So I'm sitting here at nearly 1 am being anxious about life and my place in it, the usual stuff, and I wanted to talk to no one in particular about the Green Knight and some thoughts I had about it a few weeks ago, despite my having seen it months prior. Specifically, after some thought, I've come to the conclusion that (one of the film's) message(s) is that honor is bullshit and unreasonable.
His interaction with the looter in what I can only call the first chapter was basically him coming across a dude robbing corpses in a battlefield and asking for directions. The dude hassles him and bugs him but gives him directions and, when Gawain turns to leave, demands payment as thanks. Gawain seems confused about this and I won't lie, I was too. I get that it would've been kind to toss him a coin but A: the guy is already stealing from dead people so I think he's good on money for the time being and B: the directions caused him little inconvenience and cost even less to give. If I was asking someone on the side of the road for directions I wouldn't think to give him a dollar just for the help. The dude was also really rude about it too, getting up in his face (as much as a graverobber can to a dude on a horse) citing honor and shit despite his incredibly dishonorable act of stealing from the dead. Not to mention the dude gets his bandit buddies and robs Gawain blind, stealing his horse and leaving him to die in the woods even after successfully convincing Gawain to toss him a coin for his "trouble". So he's the last guy to lecture anyone on honor.
In the second chapter, Gawain is sleeping in an abandoned cabin and is approached by the ghost of a young woman who was killed by a lord after she refused his advances. She asks him to dive into a pitch black river in the middle of the night and retrieve her skull so she can rest in peace. He goes to do this but stops and asks what he'll get in return and she gets really angry at him for asking for something in return. I immediately called bullshit on this, because Gawain was just robbed and left tied to a tree and just barely escaped with nothing but the clothes on his back, and was just asked by someone he's never met to do something incredibly dangerous and unnerving purely for her benefit. His request of some sort of reward, like supplies or something, is 100% reasonable given the circumstances and is even what the dude in the last chapter outright demanded and punished Gawain for. But it's somehow wrong of Gawain to ask for something in return for doing something so strenuous for someone he's never met.
I won't say a whole lot about the chapter with Joel Edgerton because I don't remember a lot of it, but I remember Edgerton talking to Gawain about honor and how it's a behavior not a status, something so incredibly obvious to people outside the movie so it's pointless to go on about it, Edgerton kissing Gawain because his wife jacked him off, and said handjob from the wife after she offered Gawain the sash his mother made him that was stolen from him by the bandits while also telling him that she made it, then calling him a dickhead for accepting said sash and handjob. So it's apparently more honorable to lie to someone and sexually coerce them with promises of protection and safety than it is to accept said help because you're alone, scared, and more than a little frustrated with his BS quest the dude from Mission Impossible said you had to do. Aight cool, gaslight gatekeep girlboss I suppose.
The last chapter I remember as Gawain meeting the Green Knight and talking to him about being beheaded, and it struck me that the knight walked up to the court and demanded a fight with whoever wanted to fight for their king, knowing full well that he could take whatever hit they had to give him. And that was a shitty thing to do, we're all in agreement that stacking a deck like that is not cool. Not mentioning that you're immortal and calling the beloved leader of a bunch of honor bound warriors a ***** is probably not very honorable to do. So Gawain shows up with the sash, hoping that it will protect him from dying. At first I agreed that yeah, it's not great to avoid consequences like that. But then I thought about it and I realized that what Gawain was doing was no different than what the Green Knight did, but this was somehow treated as different and worse for some reason that escapes me. I know it's a thing about following through and stuff but he's still there with as much of a stacked deck as the Green Knight had, maybe even less given that the sash hasn't actually done shit yet, and the movie paints this as the wrong choice to make.
