Beowulf
Note: This article contains Beowulf movie spoilers.
There's a scene in Beowulf where a fellow tries to get Beowulf to admit to a loss in a swimming match, but Beowulf explains that he only lost because he was otherwise engaged in killing the shit out of sea monsters. According to the men who sail with Beowulf, however, the sea monster story has grown a bit in the repeated telling, and is not quite as impressive as he makes it sound.
I think this scene is very important to the movie because it introduces the notion that oral tradition, specifically Beowulf's oral tradition, is prone to exaggeration and selfish modification, and in instances where the truth is known, his version does not always match it. This idea opens the door for a different yet more cohesive interpretation of Beowulf, which in most cases quite closely follows the outline of the original, but makes bold changes in sequences that would have been reliant on only Beowulf's word.
The most obvious example of this is when Beowulf heads into the marshes to kill Grendel's mother. According to the original, he enters the cavern alone, and by his account, he fights with and eventually kills the monster who gave birth to Grendel, returning with Grendel's head and a melted sword to show for it. The head proves that Grendel is dead, and that Beowulf was in or at least near the lair of the monster, but the sword, which Beowulf claims was melted by the mother's poison (or something), is open to interpretation, and there is certainly no hard evidence that Grendel's mother has been killed.
The film assumes Beowulf is lying about the encounter, and creates an alternate version in which Beowulf has a son by Grendel's mother, and that son grows up to be the dragon that appears later in the story. Grendel himself is revealed to be the son of Hrothgar, who apparently found himself in a similar situation as Beowulf regarding Grendel's mother.
Now, there's a part of me that hates that. It's the part that groans when changes are made in the journey from book to film, but I found myself actually appreciating the alterations in this case. I think I liked them because they seemed to serve a purpose, that is, to facilitate the version of the story they wanted to tell, which was allowable via the theory that anything that happened without witnesses is bound to be inaccurately reported. If they had been all frivolous or pointless changes (such as when Beowulf becomes king after Hrothgar dies rather than returning home to be king there), then I'd probably say the film was mismanaged, but they were not.
I'm afraid the other reason I liked them is because my expectations for the movie and my personal interest in Beowulf were so low that I'd have been impressed by nearly anything.
Did anyone else see the movie? Thoughts?
12 comments:
not seen it yet. the trailers make the special effects look cheap which frightens me.
I think they look cheap because the actors' looks and feels just don't match the look and feel of the environment created by the cgi. The mismatch makes everything just seem out of place and thoroughly fake
This is my impression before seeing the movie.
That's a pretty accurate assessment. The movie is pretty firmly entrenched in the uncanny valley, and there are some pretty blatant 'HEY LOOK, THIS MOVIE IS ALSO IN 3D' moments, which were kind of distracting. Kind of like watching an old TV show where the commercial breaks are all in different places.
Initially I thought they did full CGI to make everything appear consistent, a part of the same world, if you will. Then I remembed that Golem and the Balrog were CGI and they did not appear to be out of place.
Having seen the movie I think they went with full CGI so that they could have that pullback at the beginning of the film where they pullback from the mead hall all the way to Grendel's cave. And that was totally worth it.
which was allowable via the theory that anything that happened without witnesses is bound to be inaccurately reported
That's a dangerous precident to set. Beowulf was the only one who said he killed Grendel's mother, so it's possible that he didn't. Well, yes... But how many witnesses are required to establish something as literary fact? Elrond is the only living witness to what happened within Mount Doom when he led Isildur in to destroy the ring. What if Isildur did not decide to not destroy the ring, but really Elrond prevented him from destroying the ring and fathered the Balrog?
Eh? EH?!
The biggest problem I have with the "Beowulf is my dragon baby's daddy" twist is that
1: The film isn't presented as an alternate representation of the epic tale.
2: It is very similar to what conservapedia does with its evolution entry.
Conservapedia says that the theory of evolution isn't really science. It cannot be recreated in a laboratory; it cannot be observed. Hay, Creationism cannot be recreated in a laboratory and it cannot be observed...so they must be equivalent.
That's what this movie does with the problem of oral tradition. The claim that Beowulf killed Grendel's mother is only supported by Beowulf, who might have lied. So obviously the claim that Beowulf fathered a dragon is equally likely given that NO ONE made that fucking claim in the poem.
But, you know, ok movie.
It had a viking funitarl. Everyone loves funitarls.
It's true. Everyone does.
While I agree that using the questionable validity of oral tradition could justify nearly any change some hack would want to make, I think in the case of Beowulf's mythological context, the changes they made actually made more sense than the original.
They use two very plausible (again, given the mythological context) events to make the dragon situation seem understandable. The first event is when Beowulf misrepresents his abilities in the story of the sea monsters, making it clear that he's not above exaggeration and misinformation if it'll help him somehow. The second is when Hrothgar admits to fathering Grendel, a humanoid monster born from a human father and some sort of shape-shifting mother.
