I watched the 4K disk for The Northman last night. This was my first time watching it, and maybe the only time although it’s a well made, interesting film.
The 4K disk looks great. I’ve got an OLED TV which helps make everything look gorgeous to begin with. Visually speaking this film is really rich. The natural environment, the sea, and village life, set design, costuming, and makeup, etc, are all captured rather intensely. I listened via AirPods and the sound mixing seemed excellent.
To provide some context: I had accumulated a pile of blu rays, most of them 4K, with the majority being films hadn’t gotten to yet and few that I have intended to give a rewatch. I’ve been watching one per evening recently. The reason I mention all this is that many of these films prominently feature the human capacity for violence, cruelty, and even outright savagery and brutality to one’s fellow human being. This is the fourth film in a row where that’s been the case: Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut), The Revenant, Atomic Blonde, and now The Northman.
We all know that American cinema glorifies violence. Portraying violence creatively in film has become an art form almost in its own right. And I’ve always been a fan. But this recent run of films that go so hard and graphic with it is wearing me out.
I’m a little more than halfway through. The movies I watched thus far are Ben-hur (1959), One-eyed Jacks, Barry Lyndon, Watership Down, Chronicles of Riddick (director’s cut), Cloud Atlas, Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut), The Revenant, Atomic Blonde, The Northman. The remaining ones are Pacific Rim, The Woman King, The Last Emperor, Oppenheimer, Malcolm X, and Tenet.
The films I’ve enjoyed the most by far have been among the least violent ones: One-eyed Jacks, Barry Lyndon, and Cloud Atlas. Those movies have considerable violence too. But it’s not so extreme and in-your-face most of the time like the most recent ones I’ve watched. For those three it’s more like the violence simply punctuates the story.
In any event, the Northman is all about savagery. It does tell an interesting enough story about that though, I would say. The film made me care about the protagonist, a Viking prince who swears an oath to avenge his father’s murder. And I come to care about his mate as well, a peasant sorceress.
To the film’s credit, the human relationships in the story are given a fair degree of depth and complexity. But even so, everything in that social world is organized around the primitive animalistic instinct to control and dominate others—and the use of violence in the cruelest of ways to do that. Like that drive energy is relentless. Their shamanic and spiritual practices and beliefs, and the ancient Norse mythology, are essentially a means of attempting to harness it. The Vikings invented a belief system that warriors go to Valhalla if they die in battle to rationalize early death from that warring lifestyle.
An interesting theme in all of this is that the two women in the hero’s life, his mother and his bride, while obviously subjugated as women are also like puppet masters to the men. They too show a fierceness to achieve their goals, but they must use psychological manipulation to wield power.
Tonight as I continue through the pile of disks, I’m planning a double feature of two rewatches, Pacific Rim and The Woman King. That should give me a break from extreme violence.
I want to believe that the human species is working through the problem of finding a way to have shared social existence without violence at the core of it. To evolve past that. That we can become intelligent and mature enough to do that. Maybe the fact that we’re so heavily obsessed with it in this most powerful of shared art forms, cinema, reflects that.
Addendum: I forgot to add that there’s an interesting tension that occurred to me the next day. From the vantage of modern day western humanism this story is essentially a tragedy. The hero, Amleth, is so brainwashed by his culture, conditioned to bloodlust, and hellbent on revenge that he is unable to make a life for himself as his own person, taking freedom to choose what that will be. He has an opportunity to walk away with Olga, but he can’t. On the other hand, from the perspective of his own culture he dies a glorious and honorable death, fulfilling his destiny. That’s a bit difficult for us to relate in our present day culture.