1 I would like to thank the editors for their thoughtful comments and advice and my colleague Christopher Herzog for his input on ghosts and the transhuman continuum. This article springs from discussions with the students of my seminar “A Quest Through Medieval Literature” at the University of Duisburg-Essen (summer term 2024), who drew my attention to the “utter weirdness” of the talking fox in Lowery’s film and then introduced me to the concept of the backrooms, suggesting the liminal realm Gawain traverses on his quest constituted “medieval backrooms”. Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism Julia Boll The quest for greatness In search of honour yet unclear about what, precisely, this entails, aspiring knight Gawain (Dev Patel) plunges into Saint Winifred’s well to retrieve her severed head. His eyes blink open underwater and the boundaries of the earthly world dissolve. As the universe unfolds before him, he glimpses its vastness: Galaxies upon galaxies swirling in silent, intertwined motion. When he returns to the shore with Winifred’s skull in hand, he finds her gone. In her place sits the red fox that will become his companion for the remainder of his journey towards the Green Knight, a wood spirit with designs upon Gawain’s own head. The three nonhuman creatures serve as interlocutors, embodying the complex interplay between the human and nonhuman realm and urging Gawain towards a deeper understanding of wildness, interdependence, and vulnerability. The Green Knight, Winifred, and the fox point to aspects of each other, and to figures of nonhuman otherness. 1 The Green Knight, David Lowery’s 2021 film adaptation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a radical reinterpretation of a rich and multi-faceted text that, itself, already engages with longstanding themes of ethics, embodiment, and interconnectedness, which the film amplifies by displacing human-centred narratives and emphasising the autonomy of nature and spectral forces, reconfiguring the chivalric journey as a challenge to heroic anthropocentrism. The film thus reconfigures medieval motifs to address DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 2 All direct quotations from SGGK are taken from Gollancz (1940), except when otherwise noted. References by line number refer to the poem itself, consistent across all editions and translations referenced in this article. contemporary questions of agency and the boundaries between the human and nonhuman world. In this article, I argue that Lowery’s film expands the poem’s attention to nonhuman presence and interrelation while deepening its ethical implications. The film systematically undermines ideals of anthropocentric heroism, suggest‐ ing instead that ethical and existential growth emerges through relationality, exposure, and the influence of the more-than-human world. It reimagines the heroic quest as an encounter with vulnerability and forces beyond the human as active participants. I will show how this shift takes shape through the film’s attention to nonhuman perspectives. Reading the Green Knight’s challenge through Jack Halberstam’s notion of wildness allows us to understand it not as a test of individual valour, but as an invitation into temporal, spatial, and ethical disorientation that resonates with the film’s take on what I call “medieval backrooms”. Thinking about the film’s portrayal of relationality and entanglement through Karen Barad’s discussion of agency and intra-actions shifts our focus to Gawain’s intra-actions with various nonhuman entities, showing how these shape and co-constitute his identity and situate him within a broader system of interrelated agencies that open space for ethical engagement and blur boundaries between self and other, human and nonhuman, living and dead, making room for forms of spectral agency. This relational ethics converges with Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis, or “making-with”, in which beings come into existence through ongoing, uneven collaboration rather than individual autonomy, a dynamic further clarified by Anna Tsing’s distinction between environmental alienation and an understanding of contamination as the basis of life-enabling alternatives and mutual world-making. This culminates in a discussion of how the film can be read in terms of arboreal time, a temporality defined not by linear progression but by a thick present, by cycles, and by recursions bringing together past, present, and future into a continuous, material now. The film, I argue, invites us to inhabit an ethics grounded not in heroic transcendence, but in attentiveness to entanglement, vulnerability, and the more-than-human rhythms of time. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter SGGK  2 ), part of the Pearl Manu‐ script (BL Cotton Nero A.x, late fourteenth or early fifteenth century) and attributed to the anonymous “Gawain Poet” or “Pearl Poet”, is a fourteenth-cen‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 68 Julia Boll 3 The exact dating is unknown. Most recent scholars date the poem to around 1400, a premise also adopted by Simon Armitage in his popular translation (Armitage 2007: v). tury 3 chivalric romance written in Middle English alliterative verse and in a Midlands dialect. It is the tale of a beheading game and an exchange of winnings. At Christmas, the young and unproven Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from the enigmatic Green Knight, a liminal figure embodying the autonomous, regenerative force of the natural world. The terms of the game are simple: whatever blow Gawain deals must be returned in kind a year later. Gawain decapitates the Green Knight, who retrieves his head and reminds Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day to uphold his end of the bargain. When Gawain sets out to keep his promise, his integrity and honour are tested by the Lord and Lady of the castle where he stays as a guest. While the Middle English poem has a narrative focus on Sir Gawain’s quest to confront mortality and mature into a valuable member of Arthur’s round table, emphasising courtly values and moral testing, it nonetheless already contains tensions between the human and nonhuman realms. Ultimately, the poem affirms a human moral order, yet as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out, it “clamours for ecological engagement” (2019: 25), anticipating themes later amplified in Lowery’s film adaptation. Cohen suggests that beyond the poem’s linear, traditionally masculine storyline of failure and