“I was in the company of the president of the United States,” the Game of Thrones director David Nutter told Entertainment Weekly. “He turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said: ‘You didn’t kill Jon Snow, did you?’ I said: ‘Jon Snow is deader than dead.’ I thought I was going to be sent to Guantánamo or something, but fortunately I’m here – but he’s dead.”
As the sixth season of Game of Thrones processes into town – with fabulous fanfare and the world standing by, braced for fresh astonishment – a couple of things possess my waking thoughts. If Jon Snow is deader than dead, why is he on the posters? Why did anyone ever think it a good idea to kill Jon Snow? The truly amazing thing – that Barack Obama is a fan – never even occurred to me.
It is amazing because leaders of countries, even very small ones, have a lot on their plates. When they do engage with the prevailing culture, it is to make themselves seem normal and in touch with their people. They have to keep abreast of sports, while being too lofty for soaps; they need to know what the kids are reading and eschew the racket they are listening to; they have to use their five minutes of cultural engagement to extend their tendrils, intelligently, into generations and classes other than their own. Not Game of Thrones, in other words: this show never set out to make anyone more normal.
The tipping point, after which more normal people watched it than didn’t watch it (I am, of course, defining “normal” myself, and this relieves me of the necessity of data), came around season three. So it now looks perfectly reasonable for it to be the cultural emblem of the US president, and fair, if a little spoilt, that he asked for the episodes of the new season to be sent to him in advance. This opened the door to a puckish freedom of information request from the journalist Vanessa Golembewski, that the president then release the screeners to the wider public. It was pointed out to her that there are still FoI requests pending from 2014, and it might be quicker to just wait for it to air, as it will in the UK and the US on 24 April. Golembewski is hoping it will go to the top of the queue. “The only reason that they can really expedite it is if someone is in physical danger, or if someone is in danger of losing their due process in court, or some civil right. So I responded: ‘This is timely. Jon Snow may be dead. We need to know that.’” This failed, because we already know that Jon Snow is dead. Deader than dead.
The definitive word-of-mouth advocate for GoT was John Lanchester, in the improbable context of the London Review of Books: “Game of Thrones was first described to me as ‘The Sopranos meets Lord of the Rings.’ At that point, I knew I was going to like it. But then, I am that person – the one who likes fantasy and SF. It was far from clear that anyone else would like it.” This appears to be the ongoing mystery for all of us: I know why I love it. But why do you?
The go-to explanation is all about the breasts. It is quite unusual to see this much flesh in a highbrow series, which immediately raises two questions – a) why? and b) are we absolutely sure this is highbrow? Where nudity is verboten in culture, I don’t think it’s on feminist grounds: it is astonishing to me how many putatively intelligent shows – The Night Manager, I’m thinking of right now, but even the magnificent Wire – struggle to build a world in which women are actively present, are complex rather than mysterious, and are agents of their own fortunes rather than the prize of male agency – indeed, where women have fortunes, and are not ultimately moved around like plot-chattel for male motivation.
No, highbrow TV doesn’t avoid breasts because it wants to avoid objectification, but because of the exigence that it must be the opposite of car advertising. Nobody should be naked unless the situation calls for it, and the precincts that tend to require it – brothels, swimming pools, gyms – rarely present much distinctive drama. The fantasy element of GoT lets it get away with the constant brothel-hovering; normally (Torchwood, I’m looking at you), the cliches come so thick and fast – knickerbockers? Check! Pregnant prostitute, crying? Check! Two women fighting over a blusher? Check – that it is basically unwatchable to anybody.
Compare the scenes in Game of Thrones: Little Finger – who can’t act at all, incidentally – delivering his political insights studded with instructions to his female employees on how to shag better; Joffrey’s savage killing of two prostitutes, the moment when his mother finally reconciles herself to the fact that he is irredeemably bad; Melisandre, commonly agreed by the internet to have the starring breasts of the show, giving birth to the 6ft soot baby.
The sex isn’t incidental to the plot, but nor is the plot used instrumentally to deliver more sex. But nor is any of it at all sexy: most of it is like an anxiety dream someone might have about sex, when they had hang-ups so deep-seated that it was actually easier to mediate it through death than to think about it in life.
People talk, too, about escapism, the relief of being freed from a fictional world of coherence, where a religion either does or doesn’t exist, and a danger is either real and present, or imagined and absent, and there are none of these nauseating gear shifts, where one episode you are petrified of the white walkers and, three episodes later, you’ve clean forgotten them. But this explanation, again, is insufficient: if it were just incoherence we wanted, we’d all be watching Twilight.
On the matter of whether or not it’s highbrow: it is certainly well-plotted (which is where the Sopranos comparison derived from, I would say) and very densely populated (that’s Lord of the Rings), but it has no subtlety. The scheming is amplified, the evil is cartoonish, the violence grotesque. Motivation runs the gamut from honour (Brienne of Tarth and her promise to Lady Stark) to base ambition (all the Lannisters, doing almost anything), but it’s not really a gamut, since there’s nothing in between. All the characters have their own arc; none is there just to prop up someone more important, which is unusual.
But I think the uniqueness is that, following the plot of the George RR Martin’s books, it doesn’t have any of the cynicism of television. TV writing can be magnificent, as good as any writing has ever been. But it’s also instrumental. You would never kill Sean Bean in a TV script. You might want to, but when it came to it, you would just say he’s too good. You would never have a red wedding, and let your carefully tended family, that you’d built and differentiated and intertwined in beautiful ways, die all at once. You would arrange the cast so that there weren’t too many big hitters in a scene.
And those rules are really good, but they also lose something, some property of unpredictability, some cruelty to the audience, that is the real uniqueness of Game of Thrones. It doesn’t just disregard you, viewer: it despises you. And that’s what you love about it.
