By Prof. T.

On Anger and “Meaning It”

So apparently there’s a new documentary about Morton Downey Junoir  out. People like to talk about how the great things they read when they were young stuck with them like nothing else but of course it’s also the crap that sticks to us. I don’t think I actually watched his show, though I certainly watched a lot of crap when I was in junior high and high school. But I have a clear image of him, in super close up, smoking, holding a noose, saying some one or other should be strung up by his testicles in it. I think maybe it was flag burners. Remember the flag burners?

Now if someone described someone with a noose on TV screaming about who should be killed in what manner for having the wrong beliefs or whatever, and you didn’t know the time or place, probably you might  say this is a dangerous person. We might say “fascist” without being accused of hyperbole. But from the description, it sounds like the documentary makers are more interested in him as a kind of media pioneer, paving the way for the Glen Becks who walk among us, “important” in some way, worthy of more than the expected liberal handwringing.  And while I’m all for avoiding the predictable liberal hand-wringing, there’s something equally tiresome about liberals bending over backwards to lend “complexity” to their discussions about the people who just plain hate them. I’ve been trying for a while to write something about how David Foster Wallace (not exactly a liberal but close enough) falls into this – how he was so much less smart about politics than he was about everything else. His profile of a B-list shock jock is typically brilliant in dissecting all the rhetorical and psychological tics of its subject, but in the end, you don’t really end up with something that different from: white dude pissed off that people are daring to speak back to white dudes.

Presumably the filmmakers, like Wallace, would find the position of righteous indignation towards Downey tiresome and predictable. He’s a buffoon, an entertainer, representative of something or other about relentless American self-invention and so forth. He’s an entertainer, and  presumably “he didn’t really mean it.” But of course we’re quick when it’s other places and times to say those who seem like buffoons can be the most dangerous. In any case, at 14, I didn’t know I was supposed to make those distinctions. I thought he was completely terrifying.

As a kid in the eighties and a teenager in the late eighties and early nineties, AIDS had far more of a  impact on me than anything else that was roughly construed as a “political issue.”  I remember watching The Day After – or maybe I just remember people talking about it – and I remember asking my mother why there was this strange commercial on TV about a bear.  But this fear was abstract, philosophical. AIDS was visceral. I remember my parents recording the 5:30 NBC news every night on the VCR and the sound of Robert Bazell’s voice signing off his dispatches from the NIH, the graphics of the cells that would come and invade your body and turn it against itself. I remember my parents watching the McLaughlin Group and Pat Buchanan shouting about quarantines. I remember our “health” class, where the proto-absitence education of choice was mostly touch-feely stuff about 50 ways you could be intimate without sex, laced with strong doses of gender essentialism. (I remember “Guys give love to get sex, girls give sex to get love” being not just something that was discussed but presented as a clear fact about the world. It may have even been an answer on a test. “There’s no condom for the heart” was also a popular one.) I remember a guest “motivational” speaker saying that Magic Johnson would be condemning his wife to death if he slept with her again even once. I remember people saying that 1 out of 50 – or was it 1 out of 10 – kids in college had AIDS and if you slept with anyone it was only a matter of time until you got it. 
No one was out in my high school that I was aware of. The only time gay people were mentioned was when someone said “It’s not just gay people who get it” (implication: therefore it matters) or when a certain teacher/coach would tell gay jokes to get the kids on his side. There was a substitute teacher who I guess was effeminate in some way – I only remember the way people talked about him – and he got it even worse than the other substitutes, including from the other teachers. There was nothing about gay rights in our very short history section on Civil Rights. Even though I thought of myself as “political” because I’d gotten interested in Civil Rights and feminism and even tried to organize a little “teach-in” when the first Gulf War happened, I’d never heard of Stonewall or Harvey Milk or ACT-UP. This was at a well-regarded, public suburban high school where people did well on the SATs and everyone went to college. And it wasn’t the South. I got into a lot of political arguments with people that ended with them telling me I shouldn’t take things so seriously. I didn’t know what I was angry about yet, but I knew there was something wrong with a world where the “good schools” expected a loud mouth girl to “do well” and “be smart” but found any actually application of curiosity to the outside world embarrassing and a liability. 

Reading about this film made me think about AIDS in those years because of an essay I came across when I was teaching composition in graduate school by Randy Shilts called “Talking AIDS to Death,” a follow up to And The Band Played On, where he talks about the horrible irony of being “successful” with his book while people kept dying.  (I can’t seem to find a copy online but there are lots of student essays for sale that quote it and a link to a database that has an abstract and warns that the information in it was accurate in 1989 but “standards may have changed.” To plagiarize Jamaica Kincaid: there’s a world of something in that, but I can’t get into it now.) In the piece he talks about going on Downey’s show, reluctantly after being assured Downey had a brother with AIDS and would be respectful. Once they’re on the air, it’s all quarantines and fuming. Shilts threatens to walk off, only to be told not to worry, Downey had “a fall back position.” Everyone was in on the act, it seems, but the audience.

Shilts didn’t get tested when he was writing And The Band Played On, reportedly because he was afraid it would affect the “objectivity” and reception of the book.  It’s an old story: feminists who write about gender, African-Americans who write about race are “not objective” or “angry.” Those with less at stake, who wield their real or faked or real but amped up anger for ratings don’t have to worry about such things. The righteous anger of outsiders and people fighting for their lives frightens us: it challenges us. Why aren’t we fighting too, why aren’t we angry?  But reactionary anger we’re meant to take in stride: it’s just how people blow off steam. It’s just good TV.  

Maybe so. But poking around in the much the way these filmmakers seem to have done or the way David Foster Wallace does never makes good on its promise. It never unmasks some legitimate grievance at the root of all the ugliness. It never says anything useful about some populist way for progressives to talk to “the people.” There’s just one layer of ugliness after another. It’s not without its fascinations. But better to rewatch How to Survive a Plague, reread Shilts or Larry Kramer, and imagine how ridiculous the question of whether they “really meant it” would seem.

