The story of
Game of Thrones wrapped up last night
with the most lavish display of narrative housekeeping in TV history:
Jon Snow betrayed and knifed a power-mad Daenerys to prevent future mass
murders; Tyrion successfully made the case for Bran to take the throne;
Sansa was appointed head of her own kingdom; Arya sailed off on a boat
to uncharted territory; and Jon was sent up North, exiled and neutered
to appease Dany’s supporters.
But the show had already summed itself up a week earlier in “
The Bells,”
when the Hound and the Mountain fought to the death in the crumbling
stairwell of the Red Keep, an action scene that doubled as a summary of
all the impossible challenges the show has tried and often failed to
overcome. The Mountain, a.k.a. Gregor Clegane, was poisoned in a duel in
season four but continued to function thanks to
Frankenstein-like
medical experiments by Cersei’s adviser Qyburn. He returned to life as a
putrefying goon who wasn’t really alive anymore, in any meaningful
sense, but had to keep guarding Cersei and killing her enemies. The
Mountain’s actions in his final scene — recognizing his brother Sandor,
then disregarding Cersei’s orders by killing Qyburn and entering a
combat to the death — indicated that he still had some agency. But in
every other way, that gray-fleshed, red-eyed creature of obligation was
not the person he’d once been.
Neither
was the show that sent him to such a spectacular end. This image of two
brothers, one living and one nearly undead, fighting to the death
became a metatextual summing-up of Game of Thrones’
final seasons. As it entered its homestretch, David Benioff and D. B.
Weiss’s juggernaut of a fantasy became a gigantic entertainment
revenant, shambling on despite having lost much of its original life
force, along with George R.R. Martin’s source text, somewhere around
season five.
Ironically,
this eighth and final season was absolutely on-brand for the series,
though surely not in the way its creators or its fans would’ve imagined.
Regardless of whether you liked or disliked its individual episodes or
story lines,
Game of Thrones constantly set up audiences to expect, even want, a particular outcome, only to deliver the worst-case version of their fears.
Game of Thrones
itself got Red Wedding’d or Ned Starked — choose your comparison from
the series; there are dozens of equally good choices available — as its
devotees sat there every Sunday night wishing for something other than
what the show intended to give them. More than a million grew so
disenchanted that they
signed a petition
to remake all of season eight. This was a fantasy more ridiculous than
anything in Westeros, a demand contrary to the spirit of popular
storytelling itself (television is not a restaurant where you can send
the food back), and had an almost endearing impotence, like those shots
of the crowd that gathered to watch Ned Stark’s death in season one.
This thing was happening, whether you wanted it or not.
The core of Game of Thrones’ appeal was always
its comfort with horror and terror.
In its earlier, stronger seasons, the series often felt more like an
adaptation of an ancient text than anything modern. It ignored
contemporary Western liberal notions of morally and politically
acceptable storytelling (especially when it dealt with gender relations,
racism, colonialism, and the white-savior complex, which approached
Tarzan or Conan levels of cheerful obliviousness), but it was equally
uninterested in giving the audience the neat and life-affirming closure
that it seemed to want from all other fantasy and science-fiction
franchises, whether it was
Star Trek or
Star Wars,
Doctor Who or James Bond, Marvel or DC. On
Game of Thrones,
as in life itself, the rain of death fell on the just and unjust alike.
There was an ominousness to the violence that would’ve seemed even more
wanton and sadistic if the show hadn’t channeled that George R.R.
Martin–esque feeling of events’ being subtly finessed by the whims of
unseen gods. It was a 21st-century series in terms of
its technology of production and
distribution,
but the sensibility was primeval. Watching it from week to week was the
closest that modern Western viewers have gotten to the experience of
reading the original Grimm fairy tales, where Jack the Giant Killer
would cut open a giant’s stomach and replace it with a sack of hasty
pudding, or folktales like the early French version of “Little Red
Riding Hood,” where the girl climbs into bed with the wolf and is eaten.
The end.
