It's funny, I have the same complaint about my children, ages 6 and 3. We'll be watching some kid movie like Tangled, which they've seen several times before, and they'll start asking basic questions like "why did the witch steal the baby" or "why did Rapunzel hit the boy with a frying pan". I guess some people never grow out of doing that.
(In case anyone is wondering, the answers are: because the baby just been shown to have magic hair, and because not five minutes ago the witch was singing a whole song about how the outside world is full of bad scary people so you'd better stay in your tower.)
This one is particularly hilarious because, unlike the Sopranos, Breaking Bad is on-the-nose allegorical and yet some people still don’t get this about Walt.
Haha yeah he literally undergoes physical transformation into a villain (Heisenberg) and is increasingly monstrous to everyone around him. He even brutally strangles a guy to death in a panic in one of the first episodes and then dissolves his body in acid, in case it wasn't obvious that he was going down a bad path.
Isn't that kind of the point of shows like this? The entire concept of the "anti-hero" boils down to a bad person who you want to root for anyway. There's something compelling about them even when they're cruel or pathetic or downright evil. I don't think people who consider Walter White or Tony Soprano or Don Draper heroes are missing the point at all.
Maybe "worthy of emulation" is a clearer concept than "being the hero" to describe the mistake being made. But (as also implied by a sibling comment here), the show isn't called "Breaking Good".
Or it should make us think about why we DON'T feel uncomfortable rooting for the bad person. Does it point to something lacking in ourselves that we admire in this person despite their obvious flaws and lack of a moral compass? Is being a good person always the best choice under all circumstances? What does it mean to be good, anyway?
It didn't make me uncomfortable to root for Walter, because I was also rooting for his family, and Jesse, etc., I just saw him as a flawed person, but he also saw that at the end, so hey, go Walter. But I'll root for any bad person against the cops because I guess I have that prey animal orientation, even when the person isn't someone I "know" like Walter.
This is a good point. I guess in the world of Breaking Bad, yeah you do root for Walter White a bit. But the weirdness for me is in translating that rooting into identification in normal affairs. It seems indisputable that Breaking Bad is beating its audience over the head with “this is a bad path full of pain!” and people still take little lessons from Walter White’s way of moving through the world as if there is some wisdom in it. I dunno. There are ways in which I identify with Walter White as a once-ambitious American smart guy, but given the overall point of the show, those ways scare me and the show helped me to think twice about aspects of that.
I saw Breaking Bad as a sort of ironic morality play, sort of a methhead Don Quixote, with Walter White as a guy who had played by the rules his whole life and with little to show for it, not even something so basic as medical care as he dies. When he goes for broke, he becomes increasingly sociopathic and destroys what little he has, other he makes money that he can't spend, at least perhaps until the very end, when Walter White tries to salvage what little is left to him.
Jesse is a mope of a kid, a kid who had it pretty good at first, but seems intent on fucking that up. The irony is that he becomes more moral, more aware of himself and the evil around him as the story progresses.
I have not read Don Quixote, but that is in line with what I meant when I said it was an on-the-nose allegory. It seemed to me like it was transparently exaggerated in order to emphasize its moral universe. It wasn’t going for gritty realism.
I think every methhead drama is required by law to be larger than life. I see this as a sort of crude form of magical realism.
Just like a Florida Novel isn't really a Florida Novel, unless all of the main and most of the supporting characters are all certifiably nuts.
Now, when Art and Science combine to give us a Methhead Florida Novel, then the singularity will be achieved and the universe will collapse upon itself.
In thinking that he's the hero, a really good villain actually sort of has a point.
Edward VIII in "The Crown" is a prime example. Yes, he's scheming, deceitful, manipulative, and ambitious, not to mention a shitty son, a shitty brother and a shitty king. Not to mention a little bitch.
But he is genuinely devoted to Wallis (herself a piece of work) and she to him. More to the point, his criticisms of the Royal Family and its members and court are so cutting and insightful because they're so accurate and incisive.
Yep. Walter White was awful. And he lost, comprehensively. At the end of the show he'd murdered countless people, gotten his family member killed, ruined countless lives including those of his wife and children, his wife and son despise him, his legacy is one of death and despair and drug addiction. He was an absolute consummate 100% loser.
This doesn't make sense to me. As much as sophisticated people who loves the show want to say this is the correct interpretation of Breaking Bad, it always struck me as false signaling. Who is watching 62 hours because they think Walt is so irredeemable? You watch it because it's awesome when Walt says shit like tread lightly!
Lol I get you, you're not wrong, we all love the show. But there's no objective standard by which Walt is not a really truly awful person. Awful to his friends, awful to his family, awful to his employers, awful to everyone he encounters. He even gets a group of El Salvadoran women deported by accident! The only guy with whom he has anything resembling a remotely cordial relationship that doesn't end in bloodshed and death is the illegal arms dealer. He's a really, really bad guy.
For sure. I just think it is dumb to then take his badass quotes and put them in some kind of real estate seminar or something. That is what is extremely stupid.
Well, compared to Ricky Hitler, and the truly evil guys who were holding Jesse as a drug slave, Walter White WAS a hero, in perhaps the greatest Pyrrhic victory end-of-series episode EVER. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Walter got ensnared in the drug trade because he wanted to provide for his family after his terminal cancer diagnosis. His good intentions and his intellectual hubris got him entangled deeper and deeper with inextricable horror, like quicksand, but that horror DID enable him to succeed at great cost in providing for his wife and son’s future, DID succeed in enabling him to free Jesse, and he died a happy man knowing he had succeeded. He was like Dr. Frankenstein, and his love for his creation, his monster, his Baby Blue crystal meth, was the true love of his life. He regarded himself as a great artist, and the whole series was like a morality play about the destruction caused by unchecked intellectual pride. Despite this, we rooted for him because his original intentions were pure, and because his defeated enemies were truly nasty.
Yes. Exactly. WW was both "good" and "bad." Like you said he wanted to provide for his family. I think most people who do conventionally bad things always "think" they're doing good, or that they're doing what they're doing out of cold hard necessity. We all have a complex internal drive-system which motivates us to do all kinds of things. It's never so simple. It's not a binary, Manichaen situation. That's what makes characters more complex and real. Like us :)
And ultimately I think that's why people watch shows like BB. We relate to WW on a deep, fundamental level, even though we'd never actually do what he does.
I agree there were worse people than Walter in the show. I'll let the man himself have the last word (quoting from the series finale): "I did it for me."
What kind of person, when confronted with despair and the impotence of a cancer diagnosis, goes full…well, Walter White? To me, the “I did it for me” gives us a very specific way of looking at Walter and his evolution.
Walter did not want to provide for his family. He told Skylar in the final episode, and Jesse in the first, that his intentions were purely self-serving. He got cancer and he went crazy and just wanted to break bad. If he truly wanted to provide for his family, he would've taken the Gray Matter job, used their top-rate health insurance to get treatment, banked probably $1.5 million in salary in benefits over the next 18 months, activated whatever premier life insurance policy the company had, and left his family tons of legitimate money. He didn't do that because he was more interested in serving himself than his family. You're right that the series was "a morality play about the destruction caused by unchecked intellectual pride," but in no way were "his original intentions...pure." He was a megalomaniac from the start.
They were great! They were clearly very nice, warm, genuine people; they had obviously forgiven Walt for his weird departure from the company years before; they generously extended him the job opportunity of a lifetime. They were wonderful people whom Walt, in his gargantuan egomania, targeted for exploitation and ruination. Bad dude.
I remember getting into a fight with someone about how "woke" and "redpilled" literally mean the same thing, they just got adopted by groups with different political valence, and they kept refusing to accept it. I still think I'm right, but maybe I'm the clueless art misinterpreter.
The red pill means you literally awaken from the illusion, and this was what "woke" meant in its earliest form, which I think was supposed to apply to black people who woke up from the illusion that if they just played by the rules and worked harder, like Boxer in Animal Farm, that they could have their American Dream. The woke ones know that a lawn that is mowed to precision and free of dandelions is a patch of toxic and sterile sadness that is helping kill off pollinators and therefore all of life.
