Observing or Participating: Game of Thrones, Hannibal, and the Question of Viewer Culpability

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE MOST RECENT EPISODES OF HANNIBAL AND GAME OF THRONES.

This week both Game of Thrones and Hannibal raised specific questions about the relationship between televised violence and viewer responsibility. Not in the tired and hackneyed register of Reagan era congressional moralists trying to chart the relationship between violence on TV and violence in life, in hope of a smoking gun, but in the more immediately arresting register of complicity with structures of violence.

Thrones has been strongly, and rightly, criticized for its representations of violence against women. While I won’t delve into a specific discussion of the violence perpetrated this season against Sansa Stark, it is worth having at the front of your mind. This week’s episode “The Dance of Dragons” was no exception. Through the course of the episode we watched Meryn Trant, one of the central figures on Arya’s list (he killed her fencing instructor in season one, remember?), purchase a girl for sex, and were treated to the sight of Stannis Baratheon, a figure who is supposed to be known for his rectitude and justice, elect to burn his daughter alive in the most callous bid for the success of a military expedition since Agamemnon dispatched Iphigenia at Aulis. The episode’s pay-off for having us sit through 45 minutes of violence directed not even at adult women (which is more than bad enough) but against girl children was a scene set in Meereen’s version of the Coliseum. As viewers, we had spent nearly three quarters of the episode’s run time in the same position as Dany and Tyrion—watching terrible violence play out in front of us as a form of entertainment. But when the Sons of the Harpy emerged from the crowd, viewer perspective shifted. The grotesquery was de-centered, and it was almost impossible not to be caught up in the action. From the moment Jorah threw that javelin, we were no longer in the position of Dany and Tyrion; we were in the position the crowd had occupied the moment before, baying for blood.

The conclusion of “Antipasto,” the first episode of the new season of Hannibal addresses this question directly. Having brought Anthony Dimmond back to the home he shares with Dr. Du Maurier and commenced with murdering him, Hannibal poses a question to Bedelia: “are you observing or participating?” She replies that she is observing. Hannibal is not so sure. He asks her if she is trying to understand him, to suss out his motivations, to figure out what will come next. When she replies in the affirmative, he points out that “then you are participating.” The point is clear, investment in the outcome—whether it is literal profit or emotional payoff—is all that is required to make one, in some sense, an agent of narrative violence. Similar discussions have roiled all year long in relationship to sports: knowing that a game like NFL football is unspeakably violent and destroys the bodies of the men who play it at the highest levels, what is the responsibility of the viewer? Ratings for Game of Thrones and the NFL have never been higher, both are on the verge of acquiring a legitimate license to print money. When Tyrion tells Dany that she can stop the violence in the pits, he is right. He is also speaking to us. Narrative enters our lives through a particular medium, and we have the power to activate or deactivate those media sources within the context of our lives. But Hizdahr is also right when he rebuts Tyrion’s claim that Dany can stop what is happening whenever she wants to by saying “No. You can’t.” Because Dany lives in a world that is structured by violence, and that violence will not go away simply by ignoring it. She can shut it out of her own life, or she can try. We can turn off the television or close the book, but that insulates us only from one degree of complicity. We are always participating.