Mohenjo Daro: Back to the Bronze Age

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Ancient India, Ashotush Gowariker, Bollywood, Hrithik Roshan, Kabir Bedi, Mohenjo Daro, Pooja Hegde, The Indus Valley Civilization, Woman as Prize

My local shopping mall multiplex mostly runs the usual big-budget action films and rom-coms, but one of its 18 theaters is dedicated to Bollywood films. So when I noticed that it was running a movie about Mohenjo-Daro, one of the cities of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, I decided I had to go and see it. Mohenjo Daro (2016, dir. Ashotush Gowariker, Hindi with English subtitles) is set in 2016 BC in a civilization that most people have never even heard of.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re interested in seeing this film, you should stop reading after my summary of the Indus Valley Civilization, because I discuss major plot points, including the resolution of the plot.

 

The Indus Valley Civilization

The Indus Valley was home to one of the first four great civilizations of the Old World. It emerged around 3300BC, so it was slightly younger than Sumeria and Egypt, but slightly older than China. At its peak, from about 2600 to 1900 BC, it may have had as many as 5 million inhabitants, making it much larger than those other three civilizations, and more than 1000 cities and town are known to have belonged to it. Although it possessed a written language, scholars have not yet been able to translate it, and consequently it is known purely through archeology.

The Indus Valley Civilization

As the name implies, the IVC developed along the banks of the Indus and Sarasvati Rivers, in what is today Pakistan. The cities of the IVC show considerable urban planning efforts, including a regular street grid, warehouses for goods, and most impressively of all, a sophisticated system of hydraulic engineering that provided running water, efficient sewers, public baths, and the world’s first flush toilets.

All of that suggests a complex urban government, but the nature of that government has largely eluded scholars so far. There is no evidence for temples, so it does not appear to have been a theocracy, nor is there evidence for palaces or large homes, which suggests that the cities did not have powerful monarchies or wealthy elites who monopolized political power. But there was considerable standardization of units of measure, such as weights and building bricks, across the IVC, suggesting that there was large-scale co-ordination of efforts. So scholars are divided as to whether there was a single over-arching government, a network of monarchies or religious leaders in individual cities, or some more egalitarian system we cannot currently work out.

Statue of a so-called ‘Priest-King’

The IVC is thought to have been the first culture to produce cotton, and may have been the first to domesticate chickens. There is evidence for fairly sophisticated dentistry. And they clearly traded with Mesopotamia and Egypt. They had a complex writing system of between 400 and 600 symbols, which were used on seals and pottery, but what these symbols mean or what function they played is unknown.

Seal with symbols and a ‘unicorn’

The IVC began to go into decline around 1800 BC, for reasons that are unclear. The best theory is connected to climate change. This theory holds that changes in the climate caused the monsoon that brings so much water to the region to shift southward toward India proper. That would have caused a decline in the amount of water reaching the Sarasvati and Indus rivers. The Sarasvati also seems to have shifted its route, causing its water to drain into the Ganges watershed rather than the Indus. Accompanying these hydraulic changes may have been increasing salination to the soil, thus hurting the IVC’s ability to grow crops. There is also some evidence that violence may have been a factor. And archaeology suggests that Mohenjo-Daro, one of the IVC’s two best-excavated cities, may have been destroyed in a flood. One theory holds that the IVC population migrated eastward to the Ganges and helped lay the foundations for later Hindu culture.

The ‘Dancing Girl’ statue

 

Mohenjo Daro

Ashotush Gowariker was serious about trying to recreate some sense of what Mohenjo-Daro might have looked like. He consulted a half-dozen experts to get a sense of how the community’s architecture looked, and one scene takes place around what archeologists have called The Great Bath. His city has an upper and lower city, which roughly corresponds to the citadel that rose over the main city. There are only hints of what IVC clothing looked like, so Gowariker admits they simply made it up, but they tried to reflect surviving artifacts where possible; one character is dressed exactly as the statue of the ‘Priest-King’ is, and the Dancing Girl statue appears in one shot.

The Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro

Unfortunately, given that we cannot read the IVC script, the plot was made up wholesale (and to Gowariker’s credit, a prologue text admits as much). The plot turns on Sarman (Hrithik Roshan) a small-town indigo farmer who is drawn to Mohenjo-Daro by a strange dream involving a unicorn, which is the symbol of Sindha, the goddess of the local river. He meets Chaani (Pooja Hegde), the Chosen One of Sindha, and this being a Bollywood film, immediately falls in love with her and starts trying to win her hand.

