The Cinematography of "Game of Thrones"

On average it takes me at least 3 years to jump on a TV bandwagon that everyone else has been buzzing about forever - and the vast, twisty Game of Thrones is my latest (6-years-delayed) entertainment binge. 

I love the look of it, which is clearly informed by the design of epics like The Lord of the Rings, as well as various adaptations of Arthurian myth. But beneath the GoT visuals runs an undercurrent of fear and pain and tension, and the effect is like an arrow to the heart. 

Much of the GoT style is understated and hard to pick up on in part because the show doesn't really hit its stride stylistically until about season 3. At that point, signature characteristics begin to leap out.

S03E04 "And Now His Watch is Ended"

S03E10 "Mhysa"

For starters - and this is probably my favorite quality - warm light and dust combine beautifully. The glare of the sun is diffused softly and naturally to great effect, never washed out or jaundiced. (And for some reason, Jorah in particular is lucky enough to be frequently and flatteringly silhouetted against it.)

S05E05 "Kill the Boy"

Relatedly, GoT, for the most part, is masterfully color balanced. Most shows and films of its genre are either orange'd out or bathed in an unholy greenish or bluish cast (please see: early LotR especially), but this series is naturally colored and lit. Even scenes that take place in the icy north avoid the sickly look that seems to be a common side effect of editing to communicate coldness and low light. 

S07E04 "The Spoils of War"

S01E09 "Baelor"

S02E10 "Valar Morghulis"

S02E10 "Valar Morghulis"

I remain - as I was with NBC's Hannibal - a steadfast fan of evocative medium shots to highlight critical character turning points and formative moments. Especially of Jon Snow, whose journey to leadership is a developmental centerpiece, and whose expression always begs sympathy of the "poor, tragic frozen baby" brand. Bonus points if the camera tracks towards the subject. 

S05E04 "Sons of the Harpy"

S06E09 "Battle of the Bastards"

S06E09 "Battle of the Bastards"

S04E04 "Oathkeeper"

These are similar to what I like to think of as "leader" shots - shots that frame someone close to dead center & visually sets them apart. The framing is cold, striking and lonely for some (Jon Snow), eerie and white savior-y for others (Daenerys), and sets the tone for the character of their leadership.

S06E03 "Oathbreaker"

There is a fascinating visual contrast here that mirrors the differences in Jon Snow's and Daenerys Targaryen's styles of command. While Jon's backing characters are usually clearly visible as distinguishable figures, Daenerys stands out as a single pale speck in a sea of vague, depersonalized brown blobs. Given the contrast, I think there's an argument to be made re: Daenerys being a troublingly dismissive, aloof leader who establishes a cult of personality and who rises to power on the backs of people she remains willfully disengaged from, both personally and culturally. 

S03E10 "Mhysa"

Even so, GoT doesn't aggressively ask us to reject Daenerys - in fact, she is positioned as a complex, developing ruler who, despite a tyrannical streak, still has a "good heart." GoT doesn't often tell us exactly what to think of its people or events; it drops little visual cues here and there and leaves us to form our ambivalent assessments.

In that spirit, GoT employs what I would call a "reticent" camera. Many films and shows with an element of intrigue make heavy use of dramatic irony, inviting the audience to be privy to information that the characters have yet to learn. The eye of the camera in GoT, however, steadfastly refuses to let us "in" on alliances, deceptions, and other information that characters have not yet discovered. We generally know and see as much as the central characters do (Sansa, Jon, Arya, Daenerys, Cersei, Tyrion), and no more. (e.g., Ned Stark's beheading is treated respectfully, with a discreet cut to flying birds, and at the Red Wedding, we have no clue that a bloodbath is imminent until Catelyn discovers the man she's been conversing with is wearing protective chainmail under his clothes.) Often, characters don't even say that much to each other that is meaningful, and when they do: they lie, they lie, they lie. 