Self-Help, Politics, and that David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-help lately.  From a left perspective, the critique of self-help culture pratically writes itself: it encourages us to think of our problems as individual, it shuts down critique and collective action, and it blames the victim, telling cancer patients and the unemployed equally that they brought it on themselves but not thinking positively enough. Which is all true enough as far as it goes. But one of the things I liked about Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright Sided  was that, although she makes this case definitely, drawing on her own experience with the truely noxious breast cancer cult , she also talks about the roots of the movement in the nineteenth century, as an attempt mostly undertaken by women to soften the Puritan/Calvinist tradition. There is, of course, a strongly gendered component to the way we talk about self-help: just mention Oprah to the sort of fake-populist who is always waxing poetic about the wisdom of their cabdrivers and watch them go crazy about her self-esteem “cult” and “middlebrow” book picks.

But I’ve also been thinking about the versions of self-help that circulate in liberal/upper middle-class circles: yoga, meditation, the more “spiritual” claims of certain kinds of foodies.  Since it’s graduation season, I’ve been noticing David Foster Wallace’s graduation speech “This is Water” floating around the internet again, and now there’s a “film version.”   Wallace has riffed on self-help ideas in a good deal of his work, most thoroughly in the depiction of addiction and the culture of 12-step programs in Infinite Jest. His personal library contained a huge number of carefully annotated self-help books, as The Awl’s  Maria Bustillos  maticulously detailed. Even without thinking of the tragic end of Wallace’s life, it’s easy to think about much of his work as a way to redeem self-help from the tyranny of cant. I’m thinking especially of that piece at the end (near the end?) of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, in which the interviewee struggles with his contempt for his girlfriend’s New Age-isms which have, despite the aesthetic offense they give him, saved her life. (A side note which isn’t really a side note: it is of course impossible not to think about the end of Wallace’s life, and there’s no reason to feel one shouldn’t out of some lingering New Critical-taboo, which often comes from the same pseudo-sophisicated gendered place as knee-jerk Oprah bashing.)

The heart of Wallace’s speech is his discussion of how, ideally, a liberal arts education should teach one not “how to think” but “what to think about” and therefore a way to manage the frustrations of everyday life. Describing a frustrating trip to the supermarket at rush hour he talks about the choice we have to see the others in the supermarket lines as something other than impediments:

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

It’s good stuff, really.  One of the reasons I like teaching writing and especially “creative” writing so much is how intellectually and personally powerful it can be for students just to take a step back, to reflect, Here’s my question, though: what if you are the “fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line?”  Or the clerk he mentions in a previous section, whose boredom Wallace is sure no one at Kenyon could ever imagine? What inner resources are you supposed to muster in order to not yell at your kids? To feel a little less “dead-eyed?” What about to not yell at the liberal arts grad who is looking at you as a symbol of everything about the world that depresses them? And doesn’t that liberal arts grad deserved to get yelled at, just a little bit? (And, come to think of it, I’d bet that a Kenyon college graduate mother  (or father!) has yelled at his/her kids at least once in the history of the universe.)  Interestingly enough, just a few paragraphs before Wallace himself tries to steer his audience away from the kind of lazy superiority he falls into here:

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on. 

Wallace insists his argument isn’t a moral one, that he’s not trying to lecture the Kenyon kids about how to be, to tell them to be more compassionate, but just to think about the control one has over one’s mind. But it can’t help but be moralism, because he’s punching down. He figures that the main problem Kenyon kids will face is all the ordinariness of the world and the people they’ll encounter who aren’t as special and passionate as Kenyon told them the word would be.  He’s counseling them against despair and anger when they find this out. But for people who already know this, isn’t anger sometimes the way out of despair?

I’m sure that to Wallace or many who love him it would seem like I’m just doing the same thing he’s talking about – running an automatic left tape through the scenario the way the Kenyon students wanted to run the liberal one. They say “modern consumer society sucks”; I say “capitalism sucks.” But the thing is, big cars really are trashing our planet, and long drives to stores with musak really do make us miserable. And things are that way for reasons, and those reasons don’t have anything to do with mothers who wear too much makeup. In reading and writing about second wave feminism, “Consciousness raising” gets mocked a lot but I don’t think you can underestimate the liberating move of saying, this thing – be it rape, sexual harassment, my inability to take my own work seriously – it is a thing, it is not “life.” Unlike a lot of lefties, I don’t begrudge anyone Oprah or religion or anything that helps, and I think a lot of them actually are genuinely helpful, not mystifications or what have you.  But sometimes we fish need to say to each other: This is not the world. This is not water. This is a tank.

On Being a Problem

Once, when I was studying in France during college, I was at some sort of dinner party, the kind where I was the youngest person there by about twenty years. I remember being asked about the death penalty (which often seemed to stand in for Europeans’ sense of the United States’s backwardness back then – ah, the relative innocence of those Clinton years) and about Virginia Woolf (because when you tell French people you’re studying literature they ask you about what you’ve read instead of asking if you like being poor the way Americans do).  In my mediocre French I managed to say, more or less, that I was against the death penalty and very, very much in favor of Virginia Woolf.  Then the male host, who up until then had been pretty quiet, leaned in with that “ok this has been fine and all but now I will ask the really important question people are afraid to ask” posture.

“Et les noirs, aux Etats Unis?” he asked. ” Comment ça va?” Black people in the U.S. How’s that going?

Now, obviously, he  didn’t rationally think there was anything I could say that would meaningfully speak to the condition of 30 million people. Like a lot of dinner party conversation, it was a performance. I think he disliked me for some reason and wanted to trip me up, to ask something ‘controversial’ that would throw me off balance.  The people he was talking about weren’t really people, weren’t really even a ‘problem’ or a ‘question,’ they were just words for him to say.  I wish I could say I whipped up a stinging reply invoking James Baldwin about how we don’t have a black people problem, we have a white people problem, or something like that.  Instead I mumbled, well, that’s a very complicated question. The female host saw my discomfort and changed the subject and may have shot her husband a nasty look. I don’t remember exactly.

But I remember that detail from that dinner party from all those years ago because it comes to mind every time I read some article about what people – most often women, or non-white people, or poor people – are doing wrong.

For a long time I was unable to read any article like this that was about a group I’m a part of. Being relatively fortunate and white, these were usually relatively mild pieces about why there were so many single women in New York City and why so many people were stupid enough to go to graduate school in the humanities. Back when I was doing internet dating, I made a rule not to reply to the (so so many) guys who had rants about how they never wanted to date anyone who identified with any of the women on Sex on the City.  I didn’t identify with them (well, almost never), but I was weary of anyone who was a little too excited to have a shorthand for the single-woman-as-problem. (Correctly so as I found out when I broke my rule).  I still have a problem getting through a lot of these kinds of articles, especially now that I’m a mother. Maybe I’m just sensitive, and this is just a variation on the Groucho Marx problem. I can’t read any article that has me as a member of its problem. But I don’t think I’m alone on this.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks because of these horrible ads.  Now, not surprisingly, a lot of the responses have been about the tone of them, whether they shame teenage parents and whether they’ll be effective. There’s been less discussion about whether they are accurate.

