Queer Crusading, Military Masculinity, and Allegories of Vietnam in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian

Summary

In their 1976 film Robin and Marian, screenwriter James Goldman and director Richard Lester retell the legend of Robin Hood, but not to celebrate the romantic possibilities of military or vigilante heroism; rather, this post-Vietnam film posits the Crusades as a queering experience, one that unravels fictions of heteronormative romance and military masculinity. The debilitating effects of crusading in the Holy Land, notably in the ways in which it confuses relationships between lovers (as well as between enemies), undermines the mythic cast of the Robin Hood legend which, writ large, depends on patriarchal gender roles of brave men rescuing maidens fair. Moreover, the gendered confusion resulting from crusading abroad is revealed to be a peripatetic affliction, as it also corrupts the idyllic depiction of England, despite its ostensible position as a land culturally and geographically removed from the barbarities of war. Revising heroic conceptions of war and military conquest in light of the immeasurable suffering of Vietnam, Robin and Marian exposes the queer potential of battle to estrange warriors from themselves, their communities, and their genders. The protagonists of the film, including Sean Connery as Robin and Audrey Hepburn as Marian, are older than their typical cinematic incarnations, but the wisdom of age does not readily assist them as they struggle to understand the ways in which wars have shifted their sense of gender and, thus, of one another.

At its most powerful, and, I would argue, in its most productive applications, queer theory encourages investigations into the maintenance of gendered and sexual normativity, as well as the ways in which such cultural practices service particular ideological regimes. Queerness interrogates systems of normativity through myriad perspectives – including sexuality but expanding to additional constituent factors of personal identity that can be deemed non-normative.

In this protean adaptability, its utility in addressing questions of political import defines its subversive relevance, as Judith Butler suggests:

If the term “queer” is to be a site of collective contestation, a point of departure for a set of historical reflections and future imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes.