Failure of Execution: Game of Thrones and THAT Scene (SPOILERS)

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This post contains the following: Spoilers for Game of Thrones and a frank, graphic conversation about rape. Please be advised.

Last night on Game of Thrones, Sansa Stark and Ramsay Bolton got married and the directors included a scene that frankly, has been telegraphed for quite a while now. Ramsay Bolton rapes Sansa on their wedding night, while forcing Theon Greyjoy to watch. This scene was the inevitable result of both the cartoonish characterization of Ramsay and HBO’s decision to cut the character of Jeyne Poole and move Sansa back to Winterfell, and this morning it is the catalyst for a thousand angry articles, blog posts and tweets. I won’t lie to you, I find this scene horrific, problematic and sadly, unavoidable.  In this post, I attempt to breakdown my reaction academically, in order to keep myself from screaming.

As I said, my first reaction to this scene was to say “Welp, saw that coming.” From his first introduction, Ramsay Bolton has been such an over the top villain, I half expected Blofeld to show up and tell him to take it down a few notches. Creatively, when you set a character up in this way, that character has no direction but the further extreme in which to head. As writers, the team at HBO have brought Ramsay to the screen in such a way that escalating his sadism to raping his new wife in front of a man who is basically her brother was the only option available to take his character anywhere at all. When you combine that with the change in plot that puts Sansa in Winterfell instead of The Vale, to have him not rape Sansa Stark in their marriage bed would have not been credible, from both a storytelling and characterization perspective. So, while I was disappointed to see such a scene on my television, I wasn’t at all surprised. I’m disappointed because honestly, I want to believe that the team at Game of Thrones is better than this, and that they could have tried to find a more original way out of this particular artistic corner.

And here is where we come into the rest of the issues with writing, shooting and showing such a graphic and sadistic rape scene. If you’re going to subject your audience to this kind of horror, you need to think about how you do that. The way the scene was shot and edited is really bothering me. This entire season has been about Sansa Stark gaining, for truly the first time in her life, a sense of agency and control. That she discovered this agency and power through the conduit of Petyr Baelish has always been interesting and dynamic to me. There are many ways to become empowered, and one of my favorite things about Sansa Stark for about a million years now has been her apprenticeship with Littlefinger. To see that agency brought low through violent rape is as horrifying as it is typical. But to see that loss of agency exacerbated by making the scene actually all about Theon Greyjoy is insulting.

I mean, come on guys, if you’re going to trot out the exhausted trope of “Woman Raped to Show Her Vulnerability”, at least have the decency to show us Sophie Turner’s performance of that moment. Don’t pan away to show Theon crying. I get that he is there as an audience surrogate, and that as a character, he is entitled to a reaction to what he is witnessing. But by panning away from Sansa to Theon, the audience is robbed of Sansa’s reaction to her violent rape at the hands of her husband. By leaving Theon in the room, Game of Thrones stripped Sansa of her newfound agency and stripped the audience of their ability to react to this scene on their own. Lingering on Theon’s face forces the watcher to experience only Theon’s emotions, which, in my opinion, further victimizes Sansa. This is unnecessary, it’s sexist, and frankly HBO, not cool. Now, as audience members, we are forced to assume everything about Sansa’s experience based on no real facts or evidence. Which isn’t fair to us, and it isn’t fair to Sansa. This issue is compounded by the fact that the scene is the final one in the episode. We literally fade to black while Theon cries and Sansa screams. We never get to see Sansa’s reaction, we never see her face after the camera switches the Theon. This is the worst kind of emotional manipulation, a false and pointless cliffhanger, as if the audience for Game of Thrones was going to tune out next week if they already knew that Sansa was devastated, or defiant, or, you know anything at all besides absent from her own experience. Women suffering violence at the hands of men should be more than a way to ratchet up the tension of a TV show, and this rape scene should serve as something more than an opportunity to show how a man reacted to it. I’m confident that Sansa will exact her revenge at some point, but by using her rape as nothing more than a dramatic tactic, neither the plot nor the characters were well served. In other words, by reducing Sansa to the object of Theon’s gaze and a victim of Ramsay’s abuse, Game of Thrones doubled down on totally unnecessary misogyny.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need go rewatch only the scenes with Arya over and over again, to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

 



4 thoughts on “Failure of Execution: Game of Thrones and THAT Scene (SPOILERS)”

  • I fully agree that just showing Theon’s reaction robbed Sansa of a character defining moment. However, I disagree that they did it for any other reason then to show an important moment for him. We’ve seen Theon stop caring about his own situation, and Ramsay’s other victims. Up until now it did seem that he had fully become Reek. However, Theon is reached in that moment, and he is upset. His own torture and abuse is something he has accepted, but watching Sansa’s rape makes him care again. Still a shot back on Sansa would have fixed this. Let both characters have their moments.

    • I agree, Megan. That’s why for me this is a huge issue of direction, editing and writing choices. Hell, I saw someone earlier on the internet somewhere suggest that a lot of this could be abated by putting the bath scene AFTER the wedding. Show Sansa still has her defiant anger, and you get a cleaner story. I think they did it because they’re lazy and don’t think about the female gaze is all. I don’t think it was intentionally sexist, but latent misogyny is the most insidious kind, IMO.

      • I agree that placing the bath scene afterwards would have been much more powerful, if they felt oblidged to take this route. Which, quite frankly, I do feel was shoddy writing done for the horror factor. The last several episodes it feels like Sansa’s entire power-up from last season has been taken away. At the dinner scene, why do we see her rude and sullen, instead of swallowing those feelings to charm Ramsay/Walda and/or gain Roose’s respect, to find a way to stall the wedding without providing insult?

        And of course, this is going to culminate in her lighting that candle and people coming to help rescue her, instead of her figuring out a plan beyond that. I’m not saying she doesn’t, or shouldn’t, need help to escape the situation–I’m just very afraid that her agency in doing so will be limited to lighting a candle instead of working to manipulate the world around her.

        I don’t think the implications of keeping the camera on Theon occurred to the writers, which is a serious problem in and of itself. I have absolutely no problem with having seen his reaction, but the scene should have ended on Sophie’s face. The person being raped in a scene is the most important note, not the person watching. It feels very much like Sansa’s character arc is being sacrificed to advance Theon’s.

        On a final not, it is also not cool that they described this season to Sophie as “You get a love interest.” Even as a joke, that’s not funny.

        • First of all, Welcome Amanda. Thank you for checking out SiG and joining our discussion. I couldn’t agree more with your concerns, especially this: “It feels very much like Sansa’s character arc is being sacrificed to advance Theon’s”. I also agree with your concern that she is now simply going to construct a plan to be magically rescued and all her character work for the last three seasons is going to vanish. And they will use “what happened to her” as the excuse for doing that, and I think that sends a really bad message.

          And yes, all the language coming from the writers, directors and so on is disturbing. The scene was nicknamed “Romance Dies” is the scripts and storyboards. It’s like they are so removed from the effects of their storytelling choices because they are only seeing these moments in the context of the larger Game of Thrones world and arc. I don’t know. It breaks my heart, I’ve been a fan of the world of Westeros for a long time, and to see them reduce this complex and amazing world to a series of “gritty” cliffhangers is disappointing.

          I mean, I hope I’m wrong, and that next Sunday they do something amazing and truly surprising. But I’m not holding my breath, you know?

          ETA: OMG, Amanda, I am an idiot! I didn’t realize it was, you know, you! 🙂

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