Kell Goff  claims that critics have focused on tone because “of course” they’re accurate – a claim she finds so self-evident she doesn’t feel the need to support it – although she finds time to link to a very relevant study about young people wanting to be famous.

But actually, there’s a lot of evidence that they’re misleading at best. This overview of recent studies  argues  that teen pregnancy is a result, not a cause, of poverty and that it actually has “little, if any, direct economic consequence.  Kristin Luker reached the same conclusion in her book from 1997, and Planned Parenthood’s criticism of the ads cites the work of Frank Furstenberg,  who did an early long-term study following young mothers and their kids and found the same thing and similarly summarizes the findings.

Now, I know a lot of people find this hard to believe. But you, know, that’s why we have studies: because something seems intuitive and is agreed on by both liberals and conservatives doesn’t make it so. And when you think about it, it actually does make sense. Kids are expensive! scream the ads. But they’re expensive no matter what age you are. If you’re middle class, your income will likely go up a lot over the course of your working life, so waiting has a lot of economic benefits. If you’re poor or working class, not so much. And having your kids early has some advantages: you have more energy, you’re more likely to have help from your own parents and extended family. (Ironically, you’ll see articles acknowledging this, but usually only when they’re using it slam on women for having kids too late.) And being a parent can inspire young people to do well in or go back to school, and to achieve in all kinds of ways.

But these false beliefs have real consequences for real parents and their kids. Listen to someone who’s been there: 

“As a teen mom, my life has seen some insanely high peaks of hell and it wasn’t because of my pregnancy or motherhood, it was because of the crappy experiences I had to endure with people who were (and still are) judgmental and bitter. When I wanted to apply for college in high school, my guidance counselor told me not to bother – that I should focus on trying to graduate high school first and apply to a community college IF that even happened. When I turned to people for support, they threw statistics into my face and told me I was what these very ads portrayed. I wasn’t. I’m not. And most teen moms aren’t. Until today, I still hear the “Well, you should have thought about that before becoming a mom.” 

There’s a particularly awful irony here: when people cite statistics about poverty in order to talk about the challenges of helping students succeed, the administration who spent your tax dollars on this crap accuses them of “making excuses.” Demographics aren’t destiny! A good teacher can solve everything! Defy the odds with bootstraps! But once you’re a fallen woman, the (misleading) statistics are all. You no longer have any agency.  Poverty isn’t a problem in Bloomberg-land; it’s a punishment.

That’s why the criticism that “you can’t change people’s behavior by shaming them” isn’t quite right. Because the people being shamed aren’t ones the ads are talking to. They’re the ones being talked about. They’re the problem. They’re the object lesson meant to wear the scarlet letter for the rest of their lives. And we should think twice before doing anything to improve their lives – or the lives of their kids – because it will send the wrong message. That might sound paranoid, unless you remember the “debate” over welfare reform.

I remember leaving the hospital with my son just over a year ago now.  The hospital where he was born is on a busy city street, so I remember the odd feeling of stepping out from that other self-enclosed world to find the city had been going about its normal business. I remember the mix of exhaustion, adrenaline, joy and terror.  I can’t imagine what it would have felt like if I had come across an ad, an official message put forward by the city of which I was a citizen, that told me my worst fears were justified, their realization inevitable, and that any joy I was feeling was a delusion to which I had no right. I would say that I wouldn’t wish such a feeling on anyone, but I sort of do wish that the ad team that came up with this “edgy” concept and probably is congratulating themselves, taking the controversy as evidence they’ve “started a conversation” or what have you, would feel it, just for a while. Because they’re the problem.

If NY Mag Had Asked Me

So there was a bit of a noise recently after New York published this survey about the now (presumably complete) Roth oeuvre. Most of it had to do with how many women and men were included in the survey (take a guess), the probable impact of this on the answers to the question “Is Roth a misogynist?” and the unfortunate start of Keith Gessen’s response to that question: “Did Roth hate women? What does that mean? If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them?” Oh, and they asked James Franco. So there’s that.

So New York didn’t ask me, sadly. But I do feel somewhat uniquely qualified here. I’ve written about Roth quite a bit, and have read almost all his books, including the lesser-known non-fiction memoirs and essays. Even the one about baseball. And because, while I’m sure many people would think this only shows my “bias,” I actually think having also spent a lot of time reading, writing and thinking about feminism, might put me in an interesting position to answer these questions.

So, if New York had asked me? Well, before getting to the misogyny thing, I would have been tempted to make fun of their questions. Is he the greatest living American novelist? Like, really, the greatest ever ever? And should he win the big prize? They might as well have asked, but is he awesome. . . or super awesome?  (A fawning biographer having an affair with her famous subject would make a pretty good Roth novel, actually). Can’t we leave the obsessive ranking to the Ivy League admissions offices and the guys from High Fidelity? If you have to go there, I do have a soft spot for his consistency: it is pretty impressive that of the almost thirty books of his I’ve read, there’s only one stinker in the bunch. (That would be the baseball one.) 

So, is he a misogynist?  Presumably a lot of people find the question stupid or insulting, but I’m with Zoe Heller here: it makes no sense to celebrate art’s potential to offend, and then claim that anyone taking offense is deluded or stupid. Of course, to take offense is to risk sounding like one of the Puritans Roth rails against.  That’s probably why Nell Freudenberger said “I don’t like the way he writes about women, and I don’t like the way I sound complaining about it.” And it’s true that while, as everyone rushed to point out, the fact that the characters spend a lot of time thinking about fucking women doesn’t mean they aren’t misogynist, it doesn’t mean they are, either. Straight male sexuality is as good a theme as any, and, given that Roth isn’t wrong about our Puritanism, there’s a tendency to react negatively to that in a way that is kind of hollow. There’s a Terry Gross interview with Roth when she asks him about his character’s “excessive” sexuality, and he said that the concept of normality wasn’t one any serious person has any business entertaining.

