Acephalous

"Will the Wolf Survive?"

It’s been brought to my attention that the two posts I’ve produced about “The Rains of Castamere” were written under the influence of Los Lobos’s How Will the Wolf Survive? (1985). Weeks ago, insomnia guided me to some 3 a.m. PBS documentary that placed Los Lobos between Public Enemy and the Rolling Stones in terms of the most influential bands of the 20th Century, and since then I’ve been revisiting their catalog.

I just didn’t realize how biased this non-deigetic sound may have made my past couple of analyses. Maybe the Lannister’s deserve more benefit of the doubt than the “none” I’ve been extending them? The Boltons too?

Awful Greek words that apply to "The Rains of Castamere"

When we left off, Catelyn was in the act of recognizing the terribleness of her moment. At 37:38 in the podcast, Steven and I argued about when the band began to play the song “The Rains of Castamere,” which is associated with House Lannister, and though this may seem like an insignificant detail, I don’t think it is. So I don’t want anyone to think that I’m arguing just to argue here, because this is one of the most important moments in traditional tragedy. In the Poetics, Aristotle claims that simple plots merely contain a catastrophe — something terrible happens for which general pity is felt — but complex plots combine that tragedy with anagnorisis, or a moment of recognition.

This moment of recognition is not had by the audience, but by a character within the play; that is, it’s had by a character with whom the audience sympathizes, and through whose perspective the consequences of this catastrophe can be understood. In other words, for Aristotle, the superior play is one in which the audience’s sympathies are focalized through a perspective in a way that personalizes the catastrophe. It’s not just generally sad that these Trojans have to die, it’s particularly sad that we’re forced to watch one of them we care about realize he’s about to die. That’s the heart of traditional tragedy: it’s not the catastrophe itself (because the audience isn’t in actual jeopardy), but the sympathetic identification with the character who realizes he’s about to be killed (because that’s something the audience can actually feel) that makes a tragedy effective.

In other word: this moment is important because it’s the engine of tragedy. The audience may only realize what’s happening when “The Rains of Castamere” begins to play, but because tragedy’s supposed to lead to reflection, it’s important to determine exactly when Catelyn does. So here we go. Robb and Talisa are having a long and playful conversation that ends in her informing him that she’s carrying a child named “Eddard Stark.” I’ve animated the 33-second-long conversation so you can see that it consists of 15 reversals and one pan down:

It's always been raining in Castamere

We probably don’t need to talk too much about the content of “The Rains of Castamere,” if only because I said most of what I wanted to, content-wise, in the podcast. Instead I’d like to focus on how the director, David Nutter, used the confusion created by Michelle MacClaren in “Second Sons” to great effect during the Red Wedding. If you haven’t read the books or watched the ninth episode of the third season, I highly recommend you stop reading this right now. As you remember, MacClaren’s means of shooting Tyrion’s wedding in “Second Sons” was one part (hers) misdirection and one part (the character’s) indiscretion. Everyone was a spectacle-in-waiting or a secret-about-to-be-told, but no one was talking to one another. Even the actual attempts at communication — Tywin’s conversation with Tyrion and Joffrey’s failed attempt to hold the floor — weren’t communicative, to the extent that when Tyrion finally revealed what his (modified) intentions were, there was, as I noted in the first post, “a real potential for chaos.” The lesson of the episode is, in short, that when no one’s communicating honestly, honest communication becomes impossible. Everything becomes a performance and the most convincing performer — in this case Tyrion — wins the wedding. All of which is only to say that Tyrion’s wedding consisted of jealously guarded secrets and innuendos, as opposed to the Tully-Frey wedding, in which everyone is open about everything.

Beginning with the attractiveness of the woman who isn’t the bride:

In a sense, this is a classic medium long shot of the “plain américain“ variety, in that it mimics the Western’s imperative to have everyone visible from the tops of their hats to the tips of their guns — except in this case the gun is Robb Stark’s sword. Point being that this is traditionally an “honest” shot used by directors to indicate that the characters have nothing to hide. They’ve shown their opponents what they’re packing and now a firm assessment of relative armament can be made by characters and viewers alike. In this case, it demonstrates how anemic the Stark complement within the banquet hall seems. In the light that’s filtering down from off-screen right, only Robb’s sword seems visible. It’s significant that in an episode that will — as I’ll argue — be characterized by requited gazes and general openness, the lighting in this scene indicates that the Starks have something to hide. The white light coming in from frame-right leaves the right sides of their faces in shadow and almost makes it seem as if they’re planning something nefarious, which is ironic both for the obvious reason and because, at this particular moment, Robb’s being chastised by Walder Frey for bringing Talisa to what should have been his wedding:

Frey’s half-lit face is also suspect, only more so, because Nutter frames it in a medium close-up. When a group of six people are all “victims” of the same strong off-screen light source, the general effect is that there’s a large off-camera lamp or window. It's innocuous. (That’s why “almost” is in italics up there.) The only way to make them actually seem nefarious would be to exaggerate the effect like so:

Had Nutter shot the Stark clan with such extreme contrast, they’d look genuinely secretive and dangerous. But he didn’t. And the fact that in this scene they’ve bucked common sense and not only allowed Talisa to accompany them, but that they’re allowing Walder Frey to inspect her, means that the single off-screen light source is naturalistic in these medium long shots. But it’s absolutely expressionistic when the camera reverses to Frey:

Even though Nutter pulls back into a medium shot, the fact that Frey’s the only person in frame and that shadows cover half his face make him look like a man of dubious motives. It’s a basic yet effective principle that one-shots, like the ones of Frey above, tend to be read as psychologically indicative of something in a way that similarly lit shots of groups don’t. Of the many reasons for this are that our brains consider gangs of people inherently menacing, whereas when we encounter a single person, his or her motivations are a matter of specific divination. A different part of the brain’s engaged when we’re trying to evaluate the danger potentially written on an individual face, so these one-shots of Walder Frey invite us to consider him as a singular agent and the shadows falling over half his face make it seem like he’s hiding something. Because he is: he’s hiding his face. Even if you haven’t read the novels, the way in which Frey’s shot as he discusses the “pertness” of pregnant Talisa’s breasts should alert you that the conversation isn’t the only thing that’s inappropriate here.

