Traveling to Enlightenment
We went to see the new Ridley Scott movie The Last Duel last night at the local Angelika Film Center. Once again, it was very lightly attended with a mere 8-10 people in the well-appointed theater. The film is set in 1386 or so and chronicles what was the end stages of the Middle Ages in Europe. The movie makes reference to the economic hardship to noblemen and their estates by virtue of the plague and the deaths of so many of their peasant workers. It also does a great job of giving us a more realistic view of the harshness of life in those times. There seemed to be little beauty and grandeur, even in the upper eschelons of society. The mud was everywhere and the greyness of life comes through loud and clear. While two of the main characters, Marguerite de Carrouges (played by Jodie Comer), the wife of Sir Jean de Carrouges, and the antagonist squire and purported rapist of Marguerite, Jacques les Gris (played by Adam Driver), both seem well appointed and clean, one gets the distinct feeling that the central protagonist, Sir Jean de Carrouges, played by Matt Damon, is always filthy. He seems almost common in his mullet haircut and ducktail beard with a large piecing scar on his right cheek.
Sir Jean is simply not a sympathetic character since he is crude brawler in battle, an outspoken misogynist in polite company and a course man of privilege who is certainly no man of letters and is even accused by some of being unable to read. Indeed, when we see him sign his name, it comes close to being the infamous X of an illiterate. His actions are also not terribly noble as he squanders his family wealth, not taking care to manage his estates properly, and is quick to use the French court system to bring suit against anyone who threatens him or has more than him. He is not liked at court and doesn’t even get much approval from his fellow troops in battle. I can’t help but think of Donald Trump when I think of Sir Jean. In truth, he is more an antihero than a hero and both les Gris and Count Pierre de Alencon (played by Damon’s old pal Ben Affleck) are more learned than he and seem considerably more enlightened. And yet, despite all of their qualities and even that les Gris is more handsome, more courtly and, indeed, stronger of body, he succumbs to the brut force of Sir Jean de Carrouges, who prevails in marriage, in battle and overall in life.
In trying to make sense of the storyline, I find myself needing to put much on the shoulders of the harshness of times represented by the late Dark Ages France. This was a time when civilization was trying to regain its footing from a millennium of debased life where there was barely enough time and substance for simple survival. It was a time of strength without honor. Honor was a lofty creed that we historically imbue on the heraldic life of those who attained knighthood. I have always loved the movie A Knight’s Tale with Heath Ledger because it seemed to me to depict the era of knighthood with the appropriate sense of randomness that inhabited the lives of the common people who suffered through its daily grind. The spectacle of the games accompanied with the lofty tunes of Queen added a connection between what life in those days might have been like and how we imagine the spectacle of our lives today. I found the ramblings of Paul Bettany as Geoffrey Chaucer to be a plausible sense of how a bard might have gone through these same harsh times with the misfortune and yet whimsy that might breed the sort of prose that came from Chaucer’s pen.
But A Knight’s Tale cannot begin to compete with the reality we see before us in The Last Duel as it shows us the streets of Paris when Notre Dame Cathedral was under constant repair and reconstruction and the Rive Gauche was a filthy field with pigs and chickens running free in the muddied streets. When a Knight is toppled by Heath Ledger, he is helped up and stumbles off stage left. When the same thing happens under Matt Damon much more cruel hand, he is gutted and dragged off the field of battle in disgraced nudity and strung up for all the common folk to see and spit upon. Life was not just hard, it was harsh. It lacked all qualities of mercy as Marguerite sits nervously in a lone tower watching the brutality in hopes that her lord will prevail and thereby spare her burning alive at the stake, as would be her fate if he lost. That was an amazing reality of law in that day. If you prevailed in battle, then God was with you and you and your witnesses were right by the law of God. If you lost, you were simply not worthy. Interestingly, those who were common and bore witness at trial were allowed to be tested with torture to see if they were being truthful. Sounds a bit like Dr. Christine Blakey Ford at the Brent Kavanaugh hearings. Is it any wonder people eschewed testimony?
The Renaissance began in Europe in the late 14th Century, what the Italians called the Quattrocento. The Crusades had given the nobility of Europe four hundred years of distraction from the plagues and filth of the era. The Inquisitions had firmly established extreme cruelty as something not only sanctioned by the Church but instigated by it, all in the name of Heaven. I find the best definition of the Renaissance to be the search by man for happiness. He was tired of all the pain and suffering, both having it inflicted upon him and perhaps even of inflicting it on others. I liken those times of transition to the times in modern life when we brought an end (albeit temporarily) to war and wanted no more than peace and tranquility in our lives. That brought about the prosperity of the 1920’s and the economic surge of the 1950’s leading into the 1960’s.
The world moves in cycles and man moves with those cycles. There is little stasis is life. Peace seems to be the equivalent of a societal vacuum and we all know that nature abhors a vacuum. The ability of man to be cruel is well documented over the millennia and there are certainly times when it is more prevalent than not. We seem to need to travel through cruelty and suffering in order to find the path for traveling to enlightenment. I do not know whether the era represented by the mid 1980’s until now constitutes the equivalent of war, or a Crusade, or, indeed, a Dark Age, but there are times when it feels like it in contrast to the prior thirty-five years, which were characterized by liberal democracy. This last duel may be a great analogy of the Trump presidency.
Rudeness is the newly acquired form of cruelty between men and women. The rise of rudeness and the acceptability of crass, aggressive and blatantly antisocial behavior has been noticed by us all, not to mention prompted by our last Commander-in-Chief. “Let’s go Brandon” is its latest incarnation in the United States. I can just imagine Sir Jean de Carrouges uttering those words as he wields his battle axe into the hamstring of his opponent. I find myself reflecting based on this latest Ridley Scott movie, that the defining characteristic of war and peace may be how we treat losers. In wartime, they are vanquished and dragged from the field of battle, as losing is the greatest of sins. In peacetime, they are pitied and nurtured and told to arise and try again since grace requires us to be merciful. I have never understood why anyone should or would find the need to hate a loser unless they were deathly afraid of reaching that same conclusion of being eviscerated in public for one’s failures. Pax vobiscum.