S05E01 "The Wars to Come"

S05E02 "The House of Black and White"

So where does the emotional honesty in GoT come from? Its reticence means the show relies frequently on cinematography in order to convey emotional information that - in a normal series - we would normally get from a character's words. Sometimes framing drops hints about characters: even before we get to know him, Tywin Lannister threateningly butchers an animal just offscreen while he and son Jamie discuss political strategy. And sometimes framing drops hints about how we should feel about a situation, or how a character is feeling in the scene.

Above: we have these great upward-shot angles, which are usually visual indicators of alienation, apprehension or mystery. There are a lot of these in the show - more than we usually see on TV. Probably because everyone in this series is scared or confused (or both, if you're Sansa Stark).

We're also shown a lot of thin, vertical lines for a sense of severity, scale and dread, whether using trees or palace pillars or even bedroom curtains. Notably that dread knows no boundaries - it follows us indoors as well as out.

S05E06 "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken"

S01E06 "A Golden Crown"

S04E06 "The Laws of Gods and Men"

And there are windows - so many windows. GoT features many scenes of characters in dangerous, lonely situations gazing out of windows or silhouetted against them. (I'm often reminded of birds in cages.) Though these windows let in stark beams of light, it's often very hard to see what's out of them - a physical rendering of political imprisonment.

S03E04 "And Now His Watch Is Ended"

S03E06 "Kissed by Fire"

S07E01 "Dragonstone"

S06E10 "The Winds of Winter"

Until...Tommen Baratheon steps out of a window and out of his life entirely, into the beyond.

S06E10 "The Winds of Winter"

Outdoors, characters are no less trapped. Even in wide overhead shots, we feel the helplessness and claustrophobia of large-scale violence. Below: armies in formation surround wearied opposing forces, eventually chasing them into a forest and wiping them out. 

S05E10 "Mother's Mercy"

Noticeably absent are shots that invite close identification with characters, or that communicate genuine, positive intimacy, like POV shots, paired close-ups, etc. Even kissing shots and near-kiss shots are shadowy or cold-lit in a way to suggest manipulation and danger. This doesn't surprise me for a show that's wary of betrayal around every corner, and is ultimately more concerned with large-scale political relationships rather than romance or sex.

S05E04 "Sons of the Harpy"

S05E05 "Kill the Boy"

The closest we get to a sense of intimate identification with a character comes from angled,  downward shots like this one of Theon Greyjoy, which evokes a kind of brokenness and meekness. (We are literally asked to look down upon him.) Interestingly, GoT does not invite intimacy like this with characters that haven't been through some serious shit.

S06E07 "The Broken Man"

IMO the series is at its most hair-raising when using a Stark direwolf as a flag for magic. The wolf is CGI, of course, and though there is a jarring falseness to the way it moves onscreen, its over-smoothness has the happy side-effect of giving its scenes a sense of the uncanny. In other words, the fake wolf doesn't take us out of the experience of GoT at all - instead, it feels a little weird and magical. When it appears, we know something eerie is afoot. Maybe we're meeting a warg, or maybe Jon Snow's dead body is about to come back to life.

S03E02 "Dark Wings, Dark Words"

S06E01 "The Red Woman"

I've touched upon several thematic dualities - inside/outside, imprisonment/freedom, real/magical and uncanny, leading/conquering - but there are so many others in GoT. There's the struggle between old and new, north and south, east and west, and stylistic borrowings from northern Europe vs. Asia Minor and North Africa. Of the less obvious dualities, my favorite is the tension between space and clutter - most salient in the abundance of misty negative space when we are in the quiet, brutal North (below left), vs. the noise, commotion and grime of scenes associated with those from the South (below right).

