Tag Archives: Breaking Bad

Walter White: Ultimate Supervillain or Misunderstood Entrepreneur?

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Since their creation less than a hundred years ago, superheroes have effortlessly captured our imagination. Studios seem incapable of making non-superhero movies and television executives are following suit. As the superhero genre expands past the pages of the pulpy comic book, it has to evolve and grow. A great example of this growth is the show Breaking Bad, particularly in its depiction of the character Walter White. A close look at Breaking Bad will reveal its underlying superhero DNA and how Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, used the superhero genre to expound on his hypothesis.

First, a brief history of the origin of the superhero figure. The modern American superhero is derived from hundreds of years of hero figures. The superhero genre has its roots in myths, with figures such a Odyssey or Robin Hood linking the notion of heroism and bravery to justice and fairness. In the era directly preceding what would come to be known as the “Golden Age” of superheroes, figures such as Doc Savage, Tarzan, and the Phantom laid the foundation by contributing certain genre elements such as a double identity, masked costumes, and superhuman strength. Arguably, one of the direct ancestors is the Scarlet Pimpernel, the dashing protagonist of Baroness Emma Orczy’s same titled play and subsequent novels. Each iteration brought us closer to what is undeniably the first superhero; Superman. Adorning the iconic cover of Action Comics #1, Superman ushered in a new age and helped establish a new literary genre. Batman and Wonder Woman followed suit and helped codify the genre. The genre has grown by leaps and bounds, no pun intended. A new generation of writers, artists, and creators pushed the boundaries of the established classification in the Silver Age of Comics, with figures such as the Hulk, Spiderman, and the Flash redefining the genre.

>Delving deeper into the specifics, let’s look at the definition and the various elements that comprise a superhero figure.

When we meet the mild-mannered Walter White with his alliterative alter-ego sounding name, he is working two jobs to make ends meet. His life is bleak, and it gets bleaker when he finds out he has cancer. Walt undergoes chemotherapy and pumps toxic chemicals into his body to fight the tumorous lung cells. As the chemicals course through his veins, Walt has to resort to increasingly desperate measures to pay for his treatment.

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Historically, chemicals/ chemistry as an agent of change is a common trope in comic books, especially in the Silver Age of Comic Books. A radioactive spider bite mutates Peter Parker’s DNA, gamma radiation transforms Bruce Banner into the Hulk. And the anti-carcinogen chemicals used in chemotherapy allow for the creation of Walt’s alter-ego, Heisenberg. As Walt starts cooking methamphetamine to make money for his family, he gets pulled deeper into the drug world. Initially just a pseudonym to protect his identity, Heisenberg ultimately becomes the persona Walt uses in that world. This development happens over the course of the first season, culminating in an explosive scene where Heisenberg has ostensibly bested his first arch-nemesis, Tuco.

Heisenberg Intro CLIP

This is arguably the first appearance of Walt’s alter-ego, Heisenberg. Unlike Walter, Heisenberg is self-assured and confident. He is able to hold his own against an aggressive and unstable drug dealer and he only grows stronger.

The reason Walter White continues to make methamphetamine despite the danger is for the money. Well, not just the money.

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While solid, hard cash pays for his treatment, it also then serves as a nest egg and a protection of sorts for Walt’s family- his wife, Skyler, his son Walt Jr (immediately a properly sympathetic character), and his as yet unborn daughter. Walt’s prowess at organic chemistry, even for a brilliant student from the California Institute of Technology, border on the fantastical. He is able to make an incredibly pure thus potent version of meth, “Blue Sky” which even addicts recognize as being superior. Early in the first season, Walt gets rid of the evidence of a murder using the dissolving powers of hydrofluoric acid to destroy a human body. He creates a mini-bomb from fulminated mercury which he uses to destroy Tuco. In season 2’s episode “4 Days Out”, Walt constructs a mercury battery using chemicals, coins, and galvanized metal for the chargeless RV, rescuing Jesse and himself from dire straits and making MacGyver proud. Walt may have the goods, but Heisenberg is able to deliver them.

Any respectable superhero must have a sidekick, and Walt would be bereft without Jesse Pinkman, or Cap’n Crunch as he’s known in the meth head circle. Walt chances upon Jesse escaping during a DEA ride along, and convinces him to help cook and sell meth. Jesse is Walt’s sidekick, helping him navigate the seedy world of drug dealing, while providing a skewed moral compass. They even have their own version of the Batmobile, the RV. It can’t fly, but it does allow them to cook in undisturbed peace and a place to store their equipment. Despite his complicity in Walt’s dealings, Jesse remains an innocent figure, even by the end of season 5.

