Inner-City Chivalry in Gil Junger’s Black Knight: A South Central Yankee in King Leo’s Court

Abstract

The desire to use the experience of the Middle Ages to relieve the 1 trauma of urban modernity provides the foundation for Black Knight’s use of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee formula.1 Though universally panned by critics, Gil Junger’s 2001 comedy offers an intriguing postcolonial fantasy that draws upon and transforms the very real oppression of urban modernity in inner-city communities like South Central LA by transporting the ghetto to the Eurocentric Middle Ages. At first glance, nothing could seem a less appropriate—and hence less realistic—setting for a time-travel movie about the Middle Ages than the inner-city ghetto. The first thing everybody notices (or perhaps does not even need to notice) about films set in the Middle Ages is that the characters are usually white. The fantasy of the Middle Ages has always been the exclusive province of European colonialism, representing the historical legitimation of white, Christian, European domination. A nonwhite character in such a landscape would surely seem “unrealistic” and need explaining.’ The real point of interest in Black Knight is to see how this unlikely melange of Martin Lawrence hip-hop comedy and medieval swashbuckling connects the twentieth-century urban black man with the “black knight” of chivalric fantasy and so realizes the pun in the title.