S01E01 "Winter Is Coming"

S02E04 "Garden of Bones"

The tension between light and dark is always interesting, and doubly so in GoT. It is not quite clear to me just yet what light and fire mean in the show, or their meanings and associations are even all that stable. Often it seems that flame signals coming danger or dark magic, e.g., lanterns leading Sansa to her Bolton wedding, or Melisandre encouraging the wielding of torches to sacrifice victims to the Lord of Light. This is an interesting subversion of the more typical light-as-clarity-and-goodness trope, and I like it.

S05E01 "The Wars to Come"

S05E06 "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken"

S03E10 "Mhysa"

And what about the throne? For all the bloodshed over it in this universe, we see very little of the Iron Throne, and very few characters are depicted sitting on it. GoT cinematography treats it two ways: it is either a distant, unused prop informing political tension between characters (below left), or a presence that dominates the entire backdrop, suggesting power & singular obsession (below right).

S02E01 "The North Remembers"

S03E07 "The Bear and the Maiden Fair"

Finally - and this is a setup I can't quite place yet - we have this rare shot type that just about breaks the fourth wall.  

S06E10 "The Winds of Winter"

Its most striking use is late in season 6, when we cut directly from Lyanna Stark's illegitimate newborn to the face of a fully-grown Jon Snow, implying his true parentage.  There's only one other character who gets the same treatment from the camera:

S07E04 "The Spoils of War"

It's (the frankly terrifying and impassive) Bran Stark, who has taken six seasons to become a magical figure capable of transporting his consciousness into other living creatures or transporting his mind's eye back in time. The parallels between these shots are almost perfect: the coloring, the zoom and framing, the lighting (note the soft orange glow against the shadowed sides of both characters' faces)...even their dress and dead-ahead stares.  

What are we being told here? Hell if I know. But I want to say it's something of a revelation shot - a signal to us that we have just been gifted an important piece of information about someone (in the case of Jon Snow), or a signal to us that a character is making use of knowledge and consciousness beyond regular bounds (in the case of Bran Stark).

I often get chills when GoT gives us shots like these. And with where the series is headed in seasons 7 and 8, I think we're gearing up for a few more powerful ones.

13 Reasons to Watch Hannibal

It was a miracle of sorts that NBC's series Hannibal made it to the end of its third season before being canceled. Ostensibly, it was a crime procedural and thriller focusing on a gifted FBI profiler's pursuit of a prolific and elusive serial killer, unknowingly accepting his help on a number of cases as well as becoming his friend. Beyond that, it was profoundly weird. A bizarre creature, the show crossed several genre lines without explicitly committing to any single one, demanded a level of audience participation that most broadcast shows dare not ask, and week after week, brought to the small screen an onslaught of increasingly lurid murder tableaus that pushed network limits. 

Despite its oddness -- or perhaps because of it -- I find myself returning again and again to this short-lived series, replaying its highlights, and scouring Netflix for similar titles in hopes of prolonging its spell. Along the way, I've pitched it to many a friend but failed each time to articulate just what makes Hannibal such a deeply affecting and worthwhile watch. And here, finally, is my attempt to make sense of its appeal, even if only to myself, because I still get lost in its richness sometimes -- 

13 / CHIAROSCURO

Like many other screen tales that veer uncomfortably close to the macabre or monstrous, Hannibal plays with light and shadow, showing us how eerily different the same objects or people can look in the wrong (or rather, horrifically right) light. The production design team uses shadow to great effect particularly when framing Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter for a shot: brows and cheekbones loom forward and eyes sink in, leaving the audience to face a floating skull in the dark. It's Caravaggio converging with the bony architecture of Kutná Hora, and the result is deliciously chilling. 

12 / GENDER-CONSCIOUS CASTING

Developer and executive producer Bryan Fuller has called the original gender composition of Thomas Harris' Hannibal novels a "sausage party." The journalist Freddie Lounds and psychiatrist Alana Bloom are male in the source material (Freddy and Alan respectively), so Fuller and his writing team made the deliberate decision to swap some gender identities around and bring balance to the show. Also added: the bright and resourceful Beverly Katz (notably played by an Asian-American actress), as well as original character Bedelia du Maurier, a calculating figure who holds her own against Hannibal Lecter in a way no one else can match.

