Emily Nussbaum The Aristocrats: The Graphic Arts of Game of Thrones

Instructor's Notes

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Courtesy Emily Nussbaum

EMILY NUSSBAUM has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, Slate, and New York magazine, for which she worked as culture editor. Currently, she is the television critic for The New Yorker, in which this review originally appeared. Her initial fascination with analyzing and critiquing television programs sprang from an obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her reviews and commentary have become influential particularly in discussions about the effects of technology and social media on television as a medium and on our viewing habits. As you read,

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1

F or critics, sorting through television pilots is an act of triage. Last year, when Game of Thrones landed on my desk, I skimmed two episodes and made a quick call: we’d have to let this one go. The HBO series, based on the best-selling fantasy books by George R. R. Martin, looked as if it were another guts-and-corsets melodrama, like The Borgias. In the première, a ten-year-old boy was shoved out of a tower window. The episode climaxed with what might be described as an Orientalist gang rape/wedding dance. I figured I might catch up later, if the buzz was good.

2

It was the right decision, even if I made it for the wrong reason. Game of Thrones is an ideal show to binge-watch on DVD: with its cliffhangers and Grand Guignol1 dazzle, it rewards a bloody, committed immersion in its foreign world — and by this I mean not only the medieval-ish landscape of Westeros (the show’s mythical realm) but the genre from which it derives. Fantasy —like television itself, really — has long been burdened with audience condescension: the assumption that it’s trash, or juvenile, something intrinsically icky and low. Several reviews of Game of Thrones have taken this stance, including two notable writeups in the Times: Ginia Bellafante sniffed that the show was “boy fiction” and Neil Genzlinger called it “vileness for voyeurism’s sake,” directed at “Dungeons & Dragons2 types.”

The show is so graphic that it was parodied on Saturday Night Live, with a “behind-the-scenes” skit in which a horny thirteen-year-old boy acted as a consultant.

3

It’s true that Game of Thrones is unusually lurid, even within the arms race of pay cable: the show is so graphic that it was parodied on Saturday Night Live, with a “behind-the-scenes” skit in which a horny thirteen-year-old boy acted as a consultant. To watch it, you must steel yourself for baby-stabbing, as well as rat torture and murder by molten gold. But, once I began sliding in disks in a stupor, it became clear that, despite the show’s Maltese vistas and asymmetrical midriff tops, this was not really an exotic property. To the contrary, Game of Thrones is the latest entry in television’s most esteemed category: the sophisticated cable drama about a patriarchal subculture. This phenomenon launched with The Sopranos, but it now includes shows such as Deadwood, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and Big Love. Each of these acclaimed series is a sprawling, multi-character exploration of a closed, often violent hierarchical system. These worlds are picturesque, elegantly filmed, and ruled by rigid etiquette — lit up, for viewers, by the thrill of seeing brutality enforced (or, in the case of Downton Abbey, a really nice house kept in the family). And yet the undergirding strength of each series is its insight into what it means to be excluded from power: to be a woman, or a bastard, or a “half man.”

4

The first season of Game of Thrones built up skillfully, sketching in ten episodes a conflict among the kingdoms of Westeros, each its own philosophical ecosystem. There were the Northern Starks, led by the gruffly ethical Ned Stark and his dignified wife, Catelyn, and their gruffly ethical and dignified children. There were the Southern Lannisters, a crowd of high-cheekboned beauties (and one lusty dwarf, played by the lust-worthy Peter Dinklage), who form a family constellation so twisted, charismatic, and cruel that it rivals Flowers in the Attic3 for blond dysfunction. Across the sea, there were the Dothraki, a Hun-like race of horseman warriors, whose brutal ruler, Drogo, took the delicate, unspellable Daenerys as a bride. A teen girl traded like currency by her brother, Daenerys was initiated into marriage through rape; in time, she began to embrace both that marriage and her desert queenhood. (Although the cast is mostly white, the dusky-race aesthetics of the Dothraki sequences are head-clutchingly problematic.) By the finale, she was standing naked in the desert — widowed, traumatized, but triumphant, with three baby dragons crawling over her like vines. (This quick summary doesn’t capture the complexity of the series’ ensemble, which rivals a Bosch painting: there’s also the whispery eunuch Spider; a scheming brothel owner named Littlefinger; and a ketchup-haired sorceress who gives birth to shadow babies.)

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5

In the season’s penultimate episode, the show made a radical move: it killed off the protagonist. On a public stage, Ned Stark was beheaded, on the orders of the teen-age sadist King Joffrey, a sequence edited with unusual beauty and terror — birds fluttering in the air, a hushed soundtrack, and a truly poignant shot from Ned’s point of view, as he looked out toward his two daughters. This primal act suggested the limits of ethical behavior in a brutalized universe, and also dramatized the show’s vision of what aristocracy means: a succession of domestic traumas, as each new regent dispatches threats to his bloodline. (Or, as Joffrey’s mother, Cersei, puts it, kinghood means “lying on a bed of weeds, ripping them out one by one, before they strangle you in your sleep.”) It demonstrated, too, a willingness to risk alienating its audience. . . .

