Joan of Arc and Assorted Other Nods to the
Medieval in the Final Episode of Season 5 of Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones, Season 5, originally broadcast 12 April-14 June 2015; written by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, Bryan Cogman, and Dave Hill; directed by Michael Slovis, Mark Mylod, Jeremy Podeswa, Miguel Sapochnik, and David Nutter; Season 5 finale directed by David Nutter. Produced for HBO and British Sky Broadcasting by Home Box Office, Television 369, Grok! Television, Generator Entertainment, and Bighead Littlehead.
Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University
Game of Thrones ended its fifth season
on June 14, 2015, with the usual surprises as to which characters live and
which die, but what was most significant about the season’s last episode was
the startling image of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), the archvillain of the series, sporting a plain
shift and, what the French call, a coupe à la
Jeanne d'Arc—in an evocation of yet
another screen Jeanne, Jean Seberg’s in Otto Preminger’s 1957 film Saint Joan, with a screenplay by Graham
Greene from the play by George Bernard Shaw.
Fans of Game of Thrones may debate its fidelity
to its source, the Song of Ice and Fire series
of novels by George R. R. Martin, which I have not read. But the HBO series is certainly replete with
medievalisms—all of which cater to what readers and viewers alike would
generally see as examples of the medieval.
There are castles, dragons, political alliances and marriages, rivals
for several thrones, dungeons and torturing, beheadings, burnings at the stake,
a clear feudal system, swords, spears, armor galore, an abundance of the
Gothic, and more than a dash of orientalism and the exotic.
What has
distinguished Season 5 from its predecessors has been its emphasis on
religion—a topic always at the narrative edges of Seasons 1-4. Indeed, religion seems to propel several of
the interlaced plots of Season 5. In
Meereen, attempts by Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) to rule the city are
undermined by the insurgent “Sons of the Harpy,” whose role model is clearly a
mixture of our ideas about what medieval and contemporary Islam Extremists look
like and do, thus setting up a clash among three rival religions represented by
those loyal to the “Mother of Dragons,” the Unsullied, and the masked
terrorists who are the “Sons of the Harpy.”
In his
attempt to seize the Iron Throne, the Lord of Dragonstone in the North, Stannis
Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), is coached by the Lady Melisandre (Carice van
Houten), often referred to as “The Red Woman,” a priestess of the Lord of
Light. In a series where venues are
often either impossibly dark or glaringly bright, her reasons for backing
Stannis seem as much to do with religious fanaticism as they do with political
ambition. It is Melisandre who had, in
Season 2, established Stannis’s legitimacy to claim the throne by allowing him,
in an Arthurian moment, to draw a flaming sword from a statue. And her black magic, and her lust for royal
blood to support it, continue into Season 5 and ultimately prove her
undoing. In a scene that references the
story of the death of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia perhaps more than that of Joan
of Arc, Stannis’s daughter, Shireen (Kerry Ingram) is burned at the stake to
ensure her father’s victory in his march on Castle Black.
But, in
Season 5 of Thrones, religious fanaticism
has most run amuck at King’s Landing. With
the marriage of Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) to the boy King Tommen
(Dean-Charles Chapman), Cersei’s youngest son, Cersei has a rival for her son’s
affections and a potential threat to her control of King’s Landing. To counter the threat posed by Margaery,
Cersei literally makes a bargain with the devil, the High Sparrow (deliciously
played by the always-oleaginous Jonathan Pryce), the leader of the Faith
Militant wing of the Faith of the Seven who have unleased their own brand of ascetic
fanaticism, in effect introducing the Inquisition to King’s Landing. The High Sparrow is both Joan’s Bishop Pierre
Cauchon and Florence’s Girolamo
Savonarola. Cerci has been tricked into implicating herself in a number
of sins—but not her incestuous relationship with her twin brother Jaime
(Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who is also father to their children—and is imprisoned
and interrogated Joan-like in the dungeons of the Great Sept for blasphemy and
heresy, though the two seem to be interchangeable sins. Deprived of food,
water, and any creature comforts—again the Jehanne references are fairly
obvious—Cersei is visited (more properly tormented) by nun-like members of the
Faith Militant who attempt to get her to confess to her crimes. When, exhausted and on the verge of hysterics,
she finally relents,
Cersei is seen kneeling at the feet of the High Sparrow to
make her confession.
Since Game plays fast and loose when it
references the medieval, the exchange here between the Sparrow and Cersei
recalls that between Joan and her confessor, a character played by Antonin
Artaud in Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s famous 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, though the latter is more sympathetic
to Joan (played by the stage actress Falconetti), while the Sparrow is simply
intent upon getting Cersei to incriminate herself further.
Both
medievalism and the medieval are the basis for much of the complicated
interlaced plot lines of Game of Thrones,
and the producers have at times even gone to great lengths to use authentic
medieval locations for any number of settings—in Season 5 of Thrones, the palace of House Martell of
Sunspear, the Water Gardens of Dorne, is, for instance, actually the Alcázar of
Seville built by the Moorish Kings of Iberia (a favorite site for movie
makers—scenes for Lawrence of Arabia were
filmed there)—but the visual reference to Joan of Arc in the last episode of
Season 5 is novel for the series and startling overall. In the scene, Cersei briefly has become Joan
of Arc, albeit à la Jean Seberg.
Previous seasons of Thrones have
offered no end of more morally upright women who might have been cast in the Jehanne
image, but the writers for this final episode of Season 5 clearly seem to want
to make the comparison with Joan ironically.
A woman of vice, not of virtue, a mature woman used to getting her own
way no matter the cost, not a young maid receptive to the voices of heaven with
no will of her own, is simply the latest in a long line of Joans—for what she
will do with her newfound freedom (and to the High Sparrow and his followers) tune
into Season 6 sometime in Spring of 2016.
