The last ten to fifteen years have witnessed a rapid growth of academic interest in the formal, cultural and political aspects of both medieval film and graphic novels.[2] While more recent scholarship has highlighted their aesthetic as well as cultural complexities, both have been (and sometimes still are) accused of political conservatism (in relation to the former) and frivolity (in relation to the latter). Their alleged deficiencies have been linked not only to the perceived appeal of these media to primarily male and/or mainstream audiences,[3] but also to their frequent engagement with fantasy, both visually and in terms of content. Thus, while they are distinct forms, there is evidence of a shared aesthetic, and recent developments in cinematic animation techniques have further stimulated traffic between them.[4] Due to its close association with fantasy as well as its increasing technological sophistication, animation has, in turn, given rise to discussions about its relation to veracity and historical truth. This is partly because graphic novels have turned to ‘serious’ topics, but also because digital animation has offered filmmakers unprecedented opportunities of simulating, or altering, ‘reality’. Such developments become especially meaningful within a wider context that has witnessed the rise of memory studies, as well as psychoanalytic, feminist and postcolonial critiques of traditional historiography, since the 1980s. Animation encourages discussions over the relationship between memory, history and fantasy and in this article I will begin to explore some of their interconnections with reference to medieval film, particularly as they are negotiated in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (2007).[5]
In a 2002 special issue on ‘history in the graphic novel’ for the journal Rethinking History, Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys note that in the West comics have been marginalised by scholars because they are ‘hybrid forms, which mix text (without being novels) and images (without being films)’.[6] Yet this apparent rejection by academe has not been replicated in film, with ‘both Hollywood and independent cinema’ showing ‘an increasing interest in filmic adaptations of graphic novels’ (Frey and Noys, 2002: 257).[7] And there certainly is evidence to show that graphic novels as well as animated films have not shied away from ‘historical’ themes in recent years. Among the most well-known ones are Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991), which won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992, as well as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir(2008), both of which were also released to widespread critical acclaim.[8] Yet despite the fact that all of these engage with historical events, the media themselves remain more frequently associated with fantasy.[9]
As Susan J. Napier points out, animation is often ‘explicitly nonreferential’; unlike other visual media such as photography, it ‘stresses to the viewer that it is separate from reality, or perhaps even an alternative reality’ (2005: xii). Indeed, it is precisely the ability of animation film to ‘move seamlessly between the “real” and the unreal’ that makes it both unique and ties it to other electronic media (Napier, 2005: xi).[10] The concerns raised by critics of the use of animation technologies in ‘historical’ films are primarily about animation’s close association with fantasy – the ‘seamless’ shift between reality and unreality that it makes possible – and crystallize around the two key issues of authenticity and realism. The technological advances made in particular in the area of digital imagery have complicated the traditional distinction made by historians between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ images. Jan Baetens explains that while the fundamental opposition set up by ‘traditional historiography’ is that which ‘privileges text over images’, a secondary opposition also exists, which opposes ‘“good” images …– to “bad images”’. An example of a ‘good image’ would be a photograph, which ‘assumes a close proximity to its referent’; examples of ‘bad images’ are ‘the comic strip or bande dessiné’, which seem not to.[11] This distinction is also evident in relation to ‘bad images’ in the cinema – those that are digitally manipulated or enhanced. Robert Burgoyne notes that in recent historical films using digital technology, ‘the status of the “document” – which as Paul Ricoeur reminds us, is the indelible dividing line between history and fiction – is placed in doubt’.[12] As an early example of this, Burgoyne cites the ‘morphing and compositing techniques’ used in Forrest Gump (1994) – which, like Beowulf, was directed by Robert Zemeckis (2003: 233).
The second concern is to do with the threat that such category-confusion has been perceived to pose to ‘realism’, which, it has been argued, is being replaced by a fantasy-memory that indulges and pampers viewers rather than challenging them. Such critiques go back to the early days of animated film. Thus William Kozlenko argued in 1936 that ‘the appeal [of animation] for adult audiences would lie in the indulgent regression into an adolescent state’ that it encouraged.[13] While those concerned with authenticity have tended to see animation as offering a ‘false reality’; those primarily concerned with cinematic realism have rejected it as escapism. Even more recent critiques of both the fantasy genre and animation film, which treat both as serious, complex and varied phenomena, acknowledge that one of the reasons for their immense popularity is that they offer ‘alternatives to the frightening new reality’ (Napier, 2005: xi).
