The last two seasons of Game of Thrones are all the argument needed that DB Weiss and David Benioff’s new passion project, Confederate, should be aborted immediately.
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS
Let’s get this out of the way first. Weiss and Benioff abandoned the work and abandoned their fans. When the two are confined to the source material they were able to make sweeping, beautiful, deep, and meaningful episodes about the nature of humanity. The nature of society. About life itself. They owe this to Martin. When they ran out of his words, they turned to plot devices and clichés hurrying along to an ending that, though vaguely satisfying, could easily have been so much more. The conflict with the Night King could have been a season instead of a couple of episodes. The ominous winter lasted all of a, well, winter. The spiraling of the Mother of Dragons into insanity would have been a lot more powerful with more than one episode to play with. The lead up to the Battle of King’s Landing could easily have taken another season. Instead we got a hasty wrap up because Benioff and Weiss (and perhaps HBO?) were done with this story. I suppose it could have been worse. They could have run the show into the ground the way they do so many American television shows.
*Full disclosure: I have not read the books and I am not going to until Martin finishes the series or dies. My lizard brain curls up in anxiety at the thought of waiting years (and years and years) on the next novels to come out. I’d rather just know it’s never going to happen.*
Now on to why they have shown themselves completely unfit to run a show like Confederate.
When confined to Martin’s narrative Weiss and Benioff produced works of art. But even then, they made some seriously problematic decisions. Diversity in GoT is sorely lacking. This is predominantly due to most of the main action being set among the great houses of Westeros. A land which George RR Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, has claimed to be inspired by what he erroneously believed/s to be a very white Medieval Europe. Martin was also no doubt influenced by Tolkien and CS Lewis, who are often hailed as the fathers of the high fantasy genre. Both are white Englishmen born into a British empire that spanned the globe and their work reflects a white privileged and Eurocentric way of thinking about the world.
Modern views on race are, well, modern. The concept of whiteness as we use it was born of European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. White as an adjective in reference to “a white man, a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion” didn’t make it into print until the 1670s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. However, even by our modern standards, medieval European history and literature are scattered with people of color.
This truth is not acknowledged in part because a view of the Medieval era popularized over the last couple of hundred years by slaveholders and Nazis has seeped into the popular consciousness in both America and in Europe (where they really should know better). The fact that even now most of the modern world exists in a white supremacist patriarchy means that white supremacist views are not only held by the masses, white and non-white, but often seen as value neutral perspectives. As a result, this misperception of a pure white world of European Middle Age has not only been mostly unquestioned it has been reinforced in and by movies, television, books, and even video games.
Scholars of the history of the Middle Ages are aware that the medieval world was not limited only to Western Europe and that, even it was, people of color would be present. People moved around in the Middle Ages. There was trade to be done, in things and in people. There were political machinations and wars to be fought. As a result, even by our modern standards medieval European history and literature are scattered with people of color in both supporting and major roles. From saints like Maurice and Balthazar, to countless paintings and sculptures depicting a range of people of color, to Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, to the adventures of knight Sir Palomides, a Muslim until his late in life conversion to Christianity.
It’s also how the few people of color are portrayed in GoT. The fact that most of the people of color we do see on the show are bowed at the feet of Daenerys as she parades her white savior routine around Essos on a journey of self-empowerment or some such shit only makes things worse. It underscores the idea that humans have seen, and continue to see, other places and people as a source of power to be exploited for our own ends. In western culture this is a viewpoint most explicitly illustrated in European colonization and imperialism, the devastating effects of which we feel to this day. GoT casting people of color in non-speaking roles, as servants, as slaves, as barbarian hordes, while the white folk swan around in silks in their castles genteelly poisoning each other- it matters.
Next, lets talk about sex. The world of GoT is savage, violence and rape are a norm. But on two occasions Benioff and Weiss decided to change what was consensual sex in the novels to rape on the show. The first time is right in the first season when Daenerys is sold into marriage to Khal Drogo. While one may (and should) argue whether a fourteen-year-old character is capable of giving consent in the novel Drogo goes out of his way to obtain an explicit yes, both vocal and physical, from his child bride.
“He stopped then, and drew her down onto his lap. Dany was flushed and breathless, her heart fluttering in her chest. He cupped her face in his huge hands and looked into his eyes. “No?” he said, and she knew it was a question.
She took his hand and moved it down to the wetness between her thighs. “Yes,” she whispered as she put his finger inside her.”
Considering that Daenerys goes on to fall in love with Drogo in both the book and the show one must wonder what Benioff and Weiss were thinking in replacing a gentle scene with one of violent sexual assault. At least they aged up Daenerys and so could avoid the ick factor of a fourteen-year-old protagonist cuddled up in the lap of the nearly thirty Khal.
The second was Jaime Lannister raping his sister and romantic soulmate, Cersei. In the novel Cersei’s protests are about propriety and quickly fade to:
““Hurry,” she was whispering now, “quickly, quickly, now, do it now, do me now. Jaime Jaime Jaime.” Her hands helped guide him. “Yes,” Cersei said as he thrust, “my brother, sweet brother, yes, like that, yes, I have you, you’re home now, you’re home now, you’re home.” She kissed his ear and stroked his short bristly hair.”
