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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • GlitterInfection@lemmy.worldtomovies@lemm.eeAnyone else?
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    11 months ago

    She isn’t a controlling spouse, she’s a controlling housewife in an exaggerated disappointing version of a post-nuclear American family.

    The show states over and over again that Walt believes a man provides for his family… a necessarily and pointedly gendered role that is central to his entire character’s motivations. Skyler’s nagging is framed exactly in relation to his perceived shortcomings with respect to this gendered expectation.

    In a gay relationship you don’t tend to just mirror straight relationships but the bottom replaces the women, or something. So you can’t just conjure Skyler as a dude and make it make any sense as a family.

    When there are two or more men coming together, usually they all have their own separate careers and plans for life. There is no template gay relationships have to build off of, and having children is way more difficult and complicated. We have to define everything for ourselves.

    None of the tropes that are foundations of Breaking Bad work if you swap the genders of the characters. If walt were a woman nothing she does would make sense to the audience and the treatment from her annoyed husband would be absolute nonsense. Why would he expect her to provide for the family? Why would he expect her to man up? Etc?




  • OP posted to a movies community about Tom Cruise’s narrative troubles, and how he changed them in the eye of the public.

    Your comment recommends two movies that don’t have anything to do with Cruise, and a third, from 1988, with Cruise decades prior to his narrative issues.

    You didn’t offer an explanation of why we should watch the movies, or even mention that Cruise was in the third, which is odd since you mentioned stars from the others. It came off as you ordering us to watch unrelated movies that don’t have anything to do with the article.

    That just makes it feel very out of place. A recommendation list even with Tom in one of the movies feels like a sort of social non-sequitor in this type of thread.

    That gives a similar kind of energy that a dad trying to search for celluloid clitorist couplings has when he mistakenly types into Facebook before confidently hitting Post.

    Had you said:

    “Tom Cruise was excellent in The Color of Money which was a sequel to the wildly successful and excellent The Hustler staring Paul Newman, and despite Cruise’s personal issues later in his career I recommend everyone see both films! Also watch The Sting if you enjoy Newman’s performance in The Hustler since he’s excellent in both.”

    Or something like that, we would have all followed your thought train from the article.












  • The fediverse has a built-in search engine?

    I can only comment on my experience searching for communities in lemmy and people to follow on mastadon, but in both cases I am not sure I’d say “works quite well” would describe my experience.

    But also that’s not what I think OP was talking about.

    They want a search engine for a random fact like google. It’s been long true that you need to add “reddit” to the end of any google search to find the info you needed.

    It’d be nice to have a fediverse alternative.





  • GlitterInfection@lemmy.worldtomovies@lemm.eeAnyone else?
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    1 year ago

    I hear what you are saying, and while I don’t fully agree that she’s inherently unlikable, I understand why you’re saying that you find her to be so. I mostly was asking you to question your assumptions on it, and I used some charged up language that wasn’t meant as a knock at the show.

    To elaborate, what I meant was that the show exaggerates her mannerisms to give Walt motivation rather than to create a fully fleshed out character. She’s not a woman, but a symbol of how men have become emasculated by their wives’ “wearing the pants” in the family. At least early on she’s not much more than a framing device and justification for Walt’s decisions.

    She grows as a character, and ends up having more agency, but only in the confines of Walt’s domination of their lives with his selfishly motivated, and traditionally toxic masculine, choices.

    And I don’t think you meant it this way, but you can’t really easily separate disliking her from being a woman. I don’t mean to imply that you dislike her because she’s a woman, but that her character’s role is to be a controlling wife. It’s an inherently gendered character that relies heavily on preconceptions of what a woman should and shouldn’t be in a relationship with a man who is a main character in a story.

    I think it’s telling that she is considered unlikable enough to even warrant discussing in a show where the main character is a multi-murderer monster who destroyed the lives of everyone he loved, and the main villains include nazis, cartels, lawyers and corporate shills.

    That, for anyone, she’s the most hated character on the show is enough for me to take a minute and question my assumptions on her, at least. So I thought it was worth pushing back on your comment asking you, and others reading, to do the same.


  • GlitterInfection@lemmy.worldtomovies@lemm.eeAnyone else?
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    1 year ago

    Sorry, I should have said that Skyler, the character, did nothing to deserve being disliked. The show was rigged to make you dislike her, in the sense that the storytelling was solely through Walt’s eyes, even in scenes he wasn’t present for.

    But I didn’t say that. Vince Gilligan, creator of the show, said it.

    https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/breaking-bad-vince-gilligan-skyler-white-sexist-backlash-1234754425/

    I also called it a “power fantasy.” The show’s pitch was to show a man turning himself from “Mr. Chips to Scarface.” It’s not a criticism, I loved the show. It took the power fantasy tropes and subverted them frequently. But at its heart that’s what it is.

    If you’re upset that I said that it was about toxic masculinity, then I apologize. That was reductive of me. It explores hegemonic masculinity through the power fantasy trope, and it can be interpreted as either a celebration of or criticism of toxic masculinity depending on how you approach it.

    Plenty of more well reasoned people than I could hope to be have written in depth on the subject. Someone even wrote a book in the subject.

    If you were reacting to thinking I was putting the show down, which I wasn’t intending to do, then my bad. I could have worded it better. I was trying to make the point that it’s both intentional to not like Skyler, and also the obvious wrong take to not like her.