attempted redemption lie subtler parallel narratives marked by “yearning and vitality, dormancy, season-change, lives glimpsed but not grasped, nonhuman tempos and dura‐ tions […], knotted structures of precarity and endurance” (26). He highlights the poem’s underlying celebration of a love of life, noting that the Green Knight spares Gawain precisely because of an ethos “that reverberates with a compassion for all things that want to survive and flourish” (46). From this reading emerges a “secular ethics of shared precarity” and an expansion of the poem’s spatial and temporal scope, “an enlarging of the here of the poem that widens but refuses to transcend” (48). This resonates with Haraway’s reading of the thick present, a mode of temporal and spatial alignment that resists linear progress and instead fosters a sustained, situated awareness of “an eco-temps” that foregrounds overlapping climatic rhythms, seasonal cycles, and place-based interconnectedness (2016: 1). As I suggest below, the notion of arboreal time provides a useful framework for understanding this temporal logic, one grounded in growth, branching, latency, and interdependence. Lowery’s film evokes the poem’s legacy by referencing its material history throughout. Visual details drawn from the BL Cotton Nero A.x manuscript are echoed in the film’s aesthetic, particularly in the chapter headings. The publi‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 69 4 SGGK was first printed in its entirety in 1839, edited by palaeographer Frederic Madden. The film’s typographical choices thus mostly allude to nineteenthand twentieth-cen‐ tury print editions ( “Boldest of Blood” 2021); for example, to the translation by Israel Gollancz (1897, published with Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society in 1940). cation history of the poem is also evoked through the stylised use of typography: Cycling through a series of title cards at the beginning, the phrase “Sir Gawain and…” appears three times, each in a different font, subtly referencing the poem’s fragmented textual transmission and its belated emergence into print culture 4 and echoing the first part of its Middle English title. In contrast, the second part, “The Green Knight”, which is also the film’s actual title, appears just once, at the very end of the film. When it finally does, it is steady and unwavering, superimposed onto a tree stump with visible concentric rings, suggestive of endurance and the passing of time. By omitting Gawain’s name from the title, the film shifts the focus away from the traditional hero-centred narrative and gives more space to the notion and function of the Green Knight, a choice that invites viewers to reconsider him not merely as an adversary or obstacle, but as a central agent whose presence shapes the thematic and ethical structure of the narrative, underscoring his role as a catalyst for transformation and as a symbol of nature’s ambivalence, as a mediator of nonhuman agency. Like the Middle English poem, Lowery’s film is a meditation on mortality and on what it means to live a meaningful life. As Gawain’s year of reprieve comes to an end and he prepares to set out to meet his fate, to become the knight he believes he is meant to be, his lover Essel questions his decision. She asks whether he will truly go and have his head chopped off by a mystical woodland spirit, and why he thinks this is a sound idea, when, instead, he could be with her. “For greatness”, Gawain replies. Essel pointedly responds, “Greatness? Why is goodness not enough? ” (00: 35: 17). As Robinson Murphy (2025) notes, Essel offers Gawain the possibility of a partnership, a life rooted in love and shared humanity, but Gawain chooses greatness and “honour” instead - a concept he clings to but ultimately fails to understand (1353) . A wild knight The Green Knight’s challenge to the court, in Lowery’s film read aloud by the Queen, is framed as a trial of courage: “Indulge me in this friendly Christmas game”, he says, “[l]et whichever of your knights is boldest of blood and wildest of heart set forth, take up arms, and try with honour to land a blow against me” (0: 17: 36). On the surface, this is a call to bravery, but symbolically, the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 70 Julia Boll knights of the round table are invited to take an axe to a tree (Higley 2022: 69), while “with honour” turns out to be the operative phrase here. 5 Crucially, the challenge is not to fell the Green Knight, merely to strike him. The test lies in the manner and measure of the blow, a distinction resonating, I suggest, with the film’s broader investment in arboreal time as a model of slow, cyclical persistence rather than the excessive gestures of heroic action. In the Middle English poem, a young King Arthur urges Sir Gawain to win the game (SGGK lines 372-374) , suggesting a competitive mindset geared towards what we might file under ‘classic heroics’. By contrast, the film adaptation presents an aged, more contemplative King who cautions Gawain to remember that “it is only a game” (00: 19: 54). The shift underscores a crucial thematic ambiguity already present in the poem: the exchange of blows could encompass anything (SGGK line 287; Dunai 2023: 457 f.). Instead of pausing to consider the implication of the challenge - which facet and interpretation of ‘honour’ might he be asked to demonstrate here? - Lowery’s Gawain follows his Middle English model and opts for decapitating the Green Knight, thus setting himself on a trajectory of violence and misunderstanding. It becomes evident that he has failed the test right from the outset: His rashness is met with visible shock from the King and the Queen, and with disappointment from his own mother. From an ecofeminist perspective, this opening act is especially jarring, a shocking display of unwarranted violence and an assertion of dominance over a being who poses no real threat, a decision that does not signify a triumph, but a failure of imagination, empathy, and restraint. Gawain’s quick resort to violence is reflected in the film’s visual landscape of ruin and desolation, particularly in the deforested, war-torn lands surrounding the King’s castle. As he departs the citadel on his journey to the Green Chapel, he passes through a former battlefield where he encounters a young scavenger who will later rob him. Throughout the film, human presence is often reduced to mere traces, to long-dead corpses rotting and overgrown by vegetation. The visual motifs echo Lowery’s reflection on