Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television by Michael Mario Albrecht

Author:Michael Mario Albrecht [Albrecht, Michael Mario]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409469728
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Breaking Bad, Hung, and Masculinity in the Great Recession

The effects of the Great Recession were at their devastating peak in 2008 and 2009. The collapse of the housing market presaged the near-collapse of the financial market, the subsequent failure of the automobile industry, and unemployment rates were at their highest levels since the Great Depression. Discourses of economic crisis abounded in journalistic and popular media and circulated conterminously with discourses of masculinity in crisis. These narratives suggest that the recession reconfigured expectations about domestic financial security, and subsequently expectations about masculinity. The middleclass excesses that provided the backbone of American domesticity from the Second World War until the new millennium were seemingly untenable at the end of the first decade of the new century. While the myth of the male breadwinner remained strong in the popular imagination, the reality of a single person being able to support a comfortable middleclass existence was much less achievable by the dawn of the financial collapse. The inability of many middle-aged men to provide for their families as their parents did evoked a sense of cultural anxiety that proliferated in popular culture by the end of the 2000s. In this chapter, I examine two television shows that derive their premise from a middle-aged man who is suddenly unable to provide for his family. In Breaking Bad, which debuted in 2008, an Albuquerque chemistry teacher discovers that he has terminal cancer but does not have enough money to pay for treatment or to provide for his family after his death. Hung premiered in 2009 and focuses on a Detroit gym teacher whose house burns down, and his wife leaves him for an affluent doctor.

In both Breaking Bad and Hung, the male protagonists becomes so frustrated with their respective inability to provide for their families that they resort to illegal activities as an alternate source of income. Breaking Bad’s Walter White uses his extraordinary knowledge of chemistry to produce methamphetamines, and in an incredibly unsubtle metaphor for a man stripped of his masculinity, Hung’s Ray Drecker becomes a prostitute with an exceptionally large penis that invokes the title of the show. Both television shows are set in areas that greatly suffered during the Great Recession and in the years immediately preceding it. Albuquerque was one of the Sun Belt cities that experienced a tremendous housing boom that busted in the months prior to the recession, while Detroit is the symbol of Rust Belt manufacturing and the automobile industry, which has flailed for decades and which almost collapsed completely in 2009. As schoolteachers, both men existed in the readily identifiable comforts of the suburban middleclass; however, their newfound illicit professions necessitate that they move between the friendly confines of the suburbs to grittier urban locations. Their move to the suburbs evokes a frontier narrative of the American Dream—a narrative that suggests a departure from civilization during hard times, and one deeply imbricated with an American version of masculinity. The similarities between the characters of White and Drecker are striking enough that other scholars have noted the resemblance.

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