The HBO event is a triumph of the shills.
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. (Dragon’s presentiment of American civil war is intentionally cast for politically correct diversity.) Premiering Sunday nights, the episodes offer new immoral Sunday School lessons about the post-Christian world, teaching viewers to enjoy ruthlessness.
No doubt Sontag would have recognized that the series’ Anglophile novelty (despite rampant contempt for Western patriarchy) also plays into the inferiority complex that still oppresses Americans. Going back to medieval times (past Beowulf yet with a nod to Marsellus in Pulp Fiction), both Game and Dragon exploit the roots of epic warfare popularized in Peter Jackson’s dreadful Lord of the Rings trilogy — but based on George R. R. Martin’s bowdlerization of J. R. R. Tolkien. Now, 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.
While HBO subscribers simply consider Game and Dragon as entertainment, the unanimous media approval suggests there’s something undeniably political — and sinister — in their appeal to the zeitgeist. Dragon’s origin story is set 200 years before Game, when two brothers, King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) and Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), fight for dynastic power. The Guardian promoted the show as a “game of political, seven-dimensional chess,” grasping how its fantastic period premise and outré spectacle resemble America’s contemporary political underbelly. It’s an allegory of famous families fighting (despite party differences) against insurgency by using dominance, influence, and ominous, spectacular tricks.
Jared Hess had definitively parodied this in Jemaine Clement’s hilarious lecture scene of Gentleman Broncos, unpacking florid, over-enunciated, quasi-sci-fi cult literature. But Dragon’s killings and birthing horrors celebrate cruelty without examining it the way Shakespeare, the Bible, or Sir Walter Scott did. So when media shills endow Dragon with wild significance, it perpetuates that unequal exchange of wills that Sontag warned would result from the production and dissemination of fascist art.
Fans of Dragon and Game, in thrall to monsters and monstrous behavior, don’t recognize how this demoralizing tendency appeals to the adolescent mindset — proving the dichotomy of power-worshipping media elites and the great unwashed binge-watchers that Sontag anticipated. This crisis prevents perfidious politicians, and authors of social disasters such as the televised J6 show trials, from ever being held accountable.
Note one journalist attempting to normalize the import of the show’s attention-grabbing flying dragons: “The dragons . . . do a good job during the early efforts to conquer the empire of Viserys from without and undermine it from within.” The conquering and undermining are too, too close to the mounting revelations of deception by bureaucrats working against the previous administration.
It’s unsurprising when reviewers praise Dragon because it “puts its female characters front and center like never before.” The show symbolizes the political fantasies that the leftist media forces upon the public.
Now that Marvel and Netflix have flattened the public’s interpretive reflexes, and most streaming storylines conform to one ideology, the refusal to see Dragon for what it is seems part of an unstoppable cultural dumbing-down. Reviewers are excited by the TV quality of Game and Dragons because they, like Dragon director Miguel Sapochnik, learned nothing from superior cinematic epics, whether Zack Snyder’s 300, Man of Steel, or Rise of an Empire. HBO enthusiasts have no concept of the magnificent Chinese action epics — Hero, The Promise, Curse of the Golden Flower, Shadow — which transcend politics by the absolute visionary amazement they instill in non-Eastern viewers.
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”).
The tent-pole, multiverse excitement surrounding Game, Dragon, and the J6 proceedings is akin to “the vertigo before power,” a term Sontag used to describe irrational mass enthusiasm. It’s a good phrase for the illogical self-punishment of post-Obama, not-Hillary, anti-Trump America taking delight in HBO’s elaborate debauchery. 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.
