Door Number One

Lately, in lieu of book choices that would require more sustained effort, I've been rereading random chapters and passages from A Song of Ice and Fire. Over the past two days, for example, I reread all twelve Tyrion chapters from A Dance with Dragons, and this morning I reread the two Jon Connington chapters. (I hadn't noticed until now how hard much of a cruel streak he has. I mean, dude is taking Tywin Lannister as a leadership model; this is not good.) And last night I was flipping through the House of the Undying chapter from A Clash of Kings.

The House of the Undying has been at the back of my mind for a few weeks now, after its equivalent appeared on the TV series and there was a fair amount of fan discussion about how disappointing the sequence was or wasn't, how important or impressive the chapter was or wasn't, how important the absence of mystery and foreshadowing from the show was or wasn't. I'm not exactly interested in raking over those issues again here, although on rereading I did get a fresh sense of the chapter's eerie potential and how possible it would have been to capture some of that on the TV series' budget. (A darkened room, creepy extras, whispering voices, maybe a CGI heart: hardly breaking the bank, even if you've already done that making the Blackwater kewl enough.)  What I want to talk about at the moment is this.

She fled from him, but only as far as the next open door. I know this room, she thought. She remembered those great wooden beams and the carved animal faces that adorned them. And there outside the window, a lemon tree! The sight of it made her heart ache with longing. It is the house with the red door, the house in Braavos. No sooner had she thought it than old Ser Willem came into the room, leaning heavily on his stick. “Little princess, there you are,” he said in his gruff kind voice. “Come,” he said, “come to me, my lady, you’re home now, you’re safe now.” His big wrinkled hand reached for her, soft as old leather, and Dany wanted to take it and hold it and kiss it, she wanted that as much as she had ever wanted anything. Her foot edged forward, and then she thought, He’s dead, he’s dead, the sweet old bear, he died a long time ago. She backed away and ran.

That couldn't have been in the TV series even if they'd been willing to create meaningful new sets for the House of the Undying, because the context that makes it meaningful has been omitted. From the first Daenerys chapter in A Game of Thrones:

She did not remember Dragonstone either. They had run again, just before the Usurper’s brother set sail with his new-built fleet. By then only Dragonstone itself, the ancient seat of their House, had remained of the Seven Kingdoms that had once been theirs. It would not remain for long. The garrison had been prepared to sell them to the Usurper, but one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had broken into the nursery and stolen them both, along with her wet nurse, and set sail under cover of darkness for the safety of the Braavosian coast.

She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her “Little Princess” and sometimes “My Lady,” and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever... All Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.

So the house with the red door is part of Dany's backstory, a memory of childhood safety and security. And if it had only been mentioned in that one early passage, its absence from the TV show wouldn't even be worth discussing. But that's not the case. It shows up in the House of the Undying, not once but twice: among the flash of images from Dany's past and future when she meets the Undying is "A little girl ran barefoot toward a big house with a red door." And there are many other examples, which I'll get to in a moment.

My point here is not that any recurring image from A Song of Ice and Fire is too important to be omitted from the TV show. In fact, I don't particularly care how faithful the show is to the books, provided it offers quality drama in its own right. When I use material from the books to adversely criticize the show (and I plan to continue doing so in the future, though relatively few of my blogging plans come to fruition), I do so because I think the books, whatever their flaws, generally offer more complicated and worthwhile characterization than the show. The trouble is that this characterization is often only mentioned briefly, suggested, or alluded to symbolically, which makes it easy to miss in the mass of text that is A Song of Ice and Fire, especially if your primary concern is figuring out how to translate that mass into TV storytelling. It might seem that Renly's peach, or the scene alluded to in the name of this blog, are small things, but they have unexpected weight, and are arguably more significant than things that take many more words to describe. The house with the red door is one such.

Later in A Game of Thrones, as she crosses the Dothraki sea, Daenerys thinks again about her yearning for home.

But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King's Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind's eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind's eye, all the doors were red.

