A visual analysis of Game of Thrones' stunning 'Battle of the Bastards,' in 37 images

published 23 June 2016

There's a lot to praise in the direction and cinematography of Game of Thrones' latest episode, "Battle of the Bastards," but to me, one of the most fascinating choices was also — compared to dragons, dying giants, and the agonizing, almost expressionist footage of Jon suffocating — rather subtle.

I'm talking about the formal parallels between these two shots in which the Stark siblings go rogue — on different-colored horses and facing opposite directions. Sansa leaves the parley and rides away from Boltons and Starks alike after telling Ramsey to sleep well since he'll be dying tomorrow. (Is she riding off to get Littlefinger? It's unclear, cf. the Sansa Problem.) The next day we see Jon in the same location doing the same thing, but riding the other way.

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That's obviously a small detail given an episode chock-full of rich, gorgeously rendered action, but it's worth noting — one of the pleasures of brilliant direction is the beauty of its grace notes. Director Miguel Sapochnik did so much to evoke the psychological horrors of battle. There's the whiplash produced by the cinematic contrast between the perfect geometries of Ramsey's forces and the chaos they create:

But for all that, what interested me most about Sapochnik's direction was how virtuosically he multiplied the horrors of archery — and how he used archery to bracket the battle's larger story. Bows and arrows are frequently the tool of choice for good guys in fiction (hi Hunger Games) because of the skill it requires and its precision, but Sapochnik alternately renders arrows as highly targeted deliverers of death and — on the other hand — terrifying and constant and arbitrary. The transition happens slowly and takes three slightly different approaches — before taking one last cathartic approach. Let's walk through them.

By the middle of the battle, arrows will have become technological nightmares, basically drones. But right now we're building momentum. They're still single, specific. The biggest fake-out in the direction came when the camera lingered on Ramsey taking what looked like the fatal shot. Our depth of field literally narrows here: The bit in focus slowly moves forward, from Ramsey's psychopathic face to the arrow's tip.

It's immensely artistic and hugely effective. It gives us yet another angle on their relative positions on the battlefield, and it produces the particular panic things coming from above tend to evoke (see: Dany's dragons). If Rickon's death collapsed our sense of distance from the enemy, there's at least a certain relief in a death you don't see coming. This shot dispenses with that cold comfort: It stretches the arrow's time to target just slightly. These arrows may take a little longer than Ramsey's lethal shot — you can track them with your eyes — but they're all the more horrifying because of it. Worse, somehow, they're not even aimed at you in particular. Any lingering association between fair play and archery dissolves.

It's a perfect bookend to the beginning of the battle, when Ramsey taunted Jon into an insane rage by killing someone he loved in front of him. And it undoes its horror by collapsing the distance that made it so uncannily chilling. Ramsey's final encounter with Jon is too close for arrows. Ramsey's perfect archery fails. His power collapses up close, and his inability to kill Jon is frankly therapeutic. Jon's incredible blocking ability trumps Ramsey's incredible aim, and this shot of those stymied arrows does a lot to salve our jangled nerves.

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.

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