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Finally, what would a superhero be without a costume? Naked, unrecognizable. Heisenberg’s iconic porkpie hat elevates his status from measley high school teacher to drug lord. By Season 3, Heisenberg has accumulated a reputation for himself and is known by his hat.

But is Walter White a superhero or a supervillain?

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In Peter Coogan’s book, “Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre”, he outlines 5 main types of supervillains; the monster, the enemy commander, the mad scientist, the criminal mastermind and the inverted superhero-supervillain. While Walter definitely displays aspects of the mad scientist and the criminal mastermind, he is a great representation of the last type of supervillain; the inverted superhero-supervillain. Walter clearly views himself as a “good guy”, a man kept down by the fates but his actions are those of a self-interested and selfish man. Season 2, Episode 12 “Phoenix” marks an important turning point in Walt’s character. Walt and Jesse are on the outs, and Walt is holding Jesse’s share of the drug money hostage until Jesse can prove his sobriety. Their relationship is further threatened by the interference of Jane, Jesse’s girlfriend. Walt arrives to confront Jesse and notices both Jesse and Jane in a deep drug-induced stupor. He inadvertently rolls Jane over on her back and she subsequently chokes to death on her own vomit, while Walt looks on, horrified but unwilling to intervene. His desire to be rid of Jane combined with his callousness towards an innocent life are classic supervillain traits.

Walt displays other traits typical of a supervillain. In season 5, Walt is given the opportunity to sell his share of the methylamine to a competitor and receive $5 million. He refuses to take the money and leave the meth business. This mania about needing to be the best and creating a drug empire is typical supervillain behavior. “You asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I’m in the empire business.” While he seems to have some remorse about the vile product he’s creating, it is fleeting at best. Any guilt Walt feels is overshadowed by his pride in the purity of the product. This pride in his criminal artistry is another one of the characteristics of a villain.

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One major attribute of a supervillain is “the wound”. Many supervillains suffer from an original incident that leads them to battle the superhero. This wound, real or perceived, is essential to the identity of the supervillain, the core of what drives them to do ill. Walter believes what he has—not just the physical resources of supplies and equipment he possesses but more fundamentally, his native resources of intelligence and invention—is of infinite and absolute worth. He is not going to stop until he’s been fairly compensated for them, which means he’s never going to stop.

I’m the one who knocks clip

 

It’s not just the character of Walter White that draws inspiration from the superhero world. From the colorization to the cinematography, elements of graphic novels and comic books are evident in the look and feel of Breaking Bad. When comics were printed on pulpy, rough paper, they had to be brightly colored to sell. Superheroes had to recognizable when someone was scanning the newsstand. Vince Gilligan similarly colorized his characters through costuming. Walt’s sister-in-law Marie’s obsession with the color purple was treated as a joke, but it becomes her signature color. This meticulously prepared chart shows the color of each outfit the characters worse throughout the series. Delving a little deeper in the colors, we see that Walt starts off in neutral, bland earth tones. His obsession with money is reflected in the light greens. As he becomes Heisenberg, the colors get darker and muddier.

>Skyler is usually dressed in blues and whites, indicating her innocence and purity. In season 3, as she gets increasingly drawn into her husband’s web of lies and deceit, her clothes get darker. When she is fully immersed in a scheme to launder Walt’s drug money, Skyler is shown as wearing black and dark browns. She is once again depicted in lighter colors as she tries to extricate herself and her family from Walt’s drug empire. This type of color analysis can be done for Hank, Jesse, and Walt Jr. as well. Gilligan’s meticulous eye for colors and costuming reinforce who the characters are and the world they inhabit.

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Gilligan’s careful consideration of color is evident in the cinematography and visual design of the show. In an interview with Creative Cow, Director of Photography Michael Slovis says about the show’s look:

One trademark in the show that’s terrific and that Vince and I talk about and exploit is that we often don’t see the faces of the main characters. Vince says that everyone knows who these people are so we really don’t need to see their faces…If I can tell the story in a pitch-black room with the face totally in silhouette, that’s what we do. It’s expressionistic. We represent reality, we don’t reproduce it. Another example of that are those colors in New Mexico. Those golden, orangey, yellowy colors don’t exist in real life… We take a very, very representational, emotionally based, expressionistic approach. The same thing goes with those wacky POV shots we do… nobody sees things from those angles but they serve the story.

