sabotabby | My ramblings on Breaking Bad, let me show you them

Yes, I know I should be posting about Occupy or any number of things going on in the world, but I'm up to my ears in trying to teach kids how film works as a medium, and it so happened that I was finally talked into watching a show that makes great use of film (well, video, but the conventions of film) as a medium. (I'm also reading an interesting book about social networking, so get ready to hear me rant about that when I'm trying to teach kids how the intertubes work as a medium. Probably not as much, though, because so far nothing has blown up in the book.)

I highly recommend

bitter_crimson's post on why you should watch the show, as it convinced me and I more or less agree with said post, having now watched the show. Also, those clips are about a thousand times funnier in context.

A note on spoilers. There are some. But they're things like (as

snarkitysnarks brought up in my last post) "human head on a tortoise." Which makes absolutely no sense if you haven't seen the show, so probably won't ruin your enjoyment of said scene when it occurs. If I told you what happens after there's a human head on a tortoise, I suppose that would be a spoiler.

Accordingly, if you're one of those people who cannot possibly know anything about what's going to happen before you see it, might be better to skip this one. But I'll try not to give everything away.

Okay, so I've mentioned in various other posts that there are certain things that I find triggery and don't like to watch as entertainment. These things amount to: drug dealing, drug addiction, cancer, and people being fuck-ups*. This is basically the entire plot of Breaking Bad. And these things are depicted—well, not realistically per se, but realistically enough—that it's kind of like watching one giant trigger. Oh, with added sexual assault in one episode, and bad things happening to children. Why this bothered me so much in The Wire and why I think it's hilarious in BrBa is kind of complicated. The representations of the things that trigger me are just removed enough, I guess, just stylized enough, that while I find it deeply disturbing to watch, it is not disturbing enough that I can't watch.

(Though maybe it's just that I'm a saner person than I was a year or two ago. Just don't make me re-watch Requiem for a Dream. Like, ever.)

Anyway, enough about my triggers; this is basically a squee post. And what makes me squee is:

The premise is a deconstruction of the American dream, the trope of the rugged individualist, and capitalism.

I've said it's my second-favourite TV show currently on; my first is still Treme, which is explicitly political and explicitly my kind of politics. Nuanced about it, and subtle, but the politics are there. I won't argue that BrBa is a political show as such (though it does contain a dig at libertarianism that is pretty great). It's more that it questions the unstated politics of other shows and films.

Essentially, Hollywood is all over stories of the underdog who goes it alone. Characters can be dark, and gritty, and do bad things, but if there's a good reason–and the best reason involves the nuclear family—the narrative excuses it. BrBa is all about problematizing** that narrative. Walt has what's considered the best of intentions and he's never let off the hook, either within the internal world of the other characters, or from the audience's POV. The more ruggedly individualistic he gets—and the richer he gets—the more horrible he becomes.

The critique of capitalism is just as obvious. The drug trade is a business. In one episode, Jesse delivers a tirade about how he and Walt produce the wealth, but only receive a fraction of the value of what they produce. It's Marx, adulterated with liberal use of the word "bitches." He comes off as a brat, because, well, he's a millionaire by that point in the show, but the dynamics are still evident. At the bottom are the Latin American workers, who face the most risk (deportation and death) for the least payoff, and at the top, the capitalist class provides initial investment but is sheltered, season finales aside, from the consequence of its actions. Not to mention that the entire premise of the show would fall apart in the face of a functional social safety net, but that's too obvious for me to even point out.

How bloody horrible is Walt, anyway?

There's villain protagonists, but not very many on TV. It's something that works better in film, because it's hard to maintain audience sympathy for someone who is irredeemably evil. I've seen it argued that the only way BrBa manages to make it work is that the audience sympathizes with Jesse rather than with Walt, but I don't think it's just that. It completely revels in making you root for hypermasculine bad guys who've made Faustian bargains (Gus too—and he also has a sympathetic backstory), and makes you complicit in their actions because you're enjoying yourself so much. Someone (maybe Amanda Marcotte, who seems to share my taste in pop culture a bit) brought up a parallel to the movie theater scene in Inglorious Basterds, where the audience of Germans applauding the deaths of Allied soldiers reflects you, the audience, taking too much pleasure in the gruesome deaths of Nazis. BrBa is amazing at taking the vocabulary of film and using it to ramp up the anxiety every time it looks like Walt might get found out.

Speaking of hypermasculinity...

Every male character except Walt Jr. is just so, so macho (coincidentally, Walt Jr. is the only morally pure character), and the show loves to deconstruct that too. It is in almost all cases bravado, a survival strategy in an incredibly violent milieu, and it's so great to watch it being challenged. (Oz, which if you discount the last season where everything got silly and there was a musical and no Said, is probably still my favourite TV show ever, did this too.) The focus on what it means to be a man does mean that the female characters get short shrift and Alison Bechdel is not be most pleased, but it is still a critique of the patriarchy.

