The Targaryans and the Administrative State

The Targaryans and the Administrative State

The Game of Thrones franchise--and the American culture--was just savaged in a recent National Review article. It seems that, as the old line states, "Everything is politics." And, if you enjoy the story, you enjoy power, abuse, and servitude. Everything has purpose, everything fuels a battle. And even those things we see as relief are not allowed.

Here are some quotes from the article: 

Susan “the Explainer” Sontag might have seen through the Game of Thrones phenomenon — now extended into HBO’s prequel series House of the Dragon — and pronounced it “Ignorance as Metaphor.” Each show epitomizes the violence, profanity, and sex formula that HBO uses to sell its ancient-mythology programming.

HBO romanticizes the administrative state for the Millennium audience just as Sontag claimed that Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will romanticized Nazism — but without the “talent” and “art” that Sontag granted Riefenstahl. Each show is a costume-pageant version of the same decadent urban dramas that HBO peddled in The Wire and The Sopranos — guilty-pleasure nightmares of depravity favored by liberal media.

These ersatz history tales do not inform our present condition but exacerbate it.

Premiering Sunday nights, the episodes offer new immoral Sunday School lessons about the post-Christian world, teaching viewers to enjoy ruthlessness.

Tolkien’s religious allegory is cheapened into secularism, meant to appease today’s politically confused consumers, thus fitting the metaphor of fascist art that Sontag expounded upon in her 1975 thesis Fascinating Fascism.

All that prurience, violence, and political overreaching that HBO sells in the power struggles and sex wars of Dragon and Game fulfill what Sontag exposed as the essential appeal of fascist art, resembling “an anthology of pro-Nazi sentiments” (remember, Biden forbade the media to say “Antifa sentiments” when he asserted that “Antifa doesn’t exist”).
Game and Dragon show us that “fascist aesthetics endorse two seemingly opposite states: egomania and servitude.”

That’s the basic House of the Dragon, Game of Thrones drama — far different from Michael Jackson’s assessment that “every legend tells of conquest and liberty,” in his song “HIStory.” House of the Dragon was filmed during April 2021 and February 2022, produced under the willed tyranny of government and media. Its exaggerated fantasy repeats today’s bureaucratic self-aggrandizement. If subservient viewers enjoy this egotistical rubbish, they ought to realize that it is rubbish.