IN THE 2013 film The World's End, directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and Simon Pegg, the main character, Gary (played by Pegg), a middle-aged man who has made nothing of his life, gathers his old school friends together to return to their hometown of Newton Haven, England, and complete a famed pub crawl— the Golden Mile— that they had attempted and failed when they were eighteen. The epigraph that opens this chapter is Gary's internal recollection of that time. To Gary, the completion of the Golden Mile, which includes a beer at every pub, is not only a return to the powerful, heady days of his youth, but a confirmation that he has truly passed into manhood. The film implies that in Gary's mind, the Golden Mile is a coming-of-age experience that can transform him into the masculine, powerful, confident man he wishes to be. It is a hero's journey predicated on a return to beginnings, but which leads to endings, both symbolic and literal; the World's End pub at the completion of the Golden Mile becomes the site of an encounter with alien colonizers who bring on the apocalypse.

I introduce this dark comedy because it provides an example of how beer stories and medievalism can intersect in unusual ways. The film memorably and humorously illustrates not only the gendering of beer consumption as masculine, which was discussed in the previous chapter and is further addressed in the following pages, but also the easy conflation of a beer journey with the narrative tradition of heroic transformation— a transformation that requires the hero first to return to and understand his origins (his “cradle” and “playground”), and then to move forward into the future.