Like the late arrivals we often are, Rhonda and I are just
now watching the first season of HBO's Game
of Thrones. I happened to luck into
a remarkably bargain-priced set of the DVDs at our local Joe's Records, and
picked them up because many of you have recommended them, because they're high
fantasy, and since I started my writing career working in that genre….well, you
know the rest.
My reaction to the show has been mixed favorable. The acting, the production values, and the
Northern Ireland sets are, to my way of thinking, pretty wonderful. I've liked Sean Bean for ages, it seems, and
having him anchor the cast is, to me, one of GOT's principal strengths.
But hold on a minute.
Does he really anchor a cast or is he just one among a helluva lot of
people—so many that I'm finding myself looking at the guide in the DVD set
because I can't tell the players without a scorecard? Baratheon mingles with Stark and Lannister (there
are also the blonde ones whose name eludes me—super-entitled wicked brother,
gradually empowered sister) until I find
myself stopping the disc, tottering on the edge of lost until I piece together
who's who, the image frozen on the screen.
This is digital narration rather than the television or the
film I grew up with, so I am forced to scramble a little—not a bad thing for a
budding geezer. It's the kind of
"cast of hundreds" you can pull off if your last name is Tolkien or Tolstoy,
the leniency of prose fiction allowing the reader to backtrack and cross-reference. But I'm not as used to it in film or video,
and GOT is asking me to access the
story in a way that's relatively new to me.
And I'm grateful for that gauntlet being thrown down, for something
asking me to venture into unfamiliar realms of "reading".
Having said that, I'd really like to see the elements of the
fantastic more in play in the series, fulfilling some of the stark (pun
intended) promise of the first few minutes.
We're on the eighth episode, and it seems to be returning, but that's a
long time to wait. The preternatural
lurks at the margins of the narrative, and we glimpse moments of it, but it's
almost as though it's an afterthought, a kind of hood ornament on the
far-ranging Byzantine intrigue. Whatever
one can say about Jackson's Lord of the Rings (and I've heard ranging opinions,
from loving to loathing), the fantasy is integral to what happens on
screen. I also found it far easier to
tell one character from another, but I'm not reliable on that, since I know LOTR better than any book other than my
own, and leaned on that knowledge as I watched the movie. People who were introduced to Tolkien via the
Jackson films might well have found some rough going in growing acquainted with
all the characters, but the film (and Tolkien's novel) have the advantage of
convening the whole bunch at the Council of Elrond, so that their dispersal
becomes easier to follow in the last two books of the trilogy; GOT, on the
other hand (at least the TV series—I can't speak for the novels, though I suspect
they do the same) moves its characters from distant sources toward convergence,
so that the advantage of contrasting one dirty-haired Boromir-type with another
goes clean out the window, and I've been looking at them as family members
rather than individuals in order to tell them apart.
Something else, though, has always set apart fantasy from
other modes of storytelling—especially the high fantasy version of the
genre. We often laugh about how many
high fantasies involve the "rag-tag group who save the world from ultimate
evil" but they do this because high fantasy deals in the Big Idea, the
quest, the important issue, and rests on the premise that ultimately, the world
is worth saving. Martin's Westeros is up
for grabs, and I have yet to get a sense of what's at stake beyond raw plays for
power, and I am, as I said before, eight episodes in. That's 4/5 of Season 1.
And this bothers me.
In high fantasy, the stakes should be high for everyone involved, and I
get the feeling that these intrigues at the uppermost levels of fantasy
politics will make little difference to those who live day by day in Westeros,
something you wouldn't have said about the events that take place in Middle
Earth or Earthsea. Maybe it's high
fantasy with the postmodern turn of "no grand narrative"? If that's the case, I suspect I'm going to
feel cheated ultimately, like in so many postmodern stories: shimmering surface
gives way to a kind of self-referentiality, a kind of brittle thinness.
All in all, the attempt to set down the War of the Roses or
Jacobean intrigue in the midst of an alternative world may or may not end up
successfully; I'm suspending judgment and enjoying the sumptuous visuals, the
neat suspense of the self-contained episodes, and not yet worrying my pretty
little head about a more nagging concern: the lack of a grand thematic design
of the whole work (so apparent in Tolkien's books and in Jackson's film version
of them). Grand design is something I
like in heroic fantasy, just as integral to the genre as the preternatural
mythic stuff; however, I'm beginning to fear that, once you get beyond the dark
visual beauties of George R.R. Martin's Westeros, it'll end up being kind of like Gertrude Stein's Cleveland, in that "there's no there
there".
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