Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Coward's Weapon

Say I handed you a weapon. It was something completely unlike anything you'd seen before: a device that could take out an attacker before he even knew you were there. It could be wielded in complete stealth, with excellent accuracy, and it wasn't expensive to make.

I am speaking, of course, of the bow.


As long as there have been bows, there have been legends associated with them. It makes perfect sense: at heart, the bow is an impossibly miraculous weapon. It puts the rich man in armor on the same playing field as the peasant with good aim and access to a yew tree. It ensures a certain amount of protection for its wielder - a good archer can get rid of a lot of foes before they get close enough to hit him back. Legends can't ignore the bow; they're full of archers, most of them crack shots. But no one can quite make up their mind about what the weapon says about the wielder.

Mostly, anyway. There is one true cowardly archer: Paris of Troy. In a culture where courage is measured by risking life and limb in a chariot melee, the pretty boy who shoots arrows from behind his city walls is never going to get much respect. When Paris and Menelaus fight their duel over Helen, it's implicit that the bow is not an allowed weapon: real men fight face-to-face, not bow-to-shield. Paris's slaying of Achilles is hideously ironic - the greatest warrior of the age, a man who physically attacked a river and won, is killed with the weapon of a coward. It's deliciously karmic that the Greeks turn Paris's own weapon against him; his killer, Philoctetes, inherited from Heracles the bow and poisoned arrows he uses to take out Paris. But that very act takes some of the sting out of the taunting of Paris as a fraidy-cat archer. He may sleep around with another man's wife while his brothers die in the dust, but his archery was something not only to be feared, but to be emulated. Even when it's the coward's weapon, a good bow is worth having on your side.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, Warner Bros.
Things could only get better for the bow, and did they ever. From the moment Robin Hood shot his first arrow, the bow was enshrined in legend as the weapon of the underdog. So you can't afford a sword or chain mail or a war horse? No problem! You can go them one better. For a few hours of labor, you can make yourself an armor-piercing weapon that keeps you out of reach of a sword's edge or a horse's hooves. Rebels from William Tell to Katniss Everdeen embrace the bow's practical and symbolic value. Armed with bows, the oppressed masses are no longer defenseless. Singlehandedly, an archer can start a rebellion; get a group of Merry Men together, and you've got a full-scale coup on your hands. The sheer nature of the weapon - requiring forethought and planning - also seems to influence its wielders: legendary archers tend to be far more strategically minded than swordsmen.

Eventually, nobility is allowed to use the bow. One of the engagement challenges for the hand of Princess Yasodhara requires her suitors to string and bend a massive bow. Siddhartha, the future Buddha, calmly fires off an arrow as well, when no other suitor had even managed to string the weapon. Similarly, Odysseus is the only man who can use his own personal bow; his reclamation of kingdom and queen truly begins when he completes Penelope's impossible challenge. But the nobility is still weird about archery; both instances are the only times we see either hero use a bow, and they're relegated firmly to the arena of showmanship, with no practical side in evidence. Rama is rarely depicted without a bow, but Rama is in a strange fix: undeniably royal, he's also a prince in exile. He may be the only noble to escape without censure from the practical wartime use of a bow.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, Lionsgate
Most recently, the bow has become an oddly gendered weapon. In an unfortunate modern transposition, the "cowardly" archer has become "feminine." The two best-known archers in pop culture are Katniss and Legolas. One's a girl, one's played by Orlando Bloom. Women in stories set in or influenced by the Middle Ages have a choice of two weapons: the knife, for close work when her protection has failed, or the bow, to keep her out of danger but still enable her to please a modern audience by fighting. It's the same stigma that Paris dealt with: men don't fight from a distance, ergo men don't use bows. And the complexity of Katniss, currently the most visible archer around, means that while we admire her incredible aim and accuracy, we are always horrifyingly aware of what it costs her to use her skill to kill. She's not a good-versus-evil hero, and while her weapon represents rebellion, she's not one with it in the same way that Robin Hood is.

It's a weird full-circle situation, with the bow slipping off its rebellious pedestal into, if not ill repute, certainly a loss of luster. And it's hard to predict exactly where the bow will wind up next. But it will probably always be the weapon of revolution; its equalizing nature will never change. It will circle back around to pure uncomplicated heroism, and then around again as we remember what long-range weapons do to a gallant charge of heroes. It's a complicated weapon, and it'll probably always make us a little bit nervous.

16 comments:

  1. oooo interesting. Nicely done. :)

    I'm thinking of the other female players in the Hunger Games now, and if I remember correctly, the Fox girl doesn't use a weapon that we ever see, and the little girl from district 11 relies on hiding. I can't remember very well about the 2 Career girls, but I believe the one that tries to kill Katniss uses knives? This would indicate that Katniss might be using the most honorable weapon out of the girls in the Games. The arrows are quick and clean, and her shots are almost always face-to-face.

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    1. Honor in the Hunger Games is a super-tricky question, but yes, I love this idea that Katniss uses the most honorable weapon.

      Thinking about the other girls... Clove has her knives, and Glimmer, who initially tries to use Katniss's bow, is a very beautiful and glamorous Career who wins initial support via her sex appeal. And totally fails at archery. I do think it's significant that the bow is claimed by a girl, especially when she runs with the pack of Career tributes who are evenly split between male and female. Glimmer tries shooting Katniss, but mainly for fun. Until Katniss gets her hands on it and proves its deadliness, the bow is simply not seen as a killing tool.

