On 'Sons of Anarchy' and the Inevitable Pain of Growing Up
How Kurt Sutter’s epic show became an extension of my childhood and the friendships I couldn’t save.
I was eighteen years old when I started watching Sons of Anarchy - that was the time in my life when all my friendships began to crumble.
My childhood friends and I have finished high school and went in different directions. We left our hometown. I moved away with my then-girlfriend to a city where none of them followed. Slowly, I started feeling more and more disconnected from all the people who initially made my world for what it was. Looking back, that was the point in my life when my childhood ended and adulthood began. But I wasn't ready for that change just yet.
Facing adulthood is one of the hardest things. We all suffer through it, I guess, and some of us never quite learn how to accept it. It’s like the loss of a loved one you can never be ready for.
I didn’t take it easy. My departure from boyhood has taken four-five painful years. In those years, I tried anything I thought could slow down the transition. I threw house parties, organized soccer sessions, and scheduled meetings on weekends when most of us would return home. But, as time went on, my attempts were less and less successful. You can’t beat time - and as Sheriff Hale says in the first season of SOA, “You can’t stop progress.” I learned that the hard way, sinking into an apathetic depression.
Sons of Anarchy became an extension of my childhood and the friendships I couldn’t save - but I wasn't ready to let go of either of them.
I fell in love with Charming and its Sons because they conveyed a brotherhood I no longer had in the way I used to. Watching the show was one of many coping mechanisms I employed to ignore how my relationships were deteriorating. I held onto the sweet but toxic nostalgia - my greatest love affair.
I grew close to the characters as they represented classic male traits - masculinity, trust, loyalty, respect, and most importantly, bros-before-hoes. Those things unite men. They also had one primary rule: protect SAMCRO at all costs.
On the surface, being a part of a club like SOA is every man's dream. I mean: bikes, parties, drugs, guns, hookers, and a taste of American freedom. Those are things most men care about at a certain age. But, at the time, the show resonated with me mainly because there was nothing more important to me than my bros; not my longest relationship I ever had and not my family. It’s different now, but back then, they were my SAMCRO - except, you know, not criminals.
I glorified Sons of Anarchy because it empowered my need for a sense of community. It became a means to boost my feelings that were disappearing rapidly and unavoidably. I wanted something to keep them alive as long as I could.
Kurt Sutter’s one true talent was to romanticize masculinity by portraying outlaws in a way that men could relate to them as brothers. It was quite an achievement, considering that he admittedly based the show on Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a modern interpretation. It worked like a charm since I longed for the kind of brotherhood SOA portrayed, and I refused to see the toxic side.
But thirteen years and many lost friendships later, Sons of Anarchy is quite a different experience. I’m kind of baffled by how oblivious I was to its toxicity. Let me rephrase that: the series itself isn’t toxic, but the club’s moral cornerstones certainly are. The Sons live by a principle that advocates any means necessary to protect the club. It’s a nice but false idealization they believe in religiously. The truth is that they’re bound by their own crimes, secrets, and violence. The more they try to distance themselves from all those things, the worse everything gets.
Season by season, Sutter destroys any noble idea the characters ever had. Every new step they take eventually turns into an ugly and bloody nightmare that cracks their trust and loyalty. It’s telling that the only person who had ambitious plans to turn SAMCRO into a peaceful and legit organization is long dead. All we have is his journals. In them, he speaks about a dream that got corrupted by violence and greed.
Make no mistake, Sons of Anarchy was always about white-trash criminals who justified their wrongdoing by constantly echoing that it was for the greater good. That’s the same moral ground Walter White believed in Breaking Bad: he used his family as an excuse to build a drug empire. If you think about it, Tony Soprano suddenly becomes the most candid antihero of that era of television - he never lied to himself about who he was or what he was doing.
For four seasons, Jax believed his own lies: he thought that every person who got killed because of the club died for the greater good. But, as SAMCRO sinks deeper into crime, he eventually realizes that there’s no such thing as "The Greater Good." People die because everyone has their own selfish agenda, period. In the long term, any person who becomes associated with the club realizes it's a suicide mission - and it only leads to destruction and death.
As the violence becomes frequent, any act that brings the members closer is so few and far between that it gets harder and harder to relate to them as a whole. Greed, lies, revenge, guilt, and betrayal alienate the characters and poison anything that once might have been pure and benign.
In SOA, most relationships are dysfunctional because people refuse to change or accept that the other person is changing. They want to maintain a status quo that’s no longer maintainable. That's what Sheriff Hale explained to SAMCRO in the first place, and he wound up dead too. The destruction the club brings on crushes everyone who attempts to stop it.
No wonder why the act of love is a rarity in the world of Sons of Anarchy - and even when it does happen, it’s always just a by-product of violence.
In the first season, Jax and Tara reunite over killing a DEA officer who harasses Tara regularly. Their high school romance is reignited by blood and murder. That’s probably the most “subtle” way of how love is defined in Sutter’s show.
In season two, the escalating feud between Clay and Jax gets tossed aside when Gemma tells them she's been raped by neo-Nazies. The two embrace in order to retaliate. In season three, Jax is driven by anger as the IRA stole his son. In season four, Clay beats Gemma and kills Piney, which demands revenge. Although Ope and Jax share intimate moments throughout the season, the central emotion that brings them closer is rage toward Clay. In season five, Jax witnesses the murder of his best friend and seeks vendetta - again.
You can see the pattern here without me going into further plot points in the following seasons. My point is this: in the world of SOA, love never exists on its own.
By the end of the series, there's almost no one left for Jax to love, though. There's only blood, corpses, and bleakness in Charming. Violence can no longer trigger an act of love, not even as a by-product, if there's no one to receive it. So, the lonely king of SAMCRO goes for one final ride with no intention to return - as the people he loved the most are all on the other side already. He has no reason to stay in a world ruled by violence. So he, we - and Charlie Hunnam - say goodbye.
I’ve fallen out with most of my friends I grew up with because people change and drift away - physically and emotionally, too. That’s the way life works. Friendships cease to function when the sole thing that maintains them is ancient memories. Therefore, nostalgia is a trap.
To sustain a healthy friendship, you have to be willing to evolve and grow - even if the other person’s change doesn’t align with your own. You have to adjust and attempt to accept it. But the truth is it doesn’t always work. Sometimes friendships die when two people can no longer help each other grow. And they simply part ways.
For me, watching Sons of Anarchy was a way to avoid facing the inevitable pain of dying friendships. I indulged in its world because it kept me remembering the old days when we were exempt from real problems and responsibilities. But you can’t retrieve the feelings you had at a certain age - not with a TV show and not with anything, really - and you can’t revive connections that are no longer exist.
Eventually, you have to give in and let go of the past, regardless of how beautiful and pure it was. Because if you won't, it will absorb you, and you'll end up like Jax with no people around you to love.
In an interview with The Verge, Sutter said,
"SOA is about family, but it's also about community and the organization you belong to. That's part of the positive stereotype we represent as a nation—that sense of no matter how f**ked up or damaged these people are, and they are, there's something wholly familial about them."
In my book, life is a constant search for a community that you can be a part of, and the people in it accept you no matter how flawed you are. At its core, that's what Sons of Anarchy represents - and it’s the reason why it became striking television.
This article was originally published in FanFare on Medium.