Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Breaking Bad and Girls

When I first watched the first 6 episodes of "Breaking Bad" I finally had to tell my daughter's boyfriend that I watched these with on Netflix that I thought the series was just too twisted for me to watch anymore. I found it a "guilty pleasure" that was too sick for me to continue watching. For example, I could watch "The Hangover" and "The Hangover 2" but could not watch that every week in a series because it is just too way out there.

Likewise, for my wife I had heard about an HBO series called "Girls!" And how she described this series is about young women in their early 20s who are not self aware or self disciplined who do all sorts of really crazy things that often are the kinds of things that women who don't survive mentally or physically do who don't survive until 30 do.

So, as I watched my first episode (because I don't get HBO at home right now on purpose) at our 2nd home (that is a vacation rental) that does get HBO on one of the TV's there, she woke up after watching this episode and telling me she couldn't ever watch this series again with me. I didn't have a problem like this because I'm not a woman but I still understood what she was saying. So, even though the "Girls!" were not killing anyone, but instead just damaging themselves psychologically instead I understood my wife's point of view.

In this episode the sort of frumpy girl named Hannah is trying to get a job as a writer for an internet website that pays for "Freelance articles". The website manager tells her she must go outside of her comfort zone and go buy some cocaine and use it to write about the experience for the website. So, Hannah finds a junky that lives in her apartment building and gets the name of someone who sells her cocaine. So she and her ex-boyfriend who has decided he is now gay and try some. So, they both do cocaine and go out partying to night clubs in their city. At one point she changes tops with a boy she is dancing with in a club. The only problem with this is his top she puts on is a see through top that boys sometimes wear to show off their stomach and chest and upper torso muscles. So now, Hannah is on cocaine with a see through top without a bra running around the city. Then we cut away to her friend at another location who is working at a bar in a sort of skimpy outfit and a customer comes up to her and says, "You are going to have sex with me" and the girl does not resist and he takes her hand and she walks out the door of her job with him to his place. Then he puts her inside a technological device and locks her in to overwhelm her senses with awful images of bad things happening. So, when he unlocks the device he has conditioned her to not resist having sex with him. As a man if someone had locked me inside a device like that I would have knocked the guy out. But, because this young woman is not self defined she doesn't even know she should be mad at this guy and submits to strange strange sex with this man which is kind of abusive, especially for the first time they are going to do it.

So, as a man there is something about this series "Girls!" that is sort of like watching moths burn up in a candle flame that is sort of fascinating about this show. However, in real life often girls actually living their lives like this often results in drug overdoses, AIDS, mental illness and being dead before they are 30 years of age. So, as a man even though watching something like this is more interesting than "Breaking Bad" it really is like watching women slowly commit suicide more than any other single thing by making really bad choices that cannot be sustained.

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