This season on “Game of Thrones,” Tyrion Lannister—a salty dwarf with a Wildean wit—cuts a deal with some powerful slave owners on behalf of his boss, the flame-resistant abolitionist desert queen Daenerys. If they agree to stop funding regime change, they will get seven years to phase out slavery. Tyrion’s aides, former slaves, object. “Slavery is a horror that should be ended at once,” Tyrion shoots back. “War is a horror that should be ended at once. I can’t do both today.”
In the colossal, bloody, flawed, exhausting, occasionally intoxicating phenomenon that is “Game of Thrones,” the best bits are often moments like this: seductive mini-meditations on politics that wouldn’t be out of place in “Wolf Hall,” if “Wolf Hall” had ice zombies, or “Veep,” if “Veep” featured babies getting eaten by dogs. Season 6, which ended on Sunday, to the usual celebration and fury, and with the usual viral memes, and with corpses mangled (I assume, since HBO didn’t give me a screener), felt perversely relevant in this election year. It was dominated by debates about purity versus pragmatism; the struggles of female candidates in a male-run world; family dynasties with ugly histories; and assorted deals with various devils. George R. R. Martin surely didn’t intend his blockbuster series of fantasy books, set in feudal Westeros (which I haven’t read and, let’s face it, probably won’t read), to be an allegorical text for U.S. voters in 2016. But that’s what you get with modern water-cooler dramas, which so often work as an aesthetic Esperanto that lets us talk about politics without fighting about the news.
Certainly, TV spent many years helping viewers to imagine what it might be like to elect Barack Obama: on shows as varied as the ultra-liberal “The West Wing” and the neocon “24,” we saw black or Latino male Presidents, often heroic and authoritative. (On “The West Wing,” the cool upstart Santos was explicitly based on the young Obama.) Hillary Clinton hasn’t had quite the same fictional fanfare. With a few exceptions, like “Madame Secretary,” on CBS, the Hillary-inspired characters on modern dramas, from Mellie Grant to Alicia Florrick to Claire Underwood, might as well have been funded by the R.N.C.: they’re scheming ice princesses at best, corrupt ice queens at worst. This season of “Game of Thrones”—the first to fully depart from the books—expands that palette, providing a weirdly fascinating array of female conquerors, enough to fit every attitude and ideology.
If you’re one sort of person, you might see Hillary Clinton in Daenerys (Emilia Clarke)—a former First Lady who quite literally walks through flames, and whose hawkish (or, I guess, dragonish) résumé is tempered by her desire to make her kingdom less violent, through canny dealmaking. (For gun control, substitute fights to the death in Slaver’s Bay; for Barney Frank, Tyrion Lannister.) In private, she’s a progressive, not a liberal, arguing, about the cycle of monarchic struggle, “I’m not going to stop the wheel. I’m going to break the wheel.”
If you’re another kind of person, of course, you’ll see Hillary as Cersei (Lena Headey), ethically rotten and sexually perverse, a born élitist, sympathetic only when she’s been literally stripped, pelted with garbage, and given the kind of haircut a gal usually gets when drunk, after a bad breakup. (The Bada Bing aesthetics of “Game of Thrones” are so persistent that the nuns of King’s Landing couldn’t even bring themselves to shave Headey’s head—instead, they shamed her with a Mia Farrow pixie cut.) Both queens are “bossy” and struggle with likability; strangers have strong opinions about their hair. (You can’t make any clear analogy to modern racial politics, but the less said about the colonial aesthetics of Daenerys’s world—in which she has a black best friend and is the white liberator of dusky, rape-happy savages who know how to dance—the better.)
Daenerys and Cersei aren’t the show’s only rising female politicians. There’s also the tormented princess Sansa Stark (the excellent Sophie Turner), a survivor of three lordly betrothals—two to psychotic sadists—who is driving an army led by her wet-eyed, newly reanimated half brother, Jon Snow. There’s Yara Greyjoy, the pugnacious lesbian daughter of misogynist seafarers; there’s Ellaria, a bisexual orgy-and-revenge buff from egalitarian Dorne, and her sultry army of daughter figures, the Sand Snakes.
Female “badasses” dominate the landscape, among them Sansa’s sister, the avenger Arya, the refreshingly butch Brienne of Tarth, and, recently, the kiddie-queen Lady Mormont. The sexual politics of “Game of Thrones” have long been a model of cognitive dissonance, like an anti-misogyny pamphlet published in the form of a Penthouse letter. And the girl-power fantasies can often be one-note—Arya’s training as a multifaced assassin rivalled the torture of Theon Greyjoy for sheer tedium. But place a lot of one- or two-note heroines side by side and you gain a choral richness. For all its contradictions, the show has something to say about the psychic cost, for women, of achieving power, with plots like Sansa Stark’s slow transformation from the worst-off “Bachelor” contestant to dry-eyed warrior queen, smirking as she watches her rapist get his face ripped off by hungry dogs.
