From The Living Church-HBO’s epic sword and sorcery series Game of Thrones returned for its third season March 31, and my local cable provider replayed the first two seasons in celebration of this event. In watching the series over a week’s time — and after making the requisite adjustment to HBO’s “We’re premium cable so we can show naughty body parts to our heart’s content” routine — I noted a significant parallel to a previous film fantasy: I was watching a medieval version of Pottersville, the dystopian hamlet from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
In Capra’s movie, decent, self-sacrificing George Bailey, having wished that he’d never been born, is granted a vision of his world without him. In it, his home town of Bedford Falls, renamed Pottersville (for the film’s miserly bête noir), has been transformed into a harsh, raucous land of bars which men frequent not for conviviality but merely to drink themselves into a stupor, where widows are suspicious and rude, single women are either trollops or spinsters, and relations between the sexes are limited to “Dime a Dance” halls and, well, whatever’s going on upstairs.
Throughout Game of Thrones we are treated to pretty much the same thing. The only marriages on display are purely political matters honored in the breach if at all (one exception is a middle-aged couple who are separated for pretty much the entire first season and permanently thereafter by death). The males are generally of two types: brawling, lecherous brutes or ambitious (generally equally) lecherous schemers. The women are all harlots, with the difference being that the underclass are paid for their services and the high born are technically married to those they lie with (though of course adultery remains a blood sport).
More here-
http://www.livingchurch.org/medieval-pottersville
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