Neither of these are too difficult to swallow, but I think they're necessary in order to make sense of the later event in which some guy steals a golden horn from near some cave and a dragon that nobody seems to have known about pops out and ravages the kingdom.
In the film's version, the horn represents some sort of pact between Beowulf and Grendel's mother, and when it's found, it has some sort of significance (G's mom was apparently securing the prosperity of Beowulf up until that point, and now she is not, I wasn't quite clear on that), and the dragon appears apparently to put an end to Beowulf, and nobody knew about the dragon probably because he only just recently grew powerful enough to do some real damage. The scene with the dragon, then, is changed from a mostly random encounter with fatal results, to a somewhat logically anticipated event (Beowulf had a monstrous son, just like Hrothgar, but B's was a dragon, odd, but not impossible given that we know it's possible for humans to give birth to monsters through Grendel's mother, and we know that she's some sort of shapeshifter, so a dragon is not an unreasonable mythological child to have) with fatal results.
In some ways, it's sort of like when Marvel put out Earth X. They tied together decades of unconnected material using a sort of "it was all there, we just didn't understand it correctly" approach. Whether or not you accept it as canon is up to you, but it does make more cohesive sense then the individual originals.
I have to give them credit for working within the holes of the story and not fabricating their own holes.
Still, the only proof we have that Grendel's mother was killed by Beowulf is that Beowulf said he killed her. And, sure, there's a hole there. But oral tradition itself has that hole.
The only source we have for the Iliad and the Odyssey is Homer.
That's the source of my unease. When we start to question oral traditions based upon witnesses to specific events within a story the entire enterprise of oral tradition falls apart.
Which is fine by me. Except if we start arging that certain events within Beowulf totally happened and other events totally didn't happen it starts to get silly.
Well, given our current understanding of how the world works, we can be quite certain that some events in Beowulf did not happen as they are reported in either version.
And even though all we have is Beowulf's assurance that he killed Grendel's mother, and all we really have is Homer's word that there was a war in Troy, Homer at least has some amount of archaeological evidence to support him, whereas Beowulf has virtually nothing. Furthermore, Homer seems to have little to gain by inventing the Iliad, but Beowulf has quite a bit at stake in his encounter with Grendel's mother, so one seems more likely to lie than the other.
So I think there's nothing really wrong with questioning the validity of oral tradition, but there are some criteria by which it's possible to gauge approximately how likely it is to be true. Also, with most mythology, the fact that it happened or didn't happen is not nearly as important as the story that the myth is trying to tell.
But is Beowulf really a story about how one oughtn't fuck a dragoness in order to become king because then your dragon baby will come back and try to eat your kingdom?
But I guess there is no harm in teaching that lesson through the story. I mean, it's not hurting anyone to attempt to deteur an individual from that sort of behavior.
Also, don't like, cause, you know, dragoness...
Certainly you could take the direct approach and learn that particular lesson, or maybe extrapolate a more general lesson about how lies tend to hurt in the long run, whether by putting a strain on relationships, through weight of conscience, by creating the means by which everything is lost, or a combination of all of those.
The thing I liked best about the movie, however, was that it caused me to reconsider my otherwise universally negative attitude towards movies that tamper with the source material.
In Lord of the Rings the tampering occured in a "replace Glorfindel with Liv Tyler" manner where the story itself is rewritten.
In Beowulf the tampering occured by exploiting established holes in the plot.
I don't like it when a movie changes the story, but I think that Peter Jackson will be in a deeper pit of hell than Neil Gaiman, at least with regards to their inability to fucking retell a story.
Seriously. How the fuck hard is it to take a book, read it, and then literally translate the book into a movie? Is that hard? Is that difficult?
I would think it would be far easier to just literally translate the damn story rather than fabricate new shit.
I suspect that filmmakers look at making strictly accurate film adaptations as boring, or maybe studios look at them as unprofitable. And I'm not referring to the cases where things that work in one medium fail to work in another medium (where filming a book can be like painting a song), but where the plots diverge for invalid reasons.
It's possible that the film industry looks at accurate film adaptations as the equivalent of that shot-for-shot remake of Psycho from a few years ago, where if you've seen the original, there's little reason to see the remake, because it's essentially the exact same movie. I suspect they think that It'd be like re-writing the Hobbit and keeping everything exactly the same except for the font. Of course the difference here is that these examples are copies within the same medium, and moving from one medium to another is reason enough to re-visit a particular work, in my opinion.
So in order to avoid that, they update the damn thing or put a spin on it or in some way make it "new", not realizing, I think, that doing so is as at least as offensive to the fans of the original work as colorizing a black and white movie.
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