Breaking Bad is the worst show in the history of television.*

I've just now finally caught up with Breaking Bad, which I just started watching last week.** Amazing how a show about meth has the same effect on its viewers as its subject does on its victims. But as I start to catch up on the years of episode breakdowns and critical analyses, I can't help but be a little annoyed by the repeated claim about the show's "realism." Joe Kugelmass wrote about this  vis-a-vis The Wire, and though I can't seem to find the post, I want to give credit where it's due, because I'm no Zakaria. Joe's point, in brief, is that people always claim that The Wire is a realistic portrayal of the tangled mess of conflicting interests that is the great city of Baltimore, except that isn't realistic in the least. Consider one of the infamous "Omar's coming!" scenes: it's a classic Western sequence whose sole post-modern twist is that it's a shoot-out within a shoot-out. I'm not saying it's not clever or well-executed, only that it's highly stylized, i.e. not realistic and not attempting to be so.

Breaking Bad is equally unrealistic, except unlike The Wire, whose overarching narrative does actually embrace a realistic ethos, Breaking Bad is a thoroughly naturalist narrative. What do I mean by "naturalist"? Even I'm not entirely sure. But a decent (if stripped) working definition might be that a naturalist work is any in which a person's character is determined by the restrictions of the social environment in which it operates. No matter what its author claims a naturalist narrative isn't a realistic project: it's a thought experiment that amounts to "If I place Person A into Environment B how will he or she react?" It may aim for realism but its logic is beholden only to itself. (Which is why naturalist novels often begin with a dentist winning a lottery ticket but end with a man handcuffed to a corpse in Death Valley.) Breaking Bad clearly fits into this tradition.

A high school chemistry teacher learns he has cancer. He can't afford to pay for the treatment. What will he do? He'll make meth. How will inserting a tidy high school teacher into the seedy world of meth production and dealing change this man's character? The show's spent five seasons answering that question, and the answer, as is always the case with naturalist narratives, is astoundingly unpleasant. If you win the lottery, you kill your wife before dying alone in the desert cuffed to a stranger. If you win the cancer lottery, you can't afford treatment and estrange your wife such that she's counting down the days until your cancer can mount a comeback. In short:

There is no good here. But there's no realism either. Naturalist narratives are necessarily and aggressively pessimistic. When presented with a choice between a creating a disturbing tableau and presenting the likely consequences of a particular course of actions, naturalist narratives opt for:

Without giving away too much game, that's an image of a man who's just had half his brain blown into a cavity and he's fixing his tie. Is he about to die? Of course he is. The life expectancy of people in his situation is dire beyond the telling. But it's a powerful image of a man who risked everything with composure and is determined to die as subdued and dignified as he lived. Can a man actually take a pipe-bomb to the face and ablute himself? Of course not. Then why do people insist that Breaking Bad is a realistic portrayal of the perils of the methamphetamine trade? Because of scenes like what I'll call "The Story of Jesse and the Beans."

You'll remember that I praised Louie for its commitment to the two shot. The two shot is one that has two people in the frame. (Can you guess what a three shot is?) The purpose of a two shot is create a connection between the characters through the process of accumulation. If you include two subjects in the same frame for an inordinate amount of screen-time the audience will consider them partnered regardless of whatever their actual relationship is. Playing against this instinct is why Bergman films create such discomfort.  The same logic appears in Breaking Bad, except the sequences aren't nearly so staged as Bergman's. A typical conversation on Breaking Bad isn't a two shot. It looks like "Walter, what do you have to say?"

And "Jesse, how do you feel about that?"

Their psychological and sociological differences are accentuated by filming them in a series of perpetual shot and reverse shots. They don't share the frame because they're not friends and barely even co-workers. Which brings us to the scene in which Walter invites Jesse over for dinner with his wife. The sudden shift to the two and three shots is glaring because it's painfully oblique to the status of their current relationships. So:

"The Story of Jesse and the Beans" opens with a half-empty long shot. (Just compare it to a very similar scene in Kick-Ass.) All three half-occupy the bottom half of frame that's fronted by an empty chair. Moreover, the dominant diegetic light source pulls our eyes up to the chandelier, which means that when we search the frame for meaning we're incredibly aware of all the empty unlit space in the top half of the frame. These are three diminished people sharing a table with Elijah.

