Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (part II of) Part 2

Life is a state of Mad Men, with Game of Thrones always creeping in. Mad Men, recreating an era of ersatz American perfection which turned out to be a prison from which America had to escape, and doing so with its own claustrophobic perfection.

Endings are tricky, they're much easier to do well when the show was flawed, because the show can then be about the ending itself. Was there any truly great TV show, or great novel, that landed its ending on a level as estimable as the rest of it? Any story longer than the story itself is not about capturing the story, but the passing of life itself. The passing of life and time can't simply end (unless it's The Sopranos), it has to wind down and show that life still goes on even if we don't see it. 

Mad Men was a victim of its own achievements. It was, in my firm opinion, the greatest TV Drama that ever there was, or ever there could be. But subjecting that level of examination to life as it happens, to 'lifeness', can never be sustained forever. Just as life seems to, the story can go on forever, even if we're not around for it. But in the real world, every story has to end, and it's almost a given that a story that so deeply questions what pure life experience is made of will have no idea how to correctly land its ending, because no person has seen their end and lived to tell us what it's like. There was only one appropriate ending for Mad Men, and it was already used by The Sopranos. 

The final half-season of Mad Men was perhaps its weakest. It did not end with a bang, it simply wound down to an ending that is completely in keeping with the tone of the show itself, yet it felt completely wrong at the same time. To see the shock of Don Draper becoming a fervent follower of an Ashram is so banal, so petty in comparison to the mythic man he once was, that it diminishes this larger-than-life figure to smallness. It leaves a horrible taste in our mouths that we've been following ten years in the life of a man we thought was of mythic dimension, only for him to confess his sins and in his first moment of true vulnerability, show that he's just a human as gullible as the next person. And yet, in keeping with history, in keeping with the tone of the show, it's still absolutely perfect. 

Mad Men is a study in the glories, and the limitations, of perfection. It is as flawless a work of art as has ever been created, but its flawlessness is its flaw. It's a prison from which the only escape is to ignore it. By Season 5, their best in my humble opinion, the world no longer cared about Mad Men. It had moved on to Game of Thrones. Mad Men is about trying to grasp the mysteries of human personality, Game of Thrones is about showing us how cheap human life is. Mad Men is a work whose creator is a single authority who allowed no compromise to his vision and no telegraph as to what was in store. Game of Thrones is a work defined by collaboration, whose plot is developed in concert with the original novelist whose work half the audience already knew from the books before it's shown on TV, and whose work may further be developed by suggestions from the audience. Mad Men is meant as a work of Art with a capital A, Game of Thrones is a work of awful magnificence, but like so many works of great art, it is primarily intended as entertainment. Mad Men is a micro snapshot of our world and history, Game of Thrones is a macro panoramic view of an historical world that isn't even our own. Mad Men deals in perfection, Game of Thrones deals in the infinite. 

Perfection is a prison from which the life force which is nature has to escape. The classical age of TV is over. Mad Men is our Mozart, our Leonardo, our young Shakespeare, our Tolstoy, our Jean Renoir. The elegance, the naturalism, the formal perfection, is so finely honed that the only way forward is to smash the rules it sets out into a million pieces. In the control which the showrunner has, Mad Men recalls the Hollywood's Golden Age of the Director, when Coppola and Scorsese and Altman could fulfil a genuine artistic vision. But in its achievement, perhaps Mad Men goes even past Coppola and Scorsese, with their concessions to potboilerdom, and is an achievement to rival great figures from the Golden Age of World Cinema - Renoir, Ozu, Ray, DeSica, Bergman and others of similarly gilded eminence to the World of Great Art. Except perhaps for Altman and Bogdanovich, no director from America's Golden Age mined the problems of real people so deeply.  