Animation and the medieval
The traits associated with animation and fantasy, understood negatively as escapist, adolescent or politically conservative have also featured prominently in critiques of medieval film. One reason for this is because of the subject matter that many medieval films (at least within an Anglo-American context) concentrate on – Arthurian romance, or the Robin Hood legend, for instance. But another reason is the way the Middle Ages have been constructed, historically, as ‘premodern’ and therefore also as modernity’s ‘other’. Arthur Lindley outlines both of these aspects in his 1998 article, ‘The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film’, where he writes that, while ‘all historical film is necessarily mythic’, ‘medieval films are far more likely to foreground their mythic status’. Lindley reminds us that ‘Western history [is often figured] in terms of a break between medieval and Renaissance in which the latter is the beginning of modernity and the former that which is discarded’. What comes after that rupture is history; what comes before is ‘the land of archetypes …, dreamland’. [14] In 2008 Nickolas Haydock returned to this idea in his book Movie Medievalism, where he concludes that ‘[t]he very alterity of the Middle Ages works to make it an especially potent preserve of fantasy’.[15]
A conflation of ‘medieval’ with ‘mythic’, or with fantasy, is also found in comments made by film theorists and film producers when discussing animation. Thus, Burgoyne states that:
computer generated imagery in fact pushes cinema’s origins back beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dream of the mechanical or electronic production of reality, all the way to premodernity, to medieval or mythic times when the line between fantasy, fact and speculation was not yet clearly drawn.(2003: 234)
The mythical-medieval is then further associated with ‘magic’, a word that is used to describe both technological developments and the premodern past.[16] In the production notes to Zemeckis’ Beowulf, for instance, we are told that the ‘cinematic form’ is ‘advanc[ed] … through the magic of digitally enhanced live-action’, while the story itself is set ‘in a magical era, veiled by the mists of time’.[17] This is despite the fact that the film opens by giving the audience a rather precise historical date and geographical location: ‘Denmark, A.D. 507’. It should be noted that while the distant past clearly does lend itself to these new technologies, it does so in the name of both ‘realism’ (or authenticity) and of ‘fantasy’. When faced with a lack of surviving or sufficiently complete material remains, for instance buildings, CG can create settings that are visually coded as ‘historically authentic’, thereby heightening the visual impression of historical accuracy. Haydock discusses the recreation of Hadrian’s Wall in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) as one example of this (2008: 166). Yet animation in the name of realism again gives rise to concerns about authenticity, primarily because the use of such ostensibly authentic simulacra is clearly not a reliable indicator of historical fidelity in relation to the events being depicted. The discrepancy between authentic ‘look’ and freely interpreted content can lead to the creation of ‘false historical memories’ through technology, a development that has been termed ‘prosthetic memory’ by Alison Landsberg.[18]
The flexibility and interpretive openness that animation makes available to directors and producers does seem to bring its uses closer to ‘fiction’ which, as we have seen, already provides much of the source material for many medieval films, at least in an Anglo-American context. Yet, as I have suggested, even here authenticity remains central to the debate.
While historical or documentary authenticity might be elided or undermined by animation, a different kind of authenticity has been made possible: the authenticity of subjective experience that is also frequently associated with memory. As Burgoyne points out, explaining the difference between the two terms: ‘History … is traditionally conceived as impersonal, [as relating to] the realm of public events’. In contrast, memory ‘describes an individual relation to the past, a bodily, physical relation to an actual experience’ (2003: 223).
As some recent animated films (such as Waltz with Bashir) have shown, what makes animation a new and powerful way of engaging with historical events is precisely its deliberate engagement with fantasy, especially where fantasy is understood as a mode uniquely capable of conveying subjective memory or personal experience.[19] Paul Wells suggests that animation ‘captures the oscillation between interior and exterior states’ (2002: 7),[20] and Jerome de Groot has recently argued in relation to historical graphic novels that their combination of text and image allows them to ‘introduce[s] an entirely new way of dealing with an historical horror’ (2009: 225). In this sense, then, the rise of the graphic novel and animation film coincides not only with the ascendancy of memory, but also the turn to ‘affect’ in cultural studies.[21] This too, among other developments, has changed the way that history is thought about and represented. Film scholars, for instance, have noted in recent years that the relationship between the cinema and the past has changed. While it remains interested in the ‘historical’ past, the ‘truth’ it offers audiences is seen to reside not in its factual accuracy as much as in how successfully it offers them a personal experience of that past. Thus, ‘authenticity’ is no longer understood primarily as ‘accuracy or fidelity to the record’ – it is now associated more closely with ‘emotional and affective truth’. Understood this way, film, like memory, is ‘associated with the body’. It aims to ‘engag[e] with viewer at the somatic level, immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem burned in’ (Burgoyne 2003: 223).[22] A clear opposition or hierarchy of the terms ‘history’ (as objective) and ‘memory’ (as subjective) – or of ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ – are no longer sustainable; if anything, the personal and experiential are increasingly privileged.
Beowulf & Grendel vs Beowulf
How are aspects of such debates played out in medieval films? While there is obviously no single answer to this, a brief comparison of how two directors, Sturla Gunnarsson (Beowulf & Grendel, 2005) and Robert Zemeckis (Beowulf, 2007), talk about animation and history when discussing their cinematic renditions of the Old English poem Beowulf, provides a useful starting point in thinking about how medieval film can negotiate some of these issues.