But Chaani is engaged to marry Moonja (Arunoday Singh), the villainous son of Maham (Kabir Bedi), the ruler of Mohenjo-Daro. The city is governed by a Senate, made up of representatives of all the major occupations (farming, mining, merchants, weavers, etc). Maham is the chief of the Senate, something like an elected president. That’s not a totally implausible idea for a society that lacked the usual foundations for ancient government. Maham has dammed the Sindha river so that he can mine gold from the river bed, and he is using the gold to buy copper weapons from Sumeria and hire thugs to help impose his rule on the city by force, as part of a plot to destroy Harappa, the city that exiled him twenty years ago.

Sarman (Hrithik) courting Channi (Hegde)

All of this brings him into conflict with Sarman, who thinks that Maham’s taxation is immoral, so he starts to foment rebellion, while still finding time to sing and dance (this is Bollywood, after all) and romance the Chosen One. Eventually, he realizes that the arrival of the monsoon is going to cause the dam to burst, and so in addition to leading a revolution, he has to persuade everyone to flee the city and migrate to the Ganges river. This last sequence, in which the city is destroyed by a torrential flood, is really the high point of the film, and feels a great deal like a classic Cecil B. DeMille epic.

So while the film’s story is entirely fictitious, at least Gowariker made some effort to incorporate what is known about the IVC. The film has a tendency to project later Hindu practice back onto the IVC; both cultures revere rivers and cremate their dead, for example. And at the end of the film, Sarman leads his people to what he declares to be the Ganga (Ganges) river, explicitly positioning the Indus Valley Civilization as one of the foundations of Indian culture. But Hollywood is constantly projecting its values onto the past, so it’s hardly surprising that Bollywood does exactly the same.

 

Old vs New

What I find most interesting about Mohenjo Daro is the way it dramatizes, probably unintentionally, the clash between a traditional agricultural society and an increasingly sophisticated urban society that is embracing new technologies and long-range trade. Given that the IVC was probably in the middle of that transition, it is not impossible that some version of that tension existed at the time.

An artist’s idea of what Mohenjo-Daro might have looked like

Sarman represents a traditional pre-urban farming culture that is barely out of the Stone Age. Throughout the film, he favors wooden tools, rocks, and his bare hands, only briefly making use of copper or bronze weapons when he has no choice; late in the film his followers use spears tipped with sharpened stones. On some level, he is xenophobic. All his enemies are in some fashion foreign to Mohenjo-Daro; when he discovers that Maham is buying copper weapons from the Sumerians, his solution is to attack the Sumerian caravan and force them to stop trading with Mohenjo-Daro. And after living in Mohenjo-Daro, he discovers a secret about his past that intersects with Mohenjo-Daro’s past, so he is literally a representative of the past returned to the city to restore the way things used to be (at least until the flood wipes out the whole city and he is forced to lead the people to a new place).

In contrast, Maham and Moonja represent new technologies and practices. Maham uses the new idea of trading gold to acquire the new technology of copper weapons, and he, Moonja, and his cronies all use metal weapons, often in a way that makes them explicitly villainous. He is a merchant, and wants to make Mohenjo-Daro powerful by trading with distant cultures like Sumeria, Mecca, and Bukhara, but his new practices are explicitly corrupt and abusive. Early in the film, Sarman and Moonja come into conflict because Moonja refuses to offer what Sarman deems a fair price for goods, so Moonja is comfortable with inflation and Sarman is not. Maham uses the new technology of damming to divert the river. Ultimately, the river (or perhaps the goddess Sindha) rejects this new practice, destroying both Maham and the city, while Moonja is killed with his own metal dagger.

You can tell Maham is a villain just from his hat

So the film seems to be appealing to a conservative, anti-modern sentiment, showing how the old ways are both morally better and more reliable, whereas new things are bad, corrupt, and unreliable.

Unfortunately, the film resorts to the tired cliché of the Woman as the Prize. Chaani would be right at home in most American films from the 1950s. Although the film asserts through a prophecy that Mohenjo-Daro’s survival rests on Chaani’s decisions, in fact at no point does she actually make a decision and she has no agency whatsoever. Instead, when Moonja decides to kill her because Sarman has found a way to break their engagement, she is simply helpless until Sarman runs to her rescue, and thereafter she is just his reward for overcoming all the hardships of the film. Bollywood cinema is quite conservative this way, so it’s not surprising, but it is rather boring and predictable.

