a belated UnREAL post for Valentine's Day

[pocochina]

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

Comments

[waltzmatildah]

I haven't seen Man Men so I can't comment on the Don Draper comparison, but people have been saying Rachel = Walt??!!!!

Okay then.

[pocochina]

Heh, yeah. In fairness, a lot of it seems to come from the producers. They seem to have thought (if so, quite reasonably) that no matter what the narrative did, people would refuse to see a young woman as an antihero and so the point would be missed. And I think BB was the easiest comparison to access in some ways because it was the most recent of these types of stories and because the basic setup of "person starts doing X under pressure but the viewer is made painfully aware that they want to do X" is more or less the same

[sunclouds33]

I agree that Rachel is far more a Don than a Walt (or IMO, as I argue below, a Peggy). However, IMO, it's Mad Men (the past)- UnREAL (the present) - Dollhouse (future) on a continuum. I agree a big Rachel/Walt comparison is that the basic setup of "person starts doing X under pressure but the viewer is made painfully aware that they want to do X" However even there, the pressure to do a morally objectionable job under financial coercion is actually more universal than Walt or Rachel would like to believe. Walt's impending lung cancer death and Rachel's debt to Everlasting is extreme unusual circumstances

[pocochina]

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......She's the Smart Quirky Girl who is making the Bimbo Cheerleader Sluts look like morons and hoping beat her own Elliots

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.

[ceciliaj]

For me? I accept. Seriously, I feel like this post is the perfect Valentine's Day present. I especially love the insight about Rachel being the perpetual mentee, for I am also a perpetual mentee. Anyway you're awesome.

[ceciliaj]

Also this whole paragraph is just, like, ridiculously smart:

This lifestyle is more ideological than Don realizes. The American Way(TM) of the early '60s was in no small part a pervasive and intimate repudiation of communism. And Don Draper could only have happened to the world under that particular implementation of capitalism, where he can collect wealth without being restricted by his class background. But he's unusual in his success - indeed, to stop being working-class and get on the road to riches, he had to give up his own name and take on someone else's. Sterling Cooper - or, more accurately, the clients they work so hard to enrich - will lead to the exploitative and unsustainable economic situation of the twenty-first century. Rachel, born into an “upper-middle-class” family of similar social standing as Betty and her children, is broke. While the vast majority of millenials don't come from a comparable social background, her experience of growing up with the belief that education and work will lead to prosperity and then

[pocochina]

ahaha, thank you, I am thrilled to hear that that paragraph even made sense outside of my own head. But I think that dramas with this good a grasp on class, wealth, and the distinction between them are pretty rare so I wanted to try and touch on it. (Comedies slightly less so, for some reason? But still.)

[pocochina]

[sunclouds33]

[pocochina]

[sunclouds33]

Small correction, Lane Pryce was the work colleague who committed suicide, not Duck Phillips.

This is wonderful. I have a problem in general with too much lumping of the socially sanctioned Rachel and Don with outlaw Tony Soprano or Walter White. To a great extent, I think it's a way for the audience to claim some moral superiority that they don't have. Most of the educated, wealthier audience of UnREAL or Mad Men wouldn't join the mafia or deal meth but they either would jump at the chance to be a producer of one of the most highly rated reality shows or a millionaire advertising creative director or it's already their job. MM and UnREAL particularly challenges its audience to hold a mirror up to themselves, instead of to feel EVEN BETTER about themselves or smug about the 2000s vs. the 1960s, as the problems captured in UnREAL indicate in present-day media land

[sunclouds33]

However, I think there's also a critique of our current Gilded Age in seeing how non-heroic, capitalist characters like the SC crew still felt a societal pressure for partners to forgo Christmas bonuses to give the staff bonuses in a tight fiscal year or for partners to try to retain more staff after Lucky Strike leaving by putting up capital contributions from their own fortunes or for characters like Peggy to feel righteously upset that their personal career plans weren't taken into consideration in an agency merger or for the partners to feel a little guilty and defensive about their choice to merge with McCann even though it would create redundancies on their staff. It's the old, "Republicans want to live in the 1950s while Democrats wants to work in the 1950s" canard. IMO, the UnREAL network world is more socially liberal but more economically cut-throat than the MM world and I think that's right. Corporations have been even more anti-worker and there's an even bigger disparity in wealth now than in the '60s. A Rachel can't even

[sunclouds33]

There's a direct parallel that there's something mentally and emotionally rotten in Rachel so it's not wrong to assume that she needs therapy. However, the way that her mother and Jeremy went about it is its own kind of sick. Meanwhile, there's also something deeply unhealthy in how Peggy entered into her affair with Pete in S1 and how she convinced herself that she wasn't pregnant until she was delivering the kid. However to a great extent, Peggy and Rachel absorb the sickness of their society to become their own mental illness which society than pathologizes them for. And the sickness continues in the end of S1- with Jeremy/Olive trying to get Rachel somehow committed and Peggy actually being committed to a mental asylum. Don and Quinn offer similar advice to slough off the familial concern, abusive familial control, wrong diagnosis or correct diagnosis all in one

[pocochina]

Rachel is very meta on this level. Like, part of what's wrong with her probably is just a lifetime of being told that something's wrong with her. But Quinn just telling her that pain doesn't exist is another way of manipulating and controlling her.