Breaking Bad and the Modern Western Trope
Feb. 6th, 2011 12:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatAte too late, again. So a little wired. Maybe a hot shower.
Apartment or flat hunting is frustrating. Not sure sometimes if it is easier with or without a buyer's agent. Without one - you have to do more work and are at the mercy of the seller's agents. With one, you spend your time explaining to them why you just didn't like an apartment they thought was great and perfect for you. It's like a battle of wills sometimes. Although I do like my buyer's agent, who more or less picked me off the street - at the very moment that I'd thrown up my hands and given up on the whole thing.
Been watching Breaking Bad again tonight and finally figured out what it reminds me of. Feel like I've seen this story before. This show or trope is what I like to call a Modern Western - which like the Old Classic Western is purely an American Genre and by American, I mean Mexico and Southwestern and Western United States. If you are American, you probably saw quite a bit of it growing up - either on tv, in the movies, or in books.
I was weaned on Westerns. My mother's family adored them, and my father loves them as well. Momster even had a course with Larry McMurty - one of the pioneers of the modern western - with novels such as Horseman, Pass By (or "Hud"), Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove...his novels spoke of the dying of the west, a place of lost hope. And my grandparents lived out there - wandering about in an RV and living in such places as Yuma and Why, Arizona. In school - I spent time in Juarez, Mexico, Bandliere, Sante Fe, Pueblo, Colorado...and of course my Aunt was a librarian of a school made of just 6th graders in Vegas. We call it Vegas. Granny learned to make jewelry from a Hopi and Navajho Indian - she called them Indians. And in undergrad - I took a course on Cinema:the Western - also collected and studied American folklore - urban legends and western legends - since I was in Colorado Springs.
I admittedly love aspects of the genre, and dislike aspects. It's not female friendly for one thing, but that's true of a lot of genres. Like it or not, we do live in a world run largely by violent men.
The Modern Western - really came to life after Sam Peckinpah's the Wild Bunch, and in the 1970s. Unlike the Classic John Wayne, Rod Taylor, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Stewart Granger, Howard Hawkes, John Ford, Gary Cooper and even Clint Eastwood Western's the modern western is more realistic, less romantic and mythic in its leanings. It's gritty. And painful. There's no hope.
The best example of Modern Western may well be Cormac McCarthy's novels from Suttrea to No Country for Old Men, which take place along the border lands, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas...in the dry desert hills, where people will kill for a buck. In McCarthy's novels...the hero is an anti-hero, there is really no happy ending, and the story is as painful and deadly as the landscape it inhabits. The humor painful as well.
Breaking Bad is in many ways a Modern Western. With a hero who descends into the hell, as he moves closer and closer to the borderlands. The closer he gets to those lands, the more his morals slowly decay...the less he cares, and the less human he becomes.
Australian Westerns are actually similar in tone to American ones - in part because Australia like America has a section of its country that is uninhabitable - a vast wasteland of dust and cacti and ragged rock, that only natives seem to be able to live in or so we think. I've seen a few gritty Australian ones that remind me a bit of the American ones.
If you are familiar with this genre at all...you know where Breaking Bad is headed - in much the same hopeless dirt that No Country for Old Men traversed. Both comment on the drug culture - which is the commerce of choice for a modern western. The old classic westerns focused on guns, booze, money, and
cattle. Here - it's meth, or cocaine. Powder. Crystal. If you are American - and are like me, have worked in criminal law in any capacity - you know the drug laws, and you've met the doped up victims and criminals of the trade. I remember sitting across from a hitman hired by an east coast drug cartel in what can best be described as an airport lounge or doctor's waiting room at Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1992. He had tracks up and down his arms, and his eyes were yellow. OR the bank robber, who had done 15 years hard time, because he needed to fuel his cocaine habit. When you see it up close and personal, it loses some of its romantic allure. And you understand the need for gritty painful realism far more. In the East Coast - we have the gang movies, mobsters, and in the West, the modern westerns. Both gory and blood-soaked. Women on the periphery, pregnant, harrassed, sexual objects for male consumption. As a young twenty-something intern at a defender clinic, I remember ignoring the cat-calls, as an even younger 19 year old in Juarez, I remember doing the same.
Breaking Bad is not a stylized satire like Mad Men so much as a gritty picture of a man's descent into the hopeless abyss. It's a Western - by way of the Cohen Brothers, yet without the mythic touch, having more in common I suspect with Hud and Sam Shepard's True West. While critics have compared Mad Men to Breaking Bad - because they both appear on AMC, it is not fair to do so - since they reside in different genres and narrative forms. Mad Men is a satirical and highly stylized soap opera about the fake cool of the 1960s and the Advertising Age - it's East Coast, Urban Noir in top form. While Breaking Bad is a gritty realistic take on a depressed world in a modern age. Both are about men and how they are perceived in a specific time period. Yet outside of that? They are as different as...well oil and water.
