The other day I was struck by an amusing scene in Mad Men, which prompted a part two to my previous blog post. Don comes home from work and sees his brother-in-law William with the sleeves of his blazer rolled up to his elbows, trying to unclog the kitchen sink with a plunger. “Don, don’t worry about this. It’s under control!” assures William. Handyman (in)competency is densely symbolic and little else functions as efficiently to comment upon a character’s masculinity. I had the pleasure of teaching a course in genre and gender in film and television where we witnessed this trope turning up again and again. There’s a unique permutation of this trope in Breaking Bad. It’s worth taking some time to analyze it because it strikes at the heart of Walter White’s problematic masculinity, as well as what cleaves his family apart and makes Skylar appear so adversarial. My argument is best illustrated by first comparing the usage of this trope in another film we explored in class, Unforgiven.   

To help them get a grasp on how this trope works, I recommended my class read Janet Thumim’s seminal article “Maybe he’s tough but he sure ain’t no carpenter’: Masculinity and In/competence in Unforgiven. Her analysis of the film’s various displays of male incompetence, be it in carpentry, gun slinging, or pig farming, reveals how the Western genre and masculinity in general thrive upon public displays of skill and adequacy. This is doubly true in representation: the Western showdown is a show of masculine prowess by the two standing off, a scene for townsfolk peering out their windows as well as the viewers. Eastwood’s film is painstakingly reflexive so that audiences can glimpse some connection between those onscreen icons and their own gender imitation. But what’s most compelling about Thumim’s article is the anomalous correspondence she points out between competence (which signals convincing masculinity) and morality (which marks maturity).

This three-way relationship between masculinity, morality and handyman competence is closely entangled. It’s precisely this non-clarity that gets exploited so cleverly in good drama. Unforgiven’s town Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) seems like an avuncular man with good intentions. He outlaws guns in his town; he tries to minimize bloodshed; he builds himself a house so he can smoke pipe and watch the sunset. The roof on his house leaks like a sieve, however. His poor carpentry skills (‘rough and ready’ as Thumim puts it) mirror his brand of justice: unequal, summary, and corner-cutting. A man who did a finer job cutting the wood shingles on his roof might have shown more sensitivity to the brutal mistreatment of the town’s prostitutes, but Bill’s sadistic, abusive, and borderline racist nature—foreshadowed by his shoddy carpentry work—slowly reveals itself. Subsequently, he comes to his reward without ceremony, at the hands of a bounty hunter in the final scene. His dying words: “I don’t deserve this… to die like this. I was building a house” are rich. The house that would redeem him is a barely glimpsed metaphor, as much for the audience as it is for Little Bill. Though he is as oblivious to his incompetent carpentry as he is to his miscarriage of justice, the relation between them can’t help but spring to mind in his final seconds. The devil’s in the details, as it were. The moral threads of a character can be read in their handiwork, and if the screw’s too loose or too tight, it will manifest as a tic in their masculinity. 

If Little Bill’s screw is too loose, then Breaking Bad’s Walter White’s screw is too tight. The two are comparable in many respects. Their compulsive masculinity has them both tinkering within the handyman trope. And because Breaking Bad is primarily about masculinity, it strategically deploys the Western as its shorthand, both in its picturesque desert vistas and its penchant for showdowns. Take for example the OK Corral standoff toward the end of season five, an Easter-egg referenced on a painting in Hank’s living room. Or consider one of the first heated moments between Walt and his brother-in-law Hank. “My son, my bottle, my house!” Walt roars during his poolside party. At this point, Walt’s had enough of Hank’s storytelling, showboating and making moves to become Walt Jr.’s preferred father-figure. If Walt wants to keep topping up his 16-year-old son’s cup with tequila, he’ll be damned if he’ll let Hank stop him in his own house. The guests fall silent as Walt and Hank glower at each other, both unwilling to budge until Walt Jr. breaks the deadlock by throwing up in the pool. It’s no coincidence that this is the same episode when Walt decides to put on his coveralls and replace his water heater.

