Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (USA 2007) is an unusual film. It follows an unusual narrative structure – the hero’s path shifts dramatically into the future at the very moment in which we might expect a romantic resolution – and yet it is at the same time recognisable as a very ‘generic’ film, investing energy in fulfilling rather than challenging generic norms. The film is bursting with implicit contradictions, no more so than in its various approaches to the medieval past. The film is a loose adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon poem of the same name. The film’s relationship to its source in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf is ambiguous. Even while the film appeals to its audience to respond with fierce emotion to the idea of a ‘story’ that endures across time, screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman blithely transform their literary source in order to write their own cultural stories on the bodies of the monsters.
Using the technologies of motion-capture and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the film narrates the trials of a small settlement in early medieval Denmark which is led by an ageing king, Hrothgar (voiced and performed by Anthony Hopkins). When the settlement comes under attack by a man-eating monster named Grendel (Crispin Hellion Glover), it becomes clear that Hrothgar and his men are unequal to the task of defeating the monster. Enter Beowulf (Ray Winstone) – young, strong, and eager for adventure, he sails to the settlement after hearing of their problems and defeats Grendel in single, unarmed combat. The hall falls under attack for a second time when Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie) takes her vengeance. Beowulf ventures into her lair, but instead of killing her, he allows her to seduce him in return for the kingship. The film lingers long enough to show us both that Grendel’s mother’s promises have not been in vain as Beowulf assumes the kingship, and that Grendel himself was the product of an earlier sexual encounter between Hrothgar and Grendel’s mother. The film then jumps forward in time to the end of Beowulf’s reign, when the settlement again comes under attack, this time from a dragon – who is the progeny of Beowulf and Grendel’s mother. The film ends with father and son killing each other, bringing peace to the kingdom once more. We are left with a tantalising glimpse of Grendel’s mother hovering in the sea, about to claim her next – male – victim.
The conflicts in Zemeckis’ Beowulf are staged as eternal conflicts – conflicts between man and monster, and between man and his own darker nature. The film forges links between these ‘eternal conflicts’ and its generic figures, who at times fulfil our contemporary expectations so fully as to seem almost satirised. Hrothgar and Beowulf are at once more comically ‘slapstick’ and more tragically flawed than the film’s action-adventure heroic narrative can quite sustain. This, then, is another contradiction of the film, that it encompasses both a sincere desire for the triumph of heroes (and for the death of monsters), and an anxious sense that the heroes themselves exceed the roles required of them.
The conflicting narrative desires of Zemeckis’ Beowulf are projected upon a medievalist backdrop. The film offers, variously, a ‘medieval’ aesthetic, a ‘medieval’ ethos, and an idea of the ‘medieval’ as a place of fantastic possibility. The film’s medievalism, in many ways, allows its different generic approaches to cohere. An analysis of Beowulf, then, involves an investigation into how medievalism interacts with and affects popular genre. The film’s use of CGI to construct a recognisable medievalist aesthetic highlights an important feature of popular medievalism. The film emphasises material detail to create the illusion that we are entering a complete medieval ‘world.’ This is an aspect of popular medievalism that is often recognised implicitly, but seldom understood in terms of its relationship to popular genre.
The invocation of a material Middle Ages is connected in this film to an invocation of an authentic, ‘emotional’ or ‘psychological’ Middle Ages. Zemeckis’ Beowulf presents itself not as an adaption of the Anglo-Saxon poem, but as a creative rediscovery of emotional and psychological truths that have been obscured by the original source. This approach performs a dual transformation of the epic narrative of Beowulf, transforming it simultaneously into a modern story and a ‘timeless’ myth. The final segment of our essay will examine the ideological work that this alignment of modern medievalism and modern genre performs. It is our argument that popular medievalism works to strengthen the ideological practices of genre, and we examine the way in which this film’s deployment of the medieval functions as a mask for ‘essential’ constructions of gender, heroism, and human nature.
