From The Golden Age of Television

We Are All Close Readers Now: On Season Five

I wanted to be the 45,931th person to blog each episode of Mad Men this season, but it was not to be. I could try to be noble and say David Simon’s arguments got to me instead of, you know, life.  Just as a counterpoint to Simon, though, I think it’s kind of awesome that so many people spend so much time dissecting them, from acting and costuming to character motivations to each period reference. Sure, there are more important things we should be doing, but when is there not? When I was a kid there were lots of earnest pieces by the serious concerned types about how TV was making everyone “passive.” Now these serious (semi-serious?) people say that TV is brilliant art and it’s the interactive 2.0 stuff that’s killing us, what with how we’re all “distracted” instead of “absorbed.”  I’ve spent more than my share of time around my English department comrades lamenting how hard it is to get people to close read, or how students resist analysis by saying “they didn’t really think that much about it.” But of course people love to “close read” as soon as there’s something they’re invested in, and no one is saying Weiner doesn’t think this shit through. 
And so, at this belated hour with two of thirteen episodes to go, ten ways of looking at season five:
1) Over at slate, John Swansburg asks the big question: Is it possible Don is actually becoming something like a better person?  Weiner of course comes from The Sopranos, where the whole arc was about Tony setting out half-heartedly to see if he could be redeemed, when it was actually clear all along that he couldn’t. As with Tony, we forgive Don too much because of his charms, but of course we’re operating in a very different moral universe here (no matter what that stupid fantasy murder scene thought it was trying to do), one where redemption would seem to be more possible. The real obstacle seems to be the narrative one: this is a serious show, so it has to be a tragedy, right?

I remember reading Crime and Punishment way back and being struck by how Raskolnikov kept falling back into justifying his actions after he’d seemed to have a breakthrough. The Sopranos used the long form to capture this even more acutely. We think we have epiphanies, we think someone’s “life can change in an instant,” as the melodramas would have it, but more likely the change is just another thought we had about ourselves. Don sunk low in the fourth season, and seems to be crawling back up, but who knows. It’s not just that these multi-season shows can have characters ebb and flow over years instead of having the one arc Christopher Moltisanti thought he should have, it’s that we get the feeling we’re dipping into lives that continue off-stage, a whole texture of experiences that are as much like the formless unfolding of lives – or history – than the constructed lives of tragic personalities.

Of course the tragedy could be that he becomes a better person too late: one of those men who becomes such a devoted husband/father the second time around, in part because the first set can never forgive him. I loved Ken’s line about Don and Megan’s cool whip act, how it’s a twist on the normal schtick because “they actually like each other.” Our girl from Montreal isn’t at all the Betty 2.0 she seemed to be last season. That would be a very take-this-to-the-seventies outcome, but it feels pretty unsatisfying. 


2) I’m struck again and again by how, with all its bang up research, the thing that really makes the period detail work is that it’s a little “off.” And as with The Sopranos, the dialogue is also a bit off – a little over the top, a little too metaphoric. It fills in what would be outside the dialogue in a story, punching it up to where it feels real instead of being realistic in a mimetic sense. This shit isn’t easy to do. Likewise the reference points are not inaccurate, just not the trajectories or reference points you’re expecting. Even the Beatles thing hit at this – the unexpected choice, the last song off the album, after an episode of fake-Beatles. Being interested in the period I’ve seen enough films and documentaries that hit the exact same notes to realize how important this is. It’s the sixties as lived before people knew what “the sixties” were.

3) Hey, do you remember when the woman who played Daphne on Frasier was pregnant and instead of writing the pregnancy into the character or trying to disguise it they put her in a fat suit? Yeah. Fat suits and fake chins need to die. I had a problem with the Peggy stuff in the first season but there you could at least make a case for it. There’s no excuse for such a perfectionist show to have something so visually unconvincing, as if we don’t know what non-thin bodies look like and will just accept the signifier. Find something reasonable to do with Betty Draper or let her go.

4) Speaking of pregnancies, what happened to little Kevin? Yes, yes, Joan’s mom is at home, and yes there was no attachment parenting in 1966 but she seems awfully unencumbered.  Mad Men has done a great job with Sally, but Bobby, Gene and Kevin all seem to follow the pattern of existing as plot points. Obviously there are practical reasons for this but it would be nice to see a little of how these little ones affect the texture of these everyday lives.