Still, it’s a reasonably fun story in a setting you’ve never seen before, and at least on the level of the sets and art direction, it offers an approximation of what the Indus Valley Civilization might have been like. And the dance numbers are decent. Check it out.

Want to Know More?

The movie isn’t available on video yet.

If you want to know more about the Indus Valley Civilization, you might look at Gregory Possehl’s The Indus Civilization.

Beowulf: Shame on You, Neil Gaiman

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Anthony Hopkins, Beowulf, Grendel, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scandinavia, Movies I Hate, Neil Gaiman, Ray Winstone, Robin Wright Penn, Woman as Prize

Beowulf ranks among the greatest works of literature in the English language, and holds pride of place as the first great work of English-language fiction. It is a powerful, profound, and mysterious text that continues to move and fascinate readers more than a thousand years after it was first written down.

Unfortunately, when film-makers try to translate the story to the big screen, this strange old tale thwarts their best efforts to produce a decent story. Beowulf (2007, dir. Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) is perhaps the worst adaptation of a piece of medieval literature I’ve ever read, and Neil Gaiman, who is normally a great storyteller as Sandman demonstrates, ought to be embarrassed that he wrote it.

The Poem

Beowulf, as many who read it high school or college know, tells the story of the Germanic’s warrior’s three greatest battles. He is a Geat, belonging to a tribe that resided in what is today southern Sweden, a branch of the Gothic people. (Side note: ‘Geat’ is pronounced ‘Yat’ or “Yay-at’, not ‘Geet’.) He travels to Denmark to help the great Danish king Hrothgar. Hrothgar is a successful war leader, but he is outclassed by the horrible troll Grendel, who is harrying the Danes in their great hall, Heorot. Beowulf kills Grendel by ripping off the creature’s arm. But then Grendel’s unnamed mother (whom I’ll just call Mother) continues her son’s feud against the Danes, and Beowulf is forced to track her to under lair in the moor where he eventually kills her.

The geography of Beowulf

After that Beowulf returns home to Sweden and becomes the Geatish king. Fifty years later, a slave steals a cup from the horde of a dragon, who goes on a rampage, killed and destroying the Geats until Beowulf and his warband go to confront the monster. With the exception of the faithful Wiglaf (‘Wee-laf’, not ‘Wig-laf’), the warband chickens out and runs away, leaving Beowulf unsupported in his battle against the dragon. As a result, he kills the dragon but is mortally wounded. The poem ends as it begins, with the funeral of a great king. The Geats lament not only the death of their king but also the cowardice of the warband, because they are now vulnerable to the depredations of their neighbors. One woman predicts the destruction of the Geatish tribe, a prediction that eventually came true in the real world when the Swedes eventually conquered and absorbed the Geats.

While a great poem, Beowulf presents many puzzles to the reader. In a surface reading, the first two fights seem essentially unconnected to the third fight, and scholars have debated how much unity the poem actually has. Indeed, it’s been suggested that the poem as we have it (which survives in a single 11^th century manuscript) may in fact represent the fusion of two unrelated poems. My personal feeling is that two halves of the poem are in fact a unitary whole, tracing as it does a hero from his early triumphs to his disastrous death. There is an underlying theme about the dangerous nature of violence. The poem is riddled with apparent digressions about unrelated acts of violence, but I tend to see these digressions as commenting on the nature of violence and highlighting Beowulf as a hero precisely because he understands when violence should and shouldn’t be resorted to. The cowardice of his men serves as a warning that sometimes violence is necessary, and Beowulf’s successful battle as an elderly ruler counterpoints Hrothgar’s earlier inability to triumph over Grendel. But that’s just one way to understand the poem.

The first page of Beowulf

As a result, the story presents a basic problem for modern audiences. The first two acts don’t connect to the third in any obvious way; there’s no through-line for the plot. Beowulf is a Germanic hero; he lacks the interiority and personal conflict that modern audiences tend to want in their heroes. His conflicts are mostly of a purely physical kind, although he does face social challenges as well, such as when he arrives as an outsider at Heorot and is challenged by the loud-mouthed asshole Unferth. And at a later moment in the poem, he is tempted by Queen Hygd to seize the Geatish throne, but refuses to do so, refusing to take it until King Heardred is killed in battle. (Like I said, he knows when to use violence and when to reject it.) But the moral universe in which he operates is drastically different from modern America, and that makes it harder to get modern audiences engaged with the underlying ideas in the poem.