Viewers
of the show, like children listening to old fairy tales, got to the
point where, going into each hour, they knew on some level that this
story probably wouldn’t go the way they wanted it to, and that to enter
its narrative space was to accept a certain amount of cruelty. This
freed the writers to deliver massive, often unimaginably horrific
shocks, like the death of Ned, the Red Wedding, the maiming of Jaime
Lannister, the prolonged torture and eventual castration of Theon, and
the innumerable mutilations, eviscerations, immolations, rapes, mass
murders, and other atrocities. The absolute worst thing that could
happen to a character often did happen, and at the worst possible
moment. That was the source of the show’s narrative power and the key to
its viselike hold on audiences, even during the lackluster recent
years.
The
show at its most disturbing was a perfect combination of that horror
and terror, gussied up in the superficial trappings of European-styled
sword-and-sorcery. The difference between horror and terror is subtle
but easy to understand once you know what to look for: If terror is
about fear of a violent physical death or damage to the flesh, horror is
a more psychological or spiritual kind of distress. It’s about fearing
the loss of sanity, of individual autonomy, or (a pre-Freud way of
putting it) of the soul. The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby are horror. Jaws is terror. The original Alien,
a stalker movie set in a dark castle of a starship that was also a text
about fear of rape and forced impregnation, was both. So is virtually
the entire filmography of David Cronenberg. Game of Thrones lived
at that intersection, swathed in gloom and gnawing on bones. The
voluminous abuse Sansa suffered at the hands of others was terror, but
the toll it took on her was horror. Ditto the unrelenting misery of
Daenerys, who was abducted and raped in season one, undermined and
betrayed throughout the series, and in the final seasons saw two of her
“children” — who doubled as manifestations of her literally growing rage
— taken from her. (The data trove justifying Dany’s actions in “The
Bells” was filled to the brim over eight seasons; it was only the rushed
and patchy storytelling at the end, with all the crazy-lady shorthand,
that rankled.)
The
entire show was unified, visually, by the reactions of characters who’d
been forced to watch the absolute worst possible thing happen and were
powerless to do anything but absorb it and try not to lose their minds.
This was a recurring feature, practically a dramatic motif, from Sansa
and Arya being physically restrained from trying to help their father as
his head was lowered on the chopping block to Catelyn Stark realizing
at the Red Wedding that there was no reason for a guest to be wearing
chain mail and then screaming warnings after it was too late to warn
anyone. These moments returned audiences to the emotional state of
children watching Old Yeller or E.T. or Avengers: Infinity War, endlessly cycling from hope and trust to betrayal and fear and sorrow, then back again. It worked like a charm. A magic charm.
It
wasn’t just the epic moments and shocking twists that made the series
such a topic of conversation. It was also, perhaps primarily, the
intricate sense of place Martin’s novels brought to the tale, which
anchored the original run of the series and made it special enough to
overcome (usually valid) complaints about misogyny, racial
insensitivity, and other shortcomings.
Game of Thrones was often compared in its early years to
The Sopranos with dragons, but in totality, those first few seasons were probably closer to something like
Mad Men or
The Wire,
in that they showed how individuals were shaped by their history and
culture even as they exercised free will. To mangle the famous
Casablanca
line, in this crazy world, the problems of two little people, or even a
royal bloodline, didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The definitive
elaboration on this comparison can be found in
an article by Zeynep Tufekci in Scientific American. Tufekci theorizes that
Game of Thrones
frustrated even devoted fans in its later years not just because it ran
out of George R.R. Martin text to adapt (though that was a problem) but
because it moved away from sociological storytelling, which focuses on
whole institutions or civilizations and their relationship to their own
histories — a thing the show often was brilliant at — to psychological
storytelling that was mainly focused on the individual and treated the
larger society as a mere backdrop for their progress through the world.
The latter was of secondary interest in Martin’s novels.
Without
the books, Weiss and Benioff and their actors were still capable of
striking and even deeply moving character moments (this season’s
second episode, which was built around quiet conversations, was filled with them). But this wasn’t the dramatic third rail that made
Game of Thrones electrifying.
