Confess Your Crimes in Sand and Blood

Eric Jager, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial By Combat

One rainy afternoon in January 1386, a crime transpired in the undefended castle overlooking the sleepy French hamlet of Capomesnil. Exactly what happened, and why, jeopardized the French legal system. Jean de Carrouges, a knight with a reputation for stroppy behavior and no aptitude for court intrigue, claimed his rival invaded his mother’s nearly abandoned château and savaged his wife. The rival, Jacques le Gris, a talented courtier and squire, denied everything.

UCLA medievalist Eric Jager stumbled upon the Carrouges casewhile researching another project. It struck his imagination because Carrouges’ accusations against le Gris escalated into violence. Not Red Wedding-ish violence that pulls audiences into mass media, but France’s sluggish late-medieval justice system. Carrouges, a minor aristocrat himself, believed his feudal liege ignored the crime for reasons of court politics, and appealed for a rare option: a “judicial duel.”

Jager reconstructs the events preceding this exceptional outcome—which would, though nobody knew this then, be the last trial by combat authorized by the French monarch. He also provides a guided tour through a distant nation that, if any ever has, deserves the name “foreign.” Though Jager name-checks places you could visit today, like Paris, Bordeaux, and England, the standards and traditions circumscribing everyday life differ wildly from ours.

Jean de Carrouges was an accomplished warrior, descended from accomplished warriors, amid the interminable slog of the Hundred Years’ War; he was knighted for distinguished combat services. But he proved a lousy courtier, ill-suited for house politics and prestation. Carrouges ascended quickly through the court of Count Pierre of Alençon, then fell equally quickly. His easily bruised honor required frequent satisfaction, and he burned bridges faster than he built them.

Jacques le Gris lacked Carrouges’ pedigree, but proved more adept at court politics. He and Carrouges began as allies, but as le Gris out-earned Count Pierre’s favor, Carrouges felt himself slighted. The two squires (before Carrouges’ knighthood) intermittently fought and reconciled. But by early 1386, Carrouges discovered his newly-minted knighthood meant nothing at court, and the courtiers found themselves irreconcilable. LeGris swore revenge on Carrouges’ household, and targeted his wife.

Eric Jager, Ph.D.

Reading this book, it’s impossible to miss how Carrouges’ world differs from ours. The government received its power from inheritances, not merit, and lesser courtiers received advancement based on personal connections, not competence or hard work. (Okay, maybe not so different from ours.) Because King Charles VI supposedly received his crown directly from God, “justice” meant whatever dribbled from the king’s lips, which immediately became holy writ.

Carrouges’ world turns on two liabilities: war and distance. Kings fight other kings, not to achieve any advantage, but because it’s what they do. Lesser nobles gain whatever limited fraction of power they possess by furthering that goal. Meanwhile, before motor vehicles and mass transportation, distances were truly huge. Twenty miles is an arduous overland slog which, depending on weather, requires a commitment of days; even light war requires months.

Therefore, Carrouges’ decision to appeal his lawsuit to Paris is no small obligation. But rape, it seems, was no small accusation, either. Despite the recent trend in “grimdark” medieval fantasy pitching rape as banal in feudal society, Jager notes that it remained a capital offense, at least among the nobility. Violating a titled lady’s virtue jeopardized the assurity of legitimate offspring, which threatened the entire system of male agnatic primogeniture.

Feudal hierarchies, in Jager’s telling, appear remarkably brittle. The state remains stable only while lords and vassals accept their place in the hierarchy and serve the aristocratic state. Therefore, whatever happened in Capomesnil in 1386 threatened the entire social order, since someone transgressed their roles. This is the archetypal “he-said, she-said” case, as nobody but le Gris and Lady Carrouges (and le Gris’ man) saw what actually happened.

When logical arguments fail, two trained warriors resolve their differences with weapons. But again, in defiance of paperback fiction, this is hardly an outburst of premodern savagery. A judicial duel required ceremony and strictures that make today’s courtrooms seem loosey-goosey. When we discuss modern courtrooms as “level playing fields,” we copy the rules of the dueling ground, tightly controlled to ensure nobody but God granted either combatant an advantage.

History records who, exactly, won this duel (though Jager plays coy). What matters more, in Jager’s telling, is reconstructing the world in which this event occurred, a world where invested noblemen believed their battles bespoke God’s favor, and might literally made right. A world where justice is both necessary, and costly. A world violently different from, yet also surprisingly much like, our own world.