The Movie

When Gaiman and Avary were trying to figure out how to turn this story into a 3D animated film that uses motion capture technology, they clearly recognized the problem of the disjunction between the first two acts and the third. Unfortunately, their solution to the problem was to tie the third act to the first two in a way that shits all over the heroic qualities of Beowulf and Hrothgar. In order to explain what’s so wrong with their screenplay, I’ll need to summarize the whole film.

The film opens with a feast in the newly-built Heorot. The elderly Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) is a fat, drunken slob who has to be carried into the hall and can barely keep his bed sheet wrapped around his otherwise naked body. His beautiful young wife Wealtheow (Robin Wright Penn) is disgusted by him and refuses to sleep with him. The feasting and merriment unsettles Grendel (Crispin Glover), who has very delicate ears, and so he rampages through the hall, killing men while the impotent Hrothgar proves unable to attack him.

Grendel

Eventually Beowulf (Ray Winstone) the ‘Geet’ shows up and promises to fight the monster. He is confronted by Unferth (John Malkovich), who points out that the only thing Beowulf has done of note is lose a swimming contest. Beowulf responds by explaining that he lost the competition because he had to take time to kill nine sea monsters. One of his retainers comments that the last time Beowulf told the story, there were only three monsters. And in the flashback to the event we see that Beowulf is lying; one of the monsters is actually a mermaid, who successfully seduces him, rendering him unable to kill her.

Beowulf clearly has the hots for Wealtheow, because as the feast is winding down, he literally takes off all his clothes while everyone watches. She is appalled by this and flees the room, so he just lies down to relax while his men keep partying. When the fight with Grendel comes, Beowulf rather inexplicably watches the monster kill most of his men before getting into the fight. He manages to trap Grendel’s arm in the door of the hall and smashes it off. As he later retells the story, he just ripped the arm off while wrestling with him.

After Mother comes to slaughter Danes in vengeance, Hrothgar offers Beowulf his greatest treasure, the Dragon Horn, an elaborate drinking cup, which he got when he killed Fafnir, a dragon. (Fafnir is the dragon from a completely different legend, the story of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, but whatever.) Beowulf inexplicably takes the horn with him when he tracks Mother back to her lair, and discovers that it glows in the cave (which is actually kind of a nice touch).

Hrothgar giving Beowulf the Dragon Horn

When he meets Mother, she turns out to be Angelina Jolie with golden body-paint, a sexy braid that is also her tail, and built-in stiletto heels. Instead of fighting her, she seduces him with a promise that as long as the cup remains in her lair, nothing will be able to harm Beowulf and he will be a great king. So instead of killing her, he bones her and then goes back to Hrothgar and claims to have killed her. Hrothgar is relieved, declares Beowulf his heir, and then commits suicide by jumping off a tower. By this point it has become clear that years ago Hrothgar did exactly what Beowulf has just done, and that Grendel was actually Hrothgar’s son.

It must be really hard for Mother to shop for shoes

The film jumps forward to years later. King Beowulf of the Danes is married to Wealtheow, who is as disgusted with him as she was with Hrothgar, so he needs to sleep with slave girls instead. He’s disgusted with himself, because he knows he’s not actually a hero but rather just a liar. There’s a hint that perhaps his deal with Mother has made him invulnerable to battle, so that he no longer feels any danger when he fights.

Unferth has inexplicably become a Christian. But his slave steals the Dragon Horn from Mother’s lair. A dragon, who is Beowulf’s kid, goes on a rampage, destroying the local church (which is several centuries too early for a film set in 6^th century Denmark), and sending Beowulf a message that the deal is off. Beowulf returns the horn to Mother, but she refuses to accept it, and releases the dragon again. The dragon rampages, destroying the town and much of Beowulf’s castle. He eventually realizes that the dragon has a soft spot at the base of its throat, but for reasons I won’t go into, he has to partly sever his right arm in order to reach into the soft spot and rip out the dragon’s heart (I guess because he tore off Grendel’s right arm). They both plunge to the surf, where the dragon transforms into Beowulf’s son, and they both die.

The fight with the dragon is pretty much the best part of the film

Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson) becomes king and Beowulf is given a Viking ship funeral. Right after that, Wiglaf finds the Dragon Horn in the surf. Mother appears to kiss Beowulf’s corpse, and then beckons Wiglaf to come to her, implicitly offering to repeat the cycle again. Wiglaf stares back at her, and the film cuts to black, leaving it unclear how he responds.