But maybe great art needs that potboiler aspect to it. We are as much dust as divinity, and without the ability to be entertained, who will pay attention? Even I can admit that Mad Men had its dull, even wooden moments that didn't ring true at all. Perfection is an enclosed space from which by definition, you can't reach higher than its limitations. But when the White Walkers come spilling into Hardhome like latter day devils making their first inroads into Elysium, when Ned Stark is senselessly beheaded in front of his family, when Daenerys Targaryen emerges alive like a goddess from the fire - completely nude with baby dragons on her shoulders, when a condemned Tyrion Lannister curses the entire audience of the showtrial his father convened to have him killed, when Oberyn Martell's head smashes like a falling melon, when half the remaining Starks are butchered when they finally recover from the loss of their patriarch, when Stannis Baratheon - TV's Macbeth, or King Saul - literally sacrifices his daughter to fire as a last desperate attempt to fulfill his ambition, you realize that you're dealing with a different, wholly more potent and terrible, kind of sublimity. Mad Men merely hints at this horrific, warnographic sublimity in its 2nd to last episode when an Oklahoma WWII veteran alludes to his brief dalliance with cannibalism on the Western Front. Game of Thrones stands, perhaps lesserly, but still very much present, in the tradition of Beethoven, Michelangelo, older Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Orson Welles. It grasps at the infinite, and goes higher and further into the sublime than Mad Men ever could. It's strong evidence, like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare at his worst, that only works that sink so low can rise so high. No amount of absurd, bad, or trashy scenes can take away the horrific and disgusting greatness Game of Thrones has achieved. 

Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (Part 1 of) Part II

There was a few weeks when I thought I'd made my peace with Game of Thrones. No matter how much sadism is served to us, no matter how many rapes, how much torture, how many grisly ways to mutilate bodies, how much undeserved death, it is still true to itself, and true to what we as the audience require from it. Here is a TV show, a work of art, of operatic, epic, Shakespearean, near-Biblical ambition; with more characters, more plotting, more set pieces, more sheer scope, than anything ever seen on a screen, either large or small; served to us in brilliantly disturbing bits, but with a surfeit of wit and panache to help us through the grimmest of passages. Last week, the White Walkers appeared, in a battle scene (or a massacre) whose filmmaking stands with the most extraordinary passages in Spielberg.

Then Stannis Baratheon sacrificed his daughter to the Lord of Light by burning her on a pyre, and we the audience are compelled to listen to this sweet little girl, more intelligent than anyone around her and who never got anything but suffering from this show, as she screams in agony while her mother is held back by soldiers after she tries to rescue her. There has never yet been horror quite like this so graphically rendered on a screen. And make no mistake, this is horror rendered as it is. It's the kind that haunts our nightmares for years because we're made to care about these characters in a way that slasher movies throwing fake blood at a camera never could. With slasher movies, taking their cue as they do from Alfred Hitchcock, there is almost always a wink that tells us this is all in good fun - you can disengage from your nightmares being exploited at any moment. But Game of Thrones never gives us that wink. We're carried along, horror after horror, with our critical faculties long since obliterated. The sensory assault continues week after week, battering us into craving ever greater levels of gruesomeness. What horror can possibly be in store after this?

I predicted that this would happen weeks ago, my mother can attest to it. And yet I honestly thought they would spare us the horror, just this once, because it's just too horrible. Perhaps she'd be led into a room with Melisandre, and it would tastefully happen offscreen. But no, it happens in real time, in front of a cast of thousands. Fortunately, we're spared watching the burning girl, but we hear everything, and short of actually seeing something like that, what could possibly be more horrifying?

Game of Thrones is in a terrible bind. In order to keep us watching, they have to create ever more horrifying levels of violence. Yes, war is war, today as much as in the Middle Ages, and people far more real than anybody on Game of Thrones get raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered; but to show it so often makes violence the entire point of the show. At this point, Game of Thrones belongs to that unholy class of art that's both great art and horrific exploitation. 

