A friend recently emailed me asking about my thoughts on the recently released cinematic version of Beowulf. After emailing her, I thought I would share my thoughts with the Scroggles community.
The recent, cinematic version of Beowulf is based upon some of the modern rewrites of the primary text. This is made obvious by the fact that there were far too many obvious Freudian ideas. I lost count of how many times the sword was used as a phallic symbol, though this does occur in the primary text also. Two come to mind, actually. 1) When Beowulf is naked, there’s a dramatized shot of a sword in the foreground with him in the background. The sword, of course, is placed perfectly to cover his genitals. 2) When he brings the family sword to confront Grendel’s mother, she touches it with her hand and it melts. This is obviously a symbol of castration and the point at which he does indeed lose all power to her. Added to these is the castration anxiety already present in the text with the dismemberment of Grendel. There are also the oedipal issues, Rothgar as Grendel’s father and Beowulf as the dragon’s. In order to escape them, of course, Beowulf must perform a sort of self-castration in the end.
A twist on Freud occurs with the explicit power endued to Grendel’s mother. She is somewhat powerless in the primary text, but in the movie she is ultimately sovereign. Where we’re left with a feeling of resolve in the primary text with all beasts slain and the heroes of the old order now perished to give way to the Christ hero, in the movie, we’re left wondering whether Christianity has triumphed at all. Wiglaf may indeed choose to go the way of Rothgar and Beowulf, which seems to suggest that there is an order that supersedes and even undermines Christianity, which claims to be supernatural. Because Grendel’s mother, though she remains unnamed in the primary text and the movie, survives in the cinematic version, we don’t know what to think about the twist on Freud or the departure from the primary text in terms of the conflict between paganism and Christianity. In this sense, the movie is modern.
The archaism that the movie maintains, however, is the ushering of female characters into the flat, traditional Madonna/ Whore dichotomy as in the primary text of Beowulf. As a comparison, consider also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Guinevere and the Virgin Mary the Madonna figures and Lady Bertilak and Morgan Le Fay the respective Whore figures. The cinematic version of Beowulf clearly had the opportunity to rewrite Grendel’s mother, which they did but only in a superficial sense. Without significantly changing the plot points, they could have easily rewritten Grendel, his mother, and the dragon simply by shifting the perspective to the three who were marginalized due to their ‘otherness’. As an example of this, think of ‘Wicked’ and its radical shift in perspective.
So, as fodder for discussion, the new, cinematic version of Beowulf is interesting. It is not, however, something I would like to see again.
The ability to see such patterns and meta-narratives continually amazes me. Such a cool analysis of a movie.
It occured to me while reading your analysis that in-depth literary analysis is as difficult for me as math and statistics is to most people.