Simulating: Emptinesses

by Ander Monson

It is 2009. I finally get to go to Medieval Times, or more specifically, the Medieval Times based in Schaumburg, Illinois. Schaumburg is a suburb of Chicago, hometown of my friend Heidi. As such I attach a specific mythology to it that is, I’m sure, unwarranted. I don’t know if we can tell a place by someone we know who grew up there. By going there we get a fuller sense of the person, though, or we think we can, which is more important. Hence the whole idea of visiting famous dead writers’ houses or birthplaces (the Carl Sandburg boyhood home is in the town where I went to college and continues—like many writers’ homes—to be set up like it allegedly was when he was Y age and wrote poem Z in this place, as if by seeing his room, or his writing desk, or whatever, you can get deeper inside his writing, you can inhabit his writing, his body, his brain for a moment. Maybe you can simulate being Carl Sandburg if you buy the typewriter he used and hunch yourself in the pose he liked. I don’t believe in the idea, but there remains this fascination. But then I don’t really like to think about writers as people so much as conduits or magicians. You can get pretty depressed looking at what flawed and sometimes downright awful people writers often are. So it’s best to take that off the table. But if you want to check out writers’ homes, check out Brock Clarke’s novel, The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. It’s pretty engaging if you’re down with the voice/conceit.

At any rate we were talking about nerdery. If you drive through Chicago (which you do sooner or later if you drive through the Midwest), you’ve seen the Schaumburg Medieval Times. It’s the big fake castle structure just off I-90 east of O’Hare. It looks like a small medieval Disneyland. And if you see it as a kid, you’re imprinted. They know this. Sooner or later you must go to it. It is a beacon.

I first encountered the edifice driving by night in 1994, three years after it opened. Its faux-stonework facades were spectacularly lit up. It looked like a dream. I thought it might have been a dream. I often have dreams like this.

I’ve tried to convince almost all of my Midwestern friends to go with me to Medieval Times at one time or another. I almost had Heidi on the hook, but then she tried to talk me into another medieval dinner theatre thing downtown someplace. I’m sure it’s better, classier, cheaper, more entertaining, and more authentic. But Heidi, I said, (I might as well have said, But Daaaaad!), let’s go to Medieval Times. It’s going to be awesome. She refused. She is a hard woman. She doesn’t live in Schaumburg anymore, though her parents do. So the whole time I’m in Schaumburg I’m thinking about her parents and whether I’ll remember their names (I’ve met them many times, but I suck at names, especially with people who are essentially role players and less people to me—sorry, but it’s true, they’re still Heidi’s parents first and foremost, so they get popped in that role, though they’re both charming and lovely and entertaining), and trying to construct some kind of scenario that would account for Heidi not going with me to Medieval Times.

I mean, I’m staying in a fancy hotel in Rosemont now, but it might as well be Schaumburg, or Skokie, or whatever. These suburbs feel interchangeable, which is the point of suburbs, and, for the most part, hotels: they are the same, but they aren’t the city. You are here, but you are safe; you are other. I am obviously a fool and know nothing, but still. I think Schaumburg also has the Ikea that slows traffic to a crawl trying to get off I-90 onto I-290 when you’re already late for wherever you are going. Schaumburg is rich in car dealerships indeed, since I’ve seen a lot of custom frames around license plates embossed with Schaumburg. But until now it–and Medieval Times—has more or less been myth, like most of America that you’re aware of but just don’t have time to actually get off the interstate to investigate, because your dad insists on Making Good Time and Not Stopping to Use the Bathroom More than Once Every Four Hours, and because you are a son of your dad, and these habits are hard to break, and will continue to be hard to break even after he is dead, which you don’t like to think about often, but do, and besides it is eventually to be a sad fact so why deny it. He even speaks of his own mortality, which is disturbing, only partly because he is right.

History, if you care: Schaumburg, Illinois, was settled by German immigrants (friend Heidi is partly or fully of German descent), and the city was named after Schaumburg, a medieval county in Germany. So the Medieval Times is potentially period-appropriate. I imagine this was considered in the decision to locate a new Medieval Times here.

I have never seen another Medieval Times. I proceed only on faith, as we are forced to do so often in this world—and on whatever empirical evidence websearching counts for—that they are out there at all, eight other stars in the constellation, most of which are unsurprisingly in Florida, the state most invested in simulation.

Anyway, I am here because of the idea of simulation, or reenactment, or of Dungeons & Dragons. They are not the same things, but they have similar concerns: representations, (re)creations, modeling a kind of reality: flagons, mead, bawdy maidens, and ritual. I am here on a geas, a quest, a powerful compulsion.

