For my recap/review of Episode 20, please visit Rolling Stone.
No, for serious: Please do click the link and read it, because that’s my real review. The stuff that follows is…I don’t know what it is. A review of my own viewing experience?
Alright. BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD. Do not read unless you’ve read at least the first three volumes.
All season long I’ve tried to chart a middle ground — not just in writing the reviews for RS, but also simply as an audience member — between considering the differences between the books and the show and not letting that be my be-all-end-all. There’s a good professional reason for that: Most of the audience hasn’t read the books, and I want something I write for a big mainstream publication like Rolling Stone to be useful to as many of those people as possible. And there’s a good critical reason for it, too, I daresay: It’s just not a productive use of one’s critical faculties to perpetually weigh an adaptation against the source, across the boundaries of different media/art forms and geared toward a different audience and with different creators behind the wheel.
Unless you’re someone for whom fealty to the book is quite openly the one metric that matters to you — and I can respect that — the fact that Littlefinger behaves differently on the show than he does in the book, say, is a value-neutral proposition. Is his new behavior well written, well acted, well shot? In the end that’s all that matters. Frankly, I don’t center my criticism on “but THIS changed, and THAT changed, and and and” as a writer, because I know how little use I’ve gotten out of that sort of criticism over the course of the season as a reader.
Now, once upon a time I tried to evaluate the series based on what non-readers would think, or even what they’d simply be able to understand and comprehend; I don’t think I lasted any longer than the series premiere before realizing what a mug’s game that was. I’m not a mind-reader and I can’t speak for those people, and it’s a waste of time to try. What I described in the paragraph above is different than that, mind you: I’m not trying to guess what non-readers think, I’m trying to base my opinions solely on the text at hand without constantly turning to an outside source for justification.
That being said, nothing can change the fact that, well, I have read the books, and I do notice the differences. And it’s clear at this point that some, but not all, of what I truly love about the books isn’t a priority for Benioff & Weiss. I don’t know why the truncation and bowdlerization of the House of the Undying came as such a shock to me given that the two most directly comparable scenes from the first book, Bran’s vision of the land of always winter and Ned’s dream of the Tower of Joy, were both dropped entirely, but it did. And that’s hard to deal with, man! If I were to make a list of the most important scenes in the series so far, in terms of communicating what the series is “about,” the original House of the Undying sequence would be in the top four, behind only Jaime throwing Bran out the window, Ned’s execution, and the Red Wedding. For all intents and purposes it’s not in the show at all, not in a form that counts — a form freighted with all that prophetic information and linking Dany to a grand tapestry of past, present, and future events. And that’s a loss to me. To a lesser extent, so is turning Brienne into a fury-fueled killing machine, or making it look like Jon killed Qhorin in a rage.
I don’t feel “betrayed” like Linda does, though, because I don’t understand how art can betray anyone. All of us have it within our power to make art completely harmless in terms of its direct impact on our lives, simply by not watching or reading or listening to the stuff we don’t like. Moreover there’s still plenty of stuff going on here that I DO like, centered mostly on marvelous, powerful performances, and a tendency to nail the big images, and the same healthy, bitter anti-violence message I respond to in the books.
Ultimately what I need to do, I suppose, is stop weighing the two against each other entirely — to look at the books as an outline, if at all, and take Game of Thrones as it comes, on its own terms. That’s a tall order, not because I’m married to the text, but simply because when you’ve read the source material you can’t help but remember it. Unlike The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Deadwood, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, and even Boardwalk Empire, the element of surprise that separates those shows from the pack — when I sat down to watch an episode of any of them, I literally had no idea what I might end up seeing, and that’s different from 95% of television — simply cannot exist for me with Game of Thrones. In the end, that’s the big obstacle for me, not for the show, not if I’m giving it a proper chance to be its own thing.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, books, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, reviews, Rolling Stone, TV, TV reviews
As a long time reader of your site, I wish that your Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire… reviews? Coverage? –was more criticism and less unalloyed endorsement of an entire empire of licensed material I understand that you’re SO close to the source work, insofar as it made a real emotional impact on you. I’d be the same way if the subject were the Dune novel and its several misbegotten adaptations; although I’m not a critic.
But your writing on all the different Game of Thrones iterations seems less like a critic engaging art and more like a tv network covering the Olympics. Here, Rolling Stone, MTV, podcasts, etc– it seems more like you are a paid sponsor for A Song Of Ice And Fire as an intellectual property than a talented critic engaging with a piece of art.