Yes, I can hear the protests of the half-dozen of you who've read this far. It's the same protest my mother pointed out to me. There are so many other things in Game of Thrones - complex characters portrayed by great actors, amazing filmmaking of stupefyingly complex plots, and intrigue on a level The Wire can only dream of. But that's ultimately the problem with the fantasy genre. It can literally do anything, and because it can, it must do everything in order to be compelling. Reality may have moved past magic and medieval superstition, but our minds have not. Our psyches still boil with reptile fascination for the ability to destroy, and the more we gaze into the that power to destroy, the more likely society is to embrace destruction.  

Art is a societal seismograph, and when millions of people are reading and watching scenes of horrific violence, with every taboo broken of what society once held sacred, history stands to reason that horrific violence is none too far away. Like the Ring Cycle before it, like The Brothers Karamazov, like even Candide, Game of Thrones exists in the world of the psyche and its archetypes. It speaks to its society because it gives voice to all the unmentionables that are already in the air. 

Westeros is America. The phenomenon of Game of Thrones was created by a country with 350 million privately held guns, with nearly 20 trillion dollars in government debt and nearly another 40 trillion in personal debt (household, small business, unfunded liabilities) , with temperatures and sea levels rising (summer is coming...), thousands of nuclear weapons not protected, 1 in 10-20 people controlling half the country's wealth, and a threat from a country known for its dragons just beyond the horizon. Game of Thrones speaks, very loudly, to the unmentionable, almost unconscious, fears of what lies in a future all too close at hand. Some works of art exist to console us, others exist to drive us mad. 

The world has always relied on fantasy to give us the most stupendous bursts of sublimity. Religion is impossible without fantasy literature, so is all the human progress that comes in the wake of epic tales that awoke parts of our imagination we never knew existed. How many worlds of thought were opened by the Bible? By Homer? By Shakespeare? All of them traffic in a mental world where even the most miraculous things are possible. But the sublimity that makes them possible also drives men crazy with the idea that all things are possible so long as we make them happen. 

There is not a shred of verifiable evidence to show that art makes us better people, but it is a mark of civilization that we can recognize our baser selves through art, but great art puts us in touch with the fundamental truths of what lies within our natures, almost like a 'warning and reassurance' system to our psyches as to what we're capable of. We shouldn't necessarily like what we see, and we shouldn't necessarily believe what great art tells us - nowhere moreso these days than on Game of Thrones. 

Game of Thrones was an inevitable show. If it weren't Game of Thrones which shows us the deep darkness of human nature, it might have been a still more violent show. But while we grew incredibly accustomed to violence long before Game of Thrones appeared, it's beyond debate that Game of Thrones has desensitized us to the idea of that those we are close to will be murdered.

800 Words: Game of Thrones - The New TV

SPOILER ALERT - OF COURSE

Last night, Mad Men premiered its last season and nobody notices, they were too busy recovering from King Joffery’s poisoning at his own wedding. One show prides itself on belaying audience expectations, going at its own pace, and giving the audience what it needs rather than what it wants. The other show plays to our basest, most primal bloodlust. One show presents humanity in all its slow-burning existential messiness, the other is a freak show.

King Joffery’s death wasn’t even the most disturbing moment in the episode, it wasn’t even the second-most. The second-most disturbing was to watch a beautiful girl chased through a forest like a hunted fox by nobles until the nobles ordered her torn apart by their wild dogs. But at least the actual tearing apart was off-screen, even if we had to listen to her choked screams. The most disturbing was to watch King Stannis order the burning of his wife’s brother at the stake, and by this point, Stannis’s wife is such a religious nut that she’s happy about it. She claims she saw the Lord of Light claim his soul after the fire cleansed it. I’ve occasionally had nightmares about medieval torture since I was a child, and that moment shook me so profoundly that I’m actively contemplating giving up the show - it’s not the first time such a moment caused me to.

