I have lately been reminded of
something.
A film, and its importance.
I was feeling down earlier this
evening, caught up in one of my far-too-frequent recent melancholy moods.
Musing on fiscal matters, as it happens. Which, when one is a writer, is never
the smartest of plays.
Anyhow, I got it into my head
that what was needed to rectify this joy-rot was a good, solid, movie-going
experience. I felt certain that, should I be able to find the right film, I’d
be lifted clear of the doldrums.
Only, an actual movie-going
experience was, by the time I hit on this idea, not going to be feasible. Not
only was it too late, too cold, and too wet to be travelling anywhere to see one;
but going out to see one would only have compounded my aforementioned monetary
woes.
So, instead, I plumped for
watching something on demand. I wheeled through the action/adventure selection,
considering everything from Blood Simple to Snatch to The Hurt Locker
to The Outlaw Josey Wales.
I spent a good few minutes mulling each option over, but, in the end, I didn’t
quite fancy any of them.
In fact, I was beginning to go
off the idea altogether. It seemed as though bedtime was approaching, a good
couple of hours faster than usual.
Until, that is, I noticed –
shunted in and amongst a bunch of wholly dissimilar titles – the 1938 classic, The Adventures of Robin
Hood. The kind of film about which it is often said: ‘They don’t make
them like this anymore.’ – which seemed as fitting a recipe as any other for a
late evening’s reality-break. Indeed, though I hadn’t seen it for a long while,
I recalled how I always used to enjoy it when I was younger, and decided to
give it a go. At the very least, I was sure it couldn’t make me feel any worse.
After only a handful of minutes,
I noted down the following thought: There are few films so excellently and
effortlessly entertaining as this early Technicolor marvel.
And then added: There are few
films as effortlessly rebellious either.
Already, it was beginning to do
what I wanted it to. Furthermore, it was also helping me recall the way I felt
when watching such films as a kid.
At the age of six or seven, I
felt a kinship with The Adventures of
Robin Hood because it seemed to mirror the medieval mischief I got up to
with my elder brother and our friends out in our garden or in the neighbouring
field. Running around with plastic bows and arrows, or with ones that we’d
fashion from sycamore branches and tightly-tied string.
As an adult, I found I was
revelling not only in the memories of such times, but also in the newly-noticed
anarchic angle, the rebel tone, which I didn’t have to think to understand when
I was young. The outlaw aspects of the story and of Flynn’s performance were
much clearer. The socio-political underpinnings of that standpoint, I mean.
Indeed, as a child, there is a
sense in which outlawry is one’s natural state. Only you don’t notice it so
much, because few people bother to clamp down on you so hard with the rules.
They do not really apply, as the assumption has long since been made by
grown-ups that you’re too young to understand most of the mistakes you might be
making. There was a healthy degree of discipline in my upbringing, I should
admit, but I was still are free, by and large, to indulge my playfulness, my
imagination; I was free to give full heed to my (then) innate sense of
adventure.
Such actions do not represent a
side, a political/philosophical ethos you have chosen. They are simply actions,
tied to goals at once far smaller and far larger than any you’ll encounter in
your adult life. You give yourself quests to fulfil in your makebelieve, and
then forget them, and so are free and able to repeat them at your leisure. The
questing itself is the joy, and it hardly matters, at that age, against whom or
what, or for whom or what, you are doing it.
At the age of about six or seven,
I understood, I think, The Adventures of
Robin Hood on those terms. That is to say, as an extension of my own early
adventuring. I knew some of the episodes contained within it from picture
books, and probably from the Disney version also, but
at the same time they felt fresh; I couldn’t help but take them on their own
terms. There was none of this lengthy, rambling analysis. I knew Robin Hood was
an outlaw simply because people called him an outlaw. Because he called himself
an outlaw. I knew he was a good guy because he was the focus of the film and
played by Errol Flynn.
I knew he was the good guy because he wins at the end.
