Remember, in Salvage here I’m focused on the ways very old literature has influenced our technological vision; and I originally turned to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—or, as the medievalists fondly refer to it, “SGGK”—to show the form of the romance, a literary genre that’s had a marked effect on the modern technological imagination. So in this post I’m looking at SGGK as a prototype of a lot of other stories, many of which are much more “techie.” Recall that the romance, as a genre, is not so much concerned with buxom beauties swooning in the arms of Fabio-looking dudes as with adventure beyond the limits of the protagonist’s society’s knowledge. The hero/ine of the romance enters the weird, the space beyond the edge of the map, encounters monsters and wonders there, and returns, changed, to tell the tale, hopefully bearing some proof that the story is true. The romance thus functions as a new installment on a previously-less-complete map. With proof, the hero/ine’s story is taken to be true, then it’s added to what’s known at court about the outside world.
Somewhere in fitt II Gawain crosses a limit, departing the space known at Camelot and entering the weird. Because this limit lies in the middle of fitt II, by the time we reach fitt III it’s easy to forget that Gawain has crossed it. So we have to read fitt III with the latter half of fitt II in mind. Suddenly—Tolkien might have said “eucatastrophically”1—Gawain’s journey, which has been lonely, hard, cold, and combative, gives way to conviviality, ease, and leisure when he suddenly comes upon a great chateau, the house of one Lord Bertilak, which is also warmed by the presence of Lady Bertilak and one of her handmaidens.
The action in fitt III centers around the tension between (1) a deal Sir Gawain makes with Lord Bertilak and (2) Lady Bertilak’s seductions of our hero, who is, apparently, known in these parts. That is, they know of him; he knows nothing of them. When Gawain arrives at Chez Bertilak (as I like to call it), armor-clad and armed, the hospitality Bertilak’s people show Gawain near the end of fitt II includes helping him disarm. Mounted and armed, Gawain is a mystery, his true identity masked by metal, speed, and force. But his gear is painfully heavy and cold, so disarming him is in some sense a kindness. Moreover, the squires’ removal of Gawain’s armor constitutes a small apocalypse, a revelation of the true man beneath the apparatus. And this unmasking and unmaking instills in us, the readers, an assumption that now we’re seeing the true Gawain. Perhaps we are. But one need not wear armor to be disguised.
Remember that scene in Shrek when Fiona asks Shrek to remove his helmet? He doesn’t want to do it because, in a twist on the old romances, he is the hero… but he is also the monster. By this point in the film Shrek has already intimated to Donkey that “Ogres are like onions” (and “NOT like cakes”) insofar as they have layers. And as we see in that film, although Shrek’s helmet comes off, there are plenty of layers beneath it.
So the helmet isn’t the only mask a knight may be wearing. With this in mind, we see that the armor removal scene at the end of fitt II of SGGK sets us up to read fitt III as an alien encounter that issues in a steady stream of unveilings that reveal not only who Gawain’s hosts are, but who he is as well. And as we shall see, this revelation process culminates at the Green Chapel, where at last he reencounters the Green Knight.
As the reference to Shrek suggests, I want to come at this notion of an alien encounter manifest in a series of unmaskings or unveilings by tracing it in modern film, particularly films about aliens, which will demonstrate how long an historical reach the romance has had. For many of us, to read something as old as SGGK is to have a different kind of alien encounter because medieval texts come from a past that’s well beyond the limit of our historical knowledge, and from cultures that we don’t necessarily fully understand. Most importantly, I think the work of salvaging these alien-feeling texts gets done when we show the links between our own time and place and those in which these stories were written and told.