Nevertheless, I love watching Game of Thrones. I also love watching youtube clips of idiots jumping into cactus patches. We all have a part of ourselves - the Id - that wants to trivialize other human beings, that wants to treat others as our playthings, that makes us feel triumphant in our relative security to the savagery brought upon people in inferior positions to ours. We may superficially mourn the loss of the Starks, but our primary emotion at their demise is excitement and delight - delight at an exhibition that alleviates us of civilization’s veneer and excites us with its barbarism. Game of Thrones conjures a world of medieval inhumanity, and is a spiritual descendent of the Auto-da-fe, during which medieval humans laughed and cheered uproariously as they picniced to the soothing screams of heretics burned and disemboweled - heretics who may well have been their neighbors. We want to think our sensibility more evolved, but we’re a mere few centuries away. The reptile part of the brain is still with us, and for all our civilization, all it takes is to watch Joffery Baratheon turn purple to momentarily turn us into Joffery Baratheon.

In the history of Television, there is not a single show, not Seinfeld, not South Park, not The Sopranos, not Breaking Bad, that has shaken the world to the extent Game of Thrones has. Each of those shows felt utterly shocking in their heyday, but none of them seem to shock people in the manner which Game of Thrones does. Every episode is an event, because people can’t wait to find out to what new inhuman depth the show will bring us.

It has long been the privilege of costume drama, of legend, of fantasy and myth, to act out those situations which would seem completely unbelievable in reality. In dreams, many people may well perpetrate all those acts of violence and lust which we see on a show like Game of Thrones, but thankfully few could ever do in reality until a war happens. What Game of Thrones does, what Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby do, what Titus Andronicus and Richard III do, what Salome and The Ring Cycle do, what Breughel’s Triumph of Death and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights do, is to bring us closer to those horrible instincts which fester in the unconscious of every human. It is not the thinker or empath within us which loves such work, it is the Id, that Freudian sadist in every one of us which delights in seeing the suffering of others without fear of reprisal; and equally, it’s our anxious superegos, momentarily relieved that it can let down its guard because we no longer have to worry about breaking certain taboos. In reality, murder is rarely if ever funny, but in certain fictions, murder can be hilarious, it can be exciting, it can be delightful.

It was sometimes said about Alfred Hitchcock that he shot scenes of love as though they were scenes of murder, and scenes of murder as though they were scenes of love. This, more than any other reason, is why Alfred Hitchcock is still the most influential movie director of all time - many would even call him the greatest. After Hitch, there was no going back; movies were no longer about anything but voyeurism. The most salient quality of most great movies was to show you disturbing things that dared you to look away. For all its strengths in storyboarding, acting, production design, Game of Thrones is not worthy of Hitchcock. It does not display anything like the wit or character inwardness or philosophical profundity present in Rear Window, or Psycho, or The Birds, but it is a spiritual descendent of Hitch nevertheless because it shares his most influential quality. With Game of Thrones, television has now gone over the cliff to that exact same place. Will it eventually be remembered with all the veneration we now give to Hitchcock? I sure hope not, it would say something terrible about human beings. But it’s certainly possible.

And because Game of Thrones has brought TV to that new place where our every desire is met, TV itself has entered a new age. The years 1967 to 1983 - Bonnie and Clyde to The Right Stuff - were a sixteen-year golden age for movies when Hollywood cared about Art as much as Money. Movie directors were not merely artisans who created products to order, they were artists whose creativity was limited only by their imaginations. But the Star Wars Trilogy killed all that, because studios saw that by putting the focus on special effects rather than human beings, they could take in much more at the box office. Young men interested in technology would see movies over and over again, beleaguered adults interested in escapist fare rather than challenging work would wander in, knowing that they could turn their brains off; and they could bring their children too, secure in the knowledge that the children wouldn’t be exposed to anything too offensive.  

