The Northman (2022)
ALEX
If you and I aren’t careful, we’ll end up tearing this movie to pieces; that’s an inaccurate review of how much fun we had watching it. There are core human traits being celebrated and explored in The Northman and nowhere else. We must therefore give harsh judgement, in rough proportion to the respect this movie has earned.
I was completely engrossed during the early rite-of-passage scene. Here the king joins with his son, and both are guided through The Cosmos by the rituals of their culture and by their personally trusted shaman. These moments are portrayed so clearly and intimately, so early in the movie, that every ceremonial and accidental gesture seems to resonate with Truth itself.
When the king took his frightened son’s hand, to put it inside his own wound, I experienced a profound new meaning presented only in image. It’s not that this image of son’s hand to father’s open wound means something specific, but that it is so powerful an image as to continuously generate new singular meanings over time. A hyper-image, then.
Ethan Hawke as king formally passes on his power and wisdom to his son, while alive, and the tree of their bloodline is maintained. With that as the established standard, Amleth can be judged as a failure. He chose to honor his father’s commandment to achieve vengeance, and so defaulted on the implied commandment to pass on his life’s wisdom to the next generation.
The vision of Amleth’s daughter, in regalia and glowing, suggests a very dramatic future for this girl’s life: Her father will be a myth, a powerful guiding legend unhindered by physical reality. I think she herself could be a reincarnation of Amleth: His failure to completely embody the kingship causes him to immediately create another life, this time as a woman, and correct the overmasculine life with an addition of the anima. The magic of their family tree is passed on then, but unconsciously.
This is a fascinating side effect, but not necessarily true to the intention of the film, which according to Eggers was to present the Viking mindset as objectively as possible. I think his daughter becoming a maiden king is a concession by the writers to third wave feminism, and a public apology for making such a hyper-masculine movie.
JADE
Modern people are distanced from such a multigenerational view of life. To live in the postmodern age is to feel as if you’ve sprung straight out of the ground, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. The utility then of turning the gaze to a culture, and particularly a religion, such as the one presented in this film, is to absorb the wisdom of those people and that time. Unfortunately this film offers too little information for the audience to walk away with a sense of great catharsis, (as we said in the vid, no one’s going to cry at this ending) to feel the divine order restored by the completion of a karmic cycle. A story arc that completes a karmic cycle is necessary for people living in a postmodern age: without memory of the past or prophecy of the future, our lives are entirely our own and our karmic cycles must be completed in this life.
ALEX
In that sense, a more satisfying ending would have placed Amleth with Olga in a new life together, perhaps after replacing his uncle and guiding his uncle’s community back to prosperity.
JADE
The spirit of Viking culture is best captured in Amleth’s shapeshifting scene around the fire: as the berserkers roar in flickering fire light, they appear truly monstrous, entrancingly terrifying. Muscles flexing, mouth agape and roaring, eyes rolling back, these men become not bears but the fully embodied spirit of beastliness itself. The audience can only look on in tense and stunned awe at the spectacle of it. It’s so basically exciting to behold the overwhelming intensity of the scene: you feel as if it is happening to you. To witness that level of aggression would usually only happen in a potentially life threatening experience. Seated in the safety of a movie theater then, I was able to get close enough to the essence of it, without being burned. That much male intensity at once is rare in our culture, because most people, like me, are afraid of it: It becomes diluted, taking the cheesy form of a WWE performance made for cable TV. Scenes of Amleth as the warrior man, with massive shoulders hulking through a village he has destroyed are awesomely intense. There’s a basically undeniable vitality and sex to the whole thing. And it’s also fucking terrifying. The film gives us a glimpse of uncensored masculine beastliness. It’s super sexy and it’s damned.
ALEX
This is what’s missing, this is what’s needed in our world today, right now. The great masculinity! Truly terrific human power. This is the aggression and clarity of mind that makes such huge creative enterprises as The Northman possible. And it produces real effects in me: I could feel my body yearning to respond to the religious catharsis of a valkyrie carrying Amleth to Valhalla.
If it’s necessary to bring this vision of masculinity into our culture, then the artist must remove all obscuring non-essential ingredients. A film that delivered the promise I’m glimpsing might have had way more fight scenes, more shaman-magic scenes, and would have a protagonist that chose life and evolution over revenge and death. The Northman has nothing of real value to transmit to our culture because it believes the proper path for such a magnificent beast as Amleth is only to die in battle (not a questline available for most men today) and let a woman (his daughter, the maiden king) be the real hero.
JADE
This film is worth seeing for the aesthetics of it, its energy and intensity. But as I said to you in our video, it’s not exactly a story I need someone to know. The energy of Viking culture seems basically, elementally fascinating to us now. But where are our own channels for harnessing and manifesting aggressive and intense animal energy? The women of this film provide a potential answer: they attempt to direct male action and aggression. They are the “Beauty” counterpart to their “Beast” men. Björk plays this role best–and of course she does–being, after all, a supernatural figure: she is like Athena to Odysessus, appearing to the straying hero to remind him who he is and what his destiny is. She helps turn the dog into a man again. Amleth’s mother fails to take up this same responsibility with her first husband, who literally says that he is returning to her “as a dog returns to its master.” She defaults on her potential to tame the beastliness of her husband and instead seduces his brother, whose own gentleness makes him lose the kingdom he took over. Olga similarly is unable to help Amleth properly harness his more beastly impulse, and so he dies at the gates of hell rather than carry on toward his true destiny of being king.
The story is not exciting to transmit because it’s not redeeming. It spells tragedy for all intensity of spirit. Your notion of the larger multigenerational story going on here, and the way that karmic cycles are being redeemed through generations, informs the historical accuracy of Eggers’ film. Yet we don’t get a full picture of an entire karmic cycle, a larger view of how all those generations relate to each other, which could offer a fulfilling resonance. Eggers’ picture gives us precious glimpses of the tree of kings, but tells us nothing of the wisdom in its roots.