6

Still, the most compelling plots remain those of the subalterns, who are forced to wield power from below. These characters range from heroic figures like the tomboy Arya Stark to villains like Littlefinger, but even the worst turn out to have psychic wounds that complicate their actions. If the show has a hero, it’s Tyrion (Dinklage), who is capable of cruelty but also possesses insight and empathy, concealed beneath a carapace of Wildean wit. So far, his strategic gifts have proved more effective than the torture-with-rats approach. Power is “a trick, a shadow on the wall,” the eunuch tells Tyrion. “And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

7

Then, of course, there are the whores. From the start, the show has featured copious helpings of pay-cable nudity, much of it in scenes that don’t strictly require a woman to display her impressive butt dimples as the backdrop for a monologue about kings. (The most common fan idiom for these sequences is “sexposition,” but I’ve also seen them referred to as “data humps.”) These scenes are at once a turn-on and a turn-off. At times, I found myself marveling at the way that HBO has solved the riddle of its own economic existence, merging Hookers at the Point4 with quasi-Shakespearean narrative. In the most egregious instance so far, Littlefinger tutored two prostitutes in how to moan in fake lesbianism for their customers, even as they moaned in fake lesbianism for us.

8

Viewed in another light, however, these sex scenes aren’t always so gratuitous. Like Mad Men, Game of Thrones is elementally concerned with the way that meaningful consent dissolves when female bodies are treated as currency. War means raping the enemy’s women; princesses go for a higher price, because their wombs are the coin of the realm, cementing strategic alliances. It helps that the narrative is equally fascinated by the ways in which women secure authority, and even pleasure, within these strictures, and that in the second season its bench of female characters has got even deeper — among them, a seafaring warrior princess, a butch knight, and Tyrion’s prostitute girlfriend.

9

Game of Thrones is not coy about the way the engine of misogyny can grind the fingers of those who try to work it in their favor. An episode two weeks ago featured a sickening sequence in which King Joffrey ordered one prostitute — a character the audience had grown to care about — to rape another. The scenario . . . seemed designed not to turn viewers on but to confront them with the logical endgame of this pornographic system. . . . But while the scene may have been righteous in theory, in practice it was jarring, and slightly incoherent, particularly since it included the creamy nudity we’ve come to expect as visual dessert.

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10

As with True Blood, the show’s most graphic elements — the cruel ones, the fantasy ones, and the cruel-fantasy ones — speak to female as well as male viewers. (One of the nuttiest quotes I’ve ever read came from Alan Ball, True Blood’s showrunner,5 who said that a focus group had revealed that men watched his series for the sex and women for the romance. Please.) But there is something troubling about this sea of C.G.I.6-perfect flesh, shaved and scentless and not especially medieval. It’s unsettling to recall that these are not merely pretty women; they are unknown actresses who must strip, front and back, then mimic graphic sex and sexual torture, a skill increasingly key to attaining employment on cable dramas. During the filming of the second season, an Irish actress walked off the set when her scene shifted to what she termed “soft porn.” Of course, not everyone strips: there are no truly explicit scenes of gay male sex, fewer lingering shots of male bodies, and the leading actresses stay mostly buttoned up. Artistically, Game of Thrones is in a different class from House of Lies, Californication, and Entourage. But it’s still part of another colorful patriarchal subculture, the one called Los Angeles.

[REFLECT]

Make connections: Binge-watching.

Binge-watching is a marathon viewing of multiple episodes of the same television show in a single sitting. According to Nussbaum, “Game of Thrones is an ideal show to binge-watch” (par. 2). Her reason is that “with its cliffhangers and Grand Guignol dazzle, it rewards a bloody, committed immersion in its foreign world.” But what Nussbaum seems to think makes Game of Thrones so good for sustained viewing is not primarily the horror or titillation it provides, but its immersive power to draw viewers into a complex imaginary world (par. 3). Think of your own experience. What, if anything, have you binge-watched or been tempted to binge-watch? What would make a program worth bingeing on? Your instructor may ask you to post your thoughts to a class discussion board or blog, or to discuss them with other students in class. Use these questions to get started:

[ANALYZE]

Use the basic features.

A WELL-PRESENTED SUBJECT: PROVIDING INFORMATION

Reviews usually begin by providing basic information about the subject. For example, William Akana’s title identifies his subject by name, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: A Hell of a Ride.” The second paragraph also provides the kinds of information readers expect to learn from film reviews, such as the name of the director (and his or her well-known films), the main actors and their roles, the setting, and a brief summary of the plot.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, released in 2010 by Universal Studios, came into production as a comic book adaptation film under the direction of Edgar Wright (best known for the zombie movie masterpiece Shaun of the Dead). Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a twenty-two-year-old . . . in Toronto, Canada. Pilgrim’s life takes a dramatic turn when he falls in love with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) . . . and he is forced to fight to the death to prove his love. (Akana, par. 2)

Because Akana knows that his audience, particularly his instructor, might not have heard of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (a cult classic but not a box office hit), he opens the review with a brief anecdote. Recounting a personal experience in a review is an unusual move, but it allows Akana to take the same position vis-à-vis his readers that his friends had taken with him — sharing a favorite film with a friend — and as a consequence may contribute to his credibility with his audience.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph analyzing how Nussbaum identifies her subject in “The Aristocrats”:

  1. Compare Nussbaum’s way of presenting the subject with Akana’s. For example, how does she use the series’ name and what kinds of information does she give her audience about it?