11 / OVER-THE-SHOULDER MEDIUM SHOTS

A wide range of characters are given over-the-shoulder medium shots by way of introduction to a scene, but none in more interesting ways than protagonist pair Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. With Graham, these shots are an invitation to identify -- a visual parallel to the FBI profiler's empathy disorder as he kicks down doors, stands before crime scenes, and surveys the bloody landscapes before him with a heady mixture of horror and excitement. With Lecter, these shots disinvite identification. They distance us from the faceless, fastidious figure by calling into sharp relief that which we cannot see: his expression, his handiwork, his motives.   

10 / ANGLES, SPACE, INTIMACY

Armed with a razor-sharp sense of space and dynamism, the Hannibal cinematographers frame their scenes like lines of poetry. Not a detail is out of place, and no space is wasted. It's masterful visual compression of movement and meaning: tilt and crop an actor's face at just the right angle, and we are left with a shot that has tension, direction, balance, and a fierce and almost voyeuristic intimacy -- all efficiently packaged together.

09 / ORIGINAL SCORE & SOUND MIXING

I once watched an episode of Hannibal with a musically-inclined friend who found the score profoundly off-putting. To be fair, if approaching the score with expectations of harmony and melody, it certainly would be jarring -- and that is, of course, wholly the point. Brian Reitzell's unconventional compositions for the series are abstract, utilizing a variety of uncomfortable sounds to elicit the kind of stomach-turning fear and anxiety that the characters themselves must live and struggle with. In the show's key moments, be prepared for the sounds of twisting, accordioned plastic pipe, metal clanging against metal, and the slow-dripping creep of something macabrely viscous.  

08 / VISUAL SYMBOLISM

There is an entirely unselfconscious glee to just how symbolically heavy-handed Hannibal allows itself to become. It begins with the meaty, bloody color palette of the first two seasons and Hadean objects on Lecter's dining table, and it culminates in full moons, dragons, and crumbling precipices by the end of season three. (And when Lecter's face disappears into a projected image of Lucifer early in season three, you just know someone on set high-fived themselves for coming up with that.) But none of it is dull or even all that predictable: one can have a lot of fun zeroing in on symbolic references and finding the undercurrent of gothic humor beneath them. (Freddie Lounds' all-red, blood-slick, meat-like outfit in season one, anybody?)

07 / TOUCHING THE GROTESQUE

From episode 1.01 Apéritif: "Everyone has thought about killing someone, one way or another" -- but Hannibal dares to admit it. Dares more than admit, even. It embraces, with reverence and passion, a part of humanity that we like to tell ourselves is unspeakably ugly. And yet: here we see the ugliness elevated to art. This is our doorway into the mind of Will Graham, in which horror is bound up with beauty, and the difficulty of reconciling that perspective with desirable normalcy is -- for both viewer and Graham -- deeply unsettling. Hannibal wants us to feel that secret conflict, that oppressive anxiety and inwardly-turned fear and disgust of harboring a terrible appreciation and attraction that everything you know is telling you ought not to exist.

06 / HUGH DANCY'S WILL GRAHAM

I never know where to begin with Will Graham, and perhaps his on-screen boss Jack Crawford, director of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, puts it best when he notes, "We can't define Will at all." It is a delight to see Graham at the heart of the series rather than the better-known Clarice Starling, since Graham's empathy disorder forces him to vividly relive the crimes of others, both shocking him and tempting him over to Lecter's side of the monstrous, beyond-human veil. Graham provides a wealth of material to interpret, as the answer to any question about him is both yes and no. It is hard to know where Graham stands, even harder to know what he is capable of, and even harder still to guess his next steps. Soft and tough by turns, vulnerable and aggressive, Graham is played as both pawn and mastermind, victim and destroyer, by a capable and nuanced Hugh Dancy. Dancy sparks with nervous energy in one scene and is glacial in the next -- he keeps us guessing as Will Graham should.

