Obscenity in art is a powerful thing. Not cussing and fucking, though they’re pretty great too, and thankfully in some abundance during this season of The Wheel of Time. True obscenity — the profaning of the sacred, the desecration of the holy, the soiling of the pure — is a powerful thing when you want to depict what evil really looks like.
Think of the Avatar movies and how gross and vile it feels when the human soldiers destroy that big Hometree or slaughter that poor mother whale. They’re not just committing a crime against some blue aliens but against life itself. They’re making a mockery of what we hold dear. It feels more than wrong — it feels filthy, like we’re seeing something disgusting that should never have happened. An obscenity.
That’s how I felt watching the Seanchan commander, High Lady Suroth, command her new Ogier slave Loial to “sing.” This is no mere command performance for the courtiers; this is profound magic, an obviously sacred and meaningful sonic ritual through which the Ogier can persuade the earth’s plants to grow before our very eyes. To Suroth and her cronies, it’s a party trick, like bringing a toddler out to recite the alphabet or making your dog sit with a Milk-Bone on his nose. It’s one of the most beautiful uses of magic we’ve seen so far, and they laugh at it like it’s a mere amusement. To Loial, it’s clear he couldn’t be more humiliated if they’d forced him to whip his dick out. It’s grotesque, shameful, obscene.
I reviewed this week’s brutal episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.
Tags: fantasy, reviews, the wheel of time, TV, TV reviews, vulture