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“The Green Knight” is the Existential Queer Folk Horror We Need

David Lowery’s Arthurian fable about bloodthirsty plant gods is also a surprising story about queer courage.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
6 min readAug 9, 2021
Dev Patel is hit on by a polyamorous lord, played by Joel Edgerton.
That’s a pretty deep V on that robe. Still by Katie Lida, provided by A24.

Everybody dies. We think we know this, but we don’t; most people comprehend death in the abstract, including the fact that it happens to everyone, but when it comes to our own lives, we expect to find a loophole. I’ve felt close to death once or twice — a bad car accident; a COVID false alarm — and every time, I was shocked at how messy the narrative of my life was, like a cancelled TV show that ended on a cliffhanger. I’d assumed I would get to wrap things up.

I thought I could put death off until I was ready, but no-one has that power. All we can do is decide who we want to be when we die. This, anyway, is the bracing moral of The Green Knight, David Lowery’s gorgeous folk-horror adaptation of the Arthurian legend. I’d heard it was grim; there were stories about audience members storming out of the theater. I found its embrace of death liberating — and kind of beautifully gay.

To call the story homoerotic is not new; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 14th-century poem upon which the movie is based, is famously bi as all get-out, with large parts of the action centering on Gawain’s recruitment into a mixed-gender throuple. Lowery’s movie does not quite go there, which has led other reviewers to decry it for selling out. I respectfully disagree. The muted way the movie handles Gawain’s queerness — more than hinted at, but never quite open — is of a piece with the story Lowery is telling, about what is lost when people take the safer road.

The story begins when Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s good-for-nothing nephew, attends a Christmas banquet held by the king. The Green Knight arrives, very obviously an emissary from the otherworld — in Lowery’s vision, his entire body is made of wood and greenery, like a Green Man carving — and poses a challenge. He will allow one of the knights present to cut him, but that knight must come to his Green Chapel next Christmas and allow himself to be cut in the same place. Gawain, eager to prove his masculinity, and also (the movie stresses this repeatedly) a massive dummy, cuts off the Green Knight’s head. The Green Knight…

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Written by Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.

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