In the same way, the end of Mad Men in 2015 may mark the end of a golden era of American Television that began sixteen years before with the launch of The Sopranos. During these sixteen years, the showrunner was king, and the talented among them were free to pursue their art to the fullest extent of their potentials. For my entire adult life thus far, TV has been the most exciting thing in the world - an artform awakening to its fullest infinity. To see Mad Men or Seinfeld or The Simpsons or when they first air is a pleasure not altogether different from being present at the Globe to see Hamlet and King Lear. In every other artform, movies included, the revelations of what’s possible have mostly been revealed. Nearly every movie, novel, play, painting, sculpture, poem, and song is a footnote to work already created. But the history of TV is still being written, or at least it was until Game of Thrones.  We know that we’re the first people ever to experience revelations which no audience before us has ever experienced. Is there any greater privilege of being alive in the era we are?

Game of Thrones is a beginning. Good as it is, it is probably the beginning of TV’s decline in an internet age. Netflix, the corporate halfway house between television and the internet, is the most seismic shift in American culture since Ted Turner started distributing Basic Cable in 1976. A year later, Star Wars was released, and a trip to the movie theater became a special event rather than a way of life. The American Way of Life became television. But Game of Thrones has made us so accustomed to adrenaline and immediate gratification that it changed American TV into something like movies. Just as Star Wars was the first movie whose merchandising tie-ins were mass-marketed on television, Game of Thrones was the first show to gain its popularity through viewer feedback on the Internet. Game of Thrones is such a success because it gives its viewers what they want, unconsciously or consciously. The gratification on Game of Thrones is visceral and instant in a manner no show before it ever was. If a show wants to be successful in its wake, it will have to respond to its audience’s demands in more basic ways than even Game of Thrones ever needed to. On-demand viewing allows shows to be watched whenever people want, and however often people want. If a show makes demands on the audience, they can simply watch something less challenging. Every niche will have shows which cater exclusively to them, and television will very quickly become a less interesting place.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 35 and 34

I am not a typical blogger. I do not falsely claim knowledge of every movie, book, or album to come out in the last year. I’m merely a smarty-pantz who has occasional delusions of grandeur that one day he could be that guy who can claim knowledge of every movie, book, or album ever made when we’re all too old to beat each other up for being nerds.

This list will be about new ‘Cultural Stuffs,’ meaning ‘cultural stuffs’ that is new for me, and no one else. I’ll be ranking it in terms of what blew my mind the most. So...let’s get to it.



35. Animal Collective Fans


(Soooooooo deeeeeeeep.)

I’m only three years younger than Animal Collective’s musicians, and I grew up not ten minutes away from all four of them. I have a cousin who was their high school classmate and friend. But I have to be honest - Animal Collective’s music is hilariously overrated. I once heard their music described as “two Beach Boys’ albums playing simultaneously,” but it’s too complementary by half to mention them and The Beach Boys in the same sentence. Some artists create a kind of self-consciously lofty kitsch which is at best entertaining and at worst a last word in boredom. But intellectually insecure people inevitably mistaken this kind of kitsch for profundity. I have a personal list of artists who play that trick on people that goes on for ages and would seem like intellectual namedropping even for this blog (because whatever my intellectual faults, insecurity is not one of them:).
As music, the Animal Collective Concert which I went to this summer was pretty dull. As an experience, it was one of the most amazing concerts to which I’ve ever been. I have never seen an audience so enraptured, so viscerally involved in a performance as Animal Collective’s fans were this July at Merriweather Post Pavilion. It seemed less like a concert than a religious rite. Not a dull Anglican church service, but a Revivalist Mega-Church where half the people convulse while speaking in tongues and the other half sit in reverential silence until the music ends, at which point both halves explode as a single body into a frenzied roar. And lest my prim and classical self get called out for being naive, let me assure you, I’ve been to more than my share of concerts where the druggie contingent was plentiful and quite visible. But the hard drugs contingent usually takes up their own corner of the concert and make at least a pretense to discretion. I suppose drugs could explain part of this euphoria, but nowhere near the whole. The ecstasy on display at this concert was far more primal than drugs. There is clearly something in this music which inspires a euphoric sort of experience in people (though not in me). Perhaps what I was seeing was just mood music, a soundtrack for a lifestyle. But I felt exactly like what Mark Twain described about visiting Bayreuth, sight of the still-extant (and how) festival of Wagner operas: “I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in the community of the mad.....But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life....I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.” What Twain saw was something far more spiritual than most organized religion. He saw people mesmerized, infatuated, spellbound, by the kind of music that gives a far more religious experience than religion. That is what I saw in Animal Collective: a band not good enough for The Beach Boys, but good enough for Wagner.

