by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched episodes seven and eight of season
four of Game of Thrones, “Mockingbird”
(which sounds more like the “Mockingjay” episode of The Hunger Games — a cycle set in a dystopian future instead of a dystopian past!) and “The Mountain and the Viper.” The synopses of
these episodes that appear on imdb.com — for “Mockingbird,” “Tyrion tries to
find a champion. Daenerys sleeps with Daario. The Hound becomes wounded. Jon’s
advice is ignored at Castle Black. Brienne and Podrick receive a tip on Arya’s
whereabouts”; and for “The Mountain and the Viper,” “Theon helps Ramsay seize
Moat Cailin. The wildlings attack Mole’s Town. Sansa comes up with a story to
protect Lord Baelish. Daenerys finds out a secret about Jorah Mormont. Oberyn
Martell faces Gregor Clegane, the Mountain” — are a bit of a help in terms of sorting out this confusing
story and keeping track of just who is who. The gibberish names common to
fantasy characters, especially ones in extended series like this (the creator
of Game of Thrones, George R. R.
Martin, originally intended a cycle of three books under the overall title A
Song of Ice and Fire, with A Game
of Thrones the first book in the series,
but it stretched out to five books he’s already written and two he’s got on the
drawing board, and series producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss went with Game
of Thrones as the generic title for the
whole series; they also had to write their own ending for the cycle since
Martin hasn’t finished the last two books yet and seems to have succumbed to
the Mother of All Writing Blocks).
At least these two episodes put the series’
most interesting character, Tyrion Lannister — played by the series’ most
consistently interesting actor, Peter Dinklage, who for once in his career got
to play a character of real complexity and moral ambiguity instead of the dreck
little-person actors usually get stuck with — front and center as he’s literally on trial for his life, accused of poisoning King
Joffrey (a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work comparable to Roman emperors
Caligula, Nero or Commodus) at his wedding to Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner). At
the end of episode six, realizing that whatever legal process existed in this
story’s fictional setting, “Westeros,” was being rigged against him —
especially when both his wife and
his mistress appeared as witnesses against him — he demanded trial by combat.
That meant both he and the prosecution had to pick champions to fight on their
behalf, and the prosecutors picked a grotesquely unpleasant character we’d
never seen before named “Gregor Clegane, the Mountain.” Gregor Clegaine, the
Mountain, is introduced at the beginning of “Mockingbird” at the vanguard of an
invading army against which, as they say on the later versions of Star
Trek, resistance is futile: he’s essentially
Goliath, transposed into the Game of Thrones world, and he gets his kicks by rampaging through
any group of people standing in his way and slicing them open with his sword so
their entrails literally come
spilling out, leaving the road behind him littered with things that look like
sausages (this is one movie in which you really don’t want to see how sausages are made!). This was
the most grotesque piece of bloodshed I can recall thus far in a series that is
full of them — though even as he was knocking off people right and left for
little purpose beyond the sheer joy of it, I was also admiring the topless
torso of Ryan McCann, who played Gregor, and getting special joy from seeing
those big pecs.
Of the other two most interesting characters in this story,
Joffrey is already dead (so we miss Jack Gleeson, whose portrayal of him was a
masterpiece in depicting a combination of sadism and emotional immaturity) and
Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) is still making only small appearances here
and there, in one of which she peremptorily orders Daario Naharis (Michiel
Huisman) to have sex with him with all the demented determination of an Ayn
Rand heroine (though at least she doesn’t want him to rape her; the fact that all Rand’s sex scenes depict a strong-willed, dominating
woman ending up subjugated and essentially raped by an even stronger-willed,
more dominating man indicates that her sexual ideas were as screwed up and sick
as her ideas about politics and economics), though her courtiers note that she’s
in a considerably nicer mood the next morning than she was the night before.
