They’ve made a big fancy new exhibition at the studios where Game of Thrones was filmed. The boy is an enormous fan so his parents got us tickets for Christmas, and we went down there yesterday and left three hours later with some Thoughts.
So this place has been open two weeks. And yes, it’s a very good, very thorough look at the show and has some great location models, concept art, sets, a lot of costumes, weapons (these were our favourite, lol), the Iron Throne, etc. I had this feeling, though, that there was something kind of … off. The whole thing seemed very slick, very professional, very Financed, with a few teething issues: there was this weird moment right at the beginning where we watched a sort of introductory video, narrated in Nathalie Emmanuel’s British drama school accent, and then stood around awkwardly while the wee girl letting us in said “well, do yous dare go beyond the Wall?” and then fumbled with the ropes that very much didn’t need to be there before we all filed through into the start of the exhibition proper.
But that wasn’t the problem, although I guess the extraneous ropes were symptomatic of it. There were a lot of barriers, actually, sometimes at quite a distance from the exhibits. There were tiny signs on the ground by the various costumes on display that said which character the costume belonged to; but as we were physically forced to keep our distance, and the lighting was fairly low, and the contrast between the text and the background on those signs was actually quite minimal, most of them were effectively impossible to read. Sure, it’s been open two weeks, this is the sort of thing a visitor feedback form could address. Strange thing, though, there were no visitor feedback forms.
I’ll come back to that. I’m circling around the problem here, picking a few things out to illustrate what the overall issue really was (imo), not necessarily in the order we encountered them, but just in a way that seems to make some logical sense. Here’s a more fundamental issue: the exhibition felt very superficial. There were set models, there was concept art, there were mockups of some of the working areas on set with desks and tools and buckets of fake blood (we also found it fascinating that there are two different varieties of fake blood. I promise violence isn’t the only thing we’re interested in). There were videos that occasionally showed a bit of behind-the-scenes footage, the unedited version of a shot with the green screen, and then even more occasionally cut to what was actually aired. Those rare moments were probably the most interesting part of the exhibition, because they actually gave some idea of the process. But aside from that, that element of things was … kind of lacking. There was no technical detail about what was really involved in making the show. No sense of the number of people and the range of roles behind the scenes, the cost, the time it took, the environmental impact – and I’m sure it would have been difficult to frame the last one of these in a positive way, but some sense of the material scale of the show surely would have helped understand what an enormous operation it was. (Compare this with the Titanic museum 30 miles up the road, which locals love to slam, but actually has a really informative opening section all about the context, going into enormous detail about Belfast in the early 20th century and how shipbuilding shaped the city.) The section that came closest to giving us a bit more substance relating to the process was the prosthetics room, but even there, the emphasis was more on finished pieces, and on “stand in front of this screen and let motion capture make you into the Night King”.
So, on that note, the interactive stuff. It was … it was of a kind. There were a few instances of the motion capture thing, where visitors could have themselves transformed into various armoured figures and then, idk, move about a bit I guess. There were some touchscreen panels where one could create a house sigil and have it displayed on a screen above one’s head for other visitors to gawp at. There was an “add your face to the Hall of Faces” room. There was green screen photography while waiting for the introductory film to start, and another opportunity for it in the gift shop where visitors sat on a replica Iron Throne. The actual Iron Throne was the last thing in the exhibition, though, so it did seem a bit of a letdown coming from there when the gift shop incarnation was about half the size. Anyway, all these activities have something in common. See, I would not normally be averse to engaging with interactive stuff in museums – I have fond memories of smelling the inferior socialist coffee beans at the DDR Museum in Berlin – but the thing that all these features had in common were that they were all … I mean, I don’t want to be putting on my “social media is bad” hat here, but … they were all based around, like, sharing yourself. Promoting yourself, even? They were all things that other people could watch you doing, and more often than not they included seeing your own face onscreen, and … I don’t particularly want to do that? I especially don’t want to upload my likeness onto the big Hall of Faces database so that, checks notes, Big Pharma can, er, steal my identity and inject Windows 11 into me. Joking aside, I both a. have strong feelings about droit à l’image, and b. am a private and inhibited person who doesn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of strangers.
