Recently, I got around to reading some of the reviews that
came out about Game of Thrones Season Two.
Despite being one of the best shows on television, the reviews I saw
where rather mixed. Much of this can
attributed to the “frustrated-English-grad-school-casualty” philosophy that
tends to dominate a lot of critics in this day and age. Critics, especially critics in New York, seem
to see their role in life as being to attack everything, well everything but Sex in the City, and write in a sort of
preening/whining Village Voice-esque tone.
In addition, Fantasy has always been a denigrated genre in American
literary circles and I suspect the same goes to for the world of TV. But what I can’t stand is when critics are
just simply wrong about historical fact and use their ignorance of history as a
way of attacking a TV show. Emily
Nussbam took a typical stand in her review in the New Yorker:
Leaving aside the fact that all TV shows are “scentless”,
that is they are a visual and audio based medium not an olfactory one, what
struck me was that last sentence where open sexuality is described as “not
especially medieval.” This is utter
nonsense.
To begin with the books the TV show was based on was heavily
based in medieval history. Most fantasy,
especially stuff that comes from Tolkien, creates a world where technology
might resemble the Middle Ages but human behavior seems to have for more in
common with Victorian norms and mores.
Romance looks a lot like it does in Withering Heights with distant
lovers constantly pining away for each other.
The world Robert Jordan created in his “The Wheel of Time” series has no
swear words stronger than “blood and ashes” and no one is ever dirty. George R.R. Martin, who wrote the books,
deliberately set out to create a world that resembled life in the Middle Ages,
and did a huge amount of historical research before he began writing. Accordingly, the show maybe set in a fantasy
realm but it does resemble the period in history it was based on, even in the
portrayal of sexuality that seem to get Nussbam all in a tizzy.
Life in the Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and filthy. Violence and cruelty were regular parts of
life and ever present, much as it is in the show. Common games played in that era by villagers
included one “sport” which consisted of a group of men chasing a pig around a
fenced in area, such as a village square, armed with clubs beating the pig to
death while spectators cheered them on.
Another one popular with young men in France was to take a cat and nail
it to a tree through its abdomen.
Participants then take turns standing in front of the dying cat with
their hands behind their back trying to beat the cat to death with their face
and forehead. You proved you manliness
and skill by killing the cat without it managing to scratch out your eyeballs. These types of cruelties seem shocking to our
modern sensibilities but they were rather tame compared to what people did to
other people in that age. A common
problem you would face as the host of banquet or feast was people getting drunk
and stabbing each other to death with their daggers at the dinner table. French nobles solved this problem in later
centuries by introducing the practice of hosts providing silverware for
attendees, as is the modern custom, with knives with rounded off tops to make
it harder to stab someone to death. This
is why your table knives have rounded off tops.
Even this level of violence was relatively tame compared to life during
war time, where most tactics involved slaughtering your opponent’s peasants and
burning his lands to the ground to reduce his incomes and prove he was unable to defend his friends and subjects. Raping
and pillaging was seen as a normal and effective way to reward your men for the
hard work of taking a town or city.
Witnessing a town being "put to the sword," that is the methodical killing of all of its residents, was probably a “jarring” experience as well. All of this is recorded fact, but I’m sure if it
was put into the show-especially the cat game-it would be dismissed as
“unrealistic” or “outrageous” by people like Nussbaum.
Sexuality and gender relations were also very different from
contemporary American customs. Medieval
life was a bawdy and social affair, every day-especially for the nobility-was
never ending parade of social customs and rituals done with others. Hypocrisy and contradiction was built into
all forms of life. The entire ideal of
courtly love seems so foreign to how we live today it seems to have come from
another civilization. As Barbra Tuchman
points out in her great book about the 1300’s A Distant Mirror:
In no way did people in this time act like well to do New
York professionals without computers and wearing goofy tights and they were not “prudish” compared to modern
American sexual customs. In the crowded dense world of
the medieval city numerous people would sleep in the same room. A common practice would be for the master to
sleep with his wife in a bed in a small room with his servants sleeping on the
floor only a few feet away, obviously being personal witness to whatever would
occur. One English King fathered 16, yes
16, children out of wedlock, another age 29 married a six year old for a
variety of political purposes. He fell
ill and died before the holy wedlock could be consummated. A popular story of the 14th century began with the line
“a Priest and his lady went off to bed.”
There are records of the building of a Cathedral in Italy that document
contributions from all aspects of medieval society including wealthy merchants,
local guilds and “Rafela, a prostitute.”
This is how people lived for centuries, but put a scene like
that in the show and no doubt critics would complain about its lack of
“realism.” But this is because of their
ignorance of history, not poor production choices. Their world was simply very different from our
own. Thus Joffrey’s cruelty might shock
modern critics like Nussbaum but in no way was it “not medieval.” Patriarchy and male superiority were hallmarks
of medieval life, Joffrey as a king could do as he pleased and he never would have to
worry about being arrest by the NYPD after being accused of sexual assault by a
chambermaid, unlike modern political figures. Indeed history records a
French nobleman, Gilles de Rais, who acted like a modern serial killer before finally being
caught and burned at the state. The legend
of Count Dracula is based on the myth of a Romanian noble “Vlad the Impailer”
who was famous for impaling captured Turkish soldiers on large spikes. These examples might be extreme but they give
a picture of Joffrey’s behavior being quite possible.
What we see here is an attempt to distill all of the ways
that people can look at life through the narrow lenses of early 21st
Century American rich people. When
something comes along and points out that in no way is our own culture and ways
of living “normal” or “natural” some people seem inclined to push back. But this is wrong. While the world of Westeros may be a
fictional creation of one man’s imagination, it’s a powerful reminder of the
different possibilities for how people can live and interact. And we shouldn’t dismiss it because the
possibilities, both good and bad, for change in our own society can seem quite unsettling.
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