Watching it as an adult, such
simplicity is, largely, stripped. And yet it remains tremendously escapist and
entertaining, despite, or possibly even because, I can now detect layers of
discourse I previously was unaware of having overlooked.
Perhaps I have even retained a
kinship with it because I, and my social situation, has changed so much. I am
no longer free to do exactly as I wish. I am expected, as a full-grown man, to
be obedient to the rules and dictums of the society within which I find myself
surrounded. To be upstanding, as best I can. To be sensible. And, when the
government says something, passes some new law, rolls out some new policy, even
though this is a democracy, I am not really expected to say anything in
response, to answer back.
Furthermore, I am, difficult and
shameful as it can be at times to admit, not in the finest position
financially. Which is to say I’m on the dole. And have been for some time. Not
for want of trying to find work, nor for want of trying to make money off my
writing; but that is, regardless, the way things have gone. There’s a line in
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse
Five, in which a character propounds: ‘Many novelties have come from
America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of
undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love
themselves.’ And, being in the position I felt locked in last night, I could
fully see where that sentiment came from. It seemed, as I thought on it, to
have grown out, spread across the Atlantic, taken hold here. And elsewhere,
judging by the global nature of the Occupy protests against that
quasi-mythological entity, the ‘One Percent’.
However, as I watched the opening
scenes of The Adventures of Robin Hood,
I began to reflect instead on the tendency of each generation to assume they’ve
experienced the first instance of everything.
It having been so long since I
last watched the film, coupled with my fuzziness over what exactly the Hays
censorship code prohibited, meant I was unprepared for the way in which it
actually begins. Within those first couple of minutes, we see the harsh actions
of Prince John’s knights towards the ‘Saxon’ villagers and peasants in
Nottingham. They are denied extra food, leniency, comfort. As I watched this, I
understood these scenes as austerity measures. Austerity Britain: The Middle
Ages Edition.
Rather than Robin Hood, who I
always was (even if my brother was Robin Hood as well), I found myself feeling
closer, identifying more, at this stage, with them. In particular with a figure
in pale blue robes who, after being denied a fairly basic demand by a soldier,
waits for the soldier to leave the frame before looking him daggers and
spitting into the mud. I watched that and clicked with the sense of curiously
impotent anger that figure projected, the vague notion of their being a
wrongness he could do nothing to right.
But then, moments later, Robin
Hood himself bounds into view, jumping a low-hanging tree branch on his horse,
looking every inch the ultimate badass. A feat made all the more impressive
given that at least a third of his inches are taken up by bright green tights.
And it is the introduction of Robin, in such a way, which ensures that the film
stays entertaining. Which lets you know that things will be alright. That the
preceding injustices will be addressed, rectified.
As soon as I see him, I can’t
help but grin. I grin wildly and my breath is taken a little, because not only
does this image return me to the aforementioned simpler, less rule-stricken
times. But, having associated myself with the downtrodden, I understand and
feel his presence as more heroic also. I understand that heroes are not only
heroes because they tend, in films like this, to win, but because they
represent a moral/ideological position that people suddenly, desperately need
to witness being upheld.
There’s a long line of similar
folk-heroic figures peppered like buckshot through the arse cheeks of history.
Rebels, poachers, bank robbers, ne’er-do-wells who nevertheless are felt to
have done well by a great many people, all in the name of sticking it to The Man. Most of these, however, do seem fairly
stuck in their own historical context. Their heroism is defined by the era they
were in. As Sam Elliott
intones in his introductory monologue in The Big Lebowski,
‘Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man
for his time and place.’ This seems to be a fit description of such folk-heroes
as Bonnie and Clyde, the kind of bank robbers most often linked to ideas of
Robin Hood-like aspirations.
Indeed,
though films have been made about them, and figures like them, decades after
their era, these, especially Arthur Penn’s
masterful Bonnie and Clyde,
come laden with an elegiac tone. The audience is aware of most of the actual
facts (not ‘stories’, mind you) about such figures, and so these facts undercut
the escapist mythologizing such films might otherwise aim for. The audience
knows the era of these characters has passed, and so they will be able to
embrace them only fleetingly before their inevitable end. And, when it comes,
that end will come with the implicit moral that crime doesn’t pay, and it’ll be back to reality for everyone.