In referring to the generic practices of this film, we refer to the conventions and expectations associated with Hollywood’s popular narrative forms. These kinds of “systems of comprehension”[1] are obvious examples of John Frow’s definition of the term “genre” as a “specific organisation of texts with thematic, rhetorical and formal dimensions.”[2] Popular genres, especially, are recognised by their “formal dimensions,” being more easily illustrated by examples (Western, romantic comedy, heist movie, space opera) than by definition. The expression of medievalism within popular texts is always inflected by the conventions and expectations of popular genres. Yet, at the same time, popular medievalism is always in excess of genre. It is important to recognise that, within popular culture, the medieval has a kind of cultural capital as something that can be communicated as something ‘whole,’ a ‘world’ that is somehow complete. The communication of this sense of wholeness is bound up in the fact that “genre is not a property of a text but a function of reading.”[3] As Frow explains:
genre is neither a property of (and located ‘in’) texts, nor a projection of (and located ‘in’) readers; it exists as a part of the relationship between texts and readers, and it has a systematic existence. It is a shared convention with a social force.[4]
Popular medievalism can be understood in much this way, as a “shared convention with a social force,” that comes into existence somewhere between being invoked by the film and understood by the viewer.
It is unlikely that the mark of medievalism will be understood and acknowledged as a new genre by contemporary audiences of film. Medievalism does not fulfil the commercial and narrative requirements of a specific popular genre, but is instead more likely to be understood as an integral aspect of the ‘fantasy,’ or the ‘epic’ film. We do not wish to suggest that Beowulf’s popular medievalism is a generic form, nor do we wish to provide a taxonomy of popular approaches to the medieval. Rather, we explore in this essay just a few of the myriad ways that popular medievalism transforms and is transformed by generic forms and conventions.
One of the ways in which the film achieves its medievalism is through the use of medievalist material detail that is both amplified and estranged by the film’s use of CGI. The film rewards the viewer’s gaze with an abundance of early medieval, ‘Scandinavian’ material and physical details which are in fact neither material nor physical, but are instead facilitated by the film’s use of computer-generated images. The film opens upon a feast in the hall of Heorot. In this scene, the details of clothes, jewellery, coins, weapons, food and drink present a textured visual aesthetic. The film’s creators cannot resist showing us the detail of the world they have built, as the ‘camera’ seems to pause for long moments upon cups and plates, food, liquid mead moving in cups and being spilled, cloth flowing around naked bodies. Such a level of material detail signals a kind of historical specificity even if the details themselves are not accurately researched or consistently presented. These material details are what Jonathan Culler, in a discussion of Roland Barthes’ “reality effect” describes as “a descriptive residue: items whose only apparent role in the text is that of denoting concrete reality.”[5] The film’s medievalist objects do not function solely to fulfil Barthes’ “reality effect,”[6] as they are in fact “picked up and integrated by symbolic or thematic codes”[7] insofar as they cue the audience’s appreciation of an early medieval setting.
