We love to watch bad guys on TV. Why do we love to hate their wives almost as much?
“I guess that’s why gangsters have molls.” That’s what scumbag attorney Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) said to his client Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in the second season of AMC’s Breaking Bad—a show I’ve recently been marathon-watching with my girlfriend.
While helping the cancer-stricken former chemistry teacher turned meth maker launder his money, Goodman tells Walter that his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) is getting in the way of his ability to cook crystal and make loads of cash. He’d be better suited for a moll—a woman who provides companionship but does not let morals and domestic obligation trump profit. To Clyde, the lawyer advises: find a Bonnie.
“You always hate the wives,” my girlfriend said as I praised Goodman’s legal advice. I denied the accusation but knew the thought had crossed my mind.
It’s a curious thing. I don’t cook meth; I don’t need a shady lawyer; I’m not a mob boss (The Sopranos); I’m not a serial killer (Dexter); I’m not a bootlegger (Boardwalk Empire); I’m not a womanizer (Mad Men, et al.), yet I root for the disturbed TV characters who are, and I criticize the wives who generally have moral compasses similar to the types of people I’d like to be around in real life.
Numerous questions arise from this admission. Am I sexist? Are female characters poorly formed by male writers? Why are anti-heroes so popular with largely male audiences?
Stephen Silver notes that the trend of anti-wife sentiment stretches back to the internet’s pre-Post-Show-Roundup days when The Sopranos was a hit. Commenters hated what they perceived as Carmela Soprano’s shrillness and obstruction and wished Tony would whack her. Wrote Silver, “That [Tony] was never judged as harshly as his wife is a sexist double standard that, to this day, persists.”
Similarly, many Breaking Bad fans hold Skyler, the anti-Bonnie, in low esteem. A Facebook group called “Fuck Skyler White” with the tagline “this bitch completely turns me off the show” has over 27,000 ‘likes’. Fans complain that Skyler smoked while pregnant, had an affair with her boss while separated from Walter, and coerced Walter to undergo chemo for his cancer against his will thus helping to push him into the meth business. Animated GIFs of Skyler rolling her eyes showed her passive-aggressive undermining of Walter.
As the Los Angeles Times reported, show creator Vince Gilligan commented on the audience’s antipathy for Skyler compared to their empathy for the murderous Walter, “I want as many people as I can to watch the show, but wow, I hope I’m not living next door to any of them.”
The same goes for The Walking Dead’s Lori Grimes (Sarah Wayne Callies). The “I Hate Lori Grimes” Facebook group has 2,973 followers with fans scornful that Lori often stood in the way of her husband Rick’s attempts to lead their group of post-apocalyptic survivors. Like Skyler, Lori slept with another man after Rick was wrongly presumed dead. Lori also had a hard time keeping track of their child, Carl, who also frustrated fans by derailing the show’s plot. Lori didn’t want Rick to teach Carl how to shoot a gun, and in a scene in the second season the group starts rifling through cars that had been abandoned on the highway. Lori hesitated, saying that it “doesn’t feel right.”
Lori’s struggle to leave behind the moral code of a safer world irked fans who later celebrated when she died (ironically, after being shot by Carl).
Showtime’s Dexter provided my first taste of wife hate. Dexter is a show about a serial killer (Michael C. Hall) who, in order to satisfy and justify his ‘dark passenger’s’ blood lust, murders people who’ve already committed great evil.
Dexter’s wife, Rita (Julie Benz), often got in the way of his kill schedule. She’d confront Dexter with chores or with heart-to-heart conversations about the status of their relationship. She even once dragged him to couples therapy, the classic tactic of annoying TV and movie wives.
One story arc had Rita upset after finding out that Dexter was maintaining a bachelor-pad away from their new home. The apartment served as home base for the serial killer side of Dex—the place where he stored the totems of his kills: racks of microscope slides with drops of blood from his victims. The symbolism was that Dexter’s new relationship limited his freedom.
I sympathized with Dexter’s domestic dilemma and wasn’t as upset as I was supposed to be when Rita was found snuffed out in the bathtub of their home at the end of Season Four. My contempt wasn’t just for Rita. Her kids, the ones Dexter adopted after he married Rita and killed their father, got in the way too. Between his job and cooking dinner or taking the kids to school or dealing with their tantrums, Dexter had hardly any time to stab people in the heart. And that’s pretty much all I or anyone else ever wanted to see.
Since I wanted to see Dexter in action, I grew to despise these agents of morality. These cockblocks of killing: wives, girlfriends, bosses, sisters, and innocent children. All of this mirrors what Silver noted back in the early 2000s.
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Besides carrying Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and Mad Men, AMC owns full rights to The Godfather, perhaps the classic antihero drama. As Meg Ryan’s character said in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, “what is it with men and The Godfather?”
With its annual Mob Week, AMC—with a viewership that skews 55% male—runs and re-runs the Mafioso classic which is a tale about many things including the transition of the youngest son in a crime family from innocent war hero to violent mob boss. Michael Corleone breaks bad by killing a cop and his gangster crony in a small Italian restaurant. He avenges the death of his brother and the attempted assassination of his father, and ends up having his other brother killed. Michael has the husband of his sister murdered and puts out a massive hit job on the heads of other crime families on the day of his son’s baptism.
Michael refers to a certain code to handle those conflicts, but it is the pressure of domestic obligation which causes him the most trouble and which prevents him from exerting his power as the Don of a big crime family. This shows up in what is one of the most famous scenes of the trilogy when Michael and his caporegimes close the study room door on Kay, the blonde, blue-eyed, non-Sicilian who asked too many questions about the family business and cast too much judgment on his activities. That was a new type of conflict for a man of Corleone’s stature; it was something his father didn’t have to grapple with.
Kay was right all along. She knew when Michael proposed marriage that he would gravitate towards crime. He became ruthless, cunning, and thirsty for more power, just like Walter White and so many modern antiheroes. But if internet forums existed in 1972 there’s no doubt which character would be glorified and which would be hated.
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The testosterone-infused shows of Golden Age television come during what some have called a ‘crisis of masculinity’. The argument goes that as more women become breadwinners, men are flailing about trying to find their proper place in society. This complexity feeds through to movie and TV characters. Hanna Rosin, whose book The End of Men has spurred debate on this ‘crisis’, has pointed to the evolution of the doltish dad as well as the pater familias. No longer are paternal figures cast as purely good or doltish dads without agency. Audiences have grown too cynical for broadly painted characters.
I asked Rosin whether these shows are manifestations of that underlying crisis. “I think that mass anxiety comes in waves, and we’re in one of those right now,” she said.
Heroes and antiheroes of the past were forced to deal with external enemies. Their flaws were never exposed by their relationships with their intimates, mostly their wives and it is often those relationships that are the source of “open-ended anxiety”, as Rosin puts it. “This is more to do with domestic roles. There is so much pressure on men who are trying to figure out what it’s OK to do.”
Thomas Doherty, chair of American studies at Brandeis University makes a similar argument. He said of the appeal of the character depictions, “You know where you are with the mob and the meth lab. You put women into the mix and things get confusing.” Doherty says these shows are part of the Era of the Arc. Their rise is attributable partly to the decline of censorship and the spread of technology.
“In all of us there is a little bit of Walter White and Don Draper.” Ideally, according to this thinking, the men who cheer these anti-hero characters aspire to be them. At least while watching these shows, men would rather be gangsters, bookies, or meth dealers than fathers and husbands.
“They are little boy fantasies of defying Mommy and being bad,” says Elayne Rapping, professor of American studies at SUNY/Buffalo. “Male identity is very problematic and vexed these days and these antiheroes represent a kind of cry of resentment at the confusion of their identity; they fulfill a fantasy in a very masculine way but not a traditional one.”
Rapping notes that women aren’t immune to these fantasies which may explain why many of these shows have cross-gender appeal. “As Barbara Ehrenreich once said of women fans and groupies of ‘cock rock’ bands, they didn’t want to fuck them, they wanted to be them.”
Antihero dramas certainly have their fair share of female fans, but can audiences accept a female character that mimics the masculine gesticulations of a cock rocker, meth maker, or ruthless murderer?
One experiment is taking place at ABC. Red Widow is a show created by former Dexter writer Melissa Rosenberg about a woman who has to take over the drug business of her dead mob-connected husband. In an interview with Zap2It Rosenberg said “It’s a very tricky character to sell to an audience, because women are held to a higher standard.”
FX network president John Landgraf notes the same double standard. He told an industry gathering “I think that male antiheroes are something that’s more easily acceptable. I don’t mean that a female antihero can’t be done, but I do think that somehow it’s a more acceptable character, a more easily acceptable character to have a male antihero.”
Red Widow’s ratings bear this out. After a decent start, the show has fizzled and ABC hasn’t decided whether or not to bring it back for a second season.
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Brendan Foley summed up the gendered action roles of modern cable dramas:
Character A promotes forward momentum through their behavior.
Character B inhibits forward momentum through their behavior.
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Character B gets mad at Character A for doing all that stuff.
And, and this is the important part, Character B is almost exclusively a female character.
Foley is correct that the plot-blocking character is almost always a woman, usually a wife or a girlfriend. But as Dexter’s step-children and the Soprano kids show us, children get in the way of the anti-heroes journey as well. But it is easiest to convey the anti-heroes less thrilling but realistic conflicts through his life partner. There is an irrationality here that I’ll admit to in lieu of owning up to being sexist. To remain some semblance of a good guy, the anti-hero needs a family to humanize him and give him something fight for. Without it, he’s just another bad guy. Walter White’s family is his Achilles’ heel, a metaphor based upon a mythological anti-hero. A couple of Walter’s drug land enemies come close to killing members of his family, and when he frantically tries to save them we are reminded that his intentions aren’t completely self-centered. But his family which inspires him also hinders his ability to do the things he wants to do—the things that make for entertaining TV. This exposes a duality in both the character and the viewer, and sometimes our bad side shows up in the form of nasty Facebook groups or mindless cheers when the plot-blocker is pushed out of the way.
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As Breaking Bad heads into the last half of its final season, Skyler White has become Walter’s moll. But what makes her different than a passive Bonnie is that she’s not a moll for Walter’s sake; she’s a moll for her own. Denise Du Vernay, who contributed an essay to the pop philosophy book Breaking Bad and Philosophy said, “we like Skyler so much better now because she’s no longer the doormat trying to get the family to eat veggie bacon we met in the pilot.” There is the scene in Season Four when Skyler tells Walter, “someone has to protect this family from the man that protects this family.” The irony here is that if Skyler murders Walter the audience will like her better than if she just nags him to death. But so far it has been easier to accept her as a nagger than a killer. For wives of antihero men to be both compelling and to not be hated by audiences, it seems that they can’t be overbearingly good and moral, and they can’t break bad. They have to break just right, and that’s hard to pull off.
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