Acephalous

Surprisingly, not unwatchable: Hannibal

(There's a television show in the title. How could it not be yet another one of those posts?)

I say “surprisingly” because the show’s producer — and at this point, principle director — is David Slade and I’m not exactly a fan of his work. That means Hannibal is a litmus test for my brand of auteur theory, because I’m genuinely impressed by some of his work here and consider him a derivative hack with all the subtlety of a nine-year-old learning to play the trumpet: whatever talent he possesses is masked by the fact that all he can do is blow. I took the fact that he does so as hard as he can for as long as he can sustain his breath as a fairly damning character flaw. But Hannibal suggests he may have finally learned something.

For those of you who know nothing of American popular culture, Hannibal is a show about a man named Hannibal Lecter. He’s a serial killer who loves playing psychological games with know-it-all FBI agents. That’s the show’s motivating irony: he’s contacted by the FBI to provide psychiatric support for their most gifted criminal profiler. He’s solving crimes! While copycatting them! Talk about dramatic irony!

The point being that this is a show about people with deep insight into the thought and behavior of sociopaths who fail to notice that their consultant’s therapist is one. It’s a show about psychological isolation — about people who can’t interact with the world or the people who inhabit it because there’s a felt distance between themselves and their humanity. So it only makes sense that even when they’re together, they’re alone. In “Potage,” for example, Lecter meets with the head of the FBI’s behavioral science division and one of their top psychiatrists:

The long shot establishes that they’re all in the same room, which is important because if it didn’t, you might not realize that. The conversation proceeds via a series of medium close-ups in shallow focus:

The depth of field is so shallow that the items on the front of his desk as unfocused as the wall behind him. His body occupies the thin slice of the world that the camera and lighting conspire into focus. Same with her:

And with him:

The three of them are sitting in the same room but are connecting neither with it nor each other. Their psychological isolation is being represented by the thin slice of the diegetic world that happens to be in focus. How thin is it?

Thinner than this man’s face. It’s almost as if this man — the aforementioned criminal profiler — doesn’t even understand himself. Maybe he should see somebody about that.

That’s right — he already is and it’s not working. You can tell because even when Slade switches from medium close-ups that suggest that all men are islands to two-shots that should suggest companionship, the thin depth of field isn’t even ample enough to include both subjects in focus. How isolated does Slade want these people to seem? Even when they’re four of them in the same frame he racks the focus from one to another depending on who’s talking:

Sticking four people in a frame and creating a sense that they’re talking at rather than to each other requires a deft touch I didn’t think Slade possessed. It’s not exactly unsubtle, but it effectively creates a mood that untrained viewers would describe as “creepy” without exactly knowing why. Instead of the shallow focus functioning as it normally does — to focus the audience’s attention on one element in the composition — the cumulative effect of these shots is a claustrophobia tinged with obsessive attentiveness. The world is small and largely unfocused except for this little slice of clarity. And on Hannibal, as often as not that little slice of clarity contains corpses mutilated by someone with an eye for composition. The mundane world of homes and offices and other people exists only in an unfocused and isolating haze; the frail horror of artfully desecrated bodies is sharply in focus.

Mad Men: "Collaborators" in the Secret, Sacred Curb Dances of Suburban Love

(Of course this is yet another one of those visual rhetoric posts. Can you not see all the pictures?)

The title of the episode, "The Collaborators," is so obviously meant to be evocative that it almost sinks beneath its own freight. The episode's foremost "collaboration" occurs between Don Draper and his upstairs neighbor, Sylvia Rosen, who are acting out the transparent stratagems of Updike's titular Couples (1968). Though Updike's novel covers the time addressed in earlier seasons, its particular combination of adultry and war is relevant here:

This pattern, of quarrel and reunion, of revulsion and surrender, was repeated three or four times that winter, while airplanes collided over Turkey, and coups transpired in Iraq and Togo[.] (161)

Simply put, there's something about having sex while the radio describes some new front in the Tet Offensive makes The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit feel more like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. (And we well know how accurate that novel is.) Consider the first time Don and Sylvia play "collaborators." The scene begins with a point-of-view shot from Don's perspective as the elevator door opens on Sylvia and her husband, Dr. Arnold Rosen, arguing over money:

It's significant that even though she's shot in profile here, Don's able to see her entire face. He can see more of her than she can of him; he exists only in her peripheral vision, if at all, whereas he can observe her from two angles. He's not spying on her, but he is paying attention to their private matter. When Dr. Rosen enters the elevator, she throws Don the most meaningful glance she can in the half-second that she has:

The director of this episode, some clown by the name of Jon Hamm, uses this medium close-up to great effect. Remember that close-ups are meant to suggest intimacy, whereas medium shots are designed to give some sense of body language. In terms of scale, this medium close-up provides intimate access to her face as she shoots Don a plea, while simultaneously allowing enough frame to depict the familiarity of Dr. Rosen's body language. He's distant from her (emotionally) but doesn't know it (physically); she's distant from Don (physically) but acutely feels it (emotionally); and Don's somewhere back there on the elevator, but the camera's not aligned with his perspective anymore so his feelings are absent from this shot. (If it were his perspective, the eyeline match wouldn't be slightly frame-left.)

But not from the scene. This is the first example of the "collaboration" between the two, so it should come as no surprise that after Dr. Rosen enters the elevator, Don remembers he's forgotten his cigarette:

The medium shot is perfunctory, because its main purpose is to capture Don's exaggerated gesture. The fact that the gesture's exaggerated is important, or would be if Dr. Rosen were paying attention. (Which he seems not to be.) But Don puts on a show just in case and zips back up the elevator:

To Dr. Rosen's apartment, where Sylvia awaits. Whether she knew he was also playing this game at this point is unclear. That she wanted it to be one of the days he did goes without saying, but her attractiveness here isn't a function of being "made up" so much as being natural. Which reminds Don of something:

If you click you can see the subtle hint of a thinking zoom that makes the reverse from the shot above more significant. Instead of reversing back to the door as Don enters it, the audience is presented with another point-of-view shot from Don's perspective:

Instead of entering Sylvia Rosen's apartment to continue playing "collaborations," the camera reverses into Don's memory. Note how the same subtle zoom works in two different ways here: the first begins with a close-up and moves into a closer-up, and because the perspective belongs to the audience, it believes that it is "getting inside Don's head." And it is, as evidenced by the second zoom, which moves from a medium into a closer medium and is clearly from a perspective within the diegetic space:

Young Don's. The subtle zoom here is a young boy staring at a prostitute into whose house his pregnant stepmother has brought him. There is a lot to untangle here, but the main point is the very subtle way in which the memory of young Don's time in the bordello is coloring what's about to happen between elder Don and Sylvia Rosen. Because remember what Sylvia and her husband were arguing about earlier? In case you forgot, here's how her encounter with elder Don ends:

They're not playing "collaborators" anymore: the movement between his memory and the present moment makes it clear that, in Don's mind, they're playing "prostitute." And they're doing so while being informed of yet another U.S. setback in Vietnam because of the Tet Offensive, which itself followed on the heels of the Koreans taking the USS Pueblo. Death and violence are not visible on screen, but their presence is pervasive. As, for example, is the case with Peter and his game of "collaboration," which begins innocently enough:

Combined, these two images strongly suggest that wives are about to swapped, but 1968 is not yet the 1970s in suburbia, so this should be nothing more than a dinner party. Which it seems to be until one of the wives stops by Pete Campbell's apartment in the city:

Yet again, the woman is playing "collaborator," and clearly enjoying her role in what she believes to be their affair. However, after sex, she tries to talk to Pete about the covert eperations they will undertake: cars parked near rather than next to mailboxes or on the street rather than in the driveway—the secret, sacred curb dances of suburban love. The reclining long shot of her as she snaps on her special lingerie seems to indicate attraction, as this is a clearly attractive, nearly naked woman offering to play her part:

Pete looks at her and wishes she were a prostitute. So he just starts playing "prostitute" anyway. He walks up to her and invades her space, but instead of an intimate close-up of the sort that would be appropriate, given they've just been intimate, Pete looks at her, gently touches her hair and says

That we can't see his face as he delivers this blow isn't a surprise. After all, only one person can play "prostitute" at a time. Sylvia and this woman are both forced into the role of playing prostitute by someone they considered their collaborator, but while the outcome of Don's mid-course game-change is merely violence on the radio, the off-screen violence this woman suffers is more personal:

In terms of scale and angle, this shot nearly mirrors the one above it, in that both register the prolongation of a moment of pain in a medium close-up. The first pain, in the panel above this one, is psychological, in that she's merely be made to feel like a whore; the second pain is also psychological, in that she has lost both her first collaborator, her husband, and must run to her second lost collaborator, Pete. But the second pain is also physical, because her first collaborator beat the shit out of her. But he did so off-screen, leaving Pete and Trudie to deal with the repercussions of violence.

And this is the key to the episode: the deaths and violence that happen off-screen are beginning to intrude into the lives of these characters. Such things have happened before on Mad Men, but they seem to be coming at an accelerated pace. Why? Because the game is changing, as are the players, but the game's not merely evolving from one into another, as it seemed previously; now the rules of the game are being changed such that it's the bottom of the third inning, the batter asks the umpire if he can take two free throws instead trying to hit that wicked curve again and is being given the go-ahead.

Mad Men: One foot in "The Doorway"

(Yes, yes, this is yet another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

Midway through Don Draper's life journey, he strayed from the path and found himself in a dark wood:

I know that doesn't look much like a dark wood—and the idea that Draper somehow just started his midlife crisis is rather far-fetched—but this is what writer Matthew Weiner and director Scott Hornbacher wanted the audience to be looking at while Draper read the opening lines of the infamous beach book that is Dante's Inferno. Of note is the fact that Don is just beginning the book, and the only evidence that he's finished it is that, when asked by its owner, he replies "It made me think of you." Which means that in all likelihood he didn't read it, and so what follows has less to do with Dante's actual poem and more with what it stands for in this scene, i.e. an epic midlife crisis written in terza rima that no man in recorded history has ever read on a beach. The juxtaposition of Dante's meditative lines and Megan's taut stomach signals the insincerity of Draper's reading. The last time the audience directly occupied Don's head, after all, is when he composed his anti-tobacco letter, an effective but utterly insincere and ultimately petulant rebuke to a suitor who'd already rejected him. But he's trying, for whatever reason and however insincerely, to come to terms with the state of his soul.

While on an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii. How well is it going for him? He attends the Sheraton's approximation of a luau:

And seems unsatisfied with it:

Catching him in a medium close-up with a fuzzy couple in the foreground and fuzzier G.I. in the background is significant because the camera is calling attention to Don in a crowd—a crowd comprised of happy people busy enjoying this simulation of a traditional Hawaiian festival in a way that he can't. It's not because he's unmoored from culture or that he doesn't want to enjoy the proceedings; he feels the absence of something acute here, which ironically enough presents itself, visually, as being the only sole subject in focus. His pain is more real than the joy of the fuzzy faceless crowd to which he belongs—but thinks himself better than. Love, after all, is a feeling invented by guys like him to sell nylons. The folks at this luau are just stupid enough to feel it. So what does someone who can't muster fake emotions at a simulated celebration of nothing in particular do?

He drinks. But he doesn't just drink anywhere, no, he drinks immediately before a painting of what is, presumably, an actual version of same ceremony he just witnessed. It's still mediated, only this time by art instead of commerce; and it's still unsatisfying, because he's not even looking at it. It clearly exists, dominating the central area of the frame as it does, but it almost seems to be shaming him, almost as if he can't make eye-contact with it without being reminded of his inability to feel the emotions he evokes in others via mediations like this one. Don seems to have lost the ability to feel anything other than drunk, and with this anhedonia comes an inability to even appreciate artifice for its own sake, a skill that's not merely critical to his profession, but the one that sets him apart from others in it. (But more on that later.)

As those of you who've been reading these for a while no doubt already noticed, this shot is extremely unbalanced. Don occupies frame-left in a way that begs for something to occupy frame-right to balance it out, and who better to occupy it than a fellow military man? They bond over military issue lighters and the groom-to-be joins Don for a drink, thereby balancing out the shot in a way that suggests that Don's balancing himself out:

Only no. Even when the groom-to-be joins him, his blacked-out best man tilts the frame in the other direction, with a compositional element on the right that vainly demands a similar one on the left. The reasons for this are complicated: like Don, Private First Class Dinkins has tangled up war and marriage in an unconventional way. P.F.C. Dinkins wants to ensure that his wife acquires American citizenship before he returns to Vietnam and (possibly) meets a terrible end; in short, he's  using his war as an excuse to legitimize her identity, as opposed to Don, who used his war to acquire an illegitimate identity. Who is Dick Whitman to commune with such a soldier, much less the woman marrying him to acquire, through legal means, an identity?

He's the man to give her away, that's who he is. I'm not even going to try to unravel the ironies evident in this shot here. I'm not going to point out that he abandoned his wife all night to give another woman away in marriage; or that Dick Whitman is helping a Mexican immigrant acquire an identity he doesn't have; or that the painting Draper and Dinkins decided to do this before is of a wedding ceremony that failed to move Draper in the least; or any of the other ironies compounded in this simple long shot of some people getting married on the beach. Instead, I'm going to point out that Don is no more moved here than he will be later, when he sees this image again through one of Megan's photographs:

Don's inability to be moved by this image of himself being unmoved during a ceremony that replicates, in life, the subject of a painting that also failed to move him is even more significant because of how it's being displayed:

That's a Kodak Carousel, which as you remember from "The Wheel," is a machine that produces nostalgia, that "twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone." Except here, Don feels no twinge. Despite his old wounds, some of the most significant of which come from this exact same sort of intermingling of love and war and identity, Don feels no pain. His moving and dramatic speech in "The Wheel" betrays him, as this episode isn't about Dantean self-reflection so much as fleeing. What is Don fleeing?