So too should your memory of Tyrion’s wedding. Remember that McClaren’s first shots of it were deliberately confusing: the audience wasn’t allowed to see who sat where or in relation to whom. But at the Tully-Frey wedding, Nutter canvasses the room via the plate of bread and salt intended to secure the Stark’s safety:

As that plate moves about the room in a fairly long take, we’re able to see the relative locations of all the major players. We know where everyone is and that they’re relating to each other in a conventional “medieval” hierarchy: the Lord takes the high seat even in the presence of the King of the North. That should tell us something too — that Frey’s requiring his nominal King to act the part of supplicant, which is understandable given these particular circumstances but contradicts conventions set up elsewhere, as in “Winter Is Coming”:

The Queen sits beside the Lady of House Stark, she doesn’t stand before her, as Frey demands of Robb. Speaking of whom, and because I am trying to break your heart, here’s a random image from “Winter Is Coming”:

What can we say in the presence of the child who be King? Only that his position relative to his mother and Queen Cersei is as appropriate here as it is inappropriate in “The Rains of Castamere.” That Robb isn’t this Robb and shouldn’t be treated as such, or at the very least should be suspicious when he is. Frey’s trying to infantilize the King of the North, and because he believes he’s wronged Frey, Robb offers this small social humiliation as a kind of physical apology. So as things stand the audience should be acknowledging Robb and company’s attempted humility before a literally shady Walder Frey, and because of the broken bread that’s traversed the room, should not only be secure in the Stark’s safety but also aware of the slightly inappropriate location of the significant characters relative to each other. The ostensible openness of this wedding is a direct invocation and inversion of Tyrion’s, but as we well know, the bile undermining this visual candor will bubble up soon enough. Just not before Nutter reminds us that everything is fine:

This shot’s representative of how the banquet’s framed. Instead of families staring each other down off-frame from opposite ends of the hall, Nutter captures all the celebrants in establishing shots like this, which for the purpose of this episode work like a cheap magician’s sleeves: you can’t see what you know’s up them. The shadows falling on Frey’s face and his defiance of decorum should’ve alerted you to his base intent, but Nutter’s framing of the banquet reassures you that man who pointed over there and yelled “Squirrel!” isn’t engaged in misdirection. I won’t subject you to another episode of Game of Lasers, but I assure you that everyone’s making eye contact with the appropriate people. Frey threw Robb one knowing glance when the beauty of the bride was revealed, but other than that, when people are talking to each other, they’re talking to each other:

Everything must be fine because everyone’s behaving like humans engaged in natural conversations. Be it the three-shot of Catelyn talking to Bolton or the four-shot of Robb and Talisa talking about Catelyn talking to Bolton, everyone at this wedding is making appropriate eye contact.

Did I say “everyone”? I meant almost everyone. Remember what I said earlier about our human disinclination to trust gangs of people? The Starks fought that instinct by turning toward Frey and offering him their full faces. He could make eye contact with any of them as per his desire. This lot with the musical instruments? They’re not making eye contact with anybody — not even each other. And they’re being shot from an empowering low angle. And they’re focusing on their instruments with the deadly intent of incompetent amateurs. All of which are indications that something’s afoot at this otherwise open-seeming wedding banquet. The tension builds between Nutter’s direction and what half the audience knows is coming, but it should also disquiet the half that doesn’t. Because Nutter’s not even a cheap magician. He's the replacement magician your father hired when the first one showed up stoned: he’s trying to disguise the birds in his lapels by pulling coins from your ears but he isn’t fooling anyone.

You what’s coming.

Even if you don’t.

Because this is what foreboding feels like. This is the look on your lover’s face the moment before she reveals she’s betrayed you. This is crack in your father’s voice the moment before you learn your mother’s died. This is that moment and it is terrible:

Catelyn sees those doors shut and realizes she’s in such a moment. She’s quickly coming to terms with what that means — like Diane Keaton at the end of The Godfather, only Catelyn knows that she’s not being barred from so much as locked in with the monsters.

I still know that you've seen that I saw you: miscommunication in "Second Sons" (Game of Thrones)

To recap: this is a complement to the most recent podcast Steven Attewell and I produced, on “Second Sons,” in which we discussed, among many things, miscommunication at the wedding of Sansa Stark and Tyrion Lannister. I found my contribution to that part of the discussion lacking, so I decided to demonstrate what I meant about Tyrion coming to dominate a scene that possesses real potential for chaos. The first part can be found here and really needs to be read for the following to make sense.

When we left off, what had been a hostile but orderly wedding banquet teetered on the edge of something. Relations had been frosty but fine until Loras Tyrell reminded people how legs work and walked away from the table, which inspired Tyrion to do something with alcohol. His father, Tywin, noticed his clever son noticing Loras and, aware that Tyrion can become a giant fucking lion when the mood strikes, strode across the hall to talk to him. However, his grandson  (twice-over) had a terrible idea: Joffrey “Baratheon” decided to humiliate his former bride-to-be, Sansa, but caught Margaery Tyrell noticing his planning-face and decided she should be part of it too. All of this happened via glances passing between parties. We resume mere seconds after the last post ended, with Tyrion staring at Sansa’s ass:

This is only unusual not only because, in recent episodes, Tyrion’s been shot in a manner that makes his head appear level to those of the people he’s speaking to. From the camera’s perspective, when he spoke to his father, sister or nephew, he’d ceased being a little person. But earlier in this episode, his height — and its relation to his sexual abilities — had been made an issue when he met with Sansa:

Such is what’s required of him not to stare at her ass. The contrast between this shot before the wedding and the one of his father — that’s Twyin behind him in the first image — is part of both Michelle MacClaren, the director, and Tyrion’s respective plans. In order to make himself appear drunker than he actually is, Tyrion abandons the pretense of being the willful supplicant and lets his eyes rest at their natural level. That it happens to coincide with Sansa’s ass is a happy and convenient coincidence that fails to impress his father:

Note that since she’s merely moving the camera up and to the let about a foot, MacClaren could’ve used a conventional two-shot; but because conventional two-shots create the impression of a bond between characters, she shot them individually. This has two effects: it reinforces the notion that these two are only strategically “intimate,” and it allows Tyrion to dominate the screen when he’s on it. That may not seem significant, but it’s important that the audience, at this moment, see Tyrion as someone capable of dominating the screen:

Is his father behind him? Yes, in the literal sense; but only maybe in the colloquial, because Tywin doesn’t know what Tyrion’s planning. But in a scene in which eyelines and eyeline matches are so important, it’s not a coincidence that while Tywin’s staring directly at his son, Tyrion’s refusing to establish eye contact at all. It was his eyes, after all, that gave away the fact that he was planning something earlier, so no matter how very intently his father stares at him:

Tyrion’s going to refuse to meet that stare, which would allow his father further entry into whatever it is he’s planning. It’s significant that the dialogue at this moment is mostly Tywin talking about the importance of his plans for Tyrion and Sansa coming to fruition. It’s as if he’s trying to stare Tyrion into submission, but it’s not working:

Tyrion won’t return his father’s gaze — because in addition to giving away his own plan, it would suggest consenting with his father’s. So he continues to make contact with everything except his father’s eyes. This is where the situation stands when MacClaren pulls the camera back into the only kind of two-shot that doesn’t suggest a bond between characters, i.e. one in which the characters are looking past each other in different directions:

This is a singular variation of the two one-shots of Tyrion and Sansa earlier in the scene. So intent is Tyrion on not making eye contact with his father that he’s failed to notice that Joffrey’s returned. Tywin recognizes the gravity of the situation: Joffrey’s decided that Tyrion and Sansa should be “gently” escorted to their wedding chambers and stripped for all to see, and Tywin isn’t entirely sure how to tell his grandson that this is a foul idea. So he leaves:

Note that as Joffrey enters and calls for Sansa’s public humiliation, he’s looking right at Margaery. The threat isn’t even implicit: he caught her staring at his planning-face and wants her to know exactly how their upcoming nuptials will end. Tyrion isn’t sure what to do. Whatever his plan had been, Joffrey’s has interrupted it, so Tyrion takes a moment to stare at his wine glass again. He may not be sure what to do next, but he’s certain it’ll involve alcohol. Joffrey then seeks approval from his mother:

Or, more accurately, from the chair she recently vacated. Despite the audience’s initial confusion as to where the characters were in space and in relation to each other, at this point it’s clear that Joffrey’s staring at his mother’s empty chair. Sansa, meanwhile, can no more make eye contact with the boy-king than his mother could. She knows the depravities of which he’s capable. The audience, at this moment, is reminded of what happened when Margaery stared directly at him. One does not make eye contact with the boy king. Tyrion agrees:

He continues to stare at the table evaluating his options. He ignores both Joffrey’s taunt and Sansa’s plea. The situation is so unbearable that the audience is happy to follow everyone’s eyelines to the Tyrion, then to the happy couple’s table: better to be staring at the table cloth than dealing with what’s about to happen. And it is about to happen:

Joffrey turns back to the audience generally, and in the direction of the Tyrell table particularly, and reiterates his terrible idea: Sansa shall be carried to her wedding bed and stripped. Publicly. That she’s not included in this shot indicates that this isn’t really about her. Obviously, Joffrey enjoys humiliating her — but his design here is grander and aimed, along with his eyes, on his future in-laws. Tyrion bides time.

Then he doesn’t:

Now this is a lovely little shot. Tyrion’s pretending to be far more intoxicated than he actually is, so initially the fact that this seems to be a shallow focus shot of nothing could be his drunken perspective. It isn’t. Tyrion’s decided to act, and though it’s difficult to see, there’s the thin edge of a blade in front of Sansa’s down-turned face. MacClaren racks the focus to capture Joffrey’s expression:

Tyrion’s just pulled a knife on the king. Joffrey’s face says it all: “You don’t pull a knife on the king! You don’t pull a knife on the king!” Unless you do:

And here’s the close-up the entire scene’s been setting up: Tyrion staring down Joffrey at eye level. He’s no longer Sansa’s willful supplicant: he’s dominating this close-up and he’s a giant fucking lion and no one has any idea what to do or where to look:

Because he’s Joffrey, Joffrey looks to his mother’s empty chair. Tywin seems to be looking there too, a plaintive glance that somehow communicates his disdain for how Cersei’s raised the boy-king. Margeary seems to be the only one who can look at Tyrion — Olenna stares at her staring at him while Sansa studies the floor and silly me I almost forgot Tyrion continues giving Joffrey the eye-fuck of the century:

Who owns this room? Tyrion owns this room. His father’s impressed:

Note that he’s not making direct eye contact with Tyrion though. He’s looking in the right direction, but not high enough to be looking at Tyrion. The perspective’s a little off here because he’s looking at the camera, so I had to approximate his eyeline. There’s other evidence that he’s not looking precisely at Tyrion though:

Joffrey isn’t looking directly at him either. Note that Sansa and Margaery are looking to Tywin for their cues, because everyone seems to realize what happens when the boy-king’s brought to anger. And he’s certainly angry: he’s been forced to lower his eyes to his uncle because he’s suffering what Elizabeth Loftus calls “weapon focus“:

Except it’s not fear that’s blinding him so much as outrage. You do not pull a knife on the king! But he’s not only offended: he’s profoundly disappointed that what should have been Sansa’s humiliating moment has become his. Tyrion’s ruined the evening’s “entertainment.” He’s upset the king. That Joffrey can’t steal his eyes away from the knife is a telling detail: it’s part and parcel of his reluctance to do anything for himself. He’s as much of a Lannister as a person can possibly be, but he lacks the conviction for self-reliance Tywin tried to teach Jaime in that scene. Unlike Ned Stark, who in the first episode of the series beheaded poor Will in a manner befitting a lord, Joffrey orders knights to kill people and executioners to put them down. Sansa, meanwhile, seems to recognize how precarious her situation is and studies the floor so as not to draw Joffrey’s ire further, and that’s when Tywin calls a stop to it:

He shifts his eyes — but not his body — from the Tyrion’s blade to the enraged boy-king. Significantly, it’s while he’s looking at Joffrey that Tyrion finally relents:

He still dominates the screen — and the room for that matter — but he breaks into an ostensibly drunken laugh and eases the tension among the gathered. That he relents doesn’t change the fact that he’s just put the boy-king in his place, publicly, in a moment of enforced humiliation that Joffrey thought would be his. Little as the victory may matter in the long run, on this day Tyrion’s succeeded where Joffrey failed. He’s taken ownership of his own wedding banquet away from the boy-king who thinks the world belongs to him — who thinks he’s the culmination of his grandfather’s lifetime of scheming. And it’s in this moment that Tywin, for once, seems to agree:

Or sees something on the ceiling and decides to look at it. This is the one eyeline that baffled me. Is he looking at Cersei descending from the balcony maybe? Is this an exaggerated glance at Tyrion for the purpose of making him seem “taller” in the eyes of the assembled? I don’t know. But I do know that his estimation of what Tyrion’s accomplished isn’t out of line with mine. It’s just he doesn’t see the point in needlessly annoying the boy-king. Fortunately for the audience, MacClaren’s been watching the show and understands the joy that comes with watching Joffrey impotently roar.  

Especially when it’s at his “little uncle” and especially when it’s because he’s interrupted the boy-king’s reindeer games.

I see that you've seen that I saw you: miscommunication in "Second Sons" (Game of Thrones)

This is a complement to the most recent podcast Steven Attewell and I produced, on “Second Sons,” in which we discussed, among many things—some of them kitten-related—miscommunication and the wedding of Sansa Stark and Tyrion Lannister. I found my contribution to that part of the discussion lacking, so I decided to demonstrate what I meant about Tyrion coming to dominate a scene that possesses real potential for chaos. But first let me make two noncontroversial statements:

1. Prior to acquiring language, mammals developed the ability to use their eyeballs to control others’ eyeballs simply by looking around an environment.
2. Filmmakers have long taken advantage of our inability not to follow the eyeballs of characters as they glance around the screen.

So if you walk into a crowd and everyone’s looking up:

I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, you’re going to follow their eyes and look up too:

It’s just natural—even if you’re really not from around here. The same logic applies when you’re watching a film. If all the characters look at something, your eyes will follow theirs. It’s the quietest means a director has to move your eyeballs where he or she wants them. Noisier varieties include dramatic movement, the sudden appearance of a new object or character, a loud unexpected sound, etc. Clearly these attentive systems evolved hand-in-hand: the first person who notices the sudden appearance of a new object may make a dramatic movement, which catches the attention of everyone else and compels them to follow that first person’s glance.

For example, if four people are in dining room and one of them notices a giant fucking lion in the kitchen, that person’s likely to make a dramatic movement accompanied by a loud unexpected sound; everyone else will turn to that person and then follow their glance into the kitchen, at which point they’ll also notice a giant fucking lion and panic will happen. At this point in our social evolution, however, we don’t need dramatic movements and loud unexpected sounds to compel our eyes to follow others’ glances—we just do it.

When coupled with all the social strictures that regulate who can look at whom and in what way and when, the potential for a director to make an audience very uncomfortable should be obvious. They can make us look at things we shouldn’t be looking at, or at things we can be looking at but are doing so wrongly, or most powerfully, they can use the sympathy or enmity they’ve already established for particular characters to make us pity or praise them for the direction of their glances. The wedding of Sansa and Tyrion is a perfect example of exactly how this is done by someone quite talented at doing it, Michelle MacClaren, whose episode of Breaking Bad, “Gliding Over All,” was all about staring and following stares. (In fact that second link contains images strongly resembling those about to follow, except this time, for ease of reference I’ll keep everyone’s eyelines a consistent color: Joffrey’s yellow, Tyrion’s teal, etc.) So let’s start staring!

Here we have Joffrey repaying Tyrion for the venomous look Tyrion shot him when he saw that the boy-king, who had murdered Sansa’s father, would be accompanying her down the aisle in her murdered father’s stead. Note that though Joffrey occupies the central element of the screen, his exaggerated posture as he bends to steal Tyrion’s wedding-stool mocks his uncle’s stature. He need not say a word—the insult is understood:

MacClaren responds to the boy-king’s pettiness by closing in on Tyrion’s face. The audience sympathizes with the sadness in Tyrion’s eyes just as it had the hatred moments earlier. His eyes aren’t open and inviting—as say this fellow’s are—but we’re close enough to his face to register the pain upon it, which makes the following shot all the more judgmental:

The perspective on Cersei’s eyeline is a little off—she’s actually looking more up and towards the audience, which now stands approximately where Tyrion did—but Joffrey’s clearly looking not at his uncle but at Sansa, his former bride-to-be, as a means of furthering her humiliation. Neither mother nor son need speak a word for the audience to hate them for openly mocking an already tragic scene. We only need follow their eyes to condemn them. This dynamic continues right through to the wedding feast:

The scene opens without an establishing shot. Instead, this medium shot is the only information the audience has about who's there and where they exist in space. Joffrey and Cersei are staring in the same general direction, and we want to know what they’re looking at:

Apparently they’re looking at Tyrion, except that doesn’t seem right. They medium shot was level with them and they appeared to be looking down, whereas now we seem to have a close-up that’s angled slightly low, meaning we seem to be looking slightly up. This could be a reverse to an eyeline match—that it follows the shot of Joffrey and Cersei strongly suggests as much—but the attention Tyrion’s paying to pouring his glass suggests that if he’s the object of their eyeline match, he’s an unwitting one. Given how “drunk” he’ll become, that’s a possibility, but my real point here is that the first two shots of the wedding banquet are merely contiguous, nothing more. They follow each other, but they don’t do so in a conventional manner, meaning that two shots into this banquet the audience is already a little lost about who’s where. Perhaps the next shot will provide a clue?

It will not. The bride’s not watching her new husband attentively pour himself more wine, she’s looking off-screen at something, but we’re not privy to what. But at the very least MacClaren makes a compelling point with the direction of their respective glances: the attentions of the newly betrothed are literally pointed in opposite directions, his to the left, hers to the right. Maybe we’ll get to see what she’s looking at?

This is at least a possibility: even though the camera’s level on Olenna Tyrell, it’s possible that Sansa’s looking down on her and that this is an eyeline match; but even if she is, what’s significant that Olenna’s not looking up and returning Sansa’s eyeline. There’s no connection between them—no eye contact—which only doubles the audience’s impression of Sansa’s isolation: she was just looking in the opposite direction of her husband, but now she’s watching someone have a conversation with someone else. Who Olenna’s having that conversation with isn’t clear because, again, MacClaren’s still hasn’t provided us with an establishing shot. All we can tell is that it’s not Sansa.

