Game of Thrones obsessives need reality check
Hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg recently provoked a viral snigger by revealing he watches the fantasy drama Game of Thrones for “historic” reasons.
He’s trying to understand “what this world was based on before I got here”. Here’s a tip, Dogg: it wasn’t based on dragons, giants, shapeshifters and women giving birth to spectral assassins.
But he’s not the only one having trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality. A marital rape in this week’s episode triggered feminist tweetrage; a US Senator denounced it as “disgusting and unacceptable” and sickened fans vowed they were “done” with the show.
I doubt anyone will notice: GoT is simulcast in 170 countries. Whatever your favourite thing in life — Christmas, Labrador puppies, sunsets, birdsong — it’s not as popular as GoT.
As Dogg detected, GoT takes place in the olden days. It might be worth pointing out to those seeking to impose contemporary morality and sensibilities on fiction set in a dim, distant imaginary world that most Western countries didn’t acknowledge there was such a thing as marital rape until the 1970s. Quite a few countries still don’t.
The more general complaint is that the scene was gratuitous, coupled with a feeling that the victim — teenaged orphan Sansa Stark — has suffered enough. It’s certainly true that poor Sansa has found herself at the mercy — or lack thereof — of two of the nastier items ever seen on screen: the diabolical boy king Joffrey and her new husband, the equally warped Ramsay Bolton. It’s even possiblethat her wedding night was marginally less traumatic than having to watch the betrayal and beheading of her beloved father.
The gratuitousness charge is a critical judgment on the storytelling. I dare say the show’s creators would justify the scene and others like it — it was far less graphic and drawn-out than Ramsay’s torture of the wretched Theon — by pointing to GoT’s runaway success: their storytelling has mesmerised a worldwide audience for four and a half seasons.
But it is the case that one sometimes grows weary of the darkness. Thus far the moral of the story is that precious few good deeds go unpunished or, to put it another way, the vile shall inherit Westeros.
Perhaps we’ll continue to wade through gore and horror. However, without having read the books on which the series is based, I suspect GoT will prove to be a traditional revenge tale and we are being primed for a cathartic payback in which the surviving Starks get medieval on the asses of all those who have wronged them. The more the “good” characters suffer, the more we look forward to their tormentors getting their just — ie, appropriately humiliating and agonising — deserts.
The fuss is another example of how the narrative threads of major TV shows have become ongoing news stories. There was also much media conjecture and handwringing this week over the end of Mad Men. One newspaper wanted to know “What becomes of Don Draper?” Well, since you ask, the show’s creator has supplied the answer: nothing. He’s in suspended animation awaiting the reboot or Mad Men: The Movie.
Eight years after the event, critics and fans are still deconstructing the last episode of The Sopranos. James Gandolfini is dead but Tony Soprano, the character he played, lives on even though the obvious interpretation of the final scene is that he didn’t.
This is partly technology-driven. If GoT wasn’t simulcast in 170 countries, it wouldn’t be part of the global conversation taking place on social media. It’s also possible the entertainment industry’s ever-increasing pervasiveness and immediacy is exacerbating the laughable but apparently human tendency to fixate on fictional characters to the extent of relating to them as if they were real people.
Silly but harmless then? Not quite. While a massive gulf separates the shrillest GoT critics from the Iranian mullahs who imposed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie or the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, the common element is the urge to censor in the name of ideology: the conviction that what is fundamental to their belief system should be off limits to fictional or satiric portrayal.
“The ultimate form of censorship,” observed George Bernard Shaw, “is assassination.”
We should be wary when censorious critics condemn a work of art or entertainment as “disgusting and unacceptable”. As history buffs like Snoop Dogg are well aware, that has been the catch-cry of book-burners down the ages.