Acephalous

Breaking Bad can't be art: Thoughts on the first truly naturalist television narrative

A few weeks after the finale of Lost, Chad Post attempted to defend it by claiming that its nonsense was the stuff of art. “What’s interesting,” he argued, “is how these six seasons functioned as … a great work of art [that] leaves things open to interpretation, poses questions that go unanswered, creates patterns that are maybe meaningful.” I’m not interested in discussing the merits of the Lost finale – whether all of the “survivors” Oceanic 815 were dead the entire time or some of them were only dead most of time doesn’t matter, as they’re both the narrative equivalent of convincing a child you’ve stolen its nose: it only works because kid’s not equipped to know it doesn’t.

Defenders of the Lost finale, of course, have no such excuse and are instead forced, like Post, to recapitulate aesthetic theories they half-remember from high school – in this case, the quasi-New Critical theory that elevates the interpreter over the work of art. It’s the critic, after all, not the artist, who benefits from “leav[ing] things open to interpretation.”

The New Critic was an archeologist of ambiguity, teasing from every contradiction he encountered a paean to the antebellum South. They valued ambiguity as an aesthetic virtue because poems and novels that possessed it could be made to be about anything, which freed them to make statements like, when it came to great works of art, “all tend[ed] to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way.” And they did so by being ambiguous, which allowed the New Critics to say, without irony, that great works of art celebrated “the culture of the soil” in the South. This, dear reader, is the brand of literary and aesthetic theory you were likely taught in high school, and by its druthers, Breaking Bad‘s not even a work of art, much less a great one.*

In fact, by this standard, it’s quite possibly the least artful narrative in the history of American television, and because of this, it’s the first show that deserves the label “naturalist.” The naturalist novels of the early 20th Century were tendentious in the most base sense of the word: any tendency that appears in characters’ personality early in a book will, by its end, have metastasized into impulses so vast and deep you wonder why they even tried to repress them.

For example, in the first chapter of McTeague (1899), Frank Norris compares his titular character to a single-minded “draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient,” whose one “dream [was] to have projecting from the corner window [of his "Dental Parlors"] a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive.”

There’s your premise: McTeague is dumb and stubborn, especially in the service of his vanity. In the next chapter, when he tries to extract a tooth from the mouth of a patient he’s fallen in love with, it’s no surprise that “as she lay there, unconscious and helpless, very pretty [and] absolutely without defense … the animal in [McTeague] stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring.”

“No, by God! No, by God!” he shouts, then adds “No, by God! No, by God!” He tries not to sexually assault her, but fails, “kiss[ing] her, grossly, full on the mouth.” Moreover, his failure revealed that “the brute was there [and] from now on he would feel its presence continually; would feel it tugging at its chain, watching its opportunity.” When the woman, named Trina, wakes from the procedure, he proposes to her with the same stupid vehemence with which he tried not to assault her:

“Will you? Will you?” said McTeague. “Say, Miss Trina, will you?”

“What is it? What do you mean?” she cried, confusedly, her words muffled beneath the rubber.

“Will you?” repeated McTeague.

“No, no,” she cried, terrified. Then, as she exclaimed, “Oh, I am sick,” was suddenly taken with a fit of vomiting.

One of the most prominent features of naturalist prose, as you can see, is stupid, ineffective repetition in the face of adversity. McTeague can shout “No, by God!” as many times as he’d like, but he still assaults her, and no matter how many times Trina says “No, no” in response to his “Will you?” the only way this ends well for either of them is if she vomits all over his office. Given such favorable initial conditions, would it surprise you to learn that after she wins the lottery, he beats her to death? Or that the novel ends with him handcuffed to the dead body of his best friend, who he also beat to death, in Death Valley?

Because McTeague is a naturalist novel, it shouldn’t. The key phrase buried in the previous paragraph is “initial conditions,” because when you’re in the presence of a naturalist narrative, they’re all that matter.

By now, I’m sure it’s obvious how this relates to Breaking Bad: in a real sense, the second through fifth seasons mark the inevitable, inexorable consequences of what happens when someone with Walter White’s character flaws is put in the situation he’s put in. Like his forbear McTeague, he’s incapable of developing as a character: he can only more robustly embody the worst aspects of his fully-formed personality.

This is why, in naturalist novels and Breaking Bad, repetition is so significant: it’s only when provided with a reminder of where the narrative started that we’re able to recognize how much the central character hasn’t changed. Every time we see another visual echo from episodes past – and in the fifth season, they come fast and frequently – we’re reminded of how committed Walter is to his vision of himself as a heroic figure struggling against a universe determined to wrong him. Consider this shot from “Bit by a Dead Bee,” the third episode of the second season:

Walter is in his hospital bed after the shoot-out with Tuco in the desert, which happened after he had been missing for three days and, of course, which almost got his brother-in-law Hank killed. He’s also claiming that the cancer treatment ate the memory of the walkabout it sent him on. The difference between the man he is – one who’s capable of devising a cover story for his meth-related absence that involves playing cancer for sympathy – and the one he imagines himself to be: the one in the boat, about to leave his family alone, possibly defenseless, while he heroically sets out into the great unknown. The next time he sees that image, he’s in a motel room surrounded by white supremacists planning the coordinated execution of the remainder of Gus’s crew. The director of “Gliding Over All,” Michelle MacLaren, moves our eyes around the scene before settling on a convoluted long shot:

MacLaren is fond of shots in which you’re forced to follow eyelines around the frame in order to make sense of the scene, and like that banquet in the “Second Sons” episode of Game of Thrones, it’s only after you’ve done the work of following everyone’s eyes around the room that you realize that the most important element in the frame isn’t actually in the frame. Once you follow an eyeline to an uninteresting terminus, you move on to the next character, so if you start analyzing the frame from the center and track on action, you’ll move to Kenny stretching and follow his eyes (red) to the floor, then Frankie shuffles in place, so you look at him and follow his eyes (blue) to the table, but since that seems unpromising, Todd catches your attention when he shifts his weight, then you follow his eyes (green) to the bed, which means that McClaren’s direction has compelled you to move your eyes around the screen until you reach the area of the bed at which Todd’s staring, which is puts them right next to Walter, who has remained stock-still throughout. She didn’t need him to move or even speak to draw your attention to Walter, she’s done so by other means. Once she has you where she wants you, she has you follow his eyeline (yellow) to its terminus, which is off-frame.

