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)
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
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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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.
posted under
Breaking Bad
,
Pamela Wojcik
,
serialization
by Unit for Criticism
[The third in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad]
Untrue Confessions
Written by: Pamela Wojcik (University of Notre Dame)
“Thank you for your honesty,” Sklyer (Anna Gunn) says to a customer who tells her she has given him a five dollar bill instead of a one dollar bill when making change for his car wash. This is the only moment of unforced, unfiltered honesty in the Breaking Bad episode titled “Confessions” (Season 5, Episode 11) which ran last night. Instead of truths freely offered, the episode more often makes characters and viewers ask, as Skyler’s sister Marie (Betsy Brandt) does, “where the lies begin and end” and to question the past: “That affair of yours,” Marie asks Skyler, “Did that even happen?” The episode title promises multiple confessions, but what we get are thwarted confessions, interrupted confessions, elisions, denials, revisions, reinterpretations of the facts, tall tales, and downright lies.
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"Treading Lightly and Staying Quiet: The Calm Before the Storm"
Written by: Lysa Rivera (Western Washington University)
If last week was all about treading “lightly,” this week’s episode was all about staying “quiet.” That, at least, was the advice Skyler, unwilling to rat out her husband, gave to Walt, who just before had offered to turn himself in. Even Hank, for now anyway, is keeping his secret to himself (with the exception of telling Marie), partly because it might cost him his job (or, at the very least, his reputation), but mostly because he doesn’t yet have the solid proof he needs to put Walt away for life. Or, if the cancer is actually back, “life.” And then there’s Jesse’s own brand of treading lightly and staying quiet: he spoke not a single word during the entire episode. But his wheels, like the merry-go-round in the park, are clearly spinning and it is only a matter of time before Jesse acts on his angst. Whether or not he cooperates with Hank for saying what Skyler will not, of course, remains to be seen. We’ll just have to wait for the merry-go-round ride to end.
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posted under
Breaking Bad
,
Creekmur
,
tragedy
by Unit for Criticism
"Bad Breaks"
Written by: Corey K. Creekmur (University of Iowa)
The final half of the final season of Breaking Bad has arrived with absurdly high expectations, generating what Alessandra Stanley called a “finale frenzy” in the New York Times yesterday, in one of dozens of pieces written in anticipation of the impending conclusion of the celebrated AMC series that began in 2008. Centered on the rapid expansion of former high school chemistry teacher Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) methamphetamine empire, critics quickly summarized the show’s evident appeal as “addictive,” and so are now preoccupied with calculating the impact of our collectively going cold turkey once the supply of new product is cut off. However, as many other critics -- as well as ordinary viewers and even creators of “quality television” series – now clearly recognize, consumption of relatively harmless recreational drugs like Breaking Bad no longer requires waiting patiently for the serialized disbursement of weekly broadcast doses. Even if the first airing of an episode continues to draw the most fevered fans, determined to avoid the dreaded “spoilers” felt to dilute their rush, the widespread ability to record, download, stream, demand, or otherwise watch television on consumers’ own schedules has thoroughly altered our relationship to TV reception, perhaps especially of densely plotted serial narratives. The now common activity of binge viewing, as well as selective and controlled re-viewing (no longer determined by network re-run schedules or syndication), in addition to everyone’s more surgical ability to pause, rewind, and fast-forward, explodes the limited time frame of reception as well as the activity of collective cultural response. We are now, as another recent New York Times article puts it, in the age of “post-water-cooler-TV.” I could ruin the endings of Fringe or Battlestar Galactica for you since I’ve plowed through each in its entirety, but since I haven’t yet gotten to The Sopranos or Lost, please don’t tell me what happens: we are a now a long way from all talking about who shot J.R. together on the same morning in America.
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