Tag: Breaking Bad

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“Breaking Bad” Goes off the Rails

The last few episodes of “Breaking Bad” betray a sense that the show has gone off the rails. They are trying to strong-arm the plot into setting up various confrontations that might prove more visually exciting but drain away plausibility. I am not convinced Jesse would find Hank any less repugnant than Walt, and that he wouldn’t find himself even more repugnant for betraying a man who actually treated him pretty well. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. I’m saying that it is a dramatic challenge to make it believable, and Gilligan completely failed that challenge.

The same goes for Hank’s senseless decision to keep his suspicions of Walt private, including chasing him out to where they think he hid the money without backups, and with Jesse in the car. This is so obviously intended to provide a motivation for Walt to kill Hank and Jesse (what would the point be if Hank’s colleagues had the information) that it would be laughable if it weren’t so lame. It’s just not believable on any level at all.

Nor was it believable that Walt would be so stupid as to fall for Jesse’s trick phone call. But it was the height of ridiculousness to have Walt confess most of his murders to Jesse on the phone while screaming at him on his way to check on his money, not suspecting for one moment that it was being recorded or monitored. This is a huge lapse of sanity on Walt’s part and there is no dramatic groundwork for it. They couldn’t do better than that to set up the confrontation that they wanted? Or that Huell Babineaux would so readily believe Hank about having been betrayed by Saul Goodman. Sure, he’s a fool– but fool’s are just as likely to disbelieve the truth as they are to fall for a lie. Just how many implausible events and coincidences had to occur to get to this scene, in the dessert? The credibility and the tension sap away, which is a shame, because it was so good up to the last season.

“The Wire”, on the other hand, ended without a single false note– gracefully.  “The Wire” ranks among the best TV series ever, and much higher than “Breaking Bad”.

Skyler’s Complaint

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Skyler’s Complaint

In a baffling op-ed piece in the New York Times, August 23, 2013, the actress Anna Gunn complains about what she perceives to be a double standard: the main male character of the TV series “Breaking Bad”, Walt White, seems to be regarded as a kind of lovable rogue, who’s just trying to take care of his family while selling methamphetamine to pathetic addicts who have faded further and further into the background of the series. Her character, Skyler White, who, she says, lives a relatively faultless life, is vilified. Why? It’s because, she says, Skyler is a woman. It’s a double standard. Skyler has become “a measure of our attitude towards gender”. And that measure indicates rage and hypocrisy towards women who don’t stand by their man. At least, that’s Anna Gunn’s take on it.

Guilty. I’ll admit it: I found the character of Skyler White repugnant.

Is she arguing that Skyler should be admired? She says Skyler “has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, non-submissive, ill-treated women”. Ill-treated? If, I suppose, you buy one of the fundamental conceits of “Breaking Bad”, which is, that there really is something admirable about Walt White’s desire to support his family, even if it means destroying hundreds of other lives. Then Skyler is ill-treated, I suppose, by Walt’s dishonesty. But Skyler had the opportunity to walk away and didn’t take it. Walt provides for her, desires her, and wants to sustain their marriage. How is that “ill treated”?

But what if you didn’t even buy the first part: that Walt is admirable in some way, because, after all, he is taking care of his family. Americans seem to be complete suckers for family: you can commit any atrocity, as long as it is to protect your family.

Well, in my view, Walt is a psychopathic criminal and a cold-blooded killer. In my view, anyone who would harm another man’s family to protect his own is not admirable: he’s selfish. Just as a mother who brags about her overweening love for her children can be suffering from “overflowing self-infatuation”. I don’t admire either of them. Am I off the hook?

The brains behind the program, Vince Gilligan, claims that “Breaking Bad” is about how far a man will go to take care of his family. If he is a psychopath.

Skyler wants it both ways, and it’s not unusual for audiences to find hypocrisy more repellent than mischief or even murder. Walt is repellent but he really doesn’t hide the fact that he doesn’t have any morals other than the desire to provide for his family, which isn’t really a moral. It’s a motive. And it doesn’t, in my view, make him admirable. His family really isn’t “other”. It isn’t someone other than himself who benefits from his criminal activity. And his passion for his family, as dramatized in “Breaking Bad”, is fundamentally unbelievable. In real life, that is something put on, a charade. In real life, people like Walt White are fundamentally psychotic and narcissistic.

Why does Vince Gilligan make this a central trope in “Breaking Bad”?  So the viewer can enjoy Walt’s shenanigans without feeling repulsion.  After all, he’s just taking care of his family.

Skyler doesn’t walk away. She doesn’t turn him in. She accepts the money. She cheats on Walt. She helps her employer cheat. Just what does Anna Gunn believe is admirable about her? That she is “strong”? But not strong enough, apparently, to walk away.

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Breaking Bad: The Read-Ahead Actor

In a scene from “Breaking Bad”, Year 3, Episode 10, Walt and Skyler are having a conversation about laundering money. Skyler offers to manage a car wash Walt is considering buying for that purpose. He has to buy it because, he says, the manager has to be in on the scam, and the only way to control the manager is to own it.

Somehow the conversation turns to their divorce and Walt says to her something like “but we’re divorced?”.

Skyler has been after him to sign the papers for several episodes. She has been resolute that there is no future in their relationship because of his chronic lying. In a previous episode, in a moment of moral clarity, he finally did sign, with a flourish.

Now, “Breaking Bad” is a brilliant TV series, exceptional in almost every respect. But I was not as happy with this episode as I had been with the earlier ones and this scene was emblematic of a problem beginning to creep in. (Maybe it stops here, maybe it gets worse: I don’t know). Walt reads his line as if there is some question about whether or not they actually are divorced. He almost makes it a question: “we’re divorced?”. “Right?” “Aren’t we?” But in this story line, we find out that Skyler never filed the paperwork after Walt signed it. She notes that married couples can’t be forced to testify against each other. This is important because Walt makes methamphetamine.

In my opinion, Bryan Cranston gave away a plot element in his reading of this line. The character, Walt, has no reason to believe that Skyler had changed her mind about the divorce, and every reason to believe she would have rushed out the minute he signed the documents and filed it with the court. He should have said, “but we are divorced” as if it was final, settled fact. But the actor, Bryan Cranston, knew what was coming next. He tried to set it up, perhaps unconsciously.

Fans of the show and of Bryan Cranston’s otherwise impeccable work on it might argue that Walt may well have suspected that Skyler hadn’t filed the paperwork. Maybe, maybe not. And if it had been the only instance of read-ahead acting in this episode, I would have ignored it. However it was, by my count, the fourth and maybe fifth time in this episode that a character had reacted to knowledge held only by the audience, or a secret known only to the character they were talking to. The conversation between Jesse and Walt about the night Jane died was utterly portentous because of this flaw: Jesse was filmed as if he was about to receive a piece of shocking information, though he could not possibly know that there was anything shocking or even important about Walt’s nattering. He should have continued his tasks (cleaning the equipment) without paying much attention to what Walt was saying at all.

In real life, in fact, we often don’t even hear information that we don’t expect to hear.

These are quibbles, relatively minor quibbles. I just don’t like to see flaws like that creep into what is a very, very good TV series.

There is one other problem I have: it is clear that the series has become invested in the actors playing the major roles. None of them are going to die any time soon. I know it and they know it. This does deflate the drama of some of the tension that should be there. I have long believed that good dramas should plan to kill off major characters along the way just to make sure that the audience doesn’t come to the sedate feeling that no matter what crisis confronts our heroes, they are going to live. They are under contract.

It diminishes the effect.