Looks like I get the honor of being first post.
I had this nagging feeling this morning that "Game of Thrones" sucks.
Ok, sensational hyperbole, but i did have a kind of morning after malaise.
I have been a fantasy guy since I was a boy, reading and rereading Tolkien, Brooks, Kay, Jordan et al all through my pre- and teen years, and beyond. I have been an avid ASOIAF reader since about the time of the publication of the second book. Look, I seriously tried to convince my wife to name one of our sons Tyrion. My geek credentials are solid.
I think my literary/film/highbrow TV credentials are also solid. The little classical school that I went to for my undergrad had only one curriculum that everyone went through, and that included one literature course per semester. I have actually read, in their entirety, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Oedipus Rex and at Colonus, at least 61.275% of the Shakespearean corpus, The Brothers Karamazov, poetry from Catullus and Horace to Eliot, Crane and Lowell, tons of Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner, and even that awful piece of crap Waiting for Godot, to name just a few. A ton of reading and writing and discussing great literature.
I am generally a movie snob, with a preference for movies that make my wife groan whenever she sees me watching one. I am an avid watcher great TV, and am always the guy who says things like, "How is "NCIS" a hit and "Rubicon" is DOA?" I think "Terriers" was absolute genius, "Homicide: Life on the Street" is undervalued as a transformative procedural, and that "Deadwood" was one of the best filmed things ever made, and damn near Shakespearean.
And yet, with all of that mass of opinion and self-important bloviation potential at my command, I find it difficult to capture what I think about the first episode of Game of Thrones. I am happy that HBO is producing , and so the show will have a level of financing and talent involved that will keep these wonderful books from sliding into the dreaded schlock-bog that mires most attempts at fantasy on TV (cf Legend of the Seeker, all Zena-related projects). There was certainly no disappointment on that score. The look of the show is very polished (or polished in its lack of polish, which is probably harder to pull off). The cast is excellent, the level of performance is very high, the writing is taut and dexterous.
And yet I've had some ambivalence. A touch. A soupçon. I've had a nagging feeling of disappointment. That the show is not great. I couldn't shake it this morning. I was worried that the material was too big for the screen, that the adaptation was doomed to fail by its very nature.
Then, out of the blue, a friend from back home in Boston called me about our 20th high school reunion (we shall call him "The Nice Mountain" - he has all the size but none of the penchant for unbelievable cruelty of the books' Mountain). As we were wrapping up, The Nice Mountain said, "Oh, by the way [Old Bare], Game of Thrones? Do you know it? (Of course, he knew instinctively that I did - he was one of the few in high school who knew of the depths of my geekdom). My wife and I watched it, and IT IS AWESOME! [Mrs. Nice Mountain] didn't want to watch it initially, but by the end we were both hooked!"
I understood then that I had psyched myself out. I had forgotten everything I knew about what makes good TV, and came to grips with the fact that my knowledge of the books is actually an obstacle to be overcome if I am going to enjoy the show.
All great filmed art obscures as much as it shows. Not in theme or idea, but in technique. A novel can give you a lot of information in such a short space. Drama cannot. If a world is going to feel real, lived-in, then there must be gaps, pauses, and obscuring corners in how much the viewer sees and knows. Some examples.
"Firefly" worked as an integral world because you had to assume a bunch. You had space cowboys with futuristic six-guns who spouted Chinese occasionally. I remember thinking, the first time I heard Mal curse in Chinese, "Was that Chinese? Why the hell did Lucas McSkywalker just speak Chinese?" And it is never explained in the series. They never, to my knowledge, explicitly say why the characters use Chinese. You just have to infer that America and China were dominant in the migration from Earth. This obscured fact makes the Verse seem all the more real.
Now think about the Star Wars prequels. One of the things that makes them so terrible is that there are these ridiculous, long sections of explicatory dialogue. After a while, you start to think, 'Wait, I thought you all were FROM here. Why do you need to have this guy give you the encyclopedia entry about this or that subject?" There was little thought to how you SHOW the world to the audience, and the screenwriter/man-who-doesn't-understand-his-own-creation just fell back on the easy device of constantly TELLING the audience what he wanted them to know.
In a novel, you can explain things more fully and increase the readers' immersion in the story (although of course this can be overdone in literature, too). On TV, if you do this you will create a wordy talkfest that fails to convey what is specific to the medium - the movement and emotions of the particular characters. It is in the interaction of the characters in motion that the story is revealed. And in that, GOT excelled. The small reactions - the worried glances (Catelyn), the smirks (Jamie), the considering and appraising and weighing looks (Benjen and Tyrion), the "go to your happy place" blank stares (Daenerys) - told us about these character in a way more natural and ultimately revealing than any narrator or clunky passage of explanation could have. The Night's Watch is shown bit by bit, a small reference here, a black clad uncle there. The political animosities are revealed in Tyrion's reaction to having to go to the feast, Roberts tight jawed affirmation of the existence of Daenerys and Vicerys, and Benjen's remark about not leaving Ned alone with the Lannisters. Why are Robert and Ned so close? Well, if you've only seen the show, you know it has something to do with Jon Arryn, but that back story, so easily and rightly handled in the novel by one sentence with the verb "fostered" in it, is displayed instead by one comical look by Ned. "Aha, they must have grown up together, they have that kind of brotherly thing." Then "Oh, they both know Jon Arryn." Then "Interesting, Robert loved Ned's sister, but there's something there that makes Ned really uncomfortable."
TV is a medium of light, and with light there has to be shadow. I have to suppress my need to see the grand sweep at once and trust that the very talented people adapting these books will reveal the entirety of the whole story, even if they hide a certain amount of the rich minutiae.
That being said, what I liked and thought about ep.1:
- the Others: I love how they were portrayed. I had always thought them ghostlike, but I really like the kind of primordial feel they have been given. Ancient (prehistoric even), alien, and very badass. Like they are cousins of the thing William Hurt becomes in "Altered States". With crystal ice swords.
-the kids: LOVE how the kids work together. Great little actors, their relationships portray the love/hate of siblings very well. And I like TV Robb more than I liked book Robb. Don't know why, just do. Jon Snow is pitch perfect. I could go on and on, just love the kids.
-Jamie: I think they are going for a bigger arc overall on Jamie (if that's possible), because he seems a touch more malicious (or perhaps more sociopathically cavalier) than in the books. I was a big fan of certain elements of the show "New Amsterdam", and all of those elements had to do with Nicolaj Coster-Waldau. His scene with Ned was great.
-Tyrion: is Tyrion. Being played by Peter Dinklage. Carry on.
-the Dany side of the world: talk about big arcs. I forgot how helpless Danerys really is at the start of the books, and GOT plays that up to the hilt. She had more blank stares than an Afterschool Special about child abuse. Which her story could have been, actually. Jorah Mormont: perfect. Illyrio; great. Dothraki: seem to me to be like x-rated performers of African cultural rituals on acid. Its early yet, though. Language was cool, though.
So much more, but the baby's crying, and Heart-of-Starkness is trying to get some real work done. Ciao for now.