Nothing.

The nothing that he can't seem to escape but which has incapacitated him. When he pitches to Sheraton near the end of the episode, he's a hollow shell of the man who sold Kodak on selling not just memories, but the emotions they necessarily evoke; because whatever necessity tied him to his emotions has been severed by something. What?

Nothing, as in, the Big Nothing.

Don's struggle to understand Lane's suicide, which initially manifested itself as guilt-by-hallucination, has been replaced with nothing. Neither life nor its many imitations, be they painted or projected, can move him, because he's nothing so much as a member of the title of the show whose time-slot Mad Men took: The Walking Dead. In the Sheraton pitch, he desperately tries to make art imitate life in a meaningful fashion. Here's his bedroom floor the night before:

Here's his pitch:

As the Sheraton executives bluntly inform Don, this guy? The one who made the footprints? He's dead. From their perspective—and this is, literally, from their perspective—this man who walked into the ocean believes he has nothing to live for. Don's examination of this board after they leave is heartbreaking in its cluelessness:

He simply doesn't see it. He feels it—or more accurately, he doesn't—but he doesn't know what it isn't is. He doesn't know what's missing. The medium close-up here emphasizes that instead of the emotional response he had to his Kodak pitch, Don's intellectualizing everything. He's thinking instead of feeling, and the result is unambiguously inappropriate art accompanying suicidal copy. When he tells Dr. Rosen earlier in the episode that he doesn't want to compare what he does, advertising, to what Dr. Rosen does, doctoring, it's partly because you have to want to live to care enough to save someone else's life.

Don clearly doesn't.

About which more tomorrow.

All images in this post are used for educational purposes and are the exclusive property of Lionsgate Entertainment and AMC Network Entertainment.

Mad Men: Now, where were we exactly?

To celebrate what’s going to be a very Mad Men week at Lawyers, Guns & Money—at least two posts by me and a podcast starring an illustrious cast of thousands—I thought it’d be good to remind everyone where we left off. (And by “everyone” I probably mean “me,” as I need to pick up threads I’ve forgotten about in the intervening months.) So here’s where we left off (plus a little coda) according to Yours Truly:

LG&M Podcast: SEK and Steven Attewell on "Valar Dohaeris," the Season Premiere of Game of Thrones

In this podcast, Steven Attewell, author of the indispensable Race for the Iron Throne blog and general internet celebrity, joins Yours Truly for a rousing discussing of "Valar Dohaeris" that was in no way ruined by me posting everything I had to say about the episode three hours earlier. Because it turns out that, in the presence of experts, the smartest people are the best listeners. All spoilers are prefaced by a damned fool loudly declaiming against them and I'm responsible for 99 percent of the salty language, for which I apologize in advance but will not be endeavoring to amend. Enjoy!

Download Kaufman and Attewell discussing "Valar Dohaeris" here.

Game of Thrones: "Valar Dohaeris," indeed. But who? Where? To what end?

(It goes without saying that this is one those visual rhetoric posts.)

The title of the third season premier of Game of Thrones comes from the traditional Braavosi exchange: one meets the chipper greeting, "Valar Morghulis [all men must die]" with the equally cheery response, "Valar Dohaeris [all men must serve]." Given that the last episode of the second season was named "Valar Morghulis" and the first episode of the third season is "Valar Dohaeris," it seems sensible to consider these two episodes together because they are, if only ritually, conversing with each other. What are they saying? "Valar Morghulis" would be saying "I may not be a liar, but I'm not telling the whole truth," because the episode's final shots demonstrate that all men must die except for the ones that don't stay dead:

Combine that with the man who was Jaqen H'ghar becoming another man after advising Arya and it becomes clear that the certitude of the Braavosi greeting is a comforting ruse. All men must not be anything—not absolutely—if they can also be both one thing and another. What can change its face isn't a man and what can't stay dead can't be trusted. Meaning I'm not sure how much I want to invest in "Valar Morghulis" as a title tied to its theme; in "Valar Dohaeris," however, the theme that "all men must serve" manifests repeatedly, beginning with the opening sequence. This sequence ties the two episodes together almost comically, as the change in scale from the first two close-ups (from "Valar Morghulis") to the extreme long-shot (from "Valar Dohaeris") resembles the kind of fear-realizing and mad-scrambling often found in cartoons:

Sam Tarly's service is twofold here: first, his general service as a man of the Night's Watch; second, his particular service as a member of a scouting party, which was to tend to and dispatch distress-ravens. That he failed to do so during his epic flight from the White Walker only indicates that he failed to meet the terms of his service, not that he escaped the responsibility of serving altogether. The episode's director, Daniel Minahan, could have foregrounded the humiliation written on Sam's face when his Lord Commander upbraids him by using a close-up, which would've captured every mortified muscle trying not to twitch with shame; instead, Minahan decided to shoot Sam in a medium close-up with his Lord Commander in an off-center two-shot that suggests both the bonds these two share and the precariousness of their situation:

But it is not just these two, bound by service though they may be, who are in a tight spot. The reverse to the long shot—which is even more unbalanced than the one from which it reverses—heightens Sam's humiliation by including the presence of everyone he failed to serve:

Point being, the opening sequence strongly suggests that service (and its terms) will be a thematic element of this episode in a way that death (in its finality) was not in "Valar Morghulis." In truth, saying that service "strongly suggests" itself as a theme is an understatement so grave as to almost be a lie: from Jon Snow and Ser Barristan pledging their respective fealty to Mance Rayder and Daenerys, to Tyrion and Davos bemoaning their father and father-figure's reluctance to recognize their commitment to the cause, and did I mention the Unsullied? The elite band of warrior-eunuchs who have been on their feet for nearly two days just waiting for someone to slice off their nipples? These are examples of the meaning of "service" to which the phrase "Valar Dohaeris" conventionally applies, so connecting the visual rhetoric to iterations of this theme would be a bore.

More interesting is the visual pun on another meaning of the word "serve" that worms its way into the episode. Consider the scene in which Cersei comes to talk to Tyrion, who is still convalescing in his new quarters. Tyrion hears her knock, pulls a stool to the door and greets his sister through the bars:

He is not a prisoner in King's Landing any more than his sister is:

And yet Minahan chooses to shot both through the bars. The tightness of the framing on Tyrion makes him seem the more imprisoned one, because this shot is, debatably, from Cersei's point-of-view. Despite having an entire door to look at, she focuses her attention (via the camera's close-up) on the one section of the door that emphasizes the bars between her and her brother. (She could just look at the door, after all.) The reverse shot from Cersei, however, isn't even debatable: it's clearly a point-of-view shot from Tyrion's perspective. He's looking at his sister as if he is serving time, and and for what? For successfully defending King's Landing at Blackwater? Tywin will answer those questions later, but for the moment I want to focus on Minahan's decision to imprison, visually at the very least, members of the Lannister family. Because they aren't serving—they're serving time.

