Very updated, very subversive, very Boomerized—this is the best way to describe Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of the Old English poem Beowulf, which I recently rewatched and feel compelled to write about. Future historians studying the bizarre times through which we are living will want to examine this film; it crystallizes the way culture-makers thought in the early 21st century.
As a policy, I try to moderate my instinct to bemoan all changes made to great stories as they jump from the page to the screen, a different medium with different demands. Sometimes changes might work. But at the very least they should not be made lightly and should not feel like scribbles made with crayons over the work of superior men. Adapting a book for the screen is like anything: you can do whatever you can convincingly get away with, but only the best adaptors can get away with much. Which makes faithfulness a surer option.
What’s obvious is that screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary thought they could get away with a ton. Their Beowulf is not a hero who kills three monsters over the course of a glorious career—but a liar who kills the first monster, fornicates with the second, and begets the third, which he then has no choice but to fight and kill. He’s a hero remade in the image and likeness of contemporary debunkers.
The Monsters and the Filmmakers
In fairness to Zemeckis and company, this is a tricky work to adapt. The story appears to be bafflingly simple: man vs monster, repeated three times. I had to read JRR Tolkien’s critical essay even to begin understanding what the poet was trying to capture in the transition between the Age of Vikings and the Christian Middle Ages that followed. Northern heroism is a stirring and remarkable thing, Tolkien says, but it ends in final defeat:
The worth of defeated valor in this world is deeply felt. As the poet looks back into the past, surveying the history of kings and warriors in the old traditions, he sees that all glory (or as we might say “culture” or “civilization”) ends in night. The solution of that tragedy is not treated—it does not arise out of the material. We get in fact a poem from a pregnant moment of poise, looking back into the pit, by a man learned in the old tales who was struggling, as it were, to get a general view of them all, perceiving their common tragedy of inevitable ruin, and yet feeling this more poetically because he was himself removed from the direct pressure of its despair.
Such subtlety is not something that grabs the average 21st century moviegoer. Even Zemeckis himself did not like the poem. But he did like the screenplay by Gaiman and Avary, probably because they “read between the lines” and sexed things up.
Their method, shallow as it is, has a certain internal logic to it. You can imagine mildly clever nonconformists gathering in a garage, firing up a bong, and deconstructing an old poem so that it makes better sense to them. As Avary explained in an interview:
There are a lot of questions [to the original poem]. For example, Grendel is described as half-man, half-demon. The mother is described as a water-demon. So who's Grendel's father? Grendel's always dragging men off alive to the cave. Why? Why is he never attacking Hrothgar? … And if Hrothgar is Grendel's father, then what happens to Beowulf when he goes into that cave? Did he kill the monster? Did he kill Grendel's mother? Or did he make a pact with the demon? It was those kinds of questions that allowed us to explore deeper into the myth, and in a way that I don't think bastardizes the original myth; I think it actually is a deeper examination of it.
His last line is rich: “a deeper examination.” Truly the thoughts of an edgelord. And you shall know such edgelords by their fruits: the screenplays which radiate a strange and self-impressed mix of moralism, voyeurism, and nihilism.
The first act of the film feels like a foreshadowing (several years ahead of #MeToo) of a comeuppance on the way for Toxic Masculinity. King Hrothgar’s mead hall thoroughly deserves to be terrorized, with all its Nordic louts and lechers throwing their Male Gazes all around. Hrothgar himself (Anthony Hopkins) is a fat drunkard who can barely keep his robes on and who needs to be carried basically everywhere. The situation is already highly “problematic” even before Beowulf arrives to save them from their doom.
Then in the second act the moral perspective curiously shifts as the viewer is taken into the pornified underworld lair of Grendel’s mother, where Beowulf is seduced by a CGI Angelina Jolie wearing only gold stripper glitter. (The actress herself later said she couldn’t believe the film received a PG-13 rating.) Even though the filmmakers are smart enough to inject this tryst with a sense of warning and doom, they still take glee in the luridness of it, and their eagerness to build their adaptation around Sexy-Time-With-Grendel’s-Mother tells you what kind of pervs we’re dealing with. Their creative choices actually parallel Beowulf’s failure. Moralism in act one is trumped by the voyeurism in act two.
Of course Beowulf then lies about what happened in the cave, telling his comrades that he slayed Grendel’s mother rather than impregnating her. Which is nothing new for him. Earlier in the film Beowulf lied about an epic swimming contest: he claims to have lost the race because he was impeded by sea monsters, when the truth is he was busy cavorting with a mermaid! You almost can’t make this stuff up. In his review Roger Ebert noted his suspicions that the filmmakers are satirizing the original poem—but they are also satirizing themselves without knowing it.
Beowulf does finally confront the disaster he’s made, but his willingness is driven less by honor than by a death wish. The proper response to his demise is a sigh of relief.
Beyond Subversion Cinema
This updated, subversive, and Boomerized Beowulf hits a proverbial nerve for me not just because it captures the spirit of the times but because it was released at a pivotal moment in my own life. In 2007, I was trying to scrap together the education I did not receive in my formal schooling. No teacher assigned the poem to me. Nor would I have read it if one had. I didn’t read anything my teachers assigned—mostly because the larger lesson they had instilled was that reading was boring and pointless, and there was little worth knowing and studying anyways, especially not poems from centuries ago. My years in public schools were an exercise in the consumer-nihilism of my teachers. Why read a book when you can I just watch a movie instead? What was the point of all that effort? These educators were driving me into the loving arms of the Gaimans and Avarys of the world.
This is a spiritually crippling way to spend one’s formative years. Not until I was on my way out of high school did I realize that a) I kind of liked reading and b) there actually were things worth studying and learning about. A pretty wild reversal, and I was living with the consequences of it just as Beowulf hit the big screen. Only then did I read the poem and get drawn deeper into this realization about my own formation.
Unlike the old poet who loved both Northern Courage and the Faith, these filmmakers admire neither, and they’ve done their best to refashion the world accordingly—both Beowulf’s world and ours. Nobility is a lie. Great men get debunked. Moral postures are struck, but are almost immediately undermined by perviness. And then we die and our “civilization” ends in night.
This is obviously not the last word, though, no matter what Zemeckis, Gaiman, Avary, and the public school teachers in cahoots with them might have told you. Just like Beowulf unleashing the dragon into the world, recent generations have beckoned the destruction of our civilization with their own choices—the fakeness, the gheyness, the bad culture, the bad policies, the sterility, the deathcult of tolerance, the dismissive irony toward actual virtue. And in the process they’ve given us plenty of work to do, plenty of monsters to destroy. There might even be opportunities for nobility and a certain kind of heroism in the effort.
I got so pissed off after watching that movie. Read Beowulf in sixth grade and had a hard time with the prose. Came back to it and felt an inner viking rising.
We were assigned the poem in 7th or 8th grade (yeah, I’m old). We were all too young to understand it. When I read it years later, I started to understand it. Like most great works, it rewards multiple readings.
I’m glad I didn’t see this movie.