The effect of historical detail can itself be considered in terms of popular genre expectations. Stephen Neale claims that:
there is in any individual genre always a balance between generic and socio-cultural verisimilitude, and some genres appeal more to the latter than to the former. Gangster films, war films and police procedural thrillers in particular often mark that appeal by drawing on and quoting ‘authentic’ (or authenticating) discourses, artefacts, and texts: maps, newspaper headlines, memoirs, archival documents, and so on – Other genres – sword-and-sorcery adventure films, space operas and supernatural horror films, for instance – appeal much less to this kind of authenticity.[8]
The contrast Neale draws here between speculative and more ‘realist’ generic forms does not apply to the increasingly popular genre of epic fantasy fiction. Contemporary fantasy fiction fabricates maps, invokes archival documents, and reproduces artefacts, names, and battles from medieval histories and encyclopaedias. An appeal to what Neale calls “socio-cultural verisimilitude” through such documents is found across examples of the genre, and has become itself not only a convention of the genre-text, but even a sign of generic identity, a “mark of belonging”[9] to the fantasy genre. The “verisimilitude” of these maps and archival documents fulfils a desire to suggest a separate, fantasy reality. In constructing “alternative conceptual worlds,” fantasy novels tend to display a multitude of physical and material details, which are carefully integrated into thought-out ‘systems’ (socio-political, magical, natural). The pseudo-historical details in recent fantasy films can be understood in just this way. The ‘texture’ and close detail of settings, costumes, even accents, was also an obsession of the makers of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.[10] In both Jackson’s trilogy and in Zemeckis’ movie, we see this attention to detail in cinematic media. In Zemeckis’ film, the computer-generated images remove the medievalist materials into a location that is, like the “alternative conceptual world” of fantasy fiction, “different and discrete.”[11] It is possible that the aesthetic wholeness of the historical detail is facilitated by the digital medium. Perhaps without the physical reminder of anachronistic textiles, without the sound of creaking plastic or glimpses of actors moving weapons that are obviously too light in their hands, it is easier for us the audience to suspend its disbelief in a modern filmmaker’s ability to recreate the lived details of a medieval past.
What does this effect of worldly details suggest about a contemporary audience’s understandings of the medieval in modern narratives? We might focus this question upon a single medievalist object: the golden drinking horn that Hrothgar calls “the royal dragon horn.”[12] The horn is the opening image of the film. The picture of a dragon contained in the film’s title segues into a close-up of a gold drinking cup with a gold dragon curled around it. Wealtheow (Robin Wright-Penn), Hrothgar’s queen, is holding the horn against her richly garbed body. A CGI metallic shine is played up in the frames in which the horn appears. The effect is quite surprising to a viewer who is perhaps used to the more painterly colours of animation. The film’s emphasis on the metallic glint of the horn can be viewed both as a flaunting of its own effects, and as an indication of the significance of the object.
We are invited to interpret this golden horn as a quest-object. This notion is reinforced by Hrothgar when he seems to connect Beowulf’s possession of the horn to his queen; Hrothgar looks at Wealtheow as he promises Beowulf the drinking-horn “for ever and ever.” Perhaps we are meant to understand the conflation of woman and treasure as a ‘medieval’ notion of objectification. However, the overt way in which the frame sets up the transference of Hrothgar’s gaze, and the rather disturbing close-up of the horn against Wealtheow’s torso (there is a relatively long pause before we see her face), strongly indicate the film’s complicity in the conflation of treasure, queen, and kingdom.
The dragon horn belongs to a romance trajectory. It is a quest object, but the quest belongs to a contemporary genre of adventure and does not necessarily echo medieval romance. There is nonetheless a very specific medievalism concentrated into the object, a medievalism of material weight. The horn’s creators have laboured to present the film’s audience with an object that has not only a golden surface but also a kind of ‘realist’ depth. The horn and its stylised dragon are inscribed with decorative patterns that echo the Celtic knot-work we see on the lid of the chest where the dragon horn is kept. This patterning writes the cultural specificity of an historical artefact upon the golden quest object. The idea of an ‘artefact’ has cultural significance as a link to a tangible, historical, ‘real’ middle ages. It conveys the sense of glittering authenticity that is attached to the objects found at the Anglo-Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo,[13] or to other artefacts that the Western audience of Zemeckis’ film might have seen, in museum cases or books or lectures, and thus designated as ‘historical.’ Yet the film only ever invokes, and does not really need the authenticity of historical research. It is clear that the ‘realistic depth’ that we perceive is a matter of outer decoration. The CGI effects that create the horn and the other objects and physical details in the hall could be described as “hyperreal”, offering the “absolute fake” to be experienced for a time as an absolute reality.[14] Umberto Eco, writing of America in the 1980s, observes how the absorption of historical information relied upon that information assuming:
the aspect of a reincarnation. To speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The ‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake.’ Absolute unreality is offered as real presence.[15]
“Real presence” cannot perhaps ever be invoked within the space of cinema, yet the CGI comes very close, presenting a sense of a fantastic ‘environment.’ The same digital medium that facilitates the medievalist aesthetic enables the film’s ‘fantasy’ elements. The animated (CGI) medium allows the fantastic monsters to be embodied, not just in form but in speed and brutality. Furthermore, the film uses ‘performance capture’ or ‘motion capture’ technology which involves mapping an actor’s movements, gestures, and facial expressions, and then incorporating this information digitally into the computer generated animation.[16] The use of performance capture allows the monsters to really ‘touch’ the bodies of the main characters. The digital medium allows Beowulf to be in ‘real’ contact with the dragon; Grendel’s monstrous difference is not created by the addition of a costume or prosthetics to an actor’s body, the body we see is Grendel, in the constructed reality of the film. Despite the unreality of the digital medium, the fact that the monsters and the human characters inhabit the same universe must have a powerful effect on our suspension of disbelief.