Incidentally, despite the overwhelming maleness of the characters, I really relate to them. Many pixels have been spilled (bad metaphor) over whether Walt starts out good and becomes evil, makes a conscious choice to become evil, or was always a nasty bastard deep down and was just waiting to express it outwardly. I don't know how much it matters, insofar as the critique of the construct of masculinity in the show suggests that under normal circumstances, one can be a nasty bastard but as long as one's actions remain socially acceptable, one can still present as a steady, reliable beta male. These can be female social restraints as well—in some cases, even more so—and as someone who frequently feels like a vicious, twisted bastard in the shell of a docile, socially acceptable woman, I can really get into a narrative that's basically the fantasy of a repressed, ugly piece of work.

Okay, but let's talk about the female characters.

I could take or leave Marie, and Jane and Andrea aren't major enough to really analyze, but dear God do I ever love Skyler. I love that they've presented her as a combination of the stock wife in a sitcom (nagging, shrewish, humourless, smart, but having no inner life beyond being the family organizer and general killjoy) and the stock wife to an antihero (clueless), and then blown those clichés apart, reminding you that she's a fully realized, intelligent person who clues in to her husband's deceit, plots against him and then later with him, and struggles to fulfil her own needs and desires. And also that you're a terrible person if you hope that she doesn't figure out what Walt's up to.

The cinematography

I kind of want to go to New Mexico now. It's really pretty.

Beyond that, there is so much cool going on visually. There's beautiful framing, time lapse, stop motion, a music video at one point, amazing mise en scène, and blah blah I didn't actually go to film school, you know? There's subtle things like the way they shoot Walt when he's talking to Jesse (he looms in the foreground) versus when he's talking to Skyler (he slouches behind her, even though there's not much of a height difference) versus when he's talking to Gus. Or the openings, which flash forward to deliberately confusing scenes—a teddy bear floating in the pool with half of its face blackened, a pair of pants flying away from a truck—so that you're left trying to piece together the sequence of events, sometimes over several episodes.

Did I mention there's a music video?

Watch on YouTube

Like, the whole thing. With shitty transitions and everything. On the version I watched, it didn't have subtitles. I couldn't stop giggling.

Stylization!

I am a sucker for stylized dialogue. Mamet, Buffy, you name it. That is pretty much my favourite thing. The second I realized what they were doing with Jesse's speech patterns, I no longer wanted to punch him in the face.

No, seriously, I love Jesse.

I realize he's supposed to be in his mid-20s and therefore closer to my age than to the age of the kids I teach, but he is basically like half the boys I've ever taught. (Which makes me hate Walt for being such a shitty teacher, and also for not taking Jesse Go-Karting.) I have no idea what other things that actor has been in, or whether he's playing against type like Bryan Cranston apparently is, but the clothes, the mannerisms, the bravado, the boredom montages, all read to me as incredibly authentic and just heartwrenching, and makes me want to try even harder with my kids so that they don't flunk out of my class and become meth dealers who get punched in the face all the time.

I almost love Gus more. Almost.

If you don't know why I love Gus, it's because you haven't gotten far enough in the show for him to have made his first appearance. Also, he kind of reminds me of one of my favourite instructors at OISE. Who was not a drug lord to my knowledge, but had very similar fashion sense.

The pacing.

When you think about it, there's really not that many stories that can be told given the concept while still focusing on basically four main characters. Which is how they can get away with an episode every so often where—another spoiler—a fly gets into the meth lab and Walt and Jesse have to kill it. That is the whole episode. It's bloody brilliant. I mean, it's a metaphor about how their entire dynamic and lives are fucked up, and there's character development and so on, but it's also two guys trying to kill a fly for 45 minutes in a show that also has car chases, shootouts, and really awesome explosions.

The character dynamics.

I love two characters not being able to spit it out almost as much as I dislike watching people be addicted to drugs. Absolutely no two major characters in this show are able to say what they mean to each other. It's all repression, all the time. Which is my favourite thing next to stylized dialogue.

The black, black humour.

I mentioned this before, but there's a scene in around the second or third episode where Walt kills a guy and then he and Jesse have to dispose of the body. Using acid. It goes wrong. Several floors of liquified drug dealer remains kind of wrong. There's a part where the sequence is funny, and then there's a line that it crosses where it becomes really disturbing, and then they find another line to cross where it goes back to funny again, and it just keeps going. Same thing with the head on the tortoise. It's all anti-comedic timing, and it's so uncomfortable to watch, and mood whiplash is really the greatest.

Um, that was longer than I meant it to be. Shorter

sabotabby: As a viewer, I like to be manipulated into watching things that I shouldn't like, and to be conscious of said manipulation. And also drugs are bad.

* The best example of the latter is that scene in The Wire where the guy can't put an IKEA bed together. I hated that character and wanted him to die. I can put an IKEA bed together.

** SORRY! I typed it, regretted it, and couldn't find another way to express that idea. Just ship me off to York University to run anti-oppression workshops or something.