The first episode of Breaking Bad and media's mixed messages for men

Anytime you make a claim that it's hard to be a man, you're likely to get pushback. Therefore, I am stating from the outset that the point of this post is not that it's hard to be a man. It's that it's hard to be a good man. Being a good man is made harder by continually shifting cultural narratives, even coming from what seem to be reliable sources, about what it means to be good man. I want to emphasize the "man" part of that last sentence. It's hard to know how to be a good person, but there are added roadblocks in the way of men who want to know if they have some specific responsibility qua men to be good men, as opposed to just good people.

History of masculinity in western stories in four paragraphs

Traditionally, men in cultural narratives were heroes if they could use violence as a means to obtain socially sanctioned ends. Western narratives are filled with heroic men of violent action, from Beowulf to the American Western gunslinger drama. These stories expect their heroes to use violence to some end their surrounding societies approve of. Usually, it is to vanquish an enemy that threatens civilization in some way. Civilization is seen as female in a traditional sense: it is nurturing, yet also passive, and evil actors can, through their negative violence, keep it from existing. The only way to stop negative violence and allow civilization to live is through positive violence, or what critics call redemptive violence. Without the active violence of the hero to stop the destructive violence of the villain, civilization cannot live. In this sense, masculine, active violence is a necessary condition that must exist before female civilization can come forward.

So violence is a necessary antecedent to civilization. But it also cannot long survive the advent of civilization. In Castiglione's 16th Century guide to courtesy for nobles, The Courtier, a man is expected to be fierce in battle, but also graceful in court. He is expected to know poetry and the humanities. Castiglione mocked those who wished to walk around court showing off their martial spirit by wearing their armor when fine clothing was more appropriate. In American stories of righteous violence, the hero isn't even able to change clothes and stay in society. The hero so fully embodies the spirit of masculine righteous violence, he has no place in society. He has to ride off into the sunset. Having made the world safe for civilization, he now has to remove himself from it that it may flourish. The masculine must make room for the feminine. The man who follows his own law must head into the wilderness so that the common law for all can take root. The woman he rescued may pine for him, but she will marry the steady family man who will help her to raise a family. The hero moves on to let her follow her destiny with a different kind of man. At least, until civilization is threatened and needs the righteous outlaw again.

There has, of course, always been a thread of critique of this kind of purifying violence. The Iliad praises the warriors who fight at the gates of Troy, but also has a sense of how all the violence is vanity. The wise Odysseus tried to avoid participating in the war altogether. The fact that there are good people inside the gates as well as trying to knock them down is itself a powerful critique of the narrative of redemptive violence. In the last century, the critique has been more along the lines of noting that those who do the violence on behalf of civilization are, in fact, often favoring one form of civilization over another. They aren't fighting on behalf of civilization against the forces that would destroy it; they're fighting to preserve their preferred form of civilization over another. Rather than fighting monsters, they're simply fighting what they fear and choosing to call that fear monstrous. All of which led to a full-scale deconstruction of the belief in redemptive violence.

Finally, we have come, through as dialectical a process as ever took place in the real world, to a neo-masculinity, an attempt to redeem redemptive violence itself. In this new version, the hero doesn't ride away. Men are expected, as in the Courtier, to be capable of fighting savagely and successfully for good, but then changing out of their armor and coming to the banquet table of civilization. The hero doesn't ride away. He has to attempt, awkwardly, to adapt and become the man who helps to raise a family. He must be both gunslinger and diaper changer. Instead of being merely intellectually well-rounded, as in Castiglione's guide, they are expected to demonstrate emotional well-roundedness. A man should be able to sense the needs of his female partner, gently stroke away the tears of his children, and then, at the flip of on interior switch, reconnect with his savage side in order to fight what our society considers a threat. Often, this threat is to the emotional well-being of its members. The man's man of today generally keeps his savage side hidden, because he's "secure in his masculinity," but can also turn it on on a dime, like Goku turning Super Saiyan. In the words of Mmes Salt-N-Pepa, a real man is both "a lover and a fighter and he'll knock a knucker out."

This is not realistic. Like, at all. 

