Movie Doubles

Memories Of Dark Frustration

A long time back, I was a disgruntled university student, taking the train in everyday for 45minutes, and then arriving early for lectures with nothing to do but sit around and read. I was disgruntled because I was in the company of cultural munchkins and ignorant hicks who thought they were elite because... well, because they got the marks to get into Med School.

While some of my friends were off studying really interesting things with interesting people, I was sitting around surrounded by morons who thought a good university education was a vocational training in doctor-ing. I don't know what I expected of university but it wasn't that; and so I began reading books that had little to do with Med School and a lot to do with history and literature. I guess I started giving myself an arts education.

One of the books I read in the train that year was 'Beowulf' - the others were 'Image Music and text' by Roland Barthe and Goethe's 'Faust' Parts 1 and 2. I really should've been studying Arts. Anyay, one day I was spotted reading 'Beowulf' in the early morning before lectures started and I was asked by a medical student, "what is that?"
"It's the oldest piece of Anglo-Saxon literature we know of," I replied.
"What's an Anglo-Saxon?" he asked.
I rolled my eyes and went back to reading.

Myth of Redemptive Violence - 'Beowulf and Grendel' & 'Beowulf'

Gotta love Viking movies, even though they get made so rarely.
'Beowulf' is a primal story about a pretty primal bunch of characters with immediate needs, but it somehow got this thin glaze of Christian respectability as it came down to us in writing. Much like the Icelandic sagas, the story of how Beowulf kills Grendel, Grendel's mother and then a dragon, forms the pinnacle of Dark Ages narrative. If you really want to know what dark ages meant, well, you just have delve into the crazy world of 'Beowulf'. John Gardner who wrote his fabulist work 'Grendel' based on 'Beowulf' also discusses the poem extensively in 'The Art of Fiction' . The three monsters form a triptych of deeds that rationalises kingship. So Beowulf killing Grendel represents strength and courage while the slaying of Grendel's mother represents tenacity and wisdom and so on.

In bringing this story up to date then, the triptych is inviting as a three-act play, but has the fundamental problem of distribution of events. That is to say, Grendel is the main monster - but if he gets slain in the first act, what the hell are you selling in the rest of the two acts? John Gardner's book 'Grendel' solves this problem by making it solely about Grendel and his relationship with his mother and the world, fashioning it into a tragedy; there is no dragon.

In 'Beowulf and Grendel', the third part about Beowulf's kingship and the dragon are discarded, and the events focus upon the 2 monsters. In so doing, the film sets itself up as a feud between the family of the trolls and Hrothgar's Mead Hall. It's an interesting choice because it harks to the Icelandic Sagas where family feuds form the crux of the conflict, and these Danes surely are somewhat Viking-like. Stellan Skarsgaard plays Hrothgar in this version, which is interesting because he also played the evil Saxon King in 'King Arthur' - effectively, he carries an interesting baggage into this role. The brooding Nordic guy with enough angst to last a career in Bergman movies (if only he were still making them), trudges around dissolute and devastated by what Grendel has wrought.

In 'Beowulf', the three stories are tied together in Freudian re-imagining. Grendel is Hrothgar's son by the seductress monster played by Angelina Jolie. The dragon in turn is the monster sired by Beowulf himself by the same seductress monster. Even unto the end, Beowulf's successor is tempted by the seductress monster, bobbing in the waves. Hrothgar is played by Anthony Hopkins, and it's an entirely different kind of despair. It is a the despair of regret, because he is wracked by his own deeds. Grendel will kill everybody else but Hrothgar because Hrothgar is his father.

Thus the stage is set for the famous conflict where Beowulf ends up ripping of Grendel's arm. In the former film, Grendel is trapped and so, cuts off his arm to escape. In the latter film, Beowulf traps Grendel in the door and tears off the arm - which is reminiscent of how Grendel dies in Gardner's book. In this film, it is Beowulf who severs his right arm, to get at the heart of the dragon, making an interesting allusion to the former film.

In neither film does violence really answer the cycle of events in which it takes place, and this is perhaps the most important aspect of both films. The point of the poem is that violence does solve a lot of problems, as long as it is the King laying down the law as he sees fit. Being post-monarchic films and even post-democratic films to a degree, neither film backs this position. The violence meted out by all parties is part of a narrative that brings on a further cycle of violence. This is perhaps inevitable in a post-Post-Modern kind of environment where we struggle with our conscience to support any war.

Imagining Beowulf, The Character
This Beowulf text then is a pretty interesting challenge to put on film. What can we say about the characterisation in these two films?

Gerard Butler is better known for his portrayal of Leonidas-With-A-Scottish-Brogue in '300'. Yes, he of "this is Sparta! (kick)" fame plays Beowulf in 'B&G'. He plays a Beowulf who seems to be the calm centre of a moderately hysterical Dark Ages. Butler's Beowulf does seem to bother with the Norse Gods or the Christian God that is being peddled around. He walks around the beautiful, yet sullen landscape, brooding with questions and a muscle-bound fury. On the whole the character seems way too contemporary in his insight to really convince us. Yes, Beowulf must have some kind of insight into the monster to defeat it - that's par for the course - but you really shouldn't have a Beowulf who is worried about the cycle of violence. It's culturally implausible for a Germanic tribesman of 500AD to be worried about that.