5) Also speaking of pregnancies, is that memory out of Peggy’s life for good? Narratively speaking it seems so. I want her to triumph as much as anyone (which is to say, a lot), but it doesn’t seem likely that she would have put this behind her in any meaningful way – as far as we can tell she only discussed it honestly with Don once, in “The Suitcase,” and even then somewhat obliquely. And from what we know, adoptions of this period proved highly traumatic in the long run.

6) How great that the least angsty of the bunch, Ken, continues his run as the show’s one true artist? And too bad for Paul that wishing don’t make it so. Like Pete, no one likes him, but unlike Pete, he’s not an asshole, just kind of foolish. If he’d kept his mouth shut in his early romance with Joan she could have broke it to him gently and helped him find out he had a talent for gardening or some such and maybe they would have moved to the country together . . . 

7) “Signal 30” and “The Other Woman” were to me the strongest so far. “Signal 30” is a perfect short story – what Cheever or Updike would have written with the benefit of feminist insight. And putting them together, it’s striking how much Joan’s situation owes to this little worm. Pete’s another example of the zig-zag in the long-form approach to storytelling: for a while it seemed like he and Trudy were actually the best-matched couple on the show, but like Pete and, like one suspects, Trudy before too long, we had another thing coming.

8) Speaking of which, Trudy seems the perfect candidate to get radicalized. I’m afraid the show won’t totally go there in later seasons out of the misplaced fear of being too explicitly political, but for all the talk about how it would be ahistorical for people on the show to speak from contemporary values, there’s a point at which ignoring radicalism will become the real ahistorical path. Joan’s too caught up in the games she’s learned to play – the feminist insight about femininity as role playing wouldn’t be a shock to her at all. Peggy’s too invested in her ambition, and Betty’s just too Betty. But Trudy is still young, she’s obviously well-educated and nobody’s fool, and watch out if she finds out just a fraction of what the man she’s hitched her star to has been up to. 

9) Speaking of radicalism and the ahistorical, there had really really really better be some payoff with Dawn in the next few episodes.  Seriously, I don’t care how realistic you want to make the period’s racism, there were, you know, still actual African Americans who have personalities and stories. Start telling them, like, way before yesterday.

10) Is it time for the Mad Men death/suicide pool?  Pete was the early and perhaps too obvious choice, Roger would have made more sense a while back, and Joan – well, can’t bear to think about that. My money’s on Lane.  

The Rise of Peggy Olson, the Fall of Don Draper and the Affective Life of Capitalism

So the new season of Mad Men started last night. The official posters, with Don looking at a pyschadelic print, aren’t out and out historical gaffes like this Netflix ad, but they point to a lot of the problems the show had last season. Season six was, I think, one of false starts and frustrations.  A lot  them came from having to sustain a long-running show that’s worked through a lot of its premises, but others point to something interesting that’s been there since the start. Mad Men started out as fundamentally a show about hierarchies. (“It’s a hierarchy!” Ken cried desperately in last night’s premier.  Well, it was – and largely still is – but more on that later.) Peggy’s first day tour of the office showed us the lay of the land in all its beautiful horror. We knew part of the long arc would be about how the people at the top – whom we’d more or less been asked to identify with – had their positions challenged. But the show’s strength was always in showing the everyday cruelties of the old order.  Many of the best episodes, like “The Gold Violin” from season 2, or “Signal 30” from season 5, have the feel of a certain kind of old school New Yorker story. As Vivian Gornick described it in “The End of the Novel of Love”:

In the fifties John Cheever’s stories of marital disillusion seemed profound. That famous climatic moment in Cheever when the husband realizes holds him in contempt, or the wife knows husband is committing adultery, these moments delivered an electric charge. The knowledge encoded in them seemed literally stunning, leaving the characters riven, their lives destroyed. Who, after all, could go on after this? Then came the shocker – the thing that made the story large, awesome, terrible – they did go on like this. 

