Game of Thrones, HBO, 8 seasons, April 2011-May 2019, £9.99 (monthly subscription rate)
Fantasy at its finest.
I’ve been wanting to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) for a while now, but kept putting off what seemed like a mammoth task. I came to the series late, somehow insulating myself from all the hype for nearly a decade. Then COVID-19 arrived and (like many people, I later learned) it seemed the perfect time to tackle all 73 episodes (which run to just over 70 hours in total). I watched it on my own during the first lockdown, then with my wife, and then we watched it together again during the second lockdown. I had heard, as one does, that GOT was yet another case of diminishing returns and that fans were particularly outraged at the final season. The former accusation is complete nonsense and the final season was just as good as the rest and even better than some. One of the reasons for its poor reception may have been the slightly longer wait (two years instead of one) creating unreasonable expectations. Another is probably the fact that the television series had overtaken the novels on which it was based, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (five of seven novels published from 1996 to 2011, the rest as yet unpublished), and readers were dissatisfied with the direction it had taken. Which is fine…but no one is forcing you to watch the series and personally I sometimes avoid cinematic or televisual adaptations if I really love a novel or series of novels. The only justified accusation of anticlimax is that there is a Lord of the Rings-like sense in which the biggest and most desperate battle takes place before the final battle, but the final battle is between the protagonists and the antagonist so the narrative is perfectly in keeping with what we expect (and, indeed, desire) as audiences. To stay with LOTR for a moment, I loved both the films and the books, but read and watched them as two separate works rather than expecting the latter to slavishly imitate the former and I recommend the same approach to GOT. (I read Martin’s novels after watching the series and enjoyed them too, but they are very different.) On the point of giving audiences what we desire, two of the great triumphs of GOT are the way in which it both deploys and undermines the mythic mode of storytelling (which has been the Hollywood norm for the last fifty years) and combines that mode with a rich architecture of allegorical meaning.
GOT is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks (Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to two protagonists and an antagonist, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Daenerys, and Cersei Lannister (the antagonist, played by Lena Headey). Each of the 73 episodes runs from 50 to 82 minutes and they are distributed across the seasons as follows: 1-10 (Season 1, 2011), 11-20 (Season 2, 2012), 21-30 (Season 3, 2013), 31-40 (Season 4, 2014), 41-50 (Season 5, 2015), 51-60 (Season 6, 2016), 61-67 (Season 7, 2017), and 68-73 (Season 8, 2019). The series also employs the five-act structure popularised by Shakespeare, although the acts do not follow the series exactly. Having watch it four times now, I’d say the overarching narrative goes something like this: exposition (episodes 1-9), complication (episodes 10-29), climax (episodes 30-50), crisis (episodes 51-67), and resolution (episodes 68-73).
In addition to following this structure, the overarching narrative is structured as what the late Fredric Jameson calls a ‘genuine allegory’, which I first mentioned in TQF when reviewing another television series, Amazon Studios’ Carnival Row (2018; there’s a review of the second and final season here). Genuine allegories have four distinct levels of meaning that combine in interesting and sometimes unique ways to provide audiences with especially memorable and meaningful experiences (and are well-suited to the television series because of the length of the form). The literal level of meaning of GOT is revealed in the title, the deadly game played by the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen – as well as the other eight – for the Iron Throne, which bears the weight of many a different noble bottom as the seasons progress. The symbolic level is the Night King (played by first Richard Brake and then Vladimír Furdík), his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. Significantly, the first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter is Coming’ and it is an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. At the existential level of meaning, GOT appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to egotism and hubris. Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity that draws attention to sexual violence, femicide, and systemic sexism. The anthropic level is primarily concerned with the relationships among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. The micro level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens and the macro level the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros) and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural.
GOT is, as my brief summary suggests, an incredibly complex narrative consisting of layer upon layer of plots, meanings, protagonists, characters, and conflicts, all of which are eventually – and masterfully – tied together in a resolution as rewarding as it seems retrospectively inevitable. While the combination of myth and allegory is, as already mentioned, exemplary, my particular fascination with the series is the way in which it succeeds in replicating rather than representing the experience of living through an – or perhaps the – apocalypse. In his long essay, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022), Mark Fisher discusses one of the few other narrative fictions to achieve the same end: ‘The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.’ As T.S. Eliot wrote before him (influenced by if not explicitly reflecting on the mass destruction of World War I) in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ For all the fire and ice in GOT, deadly dragons and unstoppable undead, humanity is petering out slowly, person by person, most by starvation and disease rather than blade or bow. It is, another words, a world very much like our own, where humanity faces existential threats from multi-polar conflicts, artificial intelligence, and climate change that most of us are able to ignore most of the time. I have only had such an experience twice before, with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which consists of the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) (about which I wrote here) and with Alfonso Cuarón’s feature film, Children of Men (2006). Read and watch them all: I guarantee you won’t be disappointed and you might just find them resonating with you in the same way I did. ****
