A few months ago I broke down and purchased a flat panel television set to replace the big box I’d bought when I first moved to Baltimore in 2001. I’d been in no rush since the old one worked fine, CRTs actually have a pretty good picture, the mere 27″ didn’t give me penis envy, and I really don’t watch that much television anymore. But in the end, I wanted something I could mount on the wall to create some more space in the living room. So I went to some TV store and bought me a 42″ LCD thingamajig.
Maybe I’m turning into a shallow, middle age, bourgeois consumer. How else to explain treating a television like furniture?
Either way, it turns out even 42 inches aren’t enough in some cases. My friends Sam and Rebecca made that clear when HBO debuted its ten episode adaptation of George Martin’s novel Game of Thrones in April. Sam in particular was adamant that I should maximize the experience by watching it on their new 60″ jammy, wired into their killer 5.2 stereo. I figured the extra 18″ and souped up sound might be worth it. Oh, and I don’t have cable, so yeah, I was in.
About a year ago, I turned Sam and Rebecca on to The Song of Fire and Ice, Martin’s horrifically titled series books. Game of Thrones is the first of four, with the fifth one due out next month. I myself had started the series a couple of years back after several friends raved about it. Doing so required a leap of faith because this is a fantasy literature series. Generally speaking, genre literature bores me. I did read a fair amount of fantasy and sci-fi when I was younger, and yes, I played D&D as a teenager (Note to the Geeks: No of course it was actually AD&D, but let’s try to reign it in here for the sake of casual readers, and for the record, I both played and DM’d a number of RP games during the 1980s, including the disappointing Boot Hill, the absolutely awesomely vicious Call of Cthulu, and the then-contemporary 
Cold War set piece Top Secret), but I hadn’t read anything in that vein since high school. Well actually, when the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I made one last effort at Tolkien’s trilogy, and failed miserably yet again, though I did enjoy The Hobbit, which I find to be far more cogent and readable. I don’t know, does Kurt Vonnegut count as “Fantasy?”
Anyway, nowadays I read mostly non-fiction. You know, the whole History Professor thing. Aside from work, I love good creative non-fiction, and when I do read fiction, it tends to be a bit more adult oriented than your typical sci-fi or fantasy fare. Cormac McCarthy, George Orwell, that kinda thing.
But once I started Game of Thrones, that’s exactly what sucked me in. It’s very adult. Very. Yes, it’s genre literature, and that can be a little annoying at times as Martin hews to some rote conventions here and there. But that’s easy enough to look past because he is in fact a masterful writer, and his books are not only relentless page-turners, but also really quite smart. For when I say his work is very adult, I’m not just talking about the sex and the violence, of which there’s plenty. Rather, it’s that Martin has done what good fantasy writers do in creating an entire world, but he has done so in an intellectually sophisticated fashion. Character development and plot are central to his work, but along the way, he also develops very subtle and remarkably intelligent insights into the nature of things like the complexities of state-building, the nature of organized religion and its relationship with less organized spiritual systems, the corruption and capricious brutality that often flows from unchecked power and arbitrary authority, and the force and flexibility of culturally expressed constructs like gender, race, and class.
And no, GoT doesn’t read like I just described it: dry, academic, and boring. Rather, it just reads and reads and reads, and you can’t put it down. Martin’s an accomplished fiction writer, and he knows that your imagination is just as important as his, so he leaves out as much as he puts in, allowing readers to connect many of the dots on their own. Needless to say, I liked the books quite a bit. So I was very excited last year when I found out that HBO had optioned GoT for a ten episode run, and would presumably air additional seasons for each book if the ratings were high enough. Boy, were they high. HBO picked up the second season option after the pilot aired.
Seeing a beloved book come to life can often be a very disappointing experience, but I felt this had the potential to be different. Indeed, I remember thinking to myself when I was about half-way into GoT, “this thing is perfectly designed for adaption to film.” Perhaps that’s not surprising since Martin has substantial experience writing for television. His characters are incredibly well developed, his storytelling style is episodic, and his multiple, interlacing plots are full of completely unexpected turns and heart-stopping cliff-hangers. In a flight of my own fantasy, I would read the books and imagine ways in which they could be adapted to the screen. And even then, it was obvious that HBO would be the ideal venue. The books are far too long to be successfully condensed into a two-hour movie, and far too racy to ever appear on broadcast television. Thus, when the announcement was made last year, I was quite happy.
