Ideology of Ridley Scott\'s Kingdom of Heaven

Kingdom of Heaven

The great irony of Ridley Scott's 2005 film "Kingdom of Heaven" is that its central argument is calculated to seem inoffensive to contemporary audiences, but does so by being historically inaccurate. I take the central message of the film to be what Liam Neeson says approximately 22 into the film, as the ailing Crusader Godfrey of Ibelin (a somewhat fictionalized depiction of Godfrey of Bouillon) tells his son why he will be journeying from rural France to the Holy Land. The son, played by Orlando Bloom, asks his Crusader dad what the Crusader King of Jerusalem could possibly ask him to accomplish. Neeson, as the ailing Crusader, responds with the speech that gives the film its title:

"A better world than has ever been seen. A kingdom of conscience, a kingdom of heaven. There is peace between Christian and Muslim, we live together. Or, between Saladin and the King, we try. Did you think that lay at the end of Crusade? It does. My son, you are all that survives me -- do not disappoint me."

The phrase "Kingdom of Heaven" is used elsewhere in the film -- Raynald of Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson) will employ it in flip fashion as he is debating tactics with Raymond III of Tripoli (Jeremy Irons) -- but this is its first, most salient, and least ironic usage. As a view of the historical aims of the Crusades, it is, of course, sheerest nonsense.

Scott's film is a product of its own historical moment: four years after September 11 and two after the 2003 Iraq invasion. This generated enough interest in the Islamic world to make a film about the Crusades viable, but also required Scott to tread carefully -- George W. Bush had used the word "Crusade" to describe his war on terror in the immediate aftermath of September 11, and Europeans (who live alongside larger Muslim immigrant populations) were quick to point out how offensive the term still remains. But the notion that Godfrey of Bouillon was motivated by an unending thirst for interfaith dialogue is risible, to say the least. The film is careful to portray different attitudes toward Muslims across a different spectrum of the Crusader characters: in the Italian port of Messina we are permitted to witness what religious pluralism might have looked like in the twelfth century (those praying toward Mecca are said to have paid a tax permitting them to worship), but the Orlando Bloom character adds an utterly spurious-sounding note of ecumenical tolerance, suggesting that the meaning of their prayers sounds a lot like the prayers of the Crusaders. Then again, Orlando Bloom's character begins the film by setting a priest on fire, which may explain why he has so little sense of how Islam was defined as fundamentally heretical. (This also permitted the Crusades to extend, in the early 1200s, to extirpating a Christian heresy in the south of France -- as long as religious heresy was a fair target for warcraft, the Albigensians were indistinguishable from the Muslims.) Ridley Scott's film congratulates itself for being more accurate, or cynical, about the motives of the Crusaders -- Neeson's character describes the Holy Land as a "New World" where French peasants can own real estate, suggesting the Crusades were nothing more than colonialism avant-la-lettre -- but it utterly sidesteps the truth about those motivations that are least palatable in terms of the geopolitical situation in the early twenty-first century. The Crusaders' view of Islam, and of religious diversity, would have been much closer to Dante Alighieri's in his depiction of Mohammed than to the wholly post-Enlightenment notion of tolerance preached by the film. Whether or not this message is admirable is beside the point: it simply isn't true.