It's not just Cersei and Tyrion who find themselves behind or speaking between bars. When Joffrey and his newly betrothed, Margaery Tyrell, venture into the city, here is the perspective the young king has of his subjects:

Those bars framing the shot? They're bars:

This medium shot is almost too precious. Look at little King Joffrey peeping at his bride-to-be through the bars of his processional. He doesn't occupy the center of the shot, nor does his tiny blue carriage, the size of which suggests that peeking out requires he kneel before his subjects. The bars quadrisect his face into a giant ear, an eyeball, another eyeball, and another giant ear.:

He's less of a person than an assemblage of odd-looking sense-organs seemingly on display for all and sundry. He may think he looks regal as he jealously peers out the rear of his cage, but Minahan's framing suggests that Joffrey misunderstands what's meant by "the trappings" of royalty here. Who is free to move as they please and who is serving time in a gilded hot box?

Which brings me to my point: what do all of these characters have in common? They're all serving time in Tywin Lannister's royal scheme. Much as you admire Tyrion or detest Cersei and Joffrey, this episode erases all doubts about who has agency in the House Lannister: it's Tywin and Tywin alone. His children and grandchildren are pawns imprisoned by the moves Tywin plays. Just look at the poor bastards.

But maybe it's a coincidence that the Lannister brood is shot in a manner suggestive of imprisonment, and maybe other characters with claims to the throne are also shot in a similar fashion. It would be nice if Minahan provided some sort of direct reference for the sake of comparison. Maybe something like this?

In both shots, a claimant to the throne is surrounded by a repetitive vertical element that meets slightly to the right of frame-center. By structuring the shots the same, Minahan invites the audience to pay attention to the differences: Joffrey's vertical elements terminate at hard wooden walls and ceiling, creating a claustrophobic effect amplified by his retracted posturing, as if he wished there were more wall for him to cower before; Dany's vertical elements extend into open sky, and she stands with her dragon before her and her friends beside her, resulting in a shot as expansive as Joffrey's is confining. Same structure, similarly stationed subjects, but these shots convey vastly different messages about the "service" required by the throne.

Peter Jackson and "Competitive Realism"

January 28, 2013 | SEK

An old (and far more talented) friend of mine responded to the discussion Rob and I had about frame rate:

The choice to go from 24 fps to 48 fps was that some filmmakers really hated the strobing effect when the camera pans in 3-D versions of movies. Their solution was to up the frame rate—giving the filmmaker more information to play around with. Honestly, the 24 fps strobing never bothered me, cause if you are telling your story right, little nitpicks like the don’t enter the mind of your audience.

For reasons unclear even to me, I responded to his gentle correction with A Brief and Inadequate History of Special Effects:

I didn’t want to get too technical in the podcast, but I was hinting at that: 3-D created a problem that didn’t previously exist, and the solution is worse than the original problem. No more strobing, but now the effects are so obviously “special” that we may as well be watching the original Clash of the Titans. An incredible film, don’t get me wrong, it just required a superhuman suspension of disbelief. Which at the time was fine, because “special effects” like George Reeves flashing across the sky were meant to be “special,” outside of the ordinary, and didn’t need to look as if they were of this world or obeyed its laws of physics.

I tend to think George Lucas ruined this fantastical acceptance of the specialness of “special” effects when he married recognizably modernist styles with space stations and star ships—the Millennium Falcon could’ve been a Le Corbusier, the stormtroopers come from the mind of an Italian fascist, and half the scenery consisted of the same brutalist style that litters my campus. Point being, his realist aesthetic made “special” effects look quaint, the people who loved them rubes, and that’s where we’ve been ever since. Realism or naught! Realism or naught! (With a few exceptions, Del Toro notably among them.)

So I could understand why Jackson wanted The Hobbit to accede to the demands of the regnant style, but in doing so he utterly ruined his film. I mentioned in the podcast that the best scene in the film, Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, looked like exactly what it was: Martin Freeman in front of a green screen talking to a man in ping-pong ball covered suit. (I know that’s not how they do it anymore but you know what I mean.) It looked like Jackson had decided to avoid the uncanny valley by introducing its monstrous child to an actual human being and hoping the audience wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I’m not going to say it made me want to cry, but I’m not going to deny I teared up a bit at the sheer waste of it all.

Like you, I’m more interested in the story, so if the technological advances can be integrated into it—like the conference tables in Avatar—I’m fine with that because it complements the narrative. But I don’t even think we need 3-D. It took us millions of years to develop the particular sort of stereoscopic vision we have, and our brains react to an “occupied periphery” the same way now as they did before: by flooding our bodies with hormones that make us nervous, tense, excited, afraid, etc. Since our eyes still point forward, you don’t need anything more fancy than an IMAX to occupy our peripheries, and I’m fine with that.

I thought I was talking about special effects and their more cloyingly “special” forbears, but the real sore spot for me here is the blind lionization of a limited definition of “realism.” Don’t misunderstand me: I find relocating fantastic narratives to a world that resembles ours an admirable endeavor. Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the “Joker” outstrips Jack Nicholson’s because we don’t need a vat of quasi-mystical chemical slurry to believe that a child of neglect and poverty might come to resent those he believes kicked him down to choke him out. I’m all for grounding narratives that occur in fictional worlds in ones that mostly obey the rules of ours. I’m on board with Battlestar Galactica and (though I’ll never admit it) I even watch Arrow. But the “reality” of “realism” has to amount to more than a little extra grease smeared on the walls of some backlot “Brooklyn.” Because when “competitive realism” becomes a sport the audience always loses. Embracing filth for love of the slop as an ethos would be one thing, but embracing it as an aesthetic out of devotion to an empty notion of what constitutes “realism” is more than just a thing:

Game of Thrones: Learning to use "The Pointy End"

As I noted in my first post about this course, one of the signal elements of high fantasy as a genre is the presence of a coming-of-age narrative, and Game of Thrones is clearly no exception. "The Pointy End," in fact, delivers three distinct moments in which a character is provided an opportunity to take a significant step in his or her maturation process. (It actually contains more than three, but only three of the characters take advantage of the opportunity provided and I want to focus on them.) We'll begin with Arya Stark, who as the episode opens is literally practicing at life:

The balanced long shot employed by director Daniel Minihan has the effect of bringing a sense of calm to this fencing lesson. Arya and her instructor, Syrio Forel, are playing at combat in a manner as elegant as this shot is composed. Note that Arya moves between the third arch from frame-left, while Syrio strikes at her from the third arch from frame-right. If this is fighting, it is unlike the brutal art being performed outside this very room at this very point in time:

This violence is sloppily composed, with the elements of the background functioning as mere backdrop to the slaughter before them. The characters rush into and out of focus as jagged edits push and pull the viewer from one point in the mise-en-scene to another seemingly without reason. I say "seemingly" because the disorientation is clearly the point. Not being able to tell who is and isn't on "the pointy end" is why Minihan cuts from the above to:

To here only after this skirmish concludes. The Lannister guards have a dispatched a man who lies helpless, dying if not already dead, and Minihan makes his suffering seem insignificant by shooting it from a high angle with canted framing. The canted framing is important because it keeps the shot uncomfortable even after the initial confusion is resolved. ("So that is who was on the pointy end.") The deliberately awkward composition of the previous two frames and the frantic editing that transitioned one to the next leads to a clash not just between characters in the show but the formal elements of its direction. When the Lannister guards confront Syrio and Arya, the shot maintains most of its initial balance:

It is slightly altered because the circumstances of the characters it had framed has altered. The fight that follows, then, will be between both the characters and their attendent compositions. Here, it seems as if Syrio and Arya have the upper hand: they occupy the center of the frame and the slightly low angle of framing makes them appear slightly more dominant than the figures in the background. (Who are the same height, relative to the frame, as Arya at this point.) This is Arya's moment—the point in her coming-of-age narrative in which she puts her training into practice—or it would be if not for the fact that

Game of Thrones: Table-setting and brain-burning in "You Win or You Die"

My close-reading instincts typically compel me to focus on scenes more than structure, and that's not necessarily a good thing. So let's talk about structure from the point of view of someone who went to film school before the advent of DVDs and Netflix, by which I mean before we could finish one episode and jet right into the next. Traditional dramatic structure in serial narratives involves table-setting and brain-burning. In "You Win or You Die," here's how the table's set:

Jaime Lannister enters the tent of his father, Tywin, but he does so out of focus and in the midground. In the foreground, shot in shallow focus, is a big dead stag-looking beast, which creates a connection in our heads between whatever it is Jaime's talking about and big dead beasts. (That stags are affiliated with House Baratheon isn't immaterial either. Especially when you consider that when introduced to Tywin, he's elbow deep in a dead stag, suggesting his role in Baratheon's demise.) This is significant because it's not just that beast is big and dead—as we're fine with that when such heads are hung on walls—but that it's in the process of being broken down:

As everyone knows, if you want to make the majority of Americans uncomfortable, ask them where their meat comes from. Tell them that it wasn't born shrink-wrapped on a styrofoam plate and that it had a sad face when it was dispatched. Point out that the meat department in their favorite grocery store is a literal wall of death befitting of a serial killer's trophy closet. Or not. You don't have to do that: seeing Tywin going to town on that beast has already made them uncomfortable enough. The writers and directors know this, which is why they shot this conversation, which could have occurred anywhere, in a room in which Tywin Lannister was butchering his kill. Moreover, it's significant that Twyin is butchering the beast himself, because as is noted in the "Prologue," being suckled at your mother's teat is a sign of being low-born, so surely he someone in his employ who could butcher this beast for him. The fact that he's doing it himself is somewhat admirable, in that hunterly way, but it also suggests that he enjoys it, i.e. he enjoys doing something that the majority of Americans can't even bear thinking about, which makes them dislike him.

Not that they didn't already, mind you, because the show has long since marshaled our sympathies against the Lannisters, but this is the opening scene in the episode—the lens through which all the events that occur in it will be seen. And there's a lot going on there. There's not just the beast on the table, there's the deliberate arrangement of dialogue and imagery, e.g.

A brief (and oversimplified) cultural history of pornography and profanity on American television

In 1993, the American Family Association convinced 57 ABC affiliates not to air the series premier of NYPD Blue because it contained the word "asshole." A few years later, many conservative groups called for a boycott of the show when news that Dennis Franz's ass would be shown in an episode. Which isn't to say that the '90s were a quaint time in which profanity and pornography only existed on the cultural margins, only that there existed a consensus among network television producers to behave as if they did. Television audiences in the '90s weren't shocked by the profane or pornographic content, only that it was appearing on networks during primetime—but they were shocked, as the producers of NYPD Blue intended them to be.

And it was a superficially quainter time: the ability to be shocked by hearing a character curse is completely lost on people whose knowledge of televisual culture can be characterized as post-September 11th. I know because I teach them. Here's the thing: in order to shock people whose baseline includes all the colors of George Carlin's rainbow something more extreme must be endeavored. Something like Deadwood. I brought up that sentence in class on Thursday and read it aloud:

Ellsworth: I’ll tell you what: I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker.

After discussing its literary quality for a moment, I asked them why their jaded faces had blanched when I read it. The answer, in the end, is because David Milch, who'd outraged audiences in the '90s with "assholes" and asses on NYPD Blue had found a way to reinvest profanity with its ability to shock. How? When South Park reveled in "shit" in 2001, it became clear that repeating a word robs it of its offensive intent. So Milch went literal: the phrase "hammered shit" offends not because of the presence of the word "shit," but because "shit" actually signifies shit, and the image of what happens when someone hammers actual shit is disturbing.

Then he introduced an implicit comparison: "human cocksucker." Ellsworth is "beholden to no human cocksucker," a qualification with disturbing implications: is he beholden to an inhuman cocksucker? What is an inhuman cocksucker? Why are we even talking about human versus inhuman cocksuckers? The answer to that last one is easy: because David Milch planted that thought in our heads. We didn't want it there—we would rather have never had to think about it—but it can't be unthought anymore than certain images can be unseen. Milch recuperated profanity for a generation whose ears would otherwise be dead to it.

A similar dynamic is at work in Game of Thrones, only this time it relates to the pornographic instead of the profane. Contemporary culture is steeped in pornography: if someone traveled back to 1996 with an episode of Jersey Shore they might be arrested for transporting it across state lines, but if they actually managed to air it? The amount of incidental nudity in a single episode of Jersey Shore would drop jaws and make eyes bleed. Remember what happened with Dennis Franz's ass? One old white ass had conservatives screaming about Nero and his fiddle. How effective would an old white ass be today? Would it shock?

Absolutely not. It would seem neither more nor less appropriate than half the ads on mainstream news sites, much less what college-aged people actually read online. In order to reinvest nudity with its ability to discomfit, Game of Thrones treats sexual situations with the same attitude Milch brought to pornography. Imagine watching a scene in which Littlefinger was Littlefingering with your mother? Pornography may be ubiquitous in contemporary American culture, but it still has its place—and that place is typically a private one that bears little resemblance to you and your mother sitting on a couch. Point being:

You can't divorce rhetorical effect from historical context. What worked in 1996 fails to offend in 2012. This is a blindingly obvious fact to most people of drinking age, but most of the people I teach aren't of drinking age. I share this with you because most of the emails I've received since the "Littlefinger" post concerned how I deal with the pornography in the classroom when I'm not being flip about it. The answer, as should be clear, is that I contextualize it.

Game of Thrones: How circular is "A Golden Crown"?