But I think a lot of readers who aren’t Puritans are responding to something else. At times it’s the Tom Wolfe-level satirical misses: a lot of The Human Stain is wonderful but as a satire of a female academic Delphine Roux could have been written by a National Review intern over his lunch break, and about Rita Cohen, the man-eating radical from American Pastoral, the less said the better.

More than that, though, I think the interesting question is the extent to which there’s an imaginative sympathy extended, one which at least attempts to see all the characters as they see themselves. Not everyone has to be George Eliot, of course, and being inside one head, with all its peculiarities and solipsisms, even the same one year after year and book after book, can be a pretty rich vein to tap. (Though the churlish part of me wonders whether such a project would get a woman author labelled as ‘personal’ or ‘minor,’ rather than land her a manly poll with big yellow circles to mark the circumference of her greatness.) And ironically, his big theme actually necessitates that Roth spend more time with his female characters than a lot of male writers. No one that I know of has asked if Cormac McCarthy is a misogynist for creating worlds where women often don’t exist. Personally I prefer writers who explore masculinity rather than take it as a given universal.   I think, for example, that Junot Diaz’s latest collection is brilliant in how it does that – and not only because he includes a story from a woman’s point of few.  It’s still noteworthy that he does this, I think, and that it’s hard to imagine Roth doing this. Not that anyone has to, of course, but shouldn’t it be seen as a skill that’s part of what we talk about when we talk about writers who can ‘do everything’?

Still, at a certain point there’s a failure of imagination that does get wearying. It’s interesting that Benjamin Kunkel picked as his favorite passage this one from American Pastoral: “You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.” That’s Zuckerman talking about “Swede” Levov, whose placid world and un-Zuckerman like bonhomie has been torn apart by his daughter’s radicalism. The daughter, Merry, is completely unconvincing as a character in her own right but completely convincing as a portrait of how the Swede would see her. But it’s Zuckerman who’s worried about getting the Swede right – Merry herself is portrayed as so irrational there’s nothing right or wrong to get about her.

Interestingly, for me there are two times in Roth where a female character breaks outside of the projections and fantasies, one from the start of his career, and one from much later. As Vivian Gornick writes in her essay on Roth and Bellow from The Men in My Life, the relationship between Brenda and Neil in “Goodbye Columbus” has a tenderness that immediately disappears from his work thereafter: “When, close to the end, Neil says to himself, “Who is she? What do I really know of her?” it is not to demonize Brenda, it is to underscore the mystery of sexual love.” To Neil’s final reflection that “I knew it would be a long while before I made love to anyone the way I had made love to her” Gornick remarks, “A long while? How about never?” (I’d been working on this post for a while when I realized that of course Gornick had already said it all and said it better. I don’t think the essay is online but there’s an interview where she talks about its argument and the relationship between sexism and the Jewish thing. There’s also a fascinating 1976 essay on Miller and Mailer and Roth in this collection.)

Never indeed, but to my mind something interesting did happen late in the game with Sabbath’s Theater, the winner in the “best book” part of the poll.  Drenka, mistress and foil for the puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is the one woman in Roth who is a peer of the man who pursues her – not only because her libido and erotic imagination match his, but because they’re both outsiders. Unlike so many women in Roth, Drenka doesn’t embody the fear of aging or illness or death; instead she’s a kind of double for his own experience of isolation, someone whose solidity is as tenuous as his own. In the Gornick interview I linked above, she talks about how Roth and Bellow use women as a way to avenge the experience of feeling excluded.  By the time we get to Sabbath, though, there’s something else: how the resistance to domestic and conventional life has made this almost-old man another kind of outsider, and the cost of this. Not that he should have done otherwise, exactly, but it’s an ongoing joke in the book that he fancies himself the proper bohemian artist sacrificing everything for his art, but his art is puppets. 

Sabbath also points to something that’s evident throughout late Roth: the sense that his protagonists are raging against an order that’s long since faded away. Sabbath’s friend asks him “Isn’t it tiresome in 1994, this role of rebel-hero . . .Are we back to Lawrence’s gamekeeper? At this late hour? To be out with that beard of yours, upholding the virtues of fetishism and voyeurism . .. the discredited male polemic’s last gasp.” Interestingly, Gessen says something similar  in the rest of his response: “Still, it might be said that Roth is slightly less useful in a world that is slightly more equal than the world he knew; where men and women do not stand on opposites sides of the question of sex, but arranged, together, something helplessly, against it; where sex is less of a battlefield and more of a tragedy.” I’m not sure about the tragedy part:  Everyman, for example, doesn’t work because adultery no longer carries that weight. I was reading Details at the hairdresser yesterday and there was a teaser for the Roth documentary coming out. So I guess Roth is still a male symbol of some sort for some people. It quoted him saying something about all those 19th century novels with adultery as their theme. I love adultery he says, don’t you. Well, many people do, it would seem. But by Everyman he was tired enough of writing it that he breaks off a scene of the protagonist’s fight with his wife, noting that scenes such as these are common enough, no need to write them again.

  I do think what Gessen says applies more to the pre-sexual revolution mores depicted in things like Goodbye Columbus, Letting Go and Indignation than to all of Zuckerman and Kepesh’s exploits. Still it makes me want to give Gessen the benefit of the doubt that he was making a joke with the first part. Either way, it does point to something: as Freudenberger’s comment shows us, no one wants to be the reactive critic, waging a finger at the artist’s vision. But Gessen gets at what’s behind her ambivalence: it’s Roth’s work itself which is so often the “reaction.” This is not necessarily a fault, but it’s something that demands a better question than one about greatness.

