SHOOT THE LAWYERS! MORE SKIN ON HBO! L. H. PUTTGRASS SIGNING OFF AND HEADING FOR THE TUB!
May as well close the comment section.
I don't know if anyone watches Outlander, but I found the season finale this weekend genuinely shocking for its graphic rape/torture scenes. I haven't seen GoT, but I don't think I've seen anything that intense on television before, and very few things in the movies like it.
I thought the Salon take on this was smart.
Brief opinion: If you're going to choose to do something this graphic, they did it well. I'm not sold on the value of doing something that graphic, though. (And the plot otherwise didn't hang together particularly well.)
As an agnostic on the subject of trigger warnings, I will say that the episode and the Salon discussion of it strike me as triggery as hell.
Outlander was supposed to be the chick-romance thing that also appeals to men. But I'm either super manly, super insecure about my manliness, and/or super sexist, because I found it kind of lame and unwatchable.
I don't watch enough tv to be absolutely certain of this, but this:
So you can really focus once again on character, and those characters can engage in sex the way actual humans do
seems implausible to me.
It seems pretty obvious to me that it's "naked women as props (with sometimes the odd naked dude, too." All of the explanation seems to be attempts to argue that the well-written, interesting show requires boobs, no, really, it's artistic.. Which, fine, whatever; it just makes it hard to recommend an otherwise excellent show to my mom, which is probably not anyone's main concern.
I should admit, I haven't watched any of the shows discussed in the articles. But it seemed like the sort of topic that people on unfogged would have something to say about.
Your mom wants to see the boobs without the art getting in the way?
It is--in the words of this executive--an attempt to appeal to the "pervert" side of the audience.
Come on, it's not as if a fantasy/medieval series like GoT has a bunch of gamer bros who objectify women comprising a large part of its fan base.
Yeah, HBO has a problem with it. I'd prefer they either remove all nudity or else be more balanced about it so there's something for everyone (but we all accept that this doesn't make it purer art; it's just another part of a variety show, at least the way they're using it). It's almost hilarious how carefully they hide their male actors.
re: 12
It's almost hilarious how carefully they hide their male actors.
Possible exception of 'Oz'.
Obviously the nudity in GOT is gratuitous and designed to appeal to 15 year old boys, as is essentially all of the whorehouse plotting, so yes it is indeed sexist, but I find the "nudity is interfering with the artistic greatness that is Game of Thrones" argument super stupid. You've chosen to watch a well-crafted, well-plotted, slightly sleazy entertainment that is all about delivering cheap visual thrills and a vaguely "adult" version of stupid fantasy whatever, so yeah some gratuitous nudity is part of the package. BUT WHY CAN"T MY STUPID POTBOILER SLEAZY FANTASY ENTERTAINMENT DESIGNED FOR 15 YEAR OLD BOYS BE LESS SEXIST??? I mean, come on, you've signed up for something ridiculous, face up to it and roll with it.
I mean, to be clear, that's a less stupid argument than the "let's go on for 59,000 words about what the politics of Westeros says about blah" that e.g. takes-Game-of-Thrrones-way-too-seriously-guy does on Lawyers, Guns, and Money, but it's still pretty stupid. Just let your dumb but fund sleazy entertainment be dumb but fun.
Further to comment #3, I can't put my finger on why the collective cultural interest in talking about Game of Thrones seems more intense to me than the collective cultural interest in talking about any other television program since television began. I think it's that a) people won't shut up about it, as happens all the time, but also b) the implicit question under discussion is so often "is there any real reason why anyone should feel bad about watching this show?" (Entertainment -> guilty conscience made dialogic made further entertainment.) Can you think of another case where that particular question was litigated for years like this? Go on, depress me. I can totally give up reading all commentary on cultural topics for the foreseeable future. There is going to be some identical version of this in 20 years, right?
(sarcasm watch: "further to #3" is my sly, subtle way of implying that my entire comment should not exist; it did not seem incomprehensibly obtuse as I typed it)
I haven't seen Game of Thrones and don't plan to, because I made the mistake of reading a couple of the books first, a mistake I didn't make with Dexter and True Blood. Speaking of, didn't True Blood provide enough male nudity to balance out GoT?
Yeah but the whole "potboiler sleazy fantasy entertainment" thing means that it would be perfectly possible to have lots of non-gratuitous nudity. The complaint is about the obviously forced stuff and the openly sexist patterns, not the bits that make sense.
It could be fun sleazy-ish entertainment with lots of nudity without doing it by occasionally stopping the show and bringing some naked ladies on, or randomly having them walk across the background of a shot or something. I mean, Spartacus* made Game of Thrones look like the 700 club as far as sex and violence goes but it didn't have any of these problems because when people didn't have their clothes on it made sense. Which means that despite the fact that it was constant wall-to-wall nudity and sex and violence and so on it wasn't gratuitous in the way that the (much, much milder) Game of Thrones is.
*Which is my go-to example when it comes to talking about sex on television because holy cow. I'm pretty sure anyone with lines on that show took their clothes off and wandered around at some point.
Let us talk about "transgressive" art, using all preceding terms broadly and loosely.
Is a twenty minute sunrise in Satantango transgressive art?
How about cubist animation?
Do I need transgressive art, art that breaks the rules? Yes I do. I sure do want it very badly. Not Serbian Movie level, maybe not Jodorowsky, but there is still a lot of room in visual entertainment for creativity, or at least something unusual.
Can you think of another case where that particular question was litigated for years like this?
Big bouncy boobs and panty shots and many other forms of female objectification, many extremely subtle, have been litigated strenuously in anime at least since Hideki Anno produced Gunbusters in 1985.
BUT WHY CAN"T MY STUPID POTBOILER SLEAZY FANTASY ENTERTAINMENT DESIGNED FOR 15 YEAR OLD BOYS BE LESS SEXIST??? I mean, come on, you've signed up for something ridiculous, face up to it and roll with it.
One of the sentences in the linked article which most depressed me (because of it's obvious plausibility was):
I don't generally have a problem with the show's main female characters disrobing (which happens less and less each season as the lead actresses gain more control over their contracts)
If you presume that (some of) the nudity is such that the actors would chose not to do the scene if they were given a choice, it seems like it is a fair criticism to note that.
18.2: Spartacus made its nudity less gratuitous, which I am not necessarily granting, in part by making its world pretty small. At least in the first season (2?) I watched it was pretty close to a domestic drama, in the training camp and attached villa, and portrayed everyday life more than grand events. Food, sex, work, personal relations was the subject matter.
GoT has a huge epic canvas, and intimate relations are slightly out-of-place. I am trying to remember how Tolstoy would transition from Borodino to an intimate conversation. My guess would be the use of concrete details, design of tea cups and particular furniture.
It is possible that a gratuitous nude in a conversation could bring us back to the humanity of the characters, rather than their iconicity. To pull back from melodrama, to animate the tableau.
Anime has a problem with iconicity, and uses comedy, foolishness, chibi and super distortion to ground their characters.
20 - Emilia Clarke apparently did just that at some point, and it does seem a lot like the major actresses in the show have been keeping their clothes on more than they used to, which is nice.
Outlander was supposed to be the chick-romance thing that also appeals to men. But I'm either super manly, super insecure about my manliness, and/or super sexist, because I found it kind of lame and unwatchable.