Very. I know you're tired of hearing me talk about circles, but it's not my fault: the series is making me do it. Consider the set design of the Eyrie:

Circles within circles—and significantly, the Moon Door, which had been in a wall in the novel, was shifted to the center of the circular audience chamber for the series:

I mentioned in the previous post that I wouldn't talk about "empty centers," but this one is too significant not to. At the center of the seat of power in the Vale is, literally, nothing. A hole. (An execution hole.) An absence that, should someone step into it, well:

The writers and producers of the show moved the Moon Door so it would occupy the same place in the audience chamber that Jon, Tyrion, Jaime and Bronn did previous episodes: in the center of a circle, surrounded and imperiled. Only this center is pure peril, not possible, and an absence of power that is absolute instead of merely hypothetical. Put differently: it's a powerful absence.

On the one hand this makes perfect sense: in a contest for a throne that only a single person can hold, the position of power is inherently fraught. Visualizing it in circular terms, as the Game of Thrones team does, replicates that tension on-screen: Jon was in no more danger in "Lord Snow" than Jaime was in "The Wolf and the Lion" in their central positions, but they were still in some danger, as were those describing the circle around them. Capturing the precariousness of the central position is crucial to understanding the stakes of playing the game of thrones. Consider Dany in this episode:

She needs to eat that stallion heart, and she needs to keep it down. In the oddly egalitarian Dothraki society, her husband sits on the rim of the circle. Only because she is currently undergoing a trial-by-carpaccio is she allowed to occupy the central position. When the hoard is regularly arrayed, she sits beside her husband on the rim:

At the center is not a person but a communal meal, which says quite about their society but I'm not going to address that here. I'm more interested in what happens when a person steps into the center of the circle and says

Why, they give him one, of course:

A golden crown that, surprisingly, isn't a circle so much as a molten bowl. Point being, this isn't an episode in which one really wants to occupy the central position, and that's not surprisingly, given the run of the narrative: the Lannisters are making their move against Baratheon and Stark, creating a vacuum that undermines the formerly inherent power of the central position, which will remain unoccupied and contested for the remainder of the season.

That said, the next post will only mention circles in passing, I promise.

My first ever NSFW post. Enjoy!

One of the issues with teaching Game of Thrones is that nudity is treated very casually—so casually that the very idea of watching it with your mother feels deeply wrong. But it must be accounted for, and one of my classes decided to name the regular appearance of casual nudity after scenes in which Peter Baelish conducts important business while people behind him are getting down to business. (About which more shortly.) Today we were discussing scenes in which wolves and lions were isolated, and I was pointing out that in the exchange between Bran and Maester Luwin, the director prefers to give each of them their own frame instead allowing them to share a single. So I'm letting the scene run as I speak:

When all of a sudden I look out at the class and everyone is staring at me. Not in that glass-eyed way that they normally do, but with an intensity that made me want to ask them about their corn. So I said:

Game of Thrones: Everyone is alone, everyone is surrounded in "The Wolf and The Lion"

I always say that titles don't matter, then I go on to demonstrate how they do, so I see no harm in doing so again: the definite articles in the title matter because this episode focuses on what it's like to be "the" Stark (wolf) or "the" Lannister (lion) in the room. And the roles keep reversing. In "Lord Snow," Jon Snow (wolf) stood alone in the middle of a circle, surrounded by people who wished him ill and observed by Tyrion Lannister (lion); in "The Wolf and the Lion," Tyrion stands in the center of a circle, surrounded by people who wish him ill and observed by Lady Stark (wolf):

The shots are not identical in scale, but they are nearly identical in composition: in both cases a significant character is nearly, but not quite, occupying the center the frame:

I don't want to harp on about explicitly literary tropes like "empty centers," so instead I'll just note that the reason the center is empty both in "Lord Snow" and this episode is partly because the top half of the frame occupies fifty percent of the shot and is (ostensibly) empty of people. The features of the landscape are dominating the characters, and with good reason: the Wall in "Lord Snow" and the Eastern Road here represent (or in this case pose) more of a threat to the characters than they do to each other. Even if, as is almost the case above, a character's head sat square in the crosshairs, he or she still wouldn't be a dominant element in the frame. The (very) long shot allows the viewer to understand that whatever threats or pleas these characters enjoin, those hills behind them don't care, nor do the people in them:

Granted, those hill people are running down the road, but I can't show you the hill people in the hills any better than I did (or didn't) above: they're a part of the landscape from which projectiles emanate more than they are people. Because it only appeared in the first frame above that Lady Stark and those beholden (however temporarily) to her surrounded Tyrion: in truth the circles were concentric, with the hill people surrounding Stark surrounding Tyrion, and when this becomes clear to all involved, these lonely wolves and lions call a kind of truce:

Tyrion stands alone, surrounded by hill people, as does:

Lady Stark. Both of the proud members of these noble houses are cowering, because both are surrounded now. Shifting to the medium close-up allows the audience to read the fear on their faces, and the fact that both of those eyeline matches look off-frame and, in fact, are unrequited by the next shot creates an addition sense of chaos. Because if the people in the middle of a scrum can't figure out what its focal point is, how is the audience supposed to? Perhaps if they worked together?

If she unties his hands, maybe the focal point will come into—

Excuse me, "Ser," Lady Stark and Tyrion are trying to have a momen—

No, that's worse, now all we can see is your a—

At least now we can see the important people again. Now as I was writing before my shot was so rudely obstructed, Lady Stark and Tyrion are the important people here, which is why when they come together—when they are no longer alone—the person who's actually the most significant in the person in the sequence dances through the foreground. Whatever momentary truce they come to in the midst of battle matters far less than Bronn playing the interrupting sellsword. The rest of the sequence (12:49 and ff.) substantiates my point, but this post is unwieldy as is and the visual emphasis on Bronn's talents is easily discernible to anyone who's read any of these posts. The previous scene occurs on the Eastern Road to the Vale, which Lady Stark and Tyrion eventually reach only to find themselves surrounded again:

Placing Lady Stark in the center of a circle (described off-frame by the Knights of the Vale) puts her in a position analogous to Jon and Tyrion's earlier, meaning that despite the context of the scene (that is her sister on that throne), because the directors have trained the audience to consider center-circle people imperiled, she doesn't seem altogether safe. Nor is she. The director of this episode, Brian Kirk, points out via his short selection that whatever bond she shared with Tyrion on the road to the Vale has been unforged:

She is as alone here as she was in "Winter Is Coming." The close-up and shallow focus emphasize her isolation, and a similarly scaled shot is used to reflect Tyrion's reactions to her sister's words:

In fact, the only people in this scene who aren't alone—who occupy the same frame at the same time—are her sister and her nephew:

Which strikes me as an unsubtle argument in favor of being alone. But Lady Stark is not the only lonely wolf, nor is Tyrion the only lonely lion. There are five more scenes in the episode I should discuss, but only one more that I must, which is at the end of the episode, and the reason I must is because it deliberately confounds my entire argument about center-circle people:

This shot is nearly identical in scale and composition to the first one I discussed, only this time the lonely Lannister isn't in jeopardy. He stands in the center of the circle threatening the periphery as opposed to being threatened by it. The suggestion from the earlier shot—that this is secretly a concentric circle—still holds simply because of the percentage of the frame occupied by Littlefinger's bordello, but all those spears seem to be pointing at it too. All of which is only to say that this shot interests me because it undermines my argument, i.e. because it surprises me. In an episode dominated by lonely and imperiled wolves and lions, this shot suggests that even though this series is teaching its audience how to watch it, viewers need to keep vigilant because the writers and directors are more than willing to confound the very expectations they created.

