The screaming started before I realized what was wrong.
Are
things starting to get a little spooky, what with Tormund Giantsbane
and Beric Dondarrion and “Dolorous” Edd Tollett traipsing around an
abandoned and quite possibly zombie-haunted castle by torchlight? Yeah,
sure, but it’s nothing we can’t …
Ah,
okay. So the White Walkers murdered a child, little Lord Ned Umber, and
pinned his body to the wall surrounded by the severed limbs of other
victims, the way normal people would thumbtack an important memo to the
side of their cubicle in between family photos and Cathy comics. That’s … yeah, that’s … Jesus, alright, that’s fucked up.
Still,
like Tormund says, it gives them a clearer picture of where the Night
King and his army of the dead must be. If these guys move fast, they can
…
Suddenly, people in the audience are screaming. Why are people in the audience screaming? What just …?
Oh God, the dead child is awake.
I’ve
walked you through this reaction not to humblebrag about attending the
premiere — though sharing air with both Eddard Stark and Khal Drogo was a
can’t wait to tell my kids someday moment, to be sure — but to put one of the most important weapons Game of Thrones
has in its storytelling arsenal on full fiery display. Though it’s
often been easy to overlook amid the politicking, sword-fighting,
quip-trading, and sex-having that have come to characterize the show in
the minds of many viewers, horror has been integral to the series since
before the opening credits on the pilot even rolled.
And not just any kind of horror, either.
Game of Thrones’ approach to incorporating this most visceral of genres into its overall realist epic fantasy is not primarily one of
creeping dread, or
innovative monster design, or emblematically evil
monumental horror-images, though it certainly has utilized all that and then some. Rather, horror on
GOT
is about intimacy and violation, not just the taking of life but the
perversion of it. And the final scene in the season-eight premiere reads
like a textbook case of that approach.
Central
to its horror — literally central, given the deliberate positioning of
his corpse — is the dead child, Ned Umber. Watching him revivify in the
background while our oblivious heroes go on chatting makes for a good
jump scare, as everyone screaming in their seats at Radio City could
tell you. But jump scares are easy pickings: Just a minute or two
earlier, the show got a good one out of Dolorous Edd nearly attacking
Tormund. What’s truly upsetting here, of course, is the murder of a
child as part of an obscene art project, killing an innocent for the
sheer pleasure of it and arranging his body to maximize the terror and
despair of the people who discover it.
Game of Thrones
goes there time and again throughout its run, beginning with its
opening sequence and the zombie child who confronts the members of the
Night’s Watch who’ve made an ill-advised journey beyond the Wall. Child
wights also figure prominently in “
Hardhome,”
the White Walkers’ highest-casualty assault on Westerosi humanity to
date. The Walkers themselves are created by converting human infants, as
we learned to genuinely disturbing effect in “
Oathkeeper,” when one of
the infant sons of the incestuous wildling Craster has his young life annihilated onscreen by the Night King’s council.
Killing kids makes for guaranteed cheap heat in horror movies and television, but
Game of Thrones
isn’t content to do it for shock value. Think of the slaying of King
Robert’s bastards, the crucifixion of child slaves as a warning to
Daenerys, Theon Greyjoy’s murder and public display of two local kids to
cover for the disappearance of the young Starks, the execution of
Rickon Stark by the psychopathic Ramsay Bolton, and the hanging of a
young mutineer by Jon Snow (the hero of the whole damn show, no less):
Human characters have proven no less adept than the White Walkers at
taking young lives in grotesquely symbolic fashion. As with
the show’s bracing and disturbing approach to sexual violence,
the point is that when the high lords play the titular game, the
violence necessarily and inherently flows downstream and hits the most
vulnerable among us — children, women, the poor, ethnic and religious
“outsiders” — the hardest, just as it does in real life. The zombified
children use the language of genre and metaphor to drive this point
home.
Now,
take a look at what poor Ned Umber is surrounded with: body parts, and
lots of them. The White Walkers are infamous for their sadistic artistry
in arranging the corpses, or parts of the corpses, of their victims.
Whether there’s some higher purpose to this or if it’s simply their
equivalent of a house sigil, the effect is much worse than simply seeing
bodies lying where they fell. Humans, their bodies, life itself — to
the Walkers and their wights, it’s all just so much meat. This
postmortem objectification hits our long-standing cultural assumption
that the dead should be afforded dignity hard, and in so doing calls
into question whether such shibboleths are, frankly, bullshit. The White
Walkers see us as not as people, but as raw material. What if they’re
right?
