by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The last two nights Charles and I ran through the first four
episodes of the second season of Game of Thrones, a series I’m finding alternately entertaining and utterly maddening.
We watched the first episode of season two, “The North Remembers,” on Sunday
night after the surprisingly good Lifetime movie The Wrong
Cheerleader, and ran through the next three
— “The Night Lands,” “What Is Dead May Never Die” (a reference to the
heavy-duty tendency of Game of Thrones characters not to let their feuds with each other die with them, but
to pass them on to the next generation and the generation after that) and “Garden of Bones” — last night. I must confess
that when I’m confronted with a story with this many plot lines involving this
many races and tribes, this many confusing loyalties (and shifts of loyalties),
and this many conflicts I’m going to have a hard time disentangling them and
remembering who is who and what side they’re on. (That’s one reason I like
Wagner’s Ring cycle better than
Tolkien’s even though Charles has kidded me about how in the first three
episodes of Wagner’s Ring “there
seem to be only about 12 people in the entire universe.”) After a while it’s
hard to tell which fur-clad, scraggly-bearded male is which (there are a few
people who were actually able to get haircuts and beard trims in this story,
but in an era before scissors one wonders how), and there are at least two
women posing as men — though given the ubiquity of facial hair among the adult
males in this story one would think its absence would automatically “out” the
women doing FTM drag (though there is one nice joust sequence in which a mystery knight shows up in full
armor, wins a duel, then takes off the helmet and she’s a woman who, as a
reward for her victory, talks her way into the king’s guards).
The show
maintains a consistent style despite the frequent cutaways from its most
interesting characters — Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage giving the
performance of his lifetime and obviously relishing the challenge of a starring
role compared to the dreck little-person actors usually get cast in), the
scheming adventurer and seducer; Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), the current
occupant of the Iron Throne and such a depraved nerd he makes Caligula and Nero
look like Boy Scouts by comparison (indeed he’d be perfect casting if anyone
wants to make another movie about Caligula or Nero); and Daenerys Targeryan
(Emilia Clarke), whose demented quest to regain the Iron Throne for her family
has so far killed her brother and
her husband, and who’s trying to rebuild her status as “Khalisi” (i.e., queen)
of the Dothraki tribe (pretty obviously patterned on Genghis Khan and the
Golden Hordes — though the overall geography of Game of Thrones’ fictitious setting, “Westeros,” is the British
Isles, that didn’t stop the original author, George R. R. Martin, or the series
producers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, from mashing up other cultures and
putting them in the mix: the city of “Qarth,” pronounced “Kath,” that figures
prominently in “Garden of Bones” has an exterior wall that suggests ancient
Babylon but inside it looks like Caliphate-era Baghdad or a city in Muslim
India) even though at the moment she only has a few starving men in the middle
of the desert and her retinue shrinks even further when one of the scouts she
sent out to seek help comes back as a severed head in the saddlebag of an
otherwise riderless horse. Game of Thrones has quite a lot of sex — though, like everything else in this amoral
world, sex is a commodity to be traded for money or power — and some of the sex
scenes are so vicious and brutal (Joffrey’s uncle Tyrion decides it’s time for
him to get laid, and so he hires two prostitutes for him — only Joffrey orders
one of them to beat the other to within an inch of her life because
that’s how he gets his kicks), while others
are kinky in other ways (one tribal leader named Crastor, played by Robert
Pugh, keeps his line alive by fucking his daughters, including the ones who are
also his granddaughters, and whenever one of them gives birth to a girl she’s
added to the harem, while if the baby is a boy it’s taken into the woods and
left to die — the worst aspects of John Huston’s Chinatown character and the real-life Warren Jeffs combined!),
and even the relatively “normal” guys seem so much more interested in fucking
their women in the ass than in the cunt one wonders how any kids get conceived in this world.
What’s most
interesting about Game of Thrones
is that, even though most of it was shot during Barack Obama’s Presidency (the
original series ran from 2011 to 2019), the Zeitgeist of the show is that of Donald Trump and all the
other anti-democratic pseudo-populists that are taking over in country after
country. I heard one commentator compare the current chaos in Britain, where
newly appointed prime minister Boris Johnson is determined to take the U.K. out
of the European Union by October 31 even without a “deal” for an orderly
transition, to Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, but it strikes me that Game of Thrones is a more accurate metaphor — especially since the
intense Fundamentalist Christian religiosity of The Handmaid’s Tale is a major political force in the U.S. but is pretty
negligible in the U.K. The world of Game of Thrones, dominated by unscrupulous “leaders” who seek power
for its own sake without any clear idea of what they’re going to do with it and
who demand absolute loyalty from those in their circle while being willing to
double-cross each other and make corrupt deals behind each other’s backs, is very much the world of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson,
Rodrigo Duterte, Victor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and the other
so-called “populists” who have taken power in country after country with little
or no agenda other than seizing power, making themselves richer and gorging
their appetites (literal and
metaphorical) for money, baubles, meals and (especially) sex. Game of
Thrones is also typical of modern-day
entertainment (and expressive of the cynicism of the modern age and its
disbelief in the whole idea that any
collective action can actually make the lives of ordinary people better) in that there’s almost nobody in it you can like; the most sympathetic character in any of these four
episodes was a healer who gave a predictably brutal amputation to a captive who
would otherwise have died of gangrene — and once she does her work she’s
hustled off in a cart and disappears from the action, leaving the stage to all
the amoral strivers at the heart of this deeply cynical and depressing story.
