by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the
next two episodes in sequence of Game of Thrones, season four: “Breaker of Chains” and “Oathkeeper”
(the latter a quite ironic title given that the story line of this program
features people breaking oaths to
each other, right and left!). Actually we’d seen the opening of “Breaker of
Chains” two nights ago when I mistakenly loaded disc two of season four into
our Blu-Ray player instead of disc one (disc one was hidden behind a placard
announcing what you have to do to download a digital copy of the movie, something
I have no use for and don’t ever see myself doing unless they so totally abolish physical copies of any entertainment media I have to learn to!) and so we
knew that King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson, who got his name on the credits
of “Breaker of Chains” even though he’s only seen as a close-up with a bloody
head at the very start of the show) was assassinated by being fed poison in his
wine. Much of this episode turns into Game of Thrones: The Whodunit, as Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), the most
multidimensional and fully human character in the story (and, as I’ve noted
before, a truly extraordinary opportunity for a little-person actor, especially
by comparison to how ill-used he was in the film Elf!), who spends most of his time in these episodes
in prison awaiting trial for the murder — which given that he’s going to be
tried before a three-judge panel including his father (who, he assures us, is
definitely not biased in his behalf!
“He’s wanted me dead since I was a child,” he explains) and another one of his
long-term enemies is probably going to be as fair as a Bill Barr prosecution.
The story also deals with the aftermath of Joffrey’s assassination in other
ways, as Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) is smuggled out of the King’s Landing castle
where the titular throne (a hard iron seat with a back made up of swords stuck
into the base) resides by a professional who’s been promised ten thousand
(we’re not told ten thousand what because it’s supposed to be ambiguous what the currency of the fictional
“Westeros” — really the British Isles — is, though I presumed it was 10,000
pieces of either silver or gold) and instead gets shot and killed for his
pains. (That’s the pattern of Game of Thrones: just when you think something noble is actually happening, writers George R. R.
Martin, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have a double-cross occur and the
incident becomes as sleazy and relentlessly self-serving as the rest of the
plot.) The new king is Joffrey’s younger brother, though the regent is his mom
and she and her brother/lover, in a scene even kinkier than the weird one in
the recently shown Lifetime movie Deadly Mile High Club (in which the psycho female flight instructor
who’s seduced the hot but rather dim young man has him fuck her on top of a large
wooden box that, unbeknownst to him but beknownst to us, contains the body of
his still-living but unconscious wife who comes to while they’re literally
doing it on top of her), he fucks her on top of the body of their dead son
Joffrey. Meanwhile, the men of the Knights’ Watch are supposed to be standing
guard over the Wall (ya remember the Wall? Nobody else does, except Donald Trump), have let their guard slip and
the “Wildings,” who have pasty and badly scarred faces and are cannibals (one
particularly nasty one invades a town and tells one of the boys, “First I’m
gonna eat your mom, and then I’m gonna eat your dad”) and who look like the
ancestors of George Romero’s zombies, have got through the wall and are
menacing the people of northern “Westeros.”
The good guys (to the extent that anybody is “good” in this relentlessly cynical story) are
trying to figure out how to stop the “Wildings” while at the same time getting
kvetchy about who’s having sex
with whom — the men of the Knights’ Watch are sworn to celibacy but that
doesn’t stop them from venturing outside the Order and picking up women.
There’s also a polymorphously perverse prince in the dramatis personae whose five-way with three women and a man is
rather rudely interrupted by one of the white-haired father-figures in which
this story abounds, and the finale features Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)
on her way over from — I think it’s Ireland but Charles noted the Mediterranean
accoutrements of the cities she’s conquering (much like the Universal serial The
Adventures of Smiling Jack from the
early 1940’s, which was supposed to be taking place on the border between India
and Tibet but the locales looked Egyptian because they were recycling the sets from the Mummy movies) and suggested that “Westeros” is actually
a mish-mash of various parts of Europe in which, among other things, Sicily is
located just across the sea from England). We briefly got to see her with her
three dragons at the start of episode one but when she reappears the dragons are
nowhere to be found (I like the Lewtonian reticence of Messrs. Benioff and
Weiss to show too much of the dragons, but I still wish we were seeing more of
them, especially since they’re supposed to be the medieval Westerosian
equivalent of the H-bomb, the ultimate superweapon against which there is no
viable defense; she comes to another city, incites a slave rebellion and gets
the newly liberated slaves to join the other newly liberated slaves in her
army. (There’s a sort of object lesson here about how if you liberate
yourselves with outside help, the outside help will just enlist you for their vainglorious cause — “Meet the new boss, same as
the old boss” — but there’s little real social commentary in Game of Thrones besides the overall impression that all human beings are greedy, unscrupulous,
bloodthirsty S.O.B.’s.)
Once again, though, the overall message of Game of
Thrones — that the ruling class is
a bunch of amoral savages and everyone else just exists to feed them enough
surplus value to keep them going and buy them the luxuries (including paid-for
sex partners) they live for when they’re not industriously killing each other
—is weirdly and uncannily appropriate for the Trump era even though most of the
series was shot while Obama was still president. Country after country
throughout the world — including the three that were most instrumental in
fighting the original
fascists, the U.S., Britain and Russia — has been taken over by neo-fascists
determined to turn their countries into personal autocracies, and between their
sheer unscrupulousness and unconcern for the lives and welfare of their
citizens (as witness Trump’s recent detached musings on how many people he’s
willing to let die of COVID-19 in order to “restart the economy”) modern-day
leaders like Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jiaoping of China, Viktór
Orban of Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Receo
Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines all look very
much like Game of Thrones characters!
