There is no ‘Reel’ Mordred:

The Evil Child/Good Child Dyad in Excalibur, The Sixth Sense, and The Good Son

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 In the following blog post, I try to link the story of Arthur's bastard son Mordred, who in the Arthurian Legend, comes back to seize control of Camelot from his father, as an example of the "bad seed" trope in contemporary film and fiction.

        It is easy to see how much the Mordred story is edited, conflated, or even omitted in popular Arthurian retellings. Most film versions omit Mordred as in Disney’s The Sword and the Stone (1963) or Camelot (1967) or they conflate his story, like in Knightriders (1981), where he is Morgan, a bad-guy motorcycle nut, his name a mixture of Morgan Le Fay and Mordred. And of the Arthurian films that do include him, he is either: 1.) Arthur’s nephew or a knight "gone bad" as in First Knight (1995) or 2.) the incest taboo is breeched and Mordred is recognized as Arthur’s illegitimate son, as in Excalibur (1981) or the TV mini-series version of Mists of Avalon (2000) (Torregrossa 200-201). In films without mention of the incest plot, the incest taboo is sublimated into a villainous character who desires, at any price, to storm Camelot, to take Guinevere as either a wife or slave and to kill Arthur. Either Mordred is conflated into an evil nemesis that vies for Arthur’s throne, or he is seen as a son, but, universally as a bad seed. This bad seed element is what I am interested in here as an outcrop of a problematic good child/bad child dyad that popular tellings of the Arthurian tale have generated.

This illustrates at what length the story, even Malory, to some extent, avoids discussing the crux of the Mordred story, the “bad seed” part: which is basically a story of taboo desire between a brother, (Arthur) and a sister (Morgauswe) and the product of this desire, an evil child, (Mordred). The boundary is transgressed and the child born from the brother/sister pairing is marked as impure — hence, perhaps the name Mordred: a distortion of “morte,” the Romance derivative of the Latin word, “mortus,” in English, “death.”

     In most cultures, a child made impure by a violation of the incest taboo does not bode well for the tribe. It marks death. From a Structuralist point of view, all cultures, in some form or another, have an incest taboo, for it separates us from the animals and makes us uniquely human — our rage or our sex drive is not mere animalistic fecundity, but we tend to inscribe meaning to our actions which precipitates limitation (Bataille 83). Most cultures include a narrative to limit transgression and also to speak about possible violations of the boundary as a cautionary tale. In other words: Don’t sleep with your sister because it will bring a taint on your house. Stories like this are powerful and interwoven into cultural narratives because the taboo is so strong, we need stories of its transgression to release some of the pent-up energy generated by its suppression.

     But how we tell the story is what is of importance.

     The story of Arthur’s son, Mordred, fits into this basic narrative of incest, not only as a historical figure but as a raw narrative-type fitted into whichever form of the Arthurian strand the artist wishes to take, whether he casts Mordred as a nephew or a son, or an evil traitor, the simple ingredients of the primordial story are preserved. The raw form of Mordred as an evil son, an irreducibly evil son, apparently, has become fodder for a retelling of the Arthurian myth that chooses to emphasize the mythological structure of the story rather than the anthropological structure. From an anthropological standpoint, the Mordred narrative tells of a transgression of a culturally inscribed taboo that needs to be dealt with within the society.

      This anthropological, scientific viewpoint has been challenged by the mythopoetic, or Jungian view touted first by Joseph Campbell. In this view, Mordred or any character in the Arthurian narrative is a creation of mythic imagination, not necessarily rooted in historical reality. While, there may be cause to suggest that a person such as Arthur or Guinevere did, in fact, exist in some form of the distant past, the cause of their presence in history is not inherent in their facticity, per se, but in the raw mythological power that they exert on the human imagination.

Mordred, while the facts of his historical existence are in doubt, exerts a powerful influence on the popular imagination, especially in films that utilize the rhetoric of the Men’s Movement of the 1980s by such figures as Robert Bly and Sam Keen. The Men’s Movement addresses the so-called “crisis in masculinity” that was used as a counter-attack to second-wave feminism, that stated that there is something innate about woman and that womanhood ought to be celebrated and recognized, as inherently bound up with a woman’s own sense of self and power, represented in works like The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Men, by their own, admission, deny women of this acceptance of their womanhood by disavowing their political rights and metaphysical dignity

       The Men’s Movement, or Mythopoesis, as it is sometimes called, countered this, especially in the works of Robert Bly, by saying that there is also something innate about men, but men have not been allowed to express their true feelings like women and are therefore just as much oppressed as women. Bly warned that men should not associate themselves too readily with women, lest they ally themselves with their interests, and only please their mothers and their wives (2). Writers like Bly argued that men should not only get in touch with their more sensitive, nurturing side, or their true selves, but their wild side, or their warrior side as an expression of authentic masculinity. This not only spawned a pate of men’s clubs and book tours celebrating men and men’s interests but also films have expropriated this mythopoetic rhetoric, often times to an inevitable disaster.