humanity’s impact on a world it has destroyed: Nature will ultimately overtake civilisation and restore peace (“Boldest of Blood” 2021). His film offers a clear commentary on environmental ruin, voiced early in the film by Gawain himself, likely unwittingly, as he highlights the cost of humanity’s violence against both itself and the natural world when he tells the King: “Your knights have spilled enough blood in your name” (00: 10: 26). Murphy suggests that The Green Knight presents “an ecological DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 71 5 Note that the Middle English version does not mention “honour” (lines 283-287; see Gollancz’s translation, 1940: 10-11), nor does Anderson (1996: 179) in his slightly modified edition or Armitage (2007: 17) in his translation. ethics”, notably evident in the long, uninterrupted shot of Gawain crossing the postwar terrain (2025: 1352). This scene highlights the film’s critique of anthropogenic destruction, which culminates in a powerful reversal: Building on the established Freudian reading of the beheading games as symbolic castration (1350), the film ends with a tree figure that “castrates the deforesting human” (1355). In his seminal Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992), an exploration of forests as historical space, literary and religious topos, ambivalent motif, and as location of nostalgia in Western cultural imagination, Robert Pogue Harrison identifies the woods, real and imagined, as a sylvan fringe of darkness [that] defined the limits of [civilisation’s] cultivation, the margins of its cities, the boundaries of its institutional domain; but also the extravagance of its imagination. […] The governing institutions of the West - religion, law, family, city - originally established themselves in opposition to the forests […]. (ix) Harrison probes the forests’ religious and cultural function as places of both profanity and sacredness, sites of lawlessness as well as places of refuge; enchanting sites “where the logic of distinction goes astray” (x; see also Higley 2022: 55 f.). Commenting on the ambivalent relationship between the city and the wilderness, he argues that, in the imagination, the city will always be reclaimed by the wilderness, by what has been conquered (Harrison 1992: 2), and also indicates how sharply city and forest were traditionally juxtaposed (49). Medieval social order was restructured around emerging feudal and religious institutions, according to which certain areas were set aside and declared foris, meaning ‘outside’ the law and human society. As a site of asylum, the forest became “unspeakable”, Harrison writes, a space in which “[o]ne could not remain human […], one could only rise above or sink below the human level” (61). He also foregrounds the forest’s shapeand concept-shifting attributes which may turn the profane into something sacred, or, conversely, a knight into a wild man, a place where the shadow of a thing can always usurp or evert the thing itself. This notion of a shadow, a disacknowledged force lurking in the space outside civilisation, on the fringes of the citadel, in the wilderness, is taken up in The Green Knight at a dialectical level. “Why is it green, do you think? ” the Lady of the castle - the film’s counterpart to SGGK’s Lady Bertilak - asks Gawain, who has taken shelter in her and her husband’s home in the days leading up to Christmas. She refers to the Green Knight he is destined to meet soon. “Was it born that way? ” she muses, but Gawain replies “he is not of this earth” - to which the Lady counters that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 72 Julia Boll green is the colour of earth, of all living things. Of life. […] We deck our hall with it and dye our linens. But should it come creeping up the cobbles, we scrub it out, fast as we can. When it blooms beneath our skin, we bleed it out. And when we, together all, find that our reach has exceeded our grasp, we cut it down, we stamp it down, we spread ourselves atop it and smother it beneath our bellies, but it comes back. It does not dally. And what is the point to plot or conspire to pull it out by its roots one day, and the next, there it is, creeping in around the edges. Whilst we’re off looking for red, in comes green. Red is the colour of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind, in heart, in womb. Green is what is left when ardour fades, when passion dies, when we die, too. When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread overall, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements, and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin. Your bones. Your virtue. (01: 25: 20) Quite opposed to Gawain’s dismissal of green as otherworldly, the Lady’s meditation casts it as that which is not civilised, which cannot, ultimately, be tamed and controlled, but which is essential to existence. We can draw a line here to Jack Halberstam’s exploration of wildness, which he defines as “simultaneously a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the unpredictable” (2020: 3). In his reading, “the wild” signifies a “space of potential” (3), but also of constructed alterity (18), and to privilege the wild is to privilege the subject who defies normative expectations and conventional structures by embracing disorder, unpredictability, and, above all, a refusal to be domesticated (23). In the Lady’s speech, green is aligned with the wild, not merely as nature and savagery, but as something deeply rooted in the earth, the seasons, and the cycles of life and death - clearly implying that the Green Knight, as a figure who embodies nature’s cyclical forces and eludes human comprehension and control, cannot be ‘defeated’ or bargained with, but is an incarnation of this wildness and thus, of the substance of life. His daring of the “wildest of heart” suggests a life beyond the rigid confines of chivalric codes and societal regulation, representing a transgressive force that challenges normative ideals of honour and heroism. This wildness is generative and productive, opening space for new forms of relationality between humans and nonhumans. The “wildest of heart” thus invites a queer, nonconforming wildness akin to Halberstam’s concept: a way of inhabiting the world that values fluidity, multiplicity, and radical openness over fixed identity and mastery. It pushes back against chivalric demands for restraint and conformity, suggesting that true growth arises from acknowledging and integrating the wild, untamed DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 73 6 The Green Knight’s conceptual overlap with the Green Man is a widely accepted interpretation, developed further by scholars such as Sarah L. Higley, who mentions Larry D. Benson (1965) and William F. Woods (2002) as major sources (Higley 2022: 66 fn. 25), and Carolyn Dinshaw (2013), who references John Speirs’ identical claim (1949; Dinshaw 2013: 352). parts of the self. At its core, it calls for Gawain to confront his fears and desires, to face the unknown within and outside himself, embracing uncertainty and vulnerability rather than seeking an elusive idea of greatness and honour (see also Cohen 2019: 39). In the film’s final moments, Gawain’s submission and acceptance is not the triumphant fulfilment of a chivalric quest, but a quiet surrender to a vast, impersonal natural order operating outside human comprehension and control. A nonhuman figure whose overall greenness is foregrounded quite insistently in SGGK (lines 147-220), the Green Knight evokes medieval folklore’s Green Man - a symbol of vegetal vitality, seasonal renewal, and the blurred boundary between human and nature. 6 In Lowery’s film, this connection is made literal: the Green Knight appears as an arboreal being, his body resembling gnarled, weathered wood, with bark and moss partially making up his face, his move‐ ments accompanied by creaks and groans suggestive of trees bending in the wind. He is not simply adorned with natural elements, but materially continuous with the forest. Carolyn Dinshaw’s reading of the Green Man as a site of ecological rupture and relationality offers an interesting lens here. In the figure of the Green Man, she writes, “what is supposed to be outside gush[es] from deep inside”, dismantling “the most basic conceptual boundary” between inside and outside (2013: 351). This collapse of divisions is vividly embodied in the film’s depiction of the Green Knight: he is not merely adorned with nature, but his body is composed of it, there is no fixed border where the human ends and the nonhuman begins, a fluidity the film’s imagery accentuates as his body ultimately fuses with the Green Chapel. For Dinshaw, the Green Man reveals how interdependency must be central to ecological thinking (353). Lowery’s Green Knight, in this sense, does not stand apart from the world as a mythic challenge to be overcome; rather, he embodies the inextricable relationality of all beings. His role, as will become clear below, is not simply to test Gawain, but to expose his entanglement with the world. A spectre’s agency In The Green Knight, spectral agency operates in the present without being fully visible or rationally graspable and can be understood as a kind of ‘ghost’ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 74 Julia Boll influencing the here and now, linking what is usually treated as separate - past and future, body and mind, human and nonhuman - through entanglement rather than direct action. About halfway through the film, Gawain finds himself in bed with a long-dead saint asking for his help. When he questions what he would gain by retrieving her head from a well, Winifred replies, nonplussed: “Why would you ask me that? Why would you ever ask me that? ! ” (00: 59: 30). The exchange exposes Gawain’s underlying transactional mindset: Winifred is neither reward nor guide, but an imposition for care, and it dawns on the would-be knight that genuine chivalry may require ethical commitment that goes unacknowledged and unreciprocated. Returning Winifred’s head happens at a private, eerie moment, with no audience, and hence, no glory; an act grounded in repair rather than conquest, resisting the usual game logic of knightly deeds. Yet this ostensibly non-transactional moment is problematised when Gawain’s previously stolen axe mysteriously reappears, suggesting that even acts of compassion may entail unintended consequences. Saint Winifred was a seventh-century Welsh virgin-martyr and later abbess, venerated in both medieval Welsh and English Christian tradition (Farmer 2004: 544 f.). According to hagiographic accounts, when she rejected the advances of a passing nobleman, he decapitated her; where her head fell, a healing spring miraculously sprang up. Her uncle, Saint Beuno, is said to have reattached her head and restored her to life (Callander 2023: 7). Although Winifred is absent from the Middle English poem, it makes reference to “Holy Head” (SGGK line 700), a name that resonates with Holywell, the site traditionally associated with Winifred’s beheading (Callander 2023: 5). In Lowery’s film, she appears as a spectral figure whose narrative mirrors Gawain’s own beheading challenge. Her scene disrupts the ritualised, reciprocal violence introduced by SGGK while deepening the film’s exploration of human-nonhuman interrelations and complicating the beheading motif central to the chivalric quest. Unlike the Green Knight’s beheading game, Winifred’s decapitation was not a contest or trial she willingly accepted, but an act of violence inflicted upon her, the encounter highlighting a crucial distinction between heroic ordeal and feminine martyrdom. Already beheaded, she does not offer duel or bargain but asks for the restoration of what has been taken from her: her head, her wholeness - a request that confronts Gawain’s passivity and unsettles the rationale behind knightly action. Her presence points to an ethical responsibility outside the chivalric code and even beyond human life. When, unsure of her corporeality, Gawain reaches out to touch her, Winifred recoils and rebukes him: “What are you doing? Do not touch me. A knight should know better” (00: 58: 15), reasserting her agency even in death and demanding he DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 75 recognise knightly conduct not merely as a matter of courage or honour, but of respect and recognition of the other’s vulnerability. But Gawain insists, asking whether she is real or a spirit. “What is the difference? ” she replies, “I just need my head” (01: 00: 12). Neither fully alive nor fully dead, Winifred’s ghostliness places her on a transhuman continuum oriented towards decay and persistence rather than closure. Her presence unsettles Cartesian divisions between mind and body, spirit and matter, while also destabilising the category of the human itself. Here, the nonhuman does not simply denote what lies outside the human, but what has historically been rendered Other, including nature itself - and what emerges when human identity is redistributed across