Random Observations from A Tale of Ice And Fire

Observations on A Song of Ice and Fire - massive, careless spoilers. As in literally, I just talk liberally about all four books, so yeah, stay away if you haven't read the books.

#1. Is Arya a "psychotic?" (No)

"'Is there gold in the village?' she shouted as she drove the blade up through his back. 'Is there silver? Gems?' She stabbed twice more. 'Is there food? Where is Lord Beric?' She was on top of him by then, still stabbing. 'Where did he go? How many men were with him? How many knights? How many bowmen? How many? How many? How many? How many? How many? How many? Is there gold in the village?'" - A Storm of Swords

Weirdly enough, I always connect Arya's journey to two Christian Bale movies: Empire of the Sun and Batman Begins.

Arya is a hardened, devastated, bitter, vengeful 11-year-old girl who has killed more people than most people twice her age, but she's not a psychopath; psychopathic tendencies are mostly innate, but she's purely a product of her environment. She isn't Sansa, who's coping with her best attributes - charm, tractability, meekness - she's discovered the power of brute force, and she's made the journey from willful little girl to a brutal, realistic war survivor. Complete with John Malkovich character.

And as someone whose world has been destroyed through murder and injustice - her father executed with a lie, her mother and brother slaughtered without honor or mercy - she's the classic self-appointed vigilante who regards the world around her as a place without honor or justice. The justice system is broken in her eyes, and it can no longer be relied on after failing her and her family so utterly. Naturally, she pursues her own unique brand of justice instead. She still has honor, certainly, but it fits the dog-eat-dog style of her environment, more anarchic than the genteel form of honor that undid her family. She learns this lesson much more quickly than Cat, who if you notice, also turns to a ruthless style of justice after her world collapses. In fact, Catelyn has arguably further gone than Arya, considering the fact that Catelyn is a fully-grown woman and has rejected a lifetime of principles. Arya can also be compared to Sansa, who is also learning to survive the hard way, albeit with different skills suited to her environment. Arya's irrevocably changed by her experiences, as any war survivor may be, perhaps damaged, but she isn't lost, by a long shot. I can't wait to see how her story turns out.

#2: Why are all the Tully children so inept?

Catelyn is a well-intentioned and intelligent, but she is the mother of all trainwrecks, being truly her husband's wife. She seizes Tyrion Lannister on the road without giving a modicum to the thought that it's not the best idea to kidnap the son of the oh, MOST POWERFUL HOUSE in the seven kingdoms. I know you're pissed off about your son, but how about a little consulting or even restraining oneself from making spur-of-the-moment decisions that will obviously have powerful reverberations? Ultimately, Catelyn does everything out of love for her children, but these acts have a habit of having a worse effect on her family than anything else. Also frees her worst enemy, Jaime Lannister, during a moment of extreme vulnerability, which is the dumbest fucking idea in the entire world, even for a woman who is mourning for her murdered sons. Did she honestly, honestly believe that he would even have it in his power to return her girls to her? I respect Catelyn and her late fate in the books is kind of awesome, but she is such a naive and reckless dumbass. Seriously.

Lysa is in plain terms, utterly batshit. She's a simpering, inept, deluded weakling who is arguably much to blame for the War of the Five Kings, and all for a man who has clearly only loved her sister, and does not give a flying fuck for her. Lysa's many notable acts, all of them crazier than the last, include, 1) being infatuated with said man and persisting in the facade of his love, though she has always known that he doesn't care for her. Evidence: When Robert Baratheon accidentally uttered the name of his true love "Lyanna" while lying with Cersei, it killed any possibility of love or affection in their relationship. The same thing happened to Lysa, more or less, only it had the opposite effect. 2) poisoning her husband on the command of her lover, and pinning the blame on others, planting suspicions that trigger a freaking war 3) continuing to breastfeed her child even though he's already EIGHT FUCKING YEARS OLD 4) refusing to aid her own family despite the immense resources and arsenal at her command, for pretty much no reason at all. This one pissed me off the most, because it doesn't really matter what deranged crap she gets up to in her home, but this had the most dire impact. It is really not okay to stay neutral and stay lalalalala when your only sister's children are lost, missing, captured or dead, and the rest of your family is getting massacred and their cause going the same way. What the fuck do you do in your spare time, anyway? Oh yeah, 5) stalking your loveless husband and trying to push your 13-year-old niece, who is as far as you know, possibly the only remaining blood relative you have in the world - off a castle because you saw your husband give her a kiss in the garden.

