new vid - "Blinding" - Merlin - Morgana character
Blinding
Fandom: Merlin
Song/Artist: Blinding by Florence and the Machine
Duration: 4:30 minutes
Summary: Le Morte de Morgana.
Spoilers: Whole series.
Premiered at vidukon 2013.
Password: le Fay
Seems that I have been held in some dreaming state
A tourist in the waking world, never quite awake
No kiss, no gentle word could wake me from this slumber
Until I realised that it was you who held me under
Felt it in my fist, in my feet, in the hollows of my eyelids
Shaking through my skull, through my spine and down through my ribs
No more dreaming of the dead as if death itself was undone
No more calling like a crow for a boy, for a body in the garden
No more dreaming like a girl so in love… with the wrong world
And I could hear the thunder and see the lightning crack
All around the world was waking, I never could go back
Cos all the walls of dreaming, they were torn wide open
And finally it seemed that the spell was broken
And all my bones began to shake, my eyes flew open
Snow White's stitching up your circuit-boards
Someone's slipping through the hidden door
The vid summary references Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur”. Don’t ask me about the weird gendering, Wikipedia says it’s right so I blame weird Middle French for weirdness.
The purpose of the vid was to make Morgana’s personal and emotional trajectory make more sense than it did in the show. (Mostly by cutting out a surfeit of evil smiles and random stabbing.) But I also wanted to make the “history” make some sort of personal sense as I worked through it. This show combines so many evocative bits from so many different eras: the Druids being driven out by the Romans; the Romano-Britons in turn being driven out by the Saxons; The red of Camelot versus the blue of other states, which had Saxon names but for me they mainly evoked the French and the Hundred Years’ War. The show cherry-picked in such a haphazard fashion, but to me it also served to show the idea of constant revision, the way we took a story about a fifth century Briton in a Somerset fort and transformed it into the stories told by Nennius, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, by Malory, Tennyson and beyond, all the way to a family show on the BBC.
I also loved the idea of the drama being driven by a fundamental clash of two “religions”: the predominantly Christian chivalric code versus the pagan “old religion”. Not to mention the idea that, but for Merlin’s meddling and general distrust, perhaps neither Morgana nor Mordred would have defected in the first place. “Honi soit qui mal y pense” goes the garter knights’ motto, ironically enough.
External footage is from Stonehenge Decoded and the opening credits to Simon Schama’s A History of Britain, which was great and frustrating in equal measures. Off on a tangent, but I also really recommend Helen Castor’s She Wolves: England’s Early Queens, a viewpoint that Morgana would surely have appreciated more than anyone. I struggled with only putting external source in a couple of isolated points in the vid because it didn’t feel integrated, but it was equally hard to figure out how to use it in other parts of the vid when there was so much story to be told and so many characters to fit in. Poor Gwen got the short end of the stick, as in the show itself more often than not.