Game of Thrones walks fine line on rape: how much more can audiences take?

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/20/game-of-thrones-rape-sansa-stark

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As Game of Thrones delights in telling us, “the night is dark and full of terrors”. For four and a half seasons, showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss have seemingly dedicated themselves to demonstrating that fact. They have presented us with men burned alive and women used as human pincushions; with eyes popped gruesomely out of faces, heads chopped off and bodies flayed, tortured and defiled.

Yet how much more of this can audiences actually take? There have long been mutterings that Game of Thrones has a particular issue with women and sexual violence. In the final scenes of Sunday’s episode, the eternally suffering Sansa Stark – having survived the prospect of marriage to teen psychopath Joffrey – was married off to the equally psychotic Ramsay Bolton and subsequently raped on her wedding night while her dead father’s former ward Theon stood in frozen horror. The sequence caused outrage, with Senator Claire McCaskill stating she was “done” with the show and branding the scene “gratuitous” and “unacceptable”.

McCaskill was not alone in her condemnation. While Alyssa Rosenberg mounted a skilful defence in the Washington Post, arguing that rather than revelling in the abuse of women Game of Thrones has always been “a story about the consequence of rape and denial of sexual autonomy”, most critics said that the scene was, at best, misjudged. Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson argued: “It undercuts all the agency that’s been growing in Sansa since the end of last season … did it really have to be rape that brought her low? Is that really the only horror Game of Thrones can imagine visiting on its female characters?”

For my own part, like Rosenberg, I saw Sansa’s scenes, which drew heavily on the tropes of fairytales, as fitting within a wider commentary. The rape had been foreshadowed in the earlier episodes of this season, from the moment that Sansa agreed to marriage with Ramsay – a hard, cruel man from a hard, cruel family.

However, it is also true that the problem with Game of Thrones and its treatment of sexual violence lies in the aftermaths of these storylines. Too often Benioff and Weiss show us a scene of violence against a woman, only for it to be swept away with little consequence by the time the next hour rolls around. This occurred most notoriously last season, with the now infamous reunion between Cersei and her brother Jaime in which the show’s creators believed they’d shot a scene of consensual sex even as many viewers and critics argued it was clearly rape.

By the next week all was apparently forgotten. There was no fallout. It was just one more stop on the cavalcade of horrors. Roll up, roll up, this week watch Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, use one of her children to burn a man alive.

Yet by placing that scene in a vacuum, Benioff and Weiss undermined one of the most important aspects of Cersei’s character: that she is herself the survivor of a brutal marriage to wine-sodden drunk who clearly raped her night after night. Cersei’s conversations have long made clear that her marriage to Robert was a brutal and unhappy one. During the siege of King’s Landing she touched repeatedly on the violence handed out to women both in war and in the battlefield of marriage. In that sense, Sansa’s horrific wedding night with Ramsay is a continuation of a thread that has run through this show since beginning: that Westeros is a dreadful place to live and a particularly bad one if you are female.

And yet. The problem lingers that there is a huge disconnect between what Benioff and Weiss say and what they do. On one hand there is a clearly established narrative which says “yes, this is horrible, it is unbearable, this is what happens both in war, and, perhaps worse, it can happen in peace as well”. Yet on the other, the depiction of that horror is often clumsily shoved in almost as a shock tactic, daring the audience to blink first or indeed asking them to become the watching Theon, to collude as horror after horror is paraded across our screens.

A fine line is being walked here and when Benioff states, as he did before the season started: “We really wanted Sansa to play a major part this season. If we were going to stay absolutely faithful to the book, it was going to be very hard to do that. There was a subplot we loved from the books, but it used a character that’s not in the show,” then it’s hard to believe he and Weiss are always on the right side of it. Because what that statement suggests is that Robinson’s assertion in Vanity Fair is correct: when Benioff and Weiss read this particularly grim part of A Dance With Dragons, they thought not of the girl who suffers as Ramsay’s bride but of Theon and his potential redemption. It suggests they do not understand the importance of allowing Sansa agency in her life as opposed to salvation at the hands of another man.

It is also true, however, that we do not yet know how this story will end. Benioff and Weiss are increasingly telling their own tale as much as Martin’s and perhaps Sansa will come through her ordeal, as unbowed and unbroken as the episode’s title hinted. This is a long, dark and increasingly horror-strewn road down which we are walking. I understand those who say that they want to stop.