The Beowulf in the other text is a complex amalgam of characteristics, created in the 3D realm. The action is motion-captured from the actor with the voice; these are played by Ray Winstone who does not look much like an action hero, but has a fantastic bearing and voice. The actually character is a 3D creation who looks one part New Age Hippie, one Part Surf-Nazi and one part Swedish porno stud. The combination is a staggering, phantasmagorical 'performance' that is perhaps unlike anything else in cinema.

Phantasmagorical is in fact the best defining adjective for the latter film in 3D. Everything has an overblown quality, from the props to the dress to the sets to the actual monsters themselves. Which i all a way of saying, you never quite believe what you're seeing, but viscerally you are moved to respond to the fast-paced action.

What the earlier film lacks in action, it actually has subtlety in performances that you can watch and ponder. The pace is slower and meditative as Grendel stays aloof and intractable. We see the frustration in Beowulf. The latter is more like the original text where Beowulf essentially rocks up in the boat and starts setting about killing the monster. Indeed, Beowulf's arrival in the latter film is a bit like a rendering of 'The Immigrant Song' by Led Zeppelin. The overblown quality leaves you chuckling.

Explaining The Monsters From The Id

In the original text, there is scant mention of Grendel or her mother having any kind of motivation. Indeed, the hall mark of these old Germanic and Norse texts is that the characters are largely existential an what they do are intrinsic to their beings. Thus Beowulf is Beowulf *because* he slays monsters heroically. Grendel is a monster so he does as monsters do. Hrothgar laments, but his essential characteristic is that he is a great king. Yet there are monsters.

Just where do these monsters come from? What motivates them?
These are the very questions the film makers must have had to address, and the two films demonstrate together the power of modern analysis. John Gardner's book 'Grendel' principally concerns itself with delineating and describing the monster's side of the story. In 'B&G', Grendel and his father (a character they created to set up the revenge angle) are trolls. Grendel's mother is some kind of preternatural monster, and there is no dragon, whereas in 'B', the monsters are somehow intrinsically related to the claims of kingship.

What's particularly interesting is the Freudian take in 'B', where Hrothgar begets Grendel and Beowulf begets a dragon. But there is a mention of another dragon that Hrothgar slays for Beowulf's father. The logic seems to be that Kingship begets it own monsters, in a classic 'return of the repressed'. What's more, the monster generation is intrinsic to Kingship as the slaying ad the wars that come with statehood. not only that, it seems that these terrors of the monsters come out exactly because of the 'mother-fucking' (pun intended) deeds of kings. It's actually quite brilliant how the film unites the raison d'etre of these various monsters.

All this is in stark contrast to the rather prosaic revenge story in 'B&G'. Grendel-as-troll is probably a more medieval take on a Dark Age description. The Icelandic sagas have trolls. Grettir slays one in his saga. So in working back to a more Norse sort of understanding of Beowulf, it makes more sense to have Grendel as a troll. beyond which, there is just a standard kind of motivation that would appear in any old film with any old villain.
I guess it's still better than the Dark Ages version of "He's a monster, that's what he does"; but it is inferior to the brilliant insight of the latter film.

Having said that, there is something direct and visceral in the scene where Beowulf slays Grendel's mother in 'B&G'. Apart from the Gothic horror of a monster mother, there is the satisfying hewing of the monster with a two-handed sword. It's a little too simple, given who she is, but you do feel the grunt in the strike as well as the satisfaction of slaying the monster. It is all very psycho-sexual an every bit as profound as sleeping with the Angelina Jolie incarnation of the monster.

Eroticism Of The Doomed

That body you see of Angelina Jolie, while modeled on her, is not really her. The perfection of the flesh strikes the viewer with an eerie realism amidst the phantasmagoria of 'B'. By contrast, the Mother in 'B&G' is just a yucky gothic monster. Yet both films are infused with the massive oedipalised text, and somehow sexuality and degeneracy as well as Beowulf's astounding prowess seemed to be tied in.

In 'B&G', Beowulf sleeps with the witch who was 'taken' from behind by the troll. It's pretty blunt in its presentation, but there you see, Selma the witch, having sex with the Grendel troll, which segues into the one, wide shot offering that is the entire sex scene between Selma and Beowulf. Clearly the two sexual events are intrinsically linked.

What we see in 'B' is the big come on by the Angelina Jolie Mother, full of nudity and innuendo, only for it to fade to black. Not that I'm expecting graphic depictions, but the point is, the sexuality of these characters is vital to how the texts hang together. I sort of imagine what the response would be if we could just tell a medieval Angle or a Saxon that we think it's about the Oedipal complex. Just the thought is pretty funny.

What we learn from both films is that indeed Freud was probably right in that the Oedipal complex ties together notions of love, death sex and marriage, a lot more than we thought. Beowulf doesn't just tell us a story about a montser-slaying hero, it gives us an understanding of how such undertakings are linked into our libido and sense of death. When you watch these two film versions in tandem, you get a sense f why this story has stuck around for such a long time.