Game of Thrones: In Stops and Starts

Everything is fine.

So many people have weighed in with their thoughts on the last season of Game of Thrones that even my favorite existentialist Slavoj Zizek has a column on it. Naturally, his contribution to this genre is one of the best in it, while being one of the shallowest things he has written.

It is true that, in the series’ swift denouement, a strange logic takes over, a logic that does not violate credible psychology but rather the narrative presuppositions of a TV series. In the last season, it is simply the preparation for a battle, mourning and destruction after the battle, and of the battler itself in all its meaninglessness – much more realistic for me than the usual gothic melodramatic plots. 

Season eight stages three consecutive struggles. The first one is between humanity and its inhuman “Others” (the Night Army from the North led by the Night King); between the two main groups of humans (the evil Lannisters and the coalition against them led by Daenerys and Starks); and the inner conflict between Daenerys and the Starks. 

This is why the battles in season eight follow a logical path from an external opposition to the inner split: the defeat of the inhuman Night Army, the defeat of Lannisters and the destruction of King’s Landing; the last struggle between the Starks and Daenerys – ultimately between traditional “good” nobility (Starks) faithfully protecting their subjects from bad tyrants, and Daenerys as a new type of a strong leader, a kind of progressive bonapartist acting on behalf of the underprivileged.

...

But – let’s bite our sour apple now – what about Daenerys’ murderous outbursts? Can the ruthless killing of the thousands of ordinary people in King’s Landing really be justified as a necessary step to universal freedom? At this point, we should remember that the scenario was written by two men. 

Daenerys as the Mad Queen is strictly a male fantasy, so the critics were right when they pointed out that her descent into madness was psychologically not justified. The view of Daenerys with mad-furious expression flying on a dragon and burning houses and people expresses patriarchal ideology with its fear of a strong political woman.

He captures the stakes - and the psychoanalytic arc - well, but retreats to the same inanity every other left-wing provocateur/critic of the show has taken with regard to The Thing Dany Did: she didn't, you didn't believe what's being told by _men_ did you? Which reminds me of another Zizek quote:

“We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle which Freud quotes in order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle):  

(1) I never borrowed a kettle from you;
(2) I returned it to you unbroken;
(3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you.  

For Freud, such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments of course confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny - that I returned you a broken kettle...”

The scourging of King's Landing is fast becoming a moment too Real to be approached, and so one our culture will obsess over, and over again, portraying differently each time, until it becomes an objet petit like the death of the Punisher's family or the 2016 election.

Left critics of the show therefore risk coming off like Soviet-apologists, who deny war crimes and police states as mere capitalist propaganda.

While this skepticism may sometime be useful (and dangerous!) in understanding historical accounts, it's terrible and lazy as artistic analysis. "Let's just say this bit is false and ignore it!" You could do that to anything in the work then. You're not understanding it at that point, you're just writing (negative) fan-fic. I managed to write a month log blog analyzing thirty scenes of the Star Wars Prequels with a revisionist take and still never had to resort to "this part you see didn't happen."

Sure, if something is a story within the story - particularly if it's given as exposition or just stylized - we should think more on what it sells about the teller than the events depicted. But the Burning was as real in its portrayal as everything else, and Daenerys's actions afterwards are no departure - she gives a speech in a smoking ruin and evinces no sadness or regret at the massive destruction around her.

It's still perfectly possible to do mediocre left-wing critical analysis of this turn. You can simply note that all of Game of Thrones is a fiction told by several liberal white intellectuals, who see all claimants for power as potential sinners, but the only way they can criticize a true revolutionary is by saying "well what if she went crazy and killed thousands of people for no reason?" But the war crime is no less a part of the story than Dany's womanhood itself or Cersei's many sins, so why praise one but try to ignore the other.

The solution is to actually confront the Event, and figure out from the way it was done and the context around it, how it fits into a broader interpretation of the narrative. Watch a scene and ask yourself "why did they say this? Why did this, that we might take for granted, happen?"

In particular: what are Dany's former allies all upset at her for? For killing thousands of civilians with dragonfire? Well no, in fact. She told them she was going to do this, with the fairly typical logic "my opponent is using them as a human shield, and we must stop her." Her allies could swallow this (even though this was a needless strategy: they could just wait Cersei out, who no longer had widespread support and was borrowing vast amounts of money on a ticking clock - and this was the sort of verisimilitude that the earlier books would have demonstrated.)

They were upset because she didn't stop. They had begged her to listen for surrender, and when surrender happened, she kept burning the city in the exact way she had been doing. This was the true dishonor to the protagonist/nobles.

As Tyrion said to Jon to convince him to kill Daenerys: "Does she look like a woman who's done fighting?"

We have reached the end of a decade of war, of eight years of a television phenomenon, and the good guys just want to go home. That was the source of the ennui at the Council that elected Bran; he was not a compromise candidate but an apathy candidate. And this is not at all historically unrealistic - the appetite for war diminishes as the psyche wears down, even if resources aren't also depleting.

Except Dany had just arrived. She'd been stuck in Essos for 6 seasons, and been up north for most of the time since then, and now is getting her first taste of the War of Five Kings, and she has plenty of energy to keep going. She doesn't seek a town's surrender, but it's annihilation if it threatens her. To her allies, that's just so... extra. They don't have time for that anymore, and certainly not time to "break the wheel" across the known world.

The parallel to the creative process is obvious. A show about sprawling webs of connection and inter-related reactions, where every victory led to three unexpected backlashes, and nothing was without consequence or a reason to bring on an entirely new character and perspective... was coming to an end. In some sense the narrative of this world completely rebelled against any neat ending. "But how would the Lords of the Reach react to Bronn? Wouldn't someone from Essos invade a weak and divided Westeros? Why would Jon stay North of the Wall once the Unsullied are gone?" Those are all the questions that an earlier book would ask. But in another sense, the narrative demanded an end or else it would eventually cease to be a narrative at all, just a series of chaotic events, repeating only in their meaninglessness.

Does this resonate with the culture the writer's are coming from?

The same day I saw the Zizek column I also saw this tweet explaining the Democratic primary:

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and other Democrats are Daenerys here: they have seen the energy activated and the Democratic base by Trump, and they want to use it to continue on. They want to break the wheel of Republican intransigence and corruption, and pass a full slate of the progressive agenda (and wreak significant cultural changes too.) In the idealistic sense, they are almost certainly right.

But the actual voters are tired. They want Dany to stop. They want the biggest hit of a show ever to end somehow. They're fine with Bran as King and Biden as President, just so long as they can return their attention to something - anything - else. They'll take resigned acceptability over the unbearable tension of things continuing on, and on, with no resolution in sight.