The Middle Ages, Vengeance and Movies

Chapter 13 ‘An Overdeveloped Sense of Vengeance’? The Middle Ages, Vengeance and Movies

Stuart Airlie

In AD 68 the noisy night-time streets of Rome became even more disturbed than usual. Cries of vengeance resounded in the city as householders threat- ened clumsy slaves with chastisement. ‘An avenger (vindex) is coming to get you!’ they bellowed. The real target of such cries, however, was not the cow- ering slaves but the emperor Nero himself. A general in Gaul had come out in rebellion against the tyrant; the general’s name was Vindex. These warning cries of punishment to come were not isolated but were like a chant from the oppressed, savouring the pleasure of anticipated vengeance for their wrongs. But when is the avenger’s work ever really finished? While Vindex’s rebellion failed, Nero was eventually forced off the stage into oblivion in 68, though he was to come back to haunt western culture in such various media as fevered Christian imaginings of Antichrist in the apocalypse and the equally fevered form of scenery-chewing performances by the likes of Peter Ustinov in a vari- ety of films.1 Bill Miller has spent a long time listening to cries for vengeance, acutely sensitive to the emotional power behind them, as well as to the workings of systems and discourses of law and honour within which vengeance operates. Miller’s work here covers an impressively wide field and is of corresponding- ly wide appeal and interest. But it has a special resonance for medievalists, partly because of his own illuminating readings of these treasures of medieval literature, the Icelandic sagas, but also because of medievalists’ concerns with ‘stateless’ societies in which feud, vengeance and honour seem to be

1 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, Book 6 (Nero), ch.45.2, in Suetonius, trans. J. C. Rolfe, 2 vols, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 168–70; Thomas E. Kitchen, ‘Apocalyptic Perceptions of the Roman Empire in the Fifth Century A.D.’, in Abendländische Apokalyptik. Kompendium zur Genealogie der Endzeit, ed. Veronika Wieser, Christian Zolles, Catherine Felk et al. (Berlin: 2013), 644, 648; Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (New York and London: 1997), 110–46.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004366374_017 ‘An Overdeveloped Sense of Vengeance’? 297 an integral part of the culture.2 Despite his consuming interest in medieval Iceland, Miller’s work ranges widely beyond the Middle Ages, not least in its focus on, for example, the films of Clint Eastwood as representations of the avenger in society.3 As a medievalist who is also a movie enthusiast, I intend this essay as a tribute to the breadth of Miller’s interests. I take inspiration from his work to offer a fellow medievalist’s perspective on some themes of vengeance to be found in three films that can be illuminated by his work even as they themselves cast light on it. The films are The Virgin Spring (1960), a tale of a father’s vengeance for the rape and murder of his daughter in medieval Sweden, directed by Ingmar Bergman; Harakiri (1962), also known as Seppuku, a story of an avenging samurai warrior set in seventeenth-century Japan, directed by Masaki Kobayashi; and Unforgiven (1992), probably the best known of the three, featuring Clint Eastwood as director and star in a bleak story of outrage and vengeance in the American West. The three films are very differ- ent in period, setting and style but are linked in a common concern with the nature of vengeance. And medieval films, i.e., films set in the western Middle Ages, may have much in common with films of other genres, periods and cul- tures; to juxtapose The Virgin Spring and Harakiri is to gesture towards that comparing of western feudal medieval society and samurai-era Japan that goes back to the work of Marc Bloch. Samurai films have in their turn caught the interest of western medievalists as well as of western film-makers.4 Not only has

2 See, for example, Patrick J. Geary, ‘Living with Conflicts in Stateless France’, originally pub- lished in 1986, in his Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (New York: 1994), 125–160; Guy Halsall, ‘Reflections on Early Medieval Violence: The Example of the “Blood Feud” ’, Memoria y Civilización 2 (1999), 7–29; Paul R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (New York: 2003), e.g., in chapter 1; Stephen D. White, ‘The Feelings in the Feud: The Emotional Turn in the Study of Vengeance’, in Disputing Strategies in Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Kim Esmark et al. (Leiden and Boston: 2013), 281–311. The common citation and deploy- ment of Miller’s work by such scholars does not imply consensus among them. 3 William Ian Miller, ‘Clint Eastwood and Equity: The Virtues of Revenge and the Shortcomings of Law in Popular Culture’, in Law in the Domains of Culture, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns (Ann Arbor: 1998), 161–202; William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (New York: 2006) 147–51. The bibliography to that book and the index to William Ian Miller, Faking It (Cambridge: 2003) give some sense of the range of Miller’s interests and registers; his content, of course, also testifies to this. The quotation in my title comes from a line in the enchanting 1987 fan- tasy movie The Princess Bride, whose avenger character Inigo Montoya pops up in Eye for an Eye, 143–4. 4 Bettina Bildhauer and Anke Bernau, ‘Introduction: The A-chronology of Medieval Film’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bildhauer and Bernau (Manchester and New York: 2009), 1–19; and see also John M. Ganim, ‘Medieval Noir: Anatomy of a Metaphor’, ibid., 182–202. Japan: Marc Bloch, Feudal Society 2 vols, trans. L. A. Manyon (London: 1962), vol. 2, 446–7; on samurai films as