The Golden Age of TV is a playground for the white male anti-hero

September 3, 2018 5:35 PM

Don Draper vs Jenny Schecter: The Sexist Battle of the TV Anti-Heroes Heather Hogan of Autostraddle breaks down the white male anti-hero, and extroplaits on the double standard for the female anti-hero.

"Jenny and Don were both survivors of abuse and trauma inflicted on them in childhood, adults who’d settled into idyllic lives with adoring partners, and then burned it all down. They were both selfish, petulant, erratic narcissists; both constantly promising themselves and other people they’d get better, do better; and failing in the face of perpetual existential crisis and a self-destructive lack of impulse control. They self-harmed. They were endlessly petty with their critics. They were great observers of the human condition with the ironic inability to parse out their own motivations. They pushed and pushed away the people who saw them for who they really were, the people who really loved them. They demolished their lives, the things they claimed were important to them, systematically, in perpetuity.

The main difference between them, of course, is that Don Draper was endlessly rewarded in his show and in the real world, while Jenny Schecter was mercilessly punished in both."

posted by momochan (46 comments total)

...ok look I’m gonna read the thing, but if there isn’t a big giant caveat about what an actual steaming pile of shit The L Word was I shall file a complaint

She’s comparing Mad Men to a show that literally introduced a gun in act 1 and then just let it disappear

(Jenny was the only thing I liked about that show; she was the only thing that was actually entertaining)
posted by schadenfrau at 5:45 PM on September 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wow. Well done.
posted by greermahoney at 5:48 PM on September 3, 2018

I didn't watch Mad Men all the way through, maybe just about ten episodes somewhere in the middle of the run, but I thought Draper was clearly depicted as a talentless hack who'd attained a high enough position that people felt obligated to treat him like a genius.
posted by escabeche at 5:50 PM on September 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

yeah the thing I’m having most trouble with is that I hated all those male anti-heroes (the ones I know anyway) and loved Jenny for the aforementioned entertainment value, and was similarly baffled by how much Jenny or Skyler White was hated, so it’s not really resonating personally.

I mean, not baffled, I guess. It’s pretty clear why.

So mostly this is just another reminder of how much the world hates women.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:55 PM on September 3, 2018 [8 favorites]

So mostly this is just another reminder of how much the world hates women.

Yeah, that was my takeaway.
posted by greermahoney at 5:56 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

escabeche, one of the axioms of Mad Men was that Don was actually an advertising genius, to the point that one of the best episodes of the series had him reducing coworkers and clients to tears with his beautiful pitch.
posted by ejs at 6:16 PM on September 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

I must be a weirdo or I was high af (likely both tbh, still am) during my watching of the L word, but I remember generally enjoying Jenny and being largely sympathetic towards her character until the last season or so..
posted by some loser at 6:17 PM on September 3, 2018

a show that literally introduced a gun in act 1 and then just let it disappear
This never happened. It will shock you how much this never happened.
posted by asterix at 6:34 PM on September 3, 2018 [17 favorites]

So,my dislike of Jenny was mostly around how a show purporting to be about gay women needed to be centered around a straight character for... reasons? I watched the L Word back when I thought I was straight and even then with pretty limited knowledge of representation of queer people (especially women) in media, it struck me as really lazy and frustrating in the way it pushed queer women to the background in their own damn show. I don't see the comparison to Mad Men as really being relevant.
posted by augustimagination at 6:36 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Now I wanna know about the gun thing. It’s been waaaay too many years and I’ve forgotten everything that wasn’t Shane hitting on a “soup chef.”
posted by greermahoney at 6:37 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

So,my dislike of Jenny was mostly around how a show purporting to be about gay women needed to be centered around a straight character for... reasons?

A straight character? Doesn't Jenny come out as a gay really early into the first season? All of her relationships in the show are with women (aside from the boyfriend she has when the show starts).

I did a rewatch of the show pretty recently and I don't think the dislike of Jenny is pure sexism by any means. She's basically written to be loathed after season 2 or so. In the first two seasons, she's a human being and reasonably likable, if a little pretentious. I think the dislike of her in the early season is really unfair.

Then, she veers off into being a despicable person. She kills a dog! In the process of seducing the girlfriend of a woman who wrote a negative review of her book! She also makes occasional racist comments. She's like awful for real and not in a fun way. She's impossible to empathize with because she's written pretty consciously as a terrible, terrible person.

