The Seventh Seal
That was not what I expected. Meta-Jokes, in my existential philosophy? An atheist snarky lower class worker, while the aristo wasted 10 years of his life in a pointless crusade, instigated by an idiot?
The superstructure is simple: Death comes for the crusader, but is tricked into playing a game of chess first. After one move each, the crusader flees into a “set piece” philosophically related to something, and this repeats for a while. But this is a life or death situation, the only winning move is not to play. Death wins in the end with a check-mate, and that means the crusader and all the friends he picked up along way die.
Not all of them. Fret not, for the couple with the kid survives. Life finds a way.
While the crusader is a pious believer, his squire is a heathen nihilist snarker, fulfilling the role of the jester (on my Watsonion interpretation). He is there from the start, ready to badmouth not just organised religion but belief itself, and gets the best quips and jokes.
They reach the first hamlet and the party grows with the addition of the “mute” girl. The black plague rages on, and said hamlet is dead. A looter wanders around stealing silver, but he is recognised by the squire as the initial cause of the crusade 10 years before, the responsible for corrupting the mind of the knight. He runs away before having the time to rape the “mute” girl, an extreme non-entity. She might have some trauma, it’s unclear, but the squire immediately screams at her, noticing his extreme restraint at not fucking her immediately, so she gets shanghaied into being a maid.
On the second stop, they reach a church, where the squire rants about Christianity being a death cult, and priest as succubus, capturing souls into their downer moods. There’s a captured witch outside, but she is only a weird kid.
The next characters introduced are the travelling troupe, a couple with a child and another dude, with a rant on how they are not free and their art is censored by the church. They perform to a sizeable audience in the town square, but said lead guy gets a cowpie in the face and runs away humiliated, getting into the pants of a very forward wench.
The couple continues to sing, when they are interrupted by a Christian procession, at which point the villagers default to maximum piety, the party just looks befuddled, while the squire rants on how stupid everything is.
The party has a picnic with the couple (eating Wild Strawberries and drinking milk) and add them to their party. The crusader will mention this moment as the reason why it was worth it to delay his death.
Before leaving the town with the couple, the party encounters the missing artist and the wench. This seems harmless but the wench’s husband tagged along, the dumb blacksmith. They all just get along after some slapstick.
Still on the woods, they encounter the other guy, the looter from the beginning. The squire had already met him on the town and branded him by slashing his face, but apparently caught the plague and squirms and screams until he is still. The mute girl, the one that was nearly raped by him, tried to give him water but is stopped by the squire.
Continuing on the woods, they join the convoy transporting the witch to the fire place. The protagonists try to reduce her suffering, but it’s still a powerful moment, Salem’s Lot. In another part of the woods, Death tries and manages to kill the philanderer artist by sawing off the tree he slept in. He deserved a harsher fate for stealing someone’s wife, because she has no will of her own.
Death’s embrace is near, so the knight adds another delay to the game, so he can let the couple with the child escape. The rest have a final rest-stop, the crusader’s castle, where is wife awaits him religiously, like a Medieval Penelope.
Finally, Death no longer holds sway over the party, which means they cry over their shitty life, more generally.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.