posted under
Breaking Bad
,
Corey Creekmur
by Unit for Criticism
[The eighth and final in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad]
“Under Pressure”
Guest Writer: Corey K. Creekmur (University of Iowa)
Written and Directed by Vince Gilligan
“It’s all over now, Baby Blue” -- Bob Dylan (1965)
“Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations. They fear it, and as far as we can see have always done so; the End is a figure for their own deaths.” -- Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1966)
[On September 18, 2013, the University of Illinois sponsored a one-day conference, New Deal for the Humanities, organized by Gordon Hutner and Feisal Mohamed and co-sponsored by several campus units including the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory. Below, guest-writer Patrick Fadely, describes the event. In the near future Kritik will also publish a written version of Lauren Goodlad's response during the closing panel]
“A New Deal for the Humanities”
Written by: Patrick Fadely (English)
Last May, faculty at Harvard University published a report, which included data pointing to declining numbers of students in humanities majors. Days later, the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences issued its report on humanities education, which warned of declining public support for the liberal arts, and mounted a defense of the economic and civic value of humanities scholarship. Since then, there has been no shortage of articles, op-eds, and blog posts about the crisis in the humanities.
What was new about Wednesday’s conference, “A New Deal for the Humanities,” was its emphasis on the status of humanities programs at public research universities. As conference organizers Gordon Hutner and Feisal Mohamed pointed out in their recent piece in The New Republic, this aspect of the humanities crisis has been somewhat overlooked in recent discussions. To fill this lacuna, the conference brought together a diverse group of scholars to diagnose the current state of the humanities at public institutions of higher learning, and to share their visions of a robust and sustainable future for liberal arts education.
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posted under
Breaking Bad
,
Sean O'Sullivan
by Unit for Criticism
[The seventh in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad]
"Story Land"
Written by: Sean O'Sullivan (Ohio State University)
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, there is an amusement park called Story Land. It’s for little kids, with gentle rides and tame fun—the kind of place that might show Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium on a perpetual loop in the visitor center. It’s a living diorama of stories with the fears drained out of them: Mother Goose, Cinderella, and other characters on the safe side of registered trademarks gently instruct the clientele that stories operate on us from our earliest moments of connective consciousness, and that they are about the eternal, the predetermined, the comforting. Precisely the opposite, in other words, of the narrative juice provided by serial television, and especially the kind of juice required to keep the narrative machine of Breaking Bad going.
posted under
Breaking Bad
,
Tedra Osell
by Unit for Criticism
[The sixth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad]
"Dead to Rights"
Written by: Tedra Osell
Up to the end of the opening credits--twenty minutes in--this week's episode of Breaking Bad still looked like a 70s Western, mostly open skies and gorgeous landscapes littered with bodies.. Afterwards, though, it was straight horror: cramped dark interiors, knives, people chained in bunkers. And in what I think was a first for the series, there wasn't a single moment of comic relief anywhere once the title had flashed on the screen.
There's still some humor, though, in the past. We open with a shot of boiling liquid and a flashback to Walt and Jesse's first cook that's full of foreshadowing. "What's next?" Jesse asks. "We wait." Walt responds. "The reaction has begun." Boy howdy. Walt starts to explain that "This is an exothermic reaction, giving off heat," and Jesse mutters under his breath, "put me into a coma why don't you." Be careful what you wish for, Jesse: Walt will have you in a kind of living death by the end of the hour. Interestingly, this scene also has a number of quasi-sexual motifs: Jesse asks if "we don't got like, eight more anal things we gotta do," Walt of course is naked except for his rubber apron, tightly whities, and rubber gloves--which he pulls off with a marked snapping sound as Jesse calls him a dick--an outfit that of course is about his cooking meth but is also kind of disturbingly fetishy. (Once we see what Jesse's fate is, it's downright serial-killerish.) For now, though, Walt and Jesse step outside the cozy RV into the light of the desert, and Jesse, following, averts his eyes at the sight of Walt from behind--and, symbolically, at the vision of his future. This season has convinced me that one of the underlying themes of Breaking Bad is a savage indictment of American machismo: the more powerful and "in charge" Walt's become, the more nakedly we've seen the inhumanity of the isolated male ego and the transparent way men use those things that are supposed to hold them check--family, the provider role, the role of protector--to justify their own self-interest. No wonder Jesse flinches.