material, ecological, and historical relations. As a resurrected martyr who later becomes a saint, Winifred exists outside the normative cycle of mortality, aligning more closely with the Green Knight than with Gawain as a figure who redefines what life and agency can mean (also see Higley 2022: 80 f.). No longer fully human, yet never entirely beyond the human, she occupies a threshold between human and more-than-human existence, in which agency is inseparable from place. Her identity is intertwined with the well she haunts, binding her to place and landscape rather than to a singular body. Gawain’s encounter with her thus becomes an immersive interaction not with an individual subject, but with the land itself, a crossing of the threshold between human agency and ecological memory. In this sense, Winifred's spectral body registers and echoes the violence enacted upon the land and materialises that violence, making visible how harm to human bodies and harm to landscapes are connected and persist across time. As he discusses the inclusion of Winifred into the film, Lowery reflects that her presence serves to steer Gawain “towards integrity, towards decency and chivalry”, with her legend offering a framework through which the film explores the character’s ethical development (Murphy 2021). Gawain’s momentary immersion in a cosmic vision upon entering the well confronts him with the immensity of a universe in which human agency is decentred and meaning is no longer derived from anthropocentric systems of value. “Every encounter he has in this movie changes him and brings him closer to death”, Lowery notes, adding, somewhat enigmatically, “he’s touching the cosmic” (Murphy 2021). This metaphysical rupture dissolves the boundaries between the earthly and the universal, reframing the well not as a confined space but as a site where geological depth, historical violence, and cosmic scale converge. Winifred’s violation, and its lingering aftermath, are thus placed within a broader ecological and ontological entanglement, situating human injury within a vastly extended field of relations and suggesting that harm, and responsibility, reverberate across scales, from bodies and landscapes to planetary and cosmic systems. By DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 76 Julia Boll retrieving her skull, Gawain participates in an act of reparation that signals an emergent, posthuman ethical sensibility grounded in attentiveness to the voiceless and the spectral; it is a gesture of healing that acknowledges an obligation to the more-than-human. This shift in ethical perspective invites us to revisit Barad’s influential work on quantum physics and entanglement, where ethics is understood not as a series of individual choices, but as an ongoing performative process, encouraging us to rethink relationships as constantly evolving, shaped and reshaped through repeated intra-actions. Barad argues that human agency does not pre-exist separately or independently but emerges from such relational in‐ tra-actions with humans and nonhumans. Distinct from interaction, intra-action denotes co-constitutive action among entities, including humans, originating ‘from within’ entangled systems, rather than between pre-existing, independent entities. Barad thus challenges subject-centred narratives and advocates inter‐ connectedness within entangled systems (2007, 25). “To be entangled”, they write, “is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair” (ix). Reframing intra-actions not as isolated exchanges between individuals, but as co-constitutive relationships embedded within broader systems, clarifies the connection between quantum entanglement and the idea that nothing exists in isolation. This perspective suggests a shared responsibility among co-constitutive entities that exists before and beyond choosing. Barad reads responsibility as an embodied relation, not as a chosen obligation, and concludes that ethics therefore have to be regarded as integral to the act of becoming rather than being added on as human-made rules about the world (2010: 265). A closer examination of Barad’s argument will help us grasp this ethical framework: grounded in the inseparability of ethics and ontology (2007: 225), they propose that existence itself is inherently relational, entangled with others, both humans and nonhumans. This ontological entanglement creates ethical responsibilities in all intra-actions. Intra-actions are not neutral exchanges but active sites where the world is materially and ethically reconfigured: They can reinforce or disrupt systems of domination and oppression. While Barad critiques anthropocentrism, their framework does not erase human agency, especially in the context of ethical responsibility. In fact, they argue that human actions play a significant role in shaping the world, precisely because they are entangled with broader material, social, and ecological networks (2007: 392 f.). Ethics is not something added to experience from the outside, but it is the very basis of experience itself: it “grounds human experience (not the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 77 other way around)” (391). From this perspective, change is not an individual accomplishment but a collective and ongoing process of becoming-with others. Lowery’s film resonates strongly with this approach to entangled ethics, dismantling the closed, teleological loop of medieval chivalric testing in favour of a porous, ambiguous path, shaped by encounters with nonhuman forces and spectral presences throughout Gawain’s quest. His response to Winifred is one of hesitant care rather than heroic resolve, an opening towards respon‐ sibility rooted in responsiveness to suffering within a shared material world. This intra-action opens a space for ethical engagement and reconfigures the relational field. Boundaries between self and other, human and nonhuman, living and dead begin to dissolve once we take spectral agency into account. It does not simply linger from the past, but actively shapes the present, creating new realities and subject positions. Drawing on Barad’s concept of intra-action, where agency arises from within encounters rather than preceding them, spectral agency can be understood as a particular form of this emergent force, often invisible yet powerful, that arises in specific temporal conditions, where past, present, and future compress and intertwine. In these moments, it produces effects that exceed immediate perception or direct action, pushing against the limits of what we usually