'The Northman' Is 'Hamlet' for Silicon Valley

The Northman is one of those high concept, medieval sword and sorcery movies that unintentionally offers an insight into our present-day civilization— in which the unceasing advance of technology, the triumph of the algorithm, and the continued quantification of anything and everything through advanced statistics has been accompanied by a widespread and heterogenous cultural reengagement with the primitive, the pre-rational, the mystical, and the proto-civilizational. Something like this mix courses through pop-cultural phenomena like Game of Thrones, the burgeoning genre of intensively researched witch novels, the popularity of Yuval Noah Harari, the revival of psychedelics, the myriad varieties of mysticisms and apocalyptic visions, new and old, including Eastern religions, Hasidism, goddess cults, crystals, energetic healing, QAnon, and Scientology—American society now, as in Puritan and Anabaptist times, consisting of one big grab bag of cults. The Northman eagerly participates in some of the sillier versions of contemporary neo-primitivism (“My earth magic will aid your sword of fire” is an actual line in the movie and of course foreshadows sex), but also manages to be one of its more serious aesthetic achievements to date.