Following eyelines to their rainbow’s end is a function of film that doesn’t necessarily pique our curiosity, but when we come to the end of our journey around the frame and the most significant character in it is staring at something off it, we desperately want to know what he’s looking at.** McClaren knows that we’ll be less interested in the frame when we find out what he’s staring at, so beginning with that long shot (14:43), she cuts to a medium close-up on Jack (15:06), a close-up on Kenny (15:10), a medium shot on Todd (15:13), an extreme close-up on Jack (15:17) that racks to a medium shot on Frankie (15:20) before reversing to the initial medium on Jack (15:23), then back to the initial medium close-up on Jack (15:24) before jumping to a clean medium on Frankie (15:28), then to a more extreme close-up on Jack taking a drag (15:29), then she moves back to the close-up on Kenny (15:31), then back to Jack (15:35), back to Kenny (15:39), and back to Jack (15:41) until finally returning to Walter (15:50), who is of course still staring at something off-frame. McClaren’s refused to provide us with the information we desire for more than a minute at this point, but it wasn’t a typical minute.

According to the Cinemetics database, the average shot length (ASL) in “Gliding Over All” is 5.8 seconds, but as you can see from above, after that initial 23-second-long shot of Jack, the scene has an ASL of 3.8 seconds.*** Lest you think I’m using the kind of “homer math” that leads sports reporters to write about how their team’s ace has the best in ERA in the league if you throw away the four starts in which he got rocked: I’m sequestering this bit of the scene and treating its ASL in isolation because we watch scenes sequentially and in context.

The shift in the pacing of editing created the impression that something really exciting was happening, but “four guys in a motel room talking about doing something exciting” actually qualifies as exciting; the other alternative is that the shot-frequency accelerated because McClaren was building up to something exciting, like the revelation of what Walter is staring at. The editing could be doubling down on the anticipation created by that intial long shot: as frustrating as it is to watch shot after shot fly by without learning what’s on that wall, the editing’s at least affirming our initial interest in it.

Or was, until she cut to the close-up of Walter staring at the painting (15:50), and because it’s a close-up of someone staring at something off-frame, you assume that the next shot will be an eyeline match, but no, MacLaren cuts back to Jack, who’s explaining to Walter how murdering ten people is “doable,” but murdering them within a two minute time-frame isn’t. In a typical shot/reverse shot situation, especially when it’s in the conversational mode as this one is, you expect the eyelines to meet at corresponding locations in successive frames. If Walter’s head is on the right side of the frame, and it is, you expect Jack to be looking to the left side of the frame in the reverse, and he does:

The sequence is off-putting because Walter’s violating cinematic convention in a way that makes us, as social animals, uncomfortable. On some fundamental level, the refusal to make eye contact is an affront to a person’s humanity, so even though Jack’s a white supremacist with a penchant for ultra-violence, we feel a little sorry for him. He is, after all, being ignored in favor of we-don’t-even-know-yet, but at least it’s something significant. MacLaren wouldn’t have put all this effort into stoking our interest in something of no consequence, but that doesn’t mean we’re thrilled when she cuts out to the initial long shot in which whatever-it-is remains off-frame, or when she cuts to an odd reverse on Walter, who asks “Where do you suppose these come from?”

How wonderful is that “these”? We’re finally going to learn what Walter’s been staring at, but even the dialogue is militating against our interest, providing us with the pronoun when all we want to see is the antecedent. MacLaren holds on Walter for one last agonizing beat before finally reversing to this image of the painting (16:09):

This reverse shot seems more conversational than the last – again, in a way that insults Jack’s essential humanity, or whatever passes for it among white supremacists – only now the conversation isn’t between Walter and any of the actual human beings sharing that motel room with him, it’s with himself.****

“I’ve seen this one before,” he informs the very people he just insulted. It’s not that he’s wrong – it is the same painting he saw after he ended up in the hospital, and the timing here is crucial. In “Bit by a Dead Bee,” his outlandish plan had just been successfully completed, so when he looked at the husband heroically rowing out to sea, nobly sacrificing himself for the family he’s left behind, he sympathetically identified with a man who shared his current plight, who had made a decision and was following through with it for the sake of those he loved. But in “Gliding Over All,” he sees the same painting before one of his outlandish plans has come to fruition, so now when he sympathizes with the husband heroically rowing out to sea, nobly sacrificing himself for the family he’s left behind, he identifies with him because they share a common fate, as both have to decide whether to continue with their foolishness or return to shore.*****

Astute readers may have noticed that I just wrote the same sentence with different words. That’s because I did. The only “development” Walter’s underwent from the first time he saw that painting to now is that he’s more fanatically committed to the image of himself as the hero sacrificing himself for his family. Every sacrifice he makes on his family’s behalf only makes him more of the same same kind of hero he’s always imagined himself to be.

The presence of this painting – as well as the other visual echoes, most obviously Walter’s birthday bacon – reminds us that it’s only been eleven months since the moment he first saw it, in November 2009, to the moment he sees it in “Gliding Over All,” in October 2010. Naturalist novels also focused on the rapidity with which can descend in the absence of a social safety net. McTeague’s life unravels astonishingly quickly once he loses his job: four months later he and Trina are living in squalor; a month after that, she moves into an elementary school; two months later, he murders her; two months after that, he’s chained to the body of a dead man in the middle of Death Valley. Because of the kind of person he is, this is how McTeague’s life had to end. Aaron Paul’s appearance in Saturday Night Live demonstrates just how much Breaking Bad shares this naturalist concern.

I could go on: the short stories and novels of Jack London were about the opportunities to be had in the wilderness, and the dangers associated with them. In his most famous story, “To Build a Fire,” there is a moment in the fourth paragraph when the nameless protagonist could have, and should have, turned back. Once he makes the decision not to, his fate is sealed, it just takes another 40,000 words to reach it. If there’s an art to enjoying a man struggle in vain against his inevitable doom, it’s been lost to us – or had been, until Breaking Bad, which demonstrated that there is an audience for naturalist narratives, bleak and unremitting though they may be. Moreover, the opening scene of the finale, “Felina,” almost seems like a combination of “To Build a Fire” and another famous naturalist story, Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” I’m not saying I believe that Walter dreamed he took his revenge in the moments before he froze to death, but it’s not entirely implausible, especially if the series is considered in the light I’ve presented it here. (Norm MacDonald, of all people, has my back on this.)

The question remains, then, whether Breaking Bad qualifies as “art.” Literary naturalism’s reputation has faded since the 1930s because, in part, critics consider it more akin to an experiment than literature. Literature requires its characters to develop, to become “round,” as they used to say — whereas naturalists were like scientists who would rather take a personality type and stick it in fifteen different environments so they could observe its behavior. When you consider the conversations that followed George R.R. Martin’s comment about Walter being a bigger monster than anyone in Game of Thrones, you can see where that temptation comes from, and how powerful it is, three-thousand comments deep in discussions about whether White would’ve been more like Tywin Lanister or Roose Bolton.

So is Breaking Bad art? Of course it is. The absurd amount of detail included above isn’t meant to overwhelm, merely to acknowledge the level of artistry that went into demonstrating that Walter hasn’t grown. I would take it one step further and say that even if you don’t believe naturalist narratives can be considered “art,” Breaking Bad would still be art, because as much as critics focus on the show’s content, what separates it from most television is the manner in which it’s presented. Even if the plot itself were terrible, the manner in which it’s shot would elevate it to the status of art.

*The main reason New Criticism was adopted as a model was that, unlike the modes of historicism that preceded it, it was infinitely scalable. After the GI Bill was passed, even college and university faculty were worried that their students lacked the educational background required to write the kind of research papers they’d previously assigned, but anyone could be a New Critic: all you had to do was look at a poem and point out what didn’t make sense, because that’s what it a work of art. Within half a decade, the bug of student ignorance became a feature.

**If you were paying close attention when the scene opened, you would’ve noticed, since she opens with a medium shot of the painting, then pulling back and sweeping to the right. Like many scenes in Breaking Bad, this one is sequenced backwards, providing us with information before we can understand – or if you’ve seen “Bit by a Dead Bee” recently, remember – the significance of it.

***For the record: 4 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds, 3 seconds, 3 seconds, 1 second, 4 seconds, 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds, 4 seconds, 2 seconds, 4 seconds, 4 seconds, 2 seconds, and finally 9 seconds.

****Before you wonder why I’m not just calling that an eyeline match, because it’s also one of those, keep in mind that not only has Walter been staring at it with a faraway look in his eyes for almost two-and-a-half minutes, he now appears to be asking it a question. Also, in a move seemingly designed to frustrate my former students, check out the examples the Yale Film Analysis site chooses for “eyeline match” and “shot/reverse shot.

*****The boat seems closer to shore than ship, after all, which only adds to the nobility of the man rowing it out to sea, because it’d be so much easier to just turn around.

[This was originally published at Lawyers, Guns & Money, where Scott Kaufman also writes when he's not chairing the AV Club's Internet Film School.]

My take on Breaking Bad's final season...

...can be found at RogerEbert.com. It looks something like this:

Only with more words. The first of which look like this:

The fifth season of "Breaking Bad" is an exercise in aggressive nostalgia. "Ozymandias," lauded by many as one of the strongest hours in television history ten minutes in, is especially committed to reminding the audience how different the world these characters inhabit is. It opens with a flashback that doubles as a classic "process" shot, an extreme close-up a cook flask.

But this is no ordinary flashback. This flashback is holding the narrative hostage. The audience knows that twenty months in the future, on this exact same plot of New Mexican desert, Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez are slowly staining the sand red, while Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are bound, locked and helpless in the backseats of the DEA agent's vehicles. Something shattering is about to happen...

Because I am terrible at self-promotion, this is how you’ll have to learn about my new AV Club columns

I just read this awesome new article about Breaking Bad that said things like this:

The tone being set here is riddled first with uncertainty (“Where are we?”), then with pointlessness (“Who are these skaters?”), and potential hazard (“Why so fast?”), before finally answering the question the opening shot asked (“Why are we wherever ‘here’ is?”). Once Cranston moves to the crane shot of Walter White’s backyard, we’re able to place ourselves spatially and temporally.

We recognize the once meth-blue pool in which Pink Bear and Skyler White floated; we notice the absence of the Lily of the valley Walter used to poison Brock Cantillo; and we know that the second half of season five begins where the first half did: one year in the future, closer to Walter’s 52nd birthday than his 50th.

You should read its life-affirming affirmations of life, speaking of which:

Comedy vs. Drama*

I caught the latest 30 Rock this afternoon and noticed something:

The guy in the midground is off-center:

This may seem like a blindingly obvious point, but one reason this shot is off-center is because the characters in it are off-kilter. The director, Robert Carlock, stages this shot in order to maximize the misdirection: Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer) encourages viewers to follow an eyeline match left and somewhere north of his mother (Catherine O'Hara) before the camera gently racks the foreground out and the midground in to focus. The audience resets its eyes and sees nothing of interest until the movement of Kenneth's step-father (Bryan Cranston) attracts its attention, at which point an eyeline match again suggests viewers look left and somewhere north of his mother. Compelling the audience to bounce its eyes around this quickly within a sustained shot redoubles the manic impression the dialogue and narrative want to create. As I said, this point may seem obvious, but if you want to think about the difference between comedy and drama on a visual level, the scene above may be the perfect place to start.

Situational comedies are filmed in an unsettling manner in order to maximize the capacity for surprise. When the audience haphazardly spirits its attention across the frame, the director literally has more space with which to work:

Before the camera racks, our attention is in quadrant one; after the camera racks, our attention is again drawn to quadrant one. In this case the director has at least three other quadrants in which to introduce new and potentially humorous information. We could actually divide the screen much more finely by following Kenneth and his step-father's eyelines:

But the four quadrants suffice for now. We look there in quadrant one when Kenneth's in focus, recenter when the midground comes into focus, and then follow Kenneth's step-father's eyes back to quadrant one. The rest of the screen is primed for hilarity. I grant that posts about creating comedy are by definition unfunny, but there's a reason this particular shot spurred me to write this post: this person ... about whom I wrote an entire post concerning his staring.

In Breaking Bad the audience's eyes don't bounce around the scene from character to character in an attempt to ascertain the significant in-frame elements—they follow Walter White's in an attempt to understand some particular fact. The quiet dignity to Walter's unrelenting stare is partly a credit to Cranston and partly a credit to the plot, but it's also partly a credit to the directors of Breaking Bad, who know that creating shots that contain no quadrants capable of surprise results in a menacing atmosphere. Compare the shot above to this one:

I'll refrain from drawing yellow lines all over it because, unlike the shot above, the intended movement of our eyes is obvious. We center our eyes in the frame, move to Walter's face and then follow his eyes to the money pile. That's the only movement it makes sense to make. In the frame from 30 Rock, our eyes are encouraged to move quickly but not decisively. We're not asked to stare so much as follow. I created quadrants and drew lines to indicate the misdirection that enhances comedic direction—that the two eyeline matches bracket a racking focus is significant too—whereas in this frame from Breaking Bad no such embellishment is necessary because there's nothing to embellish. Your eyes move the way director Michelle MacLaren wants them to or you lose the plot.

*This entire post was inspired by the fact that the episode had been over for half-an-hour before I realized that'd been Bryan Cranston, so I started to think about why it was, formally, that I hadn't recognized him. (Outside of the obvious fact that I'm not that bright.)

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All" I've written

Someone asked if I’d published the final post in my wrap-up of the mid-season finale and I mentioned that I had—on Saturday evening when 90 percent of our readers aren’t reading. So here’s a convenient wrap-up of my posts on the subject:

• Part I: In which we learn the value of staring.
• Part II: In which we learn about invisible lines and the value of staring at paintings.
• Part III: In which we learn about the color blue and that sometimes looking is important too.

I also wrote a post about Walter White and white supremacism but it’s only tangentially related to “Gliding Over All.” So there it is: three posts about a single episode that don’t even begin to do it justice. There may be one more on the horizon, but for now the bulk of my visual rhetoric-related work will consist of readings of the first season of Game of Thrones for my Fall course. I should have the first (of many) posts up tomorrow.

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All" until you're not

(This being another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

At this point my point should be staring you in the face: the mid-season finale of Breaking Bad is all about staring and what it means to stare. Staring can signify the acquisition of knowledge (the fly and the painting) or suggest intimacy (the cafe) or indicate an experience with the ineffable (the money pile). That it functions so differently in a single episode prevents the audience from being able to predict how a particular stare will influence the narrative. (Unlike a stare in a generic gangster film, for example, which the audience can safely assume will lead to the death of the person being stared at or being thought about while the staring occurs.) This is why the final scene in the episode works so well: its simplicity. But before I get to that, I should set up the narrative at this particular moment. Walter and his extended family, including his DEA-employed brother-in-law Hank, are having a dinner beside the White's pool. It's worth noting that this is a significant pool: Walter spent the time in which Mike's men were being murdered alternating between staring at it and his watch:

Given that the palette of Walter's depravity skews as blue as his meth, it's not surprising that the face of his watch is blue. Nor is it surprising that after he learns that the synchronized hits went down successfully, MacLaren returns to the "scene" of the crime and shots Walter thus:

There's bad Walter bathed in blue and staring at the pool. He knows he's crossed a line: it was one thing to murder Fring or Mike in what he could justify to himself as self-defense. It's another entirely to remove Mike's crew from the world because their continued existence posed a potential threat to his empire. He's cooked for three consecutive months and only could have done so by taking out Mike's men. (Otherwise one of them would've talked and Walter would've been arrested.) As he sits by the side of his pool, ignorant of the exact amount of money he's earned during his months long cooking binge, the serene look on his face may come from an exhausted sense of pride in work well-done, but it also hides the fact that he knows that work couldn't have been done had he not arranged the murders of Mike's men. The ends have justified his means. Then he's introduced to the money pile, the experience of which so muddles his immoral calculus and leads to him informing Skyler that he's retiring from the trade and bringing his family back into the fold. Which is only to say that regardless of Walter's state of mind prior to meeting the money pile, its existence alters him in such a way that he believes himself capable of recapturing the life he's lost.

The penultimate scene next to the pool is the first step in resumption of normalcy. His wife and children have returned home. His sister- and brother-in-law have come over for dinner. Everything is right in the universe. The river's flowing:

Walter White is no White Savior

Malcolm Harris is convinced that Breaking Bad‘s Walter White is yet another example of the White Savior, i.e.

The white guy who enters a world supposedly beneath him where he doesn’t belong yet nonetheless triumphs over the inhabitants is older than talkies. TV Tropes calls it “Mighty Whitey,” and examples range from Tom Cruise as Samurai and Daniel Day Lewis as Mohican[.]

I’m not one to cut Dances-with-Braveheart-Smurf slack, as I abhor little more than the notion that a white mind triumphs over brown bodies, but in this case I think Harris’ criticism is misguided. Lindsay more than adequately addresses Harris’ concern with the “purity” of Walter’s product, so I’ll focus on the simple fact that Harris doesn’t understand the trope he thinks is operative here. He seems to believe that any time a white person succeeds in a predominantly non-white discipline, said person automatically qualifies for the title of White Savior. But the examples he provides—The Last Samurai and Last of the Mohicans—indicate that on some level he’s aware that this trope traditionally involves more than a white man out-doing his non-white competitors in whatever it is they’re doing. It involves a white man teaching non-white people how to be the best non-white people they can be by leading them into battle as only a white man can. There’s typically a cultural synergy—the white man embodies the “best” traits of whites and non-whites—that enables the White Savior to lead his primitative horde to victory.

