a belated UnREAL post for Valentine's Day
UnREAL: quite possibly the best new show of 2015. All of the praise that it's gotten has been well-earned. The one thing sticking point I have is the repeated claim that Rachel Goldberg is “the female Walter White.”
Now, I have nothing against the idea of a female Walter White character. Walt's comedic doppelganger was a woman; some day soon he'll ( Read more... )
Now, I have nothing against the idea of a female Walter White character. Walt's comedic doppelganger was a woman; some day soon he'll ( Read more... )
Obviously it makes a lot of sense that they took that approach. The show never would've been taken seriously if it hadn't been sold just right, and they made it work, so good for them! But to dig deeper into the character, I think that the Don Draper comparison is more useful.
I don't want to oversell this because I feel like MM is kind of like The Wire, if you haven't watched it, it's probably for a reason? But if you're on the fence about checking it out sometime, it is definitely not overrated. Especially if you like both UnREAL and Breaking Bad.
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However even then, Rachel started off the series with unusual coercion with the debt from her breakdown, but that's hardly the beginning of her story on how she became not just an Everlasting producer, but the best producer. But the start of BB *was* the beginning of Walt as a meth dealer. Rachel became THE BEST Everlasting producer and Don became a salesman with its most optimum prestige progression into advertising out of more ordinary financial coercion- universal pressure to take the most high paying job possible and then, as Bobbi Barett says, to become the person that does that*. Rachel's debt to the show pre-series or Bert Cooper blackmailing Don in S3 with an OR ELSE contract/threat are more extreme than most people face, but it's not the start of the origin story but a consequence of making yourself both indispensable and vulnerable from the same set of strength/dysfunction.
I think the creators' Rachel = Walt story is a little clue on expected themes. Walt's choices were absolutely the nerd's revenge on the jocks, the DEA. the strong drug dealers, even Elliot, a scientist who wasn't as smart as Walt but was more socially skilled and thus, got The Money and The Girl. It's a high school story for a guy who didn't make it out of high school. I think Rachel has a little of that too and there could possibly be more, especially as we learn about her childhood and how her parents shaped her to interact with the world socially. She's the Smart Quirky Girl who is making the Bimbo Cheerleader Sluts look like morons and hoping beat her own Elliots, the former classmates at Sarah Lawrence who got producer jobs for news programs that their mothers, for starters on the contest of Making TV History. Or why Rachel was kind to Faith in the hopes of using her to aggrandize her reputation long-term.
I don't think that element of revenge exists with Don. Don doesn't have that type of "Who were you in high school?" mentality, for starters because he dropped out early in high school and he was socially isolated from the wider world as a teen as a Whorehouse Untouchable in a mining town. Don also doesn't consciously dwell on himself as downtrodden like Rachel and Walt do and actually correctly sees himself as a likely target for the downtrodden because of everything he has. Dick Whitman peed in the trunks of the cars that he parked because he was too much of an Untouchable to use the roadhouse restroom; Don Draper sanguinely tells Connie Hilton that a parking attendant is probably doing the same thing to all of the cars parked at the Sterling's country club, including his car. When Don extracts revenge, it's as his position of both nerd and jock to control everything to maintain his position at the top- trick Roger into the oyster/martini lunch and then, surprise stair climbing contest, out-drink Ted and out-write the margarine commercial.
*Ironically, teaching is a "noble profession" unlike advertising or producing reality TV but Walt didn't become a high school chemistry teacher out of some noble calling. It was also an economic choice to provide for his family even though it wasn't what he wanted to- it's just Walt didn't achieve to the most high paying version but instead just fell back into a job that paid some of the bills. The other day, I read a great analogy of Walt/Breaking Bad to Mr. Holland's Opus as an opposite-contrast on how a genius deals with the vagaries of life putting him in a low-paid high school teacher position instead of in the prestige professions that they angrily believed they were entitled to- discovering new science, composing beautiful music.
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Oh, that is great, ITA. I've assumed that Rachel probably did pretty well socially throughout her life just because she's so good at working people. But regardless of how she would come across to an observer, Rachel would feel like an unfairly overlooked Smart Quirky Girl.
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