This describes the lives of many of Mad Men‘s characters throughout the early seasons. Then, of course, as Gornick recounts “within a generation . . there was divorce. And psychotherapy. And sex and feminism and drugs . . . ” Some of the suspense came in who would crack first, and how, and at what cost.  Betty seemed doomed if she was forced to live outside her illusions – this was true and not. Would it be Pete unable to live with his own contempt, or would Trudy beat him to it? Don and Roger, while threatened by certain aspects of social change, are poised to benefit from others – they trade in their spouses with little reprisal. Except, of course, that they discover nothing has really changed. For Roger, this works insofar as we can experience his semi-nihilistic questing as a comedy, but it’s left us impatient with Don.  The wonderful Emily Nussbaum pretty much nails  the corner into which Don had been painted by the end of last season. The aside about sneering and swingers is interesting too: in an odd way, our favorite horn dog is a bit of a prude: Roger might have the most depressing stoned group sex ever, but he’s still game and mildly amused. Don’s still caught up in the guilt and secrecy. (The show’s attempts to show him as kinky, like with the prostitute who smacks him, fall flat, the way so many shows still use mild kink as a shorthand for sad people having sad sex.) I remember reading somewhere about when the Diggers who set up a free store, they had to explain to people who tried to shoplift why that was impossible at a free store. There may be sex in the streets in 1968, but Don still prefers the neighbor and hotel rooms with heavy curtains. No one needs to tell Don there’s no such thing as free love. The scene when his daughter discovers him is devastating – but where can we go from there?

The problem gets more complicated – but it still feels like a problem – when we think about the show’s broader historical and social canvas. Here too, the show was wonderful in its depiction of the repressive Before. But once that order is shaken, it has been largely unable or unwilling to present anyone who stands for this challenge in a serious way. African-American characters appear in the background, and occasionally make a telling comment. The counterculture mostly exists insofar as it embodies aspects of Don’s psychodrama. (Or, Betty’s, in the first and strongest episode of season six. Her implicit sympathy for the hippie kids was a fascinating thread that was unfortunately dropped.) And then there was the hippie punching throughout season six. Or, rather, hippie stabbing. When Abe and Peggy argued about civil rights and women’s rights a few seasons back, some of it was an easy gibe at Abe, but some of it actually got at the ways it’s easier for people to support justice from a distance, when it doesn’t bring their own position into question or even just make for an awkward conversation. But by the end of season six he was mostly shown as a fool. He becomes absurd the way the Beatniks Don smokes up with in the first season is absurd.

Now, it’s certainly true that in any time period, even one of mass political action, the majority of people are not activists, and mostly experience change through the mundane of their daily lives. The episode on King’s assassination was trying to show that in an interesting way. But there’s something perverse in the way that the show keeps suggesting that while the old ways were unjust, those who directly challenge them are fools. 
Which brings us to Peggy. Some of the publicity for this season – along with the shot late last season of her in Don’s characteristic pose – suggests this will be “her season.” It’s an intriguing possibility – perhaps the most radical and astute solution to the Don Draper problem would be if he simply fades away – like characters in The Wire, who are significant only for the ecological niche they inhabit. It also points to show’s ambivalence about social change, though. That awful Netflix ad isn’t just grotesquely historically ignorant. It also points to a certain reading of Peggy – she’s a feminist, kind of, but not part of feminism: she represents change and the struggle for respect through her story, but doesn’t have a relationship to the organized social movements of the time. Now, when you point things like this out, everyone rushes to explain to you, yet again, the difference between art and politics, or to complain you’re looking for agitprop. What is interesting to me about that is the idea that any portrayal of collective movements – or even of characters having some relationship to them – would automatically detract from complexity. Certainly it is easy to imagine a poorly executed story line where Betty or Peggy or Joan get their Consciousness Raised. But would it really be so impossible for some one in the Mad Men universe to have some real relationship to this movement, or the Civil Rights movement, or the anti-war movement, which captured the imagination of so many? And if we can’t imagine it doing so, what does that tell us? 
At the same time, though, I think Peggy’s story does reveal something interesting about contemporary feminism and its discontents. I cringed a bit at the end of last night’s episode, when she cries alone in her apartment after a bad day at the office, so lonely she wanted the plumber to hang out.  But the thing is, Peggy’s rise has always been more interesting precisely because it’s in advertising, a field that can’t possibly live up to the creative and personal energies she has put into it – as so many of our jobs cannot, not because we more properly should put them all into our home and family lives, but because of that little thing the show is actually largely about: capitalism. Much is made about Don and Peggy’s affinity for each other because they are both outsiders who struggled for respect. But that outsider status also gives them a certain take on what they are doing – they take advertising seriously and are good at it precisely because in some ways they aren’t taking it seriously – they know how to manipulate want and need, if often unconsciously, and they know it can always be manipulated because it can never be satisfied. We want Peggy to triumph, but we don’t have illusions about what triumph looks like in the venue she’s in. (Not, one should note, the venue she has ‘chosen’, simply the one she found herself in.) This doesn’t mean that Peggy is an unappealing, proto-Sheryl Sandberg or some such. It just means that when it comes to work, we are all still living in the Before. 


