The Northman - Glory In Pointless Death
Thoughts On: The Northman (2022)
A lost king seeks revenge for the murder of his father.
Conjuring a powerful vision of archetypal masculinity, The Northman is a mystic breath of fire. Its story puts love and hatred in triumphant counterpoint, its main character - Amleth - holding his hatred and desire for revenge above his compassion to death. He is himself a beast, built into a monstrous weapon through battle and rape, always with the call within him to be the man his blood set him to be: a demon wolf king. Robert Eggers' capturing of his growth in shadow, his becoming into a dark spirit who tortures and then goes to war with his uncle, is beyond epic. The framing of his story is so pristine, it has one jealous of the misery of Amleth's existence.
The last film I wrote about was Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes. I synchronistically felt the urge to re-watch The Northman; The Red Shoes and it are very similar stories. In each, a character is drawn to ragnarok; their destined death. And in each, they die in symbolic glory, as questionable as it may be. That is to say that both tragic characters die for no good reason; but that reason is theirs nonetheless. Amleth's father dies because his wife and brother betray him. He takes the sword in triumph; his life wasted to evil having produced a kingdom and son of hate and vile strength. His burp and his son's fart makes them kings; men above dogs. I love their vision of the world. They order themselves in alignment with the animalism that births their consciousness, ascending beyond mere dogs with honourable hatred and destruction. To perform their most base inclinations of violence and protection on the scale of grand familial lineage is therefore their marker and metric of ancestral success.
The most poignant aspect of The Northman is its presentation of the perfected, glorious death. Amleth fulfils his destiny by killing his uncle finally, and does so before his family is established and the woman he meets gives birth, we assume, to his child. His failure here mirrors his father's, defeated by his brother, losing his kingdom and family to him. Yet there is success, too, in the realisation of his destiny. As mentioned, like the Red Shoes kill Victoria Page having brought her fame while denying her love, so does Amleth die in a confused state. The deaths, nonetheless, crystalise these characters. Though their stories are ended soon and abruptly, they end in a moment of triumph. The deaths feel pointless, yet the life before them is momentarily fulfilled; their end a fall during ascension that grants them access to heaven - their bodies carried the last leg of the journey that they could not make by angels of war. And such completes the mindlessly brilliant vision of masculinity in this film, one celebrated in Valhöll or Valhalla. It asserts above all else that our journey towards our highest self is completed posthumously by the gods we impress, and therefore gives great guidance on how one should live their life.
