The Green Knight Movie and Taliban Chivalry. What!?
Sir Gawain, the hero of the Green Knight movie (2021) has much in common with his young American audience. They too are protected by a “King’s” army. Even better, Gawain’s Mother is the sister of the King. Best of all, Gawain can have no-string-attached sex with a beautiful pixie girl whenever he wants. She never seems to mind.
She asks him about marriage in an elliptical way but I forget if that conversation happened before or after the Green Knight make his entrance. Gawain gets away with avoiding Essel’s question. Well, he gets away with everything in the movie.
The Green Knight makes an end-run around feminist issues for the simple cost of an almost-touch to a dead female ghost. When women (at least ghosts) don’t want Gawain to touch them he respects their wishes.
About time! Right?
Later, when a female wants to jerk him off, well, why not? Isn’t that what every young man wants when visiting a castle mid-journey? Maybe the male writer needs to prove women are crucial to fantasy quests and that was the best idea he could think of? I dunno.
My topic is what the Green Knight says about today’s real-life geopolitical dragons and knights.
Never do we learn how women live outside the King’s castle. What about those women? Or the men who keep them?
Let’s look at Afghanistan, which has been in the news lately.
Afghans continually die from foreign interests for which they have no control.
From the perspective of Afghans the world is an immoral, Godless place, where Pakistan, Iran, America and Russia makes right and the common Afghan life is worthless.
Probably much like the time of King Arthur, if he existed.
Most people who live in the region have only one advantage. Regardless of all the modern technology in the West, soldiers cannot protect themselves out in the open.
In other words, no one is safer than they were in King Arthur’s day.
The core idea of a “Knight” is a single armed person trying to take on overwhelming odds.
So why wouldn’t Afghans shoot at men occupying their neighborhood with dragons (jet, helicopter and drone missiles)? Especially if a few have a horny interest in the local women?
Ironically, to step back into our current times, who are the ones trying to remove the dragons in the West? Women standing behind the men with all the dragons. In the West, the anti-war movement is mostly female.
Some of the most powerless, vulnerable and impoverished people on the face of the Earth are Afghani woman.
The only protection Afghani women and children get is from their men.
The Taliban is only pure evil if you see Afghan from the foreigners point of view. From the Afghans point of view the Taliban has a moral code. As brutal as it may appear to the West, it IS a code without hypocrisy. (I’m no apologist for the Taliban).
The central goal of a knight is not to create moral codes (they’re not lawyers), but to take action, at great personal cost, against greater powers.
None of that is in the Green Knight. It’s all childish narcissism.
A code in the West, for example, that women should be protected from violence, is not applied in Afghanistan. It isn’t applied because drone strikes are executed even if women are nearby, assuming the target is valuable enough.
When we were in Afghanistan for 20 years our goal was NOT to protect women and children. It was to kill men. We know this because we just left them to die in Afghanistan.
That is not lost on anyone in Afghanistan.
So why wouldn’t Afghan men create a strict social structure that hides women from the dragons?
Do you believe women were free in King Arthur’s time?
For women to be free in any country they must be safe from war. Nothing in the #MeToo or Green Knight movie addresses that simple reality. When young men and women in the West join Code Pink in masses maybe the #MeToo movement will do more than childish movies like the Green Knight.
