versions are political in
that they portray their characters as being caught up in the wheels of soci-
ety. In his desire to depict characters the audience can relate to, Reynolds
presents these characters in all their social deformity instead of “render-
ing the Purely-human”51 as Wagner would have it.
Less drastically than Fürstenberg, but equally unmistakably, Reynolds
plays down Tristan’s renown as a warrior. Morholt is defeated in the less-
than-heroic circumstances of a chaotic mass slaughter. The Irish Goliath
is accidentally wounded in the hand by one of his own archers and is lying
on the ground when Tristan sets upon him. Fürstenberg’s film already
clearly depicts the random nature of violence, but it is vividly expressed
in Reynolds’s movie, too. In Wagner’s opus metaphysicum, by contrast, an
unstinting providence still prevails. It is symbolized by the magic love
potion that plays a merely dysfunctional role in Feuer und Schwert and is
completely absent from Tristan & Isolde.
The one trait Fürstenberg does share with Wagner is that he does
not actually need the Middle Ages to be the Middle Ages. Reynolds’s
Tristan & Isolde strives, however, to create an illusion of serious history
122 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

and shows off its well-researched background. Since the 1990s, medieval
film has displayed a postcolonial tendency not to simply project its own
images and formulations onto the Middle Ages, but instead to pay more
attention to the period’s own voice and materiality. The motto of “the
truth behind the myth”52 aims at a truth situated within the historical
past. Georgaris and Reynolds, the former a political science major and
the latter a law school graduate, are attentive to historical detail and let
the medieval period have its own say in its depiction—within limits,
naturally, and without ruling out anachronisms. The name of Isolde’s
father, Donnchadh, for instance, comes from the history of Ireland’s early
medieval kings. The name D’Or is a reference to the Cornish hill fort
near which the so-called Tristan Stone stands, the sixth-century grave
site of a man named Drustanus who was related to a regional prince
named Marcus.53 The film anchors its history in this possible source of
the Tristan/Marke legend. By resituating the myth within specific his-
torical coordinates, the film seeks to reach what appear to be the real
historical events. In connection with this attempt at a realistic historici-
zation, Tristan & Isolde disposes of the final “esoteric” moments which in
Feuer und Schwert at least manifested themselves through their dysfunc-
tional afterlife.
Reynolds’s film makes draws on the very early Middle Ages to sup-
port its primary theme: the formation of a nation and the founding of
a state. Marke and Tristan strive to supplant the tribal system surviving
from pre-Roman times with the unity and order of a state. The uni-
fication of Angles, Celts, Jutes, Saxons, and Picts (of which Tristan is
one) and the elimination of regional autonomy are viewed as an impera-
tive of civilization that only scoundrels (namely, the Saxons from the
German forests) would question. Symbolically ref lecting the nation-
building process, at the start of the film the wooden Castle Tantallon
is burned down by the Irish. It gives way to the stone architecture of
Marke’s Castle D’Or. Hammering and chiseling are regularly heard in
the background. Interior spaces grow brighter from scene to scene as
they are decorated with tapestries and filled with music. On the one
hand, this shows “the meaning of Art as a factor in the life of the State”54
as Wagner says. On the other, the accurate manner in which Reynolds’s
film references a plethora of individual art forms highlights the pres-
ence of the Gesamtkunstwerk ’s individual components, while also giving
the adaptation its aesthetic layering. Tristan & Isolde thus lends ample
support to this book’s thesis that “medieval film at its best is capable of
critically addressing and playing with the fact that the motion picture as
an artistic product cannot help but be a combination of various artistic
elements.”55
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 123

But not only is art shown as emerging in Reynolds’s film, Christianity’s

supposedly civilizing inf luence, too, slowly but steadily spreads throughout
the movie. It is with a specifically postcolonial awareness that Reynolds
portrays the Hiberno-Scottish mission: Priests’ robes and rituals recall
Christianity’s Middle Eastern origins. Only the hymns that accompany
Marke’s coronation are Roman Catholic. Isolde is the first Christian;
she talks about the new religion and quotes the Bible before anyone else
does. Marke does not turn toward Christianity until his wedding day.
Hollywood’s piety thus contrasts markedly with the auteur Fürstenberg’s
critical attitude toward religion. In Wagner’s Tristan, no one even mentions
the Christian God. The only religious pronouncement is made by Isolde,
who talks of the power of “the Goddess of Love,” the “sovereign . . . who
governs the course of the world.”56 Wagner’s Isolde, the “wild, bewitch-
ing girl,”57 is the last pagan.
As discussed above, Wagner himself assumed a decidedly anti-Christian
position as he was writing his long theoretical essays and the Tristan libretto
in the 1850s: particularly with regard to the Middle Ages he viewed
Christianity’s historical role as thoroughly unproductive. He claimed that
hypocrisy was the Christian era’s most prominent feature,58 and that “the
candid artist perceives at the first glance: that neither was Christianity Art,
nor could it ever bring forth from itself the true and living Art.”59
In Tristan & Isolde, the process of political and mental modernization
brushes aside the traditional kinship system. Fürstenberg, like Wagner,
operates with the genealogical principle of the avunculate in that
Marke is Tristan’s mother’s brother and Morolt the brother of Isolde’s
mother. According to this system, nieces and nephews have a special
legal and emotional relationship with their maternal uncle. Georgaris and
Reynolds, on the other hand, make Morholt Isolde’s unloved fiancé and
Marke Tristan’s adoptive father. Tristan loves Marke like a father, while
Isolde despises and fears her biological father. The key social connections
are not between relatives with objective family ties, but rather between
individuals who, on account of their personal biographies, have a duty
to one another. The course of Tristan’s life is depicted as an example of
how merit is increasingly favored over ancestry. Whereas in Wagner’s
opera, Melot is Tristan’s treacherous friend, in Tristan & Isolde he is King
Marke’s biological son. Marke’s journey toward modernization becomes
even more pronounced when he passes over his “own f lesh and blood”
and names Tristan his successor.
Tristan expresses his gratitude by revising the myth’s very founda-
tions and transforming himself from a German enemy of the state into an
American cultural hero. His determination to serve a functioning society
spares neither life nor limb, and certainly not love. He hopes to achieve
124 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

national unity through the marriage of Marke and Isolde, and his love
is the first sacrifice to the reason of state. Later on, the founding of the
state will cost him his life—and Tristan gives it up willingly. This turn
of events is in complete opposition to both the historical pessimism of
Feuer und Schwert, on the one hand, and to Wagner’s political views, on
the other. The values given practical priority by Georgaris and Reynolds
are referred to in Art and Revolution as “such sweet-sounding fundamental
lies as ‘Patriotism,’ ‘Honour,’ ‘Law and Order,’ etc.”60 Hollywood, with
its official and unofficial production codes, was never the best place for
turning adultery into an act of apotheosis in the way Wagner’s Tristan
does. Even the Liebestod is cut from Reynolds’s Tristan & Isolde; if absolute
love does not require that the boundaries of death be eliminated and
the will to live relinquished, but is instead—as Georgaris’s dialogues
suggest—merely greater than life and death, then Tristan may as well
die just as Isolde may as well live. As it is, Tristan dies not out of love for
Isolde, but rather out of love for a political idea.
The question remains why Isolde survives and lives on. She is the
torchbearer not only of Christianity, but of an aesthetic culture of lit-
eracy. Even during the Ireland scenes, we see her reading, from a small
codex, the Bible’s most lyrical Bible passages: “Set me as a seal upon
your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death” (Song of
Solomon 8.6). Tristan also holds a book in his hand as he leans against
a tree, alone, and Isolde is heard reciting a poem in the voice-over. In a
f lashback at the end of the film, as Isolde kneels over Tristan’s body, we
see the origin of this recitation: The couple is lying together naked by a
fire and Isolde is reading from a book.
Surprisingly, her book must be an edition of John Donne’s Poems from
the year 1633, since the lines are taken from the third verse of Donne’s
“The Good-morrow”:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest.
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike that none doe slacken, none can die.61

Whereas Wagner himself wrote the songs recited by his singers on the
Wartburg and by Kurwenal aboard the ship to Cornwall, Georgaris calls
in professional help for the literary aspects of the film. Georgaris “buys
in” a cultural production value as a safe bet, while Wagner embraces his
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 125

total artistic responsibility and runs the risk of lyrical dilettantism. Their
different approaches are rooted deep in their respective aesthetic con-
cepts. Wagner sought to reenact situations of medieval artistic production
in which poetry was supposedly composed spontaneously and recited
with the living voice, as “a real thing, a self-conditioned and immediate
entity”62 without the involvement of “literary care.”63 But the “impass-
able waste of stored-up literature” that Wagner bemoaned in his criticism
of civilization is already very much in evidence in the Middle Ages them-
selves, as we find them depicted by Georgaris and Reynolds, and this
impassable waste, in fact, reaches back from modernity into the past. In
the Middle Ages of Tristan & Isolde, we see the work of art already exist-
ing in the age of its reproduction. Isolde models the decorations in her
home on the murals and mosaic f loors of a Roman villa’s ruins. Finally,
the tapestries which successively decorate the walls of Castle D’Or serve
as a form of reproduction as well. They depict battles and sea voyages
that might well be the heroic deeds of Tristan himself. By thus permit-
ting Tristan’s artistic immortalization as the founder of a nation to begin
within history itself, cinema is shown to be projecting itself back into the
medieval banquet hall.

Notes
1. See Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth
to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 31, 93–94. Wagner &
Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2010).
2 . Jeongwon Joe, “Why Wagner and Cinema? Tolkien Was Wrong,” in
Wagner & Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 2 [1–24].
3. Richard Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Tr übner, 1892), 1: 38 [21–65].
4. On Wagner in Hollywood, see Klaus Reinke, “Richard Wagner im Film
nach 1945,” wagnerspectrum 4.2 (2008): 141–57.
5. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1: 53.
6. Richard Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s
Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Tr übner, 1892), 1:138 [69–213].
7. Béla Balá zs, “Visible Man [1924],” in Béla Balá zs: Early Film Theory. Visible
Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), p. 9 [9–15].
8. For a fundamental discussion of medievalism in film theory, see Bettina
Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011).
126 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

9. Richard Wagner, “German Art and German Policy,” in Richard Wagner’s

Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Tr übner, 1895), 4: 77–78 [35–148].
10. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London: Verso, 2009), p. 92.
11. Ibid., p. 96.
12 . Ibid., pp. 44, 87–88.
13. Quotes in this paragraph from Wagner, “Opera and Drama,” in Richard
Wagner’s Prose Works, 2: 125.
14. Quotes in this paragraph from Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,”
in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1: 72–73.
15. Ibid., 1: 118.
16. Ibid., 1: 91.
17. Richard Wagner, “A Communication to My Friends,” in Richard Wagner’s
Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Tr übner, 1892), 1: 323 [267–392].
18. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
1: 71.
19. Richard Wagner, “What Is German?” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr übner,
1895), 4: 160 [149–69].
20. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
1: 135.
21. Wagner, “A Communication to My Friends,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose
Works, 1: 333.
22 . Richard Wagner, “Prelude to Tristan and Isolde,” in Richard Wagner’s
Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Tr übner, 1899), 8: 386 [386–87].
23. Wagner, “A Communication to My Friends,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose
Works, 1: 334. On Wagner’s “Middle Ages” as palimpsest of preexist-
ing notions, see Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandlungen
(Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 2002), pp. 197–208.
24. Wagner, “A Communication to My Friends,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose
Works, 1: 358.
25. Ibid., 1: 344.
26. Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser and the Tournament of Song at Wartburg, ed.
and trans. Natalia Macfarren (New York: G. Schirmer, n.d.), p. 143.
27. Ibid., pp. 144, 126.
28. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
1: 74 and 1: 80.
29. Ibid., 1: 118.
30. Ibid., 1: 100.
31. Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde,
ed. and trans. Peter Bassett (Kent Town, AUS: Wakefield Press, 2006),
p. 33.
 C R I S I S D I S C O U R S E A N D A RT T H E O RY 127

32 . On iconic tradition, see Meradith T. McMunn, “Filming the Tristan

Myth. From Text to Icon,” in Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film,
ed. Kevin J. Harty (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 169–80.
33. The editors, p. 9 of the present volume.
34. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
1: 71.
35. Balá zs, “Visible Man,” in Early Film Theory, p. 11.
36. This evaluation is reprinted in Genée & von Fürstenberg Filmproduktions-
gesellschaft, Feuer und Schwert. Die Legende von Tristan und Isolde [press
sheet] (Munich: Genée & von Fü rstenberg Filmproduktionsgesellschaft,
1981), Appendix.
37. Hermann Kappelhoff, “Film und Schauspielkunst: Fassbinder und
Brecht,” in Grauzonen. Positionen zwischen Literatur und Film 1910–1960,
ed. Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Fabienne Liptay (Munich: text + kritik,
2010), p. 257 [257–72] [my translation].
38. Hans Jü rgen Syberberg, Hitler. Ein Film aus Deutschland, transl. Joachim
Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982), p. 19.
39. Veith von Fü rstenberg, “Vorwort” [preface to a draft of the film],
reprinted in Alain Kerdelhué, “Feuer und Schwert. Lecture materielle
du mythe,” in Tristan et Iseut: mythe européen et mondial, ed. Danielle
Buschinger (Göppingen: Kü mmerle, 1987), pp. 193–94 [181–96] [my
translation].
40. Michael Dost, Florian Hopf, and Alexander Kluge, Filmwirtschaft in der
BRD und in Europa: Götterd ämmerung in Raten (Munich: Hanser, 1973),
p. 7 [my translation].
41. Hermann Glaser, Die Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,
3 vols. (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1990), 3: 216.
42 . Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, pp. 23,
143.
43. Ibid., p. 189.
44. The two films typify two different “cultures of reception” as defined
by Mathias Herweg and myself as distinct spheres pursuing their own
emphases, rules, and aims with regard to medial perception and adapta-
tion of diachronous and/or synchronous foreign cultures and cultural ele-
ments. Mathias Herweg and Stefan Keppler-Tasaki, “Mittelalterrezeption.
Gegenst ä nde und Theorieansätze eines Forschungsgebiets im
Schnittpunkt von Mediävistik, Fr ü hneuzeit- und Moderneforschung,”
in Rezeptionskulturen. 500 Jahre literarischer Mittelalterrezeption zwischen
Kanon und Populärkultur, ed. Mathias Herweg and Stefan Keppler-Tasaki
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 1–14.
45. Kinowelt Filmverleih, Tristan & Isolde [press sheet] (Berlin: Kinowelt
Filmverleih, 2006), p. 11.
46. This quotation reprinted in Genée & von Fürstenberg Filmproduktions-
gesellschaft, Feuer und Schwert [press sheet].
47. Kinowelt Filmverleih, Tristan & Isolde [press sheet], Appendix.
128 S T E F A N K E P P L E R -T A S A K I

48. Dean Georgaris, quoted in: Yon Motskin, “Tristan & Isolde,” in Creative
Screenwriting 13.1 (2006): 32.
49. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1: 46.
50. Wagner, “What Is German?” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 4: 155.
51. Ibid.
52 . This claim is raised by the tagline of Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur
(2004).
53. Cf. Rosemarie Lü hr, “Tristan im Kymrischen,” in Tristan und Isolt im
Spätmittelalter, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999),
p. 144 [141–68].
54. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1: 31.
55. The editors, pp. 8–9 of the present volume.
56. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, p. 89.
57. Ibid., p. 17.
58. See Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1: 39.
59. Ibid., 1: 38.
60. Ibid., 1: 45.
61. John Donne, “The Good-morrow,” in John Donne, The Elegies and The
Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1965), pp. 70–71.
62 . Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
1: 73.
63. Ibid., 1: 135.
CHAPTER 6

ADAPTATION AS HYPERREALITY:
THE (A)HISTORICISM OF TRAUMA IN
ROBERT ZEMECKIS’S BEOWULF *

Philipp Hinz and Margitta Rouse

Suddenly, the two halves of the Beowulf epic . . . made perfect story arc sense. Had it been a
snake, it would have bit me.

Roger Avary

A young man makes a mistake. Tempted by an attractive woman and

the promise of wealth and power, he unwittingly fathers a son.
Years later, after he has become a great leader and husband to a beauti-
ful and considerably younger wife, his legacy is threatened for lack of
a legitimate heir. The issue of his unacknowledged child complicates
his marriage, because his wife resents his sexual past. His adolescent
“bastard” son, a social outcast unwanted by his father and shunned by
society, suffers greatly, too. Seeking to attract his father’s attention, or
simply to revenge himself, he regularly humiliates the old man on public
occasions—but his aggressive acts fail to lessen his growing frustration
with his father. Powerless and incapable of preventing such scenes, the
old man finally hires a young assassin. Having completed his mission,
the killer is rewarded by being installed as the old man’s heir. When the
old man dies his successor inherits not only his wealth and power, but
also wins the young widow’s love. But history repeats itself: The young
man, too, is seduced by the murdered bastard’s excessively rich mother
and fathers a son with her. Years later, when his unwanted son is old
enough to haunt him, the story comes full circle.
130 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

With its ring of family melodrama, this story sounds entirely formu-
laic; if it does not remind us of the opera proper, then certainly of modern
TV-soap opera. Except that this is not just any story, but actually one
that derives from one of medieval literature’s most canonical plotlines:
the Old English epic Beowulf. A story of never-ending family trauma is
Robert Zemeckis’s cinematic take on Beowulf, based on a script by Neil
Gaiman and Roger Avary.1 Opening titles state that events takes place
in “Denmark A.D. 507.” For Chris Jones, this is a nod toward “plausibly
chronistic historicity in a way that provides ‘optional depth’ to those
in the know,” that is, Anglo-Saxonists familiar with canonical editor
Friedrich Klaeber’s attempts to match the poem’s fictional events with
the reign of King Chlochilaichus as described by Gregory of Tours.2
To the majority of viewers not “in the know,” the year 507 will pri-
marily signal an anniversary relationship with 2007, the year of the film’s
release. Here, the film indicates for the first time that its plot will have
a circular structure potentially reaching into the modern present; we
encounter the first pointer toward the traumatic recursiveness of a history
that continually haunts and repeats itself. For those not “in the know,”
the opening scene provides historicity effects, often misunderstood as
mere clichés: a golden drinking horn, boars on spits, and burping maids,
all plunging viewers directly into the deepest, darkest Middle Ages.
If the medieval narrative offers any kind of modern “feel” at all, this
is chief ly engendered by two factors: first, the aesthetics of CGI (com-
puter generated images) and performance animation, using a high-profile
cast who lend their voices and avatars to an entirely digitally animated
film; and second, the story’s psychological motivation, turning the hap-
less Hrothgar into Grendel’s father, and explaining Grendel’s monstrosity
as the traumatic effect of his exclusion from his father’s court. Grendel’s
mother is the hypersexual avatar of Angelina Jolie rising from the depth of
her underwater lake: an irresistible femme fatale on high heels, seducing
her victims with promises of everlasting success. Her only condition for
granting wealth and power is that the hero fathers a son with her. After
killing Grendel, Beowulf, too, finds himself seduced and sires his own
monstrous offspring—the dragon. Only as an old man does he attempt
to break the temptress’s spell by slaying his son, that is, the dragon, him-
self. Ironically, his actions remain futile: Whereas he succeeds in killing
the dragon, he cannot harm its mother; and it seems that his successor,
Wiglaf, too will be seduced when, at the close of the film, he glimpses
the ravishingly digitalized Jolie for the first time.
Strategies such as these that supposedly approach “the story behind the
story” are familiar in Beowulf adaptations.3 John Gardner’s novel Grendel,
published in 1971, set the trend by featuring Grendel as a philosophical
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 131

monster with intellectual abilities dwarfing those of the humans sur-

rounding him.4 Judith Klinger’s chapter in the present book discusses the
anthropological thinking behind Michael Crichton’s poetics of verisimili-
tude in Eaters of the Dead 5 (adapted to the screen as The Thirteenth Warrior);
Crichton’s “dragon” is an illusion created by a tribe of primeval bear-
people.6 And in Graham Baker’s sci-fi fantasy Beowulf (1999), Grendel’s
mother is a sexually alluring shape-shifter. Here, too, Hrothgar has
fathered Grendel.7 Zemeckis’s Beowulf explores the psychological poten-
tial of Anglo-Saxon monstrosities even further: The irresistible mother
constantly changes her shape, each hero spawns his own curse, and family
relationships are dysfunctional throughout. As will become apparent, it
is the hyperillusionistic effects afforded by CGI technology and perfor-
mance animation that prove central to making visible the medieval plot’s
psychological undercurrents as envisaged by Avary and Gaiman.
In the following, we will investigate the tensions arising from CGI’s
claim to offering a superior insight into the imagined totality of medieval
life and aesthetic experience on the one hand, and the film’s psychoana-
lytical approach toward the Beowulf-material on the other.

Medieval Hyperrealities
Zemeckis’s Beowulf is the first film of its kind to make continuous use of
motion-capture technology throughout its entire length and can, there-
fore, claim “ground-breaking status.”8 As Alberto Menache explains,
motion capture is

the process of recording a live motion event and translating it into usable
mathematical terms by tracking a number of key points in space over time
and combining them to obtain a single three-dimensional representation
of the performance. In brief, it . . . enables the process of translating a live
performance into a digital performance.9

Motion capture is not entirely new; its roots reach back to the early
twentieth century.10 What makes Beowulf stand out in the history of
animated film is how motion-capture technology is used throughout to
replace humans with their avatar likenesses, or character designs, creat-
ing an entirely digital performance animation.11 Live performances are
digitized and then manipulated to suit monstrous, younger, older, or
more attractive roles.
In Zemeckis’s Beowulf, the novelty is not the “blurring of the real-
istic with the fantastic” as Chris Jones suggests,12 since this is a general
effect of digital technology as used in many medieval-themed films, but
132 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

the presence of modern actors in their digitally removed figurations of

medieval characters within sets that are entirely computer generated. Not
only are live performances of human movement translated into the digi-
tal spaces, but also the actors’ live physical appearances, as well as the star
image enveloping their personalities.
Traditionally, CG images are often blended with photographic cine-
matography obtained on conventional sets, in order to achieve what Jean-
Louis Comolli calls “reality effects.”13 For example, animated monsters
are made to look more credible when facing a “real” human opponent;
the forces of nature are made to seem more powerful, or the number
of actors is digitally multiplied to make battle scenes more spectacular.
By contrast, in Zemeckis’s Beowulf, an all-fantastic feel of the animated
medieval story is given additional strangeness through the distorted pres-
ence of familiar actors’ “looks” and idiosyncrasies, rendering unstable the
boundaries between cartoon and human appearance.
In Zemeckis’s Beowulf, CGI technology achieves a different kind of
reality effect: It links the fantastic medieval world with the reality of
Hollywood stardom. The specter of “real” faces, that is, of recognizable
present-day actors in the animated performance, produces the effect of
a “strange yet familiar” world and helps to create a sense of the illusion
of “real” experience underneath the animated pictures. This sense of
a distorted familiarity paradoxically depends on the familiarity of the
real, thus undermining the binary opposition of “real” versus “‘illusion.”
Avary insists that “the performance capture process really allowed the
film to be performance-based,” permitting it “to be a fully formed, emo-
tional experience.”14 Producer Steve Starkey stresses that this is particu-
larly true also for the monsters: “[W]e could get the perfect performer,
who portrayed all of Grendel’s pain and suffering but wasn’t limited by
prosthetics or uncomfortable suits. If we had shot this film traditionally,
we could never have done all that.” By favoring such performance anima-
tion over photographic cinematography, the film purports to be present-
ing another, deeper reality underneath the digital images.
One of digital cinema’s trademarks is its claim to what film theorists
call “hyperreality.” Within the context of literary studies, the concept
of hyperreality is habitually associated with Jean Baudrillard’s, as well
as Umberto Eco’s analyses of the postmodern experience of reality. For
Baudrillard, “hyperreality” is synonymous with a fake world taken for
real, a “simulacrum.”15 Similarly, Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality describes
experiences in a postmodern world where copies have the status of origi-
nals and are cherished accordingly.16
It is easy to see how the Beowulf adaptation can be seen in the light
of such theories,17 when we consider director Zemeckis’s remark that
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 133

“nothing about the original poem appealed to me,” as well as screenwriter

Avary’s claims to have created an adaptation much closer to the “original”
Beowulf story than the one we know from the medieval manuscripts. For
Avary, his own version is closer to the one supposedly “lost over hundreds
of years of verbal telling, and further diluted by the Christian monks who
added elements of Christianity when they transcribed it to the parchment
we now know as MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv.”18 Robert Zemeckis explains
that the search for the “real story” beneath the Old English poem was
central to this adaptation: “Neil and Roger explored deeper into the text,
looking between the lines, questioning the holes in the source material,
and adding back what they theorized the monks [who copied the story]
might have edited out (or added) and why. They managed to keep the
essence of the poem but made it more accessible to a modern audience
and made some revolutionary discoveries along the way. This should stir
some debate in academia.”19
Ironically, their view on the epic takes us straight back to academic
debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similar to
Richard Wagner’s poetics of adaptation, as outlined by Stefan Keppler-
Tasaki in the present book, their approach strives to reimagine the
“authentic” work untainted by Christian and scribal inf luence, thereby
completely disregarding, for instance, J. R. R. Tolkien’s seminal article
“The Monsters and the Critics,” which established the extent to which
Christianity is actually indispensable for the Beowulf-epic’s specific per-
spective on history.20 Tolkien argued that Beowulf is “an historical poem
about the pagan past . . . by a learned man writing of old times.”21 For
Tolkien, the Beowulf-poet used Christian elements deliberately “to draw
distinctions, and to represent moods and attitudes of characters conceived
dramatically as living in a noble but heathen past.”22
The scriptwriters’ rather old-fashioned insistence on misguided monks
feebly diluting the fascinating glory of the pagan original is underlined
by their introduction of Unferth as an evil and disruptive Christian
character—with John Malkovich cast in the role of the Machiavellian
missionary.
As medievalist William D. Hodapp points out in his analysis of the
film, academics themselves have “[f ]or many years, in fact, treated the
poem like an archaeological dig, trying to peel back layers of Christian
and cultural debris in search of what they thought must be an origi-
nal form of the story buried beneath”23 —which, among other things, is
exactly what J. R. R. Tolkien urged modern scholars not to do. However,
as Hodapp also implies, many scholars have accepted Tolkien’s critique of
early Beowulf criticism and have therefore tended to avoid making struc-
tural, as well as other aesthetic criticism.
134 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