Okay I made up the last bit, but I wish everyone would get woke to it and change the local Department of Forestry ordinances.
Same vein as people who complain that Goodfellas or the Godfather, or Wolf of Wallstreet, glorified being in the mob/finance. Did you not finish the movie???
Separate but related--The idiot kid in White Lotus season 2 trying to talk shit about the Godfather being a sexist fantasy for misogynistic men was when I knew he was going to get punked.
I think there's a certain type of person who assumes a movie with guns and crime and violence in it is, for lack of a better word, an action movie, so we're supposed to go yeah, woo, shoot 'em up, you badass. You don't watch Crank and think about the serious psychological trauma that Jason Statham's character must have endured, or if you do, you think about it and go, woohoo, what a man's man, he doesn't let people push him around. The Godfather is a drama, not an action movie, but you get a lot of frat boy types watching it who wouldn't be caught dead watching whatever complex exploration of the human condition that's big on the indie circuit this year.
Shows like Breaking Bad and the Sopranos are part of an established genre: Gangster epics. There is a fantasy element of any popular genre. The gangster is an almost totally free individual, they can do whatever, they live a life of luxury and have many beautiful lovers. They engage in violence, which is exciting for the audience and in many cases is justified in the context of the story. If you want to see a gangster movie that de-romanticizes the criminal watch Black Mass with Johnny Depp. In that movie the gangster is physically repulsive, there is no luxurious home or beautiful mistresses, and the murders were slow and cruel and unjustifiable in the context of the movie. That movie wasn't rejected as much as ignored. The writers and producers play it both ways. Yes, Tony Soprano's life is exciting, but remember he's a bad person, but really, he's not as bad as the other characters.
You’re right and I think part of it is because he’s beautiful. If you’re handsome enough, everyone, including the viewer, will forgive the obvious and simply not see the rest. Another theme of the whole series, for me, is that beauty is sometimes enough in and of itself.
A theme well expressed in the scene where Mathis calls Don out for getting away with things others can't because of his looks. Mathis isn't totally in the right in the context of the episode, but he still hits home: "You don't have any character! You're just handsome! Stop kidding yourself!"
I'd wager a large chunk of the people who've used this meme have never seen Mad Men at all. They find the exchange, floating in the void, from some other meme template and say, "haha, great comeback, I'm gonna remix this meme for my situation".
Which feels like a microcosm of how culture is consumed and remixed in the modern age in general.
Yeah, that's the thing about (most? all? at least most) memes: they dissolve away whatever complexity their original expression had, and reduce it to a single moment signifying a simple thing.
You can say this is bad, and I think it probably is. But if it's bad, it's bad strictly in the Neil Postman formalist sense: it's inherent to the nature of the meme-form itself, not special to any particular expression of it.
Does anybody remember the "original meaning" of Drake holding up his hand, and then pointing? Or that monkey-puppet-looking guy shifting his eyes back and forth? I sure don't.
I've got a real soft spot for 'Channel Zero', the TV show adapted (at first) from 'Candle Cove'. It was far more emotionally engaging than I expected a Syfy Channel horror anthology series to be!
And like on some level I don't object to that? That's a new form of communication - if not art - that has emerged with the internet, of taking things out of context or half in context or in a wildly remixed context and using this magpie method to say something new. I don't think this particular meme is doing much of anything, unless it's a 4D-chess sort of commentary on America's obsession with the rest of the world paralleling Don's with Ginsberg in the actual episode. But I also don't think there's anything strictly wrong with that.
That said - I think the larger point stands. A lot of people, even people who can pay lip service to Don being a broken husk of a man nonetheless seem to miss that same point (although, I think Mad Men periodically missed its own points, if not that one, but that's another discussion). I think bizarrely the proliferation of fandom culture, and its steady leak into the mainstream, has encouraged a *shallower* reading of a lot of stories. The compulsion to work everything down into tropes, to make everything into something else, discourages (imho) deep and thoughtful reading).
I'm rambling, but - I don't think it's bad in and of itself that people make memes out of shows they've never seen. I do think it's part of a larger culture of...missing the point of art, somehow.
Fandoms miss the point of art because they have this need to create a canon, a shared truth, from which to build a community. That project in and of itself is contrary to the purpose of art, in my opinion, and the more people are trained to think like fans the less they're going to get out of a work of art.
I think you are right about the idea that memes aren’t generally meant to conjure up the richness of their source material the way a literary reference would (even though they sort of resemble literary references).
If the image is good enough, it should work for someone who knows nothing of the source. I think the expressions on the faces here, plus the costume/hair, make this work anyway. Likewise that little blonde toddler girl with the overbite who looks side to side; I have no idea where that came from, but she delivers it.
You mean how he was surprised that Reagan (and every lunkhead AND almost every lefty from sea to shining sea) thought Born in the USA was meant to glorify the USA?
There have been myriad accounts of the Born in the USA issue elsewhere and maybe I'm a philistine, but...
Springsteen meant to do an irony; there are accounts of this. He did the anthemic driving hook to contrast with the "real" message of the song. He also defended this for most of the life of the song, but in later years; my impression is he felt some shame. There were some acoustic performances where he plays the song entirely differently acknowledging that his concept did not work as he intended.
At one point my dad actually encouraged me to act like Ari from Entourage at work. You would have to know me to know how specifically disastrous this advice would be for me, but it is also generally disastrous (obviously).
I loved Stone when I was young, but then I grew up, read history books, starting using my brain, and realized how cherry-picky and wildly biased he is 🤣
"Americans want to think of themselves as very cool people who float above the fray, when in fact we tend to be obsessive about the world's adulation and embarrassed about the ways our systems are worse, such as in healthcare, crime, and public transit. Our showy indifference is a coping mechanism for being so powerful and unable to solve basic problems other countries solve I don't mean to pick on this guy; I just went looking for a recent use of this image."
Fuck this. Really fuck this.
I have traveled to Europe where most American liberals cement their embarrassment over the state of American vs them... and they are just a bunch of culturally harmonious white people... except in the few cities where they are not as much... and then the city is dirty and covered with graffiti.
We cannot solve problems because we are a mess of tribal cultural conflict that has been driven even further in conflict by the elite ruling class that needs endless validation for their assumed elite status.
We are the third most populated country and the most diverse. If you want to see a model for where we are headed look at Brazil, look at India. Talk about being embarrassed for the crime, healthcare and public transit.
What is the glue holding us together? It used to be Judea-Christian values and free-market principles combined with a functioning democratic political system. ALL of those things are being dismantled by the elites... the establishment... primarily the Democrats today. There is no glue now... only tribal conflict... because tribal conflict deflects from the elites looting the country to an empty sack. Fucking Gavin Newsom is raking in the cash to his personal bank account and yet California crime and homelessness continues to skyrocket. He keeps getting reelected even though he solves nothing. And he solves nothing because he is backed by his cabal of elites that manipulate the stupid seething masses to blame their neighbor for their misery instead of the elites.
Please pick one... a country that values its culture and assimilates the population to be one people that move as one and make decisions for the benefit of the whole (a nationalist focus), or a country that pursues the brain-dead globalist agenda while being at tribal cultural war within and a chaotic mess of unimpressive existence.
It continues to be an interesting confusion for me that my comment section is filled with people who think we should all take less offense and not be snowflakes - unless it comes to the United States, about which everyone is very sensitive.
I am good with the self-criticism but it seems to be always misplaced and missing the root cause analysis for what is broken and what needs to be fixed. How can we, for example, allow in 5 million generally poor and uneducated immigrants from 30 different countries in two years and expect that we are a country that can harmoniously agree with policies to solve problems and advance the country. The primary criticism of the US is that we have allowed the country to devolve into more divisiveness instead of binding it together.