At this point in the scene we have no way to orient ourselves in it: we can’t tell who’s looking at what or talking to whom, and as social animals who try to locate ourselves in social spaces, we find this extremely unsettling. It’s the equivalent of being a child lost among a sea of legs in a room we don’t recognize: we can tell that people are looking at things but not what; we can tell that people are related to each other but not how; and we can only acquire information one face at a time because we’re too fucking short to see above the crowd. This can’t go on forever. At some point MacClaren must relent:

And she does, but only somewhat, because we still don’t know which one of these three Sansa was looking at. We thought we did because of the logic of the initial reverse to Olenna, but now we see that she could’ve been looking at any of these three people who aren’t returning her glance. So Sansa’s still doubly lonely, but at least we know that Olenna’s talking to Margaery Tyrell. However, just because we have some information about the relative location of people in the room doesn’t mean people are going to start communicating with each other: Olenna and Margaery’s conversation excludes Loras Tyrell, who sits between them and glares at something off the left side of the screen. What? Maybe we’ll finally have a conventional reverse?

Didn’t think so. Now we’ve got a long shot of the Lannister table from over Sansa’s shoulder, which may not be a conventional reverse, but at least helps situate us in space. We assumed that Olenna and Margaery and Loras were to Sansa’s left because the earlier shot of Olenna could’ve been an unrequited eyeline match; if we pair that assumption with the fact that Joffrey and Cersei are to her right, we can infer 1) that Cersei’s staring down someone at the Tyrell table, possibly Loras, who was looking in her direction in the previous shot; and 2) that Joffrey and Cersei weren’t staring at Tyrion in that opening shot, but at the Tyrell table. Specifically—albeit for different reasons—they were both staring at the left side of the Tyrell table, meaning that in all likelihood this scene opened with mother and son staring at their wife-and-sister-among-many-other-things-to-be, Margaery. But in the above, at least someone’s finally making eye contact with Sansa—except that it’s Joffrey and he’s making shit-eating eyes at her. MacClaren cuts to the groom’s shoulder’s perspective:

Which informs us that the one example of eye contact previous to Joffrey and Sansa’s has been broken, as Olenna’s now staring at the Lannister table, presumably in response to Cersei shooting red lasers at Margaery in the previous shot. Margaery seems unaware of—or is ignoring—Cersei’s glare, but she has to recognize that Olenna’s broken eye contact with her. Loras, still utterly uninvolved, stares at the table. Tyrion, however, is watching Olenna stare at his sister with what seems—because no one’s looking at him—like an almost anthropological curiosity. He’s watching everyone watch everyone else without making eye contact with anyone. It’s almost like he’s gauging the room in preparation for some sort of performance.  After Olenna turns back to Margaery, perhaps embarrassed by having been caught staring so intently, Cersei turns to Joffrey:

Who’s clearly still trying to eye-fuck Sansa. Before seeing her response, it’s important to note that even though she’s his mother and has made him the “man” he is today, she’s being unduly deferential and speaking to him without even attempting to establish eye contact. As for Sansa:

She has found something very interesting on the floor. She’s looking neither at the Tyrell nor the Lannister table now, while her new husband stares, in an exaggerated fashion, into a pitcher of wine. It’s almost as if he wants people to think that he doesn’t know how it works anymore—that he’s so far in his cups he hasn’t a fucking a clue how to put more wine in them. Although it’s doubtful she knows what Tyrion’s planning, Sansa clearly wants no part of the dynamic she’s witnessing develop. And with good reason:

Now both of them are staring at her. Which provides Margaery an opportunity to stare at them:

Note that there’s no cross-talk going on between tables. The only way the Tyrells and Lannisters are communicating are through these glances. But before Margaery can figure out what they’re talking about—and most likely for her own good—Olenna draws her back into conversation:

Which seems to annoy Loras enough that he decides to leave, but instead of him leaving in this shot, MacClaren returns to the long shot from over Tyrion’s shoulder:

Tyrion seems to believe that Loras’s departure indicates that rules are about to change. Whatever sense of decorum had held these parties in check has been violated. That it’s Loras tiring of being spoken past by Margaery and Olenna is immaterial. The dynamic in the room is shifting and Tyrion needs to take control of it. He does so the best way he knows how:

By appearing to be very drunk.

So very drunk Sansa has no choice but to resume her study of the floor, only this time more enthusiastically. But Tyrion’s performance may have been a little too loud and dramatic, because it’s caught his father’s attention:

Tywin sees Tyrion staring “drunkenly” at his reflection and realizes that Tyrion’s realized something. Tywin isn’t sure exactly what—it’s not like they’ve been talking to each other with words or anything—but he realizes that his clever son has seen an opportunity of some sort and, alerted to the potential threat, will likely do something about it. He knows better than anyone that Tyrion can become a giant fucking lion when it suits his needs, and Tywin is determined that nothing of the sort will happen tonight. Because although it’s Tyrion’s wedding night, it’s the culmination of Twyin’s plans, and he’s not about to let his clever son disrupt them. Since he knows Tyrion’s a rational person, Twyin decides to convince him of the wrongness of whatever it is he’s about to do, but he never gets the chance:

Because as he started walking toward his rational son, his irrational grandson set his sights on Sansa, who has now found a fascinating object of study on the ceiling. Margaery notices Joffrey’s movements:

But she stared too long. Joffrey notices her noticing him:

And clearly decides that whatever indignity he was about to subject Sansa to must now include Margaery as well:

Nice try, Margaery, but he already caught you. You’re now an integral part of whatever plan he’s explaining to his mother:

Because he’s talking to her—but he’s looking at you. Even she knows this isn’t going to end well:

So what began as a drunken wedding party in which we, the audience, couldn’t orient ourselves either in space or with relation to the attendants is now about to turn ugly. Imagine that? A drunken wedding party turning ugly! Except given the involvement of Joffrey—a boy-king so monstrous even his mother seems afraid to make eye contact with him—the ugliness that could ensue could be beheading-Eddard-Stark awful. The only hope seems to be that Tywin can convince Tyrion to put aside whatever play he’s developing and put a stop to Joffrey’s … and about that I’ll have more to say tomorrow.

"Second Sons": an LG&M podcast on Game of Thrones with Steven Attewell and SEK

We apologize for missing last week's episode, but Google Plus had updated its "Hangouts" feature and we couldn't find the new button. But it's been found! Also, in this podcast we have a first: I've finally figured out how to incorporate images without making the resulting file too large for Youtube. So now if you're watching the podcast, you'll see the visuals we're describing while we're describing them. (At least mostly. I'm still experimenting with keeping the size down and the audio quality high. This is tougher than it looks.) In this episode we discuss making my students weep uncontrollably; the dynamics of the relationship between Tyrion and Sansa; the similarities between Dany and Walter White; the politics of Stannis Baratheon; and many other things beside. Enjoy!