The L Word is not a very good show and I don't really think it's the best show to compare with Mad Men. It's only popular because it's basically one of the very few things of its kind. It's poorly-written, illogical and often very racist and transphobic (and biphobic). Hopefully the reboot will be better. But the only reason it's even still remembered is because of the fact that a whole generation of queer women grew up on it because there was nothing else.
posted by armadillo1224 at 6:48 PM on September 3, 2018 [8 favorites]

She's like awful for real and not in a fun way.

I think that’s kind of the point of the article. Walter White and Don Draper were TERRIBLE characters, too, who did terrible things. But they’re lauded. Their characters were complex and interesting. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I actually detest all of them. I generally don’t watch things where characters habitually self-destruct and hurt the people who love them. But we seem to find that behavior acceptable in men and not in women.
posted by greermahoney at 6:59 PM on September 3, 2018 [8 favorites]

What I'm saying is that I don't think Jenny was complex or interesting. She was a horribly-written character and The L Word is not the show you want to compare to Breaking Bad and Mad Men. It hurts the writer's argument to do that.
posted by armadillo1224 at 7:24 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

She’s comparing Mad Men to a show that literally introduced a gun in act 1 and then just let it disappear

I mean, I get the metaphor, but Mad Men literally had a man in a suit jumping out the office window in the opening credits, teased it in season one, then forgot about it forever thereafter.
posted by rokusan at 7:51 PM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

Mad Men literally had a man in a suit jumping out the office window in the opening credits, teased it in season one, then forgot about it forever thereafter.

Except that has pretty obviously been a metaphor from the beginning?
posted by Anonymous at 8:28 PM on September 3, 2018

Put me on the "I wholeheartedly agree with the author's point, but this was a terrible example" list. It's not enough to have a badly-behaving character, the test is whether the audience will tolerate the same amount of bad behavior from badly-behaving male and female characters who are written equally sympathetically. These examples have been discussed before, but take any of the lead characters in Girls, or the leads of Unreal, or shit, Betty from Mad Men. All are characters that are not good people but are written in a sympathetic way. All are really great examples of the double-standard, because they've basically all been regarded as irredeemable demon-bitches and nothing else.
posted by Anonymous at 8:45 PM on September 3, 2018

Like I said, I get the metaphor. But the show also specifically showed us in-office suicides and window shenanigans, not to mention the overall careening-to-inevitable-disaster motifs, which I think suggested that the window would turn out to be more than metaphor.

But that's failing to allow for the influence of David Chase, King of Loose Ends, on Weiner. So, yes, I'm a sucker and I should have known better than to expect tidiness.

And for the record, I sympathized a lot more with Betty's sociopathy than Don's. I'm not sure if that reflects more on the writing or more on me.
posted by rokusan at 8:48 PM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

It gets somewhat tiresome that people act bewildered at why people hate Skyler White. She and Walt are both jerks in their own way, and at the start of the show, their relationship is somewhat strained, but they still love one another.

For a little while, it seems that they're going to be on the same side. Walt will earn the dirty money, Skyler will launder it. A criminal power couple, like the Underwoods, awful, but fun to watch. Then she decides that she's going to oppose Walt after all.

If she'd stayed on the side of good, she'd be a victim. If she stayed on the side of bad, she'd be an accomplice. But she flip-flopped, which makes her a betrayer.
posted by explosion at 8:52 PM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

This cannot be talked about often enough
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:00 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

If she'd stayed on the side of good, she'd be a victim. If she stayed on the side of bad, she'd be an accomplice. But she flip-flopped, which makes her a betrayer.

The problem with your theory is that people full-on hated her long before she started helping Walt launder money.
posted by ejs at 9:04 PM on September 3, 2018 [22 favorites]

Spotty-Handed Villainesses, Margaret Atwood.
posted by clew at 9:06 PM on September 3, 2018 [13 favorites]

The problem with your theory is that people full-on hated her long before she started helping Walt launder money.

Yeah, people hated her in Season 1 when her grievous offense was wanting Walt to be a reliable partner and dad.
posted by Anonymous at 9:32 PM on September 3, 2018

If she'd stayed on the side of good, she'd be a victim. If she stayed on the side of bad, she'd be an accomplice. But she flip-flopped, which makes her a betrayer.