As Slovis mentions, the show doesn’t aim to reproduce reality, just represent it. An example of Gilligan playing with representing reality is the color of Walt’s meth- Blue Sky. Using the chemicals Walt used meth should either be clear or tinged a slight yellow color. Gilligan makes the artistic choice to make it blue, a sky blue that reflects WW’s limitless pride, greed, and lust for power. An example of the colors that Slovis mentions as well as the expressionistic approach Gilligan and crew take is clearly reflected in the cold open of Season 3. The introduction of the cousins, Season 3’s big bad can be imagined easily in large columns of a graphic novel or a comic book.

Cousins Clip

Gilligan frequently uses canted and unique Point of View shots to establish WW’s looming presence. Whether using a camera mounted on the Roomba during a party scene or the shovel head when burying treasure, these POV shots firmly establish that this is an alternate reality. TV Worth Watching, a pop culture blog, compiled all the unique shots in Breaking Bad. This perspective of the characters is not typical of a drama since it is not from the point of view of the audience or another character. Despite dealing in real life situations, with blood, gore and violence, the cinematography indicates that Breaking Bad exists in an alternate reality. WW’s Albuquerque is Batman’s Gotham- a universe that is grimmer and grittier than the real world.

What does this reading of BB through the lens of the superhero genre award us? The very nature of comic books is that they are episodic and contain ongoing stories. Batman may defeat the Joker in this issue, but wouldn’t you believe it, the Joker returns. Marriages and even deaths are not permanent, and reboots offer a new creative team the chance of a fresh start and clean slate. Breaking Bad ran 5 seasons and had a clear narrative arc running through it. It is the story of how Walter White becomes Heisenberg and his subsequent downfall and redemption. While Walter’s story may have ended, the larger themes of addiction, search for power, and insatiable greed live on. The drug trade will continue to flourish without Heisenberg, people will buy, sell, create, barter, use, and abuse methamphetamine. Gilligan underscores the futility of the war on drugs by using elements of a genre that does not provide easy resolution. The players may change, new opponents rise and fall, but the story continues.

References

Coogan, Peter M., and Dennis O’Neil. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain, 2006. Print.

Gilligan, Vince. “No Mas” Breaking Bad. AMC. 21 Mar. 2010. Television

Hutchinson, Gennifer. “Cornered'” Breaking Bad. AMC. 21 Aug. 2011. Television.

LaRue, John. “Infographic: Colorizing Walter White’s Decay.” TDYLF. N.p., 11 Aug. 2013. Web. 25 Jan. 2016. <http://tdylf.com/2013/08/11/infographic-colorizing-walter-whites-decay/>.

Mastras, George. “Crazy Handful of Nothin'” Breaking Bad. AMC. 2 Mar. 2008. Television.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Print.

Slovis, Michael. “CreativeCOW.” CreativeCOW. Ed. Debra Kaufman. CreativeCow.Net, 2013. Web. 25 Jan. 2016. <https://library.creativecow.net/kaufman_debra/Behind-the-Lens-Michael-Slovis/1>.
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Shreya Durvasula is an Outreach Coordinator in Cambridge, Massachusetts and an avid TV enthusiast and blogger. This post grew out of a presentation she gave to the University of Maryland Honors course, “Deconstructing Breaking Bad”, which attempted to dissect what made Breaking Bad so compelling. Shreya’s guest lecture on the superhero genre as it applies to BB inspired a graphic novel student response, so she feels like she got the job done. You can read more of her writing here.

Subtitled Love Affairs: Why Millions of Americans Prefer Korean Television

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Cityhunter promo poster optmzd

 
American television doesn’t want me anymore.

I realized this a couple years ago when I downloaded the first season of “Breaking Bad” for distraction on a plane flight. Although I admired the clever structure of the pilot, I discovered I wasn’t curious about what would happen next. Even though I’ve worked as a high school teacher and I carry debt for hospital bills, I couldn’t relate to Walter White. And perhaps because I’m a female writer in my late thirties, I thought Walter’s late-thirties writer wife Skylar was an unrecognizable stock character. I lost interest without finishing the short first season, and it’s still sitting on my hard drive whispering that I must be lacking in good taste.