Enjoy this fine podcast without the images I painstakingly inserted into it just for you.

Our very civilized discussion of the premiere (S03E01).

Fancy-talking about “Dark Wings, Dark Words” (S03E02).

Here we are blathering on about “Walk of Punishment” (S03E03).

Don’t watch — because you can’t — us discuss “And Now His Watch Has Ended” (S03E04).

The rudely interrupted first half of our discussion of “Kissed by Fire” (S03E05).

The second half of our discussion of religion in “Kissed by Fire” (S03E05).

In which we discuss “The Climb” sans spoilers (S03E06).

"The Climb" with spoilers (S03E06).

Mad Men: Is the awesomeness of white men really "For Immediate Release"?

The majority of people watch Mad Men wrong. What do I mean? A translation of last night’s episode, “For Immediate Release,” from their perspective should suffice:

With the exception of Matt Zoller Seitz and a few others, the majority of responses to this episode have focused on how “satisfying” it was to see Don Draper behaving like Draper again. Meaning the majority of the people writing those responses are still watching the show primarily to experience the thrill of being a powerful white man. The episode, directed by the always excellent Jennifer Getzinger, undermines this reading at nearly every turn. Consider when Sterling announces that he’s landed SCDP a chance at Chevy after Don brushed off Jaguar:

Pete Campbell upbraids Draper, saying “Don’t act like you had a plan, you’re Tarzan, swinging from vine to vine,” creating an image that would seem to correspond with the “appealing” white male narrative above. Draper isn’t just any powerful white man — he’s the walking-talking embodiment of early 20th Century theories of white male supremacy. Like Tarzan, he’s an orphan who cultivates the talents required to survive in a hostile and alien society; and like Tarzan, when he finds himself among “normal” people again, these talents appear superhuman to them. To become king of the apes he had to become more than just a man. In this particular context, Campbell’s insult almost reads like a compliment; however, this isn’t the first time this season we’ve encountered an ostensibly superior white man in a society of apes:

For the second time in two weeks, the show demands we consider the hubris of a white man in the society “unworthy” of his talents. The reference to Tarzan in “For Immediate Release” only seems ambiguous if we conveniently forget that Draper’s mildly obsessed with a film whose premise is that no man — not even a white one on a world mad with apes — is beyond reproach. Campbell’s insult holds these two visions of white male supremacy in tension: Draper can only continue to feel superior if he deliberately forgets what he learned watching Planet of the Apes.

Those critics who found this episode a “return to form” fail to realize that they’re taking comfort in a momentary resurgence of white male privilege — a momentary return to that Golden Age “when things just made sense” that conservatives reference every time a woman, person of color, or anyone under the age of forty-five decides to have an opinion. Wasn’t it grand when self-made men like Draper could impose their will on the world?

The problem with finding “satisfaction” in this episode, then, is that it requires us to ignore the same things Draper does. Note how the medium shot of Campbell upbraiding him is composed: Draper, representing the old guard, is in the foreground, but he’s a face without a brain and out of focus;  Campbell, Ken Cosgrove and Joan Harris, representing the generation after Draper’s, occupy the midground; and in the background is an unfocused Michael Ginsberg and sundry, representatives of the new generation. Although no one actually occupies the center of the frame, the dominant element seems to be the irate Campbell, as he’s on the receiving end of Draper and Cosgrove’s stares. But then there’s Joan Harris — the color of whose dress seems out of place and whose eyes meet no one and nothing — there’s Joan Harris on whose back alone the company survived. What does she have to say about Draper’s “return to form”?

Exactly. She doesn’t belong in the story white men tell themselves about how awesome they are — but she does belong to the one currently being told by Mad Men. If only more of the people watching it realized that.

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.

Ironically, she's not doing transwomen any justice.

I'm genuinely fond of Gail Simone's work—both in comics and combative internet forums—and I fully support what she says about the addition of a transwoman to the cast of Batgirl:

She added that she thinks most superhero comics readers don’t have a problem with increased diversity, but rather with stories that promote sermonizing over storytelling. Alysia will be “a character, not a public service announcement … being trans is just part of her story. If someone loved her before, and doesn’t love her after, well—that’s a shame, but we can’t let that kind of thinking keep comics in the 1950s forever.”

Except it's not "just part of her story," because it's just not part of the story. It's an interruption in Barbara Gordon's issue-wide interior monologue. Because in this issue Gordon has quite a bit of confessing to do:

You don't even need to enlarge the image to see that the majority of this conversation is filtered through Gordon's interior monologue—those black dialogue boxes speak for themselves. This is Gordon telling you a story about Gordon, which would be fine if this didn't happen:

I admit to having edited out three panels of hugging and a close-up of that message-cat, but that doesn't detract from my larger point: Alysia's confession isn't an organic element of the narrative. It's utterly forced. Consider the first set off panels above: it's a series of two-shots emphasizing the bond between Barbara and Alysia that "transitions" to an unnecessarily dramatic close-up on Alysia. Because it's not as if Barbara's confession of having been paralyzed and tormented and stalked lacks emotional weight. Her burden is even indicated, visually, by the purple half-bat that haunts her words. She can't escape what's been done to her and who she is, not even when she's telling her own story to herself. Which, again, is all well and good. I adore the confessional mode so long as it doesn't involve Don Draper talking about swimming. But a narrative written in the confessional mode simply isn't the best place to have someone other than the confessor make a grand gesture. My editorial work above may be a little dishonest, but it's certainly indicative of the issue's overall narrative emphasis. If Simone wanted to have Alysia's moment be hers, she should've placed it in a narrative that didn't belong to Barbara Gordon, because that makes it seem like an afterthought.

And that only provides more ammunition to people who think "cis-gendered" is just "another one of those terms invented in universities aimed at eliminating the word “normal” when discussing sexual preferences." Because people who think DC is pushing an LGBT agenda will feel like its being "shoved down their throat" when revelations like this are inserted into narratives so awkwardly. That close-up pushes Alysia into the reader's face in a manner liable to remind readers that the forced intimacy of all close-ups is actually really creepy, and when it comes to rhetorical effect, the difference between "shoved down my throat" and "thrust in my face" is without distinction.