I thought it was supposed to be a chick-romance thing -- full stop. The books (which The Missus has read) are certainly regarded that way.
I may be more effeminate than I let on, because I do think the TV show (usually) transcends that. Though even with that, the plotting is rather loose.
Having read and seen the movie A Clockwork Orange, I was surprised that the onscreen brutality has so much more impact than the brutality in the text, even though the movie was a faithful representation of the book. I suspect the same is true with the Outlander rape scenes.
I mean, my preference is to keep the gratuitous, barely justified naked sexy ladies in. Just throw hot naked guys in in equal measure. And if that means full frontal--which they really are quite afraid of except in very limited circumstances*--great. I want this to be a show that my wife can get as much sleazy enjoyment as I do.
* I can recall only three cases of this across all of GoT and the three seasons of True Blood I saw, only one of which could be considered remotely sexy.
I want this to be a show that my wife can get as much sleazy enjoyment as I do.
I'd rather it be a show that gets my wife more into chicks. God, people, have a vision.
I think around 40% of the GoT audience is female. Someone should poll them as to what kind of sleaze they want.
OMG I go looking for a link to 1 every five years or so and come up short. THANK YOU, BOOKMARKING
where's the one where they poll him over the phone
Here it is, do you guys think "Louella" is another wife entirely, or just a pet name for Louise?
13: I'm arguing only against the claim that the sex is real, authentic, and contributes to whatever artistry the show has. The arguments are basically: It's just impossible to write a scene about intrigue without boobs floating around. The spy game gets all mixed up without the boobs. That's just how it was in Westeros, man; we have to be authentic. We can't demonstrate the horrors of medieval society without naked women!
18: Spartacus is a lot of fun, and really weird, in that it was so over the top that it's out of place to even wonder. Sure, store your goddess mask collection on naked slave girls; it's not like they were wearing clothes anyway.
I couldn't get through the opening credits of Spartacus - all the blood splashing effect seemed so unbelievably puerile.
Trying to remember: I know Rome showed some male nudity, inc. iirc one full frontal of Marc Antony, but was it remotely balanced? I mean, there were certainly more nude women*, but I'd call anything better than 2:1 "remotely balanced".
*of course the whole thing is a bit skewed by boobs. If it's a sex scene and you see anything below the shoulders, you're either getting boob or you're getting a very clear/artificial effort not to show boob. Failing to show dick is only remarkable if there's a lot of she-bush showing.
so over the top that it's out of place to even wonder
Right? Felt almost more like a graphic novel instead of real people.
I watched the first episode of Spartacus about two years ago and thought it was ridiculous; then I started watching it out of boredom a few months ago and suddenly was completely hooked even though it is still ridiculous.
There's a point there. Sex was being used rather poorly. I remember watching 'Odd Man Out' which was set in Ireland in the 1920s. The protagonist, trying to save the man she loves, goes up against the British colonialist authorities, the Irish Republican Army and the Roman Catholic church. I kept thinking that in a modern remake they'd have to have a sex scene, because no one watching would be able to figure her motivation.
Onion AV TV Club (which despite the name is an ordinary TV review site) has a comment section with a bunch of gimmick posters. One is the HBO CEO of Tits, who shows up whenever there's nudity on the network. When that interview came out that mentioned the HBO executive who pushed for full frontal nudity, people on the site freaked out to find out this is basically a real job at HBO.
Gratuitous violence, on the other hand, is totes OK and not dehumanising or perverted or anything.
13-14: Dude, I'm beginning to think that you led a sheltered life up until recently. First the revelation that you think the first big rap album was The Chronic, and now this. Haven't you ever seen any fantasy movies or TV shows before? Conan the Barbarian? Xena: Warrior Princess? Compared to those, Game of Thrones is fucking King Lear.
Come on, it's not as if a fantasy/medieval series like GoT has a bunch of gamer bros who objectify women comprising a large part of its fan base.
Most George RR Martin readers are women. (Indeed, most readers of the genre overall are women.) And 42% of the show's audience (and 50% of those posting about it on social media) are women. But you knew that, right?
38: Hey! Conan the Barbarian was, like, deep, dude! It had a Nietzsche quote at the beginning and everything.
I suspect the same is true with the Outlander rape scenes.
Haven't seen the show, but I read the book, and the rape scene described was vivid enough that I stopped enjoying the book at all, didn't read the sequels, and disliked the author. A softporny (well, ordinary romance novel, but on the sexy end of it) fantasy adventure is a bad place to put a detailed, vivid description of a multiday torture-rape, unless you think it's part of the titillation. I don't have super tight standards for what I'll read without being put off like that - while I got sick of the GoT books, there wasn't a particular scene that lost me, but Outlander turned my stomach.
40: When Thulsa Doom orders some of his followers to jump to demonstrate the power of belief, I thought it was the most profound statement about religion ever. Admittedly I was a teenager at the time...
I thought it was just a garden variety snake cult before that.
Xena was a great show. Though the later part of the series lost me, after Xena and Gabrielle had kids.
Crom: Don't, don't you want me. You know I can't believe it when they say that you won't see me.
Conon: I was working as a barbarian pushing a bar. That much is true. But even then I knew I'd find a better place on my own, either with or without you.
21: I am trying to
remember how Tolstoy would transition from Borodino to an intimate conversation. My guess would be the use of concrete details, ...
It's been a while since I last glanced at WaP, but I seem to recall fairly rapid transitions from concretely detailed descriptions of blood and guts to concretely detailed descriptions of bare boobs in the parlor, no? In the latter case, the concrete was esp. appropriate when the description was of a fake boob. In fact, as I recall (but as I age, my memory plays more and more tricks on me), Tolstoy often pointedly mentioned the men having difficulty making eye contact with the women during the conversations.
So, "failing to show dick" in a sex scene is not remarkable if the women in the scene are clean shaven or suffciently styled that one would not describe the result as "bush"?
Sorry about that last. I screwed up closing the tag, and the comment number got butchered in the general carnage. It refers back to comment 32.
I read that as referring not precisely to hair, but to what one might describe as the crotchal region generally. The point is that above the waist nudity looks nuder on women than men.
I get my nudity above the waistline, sunshine.
40: BY CROM! NO MAN MALIGNS "CONAN THE BARBARIAN" OR THE ACKNOWLEDGEDLY INFERIOR BUT STILL ARNOLD-TASTIC SEQUEL "CONAN THE DESTROYER" WHILE I'M ALIVE! I WILL HAVE MY OWN KINGDOM -- MY OWN QUEEN!
49 is correct. I wasn't thrilled with the turn of phrase, but hell with it.
To expand a bit, naked boobs in the background are usually going to be gratuitous. Full frontal female without corresponding male is usually going to be gratuitous. Boobs seen as part of an actual sex scene, while perfectly likely to be gratuitous, isn't obviously so, absent obvious staging (e.g., one or the other sits up, male POV on boobs).
The whole gratuitous nudity thing seems to be required because it's a cable series. HBO was the "high class" one and Cinemax (do people still call it Skinemax?) was the "low class" one. You are paying for the content directly, so it better offer something more than AMC or FOX. Could be better writing, better production values, or it can offer more sex, more violence, which is hella easier if you're a show-runner.