34. Game of Thrones - The TV Show


(Some critic I can’t remember called this “The Greatest Use of Nudity in TV History.” I can’t help agreeing. As trash goes, this is utterly fantastic and tells a primal myth with awesome urgency. In case you’re too dumb to get it from the first sentence, it’s NSFW.)

Fantasy Literature is not for me. It’s a shame to declare this, because the list of people whom Fantasy Literature is most definitely ‘for’ numbers half my friends and one of my brothers. But I just don’t see it. And I can’t help thinking something a little creepy about privileged American kids in the 21st century spending years of their lives learning about fantasy worlds - particularly Jewish kids. Ashkenazi Jews spent a millenium trying to escape the brutality of precisely the sort of medievalish Northern European realms which fantasy literature is inevitably meant to recall (come on people, ‘dwarf’ was a euphemism for ‘Jew’ long before the Brothers Grimm and Wagner), and only a century after they got out, their spoiled American great-grandchildren want to go back.
I certainly understand the appeal of the sorts of parallel worlds one finds in fantasy books, but I frankly have enough trouble understanding our own to start thinking about a different one. So if there isn’t some sort of vast network of ambiguous motivations in either the human or the idea realm, I generally read about all those swordfights, spells, mythical creatures, and medievalish battles with disinterest well past narcoleptic. For all those reasons, I can like the Harry Potter series very much at the same time that I think The Hobbit is the worst book I’ve ever read - a title which I’m sure would be supplanted by Lord of the Rings if I ever finished it. There are plenty more fantasy books that I’ve read...er...started, and one day I’m sure I’ll make a concerted effort to finish them. Perhaps I’ll then discover that I adore everything about Fantasy Literature, but until that day, Fantasy Lit. is not for me.
When that day arrives, I will read more than a couple chapters from the Song of Fire and Ice which my brother Ethan, my resident fantasy lit scholar, swears is the best series he’s ever read. I certainly see the appeal - sex, murder, S&M, betrayal, fetishes, torture, who doesn’t like a story with all that? But let’s be honest here - everybody has their own outlet for those sorts of primal tales. And I never needed superhero comics or fairy tales, I had opera.
As a book, my problem with Game of Thrones was that the characters seemed uniformly wooden and boring. Yes, they die and dismember and fuck with impressive frequency, but not for a moment did I believe in them as anything more than plot points. It’s all too easy to read about the death of a character in which you have no investment. And the end result of Game of Thrones seemed to be a bunch of characters whose sole reason to exist is for us to watch them killed.
But the TV series is entirely different. On the page, Game of Thrones is dreary and heavy-handed. On the screen, Game of Thrones comes to wonderful, trashy life. Scenes that take an eon in the book to describe are dispensed of in two minutes. Scenes of unprecedented violence in the book whose descriptions feel creepily loving are played up with comic hamminess in the TV show. All that sex and violence which the books make lugubrious and funeral spring to an incredible comic vitality on the screen. The sex on the screen is very funny at worst, and at best it can be genuinely hot. Furthermore, violence takes far less time to describe with images than with words - so the audience is not left to wonder why the author cares more about violence than he does about character motivation. As a TV show, Game of Thrones is total and unapologetic trash. And for that quality, I think it will never be forgiven by many people who take the books seriously as high literature. But as far as trash goes, this is awesome.