I say this not to poke you in the rib (necessarily), but more in this case because maybe that’s a part of your trouble with how best to “cover” last night’s episode. Your above post feels much more like criticism — although a very loving, not particularly objective criticism — than your Rolling Stone post, which just seemed like a list of things that were great once again. I know that my favorite thing about your critical writing is your ability to get at the guts of why certain things function, to see beyond surface elements to the ideas that fire a work. But I think when you’re very close to something, BSG for instance, and especially A Song of Ice and Fire, that talent for exhumation is subsumed under the thrill of writing about something you love.
Again, I say this as someone who’s a fan of your writing, both about comics and tv and whatever else, and don’t mean any disrespect. But I thought it was worth pointing out here.
When I like something substantially more than you do, Dustin, you see it automatically as me being “too close” to the work. I obviously have to grant you A Song of Ice and Fire, because for chrisssakes LOOK AT WHAT I HAVE BECOME, but there’s no real way in which I’m closer to Battlestar Galactica than I am to any of the other shows on that list up there, or to anything else I review. I mean, to be blunt, that’s just a made-up assertion to explain my liking the show a lot more than you do. (I was and remaine VASTLY closer to Lost, The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, and Deadwood than to Battlestar, just to name a few.) The fact is that “the thrill of writing about something I love” IS “get[ting] at the guts of why certain things function, to see beyond surface elements to the ideas that fire a work.” If I love something enough that writing about it is thrilling, that’s worth examining.
Then I’ve misunderstood how close you are to Battlestar, for sure! In my mind, I have thought of it as being just below ASoIaF in terms of works that hit you in a certain place.
But I disagree with your first assertion–for instance, I think you like Lost much much MUCH more than I do/did, but your writing about Lost was consistently pretty objective, even though it was an excited kind of objectivity. Some of your points about Lost, in terms of “getting at the guts” changed the way I thought about that series, while still in the midst of watching it.
On the other hand, you seem to go out of your way to avoid negativity in your Game of Thrones tv writing, and I’d suggest it’s because you’ve become too close — not to the books, but to the whole empire of it. You are part of that world now, a member of the team, and I think it’s damaged your ability to criticize the show or the books or whatever with any degree of remove. As this post, a second review that includes the misgivings that you left out of your much more positive Rolling Stone review, points out.
They’re all in the review, Dustin. I mean, not to get touchy, but did you even read the review? That’s how I close it! I didn’t go into as much depth in terms of my problem with changing the House of the Undying around, I suppose, but as I said, that’s because it’s a TV review, not a book review.
I’d also KIND of like to believe that hundreds of reviews written over the course of a decade about every conceivable thing under the sun would immunize me from charges of bullshitting in order to be more of a team player, but I guess we can’t always get what we want.
Sean I definitely read the review! Sorry to have touched a nerve, but I think it’s a valid criticism. I would never accuse you of willfull bullshitting, and I’m sorry if I made it sound like that, that wasn’t my intention at all. But I do think you’ve become a part of that media and PR team DEFINITELY, and so have lost most, if not all, of your ability to be truly objective about this material. I’m genuinely surprised that you’d be so taken aback by it though, unless just my poor and potentially insulting phrasing made it seem like I was saying a different thing. How could you NOT be somewhat compromised by it?
Also, not to be touchy myself, but your suggestion that having written a lot of reviews somehow immunizes from being criticized is crazy. Especially because my point is I like your reviews very much and am commenting on the recent changes. Do you think a critic should be immune from criticism? Because in order to take your criticism of art seriously, I have to imagine that your skin is as thick as that of those you’re criticizing.
Criticizing my criticism is one thing, and a thing I welcome. You’re calling me a shill, Dustin. I’m not part of any PR team. Ha, trust me, ask HBO how they feel about some of the stuff I’ve written if you think I’m part of the PR team. You’ve hit a nerve, yes, because what you’re saying is enormously insulting and impugning my integrity.
Ha, I wrote more about my complaints in the review than I did here, in fact!
Well, I’m not calling you a shill, Sean. I’m saying that you’ve lost objectivity, and you’re interpreting that as me calling you a shill. Either this is the first time this has ever occurred to you, or it’s something that you have an itch about already. I think of you as acting with a lot of integrity, and taking a lot of care with how you approach criticism, up to this era of Game of Thrones uber-coverage, or I wouldn’t read your site, and certainly wouldn’t think to engage with something I found problematic vocally. Especially if it provoked this reaction from you.