There’s a Bernie Sanders avatar, too, if you don’t like Bernie Sanders: with shocking timeliness, given the bird that landed on Sanders’s podium recently, his name is the High Sparrow. A revolutionary ideologue who is obsessed with purifying the élite of King’s Landing—including Cersei—the High Sparrow is unwilling to compromise, sticking to his principles in a way that is both impressive and aggravating. Like Sanders, he could easily be mistaken for Larry David.
Even the more purely geeky aspects of “Game of Thrones” improve when viewed through polarized spectacles; among these are the White Walkers, undead creatures invading Westeros from the north. I groaned when, in one of the show’s undeniably breathtaking battle sequences, these blue-eyed skeletor-demons streamed over a steep cliff like so many black sequins spilling from an Oscar de la Renta ball gown. There were enough skimpily motivated characters, to my mind, without folding in soulless monsters defined by their unstoppability. Then somebody on Twitter argued that the White Walkers symbolized global warming—a radical existential threat that the Westerosi clans had failed to unite against, too busy squabbling over that hideous iron Barcalounger that serves as a throne. One solid metaphor and I was on board. Fine, bring on the zombies.
Electoral politics aren’t the only politics, of course. There’s also the show’s broader philosophy, its strongman fetishization of survival at any cost. In Westeros, vulnerability is always a mistake: feel and you’ll get flayed. It’s the landscape’s only truly democratic quality, whatever category you fit into—poor, a child, a woman, a man with an arm or a penis that might get chopped off, a parent, a lover, or really anyone with anything to lose, like a king. As Sansa Stark puts it, with regal disgust, after yet another empty promise of masculine chivalry, “No one can protect me. No one can protect anyone.”
Still, that doesn’t quite explain the show’s chop-licking relish at torturing its viewers. At the series’s lowest moments (like the penectomy/enslavement plot that takes place in what I started to think of as Fast-Forward Dungeon), it can feel as airless and acrid as “The Walking Dead,” just another macho cable wallow in sadism. Being a fan means living in Westeros: go numb or go home. If you care too much, you’ll stop watching—but if you care too little you’ll also stop watching. (I did, for a while. My turning point was one of several terrible Westeros weddings—the one with the dwarf-torture, not the one with the throat-slitting, the dwarf-shaming, the pregnancy-stabbing, or the torture-rape. If you get an invitation to a wedding in Westeros, politely decline!) A regular viewer finds herself adopting a troll’s detachment, in it for the lulz. I sneered at the sight of a house cat; a baby made me shrug. With cool logic, I can justify nearly every scene of ultraviolence on the show—the child burned at the stake made sense; Sansa’s torture-rape made sense—but making sense is not the same as having meaning.
Over drinks recently, a friend talked in distress about what felt to him like the Trumpish undercurrent to the series: as much as he enjoyed more complex characters (mostly Lannisters) and those brilliant battles, he felt repelled by the show’s nihilistic insistence that only dominance mattered. Even an episode in which a hardened killer, the Hound, joins a kind of A.A. recovery group—where penitents embrace humble service—worked mostly to head-butt the entire notion of civic resistance to violence. “You don’t cure a disease by spreading it to more people,” the preacher who leads the group insists. (He also resembles Bernie Sanders.) “You don’t cure it by dying, either,” the Hound says. Five minutes later, that preacher is hanging from the rafters; finding him, the Hound pulls an axe from a log, beating plowshares back into swords.
I argued that the show was, if not necessarily deeper than that, then at least a bigger tent. An extended battle scene in a recent episode should have been about bloodlust, but instead it was about empathy: as horses heaved and arrows flew, the lens repeatedly flickered up from beneath a pile of bloody, muddy bodies, forcing us to feel a soldier’s panic and his fear. It was an action sequence with a flexible humanity, and a thoughtfulness about war, that the larger plotlines too often lack.
Midway through this season, Arya Stark—a survivor of family trauma, like almost everyone on the series—watches a Punch-and-Judyish play about her clan’s history. She sees her father beheaded, an act she had witnessed in real life. Then she laughs at the death of her enemy, the psychotic Joffrey, giggling amid a serious crowd. But, when the woman playing Cersei weeps over Joffrey’s corpse, Arya’s face goes still. The scene felt designed to let both audiences cry, the one inside the show and the one outside it. It was rare permission to acknowledge that, even when a villainess grieves a sadist, it’s not really a joke. In a show that so often demands armor, it was a powerful reprieve: the chance to be more than just another hungry dog. ♦