My Analysis

Words cannot express just how much I hate this mangling of the story of the poem. It’s only with great force of will that I am going to refrain from swearing as I dissect it.

The central problem is that instead of presenting Hrothgar and Beowulf as great heroes, which is exactly who they are in the poem, the film offers us two decidedly unheroic liars. Both men achieve their worldly success not by killing monsters but by having sex with Mother and then lying about it. It’s clear that both men are glory hounds who are more than willing to exaggerate their great accomplishments. They are both fundamentally weak men incapable of keeping their pants on when presented with the opportunity for hot monster sex. Their glory is purchased with the future slaughter of their own men because their pretended triumphs lay the foundations for the future crisis that will ruin them and wreak havoc on their people.

Heorot at the start of the film

Whether Hrothgar was ever a great man is entirely unknowable, because we don’t get enough evidence to tell whether anything in his version of events is true. Beowulf shows signs of being a potentially great man; he does basically kill Grendel nearly single-handedly, albeit not the way he later claims. Whether he actually kills any sea monsters is left uncertain; he’s clearly an unreliable narrator and it’s entirely possible that he lost the swimming contest because he decided to get busy with a mermaid and then made up the sea monsters to explain his failure. But in his fight with Grendel he literally just watches Grendel butcher his warband until it’s pretty much only Wiglaf left. So in contrast to the poem, which emphasizes the mutual obligations between war leader and warband by showing the failure of the warband in the battle with the dragon, it’s Beowulf who fails his men.

It’s only at the end of the film that Beowulf gets truly heroic by confronting the dragon and severing his own arm in order to kill the dragon, well aware that he will die when the dragon he’s clinging to falls from the sky. It’s a heroic moment, but sharply undercut by the fact that the whole disaster is his own fault.

Instead of being a film about heroic men doing great deeds, this Beowulf is a story about lying faux-heroes discovering that glory is ultimately hollow and emasculating. Hrothgar’s response to this discovery is to drink himself into a stupor and eventually kill himself, whereas Beowulf manages to rise above himself and finally do the right thing. In other words, the film is about the falseness of heroism far more than its possibility. All heroic inspiration is a falsehood rooted in boasting and deceit. And Wiglaf’s final comment, “He was the bravest of us. He was the prince of all warriors. His name will live forever” reads more as an ironic commentary on the impossibility of true heroism. If the greatest of all heroes is basically a liar and braggart who barely deserves his acclaim, what possibility of heroism is left to the rest of us lesser men?

Seeing the film in the theater in 2007, I was struck by how much the film read as a critique of contemporary American politics, with political leaders whose “Missions Accomplished” are little more than hollow boasts covering up miserable failures that got lots of good people killed. But maybe that was just the mood I was in at the time.

 

And Then There’s the Women

The film has three female characters, Wealtheow, Mother, and Ursula, Beowulf’s concubine (who’s mostly there to demonstrate the failure of Beowulf and Wealtheow’s marriage). Wealtheow is on the surface a strong women, refusing to sleep with either of her husbands because she is disgusted that they both slept with Mother. But she’s like a day-old sink full of dirty dishes and brackish water; the moment you poke the surface, you’re assaulted by the nasty stench underneath.

Wealtheow

It’s hard to see her disgust as anything other than sexual jealousy. She’s angry that her husbands both slept with a woman who is incomparably more beautiful than she is. And her disgust appears to be the reason that both her husbands are emotionally broken men. She has driven Hrothgar to drink and left Beowulf bitter with his life. It is her failure to adore her husbands that forces them to see the hollowness of their victories, because neither man understands the long-term consequences of sleeping with Mother until long after they’re broken men. So basically, if Wealtheow wasn’t such a jealous shrew, these men would have been happy and able to enjoy their false victories. She is the cause of most of their man-pain.

What makes this worse is that she’s also the Woman as the Prize. Hrothgar literally gives her to Beowulf when he declares Beowulf his heir. So Beowulf’s reward for apparently defeating Mother is a kingdom and a beautiful young wife. But that beautiful prize turns out to be a viper that gradually poisons him by refusing to have sex with him. The film treats this as entirely natural, and is completely oblivious to the fact that Wealtheow clearly has no attraction to Beowulf. She’s his prize and ought to put out for him, and her persistent refusal to do so is part of his ruin.