Arguably, Anglo-Saxonists’ own lingering preference for the roots

beneath a Christian overcoat is masked by manuscript critique and by
what Chris Jones, adopting a phrase from Julia Smith, calls the “dat-
ing game.”24 Interestingly, at least for some medievalists, Zemeckis’s
film appears to ease the sense of guilt for craving a “truer” version.
Hodapp’s own essay is a fine example of this: “In a sense, the [Beowulf ]
poet translates . . . the world of the story . . . for a target culture shared by
Christianized Anglo-Saxons . . . [W]e can also consider how Beowulf
serves as a source text for other translations ranging from English versions
of the Old English text to renderings of the poem in different media.”
And he concludes: “Zemeckis—unwittingly I think—tells a version of
the tale that serves as stand-in for those elusive, pre-Christian Germanic
tales presumably underlying the poem.”25
It is fascinating to see how Avary and Gaiman, at one strike, rec-
reate the conservative nineteenth-century attitudes toward the poem,
but also liberate Anglo-Saxon studies from obsessing about originals,
sources, and analogues to embrace adaptation studies fully. Chris Jones,
for example, repeatedly emphasizes the point that “in Cotton Vitellius
A.xv we first glimpse the Beowulf poem in transit, already on its way
from then towards now, or rather, we see Beowulf already in a moment
of transmission and reception.” He goes on to say that for “professional
Anglo-Saxonists to ignore Avary and Gaiman’s re-performance of the
poem would be as intellectually complacent and as strategically unwise
as it would be easy, and would concede and confirm the marginal posi-
tion of Anglo-Saxon studies within the English-speaking world in the
twenty-first century.”26
In the context of digital cinema, the concept of hyperreality ostensibly
does not belong to discourses of originality and simulacra or indeed adap-
tation; here it refers to the preference for an aesthetics of continuity. As
Lev Manovich, one of the most prominent theorists of digital narratives,
explains, computer games and digital cinema aim to

simulate the continuity of a human experience, guaranteed by the laws

of physics. While modern telecommunication, from the telegraph, tele-
phone, and television to telepresence and the World Wide Web allowed us
to suspend these laws, moving almost instantly from one virtual location
to another with the toggle of a switch or press of a button, in real life we
still obey physics: In order to move from one point to another, we have to
pass through every point in between.27

This does not imply that cartoon animation or CGI merely simulate the
laws of physics; rather, hyperrealism is an exaggeration of continuity
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 135

editing. Typically characterized through the use of long continuous shots

and digital morphing, hyperrealist aesthetics avoids montage.28
Such an aesthetics clearly dominates Beowulf ’s opening scenes that
introduce us to the film’s medieval setting. First we see what is ostensibly
a conventionally edited scene of merrymaking in King Hrothgar’s new
mead hall, here renamed Herot, where Wealthow, Hrothgar’s Queen,
appears to be the only unhappy character amid the festive hustle and
bustle. In a point-of-view shot, the virtual “camera” brief ly simulates
her gaze, as she carries mead in a lavishly ornamented drinking horn; her
husband noisily enters the hall, she takes it to him, he drinks and then
shares his riches with the Danish court. As the camera leaves Wealthow’s
point of view, traditional editing suddenly gives way to hyperreal per-
spectives. The camera moves up into Herot’s rafters and then, in one long
tracking shot, its trajectory follows a dog entering the picture from the
dais where Hrothgar slouches in his throne. Rising higher as if to get a
better view of the moving dog the camera almost hits a wooden beam.
Seamlessly, the image is taken over by a rat on the beam. Rat and camera
escape through a hole in the roof. With constantly increasing speed, the
camera then follows a second rat, as it is caught by an attacking bird of
prey. The Danish settlement rapidly fades into the distance, and the cam-
era traverses the vast terrain separating the humans from their enemy’s
lair. Rising up again to follow the branches of bare trees the camera
finally enters Grendel’s den.
Media theorist Jay P. Telotte scorns this particular scene as an example
of CGI’s typical aesthetic pitfalls. For him, “that rat-and-hawk-impelled
movement . . . foreshadows Grendel’s own predatory attack,” but is char-
acterized by a “pointless” tracking through space; “impossible spaces” are
constructed through an “improbable movement” of the camera which
moves this way “just because it can”; the camera even draws us “out of
the narrative . . . out of our ‘sense of reality,’ because we recognize that we
are seeing movement for movement’s sake.”29
It is, however, just as plausible to understand this scene as deliberately
drawing us out of our experience of reality to thrust us into an alternative
experience of vision. The quick succession and blending of apparently
unconnected events suggests that the virtual camera is neither inde-
pendent, nor bound to character perspectives alone. Rather, the images
appear to be driven by other—apparently physical—forces, as they sweep
away from the festive scene in Herot towards where the monster lives.
Thus we are reminded that there is a world beyond Herot’s boisterous
merrymaking: The boundaries of Herot’s civilization are both permeable
and threatened. Where animals such as the rat can come and go as they
please, a monster such as Grendel might intrude just as easily.
136 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

Further, as our gaze cannot but assume the virtual camera’s speed, it
appears that we cannot control what we see. The hyperreal aesthetics of the
film’s CG images thus demonstrates an affinity with the mechanics of medi-
eval visual experience. As Sarah Stanbury explains, “writings about vision
and optics in the Middle Ages often understand sight to be a property of
physical contiguity. In looking we are connected physically to the object
we see by the agency of species, or visual rays.”30 “Species” is the property
of objects to transmit their visual likenesses through space. According to
classical optics, further developed by medieval thinkers, we follow with
our eyes what actively attracts our gaze. Similarly, in Beowulf the virtual
camera recreates a concept of seeing that does not permit the power of the
gaze to rest with the seeing subject alone. According to Carolyn Colette:

Most modern readers assume control and power in the gaze located in the
gazer. Certainly the inf luence of film and feminist theory has shaped our
thinking in that direction. In contrast, the most inf luential late medieval
thinking about optics assumed a degree of power in the object of vision
itself. As a result, the subject one looked at was thought to be as important
as the act of looking itself, and the act of looking always a dynamic inter-
change between viewer and viewed.31

That objects are given authority over the way we see, and that hyperrealist
aesthetics in Beowulf adopt something like a medieval attitude toward the
power of vision, is given further support by the way in which the film turns
one specific object into a central plot element: the golden mead horn.

Delayed Indexicality
In hindsight we understand that it is the golden horn, called the Royal
Dragon Horn, that drives the plot—and thereby the ways in which we
“see” the story of Beowulf—from the very beginning of the film. It is the
very first object we see, depicted in a long close-up, emerging from the
circular O of the word “Beowulf ” in the opening credits (figure 6.1).32
Later we learn that whenever a hero desires this horn, he will win power
and wealth, but that his rule is won at a price that will haunt him for-
ever later. The horn both guarantees the hero’s success, and heralds his
downfall. It functions as a torch, and indexical sign: It serves Beowulf
by glowing in the dark as he enters Grendel’s cave, leading the way to
the monster’s mother. It is because of the horn’s destructive allure that
Hrothgar acquires wealth on the condition of fathering a monstrous son.
It is ultimately because of the horn’s power that the hyperillusionistic
images take us from Hrothgar’s hall to Grendel’s and his mother’s den.33
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 137

Figure 6.1 Cursed object and indexical sign: “The Royal Dragon Horn” in
Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf.

As first-time viewers we are, however, initially oblivious of the horn’s

particular agency; first-time viewers’ grasp of its power is delayed.
Through its specific agency, the horn echoes the cursed objects in the
Beowulf-epic, such as the collar Wealhtheow gives Beowulf and which he
later hands on to Hygelac, or the cup which the slave steals from the dragon’s
treasure thus initiating the chain of events leading to Beowulf ’s destruc-
tion. But in a sense, the horn’s indexical power is just as characteristic for
modern responses to Beowulf: In her engagement with the Old English
poem’s visual history in illustrated retellings and adaptations, Siân Echard
shows that objects typically have a controlling, but almost unnoticed role
in the ways in which the poem has been approached in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries: “Helmets, swords, and other medieval artifacts have
become a convenient shorthand in the packaging of Beowulf, so automatic,
that we almost fail to notice their presence or effect.”34
In the film, our suspended appreciation of the horn’s significance is cen-
tral to understanding the self-perpetuating nature of an ill-fated history
that potentially continues to haunt us in our present. The horn denotes a
history where there is no learning from previous errors, or where insight
into past errors comes too late and has no positive consequences; there is
no progress; there are no revolutions, and no utopian hope for a better
future, although there is clearly a nostalgic craving for a better heroic past.
Hrothgar claimed the horn when he killed “his” dragon Fafnir; his scops
still sing of it, although he cannot rid his community of the man-monster
Grendel now. Here, Avary and Gaiman give Hrothgar his own glorious
dragon-killing history and base it on Old Norse Eddic poetry, which fea-
tures the motif of the greedy man-dragon explored in the film.
In Old Norse myth, Fafnir is originally a man who kills his father
to take his gold, later transforming into a dragon fiercely protecting his
138 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

hoard.35 As Hrothgar promises Beowulf the golden horn as a reward for

killing Grendel, he also passes on the secret of dragon-slaying, a secret
that will come in useful when Beowulf must face his own man-dragon
offspring—but also his death.
As he sets eyes on the trophy, Beowulf chooses to remain oblivious to
the consequences of winning the dragon horn. Hrothgar asks: “I wonder
how many men have died for love of her beauty,” and Beowulf replies:
“Can you blame them?” “Her,” not “its,”36 beauty here ambivalently
refers to the horn, as well as Wealthow who is present in the picture and
whom Beowulf desires. But most importantly, this “her” alludes also to
Grendel’s mother who seduced so many men in the past and will con-
tinue to do so—always demanding a son, each of whom will eventually
cause his father’s downfall. Circling him three times, Grendel’s mother
seduces Beowulf with the words: “As long as this golden horn remains
in my keeping, you will forever be king.”37 The dragon’s snake-like tail
coiling around the golden trophy resembles the live braid of hair, which
the seductive mother uses as an extra arm; curling snakes also decorate
Hrothgar’s throne and crown. That the horn is missing on Beowulf ’s
return to Herot is sign enough for Hrothgar of what has happened in
the cave—he asks Wealthow with unmistakable irony to “find our hero
another cup.”38
The horn’s absence is the sign for Hrothgar that his kingship has come
to an end. As Hrothgar jumps to his death, Beowulf is made king in his
place. With one slow circular movement the camera propels us 50 years
forward, closing up on the embossed dragons and snake designs on
Hrothgar’s circlet now crowning Beowulf ’s head. Although we under-
stand that Beowulf ’s kingship rests on a pact with a seductive demon, it is
only when, after many years, the horn is returned to Beowulf as if by acci-
dent that we can be sure of the trophy’s symbolism’s true implications: The
demon will inevitably claim its victims; it cannot be defeated, not even by
Beowulf himself, and the monstrous woman represents what is truly mon-
strous in an archaic male warrior society: the greed for “gold and glory,” a
greed for power and wealth that brings only misery to the people.
Although, by killing his demonic son, Beowulf attempts to break the
circle of self-perpetuating greed, killing himself in the process, he, too,
fails to make his chosen successor understand the destructive temptations
of power. When Beowulf tries to tell Wiglaf the secret of his kingship, his
old retainer emphatically refuses to “see” what went wrong in the past:

NAY!!! THERE IS NOTHING I MUST KNOW!! You are

BEOWULF! . . . The slayer and destroyer of demons!!!! Now let’s kill this
f lying devil where it sleeps, and get on with our bloody lives!!39
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 139

Although, true to its circular plot, the film is open-ended, we suspect that
Wiglaf, too, will be seduced. When, at the film’s close, Wiglaf watches
Beowulf ’s funereal ship burn, the horn washes up on the beach. Picking
it up, he walks into the water where the temptress already beckons.
The delayed disclosure of the horn’s symbolic significance within
the film is in fact prefigured in the poem, where, at a late stage in the
plot, a particular goblet unfolds its power. As Seamus Heaney notes
in the introduction to his translation of the epic, gold is a “constant
element . . . an affirmation of people’s glorious past and an elegy for
it. It pervades the ethos of the poem the way sex pervades consumer
culture.”40 When an unnamed slave steals the goblet from the dragon’s
hoard, the dragon’s fury is unleashed, leading to Beowulf ’s destruction.
Even as the poem’s Beowulf dies, he still demands to see samples of the
dragon’s treasure, wishing he had a son on whom to bestow his ill-fated
riches. Like the film’s Beowulf, he is an ambivalent figure: boastful, ava-
ricious, yet undoubtedly heroic. As he dies without an heir, his kingdom
is doomed.
For the film, the screenwriters amplify the fateful goblet’s narrative
authority in order to evoke the constant presence of gold in ways echo-
ing the medieval narrative,41 in order to connect the story’s disjointed
parts and to motivate the circularity of the plot with its nostalgic conclu-
sion. In brief, the film’s symbolic use of medieval interlace decoration for
royal horn, throne, and circlet, fulfills several functions: It metonymi-
cally signifies the plot’s medieval setting; it effectively epitomizes the Old
English poem’s obsession with treasure; it points toward the inescapable
recursiveness of a traumatic (family) history, and—most importantly—it
signals that this history, despite its recursiveness, cannot be understood
while it is actually happening. It is the confusing circularity of this his-
tory, as well as our inevitably delayed grasp of it, that lies beneath the
hyperillusionistic journey from Herot, where we glimpse the dragon
horn for the first time, straight into Grendel’s den.

CGI and the (A)historical Representation of

Traumatic Experience
In film studies, the notion of trauma is generally used to explain our
delayed understanding of cinematic images. Laura Mulvey’s work is central
here—she adopts the Freudian concept of “Nachtr äglichkeit” [deferred
action] to explain the ways in which viewers are continuously forced
to reinterpret earlier events as the plot unfolds. According to Mulvey,
understanding cinematic images resembles retrospectively understanding
traumatic events: In both, the significance of earlier events may be stored
140 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

unconsciously and only grasped at a later stage through another, related

incident. Mulvey observes:

The cinema (like photography) has a privileged relation to time, preserv-

ing the moment at which the image is registered, inscribing an unprec-
edented reality into its representation of the past. This, as it were, storage
function may be compared to the memory left in the unconscious by an
incident lost to consciousness. Both have the attributes of the indexical
sign, the mark of trauma or the mark of light, and both need to be deci-
phered retrospectively across delayed time.42

It is important to understand that though Mulvey’s concept of “delayed

cinema” postulates an analogous relationship between the deciphering of
filmic events and the delayed comprehension of past traumatic events, it
does not necessarily claim that traumatic experiences underwrite the way
we make sense of cinematic narratives. Essentially, the notion of trauma
as deferred action can be used to complicate the relationship between
past and present. Within the context of medieval studies, the concept of
trauma has therefore been used to conceptualize alternative notions of
time that challenge the traditional modern representation of history as a
predominantly linear succession of events.
Kathleen Biddick, for instance, argues that our desire to histori-
cize often results in what Stephen G. Nichols has called “a hard-edged
a lterity”43 of the past. The concept of trauma, however, questions the rigid
boundaries between past and present: “Since its content is not grasped
when it occurs, a traumatic loss has no present and therefore resists con-
ventional contextualization based on either diachrony or synchrony.
Trauma also resists representation since its traces recur fragmentarily in
f lashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitious phenomena.”44
Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer have put forward a straight-
forward juxtaposition of the ways in which the Freudian concept of
“Nachträglichkeit” is used both in medieval studies and in film theory.
Exploring the distinctive relationship cinema has with the medieval past,
Bernau and Bildhauer point out that medieval films are “delayed” on
several levels: “[F]irstly, in Mulvey’s sense of all films being delayed; sec-
ondly in the sense that all historical films are delayed in their subject mat-
ter; and thirdly, because the Middle Ages are also themselves perceived
as delayed.”45
Although Bernau and Bildhauer’s use of the notion of “Nachträglichkeit”
makes for interesting readings of films, it is not entirely unproblematic:
It is persuasive to think that the understanding of traumatic experiences
is necessarily delayed, and that trauma therefore has an inevitable effect
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 141

on our experience of temporality and the ways in which such experi-

ences are represented cinematically. The reversal of this argument does
not follow logically, however: A nonlinear representation of time does
not necessarily entail traumatic experiences, and a linear representation
can include traumatic events. If all films are delayed, and all medieval
films are subject to “Nachträglichkeit” in multiple ways, it becomes dif-
ficult to discuss films such as Beowulf, in which publicly historical, as
well as personal traumatic experiences are potentially at odds with one
another and are negotiated not only through a nonlinear plot structure,
but create a surplus of “traumatic energies” through the hyperreality of
the visual experience. While hyperillusionistic images claim to be recre-
ating a medieval visual experience, they also give depth to a modern style
of psychological realism and a popular version of what could be called
hyperrealist psychoanalytical imagery.
“Psychological hyperrealism” afforded by the aesthetics of CGI is
most evident at the beginning of Zemeckis’s Beowulf-film, when, after
having left Herot behind, the virtual camera appears to be following the
sound waves emanating from the hall and spreading across the country.
As the distance to Herot grows, the sounds fade to a barely audible hum.
Once the camera enters Grendel’s cave however, we hear the pulsat-
ing rhythm of sounds coming from Herot once more, but amplified
and distorted. Grendel is suffering: We see how the sounds ring pain-
fully in his exposed, enlarged, and violently vibrating tympanum. As the
single shot renders the visual narrative as continuous and unfragmented,
thereby juxtaposing the different locations of mead hall and cave, the
aural narrative clearly establishes a contrast between the aural experi-
ences of “monster” and man.
The film materializes sound, when for a brief instance the sound
waves are shown as ripples on the surface of the cinematic images. Here,
the visualized sound waves leave the diegetic frame of the narrative for a
moment, as if to reach out into the “physical world” of the viewer. More
importantly, Grendel embodies the physical reality of sound as he shivers
and slashes himself because of the excruciating pain in his ears. Evidently,
the merriment at Hrothgar’s court is contrasted with Grendel’s psycho-
logical suffering as he hears the sound from afar. All that arrives from the
“harmonious sound” of the harp—the poem’s “hearpan swég”—is his
father’s name rhythmically declaimed by the king’s retainers: “Hrothgar!
Hrothgar! Hrothgar!” The trauma of being separated from the man who
is celebrated in the hall appears to be the most significant reason for the
monster’s frustration. In Zemeckis’s Beowulf, Grendel’s visible pain trig-
gers an emotional response, conjuring up earlier suffering, which the film
further visualizes as castration angst.
142 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

As Jay P. Telotte observes, after the camera has entered the cave for the
first time, we do not yet have a measure of Grendel’s proportions: “[I]t
is not until he . . . attacks Herot and we see him . . . dwarfing . . . Hrothgar’s
men there that we comprehend his bulk.”46 Initially, Grendel is intro-
duced to us visually only through his suffering; in the later fighting
scenes he retains his magnificent size only until Beowulf defeats him;
significantly, as Beowulf attacks the most vulnerable part of his body, his
ears, the monster shrinks. At this point the film reverses the roles of the
monstrous and the human: While a merely man-sized Grendel tries to
escape from the hall, Beowulf traps his arm in the hall’s door, screaming
“Your days of blood-letting are finished, demon!” whereupon Grendel
cries in words derived from Old English: “Ic noght demon here!” Just
before he severs Grendel’s arm from his body, Beowulf responds: “I am
ripper, tearer, slasher, gouger. I am the teeth in the darkness, the talons in
the night. Mine is strength and lust and POWER! I AM BEOWULF!”47
Thus, Beowulf defines what is monstrous in his world: sexuality and
political power.
In the subsequent seduction scene, Grendel’s mother tells Beowulf:
“I know that underneath your glamour you’re as much a monster as my
son Grendel. Perhaps more.”48 As Beowulf becomes almost more than a
monster, Grendel becomes less than a man. The question of Grendel’s
missing manhood is already emphasized during the fight with Beowulf.
Beowulf fights naked—the virtual camera draws attention to his sup-
posed virility by displaying his hypermuscular body, without actually
exposing his genitals. With remarkable frequency, random objects or
other characters’ movements obstruct our view of his groin. In this way,
the images humorously draw attention to the aesthetics of CGI, which
effortlessly conjure a bout of steam wherever needed in order to preserve
a character’s modesty.
By contrast, Grendel receives the opposite treatment. Wiglaf attempts
to mutilate Grendel’s groin, which is often in full view, and cries out:
“The swifan bastard has no pintel!” Here the script book comments:
“Indeed, Grendel has been neutered long ago.”49 It appears that Grendel
has in fact never made it to being a man. Once the dying Grendel has
shrunk even further and is mourned by his mother inside the cave, we
realize that his body has the grotesque shape of a monstrous baby. The
cave itself is womblike: Sparsely lit, its ceiling resembles the ribcage of an
enormous creature. The cave’s entrance is suggestive of a vaginal open-
ing: a narrow crevice, surrounded by a thorny bush.
Vaginal/phallic imagery is central to the entire movie. Grendel’s mother
tempts Beowulf, saying that he will be “forever strong, mighty . . . and all
powerful,” caressing his erect sword “like a woman touching a man”; his
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 143

sword melts instantly “and drips like an eruption of mercury over her
hand.”50 This unmistakable symbolism suggests both an instant fulfill-
ment of his desires, as well as the transitory nature of their enjoyment.
It appears that Beowulf is not only made impotent (since he will remain
without heir), but also symbolically castrated—his entire sword melts,
and his power relies solely on the cursed power which will later undo
him. Beowulf understands and ref lects on this in later life: “We men are
the monsters now.”51 And he explains the reason for the political successes
making him seem immortal: “Because I died years ago . . . when I was a
young man.”52 “Dying” is used here with a sexual connotation, too: As
a young man Beowulf was empowered, as well as castrated by falling
for the lure of power. As he meets his end, he does so by cutting off his
own arm—this is necessary for him to be able to reach and tear out the
dragon’s heart with the other arm; here, we witness an act of self-mutila-
tion in the service of the greater good which could almost be regarded as
self-castration—after all, soon after cutting off his arm, he also loses his
dagger; this act symbolically links him with Grendel one last time, whose
arm was also severed.
The psychoanalytical undercurrents of Zemeckis’s adaptation are fas-
cinating because they support a theory of history as inescapable repetition
on the one hand, and ultimately rely on the notion of universally valid,
that is ahistorical, structures of emotional experience. That desire—and
the trauma that can result from its pursuit—is conceived of as subject to
universal experiences is particularly evident in the way in which Angelina
Jolie’s avatar is used to portray Grendel’s mother, since this interpretation
deliberately includes not only Beowulf ’s seduction but also that of the
modern audience. Initially, we merely hear the demon’s voice and see
only brief ref lections of golden scales on water. Later, we see a scaly
part of what appears to be a snake-like, golden, female body, and clawed
golden hands, rocking the minimized remains of Grendel. The film plays
here with a traditional folktale-motif, whereby a witch’s true appearance
can be glanced in the ref lection of a mirror, or by averting one’s eyes,
but not when facing her fully or directly. Showing only parts of her body
raises curiosity as to what the entire form might look like. In another
scene, during her attack on Herot, the demon appears to Beowulf as a
nightmarish image of Wealthow.
Only much later in the film do we see her face as it appears to Beowulf
and later to Wiglaf; and again, we first see her snake-like tail and hear
her seductive voice, before her entire human form slowly rises from the
water. There is no realistic movement here: The images seem to lift her
otherwise unmoving body out of the water, while the virtual camera is
static, closing up on parts of her body as they move past the lens. Having
144 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

seen itemizing close-ups from head to toe, we see a brief shot of her full
body, which markedly retains the sleek and artificially raw appearance
of a digitally designed form as it might appear isolated on the screen of a
special effects designer: a golden trophy. Subsequently the camera follows
her legs from behind, elongated limbs extending into naked but never-
theless high-heeled feet walking toward Beowulf, while her live braid of
hair swishes along.
The ways in which Jolie’s avatar is used in the film suggests that the
temptation Beowulf faces is a threat that continues to haunt the pres-
ent, as we, too, are expected to be seduced by Jolie’s sexual allure.53
The film makes a nod toward changing ideals of beauty, in that it intro-
duces an overt anachronism of high heels to the medieval narrative. As
her “modern” feet are made a “natural,” or rather a hyperreal, part of
her hyperaestheticized naked body they become universally attractive
through all times. Strategies such as these representing her body as an
ideal which is alluring across time, represent modern desires as biologi-
cally determined and, consequently, as largely impervious to cultural
and temporal constraints.
Anke Bernau has persuasively argued that the “question of [Beowulf ’s
images’] ontological reality, or factuality, is superseded by their medi-
ation between interior and exterior worlds: They visualize Beowulf ’s
desires and fears, which determine not only his own reality, but also the
lives of those around him. The monsters show us Beowulf in a way words
cannot (or at least do not) in the film and, by implication, in the Old
English poem.”54 As we have seen however, the hyperreal images extend
their “realism” not only to the medieval narrative but also to depicting
contemporary fears and desires. In Zemeckis’s Beowulf, the situation is
complex: The film effectively presents the medieval experience medi-
ated by a theory of history that conceives of history as a circular process
which continuously haunts itself—potentially into the present. This the-
ory seems to be based on a fundamentally ahistorical premise however,
as it appears to imply that history’s traumatic recursiveness has a universal
claim, based on universal emotional experience.
On the other hand, as Beowulf ref lects on the subject of heroism at the
end of the film, he states that “[t]he time for heroes is dead, Wiglaf. The
Christ God has killed it . . . leaving humankind nothing but weeping mar-
tyrs and fear . . . and shame.”55 Later we see Beowulf talking to his young
mistress, asking her if she had forgotten the celebrations of the following
day. As we see them together on the walkway of an impressive (high
medieval) stone castle, she answers that it was “his” day: “When the
Song of Beowulf is told, of how you lifted the darkness from the land,”
then adding, as if to confirm Beowulf ’s earlier comment to Wiglaf: “And
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 145

the day after, we celebrate the birth of Hallend Christ.”56 As Stephen T.