Now would be the natural pont in this essay to talk about how disappointed I am with the series. And I do have some disappointments in HBO’s handling of it. But first thing first. By and large I think they’ve done a very good job. Is it on the level of The Sopranos or The Wire? No, but it’s within shouting distance. Having drawn to a conclusion last Sunday night, the series is clearly worthy of praise. As one poker buddy who’s not read the books admitted recently, he almost cried at the dramatic conclusion of Episode 9. And the rest of us didn’t even tease him for it.
Nevertheless, HBO did, in my opinion, make some unfortunate missteps that I would like to address. But before I critique the series, let me be clear about one thing. I am not holding the show up to the book and screaming: Why aren’t you as good?! That would be unfair for two reasons. Number one, Martin’s book is so good that measuring the series against it creates unreasonable expectations. Much more importantly, however, the media of film and literature are radically different in too many ways to list here. So when a film maker adapts a book, his or her job is not to religiously adhere to the original material. To the contrary, a film maker must transform it into something very different. The goal is to make a good film on its own merits, not just film a version of the book. A film maker is no more beholden to a book that inspires a film than a songwriter is beholden to a painting that inspires a song. They’re very different media. So I looked forward to HBO taking the book and making it its own, and I accept the series on its own terms, though I will refer back to the book when relevant.
Beyond the many things HBO did well, I think it stumbled in at least two important areas: character development and costume and set design.
With regards to costumes and sets, I think HBO fell into the trap of settling for a medieval cliche. While the primary setting for Martin’s book, a land called Westeros, is obviously based on medieval Europe in many ways, it is not actually medieval Europe, but rather a world of his creation. And one of the very fundamental differences is that Westeros, unlike medieval Europe, is a very wealthy place. Westeros is in close proximity to important trading societies across the seas to its east and west. This is in stark contrast to medieval Europe, where the bounties of Asia and Africa were very far away, and the treasures of the Americas were completely unknown. Westeros may be a pre-industrial and absolutely feudal world where peasants are exploited and abused by a hereditary aristocracy whose members jockey with each other and an unstable monarchy for political power, but they do so amid the luxury of extensive commerce.
Martin expressed this in any number of ways, ranging from the picayune intricacies of aristocratic attire, to the gluttony of culinary delicacies, to a sometimes cliche rendering of color. But regardless of his success and failures in this area, Martin did in fact create a very rich world, pun intended. One of the things I had looked forward to was HBO’s interpretation of all this color and wealth in costumes and sets. I was gravely disappointed.
Sets of course can be quite expensive, so I’m sympathetic, and some certainly worked better than others. For examplel, CGI of The Wall and the Throne Room at the Red Keep made an impression. But other times, the sets suggested a backwards, medieval poverty that doesn’t make any sense. A particularly shocking example was the festival in honor of Lord Eddard Starks’ appointment as Hand of the King. A few rough hewn timber railings to separate the jousters and some shabby scaffolding for the King and his most important dignitaries. It felt like a backwater festival, not a momentous royal celebration in the capital of a wealthy empire.
Costumes were also quite disappointing. Amid the riches of Martin’s Westeros, decadent aristocrats don velvet, silk, and satin to brandish the endlessly distinctive colors of their houses; vain knights have servants to polish their ornately crafted brass and steel to a mirror finish; and merchants and nobles alike drape themselves in exotic and precious jewelry from the four corners of the world. Instead of that, however, HBO gave us a banal scape of gray, black, and brown, to the point that while I am sincerely grateful to Sam and Rebecca’s generous hospitality, I wish HBO had done more to enhance my access to a 60″ television.