All of which is, I suppose, to say: I would have gone with the 52% who voted “well . . .. “

White Guys Drive Like This, or, How to Write about Music

A remember, years ago, sometime in the early 90s, hearing a joint interview on NPR with the poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. I’m going from memory here, as is permitted in a blog post, no? They were married; Kenyon died not long after I must have heard the interview, and Hall’s poems about this are probably what most people know about him, if anything. Anyways, it was a typical NPR-kind of interview, in that on some level the interviewer knew that most people listening didn’t really care much about poetry, but might be interested in hearing a married couple banter about their creative work. So I remember a bunch of questions about when they would give their work to each other and such. At one point one of them mentioned that they had both recently written poems about the first Gulf War (of course just called the Gulf War then), and that they had shared them with each other, neither having known before that they were both writing about it. It was a joke, they both said. His was such a man’s poem, and hers such a woman’s. The way I remember it, hers involved a mother holding a torn nightgown, his had footnotes referencing the Iliad. You get the idea, even if I’m remembering the details wrong. Anyways, as people know, I’m sort of blessed/cursed with remembering snippets of things like this from 20 years ago.  I’m not sure there’s such a thing as “good memory”; I think if that space weren’t being taken up, I’d remember other things more thoroughly, and better. Anyways, I was blessed/cursed with this particular memory when I was listening, of all things, to a podcast from Slate of a discussion about Infinite Jest, featuring Katie Roiphe. (I’ve been writing about DFW; this was a “break.”)  At one point Roiphe said something like, well, can we all just admit that a woman wouldn’t write a book like this. The other people on the podcast, both men, were a little sheepish and asked what she meant and she said, basically, well, you know, writing a big book to show that you could write a big book. 

Well. I was wondering: is it ok for Hall & Kenyon to do some variation on the “men write like this . . . ” thing, but not Roiphe? If so, is it because they’re writers talking about their own work? Because they were jokey about it? Or just because they’re not Katie Roiphe, what with her whole history of using the “women do this” thing to make empirical claims about the world that have had a real, harmful effect?

Probably a little of all of these. And I think Francine Prose’s 1998 piece stands as just about the clearest reason of why you should probably stay away from such things all together.

 And then, just as I was thinking about all of this, I came across this article by Zadie Smith about Joni Mitchell. What an article! I’ve mentioned before the program I taught in when I was in grad school, how they wanted our students to write personal essays and tried to get them there by having them write this sequence of exercises with images, scenes, and reflections. It didn’t usually work, and the other departments really hated us, but I liked the effort to kill the five paragraph beast. Every now and then, I come across an essay, or a piece of a memoir, and I think, ah, that’s it: what we were trying to do. From Joni Mitchell to Kierkegaard and Tintern Abbey . . it shouldn’t work, and yet.

 I was thinking was that all the things that made it such a great piece – how she’s talking about the necessary limitations on how much art we can love in one life, how she had gotten it wrong before, how she’s probably still getting so much wrong. Even after this revelation, she says, I’m still mostly talking about Blue: the album “any fool” owns. It doesn’t argue for why Mitchell is great; instead it helps you experience it anew through someone else’s ears.

And then it occurred to me that the piece was just about the exact opposite of one the New Yorker had recently run about the Grateful Dead, which was all about completists and the lost tapes and techno-fetishism – in other words, just about every stereotypical “male” way of looking at music sent up in High Fidelity. Prose brilliantly takes down the common tropes of those who think they favor “strong” “male” writing. But I have to admit, looking at these two pieces side by side, there’s something that makes me think women are more likely to achieve something I value in writing. Lots of men achieve it – but they tend to be men who have been ‘outsiders’ in some way, however you define that. But that’s so subjective! Well, yes. The acknowledgment of one’s own subjectivity – and limitations – is part of why Smith’s piece transports me in a way a “my band is the best!” piece never could.  More writers of all genders should take it out for a spin.

Brief Thoughts After Binge-Watching Girls

1) If nothing else, the show is kind of genius at creating buzz. The SATC nod in the first episode, the parody of He’s Just Not that Into You in the second, to the Reality Bites-ish, “well, a voice of a generation. . . ” the show practically wrote half the blog posts that would be written about it in its first few episodes. I just feel sorry for all the straight girls internet dating now who will probably be reading ads saying “don’t even think of messaging me if you identify with any of those stupid girls” five years after it goes off air. Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.

2) Adam is kind of a legitimately great character: unlike any of the girls, he’s sort of like someone you know but have never seen on TV. (On the other hand, I spent the first few episodes trying to remember who he reminded me of, and it was Jeremy Sisto’s Billy on Six Feet Under. But still).

3) However. Hannah and Adam’s relationship strikes me less as the dark, fucked-up thing the show seems to think it is and more of an unrealized S&M thing. I mean, they kind of both realize that they get off on treating each other badly, on power games, but I’m not sure if they don’t know enough to be conscious of it. Yes, the awkward sex on Girls can be as good as the awkward sex on Louie, but there also seems to be this shorthand that kinky sex=bad/awkward/fucked up sex, like with Booth Jonathan in the last episode, whereas nice guy Charlie just wanted to look Marnie in the eye.  But chicks secretly like the jerks, am-I-right? In network land, the “jerk” was someone who “just wants sex.” (At least that’s how it was back when I watched network sitcoms. Even Six Feet Under kind of fell into that with Brenda and David.) Girls is too sophisticated for that, but is kinky=fucked up just the more sophisticated version?

4)  Speaking of which, sorry, that Booth Jonathan “I’m a man” line just made me laugh, and I didn’t buy it working on Marnie. That whole storyline feels really forced and fake-daring.

5) Speaking of artists, to the extent that you I did have a pretty negative reaction to these characters, it comes from how fake their passion/interest in the “arts” they’re supposedly pursuing seem to be. Yes, they’re exaggerations, and ok, there are lots of superficial narcissistic types who think you don’t have to be a reader to be a writer (and always have been), but Hannah does have a certain smarts and originality to her and you think she’d be reading something and talking about it.

6) I think the nepotism/spoiled/class charge is basically crap (when directed against Dunham rather than against the characters, who are indeed pretty oblivious). Her mom’s an artist! Yeah, that and 2.50  . . . .The race thing is more complicated. I do think it gets more crap for it than more deserving sources (Looking at you, Breaking Bad). The response with the Donald Glover story line was clever in that it showed Hannah’s incompetence in dealing with these issues (the deft portrayal of this incompetence being evidence that the show itself is less incompetent.) On the other hand, as with Hannah’s narcissism, the whole “look, other characters are accusing her of what the critics do” has a bit of the “I know this is a cliche, but cliches are true” thing to it.

7) On the other hand, if the show was giving its critics the finger,  it was a much more playful, less capital F fuck you than when Woody Allen finally wrote a black character and made her a prostitute. Speaking of which, the father doing the Dead Shark speech at his anniversary dinner seems like a just as explicit and way more ball-sy of a call out about her ambitions than the SATC thing in the first episode.

