secrets vs. wives

[allchildren]

I -- I was going to post this on Tumblr. I wrote it in a Tumblr box. And then it was giant and wtf, so HI~ My brain is all about the meta, lately.


I'm thinking about men and their secrets.

I just finished watching the second season of Breaking Bad. I didn't want to watch Breaking Bad for a long time because it seemed to me, via quite a lot of adjacent exposure, to be a lot of things I am not that into:

• mainly about the relationship between two white men
• who run around yelling BITCH a lot
• whose main and therefore narratively punished adversaries are always Latinos
• whose genre is the late-aughts zeitgest "normal [= white middle-class] people take up a scandalous [=associated with not-white not-middle class] crime for fun and profit, lol edgy"
• plus the classic "American Dream? More like American NIGHTMARE!!!" super fresh zing take on suburban nuclear family life

For the record, all of those impressions were completely accurate. But I do find it okay anyway because it's very well & creatively done and the acting is aces and the BITCH yelling is actually 99% directed at dudes, which is no less misogynistic but a lot less upsetting to me personally than seeing women degraded. And also I developed a case of feelings about a few faces.

But I'm thinking, about a corollary to that zeitgeist genre, which is "men and their secrets." I'm thinking about Mad Men. I'm thinking about Dexter. (Thinking about Weeds, wherein the female protagonist's secret lasts maybe a season before her whole family knows and becomes part of it I don't even remember how long it took because seriously fuck that show) Three makes a trend: what we have here is a current cultural narrative about a man with a secret life which, profess to love her* as he might, he can never tell his wife.


What does it mean? Certainly I'm inclined to point to recent rashes of advertising (off the top of my head: Dodge, Dockers, Klondike, virtually every alcohol but lately 1800 Tequila, now even milk; lampooned by Old Spice and I know there was an even more meta razor campaign...) that promote hypermasculinity and misogyny, and say that it's not hard to see that U.S. culture is feeling extremely insecure about its masculinity lately. To take that discussion into fiction could go any number of ways, but I want to stay on track with this, because it's subtle. (I think a great deal of what Mad Men tries to do is actually deconstruct the American notion of masculinity, but I am also sadly convinced that many viewers don't see that distinction.) These are well-written shows; their female characters are some of my very favorites; there is obviously effort put in to make these women well-rounded characters in their own right. And I appreciate that because with a little less you get Leslie Mann in Knocked Up, which I maintain is actually better than most Women Are No Fun Grown Up Meanies portrayals and still drives me up a wall. But I digress, because comedy is really its own (several) discussion(s). My point is, one could easily argue that Betty, Rita, and Skyler are great characters with agency and a viewpoint and they aren't just props for their husbands.

And yet they still always lose.

Because the narrative is never really the wife's (well, Mad Men, but then you have S4 and sure enough there is Betty becoming decentralized from her narrative, more Sally's Mother than anything else). And the wife isn't really the husband's life partner, his secret is. She will always, on some level, be the harridan asking, asking, asking -- and never getting answers. She is always, on some level, a problem; her husband's narrative job is to lie to her, appease, placate. Without being an obvious villain, she provides more conflict to the narrative long-term than most "real" antagonists, and in letting her live constantly in fear and mistrust and darkness, the husband does more damage to her than he does to his "real" adversary.

*Does he even really love her? Dexter would say he did not. Don likely did not. And Walt is the worst of them all, clearly having had an existence of quiet domestic misery long before he found a secret to separate himself from Skyler; there's also the little matter of his actions in the S2 premiere.

These are not sitcoms with a punchline of "bitches, amiright?" They're not hateful commercials for an ice cream product I will never again buy. But they are reflections of a culture that relates to stories of men and their secrets versus their wives, of sham obligatory marriage, and a woman who doesn't get to join in for some Bonnie and Clyde fun (which would be SO GREAT Dexter S5 why are you the way that you are), and I think it's worth thinking about.

What do you think?

ETA: I had forgotten that I am terrible at comments! However, I do have more to say, so I just spewed a little followup back here.

Comments

[staytheking]

Hey this is vandimion!

Well, I admit, I love Breaking Bad. And while I admit that the show does need more female characters, I think Skyler is an amazing character. She's come a long way from season one, and no one really gives her credit for how smart she is.

I'm not sure why the fandom gives her such a hard time, yes Walt has cancer, yes her started cooking METH to earn his family money after he died, but it's like he blames all his problems on her, and the fandom does too.

Not sure what I was trying to say here! /ignore me

secrets like carrying around your ova in their pockets, amirite

[tropiavera]

Yes, yes, so much yes. But especially: She will always, on some level, be the harridan asking, asking, asking -- and never getting answers., which is something that bothers me about so many of those prodigy shows (House, the Mentalist, etc etc) - they frequently involve a female boss - which is exciting! - but the show is too lazy or cowardly to actually push the limits of its construction, so said female boss can't really do anything beyond yell at the male lead and then...be awed by his abilities and/or secret emotions and/or tragic past, or whatever.

plus the classic "American Dream? More like American NIGHTMARE!!!" super fresh zing take on suburban nuclear family life
lolol.

* (I think a great deal of what Mad Men tries to do is actually deconstruct the American notion of masculinity, but I am also sadly convinced that many viewers don't see that distinction.)
I am utterly convinced that the majority of the audience doesn't, if the way the Mad Men-protonostalgic zeitgeist surrounding Jon Hamm and his face bodes. Like, yeah, I agree, it's a great face, but the way people seem to romanticize his character in particular makes me (and from interviews, I think Hamm as well) super uncomfortable.

Re: secrets like carrying around your ova in their pockets, amirite

[clevermoniker]

Your icon is the most perfectly cromulent icon for this post and everyone else can go home.

[sophia_helix]

I am thinking of Buffy now, whose secret life was kept from her mother. Because part of that story arc was growing up, and when we grow up we have lives that are separate from our parents. And sometimes we have to lie about those lives and hide them, partly to keep them just to ourselves and partly because we have to lie or our parents won't understand. But in order for Buffy to fully grow up she had to integrate her lives, this new adult world merging with her mother's misconception of her daughter as an innocent, a virgin, someone who had never killed. It was painful and difficult but necessary.

These men? Will never grow up. Not even when their secret life supposedly exists to take care of their families. They're still boys in forts playing Club Get Rid of Slimy Girls. If they share their secrets they'll have to be real grown-ups and have real relationships with the people in their lives and we can't have that.

[clevermoniker]

I saw you tweeting about Breaking Bad and was thisclose to asking if it's worth watching, so this is great to see! The preconceptions you had of the show are precisely why I've skipped on it despite its constant accolades, but then again I trust you more than average critic dude, so perhaps I'll give it a shot sometime. (Also I can never get over Vince Gilligan having written so many of my favorite X-Files episodes, including Bad Blood??? Vince Gilligan wrote Bad Blood.)

(I think a great deal of what Mad Men tries to do is actually deconstruct the American notion of masculinity, but I am also sadly convinced that many viewers don't see that distinction.)

This is one of my favorite parts of the show, actually. That there are people who unquestioningly wish to emulate the life of Don Draper is proof that a lot of people watching don't understand the critical eye the show has to masculinity. The entire Maidenform episode alone is all about Don's inability to live up to his image, and you'd have to be blind to not notice how many damn mirrors the man looks into in that episode, and the pain he feels when he sees Sally's adoring gaze.

(And you know, Pete Campbell is totally a robot who is playing a role 90% of the time. He has no idea what he is doing! I frankly don't understand how you could watch Mad Men and think it validates their lifestyles like it's Entourage in the 60s or something.)