Notes Towards a Close Reading of David Lowery’s 2021 Film The Green Knight

Abstract

Abstract This essay offers a close reading of David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight suggesting that the director has consciously subverted the text of his source to produce an always intriguing film whose debts to the medieval are many. Unlike previous directors whose ‘Gawain’ films failed even to engage with their medieval source, Lowery follows details in his source when it suits his purpose, but, more often than not, he adds scenes to, or deletes scenes from, the fourteenth-century Middle English poem. His additions are especially noteworthy in how they offer an alternate, perhaps even a queer, reading of the poem. Lowery’s goal seems to be to retell a basically linear tale in a more convoluted and circular manner thereby calling into question viewers’ thematic and narrative expectations. At the same time, Lowery’s film can be read as an antidote to the toxic masculinity found in so many other Arthurian texts across multiple genres.