Asma remarks, the adaptation here responds to the fact that the “relation-
ship between heroes, monsters, and gods can be said to experience a sea
change [in the Beowulf- epic], if we realize that the important pagan virtue
of pride has become the principal vice for Christianity . . . According to
the Judeo-Christian tradition, we don’t need monster-killers when we
trust in the Lord. After all, God, not man, punishes the wicked. Heroic
faith replaces heroic action.”57
Paradoxically however, to retain his heroism in the film, Beowulf is
required to act on his mistakes in the interest of the common good and
sacrifice himself; to be truly heroic, he is actually required to become a
martyr. At this stage in the film, Zemeckis’s Beowulf presents Christianity,
due to its teleological outlook on history, as an ideological alternative
to a world that has no choice other than continuing in a cyclical way.
Again, CGI is central to making visible this ideological transition from
pagan heroism to Christian martyrdom. Visual effects supervisor Jerome
Cheng explains that apart from financial considerations, one of the chief
reasons why animated motion capture was chosen for the film in the first
place was that Zemeckis’s preferred Beowulf actor, Ray Winstone, was
required to have Christlike facial features. Zemeckis “actually studied the
images [of Christ’s face] that are used now and found a universality that
appeals to everybody. And so he wanted Doug [Chiang] to come up with
that image and then blended Ray into it.”58
Even though Christ’s face is discussed here as universally appealing “to
everybody,” Christianity is by no means presented as a positive alterna-
tive to pagan heroism. Whereas in the poem Grendel is the descendent of
the monstrous Cain’s clan, in the film, Cain is Unferth’s slave who finds
the cursed horn. The poem’s Unferth has often been seen as an unlikable,
cowardly, brother-killing character;59 and the film’s Unferth is character-
ized accordingly. In the film, however, he is also chief ly associated with
Christianity—albeit with an unsympathetic, cruel kind of Christianity.
The film here amplifies, or rather establishes, a narrative link between
Unferth’s family history as implied in the epic, and the epic’s view of the
biblical Cain as the progenitor of a monstrous race.
At the beginning, the Unferth of the film is shown as trying to con-
vert Hrothgar’s court while urinating, then beating a small child for spill-
ing mead; at the close of the film he has become the village priest, again
beating a slave. Being carried on a cross because he has been injured
by the dragon, he shouts out the dragon’s message to Beowulf: “The
sins of the fathers! The sins of the fathers!”60 and prompts Beowulf into
action one last time with teachings of guilt and atonement. Indeed,
the insufferable Unferth, who disregards the pagan cult of the body
146 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

primarily because his own disabled body excludes him from it, is a truly
Nietzschean embodiment of the Christian faith: Presented as a crucified
Christ-figure himself, he encapsulates what Nietzsche saw as the bitter-
ness and resentment of the weak who use their helplessness as a passive yet
aggressive weapon with which they can bring down the powerful, forcing
them to participate in their frail world order. As Stephen T. Asma puts
it, “Nietzsche . . . would have liked the pagan Beowulf, a tribal-minded
monster-killer.”61 Interestingly, he goes on to say:

This pagan sense of virtue certainly dominates the original poem. But
even now it is not just a quaint historical relic, nor is it an embarrassing
impulse that must be tempered and cured with Christian humility. It’s a
sense of honor that is alive and well, thankfully, in many of our soldiers
currently fighting in Iraq. It’s a soldier’s code that still lives inchoate in
citizens, but is fully actualized in the warrior class.62

It is certainly true that the glorification of Beowulf ’s perfect masculine

body—the invincible body of an action hero—allows for such readings;
but it seems that the film’s psychological undercurrents with its empha-
sis on castration angst, preclude the perpetuation of Beowulf ’s “honor
code” into the present.
Paradoxically, it seems that in the film, Christian humility actually
plays an important part in “saving” the pagan sense of honor for modern
audiences. The poem presents the pagan past as glorious and expresses its
nostalgia for it not only despite of, but actually through, a particularly
Christian lens. By contrast, the film is capable of retaining and protect-
ing some of the old heroism’s glory only by painting a negative image
of Christianity. The film thus conceives of Christianity as a negative
force because it prompts the demise of a pagan heroism, a heroism that
celebrates sexuality, virility, bodily strength, and the use of violence. But
in its dependence on a never-ending cycle of violence this pagan heroism
proves to be self-destructive.
The advent of Christianity, then, marks the beginning of a linear pro-
gression of history in which civilization supersedes an archaic under-
standing of heroism. Christianity spells doom for heroism and provides a
way out of the self-defeating circularity of the pagan world. The film thus
appears to be situated at the threshold that divides the Dark Ages from
the Middle Ages proper. As they are presented at the end of the film, the
Middle Ages embody the beginning of higher civilization, as we now
enter a linear model of history that takes us straight to modernity. The
settlements around Beowulf ’s castle, and the architectural glory of the
fortified castle itself, as opposed to the wooden and permeable structures
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 147

of Herot early in the film, signify this transition from the Dark Ages
to the Middle Ages. Such progress is also indicated through the film’s
changing court culture: Where Hrothgar’s court was heathen except for
Unferth, Wealthow, now wearing a cross, has a cleric by her side as she is
shown working on a tapestry of Christ’s face.
This more sophisticated court culture presents itself in secular terms,
too: Where Hrothgar celebrated Herot as “a place for merrymaking, and
joy, and fornication,”63 Beowulf ’s castle is shown as a place of sophis-
tication; whereas Hrothgar’s drunken scops danced on the table, recit-
ing rude doggerel and chanting his name, Beowulf employs mummers
who accompany a verse recital of his Song.64 The film actually presents a
pantomimic performance complete with costumes and props illustrating
original verses from the Anglo-Saxon epic. Evidently, at this stage the
film self-referentially includes its own aesthetics as part of a narrative of
cultural progress, because it singles out a part of the Beowulf-epic where
sophisticated illusionistic effects are required to credibly represent the
visual “reality” beneath the poem’s words.
The scene we see acted out inside the throne room depicts Beowulf ’s
fight with Grendel. Two mummers hidden beneath a cloak perform the
part of Grendel together in order to represent the monster’s gigantic
bulk; in turn, the role of Beowulf is performed by an athletic dwarf
actor to represent Beowulf ’s vast strength; once “Beowulf ” has torn off
“Grendel’s” arm by brute strength, the monster “shrinks” as only one
mummer continues acting the part. The workings of pre-cinematic illu-
sion are highlighted as the virtual camera closes in on the intricacies
of Grendel’s “shrinking” costume. Moreover, the dwarf actor does not
fight naked, but wears a loincloth in order to protect his audience’s sen-
sibilities. Not only does this scene once more draw attention to the illu-
sionistic possibilities of CGI, but it also performatively underscores the
screenwriters’ theory that events as reported in the poem depart from an
earlier, “original” reality, a reality which the film itself can make visible.
We see that the Beowulf actor now tears out Grendel’s arm all by himself
(the way he does in the poem), whereas earlier events showed that he
trapped the monster’s arm in a heavy door. Adaptation is figured here
both as a falsifier of the truth (in the case of the mumming) and as its
great restorer (in the case of the hyperillusionistic narrative).
As many commentators note, there are several scenes in the film which
establish Beowulf as an unreliable narrator,65 and Unferth is chief ly asso-
ciated with the questioning of Beowulf ’s boastful exaggeration, as well as
with the exposure of the uncomfortable secrets on which Beowulf ’s king-
ship rests. It is therefore no coincidence that the boisterous theatrical per-
formance is first brief ly interrupted by a short view of a solemn looking
148 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

cleric who refuses to join the merriment, and ceases when Old Unferth
brings the Royal Dragon Horn back to Beowulf ’s castle, thus putting an
apparent end to the narrative of deception. Christianity is shown here as
also encroaching on secular court culture, where it is staged as an unwel-
come intruder into the (already unreliable) Song of Beowulf.
It appears, then, that within the film’s reinterpretation of the Beowulf-
epic as a narrative of family trauma, Christianity first exposes heroism’s
destructive secrets, and secondly represents the beginning of a linear
route to progress, where heroism is suppressed in the interest of a more
advanced, and relentlessly advancing civilization.
Modernity, at least this is what the film suggests, comes with a deep
suspicion of heroism, which it regards as monstrous. Accordingly, its
monsters are no longer true monsters but outcasts who suffer psychologi-
cally from their rejection. Modernity’s ambivalent attitude toward hero-
ism and monstrosity is engendered by a perceived need for heroes (who,
for example, reliably rid this world of a terrorist threat) and a profound
rejection of their greed for power and glory (since it is their kind who,
through imperialist politics, called this threat upon us in the first place).66
It is due to this ambivalent attitude that Zemeckis’s Beowulf also remains
ambivalent about the model of history it wants to advocate both for the
Middle Ages and modernity. The modern suspicion of heroism is uncov-
ered by the hyperrealist images as already part of the medieval narrative;
at the same time, the images imply that the trauma that heroism entails
is valid for all times.
But even as Zemeckis’s film proves to be ambivalent toward the
pagan world it glorifies, it does not seem capable of fully endorsing
its Christianity either. As Angelina Jolie begins to seduce the Wiglaf-
character, the cycle of violence starts over again. And we have no reason
to assume that it will ever be broken. The competition between the linear
and circular—the latter being conceived in powerfully psychoanalytical
terms—is something the film is ultimately incapable of resolving. Thus
the visual heroism of CG imagery, supposedly promising a more direct
access both to the heroism of the past and to its concomitant traumas, is
subverted just as much as the heroism the film displays.
In conclusion: CGI is the film’s central aesthetic asset—on the one
hand, CGI claims to be able to recreate the medieval aesthetic experi-
ence, and on the other it visualizes the aesthetics of trauma as an aesthet-
ics of historical recursivity; this is supported, as well as made possible, by
the psychoanalytical adaptation of the Beowulf-myth as a myth of a never-
ending family trauma. Yet at the same time, the film introduces a second
perspective on history: Christianity. Christian teleology suggests that the
trauma narrative loses its universal claim; banning the pagan trauma,
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 149

Christianity thus appears to pave the way for modernity. However, the
film does not end here: The threat of a renewed trauma returns despite
the advent of Christianity, and with it returns a need for heroism. At the
close of the film, the inescapable trauma thus manifests its universality.
The reign of trauma cannot be banned but remains active in its circular-
ity; Christianity and the advance of civilization are only situated at the
surface and can but gloss over the trauma within.
The hyperrealist CG imagery, animating a poetics of adaptation capa-
ble of exposing the inner workings of the community, or of the commu-
nity’s unconscious, thereby also makes visible the contradictions between
an interpretation of history as a psychoanalytical trauma narrative and
history as a narrative of linear progress. Ultimately, the film depends on a
psychoanalytically motivated theory of heroism, whereby the circularity
of violence is inescapable. In a sense, then, Zemeckis’s Beowulf appears to
be ideologically charged to an unexpected degree, in that it seems to use
the notion of trauma as a justification of state violence. “Can you blame
them?” asks Beowulf as he is presented with the cursed Royal Dragon
Horn for the first time.67 The film’s answer is apparently “No.”

Notes
* We would like to thank Andrew James Johnston as well as the members of his
research colloquium at the Freie Universit ät Berlin for helpful comments on
earlier drafts of this chapter.
1. Beowulf, dir. Robert Zemeckis (US: Paramount Pictures, 2007). Neil
Gaiman and Roger Avary, Beowulf: The Script Book, with Insights from the
Authors, Their Early Concept Art, and the First and Last Drafts of the Script
for the Film (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). The film was shown in
several viewing formats; our analysis is based on the standard 2D version
(single disc DVD).
2 . Chris Jones, “From Heorot to Hollywood: Beowulf in Its Third
Millennium,” in Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed.
David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2010),
p. 21 [13–29].
3. Beowulf-adaptations are comprehensively listed in Hans Sauer, 205 Years
of Beowulf Translations and Adaptations (1805–2010): A Bibliography (Trier:
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011).
4. John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Knopf, 1971).
5. Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead (New York: Ballantine, 1976).
6. The Thirteenth Warrior, dir. John McTiernan and Michael Crichton (US:
Touchstone Pictures, 1999).
7. Beowulf, dir. Graham Baker (US: Miramax Pictures, 1999). For an early
review noting the parallels between Baker’s and Zemeckis’s adaptations
150 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

see Carolyne Larrington, “Digital Monstrosity. An Anglo-Saxon at the

Cinema and in Translation,” in The Times Literary Supplement, November
23, 2007, pp. 17–18. Kathleen Forni compares Zemeckis’s adaptation
with previous Beowulf films in “Popularizing High Culture: Zemeckis’s
Beowulf,” Studies in Popular Culture 31.2 (2009): 45–59.
8. Jones, “From Heorot to Hollywood,” p. 18.
9. Alberto Menache, Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation
and Video Games (San Diego, CA: Academic, 1999), p. 1.
10. Ibid., p. 2.
11. Yacov Freedman discusses whether Beowulf can be classified as a genuine
“animated” motion picture in “Is It Real . . . Or Is It Motion Capture?
The Battle to Redefine Animation in the Age of Digital Performance,”
The Velvet Light Trap 69.1 (2012): 38–49.
12 . Jones, “From Heorot to Hollywood,” p. 18.
13. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus,
ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1989),
p. 131 [121–42].
14. “Beowulf. Full Production Notes,” Movies Central, available at: http://
madeinatlantis.com/movies_central/2007/beowulf_production_details
.htm.
15. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
16. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (San Diego, CA: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1986).
17. For a discussion that regards Zemeckis’s Beowulf as “an extraordinarily
perfect example of Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum at work,”
confirming that “the film is neomedievalism,” see M. J. Toswell, “The
Simulacrum of Medievalism,” in Defining Neomedievalism(s), ed. Karl
Fugelso (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 52–53 [44–57].
18. “Production Notes.” Avary and Gaiman have repeatedly made such claims
in interviews, see also “Cast of Beowulf Interview,” Moviesonline.ca,
available at: www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_13362.html.
19. “Production Notes.”
20. The “Production Notes” suggest that the scriptwriters as well as Zemeckis
are aware of Tolkien’s seminal article “The Monsters and the Critics,”
claiming that Zemeckis sees hero and poem “along similar lines” as
Tolkien. It seems, however, that the perceived similarities are the result
of a creative misreading of Tolkien’s essay. For the latter, see J. R. R.
Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” in Interpretations of Beowulf: A
Critical Anthology, ed. R. D. Fulk (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1991), pp. 14–44.
21. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” p. 30.
22 . Ibid., p. 40.
23. William D. Hodapp, “‘no hie f æder cunnon’: But Twenty-First Century
Film Makers Do,” Essays in Medieval Studies 26 (2010): 102 [101–8].
24. Jones, “From Heorot to Hollywood,” p. 16.
25. Hodapp, “no hie f æder cunnon,” 102–3, 106.
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 151

26. Jones, “From Heorot to Hollywood,” pp. 17–18.

27. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology Press, 2002), p. 143.
28. Hyperrealistic aesthetics in digital cinema has been defined as a form
of overstated realism, “in tension with the graphic limitations of drawn
animation, the vestiges of plasmaticness in conventions of ‘squash and
stretch,’ metamorphosis, as well as the often fantastic subject matter (talk-
ing animals, magic, fairy tales and monsters)” (Martin Lister, Jon Dovey,
Seth Giddings, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Kieran Kelly, eds., New Media:
A Critical Introduction [London: Routledge, 2009], p. 138).
29. Jay P. Telotte, Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E (Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky, 2010), p. 246–47 [emphasis added].
30. Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 6.
31. Carolyn P. Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval
Psychology in The Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2000), p. 14.
32 . The film proper begins with the circular O of “Beowulf,” which is the
first letter/image to emerge as production titles are faded out. Letters
assemble on screen, and a dragon-jewel f lies toward the O on screen.
Increasing in size once more the jewel f lips around and reveals the Royal
Dragon Horn carried by Wealthow; the story begins from a circle, as if to
say there was no true beginning and end, but only circular movement.
33. For a discussion of the tracking shot into Grendel’s den as emblematic
of a monstrous aesthetic seen as central to performance animation in
general, see William Brown, “Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie,”
Animation—An Interdisciplinary Journal 4.2 (2009): 153–68.
34. Siâ n Echard, “BOOM: Seeing Beowulf in Pictures and Print,” in Anglo-
Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas
Perkins (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2010), p. 130 [129–45].
35. Analogues between Old Norse myth and Beowulf used in the film are
inspired by Beowulf scholarship. For a discussion of analogues between
Norse legends and the Old English epic see, for example, the chapter
“Myth and legend” in Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf
(Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 98–129. Discussing Grendel’s
mother’s depiction in the film as a hyperfeminine monster, Chris Jones
posits that “the film is a record of what escapes the academy and how its
various discourses are selected, edited, altered, understood, misunder-
stood, and re-understood . . . [It] is the fruit of a long conversation that
has always been going on between the academy and ‘the outside world’”
( Jones, “From Heorot to Hollywood,” p. 23).
36. In this small detail, the final film significantly differs from the final
shooting draft of the script, where the horn features as a neuter. Gaiman
and Avary, Script Book, pp. 170–71. Quotes from the film are noted with
reference to the script only; differences to the film are highlighted if
relevant to our argument.
152 PH I L I P P H I N Z A N D M A RG I T TA ROU S E

37. Gaiman and Avary, Script Book, p. 203.

38. Ibid., p. 206.
39. Ibid., p. 226 [original emphasis].
40. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf. Bilingual Edition (London: Faber and Faber,
1999), p. xix. Heaney himself is undoubtedly very aware of the poem’s
visual dimension when he remarks: “we can envisage it as an animated
cartoon” (Heaney, Beowulf, p. xiii).
41. Enabled by the hyperillusionistic aesthetics of CGI, gold has a sexually
charged presence in the film as if the filmmakers had followed Heaney’s
observation by the letter. Liquid gold drips off Grendel’s mother’s breasts;
Beowulf slays a golden man-dragon (his son). Dying, the monster morphs
into the golden shape of a naked young man. Beowulf reaches out to the
man on the shore, they touch brief ly, until the young man melts away in a
golden wave. For a queer reading of this scene, see David Green, Manhood
in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
2009), p. 6.
42 . Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London:
Reaktion, 2006), p. 9.
43. Stephen G. Nichols, “The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity
in Medieval Culture,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee,
Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 12 [1–18]. He uses the phrase again
in “Modernism and the Politics of Medieval Studies,” in Medievalism
and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 49 [25–56].
44. Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998), p. 20.
45. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, “Introduction: The A-Chronology of
Medieval Film,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 11 [1–19].
46. Telotte, Animating Space, p. 247.
47. The dialogue is slightly different as recorded in the script book; most
importantly, Grendel speaks a form of Old English in the film as opposed to
modern English in the script. Gaiman and Avary, Script Book, p. 184–85.
48. Gaiman and Avary, Script Book, p. 218.
49. Ibid., p. 181.
50. Ibid., p. 203.
51. Ibid., p. 210.
52 . Ibid., p. 213.
53. Beowulf ’s CG rendition of Jolie reminds us of her roles in previous
films—most notably, as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, who started “life” as
an entirely digital character in computer games.
54. Anke Bernau, “Suspended Animation: Myth, Memory and History in
Beowulf,” Screening the Past 26 (2009), available at: http://tlweb.latrobe
.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/26/early-europe/myth-memory
-history-beowulf.html.
 A DA P TAT ION A S H Y P E R R E A L I T Y 153

55. Gaiman and Avary, Script Book, p. 210.

56. This is the dialogue as presented in the film that uses the phrase “Hallend
Christ.” For the scripted dialogue, see Gaiman and Avary, Script Book,
p. 214.
57. Stephen T. Asma, “Never Mind Grendel. Can Beowulf Conquer the
21st-Century Guilt Trip?” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7,
2007, B15 [B14–B15].
58. Bill Desowitz, “Jerome Chen Talks Beowulf VFX Oscar Potential,”
Animation World Network, available at: www.awn.com/articles/production
/jerome-chen-talks-ibeowulfi-vfx-oscar-potential/page/3%2C1.
59. For a more nuanced view, see Carol J. Clover, “The Germanic Context
of the Unferth Episode,” Speculum 55 (1980): 444–68.
60. Gaiman and Avary, Script Book, p. 223.
61. Asma, “Never Mind Grendel,” p. B15.
62 . Ibid., p. B15.
63. Gaiman and Avary, Script Book, p. 135.
64. According to Bildhauer, a sense of progress is communicated in the ways
in which bodies are portrayed in the film, where the differences between
human and animal are destabilized. Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle
Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011), pp. 196–98.
65. On the subject of Beowulf as unreliable narrator, see, for example, Anke
Bernau, “Suspended Animation,” or Chris Jones, “From Heorot to
Hollywood.”
66. Similarly, the more recent Beowulf adaptation Outlander (dir. Howard
McCain [US: The Weinstein Company, 2008]) portrays the monsters
as creatures previously wronged by “humans.” The so-called Moorven
attack because their planet has been colonized by technologically
advanced humanoid aliens, and their kind extinguished but for one preg-
nant female who ends up shipwrecked together with the alien Beowulf-
character in Norway AD 709. Here, too, the monsters appear to stand in
for a terrorist threat, which the terrorized have brought upon themselves.
Technological superiority is here both the cause of, and the answer to, a
monstrous disruption that can be defeated. Hence, Outlander is ultimately
more optimistic than Zemeckis’s film.
67. Gaiman and Avary, Script Book, p. 171. The question is repeated by Wiglaf
in another context, see p. 210.
CHAPTER 7

PERILS OF GENERATION: INCEST,

ROMANCE, AND THE PROLIFERATION OF
NARRATIVE IN GAME OF THRONES*

Martin Bleisteiner

N ot all is well in the Seven Kingdoms: The children of the king are
not in fact the children of the king. As the closely guarded secret
of their true parentage seeps out, the cogs and wheels of an unstop-
pable mechanism grind into motion that will plunge the realm into
all-out civil war. The fragile political equilibrium in the fictional world
of Westeros is destroyed, and what we get in return is George R. R.
Martin’s multivolume series of novels A Song of Ice and Fire (1996 to
present),1 HBO’s award-winning television adaptation of that epic saga,
Game of Thrones (2011 to present),2 as well as a computer game of the
same name (2012), and a steadily expanding range of associated mer-
chandise. What, then, is the precise nature of the impetus that triggers
this colossal narrative machine? As it transpires, the actual father of King
Robert Baratheon’s official heirs is none other than Jaime Lannister, the
queen’s twin brother.
Situated at the very core of the fictional world, the incestuous sexual
relationship between siblings is the most fundamental plot-generating
device in Game of Thrones. The use of incest for this kind of narrative
function is anything but unprecedented: Medieval romance frequently
harnesses the generative powers of incest to precisely the same purpose
of launching itself and propelling its narrative forward. Romance, where
“historical phenomena and fantasy may collide and vanish, each into the
other, without explanation or apology, at the precise locations where both
can be readily mined to best advantage,”3 also furnishes an apt model
156 M A RT I N BL EIST EI N E R

for the characteristic mixture of the “medieval” and the “fantastic” that
becomes obvious from the very first minutes of the initial episode of Game
of Thrones.4 If I subsequently argue that Game of Thrones co-opts incest for
its fictional world-making in a manner similar to romance, this is not to
say, however, that this is done in a mirrorlike fashion that would lend itself
to rigid generic taxonomy; rather, Game of Thrones is a hybrid work of art
which clearly evidences that generic conventions derive much of their
force from being honored both in the breach and in the observance.
In my use of the term “romance” I follow Helen Cooper, who has
adapted Richard Dawkins’s concept of “meme” for the romance context.
For Cooper, a “meme” is “an idea that behaves like a gene in its abil-
ity to replicate faithfully and abundantly, but also on occasion to adapt,
mutate, and therefore survive in different forms and cultures.”5 If a “family
resemblance,”6 which may be more or less pronounced, is sufficient to
trigger certain audience expectations, it is not necessary for a work of art
to exhibit every single one of the “memes” that collectively form the body
of romance’s genetic heritage. Indeed, “any of the features that might be
taken as definitive for the genre may be absent in any particular case.” 7
It is fascinating to note that theorists’ attempts to grasp the proliferat-
ing nature of romance in terms of a family metaphor have a literal parallel
in the generational peril that is incest.8 Definitions of incest depend pri-
marily on cultural context—if the prevalent sense today seems to revolve
around sexual relationships between persons connected by close “blood
kinship,” this is by no means a historical constant. In fact, for a great num-
ber of historical definitions of incest biological kinship is irrelevant; his-
torical notions of incest may include, for example, a sexual taboo around
the spiritual connection between priest and congregation or godfather
and godchild known as cognatio spiritualis, as well as a prohibition of sexual
contacts that covers kinship established through marriage ties.9 When
Mordred betrays King Arthur and uses his father’s absence as an opportu-
nity to seize both the kingdom and Queen Guinevere, he not only com-
mits an act of treason, but is also guilty of incest even though the queen is
not his biological mother.10
While Game of Thrones does not make use of this conceptual mal-
leability and stages incest exclusively in the context of various kinship
relationships, it nonetheless exhibits a striking multiplication of incest in
the narrative: The aftereffects of incestuous relations constitute a crucial
element in a whole number of constellations,11 including the external
forces menacing the realm from its northern and south-eastern margins.
Incest is to be encountered both at the narrative’s very origin and in its
most slender ramifications. In terms of sheer quantity alone, Game of
Thrones appears to overf low the boundaries of the model provided by
 PE R I L S OF GE N E R AT ION 157

romance. Yet the propensity to transgress, to resist conceptual, thematic

and quantifying constraints, is the very essence of romance itself, “the
shape-shifter par excellence among medieval genres, a protean form that
refuses to settle into neat boundaries prescribed by modern critics.”12 If
Game of Thrones modifies and enhances romance’s deployment of incest,
this mouvance is effective not despite but because of the f lexible frame of
reference provided by romance.
Given incest’s ability to generate plot, the incestuous exuberance of
Game of Thrones must needs have a structural effect: For better or worse,
the uncanny generative powers of incest carry the potential of uninhibited
proliferation—a potential that seems to increase the more often these pow-
ers are invoked. The effects of this growth are plainly visible in Martin’s
novels with their multitude of plotlines and their fragmented arrangement
of alternating point-of-view characters, which serve as focalizers for the
narration. On a more abstract level, the strong presence of incest in the
narrative structure of Game of Thrones finds a metaphorical counterpart in
the sprawling multimedia franchise that derives from the cross-pollination
of Martin’s expansive literary creation with its various spin-offs. As the
universe of Game of Thrones expands globally, the boundaries between
the novels and other types of media seem to collapse along with those
between the author and his audience: Books, television series, interactive
entertainment products, and fan blogs all develop in parallel and come to
mutually inf luence each other. The result is a multidimensional publish-
ing phenomenon,13 which is simultaneously subject to powerful centrifu-
gal and centripetal forces with as of yet unpredictable results.
The incestuous sibling relationship between Cersei and Jamie Lannister
unfolds at the very heart of the fictional world’s realpolitik; King’s Landing,
the capital of the Seven Kingdoms, is the place where royal power resides.
In assigning such a central place to brother-sister incest, Game of Thrones
would seem considerably to expand the model provided by medieval
romance, where, generally speaking, this type of incest is not a recurrent
motif14 and where it usually constitutes “a sub-plot rather than a central
theme, and often involves minor characters rather than the protagonists.”15
There are major exceptions, however, that fully justify referring to a
“medieval fashion for attaching sibling incest stories to some of the great
hero cycles,”16 with Siegfried, Charlemagne, and Arthur being particularly
prominent examples.17
The significance of the brother-sister incest scenario in some strands
of the Arthurian tradition18 is not the only parallel to Game of Thrones:
The Iron Throne of Westeros fulfills the same central function for the
narrative economy of Game of Thrones as the Round Table in the context
of Arthurian romance. On the one hand, the royal throne anchors the
158 M A RT I N BL EIST EI N E R

narrative’s individual strands by giving them a place where they can ulti-
mately converge again; on the other hand, it serves as the launching pad
for the individual characters’ various adventures, or rather, their quests.19
In Jaime Lannister’s case, it is interesting to note that his quest is to return
to Cersei after his capture by opposing forces so that they can resume
their incestuous relationship. This creates a curious situation where incest
directly causes Jaime’s removal from the proximity of his sister, while
simultaneously motivating his attempts to return to her. Game of Thrones
thus inverts the direction in which such quests usually move in romance,
where they are initiated as characters seek to escape from or prevent
incestuous contamination.20
Jaime will eventually terminate the incestuous relationship with his
sister—Game of Thrones stages the striking off of Jaime’s right hand by
one of his captors as a moral turning point. The removal of the very
part of Jaime’s body that stands in as a synecdoche for the violent acts
he committed, his “sword hand,” puts an end to his career as a warrior.
And while the cutting off of Jaime’s hand is no castration in the technical
sense of the term, it does send him on a trajectory that will enable him to
renounce his sexual contacts with his sister after a final erotic encounter.
As long as both parties actively seek to continue their incestuous liaison,
however, perpetrator and victim cannot clearly be identified; although
the relationship is universally condemned by the characters that learn
of it or suspect it, the novels at first make much of the way in which
Cersei and Jaime see each other as another version of their own self. It
would appear that Game of Thrones exhibits a certain ambiguity as far as
the moral implications of incest are concerned, an ambiguity similar to
the one we frequently encounter in religious and mythological contexts,
where incest is “both the worst of sins and the most generative of acts,
implying both creation and destruction.”21
What becomes evident here is incest’s paradoxical ability to propel the
plot into diametrically opposed directions: “Incest may further the pro-
tagonist’s career in some unexpected way, as in the case of Gregorius, or
it may lead to the destruction of his life’s work, as in the case of Arthur.”22
Apparently, the moral and ethical ballast incest is fraught with in no way
impairs its productivity as a plot-generating device. Indeed, as far as the
outcome of incestuous relationships is concerned, there appears to be a
remarkable openness:

A child born of incest, particularly that between brother and sister, is the
closest approximation of parthenogenesis or self-duplication; perpetuation
of a hero’s bloodline by in-breeding with his sister, his other self, would be
expected to intensify the virtue inherent in their blood . . . But if this child
 PE R I L S OF GE N E R AT ION 159

may, like Roland, reproduce all the virtues of a noble father, the reverse
may also be true. The son may embody his parents’ qualities but turn them
to evil purposes: he may be destined to kill his own father, for only the
hero’s demonic counterpart can encompass his destruction. 23

In Game of Thrones, Jamie and Cersei’s younger children—Princess

Myrcella and Prince Tommen—show no indications of erratic behavior
at all, but the oldest son Joffrey, heir to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms,
is portrayed as psychologically unstable and displays more and more dis-
concerting signs of paranoia and sadism as the narrative progresses. In
Game of Thrones as in romance, past sins can thus be seen to catch up
with protagonists in the shape of their children—but “[e]lsewhere, good
may come of evil; in fact, an otherwise sinful sexual liaison is often the
necessary condition for the birth of an exceptional child.”24 Incest may
bring about distinctive properties in a hero that prove indispensable for
propelling the plot in a certain direction.
Moving away from the center of Westeros to its south-eastern
periphery,25 I would now like to investigate a further constellation in
which incest plays just such a role. Forced to f lee the Seven Kingdoms
after their royal father Aerys II is deposed and killed along with most
other members of their family, Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen find
themselves exiled to the adjoining continent of Essos, separated from
Westeros by a stretch of Ocean called “The Narrow Sea.” For centuries,
the Targaryens practiced systematic intermarriage between siblings for
dynastic reasons. In the fictional world this fact seems to be accepted
as a given, a custom related to the nature of the Targaryen dynasty as a
kind of archaic remnant of a previous civilization external to Westeros,
the culture of “Old Valyria” that metaphorically partakes of mythical
Atlantis, Egypt, and Rome.26
While incest as a dynastic strategy resulted in the occurrence of mad-
ness in some family members (the “Mad King” Aerys II being a case in
point), it also seems to have conserved a genetically transferred affinity
to fire and the ability to hatch and communicate with dragons. In the
case at hand, incest thus does not generate the more predictable outcome
of stagnating intradynastic circularity,27 imagined in opposition to an
exogamous aristocratic marriage policy that would enrich the gene pool
as well as broker politically valuable alliances. Instead, incest assumes a
highly ambivalent role: Mental deformity on the one hand is contrasted
with magical powers on the other, a dichotomy neatly embodied by the
stark differences between the siblings Viserys and Daenerys themselves.
Although favored by the law of male primogeniture, the exilé would-
be king Viserys lacks the magical resistance to heat that marks a true
160 M A RT I N BL EIST EI N E R

Targaryen “dragon king” and succumbs to a crowning with liquid gold

to which he is subjected after conspicuously displaying his incompetence
in reclaiming the throne of Westeros for his dispossessed dynasty.28 His
sister Daenerys, by contrast, emerges unscathed like Phoenix from the
ashes out of the charred remains of her husband Khal Drogo’s funeral
pyre in a scene not overly concerned with metaphorical subtlety. In addi-
tion to her surviving this trial-by-fire, the dragons hatched in the con-
f lagration offer further magical proof not only of her lineage but also
of her dynastic destiny, or in other words, of the direction the plot can
ultimately be expected to take (figure 7.1).29
The incestuous marriage policy of her forebears has bequeathed unique
magical abilities to Daenerys that would otherwise be unavailable in the
universe of Game of Thrones. While both the novels and the television
series explicitly invest Daenerys’s relationship to her brother with inces-
tuous overtones, no sexual consummation takes place before Daenerys is
married off at the age of 13, nor is there any opportunity afterwards. In
this case, the sibling incest that served as the conduit for bringing magic
into being in the fictional world is relegated to the past and does not
have to be repeated any further—its function is fulfilled, and Daenerys
remains uncontaminated despite the moments of violent incestuous frisson
clearly visible between her brother and herself.30
As Game of Thrones explores incest from a variety of angles, the mani-
fold strands of narrative woven around the main political conf lict pick up
the central topoi, provide a mirror for the main plot, and echo and invert

Figure 7.1 Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons: magic born from incest in
Game of Thrones.
 PE R I L S OF GE N E R AT ION 161

its motifs and subject matter. In doing so, Game of Thrones imitates typi-
cal romance strategies in order to connect themes and narrative strands.
Mirroring as a strategy of representation serves a bracketing function
similar to the one causality assumes in the context of the psychologically
“realistic” novel, a cohesive effect that Game of Thrones with its episodic
structure and fragmented narrative perspective is very much in need of.
If romance strives to reconcile the two fundamental, competing
impulses inherent in a narrative approach that lacks a unified perspective,
namely “the impetus to segment the narrative into separate units and the
equally powerful compulsion to associate and continue romance across
such divisions,”31 Game of Thrones faces a similar challenge and opts for a
similar solution: “interlace,” a term originally coined by Beowulf-scholar
John Leyerle. In the context of romance, “adventures will typically coin-
cide, digress, converge, overlap, and part company again. This is a way of
telling sequentially a number of stories that happen at the same time, but
it is more than just a device for doing that”32—the interlaced parts do not
always join seamlessly, so that much is left for the audience to infer.33 This
is why interlacing works particularly well in connection with “glisse-
ment,” a process in which motifs and characters move in and out of focus.
Elements that are central to a certain episode assume a marginal position
in other parts of the narrative, only to return again later with a slightly
changed role.34
With its heavy reliance on cliff hangers, Game of Thrones makes the
fullest possible use of these strategies to open up spaces for the narrative to
develop in unexpected directions. At the same time, interlace and glisse-
ment are being deployed as devices to order and contain these very devel-
opments, a process in which it becomes obvious that the two narrative
techniques are strained to the very limits of their productivity. Whether or
not a particular quest out of the many in Game of Thrones will be success-
ful always appears to be remarkably uncertain. It is a distinctive feature of
both the novels and the television series that quite a number of characters
do not live to see their quests to completion. But this does not stop the
narrative machine. Quite on the contrary, it causes several new branches
of the narrative to f lourish where one has been removed—rather like the
many-headed hydra, who sprouts more heads as soon as one is cut off.
The most striking example of this proliferation of plots through osten-
sibly ending a main plot line is perhaps the beheading of Eddard Stark
at the end of the show’s first season. In keeping with the correspond-
ing novel, it not only eliminates a major character from the story, but
also a well-known actor from the cast in a plot twist highly unexpected
for an audience used to seeing its male leads weather all storms.35 But
Stark’s death launches numerous quests as the members of his family are
162 M A RT I N BL EIST EI N E R

scattered across the realm and subsequently strive for a reunion. His wife
Catelyn, his daughters Sansa and Arya, his son Brandon, and even his
ward Theon Greyjoy all serve as important focalizers and have their own
adventures, of which Arya’s is arguably the most swashbuckling.
Game of Thrones’s propensity for transgressing and exceeding narra-
tive boundaries manifests itself not only in the proliferation of the cen-
tral motif of incest and the exuberant growth of the narrative structure
around it, but also in the way in which incest is staged—in other words,
the overf lowing of boundaries applies not only to what is shown, but also
to how it is shown. Given the fact that George R. R. Martin worked
predominantly as a script writer during the years preceding the immense
success of Game of Thrones, it is perhaps no surprise that the novels have a
strong stylistic tendency toward the visual, which also makes itself felt in
the depiction of incest. This becomes evident in the scene in which little
Brandon Stark’s penchant for climbing leads to his unwittingly discov-
ering Jaime and Cersei in flagrante delicto in the ruins of an old tower, as
well as in a sequence of scenes revolving around the so-called Eyrie, the
remote mountain fortress that serves as the seat of House Arryn.
Most eminent among the famed Knights of the Vale, the Arryn dynasty
with the telling motto “As high as honor” (A Game of Thrones, p. 818)
lays claim to epitomizing the values of knighthood to the highest possible
degree. But it soon becomes obvious that circumstances at the “Eyrie”
fail to conform to this aspiration: Due to Lord Jon Arryn’s untimely
death while serving as “Hand of the King” in the capital King’s Landing,
the politically significant seat of the “Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the
Vale” (A Game of Thrones, p. 819) is currently occupied by Robert Arryn,
a mentally and physically impaired six-year-old dominated by an over-
bearing and psychologically unstable mother, Lady Lysa née Tully. With
Lysa Arryn teetering precariously on the brink of madness, the dangerous
power vacuum inherent in such a situation looms large.
As the vagaries of plot and fortune bring Lady Lysa’s sister Catelyn
Stark and her prisoner Tyrion Lannister to the remote Vale of Arryn, both
the novel and the television series carefully stage the shocking revelation
that Robert’s obvious inability to ever fulfill his political responsibilities
as a lord is directly connected to his mother’s habit of still breastfeeding
him at the age of six. In A Game of Thrones, Catelyn Stark is “at a loss for
words” (A Game of Thrones, p. 376) as she witnesses the following scene:

“Don’t be afraid, my sweet baby,” Lysa whispered. “Mother’s here, noth-

ing will hurt you.” She opened her robe and drew out a pale, heavy breast,
tipped with red. The boy grabbed for it eagerly, buried his face against her
chest, and began to suck. Lysa stroked his hair. (A Game of Thrones, p. 376)
 PE R I L S OF GE N E R AT ION 163

In a manner similar to the novel’s zooming in on the “pale breast, tipped

with red,” Kate Dickie, the actress portraying Lysa Arryn in the tele-
vision series, wears a gown specifically cut so as to visually emphasize
her naked, white breast. The cinematic gaze of the television series thus
directly follows the direction provided by the novel.
While this is not the type of scenario where a mother consummates
incest with a sexually mature son,36 the mother’s transgressive closeness to
her prepubescent child borders on the sexual and manifests itself in sexu-
alized dialogue. The incestuous overtones are sufficiently pronounced to
serve as a powerful metaphor for the moral and political corruption reign-
ing in the lofty “Eyrie.” The specter of nascent incest is thus deployed
to dismantle the chivalric ethos of Westeros where it is most explicitly
claimed; Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the attempted murder of Brandon
Stark fittingly turns into a grotesque parody of justice, a fact which the
novel again connects to the pathological mother-son relationship for
which the female breast acts as a highly sensualized synecdoche:

“Is he a bad man?” the Lord of the Eyrie asked, his mother’s breast popping
from his mouth, the nipple wet and red. “A very bad man,” Lysa told him
as she covered herself, “but Mother won’t let him harm my little baby.”
“Make him f ly,” Robert said eagerly. (A Game of Thrones, p. 377)

The transgression of boundaries inherent in the incest motif clearly does

not stop at the intratextual level—it also seems to apply to the intertex-
tual relationship between the various types of media that contribute to
the multimedia conglomerate of Game of Thrones. With its pronounced
extraliterary dimension, Game of Thrones provides an ideal opportunity
for critics to address the desideratum of engaging with the way in which
works “produce a sustainable and multivalent media franchise, coherent
in itself but open to future development.”37
In the context of transmedial marketing, theorists have been discussing
the question as to how productive it is to insist on hierarchies between
literature and other types of media such as films or computer games. If
a critical tendency to judge filmic adaptations according to the degree
to which they remain “faithful” to the (usually literary) “original” still
existed even though it is justly dismissed as methodological anathema in
current criticism,38 such an approach would prove utterly unsuitable to
tackle the complexity of an ongoing phenomenon like Game of Thrones.
The traditional unidirectional model of adaptation, where a more or less
canonical novel yields a more or less “accurate” filmic adaptation, would
be hard-pressed even to explain the simple fact that sales of the novels only
started skyrocketing after the tremendous success of the television series.
164 M A RT I N BL EIST EI N E R

In Martin’s person, we have a writer of film scripts turned novel-

ist who also supervises the filmic adaptation of his works. Moreover,
Martin is known to participate in internet blogs and in the fan culture
in general—in online commentaries concerning his works, he may now
encounter contributors who use the names of his own characters as the
aliases under which they engage with and respond to his creation.39 With
no end in sight to the series of novels—projected as a trilogy, a sixth
installment is currently in the making and at least one more has already
been announced—it is far from certain that the fragmented narrative
will at some point converge again and yield closure, and the relentless
pace of the television series means that it is catching up quickly with
the novels already in existence. It appears as though Martin’s fictional
cosmos has developed a life of its own and is now hot on the heels of its
own creator.
The notion that literature has a certain intellectual and cultural cachet
that television and film cannot hope to match is deeply entrenched,
closely intertwined with the question of whether certain qualities and
limitations are intrinsic and exclusive to particular types of media: “[I]t
seems that no art can acquire cultural capital until it has theorized itself
as medium-specific with its own formal and signifying possibilities.”40
The context of multiple adaptation provided by Game of Thrones with its
conspicuous intertextual layering shows, however, that it is quite pos-
sible to expand upon, and ultimately dismantle, the hierarchical binary of
“original” novel and “derivative” screen adaptation without joining sides
in a paragone of twenty-first-century media.41
With Game of Thrones presenting itself as an adaptation in more than
one sense, a continuum in which the narrative adapts medieval romance
and is itself adapted into other types of media in a complex interactive
scenario, the multimedia fantasy of communal literary production lived
out by Martin and his fans increasingly calls to mind the romantic per-
spective on medieval literary practice succinctly represented by the cover
artwork of the current edition of the Riverside Chaucer: Writer and
audience are united in a process of direct mutual interchange in which
the borders of orality and literacy become permeable. The fact that the
medieval can function as the foil for such projections is, I would argue, in
no small part due to the self-romanticizing of romance.
No matter if it is the “feigned orality”42 and assumed archaism of the
Alliterative Morte Arthure or the frequent appellative passages that seem to
dub all readers lords and ladies—romance’s success in the inventing and
staging of its own literary context is such that it becomes impossible at
times to discern cause and effect. Romance is not only a foil for its histori-
cal background—“[b]y intervening, persuading, inf luencing, judging,
 PE R I L S OF GE N E R AT ION 165

innovating, and deciding, [it] has a hand in the shaping of the past and
the making of the future.”43 In George R. R. Martin’s fictional uni-
verse, romance has come full circle: Apart from bequeathing the incest
motif to Game of Thrones for adaptation, which even in its most shocking
manifestations serves a powerful narrative function beyond simply mark-
ing evil, romance simultaneously provides a paradigm of production and
reception for one of the most successful and variegated medieval-themed
works of art that the contemporary media landscape has to offer.

Notes
* I am particularly grateful to Andrew James Johnston and Margitta Rouse,
whose helpful suggestions during the compositional stage of this chapter are
much appreciated. Further thanks are due to Sven Duncan Durie, who provided
perceptive criticism and encouragement at various junctures.
1. For the most part, I will limit my discussion to the two seasons of the
show that have been aired at the time of this paper’s composition and to
the two corresponding novels, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam
Books, 1996) and A Clash of Kings (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).
References to lines in the novels are given in parenthesis following the
individual quotes.
2 . For a list of awards that is as impressive as it is comprehensive, see
“Awards for Game of Thrones,” imdb.com, available at: www.imdb.com
/title/tt0944947/awards.
3. Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic. Medieval Romance and the Politics of
Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 2.
4. The show starts as a group of mounted men clad in furs and armed with
swords emerge from the portcullis of what appears to be a kind of icy
fortress, venturing out into a hostile winter forest where they discover a
number of horribly mutilated corpses and have a thoroughly fatal encoun-
ter with zombielike creatures. A choice set of signs like crenellated battle-
ments, horses, coarse clothing, severed limbs and swords is sufficient to
lend the scene a distinctly medieval air, although a closer look reveals
that only the particular type of cross-guard-equipped sword that is shown
could be said to be unique to certain parts of the historical period com-
monly referred to as the European Middle Ages. Other popular markers
of the medieval in evidence here are bad teeth (Sarah Salih, “Cinematic
Authenticity-Effects and Medieval Art: A Paradox,” in Medieval Film, ed.
Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer [Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2009], pp. 28–29 [20–39]) and filth, that classic litmus test of the
attitude of a film or television series towards the Middle Ages (Laurie
A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations. The Middle
Ages on Film [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010],
p. 48). On the other hand, the scene also makes it abundantly clear that
166 M A RT I N BL EIST EI N E R

an exclusively “realistic” portrayal of the Middle Ages is not forthcoming,

and that there is a strongly fantastic element to be reckoned with: Blue-
eyed undead are hardly the stuff of history books.
5. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time. Transforming Motifs from
Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), pp. 3–4.
6. Ibid., p. 8. Cooper in turn borrows the term from Wittgenstein as
expounded in his Philosophical Investigations.
7. Ibid., p. 9 [original emphasis]. Understood in these terms, it is unneces-
sary to discard the term romance as a heuristic tool, as Margaret Doody
has suggested due to the derogatory connotations Bakhtinian orthodoxy
attaches to it (Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel [New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996], here esp. p. 15).
8. In a closely related approach to the metaphorical conceptualization of
romance’s transgressive nature, Geraldine Heng has succinctly called it
“a desiring narratorial modality that coalesces from the extant cultural
matrix at hand, poaching and cannibalizing from a hybridity of all and
any available resources, to transact a magical relationship with history, of
which it is in fact a consuming part” (Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 9).
9. Jutta Eming, Claudia Jarzebowski, and Claudia Ulbrich, “Einleitung,”
in Historische Inzestdiskurse, ed. Jutta Eming, Claudia Jarzebowski, and
Claudia Ulbrich (Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer, 2003), here esp.
p. 9 [9–20].
10. M. Victoria Guerin, The Fall of Kings and Princes. Structure and Destruction
in Arthurian Tragedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 9.
11. All three basic incestuous constellations suggested by Elizabeth Archibald
can be encountered in Game of Thrones: mother-son incest, sibling incest,
and father-daughter incest (Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval
Imagination [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001], here esp. p. 1).
12. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance in Medieval France,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. R. L. Krueger
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 13 [13–28].
13. Game of Thrones seems to be right on the verge of making inroads into the
territory of scholarly investigation. The only publication on the novels or
the HBO series currently available is William Irwin and Henry Jacoby,
eds., Game of Thrones and Philosophy. Logic Cuts Deeper Than Swords
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012). While equipped with a slender scholarly
apparatus, the collection of essays with its focus on the accessible discus-
sion of philosophical issues seems to be aimed predominantly at fans—
the presence of a comprehensive spoiler warning after the foreword may
be taken as an indicator of the intended audience.
14. Jutta Eming, “Inzestneigung und Inzestvollzug im mittelalterlichen
Liebes- und Abenteuerroman (Mai und Beaflor und Apollonius von Tyrus),”
in Historische Inzestdiskurse, ed. Jutta Eming, Claudia Jarzebowski, and
Claudia Ulbrich (Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer, 2003), p. 26 [21–45];
see also Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, p. 229.
 PE R I L S OF GE N E R AT ION 167

15. Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, p. 192.

16. Ibid., p. 193.
17. Ibid.
18. Guerin, The Fall of Kings, here esp. pp. 7–8. Guerin reads Mordred as
the skeleton in the Arthurian closet, the sexual transgression made f lesh
which comes back to haunt Arthur with a vengeance, and argues that the
incest motif was present in the material from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
famous occupatio onwards, although it took a detour through the French
Prose Cycle before it resurfaced in an explicit manner in Malory.
19. The quest with its powerful circular pattern of “an opening disruption
of a state of order, followed by a period of trial and suffering, even an
encounter with death, yet with a final symbolic resurrection and better
restoration” (Cooper, English Romance, p. 5) is arguably the most per-
sistent heritage of romance, a quasi-religious structure characteristic
enough for Northrop Frye to dub romance “Secular Scripture.”
20. In the secular context of Apollonius of Tyre, for example, death is the only
possible outcome for those involved in consummated father-daughter
incest (Eming, “Inzestneigung,” p. 32). In a religious context, however,
incest may serve as a mark of distinction for certain characters such as
Judas and Gregorius (Eming, “Inzestneigung,” p. 23; Guerin, The Fall
of Kings, pp. 15–16) and can be overcome through repentance and grace
(Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, p. 5).
21. Guerin, The Fall of Kings, p. 15.
22 . Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, p. 230.
23. Guerin, The Fall of Kings, p.17.
24. Ibid., p. 22.
25. There is a further incestuous constellation which is again to be encoun-
tered on the margins of the fictional world, albeit this time in the far
north, in the icy regions “beyond the Wall.” A particularly unsavory
character called Craster enters into sexual relationships with his daughters
and abandons all male children in the woods where they join the ranks
of the “Others,” supernatural creatures seemingly intent on transforming
all living beings into zombies under their thrall. On a metaphorical level,
incest thus directly feeds the otherworldly menace from the northern
cold that threatens to exterminate life in the fictional world.
26. The Valyrian language is spoken throughout the fictional world, where
it serves as a type of lingua franca as well as an access point to the reser-
voir of learning contained in ancient manuscripts. “Valyrian steel” is the
pinnacle of metallurgical finesse unequalled by anything contemporary
Westeros has to offer, hinting at the technological supremacy of the van-
ished civilization. When contrasted with the modernization embodied
by the prosperous south-eastern merchant states which owe more than
a passing resemblance to Venice, it becomes clear that Game of Thrones
stages the chronological level of its main action as the equivalent of a
Middle Ages which has an Antiquity preceding it and a Modernity that
will eventually follow.
168 M A RT I N BL EIST EI N E R

27. Andrew James Johnston discusses the problem of historical circularity

inherent in incest comprehensively in regard to Shakespeare’s Pericles
and the preceding treatment of the incest motif in Chaucer and Gower
(Andrew James Johnston, “Sailing the Seas of Literary History. Gower,
Chaucer, and the Problem of Incest in Shakespeare’s Pericles,” Poetica
41.3–4 [2009]: here esp. 395 [381–407]).
28. Where romance deals with legitimacy of rule, “[a] disputed succession
calls for some sign by which the rightful king can be known” (Cooper,
English Romance, p. 324), a mechanism of which Viserys Targaryen learns
at his peril here. In romance, the rightful heir to the vacant or usurped
throne is likely to be identified with the help of magic: Arthur is the only
person capable of pulling the proverbial sword from the stone; Havelok
the Dane’s royal status is conveniently indicated by a golden shimmer
that issues from his mouth when he sleeps, and he has a birthmark in the
shape of a golden cross on his right shoulder (both examples taken from
Cooper, English Romance, p. 324). No supernatural powers come to the
aid of Viserys at the decisive moment.
29. It seems likely that the narrative will at some point pit the dragons and
the fire they represent against the icy “Others” who threaten to annihi-
late the civilization of Westeros from the North. If the individual quests
of Game of Thrones do at some point conjoin to reveal who—if anyone—
will ultimately sit the Iron Throne, the dragons will in all likelihood
feature prominently in the denouement.
30. In the novel, Viserys accosts Daenerys before she is to meet her future
husband: “He pushed back her shoulders with his hands. ‘Let them see
that you have a woman’s shape now.’ His fingers brushed lightly over her
budding breasts and tightened on a nipple” (A Game of Thrones, p. 29).
The television series omits the tunic that is present in the novel.
31. Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance,” p. 25.
32 . Cooper, English Romance, p. 62.
33. Ibid., p. 63.
34. Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance,” pp. 21–22.
35. Sean Bean, the actor who portrays Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones,
received top billing in the opening sequence of the show up to this point.
36. Incestuous mother-son desire involving adult or adolescent partners
would be the constellation to be encountered in medieval literature,
secular or religious (cf. for example Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale”).
37. Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism. The Imaginary Middle Ages
( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), p. 186.
38. See for example Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York:
Routledge, 2006), p. xiii: “[T]he idea of ‘fidelity’ to that prior text is
often what drives any directly comparative method of study.”
39. Popular choices seem to be Arya Stark and Daenerys Targaryen, but
Tyrion Lannister, and even somewhat unlikely choices such as Greatjon
Umber surface as well. Given the f leeting nature of online commentaries,
I have to stress that this observation is not based on sound empirical data.
 PE R I L S OF GE N E R AT ION 169

40. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 34.

