I had been meaning to watch The Green Knight since it was announced, but what pushed me to finally watch it was coming across someone saying that they didn’t understand it. Whenever I see a sentiment like that it always piques my interest and I get the urge to go and see what I think. It’s the contentious things are usually, at the very least, interesting.
Throughout the movie, I started getting a sense for something, and as soon as it was over I got it. This is a coming of age story. The form and structure overlap so well. And though The Green Knight obviously is structured in the manner of the chivalric romance it’s adapting and the folktales I’m familiar with from my childhood, I think that it’s only natural that the coming of age story should come out of the folklore of a hero’s journey, and why not then bring it full circle and meld the two.
And though I am fond of and familiar with the British folktales I’ve heard since I was a child, while watching, I couldn’t help but compare it to my favourite coming of age story, The Catcher in the Rye. From the boy so sure and yet unsure of himself from the very start, who makes a gallant display of his manhood but is unaware of how the display shows him to still be a boy, the kindness and naivety, the desire to have the desires of a man without actually having those desires, and finally accepting the state of things and it is that things are about to change irrevocably.
Of course, tropes and themes trickle down through the ages and endure because they are so affecting, but also because these things remain true. Time changes us, and that fact is universal across all eras, time changes everything and we are helpless to do anything about it. Be it maturing, birth and death, relationships and the entirety of the world around us, time changes it all. And yet, that is the only thing that remains the same.
The Captive Returns 