GoT has gone down hill this season as they've left Martin's plot and gone off on their own. The Dorne episode with Indistinguishable Sand Snake #3 taunting Bronn with her boobs is more or less the culmination. Those boobs were even part of the show's "plot," such as it is these days.
The internet seems to have liked the latest episode, but I watched it after some work drinks so my memory of it is a little hazy.
The internet liked the last episode since there wasn't anything sexually questionable and it gave things that had been teased for a while: Tyronn chilling with Daenyrys, and the White Walkers' army. Oh, and Cersei out of power. All we're really waiting for is Jon's parentage to be revealed and what that entails (presumably him shacking up with Daenyrys, or else that being subverted).
Is it my imagination or has the quality of the writing gone down since they passed the books?
Back upthread:
13: I'm arguing only against the claim that the sex is real, authentic, and contributes to whatever artistry the show has.
I don't think it was claiming that all sex on television met that standard, only that more of it does, now, than it used to. Certainly I can't think of another show that has attracted the attention that Girls has for having uncomfortable or awkward sex scenes.
I have not read and will never read the books but I find the notion that the series has gone downhill preposterous. It is dumb* but fun, and the last episode was one of the better fight scenes I can remember.
*so dumb
57: Not your imagination. The events are there, but they've been reduced to sketches of what was in the books, sometimes losing all the motivation provided by Martin for what the characters are doing, and thereby making it ludicrous. Other stuff they just make up out of whole cloth and it doesn't fit.
OK, now I'm persuaded to keep up my pre-existing belief that readers of fantasy fiction are morons who are way too into trash. OMG the show is now "ludicrous" because it fails to meet the precepts set out by Maester Ser Fakemedieval in the time of were-dragons.
59: You could have seen that same fight in World War Z with higher-end special effects. Admittedly, no giants.
Another name for those precepts is "intellectual property." You should at least respect that.
I discovered in high school that good taste and erudition were the ticket to TV nudity from enlightened topless Europe (specifically, Masterpiece Theatre, and more specifically Thérèse Raquin, which even featured full frontal). Also, late night TV on the Montreal channels, which often included porn.
There was nudity on Masterpiece Theatre? Why wasn't I told?
Only occasionally, but for a teenaged male, worth the plodding Alistaire Cooke introductions.
Right, but if nobody tells that teenaged male, he'll not know to sit through the introductions.
61: It's not Tolstoy but it's well-written for popular fiction. No point in genre-bashing. That ship sailed a long time ago.
63: What IP? Martin owns it and has been involved with the show from the beginning, even wrote a couple of the better episodes. They just went off on their own (with his input and consent) because he's such a slow writer that they were catching up to him and about to pass.
If only all entertainment could achieve the seriousness of death metal.
I'm on team dumb fun. I don't think the writing is any worse than the books, which as this point got very slow-paced and aimless. We're fine not having completely non memorable characters Random Dude Who Went Down to Dorne and Random Dude Who Left Dorne.
TRO shows us the contempt that everyone in the entertainment industry has for their audience.
GoT has gone down hill this season as they've left Martin's plot and gone off on their own.
Is it my imagination or has the quality of the writing gone down since they passed the books?
I haven't actually watched it since the first episode of season 4, but I think this is getting the causality wrong. Books 4 and 5 were so much worse than the first 3. I find it easy to believe that the TV-plot has gone downhill once they finished book 3's material. But if they'd stuck to the plot from 4 and 5, things would also have gone downhill, quite dramatically so.
67: Such are the rewards of truly determined intellectual inquiry.
I am totally fine with dumb but fun entertainment, and there's a lot of highly-skilled craft involved in keeping the dumbness fun as opposed to unwatchable. I'm just opposed to taking GOT too seriously.
72: But if they'd stuck to the plot from 4 and 5, things would also have gone downhill, quite dramatically so.
What they did first was remove a lot of stuff that was peripheral to the main plot (e.g., compressing Tyrion's trip to Mereen from about half a book to ten minutes, if that, of action). Can't fault that for TV.
But then they took what was left and ran it through a Hollywood script writing team. Uh. Oh. "Why did Jaime run off to Dorne?" "Umm, because ... look, boobies!" "Why did Jon Snow go to Hardhome?" "Well, actually ... OMG, zombies!!!"
Jaime ran off to Dorne because his sister-lover told him to, and he's concerned for his sister. Why did Sir Whats-his-face go to Dorne in the books?
Why did Jon Snow go to Hardhome? Because he's the only person that could possibly convince the Wildlings that the Crows will keep their word--why would they believe Viking McBeardy knows the Crows are trustworthy? Jon needs to put some skin in the game by going there and being vulnerable.
err. he's concerned for his daughter, not sister
Editing was necessary, but it feels like a lot of the plot decisions were made so that the main actors have something to do. "How about a Jaime/Bronn roadtrip?"
Sure. But that's no less motivated than what happened in the books, without introducing a new throwaway character. (A real one, one of the rare viewpoint characters who gets killed off.)
Jaime ran off to Dorne because his sister-lover told him to, and he's concerned for his sister.
He's a horrible choice for a covert mission with a high chance of failure. They lampshaded the justification.
Why is any of that more or less ridiculous than anything else in the story? Why is "Brienne of Tarth" running around? Why are some weird psychic kids walking around in the snow to find a tree? Who is Stannis Baratheon, why is he doing what he's doing, and is there any reason why we know or need to know or care? Why is some dude getting his penis chopped off? Why does everyone mysteriously decide to trust Mayor Carcetti, noted brothel franchise-operator? Why are there no broader themes other than "let's put everyone in a super violent, sexy world with a lot of plotting and hey IRON THRONE." Maybe this is all explained in 15,000 pages of backstory in the books but I say accept that you're watching a cheesy fun potboiler and roll with the swordplay and costumes and watch with your id.
Yeah: it's fun, it's consistent with the character motivation (Jaime can be brash, after all, when any of the few people he care about are in danger), it doesn't require introducing a new character/actor that has no other motivation, and it lets us have more development of two popular characters (one of which was underutilized in the books). It's no more ridiculous than any other "get these characters to this place" plotting you often see in both epic fantasy and in long running ensemble shows like this.
Maybe I'm missing some of the cues (no seasons corresponding to years, you know) but how much time is supposed to have passed in the series so far? I got the sense it is a series of months here and there, however long it would take an army to ride a few hundred miles. But they went from sweet little Myrcella being sent off to Dorne in season 2 to teenage Myrcella (obviously a different actress) getting it on with Prince Littledorne. Is that suggesting that several years passed?
accept that you're watching a cheesy fun potboiler soap opera
Really, if you look at the "previously on" jumping around between all the plot lines and characters, it reminds me of when I'd be home sick from school and turn on the TV thinking it was time for The Price is Right and accidentally catch the "next time on Days of our Lives" clip.
83: Yes, it's several years. Sam says he has known Jon for years, despite having met him early in the series. But a central conceit of the series is that time is screwy, and a season might last many years. I've been thinking of it as taking place more or less in real time, one year per TV season.
All the plot related questions in 81 are actually answered in the show, and mostly pretty straightforwardly, which kind of undercuts any point you're trying to make.
Of course they're answered, but no more convincingly than the answer given in 76. It is a dumb show!
I'm way behind on the TV series, but good God the Bran plot needs to end. I'm going to wander around for the weirwood Internet for seven thousand pages. Would anyone care if he were eaten by his wolf?
