Earlier this summer I went on a quasi-“date” with someone I had hit it off with during a conference a few weeks prior. The night went horribly, I mean one of the most cringe experiences I have ever had. How bad you ask? Bad enough that I resorted to asking questions like, “What’s your favorite movie?” This grown ass man in his late thirties answered Stepbrothers. Yikes. Little did I know: it is possible to completely bomb that question and there are people out there that genuinely do not “like” movies. Even worse, he told me that he doesn’t believe in rewatching movies!! It was that fateful night I discovered that I had a “dealbreaker” - people that don’t like movies. This was ironic because my question was prompted by the fact that my close friend and next door neighbor was at home watching Fight Club. Now if there is any movie that rewards rewatching, it’s fuckin’ FIGHT CLUB! Needless to say, the date ended shortly after that and I didn’t talk to him again.
Anyway, Fight Club is a satire on masculinity, duh. However, because of the “twist” its satirical ethos is only evident upon rewatch. This essay really isn’t about Fight Club, don’t worry. However, what I love about Fight Club most is something you discover when you rewatch it - the inversion of Helena Bonham Carter’s character, Marla. On the first watch, her character plays into the stereotype of the “bitchy girlfriend.” She just doesn’t understand the important stuff that Ed Norton’s character is doing! She just wants to fuck Tyler Durden! She is short-tempered and prone to mood swings - she doesn’t seem to have much depth. However, when you rewatch the film knowing that Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are the same person, that the “Narrator” is genuinely, deeply, mentally-ill, Marla is vindicated. Instead, Marla comes off as a flawed yet sympathetic partner, someone that is supportive towards Norton, given the way Ed/Tyler can “change” on a dime, fucking her one minute and treating her as obsessed scum the next. She is the only sympathetic character in the film. On that end, Fight Club is a feminist film disguised as a sendup to alpha male masculinity.
Enter Breaking Bad. I’m currently working through my fifth (?) rewatch - it’s like an annual ritual for me. Like a good book (I think this show is literature, but that’s a discussion for another essay), each time I rewatch the series I appreciate something new. I wanted to write a little something on the similarities between Breaking Bad and Fight Club in terms of their subversive feminist protagonists. In other words, Im talking about vindicating Skyler White.
Perhaps you are aware that Skyler White is an almost universally “hated” character, that people think she is a “bitch” wife that doesn’t support or understand the complexities of Walter White’s behavior (sound familiar?). Anna Gunn, the actress that plays Sklyer even wrote an essay for the New York Times defending the character. But like Marla, Skyler is not only supportive and sympathetic, but an anchor that audiences can depend on to track the moral decay of the protagonist. Throughout the series Walt attempts to “contain” his evil deeds either through lying or murder. In many ways, the series is a testament to the power of words to manipulate. Walt continuously manipulates through words, rather than deeds: asking his loved ones to trust him, always offering “promises” that things will be okay, lying about where he is or has been. As a dutiful wife, Skyler wants to believe Walt, even as it becomes more and more obvious that he is manipulating her - that he cannot “contain” his immorality any longer.
Skyler’s inevitable conscription begins in the third season. In the ninth episode, Walt utters one of the most famous lines of the series: “I am the one who knocks” but I think a more important and powerful statement is Skyler proclaiming that “someone has to protect this family from the one that protects this family.” Earlier in the episode Walt decides to move back in, forcing Skyler to call the cops at the same time she is unable to explain to the police the true reason for her fear. This is the point when Skyler gives up, so to speak. She decides its more important to preserve Walt Jr.’s conception of his father, and her false yet unified family, than attempt to go into “battle” with Walt - a smart move given she how little she knows, at this point, about the extent of Walter’s misdeeds. And in that moment Skyler passes the point of no return - she breaks bad.
In the next essay I’d like to further explore the theme of contamination and containment while also vindicating one of the mosts divisive episodes of the series: Fly (which is also the subsequent episode of season three).
It’s funny, it was just a week or so ago, I was going through some old boxes of books, and found photographs of an old bedroom — on the edge of one of them I could see the corner of a poster with the letters ‘TON’ and ‘CARTER’, and for a second I didn’t know what it was .. and then realised it was a Fight Club poster (I think this might be the only time that I had a poster of a film), which I had long ago forgotten or considered that I even had. I first saw the film at the cinema, maybe I was about 17 years old, and it had given me such a thrill, and left me in some kind of unusually way afterwards. I recall my heart thumping out of my chest as I was finding out what had been happening, and having flashbacks and visions of previous scenes as at the same time the film carried on, seeming to pick up speed. The Marla character aspect I recall having a distinct part of this… I mean they showed the clips of the ‘cctv’, dragging no one part, some more obvious ‘fight’ parts maybe, but I recall scenes between Marla and him in the kitchen, grey light outside, and earlier in the film when he was mentioning ‘a copy of a copy of a copy’, .. how that seemed thin and frayed, but as watching the film from the outside, the realisation, it seemed the opposite ~ something becoming deeper, .. (I just heard the words ‘saved by the creature that I create’, glancing to my left, an old copy of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that was in the box that I mentioned earlier). I think at the time, or just afterwards, I was reading a book of Poe’s verse, and came across ‘A Dream Within a Dream’ .. I wrote this out, and put it up on the wall — I think that was a different wall though.
(I haven’t seen even one minute of Breaking Bad by the way, but I decided to type this out .. (not that I have anything against it, I don’t know anything about it. I for quite a few years seem to have mainly watched older films, and not many more modern shows or films ~ I suppose there are a lot more older films than new). I had just poured a coffee, saw this, and it seemed like a good time to start typing.. although the coffee is I suppose getting a little cold) …
Either way, after a few more sips of the barely warm coffee, I will just add a little more here .. . I think because I had seen the film at the cinema, I didn’t watch it again until the DVD came out, and maybe I would be seeing scenes, visions of the film, here and there in mind, for months afterwards. To watch the film again, and to see the scenes with Marla, was something I was really wanting to do, and interested to see. I recalled this when reading your essay here, when you mentioned her.
At the time I hadn’t considered the film to be anything to do with the title, which at the time to me seemed to link to the line about ‘not mentioning..’ / it seemed to be a good time for me to watch the film (I think around the time, maybe a while after, I found a copy of Bob Dylan’s Dont Look Back — there is a part in there where he says a line about going insane, something like ‘before I eventually go in - sane..’ and the camera reel kind of falls or goes a bit strange, cuts abruptly. Maybe the sound just cuts a little as he says that. .I suppose I was seeing insanity as something other than what insanity could be, more a kind of change, on the run, and then not on the run from anything for a while, ‘..you reappear, you find you got nothing to fear..’ a relief as those buildings fall. I’m not sure if this makes too much sense, if any, but the coffee is colder … follow the highway signs.
Anyway, years passed by the door, minutes turned into hours, and hen back again … and I recall mentioning this film to people I met along the way, and it seemed quite a few had never seen it. I watched it with one or two people here and there, and they hardly seemed to react at all, meanwhile my heart would be thumping again as the scene of what was happening came into view. Maybe their hearts were thumping too, it’s hard to tell, I suppose. It seemed many people hadn’t watched the film, or even as they were watching it, just thought it was a weird film about fighting. Maybe it is.
Whilst I am here, I might as well keep typing — try and draw some kind of conclusion on the wall.. Other posters I had up there at this time were: Albert Einstein, with the line “Peace can not be kept by force, only by understanding’, Bob Dylan 1965 playing bass guitar in the studio, and an image of a model of ancient Rome.
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nm.