recognise as active, alive, or familiar. Ghosts emerge as a productive figure for thinking about agency that is present yet not fully material, influencing the present by returning, lingering, and demanding response (Gordon 1997). The film's Saint Winifred embodies this mode of agency as a ghost of reckoning, as she does not restore a damaged past, but materialises the ongoing interrelation of past, present, and future. In Barad’s terms, such ghosts are not remnants of what is over, but iterative, material reconfigurations that demand response rather than resolution (2010: 264). Following the medieval ghost tradition, Winifred returns not to be exorcised but to demand recognition of wrongdoing and the fulfilment of obligations that bind the living to the dead. While the initial encounter with the Green Knight serves as an example of Gawain’s intra-action with the more-than-human world and sets into motion his journey of self, the film's ethical force does not only reside solely in the Green Knight’s visibly material embodiment of nature. It is distributed, rather, across a network of spectral, material, and environmental agencies, Winifred among them, that collectively shape Gawain’s becoming and situate responsibility as shared and relational. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 78 Julia Boll An uncanny fox roaming the backrooms When Gawain resurfaces from the well, the ritual of restoration is completed and Winifred is gone. Yet her presence lingers, transfigured into a new form: a red fox who, from now on, accompanies Gawain (01: 02: 21). As a liminal, shape-shifting figure, the fox mediates between the human and nonhuman realms, reflecting the threshold Gawain himself now inhabits. It resonates with the other nonhuman figures in both the film and the Middle English poem, including the Green Knight himself. Like him, the fox is elusive, ambiguous, and tied to a deeper, impersonal natural order that remains beyond Gawain’s grasp. Timothy C. Baker’s Writing Animals explores this connection through his analysis of “vulpine transformation” (2019: 79). He argues that foxes in literature “challenge binaries between symbolic and experience-based interpretation, between wild and tame, between living and dead”, stressing their resonance when negotiating thresholds (77). In SGGK, the “exchange of winnings” pact requires Sir Gawain and Lord Bertilak to trade whatever they gain each day. For two days, Gawain honours the agreement, trading kisses received from the Lady of the castle for Bertilak’s hunted animals. On the third day, however, when Bertilak returns with a fox as the final prize of his hunt, Gawain withholds the green girdle given to him by the Lady, a magical token said to protect its wearer from death. Fearing for his life in the coming encounter with the Green Knight, he hides the gift, violating the pact and committing a moral failure (SGGK lines 1830-1951). The fox’s fate in the poem is thus closely linked to Gawain’s deception, symbolising Gawain’s moral ambiguity. In the film, the fox is given agency and a literal and metaphorical voice. It prominently features in the visual tapestry at the Lord’s hall, foreshadowing its deeper narrative role. And when Gawain prepares to cross the final threshold of his journey, about to board a boat that will take him to the Green Chapel, the fox suddenly blocks his path and speaks in an unsettling, distorted voice: “Go that way and your doom is at hand”, he warns, “you will find no mercy. No happy end” (01: 38: 00). This moment echoes the anonymous servant in the poem, who tries to dissuade Gawain from confronting the Green Knight (SGGK lines 2091-2125) . Gawain ignores the fox’s warning and, when confronted about the girdle, drives him away, rejecting its company and insisting it was never wanted. By warning Gawain, and by knowing about the girdle - a detail never directly explained but suggestive of its embeddedness in the Green Knight’s larger web (01: 38: 32) - the fox hints at its deeper connection to the forest’s moral and ecological order. In this sense, the fox, like the Green Knight and the Lord of the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 79 castle, appears not as an isolated figure but as part of an interconnected system. Just as Lord Bertilak and the Green Knight are ultimately revealed to be one and the same in SGGK, the film gestures towards a similar, if more diffuse, merging of identities. The talking fox also draws on the medieval tradition of bestiaries and beast-fables, particularly the literary cycle of Reynard the Fox (Bouwman and Besamusca 2009: 10-14; see also Harty 2022: 41 f.). As a cunning trickster in a world of anthropomorphic animals, Reynard embodies traits of intelligence, ambiguity, and subversion. The name Reynard itself, derived from Reginhard or Raginohardus (‘strong in counsel’), underscores the fox’s role as both guide and challenger. In SGGK, the fox, with its literary reputation of cleverness and duplicity, appears as the final prize of the hunt, yet mirrors Gawain’s own concealment of the girdle. In The Green Knight, this symbolic alignment deepens. No longer merely prey or allegorical mirror, the fox becomes an agent with its own voice and presence, related to Gawain’s inner conflict. Its ability to speak for and across human and nonhuman realms evokes Baker’s idea of metamorphosis not as a switch from one identity to another but as the emergence of “a wholly new perspective” (2019: 86). Thus, the film’s fox challenges anthropocentric storytelling through its liminal being, evoking the material and ethical complexities that lie beyond human dominance by actively trying to derail Gawain’s quest. Just before the fox begins to speak and thus breaks the boundary between animal and human communication, the film’s colour palette shifts dramatically (01: 37: 10). A yellow hue floods the screen, marking a sudden plunge into the uncanny. This aesthetic transformation evokes the eerie atmosphere of the internet ‘backrooms’ meme: a space defined by its oppressive liminality, where buzzing, flickering lights and endless, bland yellow corridors, such as one might find in office buildings or large hotels, suggest infinite dislocation (Cho & Underberg-Goode 2025: 17) and a space of transition. Yet Lowery’s film transposes this affect from a digital urban vision into the open space of a mythic, war-torn landscape. Here, the backrooms logic is not confined to fluorescent-lit interiors but leaks into the open wilderness, suggesting that the natural world can