In Zemeckis’ Beowulf, we see the film’s timeliness recede in favour of the generic action. As the narrative of the film develops, the significance of Hrothgar’s royal dragon horn as a medievalist cultural artefact melts away, blending into the film’s modern narrative of gold and greed and lust. The king’s dragon horn is a symbol of the power Grendel’s mother offered to Hrothgar, and then to Beowulf in his turn. Beowulf’s possession of the drinking cup, and thus, of the realm, is tainted by his sin and yet is also represented as inevitable. As the royal dragon horn is passed on, it becomes a symbol both of the mythic quality of the tale, which will repeat itself, and of the human flaws that allow the monsters to continue. Thus the horn encodes another form of popular medievalism, in which the modern imagination is able to perceive the ‘truth’ behind the Middle Ages.
Just as the dragon horn is able to represent both ‘pastness’ and ‘mythicness,’ Zemeckis’s film Beowulf twins an historically specific society and setting with an ‘ancient story.’ This is a move without irony; as the film continues, the authenticity of the past and the mythic qualities of ‘story’ alternate interchangeably. And, indeed, this version of the Middle Ages that wavers between historical specificity and mythic timelessness is immediately recognizable to a contemporary audience.
It certainly appears to be a marketable Middle Ages. Below is a quotation taken from the “Production Notes” section of the film’s official website. The production notes offer us a paratext against which we can adjust our reading of the film itself. The comments contained in this promotional material can be considered as a form of “public marginalia,” a term which is put forward by Anica Boulanger Mashberg.[17] The website’s “Production Notes” describe the film as:
[s]et in a magical era veiled by the mists of time, replete with heroes and monsters, adventure and valour, gold and glory, one exceptional man, Beowulf, emerges to save an ancient Danish kingdom from annihilation by an ungodly creature. In return, this legendary six foot-six-inch Viking, brimming with daring confidence and ambition, succeeds to the throne.[18]
The film’s producers create the sense that the “ancient Danish kingdom” is not a known historical time and place, but is instead a time far enough removed from our historical knowledge that it is quite easily able to absorb all the magic, monsters, and six foot-six-inch Vikings that Hollywood can throw at it.
This dislocation of the past out of the historical record and into a magical, “veiled” space resembles what Arthur Lindley describes as a “temporally abstract middle ages,” one that is “unconnected to any period before or after.”[19] Lindley argues that this kind of ahistorical approach to the past is the preferred model for medievalist film. While we would question Lindley’s thesis that the Middle Ages of these ahistorical medievalist films functions simply as “a mirror and an alienating device for viewing… the present,”[20] Lindley’s approach does shed some light on the way in which the world of the Beowulf film is constructed in relation to the present. The film attempts to present a version of the Beowulf story that is more authentically ancient and yet more directly connected to the present, than the version contained in the Anglo-Saxon poem.