The outline of Gunnarsson’s approach to his material provided in the production notes to Beowulf & Grendel highlights some of the contradictions and tensions he identifies between animation and history. His decision notto use any CG in the making of his film is said here to have to do specifically with his desire to historicize the source material: ‘Gunnarsson and [writer Andrew Rai] Berzins have taken Beowulf & Grendel out of its mythological setting and placed it firmly into the natural and absolutely CG free world.’[23] The medieval, or at least the medieval poem, is thus associated with the mythological – and, by implication, with CG. These things must be discarded in favour of a ‘historically authentic’ interpretation. Producer Paul Stephens elaborates on this process:
Beowulf and Grendel sets itself apart not by being bigger and grander, but just the opposite: it is textured, personal and deeply rooted in a specific time and place. The digital domain supersizes history and over scales [sic] everything which dulls the senses to the specifics.[24]
For Stephens and Gunnarsson, then, the CG technology detracts not just from the film’s historical accuracy, but also from the viewers’ emotional engagement with – their experience of – it. We can see here that a connection is being made between historical authenticity and subjective experience – both of which are compromised by mythology and CG. Gunnarsson’s interest lies in a demythologization of the story, where myth can be understood in the terms outlined by Paul Ricoeur – as a ‘false explanation’ related to fiction and the absurd; opposed to reality and rationalism. [25] It is presumably in the light of this aim that we must understand the rather puzzling claim made in the film’s tag-line: ‘Beneath the legend lies the tale’.[26] Haydock notes that such demythologization is evident in a considerable number of more recent medieval films; drawing on the familiar term ‘euhemerism’ from mythology studies, and referring to Gunnarsson’s film as an example of it, he argues that ‘[t]he most revealing projects of movie medievalism are in the phantasmagoric filling of gaps opened in the past by modern rationalism’ (2008: 27).
Gunnarsson’s rationalization is done in the name of aiding or enhancing experience: adherence to painstaking recreation instead of CG guarantees the film’s experiential as well as historical authenticity – both for producers and audiences. [27] Thus the mead hall we see in the film is said to have taken ‘months to build’, by ‘local artisans who used ancient building methods’. This results in its being ‘a real 6th century beer hall.’ We can then read personal testimonies from the actors, who claim that having had to work in all kinds of poor weather conditions formed part of an experience that allowed them to act ‘in perfect harmony with the story’. Here, geographical locale offers continuity and meteorological conditions enable contemporary film actors to ‘live’ the early Middle Ages as they were experienced by the poem’s ‘actors’. Gerard Butler, playing Beowulf, sums it up: ‘we’ve suffered and loved and endured’. The result, it is implied, is an aesthetically pleasing, historically accurate, personally authentic – hence ‘realistic’ – film; or, as the promotion material puts it: ‘A story of blood and beer and sweat, of sick jokes and fear of the dark.’
Alongside the search for authenticity, however, there is also the sense that the film divests the source material of its fanciful elements, thereby restoring its historicity. We are told that ‘Beowulf & Grendel strips away the mask of the hero-myth’; that it has ‘turned’ the ‘hero quest…on its head’; and has ‘brought depth and nuance to a character who, for centuries, has been two dimensional’. Ancient archetype has been replaced with the individual subject; our modern perspective allows us to see what the medievals did not: that heroes are not heroes, and monsters are not monsters. Despite its focus on personal experience, then, Bewoulf & Grendel very much participates in a cinematic mode that privileges (and enables) a particular narrative of progressive history – and which explicitly rejects the ‘rhetoric of myths and dreams’ that is implicitly associated with the poem.[28]
The approach taken by Robert Zemeckis initially appears entirely opposed to that advocated by Gunnarsson. What attracts producer Jack Rapke about ‘the Beowulf legend’ is specifically its ‘action-adventure-mythological[-]epic world with monsters and seductresses’. For Zemeckis Beowulf is an origin of sorts: ‘the foundation for all our modern heroes, from Conan to Superman to the Incredible Hulk’. Such a genealogy (as well as the fact that the screenplay was co-written by graphic novel author Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) suggests that Zemeckis’ Beowulf is not primarily interested in ‘realism’ or ‘history’, but looks instead to other intertexts and visual traditions – particularly animation media that deal with superheroes, such as comics and computer games.
Myths and heroes
An exploration of the nature of myths and heroes is central to Zemeckis’ film from the very beginning. We are shown repeatedly that heroism is a myth that is perpetuated by, as well as itself giving rise to, songs and stories. When Hrothgar celebrates the opening of Heorot, we see his men chanting and singing about his victory over the dragon. When Hrothgar orders the hall to be closed after Grendel’s devastating attack, he exclaims bitterly that ‘The scops are singing the shame of Heorot’ both north and south. When he seeks a hero to rescue them, he relies on the story-tellers to proclaim his promise of gold to whoever can vanquish the demon. When Beowulf and his men arrive, Wiglaf tells the hostile guard that ‘the bards sing of Hrothgar’s shame’. Songs, or stories, are what motivate heroism – in relation to reputation, but also to memory. Thus Beowulf says that they will fight and die ‘for glory, not for gold’; stories, unlike gold, offer the hero a life after death.
Yet such stories are quickly revealed to be problematic. Although they have brought ‘the hero’ to Heorot, as hoped, the film’s audience is soon asked to re-evaluate its understanding of stories and the concept of heroism they promote. Viewers might already have been made suspicious about the accuracy of stories by the patent mismatch between Hrothgar’s near-naked, infantile appearance and his men’s drunken boasts of their king’s heroism; such suspicion confirmed by the episode in which Beowulf responds to Unferth’s challenge. Here, he recounts his swimming-match against Breca while we see, through flashback, what ‘really’ happened. The unreliability of stories and the words that carry and disseminate them are contrasted with the immediacy and reliability of visual witness.