Knights and Other “Onions”
To begin, I’d like to introduce you to a passage from Despina Kakoudaki’s cultural study of robots, Anatomy of a Robot (2014), which opens thus:
Stories and films featuring robots, cyborgs, androids, or automata often stage scenes that depict opening the artificial body: someone ejects a face plate, pulls back artificial skin, removes a skull covering, reveals a chest panel, lifts clothing, or pushes a button, thereby rendering visible the insides of the fascinating human-like machine. The interior space may include flashing computer lights, elaborate wiring, metal surfaces, old-fashioned cogs and wheels, or sophisticated electronic equipment. Sometimes the inside is stark in its clean modern efficiency, a gleaming metal box, but it can also be gooey, shocking, or opaque, display a minimalist emptiness, or reveal incongruous skeletal structures that seem unlikely as weight-bearing supports. In their technological interpretation of anatomical structures and process, such narrative moments enact a foundational gesture of revelation as well as of implicit seduction, suggesting that the act of opening will deliver new meanings, that the inside might explain the outside, or that in contrast to the fleshy mysteries of the organic body the robot’s interior will be understandable, logical, or orderly.2
“But wait,” you object. “You were talking about aliens and now you’re citing a book about robots, which are a different thing.” I take your point, except that the two share a literary history and so they share several characteristics as well. First and most fundamentally, both robots and aliens are constructed, made up, imaginary beings from a modern history of storytelling that, as we shall see in a future post, issued from the romance and emerged into science fiction. And within the romance tradition, which includes science fiction, robots and aliens are different types of a class of beings we might label, “beings encountered in the weird.” But bear in mind that a knight from some other court is just as alien an encounter as a monster; and a knight from another court bears a striking resemblance to a robot—they are both “metal men.”
In SGGK, the weird is the land beyond Arthur’s realm. In fact, most medievalists would remind us that in British medieval literature the forest was the weird, the realm into which few dared venture. This is why Robin Hood could live out the greenwood and attack the Sheriff of Nottingham from there with relative impunity: at that time, civilized people like the Sheriff and his men would have feared to venture into the woods. Over time, the horizon expanded so that Britain’s new frontier was the ocean, then the entire globe. And then, after the Americas were settled and the U.S., that English-speaking descendent of Britain, was established, the frontier shifted first to the skies, then to outer space. Tracing only the shift of the frontier, already we can see how the medieval romance eventually evolved into science fiction and a number of other genres as well.
With this in mind we must read Gawain’s quest from two perspectives—Camelot’s and Chez Bertilak’s. From Camelot’s perspective, Gawain rode off into the weird of the forest seeking a green man whose greenness, not to mention the greenness of the Green Chapel to which Gawain (whose garb is red) was summoned, makes him seem part of that weird, just as the aliens in Alien are black like outer space. But from Chez Bertilak’s perspective, Gawain is the alien. He has ridden out of the forest, out of the weird, and sought hospitality at their hearth. To reject his request would be to treat him like an undesirable, perhaps an enemy; and all too often such treatment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since SGGK was written amid the culture of Christendom the words of the writer of Hebrews are germane here: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”3 Literary-symbolically, angels = aliens = knights. And robots are just aliens from the weird out there in the technological future.
Kakoudaki’s focus on the act of opening is particularly important because when we examine opening we see not only what lies beneath the exterior of what’s opened, but something about ourselves—the motives behind our desire to open things, but also the hope we have of finding something inside another’s interior. For this reason, we should take interest in her subsequent point that “Anatomical gestures” such as opening
imply an expectation of an equivalence between artificial and organic bodies, evident even in negative descriptions, such as ‘it had flashing lights instead of eyes’ or ‘there was a speaker where its mouth should have been’… Looking inside a mechanical body projects the desire for meaning onto a space designed to hold little insight. And looking inside the organic body is no simple matter, either: while anatomical investigation stages the analytical quests and fantasies of objectivity that characterize Western thought, it also brings these pursuits into confrontation with the enduring enigmas of the body, the limits of incision and evidence, and the limits of vision.4
At this point, I propose we review some scenes of opening (as opposed to opening scenes) from alien films with Kakoudaki in mind. Consider, for example, the scene from Men In Black where Will Smith manages to open the face of an all-too-human robot only to discover it’s being driven by a tiny alien:
Not only can we not understand how the interior mechanism works, we also want to know why the tiny alien has a head like a potato—maybe we’ll open him next—and why he’s driving in the buff. The robot’s well-lit interior and the alien’s nakedness seem to constitute a WYSIWYG interface—“what you see is what you get”—but this is hardly the case. Even the alien’s best efforts to communicate only compound Will Smith’s confusion at what the alien was trying to say and what he, Will Smith, should do about it.
The way Smith treats the tiny alien in Men In Black is far more hospitable than the way he ‘welcomes’ another alien in Independence Day.