The plot line dealing with Arya is about the aunt of Sensa Stark and her
relationship, if you can call it that, of her sister Lysa with her husband
Petyr (pronounced “Peter”) Baylish (Aiden Gillen), who engineered Sensa’s
escape from King’s Landing a few episodes ago and then promptly killed the man
who got her out of there — “Gold buys a man’s silence for a short while; a
sword buys his silence forever,” he explained — and Arya has a jealous
hissy-fit when she sees Sensa kiss Baylish and wants to throw her down the
“moon window,” which isn’t a window at all but a hole in the living-room floor
of Winterfell castle which features a 120-foot drop to the ground below, which
is usually enough not only to kill but to dismember anyone who falls (or gets
pushed) through it. (One wonders just why these writers were so obsessed with
dismemberment.)
Game of Thrones
is annoying in the speed with which Benioff, Weiss and their writers and directors
cut from one plot line to another, and it’s even more infuriating in the rigor
with which Martin, Benioff and Weiss have eliminated even any hint of the tenderer emotions from their story. This is
the main reason, as I’ve suggested earlier, why Game of Thrones is such a perfect story for the Donald Trump era
even though most of the series was filmed while Barack Obama was still
President. All the characters are
motivated by the simplest and most naked (pardon the pun) self-interest
imaginable; when Joffrey’s brother (still a child) takes the throne and says he
wants to be “a good king,” all we can think is, “How naïve you are. In this
world there is no such thing as ‘goodness,’ no compassion, no caring, no
empathy. If you survive — which is doubtful — you’ll learn to be as much a
self-interested scumbag as everyone else in this story.” This whole destruction
of the illusion that anyone who
holds power ever seeks to wield it in the interest of anyone but him/herself is
the most “modern”-seeming aspect of this quasi-medieval tale, and though I
suspect most of the enormous audience Game of Thrones attracted was interested in the bloodletting and the
sex (I joked about the movie Frozen II that “this film seems like a PG-rated version of Game of
Thrones without the bloodshed or the sex,”
and of course the main reasons anyone sits through such an otherwise draining
and interminable tale as Game of Thrones is for the bloodshed and the sex!), but they also got a confirmation
of the Trump-era world view that everyone who enters politics is in it only for themselves, and you’re a damned
fool to believe any leader who says, “I’m doing this for you.” And one can’t even retreat from the struggle and literally cultivate one’s garden in Game of Thrones the way the protagonists of The Hunger
Games did at the end of their cycle; like the grass that gets trampled when the
elephants fight, the common people in this story exist only to get themselves robbed and killed by the soldiers
of the various factions.
There are no “innocent bystanders” in Game
of Thrones because there are no bystanders
at all — and though the obligation at the heart of feudalism (that the lord
would protect his serfs in exchange for their allegiance and labor power) may
in real life have been honored more in the breach than the observance, in the
quasi-feudal world of Game of Thrones it barely exists at all. Neither does the elaborate real-life code of
chivalry that at least in theory governed conflicts between the medieval
1-percenters; the people of Game of Thrones have no moral scruples whatsoever, and if they ever
swear an oath to whatever sorts of god or gods they believe in, they’ll break
it without a moment’s hesitation. And as more and more countries elect leaders
like Donald Trump, real life looks more like Game of Thrones every day; certainly Trump, with his overweening
self-pride, his arrogance, his conviction that he can will truth into existence
and can say things totally contradictory to what he said the day before and no
one will dare contradict him about it, and his combination of bellicose talk
and thinly veiled cowardice, would fit right into the world of Game
of Thrones! “The Mountain and the Viper”
ends with the big fight between Gregor the Mountain and Tyrion Lannister’s
champion, Oberyn Marteli (Pedro Pascal), which turns into a disaster when the
smaller but more agile Oberyn — who goes into the fight saying that he’ll
outrun and wear-out his larger and stronger opponent, sort of like Muhammad Ali
in his “rope-a-dope” fights, but when it starts is more concerned about getting
Gregor to confess that he raped Oberyn’s sister, with the result that they both
literally gouge out each other’s
eyes (filmed by director Alex Graves with the sort of loving, lubricious
closeness with which porn directors film people having sex) and they both end up dead, which according to the judge of this
preposterous “trial” (a far cry from the other main depiction of trial by
combat I’m familiar with, the one that ends Act I of Wagner’s
Lohengrin!) means that Tyrion Lannister
must be executed. I hope not; it would be a real pity to lose him!