     In Films, like Excalibur,, First Knight, The Sixth Sense, The Good Son, and the Star Wars films, the Mordred myth has been expropriated into a mythopoesis that reduces the problem into a good child/evil child dyad. If there is something to be saved in men today, the men’s movement suggests, it is our boys who are in the direst need of help. This emphasis on boys in need of help, seen in books by Michael Gurian and James Pollack, with titles like, The Wonder of Boys or Raising Cain: Saving the Emotional Lives of Boys. This frenzy (or panic) to save our boys from the clutches of soft feminism creates, ineluctably, what I call the Mordred problem, spawned in part by this duality that our children are either good or evil, right or wrong, soft or hard, gay or straight, legitimate or illegitimate, with the emphasis that right, good, hard, straight, and legitimate are the privileged labels. Mordred is a type of the “bad seed,” the bad label, or the evil child and his inverse, the good child, or the virtuous child.

      Reinhard Kuhn, in his book Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature says that the evil child in literature stems from our fascination with innocence in the child and this innocence is corrupted by society (40-41). He says that evil children in books and films demonstrate “an insatiable appetite for even the most vulgar of such menacing children, and the viewing public has assured a similar success for the many films dealing with the same topic” (43-44). Kuhn remarks that the result of our fascination with corruption of childhood innocence has garnered a proliferation “of evil children on such a scale that one might fear it is they who will inherit the earth” (44).

      The Mordred-myth generates such evil children bent on destroying the father figure, the mother figure — in fact, the entire family. The incest theme is usually downplayed in these films and the villainy of the child is emphasized. These films tap into the archetype of the evil child that seems to fascinate modern audiences. It also presents us with a problematic binary. Especially when seen in context with the recent rhetoric of a “crisis of masculinity” that deems anything not of the moral norm as suspect and thus should be expunged.

Jean Mohr's Photographs of Boys in After the Last Sky (with Edward W. Said)

in After the Last Sky:

The Palestinian boy in Jean Mohr’s photograph elicits sadness just by looking into his eyes (WOR 623). He is of unknown age, so the caption says, because we are not sure if he is even a child although he is small enough to be a child.  His child-sized tummy, poking out from beneath his tight Grease t-shirt is tiny like a child’s. He doesn’t have a man’s beard.  Nor is he a toddler.  He has a playful half-akimbo pose with his left arm perched on his hip, a boy’s shaved head like a London chimney sweep and his body semi-contrapposto – but his face is veritably adult looking with those sad sad eyes.

  “You see it in our children who seem to have skipped a phase of growth or, more alarming, achieved an out-of-season maturity in one part of their body or mind while the rest remains childlike” (623).  Said has similar impressions to my own.  Except Said is writing in the first person plural “we.” “Our children,” he says.  A Palestinian himself, Said is not only looking at a boy marked by deportation, war, and strife but looking at one of his own exiled children, a child who has grown up too fast, as the clichéd expression goes.  This assertion of “we” makes his already poignant comments – and the photograph itself – an intimate expression of the pain and loss of the Palestinian exile.  This is the portrait of a child whom the Palestine’s enemies say,  “Kill them before they kill you” (623).  This is a child that the enemy says could be a potential terrorist; they say in Lebanon you should kill the children because they’re the ones who’ll kill (623).  The child in the picture is lost.  The real child who suffers is lost in a bungled list of population reports and military strategy.

But how can you justify that kind of statement when you look at this photograph – or any of the photographs in the After the Last Sky?  What kind of sloughing off of humanity do you have to do until you reach the point of disregard for human life?  Is the point of no return when you can believe that “there are no Palestinians” (623)?  Insert any group here for “Palestinian”.  When you can strip the Palestinians of identity like, “Non-Jews. Terrorists. Troublemakers. DPs. Refugees.  Names on a card.  Numbers on a list” (624)?  It seems to me, once you strip a people of their sense of place and identity you can then place upon them labels sufficient to your own cause.  The Palestinians have nowhere to call Palestine, no stable place to call home (although there has been an attempt by Palestinians like Said to refer to this disposed land as Israel/Palestine).  The boy in Mohr’s photograph, ill-fitted in his American style t-shirt – what is he thinking?  What is he trying to tell the observer?  What can be read in his face?  If anything?

