A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: April 14, 2011

With the amount of money apparently spent on “Game of Thrones,” the fantasy epic set in a quasi-medieval somewhereland beginning Sunday on HBO, a show like “Mad Men” might have the financing to continue into the second term of a Malia Obama presidency. “Game of Thrones” is a cast-of-at-least-many-hundreds production, with sweeping “Braveheart” shots of warrior hordes. Keeping track of the principals alone feels as though it requires the focused memory of someone who can play bridge at a Warren Buffett level of adeptness. In a sense the series, which will span 10 episodes, ought to come with a warning like, “If you can’t count cards, please return to reruns of ‘Sex and the City.’ ”

Shot largely on location in the fields and hills of Northern Ireland and Malta, “Game of Thrones” is green and ripe and good-looking. Here the term green carries double meaning as both visual descriptive and allegory. Embedded in the narrative is a vague global-warming horror story. Rival dynasties vie for control over the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros — a territory where summers are measured in years, not months, and where winters can extend for decades.

How did this come to pass? We are in the universe of dwarfs, armor, wenches, braids, loincloth. The strange temperatures clearly are not the fault of a reliance on inefficient HVAC systems. Given the bizarre climate of the landmass at the center of the bloody disputes — and the series rejects no opportunity to showcase a beheading or to offer a slashed throat close-up — you have to wonder what all the fuss is about. We are not talking about Palm Beach.

The bigger question, though, is: What is “Game of Thrones” doing on HBO? The series claims as one of its executive producers the screenwriter and best-selling author David Benioff, whose excellent script for Spike Lee’s post-9/11 meditation, “25th Hour,” did not suggest a writer with Middle Earth proclivities. Five years ago, however, Mr. Benioff began reading George R. R. Martin’s series of books, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” fell in love and sought to adapt “Game of Thrones,” one of the installments.

The show has been elaborately made to the point that producers turned to a professional at something called the Language Creation Society to design a vocabulary for the savage Dothraki nomads who provide some of the more Playboy-TV-style plot points and who are forced to speak in subtitles. Like “The Tudors” and “The Borgias” on Showtime and the “Spartacus” series on Starz, “Game of Thrones,” is a costume-drama sexual hopscotch, even if it is more sophisticated than its predecessors. It says something about current American attitudes toward sex that with the exception of the lurid and awful “Californication,” nearly all eroticism on television is past tense. The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange.

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Since the arrival of “The Sopranos” more than a decade ago, HBO has distinguished itself as a corporate auteur committed, when it is as its most intelligent and dazzling, to examining the way that institutions are made and how they are upheld or fall apart: the Mafia, municipal government (“The Wire”), the Roman empire (“Rome”), the American West (“Deadwood”), religious fundamentalism (“Big Love”).

When the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga “True Blood,” things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters. “Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot. If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.

GAME OF THRONES

HBO, Sunday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss; based on the fantasy book series “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin; directed by Tim Van Patten; Mr. Benioff and Mr. Weiss, executive producers; Carolyn Strauss, Guymon Casady, Vince Gerardis, Ralph Vicinanza and Mr. Martin, co-executive producers; Mark Huffam and Frank Doelger, producers; Marco Pontecorvo, Alik Sakharov and Matt Jensen, directors of photography; Gemma Jackson, production designer; Michele Clapton, costume designer.

WITH: Mark Addy (King Robert Baratheon), Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy), Sean Bean (Lord Eddard Stark), Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Ser Jaime Lannister), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Michelle Fairley (Lady Catelyn Stark), Aidan Gillen (Petyr Baelish), Jack Gleeson (Prince Joffrey Baratheon), Iain Glen (Ser Jorah Mormont), Kit Harington (Jon Snow), Lena Headey (Queen Cersei Lannister), Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark), Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen), Richard Madden (Robb Stark), Rory McCann (Sandor Clegane), Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark).

The New York Times has taken a firm stand: Game of Thrones, the venerable paper argues, is for boys only. How bizarre is that? The show is obviously targeted exclusively at women. Here's why.

The Times' Ginia Bellafante, who recently argued that Supernatural is about the Detroit auto industry, has gotten it all wrong. In her review of Game of Thrones, which she tags as a "global-warming horror story," she argues that the series is for boys only - with a little kinky sex thrown in for the girls. She writes:

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin's, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to "The Hobbit" first. "Game of Thrones" is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population's other half.

Spoilers ahead, for those who haven't read the books.

OK, well I will grant you that scenes of explicit sex, especially the rape and brother-sister incest we see in Game, have traditionally appealed only to female audiences. So Bellafante has a point there. Men generally prefer softer images of sexuality - erotica, if you will. But to say the rest of the series won't appeal to women? Honestly, I'm stunned.

All this time, I've been asking myself what there is in the show for men to like.

First of all, the entire story is basically a historical drawing room melodrama - it's Jane Austen set in a semi-medieval world, with weather systems that seem to mirror human emotion. From the very first episode, we're asked to listen to endless discussions about family melodramas, who slept with whose brother and who gets to have the nicest throne room. Children are endlessly and obsessively the focus of practically every scene. Who but a woman would even be able to keep all those Stark children's names straight, let alone all the other people connected to the Stark family?

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Two of the main characters, Sansa and Arya Stark, are suffering through dilemmas that are basically Gossip Girl plotlines, only with dire wolves instead of purse dogs. Sansa is in love with the rich prince who would rather hang with his mom and murder people than bring her flowers. Plus, he's always trying to get her drunk. And Arya just wants to practice her swordfighting homework, but somehow winds up eavesdropping on gossipy discussions about who will be killed. I ask you, would men really have patience to watch a show that's so focused on who told who what?

And that scene where a knight whose symbol is a flower shaves the chest of his guy friend? You're telling me that's for the DUDES? I have personally never met a man who would stand up indignantly in the middle of a sports event and demand to see some chest-shaving, or he's going to ditch his buddies.

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Don't even get me started on a major subplot of the series, which revolves around Daenerys, a woman who becomes queen of the horse-riding, nomadic Dothraki people across the water from the kingdom where the Starks and Lannisters spend all their time gossiping and sleeping around. Daenerys secures her power by taming her savage husband with sex, munching on raw animal hearts, and bringing new direction to a powerful nation nearly ready to invade Westeros. Similarly, the King's wife Cersei Lannister basically goes around murdering and **** everybody in sight - including her brother - to consolidate her family's power and rob her husband of his throne. Seriously, can you imagine a guy getting into these stories about women taking power and ordering everybody around?

I'll grant you that there's a little bit thrown in here and there for the fellows. There are a few scenes of bawdy humor among the poor knights who guard the Wall, and I suppose men will like the characters of Ned Stark and the King - but honestly, those men are just condescendingly thrown in to appease the testosterone-enabled half of the population. It's sad, really.

But I suppose some men might like it - you know, if they have a taste for this sort of thing.