Some facts you might want to consider before going: admission is in the neighborhood of sixty bucks before you spring for alcohol (lame beers served in collectible plastic flagons and goblets and so on; the actual glasses are a week’s wage, or what would have been ten years of wages for the average vassal) or the many trinkets they have for sale inside. You can also upgrade to the King’s Royalty Package for $20 additional per person, the (Non-Kings’ Weak Ass) Royalty Package for $10 a pop, or the Celebration Package for $16. One of these gets you official shout-outs at dinner, though I am telling you now that it is not worth it.

Here’s how it goes: you walk in to the tune of various medievalish songs and sights, or things like boobs and bodices and swords and long shampooed and flowing locks that connote a cleaner version of the past and maybe get your naughty bits and your imaginations excited. Your anachronism meter goes off the charts really fast, so you’ll want to shut it off if you’re to enjoy this at all as what it is: spectacle, narrative, fantasy, enter-motherfucking-tainment (without swears, since this is cool for kids; in fact it is designed to be kid-safe, like a bad young adult fantasy novel with the wide brush strokes instead of characters and the dramatic actions and no sex and no swearing and no real sense of danger to make you feel alive in this simulated world of the book or in this case the show). You’re randomly assigned to one of six color-coded sections, and sit in chairs surrounding an arena about the size of a hockey rink. You sit with your color-coded sectioneers, and your role is to cheer for whichever knight you are told to. I was assigned (randomly) to the Green Knight. The website describes him like this:

This warrior of Asturius is an unquestioned master of weapons. Don Temple has never been unhorsed in the joust. No mantle of peace or of serenity will ever grace his shoulders, for his temper is the dragon’s claw.

In practice he is somehow different. For starters, he’s the only knight of color here as far as I can tell. Which means he plays the role of the villain, or to cop the pro wrestling terminology, he is a heel (the “good guys” are faces—and there are whole worlds inside of this culture, like any culture, and it is worth exploring on your own recognizance). His temper is not just like the dragon’s claw, but is. the dragon’s. clawwwww.

His introduction is verbatim from the website when the master of ceremonies calls the knights out publicly to preen for their color-coded section, and for the rest of the crowd, in order to teach us what to do. By cheering for our knight we begin to love our knight. It is sad, but it is true.

You get the sense that at least half of the people here know these words by heart. There’s a narrative that gets tacked onto things, but the show consists primarily of you eating and cheering on your knight as he competes in a medieval-themed tournament (jousting, falconry, horsemanship, hair-bouncing, rose-throwing, rhetoric, and of course fighting with a variety of surely-dull-though-they-spark-excitingly-when-they-collide-in-air weapons). The narrative works into this with a captured prince, a lovelorn princess, and two powers on the verge of war. If you have watched any movie or read any book you will know where this is going.

There are a lot of lights and fog and props and sound and sound and sound. It’s a pretty little spectacle they put together, enough so you start to let down your ironic mask that protects you from really feeling this. The music is written specifically to soundtrack the story, and many moments sound a lot like other moments you’ll recognize (the main fanfare is eerily close to the theme for the movie Spaceballs!, and at least one song is surely referencing music from Conan the Destroyer or maybe, preferably … the Barbarian). The show is filled with obvious cues, so you know when to cheer, when to jeer (for the green team, we actively booed other knights; I don’t think anyone else did, but then our dude is the heel, so in a way we’re the heels, the populace of the heel kingdom; he’s a bad boy, so we become bad boys: you kind of get into the dark side of things).

Oh, but don’t worry, everything turns out all right in the end.

It’s as hilarious as the scene from The Cable Guy, the mid-nineties Jim Carrey film (which is worth watching, actually, and which only served to reinforce my desire to, irony or no, go to Medieval Times, preferably with a girl).

The weird thing about the whole experience is that these customs, these medieval(ish—obviously things here are very loosely based on the actual time period, where most of the meat you’d eat, for instance, would be rancid, which explains why you’d spice everything heavily, to cover the rotting flavor: tasty!) ceremonies are now meaningless aside from our continuing representation of what we think (what we tell ourselves) they stood for.

They stand in for a fantasy, what we think chivalry is or was, what we want it to be, a simpler time of good and evil and knights and princesses, and the usual sorts of simplifications that make these things appealing escapist fantasy. So you get these actors playing knights doing choreographed fights with a succession of weapons (swords of various sorts, whips, axes, lances, glaives (or maybe guisarmes—I forget which is which), morning stars, and maces) straight out of Ye Older Equipmente Store or Elric The Red’s Clang-Clang Blacksmithe Shoppe in any town your party may stumble across in any game, book, film, or dream. You may certainly buy cheap wooden or plastic replicas in the lobby so your stubby children can whack each other and leave you alone for a couple hours.