At first, all proceeds smoothly enough, with spectacular sea-monsters and a heroic Beowulf. At the end, however, Beowulf’s words, which his audience within the film hears, diverge from his ‘memories’, which we, as cinema audience, see. While his story concludes with the ruthless extermination of the final monster, we see him being seduced by a mermaid, his sword drifting uselessly from his grasp to the ocean floor. This vision casts doubt on everything he has said and will say: not only is Beowulf established as an unreliable narrator, but the whole myth of the hero that stories rely on and reconfirm is also undermined. We have ‘seen’ the tragic truth that will determine the rest of the plot: Beowulf’s weakness for beautiful women as well as for tall tales. The overtly animated and ‘unreal’ sea-monsters can be understood either straightforwardly as false – as figments of Beowulf’s fiction or fantasy – or as offering the subjective, even inadvertent, truth of memories. The question of their ontological reality, or factuality, is superseded by their mediation between interior and exterior worlds: they make visible 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.
The second crucial episode in the film during which the idea of heroism, as well as the veracity of stories, are undermined, occurs when Beowulf encounters Grendel’s Mother. So far much of the verbal sparring between men as been prefaced by the words ‘they say’, suggesting the importance of reputation as well as the unreliability of speech. She, however, sees straight through him. When Beowulf challenges her with the words: ‘What do you know of me, demon?’ she replies coolly, ‘I know that underneath your glamour you are as much of a monster as my son Grendel.’ Knowing him thus, she also knows what to offer him: ‘A man like you could own the greatest tale ever sung. Your story would live on when everything now alive is dust.’ While she fulfils her promises to him, his ‘song’ becomes in itself an increasingly distorted thing. From the moment that he leaves her, it takes on a life of its own. We have seen him exaggerate before – now we witness him lying outright about having killed her.
Stories are shown to circulate communally; they are related in the mead-hall and focus on deeds that take place on the battlefield. The two locations are intimately connected, for it is actions on the latter that lead to the stories told in the former. But stories also provoke, or lead to, further action. Acts of heroism are precipitated primarily by a desire for remembrance and fame. Thus, death and stories, mead-hall and battlefield, form a closed circle: firstly, because stories are told in defiance of oblivion; and secondly, because stories require death in order to have something to speak of. This latter point is most evident when we see an old Beowulf complaining to Wiglaf that what they are involved in against the Frisians ‘is slaughter’, not battle. Wiglaf responds: ‘How can you blame them? Your legend is known from the high seas and the snow barriers to the great island kingdom. You are the monster-slayer.’ The kind of story that this is all about is of course the story of heroism – or, from the film’s modern perspective, the myth of heroism.
When Beowulf returns from his encounter with Grendel’s Mother, we see him fabricating the story about his heroic defeat of her in Heorot. Hrothgar watches him closely, and when Beowulf presents a reason for why he has not returned the golden dragon cup, says to Queen Wealtheow with a sarcasm obvious to the film’s audience that she must find ‘our hero another cup’. But first he wants to have a private word with ‘the hero’, away from public space of the hall. In a separate chamber he asks Beowulf why he has returned with the head of Grendel, but not that of the Mother. Beowulf blusters: ‘Would you like to hear the story of my struggle against the monstrous hag?’ Hrothgar undercuts his claim to heroism through story by saying calmly: ‘She’s no hag, Beowulf, we both know that.’ It is clear to Hrothgar that Beowulf has not killed her; that his story is a lie. He knows this because of his own experience: he, too, has met Grendel’s Mother and he realizes that Beowulf, following in his footsteps, has also made a pact with her. Leaving Beowulf looking stricken, he returns to the hall, saying ‘She’s not my curse. Not anymore.’ As we watch Beowulf’s dismayed expression, we can hear Hrothgar’s voice coming from the adjoining hall, announcing publicly that Beowulf will be his successor. When Beowulf rejoins the others, Hrothgar flings his crown at him before jumping to his death. Only those who have witnessed the private exchanges between Beowulf and Grendel’s Mother, and between Beowulf and Hrothgar, can know the truth. I would aruge that, while Zemeckis’ production embraces animation and fantasy in a way that Gunnarsson’s does not, the debunking of heroic myth that is being promoted by the film is nonetheless in accordance with the same project of demythologisation. This is part of a more general progress narrative, which associates heroism and myth with a lack of complexity, with unmodernity or premodernity, as well as with oral and written media.[29]
As I have suggested, in Zemeckis’ Beowulf, heroism is connected to the process of myth-making, and both are ultimately associated with death. Not only are they linked to death because of the reasons I outlined above, but also because the myth of heroism is presented by the film as being profoundly anti-historical. It is anti-historical because it vitiates personal experience, causing each generation to repeat the errors of those that went before. Because errors or lies are turned into stories and are circulated and repeated communally, these encourage the re-enactment of the same ideals – that are really the same mistakes. The desire for heroism leads men to make pacts with demons and the demons’ promises reiterate a denial of change, of history. Thus Grendel’s Mother tempts Beowulf with the promise that he ‘will forever be king, forever strong, mighty and all-powerful’.