Once again, it’s an aspect of
GOT
horror that makes the connection between supernatural and human evil
clear. Consider two of the show’s biggest battle episodes, “Hardhome”
and “
The Battle of the Bastards.”
In the former, the reanimated soldiers of the White Walkers’ army
plunge down the face of a cliff en masse — a literal avalanche of
corpses. In the latter, the slain warriors of House Bolton and the
combined forces behind Jon Snow pile up in enormous heaps — a sea of
death in which Jon nearly drowns, a mountain of cadavers he must climb
to survive. There’s something spectacular to the horror in both cases,
an effect that’s stronger and more upsetting than the sum of their
(body) parts. I’d imagine the Night King and his minions create their
dismemberment art projects with a similar effect in mind.
But
the worst thing about the army of the dead and each of its individual
members isn’t what they do, or who they do it to, or what they do with
them afterwards — it’s that they’re able to do anything at all. They exist, and by existing they issue one huge collective FUCK YOU
to all that the living characters’ hope for the future and all they
hold sacred from their pasts. Whoever you used to be before the White
Walkers get to you and kill you is gone when they bring you back. Your
existence is cruelly prolonged, but you’re as mindless and dangerous as a
sword in their hands.
This is easily the most ineffable aspect of
GOT horror, and it requires a certain Potter Stewart
“I know it when I see it”
mind-set to grasp. But again, think of Ned Umber, this adorable kid who
started the episode by awkwardly attempting to be as polite as possible
to the very intimidating ladies and lords in charge of Winterfell. That
he deserved better than to be murdered and nailed to the wall is
obvious. Yet when he opens his eyes and starts flailing and screaming,
and when he keeps screeching as he’s slowly burned back to death, you
get the sense that something really awful is happening here, something
worse than just
a standard crypto-fascist Walking Dead zombie kill.
When
I watched this scene, I didn’t reach for zombie movies or shows for a
point of comparison at all. Instead I thought of the passage from The Lord of the Rings
that explains that orcs and trolls were created as a “mockery” of Elves
and Ents, races that were generally wise, kind, thoughtful, and caring
of the world around them. Morgoth, the original Dark Lord of
Middle-earth, saw them and decided to show his enemies exactly
what he thought their innate freedom and nobility was worth: a bunch of
hideous ravenous sadistic idiots who thrive in darkness and eat people
alive.
I thought too of how Bram Stoker and Stephen King describe vampires in Dracula and Salem’s Lot respectively. It’s not just that they’re mean-spirited, bloodthirsty, and possessed of dangerous powers. It’s that they’re wrong,
somehow, in a way the humans who encounter them feel in their guts.
They’re not just scared of the vampires; they’re disgusted by them. They
find them somehow lascivious and obscene in their persistence after
death. In both books, the protagonists seem to want to destroy their
undead enemies not just to be safe from them, but to be rid of them — to
avoid ever having to look at their fanged faces or hear their
sepulchral and somehow bogus voices again.
The
obvious analogue here is, once again, “Hardhome.” After Jon Snow
escapes to the sea with the few living humans (and one giant) who
survived the onslaught of the dead, they look back at the battlefield,
where the Night King stands triumphant. But he’s not done with them yet.
Staring right at Jon, the Night King raises his arms — and suddenly all
the people who’d been slaughtered during the chaotic struggle we’d just
witnessed simply get back up and stare at Jon along with him. All those
people were once alive and free, with their own hopes and dreams and
fears and biases and hatreds and loves. The Night King murdered them.
Then he raised his arms and brought them back, erasing everything they
used to be in the process. It’s an awesome
sight, in a near-biblical sense: a complete and total perversion of the
tragedy that has just taken place, on a scale that visibly boggles the
survivors’ minds.
All
three of these tactics — the slaughter of the innocent, the desecration
and objectification of the human body, the perversion of death into a
mockery of life — are nailed right up there on the wall of the Last
Hearth for all to see. The creators of Game of Thrones
have developed a unique favored strain of horror with which to offset
both the grandiosity of the show’s fantasy trappings and the
down-and-dirty realpolitik of its story line, one that speaks directly
to its core ideas about our common humanity and the way we threaten and
betray it. Tormund & Co. can burn it away for now, but Game of Thrones is all but guaranteed to return to this well before the closing credits roll for a final time, and drink fuller than ever.
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