Gawain’s choice of queen then signals Celtic dominance over the Saxons, whose suppression has allowed King Arthur’s kingdom to flourish. Gawain envisions himself casting aside his sex-worker lover, Essel (Alicia Vikander), after she gives birth to their biracial son, and marrying an ultra-pale Young Queen (Megan Tiernan) whose red hair evokes the Celtic color of Pre-Raphaelite tresses. In Gawain’s imaginative ruminations as the “bad king,” class, gender, race, and ethnicity intersect in complicated ways. These sequences, told in largely dialogue-free tableaux, turn out to be projections playing out in Gawain’s head, an alternate mythology and “reweirding” of the classic poem that creates space for contemplating the (non-white) otherness of The Green Knight itself. This is particularly clear in the culminating scenes when Gawain, upon the successful completion of his quest, rejects the role of the conquering colonizer-king after inheriting the crown from his white uncle, King Arthur (Sean Harris). The casting of Dev Patel as Gawain and Sarita Choudhury as his sorceress mother represents an obvious challenge to the myth of whiteness underlying the pallid Victorian English folklore tradition. David Lowery’s adaptation of The Green Knight is a film about a color that contains some intriguing if inchoate commentary on non-whiteness.
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