‘The Northman’ (dir. Robert Eggers, 2022)

 The Northman consists of a great many widescreen shots of primal forests, of Icelandic hills and mountains, of vast unpopulated wildernesses and hugely star-thronged skies, sublimity in topographic form, across which move various Viking characters, sometimes dwarfed by the scenery in longshot, more often shot in close-ups that dwell on the gym-built musculatures of stripped-to-the-waist, or starkers, Alexander Skarsgård, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke and others. For much of the movie these musculatures are smeared with blood and grime and engaged in the strenuous work of cutting and dismembering other bodies. There is a lot of shouting—really, many instances of people standing, mouth-wide, howling and gurning at one another—and a good deal of hacking, hewing and chopping with swords and axes, each blow carefully staged to maximise its visceral horribleness (sound effects play a large part here).

The story is a thinned-down, yet somehow also elongated, version of Hamlet: young Amleth sees his father (Hawke) murdered by his uncle Fjölnir (Bang). He escapes the scene and grows to swole and violent Skarsgårdian manhood in Russia as part of a band that spends its time Berserker-raiding fortified villages. When he hears that Fjölnir the Brotherless has married his (that is, Amleth's) mother, and moved to Iceland, he pretends to be a slave, infiltrating a shipment of serfs so as to work incognito for his uncle, and thereby get to a place where he can rescue his mother (and his new half-brother), kill his uncle and so avenge his father.

In addition to all the artfully mounted shots of Icelandic scenery there is some knowingly staged (a little too knowingly, I felt) pseudo-Viking weirdness: midnight meetings in stables and inside firelit caves with a Seeress played by Björk and a beardy mage played by somebody I didn’t recognise. There are mystic encounters, visions of Yggdrasil decorated with many dangling bodies like a psycho Christmas tree, hallucinations of Amleth being ridden up the night-sky by a screaming Valkyrie as Valhal swings wide its gigantic luminous sky-doors. Eggers also throws-in a couple of knowing (again: a touch too knowing, I thought) references to Shakespeare’s play: a fool played by Willem Dafoe who spends most of the film as a decapitated head, a sly bit of magic mushroom added to the stew that turns everyone except Amleth mad, and so on. There is a scene in which Amleth confronts his mother, who mocks him and then snogs him, which struck me as a touch too ‘psychoanalytic crit’ Literature 101 Hamlet-in-Gertrude's-bedchamber, really. But mostly this film is the brooding sublimity of Icelandic landscapes and the ick and shock of close-combat, decapitation, cutting off noses, slicing throats, spinning and sinking a handaxe in the shrieking body of your enemy etc etc.

For me the question is: why didn’t I like this movie more? I mean, I liked it fine, I guess. I watched it, the time passed, it was OK. But something was missing. It's a movie that works strenuously towards something that doesn't really come-off, leaving behind the impression only of that strain. I wondered, briefly, if it was aiming for a ‘300 with Vikings instead of Spartans’ vibe (“This! Is! VÍKINGR!” and so on) but actually that's a comparison that isolates what this newer movie lacks. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of things about 300 that are objectionable: the neo-fascistic militarism by which the US marine corps is allegorised as the last macho bastion of handsomely buff dudes holding back the orientalised hordes of corrupt, violent, perverse and bizarre ‘eastern’ (that is, Arab, Muslim, Chinese) invaders. I mean, at the same time there is a compelling cod-Zizekian take on the film that would read the Persians as, precisely, the decadent West (all sexual excess and deformity) and the Spartans as, let’s say, the Taliban on a suicide mission.

I don’t mean to get bogged-down on the Snyder/Miller flick, except to make one point: 300 isn’t an ironic film, exactly, but it is a camp one, and camp is one of the ways contemporary American popular culture approaches irony. It is both ludicrous and aware of its ludicrousness, using it to leverage its more pompously earnest stuff about masculine strength and heroism and self-sacrifice. There is something savingly joyous in this, despite all the grunting and fighting and oiled, gym-sculpted musculatures, and it is exactly what The Northman lacks. It is doing similar masculine strength and heroism and self-sacrifice things, and is as liable to being adopted by today’s neo-Nazis as was the Snyder flick, but it is trying ingenuously for ‘grandeur’, and lacking the leaven of irony that effort becomes, merely, effortful, grinding, wearying. It didn’t have to be that way—the movie gives Björk a cameo, after all, in a bonkers costume. And yet it is: humourless, self-important, struggling, with every sound-effect-enhanced knife stabbing into a shoulder-blade, or sword pushing right through a head, or handaxe thwunking into a chest, to amplify its gnarly pomposity.

It’s part of a larger thing. In a recent Lawyers Guns & Money post, Erik Loomis trolled his readership (it’s increasingly becoming Loomis's USP as a writer, this) by asserting, without evidence or argument: ‘Queen is one of the biggest bullshit bands in the history of rock and roll, just complete overwrought garbage’. Various people challenge this dismissal in the comments below the post, causing Loomis to double-down on his take, at the same time as insisting that he likes good bands like The Who and The Band. De gustibus, sure: but I absolutely love Queen and one of the things that elevates them above the common herd of stadium-filling megastar rock bands is precisely their campness. Their irony. It is absolutely integral to what they are about, especially in their early albums, filled as they are with elaborate prog-rock, Mercury's pseudo-operatic vocals, Brian May’s flute-clear guitar licks and curlicues (many of which are hard rock and blues) lifted out of the rut by a properly Sontagian campness and play. They were a band who revelled in pomp that never becomes merely pompous, able to articulate heartfelt sincerities of affect (‘Love of my Life’, say) not despite but because they are so unashamedly ironic, so playful, funny and camp—in a word, so queer. The Northman is not nearly queer enough, in any of the senses of that term.

Since we're ambling down memory lane: I remember all the way back in 1995, when various artists contributed music to a charity record called The Help Album to raise funds for war-stricken Bosnia and Herzegovina. The album is full of famous (or famous in 1995) musicians recording earnest songs about war being bad, or covers of appropriate rock classics (Suede doing ‘Shipbuilding’ for instance). The one exception to this is a gleeful track by the KLF called ‘The Magnificent’, in which a voice, notionally from Serbian radio, is intercut with a remix of the theme from The Magnificent Seven while some dude yells ‘The Magnificent!’ over and over. It is jarring, because it is so utterly at odds with the earnest, pious-priggish tone of the rest of the album (‘humans against killing—that sounds like junkies against dope’ mutters the Serbian voice). It was criticised at the time for being flippant about a terribly grave matter. That one mode of engaging with the horrors of the wars being fought across the former Jugoslavia might be to embrace irony did not, it seems, occur to people back then. Irony was on its way out, and it remains, to this day, out in the cold, culturally speaking. A pity.