8) Speaking of narcissism, I just reviewed a book about Philip Roth that spent a bunch of time playing around with character names. Stuff like that always seems a bit silly to me. But: Hannah H, Marnie M, Jessa J, Shoshanna S. What’s up with that?

9) Speaking of class, the other Sunday night show I watch is Shameless, which is brilliant and fascinating, has even more of a mix of tones than Girls, and almost as many as Louie, and its class stuff could be a whole other post. I don’t watch Dowton Abbey. But you do have to wonder: why do people hate on the Girls for being rich and spoiled but nobody looks askance at identifying with the Dowager?

The Secret Lives of Wives and Widows

So T.S. Eliot’s wife has died.  Wait, what? How is that possible?

Of course you can probably guess: “Mrs. Eliot, who was almost 38 years younger than her husband, had been his secretary for several years at the publishing house Faber & Faber when they married in 1957.” 

The Times obituary itself is a kind of accidental masterpiece, a perfectly calibrated mini-biography, evoking the strangeness of the lost worlds that passed away with her:

Esmé Valerie Fletcher was born in Leeds, England, on Aug. 17, 1926. Her father, who was in the insurance business, was a bookish sort who passed on to his daughter his love of poetry. She said she fell in love with Eliot — or at least his work — when, at 14, she heard John Gielgud’s recording of “Journey of the Magi.”

After her schooling, she worked at a library at the University of Leeds and then as a secretary to the novelist Charles Morgan. When a family friend who knew Eliot mentioned that he was looking for a secretary, she applied.

I love those dashes. Because how is a 14 year old to know the difference between a man and a voice on a phonograph, one that doesn’t even belong to that same man? 

 In my benevolent literary dictatorship when novels about professors who sleep with their students have been banned, I may make an exception for stories about those students, or other younger women who  marry much older men years down the road: what happens later when the men are not older but old or sick or dying? I know this sounds nasty or vengeful like, ha, they still grew old and died but I don’t mean it like that. A while back I read the excerpt from Francisco Goldman’s memoir/novel Say Her Name in the New Yorker. He says that when they got together, they would joke about how the future would play out, and he’d promise that if he was still alive at a certain point he would go off and leave her while she was still young enough to meet someone else, but as it turned out he was the one who lost her.

But of course more often the odds are not defied.  Valerie was 86 when she died. The marriage that put her obituary in the papers  lasted seven years. Her widowhood lasted forty-seven. 

My own grandmother was a widow for twenty-seven years, despite having married a man one year her junior. Only shortly before her death did I come to understand that so much of her personality and interests, so much of her way of being in the world – or what I had understood it to be – had been forged out of this widowhood, and that my mother and aunt and her husband and four sisters and known and loved a very different woman.  

For Valerie, of course, the widowhood that lasted more than half of her life was also her career. She managed his estate,  edited an edition of The Waste Land, edited his letters, got rich by authorizing Cats, started a foundation with that money, and defended his reputation. 

There are a lot of very obvious feminist points about this, about the trajectories of bookish girls born in 1926.  For a while I got kind of obsessed with the throw away descriptions of wives in profiles of artists and such and started collecting them. Things like this: 

During their thiry-five years of marriage, Natalia Dmitriyevna served as her husband’s first reader, editor, assistant, cook, driver, researcher, and (because Solzhenitsyn was a kind of literary monk) conduit to the earthly realm of agent, publishers, journalists, lawyers, and politicians. She also raised three sons because, she said jokingly, “the way Alekasandr Isayevich saw it, they would just grow up on their own.”
“The Widow’s Peak,” David Remnick, The New Yorker June 18 2012

 Or this: 

“It’s curious, and perhaps no more than curious, that the two most productive periods of Bowie’s career coincide with his two marriages.”
Thomas Jones, “So Ordinary, So Glamorous,” Thomas Jones, LRB, 5 April 2012 

“Perhaps no more than curious.” Because of course one mustn’t make too much of such things.
I always thought “And they were mostly, men” could be the great title for something: how that phrase, nine times out of ten consigned to a parenthesis, is called on to do so much by way of explanation and apology.

And yet. Were one to make the obvious feminist points, to reach for our Virginia Woolf and go to that passage I just taught my students, the one about how we’re on “the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet,” when we read of “a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother” – we might be led off the track.

For one thing, there is this: apparently Valerie hated talking to the press but made an exception when the movie Tom and Viv came out, defending her husband against the charge, among others, that Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne, had written parts of The Waste Land and been denied credit. “The exemplary literary widow” delicately describes her understanding of Vivienne’s illness, expresses sympathy for Ted Hughes, and asserts that the first Mrs. Eliot’s role in creating The Waste Land was the traditional one: causing the misery that helped to inspire it.  Valerie comes across in The Independent as the reluctant truth-teller, making a more modest but more accurate claim for her role in the great man’s work.

No doubt for some people this is a cautionary tale about the perils of looking too hard for the evidence of lost female genius. I remember one time in graduate school a certain professor saying that for the material we were looking at, 19th century French poetry, there were no women. “And not because they’ve been suppressed,” he said with something like a sneer. But Woolf’s point was not just about the things that don’t get read, or the things that were written as “anon”, or the ways women’s intellectual capacities were channelled into work produced by men, but the things that never get written at all.

But in a way this all misses the point. In some ways,  literary history remains a stubbornly conservative field no matter how many of us pinkos teach it. The whole mythology of genius teaches us to spend our time thinking about creation as a process that is ultimately distant from the rest of human experience, done by a select few. We can expand the pantheon, and we can talk about “context,” we can look at literary movements that tried to be collective, we can study popular culture, but it’s very hard to ever have the cultural equivalent of social history or history from below, or to really study anything but a few works at a time, be they representative or exemplary, no matter what the “digital humanities” people say.

Looking again at the lives of those who live in proximity to the big names can of course be a part of this in the worst way, like those awful panels run by author societies where everyone talks about what so and so wrote to so and so and talks like they knew them, like when the nice Jewish lawyer in Quiz Show comes back from hanging out with Van Dorens talking about Bunny Wilson. That’s what they call him, he tells his wife. Well, you don’t have to, she says.

But when you look at these in another way, they can be something else entirely. My favorite part of the obituary is this:

He was made for marriage, he was a natural for it, a loving creature, and great fun, too,” Mrs. Eliot said in a 1994 interview. “We used to stay at home and drink Drambuie and eat cheese and play Scrabble. He loved to win at cards, and I always made a point of losing by the time we went to bed.”

