In 1933, just a year after her directorial debut, German actress-turned-auteur Leni Riefenstahl released a groundbreaking political documentary entitled The Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens). It was succeeded by additional documentaries, including The Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) in 1935 and Olympia in 1938. At the time, these works were hailed as technical masterpieces, showcasing Riefenstahl’s undeniable talent as a director. Her ability to exhibit political power and strength, persuasively framing the grandeur of public rallies, was heretofore unparalleled. Indeed, her executive producer, none other than Adolf Hitler himself, chose her precisely for this reason. For Riefenstahl intuitively understood that media had the potential to influence the masses, to shape their Weltanschauung. Therein lay the promise, but also the danger, of art in general and of cinema in particular.
Roughly four decades later, in the New York Review of Books, the American critic Susan Sontag returned to Riefenstahl’s legacy. Though her films had been used to disseminate and to strengthen Nazi ideology, Riefenstahl was merely declared a Nazi sympathizer or Mitläufer (“fellow traveler”) after World War II. She was never charged with war crimes per se. This indictment nevertheless hampered her career in cinema, and she reinvented herself as a photographer. In 1973, Riefenstahl published a book of photography called The Last of the Nuba (Die Nuba)—a popular and critically acclaimed work that detailed the lives of the Nuba people in southern Sudan. But Sontag, for one, was not convinced. After mocking the liberal establishment for whitewashing Riefenstahl’s legacy, Sontag’s review traces various points of continuity between Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda and her ostensibly divergent portrayal of African tribal life. In both cases, Riefenstahl celebrates “a society where the exhibition of physical skill and courage and the victory of the stronger man over the weaker are, as she sees it, the unifying symbols of the communal culture—where success in fighting is the ‘main aspiration of a man's life’.” But it’s not just that Riefenstahl herself has embraced this ideology. It is inherent in and through her artistic gaze and style, which Sontag memorably dubs “fascist aesthetics.” It is important to note, moreover, that Sontag does not think one has to be a card-carrying fascist in in order to make fascist art. On the contrary, Nazism drew its power from “a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third World camp-following, and belief in the occult.” Thus Riefenstahl’s Nuba is not fascist simply because of the artist’s ideological background; it’s fascist because Riefenstahl’s aesthetic taps into a larger current of political eroticism:
[Fascist aesthetics] flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, "virile" posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.
Sontag’s essay is now thought to be a classic of cultural criticism, so much so that it came up recently in a review of the new HBO series House of the Dragon (2022-). Indeed, writing in National Review, film critic Armond White maintains that Sontag’s censure of Riefenstahl can be applied not only to House of the Dragon but also to Dragon’s wildly popular predecessor Game of Thrones (2011-19). This is, in my view, a provocative take. For White, both Dragon and Thrones “romanticize the administrative state for the Millennium audience.” Moreover, that they are treated as high art by fans and critics alike is “sinister.” As White explains:
The Guardian promoted the show as a “game of political, seven-dimensional chess,” grasping how its fantastic period premise and outré spectacle resemble America’s contemporary political underbelly. It’s an allegory of famous families fighting (despite party differences) against insurgency by using dominance, influence, and ominous, spectacular tricks.
The problem, White goes on, is that “Marvel and Netflix have flattened the public’s interpretive reflexes, and [that] most streaming storylines conform to one ideology”—that of the worship of power. Indeed, citing Sontag, White argues that this is precisely what the “mass enthusiasm” for the Game of Thrones franchise demonstrates. Ours is a culture “in thrall to monsters and monstrous behavior.” We crave, and consume, art dedicated to political narcissism and violence.
One need not agree with every aspect of White’s case to realize that he is hitting on some uncomfortable truths. I was a fan of Game of Thrones and, as of this writing, have watched all four episodes of House of the Dragon. When HBO first released Game of Thrones,1 the general feeling (as I recall anyway) was that it represented a vulgarization of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). This was not necessarily a bad thing. Tolkien has long been associated with children’s literature, and, rightly or wrongly, his stories have been viewed as straightforward morality tales. The innovation of Games of Thrones, so the thinking went, was that it added context and complexity to the fantasy genre. For instance, in The Lord of the Rings, a royal figure such as Aragorn is essentially a hero, while in Game of Thrones even noble leaders such as Ned Stark are forced to compromise. What’s more, Game of Thrones highlights the minutiae of politics—the interminable board meetings and tedious debates about, say, tariff rates and fiscal debt—in a way that The Lord of the Rings does not. Hence, as White observes, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon are very much interested in recapitulating our contemporary political situation, where partisan leaders jostle for governmental control, cultural influence, and, finally, global supremacy.
