Game of Thrones: Breaker of Chains

Usually in these reviews, I tend to speak about the various important plot points in the latest Game of Thrones episode. But as we look back at the Breaker of Chains episode I am going to focus on one particular scene. 

 

After the long awaited and much deserved death of Joffrey during the purple wedding, it would have been easy for the follow-up episode to be something like a let-down. I mean, really, where do you go after such a big event has taken place so early in the season? But fortunately lack of direction is not a flaw this series seems to have. 

 

There's been a lot of controversy over last week's episode, particularly because of the scene where Cersei is raped by Jaime in front of her son's barely cold body. It's bad enough that there is a consensual physical relationship between the two but this latest storyline is especially unnerving. On one level GOT purists are angry about the episode because it deviates from what is in the books. In the George R.R Martin novels, Jaime and Cersei have consensual sex in front of Joffrey's corpse as a way of grieving for their dead son. It's sick, but on the whole consistent with what we have come to expect from these two and their turbulent relationship. Game of Thrones has made a name for its self by being a show that is subversive and is able to deliver commentary on issues of identity, race and sexuality. In changing this scene I think it was a brave decision by the writers to showcase something entirely feasible in such a vastly cynical and overtly masculine world as Westeros. Cersei being raped is an important narrative point in the series and in the way we perceive this show and the world it is set in. Despite the laughs and the elaborate mythology, this is a dark place and often these are the kind of moments that are needed to remind us of this fact.  

Additionally, we have scenes in previous episodes of the series where "commoners" are raped and violated. But what is it about Cersei's rape that seems to have unsettled us so? 

 

What this particular episode has done is disturb our ideas of rape as a tool of power in Westeros. Which is to say that it does not happen to people like Cersei who are in these positions of power. Breaker of Chains is a small step towards demystifying the notion that your station in life makes you immune from being physically violated. And the fact that Cersei was raped by someone who is her family and whom she loves brings the story much closer to dozens of women all over the world who are violated by their spouses, fathers and brothers. Showing Cersei, a character we hate being treated this way, is particularly important because as an audience we are able to see that no woman, despite their deeds and flaws of character deserves to be taken against her will. If Arya or Sansa had been raped, this idea would not have translated quite as well. 

 

Additionally, in previous reviews I have written about how I am loving this softer wide of Jaime, but the fact that he has done this shows us two things. The first is that raping can be done by people who we think are good, that these types of actions are not as distant from our own reality as we think they are. Two, that Jaime at his core is a bad person, despite the torture he has been through you would think he would have learnt his lesson. Instead, after Cersei has rejected his advances several times he feels he should rape her, because she owes him for the way he fought to come back to her. This idea of a woman being indebted to a man, and her body being the only way she can pay, goes right to the heart of rape culture, both in Westeros and in our own world. This episode is difficult and unnerving - but it is also necessary.

 

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