If they’d made Tom and Valerie, no one would fall in love with Bertrand Russell and no one would go to the looney bin and I don’t know how you dramatize thirty years spend editing his letters, but I would watch any movie that showed a moment like this. Genius is all well and good (actually it’s not but that’s another story), but she also serves who knows when to lose at cards.

From the Inside Out

Imagine this scene: a woman in her thirties is standing in her apartment with her boyfriend of four years. She’s leaning against the wall and turns toward the mirror and says, apropos of nothing, “I wish I could just be just one notch more beautiful.”

Here are some things this scene is not. It is not the start of an argument between this woman and her boyfriend.  It is not a calculated moment of self-deprecation designed to make a flawless heroine more “relatable.” It is not a part of a film “about” body image. It is not part of a film that will impart any lessons about lovable imperfections or self-acceptence.

Here is one thing the scene is: it is a moment in a film that creates and explores one woman’s subjectivity. After she expresses this wish, she thinks aloud about something no character from a “body image” movie ever thinks or talks about: the actual experience of living in the in-between space where most women live, of feeling attractive some of the time, and thinking about it sometimes, in the course of a day when you’re also trying to think about other things. . It’s like I’m always on the border, she says. Like I have to make my case to every new person.

The scene is from Miranda July’s second movie, The Future, which came out last year. And despite everything you might think about July, here are some things the film is not: it is not quirky, twee, ironic, or whatever they’re calling it.  July’s dancer character Sophie is no one’s manic pixie and she’s no one’s dream girl.  But neither is the film a “response to” or “deconstruction” of manic pixies.  (Although this also a very worthy project!) Nor it is a “response” to irony or an embrace of neo-sincerity or what have you. As Andrew O’Hehir points out in an interview with her,  she’s the rare indie auteur who doesn’t seem to be responding to other films or to some theme or some aesthetic.  She’s not “responding” to anything except the experience of being alive.

July wrote what is possibly my favorite short story, “Roy Spivey.” The narrator of that story has an encounter with a famous person on a plane.  They build a connection but he explains that they won’t be able to talk when they get off.  They come up with a code: he will say “Do you work here” and she will say, “no.” But when the time comes a flight attendant interrupts. I work here, she says. I will help you. Then she rolls her eyes at the famous man, as if she was commiserating with him about people like her.  This is the kind of imperceptible but all-important shift short story writers often try and fail to describe: the little shifts in our alliances, the circles we draw of who is inside and who is outside.

I heard “Roy Spivey” read at a benefit for 826. I was there with someone I was interested in, and it wasn’t really going anywhere, and I’d done the lame “I have two tickets” thing.  Before it started I went on about how it was my favorite story, and how it perfectly described the experience I’d recently had during a brief encounter with a famous person. Maggie Gyllenhaal introduced the story and said it was something we didn’t hear enough of, that it was about a woman’s body from the inside out, not about how it looked but how it felt to be in it. That was the first time I realized exactly what July was doing in her stories and in her movies, and why the twee thing she gets tagged with is so wrong.  Like Mary Gaitskill, July is the opposite of an ironist. She’s making a movie about artistic types in their thirties and the apartment looks like something out of Portlandia but she never makes fun of them for being what they are. If you think about it, that satirical impulse – making fun of hipsters, academics, what have you – is just another way of asserting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their (ok, our) lives and fears are fundamentally different from anyone else’s.

As in Gaitskill, there’s some very interesting, very un-twee sex in “The Future.” I imagine that a lot of people probably looked at it and said, that came from nowhere or, why would she do that.  You can look at it and say, she’s anxious in her relationship, or afraid of commitment, or afraid of growing older, or you can look and say she’s narcissistic or masochistic or what have you. All of these things make sense, or none of them do. In a commentary to Three Women, Robert Altman talks about how strange it is when actors say, oh, my character does this because so and so. But people, unlike scripted characters, don’t know why we do what we do. We don’t act, he said, we behave. To the extent that July’s character has a “motivation,” it’s a kind of poetic one. She and her boyfriend make the decision to “open themselves up” to new experiences and for Sophie that means that the boundaries between inside and outside start to dissolve. Women who “act out” sexually in movies or television are usually shown as lightweight and stupid or as vicious man-eaters or beautiful fuckups. With Sophie it’s any or all of the reasons anyone might, or at least have the impulse to – and that’s a different kind of psychological motivation to explore, that what ifs – restlessness, curiosity, transgression for the sake of transgression, not in the sense of shocking anyone but in the way that Brenda explained it on Six Feet Under: that your cross a line, and then you realize the lines are all in your head. (Brenda was one of the best-written female characters on TV, although they sadly pushed her a little too much towards the fuckup category and saddled her with shade-by-numbers Freudian motivations. Her parents were shrinks! And swingers!)

After we heard that story at that benefit, the guy I was with said, “yeah, it was ok, not really my thing.” I remember feeling that thing I identify with being a kid, when you’re all enthusiastic about something and try to explain it someone and they try to humor you but you can tell what they mean is, yeah, whatever, kid. It’s why it’s sometimes better to go on a date to a movie you only like so much, or not to try to teach your favorite texts. It was why I was glad to watch The Future at home with my baby sleeping on my lap. He slept through the whole thing, and so I had the rare treat of watching the whole thing without interruptions. At certain points I found myself thinking that that guy from the benefit or this person or that would hate it, and all their reasons, and just where it would lose them. But the film is all about indeterminacy and perspective. Unlike the ironists, July never distances herself from what she’s doing. She risks being seen as pretentious. And you can choose to see it that way. Or you can let the boundaries dissolve, and think, maybe this has something to do with me, just a little bit.