The failing water tank has vexed the family since the pilot episode and stands as a reminder to Walt—along with the unkempt swimming pool, the part-time car-washing job, and the veggie bacon—of the countless little things that emasculate him daily. It’s interesting to note how very different Walt is from Little Bill in practicing his handyman competency. When installing the new water heater, Walt notices the floorboards beneath have rotted, so he returns again to the hardware store. As he neatly cuts out all the boards and replaces them, his son enquires what he’s doing. “We’ve got rot,” Walt replies, passing his son a softened plank of wood. “Do you see that?” Walt asks, almost proudly. “Those are fruiting bodies.” “Fruity wha?” says the son, perplexed, less by the term than all the changes that have transpired in his father’s embodiment. This is certainly not the Walt of earlier episodes: diffidently occupying a corner, furtive, tight-lipped and patronized by Hank. Being a man, for Walt, has become something he continually must prove. And this means excising all the ‘fruity bodies’ and shoring up the floorboards of his masculinity. Standing up to alpha Hank requires the same confidence as rebuilding his home: both are predicated in the righteous power of being competent. ‘Competent’ here means having knowledge of power tools, fruiting fungus, complex chemistry, and the exact number of BTUs presently heating up his family’s water.   


Competence is crucial to masculinity, and the way Little Bill and Walt each practice their handiwork reveals their moral grasp on things. Whereas Bill is slipshod and unperceptive, Walt sees everything and revels in the nitty-gritty with obsessive-compulsive zeal. But I read this zeal less as a psychological debility than a masculine affliction. Sociologist Michael Kimmel defines the common characteristics of ‘violence, aggression, extreme competitiveness, [and] a gnawing insecurity... [which leads to] a masculinity that must always prove itself and that is always in doubt,’ as compulsive masculinity, which is what Walter White demonstrates in all its ugly nuance and insidious reach.

Both Little Bill and Walt are caught by the same affliction, although they display its symptoms differently. Little Bill would like to end violence and live in peaceful repose, but cannot restrain his sadistic glee whenever the opportunity arises to prove himself through force. Walt, on the other hand, is given ample opportunity to give up crime and return to being a tender spouse and father, but will not—or cannot. He takes too much pleasure in the show of his own competence. Masculinity needs a feedback loop; it means nothing without witnesses. Why else is it so important for Walt to hear the sound of his own alias repeated back to him from his competitor? Say my name. The masculine subject needs to see itself being seen, by the right people, and also in the right settings.

Walt’s masculinity is on stage three times in this episode. Beginning with the pool, his gnawing interiority reveals its darkness to Hank for the first time. Then later, in the house, Walt emerges from his DIY labor for a snack. Sporting his coveralls and respirator, he munches loudly at the kitchen table. His son and wife Skylar sit there watching him, nonplussed and unimpressed. Walt appears insulated to her lack of affirmation (or perhaps that lack is just the response he’s looking for). And lastly in the closing scene outside the hardware store Walt warns a thug twice his size to keep off his territory. If the first act showed bad moral judgment and the second fell on deaf ears, then in the third act Walt hits his marks. His compulsive masculinity has finally landed in the right milieu, where the strength of his self-righteousness can menace thugs and lowlifes. 

What is worth noting at the end of all this is how utterly self-engrossed exhibitions of handyman competence can be. It has nothing to do with the work itself, but what the work aims to fulfill. It’s not that the man becomes an island unto himself, but rather that he enters into league with other compulsive masculinities, who are rarely friends or family and almost never their female partner. This constant need to prove oneself sheers right through fabric of the family, making strangers of husband and wife, father and son. (That is, of course, unless the affliction is caught by the others, too, which precipitates a whole other set of problems.) Any discussion of Skylar-hate or the polarized fandom regarding Walt’s morality can find the root of the problem elegantly dramatized in this episode. Walt’s compulsive masculinity as demonstrated through his DIY handiwork is unwelcome in the home. It severs him from his family and leaves him finally earning the fear and respect only of those he does not love. Such is the cost for men who strive to be extraordinary and are never at ease with their fruity bodies.

 

Works Cited

Kimmel, Michael S. The History of Men: Essays in the History of American and British
Masculinities. New York: SUNY Press, 2005. Print.

Thumim, Janet. “‘Maybe he’s tough but he sure ain’t no carpenter:’ Masculinity and        In/competence in Unforgiven.” 1993. The Western Reader. Eds. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman. New York: Limelight, 1998. Print.


– Originally published on The Good Men Project (2/18/14) and Masculinities 101 (1/4/14).

