“When You Play the Game of Thrones, You Win or You Die”: Game of Thrones between Mainstream Culture and Counterculture

Abstract

In his book Wonderland. La cultura di massa da Walt Disney ai Pink Floyd, the cultural historian Alberto Mario Banti identified and discussed two pop culture’s main trends, mainstream culture and counterculture, and their different narrative structures. On the basis of Banti’s work, I want to analyse George R. R. Martin’s fantasy saga and its cinematic adaptation. The purpose of this study is threefold. The first aim is to investigate the background of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. By means of a survey of the cultural production of both Martin and HBO, I want to demonstrate Game of Thrones’ countercultural background and his connection with sci-fi and fantasy authors of the 1950s/1960s and with the political rock culture of the 1960s/1970s. Secondly, I want to show how this background resulted in Game of Thrones’ contents and his narrative structures. My third and last purpose is to consider Game of Thrones’ success, in relation to data about TV show’s audience. About this topic, there are three questions: which kind of success it is, what does that tell us about the cultural history of our time, and how does this success complicate Banti’s categories of mainstream culture and counterculture?