Winter Is Coming: Defending Game Of Thrones

Posted: October 30th, 2011 | Author: miconian | Filed under: TV | No Comments »

 

 

HBO’s hugely successful and expensive fantasy series, Game Of Thrones, based on the popular novel by George R.R. Martin, doesn’t need any help from an independent blogger to prove its commercial worth to HBO, to find more viewers, or to get the green light for another season. But, being the landmark mainstream institution that it now is, I fear that it may be overlooked – or just not given a chance at all – by some discerning, sophisticated viewers who think that it’s mostly gratuitous junk. And that would be a mistake, because Game Of Thrones, at least so far, is a work of remarkable complexity and nuance.

A friend who recently watched the pilot at my urging complained that, owing at least in part to the copious female nudity and explicit sex, he felt “pandered to,” and speculated that perhaps the show’s producers had a mandate from HBO to show “so many tits per episode.”

This would be a bit like hearing, from someone who had just seen only the pilot of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, that the world doesn’t need another vampire show, nor is it satisfying, through watching the series, to participate in the further fetishization of the blonde American high school cheerleader. Both of those complaints may be legitimate as far as they go, but they don’t allow for the possibility of a particular show that turns the problem inside out by using cliched tropes as a springboard to subvert, play with, and re-align the viewer’s expectations.

This is, to be fair, an easy thing to miss, because it happens so seldom. I didn’t start watching Buffy until it was into its fourth season, and it was only through a specific set of circumstances that I was persuaded. (A cynical and brilliant friend, Huili Raffo, known for both his vast knowledge of the film canon and his disdain for almost all of it, shocked me by telling me without shame that he was a regular Buffy viewer. A couple weeks later, I was watching the whole series from the beginning.)

 

 

The problem is further compounded by an unfortunate side-effect of the collusion of art and commerce: the expectation that a particular work will signal both its message (or lack thereof) and its intended audience at the outset. The number of people who want to watch an old-fashioned sword and sorcery epic about a couple of old soldier friends trying to restore order to a magical realm is much greater than the number of people who want to watch a thoughtful exploration of politics, gender roles, family, and class. Here, with GOT, the latter is folded into the former, and it might take a while to find if you’re not looking for it.

I wasn’t looking for it. In fact, I originally had no intention of watching the series. The posters, depicting a throne made out of swords (an actual prop in the show), looked ridiculous. A New Yorker article made the book’s rabid community of fans sound insipid. But HBO posted the first ten minutes of the pilot online, and I watched it, thinking that it would provide my justification for refusing to see the rest.

I was surprised by the carefully constructed imagery, the precision of the costumes, and the sparseness of the dialog. But more than anything else, I was taken with the emphasis on the humanity of the characters, albeit in a sort of faux-medieval context. Most fantasy (and science fiction) stories are so focused on immersing the reader/viewer in the alternate world that the inner lives of the characters are an afterthought. But GOT is mostly a story about people. And not cartoony, saintly or evil, Tolkien-esque charicatures whose lives are shaped by magical objects; but real people, the kind who live in our world: complex and confused, the worst still capable of love, the best bewildered by responsibility and the burden of history.

There is magic in the world of GOT, but it’s referenced far more often than it’s seen. Significantly, one of the only glimpses of the supernatural of the entire season happens in the first five minutes (when viewers are deciding whether the show is worth watching); the appearance of the elusive “white walkers.” Even more significantly, the one guy who survives an encounter with the walkers is treated as a trouble-making lunatic and beheaded; the rest of the characters shrug off his insistence as dementia. “The white walkers have been gone for thousands of years…A madman sees what he sees,” northern lord Ned Stark says to his ten year-old son Bran, after acting as executioner. And so, the viewer is placed in the bizarre situation of taking the magic of this world more seriously than the characters do.

In fact, the characters’ habit of referring obliquely to hidden supernatural forces is more reminiscent of the way modern people talk about religion than the way that, say, Merlin talks about the Lady In The Lake (a symbol that’s beautifully inverted by Bran’s tomboy sister, Arya, in an early episode). There are references to “the new gods” and “the old gods,” to whom the characters swear and pray, and “seven hells” is often invoked where a modern Christian might say “Jesus wept.” But there is little indication that any of the people who refer to these ideas take them seriously, or what it would mean if they did. Dragons, we’re told, once ruled the earth, but they are long extinct, and those who talk of them sound fatuous, leading us to wonder whether they ever lived at all.