  2. Why do you think Nussbaum, like Akana, begins with an anecdote? Notice that Akana uses the first-person pronoun “I” only in the opening paragraph where he presents the anecdote. Skim Nussbaum’s review, noting where she uses “I.” Why do you think she uses the first person in those passages?

A WELL-SUPPORTED JUDGMENT: BASING A JUDGMENT ON CRITERIA

Reviewers assert an overall judgment of the subject in a thesis statement that usually appears early in the review. Akana, for example, concludes his opening paragraph with this thesis statement:

Evaluation

Genre

From start to finish, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World delivers intense action in a hilarious slacker movie that also somehow reimagines romantic comedy.

Notice that Akana praises the film here, making his overall judgment clear. (Of course, an evaluation doesn’t have to be all positive or all negative; reviews are often mixed.) He also uses specific evaluative language: He doesn’t claim simply that Scott Pilgrim is good. Instead, he points out what is good about the film based on the three genres it draws upon (action, slacker, and romantic comedy) and the criteria usually used for evaluating those film genres. And he supports his judgment with evaluative analysis, explaining what is noteworthy about the climactic fight scene:

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This brilliantly executed scene illustrates the artful cinematography of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. More importantly, it delivers the film’s thematic message, which undercuts the cliché “love conquers all” and instead focuses on the fresh concept that, in the grand scheme of things, the only person you are fighting for is yourself. (par. 9)

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Nussbaum presents and supports her judgment of Game of Thrones in “The Aristocrats”:

  1. Skim the essay to find the thesis statement in which Nussbaum asserts her overall judgment, and highlight the evaluative language she uses.

  2. What genre or combination of genres does Nussbaum use to categorize Game of Thrones? Consider whether Nussbaum’s evaluative language is typical of the criteria usually used when evaluating the genre (or genres) she identifies.

  3. Now reread paragraph 4, 5, or 6 and analyze Nussbaum’s use of examples to support her judgment. How does she present an example or examples and use evaluative language?

AN EFFECTIVE RESPONSE TO OBJECTIONS AND ALTERNATIVE JUDGMENTS: CONCEDING AND REFUTING ALTERNATIVE JUDGMENTS

Reviewers often acknowledge an alternative judgment and then either refute or concede it. To do so, they may use a sentence strategy like one of these:

EXAMPLE Some reviewers have criticized the film because they think that in the end it fails as a romantic comedy. . . . But I agree with New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, who argues that “the movie comes home to the well-known territory of the coming-of-age story, with an account of lessons learned and conflicts resolved.” (Akana, par. 9)

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two considering the role of the initial negative evaluations of Game of Thrones in “The Aristocrats”:

  1. Reread paragraphs 2–3, noting the negative evaluations and Nussbaum’s response. Does she refute, concede, or make the refutation-concession move?

  2. Now look at paragraphs 7–10, where Nussbaum returns to the criticism of sex in Game of Thrones. How does she respond to the criticism this time? What point is she making about “the logical endgame of this pornographic system” (par. 9)?

  3. What’s implied by the phrase “graphic arts” in the subtitle: “The Graphic Arts of Game of Thrones”?

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A CLEAR, LOGICAL ORGANIZATION: CUEING READERS

Nussbaum’s evaluation is complicated. She interweaves plot summary with analysis to support her claims about the merits (and demerits) of Game of Thrones, and she compares the series with other cable series, both good and bad. To keep her readers on track, she must use a variety of cueing strategies.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph analyzing how Nussbaum helps her audience follow her evaluation in “The Aristocrats”:

  1. Skim the essay, noting Nussbaum’s main topics and marking any key terms that she uses to orient readers.

  2. Mark any transitions, considering how each transition helps readers follow the logical movement from topic to topic.

  3. Consider how effective Nussbaum’s strategies are. How difficult did you find it to follow the logic of the review? What would you suggest Nussbaum do, if anything, to make her evaluation easier to follow?

[RESPOND]

Consider possible topics: Offering a mixed judgment.

Some of the most effective and interesting evaluations are neither wholly positive or negative. Instead, they point out both strengths and weaknesses while developing a clear overall judgment. Try to think of a subject about which you have mixed feelings — such as a sports team, video game, film, musical performance, or course you’ve taken. What is your overall judgment? What would you praise about your subject and what would you criticize? What are the criteria you think should be used in evaluating examples of this genre?