The problem with that is that Walt betrayed her much, much worse by getting into the drug manufacturing business in the first place, and repeatedly lying to her about every aspect of it for as long as he could, even to the point of not telling her about the cancer for some time. Plus, deciding to move back into their house simply because he wanted to, and ramping up the drug business even after he came into conflict with absolutely ruthless characters such as Gus or the Cousins. Pretty much everything that Skyler did throughout the series was for the family, whether she was trying to get away from Walt or helping him out because she figured out that maybe the only way out of this mess was through it, and after a while the cancer came back and she figured that she'd be rid of him soon anyway. (The one exception to this was when she had the affair with Ted, which started after she'd gone back to work because she thought that she'd have to in order to support the kids, plus she didn't want to be with Walt.)

And that truth--that Skyler was doing what she did for the kids, whereby Walt was doing what he did for his ego--is at the heart of the Skyler hate. Walt only got around to admitting the truth about that in the very last episode, but Team Walt wanted to believe that he was the ultimate family man as a fig leaf for his real attraction to them: someone who started out believing that he was powerless and came into a lot of power. Skyler not only put the lie to Walt doing it for his family, but she also didn't support his rise to power (although she couldn't stop it either, because it would bring ruin to their family; of course, that happened anyway). That failure to support Walt under any and all circumstances was what his fans saw as a "betrayal".
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:38 PM on September 3, 2018 [30 favorites]

The Atwood essay is totes brills!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:56 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Atwood is... not often wrong.
posted by rokusan at 9:57 PM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

armadillo1224, you're right - I watched it quite a long time ago and must be remembering the timeline incorrectly. I remembered it having kinda a long period of Jenny as a, like, "straight observer" before she started dating women. I'm guessing I got into S1 kinda slowly and then started bingeing later so it messed with the timeline in my head. My bad. I stopped watching entirely sometime around S3 when I was already pretty fed up with the show as a whole and I found out one of the few characters I still liked was about to be killed off. I just couldn't care any more.

I agree completely that she's just not a very well-written or interesting character. My absolute least favorite scenes were always anytime her terrible, horrible writing had any kind of monologue.
posted by augustimagination at 10:22 PM on September 3, 2018

I think Shane is a closer analog for Don.
posted by signal at 3:55 AM on September 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Unfortunately, Fanfare did not exist while Breaking Bad was on, and it wasn't discussed much here until just before the finale. I was obsessed with it, so I spent most of my time at Reddit, where the Skyler hate was common. Those people were never able to provide coherent arguments, though. Anti-Skyler comments were easily refuted by anyone who had been paying attention to the actual plot. Walt did a lot of things because he wanted to be seen as powerful and manly to her, and he felt diminished by her concerns for his safety--that was his problem, and he made it hers by doubling down again and again.

I struggle to come up with examples of female anti-heroes who are both the main characters and are on shows with good enough writing that they would have been widely seen and discussed--maybe that demonstrates my failure to see the right shows, or maybe you all can name some better examples. The closest I can come up with is Jessica Jones. About that show, I will just say that the punishment the villain received in the end of season one was not commensurate with the amount of suffering he caused, and I was greatly disappointed and did not come back for season two. I'm not normally a bloodthirsty person, but that guy deserved much, much worse. I wish Jessica had behaved worse.
posted by heatvision at 4:19 AM on September 4, 2018 [7 favorites]

I find the essay a bit hard to parse in quite what the focus of the complaint is. I mean, yes, because sexism, is obviously true for all aspects of the shows and reactions being looked at, but it feels to me like the different strands of the argument could have stood to be untangled more.

The main difference between them, of course, is that Don Draper was endlessly rewarded in his show and in the real world, while Jenny Schecter was mercilessly punished in both.

That quote, for example, both points to the problem but also part of the reason why the shows are like they are it seems. Don Draper's arc is that of the successful white guy, which is the horror of it and why it makes sense, of one accepts the premise of the show and its being made, that it would take the form it does. Of course Draper can find reward, that's the nature of business and life, the Coke theme points out the bitter irony of it all. Jenny can suffer because people like her do not have Draper's advantages so life does treat them differently.

