So last night my wife and I purchased a blu ray edition of Game of Thrones, a fantasy drama television series produced by HBO based on the first novel in A Song of Fire and Ice, a series of low fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin set in his fantasy world, Westeros. I'd seen the series before and loved it. Last night we watched the first episode, titled, "Winter is Coming."
Let me get the obligatory recommendation out of the way: if you haven't seen this show and you like fantasy and drama, I recommend it. Highly recommend it. It's subtle fantasy. It's nuanced. It's more about the characters and their struggles with personal circumstances and less about sorcerers and orcs and magical rings.
I'm inclined to compare the show to Peter Jackson's The Lord of Rings. I want to say, "if you like LOTR, then you'll love Game of Thrones." For most people this may be true. For some, it wouldn't be true at all. Why? Martin's work (and by extension, the show) is very dark in comparison to LOTR.
In LOTR good and evil are quite clearly defined. The bad guys look like bad guys. The good guys look like good guys.
Things aren't that simple in Game of Thrones.
A major theme of that novel and this show is how morality is not not black and white but more gray (to say nothing of the fact that a major confrontation in the show is between "The Night's Watch"--who wear all black--and "White Walkers"--who are, umm, white). The major conflict of the show is not some glorious battle between good and evil, between a dark lord and an angel; rather, it's a civil war.
Martin has a way of making you hate someone, and then making you love that that same character. It explodes your moral paradigms I think. Just as quickly as you turn a character into a monster, they become a human again. I call this "moral maturity."
The moral maturity of this show allegorically resonates to the extent that the novel (and show) end up focusing on some pretty serious, "adult" themes. As in the novel, sex is all over the place in the show. I have a hunch on that point, though; I get the sense that HBO producers--enjoying their "premium cable" affordances--throw in graphic and sometimes gratuitous sex just for the sake of it sometimes.
Neither here nor there. Not only is the show mature in terms of graphic sexual material, it's mature in terms of its moral material. Adult in content. Adult in theme.
I thought the show was brilliantly done. I've been a fan of Martin's work since I was 16, and Game of Thrones will always have a special place in my heart! Can't wait for season 2;)
ReplyDeleteI agree. I've only read the first novel and loved it. The show is a great vision of it. I love it.
ReplyDeleteLots of agreement from me, as well. I saw the first few episodes when it originally aired, then stopped and am now reading the novel before going back to the series. I'm really enjoying it. It's been a long time since I've read epic fantasy, actually ... I drifted away from that right after college, it seems. Maybe the sudden loss of lots of free time has something to do with that!
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, I agree that HBO's nudity and sex scenes are gratuitous. Martin definitely doesn't play that up in the novel. But what's interesting to me is the "low fantasy" approach that you mention early on. This is a world with a few hints of long-forgotten magic and mythical beings, but in the present, it's not much different from an historical novel set in the middle ages. I've read some review of the book that are very negative because the readers are frustrated at the lack of "fantasy" in these fantasy novels. I think the failure here is on the reader's part, but I also wonder about the correlation of low-fantasy and the "moral maturity" and complexity you mention here. Does the lack of high-fantasy elements leave more room for Martin to focus on developing complex characters, with all the moral ambiguity of real people, and a plot that's driven by political intrigue rather than the simple clash of good and evil writ large? I'm not suggesting the two are mutually exclusive, but a quick mental survey of the various fantasy works I've read does seem to confirm the correlation.
A similar correlation seems to apply to horror, too, now that I think of it. The more gore/supernatural elements, the more simplistic the characters and plot tend to be. Is this necessary, or simply the result of a lazy trade-off?
Wow! That's an interesting connection that seems very viable to me. I do agree there is a logic in some modern fantasy that associates "high fantasy" elements with immaturity. I'm thinking of conversations around the time the LoTR movies were coming out. Folks were afraid that Gandalf's magic would be do "CGI'd" up. Lots of discussions were out there about how "magical" Tolkien's wizards are. To a large extent, they're quite subtle when compared to, say, the over-the-top quality of other texts. For example, one of the most important spells cast my Gandalf--the opening of the gates of Moria--is simply a struggle to come up with a word. I think there is definitely something similar in some horror as well. I'm thinking of grindhouse horror movies versus, say, *Paranormal Activity,* a filme defined by its subtlety (not sure what you think of that film, but I loved it--the first one, at least).
ReplyDeleteI liked the original Paranormal Activity, too, and in general find that I appreciate the more subtle horrors. This explains why I think M. R. James writes the best ghost stories and why I prefer The Orphanage to Saw. Though it seems to me a work like Pan's Labyrinth is full of over-the-top fantastical elements, yet still manages to make the characters and their struggle the focus of the film ... Hmm.
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