Understood in these terms, it may very well be that Thrones and Dragon represent “fascist aesthetics.” At the same, however, I think it’s possible to distinguish between the metaphysical imaginaries of the two series. Both Thrones and Dragon center on politics, but the only the former (at least to this point) does so against a wider backdrop—that of the nefarious White Walkers (or “The Others”), who pose an existential threat to humankind writ large. Indeed, an underlying theme in Thrones is that political squabbles and power plays are shortsighted and even foolish given the ever present danger looming beyond the known world. This point is symbolically underscored by The Wall, a gargantuan structure of ice and rock that stands as a barrier between mundane civilization and the uncharted, mysterious realms of human experience. But how long will The Wall withstand the Others? And what will happen if it’s breached? With this in mind, Thrones’ famous saying “winter is coming” (also the title of its first episode) is far from a partisan Westerosi bumpersticker. It is apocalyptic prophesy.
In contrast, House of the Dragon has been almost entirely shorn of supernatural meaning. It is politics all the way down. Yes, the dragons are tremendum and fascinans (to borrow from Rudolf Otto), but they have been tamed for military usage and political leverage. Like the Luftwaffe over London, they do not transcend human power but serve it. In fact, there is no larger or more significant context in which to situate Dragon’s focus on the slow demise of the royal House Targaryen, which is being rent by corruption, disloyalty, and vice. The show is entertaining—though, alas, it does not reach the “bingeable” heights of Thrones—but I’m afraid that the charge of “fascism” does not seem inapt. Consider again Sontag’s definition: “[Fascist aesthetics] flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” Perhaps House of the Dragon will eventually expand its cosmology and its feel for “world-building,” but for now I can’t gainsay the notion that it’s mostly an exhibit of something our culture already has in excess—political porn.
Notably, Game of Thrones is based on George R.R. Martin’s ongoing series of epic fantasy novels, collectively known as A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-). In similar fashion, House of the Dragon was adapted from the first volume of Martin’s fantasy novel Fire and Blood (2018). While worth discussing in their own right—and certainly not immune to the concerns raised by White—Martin’s books are only tangentially connected to the present comments. I don’t want to get bogged down in comparing/contrasting the books and the TV shows. While I have read a few volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, I’m not a Martin completist. Besides, the bigger concern here is the Game of Thrones phenomenon, which is inextricably bound up with the HBO series and their massive audience.
Great post, Chris. Just had time to read it this morning. I've searched for the words to describe what built up in me over the seasons of "Thrones" and now Sontag on fascist aesthetics really does seem apt. For myself, a couple things come to mind as examples. I found that after the infamous and spectacular Red Wedding, which had pathos, surprise, betrayal and centered on the Stark family's wager on the risk of an uneasy alliance, that the Roose-Ramsay Bolton plotline only continued to the worst extremities without the pathos, so that when Sansa Stark too became the plaything of Ramsay's depredations it became almost unwatchable and to take any aesthetic interest in what Ramsay could do to Sansa seemed..... no longer to me justifiable. Yes, there is the Theon Greyjoy redemption ark, but to get there at the cost of all this gratuitous violence against a powerless person apparently for the interest of the camera angles... just like, pretty much verging on torture porn.
Similarly, one scene where I felt myself giving up on the series of Thrones as anything that might have a spiritual meaning was the ridiculous inclusion of the sort of monastic alternative community that seems to be around a popular movement with a charismatic teacher of the faith of the Seven who makes a pacificist interpretation -- I don't remember the series or the episode, but it involved the Hound finding them and it seemed like an interesting pairing of the Hound and the monastic community ---- and then they were slaughtered. It didn't to go anywhere except, well, that option is unviable in Westeros! Back to grizzled fighting for the Hound! It seemed just so pointless and stupid, and again, mostly took an interest in the slaughterers' power over the weaker --- yeah, fascist aesthetics is apt I think. I hated the last season and the White Walkers was simply a metaphor in the end for a kind of irrational unexplainable and frightening force but nothing more....