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Location
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Document Type
Presentation
Event Website
https://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-53.htm
Start Date
3-8-2024 3:30 PM
End Date
3-8-2024 4:20 PM
Description
Our Flag Means Death, a pirate romantic comedy released on HBO Max, has been discussed in terms of its mythopoesis by Sara Brown at OMS #3 (“Our Flag…Means Queer: Monstering the Majority Culture”), and has been studied as referencing Shakespearean motifs by Melissa Rohrer (“Sometimes the old tropes are the best tropes: Shakespeare and Our Flag Means Death”). In this talk, I showcase the Middle English and mostly Arthurian Romance elements we find in OFMD, particularly its episodic quest format, focus on homosocial bonds, and engagement with courtly love. Other minor motifs—such as a hero’s humble beginnings and legend vs. reality in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the fair unknown, betrayal from within, and temporary madness caused by being bereft of love from Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur; issues of desire and desirability in the trope of the loathly lady of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale; and even cannibalism made into a joke as in Richard Coer de Lyon— also appear in OFMD. While showrunner David Jenkins probably did not intentionally evoke these Middle English Romance tropes, some elements of the show, particularly melodramatic and violent moments followed by an incongruous return to a status quo, are more acceptable when understood as Middle English Romance. This reading invites a larger conversation that compares medieval Romance and the modern sitcom, and how these genres similarly make meaning through melodrama, archetypal characters, and ridiculous entanglements.
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Included in
Our Flag Means Romance…Middle English Romance, That Is
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Our Flag Means Death, a pirate romantic comedy released on HBO Max, has been discussed in terms of its mythopoesis by Sara Brown at OMS #3 (“Our Flag…Means Queer: Monstering the Majority Culture”), and has been studied as referencing Shakespearean motifs by Melissa Rohrer (“Sometimes the old tropes are the best tropes: Shakespeare and Our Flag Means Death”). In this talk, I showcase the Middle English and mostly Arthurian Romance elements we find in OFMD, particularly its episodic quest format, focus on homosocial bonds, and engagement with courtly love. Other minor motifs—such as a hero’s humble beginnings and legend vs. reality in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the fair unknown, betrayal from within, and temporary madness caused by being bereft of love from Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur; issues of desire and desirability in the trope of the loathly lady of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale; and even cannibalism made into a joke as in Richard Coer de Lyon— also appear in OFMD. While showrunner David Jenkins probably did not intentionally evoke these Middle English Romance tropes, some elements of the show, particularly melodramatic and violent moments followed by an incongruous return to a status quo, are more acceptable when understood as Middle English Romance. This reading invites a larger conversation that compares medieval Romance and the modern sitcom, and how these genres similarly make meaning through melodrama, archetypal characters, and ridiculous entanglements.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythcon/mc53/schedule/20