The film is also deeply skeptical about community. On the one hand communities do not play a very prominent role in the film – which is not the case in the poem. They are easily led, believing the stories they are told, even to the point of willfully turning away from the truth. Beowulf tries a number of times to tell others, especially Wiglaf, of his experience with Grendel’s Mother, but is silenced each time. When they return to the cave to find Grendel’s Mother after the dragon’s first attack, Wiglaf responds to Beowulf’s attempt to tell him what really happened with the words: ‘There’s nothing I should know. You are Beowulf, Beowulf the mighty, the hero, the slayer and destroyer of demons.’ The unpredictable nature of lived experience is repeatedly rejected in favour of predetermined narrative formulae. Before this, Beowulf has tried to send his young mistress away, telling her that she is free and should find some good man to love and have children with. She tells him that she wants only him; ‘[You are] a great man and a hero, this I know to be true.’ When Beowulf is dying, Wiglaf still will not let him speak the truth: ‘No, you killed Grendel’s Mother when we were young. They sing of it.’ Finally, at Beowulf’s funeral it seems that even Wealtheow, whose whole life has been marred by the very stories that men tell of heroes, colludes in the communal mis-remembrance, stepping in when Wiglaf’s commemorative speech falters in his grief. She concludes the story he tells of Beowulf as ‘bravest of us’, as ‘prince of all warriors’, whose ‘name will live forever’, with the old words: ‘His song shall be sung forever.’ Although Beowulf has arguably deserved this final praise due to his last, genuinely courageous and selfless act, the medium and modes of expression remain unchanged, erasing such distinctions. Thus community is also shown to be frighteningly powerful, in its inertia and desire to protect itself from the truth. The film shows how history is repeated not just because of individual failure, but also because of the community’s inability to accept the truth which would spell the undoing of the stories that shape their identity and collective memories. Personal experience and memory are thus silenced; events are reinterpreted and reshaped to fit the pattern of familiar stories. Even though it is clear that Wiglaf does to some extent apprehend the truth, he is for numerous reasons, among them loyalty to and love for Beowulf, incapable of acknowledging it.
The film’s insistence that oral as well as written stories are unreliable and incomplete is paralleled by its producers’ attitude to the Old English poem. In the production notes, Zemeckis relates how he asked Gaiman and Avary to explain to him why their film script was so compelling when he had found the original poem so boring. They tell him: ‘[T]he poem was written somewhere between the 7th 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.’ In Zemeckis’ opinion, Gaiman and Avary set out to ‘question […] the holes in the source material and add[ed] back what they theorized the monks might have edited out (or added) and why.’ Avary himself states that the disjointed nature of the poem had always puzzled him, but that Gaiman’s theory of Grendel’s Mother being a temptress made immediate sense to him, providing them with ‘the key operator of a unified field theory of Beowulf’.[30] According to this view, then, the film is restoring the story to its original fullness or plenitude – a plenitude and authenticity lost on the one hand because of the instability of an oral culture and, on the other, because of the ideological impositions of a medieval Christian literate culture. I would argue that the film claims to make whole the perceived gaps in the medieval story through a correct understanding of the role of monsters, whose function and importance are highlighted through their spectacular animation.
Monsters
The most obvious and ‘mythical’ use of animation in the film is in relation to the monsters: the sea-monsters that Beowulf tells us he has fought; Grendel; the Dragon who is Beowulf’s son. (Grendel’s Mother combines the seductive monstrosity of the feminine with a few CG touches.) As Laurence Coupe points out, ‘myth and monstrosity have always been linked’ (1997: 185), and while Gunnarsson reveals Grendel to have been human all along, thereby discarding myth, Zemeckis does no such thing. Scholarship on monstrosity in recent years has noted its affinity with questions of imagination, meaning, language, identity and technology.[31] In his ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposes that ‘[t]he monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy’.[32] Monsters are ‘continually linked to forbidden practices’ but ‘also attrac[t]’ (1996: 16); furthermore, they are ‘our children’ (1996: 20). All of these ideas are evident in the film. The message that the Dragon gives Unferth to pass on to Beowulf after having devastated the community is that his attack is motivated by ‘the sins of the fathers’.
Beowulf only becomes a ‘hero’ within the ultimately modern terms set out by the film when he learns from his mistakes and accepts the consequences, sacrificing himself in atonement for his transgressions. That which leads Beowulf to wisdom and maturity is his experience with monsters; what appears to be the most ‘fantastical’ or ‘mythical’ element of the film arguably turns out to be the most ‘historical’, as well as the most affecting and memorable.[33] Where the heroic mythic threatens stagnation, sterility and death, the monstrous is fecund, generative, active. Monsters signal the passing of time, and herald change. They are linked to truth – they do not speak it; they embody it.[34] Yet the film also shows that monsters ultimately must be killed, for they, too, bring death. These functions of the monstrous are made visible and affective through animation; as Haydock argues, ‘virtual representations are often posed as hidden or spiritual realities beneath, behind, or beside with world as we have been led to know it’ (2008: 183).