I'd just like to note that 57 was phrased in relative terms.
You mean... answered with basic character traits and reasons they would have to act that way? What would convincing ones look like?
I don't really think under-motivated plot is sufficient for global dumbness judgments. Otherwise, Polonius would be alive, and Achilles would have gotten over it quickly and just fought for the team.
91: No, we'd just correctly judge the Iliad and Hamlet as enjoyable, dumb entertainments.
Hamlet is loads of fun. Especially the whole "Let's stab at a moving shape we can't see behind the curtain." That Three Stooges meets Tarantino right there.
91 -- I was responding to the claim that the TV show was dumb because of insufficiently-motivated plotting in the new season, as opposed to the purportedly well-motivated plotting in the prior, more book-influenced seasons. It is dumb show, but poorly-motivated plotting isn't really the reason (or more precisely not a sufficient reason). The main dumb thing about GOT is that it's got basically no thematic development that's anything other than plunking a fast-moving plot in an invented world that is super-violent and super-sexy. Hi, I've invented a very violent, sexy "world" in which exciting, violent things happen and ... that's it. That's what makes it dumb but fun.
But, you know, it still takes a lot of skill to make something dumb but fun. Things like, in the TV show, the design quality of the sets and the direction of the action sequences, which are genuinely very very good, on average), along with the soap-opera plotting.
I'm more well-inclined towards the show than this critique, but I agree with most of it.
Those are some extremely wordy comments right there.
Oh come off it. "It's got no thematic development" is the claim people make when they're trying to find a non-obviously-self-defeating version of "I don't know what's going on therefore this is dumb." It's one of the laziest forms of trolling available.
I bet you didn't even look it up on Wikipedia before posting that..
WOW THAT WIKIPEDIA PAGE ABOUT THEMES IN A FANTASY BOOK SURE WAS PERSUASIVE! YOU GOT ME CHIEF!
While I fully support the idea that we should be reading wikipedia plot summaries instead of novels, I don't think a listing of disconnected themes really counts as "thematic development."
Because I eat carbs, I'm much more calm.
Ah, so you were looking for more sophisticated arguments then?
You go first.
I hope that's not to me. I've not read the books or seen the show. I have been reading about The Wall on wikipedia.
I'm tempted to ask "are you 11 years old, and also an imbecile" but there are a bunch of reasonably sophisticated arguments linked at 95.
I've been skimming the list of characters. Why don't they just all let Ned Stark run the whole thing? Everybody else seems like a huge asshole.
103: Well, are you 3 months old and also extremely precocious?
Sorry. I should have finished the paragraph. Apparently he died.
Well I applaud your maturity in resisting temptation. Also the sophistication of "there are lots of things happening" and "most of the characters are white" is ...not that great. The only thing it says about thematic development involves two things that don't look like they're themes in the show in the first place. "I wish the show was about different characters in a different setting with different things going on" isn't a criticism of a show, it's just a reason to watch something else.
106, 107: Damn you, Moby! There's no point in reading the books or watching the show now.
I guess I'll read Finnegan's Wake instead.
Maybe the lady with the dragons or Jon Snow then.
I like GoT and think it isn't even that dumb.
1. Its ever-shifting politics are a valuable correction to the simplistic Manicheanism of both High Fantasy and American political fiction
2. Its setting of its story in a world on the cusp of re-enchantment (zombies rising, dragons returning) is novel at least to me, I'd be interested to know who else has done this
3. thank god they're leaping ahead of the books, the last two of which have ranged between unreadable and trying
I appreciated my friend Sarah's wrestle with the rape tally here:
Here is why so many of us have been buying what Game of Thrones sells: Game of Thrones often excels at making titillation of various kinds feel like a kind of betterment, or seriousness. It excels at giving fantasy the weight of the real, at making some people's fantasies seem historical and universal, at making any objection to the graphic display of those fantasies seem small-minded and fearful.
I really should try watching some TV made in this century. I don't watch much TV. In addition to obvious things that I assume everybody watches all the time (Columbo, The Rockford Files), I've started watching TV shows about English people going all murdery. Inspector Morse is good enough that I'd probably watch Lewis if it ever appeared on Netflix. The main problem with Inspector Morse is that nearly every woman between 16 and 70 on the show is in the midst of some crisis.
I read the piece linked in 113 when it came out, and while I liked it in general, I was totally baffled by exactly the line you excerpted. "Game of Thrones often excels at making titillation of various kinds feel like a kind of betterment, or seriousness." What? No it doesn't. Nor does it make fantasy seem either historical or universal. I mean, it has to take itself seriously in order to work as a show and it isn't camp, but beyond that, come on.
I haven't watched it, but it's certainly prestige TV -- it's not a guilty pleasure, it's something people seem to take watching seriously. At which point, I think there's something to be said in defense of the line you quote.
I thought this long-winded commenter at Kotsko's place had basically the right take, though I can't vouch for what he says about Tolkein or other fantasy novels:
I always felt that what was above average about the books, and which was carried over quite well to the tv show, was short-term plot. You say "the whole point seems to be that GRRM has come up with a whole world" and yes, the larger part of "fantasy" fandom believes that this is the actual point of fantasy - to demonstrate one's genius by "creating a world", normally in tedious, neurotic, superfluous detail (which the prose must then explore painstakingly and over whole chapters of nothing much else, as if the author was some obsessive, autocratic tourguide). "Fantasy" fandom tends to believe that this was what made Tolkien great. But this is the most debased form of the genre, and it is certainly not what made Tolkien worth a read, and what made ASOIAF slightly above average was that it actually had some plot. Whereas Tolkien gave us something like historical epic in an imagined world, plot was largely absent from Tolkien (as it tends to be in epic), but it worked because Tolkien was immersed in epics of obscure literatures and it is best read in dialogue with those. And of course, he was genrefied by American authors who were not old-world Oxford philologists, and so in the more debased and lucrative tributes to Tolkien, such as the execrable Robert Jordan or David Eddings, what you get is a highly formulaic "fully imagined world" where an entirely generic "orphan becomes saviour of continent amid end-times incursion of otherworldly evil but it's alright in the end" plot. There is literally no point in reading anything like this: anyone can build a world, anyone can shoehorn a generic plot into such a world. Might as well do it yourself.
GRRM, it seemed to me at the time, was OK, was actually worth a read if I had nothing else to do, because he gave us actual plot. He still delighted rather too much in the unexceptional "genius" of world-building (and so do his fans, in droves), but he was willing to subvert generic narrative cliches by earmarking characters as protagonists and then unexpectedly killing them off. He constructed believable plots that seemed to have good causal mechanics underlying them, and managed to keep you guessing while driving the plot forward in a way that actually drew some narrative investment from a reader, as long as you could stand trekking through leagues of bad prose and mediocre world-exposition. There was occasionally the feeling of watered down sub-Shakespearean intrigue about the proceedings.
