The face of Beowulf

In lieu of rent, Codename Moose is due to take the Dr and I to see Beowulf in 3D at the Imax. I am a little excited about this and may have mentioned it to a few people. Sorry. (At least I didn’t need to be taken for a walk to calm down, like I did the afternoon before The Christmas Invasion.)

What’s not to like? There are monsters, Vikings, lots of big fights and too much violence for sexy Angelina Jolie. Who seems set to get her kit off in eye-popping CG. Cor!

That said, I only actually read Beowulf last week. The epic, Old English poem written sometime in the 400 years prior to the existing version of about 1000 AD has been recommended by all sorts of people over (blimey) the last three decades. But I think the main reason I’ve never quite got to it was I didn’t know where to start.

There are various different translations and things, and many of the people who’ve said “But you’ll love it!” have also warned “Be sure to read the right version.” And I’ve always neglected to make a note of which exactly one that is. There’s one by famous Seamus Heaney (whose bog poems I studied at A-level), and one by Julian Glover (who, top fact, was Justin Richards’s original model for Doctor Who’s brother Irving).

So a couple of weeks ago I asked Psychonomy, and he not only recommended but lent a rather nice edition by Kevin Crossley-Holland, which includes all kinds of notes, family trees, maps and explanations.

Beowulf is a young Geat – which is some kind of Dane – whose dad owes a favour to a bloke with a very nice painted hall. The trouble is, every time the bloke tries to have a party in this very nice painted hall, along comes the monstrous Grendel and carries off his guests. Grendel likes to eat people, and weapons don’t seem to touch him.

Beowulf is the Mr T of his day, and so helluva tough he takes on Grendel without a weapon. There’s a lot of gripping and then Grendel’s arm tears off. Grendel runs away and there is much rejoicing. Beowulf is given some treasure and some nice things to drink, and people tell stories.

But Grendel’s mother is not amused and comes to the painted hall that evening. She eats some people, so Beowulf tracks her back to a river of blood, goes swimming in this, finds he wounded Grendel and stabs him with a magic sword. The sword melts.

So far, so good. Not surprisingly, the style did remind me of Tolkein, what with the swords that have names and the legends of bravery. Oddly, about half way through we’re told that Beowulf wasn’t always the baddest dude around.

“He had been despised
for a long while, for the Geats saw no spark
of bravery in him, nor did their king deem him
worthy of much attention on the mead-bench;
people thought that he was a sluggard,
a feeble princeling. How fate changed,
changed completely for the glorious man!”

Kevin Crossley-Holland, The poetry of legend: classics of the medieval world – Beowulf, p. 110.

This comes a bit out of nowhere, to be honest. If we’d know it at the beginning, we might have seen some kind of character journey or moral development of our hero. As it is, the throwaway comment feels a bit tacked-on for no reason.

In fact, there’s a lot of stuff that feels tacked-on or inconsistent. And Crossley-Holland’s explanatory notes are good at giving some insight into the various fights Beowulf has inspired in historians. Partly, these scuffles are about the clues in the text which might tell us when Beowulf was first written. A reference to a King Offa might be the original author trying to lick bum of Offa, King of Mercia from 757-796 (yes, he of Offa’s Dyke).

But the historians seem most bothered by the intrusion of God. Beowulf is basically a brutish sort hero in a brutish story. The story rather assumes that life is one long series of bloody and bloody stupid battles, small pockets of neighbouring tribes smashing the shit out of each other whenever they’ve the chance.

Beowulf returns home from fighting two monsters and spends the next decades fighting his neighbours. He eventually becomes king of his people less because he’s such a brilliant slayer of monsters as that all the other candidates have been hacked to bits.

The ideology, or system of values, underpinning this seems to fit with other, non-Christian thingies of the period.

“’One thing I know never dies not changes,’ goes an Old Norse proverb: ‘the reputation of a dead man’; while the Anglo-Saxon poet who composed the elegiac poem ‘The Seafarer’ spoke of the inevitability of death by ‘illness or old age or the sword’s edge’ and exhorted each and every man to ‘strive, before leaves this world, to win the praise of those living after him’.”

Ibid., p. 31.

It’s a world of blood-oaths and warriors’ honour, where the fleeting delights of treasure and feasting are paramount because there’s so little joy in the world. And this doesn’t exactly square with Christian teaching, or the Christian spin on Beowulf and what he gets up to which peppers the narration.

As Crossley-Holland points out, the most jarring example of this is when Beowulf dies. In a bit that made me think, “Ooh, it’s Smaug!”, a dragon is accidentally wakened from where it had been sleeping on a heap of gold. It flies amok and kills lots of people, and old King Beowulf staggers out of retirement to take on one more monster.