SEK and Attewell, LG&M podcast-style, on Game of Thrones: "Dark Wings, Dark Words" (S03E02)

Or, another installment of "SEK yet again looks at everything that isn't his webcam, while Race for the Iron Throne's Attewell just looks composed, only this time SEK also looks like a Soderberghian Smurf." (He's not doing himself any favors here.) This podcast discusses, among other things, gender and violence, sex and manipulation, time travel, Batman, and Attewell's amazing ability to corral SEK's dithering into almost topical blather. (Also, the punchline to that pointless joke SEK made can be found here. It may make its way into an argument eventually, but that day is not today.) Enjoy!

Download Kaufman and Attewell discussing "Dark Wings, Dark Words" here.

Our discussion of the premiere (S03E01) and a link to download it can be found here.

All LG&M podcasts can be found and subscribed to here.

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.

Of course Obama is Satan

Whether you believe that Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, the man portraying Satan in the Hitler Channel’s adaptation of The Bible, looks like President Obama depends on a number of factors, foremost among them your familiarity with people of other races. If, like many white conservatives, the majority of your interaction with people darker than you occurs when you watch the evening news, you see this image and are shocked by the similarity:

Just look at his skin! The deep set eyes! The wide nose! His ears aren’t visible but surely they’re identical too! Except they aren’t. This is why I force my students to pay very close attention to the actual frames they’re analyzing instead of relying on an uncritical sense of what’s being represented on screen. To wit:

I chose this comparison because it’s the one in which the likeness, such as it is, seems greatest. It’s important to note that it’s from the conservative Newsbusters site, meaning that it’s been selected in order to heighten the featural similarities between them. The President’s lips aren’t always pursed, and choosing an image in which they are creates some features that wouldn’t otherwise be there, but for argument’s sake I’ll pretend this is how the President always looks.

We’ll start our comparison with the forehead: not only is Ouazanni’s deeply furrowed, the muscles above his eyebrows are far more defined. Moving down to the glabella — the bit between the eyebrows — Ouazanni’s contains both vertical and horizontal furrows, whereas the President’s is smooth. Both have deep-set eyes, but Ouazanni’s are hooded and appear almost rectangular, whereas the President’s are almond-shaped. Beneath both of their eyes is a pronounced lower eyelid furrow which combines with an intraorbital furrow to create downward facing triangles on their cheeks. In this image, they both also have well-defined nasolabial furrows descending from the tips of their nostril wings out and around their lips to their chins, both of which are squarish. There are significant differences: Ouazanni’s cheeks are sunken, whereas the President’s are puffed; the shape and presentation angle of their nostrils is completely different, etc.

In other words, a simple description of the features of their face makes it possible to believe that they look somewhat similar — or that, as many on the right are arguing, Ouazanni looks like an older version the President. Except they don’t. The number of specific features a viewer needs to overlook — or be race-blind to — in order to claim a holistic similarity between the two is just too high.*

If you want to see a connection, enough featural similarities exist for you to do so, but only if you make a conscious decision to equate an image of Satan in a hoodie with the President. The number of distinctions you must overlook is equaled by the number your cross-racial identification bias prevents you from seeing. Factor in whatever intuitive model of aging you use to crease the President’s forehead and wrinkle his cheeks and it’s clear that quite a bit of cognitive processing has gone into the “intuitive” association between these faces. Which means you ought to ask yourself:

Why do I want to overlook these distinctions and age him in this way? The answer, obviously, is that you want to see what you think you see, and are probably upset that I’ve demonstrated how your “plain observation” has been filtered by political and racial recognition biases. So much so that your rebuttal will amount not to a refutation of the features I’ve identified, but by linking to the image again and insisting that anyone with eyes agrees with your holistic judgment. As Allahpundit admits, he now has “a new front-page thumbnail for when Obama pushes an especially terrible policy.” That’s all he really wanted in the first place.

*I’m not saying there’s no resemblance. Only that judgments about human faces are highly susceptible to suggestion, as analyzing them in detail, feature by feature, demonstrates.

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:

Fellowship of the Ring: Conventions of Genre, Sorta Kinda Part the Second

(Actual Part the First can be found here.)

The answer to the question of why some films are more re-watchable than others seems, to me, a matter of unpredictability of shot selection. We can all watch episodes of Law & Order half-asleep because we all know that any close-up of one character's face will reverse to a close-up of his or her interlocutor's. (The possibility of deviating from the script-bible is basically asymptotic: the staleness of the formula makes it look increasingly likely but it can't ever actually happen.) And despite my general objections to Fellowship I'll admit that its iconic scenes are rightly remembered because Peter Jackson bucked his horror roots and embraced an unpredictability that verges on randomness. To wit, consider the scene-setting that preceded Gandalf's most infamous exclamation, which begins half-way through the mines of Moria with a close-up on Gandalf:

Did I say "close-up"? I meant "extreme close-up," because Jackson's lopped off the top of his head. That might not seem so important, but consider it in more mundane terms, for example, if this were a picture you took of a friend at a party. How happy would your friend be with a photograph in which he'd been a "bit" beheaded? How would you feel about framing your friend's face such that it shared the spotlight with a few lines of mortar and some unfocused negative space? This shot feels wrong because it violates the conventions that makes Law & Order and the like such successful soporifics. It's an ugly and unbalanced shot, but I'd wager it's meant to discomfit, if only because Jackson's going to repeat it so frequently in the next three minutes that this is the last time I'm going to mention it. Just remember that it's wrong to borrow chunks of people's heads for rhetorical effect. From here Jackson cuts to Frodo:

I'm not even going to say it, but you see it. The expectation here is three-fold: you assume that this shot's going to be followed by 1) an eye-line match, 2) a point of view shot, and 3) a reverse shot, and you're not disappointed:

But because you assumed that this would be a reverse shot, you also assumed that you'd reverse back to your point of origin, Frodo, so that you could gauge his reaction to what you've just observed while cohabitating his head. Only:

Jackson upset the implicit continuity of the reverse shot in order to make it more difficult for us to predict shot sequence. This might not seem like such a significant achievement, but that's only because you underestimate the power of convention. Imagine you're watching a medical procedural in which a doctor, in a medium close-up, addresses an ill patient and says "Blah blah blah kidney transplant." You'd expect a reverse shot of the patient, possibly in a close-up to better capture the pain of this revelation, but what if instead of that you were hitched into a roller coaster backwards and yanked thousands of feet into the air? Because that's what Jackson does when he violently zooms from Gandalf's face to, well, this:

The screen shots don't do it justice. Few currently available experiences are comparable to the ride Jackson subjects you to there outside of 47 seconds into this, and even though your mind knows you're just watching a movie, your eyes and brain are subject to a few hundred thousand more years of evolution and react differently. You may not be scared for your life, but you're not entirely comfortable with your current perspective. Jackson will exploit this feature of perspectival preference for the remainder of this scene, much of which will involve placing the viewer in places no one not named "Clark Kent" can achieve. But he won't do that quite yet:

He yanks you thousands of feet into the air, then punches you in the face by following that shot with a medium close-up of some hobbits looking frame-left. Note that when he was previously mid-air panning he was drawing your eye to the right, and that when he cuts to this shot, he knows your eyes will re-set frame-center, find nothing, focus on action, see Sam glancing backwards, and then follow his eyes to whatever they'll be matched to. In short, he's directed your eyes right-right-right, then center, then center-left, then left-left-left, then:

Here, to a canted shot, presumably from Sam's point of view, of whatever's following. It's canted because some people aren't that bright and hadn't gathered that the Fellowship might be in a tight spot. Or because Jackson wanted to marry content and form in such a way that the knowledge of the narrative peril was heightened by the manner in which it was depicted. For our purposes, all that matters is that when he's using conventional sequences (like eye-line matches) he's doing so in a dictatorial fashion, yanking our eyes from one side of the screen to other with a disregard bordering on callousness. But when he's not using conventional sequences, he's creating an environment of uncertainty of the sort I mentioned at the beginning of the post: because there's little logic in the shot sequence, the film becomes more re-watchable simply because it defies our defaults. For example, what do you think follows the above eye-line match from Sam's point of view? Back to Sam?

Nope. So we'll stick with Frodo?

Well, at least now we know who to follow, right?

God damn it. Jackson's gone all MTV and started editing like a meth-addict, which clearly indicates that we're in for a further succession of quick edits as the action intensifies and—

For fuck's sake, really? Three quick edits followed by a head-level camera gently drifting rightward to capture the action? Speeding us up and slowing us down, are you, bartender? Serving us the cinematic equivalent of vodka and Red Bull, so now we're—wait—we're not feeling so good. Weren't we level-headed with Gandalf before that CGI column obstructed our view? We were, and now we're still following the Fellowship, only from a lower angle of framing, and—

He didn't look that big before, or so up. Why's he so up?

The dwarf too? The dwarf is up? Where are we? What happened to us? We were all level-headed with them, and now they're all up, like we've—

That's the ceiling. We're lying with our backs to the floor, aren't we? We most certainly are. It's difficult to tell with the screen shots, but if you look at the film itself, it's clear that as we passed behind the CGI column Jackson tripped us because that's the fucking ceiling. But at least now we know where we are and can predict what shot'll come next. We'll get a slightly low-angled shot of the fellowship abandoning us to our inevitable—

Or Jackson'll take a page from New Age out-of-body narratives and hover us a half-mile above our proxied body like the ignorant chump he's proving us to be with every subsequent shot. Why is this sequence (and what follows) so re-watchable? Because even if you break it down before a class so often you think you can reconstruct it in your sleep, convention is the default, and you can't escape it. So every time you watch it, you think you'll know what it'll be like, and every time you watch it, you're wrong.

Tomorrow I'll finish this up by writing more about how uncomfortable Superman's director's boots are and why wizards are more intimidating than 500 foot tall fire monsters.

Damn it, Bill

I defended Obama against Althouse et al.‘s unfounded and visually illiterate accusations, but I just can’t bring myself to back the Big Dog when he’s so obviously enjoying the view:

Game of Thrones: Swords! Swords! Swords! in "Baelor"

Earlier in the quarter, I introduced my students to the anything-that's-longer-than-it-is-wide mode of psychoanalytic criticism. Not very sophisticated, I know, but it helps explain the historical context of certain rhetorical tropes.* Given that this class is based on Game of Thrones, the discussion inevitably landed on the subject of swords as phallic symbols, and I noted that while there's nothing necessary or natural about that connection, it is one of long-standing and therefore might have influenced how George R.R. Martin employed them in his narrative. Which the students took to mean "SWORDS EQUAL PENISES," a not altogether unfortunate development given how the Arya and Needle string undermines conventional gender assumptions. It did, however, make teaching the ninth episode, "Baelor," a little difficult. The episode opens with Lord Commander Mormont gifting a sword, Longclaw, meant for his son, Jorah Mormont, to Jon Snow. Snow proceeds down the stairs and is immediately accosted by his Wall-fellows:

Keeping in mind what my students think swords equal, consider the eyeline match in this shot. Not explicit enough? Fine:

That man seems a little too excited to see Jon's sword.

They all seem a little too excited to see Jon's sword.

And Jon seems a little too happy at how excited they all are to see his sword. But he obliges:

If you think I'm being juvenile and sword-blinkered, consider this scene in which a captured Jaime Lannister throws himself before the mercy of Lady Stark:

Nothing emasculating about that. The same can't be said for this:

Even skipping over the scene in which Daenerys demands that the previously de-sworded Jorah Mormount draw his sword for her, it's clear that this episode is very much about swords. Remember how it ends?

I mean after Arya considers drawing the symbol of male empowerment she's appropriated for herself before realizing the inevitable futility of doing so:

There you go. The point of all this is that anyone analyzing this episode needs to account for its economy of swords: they're distributed, re-distributed, lost, stolen, and finally wielded by a masked man at a sham of an execution. This execution, by the by, neatly parallels the scene in the first episode in a manner that highlights their differences: in both instances a man is being executed, only in "Baelor" the beheader has become the beheadee, the trial isn't just, and the Stark child witnessing it is commanded not to look.

So, as I was saying, swords! Swords! Swords! Swords!

*As an example of psychoanalytic criticism, I use an explication of The Castle circa 1950, in which the tall lanky K. and his short round assistants, Artur and Jeremias, are reduced to the walking-talking male genitalia  Kafka clearly intended them to be.