“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.
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…