There’s lot of warrior-moral stuff as Beowulf’s retainers run away, despite the fact that he gave them nice rings to wear in exchange for their loyalty. One young fellow stays true, and together the two of them defeat the Big Worm. In the process, the young fellow burns his hand and Beowulf is mortally wounded.

“Then the wise leader
tottered forward and slumped on a seat
by the barrow; he gazed at the work of giants,
saw how the ancient earthwork contained
stone arches supported by columns.”

Ibid., p. 126.

(We know, of course, that he’s looking not at the work of “giants” but of the Roman period. Though did the Romans make it to Denmark, and did they do much building? Or is it just that the English author of the original Beowulf had seen impressive things like Leeds? And again, isn’t it like Tolkein to have a land so rich in old bits of big masonry?)

Once Beowulf is dead, his young helper berates the other of the thanes who bravely ran away. They are, he says, bad knights and should give their rings back.

But the poem’s narrator then has a go at Beowulf too; he’s brought his end upon himself by being too keen on dragon gold. He should, of course, have put all his trust in the one, splendid God who looks after us all and not thought about vulgar stuff like treasure.

Which rather comes from nowhere. Beowulf fought the dragon because it had been killing people, and he only seems to notice the old gold after the dragon’s defeated. Up until that point, it felt a bit like Tennyson's Ulysses (because I have read more than one whole poem), where old Ulysses wants one last adventure before he goes and snuffs it.

Crossley-Holland seems to suggest that the debate consists of whether Beowulf is a Christian story or not. I think it’s both; a non-Christian story with some Christian bits tacked on. It’s like the teller is all excited by the fighting and the monsters, but every so often remembers to put in a word for Jesus.

This can make it a little inconsistent, and I’ve sympathy for those historians who struggle to fit the evidence so it’s either one way or the other. But these contradictions, these continuity errors, are an inevitable part of any long-sustained narrative.

Arthur Conan-Doyle, for example, gave James/John Watson two first names and two wives. The effect is even more peculiar when the long-running narrative is the work of many different authors. But we shall leave the debate about Sarah-Jane Smith being 13 in 1964 for another day.

Mike, it’s all an illusion

As a special treat, the Dr took me to Brixton last night to see “Elizabeth II”, also known as “The Golden Age”. We had to wait nearly 40 minutes for my pizza, and then discovered we’d been given tickets for the performance three hours previously. Once we’d got seats, the rat from Ratatouille asked if we’d kill a policeman, steal his helmet, shit in it and then send it to his widow. And there were the usual trailers for films that might be a bit like what we’d paid for – films with History and Proper Acting.

They ought to have trailered The Golden Compass, Beowulf and other adventures. Elizabeth is a glorious, good-looking, finely played whirl of national myth-making. But it’s also total baloney.

After the events of film one, we rejoin Elizabeth in 1588. She’s beginning to notice her age, looking sadly at her bits in the mirror. The various princes on offer as husbands are all a bit rubbish – though she does get rid of one of them just when they’re getting on. And then three things happen at once: the imprisoned, former Queen of Scotland seems to be planning something against her; Elizabeth’s brother-in-law the king of Spain seems to be planning something too; and there’s this dashing pirate just turned up with potatoes and good shit for smoking.

Like the first film, this creates a vivid world of huge castles and densely packed poverty. The use of so many period locations and the wealth of bosom-squashing costumes help convince us of a complex and real setting.

That said, it did also remind me quite a lot of The Lord of the Rings. Partly, the castles have the same Norman zigzags and arches pilfered for Middle Earth. But there were also several set-ups in which main characters stood moodily in the foreground, looking out over sprawling CGI. There’s a CGI forest being hacked down; there’s a CGI ocean on fire. There’s also lots of bits of cameras spinning around people, and stirring music over people just gazing.

More importantly, the intrigues of not-a-softy Walter and Elizabeth ride rough-shod through stuff that’s not just well known, it’s on the national curriculum. They don’t use the “heart and stomach of a concrete elephant” speech, and the defeat of the Armada seems to take place in the English Channel.

Yes, the film does make a thing about the queen getting on a bit; she is starting to get a few wrinkles. (Her bare bum still looks quite pert, though.) Yet in 1588 Elizabeth would have been 55 years-old (the same age, for example, as Bill Hartnell in November ’63). The film also concludes, as if it means something, that Philip II then died a mere 10 years later – just five in advance of Elizabeth. These things would both be less troubling if the film didn’t end by reminding us in big letters when it was Elizabeth got born and died.