Every project, every change, every policy, every step of progress will result in opposition. When the constituency is bound and connected you can get a majority to agree with a common value proposition. When the constituency is fragmented and more aligned with their tribal interest than the whole, then you have much more opposition and thus you cannot get anything done. That is the problem... we cannot get anything done because we are a mess of self-serving tribal conflict. We are too big, too diverse... and we don't have leadership binding us together. Our leadership is doing just the opposite... driving more wedges between neighbors to carve out a majority popular power.
The lack of progress is because of this. THAT is the criticism we should be focused on. The lack of bullet trains is a symptom of decision dysfunction that is directly related to the country being culturally heterogeneous with our binding values being trashed. Either we except becoming India or we close the border and bet back to assimilating everyone into a common American ethos and value system.
I find it quite ironic to have some rando pontificate on how he thinks America is the greatest thing since sliced bread and talks about how democrats are to blame for dismantling "Judeo-Christian" values and tribal conflict when the decline you lament starting happening when Conservatives have been telling Americans for 40 years how shitty the country is and only rugged individualism and tax cuts could save America. Essentially putting the screws to anything that would resemble collective responsibility and community building. Listening to conservatives complain about how government this sucks and schools that sucks and liberals suck and everyone who isn't a WASP sucks for 40+ years and never coming up with any solution to fix any problem except to cut funding and criminalize the issue. Yet any time anyone criticizes America for not living up to it's professed potential y'all start waving flags and yelling "Love it or Leave It!" at everyone.
Florida, Texas and South Dakota seem to be doing very well. They seem to be fixing a lot of problems and making great progress on infrastructure, etc.
I live in liberal land and the state and cities are being run into the ground by educated liberals.
I don't think America is the greatest thing. It used to be. It isn't today. Note your cynicism about American values and clear tribal separation from conservatives. I assume you got a lot of that imprinted by the malcontent educators you were exposed to.
I don't have a dog in the ideological fight. My only interest is to solve problems and move the country forward. If liberals could get the job done, I would support liberals. However, what I clearly see is that liberals, left, Democrat... as a species... demonstrate a consistent inability to govern effectively. They are frankly weird and too emotive... too stuck on symbolism over substance. They are not pragmatic. They cannot just make good policy decisions based on facts and math and with an eye toward long-term and logical consequences. I have a long list of direct interactions with liberal policy makers that as a business man make my head spin. The frankly seem a bit insane.
My interaction with conservative policy makers is such that they are more rational, more fact based, more real math focused... more able to actually solve problems and make progress without devolving into a mess of tribal conflict and uncontrolled feelings.
I disagree that conservatives put the screws to anything that would resemble collective responsibility. They put the screws to anything that resembles collective authoritarianism claiming to be cooperation. Conservatives tend to be communitarians... where individuals, families and private organizations... including private communities... are better at taking care of people and business than are empowered government central control. That is the old US and how it used to work. It was better then.
I was a Mad Men fan and so was my liberal business partner. We would talk about episodes at lunch and dinner. At one point I commented that the writers were going too far to amplify certain culture/ideological war points painting the 1950s and 60s as being worse than they were. He asked for examples and I used the one where the Draper family finished their picnic and just snapped the blanket and all of its trash onto the grass of the park. I said that wasn't really factual. My partner said that he and his college friends would just throw their trash out the window of their cars. I said, well I was raised as an Eagle Scout and my parents always admonished us to not litter and actually leave the natural spaces we visited as cleaner than when we arrived. My family was lower-income blue collar and he came from wealthy New England liberal roots.
It all gets back to my theory that our left ideological tribe is of people that lack self-control but are also resentful of those that have it and demonstrate it. They reject the ethos of individual responsibility and accountability because they lack self-confidence for behaving well enough in that type of system, and prefer a large book of rules that they must comply with to keep them inline... and of course to help feel better about it... those rules need to be applied to everyone else too... especially those that don't need the rules.
Mad Men was a good series addressing the realities and myths of the old American system that liberals, especially the feminist side, like to attack as our greatest dark period of white male oppression of victims. Women were so mistreated then... mothers without an education... without a career... their husbands cheating on them and the divorce system not yet tooled to getting them half or more of his income to ensure they could leave and not suffer too much economic hardship.
At least that is the narrative.
But these modern feminists are basically throwing the baby out with the bathwater in their approach. They are also failing to admit that males during that time had a profound cost associated with their "privilege". That point was attempted in Mad Men as Don Draper was both an abused and unwanted child, and a war veteran. And the other bit was the constant stress of competing at work for his position. This last piece is a big missing part of the puzzle for the feminist narrative... and it screws up the careers of many women and minorities not understanding that it isn't just privilege and oppression explaining what they see as a "glass ceiling" but a work culture that is brutal, competitive and demanding... one that all the "mad men" had to learn how to navigate. So the new door gets opened based on woke gender or other identity, and then their career gets hit with being unprepared to deal with all of the competitive challenges. Some then make excuses of a toxic work environment, but many drop out of the competition because it is too hard.
There is a macro shift occurring related to this... with American men historically being the hardest working and most productive in the industrialized world... and that ethos crashing with a non-work attitude of youth. From my perspective, it is the realization that grabbing the top rungs of the career ladder is too fucking hard and so might as well destroy the entire ladder so nobody else can climb ahead and make the less accomplished people feel bad.
We have replaced mad men with insane women and their comrade low-T man-bun-wearing man-children. That is my meme opinion.
I agree with most of what you say except with the implication that this is a bad thing. I'm all for destroying the ladder, if that is the symbol for competitive culture. We should be helping each other, not kicking each other in the face to scramble ahead of them.
Your views align beautifully with you pen name, but they are fanciful and without merit. All systems are competitive. There is no collectivist utopia of cooperative harmony because of human nature and the fact that some animals are always more capable than others.
"What is the glue holding us together? It used to be Judea-Christian values and free-market principles combined with a functioning democratic political system."
Ehh...
Not sure how Judeo-Christian values is a core American trait when we were founded on the principle of having no one religion being promoted over any other.
And the Free Market? I wouldn't call that American, I'd call it a popular form of modern global economics. Capitalism would be doing just fine had America never existed.
Your last point is decent, though I'd argue about the word 'functioning' there.
We can thank those values for ending slavery and passing Civil Rights acts. The values themselves support religious freedom. Religious bigotry is not in keeping with true Judea-Christian values. "All men are created equal" derives from those base values. Instead we have the new liberal "morality" white and white men are oppressors and all other groups should be considered more equal.
You can be secular and still subscribe to these base values. They have been lauded by previous politicians because they understood the need to bind the people of the country together. Only after 9-11 liberals started trashing the concept.
It's not a binary question though; if one does not think Judeo-Christian values are foundational to positive American exceptionalism, then it doesn't mean they are woke.
We could argue all day about how much of human history has influenced American values, especially in terms of Law: Judeo-Christian morals, Enlightenment principles, English Common Law, Roman Law, Greek philosophy...heck, even Hammurabi's Code. But it's not like the Judeo-Christian aspect of American heritage magically became the primary catalyst for ending slavery and birthing the Civil Rights era. Christianity being 20 centuries old I would think they wouldn't have waited until the 19th century for that.
I mean sure the French and English philosophers who really took the "all men are created equal" creed to heart were mostly religious...but that's because most everyone was back then. If they didn't try to relate an idea to the divine back then, not many would listen. The commoners basically lived and died under the banner of heaven.
I mean, that's like saying only propertied males should vote because that's who happened to be making all the laws 250 years ago. People with influence and money were expected to run things back then because that's who had the time and money to do so. I would hardly think anyone would say that it's because of their wealth and influence that they should be making all the rules, right?
You need a basis of common morality to bind a community. Pick something. The founders did. And the founders were very deep in their understanding of what worked and did not work in terms of the "idea" for a new system of governance.
Nothing is perfect, but the pursuit of perfection is always the enemy of the good.
Are you familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell? Clearly there is a common thread of successful societies having a binding moral value system. Historically, the common delivery mechanism were stories and myths. But they established a common framework of understand that if lacking would result in too many internal ills and conflicts. Educated liberals are always mistaken that their education has allowed them to transcend a need for these metaphysical/spiritual explanations. But unfortunately for them, the spiritual need is ubiquitous as part of the human condition. Those that reject some moral-spiritual basis will flounder creating their own made-up mythology and moral basis... that is often just a set of convenient cult beliefs... but that fragment in many versions and thus put people at tribal cult conflict.