Robert Zemeckis describes the thought process that lay behind Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s adaptation of the Beowulf poem as follows:
I asked them, ‘What is it about this screenplay that makes this story so fascinating when the poem, to me, was so boring?’ And their answer was, ‘Well, let’s see, the poem was written somewhere between the 7th century and the 12th century. But the story had been told for centuries before that. The only people in the 7th century who knew how to write were monks. So, we can assume they did a lot of editing.’ 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 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.[21]
Zemeckis’ rather aggrandizing statements may not be a very clear reflection of the screenwriters’ creative process, but they are very interesting all the same. Zemeckis’ comments forge a thematic link between the modernity of the Beowulf screenplay and the “revolutionary discoveries” that arose from Gaiman and Avary’s attempts to fill the “holes in the source material.” The implication is that the screenwriters have somehow managed to access a version of the Beowulf story that is more authentic than the version contained in the Anglo-Saxon poem. Zemeckis refers to an older, oral tradition, the actual existence of which is still hotly debated among Anglo-Saxonists. The effect of the screenwriter’s claims is that while the written, medieval narrative might be seen as boring, censored and inaccessible to a modern audience, the projected oral tradition is seen as almost modern, able to communicate directly with us in the present without the mediating presence of history or historical narrative. Moreover, the “holes in the source material” are represented as being directly accessible to the modern writers through the exercise of their imaginations. Jack Rapke, the film’s producer, refers to this accessibility when he ascribes the story’s attractiveness to the fact that “it is wrapped up in this great action-adventure-mythological-epic world with monsters and seductresses, creatures that have certainly existed, at least in our subconscious, since the ancient times.”[22] It becomes apparent that these mythic or perhaps subconscious qualities of story nicely fulfil many of the expectations of popular genre. Contemporary audiences are familiar with the idea of the early Middle Ages as the heroic Middle Ages. The film’s boasting warriors form a crowd of brawny, drunken fighting men. However at odds with the decorum of the poem, the busy hall scenes and the constricted gender roles its men and women seem to play form an important part of a Middle Ages that is recognisable to the film’s Western audiences.
It is difficult, of course, to explain just why this Middle Ages is so familiar. This is a problem that inheres in the scholarship of ‘medieval’ film. Scholars seem to agree that ‘medieval’ film is a useful category, but does not function as a genre. As David Williams has noted, “the very existence of such a category of films of the Middle Ages may be questioned. It is certainly not quite a genre, any more than is ‘the historical film,’ a part of whose ground it covers.”[23] Any attempt, for example, to find common generic ground between Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (France/Italy 1974) and Zemeckis’ Beowulf, would have to content itself with the vaguest of statements. Even within the sub-grouping of ‘popular medievalism,’ we encounter a similar difficulty when we attempt to define the conventions that bind Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale in the same category as Beowulf. But the category itself persists. Johnathan Culler notes that our intuitive sense of genre is extremely powerful.[24] Our sense of genre, or of those more informal categories that inform but are larger than contemporary understandings of formal genre, are almost unconscious, forming part of our “cultural competence.”[25]
‘Popular’ medievalism is sometimes understood to have a single, homogenous identity. This perception of popular medievalism is referred to by Umberto Eco as “fantastic neo-medievalism.”[26] Eco does not include “fantastic neo-medievalism” in his “ten little middle ages.” Neo-medievalism is instead aligned with a “vague impulse… a sort of escapism a la Tolkien” in which we “indulge” when we misunderstand our (cultural, Western, European) desire to find our “real roots.”[27] Perhaps Eco is right, as the medievalism of popular genre texts is not usually primarily connected to a search for “the real roots” of Western culture. “The medieval” is understood instead in terms of a set of motifs, settings, roles, and images that are both recognisable and malleable. Because of this, popular medievalism exists in hybrid form. The medieval is too strongly marked to be subsumed into the genres whose conventions it fulfils. The distinctness and ‘otherness’ of the medieval in popular culture is such that many different and even conflicting expressions of the medieval appear to the audience with a kind of aesthetic wholeness. As critics, we need to acknowledge the aesthetic power of the ‘medieval’ to bind together many different ideologies and forms of representation. But this is only one aspect of the medievalism of popular culture. The many different forms of popular medievalism cannot be understood and ‘solved’ by a reference to “fantastic neo-medievalism” or some other all-encompassing term. The popularly recognisable, but non-specific, Middle Ages does not really exist as some kind of literary ‘background’ kept in an imaginary drawer. Popular medievalism is always inflected by the conventions and expectations of popular genre.