Who exactly do they think they’re speaking to, anyway? That shapeless line-drawn androgynous figure there with pencil in ear and placid helper standing alongside certainly isn’t me! And how dare they draw an oversized X through my manly need to build it alone. (It’s not surprising I assumed the figure bent over and struggling alone was male, while the star-headed helper was his female counterpart.) And how dare they make it near impossible to construct anything more complex than the BILLY bookshelf without following their step-by-step procedures, in order and to the letter. Everyone knows instructions are for losers. Any handyman worth his salt can look at the parts and figure it out instinctively; he’ll finish the job and leave the site with two nuts and a screw to spare, always. Their quasi-opaque pictographs don’t look like me and don’t speak to me: they must be talking to somebody else…

But in fact I did have a female partner to help me, and in fact I did follow the instructions to the letter—because I’ve disobeyed the IKEA imperative before and the botched result made me feel even less manly than the kind of man IKEA would have me be. So it was absolutely necessary to obey the manual step-by-step, as a twosome, lifting together and sorting together, discussing, consulting, agreeing and building—with each of us up in each other’s business. It suddenly struck me that IKEA manuals aren’t instructions at all: they’re relationship and gender maps.

This realization came to me when I decided to deviate from our agreed-upon way of doing things and proceeded to hammer the backboard onto a wardrobe unit. Here I could finally reclaim some trace of manhood through the grip of a 12-pound hammer and a two-penny nail. I was determined to hammer each nail like a samurai, sinking each with a single strike. I’d be damned if I was going to fuss over each one, tap-tap-tapping away like IKEA’s shapeless man. At the end of my manly strivings I was confronted by a small black plastic unknown quantity. I assumed it was for joining the shelves together and hammered it onto the back of the unit. But the thing had an altogether different purpose. It was in fact meant to guide the nail as it’s being gingerly tapped into place at just the right distance from the edge, so as not to make an unsightly puncture in the backboard. Its conspicuous misplacement signaled my having failed at the masculine competency that can deduce a thing’s function simply from its design.

This little plastic doodad mocked me. It was strangely fitting that a lightweight piece of plastic had the heft to rattle the able-bodied do-it-yourself competency propping up my masculine self-concept. Confronted and confounded by my internal resistance to the IKEA imperative—its inane proceduralism and its mandated twosomeness—I suddenly became curious about how it is that I’ve come to identify so strongly with handyman competency. And I started to wonder about the history of how this gendered discourse has materialized in men’s bodies.

In his article “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity” Steven Gelber locates the introduction of ‘Mr. Fixit’ in America as early as 1870. The phenomenon was as gradual as the transition from “the distant Victorian father to the engaged and present suburban dad.” This restructuring of the American modern family had as much to do with property ownership, size, and location as it did with the changes wrought by industrialized and white-collar work, which stripped men of the practice of completing a task from start to finish with one’s own hands. What Gelber calls ‘domestic masculinity’, then, is an important counterpart to Margaret Marsh’s ‘masculine domesticity’. While the latter describes men’s gradual taking on of household tasks previously gendered feminine, the former is the exclusive staking out of a male sphere within the home in effort to reclaim an “aura of pre-industrial vocational masculinity” through such practices as woodworking, landscaping and handyman repair.

With the widespread suburbanization of the 1950s, domestic masculinity became firmly lodged within the gendered mindset of many American men. Even though IKEA began to spread into continental Europe, Australia and Canada in the 1970s, there were more than a few reasons they held off opening their first US store until 1985. In order for it to succeed as a multinational corporation, IKEA’s distinctly Swedish style of management needed to adopt a cross-cultural management style to suit each country. Comparing the US and Sweden on the Hofstede scale, Swedish culture has a lower power-distance index, is less ‘masculine’ and individualistic and more collective, non-hierarchically oriented. So not only did IKEA have to adjust to a different mindset with respect to corporate culture and workplace values, they also had to contend with America’s firmly rooted domestic masculinity.

At the risk of oversimplifying, we may observe that the complementary tension between Marsh’s masculine domesticity and Gleber’s domestic masculinity directly correlates with the competition between IKEA and D-I-Y outlets like Home Depot. Again, America’s suburbanization and history of home ownership differentiates it from many other countries in this respect. As a 2011 Forbes article notes, IKEA vastly outperforms Home Depot in China largely because home ownership there is really just beginning; as such, it has no pre-established D-I-Y culture.