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posted under
Deanna K. Kreisel
,
sovereignty
,
The Killing
by Unit for Criticism
Written by: Deanna K. Kreisel (University of British Columbia)
There is a clear and dramatic break between the first two seasons of “The Killing” taken together—the “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” mystery—and season three, the “Pied Piper” case. This break represents more than just a shift in Linden and Holder’s object of investigation: it’s a reboot of the show’s themes, cast of characters, politics, and ethics. Even the quality of the rain changes—perhaps after a couple of seasons filming in Vancouver the writers finally twigged to the fact that it hardly ever pours buckets in the PNW. If the guiding spirit of the Rosie Larsen case was the familiar American obsession with the disappearance and murder of middle-class young women, and the staggering public resources that can be marshalled to bring justice and closure to one family, then the spirit of season three is the equally staggering callousness and indifference that greet the mass murder of poor, marginal, racialized, and unwanted young women who live on the streets: “human garbage,” as the revealed murderer calls them in the season finale. The antithesis between treasured children and disposable children functions as the emblematic difference not merely between the concerns of the two cases, but also between the themes of the first two seasons and season three. If the subjects of the former were sovereignty (Native land rights, juridical records, the autonomy of the self) and the struggle to express sovereignty through overcoming addiction (to cigarettes, to sex, to power, to revenge), the third season reverses these concerns and focuses relentlessly and painfully on helplessness and entrapment.
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posted under
Breaking Bad
,
Scott Balcerzak
by Unit for Criticism
[The fifth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad]
Return to the Western: Genre and Origins
Written by: Scott Balcerzak (Northern Illinois University)
Last week’s episode of Breaking Bad, 5.12 “Rabid Dog,” ended at the Albuquerque Civic Plaza, with a near meeting between Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, filmed in a mixture of first person point-of-view and overhead shots typically seen in the moments leading up to a classic Western shootout. After Jesse threatens Walt over a pay phone with “Next time I am going to get you where you really live,” the ominous sound of mission bells is heard. While that episode ended with allusions to the Western, this week’s “To’hajiilee” veers the series directly into one of the genre’s standard climatic set-pieces, a standoff and shootout that encompass its final act. The action builds to a climatic sequence where Walt rushes to the desert as he fears Jesse is burning his stash of money, only to learn the phone call was an elaborate hoax devised by his DEA brother-in-law Hank Schrader. Michelle MacLaren also directed the recent “Buried,” 5.10, which contained a memorable image of Western homage involving a stare-off between Walt and Hank as the
garage door closed, creating as Lysa Rivera wrote in her post, “a shot clearly reminiscent of a duel in a Western.” MacLaren returns to direct "To'hajiilee" and pushes that cinematic allusion to its logical conclusion in the red hills of the New Mexico desert, where Walt emerges from the rocks with hands over his head to surrender to the lawmen. Soon, though, the white supremacist hit squad, lead by Todd’s Uncle Jack, arrives against Walt’s wishes and a violent shootout commences between the criminals and the DEA. The episode ends mid-action, leaving us with the ominous feeling that major characters might not make it out alive, which is a distinct possibility this late in the final season. Throughout the sequence, various shots of the desert landscape and men with guns evoke the Western, the type of iconic imagery originally created by John Ford, Anthony Mann, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and others.
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Mood Economy
Written by Eleanor Courtemanche (English)
A few days ago I came across the phrase “mood economy” as a way of describing how “working class youth are privatizing happiness” (the headline of an article in the Boston Globe). “Losing hope of the American Dream,” the headline continues, “a generation hopes for inner strength instead.” Sociology researcher Jennifer Silva, a postdoc at Harvard, has just documented how a whole generation has been locked out of the traditional metrics of success—-graduating from college, getting a job with benefits, marriage—-and is focusing instead on a totally different aspirational vocabulary that can be summarized as “Getting My Shit Together.” Their “definition of adulthood” is now built on “defining and conquering emotional problems, mental illness, family chaos, addiction.” Silva suggests that this focus on the self is not only the result of the pervasive influence of therapeutic language in pop culture, but it’s a response to an environment that literally won’t let them grow up.
Now, participants in a forum dedicated to rethinking Marxism are likely to see this development not as an empowering moment of agency but as a kind of pathetic petty-bourgeois backsliding, a mere symptom of the failure of individualism. But the desires of the working classes have only intermittently included hammering through abstract political tracts. Marxists have historically been better at some moods than others: better at sternness, at criticism, at exhortations to solidarity; less attentive to tears and softness, to depression, to aesthetic delight, to things that are funny. Of the many recent works on political affect, I’ll call attention to two that try to engage with these unpromising affects: Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, which links affect to the experience of precarity, of living in a state of permanent crisis that is no longer confined to a nomadic underclass; and also Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling–-although she is trying to reclaim precisely the kind of left-melancholic affect that Jodi Dean, in our conference readings from The Communist Horizon, would have us put behind us.
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posted under
Breaking Bad
,
Ina Hark
by Unit for Criticism
[The fourth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad]
“An Old Yeller Type Situation”
Written by: Ina Rae Hark (University of South Carolina)
Breaking Bad episode titles sometimes relate dialogically to each other, as when “Full Measure” (3.13) answers “Half Measures” (3.12). This week’s episode “Rabid Dog” calls back to episode 4.7, “Problem Dog.” There, during a therapy session with his Narcotics Anonymous group, Jesse Pinkman confesses his murder of Gale Boetticher through the metaphor of shooting a dog. The animal was neither sick nor vicious he says, only scared, but because it was a “problem,” he looked it in the eye and put it down.
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