*Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen Breaking Bad, especially season 2*
Unavoidably Outdoors
Last weekend I went out to Central Park to watch my friend perform in one of I'm-sure scores of free Shakespeare productions, this one a fairly traditional Richard III. A couple summers ago I assistant directed a production of Much Ado About Nothing in a park in West Philly, so I've observed first hand many of the typical challenges associated with an outdoor production-- mainly that it's actually, unavoidably outdoors.
Nothing in outdoor spaces wants you to pay attention to Shakespeare. It's hot, it's dusty and dirty and grassy and buggy and sunburny and windy, it's noisy and distracting. It's very hard to drop into the language and world of the play as an actor, let alone an audience member, when a toddler is chasing a puppy in the far background of an important love scene, or an ice cream truck drives by cranking its creepy kiddie catch-song right as Beatrice is asking her finally-mutually-exposed lover Benedick to kill his best friend for her.
I was quick to notice the actors who understood how to play the language (and how to hold it in their bodies) in this particular New York City park, which, unlike West Philly, is quite huge and heavily populated. It's right in the middle of a metropolis, where the competition with 400 year old words includes traffic sounds from Central Park West, bicyclists and walkers from a main park path, and loud and probably-a-little-drunk wiffle ball players maybe half a dozen yards away, to name just a few. I was sitting on the ground in the dirt and it was heat-wave hot. I'm usually all about focusing on the 400 year old words. I love them. Especially Richard III. But as much as I sympathized with the red-faced bellowing thespians, my friend notwithstanding, this particular day was not really my day to watch or hear much Shakespeare.
Of course these park conditions get a little bit closer than most indoor productions to how it was when actors were first performing the text; Richard III was likely first performed in 1591. Most theatres had no roofs, most performers had to make themselves understood, had to throw their voices and shape their bodies large, far above the din of the crowd, who behaved much more like the rowdiest of sportsgoers than modern turn-off-your-cell-phones-and-unwrap-your-candies-before-we-dim-the-lights audiences. Doing Shakespeare in the park now becomes an act of reaching back in time, and when it does capture the attention and imagination of an audience, outside, in the world as it is, it can be absolutely magical. It can... when it works; like I said, though, nothing in the park wants it to.
Something I did notice, though, was the very fact of the effort it took; Richard III and many of the other men performing were really shouting to be heard. For this "stage," standing up on rocks and trodding through the grass, to carry any thoughts out to us, most of the men had to shout, had to gesture large, had to take as much space as possible to hold our attention, had to shake off psychological realism and enter the space of epic proportions, life and death, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. It made me think about the psychological complexity/intimacy of the Richard III of the play, who, assuming (rightly, I suppose) that no one would understand or love him, undertakes these machinations that become a kind of shouting-to-be-heard above the din of the world. This man does horribly destructive things so that he can be seen, so he can be known. These actors, trying to rise above a world that does not want for you to be made intelligible, metatheatrically reenact that existential situation.
Difficult Men Shouting
A stray thought-- men shouting isn't exactly something I think most people want, or encourage, in the non-theatrical world. It's usually pretty trauma/flight-or-fight-triggering, especially for someone who's been through any kind of physical or emotional abuse. Men shouting are usually scary, or at least make everyone go tense. Any guy who's losing his shit tends to, in reality, off the stage, make the situation worse. His audience immediately stops listening, loses the ability to understand, and tends to react to what they see, not hear, which is a threat. His impotence is highlighted, not his strength. On stage or on screen, though, shouting can be highly glorified.
I've been rewatching Breaking Bad in preparation for the final half of season 5, as well as introducing my lady to the show. Something about seeing Walter White lie to and manipulate his wife, especially in Season 2, echoed backwards for me to Richard III. It reminded me that this particular genre of story, of watching a bad man do bad things so bad it's good, has a pretty long track record of success.
Right now, as it's been observed many many places, particularly in the recently-published novel Difficult Men, we're in a kind of golden age of television, and predominantly it's been of stories about anti-hero men who inspire provocation, ambivalence, pity, sympathy, and, ultimately, moral disgust or at least unease, as they fall from whatever high-ish ground they had to doing worse and worse things in more and more desperate ways, in many cases shouting, actually or metaphorically, to be heard or understood. Dick the Shit has a blood brother in Francis Underwood from House of Cards. He has a lot of cousins, too, in Walter White, Don Draper, Gregory House, Tony Soprano, to name a few. We love to watch these guys be bad.
A lot has been made of the rise of these shows and their antiheroes with the twin blows to the American psyche of 9/11 and the Great Recession, and that a shift in our culture and way of life, a toppling of men in positions of unquestioned dominance or perfect control, a loss of faith in our governments and financial institutions, in capitalism itself, all male-dominated enterprises to a disgusting degree, has lead to many people searching for that control, or yearning to see it crumble, in the stories we tell ourselves. Anti-heroes, then, work outside the systems of society, since those are untrustworthy and failing. They know better. They know what to do.
Richard III is all about having control, or the illusions he creates to make it look like, at least to the audience, that he has it. He addresses us constantly for the first part of the play, telling us his plans, how things are or are not going according to them, and how he'll exact his revenge. We don't get the direct address from Walter White or Don Draper, but we do see them jockey constantly for a sense of command of their world.
We tell ourselves the stories we wish we could see in our own lives, so the theory goes.