41. I tend to concur with Linda Hutcheon, who proposes that there are
three modes to “engage with stories”: “telling, showing, interacting”
(Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. xiv). Of these, “each mode, like
each medium, has its own specificity, if not its own essence. In other
words, no mode is inherently good at doing one thing and not another;
but each has at its disposal different means of expression—media and
genres—and so can aim at and achieve certain things better than others”
(Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, pp. 23–24 [original emphasis]).
42 . Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to
Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), p. 170.
43. Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 8.
CHAPTER 8

ARTHURIAN MYTH AND CINEMATIC

HORROR: M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN’S
THE SIXTH SENSE

Hans Jürgen Scheuer

The Quest for the Sixth Sense

An eye-catching arrangement of numbers glowing red against a black
background dominates one of the promotional posters of M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (US: Hollywood Pictures, 1999).1 The num-
bers enumerate the five senses: 1 sight—2 sound—3 smell— 4 taste—5
touch. The unlabelled number six, alone, takes the form of a fiery wreath
enclosing a child’s silhouette. A laconic subscriptio states: “Not Every Gift
is a Blessing.” Although, strictly speaking, the image is not part of the
movie itself, it nevertheless provides important paratextual information.
In emblematic form, the poster gestures toward some of the central ques-
tions the film raises as its narrative unfolds: Which unearthly, burden-
some, or cursed gift must remain unnamed? How will the sixth sense,
for which there is no other word, be displayed, and what can be per-
ceived with it: both by the film’s main protagonists Malcolm Crowe,
child psychologist, and Cole Sear, his patient, whose telling names point
to an obscure, dark form of (fore)sight? How do we, the viewers, perceive
(with) this sense? And how is the sixth sense related to the camera’s eye,
and modes of cinematographic communication?
The film’s sophisticated screenplay and the careful performance of its
most crucial moments immediately caught the attention of a wide variety
of critics; an interest that has been sustained to this day. Curiously, most
responses to the film barely touch upon the sixth sense as the central
172 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

aspect of the film. Usually, the sixth sense is merely considered in terms
of plot motivation, as an interface to the supernatural. In the few cases
where the sixth sense actually is credited with greater significance, it
tends to be treated as an aspect of cinematographic self-referentiality,
whereby the cinema is “the true sixth sense.”2 Nobody ever mentions
the sixth sense’s historical and artificial constructedness as an actual sense,
that is, a human faculty of sense perception grounded in a long history of
imagination and perception. Even when inner vision is discussed, as, for
example, in Nils Westboer’s study,3 the analysis of the cinematic images
and their relation to the history of perception tends to be replaced by a
discussion of cognitive theory (as pertaining to the physiological basis of
constructivism).
Much previous research has been directed toward an interest in the
film’s precarious form of communication between the living and the dead,
a communication no longer represented in the modern world by means
of collective family memory or traditional spirituality. Theological read-
ings, for instance, approach the film for the echoes and transformations
of religious concepts of transcendence in popular culture.4 Similarly, on
the basis of Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia and
Lacan’s notion of “belatedness,” psychoanalytical (re-)readings exam-
ine the film for representations of compromised sexuality.5 Other psy-
choanalytical discussions of the film address the Oedipal triangle and
the upheavals within middle-class nuclear families, stressing disruptions
through the loss of a father (in Cole’s case), a childless marriage (in the
case of Malcolm and his wife Anna), or a murdering parent (in the case
of Kyra, a girl poisoned by her mother). All these instances show the con-
cept of the family as severely threatened, or as having become entirely
obsolete.6
Narratological analyses of the film use varyingly elaborate conceptual
tools to rediscover the primary difference in epic form between fable and
sujet7 and focus on the narrative’s duplication through an auto-revision of
the plot structure which, after the ending has been revealed, requires us
to completely rework our initial understanding of the plot.8 Further nar-
ratological studies take a more specific route examining the conditions of
the fantastic,9 following Todorov’s notion of the “uncanny event”10 —in
the case of The Sixth Sense the visual and auditory presence of the dead.
Critics especially concerned with movie aesthetics focus in particular
on the horror genre and its self-ref lexive turn at the end of the twentieth
century.11 And studies grounded in the history of philosophy connect the
movie’s horror to Aristotle’s theory of catharsis,12 or regard the film as an
example of the Cartesian Cogito’s skepticism toward the dream/daemon-
controlled experience of the five senses and the soul.13
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 173

It was, however, a medievalist who made a very simple, but hugely

significant observation outside the well-worn paths of psychoanalytical,
narratological, (post)structuralist and feminist criticism. Kevin J. Harty
noticed that Shyamalan’s narrative possesses a clear subtext making his
film a “true cinematic translation of the Arthurian myth.”14 Strangely
enough, Harty’s fascinating contribution has made no discernible impact
on the film’s critical discussion.
I wish to read Harty’s observation—that The Sixth Sense constitutes a
fully valid film adaptation of the Arthurian legend—in conjunction with
medieval discourses on the nature of the sixth sense, discourses that previ-
ous commentators of the movie neglected entirely. Exposing the film’s
underlying Arthurian narrative structures will show that Shyamalan’s con-
cept of the sixth sense is also a full-f ledged adaptation of a premodern
notion of image perception underpinning the imagination of Arthurian
romance. Located in the interstice of adaptation studies and medieval film
studies, my reading is interested in the ways in which the filmmakers’
affinities with medieval concepts of otherworldliness drives The Sixth Sense
not only on the plot level, but also aesthetically in its treatment of horror, a
treatment relying on fundamentally premodern concepts of perception.
As will become apparent, Shyamalan’s use of Arthurian allusions dem-
onstrates that Arthurian romance does not primarily promote a model
of individual psychological development, as Harty sees it. Rather, it dis-
plays a concern with the contact between the living and the dead in the
medium of a narrated and imagined “common sense,” albeit seen from
the perspective of a modern director and screenwriter—a contact that
Shyamalan attempts to simulate or perhaps even to bring to life through
the genre of horror.

Communicating with the Dead

This is how the first encounter between Dr. Crowe, child psychologist,
and Cole Sear, his patient, is introduced: Waiting on a bench from where
he can observe Cole’s house, Malcolm is studying his notes. A close-up
of his anamnesis record highlights four observations: “parental status—
divorced,” “acute anxiety,” “socially isolated,” “possible mood disorder.”
We are shown this document twice and may note that the same words
are used for the separate cases of Vincent Grey, aged 10 (dated January 19,
1989) and Cole Sear, aged 9 (dated September 1998).
Vincent’s name is all too familiar from the film’s beginning. In a con-
frontation taking place roughly a year before the scene outside Cole’s
house, former patient Vincent, now an adult, lurks inside Malcom’s house
to take revenge because the therapist failed to treat him. Vincent shoots
174 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

Malcolm in the stomach, commits suicide, and leaves the doctor fight-
ing for his life. After one last view of the wounded man, who, lying on
his back appears almost unharmed, there is a cut to black, lasting several
seconds, before the film’s main part begins. We see a street, and a subtitle
(“The next Fall—South Philadelphia”) draws our attention away from
the shock of the attempted murder.
Crowe’s waiting would seem to be a continuation of his publicly
admired but nevertheless troubled working life. His reading the notes of
an old case that ended in violent aggression suggests that a traumatized
psychologist awaits his opportunity to redeem himself: Malcolm Crowe
is confronting his earlier failure by treating another child with Vincent’s
symptoms.
At first, he misses the right moment to initiate contact with the boy
and follows him into a church. Cole hides in a pew with his toy figures,
most of them cowboys as well as toy soldiers of the American Civil War.
Re-enacting scenes of suffering and death, the nine-year-old lets one of
the figures speak in Latin—transposing a psalm verse from the perfect
to the present tense: “De profundis clamo ad te Domine”15 [Out of the
depths I cry unto thee, O LORD]. This is the one toy figure that does
not belong to US-American history: a knight complete with shield, great
helm, silver hauberk, and f lail (figure 8.1). Cole positions him on one
of the pew’s arm rests, thereby making the knight look down as from a
stage. Malcolm’s first conversation with Cole takes place in these strange
circumstances. During this first talk, Malcolm already explicitly refers to

Figure 8.1 Cole Sear introducing the knight motif in Shyamalan’s The Sixth
Sense.
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 175

distant Medieval Europe and its concept of sanctuarium for the persecuted
and oppressed.
This brief sketch shows how the film’s first scenes already introduce
the plot’s most crucial elements. As will become clear over time, the
symptoms Vincent and Cole share are caused not by a mental illness,
but are the result of a special gift: Both boys are capable of seeing the
dead. But this fact is only revealed toward the middle of the film when
the boy finally shares his secret with the therapist and says: “I see dead
people.” Thus, the sixth sense is initially characterized as an organon of
participation in the supernatural, as a form of perception that establishes
an unearthly connection with the dark side of existence and turns its pos-
sessors into social outcasts.
Malcolm Crowe’s medical report on his earlier patient, Vincent Grey,
contains both a misleading psychopathological analysis of the phenom-
enon as well as a correct observation, the significance of which the doctor
has yet to fully understand:

Vincent seemed totally distracted by his surroundings—almost as if people

were lurking in the corners asking him questions at the same time as I
was—like he was looking for something in my office.

During his second attempt at grasping the condition aff licting both boys,
Malcolm is just as ignorant of his own actual situation. He has no insight
into what will turn out to be the film’s unforgettable moment of revela-
tion. This revelation has an overpowering effect on the viewer because it
suddenly inverts what appeared to be a clear and unquestioned distinction
between madness and reality, with Cole supposedly representing mad-
ness and Malcolm firmly fixed in the real world.
Eventually we understand that Malcolm’s visible existence is facili-
tated entirely by his patient’s sixth sense. The therapist did not survive
Vincent’s attack and is communicating with Cole as a dead person in a
parallel world, which is open only to those endowed with a special super-
natural gift. Otherwise, this parallel world remains completely closed off
to the other five senses. Under “normal” circumstances, the interaction
between the two worlds is at best instantaneous and abrupt, as in the
scene where Malcolm throws a stone through his wife’s shop window,
thereby interrupting the ostensible approaches of a potential new partner.
Ordinary human beings are either incapable of perceiving this kind of
interaction at all or do not perceive it as disrupting the scope of the “real”
within the world of the living.
Further, we learn from Cole that the dead are not aware of their condi-
tion. They move among the living as though they were alive themselves
176 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

and see only what they want to see. Hence they prove incapable of
explaining irritating perceptions, such as their persistent failure to com-
municate even with their loved ones. Since they have no notion of their
own state of being dead, the dead fail to understand the basic distinction
between life and death. Their ignorance of their own death, as well as of
the “co-existing” realities of the living and the dead, creates the familiar
symptoms on both sides: anxiety, isolation, and a troubled frame of mind.
Among the living this situation is expressed as the suppression of unre-
solved mourning and unatoned guilt; among the dead, in extreme cases
it appears as “madness”—as a raw fury at an environment that will not
acknowledge their presence, no matter how much they have to say and
how hard they are trying to say it.
In such circumstances this fury is capable of leaving physical traces
on other people’s bodies: On the skin of those who possess the sixth
sense, supposed “psychos” like Vincent and Cole, it leaves traces of direct
physical aggression; on the skin of the less perceptive “normal” people,
it is still noticeable in the form of sudden chills, spine-tingling and hair-
raising. These are the vegetative impulses of horror, the manner in which
visceral feelings respond to the unseen supernatural.
The narrative twist at the film’s close dissolves this division of the two
spheres by employing an exemplary, artificially expanded model of com-
munication. On the one hand, Malcolm is transformed from an excluded
dead person into a helpful ghost, who is thus enabled to depart from his
mortal life without anger. On Cole’s advice, he finds a way of giving his
wife a last sign of his love while she is sleeping; something which, due to
his disproportionate professional dedication and ambition, he failed to do
while still alive.
On the other hand, the audience, who had previously uncritically
shared Malcolm’s purely medical perspective on the boy, now witnesses
how Cole’s social isolation is transmuted into a particular form of inclu-
sion made possible by the sixth sense. Once the narrative has exchanged
its “problem case,” the apparent “freak,” for the traumatized psycholo-
gist, the audience is permitted to share in a sensus communis with the
protagonists. Viewers are confronted with urgent questions regarding the
community of the living and the dead; they are forced to acknowledge
the dialectic character of the film images, the apparent clarity and coher-
ence of which is suddenly disrupted, and which are now revealed to be
riddled with previously unnoticed contradictions.
In the light of Shyamalan’s film’s fantastic success, one could perhaps
say that the sixth sense, at least for as long as we ref lect on the film,
becomes something akin to the fictive “common sense” of a global recep-
tion community. Created by the medium of film, the sixth sense becomes
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 177

a sense of the second order, shared by the movie’s main characters and
its audience via a modern form of the premodern koinē aí sthē sis. It is the
sixth sense’s two fundamental characteristics, its pathologically exclusive
aspect and its socially and aesthetically inclusive aspect, that explain the
two protagonists’ relationship on a basis of reciprocity. Malcolm’s gift
of the healer makes it possible for him to help Cole, while Cole’s super-
natural gift facilitates Malcolm’s redemption. This reciprocity does not,
however, explain the appearances of knights throughout the plot and
the curious layer of meaning they add to the film. It is here that Harty’s
attempt at an interpretation starts.
Harty points out the enormous significance of the school play in which
Cole Sear plays the role of a young King Arthur after having overcome
his fear of the dead:

Unexpectedly, the Arthurian myth is . . . central to the plot of M. Night

Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, the much-acclaimed sleeper of 1999 . . . Having
confronted his fear, Cole seems changed and finds himself cast in the cen-
tral role of a school play. Actually, this play is the second staged in the film.
The first stars a pompous and over-acting classmate, Tommy Tammisimo,
as a Doctor Doolittle-like character who talks to animals. Cole has only a
bit part in this first play. The second play is, however, the story of the sword
in the stone, and here Cole is cast in the central role, while, in a nice touch,
Tommy plays the village idiot. As a narrator solemnly intones, “only the
pure of heart can take the sword from the stone,” Cole as the boy Arthur
easily pulls Excalibur free. Cole is cheered by his classmates who carry him
on their shoulders in triumph. Malcolm and the other members of the audi-
ence join in the acclamation for what is clearly now a reborn Cole.16

The theatre scene Harty describes is actually the fifth of a series of six (!)
steps which build up a momentum whereby Cole becomes increasingly
associated with an imaginary chivalric world.

(1) The leitmotif of chivalry is already introduced when Cole is playing

with his toy figures in the church (figure 8.1).
(2) It features again in Cole’s next meeting with Malcolm when the
psychiatrist visits the boy at home. In this scene, from a hiding
place behind the living room sofa, the boy answers a series of
questions about his family situation. Eventually Cole emerges and
expresses his desire to be healed, wearing a balaclava helmet that
resembles the great helm of the toy knight in the church.
(3) At the same time that this scene is taking place, we see Cole’s
mother upstairs in her son’s bedroom where she discovers his notes,
which she regards as an expression of worrying fantasies, but which
178 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

are really an account of the furious outbursts of the dead visiting

him. The child’s bedroom reveals much about Shyamalan’s atten-
tion to visual detail. Cole lives in a run-down house in a room
with anaglyphic wallpaper conjuring up images of old European
chivalric nobility. It features a fleur-de-lis relief, an echo of the
heraldic lily once part of the French kings’ coat-of-arms from the
end of the twelfth century onwards and which is now associated
with the cult of devotion to the Virgin Mary.
(4) There is another toy knight on the dresser wearing a helmet with
a red plume.
(5) The Arthurian play, on which Harty’s interpretation focuses,
sees its conclusion in a triumphant gesture of self-empowerment.
Drawing Excalibur from the stone, Cole as Young Arthur sym-
bolically celebrates his victory over his fear of the dead as well as
his integration into the community of the living.
(6) Finally, after the performance, Malcolm and Cole meet one last
time in front of one of the school’s medieval-style stained glass
windows. While the boy swings a cardboard sword with youth-
ful exuberance, he sets the stage for the movie’s final narrative
twist by telling his therapist how he can break the silence between
himself and his wife Anna. Following Cole’s advice and speaking
to her while she is asleep, Malcolm will come to realize that her
silence is not the result of a marital crisis and that it is actually his
death which precludes communication with Anna.

According to Harty, the Arthurian allusions emphasize the success of

a double healing process. The Arthurian theme introduces a significant
element of medieval myth into the interaction between Cole Sear and
Malcolm Crowe, interweaving the healing powers of Arthur with his
tutor Merlin’s famous gift of sight.

The Sixth Sense, a film that on its surface seems far removed from the
world of Camelot, nonetheless marks an Arthurian return. The boy Arthur
returns, here as Cole Sear . . . to heal himself . . . and, most importantly, to
heal Malcolm Crowe, a man who thinks it is his responsibility to heal Cole.
As a “see-r”, Cole finds himself cast both in the role of Merlin and in that of
the boy Arthur, though at first he seems much less than he turns out to be, a
trope readily found in any number of earlier versions of Arthur’s childhood.
He also has a connection to the once and future since Cole helps the dead,
haunted by their past, and he uses his ability to communicate with the past
to lay out the future for himself . . . and even for Malcolm, who initially also
serves as a kind of Merlin figure, a supernatural guide, it turns out, who
helps Cole to understand the unique role he is called upon to play.17
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 179

Significant as Harty’s focus on the Arthurian subtext of Shyamalan’s The

Sixth Sense is, in my opinion his emphasis on developmental psychology
in the form of the “drama of the individual gifted child” means that
his analysis focuses too much on the therapeutical side of the story, and
neglects the mythical thinking that provides Arthurian narrative’s basic
structures since the concept of Arthur’s return is based not only on his
role as a healer and savior, but also on the perambulatory Round Table
community’s ambiguous role itself.
If we see them in mythical terms, King Arthur, Queen Guinevere,
and their knights hold court on both sides of the divide between the
living and the dead—as if there were no rigid topographical separation
between them. They switch between belonging to one group and the
other, with the effect that individual heroes or mediators can also switch
and thus establish instances of communication between this world and
the other at special (holy) times and in distant (magical) places.18
The place to which Arthur originally or essentially belongs can never
clearly be fixed: Should he be regarded as a sovereign over his territory
(within the circle of his paladins) or as a prince of the underworld (with a
fairy queen or other Persephone-like beauty at his side)? Do the repeated
attempts to kidnap Guinevere or other members of the court lead them
into the “waste land” of death, or do they result in the court’s being
shocked out of some death-like rigor? Is Arthur’s unquenchable desire
for stories due to his ostentatious joie de vivre or to his vampiresque and
morbid preoccupations?
Hartmann von Aue’s prologue to his Iwein leaves the reader in no
doubt that Arthur is indeed a great and worthy name, but that it belongs
to a dead man, who is only called to life as an imaginary construct—in
stories and in the imagination. It is only through such artistic devices that
“his countrymen are right when they say that he lives today.”19 This same
logic, which the medieval storyteller had already discovered, applies also
to Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense which, in the name of Arthur, engenders
the encounter between the living and the dead.

Arthurian Otherworlds in The Sixth Sense

It is remarkable to what extent Arthurian otherworldliness can be traced
throughout The Sixth Sense— even in the smallest of details. Drawing on
several narrative configurations significant to Arthurian romance, I will
show how the medieval adaptations of the matière de Bretagne underpin the
film’s concepts of otherworldliness and the mythical manner in which the
film’s communicative levels involve the sixth sense. I choose my examples
from the Middle High German reworkings of the Arthurian material, but
180 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

I take them to be representative of the structures of European Arthurian

fiction in general.
Medieval Arthurian romance tells of encounters and exchanges
between Arthur’s court and the fantastic world of adventure associated
with it, constantly posing new challenges both to the royal couple and
to the Round Table. If these challenges were not met, the court would
collapse under the strain of its many contradictions that are, ultimately,
never resolved. The inevitable self-destruction of the Round Table at the
end of Arthur’s reign remains a lurking threat, casting its shadow over
each new attempt at telling of adventures. In this regard, the tasks to be
faced, and to be told in the King’s presence, help postponing the unavoid-
able catastrophe. Every victory the Knights of the Round Table achieve
is accomplished against the backdrop of the ubiquity of death and the
certainty of ultimate failure.
Up until the beginnings of the final disaster, simple but strictly upheld
values both tie the court together and keep it on edge. This fragile stability
is ref lected by the royal couple itself—Arthur and Guinevere. The funda-
mental conf licts of the court can be found between êre [honor] and minne
[love] as well as between the genders: While the knight does everything
in order to defend and enhance his honor by remaining ever generous
and keeping his word, the lady gains unjustified notoriety as an unfaith-
ful woman due to her exceptional power to arouse minne. Repeatedly, she
becomes involved in situations whereby she falls into the hands of a third
party, in most cases one of her partner’s arch rivals, who clearly has sexual
intentions. In some cases this state of affairs is caused by Arthur’s own
obsession with honor, which leads him to make a promise to a mysterious
guest, a promise only to be redeemed by placing the queen in peril.
The constant conf lict between êre and minne can also be said to charac-
terize the relationship between Malcolm and Anna. On the evening when
Vincent Grey (the “bogeyman” and otherworldly envoy) attacks Malcolm
and abruptly interrupts his relationship with his wife, Malcolm has just
been honored by the mayor of his home town and is enjoying the pinnacle
of his public recognition as a child psychologist and “son of Philadelphia.”
As in the Arthurian legend, the perfect marriage of king and beautiful
queen remains childless. Malcolm’s vocational ambition to heal the sick
sons of Philadelphia’s damaged families seems to be more important to
him than the love of his wife and having a family of his own.
Anna, too, seems to be risking her marriage. After the attack on her
husband, she welcomes the advances of a colleague, which must appear
to Malcolm as proof of her infidelity. We can see the parallels between
Guinevere and Lancelot—or whatever the constantly changing kidnappers/
rescuers of the queen may be called.
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 181

The impaired balance between the two parties forces Malcolm to con-
front the crisis—just as Arthur, or any other knight acting as the king’s
representative, would have done to redress the court’s shame. At the end
of this process, Malcolm respects Anna’s need for love, accepts his own
death as well as the fact that he belongs to the realm of the dead.
This then, is the “nucleus” of the Arthurian epic tradition, especially as
seen in studies of its German versions: a “dual course” situation in which
the hero (as representative of a community in crisis) is obliged to con-
front his own mortality while attempting to restore the balance between
courtly love and honor as part of a task that can only be accomplished at
the second attempt. This dual course model has its structural roots in a
typical mythical configuration: the passage through the Otherworld, the
Celtic Immram.20 The paradigmatic couple must experience a passage
through death coming from both directions: from that of the dead as well
as from that of the living.
The mythological “dual course” of the Arthurian tradition involves
scenes that share with Shyamalan’s film the concept of an internal rup-
ture. In the so-called Count of Oringles-episode in Hartmann von Aue’s
Êrec, for example, the knight falls from his horse “half-dead”21 as a result
of wounds that reopen again and again. Erec’s lady, Enite, immediately
embarks on a lengthy widow’s lament in which she implores God to speed
her own death with such vehemence that her cries are heard by the Count
of Oringles. Oringles appears both as a rescuer, since he saves Enite from
suicide, and as the swift executor of her death wish, since he takes both
her and her seemingly dead companion to his castle which bears the tell-
ing name of “Limors”: literally, “the death.” Here, Oringles attempts to
make Enite his wife—displaying clear parallels to Pluto’s abduction of
Persephone. However, Enite persistently rejects his advances. When she
ignores repeated commands to eat with him, he strikes her in her face
twice, whereupon her cry of pain awakens the life that remains in Erec.
This remaining life derives from Enite’s own heart which, in exchange
for his heart, had previously migrated into Erec’s body and stayed alive
when he died:

When she then called out his name, Erec recognized her at once and could
readily tell that she was in some manner of distress, though he knew not
how or where. No longer did he lie there, but once he recognized her
voice, he jumped up in fury and stormed fiercely into the hall where they
were all gathered. A great many swords were hanging nearby on a wall.
Erec seized one of them. Anger in ample measure welled up inside him.
With the very first lunge he slew the host along with two others, who
were sitting on either side of him. The rest then took to f light. No one
present heeded the dictates of good breeding, for not a one of them there
182 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

could be seen stepping aside and saying: “After you, my lord.” For who-
ever found the way out took to f light (such were their likes!), the laymen
pushing ahead of the priests. Despite all claims to high standing in the
Church, none was accorded special treatment, be he abbot or bishop. All
the court was f leeing this hall . . . They began beating a retreat and run-
ning about in mad confusion. Many a fine warrior cowered underneath
the benches, contrary to all the knightly code. There is one thing which
is quite common, and which I fail to find at all surprising: that any man
fearing for his life often-times f lees from great turmoil to ensure his safety,
retreating from the valley for the security of the fortress. These men, how-
ever, were f leeing from the castle and were slipping off into holes like mice.
The wide castle gates were for them too small and narrow, both inside and
outside the portals, so that they dropped over the wall in a throng thick as
hail, for they were driven on by frantic fear. Limors was left abandoned by
all the people . . . No one amongst them, save for Lady Enite, dared to wait
about for Erec, Enite was most delighted to see the dead man.22