The problem with claiming this trope to be operative in Breaking Bad isn’t just that there’s no cultural synergy, nor is it just that Walter cares little for the fate of the non-white people his work displaces. Walter cuts a culturally unique figure: he’s a typical white imperialist, a brash colonialist who believes his superior technical skills make him better than the “indigeneous” cooks, and the people he wants to enslave aren’t the “natives” but white people. Eighty-one percent of known meth addicts are white people, and Walter wants each and every one of them to be addicted to his product. He’s no more a Hawkeye out to preserve Mohican culture from white incursion than he is a Lt. Dunbar determined to stall American encroachment into Sioux territory. In short: the trope Harris wants to use to condemn Breaking Bad just doesn’t apply to a show that’s more concerned with the ruthlessness of capitalist competition than the color of the working class.

I’m not saying there isn’t a racial component to the show, because there obviously is. This just isn’t it.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can finish analyzing “Gliding Over All,” so more shortly.

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All" the invisible lines and immaterial connections

(This being another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

In the previous post, I claimed that the titular reference to Whitman's "Passage to India" suggests that the central concerns of "Gliding Over All" were related to connectedness. I outlined the way in which the camerawork allows the audience to peer into Walter's mind and observe him connecting the fly to Mike's body by the power of intently staring. In retrospect I realize my claim is based on a manner of reading a visual text that's not intuitive, and that I only do it because I've trained myself to. The full version of this argument can be found here, but for now a single image from it should suffice:

That yellow arrow obviously isn't painted on "The Calling of Saint Matthew." (I can personally attest to that.) I put it there to describe the eyeline match between the man at the table and Jesus. When we look at his eyes, we see that he's looking at something and follow his line-of-sight. Is that line-of-sight in the painting? I would argue that it's an invisible element that exists in the painting. Our eyes aren't inventing that line-of-sight, they're merely following it. The practical effect of this argument is that I see invisible lines all over my television. When a character stares at something I see the line shoot from his or her eyes and follow its trajectory. The longer the character the stares, the greater the intensity of the line, and the more thoughtful the act of staring seems to become. The classic example of this are the scenes in Antonioni's Blowup in which Thomas uses his photographs to recreate the geography of the park in his apartment. Here's the fence on the back wall:

Here's Thomas staring at the unidentified man on the right wall:

What happens next?

Thomas follows the unidentified man's eyes to the photographs of the fence on the back wall. Staring at the unidentified man led Thomas to follow the invisible lines shooting from his eyes which in turn compelled him to further "blow up" the image of the fence. In this sense Thomas is a figure of the audience: we share his desire to know what the man is staring at. This is an elaborate way of making a simple point: I see invisible lines and you do too. (You just didn't know you did.)

The particular significance of those lines for "Gliding Over All" is that—as in Blowup—they function as tangible evidence of otherwise intangible thought processes. The staring is the physical equivalent of the technology Whitman celebrates in "Passage to India": it is the canal through which ships can pass, the train tracks upon which locomatives can traverse, the underground cables through which messages can travel. It's an invisible medium with the potential to be made meaningful because of what can move through it. In this episode it seems as if director MacLaren is intent on making Whitman's point in as many ways as possible. On the one hand you have the kinds of connections discussed in the previous post and above. On the other hand you have discussions about creating a network of literal connections of the sort Whitman celebrated. Consider the scene of Walter and Lydia in the diner:

The fact that both of them are in-frame here is significant: sharing a frame creates the impression that characters are connected. This is especially true in a series like Breaking Bad which, as I noted earlier, the majority of conversational sequences are a series of reversed one-shots. What is the nature of their connection? The technological descendents of the invisible connections of which Whitman wrote: the telephone signals and airline routes that facilitate the movement of Walter's product halfway across the globe. Lydia is offering Walter connections. When he balks MacLaren severs the implicit connection of the two-shot and switches to a series of profiles:

The more she convinces him the more connected they become:

The irony here is that the invisible connections I discussed in the previous post and the first half of this one are absent from the scene in which characters are literally forging a network of invisible connections. Until his sublime experience with the pile of money, Walter becomes—and is depicted by MacLaren as becoming—increasingly obsessed with abstract connections. Consider the scene in which he meets Todd's uncle to put hits on Mike's men:

As is hilariously evident when we follow all those eyelines, this shot is obscenely disconnected. But as with the scene in Blowup, MacLaren creates in the audience a desire to see whatever it is Walter is looking at. She lets the scene unfold for nearly two minutes before gratifying our curiosity:

But Walter isn't just staring at a painting any more than he was just staring at the fly. He's attempting to stare through the this particular painting to all of its other iterations. After being told that coordinating the murders of Mike's men is tantamount to killing bin Laden, Walter starts talking to no one in particular: "Where do you suppose these come from? I've seen this one before. I wonder, are they all in some giant warehouse someplace?" His first and third questions indicates that he wants to understand the deeper connection between all of these paintings. His second statement is simply one of fact:

That's from "Bit by a Dead Bee," the third episode of the second season, and that's Walter staring at it from his hospital bed. There's no visible flashback in "Gliding Over All," but the suggestion is that Walter remembers where he's seen it before. Or even if he doesn't, he's trying to remember by staring at it more intently than he has before, which means that's another invisible line that's functioning as a tangible representation of a thought process. Before moving on I should note that, as with the fly, the object being stared at is important. Just as the fly connected Walter to Mike's dead body, this painting connects Walter to his family. It's a painting, after all, of a woman and two children bidding a man farewell. That this family has a dog and Walter's doesn't is immaterial: studying that particular painting immediately before putting out a hit on eight imprisoned men reminds him of something. Maybe it's why he's doing it in the first place or maybe it's how far at sea his life's drifted. Doesn't matter: both interpretations adequately serve as preparation for his decision to quit the business after the pile of money breaks him.

Tomorrow I'll discuss the episode's final scene, in which Walt Whitman helps Hank make the episode's most significant connection.

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All," said the fly to the money pile.

(This being another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

I've had a week to digest the mid-season finale of Breaking Bad, "Gliding All Over," and for the first time in weeks I'm not going to talk about kitchen tables. The episode's title, "Gliding Over All," references Walt Whitman:

Gliding o'er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul—not life alone,
Death, many deaths I'll sing.