So is the argument over these shows being made and/or representing some significant aspect of reality in these regards or the way the shows treat the characters? Hogan professes love for Jenny herself, so it doesn't seem like its entirely in the portrayals as she didn't experience hate for the character, and seems to understand Draper just fine. So is it then more that she's objecting to how other viewers react to the shows? That's something a bit different than how the shows treat the characters if the treatment "makes sense" artistically. Audiences choosing to "like" Walter more than Skylar or "like" Draper more than Jenny can be more about how people feel the need to "like" than failings in the shows.

There are legitimate and complicated possible responses to the questions that both accept the overwhelming sexism and still draw out some greater nuance in how we might approach the issue. There's no question that there still needs to be greater diversity on the creative side of show production, it needs to happen, but the rest needs better examination as the way we understand and enjoy shows and how they work is more complicated than it might first seem.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:42 AM on September 4, 2018

Three posts later on MetaFilter is the post "Killer Queen", reverently marking the death of female anti-hero Jacqueline Pearce. She was widely regarded as "fascinating, sly, cheeky, sexy, charming, compelling, riveting". It could be (whisper it) that people fail to find the current crop of female anti-hero's fascinating, sly, cheeky, sexy, charming, compelling, and riveting because, well, they aren't.
posted by falcon at 6:01 AM on September 4, 2018

I struggle to come up with examples of female anti-heroes who are both the main characters and are on shows with good enough writing that they would have been widely seen and discussed--maybe that demonstrates my failure to see the right shows

Lol no it’s because those shows don’t exist

It could be (whisper it) that people fail to find the current crop of female anti-hero's fascinating, sly, cheeky, sexy, charming, compelling, and riveting because, well, they aren't.

That you’re comparing Camp from the 70s to Serious Drama from the golden age of tv and then smugly implying that perhaps all these women today just don’t have “it” tells me that, at best, you have fantastically missed the point in your eagerness to blame women.
posted by schadenfrau at 6:39 AM on September 4, 2018 [15 favorites]

Unfortunately, Fanfare did not exist while Breaking Bad was on, and it wasn't discussed much here until just before the finale. I was obsessed with it, so I spent most of my time at Reddit, where the Skyler hate was common.

The /r/breakingbad crowd was my first direct exposure to how toxic fandom could be on reddit. I noped out after one guy came up with how he thought that the show should end (hold onto your hats): Walt would cure cancer (not an oncologist or even possessed of any particular knowledge of biology, but whatevs), dump Skyler and get Gretchen back and also get Gray Matter back from Elliott Schwartz, and get a blanket pardon from the government because, hey, he just cured cancer. Literally just about the dumbest, most unabashedly wish-fulfillment fanwank, and of course it was immensely popular. I haven't had the heart to see what the Better Call Saul subreddit is like.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:49 AM on September 4, 2018 [6 favorites]

I sort of thought the Skylar White hate was from teenage boys who were adversely reminded of Mom telling them to put down the video game controller? At least I hope it wasn't coming from grown-ass men (although that 50th birthday handjob was pretty cold).
posted by thelonius at 6:56 AM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

The most ardent Skylar hater I know is a man in his mid-forties. As a fellow member of the local board- and card game community I had to hear his rants about Skylar and other female characters in popular media (Daenerys Targaryen drew most of his ire) every time I made the mistake of playing near him. According to him Breaking Bad didn't have a satisfying enough end because Skylar didn't die horribly.
posted by aldurtregi at 7:43 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

It occurred to me that, if you reach back, there is at least one example of a popular female anti-hero in the patriarchal media: Scarlett O'Hara. The reader is given to understand from the first few pages of Gone With the Wind that Scarlett is an awful creature. But because she represents Southern white womanhood, the reader is expected to feel for her struggles and sorrows, and millions have.

Personally, I hated Scarlett immediately because we're told that she dislikes books and other women, the two things that have made my life worth living. But I read the book because some society wife writing in a publication too good for her said that she was "every Southern woman"'s idol -- in the late 90s, no less. The book was both eminently throwable and compulsively readable, which was the insult to injury.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:30 AM on September 4, 2018 [8 favorites]

But because she represents Southern white womanhood, the reader is expected to feel for her struggles and sorrows, and millions have.

White women can be horrible as long as they’re about white supremacy? And also raped into submission, I guess?