I dunno, after chewing on the movie for as long as I did, I came to the conclusion that the film, intentionally or otherwise, held Gawain to a standard that every other person refused to be held to simply because he was a knight. And I know that's the point, but then the conclusion comes to Gawain being beaten, attacked, and harassed because he was supposed to be better than the people that were beating, attacking, and harassing him but kept failing anyways. So that makes the message of the movie (from this train of logic) that being honorable is stupid because no one else is going to be honorable, you won't be better for being honorable, but people will always expect it from you because life is unfair
His interaction with the looter in what I can only call the first chapter was basically him coming across a dude robbing corpses in a battlefield and asking for directions. The dude hassles him and bugs him but gives him directions and, when Gawain turns to leave, demands payment as thanks. Gawain seems confused about this and I won't lie, I was too. I get that it would've been kind to toss him a coin but A: the guy is already stealing from dead people so I think he's good on money for the time being and B: the directions caused him little inconvenience and cost even less to give. If I was asking someone on the side of the road for directions I wouldn't think to give him a dollar just for the help. The dude was also really rude about it too, getting up in his face (as much as a graverobber can to a dude on a horse) citing honor and shit despite his incredibly dishonorable act of stealing from the dead. Not to mention the dude gets his bandit buddies and robs Gawain blind, stealing his horse and leaving him to die in the woods even after successfully convincing Gawain to toss him a coin for his "trouble". So he's the last guy to lecture anyone on honor.
In the second chapter, Gawain is sleeping in an abandoned cabin and is approached by the ghost of a young woman who was killed by a lord after she refused his advances. She asks him to dive into a pitch black river in the middle of the night and retrieve her skull so she can rest in peace. He goes to do this but stops and asks what he'll get in return and she gets really angry at him for asking for something in return. I immediately called bullshit on this, because Gawain was just robbed and left tied to a tree and just barely escaped with nothing but the clothes on his back, and was just asked by someone he's never met to do something incredibly dangerous and unnerving purely for her benefit. His request of some sort of reward, like supplies or something, is 100% reasonable given the circumstances and is even what the dude in the last chapter outright demanded and punished Gawain for. But it's somehow wrong of Gawain to ask for something in return for doing something so strenuous for someone he's never met.
I won't say a whole lot about the chapter with Joel Edgerton because I don't remember a lot of it, but I remember Edgerton talking to Gawain about honor and how it's a behavior not a status, something so incredibly obvious to people outside the movie so it's pointless to go on about it, Edgerton kissing Gawain because his wife jacked him off, and said handjob from the wife after she offered Gawain the sash his mother made him that was stolen from him by the bandits while also telling him that she made it, then calling him a dickhead for accepting said sash and handjob. So it's apparently more honorable to lie to someone and sexually coerce them with promises of protection and safety than it is to accept said help because you're alone, scared, and more than a little frustrated with his BS quest the dude from Mission Impossible said you had to do. Aight cool, gaslight gatekeep girlboss I suppose.
The last chapter I remember as Gawain meeting the Green Knight and talking to him about being beheaded, and it struck me that the knight walked up to the court and demanded a fight with whoever wanted to fight for their king, knowing full well that he could take whatever hit they had to give him. And that was a shitty thing to do, we're all in agreement that stacking a deck like that is not cool. Not mentioning that you're immortal and calling the beloved leader of a bunch of honor bound warriors a ***** is probably not very honorable to do. So Gawain shows up with the sash, hoping that it will protect him from dying. At first I agreed that yeah, it's not great to avoid consequences like that. But then I thought about it and I realized that what Gawain was doing was no different than what the Green Knight did, but this was somehow treated as different and worse for some reason that escapes me. I know it's a thing about following through and stuff but he's still there with as much of a stacked deck as the Green Knight had, maybe even less given that the sash hasn't actually done shit yet, and the movie paints this as the wrong choice to make.
I dunno, after chewing on the movie for as long as I did, I came to the conclusion that the film, intentionally or otherwise, held Gawain to a standard that every other person refused to be held to simply because he was a knight. And I know that's the point, but then the conclusion comes to Gawain being beaten, attacked, and harassed because he was supposed to be better than the people that were beating, attacking, and harassing him but kept failing anyways. So that makes the message of the movie (from this train of logic) that being honorable is stupid because no one else is going to be honorable, you won't be better for being honorable, but people will always expect it from you because life is unfair