The idea among television critics that we’re living in a “golden age” for American television overlooks the fact that some of us find critically-acclaimed American television boring. The shows that get the most buzz are smart, it’s true. But they aren’t necessarily entertaining. This isn’t a golden age of television for all Americans. It’s a golden age for people who prefer intricate plots over empathy. Who can enjoy a show even if they don’t like the characters.

Television can still move me deeply. But in the past year, the television producers who make it with me aren’t the guys in Hollywood or New York. It’s the guys in Seoul, South Korea.

I was surprised by my out-of-the-blue interest in Korea, which began while I watched the first episode of my first subtitled show. Internet video-streaming sites (including Netflix and Hulu) offer large libraries of these “K-dramas,” as English-speaking fans call them. And several million Americans are watching with me, though it’s hard to quantify the online viewership. One of the largest sites, New York-based Drama Fever, serves about six to seven million US viewers a month, of whom roughly 80% are native English speakers. That’s roughly the number of people who watched the penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” in 2013. (Independent research firm comScore confirms the site’s audience is growing, but estimate the audience at a somewhat lower 3.4 million. For comparison, that’s roughly the average audience size for the first two seasons of Game of Thrones.) Most viewers are women, according to Drama Fever—and that’s about all we have in common. The audience includes all races and a variety of tastes.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of subtitled Asian shows this summer with a touch of horror, but there’s no reason to look down on Korean television. After years of government investment in the industry, their production values are excellent. Their aesthetic is different from ours, which can be jarring in mediocre shows, and they can be as corny as a Frank Capra film bathed in the collected tears of Steven Spielberg. But when the cream rises to the top, the best shows are suspenseful, funny and heartfelt. And even though I don’t speak Korean and I’ve never visited Asia, the cultural differences are minor next to the fact that I can relate to the characters in a way I haven’t related to anyone on American television since Dana Scully and Buffy Summers left the air.

One reason to watch Korean series is for three-dimensional female characters. K-dramas have their fair share of stock characters, Korean versions of season one Skylar, but they also have a good record of developing great roles for women. The characters popular with fans in recent years include an ambitious pastry chef, a tough cross-dressing tomboy, a scatter-brained spirit medium and a cynical defense attorney.

Another thing drawing some women may be that popular Korean series have a much lower body count than popular American shows—roughly one-eighth corpse per episode (my unofficial estimate), versus the US rate of nearly five corpses per episode (three if you omit cable). Korean characters tend to die of illness or in car crashes, while most fictional American corpses are the result of murder or zombie apocalypse. The numbers themselves are less important than the narrative style they suggest. American television producers have faith in stories about crime, politics and violence—and they do a good job with these subjects. But it’s increasingly hard to imagine an American drama that doesn’t have crime, politics or violence. In contrast, South Korea makes prime-time one-hour shows about families, growing up, romance, friendship—the good stuff in life. Some series are comedies, some are weepy melodramas, but most of them touch in some way on the human capacity for mixed emotions. Here in the U.S., shows about families and romance tend to be placed in the 22 minute format time-slot, which officially makes them “comedies” by Emmy standards, even when a show like “Nurse Jackie” challenges the drama-comedy distinction.

It’s tempting to attribute Korea’s growing appeal to the declining number of female writers in American television. After all, 75% of American television pilots are developed by writing teams made up entirely of men, while the vast majority of writers for prime-time Korean series are female. Superstar writers like the Hong Sisters even become household names à la Aaron Sorkin. The worldwide hit romantic comedy “Coffee Prince” had a female director as well as writer. But this fact doesn’t explain much on its own. After all, it was male writer Joss Whedon who created a few of my favorite female television characters.

What distinguishes K-dramas isn’t their subject matter or the gender of their writers, but their tone—and it’s hard to ascribe a gender to tone. Korean series are less cynical. The heroes are idealists underneath their flaws. The anti-heroes aren’t quite as despicable. The loners aren’t quite as alone. These are all aspects of the central fact about K-dramas: they need to entertain a wide swath of the population to make money. The successful K-drama provides pleasure to as many people as possible—like American television did twenty years ago before DVRs and Netflix.