Mary Queen of Scots was French and spoke with a French accent. She was executed a good four years before the Armada set sail, and when they raised her traitorous, severed head to the audience, it dropped from the wig and bounced across the floor. Though I can see that would have spoiled the effect the film went for.

It would have been good to at least have glimpsed her son, which would have prefigured the inevitable third movie. It would have been good to understand that Elizabeth had already spared Mary’s life; and that the Scottish wanted to kill her.

It was also odd how much this was a war with Spain, and not with the rest of (what the Elizabethan’s would have perceived as) the world. Philip II didn’t just have the Catholic church on his side; he was part of a vast sprawl of interconnecting families that pretty much ruled all of Europe.

Importantly, he’d also been married to Elizabeth’s elder half-sister, Bloody Mary. They married in Winchester Cathedral (I think one of the locations of the film, based on what seemed a familiar bit of cloister). Though English law didn’t acknowledge him as any kind of heir (he was not, in Mary’s lifetime, a king of England), this was also part of his claim.

It’s also important that England’s monarchy had been much fought over for more than a century until Elizabeth’s grandfather won the battle of Bosworth Field – just a century prior to the Armada. Without a husband, without an heir, Elizabeth left England with an uncertain future…

I did like the stuff about Elizabeth setting a precedent by executing a queen for crimes against the state. There’s a nice exchange with Walsingham, where he explains that kings and princes may be above such things as legalities, but the law is there to protect the people. The precedent Elizabeth sets by condemning Mary will fall on Mary’s grandson…

I also quite liked what they did with the hubris of holy war – there’s a rather nice bit of scarlet-robed priests tiptoeing away from Philip. But I’m not sure it really worked in the way I think it was meant: rather than Elizabeth’s tolerant, protestant humility being more on the side of the angels, it felt like two fingers to God.

This wasn’t helped by a silly contrivance, in which Elizabeth steps out into the drizzle in her nightie to watch the Armada from what I think is meant to be the white cliffs at Dover Tilbury. Yes, it contrasts her simple English humility with the pride of the Spanish, but she’s liable at least to catch a sniffle. And, when they then show the storm and great waves crashing against rocks, I thought for a moment she’d been swept into the sea. (Where a strong swimming pirate would be ready to rescue her.)

There’s also much made of a horse on a ship that’s then seen swimming in the water – which just reminded me of the flood-confused bloodhound towards the end of the Coens’ Oh Brother. A fine line exists between the profound and the stupid.

The Armada wasn’t just destroyed in the Channel, but had to make a slow journey round the whole of the British Isles, caught be more storms and wreckers and starvation. It was an arduous and ever more humiliating defeat, and there’s an argument that the enemy was defeated by the whole of Britain (and not just some brave pirates and their fire-ships). That would, surely, have worked better with the themes of the film.

There’s some tedious stuff about destiny and the rise and fall of great empires, which I assume was a call out to any Americans watching. The holy war against the infidel Brits (and their American allies) also seemed a bit too unsubtle. I don’t remember the first film being so crude about the links to today.

It also concludes with a rather desperate attempt to then claim the period that followed as the golden age. But England was still at war in Europe, and its future uncertain what Elizabeth not having an heir. And the killing of the Queen of Scots had set a precedent that would define the next century… I came away feeling that the film wanted it both ways, that 1588 was the best of times and the worst of times.

This stuff bothered me as we made our way home (on trains full of middle-aged punks who’d seen the Sex Pistols). It’s a good, enjoyable film but it didn’t need to be quite so much hokum.

Jonathan Ross’s review on Film 007 was effectively that it looks so wondrous and is played so well we shouldn’t worry about a little monkeying about with the history. There’s probably an argument that these tinkerings make the plot structure and character journeys more cohesive, in ways which Robert McKee might approve.

I imagined what I’d say to him in response, and an analogy he’d understand. It bothers me like the Joker killing Bruce Wayne’s parents in Batman. No, it doesn’t really matter that the films excise Joe Chill. But it adds a convenient portentousness to the relationship of the two lead characters if they’ve always been linked.

“This is a story,” it says, rather than, “this really happened.” The “truth” is good enough for the story, and you don’t make it any better by changing it. And by changing it, making it more explicitly a story, you’re implicitly saying, “These events don’t really matter…”

Like free admission to a library

M kindly plus-oned me into a screening of The Bourne Ultimatum yesterday morning – on the basis that he’d not seen the first two Bourne outings and I might help with any questions. I was a bit giddy with excitement as we arrived in Leicester Square. The following contains some minor spoilers, but won’t give the game away. But no, Ian, there weren’t any lions.