So these fights mime actual injuries (deaths, ostensibly, given the medical care available at the time, and whatever, running someone through is running someone through, then or now–but it’s bloodless and somehow everyone is okay at the end), and then there are interruptions featuring other oddities, the knights riding around lustrously and throwing flowers to pretty girls in the crowd. There is falconry (which is the highlight of the show in this writer’s opinion), a lot of complicated horsery, and fanfares and toasts. You get the idea, right? It’s ceremony after ceremony, each of which had an original referent, and meant something, subject to the mythology and social constructs of the time, but now it’s all empty, an act caked on an act caked on an act being performed by a beautiful clown with a drunk-looking nose. Which is beautiful in its own way like any clown is. This has been distilled to pure entertainment. And we’re part of it. They know we want to play a role. They know we want to cheer and will pay to do it in person. We cheer on our sporting teams, our celebrities, our fallen and disgraced governors trying to dance to earn our forgiveness or at least some quick cash to pay the lawyers, our new American Idols, our karaoke queens on Friday nights. It doesn’t matter what rationale we develop for rooting for somebody to do something. We are told to root for the green knight, so we root for the green knight. Until the green knight loses. And then we root for the whole show, or maybe ourselves, or our sixty bucks, or our memories, or something as it recedes into the darkness and the farty bathroom where we consider ourselves with our sad green paper crowns and wonder whatever happened to us and what we thought our lives might amount to.

This is culture, distilled. Diluted. Dulled down. Cleaned up for kids. Made myth. You can pay more to play a slightly larger role. If you get one of the packages, you get front-row seating. You get a banner you may wave for your arbitrary knight. You get photos taken of you with medieval whatever all over you. You become part of the story. Your name is read off in the list of anniversaries and birthdays. Brownie Troop 894? Girl Scout Troop 282? Lovers of Madmen Theatre Group? Some Catholic School I didn’t catch? Prince Timmy, now eight? Lady Amanda, now thirteen? And some guy who turned fifty-one, and whose family loves him just enough (or not really very much at all) to take him to Medieval Times and have his name read and celebrated by the King (who looks exactly how you think a king would look)? Y’all are now part of the story! And what of the thirty sullen eastern Europeans in my group? I imagine they must have been confused by the whole spectacle.

Or maybe not. The whole project (Renaissance Faires, Medieval Times, the Excalibur in Las Vegas) appears to be mostly American, our collective longing for a history we do not have. Which becomes a kind of tourism available to everybody. I heard another group speaking German at the show. Maybe they were from the original Schaumburg, here to see what American Schaumburg has transformed their history into, here to be a tourist in our version of their pasts (like flying from Houston to England to eat at McDonald’s in London that offers a McTexan burger). I’m betting ours is better lit, with better sound, hotter knights, sexier hair, cooler falcons, more teeth. We are nothing if not excited about our technology and our dentistry in the suburbs outside Chicago. Are we—are you—am I—not entertained?

In fact we are entertained. I don’t mean to be snarky—it’s hard for anyone over fourteen to approach this without a slight sense of irony: even the MC has some nice one-liners commenting on some of the lame birthday wishes, brief opportunities to crack a smile, break a role, and improvise a bit. What works here is that these personalized fantasies are the fantasies of childhood, or of adolescence, our hormones starting to fire and whip into a froth. Coming to Medieval Times, like Disneyland or Disneyworld, is returning to when we were fourteen and made everything over in the drama of adolescence. Not to say it’s bad or dull or unbeautiful, but that the adult brain has to disconnect some in order to get back to it, and it takes a while to get us there.

What’s odd is that several bachelorette parties are in attendance. If the idea of the bachelor/bachelorette party is a ceremony we sometimes use to mark our transition from shallow singledom into married life, then the party is a throwback to who we used to be. We behave like randy drunken teenagers. Maybe we go back to the strip club to simulate what we think our lives used to be like. Weren’t all the girls hot and interested and dancing? Weren’t the beers insanely overpriced and we weren’t allowed to touch anything? Maybe we come here to simulate this fantasy instead. For these women, do they see this as a medieval romance novel brought to life? It reads that way. It’s sexy, probably, all these knights, all this jousting, all this flower-throwing to the ladies in the stands.

