Many are the days I marvel at the astonishing complexity of human intelligence. Then someone releases another Robin Hood movie, and I have doubts.
This week, I attended a preview of Robin Hood, a fast, nasty addition to the archer's oeuvre starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett and directed by Ridley Scott. The theatre was packed with fans, some of whom looked like they hadn't washed since the Middle Ages.
A radio announcer warmed things up by calling for Robin Hood battle cries. The winner was a pasty youth who shouted "Freedom!" Everyone cheered.
Next, cue a two-and-a-half-hour oohfest packed with historical inaccuracies, improbable romances, genocidal Frenchmen, incomprehensible Yorkshiremen, boilerplate bombast, seizure-inducing battle scenes and arrows deadlier, apparently, than Hellfire missiles.
I enjoyed every minute. Not that I had any choice in the matter. The tale has an irrational hold on our collective unconscious.
The new Robin Hood, for instance, turns out to be the perfect movie to watch if you're living through a head-sucking recession created by irresponsible troughers on Wall Street.
At the end, Russell/Robin unfletches a last, long arrow that improbably but inevitably impales the fleeing, shaven-headed traitor Godfrey through the back of the neck. Who does Godfrey resemble? Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs. When the woman two seats down emitted a loud hiss of satisfaction, I was with her.
Corny as it is - tricky man in green tights defeats all oppressors! - the Robin Hood story speaks to people. There are international Robin Hood conferences (held in Nottingham, natch), tours, video games, novels, non-fiction, movies, TV series and BBC specials. The story has been retold every which way since it first was heard in ballads eight centuries ago.
Each generation brings its own needs to the story: Medieval Robin was a womanless tough. Renaissance tellers gentrified him. More recently, according to Stephen Knight of the University of Wales, Robin Hood has been depicted as a Saxon freedom fighter and environmentalist (he lives in the woods, remember). He is a man for all reasons. Mr. Scott's blowout refers to unfair taxation (hark! Tea Party!) and the futility of trying to defeat Muslim hordes.
Asked last week in Cannes whom he thought Robin might be today, Russell Crowe replied, "He'd be looking at the monopolization of the media." (Lucky for him, Mr. Crowe looks good with his shirt off.)
Prof. Knight himself caused an international sensation when he suggested, in a paper called The Forest Queen, that Robin Hood was gay - given that he spends most of his time thrusting and parrying with strapping fellows under shady cover of greenwood, and is seldom depicted having intercourse with Marian (which remains true in the Scott epic as well, unless I missed something). Robin is everyone's all-time, go-to, anti-establishment fantasy: He doesn't live by the prescribed rules, whatever they may be.
We're always looking for figureheads like that. Tiger Woods and Eliot Spitzer worked until the hookers came along. But changeling Robin never fails us. The 1938 so-called classic The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, is in fact idiotic: Whenever Robin finds himself in a tight spot - taking on a hundred members of the English army at once, indoors - he chest-bumps his opponents, rendering them useless.
Watching Errol flynn-and-flit-about like Peter Pan on an overdose of Ritalin, you have to wonder how anyone ever watched it. Perhaps it was for reasons they didn't want to understand, given that in 1938, Nazis were then taking over the fort in Germany.
We like Robin Hood best when we know better. The Prince of Thieves, starring (a misuse of the word) Kevin Costner, may be the worst picture ever made, never mind the worst Robin Hood movie. Mr. Costner seems to be on laughing gas. He tries on his "English" accent, abandons it and then picks it up again, radically changed, within single sentences. (Mel Brooks made a parody, Men in Tights.)
And yet in a poll conducted this week by movietickets.com, who was named our favourite movie Robin Hood? Yes, the mutable Mr. Costner. Beefy Sean Connery ranked lowest. Maybe Robin is gay. Or at least we want him to be indeterminate.
That's apt, since, alas, he may never have existed. Academics have been arguing it for 200 years. Details are murky: He's variously depicted as a commoner, a yeoman or a nobleman in 14th-, 15th- and 16th-century ballads, in at least three different locations in northern England, and under the names Rob or Robert Hood, Wood, Whood, Hod, Hude and Hobbehod.
Francis Child, the first scholar to gather up the ballads in a systematic way, insisted the man in the green hat was a "creation of the ballad muse." He's a remnant of our earliest idealism.
At best, he was an amalgam of many people, like Jesus Christ. But unlike namby-pamby Jesus, Robin never turns his other cheek. No, he exacts revenge, instantly and at arrow point. In a world where terrorists justify the killing of innocents by saying imperialism made them do it, he's a satisfying guy to have around.
I predict Mr. Scott's movie will be a massive hit. I mean, look at the world: A broken well is filling the ocean with oil and no one can stop it. The stock market bucks and rips 1,000 points in three minutes and no one knows why. A credit meltdown threatens to sink Europe, but the geniuses who caused it are still making millions. I won't mention Iran, Israel, Ottawa or that global-warming thing.
Meanwhile, a woman reasonably nominated for a place on the U.S. Supreme Court is accused of being, horror of horrors, a lesbian.
Who better to address such injustices than a hero who will be whatever you want him to be? Too bad he's a fantasy.
Ian Brown