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    2. I think the idea of Honor in the Hunger Games is fascinating, now that I'm actually considering it. lol. I've only read the first book so far, but within that book, Peta starts out by asserting he wants to stay himself, which is essentially to remain honorable despite the absolute barbarity of the Games. In the end, Katniss herself remains honorable as well, although it's clearly something she struggles with during the course of the Games. I think, in fact, that the girl from 11 is sort of her tipping point. After that, the Games gain meaning beyond her personal survival, and her bow & arrow become (a la Robin Hood) the weapon of the People.

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    3. I LOVE that we are having this conversation.

      Come to think of it, her aggressive course in the Games is bookended by two attacks, one sneaky and one honorable. When she drops the tracker jacker nest on the Career pack (and kills Glimmer), it's done with stealth and the intent to harm. And it's before she gets the bow. But when she kills Cato, it's with an arrow, and it's almost an act of mercy. No subterfuge about it. She's doing the only right thing to do in that situation, which is to spare him further agony, and she uses the bow to do it.

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    4. Fox Face uses a weapon: Her mind.

      Also Johanna Mason, who won her games by pretending to be weak. And then hauling ass. I guess that fits into this too.

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    5. Point. But those are both very traditionally feminine methods: deceit, trickery, stealth. Yes, Johanna racks up some kills, unlike Foxface, but the power of her kills comes from her ultimate subversion of the fainting female stereotype. By playing to it and then against it, she manages to overturn it while proving its persistence at the same time. And Foxface is never seen as a threat, like Cato or Thresh or Clove, or even Katniss.

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  2. Actually, Greg just pointed out that there is one female character that uses a sword in close combat... Xena Warrior Princess!

    Also, he pointed out that maybe the men wanted to keep their "child bearing women" safe from battle and so the only weapons that would be encouraged would be the distance ones. (Maybe saying that we have more important things in our bodies that as women we need to be more protective of than men...?)

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    1. Insofar as tracing cultural attitudes, I think he's spot on. But it's still a really unfortunate translation of "cowardice" to "femininity." Either way, you've got someone seen as incapable of combat with a weapon that keeps them out of the way. To my mind, the weird thing is that the coward-to-female translation has happened recently, in the midst of an overpopulation crisis; you'd think protecting the child-bearers would no longer be so pressing an issue! :)

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  3. I remember a couple years ago seeing a commercial for the Punisher movie in which he used a bow and arrow to assassinate someone and thinking, "lame!" So you may have a point about the bow and arrow not being the manliest of weapons. Because that movie bombed! And even years later, I think his use of a bow and arrow is kind of silly looking.

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    1. That's a whole new kettle of fish, actually. You could argue that Robin Hood, for instance, makes the bow heroic because he has no other option than to use it. He's been driven to extremity, and has claimed for his own the only weapon that makes tactical sense to use. But the Punisher is in a semi-similar situation, robbed of his family and fighting a stronger power with everything at his disposal. And yet his use of the bow isn't heroic. Maybe the nature of the bow's place in society isn't fully cyclical - it is hard to forget the huge advantage of a range weapon over people struggling in the melee. This would suggest that even when used by an underdog as the weapon of rebellion, there are still uncomfortable stigma attached to the bow that clash with our cultural notions of courage and manhood.

      (I do wish the strategic minds of archers got more credit, though. No one really addresses the forethought it takes to plot a successful arrow ambush.)

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    2. Are you honestly trying to tell me that Robin Hood isn't rife with Ho-Yay? The guy wears tights for Suzaku's sake. He and Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy or Gisbourne have a much more compelling love quadrangle than him and Marian. Robin Hood isn't the most manly of heroes and the use of the bow and arrow totally justifies my thinking that.

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    3. Part of the re-mythologising of the bow as more heroic probably comes from the development of the English archers with the longbow. As they get really tied in to the English sense of national security, any stigma begins to disappear.

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    4. That makes a ton of sense. It's hard to feel weird about a symbol of your country's military success (especially when that success comes against your traditional enemy).

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  5. I have to respectfully disagree. One off-movie does not a feminine bow make or a cowardly bow make.

    The bow and arrow earned its rightful place in the history of humans as tools of war and survival.

    If we label the warrior based on method and weapon of choice like the archer, we may as well label the gun fighters, snipers, fighter pilots, terrorists, etc., etc.

    I would rather measure the courage, honor and bravery of a warrior, based not on method and weapon of choice, but how the method and weapon of choice are applied.

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    1. Not for a second would I dispute that the bow is an incredibly formative tool in the development of human society. People from all walks of life have found it not only useful but paradigm-shifting; Agincourt comes to mind, and that's just off the top of my head. (It's also a personal favorite of mine; I can't shoot for crap, but I stand in awe of people who can.)

      Smearing the bow's place in history wasn't at all my intention. What fascinates me is the spectrum of cultural reactions to a weapon that levels the field like nothing else. You can't ignore the bow once you've gotten it - it's too powerful a tool - but you can choose what stories you tell about it. The sheer range of implications that different cultures have given to this one weapon was the impetus behind this post - that, and the bow's endurance in spite of all the wildly different metaphorical weights it's been forced to carry. If aspersions were cast, they were intended to be cast on the viewpoints that speak for the bow, rather than on the bow itself, which continues to lodge itself in a variety of cultural consciousnesses and create new identities and meanings for itself.

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