Paul Grainge has argued that the privileging of ‘fantasy, subjectivity, and fabrication’ is what, from the late twentieth century onwards, marks discussions of memory in times of uncertainty about the status of ‘identity and cultural value’. This signals a movement away from earlier concerns with ‘history, community, and tradition’ (2003: 8). Certainly Zemeckis’ film does not place any redemptive hope in memory as related to community or tradition. Instead, community and tradition, as I have argued, are linked to the stasis of myth. The pivotal moments that make experience possible occur only in private – the community does not have direct access to them. Communities, it is suggested, will always be in thrall to one ‘myth’ or another – be it pagan heroism or Christianity. In the film, both the hero myth and Christianity function as variations of communal delusion that, in the case of the former, offers a martial, destructive and narcissistic masculinity and, in the case of the latter, an emasculating, sacrificial passivity.[35] ‘History’, understood here as experience, is possible really only at the micro-level, within an individual life. Yet it is also the case that while communities have to suffer so that certain individuals can learn through ‘experience’ (and individuals will suffer because of the demands and delusions of the community), this hard-won experience cannot ultimately be shared. When Wealtheow tells Beowulf that he should let a ‘young hero’ fight the dragon, Beowulf makes it clear that any young man would only repeat his mistakes. He alone can kill ‘his’ monster. While the film thus participates in a discourse that Coupe sees as typical of the twentieth-century and beyond, the valorization of the ‘the authenticity of pure experience’ (1997: 11), that experience is radically atomized.
The emphasis on subjective experience is a persistent and central motif in discussions of animation, especially also in relation to technologies such as 3D, which is seen to ‘enhance’ the viewer’s experience, making it ‘new, more immersive’. It makes animation look ‘remarkably real’ and offers an ‘experience people couldn’t get at home’. As the tag-line to one film asks: ‘What do you want? A good picture, or a lion in your lap?’[36] Such attitudes are also evident in the production notes to Beowulf, where we are told that the use of ‘Real D, Dolby Digital 3D and IMAX 3D’ in the film ‘delivers an unparalleled immersive experience that transports you to the age of heroes’. The range of animation technologies used in the film’s production offered heightened experience to those involved in its making as well: Roger Avary says that he had ‘always wanted it to be a fully formed, emotional experience’, and Zemeckis states that ‘[t]he actors are liberated from the tyranny of a normal movie’. Angelina Jolie adds that performance capture gave the actors the opportunity to express ‘pure amazing emotion’.[37] As with Gunnarsson’s production, then, personal experience and emotion are here associated with ‘truth’, though from a perspective that privileges the role of animation technologies in making such an experience possible. It is also noticeable that the ‘amazing emotion’ that is said to characterize the experiences of making and the viewing of the film is contrasted repeatedly and starkly with the unpleasure that is associated with the experience of reading the original poem.
Nonetheless, as I suggested above, what is striking is that despite this Zemeckis’ Beowulf does not present individual truth or experience as redemptive, because it is finally not communicable. Individual memory and experience ultimately stand only for themselves – they offer no consolations or truths that can be shared or maintained beyond the moment. The ending of the film is left open, but there is very little cause for optimism. Even if Wiglaf manages to resist temptation (which is doubtful, as he begins to walk towards the demon, obeying her beckoning gesture), he is an old man, a follower who cannot bear the truth, even if he suspects it. There is no heir. The queen – now presumably his queen – is also old. What best captures the fundamental pessimism of the film is the crown itself, passed from flawed man to flawed man, and now sitting on Wiglaf’s hoary head.
While the crown is a symbol of medieval forms of rulership, its representation clearly suggests a visual affinity with the comic-strip. It is decorated with a series of images depicting a battle between a man and a dragon; when Beowulf first wears the crown, the camera pans around it, revealing to us in close-up the story its images relate. Yet this strip, which initially seems to present us with a narrative, and which fuses medieval and contemporary visual media, offers only a story that is relentlessly circular, symbolizing a potentially endless or eternally repeated struggle between man and monster. When the camera has finished circling the crown, the next scene takes us forward in time, and we see an older and disillusioned Beowulf presiding over yet more slaughter. The film does not seem to be making the point that it is specifically medieval media or particular, historically-specific, social forms that are destructive. Underpinning the emotions that motivate the characters in the film – that which also provides at least some of the raison d’etre for the animation – is the assumption that sensory experience is shared across time. How are we, sitting communally in an IMAX cinema, different from those in the mead-hall? Not very, it turns out; Avary says: ‘The whole point of (the poem) Beowulf is to tell the story around the fire. Our fire is now movie theaters.’[38] At the heart of the film, then, lies an unresolved contradiction about the nature and temporality of affect and experience.
Animation, memory and medievalism
I wrote at the beginning of this article that discussions about animation have often highlighted concerns about authenticity (as ‘false reality’) and realism (animation as ‘escapism’). Medieval films have also often been read as either escapist action-adventures, as fantasy or as thinly-veiled parables, showing forth contemporary political concerns, often from a conservative perspective.[39] In contrast, more recent animated films have engaged overtly with historical events, often through the lens of personal memory. Animation, in films like Waltz with Bashir, allows filmmakers to highlight the subjectivity and immediacy of individual experience in the midst of history, and to illustrate the shifting, fragmented, dream-like quality of memory. Central to this process is affect – the emotional investments and traumatic after-effects that the individual suffers and returns to through memory of the historical event in question. By following an individual’s perspective, history is made experientially accessible to the viewer, making possible emotional identifications that demand a response to the film, but also to the history it is engaging with. Animation in such productions can offer an additional perspective and different point of identification for the viewer. History is not rejected; it is brought together with memory to address events in ways that ask us to revisit and rethink them.
