Jax Teller & Poison, Wine
“You’re loyal, decent…you love the right things.”_Piney Winston, Sons of Anarchy.
“A good father and a good outlaw can’t settle inside the same man.”_Jax Teller.
Hold on tight because I’m going to dive into my favorite TV characters. Kinda. First up, Jax Teller. I never really had issues with falling for the wrong man in real life, but my TV life makes up for it. Jax Teller is an outlaw, a motorcycle-riding cowboy. He is a dark, twisted, tormented and at times horrifically evil fictional character on the recently-completed FX show about a motorcycle club called Sons of Anarchy. Sons is loosely based on Hamlet. Jax Teller is the little prince of Charming, a fictional town in California. California, bikes, SAMCRO: Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original. I have a handful of very favorite-most favorite ride or die YASS YASS this is the best TV shows in my life and Sons is one of them. Some of the others I do/will probably mention almost every week in some capacity: Happy Endings, Felicity, Gilmore Girls, Friday Night Lights, Vikings.
Jax is played by Charlie Hunnam and is my favorite out of all of these shows, all of these characters. Fictional me would gladly ride off into the night with a Jax Teller and never look back. It would be SUCH A TERRIBLE DECISION. Awful. But. I am emotionally attached to him and I do adore him muchly. (And trust I can find something cute about almost everyone on my television screen. It’s my superpower, along with being easily excited.) I love Jax for a lot of reasons I shouldn’t, but I can’t get that deep into it because who has the time. And I’m a pleasure-delayer by nature so I’ll start slow.
I have nicknames for Jax’s hair on the show. Golden Surfer-Long. Ireland Man-Bun (FAVORITE.) Fresh Out of Prison-Shaved. Super-Slick Tuff. There’s also a glorious Twitter account dedicated to all things Charlie Hunnam-hair where they affectionately refer to it as SpunGold because it most certainly is. Amen. All of this to let you know what you’re dealing with when I start talking about Jax and Sons. From here on out you will read everything I write about Sons of Anarchy through the “Stuck Like Glue” by Sugarland lens of lovelovelove. I do love it so, although I will probably never watch another show like this because I really don’t watch things like this and am so easily scared/freaked out. I am in no way suggesting that people should watch this show if they haven’t before. It is a hard show to watch…at least it was for me. I ended up covering my eyes a lot, asking my husband when it was okay to look again. Sometimes I would read everylittlething about the episode before I watched it so I could be prepared for what was coming. All of that being said I sleep with a Sons of Anarchy blanket on my bed every night. Allow me this. And blame it on Charming I mean Charlie Hunnam.
The language of Sons of Anarchy is pretty rough at times. The guys end up running a porn studio and a brothel too, so words for female anatomy are thrown around as casually as I’d assume words for female anatomy are thrown around whenever pornography meets motorcycle club. Meaning, I know when those boys start talking, my ears are fixing to bleed. They can’t say the F-word on FX so the creator, Kurt Sutter, has gone for the equally attention-getting and offensive-in-a-completely-different-way phrase of Jesus Christ when things get hairy. Gash, shit, whore, bitch…so needless to say I watch Sons when my children aren’t home or after they’ve been put to bed. The language naturally matches the life on the show.
I’ve written about Sons before, here at The Female Gaze. In order not to write a Russian-length novel this time around, I’ll stick to some of the little things I love about the language they use on the show. The lines. LINE DRIVE.
“I don’t need a man to handle my shit.”_Tara Knowles-Teller
Women are old ladies or mamas, sweetbutts, crow-eaters. Guys who want to join the club are hang-arounds or prospects. Almost everyone has a nickname and even the nicknames have nicknames. Juan Carlos is Juice so he’s Juicy. Robert is Bobby, who occasionally moonlights as an Elvis impersonator so he’s Bobby Elvis. Phil is Phil-thy, Jax is sometimes Jackie or Handsome Jack and one of the guys who is always ready for mayhem is called Happy all the time, even when he’s scarily anything but. Clubhouse mascot Chuckie Marstein responds to almost everything by saying “I accept that.”
“I really don’t give a shit.”_Jax Teller (about almost everything.)
Jax says darlin’ a lot. Dreamy sigh. He says it to women when they get on the back of his bike. Hold on, darlin’. And he says it when he’s trying to calm a woman down. (Men love trying to calm women down.) Look, you got no reason to be scared, darlin’. He says it when he’s buying cigarettes. Get a pack of smokes too, darlin’. He says it when a woman makes a deal with him to sleep with her, so she’ll sleep with someone else in order to rope the guy into doing SAMCRO a favor. I’m all about the service, darlin’ as he slips his kutte back on because she kindly asked him to. A gentleman indeed. When he and his high school sweetheart get married as she puts it: Here? In a brothel? Wanted for murder? He comes back with: I’m all about the fairytale, baby. He also throws in the fact that he killed a Fed for her and nothing says endless love like capital murder.
Jax also says I know a lot. Someone mentions to him that he just killed like seven dudes back at the warehouse and people are probably going to start asking questions? I know. Hey Jax you got a wife and kids and you need to go spend some time with them. I know.
“I’m tired of being crushed under the weight of greedy men who believe in nothing.”_Jax Teller
I love fandoms, fangirling. I feel like I was made for it. Here’s a SoA FAN VIDEO I LOVE (trigger-warning b/c violence and all kinds of awful things.) And also, here is just one of the (more than one) fanmixes I’ve made for Jax and no worries, we can discuss fanfic later.
Sons of Anarchy has been called a soap opera for dudes. I haven’t given much thought to whether or not I agree with that (but I will tell you that I used to watch the soap opera Passions and that show was my jam, maybe for a lot of the same reasons…excitement! Ridiculousness! Surprises/predictability!) Sons of Anarchy is twisted, dark, complicated, yes…full of shadowy, scary and evil emotions without much in the way of hope or redemption or salvation, although people do tend to get what they “deserve” in the end. It is also a funny show, sweet at times, super-emotional almost all of the time and forever heavy on the themes of loyalty, family and brotherhood. When Jax is losing his way, his best friend’s father tells him you’re loyal, decent…you love the right things. This is back in season three when things conceivably could’ve gone either way, but by the end, in season seven, the loyalty, the decency, the idea of Jax loving the right things…not clear. We, like the characters, are left with what was and what could be. The drippy, smoking wreckage of so close and almost. Love for the right things and the wrong things too. In the middle we have words, words, words. Words, both cruel and kind, both rough and easy. I got this and I don’t give a shit and You wanna do the right thing by your family, don’t you? and We don’t know who are ’til we’re connected to someone else. We’re just better human beings when we’re with the person we’re supposed to be with. At times violent, at times beautiful, at times conflicted mouths spilling out both honey and poison. Poison and Wine at the same time.
Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and writer from Kentucky. She is the author of Every Kiss a War and Whiskey & Ribbons. She is also the editor of WhiskeyPaper.
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