The film picks up immediately from the end of The Bourne Supremacy with ex-assassin-on-the-run Jason wounded and in Moscow, having just fessed up to a girl. The police are after him, he’s in bad shape and it’s all a bit exciting. The fast-cutting, low-fi, hand-held look is just as from before, as is the fantastic music.

For newbies like M, there are flashbacks early on to what has gone before and a CIA board meeting where people explain the plots of the last two films to gnarly boss Scott Glenn. His, “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” is a bit awkward and knowing, but any newcomers are quickly up to speed.

The hook for this one is that the Guardian have got hold of the story. Yes, really. There’s exciting scenes of the Guardian offices as they fight they good fight against conspiracies. M, what knows those offices himself, found this especially funny.

Soon Jason is chasing the story himself, racing to collect clues about what he used to be a part of, while baddies try to eliminate the evidence. We dash quickly all across Europe: Turin, London, Paris, Madrid, the CIA merrily ignoring local laws and civil liberties as they struggle to keep hold of their secrets.

It’s as brutal and fast-paced and thrilling and smart as its predecessors, with Matt Damon using his brains as much as he uses martial arts, one man against hopeless odds. There’s some fun gags as he calls the police on his pursuers or turns up where they’re not looking. I am struggling not to say more, but note how it’s the women who help him and act as his conscience and the boys who use too much brute force.

So if you like the last two, you’ll be very happy. What’s more, the film has enough similar shots and situations to make it feel like this isn’t just another add-on to the franchise but part of a cohesive whole. That’s most obvious in the final scenes: the last lines from Bourne and then what happens next.

M not seen any of the previous two (I leant him them on DVD) and loved it too, though in the drizzle outside after he felt unconvinced by it as satire. I suggested, though, that this “it’s not the institution that’s at fault but some rogue elements within it” is no different from James Bond. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that this genre is all adventures with extremists.

Speaking of Bond, there’d been some speak last year that Casino Royale owed a great deal to Jason Bourne (though I’ve argued that it owes more to 24). So how would Bourne respond: would it break its winning formula in trying to up its game? No, it offers more of the same, only faster and more intense and with some bigger set-ups. (I also thought the rooftop chase in Tangiers reminiscent of The Living Daylights, though M. thought of the political Battle of Tangiers).

There are a small number of tiny niggles, too. Where does Bourne get his money from? How does he break into what should be such secure places? The film works hard to give Julia Styles a reason to be there, but it’s still a huge coincidence that she happens to end up in Bourne’s way again. Especially given what we learn about her past: yes, she might have reasons to be there, but that’s why her bosses would ensure she couldn’t be.

There’s also the customary British actor playing the villainous big cheese. At first I thought the bloke glimpsed in the flashbacks was an excuse to bring back Brian Cox, and wonder if Albert Finney got cast entirely for that reason.

Filmed at Pinewood, the film makes use of London’s own American actors – Von Statten and the US President from Doctor Who are in it, though I felt cheated there was no Mac McDonald. (Only this weekend M and I devised a game for watching Secret Army, where it’s one point for naming an actor, two for naming another role they’ve had, and five for who they played in some form of Doctor Who).

But anyway. I was buzzing all day after seeing it and am already booking to go again.

Woo

I have some depressingly clever friends.

Spent yesterday morning fighting badger-faced pirates and the afternoon laying out Benny. Mr Alex also showed me his rather exciting Dalek movie and film of him stinging spikes up his nose (which he has also shown Sylvester McCoy, he said proudly). I have got him talking to Nimbos and Codename Moose. Shall see if we can't Think Up A Project.

Then ambled smokewards for the customary pub. On the way, I spotted Clemmo's new book looking big in a bookshop window. It's the Oxfam halfway between the British Museum and Forbidden Planet (as is Clemmo's writing, arf).

Managed not to see the person I'd gone to the pub to see (oops), but met some old chums and some new. There's even the glimmer of a hint of a vague possibility of some work off one of the latter.

Slave I

The Dr and I went to see Amazing Grace last night, the biopic of William Wilberforce. The performances are excellent, there are some good gags, and it looks sumptuous and real. I was especially impressed with shots of a Thames clogged with 18th century shipping.

It is, though, a bit chocolate-boxy, with the very perfect Wilber not merely giving his all for the slaves, but also inventing the GCSE, women’s suffrage and modern geology. He talks at one point of the healing waters from a spring having “waited for a million years”. Er, surely his own religious convictions would have stopped him from so brilliantly pre-empting Lyell (who was only born the same year as the film opens on).