She’s also incapable of saving herself. When Grendel menaces her, she is saved by Hrothgar distracting Grendel, and when the dragon attacks and she is about to fall off the castle’s bridge to her death (because Ursula isn’t strong enough to pull her up), it’s Wiglaf who saves her. And, inexplicably, the older Wealtheow has grey hair but no wrinkles; her skin seems as dewy fresh as it does at the start of the film. So she’s literally four of the worst cinematic tropes about women rolled into one. She has no agency and exists purely to drive home the plot lessons for her husbands.

And Mother is even worse. She’s an eternally young and hot sex kitten, who never bothers putting clothes on. She is literally the cause of all the evil in the film. She is the mother of Fafnir, the dragon that Hrothgar confronted; the mother of Grendel; and the mother of the unnamed second dragon who is Beowulf’s son. Presumably she seduced Fafnir’s father the way she seduces Hrothgar and Beowulf, and the film ends with the very real possibility that she will seduce Wiglaf and repeat the cycle. (In fact, I think the film makes it likely that she does seduce him; Wiglaf has just declared that Beowulf is a far greater man than he is, so if Beowulf has fallen to Mother’s temptations, it is likely that Wiglaf will give in as well. He’s a helper, not a hero in his own right, even by this film’s tawdry standards. And his reception of the Dragon Horn just a moment before acts as a symbol of his impending seduction, since both Mother and the Horn are passed on from Hrothgar to Beowulf and now apparently from Beowulf to Wiglaf.) So the locus of all evil in Denmark is Mother’s irresistible sexuality; she has been birthing monsters since before the film begins and will apparently continue birthing monsters after the film ends. Her evil triumphs over all male efforts to stop her, and no women can apparently stand in comparison.

She is also an emasculating figure. In the poem, when Beowulf ventures into the lair, Unferth gives Beowulf his ancestral sword Hrunting. The sword turns out to be unable to hurt Mother, and she melts the blade down to its hilt. In the film, as she seduces Beowulf, he holds up Hrunting and she begins to stroke it with her hands, causing it to melt even as he has sex with her. So the film directly associates the sword with Beowulf’s penis, showing it softening when he yields to her.

Mother stroking Beowulf’s sword

And lest I be accused of getting Freudian without warrant, the film repeatedly draws parallels between swords and Beowulf’s dick. When Beowulf strips naked before the fight with Grendel, the film has a running joke of various things obscuring his penis: Wiglaf’s arm, smoke, a candlestick, and finally and most blatantly a sword. When he confronts the mermaid, he drops his sword just as she embraces him. At the end, as he is trying to reach the dragon’s heart, he drops his knife and its only then that he can reach in and rip the heart out with his hands. So the film has an odd pattern in which being swordless is somehow a metaphor for sex and heroism. It’s a clumsy image; how can he get Mother pregnant if his sword has already gone flaccid? But it’s definitely there. So the film seems to say that having sex with Mother is going to lead to his impotence.

See what I mean?

And of course, Mother sends her son the dragon out to kill when her deal with Beowulf is broken by the theft of the cup. So she gets her son killed because she’s angry with Beowulf. Grendel goes out on his own, not at her instigation, but when Beowulf comes to the lair the first time, she actually decapitates Grendel’s corpse for some reason. So just as she ruins the men she sleeps with, she also seems to ruin her children and treat them as pawns.

When you combine Wealtheow and Mother as images of femininity, we’re left with a view that women are simply destructive to men. Their power is profound, corrosive, irresistible, and ultimately enduring. Both women survive the film.

I get it. I understand why Gaiman and Avary decided to make the plot of the film fold back upon itself by linking the dragon to Beowulf’s mother and using the cup/Dragon Horn as a recurrent symbol of Mother’s seductive power. I’m sure they thought that resorting to the cliché of the Hero’s Redemption would produce a satisfying twist on the original text. But I’m baffled by why Gaiman, who is normally a subtle and perceptive author, didn’t recognize what a moral sludge the story becomes as a result of these choices and how deeply misogynist the film’s treatment of its female characters are. And he failed to recognize that the poem’s continued power grows to some extent from the fact that it doesn’t follow contemporary notions of story-telling. It produces a satisfying story of a great hero doing great deeds despite the lack of a through-line plot and the directness of the hero’s personality. And it’s not as if American action films aren’t brimming over with morally simplistic heroes whose heroism mainly consists of killing all their opponents. There must have been other ways they could have made the story engaging for modern authors than just pissing all over the entire notion of heroic valor.

