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

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.