by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was the first two episodes of Game
of Thrones, which being at least on the
fringes of San Diego’s science-fiction/fantasy community Charles and I had
heard a lot about from those sources as well as the mainstream ones who have
been hyping the recent end of the TV series based on George R. R. Martin’s
medieval fantasy cycle. (The most recent episode was heavily promoted as the
series closer, but with Martin having made outlines for at least two more
novels in the cycle, I have a feeling it will get revived.) The series — or at
least the first six of its eight seasons — recently became available as DVD or
Blu-Ray boxed sets, marked down in price for a limited period to coordinate
with the end of season eight on the HBO premium cable channel, and so I grabbed
the full cycle while I had the chance and last night we screened the first two
one-hour (more or less) episodes from season one, “Winter Is Coming” and “The
Kingsroad.” I’ll give credit to the series’ writers, David Benioff and D. B.
Weiss, for being relatively clear-cut with their exposition and not throwing
out the confused jumble of oddball names of humans, animals, plants, humanoid
races, places and legends that puts off a lot of newbies to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings. (I remember starting to
read Tolkien’s cycle in the late 1960’s and giving up about a third of the way
through the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, because I feared I would never be able to keep up
with who was who, where was where, and which side everyone was on.)
At least as
far as I could tell judging from the first two episodes, Game of
Thrones centers around four families: the
Starks (inevitably I joked that centuries later one of their descendants would
become Iron Man!), the Baratheons, the Targaryens and the Lannisters. The
Starks include five legitimate children and one bastard — the word actually
used in the dialogue — who goes by the name Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and signs
up for the order of the Night Watch (which I assumed while watching the film
was actually Knight Watch), whose job it is to maintain and guard the wall that
protects the Seven Kingdoms, where the story takes place, from attack from
outside. (The moment we got a long shot of the sheer expanse of stone that
makes up the Wall, I thought, “Donald Trump would love this movie.”) Actually, since the wall does a pretty
good job of protecting the Seven Kingdoms on its own, the Night Watch have
little to do but drink, carouse and screw — though the opening of the series
shows a Night Watch member named Will (who speaks with a Cockney accent, as do
all the lower-class characters, while the rulers and the members of their
families speak with higher-class English accents — and though the locale is
supposed to be fictitious, the map we get illustrating it under the opening
credits looks an awful lot like the British Isles) being executed because he
ran away from a gruesome display of apparently dead people arranged in a
symbolic pattern on the ground — only the “dead” people got up and turned out
to be members of a supernatural menace called the White Walkers (they were just
“The Others” in Martin’s novels). The Stark clan’s father, Ned (Sean Bean,
top-billed) makes his 10-year-old son Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) watch the
execution as a lesson to him in his own warlike pursuits. The Lannisters are
represented by two brothers, normal-sized hunk Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau)
and little person (“dwarf,” he’s called in the dialogue) Tyrion (Peter
Dinklage, the only actor in the cast I’d heard of elsewhere), who despite his
diminutive size doesn’t seem to have any trouble attracting hot young
normal-sized women as his bed partners. One of the central intrigues in the
plot is the ongoing affair between Jaime Lannister and the queen, wife of King
Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), and the cool, matter-of-fact way Jaime pushes
Bran out of the window, presumably to his death, when Bran climbs the outside
wall of the tower where they’re making love and catches them. (This is how the
first episode ends; in episode two we learn that Bran didn’t die after all,
though he’s in a coma.)
In fact, the whole show has a refreshing frankness
about sex that’s the main difference between it and a similar story as it would
have been told in 1930’s Hollywood (and was in movies like the Errol Flynn vehicle The
Adventures of Robin Hood) — not only do
F-bombs get dropped a lot and there are lines like “[King] Robert will choose a
new hand of the kingdom to do his job while he’s out fucking boars and hunting
whores … or is it the other way around?,” but there’s a remarkable scene in
which the slave girl Doreah (Roxanne McKee), who worked in a whorehouse (she
was bought by them at 9 but not “turned out” until the relatively advanced age
of 12) before being acquired by her current mistress, Daenerys Targaryen
(Emilia Clarke), gets into bed with Daenerys and they have a hot Lesbian sex
scene by way of Doreah teaching Daenerys how to teach her husband-to-be, Khal
Drogo (Jason Momoa, who played Aquaman in Warner Bros.’ recent reboot of that
hero and looked a lot more
interesting than the antiseptically handsome figure of the Aquaman comics —
even though, from what I heard of the film, it seems as if the writers thought,
“Hey! Let’s do Black Panther with
white people under water!”), to be submissive to her in bed. The marriage
between Drogo and Daenerys has been arranged by her incredibly queeny brother
Viserys (Harry Lloyd) because he was exiled from his righteous kingdom to the
land across the sea (Ireland?) and wants a brother-in-law with an army that can
invade and put him back on his throne. Lloyd plays the character as such a flaming Gay stereotype one half-expects him to
tell his reluctant sister, “And if you won’t marry Drago — I will!”
There’s also a creature called a “direwolf” which seems to have been born from
a fictitious cross between a deer and an elk, but when the direwolves grow up
they look like Alaskan Inuit dogs (which were exactly what played them — the
original plan was to use real wolves but the British government has made it
illegal for private citizens to keep wolves, and Inuit dogs were the closest
the producers could come) who have a mystical bond with their owners (like the
dragons in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books or the bears in Bill Pullman’s His
Dark Materials cycle) and protect them when
necessary: in one scene a direwolf protected the comatose Bran Stark from
assassination by attacking the killer and gripping his arm with his jaws the
way modern-day police dogs are trained to do.
Charles said his one disappointment
with Game of Thrones was he
expected more supernatural elements à la The Lord of the Rings; I can see his point, but one of the things I like about the film is its attempt at a relatively
accurate portrayal of what the Middle Ages were probably like, with everyone
and everything covered in a layer of dirt since these were people with very few
opportunities to wash themselves or their surroundings (one remembers the
opening line in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail identifying John Cleese as a king because “he hasn’t
got shit all over him”). This is one project in which the seemingly inbred bias
of modern-day cinematographers towards shooting everything in dirty greens and
browns actually works: the overall grunginess of the environment and the people
(even the royals!) in Game of Thrones is no doubt a lot closer
to what medieval England actually looked like than the bright, glowing
Technicolor vistas of The Adventures of Robin Hood. I also liked the fact that there’s at least a bit
more character depth than usual in medievalist fantasy stories; the people have
both good and not-so-good qualities and don’t fall into convenient “hero” or
“villain” categories. Though Game of Thrones hardly ranks as the best thing Charles or I have
ever seen — even within its sword-and-sorcery genre (though, as I noted above, Charles wanted more
sorcery mixed in with the swords) — I can see why it became so incredibly
popular and he and I are looking forward to working through the boxed sets of
the series.
