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GQ’s Badasses of the Year:
The Men of Breaking Bad

Our culture critic  Tom Carson on the AMC meth-dealer-in-the-desert epic’s ensemble cast and its mesmerizing fourth season:

With just one season left to go, Breaking Bad has shifted from being all about Bryan Cranston’s triple-Emmy’d (so far) lead performance to the best ensemble show on TV. This year, we were spun around four compromised points of the male compass: brains (the increasingly Machiavellian Walt), ego (Giancarlo Esposito’s drug kingpin Gus), heart (Aaron Paul’s Jesse, Walt’s reluctant sorcerer’s apprentice), and pure testosterone (Dean Norris as Hank, Walt’s DEA-agent brother-in-law—who’s got a supernally wise dark-side twin in Jonathan Banks, Gus’s head enforcer). Which one we get off on most says as much about us as picking our favorite Beatle.

[Photograph by Robert Maxwell]

these boys…

Okay, first, I should probably throw out that I actually read and enjoy a lot of GQ (because masculinities), and obviously I adore Breaking Bad (only partially because masculinities), and a big chunk of my blog is dedicated to one of these “men of Breaking Bad” (nearly exclusively because ladyboners), so, like, I get it, but…

You don’t need to do a feature on the men of Breaking Bad. You don’t. Breaking Bad is a show about men. It is about men making meth, it is about men blowing stuff up, it is about men firing guns, it is about men kicking the shit out of each other, it is about men being self-destructive, it is about men having ambiguous moralities. Like way too many shows on TV, it is about men, first and foremost.

And I don’t mean to erase the women on the show, especially as their roles become more significant. But so far, if I’m not forgetting anyone, there have been three women who have had any real effect on the plot.* One of them is dead; the other two are meddling wives. Fortunately, Breaking Bad is beginning to complicate the wife role in some really intriguing ways. This doesn’t mean most of the fandom doesn’t reduce Skyler and Marie to dumb bitches who need to die.

What I’m trying to say is, yes, Breaking Bad is brilliant television, and yes, the masculinities on the show are really interesting—but they’re also aggressively violent and highly problematic, and I’m tired of celebrating them. (It boggles my mind to consider how many deaths could have been prevented if Walt weren’t too proud to accept help, or if he weren’t so easily manipulated by the trope that “a man provides for his family.”)

Can somebody do a feature on the women of Breaking Bad? Maybe Bust or Bitch? (I can feel a feministfilm series bubbling to the surface as we speak.) Can somebody ask Krysten Ritter how it felt to be fridged? Or Betsy Brandt if she thinks the show’s depiction of her character’s mental illness is at all gendered? I’ll admit, what I really want to know is whether Anna Gunn is aware of all those AV Club commenters who want Skyler dead.

I’ve complained a lot about Mad Men and how it’s depicted in magazines like GQ; the male characters are often presented as suave ladykillers, despite the fact that the show itself constantly problematizes their masculinities and has been fairly straightforward in its gradual revelation of the men of SCDP as rapists and addicts. Breaking Bad doesn’t have that problem, because Breaking Bad doesn’t see itself as a show about gender. Representations of “the men of Breaking Bad” in other media are more or less the same as what we see on the show itself.

As a feminist TV blogger, I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of open discourse about Breaking Bad. I’d like to know what proportion of Breaking Bad viewership is male, especially straight cis male—I live in a Tumblr bubble that’s nearly entirely female and/or queer, and the fraction of Breaking Bad fans on my dash reflects that—and I’d also like to get demographics for the writing and production staff. For me it’s really not so much about what’s on the show as how we talk about it. It’s high time we acknowledge that one of the best shows on television is still far from perfect.

*Skyler, Jane, and Marie. You could make a case for Andrea, too, but I’d argue that, at least at this point, the real action revolves around her kid.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay. I hate to be the one to cry “but you don’t get it, it’s satire.” But… for real now… both the stated intent of the writers and as presented within the show itself, they’re not celebrating Walt’s masculinity. They’re mocking it. He isn’t becoming a ‘badass master criminal.’ He’s on a downward spiral, becoming more and more pathetic even as he commits greater and greater atrocities and hurts more and more of the people he cares about. And all of it would’ve been averted if he had just once put aside his pride (which I feel is implicitly masculine; Walt is shown to regard himself as not being a “real man” if he can’t provide for and protect his family) and accepted the many, many outs offered him. Like Mad Men, the show does present a seductiveness to the criminal lifestyle, but for every “crowning moment of awesome,” we’re shown Walt in his underwear, swearing at an answering machine.