I'm building, obviously, to a complaint that society expects a balancing act of men that is so difficult, there are probably no men who can achieve it. There is, of course, a similarly paradoxical set of expectations for women, one that no woman in the real world is capable of meeting. This set of expectations, to quote a young, idiot Marine I once knew who was talking about his imaginary future wife, would have all women find a way to be "a wife in the kitchen, a mother in the living room, and a whore in the bedroom." That covers a lot of the unrealistic expectations put on women, but it leaves out how a modern woman is supposed to also be a successful professional. To quote the Enjoli commercial (which I grew up thinking was the real "I'm a Woman W-O-M-A-N" song), this woman can both bring home the bacon (work successfully), cook it up in a pan (nurture), and never let her man forget he's a man (be sexually enticing, which strengthens the underlying feral warrior her man is hiding in the trappings of civilization).

That's an awful lot to ask. In fact, that's the rantings of a manic mindset gone off the rails talking. To summon the energy necessary to be even remotely successful at work, child-rearing, and sexual gratification of a lifelong mate would require full-throttle, round-the-clock effort all day, every day. And even then, most women wouldn't really become CEO, PTA President, and the sexual fantasy of all the other husbands in the local bowling leagues they are part of to make their husbands happy. That's because doing just one of any of those three things is a full-time job, one that even when followed full-time is difficult and not a sure thing to succeed at. Trying to follow all three isn't going to lead to a fully realized woman. It's going to lead to a woman who is worn out. It will lead, in fact, to a woman who is maybe the worst thing, according to our society, that a woman can be: a bitch. She's going to be bitter and short-tempered. Having set out to be the envy of a society that places unrealistic expectations on her, she will end up earning society's scorn when she breaks her psychic self trying to achieve what cannot be achieved.

When I say men have unrealistic expectations put on them as well, I'm not necessarily trying to say those expectations are equally damaging to one's psychic well-being as the ones put on women. (And I'm obviously leaving out considerations of what these expectations do to anyone belonging to the LGBTQ+ world, those who are left to find alternate understandings of how to fit gender with personhood from what is offered to those of us who live in Cisland.) I do not equate the sufferings of men with those of women. I am merely saying that current expectations of perfect masculinity are essentially both unrealistic and paradoxical, and that they have a deleterious effect on how men act in society. These expectations would have men being many clashing selves at once. When men fail, as they will, they become depressed and pathological.

These unrealistic expectations are real. They are easy to see in current cultural narratives of masculinity. I've seldom seen a better example than the first episode of Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad's first season is a myth about becoming a monster 

First, I have to confess something. I've only seen most of the first season of Breaking Bad. Mrs. Heretic and I started it years ago, because everyone was sure it was one of the best shows on television. I found it to be a little bit tedious, because the anti-hero has been done to death in the 21st Century. So it sat there in Netflix recommendations for years, until I recently read this commentary by Eric Thurm on Lit Hug about the show Better Call Saul. It discusses Better Call Saul as one of the four high-points of the Golden Age of American Television, the other three being The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. I found it pretty compelling, and since I'm always telling a friend who doesn't watch TV that to abstain from television during an era that critics are describing as a golden age is like refusing to go to the Globe Theater in the early 1600s to watch Shakespeare. Even if you end up disagreeing with the conclusions that these shows are great, you need to be part of the conversation. So I decided to watch the whole show. This week, we got through most of season one.

I realize that BB is going to go on to have a more complex view of its main character, Walter White, than we get in season one. My overall thoughts on the show will of course eventually have to take all five seasons into consideration. But I think one of the great things about modern television is the way there can be smaller unities within the greater unity of the series. The show has to be considered as a whole, but then each season is also, in a way, something of a finished work. So is each episode. This is particularly true of the show's first episode, which, as the show's opening punch, ought to tell us a lot about the themes the entire show will be exploring.

Those themes in episode one, season one, are entirely about Walter, who has become so civilized he cannot protect his little corner of civilization, and how Walter needs to become monstrous himself in order to fight the monsters that threaten him and his family. Nearly everything about Walter when we meet him is antithetical to savage masculinity, the kind capable of redemptive violence.

Walter's wife feeds him soy bacon, which she cutely cuts up into a "50" to celebrate his 50th birthday, like he is a child. He cannot buy printer paper without his wife scolding him for using the wrong credit card. He is mocked openly by the students in his chemistry class, and, like all teachers, he is impotent to do much about it. He struggles to provide for his family, although he works two jobs. The boss at the second job takes advantage of Walter. His failure to provide opens him up to more scorn, as the same students who mock him at school see him driving a crappy car and performing manual (and therefore menial) labor at the car wash. His wife's sister holds her tongue about the financial situation of Walter's family in a way that says more than just mentioning their hardships would.

