Bad Dads In Armor

This past April, I started reacquainting myself with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, spurred by the start of Season Six of HBO's "Game of Thrones."  When not actually watching the show, I spent my time searching  Reddit and Imgur for Game of Thrones memes, reading new theories about Jon Snow's parentage on Quora, and listening to the audiobooks on my iPhone. My family got used to the sight of me walking around our apartment with headphones on. If they asked me a question, I'd roll my eyes or grunt in annoyance. Being summoned back to the real world was such a drag.  

Normally, I would say that a man in his forties spending this much time on sword and sorcery fantasy stories is a man trying to escape something—such as the pressures of fatherhood.

I did not try to get my sons to watch "Game of Thrones" with me. Despite all the sword fights, magic and adventure--exactly the type of thing that a guy raised on comic books would want to share with his two pre-teen boys--"Game of Thrones" is wildly inappropriate for children. Like a lot of HBO's previous hit shows--The Sopranos, the Wire, Deadwood--GOT is gruesomely violent, overtly sexual and emotionally brutalizing. A lot of characters die, and those who don't are just as likely to end up burned, raped or crippled. I'm happy to say that my sons are not yet desensitized enough to enjoy this type of thing. 

What's more, neither seems terribly interested in the fantasy genre. The elder, who is 13, is really only concerned with social media, Drake, and his hair. The younger one, almost 10, likes to play Minecraft and memorize the Billboard charts from the Eighties through the Oughts. Different strokes, etc.

Even if you have never watched "Game of Thrones," you've probably heard that the writers regularly kill off the main characters, often at moments when the audience least expects it. This is in keeping with the source material. George R.R. Martin has made a point of subverting the narrative expectations set by fantasy classics like The Lord Of The Rings, particularly the idea that the hero will survive to the end of the story. 

My children, on the other hand, hate surprises, especially nasty ones. Years ago, I read my son, as a bedtime story, a chapter from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This particular chapter features a plot twist right out of the Martin playbook: a character who we've come to know and started to like, Cedric Diggory, is suddenly killed. When I read this scene, my son got quiet for a few moments, then started wailing so loudly his mother rushed into the room. It took another hour for her to get him to sleep and afterwards she yelled at me so loudly she almost woke him up again.  

It's just as well my kids don't discover "Game of Thrones" now anyway. The most powerful force in Westeros, far more destructive than dragons, ice demons and sorcery, is family. Both the show and the books are full of awful patriarchs: Tywin Lannister, whose dedication to maintaining his family's power and reputation warps his children in terrible ways; Stannis Baratheon, who burns his own daughter alive in order to help him win a battle (and it doesn't work, which only compounds his bad judgment); Craster, the "wilding" who weds his own daughters and gives his baby sons to the demonic White Walkers; and even Ned Stark, the protagonist of the first season, whose stubborn sense of honor costs him his head, and arguably the lives of his wife and several of his sons.

My children already get plenty of examples of incompetent fathering from my day-to-day interactions with them--I see no need to provide more.  They have their whole lives to discover the shitty parenting so ably celebrated in the world's art and literature--from Hamlet's mom to Homer Simpson.  For the moment, then, "Game of Thrones" will remain a private pleasure, no-kids-allowed, like alcohol, expensive restaurants and curse words.

Agent Carter's Rebound

         For those of you who've never seen it, Marvel's Agent Carter is an action/espionage adventure show, with a side helping of superhero. Set in the late '40s, the show's protagonist is the frighteningly capable Peggy Carter, the romantic foil to Steve Rogers in the first Captain America film. Now that the war is over and Captain America is apparently dead, Carter is working for the SSR (an organization that will eventually evolve into Marvel's super secret service S.H.I.E.L.D.)  

     One of the main themes of the first season of Agent Carter was the trouble professional women have being taken seriously by their male co-workers. The show got a lot of mileage out of the way Carter ran rings around her fellow agents, though inevitably it was the men who got the credit for her work.  For this new season, the show has added the element of race, and its treatment in the first two episodes illustrates one of the challenges of creating a period piece TV show: how do you realistically portray the racial attitudes of the past without offending present day notions of diversity and progressiveness? 

   The Season 2 premier of Agent Carter introduces a possible new love interest, an earnest black scientist named Jason Wilkes. Carter first encounters him when she sneaks into a sinister industrial firm called Isodyne in order to investigate a murder. They run into each other in a hallway, and, after a beat of surprise, Wilkes immediately invites her back to his office, in order to wow her with the still he has built in his apparently ample spare time, a collection of glass tubes and beakers in which he creates "the best wine" Carter has ever tasted. Carter is on a mission, but she's also charmed by Wilkes, and engages in some light badinage while trying to get information. Were Agent Carter set in the present, this meet cute would seem perfectly normal (if a little ham-handed). But this is supposed to be the late '40s, when such forwardness to a white woman could--and sometimes did--get black men killed.

    Suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. I've never had any trouble accepting that Carter can beat up just about any man she encounters, nor that a villain can freeze people solid with a touch of his hand, as happens in this first episode. But the ease with which Wilkes moves in the world of white people struck me as scarcely credible. Affable, intelligent, and confident enough to recognize the chance that his interest in Carter will be reciprocated, he is a "post-racial," Obama-esque figure years before such a thing existed--before the civil rights movement and "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," before it was even legal for black and white people to marry in many states (though California did repeal its miscegenation laws in 1948, around the time in which Agent Carter is set.)   

     To be fair, the writers do try to address the racism of the time. At one point, Wilkes says that Isodyne is the only company that would employ "one of his kind." Later, as he and Carter are on the run from some murderous company thugs, they encounter a white store owner whose attitude--including calling Wilkes "boy"--sends Carter into a fury. When she expresses her desire to settle things with her fists, Wilkes smooths things over, noting that the store owner is hardly the only racist in LA.

    That's about it. Wilkes doesn't seem angry about such treatment, nor particularly hampered by it. So far, so good. So far, so bland.

     Perhaps Wilkes is not meant to be a recurring character. By the end of the second hour, he seems to have been sucked up by the mysterious black ooze which serves as the show's current McGuffin. If they bring him back--and he is not possessed by some sort of alien demon (such things often happen in the Marvel Universe)--I hope the writers make him more compelling, and explore the dramatic possibilities of his character's presence. How will the other men in her life--buttoned-down butler Edwin Jarvis, playboy inventor Howard Stark, sad sack SSR agent Daniel Sousa--react to Agent Carter's interest in Wilkes?  A romantic relationship between them would highlight Carter's disdain for convention, and also give her plenty of opportunities to get outraged on Wilkes behalf: a good thing, as actress Hayley Atwell is most engaging when her character is either angry at, or annoyed by, men.

    Besides, how cool would it be for Captain America's ex-girlfriend to find happiness in the arms of a black man? This is a woman whose romantic ideal is the blond-haired, blue-eyed Steve Rogers, a guy who dresses in an American flag and beats people up for a living. For her to end up with a nerdy, African American scientist would be a subversive act in ways that resonate as much now as they would have 70 years ago.