Tribal leader turns down thrilling chance to support the Washington Redskins, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, May 30, 2014
It’s almost sad that someone in their PR department sincerely thought that they were going to get a tribal leader to drop everything he was doing and just jet off to Washington to pat Dan Snyder on the head and tell him it’s cool for him to use a racial slur. I mean, I guess you’re supposed to try everything, but you’d have to be a complete idiot to think that was going to happen. What’s next? Are they just going to start dialing up random Native Americans and trying to get them to hang out with Dan Snyder and say he’s an OK guy?
Game of Thrones, Sex and HBO: Where Did TV’s Sexual Pioneer Go Wrong? Bethany Jones, Jezebel, June 5, 2014
I find, increasingly, that this is the problem with Game of Thrones: the reflex swerve to violence and flesh ends up draining the very real significance of violence and flesh. And the view that we’re given is so geared to the priorities and desires of young straight men with such insistence and in such bafflingly offensive ways that the camera’s moves starts to resemble the rote faulty routing of a zapped neural pathway. It can only make the same moves, the same faux associations. And we always end up in the same place. If we’re showing sexual exploitation and graphic rape as part of an inquiry into human darkness, as apologists claim, why is there so little directorial attention given to the darkness of rapists themselves? Why not focus on the flexed arms, the hard eyes or the violent rhythms of rapists as they rape? Why does the scene in Craster’s Keep omit the rapist almost entirely, and focus instead on the displayed naked body of a brutalized woman? Why does the rape of Daenarys in the pilot (again, consensual sex in the books) block out the perpetrator in favor of the bared breasts of his shivering, milky victim?
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If we want to shock, I tell you what would have been really and truly shocking? (Let’s go back to the Jaime-Cersei scene for a moment). To follow the books, and to show loving, consensual sex between a brother and sister. Sure, that would have made me pretty uncomfortable. But it would have at least been explicable in terms of character. And yet it’s exactly what the show hasn’t dared do. It hasn’t showed them love each other, really, at all. And maybe it’s the case that a flagrantly fucked-up rape is less troubling to us now than genuine, adult, moral ambiguity. Maybe that’s the world we live in. That’s certainly the world you’ve come increasingly to inhabit, HBO. You give us comfortable titillation, then comfortable repudiation. And in this, paradoxically, you’re actually sort of Victorian. Victorian, but without the troublesome demure drapery to withhold the pretty titties. With Game of Thrones we get the best of modern anything-goes-permissiveness (look! lots of bottoms!) within the same old myopic sexual outlook. Fun!
