- Anna Gunn (left) as Skyler White on Breaking Bad
Moviegoing isn’t just an activity, but a state of mind—the desire to be lifted up into the work, regardless of whether one views it as art or entertainment. Yet the forbidding winter we’re currently experiencing in Chicago isn’t really conducive to this mind-set. In a season of chronic snowstorms and below-zero temperatures, the most attractive pleasures are the ones you burrow into, as if preparing to hibernate with them—model-building, complicated recipes (preferably involving heavy, roasted meats and/or gravy), and the long-form narratives found in fat novels and box sets of TV series. I remember once reading an interview with Paul Westerberg where the journalist noted that both Westerberg and Prince had recorded albums where they’d played all the instruments themselves. Westerberg said something to the effect that when you grow up in Minnesota, you get used to spending lots of time indoors, tinkering on things alone. A winter like this makes Minnesotans of us all.
It’s possible that Tony submitted knowing it would end this way—it seems a part of her has never forgiven her family for forcing her into her first marriage when she was too young to know better. (That terror makes up an earlier bravura episode, in which Mann details how the forces of family, church, and gossip combine to break the 19-year-old Tony’s will.) Had the independent-minded Tony Buddenbrook been born a generation or two later, she might have excelled in any path she chose. Instead, she’s had to submit to a chafing, chauvinistic order for her entire life. One could understand why she’d rather live under a misery of her own choosing, rather than make the best of an unfair system. But does that mean she’s justified in her actions?
