Why culture is in the grip of a medieval revival

At the conclusion of Alex Garland’s new film, Men, Jessie Buckley is confronted by the naked stalker who has been following her throughout the film, and who is now deep in the process of transforming into the mythic figure of the Green Man. He is played, like all the men in this film bar one, by Rory Kinnear. He howls in fear and pain, buckles over, sprouts sylvan vegetation from his face, grows a vagina and gives birth to a succession of the other Rory Kinnears we have been introduced to throughout the film, in his various roles as lairy village youth, creepy local priest, landed gentry and jobsworth policeman.

The Green Man is one of those ubiquitous figures who spans pagan and Christian mythologies: an ancient symbol of the natural cycles of death and rebirth, part human, part tree, equally at home functioning as a rustic quasi-Jesus, a folkish ostentation of the Gothic Revival, or, later, as a frippery of agrarian prog rock of the likes of Jethro Tull.

Men is an odd film, messy and not altogether successful: part small-town folk horror à la Wicker Man, part post-pandemic exploration of loneliness, part meditation on grief and guilt, part critique of the patriarchy. But in its trippier moments it is indicative of a wider trend in cinema and literature, one that blends together aspects of the medieval and its aesthetics with the revelatory sublime of the psychedelic (although often resembling a bad trip rather than a good one).

Some of this aesthetic can be traced back to 2019’s Midsommar, which combined the taking of actual psychedelic drugs with obscure pagan rituals and the generic plot structures of slasher films. Men picks up Midsommar‘s thematic baton and transposes it into the twee violence of English village life and its own esoteric rituals. Alongside Men there has been the reappearance of the Green Man in last year’s The Green Knight, and the hallucinatory Icelandic brutality of The Northman, which imagined Viking life as one long revenge trip, and also, most enticingly, Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, set in a small village in medieval eastern Europe, and a radicalish departure for a writer better known for documenting the apathetic vacuousness of New York social life.

These works are uneasy and odd, full of fear and wonder; time expands and shrinks, faces reappear attached to different personas, plots congeal around half-baked, superficial, cryptic symbolism. The general ambience is of the psychedelic as an exploration of the unconscious and subconscious, but it is rendered through the visually hallucinatory, the uncanny, and the supra-sensual.

A parallel is easy to draw with a little imagination: in the Middle Ages, so much was left not understood that superstition, religion and mysticism filled the gap. Now, as so much is understood, we seek to find new ‘gaps’, new moments of the sublime. Add to that our current political- social-environmental situation: pandemics, repressions, neoliberal feudalism, climate apocalypse, obscure wars fought over nothing much, nihilistic competitions between asceticism and hedonism, wellness and debauchery… and you can see why the Middle Ages are beckoning.

As today’s medieval revivalism flows from our current political and social upheavals, it’s also the consequence of, and refracted through, our living in an age of visual shallowness: our lives are mainly flat scrolls of infinite images. We work, live and document our lives in the same small rectangle, and so depth is rooted out from other places. The New York post-left flirts with hardcore Catholicism. We build cults online in the forms of performative Twitter Maoism, unhealthy addictions to BTS or Nicki Minaj or Rise and Grind capitalism. Others just dream of getting off the intense wheel of life and slipping into monkish hermeticism.

We’re sharing memes of Hieronymus Bosch paintings with captions like: ‘Tag yourself, I’m the guy in the primordial soup being sneezed on by a giant eyeless human with an owl and a monkey sprouting from his head’. We’re putting increasingly strange commands into AI generators to create fantastical images and strange short stories. All the cool artists are making representational and iconographic paintings in pre-Renaissance flat perspectives, and working at the whims of oligarch patrons. Every other meme account on Twitter feels as if it documents increasingly baroque, out of context and accidental violence enacted upon unsuspecting members of the public.

Or we are getting freaked out on increasingly recherché forms of psychedelic drugs, licking frogs in Surrey communes and squeezing large drops of refined Psilocybin oil into our mouths at Goblin-themed hard techno raves deep in the woods. Which is all to say that even the most cursory aesthetic output of this moment reveals the brutal, fantastic and surreal nature of everyday life. Which is quite medieval.

The Green Knight and The Northman are the most exemplary iterations of this trend. They are cinematic adaptations of centuries-old texts, rooted in our collective mythic histories and full of pointless violence and magnificent beauty. Part of their inherent trippiness comes from the disconnect between using these ancient fables as source material and the need for some psychological realism in modern streaming cinema (anything too complex or nonlinear and the average viewer is probably back to scrolling Instagram).

The most psychedelic moments of The Green Knight come from the translation of that fabular structure – this is a story about honour and chivalry and living with Christian goodness – into an extended dream sequence, where Gawain’s life flashes before his eyes as he is tested by the titular Green Knight. In the dream he fails the test and lives life as an unloved and unhappy king, before the dream retracts back to the current moment, and Gawain awakens with a resolution and resolve and understanding, a feeling common to anyone who has spent a drug-induced evening at the frontier of consciousness where meaning breaks down.

The Northman, based on the story of Amleth, is a kind of anti-Hamlet, swapping Hamlet’s existentialism for a brutal evocation of revenge, revealed through visions, hallucinogenic drugs, witches, omens, prophecies, dreams. There is lots of superficial pain and suffering and violence and mental torment, but little investigation.

All these works want to impart some moral, but are also afraid of that moral, or cannot find a way to make that moral feel modern. Moshfegh’s Lapvona is slightly different, in that it rejects the fabular as a vehicle for moralising and instead resembles the obsessive bodily strangeness of Bosch. The psychedelic revelations are given over to a space occupied by the unknowable mystical whimsy of a God that the characters struggle to interpret. It is the least epic of the three. Focusing on punishment, disability, grossness, sex, perverted desires, injustice, subservience, it is full of shit and blood, breastmilk and vomit, incest and death, transformation and degradation. And it is the things these characters don’t understand that provide the trippiness.

Which is partly why the medieval is in vogue at the moment. The centres of power feel as strange to us as they probably did to those of the Middle Ages – distant and god-like, and it’s easy enough to feel that we have as much control over the forces that dominate our lives as medieval serfs did. All the while strange illnesses and roaring fires sweep across civilisation, the space between life and death reduced to a flimsy minimum.

These films and novels are just as subtle as that historical comparison. Which I think may also be the point: we don’t live in particularly subtle times. Fable and myth are attractive to us because of their unsubtleties, reducing the beautiful and terrible complexity of life to moral simplicities, with trippiness used to fill the gap between the two.