Perhaps most notably, Walter is not sexually proficient. His wife has to speak encouragingly to him in order for him to maintain an erection long enough to receive a hand job--a sexual act that is meant for him, not for her. The way she has to talk him through sexual performance (keep going, there you go) is as emasculating for Walter as it is for her disabled, teenage son to have her help him try on clothes at a store in front of his peers from school.

Walter ought to be admired from the standpoint of civilization/society. He sacrifices every day for his family, including his disabled son and his wife who, for some reason, does not work, other than occasionally writing some short stories that don't sell. He works to nurture future generations to become productive members of society. He is extremely intelligent. He is the stuff that holds civilizations together. But nearly everyone on the show--and by extension, the audience--thinks of him with something between pity and scorn. He wears tighty whities above spindly little bird legs. He is only in touch with his civilized, feminine self, which is keeping him from being able to stand up for himself and those he loves. This is contrasted with his brother-in-law, who is a beer-bellied cop, quick with a profane, locker-room joke. The brother-in-law shows the disabled son a gun at Walt's birthday party. It is apparent that if the son is going to learn about redemptive violence--being a "real man"--it will be from his uncle, not from his dad. Although he clearly loves Walt, his brother-in-law is cuckolding him by taking on the role of father to Walt's son.

This all changes when Walt can't take it anymore. He finds out he has cancer, which means that all his sacrifices on behalf of civilization, all his repression of his inner monster for the common good, has been for nothing. He curses out his boss, throws a bunch of merchandise around, and leaves. Then comes the moment the whole first episode turns around. When Walt and his wife are at the store helping their son try on and buy new clothes, they hear some of the kids from the son's school mocking him for needing help from his mother. Walt's wife starts like she is going to walk over and scold the kids, but Walt stops her. He walks out the back of the store. When he has been gone for a moment, the wife tries again to go scold the boys, but Walt re-enters the scene through the front door. He kicks the loudest of the three boys in the back of the knee. When the boy falls, Walter stands on his leg on a pressure point, taunting the boy with words the effect of "How does it feel to have trouble standing?" When he lets the boy up, the boy threatens to hit Walt, but Walt does not flinch. In a classic "if you stand up to bullies they will back down" trope, the boys leave, with the main tormentor limping.

One can see the approval in his wife's face as she watches this. She has seen her husband's inner monster emerge to protect his family, even though she has been instrumental in suppressing that monster. The audience, likely, approves of the change in Walter, too. There are two reasons for this. First, we approve of violence when it is performed to protect the weak in society. Secondly, the myth of redemptive violence has never gone away. We expect men to be able to house a monster inside themselves capable of coming forth and smiting their enemies. We expect men to still be capable of being "real men," even while ninety-nine percent of their time is spent suppressing the real man.

Walt's embrace of his inner monster awakens his slumbering sexual potency as well. At the end of the first show, which then carries over to the beginning of the next episode, he is sexually aggressive with his wife. He does not need to be coaxed. He wants her and he enters her (sort of magically and without any of the gymnastics that usually come with rear-entrance, side-by-side sex). She seems to enjoy it. Violence has made him a real man in the streets and in the sheets.

The series as a whole, I'm sure, is going to examine more of the complexities of this transformation. I believe it's headed for a critique of the notion that men can transform into the monster without the monster taking over. But episode one would leave a lot of people missing that point, and I think many viewers would probably keep the theme of that episode at the front of their minds even when the series later undermines that theme. I'd guess BB is (or was, as it's been off the air for years now) a show with a large fanbase that doesn't get what the show is about, a fanbase that continues to love Walter well past the point when he should be loved.

Society does the same thing

In the real world, men are often subtly encouraged to let the monster out without any consideration of what it means to let the monster out. The winner of a fight is often not the stronger man. It's the more aggressive one. Aggression, by and large, comes from people who are aggressive by nature. Which means it needs to be cultivated. But aggressiveness is often not rewarded by society. In the real world, Walter would have been charged with assault on a minor. That probably would have meant losing his job as a teacher. Fighting comes with all kinds of risks for a man. If you lose, you can get hurt badly enough you can't provide for your family. If you win, you can face criminal and civil penalties that also mean you can't provide for your family. Unless you're in a position where the fight is clearly defensive, it's almost always better to avoid a fight. But if you're in a fight where you're clearly just defending yourself, that's likely because the other guy is aggressive. Which means you're unlikely to win. It's like men are expected to maintain the ability to play tennis well, just in case they ever have to play tennis to defend themselves, but they're strongly discouraged from ever practicing.

