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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs 'Game of Thrones' Escapist Enough?
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Tenth grade history classes are often taught that in bad times—specifically, the Great Depression—Americans prefer escapist entertainment. And you don’t need this blog post to tell you that we are indeed in bad times, with this ever-lagging economic “recovery” where stock indexes rise as people are coming up on four and five years of unemployment. But typically the escapism we once preferred was, as in the Great Depression, social-comment-free: musicals like 42nd Street and Anything Goes, superhero comic books or cutesy Shirley Temple pictures. Sprawling quasi-Hobbesian magical-realist epics about the nature of power and sex in society: not so much. Until now, when we wanted to escape, we reached for utopias.
Which, whatever else it might be, Westeros is not. Because George R.R. Martin has not finished his books—and as someone who greatly prefers the books to the show, I pray that he one day does—it’s hard to know if he’s going to give us a big, cathartic finale, destroy his Ring or his Death Star, so to speak. But it is hard to imagine how exactly that could come about. The difference between Game of Thrones and the other epics that Americans cling to is that in Star Wars and Lord of the Rings there is an identifiable enemy. The Empire, the Red Eye of Sauron: however much their evil has contaminated our heroes, the quest is clear. They must be defeated, and if at the very last moment something like Gollum has to intervene and bite your finger off to achieve that, no harm no foul. The mountain erupts and the Ewoks are ready to party. Even in the relatively even-handed Star Trek universe, the less well-defined “go where no one has gone before” quest held out the promise of new frontiers. The scales still come out for good over evil.
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’m not so much concerned, as some are, with what any of this reveals about Martin’s politics, or about those of the showrunners David Benioff or D.B. Weiss. Nor do I think, particularly, that the public’s love of Game of Thrones comes from a flat embrace of the political values of Westeros. (The joy many people take in Daenerys, I think, comes from her potential to subvert all those rules, in particular the one about being ruled by a man.) It’s more that the core of the show, with its—dare I say it—postmodern approach to power, represents a shift in how we are imagining alternate worlds.
And that strikes me as politically interesting. The German philosopher (and Marxist) Ernst Bloch argued, in his Principle of Hope, that the phenomenon of escapism was actually a good thing, in terms of encouraging social change. His thought, to put it in an oversimplified but nonetheless accurate way, was that no one ever started a revolution without a bit of hope. And as such, many utopian dreams and escapist fantasias were really about the articulation of the hope of a better world in a really bad one. But Game of Thrones, for better or for worse, isn’t about that. It is about choosing the lesser of evils, and the insistence on hope seems to have very little to do with it. Some people will applaud that, saying it gives people a more realistic view of how power works and change is achieved. But call me a dreamer, then: I’d rather have my prime directive and utopian Shire with its second breakfast, somehow.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/173582/game-thrones-escapist-enough#
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Tien1985
(920 posts)But I'm half way through the 4th book. They are dark, very dark. Sometimes I wonder if there is a point to the darkness, or if he just writes that way for the shock value of it. I'm not at the end of the series though, so I don't want to make that call before I finish. I don't know. The blogger has a point.
cali
(114,904 posts)on escapism in tough times.
As far as books v show go, I'm in a tiny minority of people who actually prefer the show to the books, although I've enjoyed the first 3, which is as far as I've gotten. Like so many fantasy writers, Martin seems plagued by the curse of excess verbiage.
Newest Reality
(12,712 posts)is an interesting way to distract, distort and support cultural insertions of conceptual infection.
I've wondered if media and entertainment industries, at-large, rely on escapism as a means of sustaining control and conformity. It can be like a sanctioned drug that seems harmless and, of course, the media creates the perspective that its products are important and useful in the Marshall Mcluhan sense that: the media IS the message.
Oh well, there is a lot of money in distraction and the worse conditions become, the more it may become a vehicle to continue the vicious circle of manipulative cycles.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)martin is a fat geek who navigated hollywood successfully (even prior to got). he knows power games.
cali
(114,904 posts)it's not about what the author prefers at all.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)"But call me a dreamer, then: I’d rather have my prime directive and utopian Shire with its second breakfast, somehow. "
cali
(114,904 posts)HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)and the last paragraph refutes it. It's called analysis. Really not that hard to see that. Why you're insisting that the author prefers escapism is a mystery to me, but in any case, you certainly seem to have missed the point. again.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)more spurious claims from you. ho hum. it's a bad habit.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)
Hayabusa
(2,135 posts)I wouldn't be surprised if he finishes the books with the White Walkers winning. If he finishes at all.
Bolo Boffin
(23,796 posts)A relationship along the lines of Rhaegar and Lyanna that also will not be allowed by the powers that be.
distantearlywarning
(4,475 posts)It's a fantastical commentary on American culture.
Whisp
(24,096 posts)I saw Martin on a cbc interview a while back and what he said about good and evil was very interesting. The evil was apparent in the regular formula in the Star Wars series and in LoTR as stated in the clip in the OP.
Martin's good and evil resides in all of us as individuals and the struggles we have with that within us.
Here is the interview: His good and evil comments are near the beginning.
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Shows/Shows/George+Stroumboulopoulos+Tonight/Guest+Interviews/ID/2209994735/
JaneyVee
(19,877 posts)
Oilwellian
(12,647 posts)I've always thought television, theatrical plays and fictional novels were escapist by nature. My entire family are Game of Throne cultists. It's very well done. 
JaneyVee
(19,877 posts)The episode had alot of heads on sticks and they said they can't make new ones so one they had to use was indeed Bush's head, which was laying around the prop room.
99Forever
(14,524 posts)... but yes, I think it's almost a given that we need to "escape" into fiction from time to time, given all of the shitty things we are confronted with in the real world.
d_r
(6,907 posts)that star trek and Tolkien are more positive alternative realities.
I think that anyone that would want to "escape" our world to Westeros would have to be a nut. It is a brutal place. Feudalism, slavery, torture, sexual slavery, disease, war, famine, not to mention white walkers up north. Human life is worth nothing there at all. It is brutal and ugly. It is about as utopian as walking dead. It is more interesting that we've gotten to a point where the "escapism" is really horrible places rather than oz. Dystopian not utopian.
MineralMan
(146,312 posts)It is an entertainment - a fantasy. It reflects various themes from history, various political things, but it is still just a fantasy series. The fantasy genre is one I never could quite enjoy sufficiently. Too many areas where I had to suspend disbelief without a logical reason to do so. I prefer real accounts of actual history. Either that or techno science fiction. Fantasy leaves me cold.
Martin's good at the genre. He's popular. They made a TV series, which appears to be enjoyed by a number of people, including my wife, who watches the shows on her iPad after I've gone to sleep and then regales me with some of the details of each episode over coffee in the morning.
I tried watching it, but couldn't get engaged in it. So, I don't watch it. I do pretend to listen to my wife's accounts, since I'm not a stupid man.
What will happen? It's unimportant. The fantasy is all that's required...that and some attractive naked women from time to time and a lot of violence. Typical stuff.
What will happen? The show will end. The book series will end. Martin will either find a way to end it or will die without finishing the epic saga. In the end, nobody will care. It is a fantasy.
2ndAmForComputers
(3,527 posts)It reeks of condescension sprinkled with puritanism.
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)