Before Feminism

So says Netflix.

“A hundred years of brilliant personalities and important events have also been erased from American history. The women orators who fought of mobs, in the days when women were not allowed to speak in public, to attack Family, Church and State, who travelled on poor to cow towns of the West to talk to small groups of socially starved women, were quite a bit more dramatic than the Scarlett O’Haras and Harriet Beecher Stowes and all the Little Women who have come down to us. . . But most people today have never even heard of Myrtilla Miner, Prudence Crandall, Abigail Scott Duniway, Mary Putnam Jacobi, Ernestine Rose, the Clafin sisters, Crystal Eastman, Clara Lemlich, Mrs. OHP Belmont, Doris Stevens, Anne Martin. And this ignorance is nothing compared to ignorance of the lives of women of the stature of Margaret Fuller, Fanny Wright, the Grimke sisters, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Stanton Blatch, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Paul.”

So said Shulamith Firestone. (Dialectic of Sex, 1970)

The Best Half Hour of (Recent) Television You’ve Never Seen

When I hosted a party for New Year’s Eve ’09/’10, as midnight came around, we tried to figure out what we should toast about the soon to be departed, not so beloved, mostly low and dishonest decade. We came up with the rise of the Latin American left and the whole (second?) (third?) golden age of television.  Now of course I would never compare television to a world changing historical event that gives you renewed hope for the future of the planet, but you may have noticed I’m a bit of a sucker for this whole whichever  golden age it is and I guess I’m marginally more qualified to discuss it, so.

Most fans of this stuff have their own pick for the best show of the ’00s that hasn’t gotten it’s due. In Treatment is mine. But really, when I say this, what I mean is this one episode. It doesn’t have a proper title, but Pine Barrons, the Suitcase – think like that.

When I was about twelve, I decided I wanted to be a psychologist. I was fascinated by adult emotions, by the seemingly inexhaustable complexity of their emotions, actions, and words. I thought it would be great to be able to hear everyone’s secrets, that everyone would have to be honest with me. (Ha!) Probably this fantasy was a safer version of what I really wanted: an idealized version of the patient experience, to feel absolutely listened to, understood. This was pretty much the same reason I got interested in literature, but that’s another story.

In Treatment had a gimmick-y sounding structure. It aired every night of the week when it was on HBO. Each of the first four nights, the therapist, Paul, saw a different patient. Then, on Friday, he saw his own therapist. The sessions of course moved a lot more quickly with a lot more immediate high points than a normal therapy session would, but everything on display – the sensitivities, the hesitations, the false starts, the defensiveness, the sometimes circular and sometimes associative logic – are instantly recognizable for anyone who’s spent any time in on the couch. (We can still call it that even though we sit up now, right?) And of course Paul uses all the same evasive moves on his therapist his patients have been using on him.

It was a perversely market-unfriendly set up, and I haven’t had much luck persuading friends to watch it from this description.  And for some strange reason, “It was based on an Israeli series!” “It was created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s son!” “There’s now something like 10 versions!” haven’t done the trick either. I suspect it’s that most people find the thought of listening to other people’s therapy sessions unbearable, like listening to other people’s dreams. Which I actually love listening to, so, maybe my twelve year-old self was onto something.

But really, the reasons people should watch it are all in that episode.  (I guess I should say this paragraph has “spoilers,” though that seems odd in the context of this show.) One of the patients in the first season is Alex, a navy pilot.  His therapy raises some of the same questions as Tony Soprano’s, though to my mind in a more morally complex and interesting way.  Like Tony, he comes into therapy for a narrow, self-serving reason (do we all?):  to be function better, to relieve stress without changing anything central about his life. Like Tony, he does a more aggressive and asshole-ish version of the testing most new patients do. Tony insults therapy and brags about his money and young girlfriend; Alex makes it known he is the “best of the best,” probes his therapist’s credentials, and insults his sub-par coffee maker.