Still, there’s one thing I take comfort in, no matter how much this film infuriates me. As Gaiman wrote in Sandman 13, “The Great Stories will always return to their original forms.”

Want to Know More?

If you really want to see this crappy film, you can find Beowulf on Amazon. Better yet, read the original. The Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition) is popular these days, but honestly, I think it’s terrible, constantly introducing Irish terminology where it doesn’t belong and horrible to read aloud. Burton Raffel’s Beowulf (Signet Classics) is a prose translation, but does an excellent job of translating for meaning. A much better poetic option is Dick Ringler’s Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery (Hackett Classics), which is meant to capture the way the poem would have sounded. (Full disclosure: I was a student of Ringler’s in grad school–he’s the best teacher I’ve ever had the privilege of taking a class with.)

Ironclad: The Woman as the Prize

Tags

Derek Jacobi, Ironclad, James Purefoy, Kate Mara, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Woman as Prize

In my last post, I discussed Ironclad (2011, dir. Jonathan English), a film about the siege of Rochester in 1215. There’s a lot to like about the film, despite some of its historical errors, but there’s one part about it that I find troubling, namely its treatment of its main female character.

In the past few weeks, as people have reacted to the Isla Vista killings, many people have argued that the killer’s attitudes were in part the product of a culture that treats women as objects designed to serve men’s needs. It’s been pointed out that many films, especially action films, tend to re-enforce this idea. So, to help further this important discussion that’s taking place, I want to look at the way Ironclad treats its main female character, because I think it’s a good example of this extremely common, but also extremely problematic, tendency in films.

Ironclad is very much a man’s movie. It’s set solidly within the action movie genre, since the entire plot is about the siege of Rochester Castle. The extreme male-on-male violence falls into this genre as well. The cast also reflects this; it has 17 named characters, of whom only 3 are women (and one of them has such a small part I’m not even sure who she is; I think she might be an elderly lady-in-waiting). The film draws heavily off of Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai, and so its action is almost entirely concerned with the actions and choices of men, particularly its protagonist Thomas Marshall (James Purefoy). It fails the Bechdel test miserably (unless you count one line in which a lady in waiting tells Isabel to get back from a fight that’s broken out). The film is so deeply male-centric, the female characters could have been omitted entirely without affecting the plot in any way. So why are they even there?

Of the two female characters worth discussing, one of them, Agnes (Bree Condon) is a serving women at castallan Reginald de Cornhill’s household. She primarily functions as a sexual partner for one of the male soldiers who comes to the castle with Marshall. When John’s forces penetrate the bailey, she takes up a weapon and fights against them, but is killed. Her character gets little screen-time and virtually no character development, but at least she made more of an impression than the third female character.

The only important female in the film is Lady Isabel (Kate Mara), who is the wife of Cornhill (Derek Jacobi). She is a young woman married to a much older man who has no interest in her sexually. When Thomas arrives, she is drawn to him because he is such a strong contrast with her husband; Thomas is young, handsome, virile, and a strong leader and decision-maker, while Cornhill is old, hesitant, possibly impotent, and generally a weak leader. While Thomas is determined to hold the castle at all costs, Cornhill waivers repeatedly and has to be prevented from surrendering. Over the course of the siege Thomas and Isabel gradually grow closer, and eventually under her advances, he breaks his oath of celibacy and they have sex. At the end of the film, she is one of three survivors of the siege, along with Thomas and Guy, a young squire. She is last seen carried by Thomas on horseback as he rides away from the castle.

Kate Mara, wearing one of those classic 13th-century off-the-shoulder dresses

So her trajectory over the course of the film is to first be a forbidden fruit and then gradually to become Thomas’ woman. Her interest in Thomas is presented as entirely a function of Thomas’ superior masculinity in comparison to Cornhill. Thomas fights and suffers greatly over the course of the film, while Cornhill acts much like a fearful old woman. Whereas Thomas finds the internal strength to survive and fight to the end, Cornhill eventually loses his nerve and hangs himself. This is historically incorrect; he survived the siege and was taken prisoner by John after the surrender. As I’ve said before, it’s important to ask why a particular detail is ahistorical, and in this case the answer seems obvious; Cornhill has to die so that Isabel can pair off with Marshall at the end of the film.