I think some of Dustin’s point help clarify my own feelings about RS reviews vs. ADD ones. I think it’s not necessarily a question of biased vs. objective, but rather incisive vs. descriptive. Both are of course *observational* – they’re relating to and recounting elements of the show – but whereas RS seems to recount the scenes and then remark “hey, that was great!” (or, “yeah, not so much”), the incisive commentary on here is more using elements of the show as a launching off point for more sustained analysis – just in fact as we see here, and in the post above.
By the way, I think Alyssa Rosenberg’s commentary falls in to the same trap weighed against her other commentary (take just today her quick analysis of a video game trailer), with the one exception being her looking at sex workers in GoT and Varys (2nd half of paragraph right after the break)
Harold Bloom says that all poetry is criticism and that all criticism is poetry (although, he adds, most of it is unfortunately bad poetry). With an adaptation, I think this really comes to the fore: we can’t help but see the adaptation as a work of criticism of the original and judging the quality of their interpretation seems like fair game for me. I think it is a legitimate question as to whether the take on the original is wrongheaded or insightful or boring or compelling or wrongheaded but compelling or insightful but boring, etc. I think it’s the opposite of what you’re saying here: the original will always be part of an adaptation in some way, so not dealing with it – trying to put it out of your mind – means that you’re not really dealing with the totality of the derived work.
All I can say is that the “but what about this, and this” criticism I’ve read is extraordinarily dull to me, and rarely insightful, so I’m trying not to do it myself.
I agree with Sean! Adaptations into a new form are always different, you can’t waste time expecting 10-hour tv show to do everything a 1000 pg novel does in the same way. I actually have enjoyed the ways the show has changed certain things. The first three books seemed so much about drama, about not knowing things, that to know EVERYthing that was going to happen would make the show hard to watch with excitement after a while.
Yes – I wouldn’t want you to do that, either. I’m probably spoiled because I don’t read anyone else on GoT than you, so I haven’t run into the kind of nitpicking that would probably drive me crazy. Having said that, a big part of my criticism of something like the Watchmen movie (which I have mixed feelings about) has to do with a sense that it is a very shallow interpretation of the original. And that sense comes less from there being a long list of things that I think they shouldn’t have changed and more from thinking about what the totality of the filmmakers’ choices about what to change and what not change means in terms of their understanding of not only the original work but also their understanding of the world. I guess that’s what I mean: that the choices people make regarding how they adapt a work matter not just in a “nerd court” sense (which I agree is annoying) but because those choices are aesthetic ones and maybe even moral ones. I think attempting to sequester THOSE kinds of aesthetic choices from all of the other ones is (a) probably impossible, and, even if possible, (b) not a worthy goal.
I suspect we agree, more or less, and I don’t want to come off like I’m lecturing you about critic ethics or anything. I’m just trying to say: I like what you’re doing now, and I don’t think you should second guess your instincts about what the TV writers’ choices mean in terms of their understanding of what the novels mean.
You know, I wish I’d thought to put it this way before I’d posted either the RS review or this thing, but I think I figured out the best way to characterize their approach: Instead of cutting characters or storylines for budgetary/logistical reasons — you know, the way Martin says that filmmakers would come to him and pitch a movie based solely on Jon or Ned or Dany — they cut a theme. The theme they cut is, basically, the Song of Ice and Fire — the grand prophetic and historical tapestry that keeps unfolding forward and backward through time from Bran’s fall.
“I don’t feel “betrayed” like Linda does, though, because I don’t understand how art can betray anyone.”
I wish I could get a really nice lithograph made from this quote and send it to every CBR reader/message boarder who’s ever sent me a question to ask the big wigs at the big two.
Back on topic: I feel you about the Jon Snow scene feeling off. It’s hard to tamper my expectations of the show having read the books, but even if I only take the show as the show, that scene didn’t quite know what it wanted to get across to the audience. I had to explain to Jami that this was an intentional ruse because they just didn’t telegraph it well on either side of the fight.
Ditto the sacking of Winterfell. The only time we heard about Roose Bolton’s bastard last night was in the “Previously on Game of Thrones” segment. Otherwise, how the castle was burnt makes no sense. Of course, they can give reasons for this next season, but as a season finale beat, that was kinda weak sauce.
I’m kind of surprised by how many people found the last Winterfell bit confusing, as opposed to just a mysterious cliffhanger. I don’t think it was “Otherwise, how the castle was burnt makes no sense” so much as “How the castle was burnt is obviously a big mystery”– I mean, even if you didn’t know who Bolton was, they couldn’t have been any clearer about the fact that the castle was surrounded by an army that was supposed to be on Robb’s side, and then a little while later there’s no army there and everything’s been destroyed. Osha and the kids don’t realize it’s a mystery because they missed the whole thing, so they just assume it was the Northmen… makes sense to me.