The film packs in the historical figures who knew and influenced Wilbur: John Newton, Pitt the Younger, Thomas Clarkson, Lords Grenville and Fox and (the only black speaking part in the film) Olaudah Equiano. The script also works hard to explain the context: that many working class people lived brutal and impoverished lives; that there was no money for war veterans or other social causes; that whole cities had been built on slavery; that with America and France in revolution, a “popular” movement could be seen as seditious.

Much of this is described rather than seen, so apart from a few city street scenes the film always looks immaculate and tidy. Evidence of the horrors of slavery is also kept to descriptions of witnesses, rather than being enacted on screen. Wilberforce sees a few opiate visions, but mostly it’s what people say.

This is, of course, as was with the case the abolitionists made to Parliament. Yet I felt the film was somehow pulling its punches. The Roots TV series, which we’ve also been watching, is much more explicitly graphic, and I think more effective.

Yet it’s not as if there are loads of films made on the subject, and it’s not a bad film by any means. Though it certainly doesn’t suggest it was easy for Wilberforce to get the slave trade abolished in the British Empire (on 25 March 1807), it does rather simplify the story.

Slavery itself was not banned in the Empire until 1834 (after Wilberforce was dead). In the independent United States it continued until after their vicious civil war. No mention is made of that – indeed, the US is spoken of only with whispered excitement as a contagious hotbed of freedom and liberty.

The banning of the trade did eventually lead to the banning of slavery itself, and because existing slaves could not be replaced it can be argued that they were better treated in the intervening period. Yet indenture remained as slavery in all but name well into the twentieth century, and slavery continued in many countries until the end of the nineteenth. Slavery in various forms still exists today.

There’s a whole heap of events and stuff commemorating abolition this year, and I’ve had fun going through all the links there to glean yet more top facts:

“The surgeon on HMS Sybille , Robert McKinnal, took drastic action when a seaman went down with yellow fever, to convince his fellows that it was not contagious. One of the symptoms of yellow fever is black vomit, and McKinnal, on deck and in sight of the crew, drank off a glassful.”

Royal Navy, “Boredom, boat service and the black vomit”.

ETA: No sooner have I posted than I notice this feature on the emphasis of the commemoration on the BBC news site. Ng. Always behind the tide, me. Get there eventually.

Mile-high film club

Marie Antoinette is a colossal exercise in missing the whole ruddy point.

It looks nice and is stylishly played, but the emphasis of the script is all in the wrong place. We watch Marie leave one sumptuous court for another. She learns posh gossip and how to excite her husband. She dances about in the gardens and goes to some very good parties. And then some yokels turn up and she’s very brave and won't run away.

Since she’s a bit of a free spirit (no, she will go to the party!), there’s a lot of punk music and typeface. This juxtaposition of the contemporary and historical would be pretty revolutionary, if we’d not seen the same thing before. It’s Casanova, it’s A Knight’s Tale, it’s Britney in the End of the World.

But it’s also pretty dim. You have to fundamentally misconstrue history to see Marie Antoinette as a punk. Rather it’s the mob who tear down her glam lifestyle – and we hardly see them at all in the film.

The film entirely fails to deal with why the mob might have grievances. The nearest it gets is to have Marie protest that she never said, “Let them eat cake!” But this is an age of public flayings and the guillotine. The general violence offended both Casanova and de Sade.

By not dealing with that – by consciously not showing it – the film is more perverse than anything those two got up to. The French court was not merely a fatuous bubble of champagne parties: in context it was clearly offensive.

Flushed Away was fun (though not helped by DWM pointing out how the lead rat looks like David Tennant). It lacks the charm of Wallace and Gromit, and that’s not merely for being set down the toilet.

It’s fast-moving and full-of-gags enough to hide a pretty ropey plot about a posh boy falling for a working class girl. Like the singing mice in “Babe”, there are singing slugs to raise a smile whenever things get a bit unfunny. And, as S. said, it’s telling how often the slugs feature. I laughed a lot, but it’s not one to watch again.

The Prestige was probably the best of the lot, about the rivalry between two Victorian stage magicians. Leads Batman and Wolverine were as manly-tough as you’d expect. Bowie had a nice turn as Tesla, and Michael Caine was as effortless as always.

Unfortunately I sussed the various elements of the ending before we were mid-way through. This may have been due to discussing The Time Travellers all weekend, which turns a few of the same tricks. (Well, it does if you can make the cognitive leap that Hugh Jackman is playing Scott Andrews).

It’s clever and deft from the start, with all kinds of nice palming of plot device. But the real trick of magic is not merely the mechanics of the con, but of managing to disguise them. The audience has to be left mystified.