10 Plus Great, Interesting, or Favorite Movies Directed by Women

Inspired by this amazingly comprehensive website and this interesting thread at Shakesville, I’ve been mulling over some of my favorite movies directed by women. After Nora Ephron’s death, a lot of people were quoting her list of things she wouldn’t miss which included “panels on women in film,” and it’s easy to see how such discussions (and perhaps lists like this one) can be wearying. But it is interesting to think about the way that, despite all the auteur theory and fan-crushing on the next hot indie whatever, most people don’t really internalize the sense of a film as having a voice or something that could be filtered through gender along with so many other factors. So we don’t really think of the missing stories that an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry gives us they way we would if 90% of novels and memoirs were by men. And we don’t really think of movies directed by women as a “canon” the way people think about classics of women’s literature. This may well be for the best, given how the canon construction, even in its alternative modes, tends towards a reification that prevents people from forming their own individualized, subjective, complex relationships to texts. And god knows The Hurt Locker is like the Maggie Thatcher of films, existing to keep feminists honest. No, women don’t have to make films about women, but they should probably come close to passing the Bechtel test. Yes, it was well done. But Thatcher was also a good politician. And the fact that it wasn’t some kind of fire-breathing wignuttery made it all the more insidious as pro-war propaganda. Oh, and she’s got one coming out this year about killing Bin Laden. So yeah. Read more

Breaking Bad Season 5 Countdown

A while back Emily Nussbaum had a nice piece in the New Yorker on Game of Thrones that kind of summed up why I don’t think I’ll be watching it anytime soon. (Aside from the fact that, despite the best efforts of just about everyone I’ve ever dated and a bunch of other friends too, I just don’t seem to have the fantasy gene.) She says that the show “is the latest entry in television’s most esteemed category: the sophisticated cable drama about a patriarchal subculture. This phenomenon launched with “The Sopranos,” but it now includes shows such as “Deadwood,” “Mad Men,” “Downton Abbey,” and “Big Love.””  (Big Love turned from something very promising to a creepy defense of said patriarchal subculture, but that’s another story). But she also talks about what the sexysexy cable sex looks like in this particular patriarchy: it looks a lot like something designed to prove Andrea Dworkin right.  When you make a point like this, a million blog comments start to auto-compose: it’s a critique! It’s showing what that world is like, not endorsing it, you stupid puritanical philistine! Since I don’t plan to see the show, I don’t really know or care, but what I do find interesting is that Nussbaum makes a point that if I recall my women’s college days of yore, somewhere late in the last millenium, Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon used to make. It’s kind of an obvious point but rarely made: pornography is not pure representation, constructed in the mind and enacted by robots. It (in the live action non-anime version), is actual people having sex.  Which of course is not an argument against it, if you support legal safe sex work, which I do, but it does mean that talking about it as just in terms of representation and “free speech” is a way of erasing that work. As Nussbaum reports:

It’s unsettling to recall that these are not merely pretty women; they are unknown actresses who must strip, front and back, then mimic graphic sex and sexual torture, a skill increasingly key to attaining employment on cable dramas. During the filming of the second season, an Irish actress walked off the set when her scene shifted to what she termed “soft porn.” Of course, not everyone strips: there are no truly explicit scenes of gay male sex, fewer lingering shots of male bodies, and the leading actresses stay mostly buttoned up. Artistically, “Game of Thrones” is in a different class from “House of Lies,” “Californication,” and “Entourage.” But it’s still part of another colorful patriarchal subculture, the one called Los Angeles.

So I was thinking about this and about whether there’s anything behind this “patriarchal subcultures” thing, any reason why it would be the setting for so many of these shows. Long form cable using its form to maximum achievement is all about the construction of worlds, layered worlds and worlds within worlds. In all these cases you’re constructing a world in order to show how its rules, power structures and hierarchies, work, in ways that resonate for our own world where these things may be harder to see. It can be a fantasy past, like Game of Thrones, the recent past, like Mad Men, or subcultures like The Sopranos.  Now The Wire took this further by starting with subcultures and then layering them on until you had a whole culture,  defamiliarized and then refamiliarized. (Or perhaps the dystopia of the near future, in the neoliberal world where we are all Baltimore, or at least 99% of us.)  There have been some interesting exceptions – Six Feet Under, who’s characters live in that atomized L.A. L.A. writers seem to love to write about – beyond the family, they don’t have much social context at all. And In Treatment, which I’ve just about given up trying to get people to watch, because no one has, but which I just found out was created and written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s son, which is kind cool.

Anyways, it’s six days until the start of the new season of Breaking Bad, and I’m wondering whether or not it fits into Nussbaum’s category. It has a lot in common with The Sopranos, working the Dostoevsky thing about what is permitted for those not constrained by normal rules. With Tony S., he starts fallen and the whole show teases the possibility of redemption even though in retrospect it’s clear there was never really that possibility. Breaking Bad seems to be about a decline, except that the decline is pretty much accomplished right away – as soon as that basement scene plays out, there’s no going back. We realize right away that Walter is not so much a man fallen as a man freed to more completely be the asshole he always was.  Certainly this helps us see why there’s never a real question of him stopping once he has enough money. It’s all about ego, proving he’s the smartest guy in the room, making sure he’s daughter knows that he provided for her. We’re firmly in The Sopranos/Mad Men world of status and hierarchy. But we’re not in patriarchy, per say, except in the sense that all of contemporary culture still fits that mode. Which of course it does in certain ways. But we meet Walter in a world where status-seeking has been dissipated or sublimated beneath the haze of southwest sprawl. His old friend has achieved some post-alpha alpha success with his biomed company, and Walter is stuck as a teacher in a world where people are polite but quietly judge him as a failure – only the teenagers themselves are upfront about mocking him. While his alpha-crime career is beneath the surface, he’s stuck in pissing contests of card games and drinking in front of the kids with his sort-of alpha brother-in-law, who in this mostly not-alpha world is mostly a comic figure. From the start, Walter was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and once the costume is off, he’s pretty much a straight-up psychopath. Jesse, on the other hand, shows himself to be more and more sheep, which makes him the tragic one and quite possibly the show’s real hero.

In short, Breaking Bad may not be a show about patriarchy, but it’s definitely a show about masculinity. (Mad Men is both, of course, as well as being a much rarely thing – a show about femininity, in which femininity is interrogated as well as embodied.) There’s a certain conservative streak, in that Walter is not trying to live up to some concept of manhood, like fellow asshole Pete Campbell. He just wants to dominate, and there’s a certain “this is the true self every man would have if faced with dying” thing –  except that Jesse, in his oversized gangster clothes is there as a counterpoint. And, potentially much more radically, there is Walter Jr., who will never chase down drug dealers but admires some of his father’s ruthlessness. I’m still figuring out predictions, but as for wishes: I want more Walter Jr. almost as much as I wanted more Carla.