The King demands your vote

I'm far too refined to write about something as petty and droll as a Presidential election, but I thought I'd share this utterly unrelated series of images I concocted for my Game of Thrones class. The idea is simple: this one character, Joffrey, believes he should sit on the Iron Throne because

As if looking like someone central casting would consider a king should be a consideration. But there are more substantive reasons he believes he should have the Iron Throne, for example

Why does he want it? Because

I'm not sure that's a good rea—

Calm down, little lordling. Nothing can stop you from being crown—

I wouldn't worry about them. What was it you told me earlier?

Exactly. All kneel before Joffrey, scion of greatness, sole hope for the realm!

Then the grasshopper said, "You've got a drink named 'Doug'?"

The person who subtitled Alias is either brilliant or an idiot:

SYDNEY: WHERE IS THE ANECDOTE!

RUSSIAN SPY: THERE IS NO ANECDOTE!

SYDNEY: GIVE US THE ANECDOTE NOW!

RUSSIAN SPY: ALRIGHT! Alright, I'll tell you ...

It's like a spy novel written by old Jews.

Game of Thrones: "Lord Snow," you're no bigger than a half-man*

Since I have two classes to devote to "Lord Snow," the third episode in the first season of Game of Thrones, I thought I'd divide them between the characters. In this post and the next we'll hie to the Wall with Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister; in the final one, we'll churn through the Dothraki Sea with Daenerys Targaryen. I'm pairing Jon and Tyrion not simply because of the odd bond they form on the way to the Wall, but because they present similar problems to director Brian Kirk: both must be built up, knocked down, and rebuilt. As you recall, in the first episode of the series Jon Snow's the victim of Catelyn Starks's redirected aggression: she can't stop Ned from taking Bran to an execution, but she can glower at her husband's bastard from above.

Then he decides to take a position in the Night's Watch, which means leaving Winterfell and joining his "black brothers" on the Wall. So lowly Jon Snow arrives at the Wall and finds himself a trained fighter among thieves and rapists and people who believe they deserve the nickname "Ser Piggy." In this lot, lowly Jon Snow isn't nearly so lowly. Director Kirk establishes that when in a prolonged training sequence early in the episode:

Everyone in this long shot is diminished by its dimensions: Ser Alliser Thorne, who likes Jon not one whit, is the closest to occupying frame-center, but the scale's so small that his figure can hardly be said to "dominate" the shot:

My patented yellow-line-technology demonstrates that frame center's about a foot above his head, but it also reveals something else about the Wall's intended scale: all of the sparring combatants are in the bottom triangle, and all of the spectators are in the the one on the right, which leaves the top and left triangles empty of people. (Note: I'm officiating the next two frames like a football ref with a sketchy understanding of what constitutes an offside position.) The compositional weight of the left and top frames seems to bear down on the tiny figure in bottom one, such that even the foremost among them, Alliser, cedes center-frame to a weathered baluster. All of which is only to say that, initially, Kirk continues shooting Jon with the same disdain that came from Catelyn's eyes. Until:

He cuts to a medium shot in which a weathered baluster still occupies center frame—except in this case it creates a telling vertical element that divides the frame between Alliser and Jon like so:

It's close enough for government work—which might cause those who have finished the novels to chuckle—but the basic point is that the purpose of this scene is for Alliser to break Jon, but that frame speaks to his inevitable failure. They each occupy the central position of their respective sides, but the importance of each is tempered by the unusally high level of framing:

As noted previously, unusally high levels of framing—by which I mean shots in which the characters who should occupy the entire vertical space in the frame don't—creates the impression that the world the characters occupy is pressing down on them. It communicates to the audience that the circumstances in the frame are, in this case, at least one-third as important as the characters who aren't even central to it. If I wanted to be really clever I'd skew the vertical line from the frame-before-last and claim that the most important element of this shot seems to be the baluster's weathered head:

But I won't, because the baluster's head being elevated is less important than Alliser and Jon's being humbled by the composition. Alliser considers himself Jon's superior, but the shot says otherwise. Alliser's words directly harken back to Snow and Catelyn's encounter in "Winter Is Coming," meaning the audience should remember that Jon's not the spitter but the spat upon. All of which adds up to Ser Alliser putting on airs and Jon being right about where he should be in the social scheme of things. At least until he begins to fight. He glowers to the left:

He growls to the right:

He owns those medium close-ups. He beats down every person from the bottom triangle above because he is the Big Man on the Wall. Or not:

Cutting away from the scene of Jon's successive victories to Mormont and Tyrion simultaneously accomplishes two things: first, it puts both Alliser and Jon back in the below-place, beneath the betters whose lowly subjects they are no matter how skillfully they fight; second, it places Jon beneath Tyrion in a manner that, again, reminds the audience of Catelyn's earlier disdain. Except unlike Catelyn, who has the luxury of despising her husband's bastard, there's no condescension in Tyrion's positioning. Is this because he's a "half-man"? (A term I use because it's what the novels and series do, not because I endorse it entering the common tongue.) I don't think so ... and I don't think so because that shot of Tyrion dominates him and Mormont as thoroughly as the earlier one oppressed Alliser and Jon. Feel free to draw your own yellow lines on it, but by now pointing out that the characters are off-center and that the spaces above and beneath them make this long shot feel longer than it is.

Which isn't to say the low angle of framing is unimportant: Mormont and Tyrion are supposed to appear superior to Alliser and Jon, but the scale of the shot indicates that "superior" is a relative term here because everyone is dwarfed by the wall.** In sum, this short scene re-establishes Jon's unimportance, establishes his potential significance, then re-re-establishes his unimportance as a function of everyone's insignificance compared to the Wall. "Everyone" is, of course, a group that includes Tyrion, whose building-ups and tearing-downs I'll cover tomorrow.

*The logic of this post and the next isn't entirely different from that of this one, about "Blackwater," except that I can't teach the "Blackwater" post because I'm working through the first season and it's in the second.

**No pun intended. I just couldn't bear to type the word "diminish" again.

Comedy vs. Drama*

I caught the latest 30 Rock this afternoon and noticed something:

The guy in the midground is off-center:

This may seem like a blindingly obvious point, but one reason this shot is off-center is because the characters in it are off-kilter. The director, Robert Carlock, stages this shot in order to maximize the misdirection: Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer) encourages viewers to follow an eyeline match left and somewhere north of his mother (Catherine O'Hara) before the camera gently racks the foreground out and the midground in to focus. The audience resets its eyes and sees nothing of interest until the movement of Kenneth's step-father (Bryan Cranston) attracts its attention, at which point an eyeline match again suggests viewers look left and somewhere north of his mother. Compelling the audience to bounce its eyes around this quickly within a sustained shot redoubles the manic impression the dialogue and narrative want to create. As I said, this point may seem obvious, but if you want to think about the difference between comedy and drama on a visual level, the scene above may be the perfect place to start.