Maybe the problem is just that Luwin doesn’t tell Osha anything about what happened? I don’t think he did in the book either, but I just put it down to having been distracted by being mortally stabbed.
Right. You’re supposed to think “gee, what the heck happened?” I don’t recall any non-readers having a problem with it.
He told them in the book, yeah. Osha had already guessed due to the number of Ironborn corpses, but he confirmed it.
As someone whose only exposure to the material so far is the show – which I do like very much – I have no way to measure the significance of the thematic cutting you mention. Just based on your description, and guesstimating from my general knowledge of fantasy literature, it seems essential, sort of like Tolkein adaption that didn’t talk about the romance of ancient myth or a Herbet adaptation that wasn’t an ecological fable. But the more I think about it, I wonder if there’s really a way that something as metaphysical as that is an idea they could easily communicate in a TV show. Every medium has its strengths and weakness and communicating the vast scope of disparate time frames is not something they’ve ever been able to do well on the small screen.
That’s pretty much my response too, and I am familiar with the books. I can usually think of all kinds of half-baked ideas of how I’d like a show/movie to dramatize my favorite parts of whatever, but in this case I drew a blank– I mean, I can think of ways they could’ve staged the visions Sean is talking about and made them look cool, but I have no idea how they could’ve gotten the meaning across to viewers who don’t have the luxury of pausing for a minute to think “Huh, I wonder who that guy was supposed to be? Maybe Rhaegar?” or coming back to reread the scene later the next time they come to something that reminds them of it. I’ve seen the “unexplained flashback that becomes clear later” thing done effectively on other shows, but never when *all* of the characters in the flashback were people you’d never seen before and weren’t really going to see again. The way Martin constructs the backstory, everything gets filled in in tiny pieces from a dozen different angles – an image here, a casual mention of part of it there – and I think that only works because it’s a book. To convey anything like that on the show, they would’ve had to commit to doing *lots* of flashbacks – something it was pretty clear from the start that they weren’t going to do – or putting in twice as much expository dialogue to compensate for the “can’t turn the pages at your own speed” problem.
Yes, the explanation I’ve seen critics offer for why the show has dropped the historical/prophetic-tapestry material that I find most persuasive is simply that it’d just be too tall an order to convey it to audiences in a way that makes any sense to the uninitiated. It’s already the most narratively ambitious show on television (I mean in terms of scope and scale, not necessarily quality or, like, loftiness of ambition), and to try and also introduce “the dragon has three heads” and Rhaegar and Lyanna and “to go west you must go east” and “three treasons you will know” and glimpses of the RW and all that stuff would just be baffling, not in a good way.
That said, Elio Garcia was on the Mo Ryan/Ryan McGee podcast and pointed out that they could have at least thrown a few easter eggs in there, that have a prophetic element to them but wouldn’t stop the audience dead in its tracks going “Wait, that must MEAN SOMETHING, let’s figure it out, aw crap, I give up.” Like, have Dany notice a blue rose in the Wall when she passes through it in the vision. To the uninitiated it’s just a nice little surreal detail. To readers, it’s a cause for celebration.
“Just based on your description, and guesstimating from my general knowledge of fantasy literature, it seems essential, sort of like Tolkein adaption that didn’t talk about the romance of ancient myth or a Herbet adaptation that wasn’t an ecological fable.”
Essential? Yes and no, I think, with a couple days’ distance. Like, I probably wouldn’t want to read a book version with all this stuff gone, and I know it’s important to me as a reader. But that’s mostly on an entertainment level — it doesn’t speak to me the way any of the, for lack of a better term, social-justice elements of the story do, or even just sheer character work does. At this point I can pretty clearly picture an adaptation that drops it entirely, the same way that (as Tom Spurgeon always points out) Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings focused on the boy’s-adventure stuff and lost the pastoral, a few very lovely location shots aside.
I’ve struggled with judging and enjoying the TV show on its own merits since it started and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to embrace it the way I want to. I’m completely sympathetic and understanding of 95% of the show’s choices, but the books just have their hooks in me too deep. Thanks for the reviews all season! of the countless weekly write-ups out there I always read yours first.
m, James! I’m happy to hear that. And I know what you mean about the books making it tougher to enjoy the show, even just a little bit. As I said, the element of surprise I so treasure in all my other favorite shows is something I’ll never have here.
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