The North Remembers

           I had a stroke of something like genius on Saturday morning. With its theme song surging dramatically forward in my head, I resolved to re-watch the entirety of Game of Thrones’ first season before the second season’s premiere on Sunday night.  An urge to re-read A Clash of Kings, the ostensible source material for the new season, struck also, but it didn’t take long to debate the idea out my head.  Reasons of time played a part in the decision, but ultimately the media are simply too different to combine without doing injustice to both. The Song of Fire and Ice novels depend heavily on their characters’ interiority, particularly when dealing with the books’ thematic strengths – they dwell not simply on the tensions within actors’ thoughts but on how each situates themselves in the social order and, more importantly, the deep and recent pasts.  The books (particularly the earlier, better ones) demand extended interrogation and engagement, something of a very long essay that contemplates the nature and intersections of duty, contingency, honor, religion, and history in human existence.  It’s project best left for another time and venue – so Robert Silvers, if somehow you’re reading this, holler when the next book comes out!

            Separating the two proved hard in practice. Of the random notes I made as I plowed through each hour, I’d bet 90% dealt with differences between the books (which I read after season one) and the TV shows that I noticed.  As one might expect, much had to do with television lacking the depth noted above, or making up for it in awkward ways. I found the television show excelled, though, in its Lost-iness – in how it spun out long plots from seemingly tiny details over the course of several episodes and, more importantly, how the characters related to the swerves of acting and being acted upon as those plots unraveled. 

            The Ned Stark character played a key role in those developments.  Driven by easily understandable motivations – a clear sense of honor and duty, loyalty to liege lord, and protection and perpetuation of house and family – he played protagonist against a world of characters driven by any number of oedipal, resentful, or just plain selfish drives.  With Ned’s gravitas and his plot as anchor, the rest of the storylines could wave about as they would.  When (SPOILER) Ned lost his head, the loss hit hard – again like Lost, it made us wonder what this whole show has been about all along – but a sense of opening followed not long thereafter.  When the main character dies, anything can happen (and will happen, if they stick to the books – Martin has a particular genius for ground-stealing plot shifts that wrench our gaze without pulling it out of the thrones-iverse) and now everything could and would happen.  After a whole season thinking we were watching it, we realized the game of thrones had only just begun. In the final episode, we saw moves made all over the Westerosi world, foretelling chaos to come.

            Last night’s opener continued those threads, but without the energy.  Had I not read the book before, I’d have wondered at their connection.  Sure, when relevant, each of the characters spoke of how their situation played into the overall game, but only a handful exhibited the energy we’d expect of planets around a collapsed star.  Ned’s gravity kept the satellites moving in their appointed directions, ones that felt oddly unchanged by the presence of a black hole where an anchor previously held firm.

            I’m wary to judge the show-runners too much for this.  The story is a complex one and requires the stage to be precisely set for every scene and act to hit as it must and being on HBO allows them to take the time to make those moves before a knock-out combo.  Where ABC allowed Lost slow penultimate episodes to set up jaw-dropping finales, HBO’s fine (to an extent) with Game spending a half season (or more) for an hour of real payoff at the end.

             It’s a risky play – we don’t turn to television to exercise our patience – but there were hints in the opener that it will all be worthwhile.  In the absence of plot, characters must fill the void and last night’s three kings earned their crowns in filling the breach.  Stannis’ stern calm, Joffrey’s Caligula glare, and Robb’s near liquid rage at Jaime Lannister portend fury to come, one imagines everyone else in the Seven Kingdoms will have to be dragged along for the ride. The game of thrones appears to becoming a war of vengeances and vendettas.  If Ned's dopy righteousness kept season one hurtling forward, his son and his enemies' righteous anger might fuel the next.

Contact Conundrums

           Let's be honest,  the idea of bands of uncontacted hunter-gatherers roaming the dense foliage of the Amazon fascinates inherently. Erudition, insight and elegant prose are hardly necessary. All the same, John Terbrogh brings all three to the latest edition (April 5) of the New York Review of Books.  His review of Scott Wallace's The Unconquered offers a pleasant excursion through the work, his own experiences in, near, and around the Brazil’s “exclusion zone” (areas akin to First Nations reservations – federal land set aside for indigenous peoples, though in this case, those peoples remain unaware of the deal), and through the history of uncontacted peoples policy in Brazil.

            Lucidly structured and informative, the piece reads smoothly, at least until its final section, where he ponders how we ought to proceed with regards to the 4 500 or so human beings who’ve had no introduction to modernity.  Despite a deep history of disease and disaster for their predecessors – a story he tells himself so well, just paragraphs earlier – Terbrogh stands firmly on the side of some kind of assimilation or integration.  Although he admits the complexity of the question in terms of practicality, he comes down in a straightforward manner. The case, he says is a moral one:

This is a question of values and some of my anthropologist colleagues would say yes. But the morality of this question has to be considered in the light of our own cultural origins. Once upon a time, the ancestors of each and every one of us lived in a premodern culture. Those cultural origins have now been completely erased from our collective memory. Do any of us regret the loss of this memory? Would any of us prefer to return to our ancestral condition, rather than to live in the modern world? Few, if any, would say yes. To live in isolation is to live a short, hard life in the absence of modern medicine and in complete ignorance of history, geography, science, and art. 

To my admittedly biased way of thinking, the modern world offers a vastly richer existence—intellectually, culturally, physically. Not only do we live nearly twice as long on average, but we are able to travel, to experience the accomplishments of a cultural history that goes back three thousand years, and to savor the best creations of a highly diverse global cuisine. 

            It’s easy to see the truths of his argument, particularly when he asks us to compare our own lives to those of our ancestors.  Of course we have clean running water, sanitation, and the ability to step into a metal tube and cross oceans through the air, among many other things all of which certainly feel better than their opposites probably would. But I get a little queasy when he equates those physical comforts with a "richer" existence.  Yes, it's sort of wonderful that I can digitally hit "publish" on the top of this screen and have these words potentially read by strangers in Iceland and that I can have the food of India brought to my door by simply switching tabs and hitting another digital button.  

             The wonder of those feats comes couched in a set of languages and experiences (the kinds of narratives he notes) that offer meaning to those who can place themselves within them. Making sense of "hitting publish" or "switching tabs" would barely make sense to computer users from twenty years ago, let alone to those without a sense of the computer, or electricity, or written language. Our lives feel richer than theirs because they are ours.  We'd be in a tough spot if we were to concede otherwise; argue against narratives in history all you want, but at the end of the day we make sense of our world by placing ourselves at the end of them. 

           Which is why it strikes me that the moral case can't be so simple, that in fact it is as complicated as the practical questions would be. The people Terbrogh and Wallace describe live existences of near total paranoia; everything outside is total enemy, to be fought or fled as needed, always to the fullest extent.  Even if (a huge "if" itself) we might protect their bodies from our germs, how might we justify the jar to their psyches we'd impose? What moral case must be made for robbing men of all meaning?  How ought we balance those costs against the seemingly obvious physical benefits of modern life? How much does it matter that less conflicted farmers or developers might get there first?

           A correct answer, in moral, practical, and political terms seems unfathomable, far more complicated than the three paragraphs Terbrogh offers. One gets the sense that by the time we've hashed it all out, the 4 500 will either all be gone or living next door.