But a note on the food: kind of ew. The menu: tomato bisque soup, garlic bread, half a chicken, a rib, then “pastry of the castle” and coffee. But yes, you must eat with your fingers. It’s an abridged medieval eating experience since surely no one would have wanted the real medieval times at Medieval Times. I buy myself a huge goblet of Michelob Amber Bock, the best beer they have available. It comes in a collectible cup I get to take home. I will never use it though it resides in the cabinet above my annoying stove. But I hate eating with my hands, and I hate eating meat on the bone. And meat on the bone, a beefy mustachioed helmeted axe-having, adventurer-beating, unwashed, angry dude chewing a turkey leg, now that’s what we think of when we think of medieval times. So I guess I hate that except in television and pornography. I shaved my mustache for this?

The chicken is awkward but okay. The rib is kind of gross (but then again I don’t like ribs). The deep-fried half-potato is unspectacular. The pastry is all right. The Pepsi is entirely rocking, which is the point of Pepsi. But we’re not here for the food. We’re here to see some crap attack some other crap.

And attack they do. The swords spark when they collide. The battle sequences are pretty decent, if too obviously choreographed. The worst parts are the ones that would be in slow motion if this were film, and we do perceive this as film in spite of its liveness. We know how to watch film; we don’t know as well how to watch this. Those moments where two knights are locked in combat, one pressing down their blade at a perpendicular angle to the other’s, six inches away from one of their faces, would be perfect for a close-up shot of the struggle, the sweat sliding down the Green Knight’s neck in high definition, as their muscles ripple simulatedly and their mouths mouth sounds of effort. But from here they’re not compelling. They’re too slow, too big, too obvious, and at full speed the moves they are executing make no battle sense at all. Jesus! It’s like they never even read Dragon magazine.

There are other film tropes, the quick xylophone scales that indicate flashbacks in film are here too, deployed so we know a flashback when we see one (we are nothing if not trained!). We are cued. We are cute, all of us in our crowns, with our cheering throngs of tramp-stamped, thong-sporting awkward kids, our odd $5 glow stick lightsabers, our turkey legs, our greasy hands, our perfect, ever-eroding teeth.

But okay, I’m talking a lot about this. And I can analyze it all I want, but here’s the weird part: by the end, I’m ready to kick somebody’s ass. With my green knight cardboard crown on I’m outraged when he’s restrained, even though he’s the aggressor, violating all kinds of chivalric rules (attacking from behind, double-teaming an unarmed guy), even as he beams up to us, his bitchy vassals in the stands.

Or actually we’re not his vassals. We’re allegedly noblemen and noblewomen, lords and ladies of the realm, here at the invitation of the king to be entertained. In fact everyone in the crowd is required to wear a paper crown. I think the crowns are color coded so we can tell each other apart. The ceremonies being performed here were originally meant both to help warriors improve their skills in the times between wars, and to satisfy our human need for carnage and competition and cheering, to settle down the crowd, to keep us pacified so we don’t all get worked up and riot in the streets and overthrow the feudal hierarchy which, it turns out, didn’t really improve our quality of life.

Or maybe it did. I can never keep it straight.

We needed these spectacles. We still need these spectacles, apparently. Look at pro wrestling, mixed-martial arts fighting, boxing, Black Friday, the race of early adopters all holding up their hard-won iPhones. Look at any sport: competitive eating, American Gladiators, bocce, the biathlon. Any human endeavor. We want entertainment. And we want some semblance of reality. Hence memoirs. Hence reality TV. Hence neoprene faux-chain mail and live action role playing. We are born to play a role. We know it rules.

So what’s the point of simulation? In this case to be entertained a couple different ways without anyone actually getting hurt, to learn a little pseudo-history, to tell our friends about it, to write semi-snarky essays trying to understand what we just saw. To take us away from our usual selves for a little while. Because our selves are boring, depressing, let’s be honest. I paid sixty bucks to watch this show and then went back to my hotel room and sat around in my underwear watching a football game broadcast in low-definition on a high-definition TV eating circus peanuts and trying not to masturbate myself to sleep. Until then, I got to root for an almost-hero with a full head of real, rippling hair. I got to be one of an us for a while.

On the way out of the building into weak Illinois sunlight, which suddenly seems fake, like it’s not quite real sunlight at all, it’s like you just came from a hockey game. You’re amped up, blinking, a little confused, ready to cross-check Gerry LaBonte into the boards when he comes for you. You’ve seen it on TV before. You are me. You might as well be me. You’re in a simulation right now, your eyes my eyes following my words, line after line.

Or it’s like coming out of an action flick: you’re ready to make your car do things cars only do in film with digital effects which might lead you to, like, die. It’s hard to check your many many impulses—here and everywhere. It remains that way for a while before the feeling fades into the memory of it, and then into the memory of the memory of it, as you stuff yourself with snacks and buy a ticket to go back.