This is not a legal court scene anticipating the terrors of Judgment Day.
Instead, what is presented is an inverse world where usual hierarchies no
longer apply, since the boundaries between life and death are lifted for a
carnivalesque moment: Once Erec has subdued his fierce opponent, the
inhabitants of the realm of the dead, Limors, f lee and the couple can escape.
In taking the passage through death the couple has resolved its conf lict:
“[A]ll her grief melted into happiness and her joy was multiplied.”23
The extent to which Erec’s “resurrection” at the end of the “dual
course” is anchored in mythical thinking can be seen in another
Otherworld motif used by Shyamalan. Enite’s consistent refusal to par-
take of the food of Limors suggests that she has learned the lesson of the
Persephone/Proserpina myth. Whoever consumes but the merest morsel
in the realm of the dead, even the pip of a pomegranate, will remain there
forever. Committing this error Persephone became a bride of Hades. She
is unique among the population of the underworld as Dis/Pluto offers
her the privilege of leading a double existence. She is allowed to spend
half her time among the living and another half among the shadows in a
rhythm bound to the seasons of the year, a rhythm which keeps the two
spheres rigidly separate.24 In ancient myth, it is absolutely forbidden that
the living and the dead convene at the same table.
Another instance of the same set of mythical notions is Arthur’s cus-
tom of leaving the splendors of the royal banquet untouched and closed
to the court until a new tale is served. This leaves him and his dependents
at risk of starving to death. However, what he seeks to achieve through
this peculiar custom is nothing less than to use the tales brought by the
outsiders for the purpose of creating a community encompassing both the
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 183

living and the dead. For the adventures always take place on the thresh-
old of otherworldliness and attract representatives from the worlds of the
living and the dead alike. What might appear to be no more than a royal
whim actually constitutes Arthur’s creation of a space where the dead
are permitted to express themselves—and this is precisely what the dead
want. It is only on condition that their stories are dealt with satisfactorily
that the court can finally meet undisturbed to enjoy the feast.
In Shyamalan’s film, too, the dead become peaceful and are capable of
resigning themselves to their fate as soon as they get the opportunity to
tell their stories. As long as they remain unheard and ignored they are a
burden and a danger to the living.
Disturbing banquets do not feature in Shyamalan’s film. The film’s
famous restaurant scene does, however, illustrate that there can be no
exceptions to the rule that the living and the dead may never share a
meal together. Commemorating their wedding anniversary alone, Anna
is joined by Malcolm who believes himself to be late—though not as
late as he actually is. Entertaining the movie’s audience with a lesson in
failures of perception and insurmountable communication breakdowns,
Malcolm’s apologetic monologue demonstrates that his thoughts are
exclusively with his patient and not on his wife, let alone their celebra-
tory dinner.
In the context of my argument, another narrative configuration of
the Arthurian tradition is pertinent: The enfances, childhood memories,
stories in which Arthur himself or a knight of the Round Table are pre-
sented in their youth. As this type of narrative, too, derives from an
otherworldly concept, it typically creates, as Nicola Kaminski puts it, a
“narrative of the unfathomable.”25
Heinrich von dem Türlin’s encyclopaedic Gawain-novel Diu Crône
(The Crown), depicts the young hero as very inexperienced. One of his
first expeditions leads him to Amurfina, the personification of courtly
love, where he is handed a love potion which deletes “his entire, as yet
incompletely formed, identity . . . suddenly and without trace”26:

Gawein and Amurfina drank all of the mighty potion, which quickly so
bewildered his senses that he didn’t know who he was and fancied he had
always been the lord and master of the land; he accepted this idea at once.
The knight completely forgot his past, knew neither his name nor his posi-
tion, and thought that the lady had been his wife for over thirty years. His
heart, which had been as firm as a diamond and had never turned away
from a brave act, was now brittle and weak and did not recognize itself.
Knighthood would have to regret deeply this change, but Lady Love and
Amurfina, with whom he was now united and whose spirits now governed
184 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

him, were pleased. His choice had brought him both gain and loss: he had
won her love and lost his reason. Yet I would think the man more simple
than a child with whom the two were separated. (V. 8660–94)27

Under the inf luence of the love potion Gawain begins to act as though
he were a second Arthur (V. 8741), with Amurfina as his Guinevere.
By shifting his self-image from that of an adolescent to that of a ruler
married for 30 years, he allows a logic of cracks and leaps in time to
take effect which trigger strange inversions of perception. On an artfully
decorated golden bowl, which Amurfina presents to him while he is
seated for a feast, he recognizes scenes from adventures that the engrav-
ings tell him are from the life of Gawain. The pictures recall events that
cannot belong to Gawain’s memories at this time and which are already
part of legend, as if Gawain (alias Arthur II) had already been dead for
some time. The deeply confused hero, who lacks a stable identity, can
only escape from this confusion by snatching “one of the knives on the
dish before him,” then driving it “through his hand to the table below.”
Stabbing his own hand, he can rip through the veil of this otherworldly
perception. Leaping up from the table he ends the feast, to return to the
world of the living and his former life.
The situation becomes even more bizarre when Gawain is overtaken
by the logic of the moving images on the stage where his living body is
performing. There he encounters the “other Gawain” (V. 16523), a like-
ness of himself. This likeness is called Aamanz and is beheaded by the evil
knights Zedoech and Gygamet, but not without Gawain’s assistance. The
presentation of the battered head before Arthur and Guinevere shocks
the Round Table into a state of paralysis. The sight of the head liter-
ally “mortifies” the court. Several thousand verses later, the returning
Gawain recalls the horrific spectacle thus: “[W]hile I was away looking
for adventure, I was brought back here to the court dead.”28
Given the highly complex histoire of Gawain, which is persistently dis-
rupted by examples of such entrelacements, it is possible, with some effort,
to understand this sentence as a paradox; against the backdrop of the
adventure-seeking knight’s otherworldliness the paradox becomes imme-
diately evident: Both the dead and the living, the aged and the youthful
Gawain can be presented to the audience in the same image, his contra-
dictory and separately active imagines ultimately belong to the same body.
Shyamalan visualizes this mythical simultaneity of the incommensu-
rable (the living dead) by making every dead person in the film perform
a characteristic turn of the body, the significance of which the viewers
realize, but not the dead themselves: The woman in the kitchen, whom
the audience and Cole first believe to be the boy’s mother, displays her
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 185

slashed veins as she turns around; the young boy who tells Cole to follow
him when he appears in the latter’s bedroom, lacks part of the back of
his head due to a bullet wound; this, too, is revealed only when he turns
around. When Kyra lifts her head in her first encounter with Cole, the
suddenly emerging f low of vomit ref lects her struggle against poisoning;
the friendly lady, who can be seen in half-profile in Cole’s dressing room
before the theatrical performance, later turns her head and the burns
reveal her to be a victim of the fire that took place in his school many
years before. Finally, the fatally injured cyclist appears with her fresh
wounds next to the car in which Cole and his mother are waiting in the
traffic jam caused by that very woman’s accident.
Much like the images of martyrs in Catholic churches, the dead in
Shyamalan’s film also bear the stigmata of their violent deaths. Through
strategic turns, they present these scars to those who possess the sixth
sense: first to Cole and to the audience, before eventually, in the surpris-
ing final “twist” of the plot, they also become visible to Malcolm as he
instinctively looks behind himself and notices the blood on the back of
his shirt oozing from his bullet wound.
The Sixth Sense makes only one exception to the rule of depicting
the dead as the living dead: This is when Cole is confronted face-on
with the three hanged corpses in the staircase of his school building: a
father, a mother, and a child. However, this group belongs to a differ-
ent theme of the film—that of the “happily reunited,” but utterly failed
nuclear family. Such “happy” families are only depicted twice, each time
with Shyamalan’s Hitchcock-like sarcasm: in the advertisement for cough
medicine, which is recommended for illness in the family, and on the
gallows, where the nuclear family’s “small happiness” is presented as a
completely dead, classical horror scenario.

Horror and the “Sense of Sensing”

But how does Shyamalan’s concept of horror differ from the mere pre-
sentation of fear-inducing corpses?29 This question can best be answered
by drawing attention to yet another characteristic of the sixth sense. In
addition to its spiritual, social and aesthetic dimensions, the sixth sense
also has a physiological one, which is rooted in premodern conceptions
of the very depths of the soul and is therefore inaccessible to modern
notions of psychological causality. Moreover, this idea of the sixth sense is
closely linked to the premodern concept of the origin and effects of inner
images, considered as pneumatic phantá smata and imagines agentes.
Drawing on classical medical teachings as well as classical theories of
the soul, Giorgio Agamben has reconstructed the theoretical grounds for
186 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

a “pneumophantasmology,” which also forms part of the mythical basis

of the Arthurian epic traditions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.30
Daniel Heller-Roazen has since expanded Agamben’s project to a veritable
archaeology of the sixth sense.31 His focus is particularly on a forgotten,
but nevertheless significant tradition in the development of aesthetics,
which, in the sphere of cognitive perception, refers to an older, alterna-
tive model than to the psychology of the conscious.
According to Heller-Roazen, classical authors of ancient philosophy
did not conceive of self-awareness as a form of cognition. For them,
“awareness and self-awareness tended to employ a set of expressions
linked semantically and etymologically to the name of a capacity that, in
distinction to reason, has often been viewed as one of the lower faculties
of the soul and that, more often than not, has been considered a charac-
teristic as much of animal as of human nature. For they spoke of percep-
tion and, more simply still, of what they called sensation.”32
Heller-Roazen explains33 that in De anima Aristotle distinguishes
between the five senses, ranking them in order—from sight down to
touch/feeling. However, by doing so, he creates a problem for himself:
On the one hand, tactility is unique as a sense (with a special sensory
organ—the f lesh—and a specific, if invisible medium of contact). On
the other hand, unlike the organs required for the other senses (eyes,
ears, nose, and tongue), this organ required for feeling seems to exist
as one with the medium that makes the sensation of touch possible.
Furthermore, touch seems to exist only as an inner capacity. At the same
time, the “inner touch” constitutes the founding principle for all sensory
perception. After all, sight, hearing, smell, and taste all come about as
the result of encounters between a stimulus and the specific organ of
perception via a medium. Touch/feeling thus becomes the fundamental
sense or even the “alpha sense” without which none of the other senses
were capable of operating. Thus tactus becomes bearer of an indispensable
sensory function; a function that nevertheless is difficult to explain since
it presents itself as a “‘total sense’ [aisthētikon pant ōn], which perceives,
combining and comparing, everything that is apprehended by the five
senses.”34 It is the “inner touch” that facilitates complex perceptory pro-
cesses and thereby forms its koinē aí sthē sis—the sixth sense as a “sense of
sensing”:

Complex sensation and the sense of sensing, too, are now said to number
among the capacities of a single common dimension of sensation. Together,
they form the functions of a “dominant sense organ” (kyrion aí sthēt ērion),
which . . . “remains for the most part simultaneous with touch.”35
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 187

Under the terms of pneuma theory, the Aristotelian solution to the prob-
lem of complex perception seems irrefutable: Pneuma is a ubiquitous
transmitter that has a sophisticated material structure. It is here that the
soul and the environs can make contact via inner images of that which
is perceived as well as of the emotions, feelings, and fantasies attached to
the perceptions. These ideas remained inf luential all through the early
modern period and are still evident in enlightenment thinking.
As a product of a culture of the external, cinematically recorded, and
projected image, Shyamalan’s film is capable merely of reminding us of
the pneumatic-phantasmatic nature of the inner image. Shyamalan nev-
ertheless manages to evoke the sixth sense as understood within classical
perceptual physiology with all the means available to him as a filmmaker.
The most striking instance of this is a melancholy gesture of loss.
A keen observer will note that, after his death, Malcolm does not touch
a single person throughout the film—not even Cole when he accompa-
nies him and speaks to him at close range. This dramaturgical necessity
of avoiding any physical contact beautifully demonstrates that there is
simply no way in which cinematic technology can represent images of
the inner touch. Hence, the film painstakingly preserves two boundaries
as absolutely impassable: that between life and death just as much as that
between film image and phantasm.
The only way to visualize the latter is through ghosts, which Shyamalan
conjures by establishing an implicit genealogy of the (six!) most impor-
tant technical media of representation, just as if he were searching for
material echoes of the lost sixth sense. In this way his cinematographic
narrative makes use of various forms of technology or media, all of which
hark back to the world of the dead: writing, in the form of Malcolm’s
medical notes; photography, with the distant light ref lections of the dis-
embodied, yet present, dead; audio cassette recordings, which Malcolm
constantly rewinds until he actually hears one of the voices of the dead
who drove Vincent Grey to madness (which confirm that Cole’s secret
is true); video recordings, as messages from the dead; puppet theater,
behind which Kyra’s death from poisoning can be seen as a “play within
a play”; and finally television, whose shallow advertising images form a
negative counterpart to the sixth sense. As they are ultimately meaning-
less, it suffices for Cole to throw a shoe at the television in order to silence
these—literally “sense”less—images.
These ghostly recordings are merely the traces of phantasms, which the
technical machinery involved has captured by chance, but they are not
the actual imagines agentes, which in premodern theories of sense percep-
tion were imagined as belonging both to the individual organs of sense
188 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

perception and the overarching sixth sense and which like the living dead,
out of necessity, coexist with the outside world.
Shyamalan’s engagement with the ghostly phantasms begins right at the
start of the film with an allegory of the filmed image itself, as cinema’s
affinity with phantasms is simulated and deconstructed in the first two
shots. First we see the filament of an electric light bulb glowing red in a
completely darkened room. This is the same cellar room in which the dead
Malcolm later uncovers the phenomenon of the “dead people,” their trou-
bles and their need to communicate. After the first cut, Anna enters the
cellar to fetch a bottle of wine to celebrate Malcolm’s award. Once she has
taken the bottle from the rack, she notices the extraordinary chill. She rubs
the bare skin on her arms and her breath becomes ragged from her shiver-
ing. Something strange seems to be present in the room, though it does not
make itself known; not even when Vincent Grey confronts Malcolm and
Anna upstairs, threatening his former therapist with a gun. Even in this
scene, which concludes with Malcolm being shot and Vincent Grey’s sub-
sequent suicide, apart from the audiovisual shock effect, the actual horror is
indicated only by the scars and scratches on the intruder’s skin.36
The entire exposition can be interpreted as a critical experiment on the
capacity of the medium of film to represent the sixth sense. Its compre-
hensive sensory faculty remains bound to the tactus, the feeling of the skin,
at all times. To meet these prerequisites cinematographically, Shyamalan
primarily uses the aesthetic means of cinematic horror. Triggering bodily
effects (such as shuddering, causing the hairs on the neck to stand on end,
goose-bumps, and stomach-lurches), horror in The Sixth Sense is nothing
other than an art form that seeks to simulate and externally reactivate
the submerged inner “sense of sensing” in the aesthetic conditions cir-
cumscribed by the projected image. Shyamalan’s motion picture does not
allow us to fully share the sixth sense as such; it does, however, permit
us—not least through its re-enactment of Arthurian otherworldliness—
to witness the undead existence of phantasms.

Notes
1. My analysis is based on the double DVD The Sixth Sense, Platinum Edition,
published by VCL Communications in 2004.
2 . Cf. Katherine A. Fowkes, “Melodramatic Specters. Cinema and The
Sixth Sense,” in Spectral America. Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed.
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
2004), p. 202 [185–206].
3. Cf. Nils Westboer, Der innere Blick. Zur Konstruktion von Sehen und
Wissen in M. Night Shyamalans The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable und Signs
(Saarbr ücken: VDM, 2008).
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 189

4. Cf. Robert Hurley, “Purgatoire et anagnôrisis dans le film The

Sixth Sense,” in Religiologiques 26 (2002): 53–65. Sabine Bobert,
“Auferstehungskonzepte im popul ä ren Kinofilm: Matrix I, The Sixth
Sense, Alien 4 —The Resurrection, Hinter dem Horizont,” in Systematisch
praktisch. Festschrift für Reiner Preul zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Wilfried Hä rle,
Bernd-Michael Haese, Kai Hansen, and Eilert Herms (Marburg: Elwert,
2005), pp. 393–414. The Christian-dogmatic aspects of the film are exam-
ined by D. Brent Laytham in: “Time for Hope. The Sixth Sense, American
Beauty, Memento and Twelve Monkeys,” in The Gift of Story. Narrating Hope
in a Postmodern World, ed. Emily Griesinger and Mark Eaton (Waco, TX:
Baylor University Press, 2006), pp. 69–83.
5. Cf. Georg Mott, “The Vanishing Point of the Sexual Subject: The Closet,
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, L.I.E., The Sixth Sense, The Others, Y Tu Mamá
También,” in Psychoanalytic Review 91.4 (2004): 607–14.
6. Cf. Laurence A. Rickels, “Recognition Values: ‘Seeing The Sixth Sense
Again for the First Time,’” Other Voices 2.2 (2002), available at: www
.othervoices.org/2.2/rickels/index.html; Kathy Smith, “The Emptiness
of Zero: Representations of Loss, Absence, Anxiety and Desire in the
Late Twentieth Century,” Critical Quarterly 46.1 (2004): 40–59. On
Shyamalan’s film as a typical example for the representation of the psyche
of children or women in Hollywood cinema, see Jerrold R. Brandell,
“Kids on the Couch. Hollywood’s Vision of Child and Adolescent
Treatment,” in Celluloid Couches, Cinematic Clients. Psychoanalysis and
Psychotherapy in the Movies, ed. Jerrold R. Brandell (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 19–45 and Marilyn Charles,
“Women in Psychotherapy on Film. Shades of Scarlett Conquering,” in
Celluloid Couches, Cinematic Clients. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in the
Movies, ed. Jerrold R. Brandell (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 2004), pp. 67–93.
7. Cf. Erlend Lavik, “Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense. A New Twist
in ‘Twist Movies’?” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006): 55–64.
8. Cf. Jonathan Eig, “A Beautiful Mind(fuck): Hollywood Structures of
Identity,” Ejump Cut, available at: www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003
/eig.mindfilms/text.html. For details on the aspects of deliberately ini-
tiated illusions using red herrings and perception routines, see Britta
Hartmann, “Von der Macht erster Eindr ücke. Manoj Night Shyamalans
The Sixth Sense,” in Aller Anfang. Zur Initialphase des Spielfilms (Marburg:
Schü ren Verlag, 2009), pp. 338–57.
9. Cf. Fowkes, “Melodramatic Specters,” in Spectral America, pp. 202–3.
10. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 32.
11. Cf. Cynthia Freeland, “Horror and Art-Dread,” in The Horror Film, ed.
Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004),
pp. 189–205.
12 . Cf. Angela Curran, “Aristotelian Ref lections on Horror and Tragedy in
An American Werewolf in London and The Sixth Sense,” in Dark Thoughts.
190 H A N S J Ü RG E N S C H E U E R

Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror, ed. Steven Jay Schneider and

Daniel Shaw (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp. 47–64.
13. Christopher Falzon, Philosophy goes to the Movies. An Introduction to
Philosophy, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 34.
14. Cf. Kevin J. Harty, “Looking for Arthur in All the Wrong Places: A Note
on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense,” in Arthuriana 10.4 (2000):
57–62. The quote is taken from another context in which Harty reuses
his text in a slightly modified form: Kevin J. Harty, “Cinema Arthuriana:
An Overview,” in Cinema Arthuriana. Twenty Essays, ed. Kevin J. Harty,
2nd revised edn. ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2002), p. 29 [7–33].
15. Psalm. 130:1.
16. Harty, “Cinema Arthuriana,” p. 28.
17. Ibid., pp. 28–29.
18. Anne Wawer writes of the otherworld concept of Celtic mythology, which
forms the basis for the matière de Bretagne: “[T]he other world—actually
the Realm of the Dead—[is] not differentiated from the world of the
living. Our world and the other world cross over, intermingle, it is only
that mortals cannot perceive the members of the other world. Selected
members however, may switch to the sphere on the other side” (Anne
Wawer, Tabuisierte Liebe. Mythische Erzählschemata in Konrads von Würzburg
Partonopier und Meliur und im Friedrich von Schwaben [Cologne:
Böhlau, 2000], p. 27 [the editors’ translation]). In his epic work on the
Roman civil war (De bello civili/Pharsalia), Lucan was the first to remark on
the essential difference between Celtic and other ancient religions being
the lack of distinction between the worlds of the living and the dead. He
writes of the druids: “To you alone is granted total knowledge of the
gods and heaven’s powers—or total ignorance. Inhabiting deep groves in
remote woods, you teach that ghosts do not head for Erebus’ silent home
or for the colourless realm of Dis below, but the self-same spirit rules the
limbs in another sphere. If what you sing is known in fact, then death is
the mid-point in prolonged life. Without a doubt the people overlooked
by Arcos are fortunate in their mistake, not to be oppressed by that great-
est terror, fear of death. This explains their warriors’ willingness to rush
upon the sword, their spirits keen for death, and their belief that it is cow-
ardly to spare a life that will return” (Lucan, Civil War, trans. S. H. Braund
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], pp. 14–15).
19. Richard H. Lawson, Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The
Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. Frank J. Tobin, Kim Vivian,
and Richard H. Lawson (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2001), p. 237.
20. Cf. Walter Haug, “Vom Imram zur Avent ü re-Fahrt. Zur Frage nach der
Vorgeschichte der hochhöfischen Epenstruktur (1970),” in Strukturen
als Schlü ssel zur Welt. Kleine Schriften zur Erzählliteratur des Mittelalters
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), pp. 379–408, and “Erec, Enite und
Evelyne B. (1979),” in Strukturen als Schlü ssel zur Welt. Kleine Schriften zur
Erzählliteratur des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), pp. 464–82.
 A RT H U R I A N M Y T H A N D C I N E M AT IC HOR ROR 191

21. Hartmann von Aue, Erec, trans. Michael Resler, University of

Pennsylvania Press Middle Ages Series (University Park, PA: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 125.
22 . Aue, Erec, pp. 139–40.
23. Ibid., p. 140.
24. It is important to note the differences in terms of time and space that exist
between the different forms of half-life in ancient myth: the under world
is not to be confused with other worldliness.
25. Cf. Nicola Kaminski, “Wâ ez sich êrste ane vienc, Daz ist ein teil unkunt.”
Abgründiges Erzählen in der Krone Heinrichs von dem Türlin (Heidelberg:
Winter, 2005).
26. Kaminski, Abgründiges Erzählen, p. 29. Cf. also the chapter titled “Puer-
senex-Figurationen,” pp. 41–56.
27. Heinrich von dem Tü rlin, The Crown: A Tale of Sir Gawein and King
Arthur’s Court, trans. J. W. Thomas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989).
28. Tü rlin, The Crown, p. 254.
29. Cf. Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror. Gothic Literature and Film
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).
30. For the meaning of perception theory for medieval narratives, see Joachim
Bumke, Die Blutstropfen im Schnee. Über Wahrnehmung und Erkenntnis im
Parzival Wolframs von Eschenbach, Hermaea 94 (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
2001); Haiko Wandhoff, Ekphrasis. Kunstbeschreibungen und virtuelle Räume
in der Literatur des Mittelalters, Trends in Medieval Philology 3 (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 2003); Christina Lechtermann, Berührt werden. Narrative
Strategien der Prä senz in der höfischen Literatur um 1200, Philologische
Studien und Quellen 191 (Berlin: Schmidt, 2005).
31. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans.
Ronald L. Martinez, Theory and History of Literature 69 (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Daniel Heller-Roazen, The
Inner Touch. Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
32 . Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch, pp. 21–22.
33. Cf. Ibid., pp. 21–41 (Chapter 2: “The Aesthetic Animal” and Chapter 3:
“The Primary Power”).
34. Ibid., p. 36.
35. Ibid., p. 37.
36. The approach of a dead person is always announced by Cole’s breath
becoming visible in front of his face and rapidly dropping temperatures.
This presence remains bound to indexical signs of pneumatic appari-
tions until we discover Cole’s secret together with Malcolm: “I see dead
people.” It is only from this time onwards that dead people’s presence is
shown in a mimetic “true-to-life” form with visible images of the dead.
I am greatly indebted to Lydia Bichel for pointing out this significant
detail to me.
CHAPTER 9

MARIAN REWRITES THE LEGEND:

THE TEMPORALITY OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL
REMAINS IN RICHARD LESTER’S
ROBIN AND MARIAN

Andrew James Johnston

C inematic images of the Middle Ages are necessarily bound to medi-

eval images. Modern films often betray a fascination not simply
with visually imagining the Middle Ages but also with the visual sources
for creating their fictional medieval worlds. Frequently, this results in
medieval films employing references to well-known medieval artworks
as markers of authenticity, but even more so as a ref lection on how the
Middle Ages and its different media cultures were themselves engaged
in complex processes of image-making and tale-telling, processes which
often combined different forms of art at the same time because medieval
media refused to be separated into neat modern binaries such as the visual
versus the verbal, the oral versus the literate, or music versus poetry. It is
the contention of this book that, through its penchant for aesthetic layer-
ing, cinema possesses a specific affinity to medieval culture, and that in
its fascination with the multidimensional mediality of medieval works of
art, medieval film proves capable of imitating, recreating, and adapting
the way medieval men and women envisioned concepts of history.
In the following, I investigate how Richard Lester’s film Robin and
Marian (US: Columbia Pictures, 1976) strategically foregrounds medi-
eval aesthetic forms and experience—archaeological remains, aesthetic
artifacts such as the triptych, and the composition and dissemination of
popular ballads—to create a sense of historical layeredness that conceives
194 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

of the telling of history as a process of creative adaptation already pres-

ent in the self-ref lexive practices of medieval media culture themselves.
Robin and Marian’s most cogent attempt at employing medieval aesthetic
practices for modern cinematic purposes is constituted, I argue, by the
film’s structural adaptation of a typically medieval genre of visual art, the
triptych. Through its multilayered sense of visual mobility, permitting
its audience to inhabit changing narrative and interpretive perspectives,
the triptych serves not merely as a powerful metaphor for, but literally
embodies, the Middle Ages’ capacity for making images move in the
service of telling and retelling stories both secular and religious. As I
hope to show, the character within the movie who grasps and exploits
the triptych’s aesthetic and narrative potential with consummate skill is
Marian. It is she who effectively rewrites the Robin Hood myth in the
process, claiming the film’s third panel for her self-consciously feminist
adaptation of the legend.
Robin and Marian —the first major Robin Hood picture to have been
shot for more than 20 years1—features Sean Connery2 as a middle-aged
and unmistakably lower-class Robin.3 After fighting for Richard the
Lion Heart in the Third Crusade and elsewhere, Robin and Little John
return to England disillusioned. The plot begins with the two protago-
nists refusing to storm a castle defended only by an old man and a few
children. Richard has Robin and John arrested for insubordination and
is fatally wounded. Dying, the king sets them free and they go home
to England, reuniting with old associates in Sherwood Forest. Visiting
Marian, now a member of the church, the two men get embroiled in the
conf lict between King John and the Pope. Having risen to the rank of
Abbess of Kirkly as “Mother Jennet,” Marian is about to be imprisoned
by a bored and reluctant Sheriff of Nottingham. Much to her indignation,
Robin and John seize her from the Sheriff ’s clutches. A series of semi-
comic adventures later, Marian and her nuns end up with the outlaws
in Sherwood Forest. Here, the romance between Robin and Marian is
rekindled, albeit in a nostalgic and skeptical mood. At the same time, the
common people f lock to Robin as their legendary hero, a hero decidedly
past his prime: “[s]tiff-jointed, rheumy-eyed and wheezing after every
swordfight.”4 While the Sheriff is happy to leave the outlaws alone, the
local grandee, Sir Ranulf, presses for a campaign against Robin, and the
outlaws’ short-lived forest idyll comes to an end. Abandoning his secure
position in the greenwood, Robin challenges the Sheriff to single com-
bat. After promising beginnings, Robin’s strength begins to fail. Heavily
wounded and with defeat imminent, he gathers his remaining powers
and kills his opponent. While Sir Ranulf breaks the truce and butchers
Robin’s peasants, Marian and John take Robin to the abbey where, under
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 195

the pretext of giving him medicine, she poisons both Robin and herself.
After Marian’s declaring her eternal love for Robin, he accepts his fate
and shoots an arrow out of the window, asking Little John to bury him
where the arrow lands.
At first glance, Robin and Marian appears to oscillate between a parody
of the legend, on the one hand, and a melodramatic rewriting, on the
other. Marian’s final declaration of love verges on kitsch, while the fight
scenes often have a slapstick-like character.5 Yet behind the apparent sim-
plicity of the film’s parody and its undoubtedly sincere critique of mili-
tary violence, there lurks a sophisticated investigation into the problems
of legendary temporality, betraying a carefully chiseled structure strongly
informed by a surprising variety of medieval aesthetic forms. It is this
complex engagement with notions of temporality, I would argue, that
contains the film’s most powerful message about the politics of temporal-
ity itself.
At first glance, the two scenes that most prominently highlight Robin
and Marian’s multilayered aesthetic approach to temporality look entirely
gratuitous. In the first, Robin and John, having just returned to England,
gallop across the countryside on a glorious summer morning. They ride
along the remains of a Roman road and pass a group of blind beggars
tagging along in single file, clinging to a piece of string and led by a boy
with a mangy dog. In the background, just before the road’s stone slabs
rise out of the ground, an early medieval High Cross stands guard over
the archaeological site (figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 The roman road with the High Cross and the blind beggars in
Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian.
196 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