My liberal friends that have embraced COVID cult, global warming cult and woke cult... and are militant in hostility against any that oppose it. I can see that the are floundering in need of spiritual grounding. However, they have rejected traditional American values that are based on Judea-Christian values and so they need something or else they will grow insane, depressed and die. I think many of them are still insane and depressed. Their ideological replacements are weak things and are barely feeding their human needs.
That you read all of this through a parochial American political lens is kind of a whatever for me but I strongly agree that the evacuation of judeo-christian values from the public sphere is a big part of the groundlessness in contemporary American culture and part of the root of our polarization.
Yeah... not. Just the opposite. Slavery was a global thing. In fact, it was the African slavery market that sold to the world. The US was slower than other western countries to abolish the practices. Some of that had to do with how young the country was and how it became dependent on slave labor for agriculture (interesting in how that got replaced with illegal immigration of brown people to do the work). But it was ultimately Judea-Christian values that prevailed to power the Republican defeat of slavery.
Wow. I recommend you read Max Weber's Protestant Work Ethic. That's kind of basic stuff as we are, in fact, a country founded on Judeo -Christan values whether you believe it or not. In God we trust.
Idk. I feel like this is true yet also there's some sort of automatic flexing people do around these critically acclaimed shows where they assume fewer people get it than really do. Sure, I've seen YouTube comments where people idealize Don Draper, but I've never actuallyet someone irl who likes the show who doesn't understand the basic point you are trying to get across here.
Even if the assumption is right, thematic criticism is difficult. It requires some baseline level of cultural or artistic training or sensitivity to understand that dramatic irony creates a deliberate contrast between the way people trade status in a show and the core truth of the characters. I don't know when it clicked for me, but I know it wasn't until I was an adult who had already read a lot of books and studied a lot of philosophy and critical theory, and also tried my hand at creative writing. So watching Mad Men for the first time a year ago, I got it right away, but if I'd watched it in college, who knows?
Sure, but you might not have the insight that that was the point the whole time. Like Freddie said, you would think "Don was awesome and then suddenly he wasn't" not "deep down there was something wrong with Don the whole time."
Maybe my recollection is off, but doesn’t the show end with Don coming up with the “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” campaign, avoiding a personal reckoning yet again?
I don't so much mind the de-contextualized memes, but I think one reason many people seem to grasp the wrong takeaways from these antiheroes is...a lot of people are kind of shitty people. I say this as someone who has a positive outlook on life and tends to think the best of others lol. But really. Part of why I don't get wildly disappointed by most people is that I realize so many people are pretty shallow and/or have really fucked up goals.
I'm probably being too pedantic here, but I've always liked to think about it like this: everyone does shitty or shallow or ugly things sometimes.
I think a big reason people like anti-heroes these days has to do with an aesthetic: it's "lame" to like heroes. Heroes are boring, and valorizing a hero feels gauche, feels 1950s. Liking the bad guy is popular because bad guys are interesting; the bad guys have the best stories, the most dynamic personalities, are the most likely to buck convention, to thumb their nose at the system. It seems like a lot of modern entertainment is an exercise in how to make bad guys likeable.
Of course they're LIKEABLE. I flat-out loved Tony Soprano AND Walter White, but did I see them as heroes, as badasses to be admired and emulated? JFC no. And I can't believe that people saw them as such, well, I couldn't believe it until I saw the copypasted comments from reddit sites. It's dehumanizing to see them as heroes, come to think of it.
So my take is that some people do fawn over Henry Hill or Don Draper or Tony Soprano. But lots of people, myself included, get the show, were touched by the deeper aspects, and now just want to have some fun as fans. These are stories about male fantasies, and the moral brokenness of them. But after having watched the sopranos more times than I wish to admit, I want to joke with my friends about Paulie and his mother or the hilariousness of the phrase “colder than your sister’s tit”, not reflect endlessly about American avarice.
People tend to like anti hereos. A lot of people even want to be the villain. I will be controversial and say that if so many people are taking the "wrong" message from a piece of art, or more accurately what the author intended to convey or what you believe the author intended, then there is something in the art itself which invites this interpretation.
I'd argue that shows like Mad Men glamorize these characters even while condemning them somewhat. That's the key. If Don Draper had been a goofy, vulgar oaf no one would take that interpretation away. Same goes with the Wolf of Wall Street, which was basically porn start to finish. You can't make something seem sexy while claiming to condemn it and then cry foul when people want the sexy thing.
You aren't wrong. I just tend to be much more of a "people are taking exactly the message they are supposed to from art" kind of guy, in politics too for that matter. I think it comes from growing up Christian, this disdain for the idea that the religion was pure and people are the problem. I still cringe at ideas like that.
I think Fight Club is absurdist in a way that Breaking Bad is not. But I've only seen maybe a half dozen Breaking Bad episodes, and it's not that there wasn't absurdity. I loved Fight Club. I left Breaking Bad behind. I think maybe the ultimate difference was that in Breaking Bad, Walter is Jack and Heisenberg is Tyler, but Walter knows he's Heisenberg. Jack has a centering / contrasting function in Fight Club that Breaking Bad lacks.
Or maybe I just like Fight Club and don't like Breaking Bad and I'm rationalizing.
I'll give you an example of how to do this and not make it sexy: Succession. I don't think very many people ideolize Kendall Roy. I'd argue Succession does a much, much better job with these themes.
Yeah...but...Kendall Roy is the loser in that show. In every conceivable way. It's much more difficult to depict, say, Pablo Escobar, Genghis Khan, Che Guevara or Erwin Rommel in a way that won't result in someone lionizing them.
I don't think you should even try. There are a lot of boot-lickers in this world who want nothing more than a bad man to rule over them, so any even vaguely accurate portrayal of such a character is going to have people lionizing them.
Same.
It's funny, I have the same complaint about my children, ages 6 and 3. We'll be watching some kid movie like Tangled, which they've seen several times before, and they'll start asking basic questions like "why did the witch steal the baby" or "why did Rapunzel hit the boy with a frying pan". I guess some people never grow out of doing that.
(In case anyone is wondering, the answers are: because the baby just been shown to have magic hair, and because not five minutes ago the witch was singing a whole song about how the outside world is full of bad scary people so you'd better stay in your tower.)
Try watching Triangle of Sadness!
Breaking Bad is another case where many viewers think the main character, Walter White, is the hero when he clearly is not.
This one is particularly hilarious because, unlike the Sopranos, Breaking Bad is on-the-nose allegorical and yet some people still don’t get this about Walt.
Haha yeah he literally undergoes physical transformation into a villain (Heisenberg) and is increasingly monstrous to everyone around him. He even brutally strangles a guy to death in a panic in one of the first episodes and then dissolves his body in acid, in case it wasn't obvious that he was going down a bad path.
Allow me to veer wildly off course to say that my grandmother was an extra in the background during one of the nursing home scenes.
Isn't that kind of the point of shows like this? The entire concept of the "anti-hero" boils down to a bad person who you want to root for anyway. There's something compelling about them even when they're cruel or pathetic or downright evil. I don't think people who consider Walter White or Tony Soprano or Don Draper heroes are missing the point at all.
It's complicated. Fight Club, again, wouldn't be much of a movie at all if Tyler Durden wasn't so magnetic.
Maybe "worthy of emulation" is a clearer concept than "being the hero" to describe the mistake being made. But (as also implied by a sibling comment here), the show isn't called "Breaking Good".
It's not called Breaking Bread either. Or Breaking Wind.
This is fun!
Taking it to the next level: it should make us uncomfortable that we're rooting for the bad person. A lot of people don't get there.
Surprisingly, some people's personal lord and savior is not Machiavelli.