Today feels like a good day for a meteor.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:57 AM on September 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

The best example I can think of a female TV character who got similar fan respect as her male equivalent is Carmela Soprano, Tony's wife on The Sopranos. Her epic explosion at Tony in the season 4 finale "Whitecaps" wouldn't have the impact it did if the viewers dismissed Carmela as a harpie or whatever. "Whitecaps" is often considered one of the best, if not the best, episodes, and it's a Carmela heavy episode.

It's relevant when discussing Skylar White, because I'm certain the Breaking Bad writers were looking at Carmela when they rewote Skylar due to fan hostility.
posted by riruro at 8:59 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oh, there are lots of examples from movies, half of the careers of Bette Davis' and Joan Crawford just for a start, but then I'm not entirely sure where the line is being drawn for "anti-heroes" as Jenny doesn't really seem to fit the definition I'd have since The L Word isn't really her narrative like Breaking Bad is Walters or Mad Men is tied to Don.

There are shows like The Good Wife which charts the character on something of a declining arc of moral value, Empire, Damages, some of Shondra Rimes shows, among others all chart some complex moral actions from the women in the shows that aren't Dexter level anti-heroic, but then there is perhaps something to be said in those kinds of bleak anti-heroics being more a providence for white men as it better fits their place in the world. That element may not be absolutely necessary, but it often serves a purpose.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:09 AM on September 4, 2018

Nancy on Weeds.
posted by signal at 10:28 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I always thought Don was obviously an irredeemable shitperson, but was portrayed in a glorifying light because the central thesis of the show is showing all of these shitty people from their despicable era in the sick glory they gave themselves back then for being so shitty. Half the struggle of even watching that show is choking down your own rage and hatred of these horrible people, before you give up and ask for the millionth time "how did this show get made, why did people watch it, and how was it ever declared good?"
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:54 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Going back to TFA, there's a link in it to something that Todd VanDerWerff said in the A.V. Club... only, oddly, it actually went to something from Alyssa Rosenberg wrote in Think Progress about TVdW's AVC comment, and which originally linked to the comment, but the link is broken because of AVC's move to Kinja. Here's the comment itself. It's a very pointed comment about how many commenters thrive on a combination of snarky hot takes and a pointed refusal to engage with the subject in question (in this case, an episode of Girls that TVdW reviewed).
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:13 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

She’s comparing Mad Men to a show that literally introduced a gun in act 1 and then just let it disappear

Wait: Pete had a rifle in his office (he returned the chip-and-dip and got it) that was never Chekhov-ized either.
posted by jetsetsc at 1:03 PM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

I loved Nurse Jackie. It was an incredible show, more people should watch it. All kinds of flawed, there. I loved watching her interactions with people and just how clever she was and how that affected everything.
posted by h00py at 5:57 AM on September 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

That you’re comparing Camp from the 70s to Serious Drama from the golden age of tv and then smugly implying that perhaps all these women today just don’t have “it” tells me that, at best, you have fantastically missed the point in your eagerness to blame women.

I'll admit that I find the point rather difficult to detect. However, the claim in the closing paragraphs that "our minds have helplessly yielded to the idea that white men, alone, deserve compassion in the grey areas or at the edges of their humanity" seems important to the argument. Has Third Wave Feminism made Powerful White Men more powerful than they were in the 70s? That would be an uncomfortable conclusion, surely.

If our minds now yield where once they didn't, it doesn't seem unreasonable to wonder what might have changed. The article itself doesn't offer any insights.
posted by falcon at 6:45 AM on September 5, 2018

If we're looking to make sure the comparison is more equal, we can look at the audience's different reactions to Don and Betty on the same show.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:33 AM on September 5, 2018

Jenny versus Don is a "poor" comparison because Jenny isn't a female Don Draper. The point is that female Don Draper doesn't get written because women aren't allowed to be Don Drapers, neither in fiction nor real life. The ways in which women are barred from being Don Draper is a major theme that Man Men explores through characters like Peggy and Joan.

As a side note, I love Mad Men and Breaking Bad. I think Don and Walter are super compelling characters. I don't want them to disappear from my screen, I want a world in which female characters are allowed to be as compelling/despicable/complex/nuanced.
posted by Emily's Fist at 5:16 PM on September 6, 2018 [2 favorites]