Zemeckis’ Beowulf, as I have argued, also presents its concern with questions of memory and affect through animation technologies. In this sense, the film offers a ‘memory experience’ that allows the individual viewer to feel a ‘bodily, physical relation’ to the deeds that make up the Old English poem. The obsolescence of the original medieval source is referred to by producers, directors and actors: the unpleasure it provokes; the boredom it causes. Animation, this film claims, makes the medieval exciting, present, sensory. That is, the same emotions that unite us with our medieval ancestors can now be transported, intact, because of the medium. The suggestion is clearly being made that the ‘magic’ of animation technology can offer us an unparalleled – hence memorable, and authentic medieval experience, communicating to us what the form and language of the original story cannot. To this extent, it participates in a progress narrative insofar as these technologies are presented not only as making whole the lost original (as restoring, correcting – even historicizing), but also as making it accessible to the modern viewer on the basis of emotional accessibility and sensory immediacy.
Nonetheless, I would argue that the film not only undercuts all claims to ‘the power of stories’, but also reveals itself to be at best ambivalent about the value of experience, since affect is not harnessed in the name of any larger project that carries on beyond the moment. Instead of creating a dialogue between history and memory, the film renders both history and memory suspect, and ultimately rejects both. If history, understood as change, is shown to be near-impossible (it is a succession of false mythologies – a dragon crown or a crown of thorns), subjective memory, too, is severely limited in what it can offer. Although it can be redemptive on an individual level, every man – every generation – has to fight its own monsters, and die in the process. Nothing is passed on; affect feeds only itself. And emotions are particularly unreliable, for heroism is revealed to be little more than the ruthless pursuit of self-gratification clothed in the alibi provided by powerful fictions.
Ultimately, then, ‘animation’ is suspended – in all the senses that implies. The creative, even radical, potential of animation and fantasy is shackled because the ‘gaps’ in the medieval poem are not used suggestively in the way that gaps in memory are, for instance, in Waltz with Bashir.[40] The difficulties and ambiguities of the source material are, instead, erased or ‘filled in’. As a result, the film fails to align itself either with history, or with memory. It offers no possibility of knowledge beyond the experience of the moment. The pleasures and sensory reaction it provokes are revealed to be solipsistic; they are context-less. (If anything, the film shows that unpleasure is the only means of gaining insight, so perhaps it is really a covert encouragement to return to the resistant poem.) Because history is understood here as nothing more than a succession of catastrophic communal delusions (underlying which is a constant, and deeply flawed, ‘human nature’), the past cannot be accorded any difference or alterity that might challenge, defy or surprise. Memory, in turn, does not enable a new perspective, for personal insight comes too late and cannot be shared. Telling another what one has learned would presumably entail another narrative, and we have seen that only actual experience will do. At the end of the film, then, we are left with Wiglaf: staring uncertainly out to sea. Like Wiglaf, we know the story; more than Wiglaf, we have ‘shared’ Beowulf’s experiences and his memories through the magic of cutting-edge animation technologies. And, presumably like Wiglaf, we are meant to wonder what pact we will make with the demon of our particular desire. Deeply pessimistic, rejecting all narratives as false or futile, the film nonetheless mythologizes one: ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’
Endnotes
[1] I would like to thank Bettina Bildhauer for many conversations about medieval film; Andrew Johnston for inviting both of us to speak on this topic at the Freie Universität Berlin (June 2009). I would also like to thank the two readers whose reports offered valuable suggestions and expertise.
[2] For a discussion of the term ‘medieval film’, see Bettina Bildhauer and Anke Bernau, ‘Introduction: The A-Chronology of Medieval Film’, in Bernau and Bildhauer (eds), Medieval Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 1-19. This article’s argument restricts itself to an Anglo-American context.
[3] On the rise of the female fan of manga as well as Japanese animation film in recent years in the U.S., see Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation(2001; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. ix-x.
[4] I will be using the term ‘animation’ throughout the essay in its widest sense, to refer to a range of technologies used in film, but particularly 3D modeling, CG [computer graphics] and digital animation.
[5] While there have been heated discussions about whether or not Beowulf can be considered ‘animation’, I will be working with the assumption that it draws on animation technologies. See: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-176170.html, ‘How “Beowulf” rose above standard animation’ (16.11.07).
[6] Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys, ‘Editorial: History in the Graphic Novel’, Rethinking History 6:3 (2002), 255-60 (255).
[7] As scholars such as Napier and John Treat have shown, Japanese animation film, hugely popular on a global scale, is in Japan itself considered ‘truly mainstream’ (Napier, Anime, p. 7).
[8] In the case of Persepolis, the Iranian Revolution; in the case of Waltz with Bashir, the Israeli army’s involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War.
[9] See Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture(London: Routledge, 2009), p. 225.
[10] See also Paul Wells, Animation and America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 7.
[11] Jan Baetens, ‘History against the Grain?’, Rethinking History 6:3 (2002), 345-56 (345).
[12] Robert Burgoyne, ‘Memory, History and Digital Imagery in Contemporary Film’, in Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 220-36 (p. 222).
[13] Cited Wells, 2002: 10.
[14] Arthur Lindley, ‘The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film’, Screening the Past 3 (1998), available online at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/ALfr3a.htm
[15] Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), p. 7.
[16] On the problematic aspects of animation’s claims to modernity, as well as its more critical potential, see Norman M. Klein, ‘A Brief Disappearing Act: Animation and Animorphs’, in Vivian Carol Sobchack (ed.), Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 21-40.
