Before I say anything else about Game Of Thrones, this Spring’s big-budget HBO epic miniseries, it has to be understood that there’s nothing family friendly about the show. Full of blood and sex, full-frontal nudity, incest, animal cruelty and some wildly explicit language, it almost seems like the producers, having seen quality cable push the boundaries with each new series, are attempting to set precedents so far past anything any but the most prurient and tasteless motion picture is willing to match.
Because it also has to be understood that a TV series like Game Of Thrones – a fantasy story based on A Song Of Fire And Ice, George R. R. Martin’s (unfinished) series of bestselling novels – is directly in competition with movies, and is so far likely to beat their competition in a battle of attrition. Because for all the talk of shrinking attention spans and diminishing literacy, audiences are showing no abatement in their appetite for sprawling, character-rich stories, with or without gory battles or epic special effects. And since they’re increasingly satisfying that appetite with quality cable shows, on ever-cheaper massive flat-panel TVs in the comfort of their own home, it would be prudent to avoid investing in any company with money tied up in theatres.
Martin’s novels currently stand at five and counting, the most recent running to over a 1000 pages in paperback, so a précis of the plot and players requires a bit of work. The setting is Westeros, a super-sized version of England, where Hadrian’s Wall isn’t a few feet of crumbling stonework but a massive rampart of ice, and Scotland has been swapped for a sub-arctic wasteland full of vicious savages and a mythical race of bloodthirsty giants called the White Walkers. South of The Wall are seven kingdoms held together in an uneasy peace, brokered a generation before in the aftermath of a civil war.
Noble families have names like Lannister, Stark, Baratheon, Targeryen and Greyjoy, the forests are full of shadowcats and direwolves, and one character becomes the proud mother of a trio of baby dragons. The story happens in places with names like Winterfell, King’s Landing, the Eyrie, Castle Black and Vaes Dothrak; there are wizards, witches, curses and blood magic, secret orders of assassins, dwarves, giants, totemic swords, and constantly shifting alliances based on conspiracy and betrayal. And if it sounds like I’m reading from the Player’s Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons, trust me that I’m more than suitably mortified.
Martin’s main inspiration, not surprisingly, was Tolkien, though in a recent interview with Time magazine, he complained about most of the fantasy genre that grew in the shadow of Tolkien’s late ‘60s popularity, calling it “Disneyland Middle Ages. You know, they’ve got tassels and they’ve got lords and stuff like that, but they don’t really seem to grasp what it was like in the Middle Ages.” For Martin, the point of his books was to mix the magic and wonder of Tolkien with the political grit and grimy realism of lived history, as embodied in conflicts like the War of the Roses and the Albigensian Crusade.
The result is that Game Of Thrones feels like a Medieval “What If?” story, set in a super-sized England founded on the speculative premise that Christianity never happened. While Westeros abounds in a panoply of fanciful pagan faiths, there’s no half-life of ghostly Roman glory in the past, no abiding Papal authority in whatever state of grace or disarray, no legacy of saints and proselytizing martyrs, no shared Biblical canon of parable, psalm or proverb, and no Christ to act as exemplar or ideal. It’s as if the Dark Ages stretched back into the mists of history, and looks set to persist for centuries to come, with no Reformation, Renaissance or Enlightenment, blood and conflict ebbing and flowing as political power, a means only to its own end, shifts from one kingly alliance to another.
A pessimist will insist that this is ultimately history’s bottom line, and a rote recitation of dates and facts might seem to bear them out, but any Christian knows that, flowing above history’s battlefields are the clouds and sky of our moral striving, constantly inspiring us to look above the wreckage and failure. The world of Game Of Thrones is intent on the battlefield and its carnage, and while it hosts a scant handful of characters with glimmers of a moral compass, it never give them – or us – much reason for hope; most telling of all, the character with the strongest moral sense is executed for treason before the first season ends. Westeros, with its kings, lords, knights and dragons, might be generically described as a fantasy, but it feels more like a nightmare.
