A Clash of Kings

I just got finished watching the first episode of Game of Thrones season 2 for the third time. This is nothing new for me; I am the type who likes to watch TV episodes multiple times. I figure that this season I owe it to myself to organize my thoughts better via blogging. I mean, after all, Game of Thrones is my favorite television show and, I think, one of the best on television period.

In terms of spoilers, I don’t intend to spoil anything. I make some reference to the existence of later books, and hint at some differences in motivation, but I do not explicitly discuss anything that has not occurred thus far on the TV show.

I should preface this by saying that I grew up reading George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, upon which the show is based. I started reading when I was seventeen (just after the 3rd book came out) and in the intervening years I have re-read them about five times (though, of course I have only read the 5th one, which came out this summer once). I am something of an odd bird, I take it, among diehard fans of any sort of genre fiction in that I do not have a desperate need for accuracy in adaptations. In fact, I find that a slavish fettishization of detail is one of the most annoying things about most fans. Between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and, now, the Hunger Games, I have had an earful from irate fans who don’t understand a simple truth about film and television: every act of adaptation is an interpretation. It’s not merely a matter of budgetary concerns and hubris (though the writers, producers and directors of films and shows can certainly be hubristic when it comes to putting their stamp on a property). At it’s core, any story has to be taken on the terms that work best for it. Those will never be the same across media. I remember way back in 2000, fans on theonering.net complaining that the Lord of the Rings films didn’t need to even be written because the dialog was perfectly transportable as is. Obviously they are wrong. Obviously I am delighted by the way that Benioff and Weiss have enhanced, adapted and interpreted Martin’s prose to work on television, but I trust them to tell a parallel story to the one I grew up with and so dearly love.

And parallel it is. The second season asserted it’s movement away from slavish interpretation. Events have been jumbled around. The timeline has been altered slightly and characters have been substituted. But all of it seems in service of covering necessary ground while leaving time for character moments. My favorite scenes from the first season of Game of Thrones were those that did not explicitly occur in the novel but could have. Martin’s close 3rd person with its multiple point-of-view characters creates a fantastic sense of occultation in the prose. Major events are often simply rumors. Characters are unable to tell truth from fiction and we get descriptions of the same occurance from four or five different unreliable sources. That doesn’t work for TV of course, and Benioff and Weiss wisely fill in those gaps with small, telling character moments. Those are employed liberally and to great effect here in season 2’s opening.

This brings us to the controversial Littlefinger-Cersei scene which many fans have complained about. I will admit that Littlefinger’s brashness in dealing with Cersei, his bold assertions seem a little out of character for the master of subtlety but I didn’t mind that small inconsistency in character for the effect it produced. Martin’s novels are complicated and feature characters with conflicted goals and motivations, but there is an aspect of it that can always be boiled down to the House Maxim’s. Morality is never balck and white and the characters are never simple, but the world he writes seems to believe in the wisdom of simple phrases which litter his page. Littlefinger’s assertion that “Knowledge is Power” is not a stand-in for the whole of his character but it helps distill him, in part, for an audience who is trying to grasp at his methods and motivations. Cersei’s awesome retort that “power is power” is not merely a distillation of her character, it is a stand-in for the show as a whole. GoT’s characters believe in the methodologies and values that comfort them but it is power alone that rules everyone at the end of the day. I may not have liked Littlefinger’s unsubtlety in that moment, but showing us the fragility of his position was excellent. Spies and secrets may help you protect yourself but everyone is fragile in the end and a knife kills a spymaster as easily as a peasant.

I also felt like the scene helped to highlight the ways in which the costumers have done an excellent job. Lannister household guards are used as faceless spooks throughout the books. Their loyalty to the lions is rarely questioned and their anonymity makes them scary. It’s a tried and true device—Nazi foot soldiers in gasmasks, hideously uniform orks, killer robot legions—but an effective one. The way in which the Lannister helmet hides the eyes of its wearer makes them much more effective at standing in for that faceless, terrifying horde. It’s the same with the Gold Cloaks and their chainmail veils. Though, as Sean Collins expertly points out in his review over at Rolling Stone, the eyes are left obscured but visible so that we can see the look of disgust on the faces of a couple tasked with murdering children.

Compared with the novels, the show seems to be making a good faith attempt at giving us a reason to be sympathetic towards Cersei. Not that Martin utterly discounts any sympathy we as audience members might have for her, but the show gives us moments of vulnerability that the Cersei of the books is determined to ignore. In a lot of ways I feel like Cersei is Ned Stark’s shadow in this incarnation. Both are characters who fanatically believe that the world ought to be a certain way (Ned believes it should be honorable and merciful, Cersei believes it should be free from gender inequality) and the blind spot for both is the idea that others wont accept their world view. Cersei may play more underhandedly and dishonorably than Ned but she seems to have this painful lack of self awareness when it comes to others perceiving her as no different from a male ruler. She may be out for her children’s best interests but when Joffrey accuses her of treason for slapping him, you can see it written across her face that she did not anticipate his discounting her as a mere woman.

And that, I think is the key to making Cersei so compelling in this telling. Unlike Catelyn Stark and, to a certain extent, Sansa, she cannot accept her role as second class citizen. She is as smart and capable as her brothers and certainly more invested in ruling than either of them, but she will never be Queen in the way she wants and, as a result, she can only live vicariously through her monstrous son. Tyrion’s crack about her being the disappointing child may have elicited a chuckle from me at first, but it drove home the sad truth of the matter, neither can really ever be Jaime in their father’s eyes. And Jaime, ironically, has no interest in power.

