The past 20 or so years of television have been lauded as a “Golden Age” in terms of quality, which moved television toward putting the audience in the shoes of morally compromised people. In many of the top-tier programs during this period, the protagonists have usually been antiheroes characterized as white men frustrated by their circumstances. For these characters, the world isn’t working the way they think it should. They’re not the rock star, football hero, billionaire playboy, or even husband or father they believed they would be. Instead they slowly realize their lives to be pathetic and their relationships as not everything they could be. They’re working jobs they hate, either waiting a table or slaving in a cubicle with a white collar and a clipboard, wondering what happened to their dreams and why they can’t be happy. And thus, the stories become power fantasies where angry white men attempt to break free in the worst possible ways from a paradigm they believe is not of their own making.
Because if playing by the rules only gets you so far, why bother? If one thinks society, the universe, God, or whatever isn't playing fair, why should one play fair with it? Why not rage against the heavens and let it all burn?
It’s interesting to compare the popularity of this TV formula to the current state of politics. Donald Trump’s rise as a candidate has been built upon support from people who are often white, male, and without college degrees. In surveys, members of this group are more likely to say they’re angry than other demographic groups. They also feel their financial situation is not what they thought it would be when they were younger, and think their current lot in life is a function of circumstances beyond their control instead of wrong choices they may have made.
In short, it’s a group ripe to hear a power fantasy about how life can be made “great again” and things can be the way they should be, if only we’d do some things in the worst possible ways.
From Andy Greenwald at the now defunct Grantland:
I think the most horrifying part of Breaking Bad may be that Walt, at his core, didn’t really transform at all. It wasn’t greed or generosity or cancer or fear that fueled this reign of death and destruction. It was resentment. Seething, burning resentment, the kind that forms not due to poor treatment but due to an innate knowledge that you, the aggrieved, are better than said treatment, better than everyone who has somehow gotten the better of you over the years ... Every moment Walt spent in front of a classroom he was thinking about how beneath him it all was. He was a genius; he was meant to be a millionaire, not this castrated cross between stepping stone and doormat.
If one looks at some of the most critically acclaimed dramas in recent memory, at the core of many of them are questions surrounding what it means to be a man. What defines manhood? What does it mean to be a “provider,” or a husband, or a father? And what happens when the privileges and fantasies of being a man meet the realities of the modern world?
In many ways Mad Men was about how flawed the idea of the “Alpha Male” is, since what people think of most when it comes to the lead character isn’t who Don Draper is within his own story. The personality is a creation, as much a fraud as some of the advertising pitches bandied about in board rooms, and it’s surrounded by relics of a flawed past which informs our present. The series shows the fantasy of walking into a bar, sitting in a fine suit, drinking an Old Fashioned, and having any woman in the joint be so enamored she’s ready to drop her panties. But how does being a womanizing alcoholic fit with being a father to Sally Draper, or a husband to Betty or Megan, or ultimately with the idea of sustained happiness?
Conservatives usually run campaigns based on a “return” to the way things used to be by appealing to simulacra that never existed. In effect, instead of offering a vision of the future, or dealing with the realities of the present, they appeal to nostalgia and restoration of an imagined past. Somehow they're going to make the country into the TV version of 1950s and 1960s America again. Because back then, America was great—except if you were a woman, or black, or gay, or poor, or any other persuasion deemed undesirable (i.e., people rarely seen on TV during those decades, or only in a very limited capacity when shown at all).
Of course, the fantasy is as much bullshit as Don Draper’s self-delusions, but for those white males angry about how their lives turned out it might be easier to believe a lie—or to believe if only some sort of “other” didn’t have their imaginary hand in their pockets, they could be somebody.
A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that … I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.
—Donald Trump, in a 1989 interview with NBC News
Part of what’s made the antihero popular in television is that it forces the audience to grapple with the morality of murderers, adulterers, drug dealers, or worse, while finding the behaviors and actions of the people involved “cool.” With The Sopranos, the audience sympathizes with Tony Soprano from the outset because he has a nagging wife, an ungrateful mother, and a son and daughter that he loves just like every other father does. His frustrations are some of the same frustrations many American men have experienced—except he also gets to beat the shit out of and kill people that don’t show proper respect, fuck other women, and make lots of money in illegal ways, too.
Tony has pride, feels responsibility for his family and friends, and has a capacity for violence to defend what’s his and take from others. He has both realistic frailties and desired qualities.
From Brett Martin at ShortList:
“Here’s a guy with all that power, yet completely emasculated by his mum and wife,” FX executive, and later head of Fox Broadcasting, Peter Liguori said of Tony. “Guys watched and thought, ‘I’d like to be the boss, I’d like to have big balls. I’d like to make all the calls and do things according to my rules.’ But also, ‘Man, he’s a lot like me, because even when I am the boss, the second I go home, I’m Hazel.’” (Women also watched, and often found themselves with an equally conflicted set of responses to Tony, turning James Gandolfini into one of TV’s more unlikely sex symbols.)
And viewers of the Third Golden Age knew what it was like to live in a time when questions of male power – how and when to use it – was very much in the air, socially and politically. The administration of George W Bush, with its crotch-waggling swagger, seemed to boil all issues down to a simple question: were you a red-blooded, US man or some kind of French girl? The US – and its allies – would have good reason to wonder what was being done in its name by the beast laying deep in its body politic.
And that brings us back to the question of why Donald Trump appeals to so many Americans. It’s because he’s selling a fantasy—just as much as any TV show—of reclaiming status and power directly to those who think it’s slipping away.