become unstable, recursive, and estranged; a dreamlike structure where meaning becomes unmoored. What was once familiar, perhaps even taken for granted - the landscape, the fox, the journey - is momentarily rendered uncanny when the talking fox becomes not just a folkloric figure but a glitch in the perceptual and narrative order, an intrusion revealing the instability of the world itself. The scene invites us to think back to Halberstam’s notion of wildness as a mode of existence that is unpredictable and resistant to normative DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 80 Julia Boll structures, be they social, spatial, or temporal. As a site of ethical and perceptual reconfiguration, wildness sees conventional relational boundaries dissolve and makes space for new modes of encounter and affective engagement. Thinking alongside Halberstam, we might read this scene, which evokes the backrooms but transposes them into a medieval outside space, as a manifestation of queer ecologies, in which the natural world itself becomes wild: destabilised, recursive, and estranged. Just as wildness theorises radical forms of life and desire that resist capture by dominant systems, these spaces - forests, wildernesses, and medieval liminal zones alike - resist normative order and thus feel both thrilling and unsettling, uncanny in their simultaneous familiarity and estrangement. The wild emerges here as a space of potential, but also as a constructed Other, where fixed identity and mastery are challenged by fluidity, multiplicity, and unpredictability. In this sense, the medieval backrooms, while framed as marginal or uncanny, invite us to engage with them as queer, non-conforming spaces of possibility, where the repressed and unfamiliar return to reshape the recognisable world. It is in this liminal, destabilised space that the fox offers his cryptic warning to Gawain: “He who you meet is as wild as I, but knows no measure” (01: 38: 03). Yet, true to the film’s many ambiguities, it is unclear whether this is a cautionary warning or a test of resolve. The fox embodies a form of wildness that is somewhat knowable and contained, while the Green Knight represents a more essential, excessive wildness that transcends human understanding and control, offering not only a challenge but also a form of radical freedom. Following Halberstam, this wildness embraces existence beyond human limits, opening space for alternative ways of being and ethical engagement precisely because it knows no measure. By destabilising any fixed ‘natural order’, it allows the natural, mythical, and uncanny to intermingle, revealing a world that is contingent, malleable, and open to transformation. Arboreal time “Is this really all there is? ” Gawain asks, as the Green Knight is about to chop his head off. “What else ought there to be? ” the Green Knight retorts (01: 47: 10). Just as he raises his axe to deliver the return blow, Gawain flinches, and the film launches into an imagined alternative future in which he runs away, returns to the citadel, becomes king, betrays and abandons his lover Essel, marries for power, loses his kingdom, is forsaken by his family and ultimately dies in a ruinous war - a dream vision of a self-centred life built on domination, ambition, and destruction (Harty 2022: 34). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 81 Gawain’s premonition of a fractured, self-serving existence echoes the alienation and disconnection that anthropologist Anna Tsing highlights as fundamental to capitalism’s exploitation of both humans and the environment. She contends that the system’s accumulation of wealth depends on turning “both humans and nonhumans into resources for investment”, cut off from the interrelations of living (2015: 5). Expanding Marx’s concept of alienation, Tsing shows how this process detaches both humans and nonhumans from their life-worlds to become exchangeable assets (121). Yet this severance is never total. For Tsing, contamination, rather than isolation, forms the basis of life: a condition of ongoing entanglement that enables new directions and mutual world-making (27). Even in the ruins of capitalist destruction, she suggests, possibilities persist for “surviving collaboratively in disturbance and contamination” (4). Haraway extends this approach, rejecting the self-bounded logic of neo‐ liberalism in favour of what she terms sympoiesis, by which she means “making-with” others in a mode of co-creation and response-ability (2016: 33), chiming with Barad’s notion of change as a becoming-with others. In a world defined by ecological and ontological interdependence, she argues, bounded individualism is no longer viable and Barad’s agential realism, where entities emerge through relations, is becoming a new common sense (Haraway 2016: 34). To recapitulate: while Barad uses the concept of intra-action to describe how phenomena are dynamically fused, Haraway focuses on the notion of symbiotic ‘worlds-with’ for co-creation and survival. Where these two approaches come together is in their mutual challenge of individualistic views, in their emphasis on how entities emerge and are co-constituted through relational entanglement. Entanglement, then, is not a problem to be solved but a generative force. As Cohen writes in reference to the Green Knight carrying his own severed head, “cutting something off will not extract it from entanglement” (2019: 26). This image - present both in SGGK and in Lowery’s adaptation - makes clear that the illusion of separability is exposed, revealing not heroic autonomy but the enduring, unruly persistence of connection. Cohen reflects on the Green Chapel in SGGK, observing how “[l]eaf and stem flourish, become overgrown. Is that not how the Green Chapel was swallowed into ruin, reuse, rebirth? ” (37). Lowery’s film vividly realises this vision: the Green Chapel, a man-made structure almost entirely reclaimed by nature, its stone walls covered in ivy, moss, and lichen, folded seamlessly into the forest. The Green Knight seems to have grown into the chapel itself, entwined with its structure, waiting in stillness like a seasonal deity. The setting evokes both ecological transformation and the Yuletide context of the tale - a period of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 82 Julia Boll transition, death, and renewal - aligning the Green Knight with festive and vegetative cycles and positioning the Chapel as a site of judgment and rebirth. Drawing on the Lady’s imagery of a green that spreads overall, the Chapel is not