The 'ick' heard round the world

Dave Itzkoff has an article in The New York Times about incest on television:

If it was not quite the ick heard ’round the world, there was a collective shudder that went up the spines of fans of serialized television at the moment it was revealed in the 4 December episode of Boardwalk Empire, the Prohibition-era crime drama on HBO, that Jimmy Darmody, the aspiring young mobster played by Michael Pitt, had had an incestuous relationship with his mother, played by Gretchen Mol. Were that not a sufficiently chilling disclosure— one that had further ramifications in Sunday night’s season finale— some HBO aficionados may have realized that this premium cable network now has three original series, including the fantasy drama Game of Thrones and the comedy Bored to Death, that feature narratives about incest.
Given the galvanic revulsion that incest yields, it tends to be a taboo subject not widely taken up in contemporary cultural works outside, say, the plays of Tennessee Williams, the fiction of William Faulkner and John Irving, and Roman Polanski’s film noir, Chinatown. That the theme had turned up in three current shows on a single network, produced independently of one another, was a coincidence, their creative teams said, though they added that these story lines were emblematic of larger ideas on their series.
Terence Winter, the creator and show runner of Boardwalk Empire, said in an interview that, from the inception of the series, he wanted to establish an unhealthy relationship between Jimmy Darmody, a troubled veteran of World War One, and his mother, Gillian, an Atlantic City showgirl who was impregnated in a rape and gave birth to him when she was thirteen. “The second she’s introduced on screen, it’s inappropriate,” Winter said. “She’s practically naked and runs and jumps into his arms, kissing him. The mislead was you were supposed to think this was a girlfriend of his, that he’s cheating on his wife. And midway through the scene he calls her Ma.” Winter said he did not decide in his own mind that the characters had committed incest until late in the first season of Boardwalk Empire, and he depicted it in the second season to show “how manipulative Gillian is behind the scenes and how much she was really the one pulling the strings in Jimmy’s life, how much damage she caused him as time went on.”
George R. R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels from which Game of Thrones is adapted, said his books, set in a medieval period on a fictional continent called Westeros, were alluding to the historical practice of incest in the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt and the European monarchies of more recent centuries, which believed that it kept their bloodlines pure.
On the first season of Game of Thrones (which concluded in June) this is manifest in the brother and sister characters Jaime (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Cersei Lannister (played by Lena Headey), a pair of nefarious nobles who are secretly conducting a sexual relationship that reflects their vainglorious designs and which, if discovered, could throw their world into chaos. “There’s an element of sociopathy to it,” Martin said, “where it’s the two of us and no one else really counts, especially outside their family. They’re twins, they were born together, they have a feeling that they’re going to die together. There’s this bonding that they’re two halves of a whole, so who else would they pair with? Anything else is lesser.”
Jonathan Ames, the creator of Bored to Death and an author whose work often deals in peculiar extremes of sex and sexuality, offered a rare comedic take on incest in the 28 November season finale of his series. While investigating the identities of his parents, the show’s protagonist, a would-be detective named Jonathan Ames (played by Jason Schwartzman) struck up a romantic relationship with a woman named Rose, only to discover that they shared the same sperm donor for a father. Yet when Jonathan is about to reveal this secret to Rose, he simply kisses her, leaving viewers to wonder what will happen next. Ames said that he intended the story line and its closing shot as allusions to any number of works, including Oedipus Rex, another narrative about a man seeking the truth about his parents that Ames called “the first detective story”, as well as films like Casablanca, Vertigo, and Chinatown.
Acknowledging that he had received some negative feedback from Bored to Death viewers who were unsettled by Jonathan’s ongoing relationship with a woman he now knows to be his half sister, Ames said: “I wasn’t creeped out by it myself because it was a comedy. It’s not the real world to me. I feel bad if it put a bad taste in people’s mouth.” Though HBO has not said if it will renew Bored to Death for a fourth season, Ames said he was not troubled by the idea of Jonathan and Rose continuing their affair, if only in his audience’s imagination. “They both loved books,” he said. “They both liked solving mysteries. They both liked Ferris wheels. They were having such a nice connection.”
Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president for programming, said that the network would not discourage any of its creators from addressing incest simply because the topic had come up on other HBO shows. The similar story lines, he said, were the results of working with “writers that are interested in exploring the outer reaches of human experience and how it affects the way we live.” He added, “I think they’re going to be drawn to areas that are rife with conflict and drama.” What did unnerve Lombardo, he said, was that he had not noticed the similarities until they were pointed out to him in an interview. “I have to start scratching my head and going, ‘Wow, how did I miss that?’ ” he said. “I’m so cynical, nothing shocks me now.”

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