#one day i might write up that post on portrayals of masculinity in koh that i've been wanting to do for ages

[incorrect-koh-posts]

"[...] narrative interest in Kingdom of Heaven focuses not on the outcome of the conflict between the Crusader Kingdom and Saladin but on the way it was fought, on means rather than ends, performance rather than goals. In the end, how the hero performs is more important than the fact that he lost the battle and surrendered the city. [...]

"Scott perhaps best encapsulates the anxieties that surround hard-bodied masculinity and the mourning for its loss in his uncanny image of Baldwin, the leper king of Jerusalem, whose death precipitates the destruction of the Crusader Kingdom. Rather than focusing the audience's attention on the ravages of the disease of leprosy (at least until after his death), Scott depicts him in a funereal image of a male body swathed in white robes and veils, his face hidden by a beautiful but lifeless silver mask. Baldwin is beautiful but inanimate on the outside - a hard-bodied shell - living but hideous on the inside. His voice detached from his body, Baldwin becomes a ghostly acousmatic, despite his physical presence onscreen. His voice seems to issue from an inanimate shell, cut off from its origin in a human body. He is his own - and his kingdom's - funeral effigy. In this figure the hard-bodied masculinity of the crusaders in Kingdom of Heaven is exposed as a performance, a disguise that hides the rottenness within the kingdom beneath its beautiful but dead veneer. The image allows not only the crusaders but Scott's audience to mourn lost glories."

- Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp. 231f.