(Rewatching this, as he was kicking the carcass in the head, I half expected Smith to yell at the alien to get his wife’s name out of its mouth.) At this point, it’s worth returning to W. P. Ker’s words from Epic and Romance, quoted in my earlier post, SGGK: Prolegomena. Ker described the kind of action we find in the romance this way: “a knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of lances; a fight on foot with swords, ‘racing, tracing, and foining like two wild boars’; then, perhaps, recognition—the two knights belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest.”5 (Isn’t “foining” such a great word? Let’s bring it back. Tag me in the comments on any post you use it in.) Okay, so Smith and the alien aren’t from the same household—for that we’d need to watch Battlestar Galactica; and we’ll do that below—but there’s something distinctly chivalric about this scene. They’re both ‘mounted,’ as it were, in their aircraft. In lieu of a joust we get a dogfight, which Smith wins after the alien’s craft smacks a rock. (I think the rock’s name was Chris.)
And then there’s the opening. We don’t see how—nor is it really the point—but Smith finds a way to open the alien craft’s cockpit and look his adversary in the face (or so he thinks), which is so ugly he punches its lights out. In my prolegomena to SGGK, linked above, I wrote that “The romance recounts how ‘we’ went out into the Unknown and encountered ‘them’—and lived to return and tell the tale, proving it with whatever we were able to bring back with us, usually wonders or horrors.” Smith’s parachute contains both a wonder and a horror; and he drags it all the way to Area 51.
Let’s imagine for a moment how much differently the plot of SGGK would be had Gawain encountered some champion of Chez Bertilak in the forest before finding the chateau. They would have jousted, perhaps. And let’s say that Bertilak’s champion had bested Gawain and dragged him home behind his horse, leading Gringolet behind them. With this new context, the disarming of Gawain would take on an entirely different tone—something darker, more sinister perhaps—because the power relations between Gawain and the chateau would put him at their mercy. Even if he met with a hospitable reception at that point, his hackles would be up, which is precisely what happens to the alien Smith’s character delivers in Independence Day:
(To see how this conversation plays out, you may also want to see this video.)
As Kakoudaki points out, the act of opening only leads to more questions. Part of that is the materiality of what they find during the ‘autopsy.’ (I use scare-quotes here because, since the alien isn’t dead, “surgery” would be a more apt description.) But the alien’s ability to use a human being as an interface—so, the capabilities of the opened body, more than its materiality—raises the most questions even while it offers a way to converse. As we’ll see next post, in fitt III Gawain demonstrates a similar power, the power of luf-talkyng—“love-talking.” He can make people feel good while observing courtly decorum, and we might even read him as wielding this power to get what he wants.
In this regard, Gawain prefigures Tony Stark, the quick-witted lady’s man (or, if you prefer, gigolo) of the Iron Man films, which together form a protracted study in the masking power of armor, and thus, in the power dynamics of removing armor. It’s telling that as Stark’s technology evolves he uses AI as a squire. His AI, Jarvis, is voiced by Paul Bettany, and Bettany’s British brogue evokes both a butler to Stark’s playboy and a squire to Stark’s knight:
Playboy and knight: if you’ve read SGGK, fitt III, you recognize here a Gawain-esque combo. In both Gawain and Stark, this pair of identities revolves in a Manichean dualism that leaves readers/viewers wondering which is the hero’s real identity. And at this point, for the Batman fans, I’ll just note that Bruce Wayne/Batman—that is, Bruce Wayne the rich playboy and Batman “the Dark Knight”—is marked by this same Manichean dualism. It’s supposed to keep heroes interesting. But how interesting can it be if so many heroes’ character is marked by this same duality? Power-and-sex, power-and-sex. It’s banal after a while.
Some Essence is Essential
The knight’s onion-layers6 therefore stymy recognition—even when they seem to be peel-back-able. In fact, this stymied recognition is central to the weirdness of so many aliens. Consider the alien-knight-robot T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, whose metallic-ness is un-peel-back-able:
Robert Patrick as the T-1000 here is one of the most sinister knights on the screen ever (and I’m going to talk about Darth Vader in a minute) because the onion metaphor doesn’t apply to him. By contrast, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 character, with its titanium endoskeleton and fleshy exterior, is an inversion of Gawain—it’s a knight with the armor on the inside and the flesh on the outside.
If you think that’s a stretch, consider the Harley he’s riding, the most American steed since the mustang, whether the Ford or the horse. That Harley tells us that Arnold is an American knight. Someday I’ll write you a full post on it; for now, suffice it to say that in their biographies the Hells Angels—who started in California—described themselves using knight language and insisted on riding only Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which, back then, were made in America. It’s only fitting that a Hollywood actor would advance this bit of his state’s history. But Patrick’s semi truck frames the T-1000 as a knight also, evoking The Road Warrior’s post-apocalypticism to enhance Terminator 2’s paranoia about the impending AI-staged nuclear apocalypse.