Of course, this wore off as the reader accustomed herself to GRRM's limited set of techniques for subverting expectations. Characters that were just too good to be true went from being earmarked for heroic status to being earmarked for beheading. If you liked a character too much, you would find yourself anticipating their execution. The Danaerys storyline never reached the level of plot, instead falling into an entirely linear narrative slog with occasionally surprising progressions. And as the series bore on it became clear that GRRM did not intend to end his book in a nihilistic apocalypse: clearly some of his characters are, in fact, earmarked as the generic "epic hero" of formulaic fantasy; his technique had been to keep us guessing who was the Real Hero by flooding the field with decoys and spending the early years having them massacre each other. It's clear that at some point Jon Snow will save everyone and the Others will be turned back, and in the end we'll have a boring uniform elegiac mood with everyone licking their wounds and reciting melodramatic lines about how costly the victory was and daring to hope that things will get better now.
I got bored with ASOIAF for these very reasons, and in fact, got bored with fantasy as a genre around the same time (around when Hollywood began to debase Tolkien). Fantasy really is 99% reactionary cryptofascist tripe. I expected the TV show to be terrible, but actually, for the first few series, I felt it managed to port across quite well the muscular plot mechanics of the books, while shedding a lot of the neurotic world-building garbage. The world should be a believable setting, not the point of the whole thing, and I thought these priorities were born out in the show.
it's certainly prestige TV
No! Or, it shouldn't be. I mean, it's a large-scale commercial and filming and production achievement, but it's basically a much better-made, better plotted cousin of The Walking Dead or Sons of Anarchy.
I also liked this, from long-winded-commenter-at-Kotsko's-guy:
And yes, as the plot breaks down and one begins to cast around for thematic or historical content, one runs up against the extremely poor political imagination of GRRM, and the fact that he really wasn't all that much of a "genius" worldbuilder at all, and the fact that - like all of these pop up fantasy universes - nearly all of his ASOIAF world is made up of clumsily rearranged elements from world history (the Andals having "displaced" the First Men in America, uh, Westeros; an Essos that is both Old World Europe and the East, great walls of china and hadrian, the barbarians at the gates, what was it that happened to the ancients again?) and the really insulting allegory of the Iraq War which doesn't even know what it wants to say and lunges around incoherently before settling on some trite liberal moral about how the empire should have had more respect for the barbarity of local customs, and that it is noble to admit you were wrong. Oh god.
Perhaps we should start with a definition of "prestige TV." Because I think maybe you're setting that bar too high.
No! Or, it shouldn't be. I mean, it's a large-scale commercial and filming and production achievement, but it's basically a much better-made, better plotted cousin of The Walking Dead or Sons of Anarchy.
I'd buy it shouldn't be, but I'm not seeking critical thinkpieces being linked about TWD or SOA. Whether it should be, it is actually being taken seriously. Which is exactly the point being made.
I don't think most (though admittedly not all) of the thinkpieces that I've seen actually take the show that seriously (as opposed to people who are immersive obsessives about the details of the fantasy world, which is different, or treating it as a fun entertainment to speculate about for what comes next in the soap opera -- it is fun to speculate about that, that's part of it being a well-plotted soap-opera). But, in any event I don't think the show actually for real succeeds or excels in making its titillation feel like betterment, and I don't think that a careful viewer should or can reasonably view it that way.
119 I, Claudius. Which I'll note, having recently been rewatching it, has bare naked titties in the very first scene. And so we've come full circle.
Well made, well plotted large scale achievement looks an awful lot like what we mean when we talk about prestige television. And you have to be at a conspiracy theorist level 'everyone is wrong about this thing' to think that there's nothing substantial to it in the face of the sheer volume of people talking about, e.g., the ways revenge shows up in different characters and its costs, or the extent to which the intricate political machinations are either distracting major players from an increasingly massive world threatening danger, or simply being ignored entirely, and so on.
Shit man, McFarlane at Kotsko's gave me some good new names, Girard! I had heard of him, his books are scarce. Charles Tilly I know Tilly. Looks too conservative.
Quentin Skinner is like totally new.
Course y'all can quote them from memory. As soon as I finish Jameson and Lacanian Discourse Analysis.
Nah rally, McFarlane made me see the show in a completely different light. Hard to believe GRRM is that smart or brave, to have GoT just fade out like Gravity's Rainbow
And those are the two examples that occurred to me because this and this were written yesterday.
As a comparison, I've been recently watching GOT on the same night as Wolf Hall. If you want to contrast how an actually-good, serious show with late-medieval/early modern political themes stands up to ersatz fantasy world-building fun plot-fest, it's a good comparison.
Anyone who comes out with "plot is largely absent from Tolkien as it tends to be in epic" is either trolling, or using "plot" in some completely rarefied and academic sense to mean something utterly different from its normal meaning, and either way should be ignored.
Plus historically ignorant, if he thinks the Andals and the First Men resemble the history of American settlement rather than the arrival of the Angles and Saxons in Britain. I mean come on, he barely even changed the name.
The long winded commented from Kotsko (that sounds like the lead in to an old fashioned dirty joke) has me with the critique of world building. It is tedious to me, in the extreme, when that becomes the point. And yet it is an inherently attractive pastime for many kids as they grow out of eg legos on the floor play and into I suppose commenting on imaginary playgrounds like here. Anyways ... my kid is firmly in the grip of the charms of world creation (complete with maps, creation myths, political systems and surprisingly elaborate and researched made up languages), and i feel guilty about how much I am looking forward to him growing out of it.
Yeah, but he's right about the short-term plotting and the fundamental dumbness of the ersatz historical borrowings.
128: I was sort of wondering about that myself. It's not really very character-driven and I figured maybe that was a requirement for "plot". But wikipedia doesn't mention that requirement.
I have been able to sneak the Lais of Marie de France under the tent tho, he liked those so there's hope. Understandably he found Le Chanson de Roland too repetitively gory.
Has anyone read any of the Maurice Druon historical novels?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/05/maurice-druon-george-rr-martin
129 - It's especially bad if you look at the map of Westeros that you see both in the books and during the credits of the show, where it's clear that Westeros is just a larger version of the UK which, I think, means that the White Walkers are actually just Scots.
Actually, if you look at the Wikipedia pages for GOT, they mention that the wall was based on Hadrian's Wall.
Game of Throne isn't that dumb, and isn't that much fun, either. (Unless, watching a guy get his dick get cut off is what passes for fun in LA these days.) An example of a dumb but fun show that's really well executed would be something like Penny Dreadful, which is a basically a really well-written soap. I don't want to exaggerate how smart the show is -- it is TV, after all -- but what's smarter than Game of Thrones? The Wire, Berlin Alexanderplatz and...?
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was pretty smart when I was watching it.
128:I disagree without reference to Wiki, but I can safely be ignored.
Tolkien can safely be compared to Shakespeare, who as early modern was transitional (still retained stuff like the witches and prophecies). Boromir and Denethor are treated much differently than Macbeth or Othello, with more compassion and forgiveness, because though sinning, Tolkien's characters remain blameless, redeemed no matter what. In a way we can no longer understand.
The epic, and this was very much part of Tolkien's point and purpose is driven by fate, destiny and/or/especially by grace, in the case of LoTR. Plot/narrative is driven by character, psychology, subjectivity.
I haven't watched GoT and am not likely to, but I will confidently claim that Black Mirror, Orphan Black, and Orange is the New Black are all smarter. Also Archer.
139 ...and?
Heimat
Nothing on live-action Japanese TV, but maybe the rare anime. But frankly, see 141 above, and anime can go iconic or mythic and epic or Aesopian more often.