Or it should make us think about why we DON'T feel uncomfortable rooting for the bad person. Does it point to something lacking in ourselves that we admire in this person despite their obvious flaws and lack of a moral compass? Is being a good person always the best choice under all circumstances? What does it mean to be good, anyway?
Now we're getting somewhere.
I can’t get uncomfortable if I was never rooting for him
It didn't make me uncomfortable to root for Walter, because I was also rooting for his family, and Jesse, etc., I just saw him as a flawed person, but he also saw that at the end, so hey, go Walter. But I'll root for any bad person against the cops because I guess I have that prey animal orientation, even when the person isn't someone I "know" like Walter.
This is a good point. I guess in the world of Breaking Bad, yeah you do root for Walter White a bit. But the weirdness for me is in translating that rooting into identification in normal affairs. It seems indisputable that Breaking Bad is beating its audience over the head with “this is a bad path full of pain!” and people still take little lessons from Walter White’s way of moving through the world as if there is some wisdom in it. I dunno. There are ways in which I identify with Walter White as a once-ambitious American smart guy, but given the overall point of the show, those ways scare me and the show helped me to think twice about aspects of that.
I saw Breaking Bad as a sort of ironic morality play, sort of a methhead Don Quixote, with Walter White as a guy who had played by the rules his whole life and with little to show for it, not even something so basic as medical care as he dies. When he goes for broke, he becomes increasingly sociopathic and destroys what little he has, other he makes money that he can't spend, at least perhaps until the very end, when Walter White tries to salvage what little is left to him.
Jesse is a mope of a kid, a kid who had it pretty good at first, but seems intent on fucking that up. The irony is that he becomes more moral, more aware of himself and the evil around him as the story progresses.
I have not read Don Quixote, but that is in line with what I meant when I said it was an on-the-nose allegory. It seemed to me like it was transparently exaggerated in order to emphasize its moral universe. It wasn’t going for gritty realism.
I think every methhead drama is required by law to be larger than life. I see this as a sort of crude form of magical realism.
Just like a Florida Novel isn't really a Florida Novel, unless all of the main and most of the supporting characters are all certifiably nuts.
Now, when Art and Science combine to give us a Methhead Florida Novel, then the singularity will be achieved and the universe will collapse upon itself.
Can’t he be both?
No. Hadn't you heard? A person can only be one thing.
Well actually kinda true right now in our polarized moment. Sad.
Or happy? But definitely not both ;)
Hero or antihero, characters without at least one “tragic flaw” aren’t very interesting to watch.
A good villain thinks that he's the hero.
In thinking that he's the hero, a really good villain actually sort of has a point.
Edward VIII in "The Crown" is a prime example. Yes, he's scheming, deceitful, manipulative, and ambitious, not to mention a shitty son, a shitty brother and a shitty king. Not to mention a little bitch.
But he is genuinely devoted to Wallis (herself a piece of work) and she to him. More to the point, his criticisms of the Royal Family and its members and court are so cutting and insightful because they're so accurate and incisive.
Yep. Walter White was awful. And he lost, comprehensively. At the end of the show he'd murdered countless people, gotten his family member killed, ruined countless lives including those of his wife and children, his wife and son despise him, his legacy is one of death and despair and drug addiction. He was an absolute consummate 100% loser.
This doesn't make sense to me. As much as sophisticated people who loves the show want to say this is the correct interpretation of Breaking Bad, it always struck me as false signaling. Who is watching 62 hours because they think Walt is so irredeemable? You watch it because it's awesome when Walt says shit like tread lightly!
Lol I get you, you're not wrong, we all love the show. But there's no objective standard by which Walt is not a really truly awful person. Awful to his friends, awful to his family, awful to his employers, awful to everyone he encounters. He even gets a group of El Salvadoran women deported by accident! The only guy with whom he has anything resembling a remotely cordial relationship that doesn't end in bloodshed and death is the illegal arms dealer. He's a really, really bad guy.
For sure. I just think it is dumb to then take his badass quotes and put them in some kind of real estate seminar or something. That is what is extremely stupid.
Gotta agree there
Well, compared to Ricky Hitler, and the truly evil guys who were holding Jesse as a drug slave, Walter White WAS a hero, in perhaps the greatest Pyrrhic victory end-of-series episode EVER. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Walter got ensnared in the drug trade because he wanted to provide for his family after his terminal cancer diagnosis. His good intentions and his intellectual hubris got him entangled deeper and deeper with inextricable horror, like quicksand, but that horror DID enable him to succeed at great cost in providing for his wife and son’s future, DID succeed in enabling him to free Jesse, and he died a happy man knowing he had succeeded. He was like Dr. Frankenstein, and his love for his creation, his monster, his Baby Blue crystal meth, was the true love of his life. He regarded himself as a great artist, and the whole series was like a morality play about the destruction caused by unchecked intellectual pride. Despite this, we rooted for him because his original intentions were pure, and because his defeated enemies were truly nasty.
Very nice analysis.
Yes. Exactly. WW was both "good" and "bad." Like you said he wanted to provide for his family. I think most people who do conventionally bad things always "think" they're doing good, or that they're doing what they're doing out of cold hard necessity. We all have a complex internal drive-system which motivates us to do all kinds of things. It's never so simple. It's not a binary, Manichaen situation. That's what makes characters more complex and real. Like us :)
And ultimately I think that's why people watch shows like BB. We relate to WW on a deep, fundamental level, even though we'd never actually do what he does.
I agree there were worse people than Walter in the show. I'll let the man himself have the last word (quoting from the series finale): "I did it for me."
What kind of person, when confronted with despair and the impotence of a cancer diagnosis, goes full…well, Walter White? To me, the “I did it for me” gives us a very specific way of looking at Walter and his evolution.
Walter did not want to provide for his family. He told Skylar in the final episode, and Jesse in the first, that his intentions were purely self-serving. He got cancer and he went crazy and just wanted to break bad. If he truly wanted to provide for his family, he would've taken the Gray Matter job, used their top-rate health insurance to get treatment, banked probably $1.5 million in salary in benefits over the next 18 months, activated whatever premier life insurance policy the company had, and left his family tons of legitimate money. He didn't do that because he was more interested in serving himself than his family. You're right that the series was "a morality play about the destruction caused by unchecked intellectual pride," but in no way were "his original intentions...pure." He was a megalomaniac from the start.
Yes, but I also hated the Gray Matter people!
They were great! They were clearly very nice, warm, genuine people; they had obviously forgiven Walt for his weird departure from the company years before; they generously extended him the job opportunity of a lifetime. They were wonderful people whom Walt, in his gargantuan egomania, targeted for exploitation and ruination. Bad dude.
My favorite example is the red pill becoming a metaphor about accepting primal masculinity when it's literally an estrogen pill.
I remember getting into a fight with someone about how "woke" and "redpilled" literally mean the same thing, they just got adopted by groups with different political valence, and they kept refusing to accept it. I still think I'm right, but maybe I'm the clueless art misinterpreter.
Isn't that meme supposed to be a reference to the "blue pill, red pill" scene from the original "The Matrix" movie?
The red pill means you literally awaken from the illusion, and this was what "woke" meant in its earliest form, which I think was supposed to apply to black people who woke up from the illusion that if they just played by the rules and worked harder, like Boxer in Animal Farm, that they could have their American Dream. The woke ones know that a lawn that is mowed to precision and free of dandelions is a patch of toxic and sterile sadness that is helping kill off pollinators and therefore all of life.
Okay I made up the last bit, but I wish everyone would get woke to it and change the local Department of Forestry ordinances.
Same vein as people who complain that Goodfellas or the Godfather, or Wolf of Wallstreet, glorified being in the mob/finance. Did you not finish the movie???
Separate but related--The idiot kid in White Lotus season 2 trying to talk shit about the Godfather being a sexist fantasy for misogynistic men was when I knew he was going to get punked.