How is that relevant to the episode? Not in the way people online are discussing it. For one, I keep seeing it referred to as an ordinary "poem," when in fact it appears, untitled, on the title page of Passage to India. And the interpretations I've read of its relation to the episode all focus on the "many deaths" because of Walter's increasing comfort with lethal force. But take a quick look at the actual poem that bit above introduces:

Singing my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,
The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires[.]

"Passage to India" celebrates the connectedness of the world. These canals and transcontinental railroads and undersea telegraph cables have made it visible and tangible the connections between distant peoples.

O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, [then] shall be justified,
All these hearts, as of fretted children, shall be sooth’d,
All affection shall be fully responded to—the secret shall be told;
All these separations and gaps shall be taken up, and hook’d and link’d together

The voyagers and scientists and inventors create the conditions necessary to acquire a new kind of knowledge: one whose "secret ... separations and gaps" will be "hook'd and link'd together." In short: titling the episode "Gliding Over All" doesn't allude to the untitled poem's "many deaths" but to the process of acquiring an interconnected vision of the world through technology that Whitman outlines in "Passage to India." Given that Walter White and his contempories aren't in the midst of a world-shrinking communicative revolution, it stands to reason that they'll come into knowledge of how secrets are "hook'd and link'd together" differently.

Director Michelle MacLaren lets Walter have the first shot:

MacLaren opens with an extreme close-up on a fly. The shallow focus blurs the background to the extent that the only thing the audience can see is the fly. Because we want the shot to be meaningful, we begin to study the wings and shadows of this centrally positioned and obviously important fly. We try to connect this fly to some structure of meaning. Is this an allusion to "the contamination" that deviled Walter in "The Fly" and the extreme actions he and Jesse took to "clean" the lab? The camera lingers on the fly for seven seconds—long enough for these questions to arise but not long enough for them to be answer—before racking focus reveals that we're not the only ones trying to understand this fly:

Turns out the blurred "background" consisted of an extreme close-up of the top-half of Walter's face. Because the shot's level of framing is the height of a person sitting in a chair, we end up staring directly into Walter's eyes as he stares into ours. Except it can't be directly, because the fourth wall's intact, meaning Walter isn't staring past the fly, he's staring at the fly. Intently. He's studying the fly for meaning just as we did before the focus racked. The impression that he's staring through the fly—created by narrowing the depth of field in a way that blurs the fly invisible—is unsettling not only because it means that he might be menacing us, but also because it suggests that he sees some connection between himself and the fly that we failed to. He perceives the "eloquent, gentle wires" that connect him to that fly.

As well he should. There's a reason there's a fly in his office: Mike's remains rot in the trunk of Walter's car. He knows that knowledge of this fly's life-cycle could link him to Mike's murder by establishing a time of death. Even when Todd enters the room to inform him that he's disposed of Mike's car, Walter can't draw his eyes away:

This new world Walter inhabits requires a new breed of knowledge. Lest this discussion of eyeline matches and the connections they entail seem a little far-fetched, consider the last two shots in this scene:

Walter completes his intense study of the fly. When Walter stands and exits the shot to the right, MacLaren again racks the focus to reveal what the white blur behind Walter above is:

Which of course includes a taxonomic chart of flies based on the geographic distruction and rate of maturation. It is a secondary screwworm fly, meaning it only consumes necrotic tissue. Its presence connects Walter to the corpse decomposing in his trunk. We now know that this fly is unrelated to the one that taxed Walter in "The Fly," because that fly represented Walter's inability to maintain the illusion of an orderly world: he didn't know how it entered the lab and found himself powerless to remove it from it. But this fly? He knows exactly why it's there and exactly how to encourage it to leave. Its presence doesn't represent a disorderly incursion into Walter's orderly world but the extent to which Walter's come to define "orderly" differently: if he can see the connections he can control them and his mind "shall be sooth'd."

The idea established in this opening scene—that Walter has the power to acquire "secret" knowledge about connections in the world by staring at them intensely—is undermined when Skyler insists he accompany her to a storage facility. After they enter the unit, Skyler pulls aside a sheet. Instead of revealing what Skyler's uncovered, MacLaren cuts to a medium close-up of Walter's face:

Within a given episode of any well-directed television, the director will establish associations between particular shots and particular narrative elements. In the opening scene, MacLaren creates a correlation between extreme close-ups and a knowledgable mastery of the world. She combines a medium close-up of Walter with the expression on his face to indicate to us that this Walter can't fathom "these separations and gaps." He can't connect what he sees to the world he knows, and no wonder:

He's staring at a sublime amount of money. And I mean "sublime" as Kant meant it: it's a mathematical sublime, the effect of encountering an object whose greatness is unencumbered by the very idea of limitations. (Which is precisely the conversation Skyler and Walter have about how much money lives in that pile. They can't even imagine a way to count it.) Note that when the camera reversed the shot scale increased again. Walter's now in a classic medium shot here and when it reverses again:

The progressive lengthening of the shot scale suggests that Walter's becoming increasingly incapable of connecting this pile of money to the world as he understands it. Unlike the fly, this pile of money can't be categorized and put in its place: the pile lives in the storage unit because its size makes it impossible to launder its incomprehensible worth. Walter is shocked out of his fantasy of mastery-through-knowledge by an unknowable pile of money. That he decides to abandon the trade soon after encountering the sublime isn't surprising: his continued participation was predicated on his belief that he could out-understand his competitors. Now he can't even connect his labor to his capital.

These are but two moments in the episode in which this dynamic plays out. Tomorrow I'll discuss the most literal link between the episode and Whitman's paean to global shipping: the conversation between Walter and Lydia in the diner.

[Part II of this post can be found here.]

Breaking Bad: "Say My Name," or fine, maybe don't even acknowledge I exist.

