(better late than never, hehe)
Several months ago, I 'tuned in' (streamed on my laptop while in bed, at my leisure) to the series finale of Game of Thrones, along with 19.3 million other people around the world. At that point, I was finishing the series in part due to intransigent commitment to finishing anything I start, which is itself at least partially due to some 'fear of missing out' or of irrelevance—the anxiety of non-conformity in highly conformist times, the social pressure that can go along with any mass-culture 'phenomenon.' My dissatisfactions with the last season echoed those of many other viewers—something just wasn't gripping me in the same way as those early episodes, in which each main character's unanticipated murder retained its shock value, and, with delightful relatability, the powers that be seemed constrained by their existence in a well-built complex fictional world.
A pervasive critique of the series was that the writing went 'off' after episodes outpaced the books. In this article by Zeynep Tufecki for Scientific American, the writer posits that the fundamental shift that took place from seasons 1-4, still based on George R. R. Martin's books, to seasons 5-8, whose writing was overseen by Benioff & Weiss, was one of the modality of storytelling, namely a shift from sociological to psychological narrative. The latter is the dominant mode of storytelling in the mass media with which we would be familiar from a series like Lord of the Rings, or any Disney movie: there are a set of main characters whose internal drives & senses of right & wrong steer the plot, usually along some variation of the 'hero's journey.' Sociological storytelling tells a larger story, fleshing out the story-world with the institutional & environmental factors that influence the characters operating within it, giving the viewer a wider perspective to empathise with any character's actions—or at least be able to understand them as more complex, rather than flattened avatars for good or evil or loyalty, etc.
This dominant mode of character-driven psychological narrative seems to be a holdover of the Freudianism that inspired much of the early-Modernist artistic production at the turn of the 20th century. The prismatic, fragmented 'stream of consciousness' musings of Joyce & Woolf exploring the nuances of the psyche, the self, & the way that lived experience is filtered & inflected differently by & through each individual person. Artists devised new formal methods of representing the human experience in a seemingly unmediated form (how does one actually experience sentient existence? how would I capture in words the flow of thoughts through my head?). This was a watershed moment for innovation in storytelling: now, the banal, the quotidian, the low-brow are all fodder for literature. And not just in the sense of the English Romantics, who a century prior revelled in idolizing the poor agrarian lifestyle as the nexus of some sort of truth of the human condition that is jeopardized by the Industrial Revolution.
About the same time that Freud was theorizing the id & the ego, as well as the pleasure principle & the death drive, of the individual psyche, Émile Durkheim was laying the foundations of sociology, notably in his text "Le Suicide" (1897), which was the first methodological study of a social phenomenon in its societal context. Prior to his study, suicide was viewed as an individual tragedy, a failure of the will; Durkheim was the first to collect data & identify societal trends that enlarged the scope to a societal scale (in his findings, he reported that single Protestant men in times of peace was the most at-risk demographic). He also developed a taxonomy of suicide, elaborating four general categories: egoistic (a feeling of not belonging), altruistic (in a society in which individual needs are subordinated to the needs of the whole), anomic (moral confusion & lacking social direction), and fatalistic (when a person's passions & free will is blocked by society). With these categories, one cannot view each suicide as a discrete, individual phenomenon without making connections to other similar cases. This sociological standpoint, the macro movement to Freud's micro/internal move, fostered a revolution in the humanities that touched anthropology, economics, literary studies, and laid the foundation for all sorts of 'cultural studies.' Writers like Pierre Bourdieu & Michel Foucault contributed their intellectual efforts to building an understanding of the nature & operation of institutional power & influence that permeate & undergird post-modern Western society.
It is in this sense that the YouTube vlogger 'Then & Now' asserts that what sets Game of Thrones apart, or at least what set it apart at the beginning, is that it is uniquely post-modern. Here is his video on GoT:
Of particular interest to me is how, 60 years after their writings, the work of these sociologists has permeated pop-culture at the mass-level—in a society that is over-saturated in pop-culture. Perhaps this is another characteristic of post-modernism: the trickling down of complex social theory into pop vernacular.
Last week, at my outdoor education non-profit's All Hands training day, every employee—from the CEO to the educators to the housekeeping team—went through a four-hour third-party Diversity, Equity & Inclusion training. It was organised by the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee, of which I am part, as a measure to offer training on power & privilege toward the end of better serving the youth with whom we work, the majority of whom come from low-income backgrounds in Reno & Sacramento. Gail & Reena, the hired experts, went through a series of orthodox definitions on the topic (racism, prejudice, discrimination, intersectionality), then led a 'privilege walk' to visualise our respective societally-provided advantages & set-backs. Their approach, as is the general approach in Social Justice circles & efforts going on around the world, is decidedly sociological; institutionalised injustice, racism, & violence is not, in fact about any of us as individuals, helplessly born into our nexus in the web of existing systems of power. This allows for some amount of personal relief, as there is no use in guilt over that for which we are not at fault; what we are responsible for is awareness & action, making the decision to dismantle the systems that benefit us and hinder others. Undertaking this work is vitally important in order to move toward a more equitable society, and is greatly aided by these understandings of the abstract machinations of power at play that often go unnoticed to the untrained or privileged eye. I will say, as a counterpoint to this uncomfortable work, it is important to strive for ways to make Social Justice work sustainable, and even fun, as Adrienne Maree Brown advocates in her book Pleasure Activism. Before the training started, we spent the morning on the ropes course, and that community bonding time is just as important as the definitions & privilege walks in making progress on the mass scale. Start at home, with your community!
Back to Game of Thrones stuff: a little analysis of the character of Daenerys.