Whereas on the show Jaime rapes his sister in anger, mounting her in a temple next to the corpse of their murdered son to the tune of her helpless sobs. What makes it worse is the showrunners and others involved in the production, including the director, Graves, and Coster-Waldu, the (Danish) actor who plays Jaime, seemed to be unaware that they had just filmed a rape scene. Benioff and Weiss have a partiality for pumping up the sex and violence of their source material, particularly for combining the two. But it’s one thing to make an already deviant scene that much more depraved. It’s another to change the tone of the scene entirely. Sure, a brother and sister having grief sex in front of the corpse of their son is sick. But a boy’s father raping his mother in front of the boy’s dead body twists the perversion into something entirely different.
Even before Jaime’s redemption plot arc, Jaime raping Cersei is a major anomaly for these two characters – based purely on what we’ve seen in the show. Rape is simply not something Jaime would do. That Cersei would stand for it is absurd. She’s eviscerated people for less of a violation. I’ve got serious issues for using rape to advance plot or as, or really, in lieu of, character development. But that’s not even what happens here. Instead both characters go on like it never happened. Cersei’s development and plot are unaffected while Jaime’s is weirdly disrupted but only for us fans. Which implies that the rape was there simply as exploitation. For shock value.
This is how Benioff and Weiss deal with fantasy and fiction. But Confederate would be both fantasy, fiction, and more. It would be revisionist history. The problem is that a revisionist history of the Confederacy and what led to it already exists – in our textbooks. To this day American high school children learn that being enslaved in the US wasn’t that bad. Plantations are sacred monuments to a time when things were right with the world. There are still many of us rallying around Confederate symbols.
Racist and white supremacist ideas about the past are deeply entwined in our culture. They can seem natural and normal and are the reason people get defensive when talking about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and other racist policies implemented or enforced by governments at the state and federal levels until almost the end of the 20th century. The past forms and informs the foundations of the present. There is very little in the way Benioff and Weiss have handled sensitive issues in GoT to suggest they are at all capable of handling the sensitive issues that would come with a story like Confederate.
Challenging the white supremacist patriarchy’s narrative, even in a show with dragons, but especially on a show like Confederate, is important because, as a Tufts study published in Science in 2009 found, televised portrayals of characters can and often do influence the bias of viewers. And not only is television powerful Benioff and Weiss make powerful television. After watching the first episode, years ago, my initial comment wasn’t on the plot, the character development, or the complexity. It was that the production value was amazing. No other television show that I have seen has been so visually stunning. Based on their previous work Weiss and Benioff would take the inhumanity that is generational chattel slavery and make it glossy. The chains would gleam. The sale of women for sexual debasement would be grotesquely sexy. The screaming of children ripped from their mother’s arms would wrench the heart strings only enough to keep the plot going. And the focus would be, as always, on the trials and pain of the white people inflicting all of this misery.
So, in short:
- Weiss and Benioff tend to unquestioningly accept the white supremacist narrative.
- Their exploitation of the female body is so extreme it led to the creation of the term sexposition. This is the technique, used in visual media, of providing exposition against a backdrop of explicit sex or graphic nudity.
- They were unable to match the complexity of Martin’s writing despite having a five novel foundation to build on. So, they abandoned the project and the fans.
- The US, hell, the Americas have not come to terms with our racist past, much less present. There are, in this day and age, white supremacists rioting in the streets and murdering innocent bystanders.
- Benioff and Weiss make brutality beautiful.
When looking at a work of art or reading a piece of history that contradicts our reality we are confronted with our own expectations and prejudices. The resistance that the GoT showrunners had to expanding the diversity in the show beyond Martin’s limited ideals, their acceptance of and push back against anything but the white supremacist narrative, their focus on exploitation, their inability to see a rape when they orchestrated it. All of this underscores the fact that they are not ready, and may never be ready, to spearhead something like Confederate.
That said, Game of Thrones is a truly stunning achievement.
Sources
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gexwp/game-of-thrones-is-even-whiter-than-you-think
https://qz.com/667326/westeros-has-a-race-problem/
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/game-of-thrones-casting-director-responds-to-lack-of-diverse-actors
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/and-the-winner-of-the-game-of-thrones-is-/2019/05/20/cb67f900-7acc-11e9-b1f3-b233fe5811ef_story.html?utm_term=.28fc83c5d5eb
https://www.publicmedievalist.com/game-thrones-racism-problem/
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/game-of-thrones-diversity-season-7-david-oyelowo
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/game-thrones-race-non-white-characters-books-show/
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2019/may/06/how-game-of-thrones-has-got-it-in-for-people-of-colour
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/06/161650/game-of-thrones-black-characters-racial-diversity
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/yellowface-whitewashing-history
https://www.self.com/story/game-of-thrones-diversity-problem
https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/288wxb/spoilers_all_whitewashing_tyrion_in_the_show_angry/
https://www.theroot.com/what-the-game-of-thrones-finale-teaches-us-about-white-1834900412
https://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/
https://psmag.com/education/yes-there-were-poc-in-medieval-europe
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gexwp/game-of-thrones-is-even-whiter-than-you-think
https://www.publicmedievalist.com/race-racism-middle-ages-tearing-whites-medieval-world/
This is an entire series. Need to share indecently on Rena Mam