The composition of the shot further distances them: the white inner curtains flank Jesse and cut him off, compositionally speaking, from Skyler and Walter, who sit before the dark outer curtains. (I know: I need to figure out what curtains are called. Feel free to point me in the right direction.) The frame's split in three and each of these characters occupies their own bit of the triptych. This isn't a realistic shot. It's a carefully staged psychological reflection of the character's current relations to each other. This shot only seems realistic because it's ostensibly conventional: we're accustomed to watching families eat dinner together and that's what we seem to have here. Only we don't. There's a tension between the compositional elements in the frame and the narrative being communicated through it, and that tension mirrors that being felt by the characters.

About which more in the next post, which will be arriving shortly.

*Clearly I'm kidding. I just covered too much ground to come up with a snappy title.

**And before you ask why it took me so long to watch a critically acclaimed show about an educator who his cancer from his wife, I've already been over that. Does this resemblance make me look tough?

Comments

[Jenwingard]

Ah, naturalism! That's great. Much better than my take on BB which I was never fully comfortable with because it separated form from ideology. My take has been that BB is great TV formally, but it has shitty politics (I see it as an Ayn Rand sycophantic representation of "the real world.") Yet, that has always made me uncomfortable because as a die-hard Marxist Cultural Studies wonk, I believe form and ideology can't be cleaved apart quite so easily. So naturalism. Wat a great thought. Walt as a latter day McTeague!

[Jenwingard]

Also, come to Houston! You have friends here. My hubby thinks your readings are smart, too. ( His website: www.academichack.net).

[Ahistoricality]

I'm not going to get into the mess of literary critical definitions, but it does seem like one of the defining features of the series is the amount of actual work characters have to do. Whether it's dead drops or negotiations with suppliers or disassembling motorbikes or running chicken joints, just doing stuff that needs to be done, step by step, occupies more of the show than almost any other TV series I can think of.

[mxyzptlk]

I like the naturalist take, but to be honest I hadn't really come across anyone describing it as realistic (but I wasn't looking, either).

But I'm a sucker for shot breakdowns, and another way to look at the dinner table shot is through the rule-of-thirds. Their heads occupy the central plane, and the upper-left and upper-right corners (above Skyler and Walter) both contain plants, while the upper-middle section is the light. Walter's raison-d'etre (at first sincere, now a pantomime) has been "family," a seemingly natural and wholesome and organic concept -- hence the plants hovering above the two family members. However, the light is artificial in every way, and that's what hovers above the outcast who introduced the organic family man to the world of synthesized speed. (But I wouldn't doubt if those plants weren't real.)

The empty chair in the bottom-center section? That's for us, the audience who's intruding upon this forced moment. But it also cuts Jesse off; he's the only person in the shot who's literally half a person, while the bottom-left and bottom-right sections allow Skyler and Walter to have full bodies. This is somehow fitting, since one of the operating themes behind the narrative is that "family" is necessary to be a complete person; while Walter and Skyler have seemingly maintained that in the face of crazy odds, Jesse has failed -- with his own parents, then with Jane, and again with Andrea and her son Brock. No family = an incomplete person.

However, one of the other hallmarks of BB is the p.o.v. camera located on an inanimate-yet-moving object, often in time-lapse. That camera has been located in places like the bumpers of cars or on pick-axes. It places the audience in a position of near-helplessness; we're simply along for the ride, and any audience choice of what to focus on in the shot is almost violently removed. I've not taken crystal meth, but from what I understand, the tweaker loses control over what to focus on and will hyper-focus on whatever's in front of him -- a game, a conversation, food, etc. The tweaker is in a position of near-helplessness, and is simply along for the ride.

I wondered if while writing this post you heard a little Zizek sputtering in the back of your head about how Breaking Bad is real precisely because of its unreality. That the hyper-stylized shots that put the audience into uncomfortable positions forces them confront, consciously or not, the specter of artificiality that hovers over so many of the symbolic social structures, relationships and rituals that we deal with every day -- husband/wife, parent/child, boss/worker, teacher/student, law/criminal, in-laws. We tend to accept them as given and natural because that's how people get through the day. The unrealistic hyper-stylized shots move us outside of those symbolic structures, and that's where the real intrudes.

...or something like that...