Robin Hood: the new iconography of victimhood

From Shane to JFK and Seven, there was a sure way of identifying villains in Hollywood movies. It used to be black hats and white hats, but that didn’t work so well—except for westerns. So Hollywood came up with an equally simply rule that worked for different genres. The baddie was always a single childless man (or group of men). The goodie was always a family or community made up of families, or at least a couple. Sometimes (Shane, The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West) he was a single man fighting on behalf of the family/community. In fact, this was usually more likely to announce a great film. With the ending guaranteed: the hero rides off, his job well done.

And so it is with Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. Women, children and old men are threatened by a wild coalition of baddies. And who will protect them? Robin (Russell Crowe). The film tells the story of how the single man returns from war and inserts himself into a new community of women and children, allied against the baddies (all men, bearded, most of them bald, the more bald the more villainous). The courtship with maid Marian is, of course, the crucial moment.

But Ridley Scott has added a new element to the iconography of victimhood. In the crucial sequence when the women, children and old men are attacked by the all-male baddies, there are a couple of curiously familiar and evocative scenes. All these medieval people are locked into a building, to be burned alive. The smoke enters the locked building. The people panic. The medieval peasants suddenly look very familiar. They look like Jews in east Europe during the Holocaust, that burning barn is a kind of gas chamber.

Robin Hood could not be more post-modern. Despite all the authentic mud and hemp, it’s not really about the middle ages. It’s Saving Private Ryan goes to Agincourt. We have scenes straight from the D-Day landings, plus the attack on Harfleur from Henry V, plus a bit of Shane, plus the Holocaust. It’s a medieval western which looks as if it’s set in the second world war.

That’s fine. It’s all terrific fun. Great cast, good battle scenes, a real jerkin-buster. But what’s new is a new kind of all-purpose victim: the holocaust Jew as Everyman?