Breaking Bad: "A Man Provides"

“And a man, a man provides. And he does it even when he's not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it. Because he’s a man”

With those words crystal meth kingpin Gus Fring convinces protagonist Walter White to continue cooking meth for him in the critically acclaimed AMC series Breaking Bad. After realizing his bad decisions have caused his family to leave him, Walter decides to leave the meth business he so eagerly entered just a few seasons before. Fring’s stinging words to Walter play on his masculine insecurities. As Jezebel.com details, “Early on in the series Walt is portrayed as a weak, emasculated schoolteacher, whose sole source of power, his scientific genius, buys him nothing in a hyper-masculine capitalist world.”

Before he begins cooking meth, Walter is stuck in a dead-end job as a high school chemistry teacher until lung cancer forces him to cook meth. However, while at first the decisions he makes are due to the fact that he wants to provide for his family, it later becomes evident that Walter does horrible things because he believes they will make him more of a man for his family and for himself. He feels like he is forced to be "the man of the house" by the family ideological state apparatus.

Men watching the show who are a similar situation as Walter career-wise will watch the show and instead of thinking, “The decisions we make, lead to our downfall” they will think, “violence and power make a man what he is.” Because the show has not ended, the audience does not know if Walter will live to see the consequences of his “manly” decisions. The show is meant to be a dissection of what a man who has lost his identity is forced to do, but it is unclear whether the audience perceives it that way.