Red door imagery again, with the implication that Dany, who in this chapter finds the strength necessary to survive her new life, begins thinking about dragons and dragon eggs, and becomes pregnant, has merged her child's yearning for that house in Braavos with an adult desire for a triumphant return to Westeros.

Later still, after the death of Viserys, she thinks about "home" again:

Home? The word made her feel sad. Ser Jorah had his Bear Island, but what was home to her? A few tales, names recited as solemnly as the words of a prayer, the fading memory of a red door . . . was Vaes Dothrak to be her home forever? When she looked at the crones of the dosh khaleen, was she looking at her future?

But is her memory of the red door really fading? Later in that same chapter, at the Western Market of Vaes Dothrak, she takes as a gift 

a dozen flasks of scented oils, the perfumes of her childhood; she had only to close her eyes and sniff them and she could see the big house with the red door once more.

Then there are her fever dreams after Rhaego's death.

Wings shadowed her fever dreams.

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She was walking down a long hall beneath high stone arches. She could not look behind her, must not look behind her. There was a door ahead of her, tiny with distance, but even from afar, she saw that it was painted red. She walked faster, and her bare feet left bloody footprints on the stone.

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She saw sunlight on the Dothraki sea, the living plain, rich with the smells of earth and death. Wind stirred the grasses, and they rippled like water. Drogo held her in strong arms, and his hand stroked her sex and opened her and woke that sweet wetness that was his alone, and the stars smiled down on them, stars in a daylight sky. “Home,” she whispered as he entered her and filled her with his seed, but suddenly the stars were gone, and across the blue sky swept the great wings, and the world took flame.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Ser Jorah’s face was drawn and sorrowful. “Rhaegar was the last dragon,” he told her. He warmed translucent hands over a glowing brazier where stone eggs smouldered red as coals. One moment he was there and the next he was fading, his flesh colorless, less substantial than the wind. “The last dragon,” he whispered, thin as a wisp, and was gone. She felt the dark behind her, and the red door seemed farther away than ever.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Viserys stood before her, screaming. “The dragon does not beg, slut. You do not command the dragon. I am the dragon, and I will be crowned.” The molten gold trickled down his face like wax, burning deep channels in his flesh. “I am the dragon and I will be crowned!” he shrieked, and his fingers snapped like snakes, biting at her nipples, pinching, twisting, even as his eyes burst and ran like jelly down seared and blackened cheeks.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon . . . ”

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

“ . . . don’t want to wake the dragon . . . ”

She could feel the heat inside her, a terrible burning in her womb. Her son was tall and proud, with Drogo’s copper skin and her own silver-gold hair, violet eyes shaped like almonds. And he smiled for her and began to lift his hand toward hers, but when he opened his mouth the fire poured out. She saw his heart burning through his chest, and in an instant he was gone, consumed like a moth by a candle, turned to ash. She wept for her child, the promise of a sweet mouth on her breast, but her tears turned to steam as they touched her skin.

“ . . . want to wake the dragon . . . ”

Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. “Faster,” they cried, “faster, faster.” She raced, her feet melting the stone wherever they touched. “Faster!” the ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and threw herself forward. A great knife of pain ripped down her back, and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen flew.

“ . . . wake the dragon . . . ”

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

“ . . . the dragon . . . ”

And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.

After that, for a long time, there was only the pain, the fire within her, and the whisperings of stars.

A tricky passage to unravel precisely, eerie and disjointed as it is (between the House of the Undying, this, and the minimal attempt at capturing Bran's three-eyed crow dreams, it's pretty clear how little interest the showrunners have in dreamlike as opposed to gritty fantasy), but one in which the red door and Dany's dreams of conquest are again juxtaposed.

That's it for red door references in A Game of Thrones, and the two from A Clash of Kings have already been mentioned. The red door is almost absent from A Storm of Swords as well, but in the final Dany chapter we get this, after she wakes from nightmares and goes out onto the terrace to look down upon Meereen:

"Your Grace?" Missandei stood at her elbow wrapped in a bedrobe, wooden sandals on her feet. "I woke, and saw that you were gone. Did you sleep well? What are you looking at?"