Not long ago, I was at a gas station in the early hours of the morning. I don't usually go to this gas station, because it's a little sketchy. But it was 5 AM and I needed gas. My son was with me, because we were on the way to see my parents, who live a long way away. When I pulled up, I sensed something was off, but I got out anyway. There was impossibly loud music playing from a truck. There was yelling. I decided to just get a little gas, enough to get somewhere else, and move on. I saw a white man of average build get into his car in a hurry and drive off. Then, I finally understood that the yelling I heard was from a larger black man who was calling him racial epithets for white people. One of the things he called him was something like a "Donald Trump MAGA motherfucker" or something like that. I figured the guy maybe had a MAGA hat or bumper sticker or something like that. Okay, I figured, maybe that wasn't the best way to conduct political discourse, but since I don't have Trump merch on my car or person, I'm probably good.

But then he started yelling at me. My instinct told me that if a guy is yelling at random white dudes at 5 in the morning at a gas station, he's probably either mentally ill or high. Possibly both. There's no way to win that, so I ignored him, kept my back turned from him, and kept pumping. He kept calling to me to try to get me to look. One of the things he called me, among the slang for white dude, was "fat boy." I think he might have thrown a plastic bottle cap at me. I decided to wrap things up and get in the car. I saw him start to move toward the car, but then he saw my son and backed away. He went off and started talking to (and hugging) a black patron of the station who had just pulled up. I got out of there. I'm not sure why seeing my son made him back away. Maybe he couldn't see well that my son is a 13-year old, and he thought I actually had a second adult in the car who would come to help me out.

I was probably never in any real danger. I did the right thing (other than doing the wrong thing in even going there in the first place, against my better judgment). Ignore and walk away is almost always the right choice, even if it means swallowing your pride. (For hours after, I kept hurting over, of all things, being called "fat." I don't think I'm fat. Was I wearing something that made me look fat? Have I let myself go without knowing it?) 

But a part of me had a hard time accepting that I had done the right thing. A real man, part of me kept feeling, should have been able to take care of business. I should have been able to face him with a cool, confident, and cocky line, at which point the bully either backs down or faces me in battle, which I should be able to win. Everything about that idea is stupid. My son was in the car with me. What if I had been beaten senseless with him there? What if this man had then tried to hurt my son? All of the mathematics of the situation dictated getting the fuck out of there. I had nothing to gain and a lot to lose. But man, there are forty-some years of conditioning that kept telling me I should have done more. Because I'm a man.

I'm writing this at a time when there is a discussion going on about a Supreme Court justice nominee who is accused of having tried to rape a woman while a teenager. That has led to a lot of sidebar conversations about how much of letting boys be boys makes sense. This sidebar over the particulars of maleness in our culture is part of a larger discussion that's been going on for longer, one that seeks to bring the darkness of rape culture into the light. #Metoo is just one incarnation of this discussion. I don't want anything I've written here to be taken as a justification of rape culture or suggesting that we should overlook Kavanaugh's past, even his past as a juvenile. As many women will point out, even if it's difficult to know what society expects of me as a man, I ought to be able to understand the simple rule "don't rape."

I agree. That doesn't change, though, the self-contradictory messages men get about how their man-ness ought to manifest itself. We are told that our aggressive sides have no place in society, and yet, we see aggressiveness rewarded, both in terms of esteem as well as sexually. In fact, the esteem and sexual reward are intricately linked, because we view "real men" as worthy of sexual reward, but also view unleashing one's "real man" as necessary antecedent to sexually gratifying a woman, which in turn, makes one worthy of greater sexual reward.

We even get this message from nuanced messengers, ones we think we ought to be able to trust, like Breaking Bad. Even if the show as a whole deconstructs the notion of redemptive violence as a means to reclaiming lost masculinity, individual parts of it seem to give the opposite message. Sophisticated consumers of cultural texts on masculinity ought, perhaps, to be able to balance these individual messages in support of freeing the beast with other messages that suggest the beast never comes out without a price. But not everyone in society is a sophisticated consumer of texts. In fact, we deal every day with the effects of what you might call culture's toxic fandom.