Korean television shows aren’t “gritty,” and this makes even their action thrillers very different from ours. The big 2011 hit “City Hunter”—based in name only on Tsukasa Hojo’s 1985-91 manga—looks pretty dark on paper. It follows a mysterious vigilante looking for justice against the men who caused his father’s death. Dozens of people die in the first ten minutes of the first episode. The first episode also features a terrorist bombing, a kidnapping of a baby, a bunch of commandos slitting throats, a noisy shootout at a Thai drug plantation, and a leg severed by a land-mine. Though the following episodes contain less killing, the plot still revolves around betrayal, manipulation and corruption. There are knife-fights, gunfights and a really cool walking cane with a sword concealed inside. In episode seven, we watch the hero dig a bullet out of his own shoulder.

But despite the violence—which is presented mildly enough for Korean network television—the show interrogates violence from an idealistic point of view we haven’t seen on American television since before Sept. 11. The hero, Yoon-Sung, is the adopted son of a ruthless drug kingpin who raised and educated him to be a professional revenge-seeker. But in the first episode he’s already questioning his father’s quickness to shoot first, ask questions later. The guy’s got great moves in combat, but he prefers to tie his enemies up, put them in a refrigerator box, and drop them off at the district attorney’s office along with conclusive evidence of their crimes. Take that! The emotional and moral heart of the 20-episode series quickly becomes the conflict between Yoon-Sung and his father over whether to achieve their goals through killing or MacGyver-esque stunts. And the MacGyver-esque stunts are way more fun to watch.

The style of humor in “City Hunter” also steers away from cynicism. Instead of relying on snarky one-liners, the show finds humor in the characters’ internal contradictions. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung’s earnest middle-aged sidekick is addicted to the home shopping channel. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung preserves his secret identity by pretending to be feeble in front of his judo-chopping girlfriend. Leading man Lee Min-Ho has great comic timing—he’s starred in more than one popular romantic comedy—making him an action hero more in the mold of a young Cary Grant than Vin Diesel.

And like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie, the hero often finds himself at the mercy of the women in his life. More than once the hero’s survival depends on his crush Kim Na-Na, a fifth-level black belt who works for the Korean equivalent of the Secret Service. She occasionally needs rescuing herself—she’s not quite Buffy—but she sometimes rescues the hero in turn. A second woman, a divorced veterinarian, provides crucial help (no spoilers here). And an important secondary narrative follows Yoon-Sung’s birth mother, whose life we learn about in flashbacks. These women aren’t accessories to the hero, but the people who make his success possible.

None of these elements—the idealism, the humor, the women with original personalities—are particularly “Korean” or calculated to appeal to women. We once found these things in abundance on American television. The idealism is particularly familiar. Our film and television spent the forties and fifties plumbing idealistic questions about the moral use of violence much like the ones in “City Hunter”—they’re at the heart of the classic Westerns by John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. But today, these elements make for a thriller that feels unlike anything on American television right now. It’s a story about characters I want to root for.

Plenty of people enjoy America’s gritty shows. But a few million of us are bored by the joylessness on television. Before another long work week starts, we want someone to tell us a good story. If it’s a story that makes us feel like we’re living in a golden age of television, that’s even better. But first, tell us a story with characters we care for, with stakes that matter.

We didn’t leave American television. American television left us.

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Odessa Jones has a lot of degrees in a lot of subjects and she puts it all to good use in her commentary on subtitled Korean romances, including “City Hunter,” at K-Drama Today.

Most Overrated Television Show…And Most Underrated, If Any Exist

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I’m watching Orange Is the New Black for an assignment, and being impressed again by how the new era of television drama seems to rely on basically overrating every single thing on the tube. With the exception of the Wire and the first season of Twin Peaks, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a television drama that managed to get past sporadically entertaining and onto “good”.

Anyway, the most overrated thing I’ve seen is probably “Breaking Bad,” which is supposed to be one of the great artistic triumphs of our time but to me (in the first season at least) seemed mired in all too familiar television cliches and lazy dramatic devices. Outside of drama, there are shows I love — the Batman TV show for example, or Warner Bros cartoons, and so forth. But I don’t know that any of them are underrated exactly.
 
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Monster Fun

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“Breaking Bad” is usually discussed in terms of its moral vision, and its unflinching depiction of Walter White’s decent into evil. Chuck Klosterman’s is probably the best-known encapsulation of the argument.

Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters’ morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn’t seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That’s the elevator pitch. But that’s completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man “bad” — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who’s no longer good.

Admittedly, I’m only through season 1 at the moment. But still, I see the trajectory Klosterman is talking about; Walt kills and sells meth and blows people up, and we still root for him.

Klosterman suggests that we root for evil because the show starts us off by sympathizing with Walt. I think that rather misses the point of the genre conventions though. You don’t root for a bad ass despite the fact that he’s a bad ass. You root for him because he’s a bad ass. Rorschach is cool not despite the fact that he shoots a policeman in the chest with a grappling gun, but because he does so. Similarly, when Walt shaves his head, goes into the drug dealers den, and uses his chemical no-how to create a huge explosion and intimidate the heavies — we don’t root for him despite that. We root for him because of it.

The first season of Breaking Bad isn’t coy about this dynamic. On the contrary, it presents good Walt, his good family, and his good milieu as hopelessly square, hypocritical, and ridiculous. Walt’s wife, Skyler, comes across as a moralistic busybody, snooping around after Walt and freaking out over his (supposed) pot use. Hank, Walt’s brother-in-law the DEA agent, is equally ridiculous, trying to scare Walt’s son straight in a painfully embarrassing scene in which he burbles anti-drug war bullshit while callously bullying the random druggies passing by. Walt himself is an ineffectual high-school teacher and a wimpish nonentity, sclubbing along in Hank’s shadow, boring his students, and generally epitomizing castrated middle-class suburban white lameness.

Until, that is, he embraces the dark side. After learning he has cancer and deciding to cook meth to support his family after he’s gone, Walt suddenly starts to become tough, sexy, powerful — a character who demands admiration rather than contempt. He defends his crippled son from bullies; he destroys the car of an insufferable cell-phone yakking stock trader; he faces down drug-dealers; he even starts subtly bullying Hank rather than the other way around. He changes from a colorless nothing to a dark hero — and who, given those options, wouldn’t root for the dark hero, not only because he’s a hero, but because he’s dark?

“Breaking Bad” does show the downsides of White’s choices as well. By stealing from the school science supplies for his meth cooking, he ends up drawing the police down on the saintly Hispanic janitor. The scriptwriters also take care to make a drug-dealer intelligent and thoughtful so we’ll sympathize with him when Walter has to kill him. Yet, the very effort to drive these moral lessons home can’t help but to contradictorily glamorize them. Walt is making Big Decisions with Big Consequences; he moves in a world of Drama and Tragedy. Who wouldn’t rather be Hamlet than Guildenstern?

As a contrast, consider Flannery O’Connor’s collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. All of these stories are about regular people — people like Walter — choosing between good and evil. But in O’Connor’s world, there’s nothing particularly exciting or sexy about going bad. Instead, sin is a small, stupid, sordid business, made up mostly of ingratitude, egotism, stupidity, and willful blindness. It’s not becoming the best damn meth-maker in the county — it’s sneering and taunting your mother as she has a stroke. It’s not killing a sympathetic drug dealer; it’s accidentally strangling your quite unsympathetic 10 year old granddaughter to death because she doesn’t behave enough like you. In O’Connor’s stories, sin makes you smaller than life, not bigger.

This isn’t to say that O’Connor’s stories are definitively better than “Breaking Bad.” Her range is limited — parent and child don’t get along; viciousness is exchanged; an epiphany is achieved just too late to forestall the tragic twist ending. The first time you read it, it can seem like a revelation. By the end of a book, though, it’s become wearisome; the boring scold repeating the same damn harangue for the sixth or seventh run through. At this point I’d probably rather watch another season of Breaking Bad than slog through another collection of the same damn stories by O’Connor.

Which is maybe the point. Evil in O’Connor is boring, which, by definition, prevents it from being interesting. In “Breaking Bad”, on the other hand, evil has the adrenaline rush of its genre conventions — it gives Walter purpose, direction, and emotional heft. “Breaking Bad” feels good, which probably tells you less about evil than it does about entertainment.

Something Has to Happen

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Breaking Bad seems to be trying obnoxiously hard. By that I don’t mean that it strives for relevance or for aesthetic bona fides, though there’s certainly a big dollop of that of that in its we’re-serious-because-we’ve-got-cancer-and-also-meth plotting. But what’s most striking about the writing isn’t the angst or the realism. It’s the events. Our hero, high school science teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has barely been diagnosed with cancer before he decides to become a meth cook, and he’s barely cooked his first batch before his life is threatened by thugs, and then, hey! he’s killed his first man. This is all within two episodes — as far in the series as I’ve gotten.