Derek Jacobi being generally ineffectual

If this were as far as the film’s treatment of Isabel went, it would merely be a clichéd ending. But the film takes things a step further and makes it clear that Isabel’s function is to be a prize for Thomas. The contest in this film isn’t just between Thomas and Cornhill, after all. It’s between Thomas and King John and his villainous Viking captain Tiberius (really? A Viking named Tiberius? Sigh.) So Thomas doesn’t just ‘defeat’ Cornhill; he must defeat John and Tiberius as well, and in both cases, his prize is Cornhill’s wife.

At the start of the film, it’s clear that Thomas is a troubled man. He has some sort of secret that led him to become a Templar; this secret is never explained, but it’s clear that Thomas doesn’t really want to be a Templar any more. There is some talk early in the film of his taking a leave from the Templars (I’m not sure how that would work; is he released from his vow of chastity for a couple weeks?) Soon after his arrival at Rochester he abandons his vow of silence (which is a good thing, because a film whose central character can’t speak needs to have a much better script than this one). Then he breaks his vow of chastity by having sex with Isabel. Finally, after the siege is over, Archbishop Stephen Langton (Charles Dance) shows up and gives Thomas his freedom, allowing him to leave the Templars because he’s earned it. This is crucially important, because as a monk, Thomas cannot have a future with Isabel. So Thomas is rewarded for his successful defense of the castle with two interconnected rewards, his freedom from the Templars and his vows of silence and chastity, and Lady Isabel. In other words, he gets Lady Isabel almost explicitly because he ‘won’ the siege. She is almost literally his prize for coming in first in a masculinity contest.

At no point is she asked if she wants to be his; it’s simply assumed that since her husband is dead, she now belongs to Thomas. She is given no agency whatsoever, apart from making a sexual advance on him partway through the film. Whereas the slutty serving girl Agnes at least gets to choose to fight and die, Isabel is kept in the keep and is pushed from room to room to keep her safe.

Most tellingly, when the Vikings force their way into the keep for the final confrontation, Guy the squire is instructed that if the Vikings get past the last line of defense, Guy must kill Isabel, apparently so she won’t raped by the Vikings. This isn’t just a throw-away bit of dialog; Guy agonizes about this command and the film builds tension over whether he will have to carry it out. So in the film’s construction of the events, once Cornhill dies, Isabel simply becomes Thomas’ property, and if he can’t have her, she needs to be killed. In the film’s logic, Isabel must belong to the man who can defend her properly, regardless of whether this is what she wants or not, and if the film’s hero doesn’t get to live with her, her life is worthless.

Let me emphasize that. Isabel has no value of her own in this film. Her entire function is to validate Thomas’ struggle to hold onto the castle.

Thomas very subtlety implying that he has a huge schlong

The film presents this in traditional romantic terms, of course, which means that the film assumes that Isabel’s consent to be Thomas’ property is given the moment she offers herself to Thomas sexually. Having slept with Thomas, she is his, and makes no further choices. The film only gives her one motive for her choice, that she is obviously poorly suited to her husband.

The film never pauses to think that Thomas, by taking control of the castle, has essentially taken both her and her husband hostage to his determination to hold the castle. Nor does it consider that perhaps she offers herself to Thomas purely as a way to survive the siege because he’s obviously a safer bet than relying on her pathetic husband. Or perhaps she’s experiencing Stockholm Syndrome and fallen in love with her captor. Nor does it occur to the film that a poor, penniless knight is not necessarily the best choice of husband for a noble widow who has probably inherited all her late husband’s property. She is a good catch for Thomas, but what he offers her other than his virility is unexplained. But that’s because she’s not really a character in her own right; she’s a prize to be claimed by the victor of the struggle. His superior virility is enough to justify this wealthy prize.

Laid out in these terms, it’s easy to see how a film like Ironclad unintentionally contributes to the misogyny that is so powerfully present in modern American culture. Thomas, like the Isla Vista killer, is entitled to sex from the woman he wants, because her desires are entirely irrelevant. The narrative is male-centric, with Isabel functioning as nothing more than an object of desire. And if Thomas can’t have her, no one should. When films frequently fail to assign women any actual value beyond sex objects and prizes, it’s easy to see why a mentally ill man might come to the same conclusion, and then lash out at them when he fails to win them over. If he can’t have them, no one should.

Arthur Chu has done a good job of exploring exactly this dynamic in nerd culture, in his essay “Your Princess is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds”. Thomas Marshall gets lucky, because at the end of his adventure, his princess turns out to be in the same castle as he is.

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Ironcladis available on Amazon.