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The Kid Who Would Be King Proves King Arthur Will Always Return

This article is over 5 years old and may contain outdated information

How much does a story change as it wends through the centuries, long outliving its first tellers? Can its essence really remain the same when our understanding of it canā€™t possibly stay static?

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If you look back to the earliest versions of King Arthurā€™s story, you donā€™t necessarily see a kindly philosopher king concerned with righting wrongs. That version of the character comes to us on the other end of centuries of moral transformation that are tied inextricably to the identity of a nation and the divergent interpretations that some of its greatest writers brought to the tradition.

Itā€™s that transformation ā€” acknowledged as an essential part of what the story of Arthur even is ā€” that makes The Kid Who Would Be King more than just a nearly perfect fantasy movie. The film also argues for a new understanding of what the heroā€™s story means.

ā€œThere did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fish-hook with; but you didnā€™t seem to mind that, after a while, because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society like that.ā€ ā€“ Mark Twain describes the Knights of the Round Table in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurā€™s Court

The Kid Who Would Be King tells the story of Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), a regular 21st century boy living in the U.K. who is savvy to the past century of popular genre fiction and the trope of the destined hero of noble parentage whose ho-hum world is disrupted by a mystical calamity that can only be solved by assuming the mantle of destiny and waving around a magic sword. In the movieā€™s version of events, Arthurā€™s half-sister Morgana is defeated and imprisoned in the bowels of the earth, vowing to return ā€œwhen the people are leaderlessā€ and ā€œmenā€™s hearts are hollow.ā€ (I canā€™t imagine why conditions would be ripe for her return now, of all times.)

In a scene that will seem familiar, Alexā€™s schoolyard tormentors chase him into a construction site where he encounters a random sword. Heā€™s aware of how nuts it is to believe the thing is actually Excalibur, but his friend Bedders (Dean Chaumoo) is ready to drop everything and chase after adventure immediately. Before he knows whatā€™s going on, Alex is pursued by flaming skeleton knights and dragged into adventure by Merlin (alternatingly portrayed with straight-faced obliviousness by Patrick Stewart and Angus Imrie).

Alexā€™s mission is to get to Tintagel, defeat Morgana, and save the world, but in doing so he finds that the specific beats of the old legend donā€™t necessarily apply anymore. The ways in which they donā€™t are the more interesting parts of the story. Through tribulations and strife, Alex, Bedders and their two erstwhile bullies, Lance and Kaye, travel across England while being pursued by Morganaā€™s evil agents. Then comes the revelation that Alex couldnā€™t have seen coming: His mysteriously absent father wasnā€™t some long lost scion of the Pendragon bloodline. Alex is nobody and has no special claim to anything. If heā€™s not the descendant of the king, whatā€™s left?

ā€œAnd do you know another thing, Arthur? Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds.ā€ā€” Merlin in The Once and Future King by T.H. White

Thomas Malloryā€™s Le Morte dā€™Arthur, one of the most definitive versions of the story, was written during the War of the Roses and is about a conqueror looking to end a chaotic time in the country through martial unity. Centuries later, in a united England where the monarchy was beginning to fall out of power, authors had to grapple with that part of Arthurā€™s legacy. If Arthur doesnā€™t symbolize a united monarchy after vicious civil war, whatā€™s left?

Victorian author Alfred Tennyson portrayed him as a figure of hope and civilization in the midst of barbarism. In Idylls of the King, he describes Arthurā€™s court at Camelot as decorated with statues depicting four stages of civilization: beasts slaying men, men slaying beasts, perfect warriors and finally ā€œmen with growing wings.ā€ For Tennyson, Arthur represented progress away from a brutal time and towards era of gentility. Itā€™s a convenient view to take as England sat atop a global empire that brutalized indigenous populations on every continent. Mark Twain certainly thought as much as he made a completely different argument in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurā€™s Court, the absurdist masterpiece that angrily uses a humanist lens to attack monarchy, religion, and romantic heroism as terrible ideas that prop up unworthy men at the expense of everyone else.

If Arthurā€™s crown or his ā€œcivilizingā€ influence no longer serve as a symbol of legitimacy, whatā€™s left?

In answer, T.H. Whiteā€™s The Once and Future King explicitly Ā inverted the reasoning behind Malloryā€™s. Written in the shadow of World War II, The Once and Future Kingā€™s wars of unification are bloody, muddled, racist affairs motivated by centuries-old animosities. Borders and nations are imaginary, vestigial constructs from a time when might made right ā€” a time Arthur must bring to an end. Heā€™s not equal to the task in this life, but heā€™ll return.

The Kid Who Would Be Kingā€™s fake-out ending, where Alex and his fellow knights dispatch Morgana on their own, would be the perfect way to end it if it were an older story, one in which victory is just about killing the other guy with your awesome sword. Alex quickly finds that isnā€™t the case, and that he must rally his entire school to stomp Morgana hard enough that it sticks. Then they all presumably grow up to vote against Brexit. Alex may not be the scion of a storied bloodline, but heā€™s worthy of taking up Arthurā€™s mantle. As Merlin says in the film, what stories claim is true depends entirely on who is telling them and how it serves them.

We are the ones who tell Arthurā€™s story, and he is whatever we need him to be, whenever we need him to be it. Like the hero himself, the story is always destined to return.


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Kenneth Lowe
Kenneth Lowe works in state government in Illinois. He also contributes to Paste Magazine and blogs at gailybedight.com.