The opening scenes of the film confront us with both the familiarity of a medievalist setting and the startling unfamiliarity of the monstrous. As we leave the hall and sweep through desolate landscape towards Grendel’s cave, the starkness of the images unsettles the comfortable familiarity of the rowdy version of early medieval society that we encounter in the mead-hall. The long sequence in which Grendel invades Heorot moves, disturbingly, out of genre. We witness the warriors’ helplessness – they cannot withstand Grendel, and even Hrothgar’s attempt to perform the hero’s role is foiled by the monster. Grendel appears to us as a monster who will not allow the warriors to behave heroically. We experience much of the scene from Wealtheow’s often blurred and obscured perspective, and the obscured nature of her vision conveys the uncertainty of the human characters’ roles, adding to the generic uncertainty of the scene.
Beowulf, the hero, resolves this generic uncertainty. Beowulf’s identity as ‘our hero’ is so well-defined as to almost be camp: Hrothgar’s line “What we need is a hero” is followed instantly by our first glimpse of Beowulf, riding the prow of the ship, grinning into the teeth of a gale. His arrival on the scene is as reassuring to us as viewers as it is to Hrothgar and his people, because it signals a return to generic norms. Suddenly, the monster makes sense – his form resolves in terms of the need for meaning, the need for a hero.
While the Beowulf film is self-conscious in its deployment of generic codes, it never seriously questions them. The film’s approach is camp rather than ironic. We suspect that our authors sincerely feel that we need a hero, even as they invite us to laugh at this desire. Arthur Lindley refers to this kind of Middle Ages as the Middle Ages of “unironized heroism,” arguing that where this kind of Middle Ages is present, the “notional Middle Ages supplants the historical one, being, after all, much easier to deal with, and much easier to sell.”[28] The Middle Ages of Zemeckis’ film is not so much a notional Middle Ages as a generic Middle Ages, a place where modern generic conventions feel at home, where they are able to appear in their unironized – if camp – forms. It is within this unironized space that generic and filmic codes become subsumed by, and disguised as, ‘mythic’ and ‘essential’ forms.
There is some evidence that Gaiman, at least, has been thinking in terms of essentialism. In 2005 and 2007, he published two short stories “Bay Wolf” and “Monarch of the Glen”, both of which are based upon the narrative structure of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. In both of these stories, Gaiman refers to Beowulf through narrative events, rather than through any specific verbal echo of the poem’s verse, or some aspect of the poem’s landscapes and settings. The characters who occupy his stories are understood to take the place of characters in the poem – characters who become through Gaiman’s process of transformation, quasi-mythical ‘figures’ who play out specific roles. This emphasis on narrative events allows Gaiman to transmute the medieval narrative poem into the stuff of myth – where myth is understood as something which speaks to aspects of the human psyche that are seen as elemental and therefore unchanging. Shadow, the hero of the novella “Monarch of the Glen”, is drawn into what is figured as a mythic conflict. Gaiman has his hero think that:
[i]t was the fight of man against monster, and it was as old as time: it was Theseus battling the Minotaur, it was Beowulf and Grendel, it was every hero who had ever stood between the firelight and the darkness and wiped the blood of something inhuman from his sword.[29]
Here Gaiman suggests that all stories are somehow alike, that all monsters and heroes fight the same battle. Gaiman’s modern fantasies are legitimised by the creation of this ‘myth’ because he is able to suggest that the ‘true’ meaning behind the poem Beowulf must exist at the level of human unconscious, of storytelling itself.