Most essentially, both Tony and Alex have killed innocent people as part of their jobs. Neither of them want to confront this in any real way; both want to continue to do their jobs effectively. Understandably so, one almost wants to write – and that’s where the wrinkle comes in. Both therapists see a suffering person and want to help. Their patient’s victims are not there. As ethical people, and as believers in their profession, they (and we) think that one cannot or should not be able to live with having killed innocent people, that it must be confronted, dealt with, although they/we also suspect from that the pure self-interest point of view, these patients might be better off with a full dose of repression.  For me, the whole arc of The Sopranos, NJ vs. NY and all the rest of it aside, is about how a man whose life doesn’t bear examination flirts with the idea of examining it and inevitably pulls back. Melfi shuts the door on him in the second to last episode, but it was never really open. I think it’s meant to be an open question whether or not she is culpable in making him a more effective gangster, or whether we are culpable for inevitably being “on his side” throughout. What’s clear is that he was never getting out. You can say this makes the show tragic – I actually think it makes it limited in a certain way, no matter how brilliant.

You don’t have to be an anti-war pinko like me to see that Alex is in a similar situation, though it helps. Even if you think the Iraq war was justified, and that the “accidental” deaths of the children in the school he dropped bombs on and others like them are defensible costs in the name of some greater good, I think most people would acknowledge it’s hard to take Alex’s initial self-presentation – that he’s basically fine with it all and just needs the therapist to sign off on his plan to go back to the bomb site,  but not because he has a bad conscience, of course – at face value.  Paul doesn’t believe it, of course, so he pushes. They dance around the usual stuff of Alex’s family and marriage, and Alex tries to best Paul by taking up with another of his patients. He eventually decides it’s not therapy he needs – it’s to go back to Iraq, to start flying. Shortly after this he is killed in a training exercise, and there’s speculation it was a suicide. In the final episode of his story, his father comes to see Paul.

His father is brilliantly played by Glynn Turman, who played mayor Royce on The Wire. (If nothing else that show demonstrated how many wonderful and criminally underused African-American actors are out there.) In talking to him, Paul is “breaking the rules” since the confidentiality of what Alex told him is supposed to live on even after Alex is dead. Like teaching, I think, therapy is often about how to create a sense of connection and even transgression without actually throwing out all the rules, and Paul tries to do this, dancing around the questions but unable or unable to disengage. Turman speaks up for stoicism, for repression, for doing what you have to do to survive without opening up every wound, accusing Paul of poking around where it wasn’t his business to be. It’s a familiar argument of stern patriarchs, but it has a poignancy and credibility when coming from an older African-American man from the south. Here the meaning of therapy diverges sharply from in the Sopranos. It may be that Alex’s killings are different from Tony’s only in that his are justified by the culture as a whole rather than just a reviled if romanticized subculture.  But his father’s resistance is something else altogether. It’s about what happens when you suffer injustice so baked into the wider world that there seems no sane response except to view family and community as sacrosanct and keep outsiders at a distance as much as possible. Paul had no right to poke around in Alex’s psyche – not just because it was dangerous but because it wasn’t his place. Paul says that sometimes people like an objective voice, an outsider they’re not entangled with. To which the father replies, like a prostitute paid for her discretion?

Because our culture is so off-kilter politically, “both sides have a point” is most often the motto of brain-dead hacks.  In dramas, even the smartest ones, we’re meant to identify with a central figure and see other people they way they see them – as opportunities or obstacles. Conflicts tell us about a character and reflect what we wish we would say in a situation. Watching this episode made me think about how rare it is to hear to people articulate fundamentally conflicting world views and not feel like the game either is rigged or staged. How much self-examination can we bear? Does someone who has made others suffer deserve aid and comfort? Is it wrong to pay someone to care about us? Which kinds of caring are ok to do this for? (I don’t happen to think either prostitution or therapy are wrong, but that doesn’t mean I think Alex’s father is wrong, either.) If we lived in a smarter more humane world having more humane debates maybe a scene like this wouldn’t be so striking. Of course, if we did, all the elements of Alex’s storyline would also have played out differently.


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?

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.