Everybody Cries
I don't deny that this smacks true to me in my own life. Throughout college, when I was feeling particularly out of control of my own life, especially my own feelings, I was pretty obsessed with House, even though it tended frequently to wobble into bad melodrama or recycle a lot of similar plot devices or even witty quips. But there was something about the cynical Machiavellian Dr. House, who always was one step ahead, who always could see what others couldn't, who always knew how to knock the right billiard balls together to sink 'em one after another, that I deeply envied. By identifying with him, I was almost able to, in this fantasy world, live his life, and, subsequently, feel in control. It felt cool to sometimes think as cynically, "Everybody lies," to remove myself from trusting humanity. Even as Dr. House did worse and worse things, as a drug addict and a hurt, angry person, I felt alongside him, and I saw the world he saw, because it let me be in control of it. I started to wonder if being wounded or broken was a prerequisite to being a genius, that maybe I needed my pain in order to be good at something. I think a lot of depressed people hold onto their depression for that reason, for that feeling of "at least I know this, at least I can control this."
I'm not sure if it was exactly that subway ride home after the play or another time soon after when I heard this, but I remember being on a train and listening to a baby start to cry, and I started thinking about how uncanny it was, to connect the two. The baby is really trying to make herself understood. She needs food or burping or whatever it is, and crying is the only way she knows how to signal to her parents that something's up.
I know I know absolutely nothing about children right now and I'm sure there are plenty of times when there's no reason at all for the crying (sometimes in life we get the same way as adults, I'd argue), but anyway, the thought stuck, and it made me feel like maybe all this shouting to be heard is really a call to be understood, that something that these men need is not being met, but they don't know how to get it. The world is too big, there's too much noise, too much competition, and the only way to get anyone's attention is to cry out.
"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
An Event Horizon
Then I watched a bunch of Breaking Bad, Dick the Shit still in my head.
I saw methed-out-of-his-mind drug dealer Tuko beat the shit out of his lackey in the final episode of season 1 of Breaking Bad/the first moment of season 2. Tuko, here, to me, is a kind of grotesquified signifier of masculine rage. He is, in some ways, the most manly a man could be, if all men were were shows of strength and viciousness. Tuko is high off Walter White's super-meth, and when he's remotely crossed, in any way, he goes apeshit. He kills a man with his fists over an off-handed comment. Walt & Jesse witness this, and Tuko says "You're done," before leaving them. They drive away, terrified, understandably, for their lives.
The first thing Walt when he gets home is turn on the TV. He drones out, doesn't even hear his wife calling for him repeatedly. She has to literally walk up to him to snap him out of it. It's a funny moment in a slew of episodes full of them, because it says a lot about how we use consuming things like TV to drown out our own horrors. Or, at least, I know I'm guilty of that. Friend hurt my feelings? Watch House. Feel justified that humanity is bullshit.
Then Walt proceeds, still in a state of shock, to go over to his pregnant wife in the kitchen who's about to fix him some chicken, and he hugs her from behind, and then starts to kiss her, and then starts to sexually assault her. Skyler goes from laughing off the weird mood he's in, to asking him to knock it off, to getting upset, to essentially shouting him off her, as she smacks her head on the refrigerator. What makes matters weirdly worse is she has some kind of green goop on her face, like for a facial or something, and it adds an extra layer of strange humour/discomfort to an already odd, tense, vague, but also very not vague moment.
The first time I saw this episode I honestly don't remember feeling horrified about Walt. For a show that is all about moral ambiguity and Walt's downfall, this moment for me was a line that felt returnable-from, not the event horizon of morality that Walt seems to constantly toe. I can intellectualize his desperate grab for some kind of sexual/life control after a moment of witnessing sheer out of control terror.
Skyler follows Walt post-assault out to the pool where he wanders off to and tells him, bewildered, exasperated, but sympathetic, too, "I know you're confused and frustrated and terrified" (she's talking about him having cancer) "but you cannot take it out on me." Walt, silently, seems to agree.
In the Trunk
Rewatching it after a few years of knowing some very dear and close women who have had experiences with sexual or physical abuse, I look at the episode, and Walt, differently. The moral ambiguity that I think the show crafts very wisely feels a little thinner here, to me. Not that I think the show should/could've done anything differently, and as we go into the final half of the season I expect Walter White to get every bit of comeuppance for the evils he's done, the bad he's become.
But violence has a rhythm, abuse has repercussions, in the literal sense of the word, reverberations. You can watch it dramatized in Breaking Bad: Tuko beats up his guy, Walt has to process that, has to put that somewhere. Violence breeds violence. Men shouting, needing to be heard. Walt can't tell Skyler the horrors of what he's seen, he couldn't bear the shame at this point in the series, but somehow he still needs to be understood. What pain we could all excise by just saying what needs to be said.
I wrote down notes about this as I was watching these episodes, thinking about this post, and then I kept watching. An episode or two later, Tuko kidnaps Walt, and one of the weirdest, most out-of-character-classic-psychological-gestures happened. Walt is locked in the trunk, dizzy and sick out of his mind, ostensibly because his cancer is getting worse. Walt has a kind of dream/hallucination in the trunk for a few moments before it opens. And what, oh what, could it be he dreams of, in his moment of life-threatening crisis?
A heavenly vision of Skyler, smiling, beaming down on him with love and forgiveness, repeating, again and again, "I understand."
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