newyorker:

“Game of Thrones” received twenty-two Emmy nominations today. In 2016, Clive James binge-watched the most addictive show on TV.

As for the top woman of the realm, the queen Cersei Lannister, she is a beautiful expression of arbitrary terror, combining shapely grace with limitless evil in just the right measure to scare a man to death while rendering him helpless with desire. She is Kundry and Lilith, Lulu and Carmen. She is Proust’s mother, who tormented him so much by neglecting to climb the stairs to kiss him good night that he spent his entire life writing a long novel in revenge. Superbly equipped by the cold edges of her classically sculpted looks to incarnate the concept of the femme fatale, Lena Headey beams Cersei’s radiant malevolence at such a depth into the viewer’s mind that she reawakens a formative disturbance: did my mother look after me because she loved me, or was she doing all that only because she had to?

Plotwise, Cersei can thus raise a long-running question: Must she behave dreadfully in order to protect her dreadful son Joffrey, the heir to the throne, or is she just dreadful anyway? Would we, in the same position, be sufficiently dreadful to protect our offspring from a richly deserved oblivion?