So… just as every other Game of Thrones this season has inspired a lot of bitching and gnashing of teeth from armchair critics and online pundits, “The Bells”, which aired May 12 – Mother’s Day – caused intense shock in people who saw Daenerys Targaryen, the last rightful heir of her dynasty (sorta) face the usurper queen Cersei Lannister in the capital city of Kings’ Landing, after Cersei captured and executed Dany’s oldest and dearest friend, Missandei. And while cooler heads conspired to negotiate the surrender of the city, Daenerys responded by having her dragon breathe fire at everyone in the city between her and Cersei, potentially around a million people. The shock was that Daenerys, who was up to a certain point being presented as an enlightened monarch and legitimate protagonist, was “suddenly” being made out to be horrible, even though most of the reason that her dynasty was overthrown was that her forebears were about as psycho. The surprise to me is that anyone else was surprised.
Especially given how many of the left-wing media types who loved Dany’s portrayal as a feminist survivor of trauma had also pointed out that she is also a “White Savior” archetype who presented herself as a liberator of dark-skinned slave peoples (‘Breaker of Chains’) and has swarthy-skinned warriors as her cannon fodder despite coming from a pale family line that is so purebred it often resorted to incest. (The ‘White Savior’ critique is of course a PC/Social Justice complaint, but that doesn’t automatically make it invalid.)
The fact is that Game of Thrones has a repeated pattern. Every time Cersei or another central character does something rotten, some other character (like Ramsay Bolton) comes along to make Cersei look tolerable.
What this demonstrates is that one consistent premise of Game of Thrones is that there are no good guys, or more precisely that the less dickishness one possesses the less competent one is to survive in that setting, arguably in any other setting. The best you can hope for in a government is a sort of Machiavellian pragmatism where the ruler is just foresighted enough to govern in the common interest, if only to stop public revolt, but also ruthless enough to survive all the power-gaming. The problem is that anybody who does know what it takes to survive the cutthroat environment, like Cersei, is the kind of person who risks public revolt, while the people who one would think have that pragmatic medium (like Tyrion and Daenerys) either become moral and ineffectual (like Jon Snow) or catastrophically sadistic (like Ramsay).
But given the grand fantasy elements, the real-world implications of such an outlook weren’t made obvious until 30 minutes after the episode, when HBO showed the season (and series) finale of Veep, the Julia-Louis Dreyfus vehicle in which she plays Vice-President briefly turned President Selina Meyer. The characters in Veep are if possible even more vicious and cynical than the ones on GoT, although the dialogue is brightened by lines such as “your proposal is as welcome as a Sriracha enema.” In this season, Meyer is trying to get elected president (after losing the last election from a tie-breaker vote in the Senate) against the popular female incumbent who succeeded her, going through a series of increasingly ugly deals to win primaries, until the show, like Game of Thrones, runs the clock on itself and crams all the craziness in before the deadline. In the finale, the primary race gets to the party convention, where once again everything is hopelessly deadlocked between competitors and everyone has to engage in old-style backroom deals to pledge voters. In less than 29 minutes real time, Selina maneuvers herself into getting the nomination through a set of compromises, up to drafting as her running mate Jonah Ryan, whom everyone hates (except possibly his wife) and who hates math because it was “invented by Muslims.” The show then forwards many years to Selina’s death “at the age of 77, 78, or possibly 79.” Her funeral coverage goes over her limited but substantial achievements, like permanently banning gay marriage (at the behest of a fundamentalist, homophobic Christian who’s ‘so gay, he’s like Sam Rayburn gay’) and temporarily securing independence for Tibet (reversed by China as a deal where they gave Meyer campaign support and election interference). As the coverage winds down, the news anchor has to end his planned eulogy for Selina to announce that Tom Hanks has also died.
This is simply a more absurd, prosaic restatement of the theme it took “The Bells” 80 minutes to get across. Veep deliberately avoids commenting on the real political parties of the United States (to the point that they never mention what Selina’s party is) but it’s made clear that one doesn’t have to be a male conservative to be a raging asshole. Nor is it necessary to have supernatural powers. Although I’m pretty fucking sure that if Selina Meyer had had her own pet dragon, the entire DC Beltway area would be a smoking mountain of rubble and ash, and it would deserve it a lot more than Kings’ Landing.