Camus suggested that there was only one worthy question in all of philosophy – should one kill himself. In pondering this and in fleshing out his philosophy of the absurd he channels an ancient story, that of Sisyphus who is doomed by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it slip and return to rest at the bottom on the verge of his reaching the top. If Sisyphus, in Camus’ conception, believes that this time he will succeed in displacing the boulder, then he is damned. If he recognizes from the outset that his task is futile, then he is damned. This is the absurd predicament in which Camus suggests we all find ourselves – creatures desiring of meaning but finding our existence bereft of it, having been denied true purpose by gods or fate.

Here we find another ancient story, one that we might casually write off as being preoccupied with chivalric courage and the premodern creation of a cult of honor. That’s what my high school English teacher told me anyways. But in Lowery’s retelling of this medieval romance, we find something closer to Camus than to Mallory, or to Chaucer. Gawain is being pressured to grow up. By his mother. By his king. Youthful lust, a wandering spirit, and a lack of conviction keep him from assuming his seat at Arthur’s table. But forces from without, spells and admonitions, will compel Gawain to abandon his own preoccupations and pursue the only currency that matters in his world, honor.

Gawain believes that he is achieving some measure of honor when he accepts the Knight’s challenge. And again when he sets out on his quest. And again when he kneels, neck bared. The ambiguity of the film’s ending is whether or not he believes that it’s possible to get the stone to the top of the hill. Does he believe there is meaning in living an honorable life or is it a fiction that he must subscribe to? Should he let the axe fall?

Arthur is us, the audience. He prefers legends to truth. Before the Knight’s arrival he calls for “myths or cantos” as idle diversion. The round table and its knights have, in this telling, exerted honorable influence over the land, subjugating the Saxons and ravaging the countryside. This is Arthur’s acceptance of his purpose, stone and hill. Morgan/Morgause is a witch, fueled by patrimonial ambition. Winifred is a casualty of cruelty. The scavenger, an agent of it. This is the world from which Gawain has been sheltered and one he, in his quest, navigates in search of honor/purpose.

Now to the Green Knight. In dialogue I can’t recall faithfully, Alicia Vikander’s character explains the Knight and his relationship to the journey Gawain has undertaken. I paraphrase – green is what seeps in when red has faded. As we age, as our passions dull, as we compromise what it seems, in youth, natural to want in favor of those things that are determined for us to be worthy of our ardor, that is the Green Knight, coming to claim what is due.

Camus envisioned two versions of suicide. One – we let the axe fall and obliterate ourselves from a world that denies us something we so fervently desire. Two – we invent meaning where there is none. We go to church. We drink. We love simultaneously knowing and ignoring that oblivion awaits. That stone will just not reach the top. In the Owl Creek vignette, Gawain sees what accepting “honor” looks like. He becomes one of Arthur’s stories: powerful, tragic, and doomed like Arthur himself. On seeing this, he kneels before the Green Knight, ready to die, something the Green Knight either denies him or obliges. What the myth reveals is that it does not matter.

I think this is a film about being seduced by worlds: that of mothers, kings, spirits. Our paths are invariably ones from blue and yellow, when we exist as untested knights, towards the green, the natural diluting and blending of our nascent selves into shapes the world can comprehend and use. And red is absent entirely. It can only ever be the stuff of dream and fantasy as we await our end, all paths converging under the axe of the Green Knight.