When watching Game of Thrones, HBO’s contentious,
wildly popular fantasy series, it’s easy to get caught up in the Big Moments,
the ones that light up social media and generate a week’s worth of think pieces:
Ned Stark’s beheading; the Battle of Blackwater; the Red Wedding; so many
deaths. But the show isn’t all about shock and awe. In fact, some of the best,
most memorable moments this season have been the quiet ones, often involving
nothing more than characters talking. There’s the circuitous beetle-crushing
anecdote that Tyrion tells Jaime in “The Mountain and the Viper,” delivered
with tortured intensity by Peter Dinklage, just before the climactic, explosive
duel scene. Daenerys’s flirtation with Daario in “Mockingbird.” Any scene
between Missandei and Grey Worm, whose tender relationship is perhaps the
show’s most welcome addition to George R.R. Martin’s novels.
There’s a reason why, even in a
season teeming with game-changing, water-cooler-ready incidents, “First of His
Name” remains my favorite episode. Although relatively uneventful, it contains
a wealth of perfect little moments that might seem inconsequential on the
surface, but actually have profound implications for the characters and their
world. Take, for instance, the scene where Podrick Payne confesses to Brienne,
“I killed a man.” It’s a simple, four-word line, but for a character that had previously
functioned as little more than comic relief, it constitutes a miniature,
heartbreaking revelation. Pod may be hopelessly earnest and awkward, but he’s
far from the naïve simpleton we and Brienne thought he was; despite his lack of
formal training and experience, he’s just as capable of taking a person’s life
as a knight of the Kingsguard.
At its heart, season four is a
narrative of disillusionment, watching as each character is deprived of his or
her innocence. In the premiere, Arya Stark, not yet a teenager, sticks her
newly reclaimed Needle into Polliver’s throat to avenge her friend, Lommy
Greenhands. A contemptuous smirk lingers on her face even as her victim chokes
to death on his own blood, yet whatever catharsis this death brings is only
temporary. Arya doesn’t hesitate to revel in her victory; instead, she simply
wipes her sword clean and continues on her journey with the Hound. In an
interview, Maisie Williams says that Arya is “being
eaten from the inside out… She's got a hole in her heart. She fills it with all
these eyes that she's going to shut forever, and she's just turning black from
the inside out.” Ultimately, killing Polliver is not the act of a girl
obtaining justice for her fallen friend; it’s the act of a girl who has lost –
or is in the process of losing – her soul. A deliberate, cold-blooded murder,
devoid of feeling, performed with matter-of-fact calmness. With this, Arya has
officially been indoctrinated into the culture of violence that reigns over
Westeros.
This season has received
criticism in some corners for its abundant, almost gleeful use of graphic
violence, especially against
women.
On one hand, I don’t blame anyone who’d rather not spend his or her nights
watching people’s heads being crushed or chopped off, and the violence can be
occasionally excessive or poorly executed (I complained about a certain scene
with Cersei and Jaime as much as the next person). At the same time, though, a
lot of the criticism strikes me as overly simplistic. As George R.R. Martin
himself said,
Westeros is “no darker nor more depraved than our own world,” and omitting or
downplaying the violence would be a betrayal of the series’ intention, which is
to present the past in all its true horror, an alternative to the glorified,
sanitized version we usually see in fantasy stories. If it’s hard to tolerate
at times, that’s because it’s effective. Fictional violence should be hard to tolerate. It’s saying
something that even in an era when seemingly half the shows on network TV feature serial killers, the carnage
in Game of Thrones is still genuinely
shocking and gruesome.
While the show undoubtedly does
employ violence as
a form of spectacle (is it even possible to avoid that in a visual
medium?), I don’t think it has, as Sonia Saraiya puts it, “gotten in the way of
Thrones’ fundamental truth… a lens
that offers not just brutality, but also the assiduous follow-through of
healing, grieving, and surviving.” If anything, this season has been all about
the follow-through, the way war can invade even the most remote areas of the
world and tear apart not only communities and families but also individuals,
forever transforming the lives of those it touches. It’s never explicitly
stated, but you can detect evidence of war’s devastation, of people struggling
to cope with their scars, in snippets of dialogue like Pod’s and in character
arcs like Arya’s – again, the little things. Trauma, the show contends,
involves more than mangled bodies and troubled minds; it’s a process of moral
erosion, the gradual disintegration of personal values in the face of a brutal,
uncaring reality. Violence, like power, corrupts.
“Everywhere in the world, they
hurt little girls.” Cersei’s blunt response to Oberyn, who assures her that “we
don’t hurt little girls in Dorne,” represents a moment of uncharacteristic
sincerity for the Lannister queen as well as an unexpected reminder to the
audience that, despite her powerful, confident veneer, she is broken inside.
Unbeknownst to her companion, Cersei has been subjected to repeated sexual assault
throughout her life, first at the hands of Robert Baratheon, her husband, and
then Jaime, her brother and paramour (as much as I wish we could pretend it
didn’t, for all intents and purposes, the scene in the Sept happened and can’t
be ignored). Perhaps more than anyone else, she understands the key to survival
in Westeros, which essentially amounts to a willingness to use and be used by
others whenever necessary, to discard your humanity for the sake of
self-preservation. As Oberyn discovers too late, this world isn’t exactly kind
to those motivated by passion and noble ideals.
Other characters are slowly starting
to comprehend this fact. Daenerys began season four as the self-proclaimed
Breaker of Chains, a benevolent ruler determined to free the slaves of the
cities she defeats. It’s becoming more and more apparent, however, that
conquering is not the same as leading, as she resorts to increasingly harsh
methods in an effort to maintain power over her subjects; the Daenerys that
liberated the Unsullied would be appalled by the Daenerys that ordered the
execution of 163 people and called it “justice”. The last time we saw Sansa,
she was walking down a staircase in the Vale, dressed in an elegantly low-cut
gown and bathed in angelic white light. It’s treated as a triumphant moment,
and in some ways, it is: Sansa Stark, the girl who once swooned over fanciful
tales of castles and chivalrous princes, all grown up, no longer a timid
victim. But
then, you remember what brought her here – a barrage of physical, emotional and
psychological abuse inflicted by the boy she used to idolize, among others –
and the moment becomes as ethereal as the light in the background, the triumph
an illusion. She may not be helpless, but she’s still a victim, just another
pawn in a system governed by forces beyond her or anyone’s control.
Not coincidentally, the season
finale, airing tonight, is titled “The Children”. Children have always figured
prominently in Game of Thrones, but
their presence seems especially meaningful this season, as we get a clearer
glimpse of the war’s effect on bystanders, people not entrenched in political
intrigue and behind-the-scenes strategizing. As it turns out, most children in
Westeros either wind up dead, like the slaves nailed along the road to Meereen
and Elia Martell’s infants, murdered by the Mountain, or turn into killers
themselves.
“The Watchers
on the Wall” puts a kid right in the middle of the fighting, contrasting the
surrounding bloodshed with shots of Olly, a boy whose parents had been
slaughtered in a wilding raid, cowering in a corner. For a while, it seems as
though Olly is being framed as a symbol of innocence, a saint amongst monsters,
but in a twist that diverges
from the source material, he shoots and kills Ygritte, partly in an effort
to aid Jon and partly as retribution for his father. The death itself isn’t what’s
significant so much as Olly’s smile: proud, not a flicker of visible remorse.
There’s something chilling about it – the realization that even at such a young
age, Olly has already joined and helped perpetuate the cycle of violence and
revenge that has endured throughout the history of Westeros, passed from
generation to generation.
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