I have never felt this way but it has come to my attention that many fans really hate Sansa and Catelyn, preferring Danaerys, Arya and Brienne for their female paragons in the novel. I always suspected that part of it had to do with the lack of a desire to coopt masculine power in the case of the former two. Arya, Danaerys and Brienne all break gender boundaries and succeed where men fail. In the patriarchal rape culture of Martin’s Westeros, that kind of success story makes for some compelling moments of ass-kicking. But for me, Catelyn and Sansa represent a kind of quiet strength that often goes overlooked. They are the 3rd wave feminists of the bunch, getting power and influence without trailblazing or co-opting an identity that the society they live in abhors. Now, of course, you need both to make a decent point about strong women in a world dominated by men and in no way would I argue that Sansa and Cat are the superior characters, but I think for fans of fantasy, who read novels predicated on exceptionalism, it can be hard to see the merits in women who break no boundaries but still stay true to their goals, values and loved ones.

Cersei, as she is written in the television show seems to be an interesting commentary on that problem. She is, arguably, the most powerful woman in Westeros and she came by that power through the means traditionally open to women in severe patriarchies: marriage, motherhood, sex appeal. But within that schema, she is seeking to be something more. She is not wielding the sword herself, but in that moment, it’s the blunt force of her martial might that decides whether or not Littlefinger lives and she makes sure that he knows it. I am really excited to see where they take her this season and in the coming years. Cersei has always been reviled, but I think her humanity is really well represented by Heady, Benioff and Weiss.

I also am really delighted by Jack Gleeson’s Joffrey. I remember during the 2000 Oscar season, having a long conversation about the difference between Benicio del Toro’s performance in Traffic and Joaquin Phoenix’s in Gladiator. Del Toro took home the Oscar that year but a friend pointed out to me that the role was written for Oscar Gold. He plays a conflicted cop trying to walk the line between a love for small town Mexico that leads him into drug trafficking and a respect for the law that would keep his neighborhood poor. It’s a role that was all about conflict, pained expressions and internal conflict playing out on one’s face. And, credit where credit is due, Del Toro played it well. Joaquin Phoenix on the other hand, had a far more difficult job and produced, what I thought was a far more interesting performance. In the hands of a Christpher Walken or Jeremy Irons, Phoenix’s Commodus might have been transmuted into a snarling, foaming supervillain. As the unrelentingly petty emperor of Rome it was a thankless and bland role as written and yet, we pitied him. In Phoenix’s hands, we never liked Commodus but we understood why he was the way he was. Not a flat villain, he was tortured, sad, relatable, if only for a moment, before throwing away our sympathy by doing something even more cruel.

Both the Joffrey of the show and, last year, Harry Lloyd’s Viserys, have had this similarly difficult role. Both are thoroughly monstrous. Gleefully, palpably cruel and insane. Both inspired so much loathing from fans. And yet, both have their moments of, if not relatability then at least sympathy. Viserys’ bathtub sex scene with Doreah and confrontation with Jorah Mormont last season made that clear. For a single moment, he comes across as a human being, remembering his childhood, realizing his own inability to do things the right way, before he threw it all away again in a storm of attempted rape and infanticide. This season we get some of the same with Joffrey. There is just the slightest hint of real teenage angst and rebellion underneath all that insanity. We see it when he confronts his mother about his own parentage the slightest flicker of awareness that he is trapped in his own body, a body born of incest, saddled with a dyspeptic, inbred madness. In the novel, we only ever get the story of the purge of Baratheon bastards second hand from Tyrion. Being so predisposed against his sister and nephew it is described only in broadly condemnatory terms. But here, in this first episode there is a real sense of sadness that precedes even the horrifying slaughter of children. Cersei calls Joffrey’s rule a claim to the throne and he retorts that he is the king, it’s not a claim. I felt the slightest twinge of pity for Joff, lied to all his life, trying to come to terms with the fact that the power he was bred to believe he was born to, might in fact be a complete fabrication. That said, I hate Joffrey all the more this season and that must be handed to Jack Gleeson as well. There aren’t many fourteen year olds who can elicit such rage from so many millions of people and that kid is doing an awesome job of it. Hopefully, he won’t be saddled with Maragret Hamilton syndrome later in life, reviled by people on the street for being confused with a role he nailed.

That gap, between Cersei and Joff’s conversation and the slaughter of innocents is an important one. I do not know if Benioff and Weiss plan to let us know whether the idea was Joff’s as a way of protecting himself from the truth of the matter: all his alleged half siblings look nothing like him, or Cersei, in an act of bloody atonement for having led her son astray as to how safe he was on the throne, but both answers work for me. Those last scenes, of gold cloaks storming private homes and whorehouses and murdering teenagers, children and babies all to protect one insane king from further slander and libel, really stuck with me in a way it did not in the novels. The episode ends with a reprise of King Robert’s theme from the first season, which he first heard as the entire court arrives in Winterfell. In that first season its stentorian tones and relentless beat helped us understand the majesty and power the king commanded. It was theater and bluster and bravado, the awe-inspiring sight of the king, the essence of divine right—essentially the core of the show, for without some kind of exceptionality, why follow a bad king in the first place. Here, eleven episodes later, and replayed in a minor key, it is the dark underside of that majesty. The power to command is also the power to destroy. Joffrey (as an inverse of Jon Snow) is still a Baratheon (you may not have my blood, but you have my name) and in the name of Baratheon legitimacy, all the other traces of that awe inspiring house are gutted, drowned and beaten. The sublimity that characterizes kingship is as much fear as it is wonder.

The familiar faces and new ones of Season 2 were all great, but, for my money, the episode belonged to Joff and Cersei, two painfully self-deluded characters, hideously cruel but, in the show at least, strangely sympathetic.