Once sucked in, you stay sucked. Be warned.
On one side of the artefact/audience interchange, avid faces will be squashed up against the screen; on the other side, avid faces will simply be squashed, and then cut off, attached to other people’s heads, sewn on to wolves, painted with tar, or stuck on spikes. As the Immortal Name, Robert Burns, has it: “Clap in his walie nieve a blade, He’ll make it whissle; An legs an arms, an heads will sned, Like taps o thrissle.”
Those legs and arms and heads are as good as snedded, because this series must surely have not only the longest cast list of all time, but also the highest body count. Will it be last man standing? Last dragon standing? Or last metaphor-for-climate-change standing – the pale, deadly-cold Others and their troops of the barrow-wightish, zombie-ish Undead with their LED blue eyes who bring endless winter? Funforall, as James Joyce punned of funerals. And it is fun for all, except for the underage, because this is Ivanhoe with the rape and gutting scenes included. Not to mention the incest, the patricide, and the kiddie murders. Freud goes on the rampage! The return of the repressed, times 100!
New generation of British actors gets its chance to shine in Game of Thrones
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Yes, it’s Game of Thrones, that mesmerisingly popular television series that surely draws its inspiration from so many fictional sources it’s hard to keep track. The Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, ancient Egypt, H Rider Haggard, The Sword in the Stone, the Ring Cycle, Tolkien, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Mabinogion, Harry Potter, The Jungle Book, Ursula K Le Guin, Hans Christian Andersen, Idylls of the King, Conan the Barbarian – himself the stolen-away downmarket twin of Walt Whitman – and The Wind In the Willows. You may laugh at this last citation, but mark:
“They were but four in all, but to the panic-stricken Lannisters the hall seemed full of monstrous warriors, grey, black, brown and yellow, whooping and flourishing enormous swords; and they broke and fled with squeals of terror and dismay, this way and that, through the windows, up the chimney, anywhere to get out of reach of those terrible weapons.”
I changed only four words: “weasels,” “cudgels,” “sticks,” and “animals.” Maybe I should have substituted “shouts” or “screams” for “squeals,” squealing not being a thing a Lannister would do unless subject to unspeakable physical or spiritual tortures in underground caverns; but otherwise, be honest with yourself: it fits. In the sword-and-sorcery formula at work in Game of Thrones, the sorcery has its moments, but the swords prevail. There are no unemployed ironsmiths anywhere in the north, the south, or the points west on the useful maps at the fronts of the books.
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A sidenote on the dragons. The past thousand-and-a-half years has given us a range of dragons, from the lucky dragons of China, to the tussling red and white dragons of Welsh lore, to the dragon of St George fame, substitute for Satan, to the Zen-ish, wise, riddling dragons of Le Guin’s Earthsea, to the hoarding, miserly dragons of Beowulf and The Hobbit. George RR Martin’s dragons are more like superweapon bazookas. They’re aesthetically attractive – more so in the books than in the series, where they have less delicate pink tracery and more scaly pterodactyl beakiness – but, so far, they don’t talk.
Luckily they’re in the hands of a character we can actually approve of, more or less. Daenerys Targaryen surely has the blood of Uther Pendragon flowing in her veins, and we expect she will live up to it. The hairstyle is a bit High Elven, but why carp? There are only so many high fantasy hairstyles to go around, and, unlike Cate Blanchett in the Tolkien films, she doesn’t have pointed ears. Not that Cate doesn’t look good in them, mind you.
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So what else can be said about Game of Thrones, apart from I can hardly wait? I asked some people younger than myself what it was they especially love about the series. The acting, said some: so well done! The characters, said others. (Nobody said “the lavish outfits”, but I wasn’t fooled.) “What is it about the characters that you like?” I enquired. They’re mixed, they answered. It’s not all good on one side and bad on the other. They behave well or horribly according to the circumstances which they find themselves in. They’re like real people.
Except that some of them are like real psychopaths. Was it absolutely necessary, as “necessary” might be defined by, say, that helpful arch-pragmatist, Machiavelli, to cement one’s power position by cutting the head off darling Robb Stark and sewing his direwolf’s head onto his neck at that aptly named Red Wedding? No, it was not necessary, it was gratuitous. But the Game of Thrones folk go in for symbolism, in addition to conceptual needlecraft.
We might also say: if Game of Thrones is a game, what then is reality? What are “real people” like?