Jean Mohr, photographer

He is similar to another boy who appears later on in the book.  This time a young villager is peering into the window of an Israeli officer in Kalandia, near Ramallah in 1967 (640).  In a series of photographs by Mohr that illustrate the juxtaposition of two worlds: one Israeli and the other Palestinian, in this one he captures another Palestinian boy caught by the photographer peeking into the quotidian life of the conqueror’s den.  The photographer is taking the photograph from the inside capturing the child looking inside.  The soldier is oblivious to the child and lost in thought (640). The Israeli officer has one hand on his chin and the villager has one hand on the windowpane, a look of shy curiosity imbued in his eyes. He has been caught by the gaze of the camera and looks downward just enough to give himself away as the forgotten one.

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Movie Review: Imaginary Heroes (2004)

In this blog post, I write a movie review about the angsty indie film Imaginary Heroes starring Emile Hirsch.

Emile Hirsch is an actor in Dan Harris's film Imaginary Heroes

It may seem redundant that there is another film out there about the dark underbelly of suburbia, but Dan Harris (who wrote and directed the film at the age of 24) proves that you cannot get too much of a good thing with the independent film, Imaginary Heroes.

Poem: "Lessons"

While he slept I peeked my head through the doorway and
noticed that he was sleeping with his glasses on

so I gingerly removed the spectacles from his face,
so he wouldn’t roll over in his sleep and crush the glass,

so better save him now, while I can,
similar to the bike ride earlier that day

when I tried to save him from his cold dash into the night and he consoled me,
indicating the efficacy of street lights and the

apparent paucity of vehicular traffic −
and I remember sighing a huge breath of relief because it didn’t seem to matter

anymore that the sun was sinking into the river, drowning away
like a melting orangcicle,
bodies bobbing on the surface of its tan waves, white foam froth

foaming at its Cerberus mouth −
that’s the mississippi for ya −

and we raced the rest of the way back
and I masked my anger that he had won;

I placed his glasses on the night stand,
retracing my steps back to the guest room to gather my stuff,

wondering if I should have just let his glasses dangle there on his face, wondering if in the morning he would be bitter that I

foolishly sought to save him
again,

or would he forget

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Greig Roselli © 2005

Poem: "Bobby"

Bobby was bigger, but only by a few inches; in a fight, he always toppled me
effortlessly to the ground
with a swift kick of his Keds, a warm thud: undulated by the trampoline’s
attraction to the center of things.  Bobby snarled like an innocent kid on crack as he stood over me, his hair almost falling into my face —
then laughing, jumping into the air,
landing on my belly
laughing —
again

I was angry by this
invasion after school with something I could only guess was
fucked up camaraderie,
his cat calls of queer only adding to the sting of the taut tarpaulin,
the weight of Bobby,
my own inability to stand on my own two feet, the feeling of
discontinuous motion,
too fueled with raw gut to understand what he meant when
he pushed his weight on my stomach,
his Abercrombie jeans against my ribs.

If there was intimacy,
it was only for a moment —
and even then,
I surmise,
illusory
for
he took my head
back to the grainy tarp, my face a contorted red mash:

His suck-my-dick mantra seemed a distorted fraternal gesture,
an initiation into the world of men,
inverted love and affection parading,
threatening to undo me —
pinning me in a corner,
giving me a cruel chance to

not verily “men loving men”
as I would read about later —
when I got older —
not a continuum —
but fractured fraternity,
violent; 

And he would
clap my back after we fought
as if it was a ritual of friendship.

as if the previous humiliation was nothing, really, as if I had nothing to be ashamed about — any feelings I might have had were none at this moment because Bobby was kind
and generous.

You did okay for a pansy.  Really.
Can I borrow X-Men?

I would say “sure” and “okay” like a monk at chant.
“They’re in my room”.

But, he was my friend.

Bobby in his white cotton v-neck Fruit of the Looms
and Abercrombie jeans,
wiry blonde hair —
(he didn’t sleep; red circles around his eyes)
would
graciously accept my comic books
as a token of some sort,
a secret pact between us —
and he would bring them back,
in their plastic slipcases,
as if he knew they were precious to me,
punching my chest with a cordial
fuckface,
not too distant from my mother’s call
to come to dinner.

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