None of which is especially improbable for television. But that’s just saying that it’s really extraordinarily improbable. The drug industry is very violent, but if everyone who ever got involved in the industry killed someone in their first day on the job, you wouldn’t have a drug industry, because everyone in the industry and probably in the country would be dead I’m certain meth addicts and providers off each other, but surely they usually take a week or so, at least, between violent murders.

Which is to say that while Breaking Bad makes some gestures at gritty realism, it remains a genre television series. As such, it’s driven by the demands of drama; something has to happen. Guns, car chases, sex, dead bodies, lots of messy blood — you get them all and get them often, because that’s what the audience wants. There wouldn’t be much point in watching a show where a high school scientist just quietly started selling meth out of a trailer, made a lot of money, and then socked it away for his kid’s college fund, right?

There’s a very similar dynamic on the very similarly-themed show Weeds. Like Breaking Bad, Weeds is a story about an everyday middle-class parent (in this case Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) who experiences a personal tragedy (in this case the death of her husband) and so turns to selling drugs (in this case marijuana.) Weeds is played more as comedy than tragedy…but it, too, is tied to the remorseless genre requirements of having something happen. Nancy is constantly being robbed and shot at when she isn’t having sex with a series of more or less unlikely partners, her travails ever-escalating until the end of the third season when she actually burns down her entire town in a fiery apocalypse.

In the fourth season, Nancy’s family heads to the Mexican border, where she hooks up (in various senses) with drug runners. Said drug runners use Nancy as a front; she is given ownership of a store selling maternity clothes. The store has a tunnel going under the border, allowing the Mexican gangs to transport drugs into the U.S. In theory, this should be a dream come true for Nancy; she is being paid a ton of money, isn’t endangering her life, and can actually spend time with her family. She works nine to five, and then can go home to her kids.

Instead of being pleased, though, Nancy is bored — which doesn’t make a ton of sense for the character as we’ve come to know her, but does make a lot of sense in terms of genre conventions. It’s not Nancy who can’t stand the day to day tedium of not getting shot at; it’s the viewers. If the story is to go on, Nancy needs to do something other than sell maternity clothes…and so, sure enough, she (for our benefit) starts poking her nose where it doesn’t belong. Thus she is confronted with a Moral Dilemma. In the last episode I was able to make myself watch, Nancy sees a young woman come through the tunnel, and figures out that the maternity store is being used as a front not just for drugs but for (gasp!) trafficking.

Sex trafficking is here deployed in a wearisomely cynical fashion. Neither the show, nor Nancy, nor the viewers actually care about the woman who we see supposedly being trafficked. She’s just there there to be young and pretty and victimized; a totem of how far Nancy has sunk. There’s never a question of whether or not she wants to be crossing the border, for example — of where she’s coming from, or where she’s going to. Nobody asks her, nobody gives a shit. She’s not a person — just an excuse for moral panic that can move the narrative along.

This dovetails in depressing ways with how sex trafficking is actaully used in political discourse. As Laura Agustin, who researches migration and sex work, argues, sex trafficking as it is usually portrayed in the media barely exists. Most women (or men) who cross a border and are paid for sex aren’t victims of kidnapping, and while they would certainly benefit from more sympathetic immigration policies and a whole host of services, they don’t necessarily need or want “rescuing”. At the very least, they need people to listen to their stories of themselves, rather than jamming them into somebody else’s simplistic genre narrative of villainy, moral commitment, and heroic salvation.

It’s hard to get away from simplistic genre narrative though. As Breaking Bad and Weeds both know, no one wants to sit down for an evening and watch paint dry. Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining; narratives are supposed to be filled with event. We don’t love violence qua violence, necessarily, but we seem to have a hardwired ineradicable bias in favor of having something — anything! — happen. I think that rage for sequence has a lot to do with (as one example) our inability to turn the drug war off. Kill the bad guys, save the babies, experience moral ambiguity, tune in next week. Nancy and Walt and the viewer turn off their own lives and take a walk on the wild side where, we all like to imagine, stuff happens. Narrative is its own addiction. Who wouldn’t, like Walter and Nancy, give themselves over to its rush?