Situational comedies are filmed in an unsettling manner in order to maximize the capacity for surprise. When the audience haphazardly spirits its attention across the frame, the director literally has more space with which to work:

Before the camera racks, our attention is in quadrant one; after the camera racks, our attention is again drawn to quadrant one. In this case the director has at least three other quadrants in which to introduce new and potentially humorous information. We could actually divide the screen much more finely by following Kenneth and his step-father's eyelines:

But the four quadrants suffice for now. We look there in quadrant one when Kenneth's in focus, recenter when the midground comes into focus, and then follow Kenneth's step-father's eyes back to quadrant one. The rest of the screen is primed for hilarity. I grant that posts about creating comedy are by definition unfunny, but there's a reason this particular shot spurred me to write this post: this person ... about whom I wrote an entire post concerning his staring.

In Breaking Bad the audience's eyes don't bounce around the scene from character to character in an attempt to ascertain the significant in-frame elements—they follow Walter White's in an attempt to understand some particular fact. The quiet dignity to Walter's unrelenting stare is partly a credit to Cranston and partly a credit to the plot, but it's also partly a credit to the directors of Breaking Bad, who know that creating shots that contain no quadrants capable of surprise results in a menacing atmosphere. Compare the shot above to this one:

I'll refrain from drawing yellow lines all over it because, unlike the shot above, the intended movement of our eyes is obvious. We center our eyes in the frame, move to Walter's face and then follow his eyes to the money pile. That's the only movement it makes sense to make. In the frame from 30 Rock, our eyes are encouraged to move quickly but not decisively. We're not asked to stare so much as follow. I created quadrants and drew lines to indicate the misdirection that enhances comedic direction—that the two eyeline matches bracket a racking focus is significant too—whereas in this frame from Breaking Bad no such embellishment is necessary because there's nothing to embellish. Your eyes move the way director Michelle MacLaren wants them to or you lose the plot.

*This entire post was inspired by the fact that the episode had been over for half-an-hour before I realized that'd been Bryan Cranston, so I started to think about why it was, formally, that I hadn't recognized him. (Outside of the obvious fact that I'm not that bright.)

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" for Will and Bran

(This is yet another one of those visual rhetoric posts that's born of this frightenining imminent course.)

You'll recall that according to the first post, Van Patten made Will a sympathetic deserter and oath breaker; according to the second, Van Patten established the family dynamic through Bran's perspective; according to the third, Bran remained the focal point because everyone believed themselves to be acting in his best interest; and according to the fourth and final post in this series, which would be this one, we'll finally witness the "punchline" of the preceding scenes. To begin:

The scene shifts from inside Winterfell to somewhere outside it. It's difficult to tell exactly where because there's a notched log occupying the majority of the frame. Why the log? Because Will's world is now the size of its notch. His world closes in on him as his death nears, so it makes sense that his purview, visually speaking, follows suit. It momentarily expands into an extreme long shot when he believes he's found an excuse that might could maybe save him:

But only momentarily:

Note contrast between these two shots: in the first, the camera is at a distance and captures a large swath of the highlands that are bright despite the mist blanketing them; in the second, the camera tightens in and centers on Will in a medium close-up, and the compositional structure is oppressive: he is flanked on both sides by armed guard and the hill behind doesn't, as the one in previous shot did, suggest freedom so much as unscaleable-rock-that-might-as-well-be-a-wall. He's trapped within the structure of the shot, and the medium close-up reminds us of the fear and pain we saw on his face when he was captured:

The irony of being imprisoned on an open field is more apparent in the above because the framing is looser, but it's essentially the same shot as the one in which he confesses his oath-breaking with one important exception: when he confesses to have broken his oath, he knows all hope is lost. In the shot above, the possibility of escape still exists, if not on that field, then possibly through pardon—hence his mentioning the white walkers two frames previous. But by the time he enters that structurally oppressive medium close-up, he knows his fate.

As do the other characters in the scene, and more importantly, the extent to which they sympathize with is indicated by the distance of the camera from their faces. This may seem like a simple means of identifying a complex emotional response, but it has a long history in film theory, the short version of it goes something like this:

Films used to be silent. Because actors couldn't tell us what they were thinking and many directors found intertitles aesthetically unappealing, the close-up on actors' faces became the preferred means of communicating their emotions. The heightened expressiveness evident in the close-up compelled audiences to pay more attention to the micro-expressions written upon the actors' faces, which made directors pay more attention to directing their actors to wear particular micro-expressions to communicate particular emotions, and so began the vicious cycle that led to the conventions of the modern close-up. Also, there's the fact that we're so hard-wired to pay close attention to faces that we'll "see" the face of Satan in a cloud formation, Saint Mary slumming on some toast, or this Martian fellow looking at whatever it is he's looking at. We want to see faces, and when we see them, we want them to communicate something to us. Just look at my cat. Can't you see the wonder in his eyes? Of course you can't. Whatever emotion Finnegan's feeling might be the feline equivalent of curiosity, but it's inhuman. Its humanity is merely imputed, drawn on his mug by our brain's intense desire to find meaning in anything structured like a face.

All of which is a long way of saying that conventional close-ups have been building on extant brain architecture for more than a century now, which is why the simple act of reversing from long shots of some characters to close-ups of others will make it seem as if the narrative's being focused through the latter. Let's continue with the scene:

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" for Catelyn and Jon Snow

(This is another one of those visual rhetoric posts that's born of this upcoming course ... which now has its own website that's only a demo at the moment so don't judge.)

To recap: in the first post, I demonstrated how Van Patten turned Will into a sympathetic character. In the second post, I established that the scenes in Winterfell that weren't in the novel were designed to establish a perspective on Will's coming execution that's focalized through Bran, but which also introduces the audience to the larger Stark family dynamics. (I also, as Julia Grey pointed out, inadvertantly indicated how Arya's character would develop over the course of the season. I'll let Julia's analysis carry the weight of that interpretative thread for now and return to it when it comes to fore later.) Before I can yoke those arguments together, though, it would behoove us to see what happens when Bran steps off-stage, as it were, beginning with the announcement of Will's capture:

Those smiles are residual: for one of the only time in the series, Ned and Catelyn have watched Arya and Bran engaging in what we might call "play." She hits his target and he's encouraged by his brothers, bastard and true, as well as his parents, to take off after her:

Every time I have this dream I want to kill myself.

Thank you Louie for the reminder:

My nightmare typically ends there. But this one?

Lynch wants to start the interview. Lynch will not stop yelling. There is no one in that chair.

Start the interview.

Lynch will not stop yelling. There is no one in that chair.

Lynch will not stop yelling. Start the interview. There is no one in that chair.

Start the interview.

Start the interview.

Start the interview.

There is no one in that chair.