One of the more gratifying things about studying film and television is the occasional payoff. You consider a scene in obsessive detail and it turns out that scene is just as important as you thought it was. This isn't a credit to you, obviously, so much as the director. (Though it is a validation that you're not imparting significance to irrelevant details.) So watching the latest episode of Breaking Bad, "Say My Name," was particularly gratifying for yours truly because it indicated that I didn't waste a day last week breaking down that scene at the dinner table in "Buyout." It had a punchline. Recall the establishing shot from that episode:

Compare that to the establishing shot in "Say My Name":

They're nearly identical. Nearly. As I tell my students: shots in which the differences are slight matter more than shots in which the differences are grand. So this long shot is a little longer—the head of the couch in the living room is visible—but the composition is identical, albeit less tightly framed. What does the looser framing suggest? Given the off-center position of the couch-head, the implication is that whatever orderly detente had been reached in the previous episode has, literally, been cast askew. Evidence of the tipped kilter abounds: two of the chairs occupied in "Buyout" are empty, and one of the characters—Jesse in his role as a figure of a son—has been replaced by a bottle of wine. It's almost as if the director, Thomas Schnauz, is claiming that if Jesse prevented Skyler and Walter from having a conversation in "Buyout," in "Say My Name" it's the wine. (And that Skyler's deliberately putting the wine between them. It had occupied the majority of her attention the last time after all.)

Point being: Schnauz wants viewers to employ their Highlights for Kids-cultivated ability to discern what's different about these establishing shots. He's inviting the comparison, and there are many to be made. In "Buyout," for example, the "family" sat down to a freshly cooked dinner from Albertson's. It's not quite home-cooking, but it's not entirely processed either. In "Say My Name," Skyler has sat down with a bottle of wine and a TV dinner. She didn't even bother to buy the freshly prepackaged meal, meaning she cares one degree-of-freshness less in this episode than she did in the last. And not just about herself:

She's "prepared" a microwave dinner for Walter as well, if by "prepare" one means "purchased and deposited in the freezer." The implication in "Buyout" was that she'd plated the food she'd bought at Albertson's—hence Jesse's confusion about it being home-cooked—whereas in "Say My Name" Walter's clearly had to microwave his own highly processed dinner. Moreover, whereas in the previous episode some modicum of social graces kept Skyler at the table long enough to listen to Jesse blather on about the green beans, in this episode as soon as Walter starts talking about Jesse's replacement, Skyler just leaves:

And note that she takes the long way:

One of the cardinal rules of directing—albeit one championed most stridently by actors—is not to step on someone else's lines. This scene is blocked so that Skyler callously steps all over Walter's, and triply so, because she not only stands when he begins to speak, which draws the viewers attention away from him, but she traverses the entirety of the frame and even briefly obscures Walter. That's three offenses against cinematic norms she and Shnauz have committed in as many seconds. On purpose.

But the best part about studying television and film is when a director genuinely surprises you. Being correct is all well and good, but finding a director who can enliven a cliché is far more gratifying. In "Buyout," you'll remember, the establishing shot segued into a series of reverse shots that ended with a medium close-up on Walter's face as he spoke to Jesse. That's the pattern established in "Buyout": establishing shot of the table, series of reverse shots, finish on Walter's anguished face. In "Say My Name," there's no reprieve from the formality of the establishing shot. It's as if the camera's telling you that it's trying its damnedest to establish what's going on in this shot, it just can't encompass it. Skyler's violation of decorum, however justified, only adds to the awkwardness. So when the camera finally cuts from the establishing shot it's almost a relief:

Pattern reestablished! That long shot led to a medium close-up except wait a minute it's daylight and where's the food and Walter's dressed differently. Skyler's violation seems to have justified another: the viewer anticipated the cut to the medium close-up to be within the scene, but Skyler's behavior necessitated that it function as a transition between scenes. Which isn't normal. The fact that it cuts to the correct sequence—a series of reverse shots—only emphasizes the fact that the wrong characters inhabit it. This sequence should (and would have) reversed from Walter to Skyler, but because of what he's driven her to do, it has to take place between Walter and Hank. (The fact that Walter has an ulterior motive isn't relevant, because I'm talking about the bleed from the previous scene.) Shnauz's direction here is as effective as it is clumsy elsewhere in the episode, but that'll have to wait for another post.

(This being another one of those visual rhetoric posts. That list has been updated to include the ones I've been too lazy to add the past few months.)

Realism and bad manners in Breaking Bad

In the previous post, I wrote:

[W]hy 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.”

I suggested that the answer is the power of conventions: if you shoot a family sitting down to dinner, the audience will peg the frame as being realistic because they've seen so many television families sit down to dinner. And there's something to that. Quite a bit actually: film conventions normalize human relations. Consider the last frame from the previous post:

Even if you've never seen the show, you know exactly what this is: a family sitting down to dinner. How do you know it's a family? Because there's a husband on the right and a wife on the left and a son in the middle? How do you know that's a son? Because he's smaller than the father and the mother. (Even if Aaron Paul were taller than Bryan Cranston or Anna Gunn, the director, Colin Bucksey, could make him appear smaller by staging the scene as he does here and simply placing Paul further away from the camera.) How do we know it's dinner? Because they're at the dinner table. But they eat breakfast at the dinner table too, which is why Bucksey doesn't backlight the window and instead employs the light above the table to illuminate the scene. I know they could be eating before dawn, but the mother has a wine glass in her hand and people don't conventionally drink wine with breakfast.

All of which is a long way of saying that the elements in the frame demand it be read as an image of a nuclear family sitting down to dinner. This shot is effective because its formal conventions militate toward the nuclear family interpretation, whereas our knowledge about the content of this situation requires we draw the exact opposite conclusion. The tension between form and content creates an awkwardness analogous to the awkwardness each of the three characters in the scene currently feels. That's not a husband on the right nor is it a wife on the left: that's a terrorist on the right and that's his hostage on the left. That son isn't their son, though it could be said that the father adopted him—except that this surrogate son is only at this dinner table because he stopped by to break up with his fake father. And the mother only knows this soon-to-be-emancipated not-son as the father's former drug dealer. At this precise moment in time these people couldn't be more unrelated, but if I show you that frame your brain will insist that it's a nuclear family sitting down to dinner.