(Unless, watching a guy get his dick get cut off is what passes for fun in LA these days.)
Pfft, "these days".
Jesus fucking Christ on a popsicle, I can't believe we have forgotten the Decalogue.
141.last is what I was trying to say but I don't think I succeeded. I wouldn't go so far as "blameless" for Denethor though.
If you're fine with trying to burn your son to death, so be it.
Is there some trick with IASiP as with Parks & Rec, where you can, indeed should, skip the first X episodes? Because I found the first 2-3 episodes to be a slog and bailed.
God help me, 141.last seems sensible to me. Not that epic heroes are without particular characters/motivations, but they aren't about growth and change - "no learning, no hugging". I guess you could argue that both Achilles and Odysseus learn some humility, but I don't think that's "character, psychology, subjectivity". That's just, "Don't mess with white whalesCyclopes/Trojans because they symbolize Naturehubris and will kill you.
I think Aragorn grew and changed more than Odysseus did, but you're right that there's no psychology or subjectivity there. Aragorn was choosing to accept a role appointed to him, not developing.
All of Kotsko's critiques apply to the last two books, which, everyone agrees, are a mess.
Where LWCAK isn't wrong or self-contradictory, his comment reduces to sneering at the fantasy genre, which is fine but unpersuasive.
Would it be childish to tell dairy queen to fuck off? So be it.
Samwise has some psychology, character, and subjectivity. Maybe Frodo also.
Is there some trick with IASiP as with Parks & Rec, where you can, indeed should, skip the first X episodes? Because I found the first 2-3 episodes to be a slog and bailed.
Yes, skip the first season.
Gandalf put different clothes on at some point, does that count as change?
I don't think I knew the Decalogue was a TV show (not that I've seen it). They used to show it in the art house theater near my house.
149: The second season is funnier than the first season, but it's not dramatically different from the first (other than adding Danny DeVito to the cast). It's not like P&R, which is a completely different show between the first two seasons. If you don't like episodes 4 and 5 of the second season, you're not going to like the show.
139 -- limiting it exclusively to shows newly aired in the last six months that I've seen, I'd say "better" as in "less dumb" shows include Wolf Hall (which I mentioned already, and has the virtue of dealing with the same purportedly "political" themes in GOT but in a 10x smarter way), Better Call Saul, The Americans, and Mad Men (though I wasn't a huge fan of the ending season), and moving onto comedy Louie, Inside Amy Schumer, Silicon Valley, and Broad City. And I haven't seen a bunch of contenders, like Transparent or Orphan Black.
Samwise and Faramir and Eowyn are going to be the parents of the next Age - they should be different from the heros of ybe ending g one. (Arguments anent Aragorn and Arwen ensue.)
Richard Burton is solid on Romance vs realism in novels.
I have a certain fondness for all the brains running all over and everyone being cleaved through to their nethers, (would not want to watch this realistically depicted, tho) also ADORE Oliphant, bestest character.
156: How do you have time to watch that much TV?
157: I missed Eowyn. That's a good point.
I have no objection to world creation leavened with a reasonable dosage of other stuff! Sheesh! P Fitzgerald one of my total all time mind blowingly favorite novelists and if the scene where they visit the mama's rotting family home in The Blue Flower isn't world building, I don't know what would be. Come to think of it there's a great decaying dacha in The Beginning of Spring too, and of course the house boat in Offshore ... let's just say she's a dab hand at disintegrating homes. At any rate, until you've had a fictional but extraordinarily elaborate electoral system or case declensions explained to you at mind numbing length more times than you care to remember I say you know not my pain. Besides I did say I feel guilty.
I guess I should also add The Good Wife to my unseen-but-potentially-less-dumb-than-GOT contenders list, just to avoid getting kicked off the blog.
Don't leave off Veronica Mars while you're just flattering our sensibilities.
112/113: I don't think that's sufficient to call it serious, and I've already made my comments on that piece. It's fun to see how the characters are going to deal with that world. It's "realistic" in and only in being somewhat informed by history, and the limits of how realistic the characters behave. So, generally on team TRO here.
I've only seen a bit of the first episode of Wolf Hall, but I'm very optimistic. I adored the books. It helped that an acquaintance pointed out that their third person limited could be seen as a dissembling first person. He wants to disassociate himself from the more personal, pathetic, or sadder events.
The Americans is fully as dumb as Game of Thrones. The exploits of the main couple are so far out of the realm of possibility that they are slightly less plausible than dragons and ice-powered zombies. Actually, the shows are rather similar in that what drives them is the tension between their genre conventions and the realism they bring to it. Game of Thrones is "What would happen if you stuck actually historical medieval lords in a fantasy world?" while The Americans is "What if James Bond were a suburban couple who actually worked for the Soviets?"
Inside Amy Schumer is a weird contrast, because the formula of the show is half dumb humor, half social commentary. For example, the bit in the 12 Angry Men parody where the guy whips out the dildo -- dumb but funny.
Didn't Henry Fonda do that in the original?
I agree that the premise of The Americans isn't particularly realistic, but realistic premises aren't everything, and once you suspend disbelief as to that premise it's a way less dumb show than GOT is when you suspend disbelief as to GOT's premise.
Once you suspend disbelief about the premise, Hogan's Heros is perfectly realistic.
I saw Gillian's Island, but I had to go to the part of the video store behind the curtain to rent it.
The site of the video store nearest my house is now occupied by a food bank. They put it in the same strip mall as the liquor store because it's a Jewish food bank and they don't have to worry as much about stereotypes of dad spending the food budget on whiskey.
117: I actually agree with the start of Kotsko's screed, then he goes off the rails and misses that Tolkien does have a plot, just plunked in the middle of an epic. In the Olde Dayes (if not on the veldt) Frodo, Sam, etc. wouldn't have been in it. It would have been all about Aragorn. (Just for starters.)
137: Sheesh. The Wildlings are the Scots. The White Walkers and their zombies are the fantasy monsters. Keep up, plzthx.
More generally, what Martin did that's new and unusual is that he has a lot of sympathetic viewpoint characters who die, because real life is like that. He shows pretty graphically how much war sucks for the common people. His "epic" plot is all about the opposite of what Tolkien called "thinning": the loss of magic from the world. It's pretty clear that Westeros, maybe the whole world, has had less and less magic for generations and now it's coming back. A few other authors have picked that idea up since, but not done it as well. All that is new and nearly unheard of in the fantasy genre before Martin did it.
127: I watched Wolf Hall, too, and liked it a lot, but ... If I hadn't read the books (since it includes Bring Up the Bodies as well) I would have thought it was dull and plodding. The TV version cut out almost everything that made Cromwell interesting, but I could remember it as I watched, and the acting was excellent.
Anyway, the TV version of GoT is pretty good, and it's fun and shocking (at times) and it has gotten worse this season, in ways that harmed a lot of the good writing they did in the first seasons. (To be fair, just like the books themselves, alas, but worse.)
Actually, I quite like The Americans. It's more Bourne-y than Bondy, and only sparingly so. The production and acting are very good, and even Keri Russell isn't bad.
As far as smart TV, there's Decalogue, The Kingdom, and Twin Peaks. Maybe Deadwood. It's only recently that people have even tried to make high quality television in this country.
