Gwendoline Christie – Memphis Flyer

courtesy HBO

The Night King (Vladimír Furdík) rides Viserion into battle.

How I feel about my longtime favorite show, Game of Thrones, crystallized recently when I saw a behind-the-scenes promotional video featuring George Lucas’ visit to the set. The show has journeyed from Star Trek to Star Wars, from science fiction carefulness about its worldbuilding to fully realized mythic fantasy. And within that, another movement: from the revelatory appeal of the original trilogy to the bloated nature of the prequels. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were adept at adapting George R.R. Martin’s novels, cutting the excess and creating momentum from the morass of detail. But having run out of novels to adapt, they now make up material whole cloth. They favor sudden reveals of plot and character development, twists which pay off simultaneously with half-convincing explanations of how they occurred.

Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

Now it’s unclear where characters’ foibles end and where their stupidly for the sake of plot movement begins. The political bickering is nonsensical, the speech less thoughtful and more modern. The pleasures of the show are that of any well-made spectacle. Dragonriders Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) have fallen in love with the all the conviction of bored real estate attorneys in a late afternoon deposition. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) gets chided for his lack of cleverness, in a retcon of how TV has softened him from the novels, where he is a more murderous and angry drunk. A long-awaited battle has come and gone.
courtesy HBO

Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Wildu) and Ser Brianne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) prepare for the undead onslaught during the Battle of Winterfell.

Because the second half of this season is yet to air, I cannot say whether these storylines will pull together into a beautiful meditation on all that comes before (online spoilers work like prophecies in the books—vaguely and inconsistently). They still could. I still worship the show even as I criticize it, and spend free time discussing and studying it. But always at my back, I hear my snobbery toward sports. How am I different from a casual football fan? Where the avid sports watcher admires the skill of athlete, I admire the production craftsmen who make this extravaganza. Both are fundamentally passive relationships. The only difference is when the show was better, I was using my brain to work out the mechanics of a fictional world. Now I just receive it, like dictates from the Pope.

The battle between the living and the dead in episode 3 of this season was wonderfully tense. I like director Miguel Sapochnik’s continual stress on the confusion of violence, and how one’s personal narrative gets lost in the chaos of battle. Jon Snow again unheroically flounders through combat. His dragon collides with his lover/aunt’s, foreshadowing what I suspect will be the real conflict post-White Walker. However, that the series’ demonic threat would be defeated in one moment after a single battle with many survivors, felt like a cheat and a mistake.

Criticisms of the episode’s lack of battle geography and dark cinematography miss Game of Thrones’ current strengths. In large setpieces, it gets the feeling of small horrific or supernatural details right. Commenters pointed out that it was an incorrect use of cavalry for the mounted Dothraki to charge into blind darkness and a zombie horde from an opening defensive position, but the visual of soldiers watching their comrades’ fiery swords go out in faraway silence communicated the ebb and flow of hope in a battle. You get the sense of how it feels to be an individual swept up in a mass event.
courtesy HBO

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark

As a fan of this one, sometimes my only recourse to imaginatively engage with a story is to criticize how it fails my expectations. At worst this can be criticism similar to a shoe-buyer complaining about a tight fit: the consumer and his product, in a swan song as their life goes by. But at best the simple act of discussion can engage with communal storytelling, and the ideas stories communicate. Two here are that might makes right, not honor, and that the upper classes focus on increasing their power instead of dealing with threats to the lower classes. I would say this is a general condition of humanity. How can the majority of us be truly free when the powerful always corrupt whatever structure contains them?

