Theon Greyjoy, on the show, is an heir to the hardscrabble, piratical, profoundly macho nobles of the Iron Islands. He can’t contend for the throne, but as a B-list character, he wreaks a fair amount of havoc in the War of the Five Kings by betraying the central Stark family when they allow him some power. The Starks are basically good guys, but by raising Theon as a bastard in Winterfell, instead of in his rightful place, they rob him of what he sees as his birthright, identity, and manhood. This chip on his shoulder drives his sexual insecurity, which in turn drives his terrible behavior, eventually leading to his torture and neutering.
Theon’s saga appears within a familiar post-Tolkien world, a version of what Umberto Eco once called “fantastic neomedievalism.” Westeros is a feudal, vaguely British place, with no cell phones and three dragons. It’s recognizably high fantasy, a genre once considered a sure-fire money-loser on mainstream TV. But the show is more than pastoral escapism and emphatically not a critique of modernity from the vantage point of a bucolic past. Westeros is no idyll: it’s steeped in brutal, backstabbing realpolitik. Still, like other high fantasies, Westeros plays into a contemporary longing for a more direct, unmediated, “authentic” life. “Authentic” can mean a reactionary, gendered longing for a world where men get to be “real” men. Or, in our current technological reality, so full of virtual interactions and deadlocked bureaucracies, “authentic” can also mean a world where power stands up and calls itself by name. We might see Theon, therefore, as a kind of stand-in for the modern, self-alienated viewer. His weaknesses, longings, and identity issues are important to a series fundamentally about gender and power — a series that cuts off his penis as part of a bid to be recognized as more than escapism, as a serious cultural force.
A close reading, then, of the dick in a box: Ramsay Snow mails Theon’s member to his father as a power play in the ongoing war. Snow wants to blackmail Greyjoy into withdrawing his soldiers from the north, which is now under Ramsay’s control. Lord Balon, a repellent and bitter old father, dismisses the grisly package and shows no interest in preventing the torture of the rest of Theon’s body. He knows that his son can no longer continue his bloodline. The penis is thus metonymically Theon’s name, and without his name and seigniorial function, Theon’s soul and limbs are of no importance to his father.
Lord Balon first abandoned Theon long ago, leaving him with the Stark family in a compromise intended to hold the peace. On the show, it’s not entirely clear how this adoption was intended to function — was it meant to punish Lord Balon by robbing him of his son while bringing the houses closer together? Or was the aim to hold the child’s life over Lord Balon forever more, as a kind of preemptive threat? Either way, the abandonment results in Theon’s deeply conflicted sense of self.
His sister, by contrast, is raised like a first son, and grows into a more noble person than both her brother and her father. Valuing her brother’s soul and the rest of his body, she “mans up” and sets sail with troops of her own to get him back. Ramsay’s package thus has the opposite of its intended effect: in a way, it makes Theon’s prick stronger. Theon can’t get Ros, a prostitute, to sleep with him for free (in direct contrast with Tyrion’s squire Podrick, of the house of Payne, whose dick is evidently so amazing that a whole group of whores feel compelled to spend time with it gratis). But Theon’s penis sets his sister’s troops in motion: detached from his body, it finally exerts some power and leadership on Theon’s behalf. Theon’s detached penis directly provokes a female warrior to take charge and lead her soldiers into battle in his name. Fantasy world, indeed.
Even before his torture, Theon wanted his life to feel different, more direct. The Starks treated him well. At least, they treated his physical body well. After Theon turns on the Starks and attacks Winterfell, he asks the tutor he grew up with, “Do you know what it’s like to be told how lucky you are to be someone’s prisoner?” He has a warm bed and money for the occasional prostitute, but he’s emotionally tormented. This crisis of identity is the source of his obsession with sex; away from the Iron Islands, he always already felt emasculated. He tells Ros, “I don’t want to pay for it” (she tells him to get a wife). With or without the fee, he will fuck the same woman. But like the self-alienated TV viewer on her couch, Theon wants a less mediated, more authentic ride.
Theon’s Winterfell prison, therefore, is a prison of the soul. The sentence that Theon lives out before he is tortured is not one of “unbearable punishments” but of “suspended rights,” as Foucault describes our modern penitentiary-based system. Foucault contrasts modern with feudal societies, which were defined by forms of spectacular punishment. Western civilization moved away from drawing-and-quartering to psychological evaluations and prison sentences. The body becomes “caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions.” The Panopticon replaces public torture. “From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.” Foucault describes the alienating experience of living in this economy of distributed bureaucratic violence, surveilled by technicians, as a system that both constitutes and punishes the human soul.
In the feudal system, torture enacts and consolidates the power of the king on the body of the prisoner. In our regime, capital punishment is hidden away, while courts concern themselves with prisoners’ motives and mental states. Westeros therefore responds in part to a modern longing for royal decrees — even cruel ones — as an escape from Foucault’s false “utopia of judicial reticence.” Instead of secretive, hidden, distributed violence that attempts to control individuals’ souls, Westeros promises clear lines of power and a forthright relationship with individuals’ bodies — even if that relationship is violent.
Theon’s self-alienation both telegraphs and throws into relief that modern longing. In an hour that’s servicing at least eight major plots, the show spends an otherwise curious amount of time with young Greyjoy and his experience. But the show’s continuing interest in his desire for “authenticity” tracks the show’s interest in itself. These people are screaming inside, I am so not Robb Stark right now.
Ramsay gets the information he wants out of Theon by being nice to him, like the Starks were. The torture is thus unnecessary, aesthetic. It’s deeply individualized and personal. Ramsay is a true sadist: he uses physical pain to obliterate the world of constraints, privations, obligations, and prohibitions. If what Theon wanted was for someone to pay attention and treat him as a Greyjoy, then his wish has been granted tenfold, for he is tortured because of his Ironborn name. Ramsay breaks Theon’s spirit by demanding that he call himself “Reek.” But, ironically, by going to such great lengths to efface the name, Ramsay validates Reek’s status as a Greyjoy.
Theon’s torture is not like Foucault’s drawing-and-quartering in the important respect that it’s private. It doesn’t function within the world of the show as a spectacle to reinforce the power of the king. Instead, it creates a fetishistic dynamic among Ramsay, Theon, and audience that emphasizes the show’s power over the viewer. After Ramsay cuts off Theon’s penis, he sits down and begins to eat something sausage-shaped. He cuts off a piece and holds it up. For a moment, both Theon and the viewer are led to believe that he’s eating Theon’s penis. Ramsay pauses, for a long nauseating second, before he says it’s just a sausage.
The nasty trick visually aligns the viewer, again, with Theon. Watching Ramsay from Theon’s perspective, the viewer is physically reminded of her own body, again forced into a self-reflexive assessment of Game of Thrones. Did I think he was eating a penis? How far will this show go? How far will I go? Was I so angry with Theon for betraying Robb that I wanted him to be tortured? For what am I being punished? Did I participate in this not-for-broadcast horror? Is this nausea the authentic experience I came looking for? What is it that I’m paying for by paying for cable?
Either that, or the viewer thinks that HBO is just torturing her because it can — exerting narrative power for power’s sake. The viewer feels then that while she is happy to entertain criticisms of masculinity, she comes to Westeros to escape, and this no longer feels like escape. Behind the torture scenes and the “Red Wedding” episode, she feels not an exploration of the nature of power but the callous hand of a calculating author. The viewer then gets up from the couch and says, “Oh, disgusting. Fuck you, Game of Thrones.”
0 yorum
Yorum Gönder