In combining a highly diverse set of archaeological fragments and

objects, as well as artistic allusions, the scene provides an emblematic view
of the history and archaeology of the European Middle Ages. Through
its palimpsestic image of historical layering,6 the scene conjures a set of
chronologically distinct moments in time inscribed in one and the same
place through a variety of material remains. The fragments of the Roman
road recall the grandeur of an empire long disintegrated. The High Cross
signifies the specifically Celtic origins of early medieval Christianity
in Britain. Finally, the blind beggars visually allude to Pieter Breughel
the Elder’s painting The Blind Leading the Blind (1568). Though, strictly
speaking, Breughel f lourished during what is traditionally seen as the
Renaissance, for modern viewers, his rustic scenes appear to encapsulate
medieval village life. Breughel’s medievalist imagery seems to have left
its marks also in Johan Huizinga’s magisterial Autumn of the Middle Ages
whose interpretation of the period, in turn, provides strategies for medi-
eval film to create authenticity effects, as William F. Woods has shown.7
Breughel’s paintings seem to support Huizinga’s contention that late
medieval mentality was dominated by a fascinating yet unhealthy mix
of sensuality, religious pessimism, and intellectual sclerosis caused by,
among other things, a surfeit of allegorical thinking:8 Breughel provides
panoramic depictions of popular culture, for example in his Children’s
Games and Netherlandish Proverbs; he interprets religious catastrophes as
in The Slaughter of the Innocents and The Tower of Babel; and then there are
his allegorical treatments of human folly in the tradition of Hieronymus
Bosch as in, for example, the Triumph of Death and Dulle Griet (Mad Meg).
Within a specifically cinematic context, the doddering file of blind beg-
gars also references the filthy and primitive Middle Ages on screen, an
iconographic innovation of the late sixties and early seventies of the
twentieth century.9 Traversing this archaeologically laden setting on
horseback, the outlaws remain entirely oblivious to the dense histori-
cal allusions by which they are framed. Impervious to the aesthetic and
historical depth they have visually been plunged into, they themselves
resemble the “Blind Leading the Blind” they are passing.
While, in purely visual and iconographic terms, this seemingly super-
f luous scene already reveals an astonishingly dense web of complex his-
torical allusions, it proves just as relevant in structural terms, since it has
a noteworthy position in the sequence of the film’s narrative. Seen from
a structural perspective, the scene with the beggars contributes to an
elaborate framing device that helps to establish the plot’s overall narra-
tive architecture. The scene separates the film’s overture—the events in
France where Robin and John become disillusioned with their king—
from its main part, their subsequent exploits in England. But that is not
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 197

all: Exactly the same setting, that is, that very Roman road with the High
Cross, recurs at the narrative’s other crucial turning point, thus effec-
tively giving the film a tripartite structure, dividing it into a triptych. We
are shown the Roman road again—shot from exactly the same angle—
when Sir Ranulf and the Sheriff march against Robin at the head of their
army, though now we watch ranks and ranks of heavily armored soldiers
file past. Here, the plot loses the last vestiges of its lightheartedness and
Robin’s violent games with the Sheriff turn into deadly earnest as they
prepare us for Marian’s creative adaptation of the Robin Hood legend.
Especially if seen in the context of the film’s insistent referencing of
medieval visual art, Robin and Marian’s triptych-like narrative structure
self-consciously evokes the notion of precinema. As a precursor of cin-
ematography’s moving images, the triptych constitutes an early attempt
to combine the visual and the narrative through mobile images. First,
there is the mobility of the individual panels; second, there is the mobility
of the viewer who may walk around the artifact: Triptychs often display
images on the panels’ backs and fronts and can thus be viewed from all
sides; and third, we must not forget the mobility of the triptych itself,
smaller instances of which often served as travelling altarpieces. A trip-
tych thus enables its audience to experience the same work of art in dif-
ferent, interactive, and, above all, changing ways. Depending on whether
the outer panels, the so-called wings, are open or shut, or even depending
on the angles at which they are opened, the triptych provides multiple
narrative perspectives that guide the viewing process, while at the same
time the triptych grants the viewer a considerable degree of liberty in
structuring his own aesthetic experience.10
Constructed as a multidimensional and supremely usable work of art,
the triptych is literally adaptable to different strategies of viewing, and
hence of interpretation. Merely by opening a panel previously closed, an
image that might perfectly work on its own will find itself juxtaposed
with an image drawing on a different tradition, which will consequently
help to redefine the meaning of the image first displayed. Typically, all
of a triptych’s individual images will adhere to some preexisting icono-
graphical and/or narrative pattern, but precisely because the hinges link-
ing the panels make it possible to alter the relations between these images,
does the triptych embody the mobility and changeability of tradition
itself, does it put on display tradition’s very openness to adaptation and
reinterpretation. Moreover, since they can be opened all at the same time,
rendering visible in close proximity stories from different historical eras,
the panels of a triptych are capable of creating a sense of simultaneity
that undermines a linear perspective on history. As scenes from the Old
Testament correspond to ones from the New, as saints’ lives contrast with
198 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

scenes celebrating divine eternity, as patrons crowd into the corners of a

crucifixion, and as familiar examples of local architecture form the dis-
tant background to a nativity, the triptych makes it possible to exploit to
the full the antichronological potential of medieval religious art.
While the film’s tripartite structure becomes manifest in important
changes in tone and atmosphere, it also affects the way viewers experi-
ence temporality. And this, I would suggest, is of crucial importance
to the political notions of temporality Robin and Marian negotiates. It is
in between the two scenes with the Roman road, that is, on what one
might call the triptych’s central panel, that the film gestures toward the
utopian form of temporality associated with the eternal summer of the
early Robin Hood ballads.
In the film’s middle part, the grotesque cynicism and ironic disillusion-
ment of its first phase are supplanted by a more humorous and humane
portrayal of events. There is the mere hint of a chance that Robin might
successfully revive his relationship with Marian and found a utopian out-
law republic in the forest. It is here, for instance, that we are granted the
kind of camp scene so typical of Robin Hood films: a gendered pastoral
of relaxed domestic activity and not-too-serious military training gar-
nished with a little merrymaking. The troops marching past the High
Cross put an end to the greenwood’s utopian charms. From then on,
the plot moves rapidly toward its denouement, shedding those lyrical
moments which, in the triptych’s central panel, slow down the action at
regular intervals. Before the first, and especially after the second of the
two archaeological scenes, the film’s plot and action proceed at consider-
able speed. But in the triptych’s central panel the pace is more leisurely,
opening up narrative spaces not only for memory and ref lection but also
for imagining an alternative future.
The film’s tripartite nature is visually reinforced by yet another, seem-
ingly gratuitous pair of images marking the film’s very beginning and its
very end: two brief still-life images of rotting apples on a stone window-
ledge.11 Like the blind beggars, the apples take us into the iconographic
world of premodern Europe. They recall the vanitas-motif so typical
of baroque still-life painting. The film’s imagery does not particularly
respect received period boundaries: Medieval and baroque motifs are
jumbled together in a style denoting a generalized “premodern” sensibil-
ity. But it is not historical accuracy that matters here. Rather, the rotten
apples point to a specifically modern interpretation of the (later) Middle
Ages and its supposed obsession with death and decay as expressed, for
instance, by the late medieval rise of the danse macabre -iconography,
another of the aesthetic phenomena that inspired Huizinga’s view of the
Middle Ages.
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 199

Within the context of a medieval film from the seventies, the image
of death and decay that the apples supposedly convey acquires a second
level of meaning, one not entirely compatible with that derived from
historical iconography. After all, Robin and Marian presents us with a ver-
sion of the Middle Ages that combines the grime and dirt of cinematic
medieval authenticity with another, more romantic view of the Middle
Ages. Repeatedly, the film revels in pastoral images suggesting that the
Middle Ages possessed a more direct access to nature. It depicts medi-
eval men and women existing in a harmonious and aesthetically pleasing
blending of human culture with its natural environment. As images of
the grimy and grotesque alternate with pretty and picturesque vignettes
of rural life, the camera frequently lingers on everyday peasant activi-
ties such as skinning animals or tying lavender up in bunches. So, the
decaying apples signify not merely decay and, consequently, the medi-
eval and early modern sense of death as a constant presence in life, but
they also embody the desire for reconciliation with nature that became
an increasingly urgent topic in Western societies after the Club of Rome
report of 1972. Ironically, precisely because they betray signs of decay
are these apples shown to be alive. Nature is ostensibly allowed to run
its course without undue human interference. Such images of natural
objects obeying nature’s cycles point to a sense of temporality dictated
by the imperatives of the seasons and the agricultural world. Within
the context of the Middle Ages’ overwhelmingly rural economies such
a natural/agricultural perspective on time cannot be without political
significance. The images of the busy peasants recall the anything but
politically innocuous depictions of rural life from the Duke of Berry’s
Très Riches Heures’ splendid illuminations.
The camera’s apparent infatuation with the merging of medieval every-
day culture and its natural environment attains a further level of meaning
when Robin pursues Marian into her cell in the abbey. Here, the camera
follows them into what looks like a cross between a medievalized boudoir
and a Tuscan luxury retreat, complete with prettily arranged bunches of
herbs adorning whitewashed walls. When Laurie A. Finke and Martin
B. Shichtman cite Robin and Marian’s depiction of Sherwood Forest as
a typical instance of the filthy Middle Ages,12 they neglect the extent
to which the film evokes a heavily gendered notion of the picturesque
and pastoral Middle Ages. Whereas Robin’s masculine Middle Ages does
look filthy, Marian’s feminized version of the period does not—yet her
Middle Ages claims just as much authenticity as Robin’s. The image of
the medieval carefully associated with her character is located halfway
between the f lower power experience of the late sixties and the envi-
ronmentalist movement of the late seventies—with a few unashamedly
200 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

bourgeois elements thrown in. Thus, the film succeeds in bridging the
binary opposition between a masculine genre of medieval adventure
and a more feminized “bourgeois costume drama” which, according to
Andrew Higson, is

characterised by . . . politeness, restraint and refinement, in which rela-

tively little happens—but what does happen tends towards romance . . . and
domestic drama, and characters are less heroic but psychologically more
complex.13

Robin and Marian combines what Higson considers to be the mutually

exclusive elements of the “premodern historical adventure film” and the
“bourgeois costume drama.”14 The film strategically exploits the tension
inherent in this juxtaposition in the service of what I consider to be a
highly political statement. Depending on the way they are contextual-
ized cinematically, aspects of what is often seen as a politically conserva-
tive, nostalgic heritage industry can assume a significance well beyond
the clichés with which they are so frequently associated. In Robin and
Marian, both the romance elements and the oddly bourgeois interior of
Marian’s cell provide not only a contrast with the senseless slaughter of
Robin’s world, but also help to construct a glimpse, albeit no more than
a glimpse, of a utopian space of female self-determination. For all its nos-
talgic veneer, this female space quite obviously bears political meaning
since it offers the only viable alternative to the masculine violence that
eventually carries the day. Though, as we will later see, this feminine
space also constitutes the source of what is often gendered as a specifi-
cally feminine form of violence: poison. Before the backdrop of Marian’s
subsequent act of murder, the pretty bunches of drying herbs will, in
retrospect, take on a distinctly sinister f lavor.
The archaeological remains, the decaying apples, and even the herbs
in Marian’s cell all illustrate the degree to which the film strategically
superimposes potential readings onto each other, constantly reinforcing
its sense of historical and aesthetic layering. The archaeological artifacts
and other images of temporality present a wide variety of historical and
symbolic contextualizations commenting on each other without, how-
ever, cancelling each other out. Consequently, the archaeological images
of the Roman road-scene(s) encapsulate, in the style of a mise-en-abyme,
the film’s overall approach to historical experience and temporality.
Rather than providing markers of clearly defined period boundaries or
ideological signposts for the interpretation of the past, the scenes per-
mit different historical periods and different interpretations of history to
coexist side by side, layered one upon the other in a manner allowing us
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 201

to savor different forms of historical experience simultaneously, just as a

triptych may juxtapose historically distinct moments. In so doing, Robin
and Marian self-consciously explores medieval films’ special capacity to
“ref lect on the fact that they make present a past that was never filmable
and offer alternatives to chronological conceptions of time.”15
By turning archaeology into a fundamental visual trope of histori-
cal understanding, the film offers an adaptation of historical experience
prefigured in medieval literature itself. Beowulf, for instance, is clearly
fascinated with archaeological phenomena. When, at the beginning of
the poem’s action proper, Beowulf and his followers first approach King
Hrothgar’s hall Heorot they find themselves walking on the remains of
a Roman road like the blind beggars in Robin and Marian. Once inside,
the hero stands on a fagne flor,16 a tessellated f loor or possibly even mosaic,
suggesting that Heorot was actually erected on the foundations of a
Roman villa.17 Later, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother with a sword on
whose hilt ancient characters are engraved describing the biblical Flood;
and the dragon sleeps in a lair supported by stone arches, the architectural
remnant of a Roman past.18
Beowulf ’s archaeological tropes have been read as testifying to an obses-
sion with a half-hidden history as a material and potentially disruptive
presence constantly threatening to rise to the surface.19 A fascination with
archaeological experience is by no means confined to Beowulf but can
be found all over medieval literature in different genres and settings—
and we even find it in medieval architecture.20 Hagiographical literature,
especially, features archaeological tropes, for instance in the form of the
inventio, the—often miraculous—discovery of a saint’s relics.21 In its use
of archaeological imagery, Robin and Marian skillfully adapts a medieval
trope of historical analysis for purposes remarkably similar to those that
already governed the trope’s use in the Middle Ages.
The film’s self-conscious adaptation of medieval archaeological imag-
ery paves the way for its second crucially important scene meditating
on the way that medieval art aesthetically conceptualizes history: the
ballad-singing scene in Sherwood Forest. Here, too, a cultural artifact,
the popular ballad, is linked to a specific form of historical experience.
While the earlier scene dealt with archaeology in a straightforwardly
material sense, the ballad-singing scene constructs what one could call
a “poetic archaeology.” Precisely because the discussion of the aesthetic
artifact in question centers not on history and materiality alone, do
things get considerably more complicated here. As the interaction of
history and fiction claim center stage in the ballad-singing scene, we are
directed towards a type of adaptation that lies at the heart of historiog-
raphy in general.
202 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

Shortly after passing the Roman road, Robin and John are reunited
with Friar Tuck and Will Scarlett in Sherwood Forest. Lounging around
a fire, they listen to Will singing ballads about “Robin Hood.” Robin
dismisses the songs about his supposed heroic exploits as nonsense, but he
is touched nevertheless:

Robin: They’ve turned us into heroes, Johnnie.

(turning to Will Scarlett)
Will, you didn’t make it up?
Will: These songs, I don’t know where they come from, but you hear
them everywhere. And everywhere we go they want to hear about the
things you did.
Robin: We didn’t do them.
Will (chuckles): I know that . . .
Robin: Sing us another song, Will, one that really happened. 22

The scene succeeds in encapsulating some of the central topoi of the medi-
eval aesthetic experience. It celebrates the memorial aspect of medieval
popular culture, while also alluding to the collective and anonymous
nature of medieval (folk) art—“I don’t know where they come from but
you hear them everywhere”—as well as to the oft-noted medieval dis-
trust of fiction—“Will, you didn’t make it up?”
More importantly, the scene juxtaposes Robin the Man with Robin
the Legend. Like an earlier version of Don Quixote, Robin encounters
his fictional alter ego. Back home from his foreign wars, he finds himself
transformed into a literary character, a fictional phenomenon beyond his
control: Robin the real meets Robin the adaptation. The scene’s true
significance will be revealed only as the action progresses, for we will
see Robin begin to model himself on the character from the ballads; we
shall see the supposedly real person adapting to his fictional adaptation.
Ultimately, Robin becomes infatuated with, and seeks to emulate, his
own image in fiction. Using his legend as an antidote against middle
age, he embarks on a course of rejuvenation that has its origin in the folk
ballads’ fictions.
By falling victim to his own image in fiction Robin effectively turns
into the prime witness of the fact that there is no such thing as a true
“Robin Hood.” Nowadays scholars are by and large agreed that there has
never been such a thing as a historically identifiable individual we can see
as the original “Robin Hood,” a verifiable history beyond the legend. On
the contrary, the first attested references to the hero already pertain to a
literary character rather than a historical person. The original Robin Hood
is no more real, therefore, than the one Richard Lester’s Robin encoun-
ters in Will Scarlett’s ballads. Indeed, as far as our sources are concerned,
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 203

there is nothing more original than the late medieval and early modern
ballads themselves. Hence, it is the process of mythmaking itself that
the film evokes by having Robin fall in love with his own legendary
avatar, despite, or possibly because, he knows full well that there is no
reality to that character. The film thus legitimizes, on a meta-cinematic
level, its own project of a full-scale revisionist rewriting of the legend,
insisting on its own distance to any kind of positivist historiographical
approach to the Robin Hood myth. Robin and Marian thereby expresses
a commitment to the entirely mythical nature of the legendary material,
since the outlaw’s mirage-like character defies all attempts at nailing him
down historically.23 Even the supposedly “real” Robin Hood must face
the fact that the hero of the ballads appears to be more “authentic” than
the actual man in f lesh and blood—a man no more than a cinematic illu-
sion. Robin’s subsequent attempt to live up to his ballad-alter ego must,
therefore, result in complete failure.
While some of the moments leading up to the movie’s end draw on the
generic features of both comedy and farce, others, especially the hero’s
final duel with the Sheriff, are painted in much grimmer tones. Indeed,
when Robin, already seriously wounded, kills the Sheriff, his supposedly
heroic act of slaying his adversary actually turns out to be grotesquely
unfair.24 What starts off as a ritualized duel invoking chivalric traditions—
the contestants pray together before they join battle—ends as a murder-
ous brawl. Lying on the ground and practically incapable of defending
himself any longer, Robin delivers his mortal thrust at the very moment
when the all-but-victorious Sheriff pauses brief ly. The Sheriff appears
to be on the brink of offering Robin quarter, something he has already
done twice before. Only through breaking the rules of chivalric combat,
effectively committing an act of murder, does Robin win the fight. The
bloody ritual meant to authenticate Robin’s identity as a legendary hero
results in an utter collapse of the values it ostensibly celebrates. Precisely
because we see the outlaw betray the ballads’ heroic ethos, do we realize
how impossible it is to fashion a real-life history in the image of myth and
fiction. But just as Robin betrays the ballads, the ballads also betray him,
since they trick him into taking a fiction for real.
In its commitment to the absolute adaptability of the Robin Hood
myth, the ballad-singing scene adds another layer of understanding to
the film’s use of the archaeological trope. Whereas Robin and John prove
to be unaware of the archaeological nature of the landscape, the ballads’
poetic archaeology is something that the characters are aware of, at least
to a certain extent. Ultimately, only Marian will show herself capable of
exploiting that poetic archaeology, as she daringly rebuilds the legend
out of the material available in the tradition. Fiction itself would thus
204 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

assume the guise of an archaeological artifact, an artifact looking back

both fondly and critically on a long history of legend, a history whose
very archaeological nature not only invites rewritings but makes it pos-
sible to pick and choose from previous material, to re-arrange, embellish
it, and, finally, to completely turn it on its head. Inasmuch as Robin and
Marian simultaneously emphasizes both the historicity and the fictional-
ity of the legend itself, the film consciously claims the ballad tradition as
its point of historical and fictional departure.
In many ways, the film’s last scene constitutes what one might easily
regard as the movie’s boldest and most intricately dialectical act of rewrit-
ing the legend. After all, Marian’s poisoning of Robin goes back to the
first medieval attempt—and a surprisingly early one at that—to turn the
scattered, episodic tales of the ballad tradition into something like a fully
developed story line, a narrative arc meant to elevate Robin’s status from
that of a trickster-like folk hero to that of a more literary, more epic, or
even romance-related character. The text in question is titled A Gest of
Robyn Hode and lends closure to its story by adopting an archetypal death
for its heroic protagonist: an end caused by treason.25 In so doing the Gest
permits Robin Hood to share the fate of such typically medieval heroes
as Siegfried, Roland, or Arthur.26 The treason that brings about Robin’s
fall in the Gest is gendered in a most cliché-ridden way. It is a woman,
moreover an ecclesiastical female, who commits the crime—though not,
as in the film, through poison but through bleeding Robin to death.
In Robin and Marian, the female poisoner is not a deus-ex-machina
brief ly wheeled onto the stage for the sake of murder, but the embodi-
ment of Robin’s principal romantic interest. The film superimposes the
role of Robin’s love interest onto that of the traitorous abbess. “Maid
Marian” is a character unknown to the early ballad tradition. She enters
the Robin Hood–narrative only in consequence of the material’s more
decisive development toward gentrification. Hence, by projecting Marian
back onto the world of the ballads, the film both explores and exploits the
tensions between the early, exclusively homosocial Robin and his later,
more clearly heterosexual mutations into a romance hero. In so doing,
the movie considerably expands the role assigned to women in the Robin
Hood tradition; after all, Marian’s act of poisoning proves to be a very
different kind of murder from that committed by the Gest ’s evil abbess.
First, Marian kills Robin only after he himself has already betrayed his
own legend, besotted as he is both with the ballads he has heard and the
blood he has spilt. By intervening at this point, Marian contributes cru-
cially to preserving the legend, since not only Robin’s bloodthirstiness,
but also the increasingly ridiculous effects of his middle age, undermine
his mythical status. By ending the senseless prolongation of an impossible
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 205

outlaw-existence, Marian unintentionally secures the basis for Robin’s

mythical immortality. Because the “real” Robin is sacrificed on the altar
of myth, the legendary hero of the ballads will attain eternal fame.27
Second, in contrast to the Gest ’s evil abbess, Marian betrays Robin for
love. At the level of the film’s plot this means that she acknowledges the
ultimate incompatibility of Robin’s notion of a good life with her own
without, however, abandoning her feelings. Desperate as her poisoning
of Robin may seem, it represents an act of female self-determination and
a conscious rewriting of the ballad tradition in a manner that recognizes
the interests of women—though women, we remember, are practically
absent from the early ballad material.
Third, the film’s ending contains an unexpected moment of spirituality
that forms a pervasive but previously rather muted presence in the film.
This half-hidden religious element first becomes visible through the High
Cross and is further embodied in the movie’s triptych structure. Whereas
in the Gest the abbess’s profession has, strictly speaking, no religious mean-
ing at all, Marian’s monastic status assumes considerable importance. The
medieval text casts its abbess as a straightforward villain whose evil nature
is brilliantly enhanced by merging two stereotypes, that of the treacherous
woman with that of the equally treacherous cleric. In contrast, Marian’s
final act is steeped in a spirituality that proves relevant also for the political
significance of the film’s ending. In the seemingly conventional role of
the healer, she hands Robin a chalice containing poison. Inasmuch as she
drinks from the chalice first and then passes it to Robin, Marian resem-
bles a priest administering the sacrament of the Eucharist—even though,
admittedly, in the medieval Church sipping the wine was the priest’s
exclusive privilege. Iconographically, her wielding of the chalice raises her
to a priest-like level—a position medieval Christianity denied women,
except perhaps in the secret world of Lollard conventicles.28 A number of
significant details further enhances her sacerdotal role. When Robin real-
izes what is afoot and forces Marian to explain, her words acquire a decid-
edly liturgical ring. In an anaphoric, hymn-like style she proclaims:

I love you.
More than all you know.
I love you more than children.
More than fields I’ve planted with my hands.
I love you more than morning prayers or peace or food to eat.
I love you more than sunlight, more than f lesh or joy or one more day.
I love you more than God.

