The Red Wedding and the Old Ultra Violence

It's cool to be a nerd. 

Nerds are smart. Some of them are literally rocket scientists. Nerds are funny. They invent hilarious catchphrases. Nerds are rich. One of them earned $19 billion USD before he turned 30, making him the most depressing point of comparison for young adults since this guy. And ever since professional athletes started dressing like your high school's chess team, nerds are probably getting laid as well.

Stay back, foxy mamas.

It's obvious that nerds have come a long way since the Days of Sorrow. Yet for all their accomplishments, there is still one thing that eludes their grasp: a sense of perspective. 

The Internet exploded this week when a bunch of mostly boring characters on a mostly boring TV show were gruesomely murdered in the bloodiest wedding reception since...ever, probably. The nerds were out in full force - some hysterically threatening to cancel their HBO subscriptions, others documenting their unsuspecting friends' reactions to the gore like a secondhand snuff film, while still others just bitterly wept, gnashed their teeth, and cursed the House of Martin.

Now, I am a bit of a nerd myself. In my younger days I was a voracious reader of Tolkien - to my great and everlasting shame, I once made a sincere effort to learn Elvish. I've read the Silmarillion so many times that I could probably sketch a map of Numenor without breaking a sweat. I know the difference between a Kirk, a Picard, and a Janeway. I laugh at Admiral Ackbar jokes. 

He'd be delicious with a little butter and garlic.

And I'm certainly not an emotionally resilient consumer of entertainment. I cry whenever I read Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, or pretty much any other book featuring the death of a canine. Dances with Wolves always gets my blood boiling. When Omar got got in The Wire, I did this. 

Yet I found it hard to twist my panties into a suitably outraged bundle over 'The Rains of Castamere'. Like most people, I felt sick when Robb Stark's pregnant wife was stabbed in the belly. I think I covered my eyes before the poor direwolf was turned into a pin cushion. I immediately voted Walder Frey into the Creepy-Old-White-Guy Hall of Fame next to him, him, and this dickhead.

To be honest, I felt that the Red Wedding scene was the most oddly compelling mix of brutality and grace since Alex and the gang tried out a bit of the old ultra violence. The slaughter in the dining hall felt horrific yet not quite gratuitous. As the credits rolled slowly down the screen, my thought wasn't, 'dear God, that was barbaric,' but rather, 'wow, that was brilliant filmmaking.' 

I'm a little worried about what this suggests. It's quite easy to laugh at the furious geeks and their endearingly stupid rants about the fictional demise of fictional characters. Seriously - Robb and his wife had just decided to name their baby after Ned Stark, aka Sean Bean. Their demise was practically preordained. And it's not like Game of Thrones suffers from a shortage of attractive yet charmless characters.

Uh, guys...

But perhaps they're right to be horrified. They're just horrified for the wrong reasons. 

The cinematography of the bloodbath was, in a vacuum, impeccable. The aural atmosphere around the castle dripped menace, from the clanging doors to the direwolf's lonely moan to the spine-tingling chords of the minstrels. Almost everyone agrees that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (who wrote the episode) created 2013's ten most captivating minutes of television.  

So what?

Game of Thrones is entertainment. It has never pretended to teach us lessons about social injustice (like The Wire), or human nature (like Breaking Bad), or delicious cookies (like Sesame Street). It is extremely well made and occasionally well written, but there is no substance behind its style. A good GoT episode is a fifty minute extravaganza of swords, sex, and dragons. It aims to please, not to teach, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is entertainment. People love entertainment. Entertainment is fine.

But if you're going to repeatedly stab a pregnant woman in the stomach and show her bloody, shredded womb gurgling sadly on national television, you ought to have a damn good reason.

And 'entertainment' just doesn't cut it.