 

 

And of course, they didn’t, not in reality, which is why the whole construct starts to get really interesting when you think about it. One of the parameters that defines fantasy as a genre is that it takes place long ago, in a past so distant that the basic rules of life (and often, of chemistry and physics) were different. As every geek pedant knows, Star Wars is properly classified as fantasy (as opposed to science fiction), since it begins with “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” thus giving credence to the tropes that follow: knights, swordplay, clear demarcations of good and evil, a captive princess, a hero with a destiny, and so on. The viewer is asked to set aside the complexity of modern (real) life, and return to a simpler “time” in which everything was clearer, and all problems could be solved with bravery, faith, and love.

But GOT does not take place in that kind of idealized past. In fact, the idealized past is embedded within the fictional world as a naive fantasy in itself. We’re teased with the idea of dragons, but most characters talk about them the way we talk about dinosaurs, and indeed, their giant skulls are on display in the Red Keep, the seat of the modern unstable government, as if to emphasize just how irrelevant they are. And so, once again the genre-expectant viewer is left frustrated. Are you fucking serious? the fantasy fanboy inside me asked at many points throughout the first season. There aren’t going to be any live dragons? The viewer’s idea of fantastical conceit is inverted. He has very few reasons to say “I don’t believe it,” and many reasons to say “Don’t they know I would believe more?”

Indeed, Ned’s admonition to Bran that “the white walkers have been dead for thousands of years” adds an ominous cast to the quaint life of quivers and horses into which Bran has been born. Really… thousands? Suddenly, it’s difficult to transpose the history of Westeros onto the history of Europe. These people are not living in an idealized past, but a sort of dystopic medieval present that never ends. “Winter is coming” is the Stark’s family motto, and we soon learn that this is both a metaphor for staying realistic about the hardships of life, and an actual warning of a force of nature which, pretty soon, is going to fuck everybody up good. Few characters are old enough to recall the previous winter, and their descriptions of it make it sound like Pluto. And I was left thinking, How are they going to film that? But, to my delight, that thought was quickly followed by I’m obviously supposed to be asking myself this question…but why?

Speaking of Pluto. The weird climate (but familiar physics) of GOT suggests that it may literally take place on another planet. Ultra-cold winters that come only once a lifetime, but last for years, are possible on a world with a long elliptical orbit. (“Years” here would have to mean something other than orbits around the star.) And the axis is tilted so that the north is always angled away from the sun, and the south is always angled toward it, keeping the Stark’s home keep, Winterfell, always chilly.

 

 

This matters because it’s another atypical choice. Most fantasy writers wouldn’t take such pains to justify the ways in which their worlds differ from ours. But we aren’t being asked to imagine an alternate universe or history here; just some other part of our own. Further emphasizing the constructed nature of the world is the opening credits sequence,which changes subtly with each episode. We get a raven’s-eye view of a Westeros that is a sort of relief map with all the key man-made structures rising up into the Z-axis. And, significantly, those structures aren’t just animated into existence as if created by magic; they are constructed before our eyes with a steampunky system of gears and levers. It’s a display which says, simultaneously and tantalizingly, No, seriously, this could happen, and Remember, you are looking at an artificial world. The animation shows the gears, but not the people doing the building, yet GOT is not a story that leaves out the little people. The architects and builders here are understood to be outside the story, in our world. And this is further underlined by fleeting closeups of Westeros’ sun, which appears to be encircled by a metal band engraved with the sigils of the royal houses. How the hell did that thing get up there? we are clearly meant to ask, followed quickly by Why am I meant to ask that?

This fantasy world, de rigeur, has a dwarf, Tyrion Lannister, in it. But he is not part of a race of dwarves; he is a human with achondroplasia, born to normal-sized parents and with normal-sized adult siblings. Tyrion is a reference to, a commentary on, and an inversion of the dwarf archetype as we’ve come to know it. Given the fantasy context, we want to see him as a cute, magical, otherworldly creature, but he constantly reminds us that he’s just a guy with a birth defect. Tyrion can’t stop referring to himself with words like “grotesque” and “broken;” he forces everyone around him to confront his real-ness and his other-ness at the same time.