I think there's a certain type of person who assumes a movie with guns and crime and violence in it is, for lack of a better word, an action movie, so we're supposed to go yeah, woo, shoot 'em up, you badass. You don't watch Crank and think about the serious psychological trauma that Jason Statham's character must have endured, or if you do, you think about it and go, woohoo, what a man's man, he doesn't let people push him around. The Godfather is a drama, not an action movie, but you get a lot of frat boy types watching it who wouldn't be caught dead watching whatever complex exploration of the human condition that's big on the indie circuit this year.
Shows like Breaking Bad and the Sopranos are part of an established genre: Gangster epics. There is a fantasy element of any popular genre. The gangster is an almost totally free individual, they can do whatever, they live a life of luxury and have many beautiful lovers. They engage in violence, which is exciting for the audience and in many cases is justified in the context of the story. If you want to see a gangster movie that de-romanticizes the criminal watch Black Mass with Johnny Depp. In that movie the gangster is physically repulsive, there is no luxurious home or beautiful mistresses, and the murders were slow and cruel and unjustifiable in the context of the movie. That movie wasn't rejected as much as ignored. The writers and producers play it both ways. Yes, Tony Soprano's life is exciting, but remember he's a bad person, but really, he's not as bad as the other characters.
Very interesting, intelligent, articulate points here 🔥🔥
Ha! Good point. There may be an element of glorifying, but they do not end up doing well 🤣🤣
You’re right and I think part of it is because he’s beautiful. If you’re handsome enough, everyone, including the viewer, will forgive the obvious and simply not see the rest. Another theme of the whole series, for me, is that beauty is sometimes enough in and of itself.
ooh, that's interesting...i wonder if that's also a commentary on advertising
🔥🔥
Exactly the plot they gave John Hamm in 30 Rock, coasting through life, fucking up constantly, while everyone makes heart eyes at him.
"You can't put salmon on Gatorade"
"Yes you can -- the hot Italian lady from the Food Network told me so"
"Did she say it on TV?"
"No she said it when she jumped escalators to try to talk to me... oh..."
Wym? He’s ugly
A theme well expressed in the scene where Mathis calls Don out for getting away with things others can't because of his looks. Mathis isn't totally in the right in the context of the episode, but he still hits home: "You don't have any character! You're just handsome! Stop kidding yourself!"
I'd wager a large chunk of the people who've used this meme have never seen Mad Men at all. They find the exchange, floating in the void, from some other meme template and say, "haha, great comeback, I'm gonna remix this meme for my situation".
Which feels like a microcosm of how culture is consumed and remixed in the modern age in general.
Yeah, that's the thing about (most? all? at least most) memes: they dissolve away whatever complexity their original expression had, and reduce it to a single moment signifying a simple thing.
You can say this is bad, and I think it probably is. But if it's bad, it's bad strictly in the Neil Postman formalist sense: it's inherent to the nature of the meme-form itself, not special to any particular expression of it.
Does anybody remember the "original meaning" of Drake holding up his hand, and then pointing? Or that monkey-puppet-looking guy shifting his eyes back and forth? I sure don't.
If you don't remember why the monkey puppet shifted his eyes, you're a monster. #neverforget
I literally don't even know what media that meme is from.
Candle Cove, of course! What, you don't remember that classic?
...I joke. Know Your Meme tells a winding tale of a Japanese kid's show dubbed into Spanish and a dash of photoshop: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/awkward-look-monkey-puppet
Candle Cove, huh? I could have sworn it was from Goncharov, but I guess I must just be remembering a similar shot.
Props for the deep cut Kris Straub content. Getting referenced on the FdB substack was definitely in my “not gonna happen in 2022” sweeps.
I've got a real soft spot for 'Channel Zero', the TV show adapted (at first) from 'Candle Cove'. It was far more emotionally engaging than I expected a Syfy Channel horror anthology series to be!
(Me either.)
Agree 🔥🔥🔥❤️👏
And like on some level I don't object to that? That's a new form of communication - if not art - that has emerged with the internet, of taking things out of context or half in context or in a wildly remixed context and using this magpie method to say something new. I don't think this particular meme is doing much of anything, unless it's a 4D-chess sort of commentary on America's obsession with the rest of the world paralleling Don's with Ginsberg in the actual episode. But I also don't think there's anything strictly wrong with that.
That said - I think the larger point stands. A lot of people, even people who can pay lip service to Don being a broken husk of a man nonetheless seem to miss that same point (although, I think Mad Men periodically missed its own points, if not that one, but that's another discussion). I think bizarrely the proliferation of fandom culture, and its steady leak into the mainstream, has encouraged a *shallower* reading of a lot of stories. The compulsion to work everything down into tropes, to make everything into something else, discourages (imho) deep and thoughtful reading).
I'm rambling, but - I don't think it's bad in and of itself that people make memes out of shows they've never seen. I do think it's part of a larger culture of...missing the point of art, somehow.
Fandoms miss the point of art because they have this need to create a canon, a shared truth, from which to build a community. That project in and of itself is contrary to the purpose of art, in my opinion, and the more people are trained to think like fans the less they're going to get out of a work of art.
I think you are right about the idea that memes aren’t generally meant to conjure up the richness of their source material the way a literary reference would (even though they sort of resemble literary references).
If the image is good enough, it should work for someone who knows nothing of the source. I think the expressions on the faces here, plus the costume/hair, make this work anyway. Likewise that little blonde toddler girl with the overbite who looks side to side; I have no idea where that came from, but she delivers it.
Don is the hero to most people.
Weiner thought he could do a Bruce Springsteen who also is sorely mistaken about people.
You mean how he was surprised that Reagan (and every lunkhead AND almost every lefty from sea to shining sea) thought Born in the USA was meant to glorify the USA?
There have been myriad accounts of the Born in the USA issue elsewhere and maybe I'm a philistine, but...
Springsteen meant to do an irony; there are accounts of this. He did the anthemic driving hook to contrast with the "real" message of the song. He also defended this for most of the life of the song, but in later years; my impression is he felt some shame. There were some acoustic performances where he plays the song entirely differently acknowledging that his concept did not work as he intended.
Boy howdy did it not work as intended. People just will not read or listen to the lyrics AT ALL. There is really no misinterpreting them if you do.
At one point my dad actually encouraged me to act like Ari from Entourage at work. You would have to know me to know how specifically disastrous this advice would be for me, but it is also generally disastrous (obviously).
At what point did your dad get sick of you practicing by shouting “LLOYD!!!” at the top of your lungs?
Lol. I was actually old enough at the time to reject the advice immediately. Sadly so, from a comedic perspective.
It reminds me of Oliver Stone and his shock to learn that guys wanted to be Gordon “Greed is good” Gekko.
it’s ok not to focus on the deeper truths sometimes.
🫰🫰
That’s true. It’s just TV. Entertainment. It’s not high literature.
I loved Stone when I was young, but then I grew up, read history books, starting using my brain, and realized how cherry-picky and wildly biased he is 🤣
"Americans want to think of themselves as very cool people who float above the fray, when in fact we tend to be obsessive about the world's adulation and embarrassed about the ways our systems are worse, such as in healthcare, crime, and public transit. Our showy indifference is a coping mechanism for being so powerful and unable to solve basic problems other countries solve I don't mean to pick on this guy; I just went looking for a recent use of this image."
Fuck this. Really fuck this.
I have traveled to Europe where most American liberals cement their embarrassment over the state of American vs them... and they are just a bunch of culturally harmonious white people... except in the few cities where they are not as much... and then the city is dirty and covered with graffiti.
We cannot solve problems because we are a mess of tribal cultural conflict that has been driven even further in conflict by the elite ruling class that needs endless validation for their assumed elite status.
We are the third most populated country and the most diverse. If you want to see a model for where we are headed look at Brazil, look at India. Talk about being embarrassed for the crime, healthcare and public transit.
What is the glue holding us together? It used to be Judea-Christian values and free-market principles combined with a functioning democratic political system. ALL of those things are being dismantled by the elites... the establishment... primarily the Democrats today. There is no glue now... only tribal conflict... because tribal conflict deflects from the elites looting the country to an empty sack. Fucking Gavin Newsom is raking in the cash to his personal bank account and yet California crime and homelessness continues to skyrocket. He keeps getting reelected even though he solves nothing. And he solves nothing because he is backed by his cabal of elites that manipulate the stupid seething masses to blame their neighbor for their misery instead of the elites.
