Thrones, real and imagined

I checked into the Games of Thrones mythos a little late, somewhere around the third episode of Season 2 in 2012, and while I picked things up along the way, I was conscious of missing the full depth of Martin's story. The characters, the alliances, the history, the back stories.

The fact is, though, that the televised series is a sumptuous visual treat - elegantly recreated (albeit mythological) renderings of the late middle ages, modestly veiled references to War of the Roses history, arched and convincingly archaic dialogue, big money production values. A dragon here and ice ghoul there to remind us that the thing is rooted in fantasy. GoT is just  fun to look at, even if you don't always know what the hell is going on, and I was content to enjoy the spectacle even if the plot had to reveal itself to me in bits and pieces, with scattered subtitling from Sharon.

Sharon was so taken by the series, though, that she speed-read all of the books over this past summer and fall, and decided that I needed to go back and catch the series from the beginning. She borrowed the first two seasons on DVD from a co-worker, and we've spent much of the holiday break watching them, two episodes a night on and off over the last couple of weeks, and yeah, I mostly get it now.

Last night, we caught a couple of episodes from the beginning of Season Two, and afterwards, we found quite by accident a 2003 film called Henry VIII , a sort of Masterpiece Theater/made-for-TV thing, directed by Pete Travis and starring Ray Winstone in the title role; Winstone is a reasonably well known British actor best known for tough-bloke movie roles and TV commercials, and he was a plausible Henry, to whatever extent that can be accurately judged. Big, bearded and bullying.

Henry VIII

One presumes Britain must claim only a limited number of credible medieval-lord types in their actor sub-population, so it was no surprise that the two productions had some commonalities - Charles Dance, who plays the Lannister patriarch in GoT, appeared the doomed Duke of Buckingham in Henry VIII (we stayed at the real Duke's castle in 2012), and Sean Bean, known as Eddard Stark in GoT, plays the brave and also-doomed Robert Aske, leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Yorkist Catholic uprising against Henry's Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. (Bean also played Boromir in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy a few years ago.)

Familiar faces, interwoven between history and fantasy. We did derive a little charge from seeing a couple of the historic sites portrayed in the film, as we had actually been to a few of them; Traitor's Gate at the Tower of London (through which Anne Boleyn was escorted on her way to her beheading), Clifford's Tower in York, where Aske was strung up after being convicted of treason and sentenced to death by Henry.

After wincing through the explicit and pitiless violence of GoT, however, I thought Henry VIII came across as somewhat tame and sanitized, more of a costumed theater piece than the gritty and aggressively visceral GoT. It's also worth noting that the real Henry ruled for almost 38 years - his marital woes are the best-recalled aspect to his legacy, but the film didn't (and really couldn't) fully describe the man and his reign in its full complexity and in context of the times. Henry remains one of the English monarchy's most controversial figures; he's an easy guy to revile from a distance, but he did a lot more than behead wives.

And clearly, the two productions - one fantasy, one quasi-historic - were poised and directed to accomplish different aims. They made for awkward but curiously compelling bookends.

I think I've had enough beheading, medieval scheming and brutish sexual conquests to last a while, at least until...oh, probably tonight.