 

 

Anyway, about the tits. The LA Times ran an article by Mary McNamara <http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/03/entertainment/la-ca-hbo-breasts-20110703> that thoroughly covers the vulgar feminist argument here: the nudity is gratuitous and typical of HBO, it objectifies women, exacerbates stereotypes, plays to the lowest common denominator, and so on. Interestingly, though, McNamara can’t help but note that the final moment of the season “may be the best use of female nudity on television ever,” and she’s probably right (not that the history of television has given us that many examples to draw from, outside of HBO).

But this, folks, is called a dramatic build (no pun intended).  Daenerys’ nudity in the final scene, at once dangerous and motherly, only has the power it does because at that point we’ve gotten used to seeing her as a piece of ass. And yet, she is never truly objectified; as she’s a “POV character,” we see her arranged marriage and abuse by a domineering brother more or less from her own eyes. Yes, she’s beautiful, and yes, we are invited to partake in her exploitation even as we’re invited, from a different angle, to despise it. But that only makes her transformation more powerful. It’s easy to be titillated by the sight of Deanery’s dangling breasts as she’s fucked from behind by her brutish (but sculpted) husband. But when the frame expands, and her eyes and ours fall on those dragon’s eggs, we realize together that her debasement carries with in it the seeds of her liberation. Her transformation is cathartic, but without starting where it does, it wouldn’t work. The fact that the starting point also plays like it could have been directed by Zalman King serves to disarm the viewers who wouldn’t watch the story if they knew where it was going. Unfortunately, it also runs the risk of alienating viewers who would only watch the story if they knew where it was going. But that’s a risk you take with a sophisticated story structure.

Speaking of the domineering brother. Daenerys’ sibling, Viserys, is another inverted archetype, the prince-in-exile turned quixotic idiot. Viserys’ murdered (or, depending on your perspective, assassinated) father was the previous king; Viserys lives in exile, plotting his vengeance and ascension. This setup – the true prince in exile, gathering strength and aligning himself with the common people, who will help him take power – is as old as Arthur (or, if you like, Moses). Viserys’ host, the wealthy Illyrio, tells the young prince that “the people drink secret toasts, praying for the return of their true king.”

Viserys, an entitled prick, takes the truth of this statement for granted. But the savvy viewer, wary of the cliche that is about to unfold, is soon delighted to learn that it’s bullshit. Nobody is praying for Viserys’ coronation but Viserys, who is a parody of a character we might find in a more typical fantasy. He believes in the divine right of kings, but nobody else does, so he mainly swaggers around talking to himself. This leads appropriately to a confrontation with his sister’s husband, the Dothraki “horse lord,” Khal Drogo.

 

 

Drogo’s title of “Khal” is purely descriptive; his power derives directly from the nomadic people he leads; if they decide to stop following him around, then he is de facto no longer their Khal. Drogo doesn’t know the word “throne,” and is annoyed with Viserys’ fixation on wearing a crown, he rightly suspects that such symbols are illusions. When Drogo is introduced, Viserys refers to him as a savage, and indeed, invoking another stereotype, Drogo and his people are all mostly naked, vaguely ethnic looking, and literally have no word for “thank you.” But their savagery has a consistency and clarity to it that the political world of Westeros lacks. It would be too easy to call them “noble” savages; they’re more like Klingons; infighting over petty issues and taking pride in they havoc the wreak. Ultimately, the Dothraki function as a sort of mass metaphor for undirected masculine energy, waiting to be sublimated into a feminine will. And it’s not much of a spoiler to tell you, if you don’t already know, that they find that in Daenerys.

In fact, the feminine co-opting and redirection of masculine power is a major motif in Game Of Thrones. The first tits we see belong to a young woman who seems to be one of many interchangeable whores in a brothel; yet she (Ros) keeps appearing alongside important men, who find they care about her in spite of themselves. She’s even at the center of a monologue given far away by a man ready to swear to a life of celibacy. Many men, in their own heads, are playing the madonna/whore game with Ros, believing that they honor her by elevating her to a sort of more-than-a-hooker status in their own minds; yet only the viewer and Ros see the network of power she’s constructing. Even the savvy viewer falls easily into this trap. Upon meeting Ros, we admire her beauty, we wish she were more than a sex object, we resign ourselves to the fact that she won’t be, and then we move on, looking for the real story, and, like all her customers, missing it. For a while.

 

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