Life In These “United” States

The Texas State Capitol, in Austin

Texas is threatening to secede from the Union, because that worked so well the first time; and countless progressive Americans are laughing. Interesting how they didn’t laugh so loudly during the Trump Administration, when Left Coast progressives threatened to enact “Cal-exit,” or California seceding from the union. It’s almost like, whatever party controls the White House, states controlled by the other party want to leave the country altogether.

California is considered so staunchly Democratic, and Texas such a Republican bastion, that journalists regularly call both states’ Presidential outcomes before any voting precincts report in. Yet both states consistently split by less than ten points. If Texas seceded to mollify conservatives, millions of progressives would find themselves foreigners in their own nation. The reverse applies in California. Therefore, even if secession were possible, it would be wildly impractical.

I’ve written before that America’s state lines are dangerous and make little sense. Drawn entirely in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, these divisions have become liabilities in the 21^st Century. Growing populations, changing demographics, and advanced technology have packed dense numbers into absurdly small spaces, while massive acreages go unused. It’s become de rigeur to moan that tiny, sparsely populated Wyoming has the same Senate representation as massive California.

Except, I’ve recently realized there’s an additional wrinkle. Wyoming, the least populous state in the 2020 Census, is more populous than the second-most populous state in the 1790 Census, Pennsylvania. Wyoming, sometimes derided as tiny, might’ve seemed crowded and buzzing to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Founding Fathers, mostly farmers (or more accurately, plantation owners), couldn’t have imagined our dense urbanization.

We call our nation “The United States of America” because the Founders envisioned a loose affiliation of independent political units. Americans often say “states” the way other countries say “provinces,” but in poli-sci parlance, a “state” is a top-level, independent polity with a central government, and the ability to write and enforce laws. In casual conversation, Americans describe such polities as “nations” or “countries,” also words with different formal definitions.

The "Sower" statue atop the Nebraska
capitol building reflects the state's
agricultural heritage

The Founders invested principal power in states, and considered the federal government only latterly, to enforce standardized trade and foreign policy. Even Thomas Jefferson, the third President, esteemed the federal government so lowly that he didn’t include his Presidency on his epitaph, which he wrote himself. This level of local autonomy turned sour, however, resulting in the Civil War. Afterward, the federal government began coordinating law and justice nationwide.

This prompts the question: do states with fixed borders and lawmaking authority even serve any purpose today? Even after the Civil War, states continued serving some legal function, since government acted at the speed of paper. The early telegraph and overland railroad expedited some government functions, sure. But in our digital age, where information blasts across the country and into our homes instantaneously, do we still need states?

Municipal and county governments remain useful. Local law enforcement can identify individual malefactors (pause briefly the question of whether we like the police), and local officials can make on-the-ground decisions about, say, road maintenance and urban development. But states, which merge multiple regions under one umbrella often built 150 years ago, have become battlegrounds for what forms of injustice we’ll willingly accept. That includes staunchly partisan states like mine.

Somebody might respond by stating that state governments coordinate regional and municipal governments. I answer: do they? Nebraska, where I live, is notorious for its chronically neglectful state government. The state capitol, Lincoln, frequently doesn’t care what happens in rural areas, or anything happening more than a two-hour drive away. The state government regularly disregards over half the state, focusing on the prestige-heavy Interstate 80 corridor in the eastern half.

If my state government disbanded tomorrow, it might take months before half a million Nebraskans cared, or even noticed. I’ve heard similar complaints, voiced informally, from residents of upstate New York, inland California, or the Tennessee mountains. States regularly abandon their poorest, least represented residents for the prestigious urban, industrialized regions. This abandonment often goes unreported, since media also ignores poor and rural people, but it definitely happens.

Disestablishing or reinventing state governments won’t magically fix ills, don’t misunderstand me. We’ll face massive conundrums, like how to apportion the Senate (or abandon it), and we’ll probably also have to revamp the Executive Branch. In the near term, abandoning state government will create as many problems as it solves. Yet we must reconsider, sooner rather than later, our 18^th Century government structure in our 21^st Century society.

