Blockbuster Women: The Game of Thrones Poison and the Fury Road Antidote

This Post Contains Spoilers from the Game of Thrones Season 5 Finale, Which I Wouldn’t Feel Bad Ruining for Decent Human Beings, but Some of You Nerds Are So Damn Vengeful.

So there we were, twenty million strong, all of us tuned in to the HBO feeds that we all scrupulously pay for, because piracy is not a victimless crime and we know that the Many Faced God does not look kindly on people who take what is not theirs.

We all tuned in to watch one of the last consensus entertainments in American popular culture—and in the course of an hour we watched female children beaten as part of a program of sadistic sexual exploitation, a Sand Snake whose only role in the narrative of the season was to expose her breasts announce to a man “you want a good girl, but you need the bad pussy,” and a woman forced to confront her sexual crimes, beg forgiveness from an old white man, and then “atone” for her sins through an act of ritual humiliation centered around her own nudity and a habited prioress who announced her shame like a 19^th century town crier that would have made the inquisitors of Salem blush.

Many people have, over the course of this fifth season, abandoned Game of Thrones because of its sexual politics. This is hardly surprising. The show has demonstrated its willingness, over and over again, to use rape and other forms of sexual violence not as narrative tools, but as emotional bludgeons. There have been times where watching this show was like paying attention to a hostage crisis. I have heard, from people I respect, the argument that rape can be used to further narrative goals in valuable ways, and that we should restrain judgment until all the facts are in. Well, the facts are in. Game of Thrones has demonstrated that it has no idea how to handle such subjects with anything approaching insight. Women exist in the world of the show to be punished. I mentioned earlier this week Hannibal Lecter’s argument that watching makes us complicit, and Thrones made virtually the same argument this week by positioning their own viewers as Meryn Trant, the sadistic pedophile that Arya dispatched, for an hour this week, we all ostensibly took our pleasure from watching women be hurt.

A quick review of the placement of women in the culture of blockbuster entertainment over the last several months has not been promising. From the controversy over Black Widow’s role, and the extra-curricular comments of her male co-stars, in The Avengers: The Age of Ultron, to the subtler disdain for Bryce Dallas Howard’s park executive in Jurassic World, women have not been well served by this summer’s highest grossing fare. That’s not necessarily unusual. Women are generally not well treated in most mass cultural entertainment and it surrounding discourses (see Sarkeesian, Anita) , it has stood out more sharply this summer. Part of the reason for that is that the summer began with Imperator Furiosa, Charlize Theron’s character in the absolutely wonderful Mad Max: Fury Road (a film I am growing fonder of literally every day that passes). Fury Road did not perform narrative rocket science either. It simply gave Theron, the film’s main character despite the title, something to do. She had agency, she took action. Nor is Fury Road a narrative without sexual violence. The violence against women in Immortan Joe’s compound is as frightening and intense as anything that has been in Thrones, but the principle difference is that the women who were subjected to violence were not made narratively passive by it. It is impossible to imagine Furiosa, or one of the breeder wives that it is her mission to flee, or one of the mothers that their convoy finds on the edge of the desert speaking the line that Sansa Stark had in the finale, expressing her worry that if Ramsay had his way “there would be nothing of [her] left.” The reason it is impossible to imagine any of the women in Fury Road speaking these lines, is that the film realizes that humanity is not something that can be externally stripped away, it has to be given up. The Reek storyline in Thrones, and the Sansa storyline, and many, many others reveal the degree to which the show’s writers either have not grasped this point, or are interested in testing the boundaries not of their characters, but of their audience. Part of the result of that failure of realization is the deployment of episodes like the season five finale—cudgels designed to induce total emotional surrender. I’m kind of tired of surrendering.