05 / "WE'RE JUST HAVING CONVERSATIONS"

Arguably, Hannibal's greatest asset is its script. Enormously efficient, clever and resourceful, it mines Harris' source novels for every usable detail -- not merely dialogue -- and cobbles together from them a rich and layered text of tense back-and-forths, philosophical development, and internal references. And arguably, the script was likely what nixed the show's chances of survival: a series that depends too heavily upon the slow build of careful, chess-like conversations between characters runs the risk of alienating casual viewers, reducing audience size as plot progresses. That said, I'm glad Fuller et al stuck to their guns rather than cave to the ratings game and maintained, for three seasons, their subtle and demanding character interactions. 

04 / UNBRIDLED THEATRICALITY

To say that Bryan Fuller and the production team have a flair for the dramatic would be a shameful understatement. Hannibal, visually and thematically, is out of control. It is operatic, overdone, and unapologetically so, pushing the limits of the ridiculous until the viewer is forced to abandon measures of normalcy entirely. Mozart's Lacrimosa -- a musical overreaction -- playing over a brief scene of Hannibal Lecter being stood up by Will Graham? Why not. A man sewing a living person into a dead horse as payback for his crimes? Fair game. Major characters lying in a pool of blood that quickly becomes a rushing sea, complete with small, lapping waves? Just a day in the life. Hyperbole is the norm in Hannibal, and through unrestrained hyperbole it forces us to see the agonizing beauty in its fevered world.

03 / THE PSYCHE & NIGHTMARE LANDSCAPES

Here the dissection really should be left to others cleverer than I am. But I'll take a stab at it (pun intended). Many fans of the series have taken to thinking of Hannibal as serving an id-like function both for its audience and even itself. Fever dream hallucination sequences, exaggerated staging of eerie landscapes, grisly murder tableaus, heightened-reality memory palace constructions -- all are traces of an aggressive base instinct that must be balanced by the super-ego and regulated by the ego for its owner to have a functioning psyche and mental life. Hannibal is in large part concerned with the war for control, balance, power, self-actualization, and self-knowledge in Will Graham's mind, where the violent id is increasingly free to run. The nightmarish landscape of the series reads like the unconscious gear-grinding of a troubled mind. 

02 / "WE'RE CONJOINED"

Penultimately: the meat of the show. The electric, puzzling, layered dynamic between Hugh Dancy's Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter needs to be seen to be believed. Predictably, the FBI profiler and secret serial killer are locked in a game of cat-and-mouse (or a game of chicken? or both?), but by the start of season two it is wholly unclear who is pursuing whom. They become co-dependent, "conjoined", and something in the gray discomfort zone between mortal enemies and lovers. Seducing and being seduced -- they are nearly indistinguishable, simultaneous processes when it comes to these two, who spark off each other with a potent mixture of hatred, aggression, intrigue, affection and desire that transforms and ignites everything around them (sometimes literally).  

01 / LECTER AS SATAN

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (otherwise best known for his turn as the icy Le Chiffre in Casino Royale) had big shoes to fill when he took on one of pop culture's most iconic roles, and fill them he did. Mikkelsen's take on serial killer, psychiatrist, and cultured aesthete Hannibal Lecter is agile and elegant, markedly restrained, and frightening in his total control. He exudes a screen presence that lingers even after he steps out of view, a shadow cast over others' faces. "He's the devil. He is smoke," says a season one antagonist, hitting the nail on the head as to what makes Mikkelsen's rendition so striking: sub-textually, he is played as Lucifer, a being somewhat beyond the realm of human but living among people, generating chaos for chaos' sake and tempting those around him with -- rather than an apple -- the unspoken urges presented to them by their own psyches. Everywhere and nowhere at once. And even for all his devilry there is a charm to him: you want to believe him, want him to get away with things, want him to linger and whisper manipulation into patients' ears.      

The Critics on Hannibal

"Hannibal is one of the wisest, strangest shows on TV about the potential and peril, thrill and terror of emotional vulnerability and engagement -- of being known by another, of consuming and being consumed by another. [...] The show is also about the fascination with evil and our romance with the genre in which it's most often explored, Gothic horror, and in a moment replete with cheap and shallow Gothicacka, Hannibal's unique brand of rich, reflective pulp is valuable." (Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly)

"The show's greatest asset is its mastery of tone, a quality most shows don't have the time or inclination to get right. Hannibal's formal daring is never empty showmanship; it's always in service of making the whole series feel like an endless lucid nightmare." (Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture)

"...an engrossing, psychologically dense show that is also visually stunning. [...] Will...is as complex as Hannibal himself...and one of the show's creative coups is its depiction of his inner life. Will has an almost supernatural ability to get in the heads of serial killers, and the show dramatizes this ability by presenting mental landscapes in which Will imagines himself committing the actual deeds. This technique, coupled with Dancy's superb acting, shows how Will's 'talent' is also a horrifying form of self-torture. [...] And what about Hannibal himself? I won't say that...Mikkelsen is better than Anthony Hopkins in the role. But he is subtler...Mikkelsen has rescued Lecter from the hamminess of...Hopkins' post-Silence performances... It also doesn't hurt that this version of Lecter is new and fresh: He's a practicing psychiatrist, a practicing cannibal, a prolific serial killer, and the most popular dinner party host in town. This is a Hannibal we've never seen before, and it's a treat." (Mark Peters, Slate)

Notes on "Parade's End" & Nostalgic Performances

The English, in their stubbornly melancholy way, have a knack for living and re-living traditions of their oft-contemplated and fictionalized past, brooding about ends of eras and mild-mannered gentlemen finding themselves disoriented as the world disintegrates and falls away before they are ready to face what rises up to replace it.

Ford Madox Ford was a master of that stubborn melancholy, penning several novels meditating upon themes of honor, "families of position," the expanding reach of women and the onslaught of modernity, years before Waugh's better-known work Brideshead Revisited even began to take form. 

Waugh's male figures -- paralyzed with Hamletian doubt and anxiety over what will come of the aristocracy, their behaviors, and their way of life -- find their prototypes in Ford's leading gentlemen, Edward Ashburnham of The Good Soldier and Christopher Tietjens of the Parade's End tetralogy. 

For Waugh, what constitutes a Gentleman has a lot to do with aesthetics, affiliations, and affectation: wearing the right color jacket, speaking in the right accent, belonging to the right Oxford college, collecting the right watercolors, and reading the right poetry. In the world of Ford's tragic, inwardly-turned, and reflective protagonists, the concept of a Gentleman is purer, and strikes at the core of what is perhaps a profounder anxiety: the Gentleman fights to behave with restraint and reticence -- simply because it is the thing to do, nothing more. No trappings, no fanfare. Ford's nostalgic dream is that of a world in which decorum is instinctively and elegantly observed, a world in which there is no need for physical ornaments of honor and class because those virtues were the stuff of one's very bones.   

It is a world that was dead long before Ashburnham begins his affair with Florence, and long before Tietjens joins his story's eponymous end of the "parade"...that is, if that world ever existed at all. Clinging to a code of "mercilessly" forgiving and restrained husbandly behavior that those around him (especially his wife) consider outmoded, Tietjens is constantly reminded that he belongs to en extinct breed. A passionate, romantic "sentimentalist," the "good soldier" Ashburnham patterns himself after novels and poems and yearns for the kind of great love affair only found in old books.