destroyed, but transformed, overtaken by slow-growing life moving according to what might be called arboreal time, a temporality defined not by linear progression but by cycles and recursions, a slow, interconnected sense of time experienced through trees and embracing ecological rhythms, contrasting with linear human time. Like trees, whose rings, roots, and canopies register time simultaneously, arboreal time holds together past, present, and future within a continuous, materially grounded thick present, a layered now in which tempo‐ ral moments remain perceptible and co-constitutive, expanding, overlapping, and refusing linear containment. Arboreal time evokes the ‘ancient patience’ embodied by the Green Knight, challenging human-centred perspectives by foregrounding interconnectedness, non-linear branching, and a slow, materially grounded alternative to abstract, linear accounts of time. The near-total absence of artificial sound in this scene enhances the sense of temporal dislocation (01: 42: 30). The film’s cyclic structure has been explored by Alan van Beek, who links it to the poem’s famous bob-and-wheel form, noting that the wheel’s four-line pattern in SGGK already echoes the cycle of the seasons, a formal repetition that the film translates into visual and cinematographic techniques (2025: 198). Justine Breton also examines cyclic temporality, starting from the motif of ‘tempus fugit’ to analyse how the film constructs “elliptical” chapters (2024: 142, 147). She emphasises a sense of “hurried time, reinforced by elliptical editing” and identifies an aesthetic echo of Greek notions of cyclic time, particularly the concept of Aiôn, which she links to circular imagery and round shapes (150). However, where Aiôn depicts repetition as stasis, arboreal time allows for slow, persistent transformation. It unfolds unevenly, through growth and endurance, builds through sedimentation rather than acceleration, and responds to environmental conditions across multiple scales. As such, it offers a concrete model for understanding the thick present not as stasis, but as a dynamic, relational form of temporal becoming. This complex temporality is conveyed, visually and structurally, most pow‐ erfully early in Gawain’s journey when he is robbed by scavengers, bound, and left to die in the forest. Around him, nature begins to reclaim his body: daffodils and crocuses bloom (00: 50: 36), signalling not an end in decay, but a transformation. As the camera slowly pulls away, circling his decomposing form, its motion echoes the concentric rings of a tree trunk, reinforcing a sense of cyclical, non-linear time. This moment unfolds as a thick present, where past, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 83 present, and possible futures converge. Rather than progressing in a straight line, time folds back in on itself, and when the camera returns to Gawain, we find him alive, struggling fiercely to free himself from his bonds. Though this vision of mortality suggests Gawain’s death, it functions as a test of his desire for life, his fear of dissolution, and his relationship to the more-than-human world. Within this arboreal temporality, ethical growth is no longer driven by linear progress or heroic destiny, but emerges from a sense of relational entanglement and a readiness to relinquish control. For much of his journey, Gawain moves through a world that is not merely indifferent but actively hostile, a landscape that seeks to absorb and reshape him before he is ready. His quest becomes less about honour or heroic completion and more a reckoning with mortality on terms beyond his control. The film’s refusal of triumphant closure can be read as an ethical gesture: Gawain’s ‘success’ is his unmaking as an exceptional human. In place of human-centred heroism, which it critiques, the film suggests that to face the future - ecologically, ethically, and spiritually - we must relinquish the fantasy of the exceptional human at the centre of every story and learn instead how to be decentred, haunted, and companioned by the wild world that we have never fully left. Returning to my central argument, The Green Knight rescripts the heroic quest as an encounter with vulnerability and nonhuman agency. The film proposes a new model of ethical formation based on relationality and affective exposure. Building on Geraldine Heng’s landmark 1991-essay, we can discern a “feminine text” perceptible only “at the limits of the masculine narrative” (501; Dunai 2023: 458). Heng argues that the women in SGGK are arranged like “constituents of the pentangle” (1991: 503), forming a structural and symbolic network within, and yet often beyond, the poem’s overt chivalric logic. I suggest that Lowery’s film echoes this insight by arranging its key nonhuman and liminal figures - the Green Knight, Winifred, and the Fox - in similarly interlinked and reflective ways: the headless Green Knight is mirrored by the headless Winifred; the talking spectre by the speaking fox; the fox as nature-spirit by the Knight himself as an arboreal figure. Each wild thing here gestures towards the others, collectively challenging Gawain’s linear trajectory with a web of entanglements that exceeds - and finally unravels - the fabric of the heroic quest narrative. As Higley notes, “[w]hile we will never see the nonhuman world through other than human lenses, we can attempt to give it greater representation than we have” (2022: 86). The film’s nonhuman figures act as ethical co-agents, not merely symbols or obstacles: the fox offers an alternative, Saint Winifred demands a non-transactional response, the Green Knight invites surrender. The interactions model a shared, interspecies ethics in which humans must reckon DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 84 Julia Boll with intelligences and demands that do not mirror their own. In doing so, the set-up challenges the quester’s role as the sole agent of ethical change and moral consequence. Gawain only begins to grasp what honour might mean after glimpsing, through a vivid flash-forward into a possible future, how his aggressive pursuit of legacy and clinging to the superiority of his own life will inevitably lead to ruin. When he finally concedes to decentring himself, ceding control and handing his agency to the Green Knight, by making himself precarious, his final act of removing the girdle and bowing his head is not an assertion of will, but its relinquishment, refiguring heroism as vulnerability. 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