"My city," said Dany. "I was looking for a house with a red door, but by night all the doors are black."

"A red door?" Missandei was puzzled. "What house is this?"

"No house. It does not matter."

 This moment, set against the wider context in which Daenerys is deciding to stay in Meereen, suggests that the red door remains her symbol of home; searching for it in Meereen is equivalent to wondering whether that city can ever truly be her home.

The red door returns in Dany's first chapter from A Dance with Dragons, where she "had been dreaming of a house with a red door when Missandei woke her." Note that Dany's first chapter in Dance runs parallel to Cersei's in Feast; both women are woken from dreams and informed of a death. But where Cersei dreams of sitting the Iron Throne and having power over her enemies, Dany dreams of the house with the red door.

Later, she dreams of it again, in a different context:

In her dream they [she and Daario] had been man and wife, simple folk who lived a simple life in a tall stone house with a red door. In her dream he had been kissing her all over-- her mouth, her neck, her breasts.

 (This is before she has taken Daario as a lover.) Shortly thereafter, Barristan Selmy, like Jorah before him, refers to Westeros as home:

Dany had never known a home. In Braavos, there had been a house with a red door, but that was all.

When Quentyn brings her the record of Viserys' betrothal to Arianne Martell, Dany thinks of the red door again:

Dany unrolled the parchment and examined it again. Braavos. This was done in Braavos, while we were living in the house with the red door. Why did that make her feel so strange?

 Perhaps because the reminder that even in that happy time she was the daughter of a royal house and the subject of intrigues is an unwelcome one?

In the chapter where she visits the fighting pits, there are other things Dany would prefer to do:

She would rather have drifted in the fragrant pool all day, eating iced fruit off silver trays and dreaming of a house with a red door, but a queen belongs to her people, not to herself.

Then finally, in the last Daenerys chapter, she uses the red door as a gold standard for happiness when remembering (with an ex post facto nostalgic glow) the crossing of the Dothraki sea:

Not since those half-remembered days in Braavos when she lived in the house with the red door had she been so happy.

At this point I think the significance of the red door references is obvious, but just for the sake of laying out the argument, let's take another passage from that last Dany chapter in Dance, when she is speaking to the phantom Jorah:

You took Meereen, he told her, yet still you lingered.

"To be a queen."

You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros.

"It is such a long way," she complained. "I was tired, Jorah. I was weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow. I am only a young girl."

No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.

"Fire and Blood," Daenerys told the swaying grass.

This is the crux: on a personal level Daenerys doesn't want to be a queen, a conqueror, a powerful person. She wants a simple life, a husband or lover chosen for her own reasons, a house with a red door. But notions of familial duty, the responsibilities of the blood of the dragon, have set her on a course that is opposite to her deepest, barely-acknowledged desires. And that, to my mind, makes her a richer and more tragic character than if she were simply a kickass dragon princess. The absence of the red door symbolism from the series makes Dany too much like the fantasy trope to which she is a response, and undermines the questions about power, legitimacy, and happiness that the novels pose. 

It's not impossible that some of this characterization will be introduced in future seasons, but the time to do so was at the very beginning. It would scarcely have been difficult or expensive to give Daenerys a quick retrospective dialogue (with Irri, with Mormont, perhaps even with Viserys) establishing the existence of the house and suggesting by the delivery Dany's nostalgia for it. Then the odd "red door" reference could have been added in later episodes, giving alert viewers something to note, an added resonance in her story of conquest and violence. This is the kind of (comparatively) subtle characterization that distinguished great HBO dramas of the past, made them so smart and compelling. Game of Thrones doesn't have that kind of sophistication. This is a larger problem than Dany and the red door; again, I don't mean to suggest that the absence of this particular nuance is a fatal flaw in the TV show. No: that flaw is the absence of any such character-driven thoughtfulness, without which Game of Thrones is simply an exercise in complicated plot, gritty tone, and lavish sets. On that level, it's successful enough. But in different hands, whether by sticking to George R. R. Martin's material or by intelligently altering it, it could have been so much more.