What was distinctive about the costume and set design in HBO’s GoT was its general absence of color, not its celebration of it, so much so that when the noble house of Lannister raises its army, the deep red cloth and gold fringe of its tents stands out in contrast to the general tenor of the show. Instead of using costumes and sets to wallow in the wealth and conceit of Westeros, viewers were offered a drab 
medieval cliche. While the actual craft of set and wardrobe was excellent, an opportunity was missed. The producers did not give us a visually a unique world in Westeros, but rather a pale homage to medieval Europe.
In terms of how the story itself played out, HBO made some interesting decisions about the characters. One was holding to the anachronistic convention of making a pre-industrial population much older than is realistic. As a historian, people often ask me about the historical accuracy of film. I always tell them it’s just a movie, it’s make believe, and that looking for historical accuracy is really beside the point. If they press me, I mention that two common flaws are teeth and age. In a world without floss, fluoride, or braces, crooked, rotting, and missing teeth are the rule not the exception. And when the world is long on wars and disease but short on modern sanitation and medicine, about half your population is going to be under the age of eighteen, and kids will grow up a lot faster than they do now.
To my mind, the only brilliant cinematic take on the dental issue was the first Austin Powers movie, so let’s just leave the teeth out if it. On age, however, Martin very cleverly made his world quite young. Some of the major characters are teenagers or even children, and many of the adults in major leadership positions are relatively young and vigorous. HBO, however, generally upped everyone’s age. In some cases it was necessary. The actress playing Daenerys Targaryen could not do the things required for that role if she were only thirteen like she is at the start of the book. But similar decisions were made about characters for less obvious reasons. Almost all of the children in the HBO version are noticeably older, and so too are some of the adults even. Was it about being happy with the actors they found? Perhaps, but the change is so consistent as to suggest a conscious decision. Maybe marketing research indicated this would put the show more in line with modern sensibilities and make it more appealing to a wider audience. Whatever the reason, the decision was curious more than anything else. More detrimental to the show was HBO’s general approach to character development, particularly in its relationship to plot.
Martin’s Game of Thrones has a rather complicated plot, full of twists and turns. That first book in particular seems like a wedding of two genres: fantasy and murder mystery. But in the successive books, while the plot has certainly continued to build and at times surprise, character development has really taken center stage. My friend Sam thinks Martin is writing a genuine epic. I suspect he may not actually know where he’s going with it. Either way though, characters are evolving, growing, adding depth, and dominating the story telling. On some level it is Homeric. The Illiad has many great characters, but the whole thing turns on that Trojan Horse, just as GoT revolves around the struggle for the Iron Throne. By The Odyssey, however, it’s not really about plot. It’s about this guy, Odysseus, and how his experiences lead him to grow as a person. Or it’s like Gilgamesh, the tale of royal hubris brought low by mortality and lost love (Jamie Lannister, anyone?). The plot now feeds the characters instead of the other way around, and that is where Martin has gone as well.
For now, HBO doesn’t seem on pace to follow in that vein. Instead, they have chosen to center the show on plot, sometimes at the expense of more sophisticated character development. For example, by focusing so heavily on Eddard Stark’s honor, and more or less ignoring the fact that he’s a rube who’s way out of his league in the capital, HBO heightened the drama of his story arc but short-changed his character. Likewise, his wife Catelyn is portrayed as the passionate mother and wife, but they have soft-pedaled her tragic combination of cocksure confidence and gross political incompetence, which lead her to make one disastrous decision after another. And little Arrya Stark is suitably tomboyish, but we have almost no sense of the emotional pain that her temper and inability to fit-in cause her.
There are other examples in this large, ensemble cast, but instead of cataloging them all, I would rather wonder aloud what this means for the long term health of the series. The first book adapts well as a plot-driven yarn. But down the road, will the HBO series be able to build these characters up with suitable complexity, or will they settle for just the story. For example, will The Hound at once strike fear into viewers while also charming them with his cynical realism? Based on how the character has developed so far, I’m a little dubious.
Despite these concerns, however, hope springs eternal. And in Westeros, Spring lasts for years. No doubt this series will as well. For while it does not really come all that close to measuring up the books, that would be a pretty tall order given the quality of the books. So I’ll look forward to the second season next Spring. But much more so, I look forward to the fifth book next month.