Director Bucksey takes advantage of this. As I noted in the previous post, the sense of isolation experienced by each of these characters is typically reinforced by sequencing their conversations as a series of shots and reverse shots. The camera tells you that even though these people are in the middle of a conversation, there's something (literally the camera) preventing them from sharing the same filmic space. Even when they share the same diegetic space they're still not together, and because we know that they seem more alone than they otherwise would. Given the circumstances outlined above, you'd assume that Bucksey would film this scene in a similar manner: establish that they're at the dinner table with an establishing shot and then hammer home their isolation with a series of reverses. But no. The irony is strong and painful:

This is the kind of two shot that directors usually use to establish intimacy between characters. Skyler's doing something that under other circumstances violates a cultural taboo: she's watching him eat. Also note the appearance of physical proximity: Jesse's head seems dangerously close to violating Skyler's personal space. (In the sense that he's in her house, you could argue that he already has.) The minor deviations from social norms that seem to be at work in this scene wouldn't be deviations at all if these two people were what the establishing shot made them appear to be. Except we know that they aren't, which makes the framing of this shot all the more discomforting. That feeling of wrongness you felt when you first watched this scene? It's being compounded by Bucksey's ironic use of convention. To wit:

Jesse's dealing with the awkwardness of talking to Skyler by trying to talk to Walter, but in another violation of social norms, Walter's refusing to return Jesse's eye contact. So what does Jesse do? He starts staring down at his food, which means there are now three people at this dinner table staring at food: Skyler and Jesse at Jesse's and Walter's at his own. They're refusing (or being refused) that most basic of pleasantries: the acknowledgment of speech. Skyler and Walter's body language signals the fact that whatever Jesse says doesn't matter—and it doesn't, since he's complimenting Skyler on green beans she bought at Albertson's—but the fact that they're reinforcing his irrelevance by refusing eye contact ups the intensity of the awkwardness. (Especially because part of the point of a medium close-up is to allow access to the language of the face.) The viewer is essentially in the position of being forced to watch a blind date in which both parties quickly decided they loathed the other but neither wants to leave until after they eaten. And so:

Of course the scene ends with another two shot that should cement the relationship between these two character, and of course this shot undermines that having Skyler talk to her wine glass. The overall impression is that the people at this table matter less to Skyler than the victuals. The particular impression of this frame, though, is that by avoiding eye contact with Walter she can make Jesse disappear, and she's right because Voila! he's gone. We know he's still in the diegetic space, but the camera's telling us that even though he's still talking about the green beans he's not important enough to include in-frame. The camera is making these characters seem rude, the result being that we start to sympathize with Jesse for the curt and summary dismissal. So why does all this clever and deliberate staging and framing make Breaking Bad seem realistic?

Because the slights created by the staging and framing are so minor that the resulting pangs do an end-around on our suspension of disbelief. On some level you know that the intensity of experience felt when, for example, Luke Skywalker prepares to make his final run at the end of Star Wars is false. It's too intense—and that intensity reminds us of the beliefs we're actively suspending in order to enjoy the film. This dinner does the opposite: because the transgressions are so unexciting we drop our guard, and so instead of suspending our disbelief we just sort of start believing. After all, it's not that different from how life feels. So it must be realistic.

So it must be realistic.

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?

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 7/09/13)

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan 
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fellowship of the Ring (conventions of high fantasy) - Peter Jackson
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Fight Club (II) - David Fincher
• Fight Club (III) - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• The Dark Knight Returns (animated) - The Zack Snyder School of Literal Filmmaking
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players" 
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" I (Naturalism)
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" II (Realism)
• Breaking Bad - "Say My Name"
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All," Said the Fly to the Money Pile
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" the Invisible Lines and Immaterial Connections
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" Until You're Not
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels" - Buckling the Frame
• Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who - "Amy's Choice"
• Doctor Who - "Vincent and the Doctor" 
• Doctor Who - "The Pandorica Opens"
• Doctor Who - "The Big Bang"
• Doctor Who - "The Impossible Astronaut"
• Game of Thrones - Embiggening Men in "Blackwater"
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Poor Will
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Catelyn Stark and Jon Snow
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Will and Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Lord Snow," you're no bigger than a half-man
• Game of Thrones - Everyone is alone, everyone is surrounded in "The Wolf and the Lion"
• Game of Thrones - How circular is "A Golden Crown"?
• Game of Thrones - Table-setting and brain-burning in "You Win or You Die"
• Game of Thrones - Learning to use "The Pointy End"
• Game of Thrones - Swords! Swords! Swords! in "Baelor"
• Game of Thrones - "Valar Dohaeris," Indeed. But who? Where? To what end?
• Game of Thrones - Eyelines of miscommunication in "Second Sons," Part I
• Game of Thrones - Eyelines of miscommunication in "Second Sons," Part II
• Game of Thrones - It's always been "Rain[ing in] Castamere," because yes, I am trying to break your heart
• Game of Thrones - Awful Greek words that apply to "The Rains of Castamere"
• Hannibal - The frail horror of shallow focus
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - "What will become of the children?" Why, they'll be raped and murdered, of course."
• Leverage - "The Van Gogh Job"
• Louie - "Daddy's Girlfriend II"
• Mad Men - "Don and Sally in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Ballad of Peggy and Pete, Redux, in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men - Who owns "The Other Woman"?
• Mad Men - Hands and hands and hands in "Commissions and Fees"
• Mad Men - Nostalgia, forestalled, and "The Wheel"
• Mad Men - "It's not the tooth that's rotten," it's "The Phantom"
• Mad Men - One foot in "The Doorway"
• Mad Men - "Collaborators" in the Secret, Sacred Curb Dances of Suburban Love
• Mad Men - Is the Awesomeness of White Men really "For Immediate Release"?
• Mad Men - Fencing with shadows over "The Quality of Mercy"
• Mad Men (I) - "In Care Of" what? OH REALLY?
• Mad Men (II) - Disappointment "In Care Of" Convention
• Mad Men (III) - Who's "In Care Of" What Now?
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• War is Boring - David Axe
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 Themes:

• On Poorly Executed Claustrophobia in Film and Television
• On Effectively Executed Claustrophobia in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot