A Knight's Tale

I want to take you back, not to the Middle Ages, but to a time not so long ago: the early 2000s. As pre-teen girls, my best friend and I loved to drive our parents insane by having slumber parties where we watched our favorite movies. Very often, this meant watching the same movie twice in one night. And then again the next morning. One of these fan favorites was medieval/modern mash up A Knight's Tale.

How much of this was because Heath Ledger was dreamy? Full disclosure: I actually shed tears when he died.

Seriously, her hair is pink.

Revisiting A Knight's Tale more than ten years later, what struck me most was how not medieval it is in many aspects. The most salient feature is, of course, its soundtrack and some of its choices with regards to style. Shannyn Sossamon's hair is certainly not medieval; I'm pretty sure that even if they had pink and green hair dye in the fourteenth century, they didn't have the hairspray required to make your hair stay like that for more than a few seconds.  While I know that people everywhere except the town in Footloose dance, I'm pretty sure that they didn't dance to David Bowie in the Middle Ages.  If you haven't seen the movie and don't believe this really happens, click here for proof.

But this is all surface level.  A Knight's Tale tells a very familiar story.  William Thatcher, peasant and squire to Sir Ector Soontobedead, has ideas above his station.  He would like to joust in tournaments, but there's a problem, you see.  All of these knightly things require you to be of noble birth.  So, he, along with his friends, Roland and Wat, decide to lie about his lineage, turning him into the noble "Ulrich von Liechtenstein from Gelderland."  Oh, and he's friends with Geoffrey Chaucer.  It's not one hundred percent clear what Chaucer (or "Geoff," as he's known here) is doing here, but he's a fun addition.  After a training montage, he starts winning, which brings him in conflict with the sinister Count Adhemar.  He's not just a noble, he's French and he dresses in black, so we know immediately not to like him.  William also picks up a widowed blacksmith named Kate and a noble love interest named Jocelyn along the way.  After several roadblocks thrown in his path, William gets the girl and wins the World Championship jousting tournament. 

It's a classic underdog story.  Replace William with a down-on-their-luck baseball team, and it could easily take place in modern day.  Its morals and messages are thoroughly modern: if you try hard enough and believe in yourself, anyone can make it.  Class is no barrier to the able.  Not to mention that, after a few obligatory moments of "what, a woman blacksmith?!" our heroes have the right attitudes towards women.  William sees Jocelyn as a human being he cares about; Count Adhemar sees her as a prize to be won and owned.

So with all of this modernity going on, how does A Knight's Tale communicate that we're watching the Middle Ages?  The appearance of Chaucer is the only element that explicitly tells the audience what year it might be.  To begin with, the whole "knight" thing is a pretty obvious indicator.  When people are running around in armor and hitting each other with lances, you must know that you're either at a Renaissance Faire or in the Middle Ages.

Jousting and knighthood come with a wide array of other images: shields with sigils, horses, heralds playing trumpets, ladies giving away favors.  The sense given to the viewer is that all of this is cool, first of all.  There's certainly a sense of ritual to it, both in the proceedings (formal lists, introduction of riders) and in the exclusionary nature of the sport (you must be of noble birth to ride, with formal documentation).  But it's also violent and barbaric.  Wood splinters everywhere.  Men are thrown to the ground.  William walks away from the jousts with bruises and possibly some broken ribs.  He even gets stabbed.  When's the last time somebody got stabbed playing professional baseball?  These medieval people are violent people living in a violent world.  Note that the list of accomplishments Chaucer invents for William's person involve some sort of violence (killing Saracens, fending off rapists).  This is not a nice time to live in.

But there are some more subtle elements, too.  Take the screenshot below, for example.  The characters' dress roughly places them in the Middle Ages, particularly the women's long tunics and headdresses.

We've also got a priest (or possibly a bishop) coming to yell at William about bringing a horse into a cathedral.  He actually shouts, "You desecrate the house of God!" and waves a pretty magnificent staff around.  Note also that William has followed Jocelyn here, trying to talk to her.  Where is she headed?  Church.  This indicates that, as in the Middle Ages, the Church occupies a much more central part of the characters' lives.  Not only does another scene take place in a cathedral, but damnation is used as a threat that's meant to have some leverage.  At one point, some Frenchmen insult the English characters by pointing out that the pope is French.  (Are any modern Catholics insulted by the fact that Pope Francis is Argentinian?) These must be religious people.

Threading through the entire plot, though, is the whole idea of the feudal class system.  Namely, the movie says that the Middle Ages were a time when the few crushed the many, and nobility conferred enormous unfair advantages.  William manages to catapult him through the class system, but it's still pervasive -- so pervasive that rather than apprenticing to a guildsman and entering the middle class, what William wants is to join the ranks of the nobility.  (Of course, you could probably make a good movie about a boy becoming an apprentice to rise out of poverty, but it would be a very different kind of movie.)  And this, arguably, is the most medieval element of the film.  Most of the protagonists are peasants or middle class people inserting themselves into the world of lords and ladies we already know so well, so that A Knight's Tale changes the focus but doesn't dismantle the idea.

I'd argue that A Knight's Tale doesn't ever quite reconcile the medieval elements with the modern ones, but maybe that's not the point.  Despite the elements of difference mentioned above, the choices communicate something that I think is somewhat more important: that medieval people were in most ways just like us with different costuming.  They still like watching sports, fall in love, and want better lives for their children.  Young kids still dance to hip music and wear the latest fashions.  We still root for the underdog.  Maybe we aren't so different after all.