Edmure Tully

Also a royal screw-up. A screwup in the battlefield (you know you can't do anything right when you end up apologizing to your sixteen-year-old nephew and promising to make amends), whines entirely way too much in a period of warfare (nobody gives a shit who you marry), complains about everyone else, makes inept threats (next time for starters, try NOT being in a bathtub when you threaten to kill a dude), falls for Jamie Lannister's entirely raw deal. Edmure, do you really think that your worthless life is worth your family's ancient stronghold and the sacrifice of your badass uncle, who is one of the greatest characters in the series as well as the only Tully that's not a complete inept fool? Use your brains. They can't kill your unborn child because it's half-Frey and the only heir to a powerful house, and it would serve the Freys better off alive than dead, and you'll have to spend the rest of your life as a Lannister servant anyway. YOU WITLESS COWARD. Even some of the things he does that's entirely not his fault - like bedding your new bride while her brothers are butchering your relatives downstairs - is indicative of his general cluelessness and futility.

So Edmure is more or less slave to his greatest enemy, Catelyn is undead, Lysa is murdered by her own husband, and justifiably so. Brindyn "Blackfish" Tully, their aged, formidable uncle who is possibly the only character in the series that possesses both deadly good sense and unshakeable loyalty and honor, is on the run thanks to his useless nephew.

Forget it. I was all for the Starks/Tullys but the latter house really doesn't deserve to survive, to an extent. There's the good-hearted loveable fool, like an 11-year-old Neville Longbottom, and then there's the really really exasperatingly stupid gobsmacking incompetent fool of questionable morality that makes you go, "eh, probably would be more beneficial to evolution if they're just all wiped out, anyway."

Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire

I've seen all episodes so far in Game of Thrones and I've read three of the books and spoiled all of them beforehand on Wikipedia. I couldn't resist.

I love it. It's everything I've always loved in big, sprawling epics; the political intrigue and machinery and intricate plotting and ruthless scheming, huge battles without the boring details, exhilarating twists and breathless tension and a mad, mad pace.

I read somewhere that George RR Martin used to be a tv writer, and it certainly seems like that in his books - he's no Tolkien, whose painstaking and near-obsessive attention to detail has so far derailed me from finishing the The Two Towers (I promised myself to read all three LOTR books this summer, but it's just....difficult to get through without my eyes glazing over, to be perfectly honest). The suspense and building up of scenes are perfect, and though the writing is occasionally cheesy and inelegant, it's just such a good story.

Martin based the stories off the War of Roses (Lancasters and Yorks = Lannisters and Starks, though the similarities mostly end there) and other major feuds in English history. And it certainly feels like it. The absolutely fascinating dynamics between the different noble houses and the scheming towards the throne is uncannily representative of medieval English politics - the persistent threat of rebellion and chaos always hanging overhead; the (at times literal) backstabbing and allegiances switching in the blink of an eye, an entire war ended by a single sword or orchestrated by a few letters, the power struggles, the greed and inevitable desperation - I just love it.

And the characters! I wouldn't say that the characters are especially outstanding - sometimes they seem to meld with one another - but the humanity is so present and the drama so compelling that you're glued to the characters at all times. I became emotionally invested in most of the characters' fates - and boy, are there many of them - it took me a long time to actually put everything together and remember everyone's names, even - and the emotional stakes feel real and utterly convincing. The backstories and flashbacks are as fascinating as the present, and everything intertwines - weaving past, present, characters a thousand leagues apart to predecessors a century before - beautifully. Even reading the thing on Wikipedia was enthralling and exhilarating.

And Christ, is Martin BRUTAL with them. This isn't Harry Potter or LOTR or Narnia, where aside from a few token minor characters' death, everyone else's safety is pretty much guaranteed and you basically have to root for them. It's a war, plain and simple, and a POV character may be wiped out ruthlessly without warning. They're the source of most of the WTF moments in the books, and have simultaneously pushed away and attracted readers. One of my favorite bloggers stopped halfway through the third book after one after reading one particularly infamous chapter, claiming that said part was nothing short of a "violent act against the reader". It's pretty incredible testament to Martin's emotional efficiency, though, to have readers to be so affected by a fictional character's fate that countless readers have either set aside the books or at least paused, either because they needed to recover from the emotional toll or were disenchanted. No death is senseless or gratuitous, in my opinion. You always, always see the core of it - you can trace the origin of the character's downfall, you see cause and consequence reverberate and the clues are right there, mapped out in the chapters. You understand why this person died, and how it will impact others or shift the course of the game. It's brilliant, really.

Me, I'm a sucker for anything that draws me emotionally, and it's most impressive of all when it can hurt me. This is particularly hard with fantasy. Not even the deaths in Harry Potter affected me or surprised me; I loved all the characters, but they were still so removed. Usually, when a major character is wiped out, I actually don't care that much, but Martin is so vivid and sick that I consider it a great privilege to actually feel so much over a character's death.