But it is precisely this tension between masculine domesticity and domestic masculinity that intrigues me. It feels good to fix things; it’s true. It feels good to complete a task with your hands from start to finish. And though it seems this satisfaction springs from a particularly ‘masculine’ sensibility, I don’t think the feeling is exclusive to men. Even so, my resistance to IKEA’s tact-and-twosome approach to home furnishing clearly exposed my need to ‘stake my claim’ in the domestic sphere. I noticed how this need for gendered differentiation also seemed to demand a palpable hardening of my embodied presence. I’d venture to say it’s this same hard-bodied recalcitrance that creeps up in many of the men being towed along by their spouses through IKEA’s endless aisles. We needn’t look any further for proof of this tension than IKEA’s newly conceived ‘Manland’—much like its Småland, but outfitted for grown ups. Complete with videogames and foosball tables, men can conveniently evade IKEA’s eroding effects by retreating to their proverbial last stand: the ‘mancave’ entertainment zone.

As feminist history continues to expand, augment and intertwine with the way men and women speak and embody their gendered behaviors and practices, IKEA will continue to serve its inestimable role as the multinational flat pack & particle-board purveyor of masculine domestication. Though it needn’t be to the detriment of domestic masculinity, IKEA certainly works to help men be mindful of any of their hard edges standing at odds with so-called ‘domestic’ or ‘feminized’ ways of doing things. For me, IKEA requires patience, breathing, and good deal of humor to diffuse an inherited pattern that inevitably bubbles up. Having accomplished this feat—three PAX wardrobe units, a bed and a few nightstands—I can attest that my partner and I pulled it off without devolving into indignant hollering, which seemed less a triumph for her than me. There are, to be sure, at least two ways of doing things around the house, and a new set of challenges and pleasures afforded by embracing an IKEA masculinity.

 Images: Ikea Catalog, http://www.mikesacks.com/ikea-instructions/ 
Originally published at The Good Men Project (26/12/13) and Masculinites 101 (12/2/13).

The Spider and the Phonograph:
Subduing the Demonic in Dracula’s Renfield & Seward Scene

The scene begins with a spider crawling over a phonograph, while Seward records his case notes on Renfield. The image is a metaphor for the struggle of the 19th century scientific mind to master nature through its media-machinic technologies and rationalist discourse — an ardent task daily being carried out in the crucible of the mental institution. As Seward exits from his steel-gated office through the ward to Renfield’s cell, we see a gaggle of idling patients, some moaning, some screaming, some being drenched with buckets of water. Seward takes his handkerchief out and inhales into it. It's a subtle cue that makes the viewer wonder, if it's not the stench he's is bothered by, perhaps he’s getting a quick fix of something to prepare him for Renfield.

Our suspicions are confirmed by the subsequent glint in Seward’s eye and his over-eager fascination with the details of Renfield’s eccentric practices. Renfield kneels in the corner collecting a selection of insect canapés, which he insists are ‘perfectly nutritious’. It's true, of course! And here we see the link between lunacy and fascination in the transgression of civilized comportment that, whether willful or not, discloses hidden and profane truths of nature. Seward embodies this willing fascination to transgress. His baggy unbuttoned shirt matches Renfield’s outlandish frock-coat and union-suit attire. Both bare chests that glisten in the heat of their rapid-fire exchange. Fascination is further emphasized in the extreme close-up of Renfield’s Coke-bottled scrutiny of his dish of insects. The organicity of the bugs starkly contrast the clunky personal protection contraptions designed for Renfield’s hands — crude measures to subdue the demonic forces of nature. Renfield symbolizes this nature, and Seward is so taken with him that he declares the need to invent ‘a new class of lunatic'. As one tantalizes the other with the promise of a kitten — no, ‘a cat, a big cat!’ — the two theatrically kneel and rise by turns. Their escalating back-and-forth ends with Seward getting bitten — a moment that exposes the dangers of overzealous scientific obsession as much as it explains the guards' preposterous head cages.

Works Cited

Conger, Syndy M. & Janice R. Welsch “The Comic and the Grotesque in James Whale’s Frankenstein Films.” Planks of Reason. Barry Keith Grant & Christopher Sharrett, eds. Scarecrow Press, 2004. 240-254.

Dika, Vera. “From Dracula – with Love” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Barry Keith Grant, Ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 388-400.