by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last week, on Wednesday and
Thursday nights, Charles and I picked up where we’d left off on Game of
Thrones with the first four
episodes of season three, “Valar Doheris” (one of the annoying things about
fantasy in general is the gibberish names given to everyone and everything —
persons, places, plot elements — which make it hard, at least for someone like
me, to keep track of who, what and where everyone and everything is; if I
recall correctly, “Valar Doheris” is “Everyone dies” in the Dothraki language,
which despite all the ballyhoo about “language creator” David J. Peterson
building on the few words George R. R. Martin wrote in his book and creating a
new language with its own syntax and a 900-word vocabulary, still sounds like a
crude mix of French and Russian to me, though I did like the Wagnerian gimmick, ripped off from Mime’s
dialogue in the second act of Siegfried, of having the on-screen interpreter of Dothraki into English put an
anodyne spin on the translations while the subtitles we get reveal what the
foeigners are really saying); “Dark Wings, Dark Words”; Walk of Punishment” (which
for some reason ended not with Ramon Djawadi’s soundtrack music, which is his ripoff of John
Williams’ ripoff of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s ripoff of Wagner, but is actually
a punk-rock song I didn’t recognize, though Charles think it’s by the band Dropkick
Murphys); and “And Now His Watch Is Ended” (yet another reference to mortality
in a show that’s full of it, though so far surprisingly few of the major
characters have actually died).
Game of Thrones is alternately entertaining and frustrating
because virtually everyone in it is utterly without scruples: all the
characters are after power, money or sex and they don’t give a damn about what
horrible things they have to do to each other to get it. It’s also typical of
medieval stories in general in that just about all the characters are nobles of
one sort or another and we get very little idea of how the common people lived.
As I’ve noted before, though most of Game of Thrones was filmed while Barack Obama was President it’s a
perfect reflection of the Zeitgeist of the Donald Trump era — indeed, watching this in the middle of the
grim farce Trump’s impeachment “trial” has turned into seemed eerily
appropriate! — especially since all the characters seem interested in power only for its own sake, not to
accomplish anything good for the common people of “Westeros” (the fictional
realm it takes place in, though it’s obviously based on the British Isles). I’m finding it
virtually impossible to keep up with Game of Thrones and keep myself focused enough to remember who is
who — indeed, as I was joking last night Game of Thrones is full of Anna Russell moments: “Ya remember the
… ?” I’m tempted to read the source novel, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of
Ice and Fire — the first part of his Game
of Thrones cycle (series creators
David Benioff and D. B. Weiss intended to base the show on his entire cycle,
but apparently Martin fell behind his expected timetable in writing the later
books in the saga and so Benioff and Weiss had to come up with their own
storylines in subsequent years) — just to see if it will help me keep track of
who is who in this sprawling multi-plot cycle, much the way people confused by
the 1946 film of The Big Sleep went back to Raymond Chandler’s source novel just to see if reading the
book would help them make heads or tails of the movie.
With such a plethora of
characters, populations and storylines the most fascinating people in the story
— Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), the libertine dwarf who’s fallen from
“Head” (a king’s second-in-command, essentially the prime minister) to
prisoner; Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), the Caligula- or Nero-like ruler
who’s sort of a bloodthirsty nerd; and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), the
exiled princess who became the custodian of three dragon’s eggs, one of which
has hatched (there’s a marvelous CGI sequence of a grown dragon flying above
her and returning, but so far that’s all we’ve seen of the much-ballyhooed
dragons in action) — keep getting shunted aside for long, boring sequences
involving the duller ones like Bran Stark (James Hempstead White), a boy who in
one of the first episodes got thrown out of a window and ended up permanently
disabled and unable to walk after he climbed up the wall of a castle, entered
through its window and caught his mother in the middle of an adulterous and incestuous fuck with her brother. This doesn’t
stop him from dreaming that he
can still walk (and climb trees!). In his dreams he sees various totemic
animals, including wolves and a three-eyed raven that’s supposed to be an omen
of something or other. There’s also Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), who
has probably the best claim to the Iron Throne (a seat of power whose back is
made of a series of seven crossed swords that supposedly represents the seven
kingdoms that make up Westeros — though this season introduced new countries,
tribes and individuals seemingly willy-nilly, including one of which my husband
joked that the only reason for their existence seemed to be that they could
capture other people and torture them — excuse me, I meant use “enhanced
interrogation techniques” on them) except that he’s fallen in love with a
mysterious raven-haired enchantress who always wears a red dress and leads him
into hopeless battles that have cost him most of his men and treasure — I
suspect Martin, Benioff and Weiss were “inspired” here by the real-life story
of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
There are various preposterous scenes here,
including one in which a bunch of knights fire flaming arrows into a boat
containing the corpse of their recently deceased commander — the idea is to
land an arrow into the boat and set off the fire that will burn the corpse, and
presumably (though this isn’t all that clear in the script), the one that pulls
it off will have thus shown he is the gods’ anointed one to replace the dead
leader. (One gets mixed signals as to just what religion the Game of Thrones characters practice; alternate references to “the
gods” and “the one God” suggest that this is a time period when paganism and
Christianity are still fighting it out for dominance.) The episodes also
include a plot line in which Daenarys goes to Astapor, a realm we previously
haven’t heard of, to seek an army to invade Westaros and seek the Iron Throne
(earlier she’d been stuck on the “Eastern Island,” i.e. Ireland, until someone
in the Game of Thrones universe
got round to inventing ships), and finds it in a clan of utterly brainwashed,
zombie-like slave soldiers called the “Unsullied” whom she buys in exchange for
one of her three pet dragons. Only the pirate king she buys them for is utterly
unable to control the dragon; after he buys it, it burns him to a crisp and she
offers freedom to the slave soldiers and asks them to fight for her as free men
— though they still look pretty much like zombies when she marches them in
strict formation to her ships. When she was being shown off the merchandise the
pirate king had illustrated how impervious they were to pain when he had one of
his non-zombie minions slice off one of the soldiers’ nipple, saying, “Men
don’t need nipples.” (As a Gay man who loves nipple play — both playing with other men’s
nipples and having other men play with mine — I resent that!)
For me sitting
through Game of Thrones is
something of a chore: this cycle (especially the TV adaptation, which like a
lot of other current projects is realizing the late Erich von Stroheim’s dream
of filming novels “complete” without any telescoping or shortening —I imagine
that if there’s an afterlife and Stroheim is in it keeping his eye on us, the
man is saying something like, “See, I told you audiences would sit for nine-hour adaptations of novels! Now is when I should have been alive!”) has become a
huge cultural phenomenon (and like most such entertainment phenomena, it left a
lot of people bitching about
what they considered a disappointing and unsatisfying ending), and as I noted
above it seems like a perfect political and sociological counterpoint to the
Trump era (in which real-life politics in the U.S. and many other countries is
dominated by what I call “dark nationalism,” highly militaristic and
quasi-fascist movements led by unscrupulous people interested in power for its
own sake) but I’m not finding it all that entertaining. Still, there’s at least one aspect of the series I really
like: the sheer power and authority of Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister (who
in these episodes got promoted to be his father’s treasurer even though, as he
admits himself, he’s far more experienced in spending money than in collecting
it). I get the impression Dinklage was so fed up with the gnome-like villains
and silly comic-relief characters that are the common lot of little-person
actors, he relished the opportunity to tear into a character with real
complexity and multidimensionality, and even though there’s precious little of
him in these episodes, he’s still the most compulsively watchable person on the
show.