But IMO, I think the first thing to understand in the books is that death is one of the major characters in the book. I think Martin effectively conjures up the atmosphere of the Middle Ages - why the fleeting chance of glory is so sweet, why anyone would welcome the chance to go to war to certain death. Death is always around the corner for every character, whether it's a peasant boy senselessly executed for no purpose at all, a musician who becomes a nobleman's scapegoat, a king's throat slit. The knowledge that "winter is coming" - the grim, endlessly repeated motto of the Starks - is a given. Living in constant fear is the only rational state of being. Whenever my mind drifted away from the books (and that happened very rarely), all I could think of was Hobbes' "life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". That's the essence of this cold, cruel, epic world of Martin's. You can't figure out what's worse, battling the wild elements in the bleak and solitary, ice-strewn land of the North, or caught in the political webs of the South. Each is just as unpredictable and unfeeling, and murderous as the other.

Still, I got to the certain part where my blogger stopped reading, though, and I almost cried. I had known about it beforehand, but when I read it, I was so affected that I actually fell into a deep melancholic state afterwards. The nature of the tragedy echoed the deaths of other historical characters that had possessed me as a kid, like the story of Lady Jane Grey or Richard III - the themes and details of their downfalls were beyond the average deaths; the way they died, and why, is simply unforgettable. I couldn't get it out of my mind, and it broke my heart. I'll talk about it in some other post. Oh, and the rest of the time I was just consumed with the desire for all-out revenge for certain characters.

The fifth book comes on July 12th. Can't wait.

Oh, and the series are badass too. The actors are sublime and everything feels in-place and nothing cheesy. Tasteful - not emotionally absent like Boardwalk Empire or silly and exasperating like True Blood. Unlike True Blood, GOT actually reveals answers (Martin's also great at that - the answers are often unexpected and surprise you, but you actually get real, concrete answers to the plots and whodunnits. No existential angst here). Speaking of which, I'll probably start watching True Blood again, but if someone asked me what had happened in the last three seasons, I'd have to admit that I don't have a fucking clue. That show is SO incoherent.

Summer Movie Schedule

First, two notes: 1) it is my female and cinephilic duty to go see Bridesmaids. Am already behind. 2) I am boycotting Pirates 4 and Transformers 3.

May 20 - Midnight in Paris (Even more behind!)

May 27 - The Tree of Life (#omygawedddddabahahahaazomggfuckyeah)

June 3 - X-Men: First Class. (Wait. Realistically speaking, I'll probably end up catching it online.)

June 10 - Super 8

June 21 + 28 - I got tickets to see the extended versions of Lord of the Rings (The Two Towers and Return of the King, respectively) in theaters this summer! booyah

July 15 - CANNOT. DEAL.

......And then, um, I don't see anything particularly interesting until October. That's ok. The summer's more interesting than I initially imagined, even with all the unspeakable sequels.

No Oscar predictions on the horizon. Last year continually surprised everyone with the onslaught of pretty good/great movies that started in summer (The Kids Are All Right, Inceptions), but it feels like slim pickings this year. The movies that have dominated the conversation aren't the usual Oscar fare. And the releases of November/December (peak Oscar season) are somewhat worrying, as they're all family adventures or thrillers (Tintin, Happy Feet 2, Mission Impossible, the Muppets movie). Hopefully the announcement of more releases will assuage these concerns.

Alexander McQueen Exhibit at the Met

Mesmerizing, humbling, transporting, spooky.

See it.

Critics are agonizing

......over the Tree of Life and I love it. Well, not really flipping out, but the reactions are extremely divided (oh, like no one was expecting that….). The movie premiered early Monday morning in Cannes and ended to dramatic boos and scattered applause, and while there’s a general consensus that why yes, this movie is a visual orgasm because did you not realize that this is Terrence Malick and there are dinosaurs and visions of primordial Earth and God knows what else in the movie, everyone seems to either hate it or worship it in equal measure.

Weirdly enough, the initial frenzy of Tweets sent immediately after the screening succinctly summed up the gist of the polarized reactions:

“As beautiful as TREE OF LIFE is, it’s pretentious drivel of the worst Cannes kind.”

“Tree of Life is naive, pretentious, hypnotic, enthralling and absolutely unmissable.”

“Utterly mesmerising first hour, slightly listless second, generally unmissable”

“visually breathtaking and technically masterful, but excruciatingly drawn out and annoyingly pretentious”

“A glorified perfume ad” Ow.

“Tree of Life just ended, and it’s a very sad and beautiful…wank? The ultimate refutation of narrative? An interminable tone poem?”

“Tree of Life is a prayer.”

and my favorite:

“….sad to report that Samuel L. Jackson does not show up after the credits. Unclear as to how Tree of Life fits into The Avengers.”

A month to goooooo.