The children of the woods are Picts, the first men are Gaels, and the Andals are the Anglo-Saxons. So I think not only are the wildlings "Scots" so is house Stark (though only through the male line).
less and less magic for generations and now it's coming back. A few other authors have picked that idea up since, but not done it as well.
If you are intending to slight Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norell then I disagree with you.
Isn't the tenor of the Lord of the Rings & the Hobbit basically that magic is coming back? It goes away right at the very end, but until about, I dunno, the arrival of the Eagles, more and more enchantment arrives - the Ring is rediscovered, the King returns from the North, the Nine ride again, the Ents, etc etc. Obviously yes the elves go away, and it's supposed to be an underlying tone, but it's only really instantiated at the end of the book.
I.e yes Tolkien may have thought he was writing book about "disenchantment" but in actual fact the internal logic of the Hobbit-LoTR cycle is an increasing enchantment of the world, climaxing in the intensely symbolic sequence that runs from the breaking of the Fellowship to the Eagles arrival at Mt Doom, a sequence which all the characters are well aware only makes sense inasmuch as the issues are being fought out on a moral and symbolic level, not a physical or material level.
I suppose you see more and more enchantment in that short of a time frame, but I don't think you're supposed to consider anything less than an age of the world as the relevant period for comparison.
It's more about the passing of the torch from the magical elves to the humans, right? More last gasp of the magical age rather than its return.
That's what I got from it. All of your upper level elves seemed pretty explicit that they were using the last of their powers, unless they wanted to go evil like Christopher Lee.
Or rather, that if they won, they'd lose the bulk of their powers.
Sure - that's what Tolkien is going for. But the actual progression within the narrative is more-and-more magic. Even within the slightly larger time frame the books cover, we see the literal return of a dragon, after all. And yes, there's a de-enchantment in the departure of the elves etc, but I'm ok with there (a) being a contradiction there and (b) I don't think it is a narratively important as the increasing ramping up of the enchantment of the story, particularly from the perspective of the view point characters, the hobbits.
Mostly I'm just pushing back on the argument that GRRM is telling a story about re-enchantment that hasn't been told before - I think it's a pretty standard fantasy trope and not one that I'm really inclined to give a huge amount of credit for.
(My personal theory is that GRRM doesn't give a fuck anymore because he made all the points he wanted to make about the genre by half-way through book three and now ASOIAF is turning into precisely the extruded fantasy product it was originally a critique of.)
From the hobbits' view, that does make some sense, especially Bilbo.
Arguing about Tolkien. Just a few more levels 'til Internet rock bottom.
TRO, does the metal band cameo in the most recent GoT episode change anything for you?
It's cancelled out by the fact that a member of Coldplay cameoed in the Red Wedding band.
I like GOT! And Mastodon. But both are often kinda dumb, but visceral and fun.
141, 143: bob, what anime TV or movies would you recommend that are in the epic vein (less emphasis on character, psychology, and subjectivity)?
I'm not stone-cold ignorant, but my familiarity with anime is fairly shallow and probably par for the course for American kids & teens (Miyazaki's stuff, Neon Genesis, Ghost in the Shell movies & show, DBZ, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Air Gear, Akira, Paprika, Vampire Hunter, etc.). I've heard good things about Death Note and have been meaning to check that out.
The Hobbits are moving from places that were historically less to historically more magical, which exaggerates the recrudescence of magic, too. Isn't it explicit that the rediscovery of the One Ring set Sauron back into action and then Gandalf gets more wizzardy in response?
And the Dapple flows into the Dawl.
91 is kind of how I felt about Hamlet and Homer, but fortunately I learned to appreciate more than plot, or at least enough to keep people from calling me a philistine until after they get to know me.
The last GOT episode raised my hopes that they would find a way to close the last episode with Baby Blue. Maybe to a scene of Jon Snow finally fucking dying of a wound after he leads the defeat of the Walkers in the climatic battle using some medieval MacGyver-type apparatus--but during which he discovers and recognizes his deep kinship with the Walkers. Something original like that.
Alternatively "Don't Get Fooled Again" played over seens of corruption and Tageryn craziness in King's Landing and elsewhere in Westeros after Daenerys wins out and becomes queen.
Generally do not watch any of Internet people talking recaps of the episodes, but liking Ben Mankiewicz I watched the TYT for this episode and have to give Cenk props for the suggestion that maybe in the final battle a dragon dies and comes back into the battle as a blue-white dragon breathing deadly ice mist.
194.2 Death Note is great. I know the English dubs are disdained by anime purists but Alessandro Juliani as L is some of the best voice acting I've ever had the pleasure to experience.
The Decalogue was produced for TV but so very cinematic. Almost bought the set before moving.
Dude, it's that or sex, right? Says right there in the post title, I think!
Black Mirror is the best tv show I've seen recently, but maybe that's because I spend a lot of time in tech-related work nowadays.
So, 205/206 lead one to conclude that ...
teo watches people have sex live and on stage because remotest Alaska doesn't get cable.
Whatever pre-Anglo heritage the Starks and other Northmen might be reflecting, I think the easier read is that they're Northern English. Even if you ignore the casting of Sean Bean, they're fighting against wild men beyond the rule of the crown north of a wall. And they can be nasty and brutish and hard in a border reivers-esque way.
I do wish they were more consistent with the accents, although whatever the hell Littlefinger's is is intriguingly horrible.
It's not that I can't get cable. I just choose not to.
211: Because you prefer the live sex?
Further to 210, the PF Chisholm novels about Richard Cary are a lark.
The Starks still share a religion with the wildlings and not with the southerners.
Live sex shows just don't have the high-concept plotting of good cable tv. Sometimes they seem under-motivated, like they're just going through the motions.
213 to 214. It's a religion in which god helps those who help themselves, and God help the helpless.
Anyway, I may have stayed at the bar too late tonight. In my defense, I was talking to people.
I haven't watched GoT and am not likely to, but I will confidently claim that Black Mirror, Orphan Black, and Orange is the New Black are all smarter. Also Archer.
Oh, come on. Orphan Black is super dumb (NB, season three has not aired in Knifecrime Island yet for some reason). If it weren't for Maslany's performance(s), it would be just another wannabe JJ Abrams impossible mystery premise show. As it is, it's great fun, but it's really quite dumb.
Archer's pretty dumb a lot of the time too. Deliberately, well written dumb, but dumb.
Orphan Black is indeed dumb. It's interesting only to watch Maslany play Person A, Person B, and Person A pretending to be Person B but getting it slightly wrong.
Yeah, add me to the anti-Orphan Black chorus. We watched the first season, but the Big Reveal in the season finale was a bridge too far for me. (And I say that as the IP-hater!)
The only recent US show that I've gotten into has been Ray Donovan, which I was expecting not to like, but which has really grown on me.
181: No intent to slight JS&MR. I really enjoyed it. However, it came out after GoT (not that I think the "magic coming back" theme was stolen or anything -- you're right that variants of it have been a genre trope for a long time).
If you're writing a fantasy story set in a vaguely real world, you have to have some sort of theory about why magic isn't widely used, known about, etc. (To officially hit internet rock bottom, I now mention the Heinlein story, "Magic, Inc.," which has a present day world where magic is routine and used for engineering, manufacturing and so on. If magic really existed it would be adopted by a technological civilization in exactly that way as thoroughly as possible.)
