It’s time someone said it: Game of Thrones is dire
That the fantasy epic Game of Thrones, which has returned to our screens for its eighth and final series, bears all the accoutrements of a major cultural event – blanket reviews of each episode from every major news outlet, frantic live tweeting on episodes as they unfold, and endless speculation on plot points and plot direction post-viewing – speaks to the ever-accelerating immiseration of the state of popular culture.
The traditional vectors for storytelling (dialogue, acting, and directorial craft) are done away with wholesale in favour of a mashed-up spectacle of big battle scenes married to the high seriousness of fantasy (made-up languages plus dragons), wooden performances from an ensemble cast, and writing so absolutely crass you wouldn’t believe.
So, why the rant? People like it: who’s to judge?
Since days of yore, visual media have been criticised in just these terms.
In the 5th century BC, Plato was terrified that the theatre would draw the Athenian public away from the stark world of philosophical truth and leave them in thrall to the cheap (and more immediately satisfying) thrills on offer on stage – self-identification with the dramatis personae, plot twists, and spectacular special effects, for example.
That anxiety is still felt particularly acutely in television, cinema’s arriviste little cousin.
In series 5 of The Sopranos (widely regarded as the greatest television series of all time), ex-heroin addict and onetime successful screenwriter JT attempts to pawn his Emmy award to pay off gambling debts to the mobster Christopher, Tony Soprano’s long-term protégé.
JT – “It’s a fucking Emmy. It’s gold-plated.”
Pawnbroker – “Melt it down, man. Look, I told you. 15 dollars.”
JT – “Fuck man, come on! This is, like, huge, this shit. “
Pawnbroker – “If it had been an Oscar, maybe I could give you something, an Academy Award… But TV…? What else you got?”
All the mobsters in The Sopranos venerate Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ series and talk about the films frequently – one of Tony’s henchmen, Silvio, performs Michael Corleone’s “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” from Godfather 3 on cue.
But when they sit down to watch Godfather 2 off a pirated DVD, the television breaks. We never get to see the mobsters react in real-time to a representation of their own near-past (the last generation of Italian-American gangsters, often referred to with the affectionate gloss – “old school”).
It’s the same anxiety – that television is just a faulty approximation of the real thing – just as Plato could only see theatre as a cheap imitation of the truth of philosophy.
But Game of Thrones affects to be more epic than cinema – here’s the chief of HBO speaking to Variety: “It’s a spectacle. The guys have done six movies. The reaction I had while watching them was, ‘I’m watching a movie’”. He added: “Everybody’s in for an extraordinary treat of storytelling and of magical, magical production.”
The latest battle scene took up a whole episode of an hour and twenty minutes and was popularly billed as the longest ever shot in screen history. It was screened in pubs – and footage emerged afterwards of crowds celebrating its climax, cheering, screaming, even hugging each other in relief.
So perhaps that explains the success of Game of Thrones: the troubling notion that the joy of real story-telling, married to wit and a delight in moving pictures, has been submerged into a trance-like vision of pure spectacle – an amorphous, expanding voluptuousness that can only deliver on the promise of ever cheaper thrills.
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