This
is not so much the case with The
Adventures of Robin Hood. For a few reasons. First off, though, within the
film, he is clearly presented as ‘the man for his time and place’, the
historical sketchiness, of both film-makers, audience, and, let’s face it,
historians themselves, as regards that time and place means that Errol Flynn’s
characterisation much more readily transcends such boundaries. Indeed, rather
than being an elegiac evocation of a bygone age, and focusing its attentions on
mourning the demise of such values as chivalry, etc., the film concentrates on
creating a platform through which modern-day grievances can be simultaneously
considered, and, through Robin’s eventual triumph, escaped from.
I’ve
talked about how I found myself drawing parallels with the ‘Saxon’ situation as
laid out in the film and my own, and associating myself with the downtrodden,
as it were. But mention should also be made of the actual release date of the
film, 1938, which is right at/just after the tail-end of the Great Depression. It
is possible that, aside from it being a darn good entertainment and starring
Flynn, this timing played a part in its initial success.
Because
there is so much more distance between now and the era in which the (hi)story
of Robin Hood is set, than there is between now and the 1930’s, say, the former
era (at least as it has become enshrined in Western myth and folklore) has
become timeless. And, as a result, can return to being timely, well, whenever
it pleases.
Which
may go some way towards explaining why it affected me the way it did on latest
watching.
The
fact that I’d not previously considered the film verdant grounds for criticism
may go some way towards explaining why that impact surprised me.
I
chose to watch it on a whim, because I fancied a complete diversion from my
current personal climate. I had not considered that, in Flynn’s performance, I
would find evoked on screen my poorness-pressured person’s patron saint.
And
yet, the more I watched, the more I came to think of him as exactly that. He is
defiant, courageous in all the ways I want to be but currently aren’t. He
carries on as though the rules that are so stringently and virulently enforced
are not really there, and, in so doing, overcomes them. He is a slave only to
his ideals.
Indeed,
he feel like the right man for this moment – for the moment I was having last
night, anyhow – precisely because he has been able to not only hang onto those
ideals, but act on them, flying in the face of austerity and the tyranny of
being told what to do. At one point, he speaks to Maid Marian of being able to
offer his men ‘silks for rags, kindness instead of riches, limitless food
instead of hunger’, and, whilst in the real
world I may be willing to dismiss such promises as empty rhetoric, in the
world of this film, it is clear that they are not lies. So I succumb to the
sentiment, allow it to lift me.
I was
buoyed as well, watching the film, by the fact that Robin has retained an
important aspect of one’s childhood makeup. He has hung onto outlawry as a
natural state.
As
the character progresses on his eponymous adventures, he therefore graduates
from peer to inspiration. The trade-off is that I accept my own downgrading,
the prohibition of my own adventuring; that I acknowledge the areas in which I
lack. But I would still be lacking, even without Flynn’s Robin Hood there to
make that jump. Which is why the fact that he is at least there to entertain me
makes my position more tolerable.
Performances
such as that, and films such as this, facilitate, for ninety-odd minutes, a
return to the freedom one used to take for granted. As you grow older, they
cease (unless you yourself have taken to wearing bright green tights) to act as
a mirror, but become instead a looking glass, a window into the possibility of
a better world.
Of
course, there is a level on which such films are purely frivolous – the
historical content is, as afore-alluded-to, damn-near utterly bunk – designed
and intended as nothing more than eye-catching entertainment. But there is
another level, both beneath and above that, in which that entertainment serves
a deep and gratifying purpose. A purpose made clear when, at the end, you watch
the court and the merry men cheer in unison, and feel something inside of you
cheer along too.
It
is a shame, therefore, that The
Adventures of Robin Hood is, indeed, the type of film about which it is
often said: ‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’
Because
films like this feel important. Not least because they make the watcher,
whatever their age, feel important as well.