182 & 188: Cala in 185 has it right. LotR is not about re-enchantment so much as gathering and expending the remaining good magic to defeat the bad magic. In ASOIAF magic is widely considered gone. No more dragons, no one believes in the White Walkers, the maesters barely do magic any more (everything they do is deliberately written to sound more like chemistry). One of the tip-offs that magic is coming back is that when they are preparing for the Battle of Blackwater, one of them remarks that their "spells" for making white fire seem to be working better than in the past.
Yeah, add me to the anti-Orphan Black chorus.
Hey, don't put me in that camp. I like the show. I just don't think it's clever or particularly well written. But Maslany is really, really good, and it rattles along at enough pace to make up for all the holes and stupidity..
maybe the whole world, has had less and less magic for generations and now it's coming back...All that is new and nearly unheard of in the fantasy genre before Martin did it.
Gah, what? Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan are two of the best selling fantasy writers ever and both their series explicitly have this theme. Brooks first book was in '77 and Jordan's first installment of the WOT was in '90. Game of Thrones was published in '96.
I got about two chapters into The Sword of Shannara and dropped it.
re: 231
And shit.
My 11 year old self gave up on it, also.
There was occasionally the feeling of watered down sub-Shakespearean intrigue about the proceedings.
People who say "oh, well, it's hardly Shakespeare is it?" as a way of dismissing the latest excrescence of popular culture normally have this in common: they do not know very much about Shakespeare, because they have not read very much Shakespeare outside what they had to read because it was on the syllabus at school.
I am not pretending for a moment to believe that "Game of Thrones" is on a level with "Henry V" or "Macbeth" or "King Lear", but, good God y'all, I have on the other hand seen "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" and "Titus Andronicus" and I would put "Game of Thrones" up against those any day and even give Pericles a head start.
Has anybody ever read Shakespeare that they have not had to read outside of school? I'm sure somebody has, but it can't be very common. Reading plays mostly sucks. Sonnets are worse. I don't know what else he wrote.
223: Archer is brilliant and great and--is that Babou?!?!?!?!
Has anybody ever read Shakespeare that they have not had to read outside of school? I'm sure somebody has, but it can't be very common. Reading plays mostly sucks.
I find that for most Shakespeare, and a fair amount of Jacobean and Restoration drama, reading is better than watching.
a) Hamlet is super long.
b) There's a lot of textual depth/ambiguity that you don't really pick up on a listen (eg pour breath/power breathe forth from Antony & Cleopatra).
c) It's verse. I don't know about you, but I find it a lot easier to grasp verse when I can see the words on the page and tease out the syntax.
As to the point of 233, most of the intrigue in Shakespeare isn't his, it's Plutarch's and Holinshed's.
I've never read or seen "King Lear," but I'm told the movie "Nebraska" copied the plot so I figure maybe someday I'll watch that movie.
Hamlet is super long.
But it was made into a Simpson's episode for ease of reference.
The intrigue in Shakespeare is also not generally very complex. Which is fine, it's not expected to be - he's got a limited amount of time on stage and indeed words for intrigue to happen in. But it's all pretty straightforward. The bishops in Henry V want to have a war for political reasons. You see them talking about it in I.i and then you see them persuading the King to do it in I.ii and then the war happens. Richard of York is pissed off at the world because the only thing he was good at is war and now the war's over, so he resolves to destroy everyone. He explains all that in I.i and then he does it, pausing for soliloquies to explain what he's doing. They're great plots but the intrigue is really not that difficult to follow.
234: good point, I should have said "they have not read or seen very much Shakespeare outside what they had to read because it was on the syllabus at school".
Incidentally, more needs to be made of the fact that the plot of Henry V is basically "a drunk incompetent with daddy issues becomes King and gets talked into a costly foreign war on false pretences because powerful political players see it as the best way to get a tax cut through".
I was assigned to read it in a poli sci class.
I'm another extra-curricular reader of the plays, and agree with GY's list of the advantages.
I've also often seen them performed, throughout my life, which informs how I read them I'm sure.
I will say that, contra 236, Moliere is better watched than read. Racine, though, I'd rather read.
Chekhov - watch.
Pushkin - read.
The literary equivalent of Shag Marry Avoid.
Racine is just a city in Wisconsin to me.
Watch in theatre, read, watch modernised movie adaptation.
But can it really be "shag marry avoid" in the UK? That's some high quality effort to maintain Britishitude.
I have a similar list for films which goes from "watch in cinema at all costs" through "watch in cinema if enough other people want to go", "buy DVD", "rent DVD", "watch on TV" all the way down to "watch on airliner".
Thornton Wilder -- kill
Ever read Dwight Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult?
He positions Wilder at the center of Midcult, and gives a framework for thinking about him and other artists like him, whom you will not be able to avoid.
My niece has just been cast in Our Town and of course I'm eager to see her performance.
But can it really be "shag marry avoid" in the UK? That's some high quality effort to maintain Britishitude.
I learned it as "fuck marry kill"
238 -- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
Speaking of, I've read every single Stoppard play up to Coasts of Utopia, and only seen/heard about half of them. So it's not just old stuff that can work on the page.
255:
Agreed. Like many people I encountered R&GAD in HS alongside Hamlet; I've read more than seen his plays.
But I saw a good production of Travesties a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it. I'd be hard pressed to identify how the theater experience gave me much more than I'd have got reading however.
I'm pretty sure the variation in levels of enjoyment at reading plays is far more likely to involve the reader than the play.
Read all of Shakes as a kid, also all of Ibsen, some O'Neill, some Beckett, early Stoppard etc. Recently Racine (because Rivette), Duchess of Malfi. A little Noh, bunraku, kabuki.
Seeing a good production can whet your appetite for more, and lead you to read plays when you get a sense of what might be in them.
I've had this experience in the last few years with Strindberg.
252 -- I like that Dwight Macdonald essay a lot, pretty sure we discussed it here.
I disagree about Moliere. Much better read in the Richard Wilbur translation than performed by the Comedie Francaise. Theatre just doesn't work in French.
But I saw a good production of Travesties a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it. I'd be hard pressed to identify how the theater experience gave me much more than I'd have got reading however.
There's some Stoppard which definitely works better on stage - typically the outright farces like Dogg's Hamlet/Cahoot's Macbeth, and I suppose the stuff with a lot of (metaphorical) pyrotechnics like Jumpers. But most of them work just as well if not better on page.
pretty sure we discussed it here
I missed that. Rereading it recently, it occurred to me that Midcult was a mid-century phenomenon, although I wonder about its applicability to what I'll style "Art Television."
I've come to the conclusion, after participating in a second production within the year, that Orff's Carmina Burana is an example of Midcult that Macdonald didn't mention. The timing--mid thirties--is right, so is the application of Avant Garde techniques to a rather banal subject matter. Naturally it's wildly popular to perform and attend.
It's the only example I've found outside American Literature, although I'm sure there are others.
Until I got into Dostoevsky mid-college, I almost always preferred verse in any form to prose*. I'm still more likely to read a play than a literary novel. Come to think of it, one of the things I like about Moby Dick is its occasional use of non-prose forms.
*I find Rieu's Homer repellant.
I attended a great translated Tartuffe this year. Good rhyming translation and the knowing maid was Lucy Arnaz reincarnated.