Walking into a multiplex cinema can often be a
depressing experience. Do you want
standard seats, or premium seats? 3D, IMAX, IMAX 3D, or silly old 2D? Do you
want a Regular or Large vat of carbonised sweetener to go on along with your
inordinately expensive popcorn? Don’t forget the zombiefied child staff, the
half hour of targeted trailers and adverts, the irritating piracy notices, the
smug celebrity endorsements. When FINALLY the film of your choice is on, fellow
audience members (here purportedly to
experience the shared magic of cinema) are either slurping nosily, talking,
texting, or snogging. The real scrotes excel at doing them all at
once. And what have you all come to see?
Whatever gives you the most bang for your £15 of course. You want to be taken
to worlds you haven’t seen before, you want big ideas and great characters
given the budget to come alive. You want a RIDE. You’re more likely to get
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which no one wants (ironically of course, PoC started out as just that, a
themed ride). Sometimes you get The Avengers, other times you get Battleship;
it’s like playing Russian Roulette, with the roaring crowd of focus groups,
marketers and studio executives urging you to blow your head off.
Meanwhile at home
on your unassuming small screen (unless your penis size is determined by 50’’
HD TVS), there has been a renaissance in long form dramatic storytelling. More
so than ever before viewers can follow intricate plot lines and nuanced
character development when they want, how they want- DVR,TiVO, Sky Plus,
iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, online catch up services and um, Pirate Bay. Smaller
channels like HBO, Showtime and AMC have made a name for themselves by
developing ambitious, higher tier programmes.
We’re in the first decade of the 21st century, and by popular
consensus we’re in the Golden Age of TV.
The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad bloody Men are usually
cited (more or less accurately) as The Unmissables. I’d also include a second tier of critically
acclaimed but less consistently masturbated over shows such as Sons of
Anarchy, Boardwalk Empire, The Shield, Six Feet Under, Game of Thrones,
Deadwood etc. Characters and genre aside, certain commonalities emerge:
sex, high production values, sex, a greater investment in acting talent, more
sex, and complex plotting that assumes the viewer will not miss an episode. All
these shows share something else too.
Anti-heroes.
They love ‘em. Walter White, Tony Soprano, Omar Little,
Don Draper, Tyrion Lannister. Narcissistic,
self-loathing, yet self-justifying men who just don’t play by The Rules .
Following the critical and commercial success of The Shield (the story
of a brutally efficient and very bent police squad headed by Grant
Mitchell Vic Mackey) the anti-hero position is such a default in television
it has almost limited the way in which stories can be told on the small screen
drama. With few exceptions, it’s not enough to simply be an ordinary person
that strives to do good only to face obstacle after obstacle in achieving that
goal. We have to watch shows give us walking talking figures that are
grotesque, funhouse mirror versions of our own worst impulses. They hook us in,
we watch them week after week, and they make us complicit in their actions.
They always have sympathetic traits though- sure Dexter is a prolific and
vicious serial killer BUT he has a cast iron (if warped) moral code that
forbids him from harming ‘innocents’ and children. Deadwood’s Al
Swearengen and Tyrion are both respectively power hungry, conniving schemers
with an arsenal of quotable quips BUT they have a rare respect for prostitutes
given the culture of Westeros/ 1870s America. Breaking Bad’s Walter
constantly pushes the boundaries of how far he’ll go to make money- lying,
manipulating, um... poisoning kids- BUT we’ll always remember him chiefly as
the humble chemistry teacher who wears a calculator watch and has cancer. Maybe
it’s a sign of the times- in a world filled with war, recession, cynicism and
David Cameron, straight-up heroes just aren’t interesting anymore, and
more importantly, feel fake. So the confused guy who does bad things for the
right reasons just might be the best reflection of where we are today.
Hang on, where
are the anti-heroines? Why was the above list of great leading characters also
a complete sausage fest?
Want to how you make a critically acclaimed, multi award
winning drama? Here’s what you do- you need to build up a morally ambiguous patriarch,
preferably in a highly masculine environment- be it biker gangs, drug
peddling, law enforcement, 1950s advertising agencies. Then start to peel away his certainty about
the way the world works, explore the limitations of this outlook and what it
means to be a man in this world.
