[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for The Green Knight.]
At the climax of The Green Knight, Gawain (Dev Patel) finally reaches the Green Chapel where, one year after his confrontation with the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), he has come to meet the Knight again, which Gawain believes will mean his death. Although he wears a sash he received from The Lay (Alicia Vikander), which is supposed to protect him from all injury, he is still afraid of receiving a blow that would sever his head from his shoulders. At first he flinches, then he tells the Green Knight to wait, and then he flees.
The story then goes in a new direction. We receive a title card reading “The Voyage Home”, and we see Gawain return to Camelot where no one knows the truth of his cowardice. He is received warmly by his uncle, King Arthur (Sean Harris), and is made a knight. When Arthur dies, Gawain assumes the throne. Although he conceived a child with Essel (Vikander), the son is taken from her to be raised in the palace. Gawain goes on to wed another woman who, unlike Essel, is a Lady, and they also have a child. Gawain’s son grows up, fights in battle, and dies. The kingdom is eventually attacked. Although Gawain had all he thought he wanted—the crown, the kingdom, a respectable family—it all comes crashing down anyway. As soldiers breach the inner sanctum, he removes the sash from his waist, his head detaches from his shoulders, and he dies.
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We then return to the Green Chapel where Gawain once again tells the Green Knight to wait. Gawain then removes the sash, and tells the Knight he is ready. The Green Knight smiles, drags his finger across Gawain’s neck, and says the game is finished.
What are we to make of this? Writer-director David Lowery has pulled a similar narrative device to 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ where Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is on the cross and then avoids his death and lives out his days only to come back to the cross and we see that was his “last temptation”—a vision of a normal life rather than one where he has to die. Similarly, this is the Last Temptation of Gawain. Throughout the film, Gawain has been beset with temptations, and he usually falls for them to his detriment like when he takes the easy advice from the scavenger (Barry Keoghan) or receives the sash from The Lay. It’s only when he chooses to be brave and give of himself, like when he retrieves the skull from the lake for Winifred (Erin Kellyman) that he’s rewarded and gets the axe back.
But Gawain’s confrontation with the Green Knight represents his greatest temptation, and the scenes we see unfold are a life lived without honor. On the one hand, Gawain gets to live, and more than that, he gets pretty much everything he wanted. But what Lowery is showing us here is that since death (represented by the Green Knight) comes to us all, then all that is really in our power is how to meet it. If we were given a magical sash that would allow us to cheat death, that wouldn’t inherently make our lives any better. On the contrary, we see Gawain live a dishonorable life as he snatches his child from Essel, leaves her to her fate, and then that child dies in one of his father’s battles (which represent Gawain’s ongoing quest for glory that he can never truly attain). And that quest for glory leads back to the grave where Gawain loses everything anyway. Faced with this choice, Gawain chooses to live honorably. He accepts that there’s really no cheating death, and he must face death with honor because that’s what gives life it’s meaning.
From there, it doesn’t really matter if the Green Knight kills Gawain or lets him go. Gawain has proven himself. He has lived with honor, and the ending of the film shows us that since death is inevitable, we may as well do the same.
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