In a similar fashion, Zemeckis’ film constructs ‘myth’ as simultaneously more ancient and more modern than ‘literature,’ as a pattern that maintains a presence in the present. The transformation of Beowulf into ‘myth’ encourages a reading practice that, to some extent, naturalises ideas of gender and heroism that that underlie particular film-genre conventions. Perhaps too the medieval setting provides a space where such ‘essential’ ideas of gender, heroism, and monstrosity do not seem out of place to a modern audience, where they seem in fact to be ‘appropriate.’
Ideas of ‘medieval’ heroism rely on marginalized bodies – heroism can only be enacted upon the body of the monster. This film revels in its portrayal of marginalised, monstrous bodies. It is instructive to consider how these essential notions of gender, heroism and monstrosity also inform the film’s portrayal of other marginalised bodies in the film – namely, those of the film’s two most prominent women, Wealtheow and Grendel’s mother. Wealtheow occupies an interesting position in the film. From its beginning, she is marked out as isolated, as an exceptional figure who moves through the society of the mead hall but who is never a fully integrated participant in it. Instead of the raucous enthusiasm displayed by her companions, Weatheow’s countenance displays signs of concern, unhappiness, and unease. She is wiser than her companions – it is she, and she alone, who feels the shame that lies behind Hrothgar and Beowulf’s success. Wealtheow’s distance from the opening scene both facilitates and resembles the distance of the viewer, coming to stand to some extent for the gaze of the modern on the past. This resemblance is at times very literal, such as when we witness Grendel’s initial invasion of Heorot through Wealtheow’s eyes as she first crouches behind an overturned mead-bench, then cringes between Grendel’s feet.
Wealtheow’s distance from her own society does not simply resemble the distance of present from past. It also fulfils a modern generic role – that of the hero or heroine whose exceptionality rests in his or her resistance to what are perceived or presented as the cultural norms of the past.[30] What is concerning in this film is that Wealtheow’s position of privilege – her resistance to cultural norms – is defined primarily in terms of her ability to withhold sex from the men in her life. Her power to resist, or even to lack, desire, seems to be almost a condition of Wealtheow’s position of moral superiority. Perhaps more disturbingly, this sexual passivity is also thematically linked to Wealtheow’s lack of positive power. She is not given the power to change or influence events, merely to observe them, and it is concerning that this lack of positive power seems to be linked to her lack of sexual availability. The film’s medieval setting discourages us from examining these generic codes too deeply – this is the past, after all, and it would be anachronistic of us to look for sexual equality.
While Wealtheow’s position of privilege is dependent upon her being passive, both politically and sexually, Grendel’s mother’s monstrosity is constructed in terms of her magical power, alluring sexuality, and alarming fertility. Grendel’s mother appears to have been written in accordance with a filmic – or generic – code that states that in order for a female character to wield or offer power, she must also offer sex. Grendel’s mother’s monstrosity lies in both her sexuality and her power, and as we see in the scene where she offers Beowulf her body and the kingdom simultaneously, these two are interchangeable. The film has already demonstrated that it is comfortable with this kind of conflation of the female body with power, and again, in this scene, it is the ‘royal dragon horn’ that symbolises the transmission of both the female body and the kingdom. Grendel’s mother’s monstrosity seems to lie in the fact that, unlike Wealtheow, she is not happy to merely be the vessel through which power is transmitted, but desires the horn/kingdom for herself.