And That’s No Moon Either

Charlie Hunnam (left), Michiel Huisman, and Sofia Boutella in Rebel Moon

The Netflix movie Rebel Moon Part One isn’t as terrible as online buzz might suggest. Let’s start with that controversial thesis. Please don’t mistake me, it isn’t timeless art: a cadre of reviewers, professional and amateur, have skewered the movie’s numerous weaknesses. Its blatant ripoff of Star Wars, for one, and its reliance on director Zack Snyder’s trademark fight choreography, intercut with abrupt breaks into silly slo-mo cartoonishness.

However, I’d like to avoid the obvious and manifold shortcomings, and spotlight one overlooked strength. Pre-release press coverage emphasized how Snyder initially pitched the screen treatment to Lucasfilm as a “more mature” take on Star Wars. He reworked his treatment as a standalone feature only after Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, passed. This made me cringe, because filmmakers frequently think “mature” is a synonym for “violent, hypersexual, and visually murky.”

American culture often treats children as twee and precious, incapable of handling life’s harder edges. Disney, of course, notoriously sanded all the sex, and most of the violence, off Grimms’ Fairy Tales in their feature-length animation. Children’s books, movies, and TV shows model chaste heterosexual romance, and only stylized violence, reducing war to ballet. European media does something similar, but not to the same degree.

This includes the original Star Wars. According to historian Garry Jenkins, Lucas modeled the original movie on 1930s Flash Gordon serials he watched on his parents’ black-and-white TV. His parents considered Flash Gordon acceptable viewing, because of its strong moral backbone, its clear division between heroes and villains, and no sex. (The episodes also broadcast out of sequence, which is why Lucas dubbed the first movie “Episode IV.”)

We’ve watched former child stars polish their adult bona fides by embracing sex, violence, and moral flimsiness. Countless former child stars, like Anne Hathaway or Lindsay Lohan, attempted to cleanly divide themselves from their childhood roles by appearing topless onscreen. Miley Cyrus’ live national meltdown continues to haunt her career even after she’s tried to atone. Achieving adulthood in mass-media culture means rejecting the preciousness of childhood.

Director Zack Snyder (promo photo)

Snyder attempts something similar in Rebel Moon. The movie’s protagonist, Kora (Sofia Boutella), is a battle-scarred veteran fleeing her past. She aspires to live in rural, agrarian simplicity, hiding from her former commanders, but she also rejects overtures of romance. She describes herself as too hurt to love; her words form a lament, but her tone is boastful. Her story dribbles out gradually, but basically, she enjoys being damaged.

Despite Kora’s best efforts, the war finds her. When the Imperium murders her village’s headman and leaves a garrison in the barn, Kora decides to run. But before completing her escape, she interrupts the hard-bitten local garrison attempting to sexually assault a young village maiden. (Rape, here mercifully averted, has become the go-to form of low-friction motivation for movie protagonists. It’s sloppy and low-hanging fruit, but audiences react strongly.)

Having tied her fortunes to the village, Kora accepts the responsibility for organizing the resistance. Here’s where the movie’s one redeeming quality emerges: Kora accepts help from villager Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Gunnar teases out the backstory Kora has concealed during her self-imposed exile, and in doing so, recognizes the injured orphan girl beneath her warrior-woman façade. The script treads lightly in admitting this, but Gunnar falls in love with Kora.

Gunnar is everything Kora wants to avoid being: generous, nurturing, and committed to his people and community. The more he uncovers Kora’s deep internal scars, the more he wants to relieve them. He’s impressed by her fighting skills, but they don’t define her. Instead, he sees her with levels of nuance and complexity which she has tried to reject, and in stray quiet moments, tries to steer her toward healing.

There we find this movie’s moral heart: one character accepts the most cynical possible interpretation of events, and even revels in them, while the other wants to nurture the whole heart, scars and all. Only fleetingly does Snyder admit this openly, but it lingers tacitly beneath the entire narrative. Though the surface-level story addresses the villagers’ resistance to Empire, the deeper story describes the tension between nurturance and violence.

Please understand, this movie isn’t good. Snyder borrows liberally from fifty years of blockbusters and B-movies to create a smorgasbord of reheated tropes. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but the movie doesn’t appear to be having much fun. If we pause these glaring objections, however, and look at the less-obvious moral themes, this movie has something going on. Hopefully Part Two will give it flesh.