Please pick one... a country that values its culture and assimilates the population to be one people that move as one and make decisions for the benefit of the whole (a nationalist focus), or a country that pursues the brain-dead globalist agenda while being at tribal cultural war within and a chaotic mess of unimpressive existence.
It continues to be an interesting confusion for me that my comment section is filled with people who think we should all take less offense and not be snowflakes - unless it comes to the United States, about which everyone is very sensitive.
I am good with the self-criticism but it seems to be always misplaced and missing the root cause analysis for what is broken and what needs to be fixed. How can we, for example, allow in 5 million generally poor and uneducated immigrants from 30 different countries in two years and expect that we are a country that can harmoniously agree with policies to solve problems and advance the country. The primary criticism of the US is that we have allowed the country to devolve into more divisiveness instead of binding it together.
Every project, every change, every policy, every step of progress will result in opposition. When the constituency is bound and connected you can get a majority to agree with a common value proposition. When the constituency is fragmented and more aligned with their tribal interest than the whole, then you have much more opposition and thus you cannot get anything done. That is the problem... we cannot get anything done because we are a mess of self-serving tribal conflict. We are too big, too diverse... and we don't have leadership binding us together. Our leadership is doing just the opposite... driving more wedges between neighbors to carve out a majority popular power.
The lack of progress is because of this. THAT is the criticism we should be focused on. The lack of bullet trains is a symptom of decision dysfunction that is directly related to the country being culturally heterogeneous with our binding values being trashed. Either we except becoming India or we close the border and bet back to assimilating everyone into a common American ethos and value system.
I find it quite ironic to have some rando pontificate on how he thinks America is the greatest thing since sliced bread and talks about how democrats are to blame for dismantling "Judeo-Christian" values and tribal conflict when the decline you lament starting happening when Conservatives have been telling Americans for 40 years how shitty the country is and only rugged individualism and tax cuts could save America. Essentially putting the screws to anything that would resemble collective responsibility and community building. Listening to conservatives complain about how government this sucks and schools that sucks and liberals suck and everyone who isn't a WASP sucks for 40+ years and never coming up with any solution to fix any problem except to cut funding and criminalize the issue. Yet any time anyone criticizes America for not living up to it's professed potential y'all start waving flags and yelling "Love it or Leave It!" at everyone.
Florida, Texas and South Dakota seem to be doing very well. They seem to be fixing a lot of problems and making great progress on infrastructure, etc.
I live in liberal land and the state and cities are being run into the ground by educated liberals.
I don't think America is the greatest thing. It used to be. It isn't today. Note your cynicism about American values and clear tribal separation from conservatives. I assume you got a lot of that imprinted by the malcontent educators you were exposed to.
I don't have a dog in the ideological fight. My only interest is to solve problems and move the country forward. If liberals could get the job done, I would support liberals. However, what I clearly see is that liberals, left, Democrat... as a species... demonstrate a consistent inability to govern effectively. They are frankly weird and too emotive... too stuck on symbolism over substance. They are not pragmatic. They cannot just make good policy decisions based on facts and math and with an eye toward long-term and logical consequences. I have a long list of direct interactions with liberal policy makers that as a business man make my head spin. The frankly seem a bit insane.
My interaction with conservative policy makers is such that they are more rational, more fact based, more real math focused... more able to actually solve problems and make progress without devolving into a mess of tribal conflict and uncontrolled feelings.
I disagree that conservatives put the screws to anything that would resemble collective responsibility. They put the screws to anything that resembles collective authoritarianism claiming to be cooperation. Conservatives tend to be communitarians... where individuals, families and private organizations... including private communities... are better at taking care of people and business than are empowered government central control. That is the old US and how it used to work. It was better then.
I was a Mad Men fan and so was my liberal business partner. We would talk about episodes at lunch and dinner. At one point I commented that the writers were going too far to amplify certain culture/ideological war points painting the 1950s and 60s as being worse than they were. He asked for examples and I used the one where the Draper family finished their picnic and just snapped the blanket and all of its trash onto the grass of the park. I said that wasn't really factual. My partner said that he and his college friends would just throw their trash out the window of their cars. I said, well I was raised as an Eagle Scout and my parents always admonished us to not litter and actually leave the natural spaces we visited as cleaner than when we arrived. My family was lower-income blue collar and he came from wealthy New England liberal roots.
It all gets back to my theory that our left ideological tribe is of people that lack self-control but are also resentful of those that have it and demonstrate it. They reject the ethos of individual responsibility and accountability because they lack self-confidence for behaving well enough in that type of system, and prefer a large book of rules that they must comply with to keep them inline... and of course to help feel better about it... those rules need to be applied to everyone else too... especially those that don't need the rules.
Mad Men was a good series addressing the realities and myths of the old American system that liberals, especially the feminist side, like to attack as our greatest dark period of white male oppression of victims. Women were so mistreated then... mothers without an education... without a career... their husbands cheating on them and the divorce system not yet tooled to getting them half or more of his income to ensure they could leave and not suffer too much economic hardship.
At least that is the narrative.
But these modern feminists are basically throwing the baby out with the bathwater in their approach. They are also failing to admit that males during that time had a profound cost associated with their "privilege". That point was attempted in Mad Men as Don Draper was both an abused and unwanted child, and a war veteran. And the other bit was the constant stress of competing at work for his position. This last piece is a big missing part of the puzzle for the feminist narrative... and it screws up the careers of many women and minorities not understanding that it isn't just privilege and oppression explaining what they see as a "glass ceiling" but a work culture that is brutal, competitive and demanding... one that all the "mad men" had to learn how to navigate. So the new door gets opened based on woke gender or other identity, and then their career gets hit with being unprepared to deal with all of the competitive challenges. Some then make excuses of a toxic work environment, but many drop out of the competition because it is too hard.
There is a macro shift occurring related to this... with American men historically being the hardest working and most productive in the industrialized world... and that ethos crashing with a non-work attitude of youth. From my perspective, it is the realization that grabbing the top rungs of the career ladder is too fucking hard and so might as well destroy the entire ladder so nobody else can climb ahead and make the less accomplished people feel bad.
We have replaced mad men with insane women and their comrade low-T man-bun-wearing man-children. That is my meme opinion.
"prefer a large book of rules that they must comply with to keep them inline"
You mean like Leviticus?
I agree with most of what you say except with the implication that this is a bad thing. I'm all for destroying the ladder, if that is the symbol for competitive culture. We should be helping each other, not kicking each other in the face to scramble ahead of them.
Your views align beautifully with you pen name, but they are fanciful and without merit. All systems are competitive. There is no collectivist utopia of cooperative harmony because of human nature and the fact that some animals are always more capable than others.
Gavin Draper?
"What is the glue holding us together? It used to be Judea-Christian values and free-market principles combined with a functioning democratic political system."
Ehh...
Not sure how Judeo-Christian values is a core American trait when we were founded on the principle of having no one religion being promoted over any other.
And the Free Market? I wouldn't call that American, I'd call it a popular form of modern global economics. Capitalism would be doing just fine had America never existed.
Your last point is decent, though I'd argue about the word 'functioning' there.
We can thank those values for ending slavery and passing Civil Rights acts. The values themselves support religious freedom. Religious bigotry is not in keeping with true Judea-Christian values. "All men are created equal" derives from those base values. Instead we have the new liberal "morality" white and white men are oppressors and all other groups should be considered more equal.
You can be secular and still subscribe to these base values. They have been lauded by previous politicians because they understood the need to bind the people of the country together. Only after 9-11 liberals started trashing the concept.
It's not a binary question though; if one does not think Judeo-Christian values are foundational to positive American exceptionalism, then it doesn't mean they are woke.
