This essay explores certain broad analogies in the medievalism of American popular cinema during the past six years, focusing primarily on First Knight (1995) and A Knight's Tale (2001). Both movies flaunt anachronism, designed not to render faithfully their respective sources in Malory or Chaucer, but rather to appeal to a cinematic imaginary about the Middle Ages, composed of bits and pieces drawn from film history and popular culture. The postmodern call to revisit the past with a mixture of nostalgia and irony is answered in such films by deploying the “prior textualization” of the cinematic history of the “Middle Ages” as pastiche. First Knight reimagines Arthurian courtly romance as an amalgam of feudal horse opera and Hollywood melodrama. A Knight's Tale recreates fourteenth century England as a Debordian society of the spectacle where jousting is an X-treme sport.

What is by turns engaging and infuriating about both films is their postmodern ontology: Exactly what worlds are these? The two quotes by Umberto Eco above reflect our mixed emotions about the medievalismby- collage of such movies. We distrust the depthlessness of pastiche and yet recognize that the anachronistic, agglutinative representation of the past in Helgeland's A Knight's Tale may be closer to the poetics of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale than we would comfortably admit. Likewise, the nostalgic eclecticism of First Knight is, mutatis mutandis, a salient feature of many medieval romances. Yet if both films flaunt the wild conglomerations of postmodernism, they do not share its suspicion of meta-narratives. First Knight rewrites the Day of Doom as a Hollywood happy ending, a smooth translatio imperii where Camelot never falls and Excalibur passes from the notably British Connery to the notably American Gere.