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Another ‘Game of Thrones’ Comeuppance: Cersei in the Raw

June 15, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Regally reamed: Lena Headey's Cersei discovers the true meaning of karmy and it isn't pretty

Regally reamed: Lena Headey’s Cersei discovers the true meaning of karmy and it isn’t pretty

In last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, the season finale, Queen Cersei, the incestuous queen regent and mother to the hideous King Joffrey, finally gets her comeuppance. Reader of the book, like me, have been curious about if and when this moment would happen. For those who have just watched the series, it is more than enough that the arrogant and vengeful queen [spoiler alert] has confessed her sins to the ascetic Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce) after a long imprisonment. To add insult to injury, it was Cersei who empowered the religious figure. And then comes her walk of shame — her hair shorn, her shift removed, Cersei Lannister is marched through the town to the gates of the palace — a punishment with a history in Medieval France. In the process she is pelted with pee, crap and rotten vegetables and even exposed to the lewdly revealed breasts and penises of her people. It’s hard to recover their awe after this stroll of shame.

The book is even more shocking because we are inside Cersei’s head. And her moment of self-realization is shattering. What the daring HBO series refused to do was to show the naked Cersei as anything but attractive. After all, this is Lena Headey, whose breasts may not be as high as they once were, or of equal size, but the carpet matches the drapes and her hips are thin, her rear pleasantly round. She’s naked and humiliated but she’s still hot. What added insult to injury to the Cersei of the book was the realization that she was no longer the fairest in the land. After giving birth to three children and a steady diet of red wine, she is no longer an object of desire but repulsive in her nakedness. And this is something that she discovers reflected in the squinty eyes of her subjects. She has become closer to crone than sex goddess, and she realizes that as a woman she has lost her sexual power even as her political power is in jeopardy. Remember: this is the woman who recoiled from her lover/brother Jamie because he had lost a hand and was no longer perfect. Her self-loathing at the discovery of her fallen flesh is even more damning than the repulsion she sees on the faces of her subjects.

As terrible as is Cersei’s fecal-filled walk of shame through the narrow streets, the deeper comeuppance is that of her self image: she is not longer a desirable beauty but a hag left alone with all the foul deeds she has committed — her outside now matches her inside. The horror! HBO lacked the guts to go that far. Even though the series continually pushes the envelope of what we see on screen, the image of a misshapen, possibly menopausal nude is not one they will venture to display, opting instead for the whitewash of Headey’s undeniable attractive form, even though the camera angles attempt to show her body as grotesque. With her golden cap of hair, she’s a little too St. Joan than incestuous, homicidal Queen Cersei.

Crone

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: Game of Thrones, Jamie Lannister, Lena Headey, Nudity, The Sparrow, Tyran lannister, Walk of Shame

Adams on Reel Women: ‘Snow White & the Huntsman’ — it isn’t pretty!

June 10, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Beauty Queen Charlize (by Universal Pictures)


Beauty is a bitch. That’s always animated the Snow White story: Vanity and jealousy drive the evil stepmother queen to slip Snow White that poisoned apple. Now, along comes “Snow White and the Huntsman,” which is all about teasing out the backstory of these Grimm characters and asking, “Why?”

Why is it so important to know who’s the fairest of them all, a question the magic mirror never answers. For Queen Ravenna, played with Joan Crawford relish by Oscar winner Charlize Theron, the answer is an exposé of Hollywood’s obsession with feminine beauty and aging, and chasing after the next unwrinkled new young thing (whether that’s Kristen Stewart or Elizabeth Olsen or Rooney Mara).

Statuesque blonde Theron, 36, tears into the beauty theme, a variation on past roles. She won her Oscar for playing a repulsive serial killer in “Monster”; last year, she courted another as the morally ugly husband stalker in “Young Adult.” In “Snow White and the Huntsman,” we see Queen Ravenna in her full glory on her wedding day as she glances back over her shoulder and a cascade of golden waves at the young girl who will grow up to be her archrival. The queen has closed the deal with the king, Snow White’s widowed father, in 24 hours on looks alone. Beauty is her power. It’s also her obsession — and her weakness. The parallel is clear: As an A-list star, Theron’s superlative beauty is her commodity, but she’s always looking over her shoulder at the next girl, and the next.

[Related: A mom’s eye view of ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’]

What extremes will Queen Ravenna go to in order to maintain her primacy? It’s a high-maintenance business. The scenes in which she ages rapidly are riveting, showing the wrinkles curdle her flesh as she morphs into that crone who in fairy-tale books offers up the poisoned apple to Snow White (played here by Kristen Stewart). When the queen begins to sag, and bags form under her eyes, she grabs a young beauty from the dungeon and sucks out her soul like a McDonald’s shake. Ravenna’s youthful glow returns.

The movie goes one step further by expressing the anger that Ravenna feels about this cruel joke: beauty and aging. On her wedding night, she flings her wrath at her royal groom [spoiler alert], blaming him for the evil she is about to do because men are so in thrall to surface beauty. (Why can’t they just love me for me?) Then she neatly skewers him with a dagger. Sexism made her do it.

Queen Ravenna has a soul sister in Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Cersei is gorgeous on the outside and corrupt within (she’s had three kids with her own brother, Jaime Lannister). In this season’s penultimate episode, Cersei drunkenly counsels her son’s dewy fiancée, Sansa Stark, that being beautiful isn’t powerful in itself; a woman has to use her beauty like a weapon in the ongoing war for dominance. To paraphrase the wicked yet compelling queen: In times of war, women have to use what’s between their legs.

In “Game of Thrones,” as in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” female anger at male sexism is an undercurrent of the beauty discussion. Cersei vents that her father taught her brother Jaime how to fight with a sword, while all she learned was to smile and curtsy and dance. He learned how to kill; she learned how to seduce. When Dad dispatched Jaime to war and adventure, he married Cersei off to a stranger, traded like a horse for a family alliance. Cersei seethes — and, like Ravenna, she’s so compelling when she’s angry!

Both “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Game of Thrones” examine the beauty myth and the extreme lengths that aging stunners will go to to maintain their gifts and their control of power by sexual conquest. In addition, as the queens attempt to squelch or absorb their younger rivals, they demonstrate the difficulty of sisterhood across generations. “You are lucky to never know what it is to grow old!” Queen Ravenna cries to Stewart’s Snow White — as she tries to see that the younger woman will never live to cash a Social Security check. And so don’t expect an alliance between Queen Ravenna and Snow White or Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark — major-league feminine beauty is a cruel taskmaster and rarely a team sport.

This column originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies.

Filed Under: Celebrity, Essay, Movies & TV Tagged With: Adams on Reel Women, Cersei, Charlize Theron, Game of Thrones, Kristen Stewart, Lena Headey, Liam Hemsworth, Snow White and the Huntsman, Women's Issues, Yahoo! Movies

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