We could argue all day about how much of human history has influenced American values, especially in terms of Law: Judeo-Christian morals, Enlightenment principles, English Common Law, Roman Law, Greek philosophy...heck, even Hammurabi's Code. But it's not like the Judeo-Christian aspect of American heritage magically became the primary catalyst for ending slavery and birthing the Civil Rights era. Christianity being 20 centuries old I would think they wouldn't have waited until the 19th century for that.
I mean sure the French and English philosophers who really took the "all men are created equal" creed to heart were mostly religious...but that's because most everyone was back then. If they didn't try to relate an idea to the divine back then, not many would listen. The commoners basically lived and died under the banner of heaven.
I mean, that's like saying only propertied males should vote because that's who happened to be making all the laws 250 years ago. People with influence and money were expected to run things back then because that's who had the time and money to do so. I would hardly think anyone would say that it's because of their wealth and influence that they should be making all the rules, right?
You need a basis of common morality to bind a community. Pick something. The founders did. And the founders were very deep in their understanding of what worked and did not work in terms of the "idea" for a new system of governance.
Nothing is perfect, but the pursuit of perfection is always the enemy of the good.
Are you familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell? Clearly there is a common thread of successful societies having a binding moral value system. Historically, the common delivery mechanism were stories and myths. But they established a common framework of understand that if lacking would result in too many internal ills and conflicts. Educated liberals are always mistaken that their education has allowed them to transcend a need for these metaphysical/spiritual explanations. But unfortunately for them, the spiritual need is ubiquitous as part of the human condition. Those that reject some moral-spiritual basis will flounder creating their own made-up mythology and moral basis... that is often just a set of convenient cult beliefs... but that fragment in many versions and thus put people at tribal cult conflict.
My liberal friends that have embraced COVID cult, global warming cult and woke cult... and are militant in hostility against any that oppose it. I can see that the are floundering in need of spiritual grounding. However, they have rejected traditional American values that are based on Judea-Christian values and so they need something or else they will grow insane, depressed and die. I think many of them are still insane and depressed. Their ideological replacements are weak things and are barely feeding their human needs.
That you read all of this through a parochial American political lens is kind of a whatever for me but I strongly agree that the evacuation of judeo-christian values from the public sphere is a big part of the groundlessness in contemporary American culture and part of the root of our polarization.
"We can thank those values for slavery."
There, FIFY.
Yeah... not. Just the opposite. Slavery was a global thing. In fact, it was the African slavery market that sold to the world. The US was slower than other western countries to abolish the practices. Some of that had to do with how young the country was and how it became dependent on slave labor for agriculture (interesting in how that got replaced with illegal immigration of brown people to do the work). But it was ultimately Judea-Christian values that prevailed to power the Republican defeat of slavery.
Wow. I recommend you read Max Weber's Protestant Work Ethic. That's kind of basic stuff as we are, in fact, a country founded on Judeo -Christan values whether you believe it or not. In God we trust.
Haha. I hope so
Idk. I feel like this is true yet also there's some sort of automatic flexing people do around these critically acclaimed shows where they assume fewer people get it than really do. Sure, I've seen YouTube comments where people idealize Don Draper, but I've never actuallyet someone irl who likes the show who doesn't understand the basic point you are trying to get across here.
Even if the assumption is right, thematic criticism is difficult. It requires some baseline level of cultural or artistic training or sensitivity to understand that dramatic irony creates a deliberate contrast between the way people trade status in a show and the core truth of the characters. I don't know when it clicked for me, but I know it wasn't until I was an adult who had already read a lot of books and studied a lot of philosophy and critical theory, and also tried my hand at creative writing. So watching Mad Men for the first time a year ago, I got it right away, but if I'd watched it in college, who knows?
Given how the show ended, I think you'd have to be pretty obtuse to come away from the show thinking Don was anything but a broken man.
Sure, but you might not have the insight that that was the point the whole time. Like Freddie said, you would think "Don was awesome and then suddenly he wasn't" not "deep down there was something wrong with Don the whole time."
Maybe my recollection is off, but doesn’t the show end with Don coming up with the “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” campaign, avoiding a personal reckoning yet again?
Especially if they’re at Esalen doing the downward facing dog.
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I don't so much mind the de-contextualized memes, but I think one reason many people seem to grasp the wrong takeaways from these antiheroes is...a lot of people are kind of shitty people. I say this as someone who has a positive outlook on life and tends to think the best of others lol. But really. Part of why I don't get wildly disappointed by most people is that I realize so many people are pretty shallow and/or have really fucked up goals.
I'm probably being too pedantic here, but I've always liked to think about it like this: everyone does shitty or shallow or ugly things sometimes.
I think a big reason people like anti-heroes these days has to do with an aesthetic: it's "lame" to like heroes. Heroes are boring, and valorizing a hero feels gauche, feels 1950s. Liking the bad guy is popular because bad guys are interesting; the bad guys have the best stories, the most dynamic personalities, are the most likely to buck convention, to thumb their nose at the system. It seems like a lot of modern entertainment is an exercise in how to make bad guys likeable.
Of course they're LIKEABLE. I flat-out loved Tony Soprano AND Walter White, but did I see them as heroes, as badasses to be admired and emulated? JFC no. And I can't believe that people saw them as such, well, I couldn't believe it until I saw the copypasted comments from reddit sites. It's dehumanizing to see them as heroes, come to think of it.
So my take is that some people do fawn over Henry Hill or Don Draper or Tony Soprano. But lots of people, myself included, get the show, were touched by the deeper aspects, and now just want to have some fun as fans. These are stories about male fantasies, and the moral brokenness of them. But after having watched the sopranos more times than I wish to admit, I want to joke with my friends about Paulie and his mother or the hilariousness of the phrase “colder than your sister’s tit”, not reflect endlessly about American avarice.
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People tend to like anti hereos. A lot of people even want to be the villain. I will be controversial and say that if so many people are taking the "wrong" message from a piece of art, or more accurately what the author intended to convey or what you believe the author intended, then there is something in the art itself which invites this interpretation.
I'd argue that shows like Mad Men glamorize these characters even while condemning them somewhat. That's the key. If Don Draper had been a goofy, vulgar oaf no one would take that interpretation away. Same goes with the Wolf of Wall Street, which was basically porn start to finish. You can't make something seem sexy while claiming to condemn it and then cry foul when people want the sexy thing.
The Fight Club paradox - if Tyler Durden wasn't charismatic, there would be no movie.
You aren't wrong. I just tend to be much more of a "people are taking exactly the message they are supposed to from art" kind of guy, in politics too for that matter. I think it comes from growing up Christian, this disdain for the idea that the religion was pure and people are the problem. I still cringe at ideas like that.
Idk man, some people are just really bad at context analysis and interpretation.
But I guess if any particular religion has advocated for the killing of infidels, it probably was pure in its intentions. /s
I think Fight Club is absurdist in a way that Breaking Bad is not. But I've only seen maybe a half dozen Breaking Bad episodes, and it's not that there wasn't absurdity. I loved Fight Club. I left Breaking Bad behind. I think maybe the ultimate difference was that in Breaking Bad, Walter is Jack and Heisenberg is Tyler, but Walter knows he's Heisenberg. Jack has a centering / contrasting function in Fight Club that Breaking Bad lacks.
Or maybe I just like Fight Club and don't like Breaking Bad and I'm rationalizing.
I'll give you an example of how to do this and not make it sexy: Succession. I don't think very many people ideolize Kendall Roy. I'd argue Succession does a much, much better job with these themes.
Yeah...but...Kendall Roy is the loser in that show. In every conceivable way. It's much more difficult to depict, say, Pablo Escobar, Genghis Khan, Che Guevara or Erwin Rommel in a way that won't result in someone lionizing them.
I don't think you should even try. There are a lot of boot-lickers in this world who want nothing more than a bad man to rule over them, so any even vaguely accurate portrayal of such a character is going to have people lionizing them.
Touché
"You can't make something seem sexy while claiming to condemn it and then cry foul when people want the sexy thing."
That is called a "moral figleaf".
c’mon man -- who among us hasn’t tried to suffocate their own mother?