Where before describing these ideas was exciting, the show is now something like America’s Most Photographed Barn in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I can feel the meaninglessness of my voice among the din. But the ritual is a balm, and the central allegory is still there, and still important.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “guilty pleasures.” I’ve got some: ZZ Top, The Purge movies, Conan the Barbarian, “Weird Al” Yankovich, and Mario Kart, to name a few. And yet, what does “guilty pleasure” really mean? That there are some things we like that we have to feel bad about, because the object of our affection is clearly stupid, or unworthy of our cultural status, or just self-evidently bad. Now, I can justify my love for just about anything: ZZ Top is the quintessential bar band who were in the right place at the right time with the right music videos; director John Milius’ casting of language-challenged Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan was so inspired it eventually won the actor the governorship of California; “Weird Al” is a lyrical genius. But I still have the notion that I should feel bad about the fact that I want to zap annoying motorists with a turtle shell when I get behind the wheel IRL. Maybe life is too short to worry about what you’re supposed to like, and so you should just like the stuff you like—unless you like Michael Bay movies, in which case you should be ashamed of yourself.

The British TV series Absolutely Fabulous definitely falls in my “guilty pleasures” category. The tipsy adventures of PR guru Edina Monsoon and magazine editor Patsy Stone, played by Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, gained a sizable American audience when Comedy Central imported the show in the mid-1990s. Like the best British comedy, it was simultaneously brainy and raunchy, pushing boundaries of good taste and decorum while skewering every facet of British life. But the first butt of Saunders and Lumley’s jokes were always themselves. Eddie and Patsy are entitled monsters from the English id. Like their American counterparts in ’90s cringe comedy, Seinfeld, they never miss the opportunity to make the worst decision possible in every social situation. Saunders, who did the lion’s share of the writing alongside her sketch comedy partner Dawn French, took devilish pleasure wallowing in the shallow end of fashion and celebrity. Lumley drew on her experiences as a former model and Bond girl to imbue Patsy with just the right amount of contemptuous consumption of drugs and men. Making Eddie’s daughter Saffron (Julia Sawalha) the only reasonable and responsible person on the show was a little bit of genius, because it allowed the eternally indecisive Eddie to vacillate between her daughter and best friend and push the limits of what audiences would consider a sympathetic character. Eddie’s always trying to do better, but Patsy pulls her back into the Champagne vortex.

Joanna Lumley (left) and Jennifer Saunders are still guilty of being Absolutely Fabulous.

The film adaptation seems to come too late. The show’s officially been off the air for the better part of a decade, appearing only for occasional Very Special Episodes, including one centered around the 2012 London Olympics. Amazingly, Saunders, Lumley, and the crew pick up right where they left off. Eddie and Patsy are still living the high life, even though they’re both blatantly broke. Eddie thinks she’s got a big ticket book deal brewing, but when her assistant Bubble (Jane Horrocks) transcribes her manuscript as “blah blah blah,” it’s back to the drawing board.

Meanwhile, at a disastrous fashion show, Patsy learns that supermodel Kate Moss is looking for a new PR person, so she and Eddie plot to to beat rival relations rep Claudia Bing (Celia Imrie) to the punch by using her granddaughter Lola (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness) as a lure at a glitzy party. Predictably, the plan is a fiasco that ends with Moss falling into the Thames and Eddie and Patsy fleeing a murder rap to Cannes, France.

Saunders’ dialogue is as dense and witty as ever, and she gets much mileage out of the now-60-year-old Eddie’s oblivious out-of-touchness. Patsy’s late-game subplot riffing on Some Like It Hot is particularly fun and keeps the momentum from getting too bogged down by the endless parade of celebrity cameos, including Moss, Jon Hamm, Gwendoline Christie, and Rebel Wilson as a mouthy flight attendant who would be a good candidate for a recurring role if the show were to go on. The movie suffers from mandatory fan service moments requiring the insertion of every minor character who ever appeared on the show, and the predictable pitfalls of expanding a half-hour comedy to feature length, but Saunders and BBC director Mandie Fletcher navigate those obstacles better than Sex and the City or The X-Files films. If you’re considering coming in cold, you’re probably better off binging on the ’90s heyday of the show instead, but if AbFab‘s already on your list of not-so-guilty pleasures, you’ll find a lot to like.