Manufacturing Armageddon

This essay is a follow-up to two previous essays: The American Armageddon Factory and Another Product of the Armageddon Factory

Historian Betsy Hartmann’s book The America Syndrome identifies shared belief in imminent catastrophe as the underlying American public morality. From Puritan Christianity in the 17^th Century, to Utopian social engineering in the 19^th Century, to Global Warming in the 21^st Century, Americans have always believed the world will end tomorrow. Corollary to this belief, Americans—or anyway a subset of us—have always believed America will survive Armageddon.

Most important for Hartmann, this impending apocalypse always has a moral implication. This is obvious in Puritan Christianity, which believes a Triune God is preparing to distribute justice, in the form of payback to unbelievers. But even in the less aggressively religious 20^th and 21^st Centuries, this moralistic judgement never abates. The defining apocalypses of those eras (nuclear war, Malthusian overpopulation, and global warming) always reek somehow of karmic consequences.

Viewed thusly, the movie Leave the World Behind both does, and doesn’t, continue the “America Syndrome.” It similarly presents a secular present stretched to its limits, and a population that clothes its awareness of imminent collapse in a crazy quilt of misanthropy, denialism, and on-demand entertainment. This world requires only light pressure to snap. As Mahershala Ali explains in his culminating monologue, America has enemies willing to apply that pressure.

However, the movie lacks the moral component Hartmann identifies in prior apocalyptic predictions. Some characters attempt to retroactively construct an explanation which makes the events a payback for Americanism, but this is ramshackle and unconvincing. Ultimately, as Julia Roberts and Myha’la watch New York burn from across Long Island Sound, we’re left to conclude that sometimes, things happen because they happen; justifications are flimsy, selfish, and meaningless.

Thus far, I’ve attempted to avoid spoiling the movie’s irresolute resolution, like a faithful reviewer. But the movie’s closing three minutes color how we perceive everything that’s happened before. The story’s youngest character, 13-year-old Rosie, has abandoned the main house, where adults or near-adults squabble for control and explanation. The grown-ups want meaning; Rosie has spoken Delphicly about wanting something else, which she now pursues.

We find Rosie in a neighboring mansion, gorging herself on starchy processed snack foods and fizzy water. Hearing her mother’s panicked cries outside, Rosie instead flees deeper into the house, where she discovers a fully equipped luxury fallout shelter, including a massive home entertainment system. She activates the TV and scours the DVD racks to find the Holy Grail she’s pursued throughout the movie: the final episode of the sitcom Friends.

Rosie, the movie’s youngest character and therefore the one most definedly possessing a future, instead flees into a low-friction sitcom that ended nearly twenty years ago. In case the symbolism seems too subtle for streaming audiences, Myha’la’s character Ruth previously derided Friends as “nostalgia for a time that never really existed.” Facing the world-altering consequences of… well, something, Rosie flees from meaning and buries herself in mass-media anesthesia.

This movie’s moral backbone, to the extent it possesses one, certainly deserves criticism. It suggests that, deprived of our technology and entertainment, Americans will descend into base impulses, racism, and paranoia. Rather than moral payback, as Hartmann postulates, this movie suggests Armageddon will expose our near-complete moral vacuity. There’s no karmic retribution, this movie implies, when Americans don’t hold anything holy anymore anyway.

Yet as bad as this moral lesson is, the final takeaway, delivered by Rosie, feels worse. Given a blank slate to look forward and reinvent society on firmer moral footing, Rosie instead seeks resolution in a sitcom’s concise narrative arc. Not just any sitcom, either, but Friends. Sure, the show ended in 2005, during America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; but it began in 1995, the decade colored by America’s brightly-hued Cold War hangover.

Clear back in 2009, Mark Fisher wrote that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The pre-catastrophe world this movie depicts resembles ours: fashionably pessimistic but convinced we need one long family holiday to restore our morality. Yet we, like this movie, face an historical inflection point: some socioeconomic change must happen soon, or everything will break without a safety net.

But instead of moralistic challenge and opportunity, the defining traits of past apocalypses, this movie shrugs and retreats into nihilism. With no vision of the New Jerusalem, or something compatible, the creative team simply can’t imagine another future. Therefore, the narrative threads they introduce don’t deserve resolution. Everything is ultimately meaningless, and ordinary humans are too vacuous to deserve rescue.

Fuck it, let’s go watch TV.