[17] My emphasis. See: http://madeinatlantis.com/movies_central/2007/beowulf_production_details.htm. In ‘Magical Transformations: Morphing and Metamorphosis in Two Cultures’, Louise Krasniewicz discusses the close connection between metamorphosis and magic, and compares the different roles metamorphosis can play, depending on historical and cultural context (in Sobchack (ed.), Meta-morphing, pp. 41-58).
[18] See, for instance, Haydock (2008: 183 or 167). Alison Landsberg, ‘Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture’, in Paul Grainge (ed.) Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 144-53.
[19] In Waltz with Bashir, which defines itself as an ‘animated documentary’, we can see how both terms are brought together: animation highlights both the traumatic nature of the 1982 Lebanon War – that is, the historical event – and the dream-like quality of the protagonist’s personal memories of being a soldier in it. Furthermore, particular elements of the animation, such as the pack of feral dogs at the beginning of the film, or the sea, indicate symbolic meanings that underpin the central concerns of the film.
[20] Wells, 2002: 7.
[21] The scholarly work produced on memory since the 1980s in a range of disciplines is vast; here are just a few examples: Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). A sense of the range and variety of approaches in memory studies can be gained from: Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon, ed. by Nicolas Pethes and Jens Ruchatz with the assistance of Martin Korte and Jürgen Straub (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001). Much work has also been done on affect (particularly trauma) and memory, especially from within the field of psychoanalysis; see for instance David Rapaport’s Emotion and Memory (1942). A study of affect in relation to a range of Western medieval and modern sources and media, see Karl F. Morrison, ‘I Am You’: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princetion, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988).
[22] This ‘affective’ potential of images is what critics also often focus on. As Baetens notes, ‘it is frequently argued that the image “says too much”, that is offers a cognitive excess, and, in particular, that images are too emotive and therefore unmasterable’ (2002: 346). The idea of memory being ‘imprinted’ on the body through the senses has a long history; see for instance St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentaries on Aristotle’s “On Sense and What Is Sensed” and “On Memory and Recollection”, trans. with introductions and notes by Kevin White and Edward M. Macierowski (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005).
[23] http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com/
[24] http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com/
[25] Cited in Laurence Coupe, Myth (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 8.
[26] A version of this had been used only one year earlier, in Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 production King Arthur, whose tagline was: ‘The True Story Behind the Legend’.
[27] Fuqua, on the other hand, uses CG to enhance the ‘real’. Both films aim to demythologize their subject matter.
[28] Paul Grainge, following Robert Sklar, notes that it was in the 1970s that ‘history memory [became] the touchstone of a movie’s cultural power, replacing a “traditional rhetoric of myths and dreams”’ (see Grainge, ‘Introduction: Memory and Popular Film’, in Memory and Popular Film, ed. by Paul Grainge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 1-20 (p. 9)).
[29] Thus, for de Groot, a sign of the ‘maturation’ of the the comic book genre is measured not least by its ‘more sophisticated take on “heroism”’ (2009: 225).
[30] He explains: ‘Had it been a snake, it would have bit me. It’s quite possible that these elements of the structure had been lost over hundreds of years of verbal telling, and further diluted by the Christian monks who added elements of Christianity’.
[31]See, for instance, Allen S. Weiss, ‘Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity’, The Drama Review 48:1 (Spring 2004), 124-25.
[32] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3-25 (p. 4).
[33] The connection between history, affect (experience) and memory is not a new one; see Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[34]Monsters enact the two meanings Marina Warner points out as inherent in the Latin origin: to show and to warn; Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 19).
[35] The film is not, however, clear-cut in its critique. At the end, it is hard not to see Beowulf’s ‘redemption’ as echoing the ideals both of Christian sacrifice as well as of a warrior ethos. While this may not be the film’s aim, it makes it evident the impossibility of extricating oneself from the past and its stories, however ‘mythical’ or objectionable one considers them to be.
[36]See ‘Cinema’s Third Attempt at 3D’ by Mark Savage, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/7976385.stm (published 2009/04/03); and ‘Directors Discuss 3D’;http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/7978785.stm (published 2009/04/03).
[37] Zemeckis explains how bored he was by the poem when he had to read it in school: ‘Frankly, nothing about the original poem appealed to me….it was one of those horrible assignments.’ See alsohttp://www.bloggernews.net/111749: ‘Beowulf is almost to digital animation what Beowulf is to English Literature’ (posted by Andy Zoric on 16.11.07), where he writes that: ‘Beowulf is fast-paced action filled and realistically violent. Though not always filled with great dialogue, probably because the epic poem was written well before the writers guild was formed and went on strike.’ What is remarkable about it is its technology: ‘What sets Beowulf apart from other action fantasy epics is nothing in the story, especially since it is the oldest one written in English. What Beowulf creates is a seamless transition from traditional photography to computer generated 3-D modeling.’
[38]‘How “Beowulf” Rose above Standard Animation’ (16.11.07); http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-176170.html
[39] See, for instance, Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
[40] See also Susan J. Napier discussion of Miyazaki Hayao’s subversive and thought-provoking Princess Mononoke (1997), a film with a (vaguely) medievalised setting (Anime, 2005: 231-48).
Created on: Sunday, 20 December 2009