I was watching the old Robin Hood movie, the one with Kevin Costner and that iconic Bryan Adams ballad. Much of the film is what, to a contemporary audience might seem ‘cute’ or in less charitable terms, ‘cringe’.
There was one scene though, which I found striking. [You can watch the scene here, if you like, before proceeding to the rest of this post. Or just watch the scene, for what are these interpretations worth anyway :)]
Little John’s wife, Fanny is in labor. The good Friar Tuck has tried his best, but the baby doesn’t come. Fanny is in pain. Enter the Moor, Azeem (played by Morgan Freeman) who has bound himself by a vow to Robin following their escape from the Holy Lands during Richard’s 3rd crusade. The Christian Friar is visibly upset by the presence of the Muslim heathen. But Azeem seems to know his stuff. If we don’t act now, we will lose Fanny…. and the child, he says. The Friar continues to remonstrate.
Fanny’s husband John is sent out of the hut. His elder son keeps guard, refusing to let even his father enter, as Azeem tries to deliver Fanny’s child. There is some suggestion that ‘the barbarian’ Azeem, who brings technical know-how to pre-enlightenment England, is performing a surgical procedure, for he asks for a ‘needle’ to be fethed. ‘I have seen this done on horses’, he confides to Robin Hood, as comedy eases the tension of the scene.
Fanny’s loud cries are heard outside the hut. The heathen will kill her, declares the Friar Tuck. John is trying to break into the hut. I was half expecting the scene to reach a climax, with the cry of a baby, and there it was right on cue.
I was however, expecting the scene to then cut to the death of Fanny. The child lives, the mother dies; sadness and hope. But this was not to be. One of the nurses puts the young babe in the hands of its mother, who lives.
Why did I expect the mother to die?
My presumption is that most contemporary netflix-regulars would have also expected the mother to die, and for the child to live. Something about such a turn of events suggests a sense of ‘realism’ which clearly, the Robin Hood film of ’91 has no interest in. Indeed, a few other shows I had watched recently, ended precisely in this way, with the death of the mother and the child surviving, or with both of them dying.
How has this ‘realism’ come to be normalised?
Maybe the sequence that follows the child-birth scene has some clues. The Friar is distraught, but then with a ruddy smile, he shakes Azeem’s hand, and says he has been taught humility by his God. The Christian Friar, and the Muslim Azeem then, proceed to the celebrations, arms linked. In one scene, the ethnophobia of the Christian has dissipated. He is a changed man.
To a binge watcher from the 21st century, this sudden change of heart on the Friar’s part, may seem as—if not more incredulous—than the mother and child surviving their ordeal. Surely, people don’t change! Surely, haters gonn hate!
It is my feeling that such a scene was possible in the decade of the 90s but is impossible to write and shoot today, for the fog of hope has now lifted, and under our 21st century century gaze, the miracle has now to scuttle under the sneer of a cynical realism.
Should the 21st century be faulted for this ‘negative’ view of the world? Or perhaps, were the seeds of this cynicism sown in the blind optimism of the 90s that ignored much that was in front of the eyes, an optimism that led many of my generation to say of the future, like Azeem catching first sight of the magical Sherwood forest, “In my dreams alone have I imagined such a place”?
screenshxt 