Another Product of the Armageddon Factory

From left: Mahershala Ali, Myha’la, Jula Roberts, and Ethan Hawk

Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind is subdivided into six roughly equal parts by interstitial title cards, like TV episode titles. While many creators behind streaming “television” have tried to position their series as multi-episode movies, this film feels like a compressed treatment for a later TV serial. This comparison becomes extremely pointed by the indecisive cliffhanger ending which resolves nothing, as though punting to the next season.

Overworked preppies Amanda and Clay Sandford (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke), burned out in Manhattan, spontaneously book a Long Island holiday cottage. They’re somewhat distressed to find unreliable internet and cell service, but hey, it’s an adventure. Except, on the first night, G.H. Scott and his daughter Ruth (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la) arrive, claiming to own the cottage. New York’s under blackout, they explain; can they borrow their house back?

This movie has few speaking characters. Besides the Sandfords and Scotts, we see the Sandfords’ teenagers, Archie and Rosie (Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie). Archie’s defining characteristic is he checks out girls; Rosie obsesses over 1990s pop culture, especially the sitcom Friends. Very late, Kevin Bacon appears as a survivalist neighbor; besides a brief appearance by a Spanish-speaking hitchhiker, Bacon is the only evidence that working-class Long Islanders exist.

Writer-director Sam Esmail bases this movie on Rumaan Alam’s novel. Therefore I wonder who exactly, Esmail or Alam, dropped the ball so badly. This movie reads like a masterclass in how to alienate your audience. Though different plotlines frustrate in different ways, we could summarize the magnitude of disappointment thus: the creative team introduces interesting questions, then ignores them. They expect us, the audience, to do the heavy lifting.

First, we never know exactly what’s happening. Apart from isolated flashes of information dropped without context, all we know is that we know nothing. The Sandfords and Scotts are trapped inside the house, reliant on outdated information and a noncommunicative government. Every attempt to leave the house ends in one catastrophe or another. It’s impossible to read this separate from the COVID-19 lockdowns that ended shortly before principal photography began.

Both the Sandfords and the Scotts are relatively well-off. Throughout the movie, their cottage never loses electricity or running water. Their supplies of coffee and alcohol remain limitless. Yet living in proximity brings out prominent tensions, fueled substantially because the Sandfords are White, and the somewhat richer Scotts are Black. Amanda even engages in frustrated, self-pitying monologues that reveal her poorly sublimated racism.

Oh, and the monologues! This movie consists primarily of conversations, but they aren’t really conversations. Every character has a thesis statement, and apart from the occasional bread-n-butter dialog to move the story along, the characters mainly discourse at one another. This is a Very Important Message Movie, and the characters remind us of that constantly. They don’t even interrupt the action to discourse; they interrupt discourse with occasional action.

As we approach the movie’s culmination, both Amanda and G.H. offer up monologues that, in another movie, might’ve come before the climactic confrontation. Except there’s no climactic confrontation. We reach the moment where experienced genre authors would’ve brought the families’ braided narratives together to unlock the secrets, and… the movie stops. Rather than resolving the manifold threads it’s introduced, the movie halts. Sad trombone noises.

I already anticipate counterarguments. Life is frequently disappointing, and lacking in resolution. In the technocratic apocalypse depicted herein, most people would never receive meaningful explanations. But this isn’t real life. Novelists and screenwriters make decisions—or, in this case, don’t make decisions. I’m reminded of “deep literature” I read in college, and wrote chin-pulling considerations of moral themes, when I really wanted to ask: “Why did the author stop mid-story?”

One suspects that Esmail and/or Alam raised interesting questions, then thought their responsibility done. This often happens in self-consciously “literary” writing, which often treats resolute answers as facile. The author ends with a discordant note, sometimes mid-action (as here), and expects the audience to contemplate the unresolved questions. I suspect the creative team wants us to ask ourselves: “What’s left when our machines, entertainments, and busywork disappear?”

Instead, I ask: “What screenwriting workshop did these guys drop out of?” Esmail made his reputation on similar morally ambiguous TV series, like Mr. Robot and Homecoming. TV audiences accept unresolved themes, expecting they’ll resume next episode or next season. In feature films, it simply feels like the creative team expects the audience to finish what the writers started. That’s a disappointing, rage-inducing conclusion to a good start abandoned.