The semi is just one of several layers wrapped around a core that, to echo Kakoudaki, is indecipherable. Peel back the semi and Patrick looks like a police officer. Peel back the police officer’s uniform and he looks human. Peel back the human and the T-1000 is… what? Liquid metal?
Although wrapped in layers, he’s not ultimately a layered being, he’s an omnimorph, a material that can assume any shape. And at the time, given the romance’s longstanding habit of defining the layeredness of a knight or alien, this was uncanny. Essentially, the omnimorph withholds even the promise of revelation. We may wonder whether Gawain, or Tony Stark, or Bruce Wayne, is really a knight or a playboy. But the shifting layers always give us some new slant on that question. Once there are no layers, though, we no longer have any hope of understanding who this is. In fact, non-layered-ness makes a character seem somehow nonhuman to us. Perhaps it’s more than human, perhaps it’s less; but either way, it’s inscrutable. And as readers or viewers, what keeps us reading or watching is partly that our scrutiny pays off once in a while.
So, once done, the anti-layered omnimorphism quickly becomes uninteresting and the romance must return to layering. In SGGK, the narrative benefits from some fulfilled promise of revealing the core beneath the layers; but that core must remain sufficiently complex to humanize it.
Unmasking as Self-Revelation
We see this logic in Darth Vader’s death scene in Return of the Jedi:
Vader is a Sith Lord, the correlate of Luke’s status as a Jedi Knight, and we have spent nearly three films wondering what his human face looks like beneath the helmet—especially since the end of the second film, when he reveals that he is Luke’s father.
The recent death of James Earl Jones, who plays Vader’s voice for most of the original trilogy, brought to light how much the actor was defined by his work as the voice of Darth Vader. This is troubling. One way to get at the trouble is to note how jarring it is, when Vader’s helmet finally comes off, to discover a pasty white guy beneath the hard black mask. In a move that will be analyzed for decades of film criticism to come, Anakin Skywalker is revealed as a white guy, which is to say that he visually and aurally removes his blackness, which has been a mask.7
Sometimes the act of peeling back is performed by the knight himself—or herself. And usually there is at least a plot twist and sometimes even an extratextual politics to it. We see a powerful example of self-revelation when Eowyn removes her helmet in The Return of the King:
This is a riff on Odysseus’s blinding of the Cyclops from Homer’s Odyssey—note that the Cyclops and the Witch-King of Angmar are both monsters their slayers encounter far from home. Eowyn’s daring trickery puts her in position to be her people’s heroine, marking her place in a history of Odyssean fraudster-heroes that also includes Gawain and T-1000. Another is Maximus, from Gladiator, who similarly uses armor as a disguise to get close to Emperor Commodus in order to kill him.
The notion of self-revelation by removing armor twists the onion-layer motif a bit because, at first glance anyway, the motif seems to presuppose that the knight-alien does not want to be disarmed, unmasked, revealed. Starbuck’s death and return in Battlestar Galactica twists this convention by offering us a situation in which a knight wants to reveal herself, but cannot because the armor she wears is keeping her alive.
And so, as promised, we come at last to Battlestar Galactica—or BSG, as it’s known to fans—which has been tinged with nerd-dom, especially by The Office, in which it’s one of Dwight Schrute’s favorite shows. Once upon a time that was the reason I almost didn’t watch it; and if you haven’t seen it, perhaps that’s your hang-up as well. Just FYI, BSG is free for streaming on Prime right now; and if you’ve never had the pleasure, you’re missing out.
For those who aren’t familiar, then, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, played by Katee Sackhoff, is an ace fighter pilot stationed on the wandering Caprican Battlestar, Galactica, which voyages in search of a new home planet after Caprica was destroyed by Cylons, a species of skinjob robots like the T-800 from Terminator who were bred to serve but rebelled instead. Starbuck’s commanding officer, Admiral William “Husker” Adama (Edward James Olmos), is cagey and cautious because the Cylons’ technology and strategy have out-evolved humans’; and his son, Lee “Apollo” Adama (Jamie Bamber), is deeply conflicted—he’s in love with Starbuck but is also her commanding officer, which forces upon him a duty to withhold his feelings. (That doesn’t really stop them, though.)