The shift to individual-focused storytelling made the show feel less
assured and less special. Characterization was increasingly subordinated
not just to plot twists but to spectacle and GIF-able moments. It
inflicted great damage on audience goodwill in the final season,
particularly when
Game of Thrones sidelined or
undermined many of its female characters (was it necessary to have so
many of them sobbing in close-up over men, and in Brienne’s case,
devoting her final scene to writing Jaime’s biography?) and staged
moments that were viscerally exciting (Jaime’s duel with Euron Greyjoy)
but seemed bizarre if you thought about them for more than a few
seconds. There were still remnants of its sociological storytelling
— the
big battle scenes
became even more important than they’d been originally, fireworks
displays built into every season. But not necessarily because they
flowed inevitably from the politics and personalities of Westeros —
because, like the various flavors of ultraviolence, they were what
Game of Thrones was known for doing, and therefore had to be done.
The
one constant that kept the show vital (and controversial) was its
interest in horror and terror. This is key to the logic of fairy tales
and so-called “moral tales,” where people’s worst fears are realized and
their most egregious missteps punished, seemingly by the cosmos, either
out of a sense of cosmic or supernatural justice or merely because the
universe is indifferent to what individuals want. It was displayed on a
grand scale two times this season: first and
rather unsteadily in “
The Long Night,” and with terrifying assurance in “
The Bells,”
a spectacle of civic ruin and mass murder that variously evoked
Hiroshima, 9/11, the Holocaust, and the conventional aerial firebombings
that have been characteristic of post–World War II life from Dresden
and Cambodia to Kosovo and Aleppo.
These
jolts of horror, whether focused on individual or collective agony,
were an artistic through-line linking the post-Martin version of the
series to its original incarnation. But the narrative infrastructure
that used to grow organically out of Martin’s concern with societies and
their leaders fell away, and what was left was a bottom-line-driven
imperative to be
Game of Thrones™, with the
characters serving as pegs around which pyrotechnic and melodramatic
flights of fancy could be woven. A Hiroshima- or 9/11-level atrocity was
well within the narrative bandwidth of this series, where rulers
regularly did awful things for ignoble, often irrational reasons and
civilians suffered and died as a result. Dany repeatedly said that she
wanted the throne, was perfectly willing to burn her enemies and their
societies to the ground to get it, and would settle for being feared if
love was not an option. When viewers argued about whether this was
something Dany would or could do — and whether her rapid descent into
genocidal rage affirmed the series’ arguable misogyny and played into
stereotypes that
critic Mo Ryan summed up as “bitches are crazy” — it spoke to a failure of process that had affected the structural integrity of the art.
When the aftershocks of the finale fade and we get a bit of distance from the whole thing, it will become apparent that
Game of Thrones itself unwittingly became the victim of an ironic and agonizingly protracted
Game of Thrones
ending. The show had all the money in the world and could’ve taken a
lot more time in production — and demanded a lot more of the audience’s
time — than it did, and that might’ve corrected some of the problems
that plagued it during its second half. Even at the end, the series
still had its moments — in spite of all its problems, “The Bells” is
astounding at the level of filmmaking and acting. But like
The West Wing after Aaron Sorkin’s departure and
Seinfeld
after Larry David’s, something was off so profoundly that you could see
how hard the series was trying to pretend it hadn’t really lost
anything. You could feel the struggle, and the insecurity emanating from
that struggle, even if you still enjoyed the series as a spectacle of
horror and terror, a war film, or a soap opera. It had become the kind
of show that felt comfortable retroactively explaining everything about
Dany’s decision to roast King’s Landing by having two men recap her life
story and argue about whether her actions were defensible (a
sensitively acted scene, but essentially a Reddit thread come to life).
The kind of show that would have a dragon make like the supercomputer at
the end of
WarGames (“The only winning move is not to play”). The kind of show that would have
Samwell Tarly present
what looked suspiciously like a tell-all memoir written in quill pen, titled
A Song of Ice and Fire.
The
upshot is a meta-death as disturbing as any the series has given us.
Ned Stark is losing his head again, there’s blood on the floor of the
reception hall, Jaime’s hand is coming off. But it’s sadder somehow,
because it’s more like a real-world death, where the person you love
gradually turns into something you no longer recognize, and nothing —
not rationalizations, not petitions, not science, not faith — can stop
it. But we had to watch.
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