Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 1 of 9 THE NOBLEST ROMAN Rewriting History in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) A. Bowdoin Van Riper Presented at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association & American Culture Association in April 2009, this talk was written for oral presentation and is therefore deliberately less comprehensive, and less formal, than an article written for publication. Historical epics—the big-budget Hollywood kind—seem to run in cycles, and one of those cycles ran its course in the first five years of the new century. It roared to life with Gladiator and The Patriot in 2000, and clanged to a stop with 300 in 2006, with intermediate stops at the Trojan War (Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy), the Crusades (Ridley Scott’s The Kingdom of Heaven), and the Napoleonic Wars (an adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander). Written by David Franzoni (best known for Gladiator), directed by Antoine Fuqua (best known for Training Day), and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (best known for making a hit movie out of an amusement park ride), King Arthur was conceived and marketed as part of that cycle. It also, however, offered audiences something rarely found in Hollywood historical epics: A point of view. The movie’s marketing campaign emphasized grim-faced warriors, clashing swords, and Keira Knightley dressed in leather straps and body paint, but it also promised audiences “the true story that inspired the legend.” The opening title card reinforced that idea: Show title clip. (We’re a long way, here, from Butch and Sundance’s “Not that it matters . . . “) The movie itself delivered a story that was—though not the Truth—a great deal closer to it than any previous movie about King Arthur. This talk is about how Jerry Bruckheimer & Co. invited moviegoers to think about the relationship between history and legend . . . and how they responded to the invitation. Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 2 of 9 THE TWO LEGENDS The “true story” that King Arthur offered audiences was set in the mid-5th century AD, on the fringes of the crumbling Roman Empire. Its Arthur was a half-Roman, half-British cavalry commander charged with covering the empire’s flanks as it withdrew from Britain after four centuries of occupation. Its “knights of the round table” were horsemen from Sarmatia (a Roman-ruled province on the shores of the Black Sea), conscripted into the Roman army as teenagers and promised their freedom after fifteen years’ service. Its Lancelot and Galahad were professional soldiers, its Merlin a Celtic guerrilla leader, its Guinevere his willowy, bowwielding daughter. Its plot traced Arthur’s transformation from dutiful Roman officer (battling the Celts in order to rescue a prominent Roman family trapped deep in their territory) to nascent British nationalist (allying with the Celts to battle invading Saxons bent on seizing what Rome abandoned). It ended with the Saxons apparently vanquished and Arthur—simple soldier turned successful warlord—triumphant, contemplating life with Guinevere and a further transformation from warlord to monarch. In choosing to tell this particular story and to label it “the true story behind the legend,” Jerry Bruckheimer & Company were staking a particular historical position. They were choosing between two distinct versions of the King Arthur story that have coexisted in Western culture for centuries. They were taking the interpretive road less traveled . . . a road unfamiliar to most of their audience . . . a road never traveled before by Hollywood. The first version of the King Arthur story was set down by Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the late 12th century but drawing on sources as old as the 6th century. Geoffrey, in his History of the Kings of Britain, places Arthur in the mid-fifth century. The Romans are gone, Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 3 of 9 Britain is beset by invading Danes, and the British king, Vortigern, unwisely hires Saxon mercenaries who become a bigger threat than the Danes. Allying himself with an ex-Roman general named Ambrosius and a Celtic wizard named Merlin, British chieftain Uther Pendragon overthrows Vortigern and takes the fight to the Saxons. His son Arthur, conceived and raised with the help of Merlin, grows to manhood and takes over the fight, defeating the Saxons at Badon Hill and consolidating England, Scotland, Orkney, and Iceland under his rule. Geoffrey’s is a story of war and politics. His Arthur fights for practical ends: power, control, and freedom from foreign rule. Abstract ideals like nationalism, much less chivalry, doesn’t come into it. The second version of the story took shape in French romances written in the 13th and 14th centuries, and was consolidated by Thomas Malory in Le Morte d’ Arthur in the late 15th. It includes most of the elements that modern audiences see as the core of the legend: the characters of Lancelot and Galahad, Lancelot’s dalliance with Guinevere, Arthur’s dalliance with his halfsister Morgan le Fay, the quest for the Holy Grail, the Lady of the Lake, Arthur’s son Mordred, the Round Table, Camelot. It was Malory and his French predecessors who yanked the legend out of the 5th century and into the 12h and 13th. In it, towering mott-and-bailey castles replaced hilltop forts, full plate armor replaced chain mail and leather, and medieval concepts of chivalry and Christian piety replaced, the ruthless political struggles to fill the post-Roman power vacuum in Britain. Malory’s Arthur is an idealistic figure, and Le Morte d’Arthur is the story of high ideals undone by human frailty. Malory’s version of the legend captured the popular imagination in the 19th century and the first two-thirds of the 20th. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur, and the rest for the Victorian mania for things Arthurian sprang from it. So, later, did T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot. The revival of Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 4 of 9 Geoffrey’s version began in 19XX, when Rosemary Sutcliffe made a post-Roman Arthur the hero of her novel Sword at Sunset. Other novelists—Mary Stewart, Parke Godwin, Stephen Lawhead, Bernard Cornwell—followed Sutcliffe’s lead. Filmmakers, with a very few exceptions, did not. The big Hollywood King Arthur pictures—Knights of the Round Table (1953), The Sword in the Stone (19XX), Camelot (1967) Excalibur (1981), First Knight (1995)—followed the Malory version of the story. So did Cornell Wilde’s Lancelot and Guinevere (1963) and Robert Besson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974). Monty Python and the Holy Grail derived much of its humor from slamming Malory’s story and characters up against a realistically grubby version of the Middle Ages (Peasant #1: “Look! The king!” Peasant #2: “How can you tell he’s the king?” Peasant #1: “He’s the only one who hasn’t got shit all over him.”). Geoffrey’s version shaped a couple of made-for-TV movies, but King Arthur was the first picture to bring something like it to the big screen. The novels that gave Geoffrey his modern voice emphasized politics and war over chivalry and romance, and a realistic tone over a fanciful one. King Arthur took a similar approach. Arthur and his knights are long-service professional soldiers who kill, efficiently and without remorse, in the service of their political masters. They are motivated not by ideals but by practicalities: stay alive, finish the mission, go home in one piece. Merlin and Guinevere (father-daughter guerilla leaders) fight for self-determination, but for practical reasons (it’s good for their people) rather than principled ones (it’s good for all people). Magic is absent—Merlin more showman than shaman. Religion is not about miracles (the Holy Grail) but about ideas: Church doctrine is still fluid, and Arthur is a disciple of the heretic Pelagius. Guinevere and Arthur’s one night together is not a love for the ages but two warriors seeking a few hours’ escape the night before a battle. Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 5 of 9 HISTORY—LEGEND—FILM Bruckheimer & Company drew a clear distinction between the legend of King Arthur and the historical people and events that gave rise to those the legends. In doing so, they articulated several ideas about our understanding of the past: 1) That legends—these legends anyway—have historical roots; 2) That the people and events behind the King Arthur legends are identifiable and knowable; 3) That the conversion of history into legend involves exaggeration, distortion, and embellishment with fanciful elements. Here, briefly, is how those ideas come together in the trailers and the opening of the film, which serve as a kind of meta-commentary on the story the filmmakers want to tell: Show Main Trailer The film’s basic approach is evident in that montage of characters: You think you know Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere/Merlin. We’ll show you the real person. Hollywood has, of course, been here before. John Ford explored the ways that history is converted into legend in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire told a similar story as straight drama, and XX’s Wag the Dog played it as satire. Several key scenes in 1776, the film adaptation of a stage musical about the Declaration of Independence, hinge on characters concerns about how they’ll be remembered as centuries hence. Most famously, John Ford’s last great Western—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence—explores the gulf between what actually happened and what people believe happened. All five of those films, and others with similar themes, shared a fundamental seriousness—of subject matter, message, or both. King Arthur was a big, loud, flashy summer blockbuster that—amid the swordplay and the debut of Keira Knightley, Warrior Babe—asked audiences to think. They didn’t like it. Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 6 of 9 REACTIONS TO THE FILM Opening the weekend following the 4th of July, King Arthur finished a modest third in box office receipts, behind Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the second week of Spider-Man 2. Its box office take dropped by more than 50% the second weekend . . . and the third, fourth, and fifth weekends. The sixth weekend, it dropped by nearly 75%. Word of mouth was not on its side, and reviews of the picture did little to help. A handful of critics met the movie on its own terms, attacking it for being lousy history. Steven Greydanus writing for the Christian-focused Decent Films Guide, complains that the film “bears virtually no resemblance either to Arthurian fact or legend” and argued that the filmmakers “simply discard virtually all the data and craft an entirely unrelated story in its place.” There was, he noted, no Vortigern in the movie. The Saxons inexplicably marched south from Scotland rather than west from Wessex, and they were the attackers rather than the defenders at the climactic battle of Badon Hill. A number of reviewers objected to the movie’s chronology: It’s set in 452 and the Romans are still in Britain, yet they pulled out in 410. A few noted that Hadrian’s Wall represented the upper limit of Roman settlement, and that Romans (like those Arthur’s men were sent to rescue) would scarcely be living north of it. Leslie Alcock, whose archaeological work the opening title card might have referred to, dismissed the film as nonsense. More often, though commentators lamented the loss of the legend. “Why?” lamented Steven Greydanus of Decent Films. “What possesses a screenwriter to take on legendary characters and scenarios that for centuries have been scrutinized by historians and celebrated by storytellers, and conclude that instead of all that he can tell another story entirely and that this Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 7 of 9 will be just as interesting?” Maitland McDonough of TV Guide accused the filmmakers of dumping “everything the average person knows or cares about Arthur and his knights in favor of “some dodgy history.” Vince Lee of Qwipster’s Movie Reviews chimed in that: “By stripping away the magic, it all becomes far more mundane than any story about legendary figures has a right to be." King Arthur is an attempt to tell the real story behind the Arthurian legend,” Mick La Salle began his review in the San Francisco Chronicle, “and if this is the truth, give me Lerner and Loewe.” The deglamorized portrayal of the knights as dirty, weary professional soldiers came in for particular criticism. Matt Anderson described them as a “shabby, dirty lot” and a “pack of thugs and roughnecks.” Mick La Salle dismissed them as “a band of interchangeable mopes with a bad history, steeped in gore up to their elbows.” Jeffrey Anderson of the website Combustible Celluloid stated baldly what many other reviewers hinted at. He lamented that “the knights now look like a pack of unshaven, roaming misfits, proudly wearing dreadlocked hair (or trendy shaved heads),” and observed sadly that “the chivalry is gone.” Matt Anderson of Movie Habit: “King Arthur, the new movie about the leader of the Knights of the Round Table, is being touted as ‘the untold true story that inspired the legend.’ Unfortunately, if it is indeed true, it’s a story that is best left untold.” Jeffrey Anderson concludes that: “After seeing King Arthur, it’s clear that Malory, whoever he may be, embellished for a reason.” A review by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe was headlined: “King Arthur gets a lot right— just not the legend it’s based on.” He argued that the film “departs so radically from what most of us accept as the basics (i.e., what we've gleaned from Sir Thomas Malory, T. H. White, Walt Disney, and Monty Python) that the movie qualifies as a whole new myth.” He also, however, Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 8 of 9 saw it as an affront to history, dismissing the opening titles’ reference to “recently discovered archaeological evidence” as “bunk,” and concluding that by the climax of the film “history has been hogtied and left in the trunk of Jerry Bruckheimer's Porsche.” Rick Groen of the Toronto Globe and Mail was still more savage. He opened his review: “May the gods protect us from modernists messing with our myths” and went on to accuse the filmmakers of worshipping “the false god of realism.” Groen, even more than Burr, implicitly accepted the legend as history, or as something more valid and interesting than history. When he decried the film’s “teensy bit of date juggling,” he wasn’t referring to having the Romans still in Britain in 452, but to “dragging the future king (Clive Owen) into the past, lifting the guy out of medieval times and giving him the bum's rush straight back to the Dark Ages.” All that said, there were positive reviews. Todd McCarthy of Variety opened his review this way: “Brandishing a surprising seriousness of purpose for a would-be summer blockbuster, King Arthur bracingly repositions the Arthurian myth in a specific and savage historical moment quite removed from its usual placement in a bucolic world of chivalrous knights, a mischievous magician and an errant queen.” Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post called the movie “the Arthurian Ur-text: a vision of the original reality, now long-forgot and all but irrecoverable, that was later gilded by more romantic tellers from other times and traditions, until it became so glamorized it had lost all contact with the harsh brutality of the real.” David Atkinsosn of the Village Voice was more measured. He called the look and feel of the picture “admirably nasty,” but dismissed the plot as another “swoony valentine to a social ideal that never existed.” Atkinson gently tweaked (screenwriter Franzoni for “swallowing whole” Howard Reid’s popular history Arthur the Dragon, but lauded him for “attempting to rehistoricize the legend” and for “taking the conversation with history somewhat seriously.” Van Riper/King Arthur/-Page 9 of 9 It’s worth pausing here to consider the tone and content of these reviews. When was the last time you saw the phrase “Ur-text” or “rehistoricize the legend” in a review of any movie, much less a summer blockbuster? When was the last time you heard reviewers commenting on who was where at Badon Hill, or the relationship between history and legend? King Arthur, by wearing its historical viewpoint on its cinematic sleeve, encouraged—but did not require— audiences to engage with it. It demonstrated, in a small way, that history is constructed . . . not simply unearthed. For that alone, it deserves a tip of our metaphorical hats.