Blasphemous as the last sentence must undoubtedly sound, especially

when spoken by a nun, the words and sentiments themselves are clearly
206 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

inspired by Christian spirituality. The spirituality we sense here is of a

kind that would fit well with the most radical spiritual developments tak-
ing place within Western Christianity during the early thirteenth cen-
tury, the very period in which the film is set. Invoking the specter of a
typically Franciscan spirituality which originates in the first decade of
the thirteenth century, the film blends a powerfully emotional devotion
to God with an equally powerful endorsement of the physical world as
God’s creation: Marian refers to her morning prayers with an almost
erotic fervor; she adores children, and tends the earth with her own
hands. Spiritually embracing the physical world, Marian’s words echo
St Francis’s “Canticle of the Creatures.”29 And even as the female eccle-
siastical character who kills Robin, Marian the nun literally assumes the
mantle of St Francis’s “sister, the bodily death,”30 whom the “Canticle of
the Creatures” allegorically praises as a gift of God.
The film’s celebration of Marian’s murder-cum-suicide as an act of
spiritual worship becomes even more pronounced in the final scene’s
very last image. Here, we are once again shown the rotting apples we
saw at the film’s absolute beginning. The camera offers a brief glimpse
of the window sill with its rotting apples while Robin’s arrow vanishes
into nothingness. But the apples are not alone any more, as they were
in the initial scene: The poisoned chalice stands beside them. The win-
dowsill now adopts the quality of an altar while the apples assume the
character of an offering, stressing once more the sacrificial overtones of
the whole event, but also the endorsement of God’s material creation and
the ineluctably temporal nature of its inhabitants. In purely visual terms,
however, most of the image is taken up by the light blue sky and the
sense of infinity it conveys. One could argue that the scene stretches the
infinite into the divine, in which case Robin’s arrow would be gesturing
toward a mystical (though rather phallic) union with the godhead. All the
same, given their association with the Fall in the Christian tradition, the
apples render the scene oddly ambivalent. The reference to Eve’s fateful
deed in the Garden of Eden also reminds us of the degree to which medi-
eval Christian tradition tends to script feminity in such repressive ways
that, in order to embark on a course of her own, Marian has to creatively
adapt the role of the traitress.
It would be tempting to see Marian’s final act of rewriting the leg-
end as an attempt to escape from history altogether. Robin and Marian’s
Liebestod would thus be imbued with a utopian quality but—for all the
Franciscan love of the material world invoked—this would ultimately
seem to be an otherworldly and consequently a depoliticized utopia.31
Religious spirituality would then appear to be the only alternative left
in a world otherwise dominated by the harsh imperatives of history and
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 207

ideology. After all, we have witnessed how the film metaphorically con-
structs an image of the ineluctable pressures of history by creating a visual
space overburdened with the debris of the ages.
Moreover, we have noted the movie’s sensitive approach to mythmak-
ing as embodied in the ballad-scene and the way it establishes a different
but no less powerful sense of history. If the film’s archaeological land-
scape with its blind beggars portrays Robin and John unwittingly trapped
in a world shaped by half-hidden layers of history only waiting to assert
themselves, then the ballads, by contrast, appear to claim a mildly utopian
quality of their own. But that wisp of utopianism evaporates as soon as
Robin attempts to turn the ballads’ f limsy utopian potential into a blue-
print for a real-life outlaw existence.
Finally, as the film takes its own particular version of a religious
turn, it seems to reject any notion of establishing a utopian space in the
actual world, suggesting that any meaningful sense of utopia is only ever
reserved for the next world.32 But such a reading would underestimate
Marian’s capacity for creative adaptation, would deny her the power of
picking, choosing, recombining, and reinterpreting the scraps from the
poetic archaeology of the ballad tradition that will, in the end, help her
to refashion the legend in a feminist mode.
Religiously inspired as Robin and Marian’s final imagery undoubtedly
is, the otherworldly utopia thus sketched is anything but depoliticized.
Both the image of the apples and Marian’s highly erotic and entirely
personal adaptation of the “Canticle of Creatures” insist on a notion of
utopia bound to the material world and appropriated for nonreligious
purposes, even if the final scene’s visual and linguistic mode of expres-
sion is steeped in Christian spirituality. The film’s romantic end does not
consist in a mere escapism embodied in the arrow’s taking a direct route
to heaven. Rather, it offers us a view that remains firmly embedded in
the material and social conditions of medieval life. Marian loves Robin
more “than fields I’ve planted with my hands,” and the altar of the clos-
ing image is bedecked with rotting apples, whose very rottenness ties the
film to the here-and-now of material experience, to the temporalities
of physical life and material production. That imagery may, therefore,
be read as Marxist-inspired and fitting very well with the ending’s par-
ticularly Franciscan allusions, but also with the film’s recurring shots of
peasants and craftsmen.
Besides, in the history of cinematic medievalism one of the most
complex interrogations of Christianity was the one delivered only a
decade before through Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e uccellini (1966),33
an allegory that discusses the problems of the Italian communist party
through a deeply ironic Franciscan allegory. Because of the way Robin
208 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

and Marian revels in its typically Hollywoodian production values, it is

easy to overlook its frequent stabs at entering into dialogue with cine-
matic precursors of a very different kind. The film’s very first (seemingly
superf luous) shot of the apples is followed by a series of images (a vul-
ture’s head, the sun, a sword hilt with the sun as background) ending
with a shot of an old man’s head in profile. The head fills the screen with
only the light blue sky as a background so that the audience is compelled
to stare at his ugly features and is forced to take a good look at the old
man’s empty eye socket—an image that prefigures the theme of human
physical decline present all through the film. Underlaid with particu-
larly grating music, this image can be read as a tribute to Pasolini, since
it displays a Pasoliniesque fascination with the grotesque human face.
Pasolini, who had made a number of medieval films with a left-wing
agenda, was murdered less than a year before Robin and Marian’s release.
In its opening allusion to the left-wing medievalism of the European
auteur -cinema, Robin and Marian ironically questions its own place-
ment in the camp of mainstream entertainment. At the same time, the
dusty Spanish landscape and the irritating score recall the tradition of
Italian Westerns that had just come to an end. The film thus establishes
a thumbnail sketch of its own cinematic prehistory—Hollywood’s own
Robin Hood tradition, the Spaghetti Western’s cynical take on American
popular myths, and Pasolini’s left-wing medievalism—creating a layered
sense of movie traditions that echoes the archaeological trope the film
inherits and adapts from the Middle Ages.
Clearly, Robin and Marian presents itself as deeply distrustful of any
incarnation of history, be it in the sense of the past’s material remains lit-
erally rising out of the ground like the stone slabs of the Roman road, or
be it in the sense of myth and fiction that seem to envelop human beings
and force them into roles that are literally prescripted, in the manner
that the outlaw hero’s role is already prescripted by the ballads. The one
character in the film who is permitted to rebel against this prescripted-
ness is Marian. Creatively adapting the poisoner-abbess’s role from A
Gest of Robyn Hode, Marian becomes the film’s actual rewriter of the
legend, thus standing in at the level of the plot for the movie’s scriptwrit-
ers themselves. Drawing on a language of love inspired by a particularly
Franciscan variety of Christian spirituality and framed by an imagery
that insists on the materiality of the physical world, Marian succeeds in
salvaging through her self-determined adaptation of the Liebestod-motif
something of the Robin Hood-legend’s political message, even though,
at the plot level, the price she has to pay is death. With the final image
of the windowsill turned altarpiece, the cinematic triptych can thus be
closed and all we see is the blue sky.
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 209

Notes
1. Jeffrey Richards, “Robin Hood on the Screen,” in Robin Hood: An
Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge,
UK: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 436 [429–40]; first printed in Robin Hood:
The Many Faces of that Celebrated English Outlaw, ed. Kevin Carpenter
(Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universit ät
Oldenburg, 1995), pp. 135–44.
2. Robin and Marian was the first of several medieval films starring Sean
Connery, such as The Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight (1984), The Name of the Rose (1986), Robin Hood—Prince
of Thieves (1991), First Knight (1995), and Dragonheart (1996). As Tison
Pugh notes, Connery’s medieval films do not simply continue the Bond-
like superhero formula of his early career but “queer [its] alpha-male
construction of heroism . . . thus allow[ing] the actor to escape the type-
casting that trapped other [Bond] actors” (Tison Pugh, “Sean Connery’s
Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages,” in Queer Movie Medievalisms,
ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh [Farnham: Ashgate, 2009]
p. 148 [147–64]).
3. Since it presents a skeptical approach to martial heroism, the film has
often been discussed in terms of the Vietnam experience. Richards,
“Robin Hood on the Screen,” p. 436.
4. Richards, “Robin Hood on the Screen,” p. 436.
5. Admittedly, the final fight scene looks “disturbingly realistic” (Stephen
Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw [Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994] p. 237).
6. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, “Introduction: The A-Chronology of
Medieval Film,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 15 [1–19].
7. William F. Woods, “Authenticating Realism in Medieval Film,” in The
Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buff y, ed. Martha W.
Driver and Sid Ray ( Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2004), p. 38 [38–51].
8. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney Payton
and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996),
p. 1.
9. Martha W. Driver, “What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It? Historicity
and Authenticity in Medieval Film,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen:
Representations from Beowulf to Buff y, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray
( Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2004), p. 20 [19–22]. See also Laurie A.
Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages
on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 48,
and Sarah Salih, “Cinematic Authenticity Effects and Medieval Art:
A Paradox,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 28–29 [20–39].
10. For a concise description of the triptych’s basic characteristics, see
Shirley Bloom Neilsen, Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage
210 A N DR EW JA M ES JOHNSTON

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 3–7. A more

detailed analysis focusing especially on the triptych’s meaning and func-
tion, see Lynn F. Jacobs, Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych
Reinterpreted (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2011), p. 1–20.
11. For an earlier discussion of the rotten/rotting apples see Christian
Kiening, “Einleitung: Mittelalter im Film,” in Mittelalter im Film, ed.
Christian Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, Trends in Medieval Philology
6 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 46–47 [3–101]. For Kiening the apples
symbolize the point at which Robin Hood’s heroism achieves its final
mythical quality: an “apotheosis” without body or transcendence.
12 . Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, p. 48.
13. Andrew Higson, “‘Medievalism’, the Period Film and the British Past
in Contemporary Cinema,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and
Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009),
p. 210 [203–24].
14. Ibid., p. 210.
15. Bernau and Bildhauer, “Introduction,” p. 1.
16. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf and
the Fight at Finnsburg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), l. 725.
17. Seth Lerer, “On fagne f lor: The Postcolonial Beowulf,” in Postcolonial
Approaches to the European Middle Ages, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and
Deanne Williams (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 77–102. See also Nicholas Howe, “Anglo-Saxon England and the
Postcolonial Void,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages,
ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 35 n.27 [25–47].
18. Emily V. Thornbury, “Eald enta geweorc and the Relics of Empire:
Revisiting the Dragon’s Lair in Beowulf,” Quaestio 1 (2000): 82–92.
19. Andrew James Johnston, “Beowulf and the Remains of Imperial Rome:
Archaeology, Legendary History and the Problems of Periodisation,” in
Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings. Proceedings of the Conference of the
German Association of University Teachers of English, ed. Lars Eckstein and
Christoph Reinfandt, vol. 30 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier,
2009), pp. 127–36.
20. See Salih’s illuminating discussion in “Cinematic Authenticity Effects,”
p. 34.
21. Monika Otter, “‘New Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval
Sense of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994):
407–8 [387–414].
22 . Robin and Marian, dir. Richard Lester (US: Columbia Pictures, 1976).
23. Ironically, Connery’s role as Robin Hood spawned its own chain of Robin
Hood associations: In Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991) Connery had a
brief appearance as King Richard the Lion Heart, and after Michael Praed
had abandoned the role, Connery’s own son Jason played the outlaw in
the TV series Robin of Sherwood. See in this context Stephen Knight,
 MARIAN R EWRITES THE LEGEND 211

“Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Fitting the Tradition Snugly,” in Robin Hood:
An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge,
UK: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 461–67.
24. The few critics who discuss Lester’s film surprisingly fail to notice
quite how unfair the Sheriff ’s end is. According to Tison Pugh, Robin,
“[w]ith one last burst of alpha-male glory . . . saves the day, but his final vic-
tory brings with it his final defeat as well” (Pugh, “Sean Connery’s Star
Persona,” p. 157). But there is no glory, since the clearly superior Sheriff,
who actually pities Robin, is off his guard when Robin kills him.
25. “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed.
Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval
Institute Publications, 1997), pp. 80–96. For an interpretation of The
Gest of Robin Hood, see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) pp. 22–26.
26. For treason as a tragic way to substantiate a character’s heroic nature,
see Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to
Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 307–8.
27. Heinrich Adolf, too, notes the film’s preoccupation with the survival of
the Robin Hood myth, but largely ignores Marian’s role in this context;
see his “Robin Hood,” in Mittelalter im Film, ed. Christian Kiening and
Heinrich Adolf, Trends in Medieval Philology 6 (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2006), pp. 132–34 [105–34].
28. Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers (London: Continuum, 1984),
pp. 49–70.
29. St Francis was one of cinematic medievalism’s more visible hippie-style
heroes of the 1970s. Franco Zeffirelli, already famous for investing a
seemingly conventional Romeo and Juliet with f lower-power-elements
in 1967, had directed his “visually arresting” Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna
[Brother Sun, Sister Moon] in 1972 (Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages:
American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films
About Medieval Europe [ Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999], p. 39).
30. Francis of Assisi, The Writings of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Paschal
Robinson, (Philadelphia, PA: Dolphin Press, 1906), p. 153.
31. For the idea of the love-death grafted onto the film from Tristan and Isolde
see Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, p. 163.
32. The film’s skeptical view of political utopianism is already present in the
medieval outlaw tradition. For an analysis of how the popular romance The
Tale of Gamelyn systematically buries its own utopian hopes, see Andrew
James Johnston, “Wrestling in the Moonlight: The Politics of Masculinity
in the Middle English Popular Romance Gamelyn,” in Constructions of
Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Stefan
Horlacher (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 51–67.
33. Uccellacci e uccellini [The Hawks and the Sparrows], dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
(Italy: CIDiF, 1966).
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INDEX
1492 – Conquest of Paradise (1992), 120
adaptation
of A Song of Fire and Ice (Martin),
155–65
as aesthetic layering, 8–15
of Beowulf, 129–49
of Dracula (Stoker), 41–54
of Eaters of the Dead (Crichton),
79–101
of King Lear (Shakespeare), 19–35
on the medieval, 59–60
poetics of, 11–14, 82, 90–1, 99,
133, 149
politics of, 21, 26, 75, 98–101
studies, 1–2, 8, 15n1, 16n4, 41, 58,
134, 173
theory, 1–15, 75
Timeline, 12, 58–76
of Timeline (Crichton), 58–76
Adolf, Heinrich, 211n27
Adorno, Theodor, 110, 121
Agamben, Giorgio, 185–6
anachronisms
as aesthetic strategy, 57–76
ambivalent, 68–76
evaluating, 64–8
in Timeline (2003), 68–76
views of, 61–4
Apollonius of Tyre, 167n20
Aquinas, Thomas, 46
archaeology, 10–11, 14, 58, 72–5,
90–1, 133, 193, 195–208
Archibald, Elizabeth, 166n11
Aristotle, 172, 186
Arthurian legends and myth
and Game of Thrones, 156–8, 167n26,
168n29
and King Lear, 24
and The Sixth Sense, 14, 173–88
Asma, Stephen T., 145–6
Aue, Hartmann von, 179, 181
Augustine, 46–9, 51–2
Avary, Roger, 13, 129–34, 137.
See also Beowulf (2007)
Baker, Graham: Beowulf, 131
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13, 17n16, 86, 89,
166n7
Balázs, Béla, 108, 110–11, 113
Baudrillard, Jean, 132, 150n17
Bédier, Joseph, 115
Benjamin, Walter, 6–7
Beowulf (2007), 129–49, 151n32,
151n35–6, 152n53, 152n41
Beowulf (poem)
archaeological tropes in, 201
and Beowulf (2007), 13, 129–49
and Eaters of the Dead (Crichton),
80, 90–4
Heaney’s edition of, 152n40–1
and Outlander (2008), 153n66
and The Thirteenth Warrior, 12, 94,
104n49
Bernau, Anke, 2–3, 8, 140, 144
Biddick, Kathleen, 140
Bildhauer, Bettina, 2–3, 8, 140, 144,
153n64
Bleisteiner, Martin, 14
Bloom, Harold, 23, 37n22
230
Boethius, 46
Bosch, Hieronymus, 196
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), 12,
41–54, 56n32, 56n35, 56n39
Branagh, Kenneth, 120
Braveheart (1995), 73
Breughel, Pieter the Elder
The Blind Leading the Blind, 196
Children’s Games, 196
Netherlandish Proverbs, 196
The Slaughter of the Innocents, 196
The Tower of Babel, 196
Triumph of Death and Dulle Griet
(Mad Meg), 196
Browning, Tod, 41, 48
Buddhism, 27–35, 39n36, 39n44
Burt, Richard, 6, 55n21
Burton, Richard, 114
Celtic mythology, 73–4, 181, 190n18,
196
Cerquiglini, Bernard, 6, 17n20, 17n22
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 24–5, 164,
168n27, 168n36
Cheney, Patrick, 23
Cheng, Jerome, 145
chronology, 2–3
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 4
Colette, Carolyn, 136
Comolli, Jean-Louis, 132
computer generated images (CGI), 13–14,
130–6, 139–49, 152n41, 152n53
Connery, Sean, 194, 209n2, 210n23
convergence culture, 63, 67
Cooper, Helen, 156, 166n6, 168n28
Coppola, Francis Ford: Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1992), 12, 41–54, 56n32,
56n35, 56n39
Coulardeau, Jacques, 55n19
Crichton, Michael
Eaters of the Dead, 80, 82–4, 86,
89–99, 104n34, 131
on the medieval, 59–60
Timeline, 12, 58–76
See also Thirteenth Warrior, The
(1999); Timeline (2003)
IN DEX
Danby, John, 22–3
Dawkins, Richard, 156
Dawson, Anthony, 20
de Grazia, Margreta, 61
Derrida, Jacques, 41
Dickie, Kate, 163
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 11, 51–3, 62
Donne, John: “The Good-morrow,”
124
Donner, Richard: Timeline (2003),
58–76
Doody, Margaret, 166n7
Driver, Martha W., 63
DVD technology, 6
Dyer, Richard, 56n32
Echard, Siân, 137
Eco, Umberto, 132
Elliott, Andrew, 63–4, 68
eternity, 12–13, 44–53
evil, 47, 159, 204–5
Excalibur (1981), 114
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 115
Felski, Rita, 18n29, 62
Feuer und Schwert (Fire and Sword)
(1982), 13, 108, 113–24
Finke, Laurie A., 5–6, 16n6, 17n16,
64, 199
Fradenburg, Aranye, 62
Franco, James, 120
Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna (Brother Sun,
Sister Moon) (1972), 211n29
free will, 47
Freud, Sigmund, 6, 139–40, 172
Frye, Northrop, 167n19
Funeral, The (1996), 40n45
Fürstenberg, Veith von: Feuer und
Schwert (Fire and Sword) (1982),
13, 108, 113–24
Gaiman, Neil, 13, 130–1, 134, 137.
See also Beowulf (2007)
Game of Thrones (television series), 14,
155–65, 165–6n4, 167n26
Gardner, John: Grendel, 130–1
 IN DEX
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 167n18
Historia regum Britanniae, 21
Georgaris, Dean, 120–5
Gesamtkunstwerk, 10, 109, 111, 116, 122
Gest of Robyn Hode, A, 204–5, 208
Gladiator (2000), 120
Glaser, Hermann, 117
Goody, Jack, 3–4
Greenblatt, Stephen, 3
Gregory of Tours, 130
Halpern, Richard, 23, 25
Hamlet (1996), 120
Harty, Kevin J., 14, 173, 177–9
Haydock, Nickolas, 61
Heaney, Seamus, 139, 152n40–1
Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 186
Heng, Geraldine, 166n8
Herweg, Mathias, 127n44
Herzog, Werner, 113–14
Higson, Andrew, 200
Hinz, Philipp, 13–14
Hiroshima, atomic bomb attack on,
29, 33
historical accuracy, 12, 15–16n2, 57,
60–8, 75, 91, 116, 198
Hodapp, William D., 133–4
Huizinga, Johan: Autumn of the Middle
Ages, 196
Hutcheon, Linda, 4–5, 169n41
Hutchinson, Rachel, 31, 38n25
hyperrealism, 13–14, 131–6, 141, 144,
148–9, 151n28
Ibn Fadlan, Ahmed: Risala, 80, 82–3,
85, 91, 98
incest, 14, 155–65, 166n11, 167n18,
167n20, 167n25, 168n27, 168n36
Inglourious Basterds (2009), 115
Inoura, Yoshinobu, 40n45
interlace, 161
Irwin, William, 166n13
Itami, 40n45
Jacoby, Henry, 166n13
James, William, 58
231
Jameson, Fredric, 41, 54
Jansen, Marius B., 38n29
Japanese theater, 26–35
Jenkins, Henry, 63
jidai-geki (samurai film), 26, 31,
38n25
Joe, Jeongwon, 107
Johnston, Andrew James, 14, 21, 62,
168n27
Johnston, Edward, 58
Jolie, Angelina, 148
Jones, Chris, 130–1, 134, 151n35
Kappelhoff, Hermann, 115
Kawatake, Toshio, 40n45
Keller, Jocelyn, 11
Keller, Wolfram R., 11
Kempe, Margery, 51–2
Keppler-Tasaki, Stefan, 9, 13, 133
Kingdom of Heaven (2005), 102n11,
120
Kitching, Juta, 103n30
Klaeber, Friedrich, 130
Klinger, Judith, 12–13, 131
Kluge, Alexander, 116
Knight’s Tale, A (2001), 120
Kott, Jan, 22
Kozintsev, Grigori, 21
Kurosawa, Akira: Ran (1985), 11–12,
19–35, 36n8
Lacan, Jacques, 172
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of
Life (2003), 120
leadership, 93, 96
Leitch, Thomas, 1–2, 4
Lemke, Cordula, 12, 65
Lester, Richard: Robin and Marian
(1976), 14, 193–208
Leyerle, John, 161
Linton, Joan Pong, 20
Lovespell (1981), 114
Lucan, 190n18
Lucretius, 3
Lugosi, Bela, 48
Lukács, György, 63, 77n32
232
Malkovich, John, 133
Manovich, Lev, 134
Martin, George R. R.: A Song of
Fire and Ice, 14, 155, 157, 161–5,
168n30. See also Game of Thrones
(television series)
McTiernan, John: Thirteenth Warrior,
The (1999), 13, 79–101, 104n40,
104n51, 105n58
medieval film, defined, 2–3
medieval studies, 2–3, 16n6, 21,
69, 140
medievalism, use of the term,
16n6
memes, 156
Menache, Alberto, 131
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(1975), 65
motion capture, 131, 145
multi-temporality, 62, 72
Multiverse, 58–9, 71
Mulvey, Laura, 4, 139–40
Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 41
Myles, Sophia, 120
Nachträglichkeit, 139–41
Nagasaki, atomic bomb attack on,
29, 33
Nichols, Stephen G., 140
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 146
nihonjinron (theories of Japanese-ness),
38n29, 40n45
Nordin, Kenneth D., 27–8, 39n36
Paden, William D., 63
Panofsky, Erwin, 61
Parsifal (1982), 114
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 207–8
periodization, 11–12, 20–1, 31, 36n8,
58, 61–2
poet-playwrights, 20, 23–4, 31
postcolonial theory, 3–4
Preser, Antonia, 114
privatio boni, 47, 49
psychological hyperrealism, 141
Pugh, Tison, 209n2, 211n24
IN DEX
quest, 60, 158, 161, 167, 168n29.
See also Arthurian legends and
myth
Raab, Kurt, 115
Ran (1985), 11–12, 19–35, 31, 36n8
Raw, Laurence, 16n4
“Reel History” (blog), 67
Reynolds, Kevin: Tristan & Isolde
(2006), 108, 119–25
Rob Roy (1995), 73
Robin and Marian (1976), 14, 193–208
Robin Hood (2010), 120
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991),
102n9, 120, 210–11n23
Robin of Sherwood (television series),
210n23
romance genre
Arthurian, 173, 179–80
and Game of Thrones, 14, 164–5,
166n7–8, 167n19, 168n28
and Robin and Marian, 200, 204
and The Thirteenth Warrior, 97
and Timeline, 60
Romeo and Juliet (1967), 211n29
Rouse, Margitta, 7, 12–14, 56n39
Said, Edward, 81, 98, 102n16
samurai, 21, 25–7, 29, 33, 38n29
Saracens, 102n9
Scheuer, Hans Jürgen, 14
Schneider, Manfred, 89
science fiction, 60, 65.
See also Timeline (2003)
Scott, Ridley, 102n11, 120
September 11, 2001, 99
Sewell, Rufus, 120
Shaheen, Jack, 80, 102n11
Shakespeare, William, 109
King Lear, 11, 19–35
Pericles, 168n27
Romeo and Juliet, 51
See also Hamlet (1996)
Sheikh, The (1921), 102n15
Shichtman, Martin B., 5–6, 16n6,
17n16, 64, 199
 IN DEX
Shyamalan, M. Night: The Sixth Sense
(1999), 14, 171–88
Sklar, Elizabeth, 84, 97, 101n3, 103n29
Smith, Julia, 134
Stanbury, Sarah, 136
Starkey, Steve, 132
Stock, Lorraine, 102n9
Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 12, 41–54. See
also Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Syberberg, Hans Jürgen, 114, 116
Tarantino, Quentin, 115
Telotte, Jay P., 135, 142
temporality, 2–15, 20–1, 26, 28, 31–2,
141, 61–72, 195, 198–200
Thirteenth Warrior, The (1999), 13,
79–101, 104n40, 104n51, 105n58
time travel, 58–9, 65–6, 69–72
Timeline (2003), 58–76
Todorov, Tzvetan, 172
Tolkien, J. R. R.: “The Monsters and
the Critics,” 133, 150n20
Trigg, Stephanie, 63
Tristan & Isolde (2006), 108, 119–25
Tuchmann, Barbara, 71
Türlin, Heinrich von dem: Diu Crône
(The Crown), 183–4
Twain, Mark: A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court, 66
233
Uccellacci e uccellini (1966), 207–8
Valentino, Rudolph, 102n15
Wagner, Richard, 9, 13, 107–25,
133
Art and Revolution, 107, 124
The Art-Work of the Future, 109–10
Opera and Drama, 110–11
Parsifal, 110
Tannhäuser, 111–12
Tristan und Isolde, 112, 115, 117,
121, 124
See also Parsifal (1982); Tristan &
Isolde (2006)
Waltz, Christoph, 114–15
Wawer, Anne, 190n18
Wenders, Wim, 114
Westboer, Nils, 172
Winstone, Ray, 145
Woods, William F., 196
Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 40n45
Yoshino, Kosaku, 38n29
Zeffirelli, Franco, 211n29
Zemeckis, Robert: Beowulf (2007),
129–49, 151n32, 151n35–6,
152n53, 152n41