PRINCESS MONSTER WIFE

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.

( moar )

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.