But the crux of the problem of nostalgia -- so powerful and crippling that the 17th century Swiss considered it a medical condition* -- is that its referent is necessarily imaginary, and that those who seek to perform according to nostalgic expectations are necessarily divorced from their referents. Ashburnham is revealed to have been a cheat and a liar all along, fickly pursuing romance after romance and driving his wife to bitterness. And Tietjens, caught in a tug of war between his desire to have an affair with suffragette Valentine and his belief in stoic and decorous restraint, does not naturally possess the hallmarks of Ford's idealized, nostalgic gentleman. He twists, he struggles, and eventually he caves. He is not, in fact, the last of a dying order. The order was extinguished before his time.

There is something near-pathological about the maddening emotional gymnastics that Ford's and Waugh's men inflict upon themselves. The only tangible and actionable hope, then, lies in the women, who in both Parade's End and Brideshead Revisited are remarkable, bright, complex, and defy rigid categorization as heroines or villains. Valentine becomes a married man's mistress, but there is no immorality attached to her decision. She merely follows her heart to a man who is her emotional and intellectual match. Sylvia, Mrs. Tietjens, rattles the bars of her gilded cage and verbally jabs the men around her at any chance she gets, but she possesses genuine admiration for her husband and yearns for real involvement with him -- not the tepid dismissiveness he gives her.

The women in these nostalgic English works also live in the future and act upon it: Valentine, a suffragette, seeks to advance the position of women in England, and Sylvia, keenly aware of the delicate workings of human motivation, pushes and prods the people around her to set her will in action. Where the men stand paralyzed, denying time and struggling with their performances of nostalgic identities, the women run forward and exercise their agentic power. Perhaps Waugh's aristocratic Julia Flyte -- who is passionate, conflicted, and rejects the backwards-gazing Charles Ryder to inherit and repurpose an estate alone -- is a WWII response to Ford's women.  (She is even, like Sylvia Tietjens, an isolated Catholic processing her relationship to her faith.)

Visually stunning and masterfully paced, the 2012 BBC adaptation of Parade's End also brings a striking literalization of identity performance to the screen. The miniseries's characters navigate a kaleidoscope of mirrors not only in the title sequence (reflective golden triangles arranging and rearranging themselves under dancing light) and in key moments punctuating its five episodes. Sylvia contemplates her reflection in a compact mirror that is damaged when Tietjens fails to emote to her liking, and she tosses it out a window for a reaction. Afterwards she continues to use it, despite the cracks running down its center. Valentine -- with a third-person gaze -- imagines watching herself admire her own naked reflection as she awaits a late-night rendezvous with Tietjens. Even Tietjens himself is reflected back at himself: after sustaining an injury in war, he dreams of his own face fragmented in a mess of mirrors, and wakes to ask a nurse, "What is my name?"

The images are fraught with layers of meaning, chief upon which is the assessment and construction of the self via image. What do these figures see in their mirrors? Do the images match their concepts of themselves? What ideal form, if any, do they strive to pattern themselves after? To perform? Why does the maintenance of identity seem to require repeated, third-person observation and assessment? Is the image in the mirror the Self, a reflection of it, a distortion of it, or something else entirely? Is it a Platonic form? When Tietjens fancies himself a traditional, upstanding gentleman of the lost English aristocracy, to what image does he refer? Mirrors are the device through which the production's designers figure the negotiation of and conceptualization of identity. And, like the object of a nostalgic desire or performance, the image in a mirror is virtual and not quite true to reality -- impossible to grasp.

I have spent nearly three years now attempting to knead the meaning out of all this grand, melancholy English nostalgia, beginning with projects on Yeats and Waugh, and like the kaleidoscopic images of Parade's End, like water through fingers and like time slipping away, any meaning that begins to form immediately moves and changes and gets away from me. But that is the great beauty of that nostalgia: it gives and gives and never takes shape, refusing to cohere, co-authoring stories that do the same -- stories with a particular brand of sublime surface tension that ripples on the verge of rupture, never breaking.