Sure, normal people enjoy those activities, but I would have liked more of a range of interactive bits: going back to my criticism of the lack of details on process, it would have been cool to, idk, get to touch a half-made sword, and experience the feeling of “oh, some of these extremely realistic metal props are actually made of rubber”. Or to smell things, I am always game for smelling things; or like, stroking some nice fabric. I can assume that the focus on selfie culture-type activities was part of the general family-friendly vibe of the thing, which was also a slight mystery to us given that the show is basically about people killing and fucking each other. Bearing in mind that I’m biased in that I actively go out of my way to avoid having dealings with humans aged under 18, it did seem odd that children were so consciously catered for, and indeed that they were there at all in any significant number. There was a notable lack of emphasis on the said killing and fucking: a few scenes with some blood in the clips that were played, but they were certainly tame. We wondered, in fact, whether this is a sign of what Game Of Thrones, The Phenomenon, has become: has it gained such popularity that it’s transcended the “big fantasy show for nerds” category and moved into “big normal show for normal people” one? We kind of thought there’d be more people there like us, weird, somewhat ambiguously gendered (in my case), bespectacled (in the boy’s case) people who go around speaking to each other in low voices and read every word on every information panel. The way the staff interacted with us (or, er, tried to) certainly gave the impression that they weren’t expecting the visitors to be like that. I was quietly looking at some prosthetics and trying not to catch anyone’s eye when some guy approached me (the nerve!!) and started telling me Facts. I wondered whether he might be particularly inept at reading body language, but then realised from the number of staff who subsequently attempted to interact with us that they are clearly being told to speak to people even when those people probably don’t want to be spoken to. I was asked if I would like to have a photo on the tiny Iron Throne not once but twice, and as I remember it, we were practically ordered to do the Hall of Faces thing (an order that we ignored, obviously) – tbh, I find this much more of a problem than the mere Existence of those activities. I mean, sure, they don’t appeal to me, but I know a lot of people enjoy green screening themselves. It’s the fact that the staff members seem to assume that everyone will enjoy doing it that’s the issue.
Another guy spoke to us in the gift shop. I’ll come back to that; first, of course I have complaints about the gift shop itself, so here they are. The doors out of the exhibition shamelessly opened straight onto the back of the shop, which I totally expected by that point so wasn’t too bothered by. What I was bothered by was the range of merchandise. The contents of the gift shop were the following: T-shirts with house sigils on them, hoodies with house sigils on them, hats with house sigils on them, some coasters with Famous Lines on them, magnets, badges, bottle openers, and a single solitary book, which was in fact the exhibition guide. Out of these, and acknowledging that taste is subjective, I would say on reflection that some of the magnets and badges were not tasteless. I found it particularly puzzling that none of the actual ASOIAF books were for sale (and again, more on that later); and also that everything was like “stuff you wear” and “stuff you display”, which very tellingly ties in with the kind of interactive things that were on offer in the exhibition. There wasn’t even any stationery. There was also a distinct lack of items modelled on designs that were actually used in the show, which I thought could have been a unique and relatively tasteful option.
So back to the staff member who spoke to us while we were perusing the single book on offer. See, I had been wondering if there would be some kind of visitor feedback form at the end, particularly as this is a really new attraction where they’re clearly expecting international footfall (and even in the off season and in a mid-/post-pandemic context, it was notable that a lot of our fellow visitors appeared to have come over from England). I had anticipated being able to contribute my valid and useful point about some of the signage being impossible to read, and, I guess, write another 2000 words of non-actionable pseudo-intellectual critique. But there was no opportunity to provide any opinions in written form; this guy who spoke to us had clearly been designated the Feedback Man, as he asked whether we enjoyed the exhibition and what our favourite part was, but then … it didn’t go beyond that. He made a bit more awkward conversation with us (making people who are normally quite skilled in social interaction awkward is one of my special talents) and then admitted defeat with an “well, I’ll let yous get on”, and … very much did not give us the chance to offer any more substantial or negative comments.
And this, finally, brings me on to my concluding summative point, which is that, to put it briefly, the whole exhibition came across as extremely laudatory towards the show. And specifically the show. There was an oddly-worded information sign early on that tipped me off about the slight weirdness of all this: the producers were praised as “visionaries” who managed to do the hard work of persuading old curmudgeonly GRRM to let them adapt his minor works of literature into this wonderful breathtaking pinnacle of the cinematic œuvre. This was, iirc, the one direct reference to the books or their author in the entire exhibition, but certainly not the only instance of, as the kids would say, simping for the producers. There was also a clear focus on the later series of the show; I guess this could be because it was already an enormous phenomenon by the time these series were being filmed and there was maybe already an idea about gathering behind-the-scenes stuff for posterity, but combined with the scarcity of book mentions … Makes You Think.
Going back to that first point about not being allowed to go near things, being physically prevented from approaching stuff – I particularly felt that when we were shown Cersei’s big map of Westeros, which took up most of the room but was once again set apart from us by big metal bars cemented into the walls. Could we … could we not have walked on it? Could they not have painted it with some preservative lacquer, or even covered it with big Perspex sheets, and just … let us walk on it? Let our humble mortal feet experience the glory of treading Cersei’s big map? No, we sinful humans are worthy only of looking on from a distance. There must have been items that weren’t immensely valuable and/or necessary to preserve: surely there were multiple props, multiple copies of costumes, things from the show that we could have actually got away with laying a hand on. But the whole lot of it was presented as sacred objects, venerable fruit of the divine imaginations of the show’s creators, who had the good grace to come to this economically deprived and politically aberrant backwater and shower their bounty upon us. Like, I get that it was an excellent show, it won multiple awards, and the very person I attended the exhibition with is of the opinion that the early series of GoT constitute the best television ever made. But. Given that the exhibition was put on at and by the very studios that made this show, the superficial quality of the exhibits coupled with the adulatory attitude, just makes it, as I said, a bit … off.