Jack Hamilton "defends" the Game of Thrones series from his own presumption that its "inauthenticity" should damn the show to unimportance. Is our culture such that every creation must conceal layers of ironic commentary about the real world in order to be valuable?
Game of Thrones is a terrifically fun and immensely popular show, but can a work so flagrantly inauthentic actually be important television?The answer is yes, and precisely for its unreality, its joyful hostility toward anything like allegory, commentary, or social relevance. Much like Star Wars and Hogwarts and other great Neverlands, Game of Thrones doesn't hold a mirror to anything. It is aggressively false, a work of far-fetched imagination so intricate and finely realized it becomes compelling on its own terms, disorienting and dazzling us in the ways that only the best storytelling can. This is a show where we cheer on an adolescent girl's precocious transformation into a serial murderer; this is a show in which a character's desire to release people from slavery is convincingly rendered as a conundrum. The most recent episode ended with yet another shocking death, a character we're coming to hate killing a character we'd come to pity, to save the life of a character we've come to love. How are we even supposed to feel? Other than, yet again, totally thrilled.
The most surprising aspect of this essay is that the author apparently believes that Game of Thrones is "aggressively false" because the characters and their motivations are nuanced and complex -- there's no "good guy" and no "bad guy". This seems quite realistic to me, but the Hamilton's perspective on the show says a lot about his view of the world.
Finally, do you expect your entertainment to tell you how you're supposed to feel? Just feel.