What does it mean to be a man? No one really knows, this writer definitely
does not know- but it makes for some damn good television!
Full disclosure: I love Breaking Bad. I need no
excuse to talk at length about Breaking Bad. But this article is that
perfect excuse so here I go, talking about Breaking Bad.
Walter White, oh how I love you. How I hate you. Creator
of Breaking Bad Vince Gilliagan, envisaged a show that explores how an audience’s
deeply entrenched affection for a character can be stretched, distorted and
finally snapped over the course of several seasons. And that’s exactly what was
delivered. Every time Walt barely got himself out of yet another shit storm we
cheered, the more bad-ass he got, the more we wanted his cool Heisenberg
alter-ego to take centre stage, shades, hat; the lot. Why wouldn’t we? With
Walt we were initially presented with a weak, emasculated schoolteacher, whose
sole source of power, his scientific genius, buys him precisely bugger all in a
hyper-masculine capitalist world. His irritating bint of a wife, Skyler,
clearly wears the trousers in the family, while he is degraded daily at his
other car wash job. Even his choice to enter the world of crystal meth is
derived from weakness; Walt believes he's going to die of cancer before he has
to deal with the consequences, either from law enforcement or the gangsters
that control the drug market.
So when something snaps in Walter, we’re ready and
willing it to happen. We want to see that evolution, or as Vince
Gilligan puts it ‘turning Mr. Chips into Scarface’. The constant visual
evocations of Westerns and action flicks reflect this, but also points in a
different direction: gender panic. As Walt's cancer goes into remission, he
becomes more and more obsessed with becoming the alpha male role he’s been so
long been deprived of. In five seasons we’ve had such MANLY MAN things like-
car explosions, ruthless poisonings, shootings, manic self-confidence, and
various forms of aggressive/threatening sexuality. As we go down the rabbit
hole with Walt, he drifts away more and more away from his friends and family,
turning in on himself to be eaten alive by his own limitless ego. It’s got to
the point now where we the audience want
him to be punished, badly.
Anti-hero shows can have this effect on us; it’s one of
their main pleasures. We gleefully watch our man rob, kill, pillage, lie and
cheat. We perversely love him, and hate
anyone who gets in their way- especially
their wives. And then, all of a sudden, the paradigm shifts and we demand
justice. When Vic Mackey’s only way out is to rat on his Strike Team and push
for immunity, there’s a truly chilling scene he casually rattles through his
crimes, his former colleagues listen on in disbelief. And so do you- oh my god he DID do that didn’t he? The
mask slips, Vic Mackey is outed as the evil bastard he’s always been, and we can’t
wait to see his comeuppance. At the end of The
Sopranos, Tony sits in a restaurant, life in tatters. There’s a suggestion
that he’s about to be whacked by a rival mobster, but then the show ends
abruptly by cutting to black for several seconds. Our thirst for blood denied,
we will never know if Tony met a bullet to the head, with onion rings on the
side. A lot of people HATED that.
High quality dramas about women haven't taken off. Women get
plenty of meaty, complex roles in
these top tier shows, but only as supporting characters amidst all the cock
fighting. Women in leading dramatic roles do exist of course-, Damages, Weeds say- but they tend to be
defined by how well she fits into a traditionally masculine world. We also
don’t seem to relish women being truly reprehensible monsters in the same way
their male counterparts can be- they can selfish, devious , naughty- but revelatory oh my God what
did she just do-style moments? In
embarrassingly short supply. We seem to have this inability to deal directly
with women engaged in complex, dramatic struggles that call gender roles into
question. Perhaps the absurdities of being female in this modern era don't lend
themselves well to drama, but have to be approached sideways, through comedy.
Women do very well heading up some of the best comedy on TV: here’s looking at
you, Parks and Recreation. Maybe this
will change- I hope it will.
Here’s the bright side though ladies. The overwhelming
message being promoted by these Golden Era shows is that old, clear-cut rules
of manhood reek of bullshit. In the
real world, strongly defined gender roles have started to fail us fellas, and
the men who thrive are the ones who have the flexibility to get past the
straightjacket of traditional masculinity.
Sorry Walt, Vic, Tony,Don, McNulty and all the rest- you’re
men out of time.
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