The most threatening aspect of Grendel’s mother is her reproductive power. This is interesting. She is clearly capable of monstrous acts of violence herself, as we see when she attacks the mead hall and hangs every man there while he sleeps. Yet despite this obvious power, she prefers to use her magic and sexual allure in order to seduce human men and produce sons – monstrous hybrids who then unleash violence upon the settlement. Even when Grendel’s mother directly attacks the occupants of the mead hall, Beowulf – and with him, the viewer – experiences the scene as an erotic dream of Wealtheow. The film draws a connection between female sexuality and monstrous, unnatural power, and, by extension, between female power, immorality, and monstrosity. The way in which the film’s narrative of sexual sin and temptation is presented as the hidden, mythic truth behind the ‘official’ version of events helps to conceal the generic codes surrounding this portrayal of female power, subsuming them into the all-encompassing, ‘mythic’ category of ‘the seductress.’
The medievalism of Zemeckis’ Beowulf is based in a conflation of ancient and modern that implies that some things are ‘essential,’ and unchanging across time. The comfortable way in which the film’s medievalism is able to absorb the modern generic conventions does suggest that medievalism acts as a particularly effective, or appropriate, screen for those same conventions. An intriguing question emerges: is there something inherent in the modern reception and understanding of the medieval that naturalises the ideology of these generic conventions? Or is the transformation of human acts into essential human nature a monstrous transformation that popular genre performs upon the medieval past? The film’s hero tells the audience “We are the monsters now.” But does Beowulf speak as an ancient figure of myth – or as a modern incarnation?
Endnotes
[1] Stephen Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 24.
[2] John Frow, Genre (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 67.
[3] Frow, p. 102.
[4] Frow, p. 103.
[5] Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 193.
[6] Culler’s discussion in Structuralist Poetics refers to and elaborates upon the ‘reality effect” described by Roland Barthes in “L’effet de réel”, Communications 11 (1968) pp. 84-89.
[7] Culler, p. 193.
[8] Neale, p. 34.
[9] Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre” in W. J. T. Mitchell, On Narrative (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 60.
[10] See for example The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Appendices. [DVD]. New Line Cinema. 2002.
[11] Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London & New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 14.
[12] Beowulf, DVD. Directed by Robert Zemeckis 2007 U.S.A.: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2007.
[13] Sutton Hoo is the site of two Anglo-Saxon cemetries dating to the 6th and early 7th centuries. It is the site of an intact ship burial, which has famously yielded a wealth of archaeological finds.
[14] Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, Transl. William Weaver, (San Diego, New York & London: Harvest Books Harcourt, Incorporated, 1977 [1983]), p. 7.
[15] Eco, p. 7.
[16] Andrew Osmond, “Review of Beowulf” Sight & Sound 18, no. 1 (Jan 2008): 61-62.
[17] Anica Boulanger-Mashberg writes that “This kind of public marginalia can be considered an “epitext … any paratextual element not materially appended to the text.” in “In Her Own Margins: Kate Grenville’s Searching for the Secret River as Marginalia to The Secret River”. Limina 15 (2009).http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/current/ibpwinner, (19th June 2009).
[18] Beowulf Production Notes, p. 2. http://www.beowulfmovie.com, accessed 31/5/2009.
[19] Arthur Lindley, ‘The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film,’ Screening the Past 3, (May 1998).http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/ALfr3a.htm (June 2009).
[20] Lindley.
[21] Robert Zemeckis, quoted in Beowulf Production Notes, p. 3.
[22] Jack Rapke, quoted in Beowulf Production Notes, p. 4.
[23] David Williams, ‘Medieval Movies,’ Yearbook of English Studies, 20 (1990), p. 1.
[24] Culler, p. 145.
[25] Culler, p. 141. We refer here to the second level of vraisemblance, “cultural vraisemblance”, which can also be termed “cultural competence”.
[26] Eco, p. 63.
[27] Eco, p. 63.
[28] Lindley.
[29] Neil Gaiman, ‘Monarch of the Glen,’ Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (London: Headline Review, 2007), p. 424.
[30] Examples of this are myriad, and include the Viking who doesn’t rape; the woman who resists the restrictions of her gender; or the Ancient Roman who abhors slavery.
Created on: Sunday, 20 December 2009 | Last Updated: Sunday, 21 February 2010