In the scene below, Starbuck has shot down a Cylon Raider, an AI fighter plane, and they’ve both crashed on a toxic planet. She’s never seen a Raider up close. And since she’s low on oxygen and her own fighter is damaged beyond repair, this Raider is her only hope of survival:
The act of peeling-back in this alien encounter reveals flesh beneath metal, as in the traditional knightly motif. But unlike Gawain himself, Shrek, or Smith’s aliens, there’s no body that can be removed from the armor—the armor itself is the body, and its innards are not robotic or mechanical, but biological. True to her legend, Starbuck manages to fly the Raider while sucking on a trachea-looking oxygen supply tube. The entire incident is “gross” in the fullest sense of the term8; but it bespeaks that curious admixture of martial prowess and pragmatic ingenuity characteristic of the knight, and also the romance’s gothic tendency to recount the visceral details of combat, as we saw in fitt I when Gawain beheaded the Green Knight.
Being able to fly the Raider solves one of Starbuck’s problems but presents her with a new one. She can escape the toxic planet; but she’s going to have to approach Galactica, and its cagey Admiral Adama, looking like a Cylon. In this situation, Starbuck wants to be identifiable, recognized beneath the mask of her plane; but she must “wear” the plane in order to reach Galactica and remain alive in space. Her solution is to fly strangely, and, as in every other crudely improvised repair, use duct tape to effect:
Here we see how long the romance’s shadow really is. Starbuck has disappeared from Galactica’s radar, crashed on a toxic planet, carved out the innards of an alien, and returned changed—to see just how much you’d have to watch BSG—to tell the tale, bearing proof of her exploits. This pattern repeats itself in science fiction and fantasy over and over and over. Exploits must be proven; and proof usually requires returning with armor, a body, or both.
Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.
Since I’m working from the Tolkien/Gordon translation, what Tolkien would or might have said is entirely germane here. See J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, translators, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1975), 23-122.
Despina Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 1.
Hebrews 13.2.
Kakoudaki, 2.
W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London, England: MacMillan and Co., Ltd., 1896), 5-6. An e-book version is available via Google Books.
But Tony Stark’s totally got cake-layers—as in “cake-eater,” for you Mighty Ducks fans, or as in “Let them eat cake!” for you French Revolution history buffs.
I’d like to propose we remember James Earl Jones for any of a number of his other films: Roots; Field of Dreams; The Hunt for Red October; even The Lion King. As Rick Moranis’s character in Space Balls suggests, Vader would have been thin and unbelievable without Jones. But it’d be nice to remember Jones as having defined Vader, not the other way around.
As in, “gross anatomy.” OED defines “gross” in several relevant ways:
“Of a liquid: having a thick consistency; viscous, sticky. Also of a substance: stiff, unyielding, dense”—the Raider is both at once;
“Of meat: from a large animal such as a cow, sheep, or deer, esp. cooked whole or in large joints,” or, “Of fruit: large, fleshy, and full of pulp,” both of which are visceral descriptions of the Raider’s neural mass here;
“Of a shoot or stem: disproportionately or excessively long, thick, or bulky,” like the trachea Starbuck’s sucking oxygen from to stay alive;
“Designating movement of large amplitude or scale, esp. when made by muscles of the limbs or trunk of the body; of, relating to, or involving such movement,” as in Starbuck’s first attempts to fly the Raider;
“Lacking elegance or refinement in form or shape; crude,” or “Of workmanship, method, manner, etc.: rough or crude; inexpert; clumsy,” as we might describe Starbuck’s work at ‘repairing’ the Raider—especially stuffing part of her astrosuit in the bullet hole (like that’s going to hold during space flight);
“Vulgar or coarse; lacking in morality or decency; morally reprehensible; uncivilized, barbarous”: I once heard a colleague describe this as “Starbuck molesting the Raider” and now I can’t not see it, which, in addition to the senses above, makes this “Disgusting; repellent; obnoxious, objectionable; (also) unpleasant, unappealing”;
and finally, in a sense from falconry, a favorite sport among knights, “to fly gross: (of a hawk) to hunt large birds as quarry.”
What are the odds I was 8/8 on your references? Incredible through line from SGGK to some of the greatest science fiction movies ever. Every post I finish totally dumbfounded. How did I miss it this whole time?!