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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Ridley Scott Owes Me a Movie
In which I outline the movie that I believe Ridley Scott ought to be making about the middle ages.
Monday, 2010-01-11 | Film
| All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ! With what reproaches will the Lord overwhelm us if you do not aid those who, with us, profess the Christian religion! Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time, have been robbers, now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward. Let those who have been wearing themselves out in both body and soul now work for a double honor. Behold! on this side will be the sorrowful and poor, on that, the rich; on this side, the enemies of the Lord, on that, his friends. Let those who go not put off the journey, but rent their lands and collect money for their expenses; and as soon as winter is over and spring comes, let hem eagerly set out on the way with God as their guide. |
| Pope Urban II |
He owes you a movie, too.
Ridley Scott owes us what I'm going to go ahead and call a "make up" movie. This is on account of two factors: 1.) 2005's Kingdom of Heaven and 2.) his forthcoming Robin Hood update. Kingdom of Heaven, while not totally unwatchable, was not a good movie and the forthcoming Russel Crowe hack-and-slash just plain didn't need to be made: there are precious few big budget action/adventure flicks set in the middle ages and, to state it plainly, Ridley Scott fans, medievalists and people who like movies about dudes in period dress beating on other dudes in period dress deserve something better than yet another Robin Hood. Yes, Ridley Scott owes us a make up movie, i.e. a movie to do what Kingdom of Heaven should have done and to do what Robin Hood most certainly will not do.
Moreover, he owes us a movie about the Crusades.
Thanks to the continuing media coverage of 2001's infamous terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the western imagination has returned to one of the most famous and celebrated tropes in our literature: the clash between Christendom and what is generally called "the Islamic East". I won't speak on the historical popularity of this clash, but as for the contemporary resurgence of the trend, I think it has a lot to do with its sheer flexibility. To wit: whether you're a complicated, well-read western liberal who's anxious about being a citizen of one of the western nations whose leaders routinely and nonchalantly refer to that nation as a Christian nation, or a simple-minded, hard-working survivor of George Bush's war on the American middle class with a homicidal xenophobia and a deep-abiding love for the Greatest Nation in the History of the World, there's something for you in this most celebrated of narrative tropes.
And yet, in spite of the widespread re-popularization in western media of the ages-old story of Muslim East versus Christian West, there are precious few Hollywood films that pander directly to the masses of westerners, yearning to unleash their id and let it run free in that particular dog park.
Sure, there are action movies that use the conflict as a back-drop (Tony Scott's Spy Game and Peter Berg's The Kingdom come to mind), and there are certainly some exhilarating action-like sequences in Stephen Gaghan's very excellent Syriana, but none of those movies offer the catharsis for uneasy American imaginations that you get from, say, Rocky IV or a The Hunt for Red October, and, in the final estimation, Hollywood movies made in the last ten years about the Middle East are just too damn circumspect to be satisfying.
For, after all, Big Hollywood action productions are how we in the west process our social and political anxiety, and another fact of that matter is that Cold War classics like the films mentioned above made Americans feel better about their political, historical and ideological uncertainty by situating a flattering military/historical-fiction narrative within a favorable historical meta-narrative about American-Soviet tensions and providing easy answers to hard questions about nations, ideas and war as a political and social reality. Contemporary action movies, with their delicate, blind-eye treatment of Christian America's war on Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalism just don't let the gallons of Karo Syrup and food coloring it takes to bring peace of mind to the American imagination.
And, if kid-glove treatment of the Christian West versus Muslim East conflict is an offense, then Ridley Scott is one of the worst offenders. His Black Hawk Down does little to demonize the Muslim fundamentalists that are the story's villains and even goes so far as to present American soldiers not only as as well-meaning, gentle-hearted and reluctant in the prosecution of their mechanized assault on "The Suck", but as generally oblivious of the Islamofascist bias of their combatants. Scott's Kingdom of Heaven--which is set during the Crusades, for Christ's sake--shirks his obligations as a maker of big budget action films even more gallingly: in that movie, he sets a story about Christian and Muslim holy warriors in a morally absolute universe (where men recognize certain behaviors as "ethical" or "right", regardless of whether they were socialized in the Christian west or the Muslim east) and then has the nerve to randomly pin the "unethical" tail on the Christian donkey before walking away from the whole idea of East Versus West, moral absolutes and the whole kit-and-caboodle to tell an inane story about a young man making his name and finding true love on the literal and metaphorical battlefields of the exotic Middle East.
Even more egregiously, the young man who makes his name and finds his love is played by the always-insipid, never-believable Orlando Bloom. Even more infuriatingly, however, is the fact that Scott sets the other-worldly beauty of Eva Green as the object of Bloom's romantic affections and attentions: I don't know about you, but to me, the idea that the woman whose enthralling grace and disarming beauty* can only be adequately characterized in Petrachan hyperbole should even be winnable by a noodle-armed, Tiger Beat pin-up in an aluminum haubergeon and coif who capers about, stupidly miming platitudes about hard work, fair treatment and honest conduct seems appropriately far-fetched for a movie about Christian Crusaders and their Muslim counterparts that doesn't depict a.) the fantastic devastation, b.) terrifying human rights abuses or c.) the far-reaching political and social consequences of Urban II's brainchild. Indeed, it seems appropriately far-fetched and, in light of the above, deeply disappointing.
And so, in light of these disappointments and America's newfound fascination with Christian and Muslim holy warriors, I contend that Ridley Scott owes us a movie.
This movie should feature wild-eyed, blood-lusting crusaders riding through the Dome of the Rock, pooling blood filling the nostrils of their horses, shouting "Deus Vult!" and crushing skulls with iron hammers. It should show a siege of Antioch where grizzled crusaders are boiling tent leather and grilling human butt-flesh to fend off starvation--the "based on actual events" material is all there in Fulcher de Chartes, practically begging to be adapted into a blockbuster, prestige action title--and it should show iridescent Greek fire raining down from the cool desert sky on screaming Jerusalemites. This movie that Ridley Scott owes us will dramatize the brutal pageantry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with his signature mix of epic grit and personal grandeur: it will, in essence, be Gladiator 2: Barbarosa, where Russel Crowe grows a beard to play the eponymous, hard-charging, no-excuses, all-go-no-quit Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick and Sean Connery reprises his role as Richard the Lionheart. The two of them will learn hard lessons about ideology and empire as they fail to subdue Morgan Freeman's defiant, urbane and genteel Saladin, only to return home and find that the Christendom they left behind in their vainglorious bids for empire has become a vile mirror of the bitter treacheries and bloody massacres they wrought in the Middle East.
Ridley Scott owes us this movie. He owes us this movie because he is uniquely qualified and credentialed to make it and because no one else seems to want to give it to us.
* Which beauty, it comes to me via anecdote, was once described by Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) as "indecent". Well said.