Apartment or flat hunting is frustrating. Not sure sometimes if it is easier with or without a buyer's agent. Without one - you have to do more work and are at the mercy of the seller's agents. With one, you spend your time explaining to them why you just didn't like an apartment they thought was great and perfect for you. It's like a battle of wills sometimes. Although I do like my buyer's agent, who more or less picked me off the street - at the very moment that I'd thrown up my hands and given up on the whole thing.
Been watching Breaking Bad again tonight and finally figured out what it reminds me of. Feel like I've seen this story before. This show or trope is what I like to call a Modern Western - which like the Old Classic Western is purely an American Genre and by American, I mean Mexico and Southwestern and Western United States. If you are American, you probably saw quite a bit of it growing up - either on tv, in the movies, or in books.
I was weaned on Westerns. My mother's family adored them, and my father loves them as well. Momster even had a course with Larry McMurty - one of the pioneers of the modern western - with novels such as Horseman, Pass By (or "Hud"), Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove...his novels spoke of the dying of the west, a place of lost hope. And my grandparents lived out there - wandering about in an RV and living in such places as Yuma and Why, Arizona. In school - I spent time in Juarez, Mexico, Bandliere, Sante Fe, Pueblo, Colorado...and of course my Aunt was a librarian of a school made of just 6th graders in Vegas. We call it Vegas. Granny learned to make jewelry from a Hopi and Navajho Indian - she called them Indians. And in undergrad - I took a course on Cinema:the Western - also collected and studied American folklore - urban legends and western legends - since I was in Colorado Springs.
I admittedly love aspects of the genre, and dislike aspects. It's not female friendly for one thing, but that's true of a lot of genres. Like it or not, we do live in a world run largely by violent men.
The Modern Western - really came to life after Sam Peckinpah's the Wild Bunch, and in the 1970s. Unlike the Classic John Wayne, Rod Taylor, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Stewart Granger, Howard Hawkes, John Ford, Gary Cooper and even Clint Eastwood Western's the modern western is more realistic, less romantic and mythic in its leanings. It's gritty. And painful. There's no hope.
The best example of Modern Western may well be Cormac McCarthy's novels from Suttrea to No Country for Old Men, which take place along the border lands, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas...in the dry desert hills, where people will kill for a buck. In McCarthy's novels...the hero is an anti-hero, there is really no happy ending, and the story is as painful and deadly as the landscape it inhabits. The humor painful as well.
Breaking Bad is in many ways a Modern Western. With a hero who descends into the hell, as he moves closer and closer to the borderlands. The closer he gets to those lands, the more his morals slowly decay...the less he cares, and the less human he becomes.
Australian Westerns are actually similar in tone to American ones - in part because Australia like America has a section of its country that is uninhabitable - a vast wasteland of dust and cacti and ragged rock, that only natives seem to be able to live in or so we think. I've seen a few gritty Australian ones that remind me a bit of the American ones.
If you are familiar with this genre at all...you know where Breaking Bad is headed - in much the same hopeless dirt that No Country for Old Men traversed. Both comment on the drug culture - which is the commerce of choice for a modern western. The old classic westerns focused on guns, booze, money, and
cattle. Here - it's meth, or cocaine. Powder. Crystal. If you are American - and are like me, have worked in criminal law in any capacity - you know the drug laws, and you've met the doped up victims and criminals of the trade. I remember sitting across from a hitman hired by an east coast drug cartel in what can best be described as an airport lounge or doctor's waiting room at Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1992. He had tracks up and down his arms, and his eyes were yellow. OR the bank robber, who had done 15 years hard time, because he needed to fuel his cocaine habit. When you see it up close and personal, it loses some of its romantic allure. And you understand the need for gritty painful realism far more. In the East Coast - we have the gang movies, mobsters, and in the West, the modern westerns. Both gory and blood-soaked. Women on the periphery, pregnant, harrassed, sexual objects for male consumption. As a young twenty-something intern at a defender clinic, I remember ignoring the cat-calls, as an even younger 19 year old in Juarez, I remember doing the same.
Breaking Bad is not a stylized satire like Mad Men so much as a gritty picture of a man's descent into the hopeless abyss. It's a Western - by way of the Cohen Brothers, yet without the mythic touch, having more in common I suspect with Hud and Sam Shepard's True West. While critics have compared Mad Men to Breaking Bad - because they both appear on AMC, it is not fair to do so - since they reside in different genres and narrative forms. Mad Men is a satirical and highly stylized soap opera about the fake cool of the 1960s and the Advertising Age - it's East Coast, Urban Noir in top form. While Breaking Bad is a gritty realistic take on a depressed world in a modern age. Both are about men and how they are perceived in a specific time period. Yet outside of that? They are as different as...well oil and water.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 11:31 am (UTC)Yet this is a similarity that offers lots of food for thought. There are not many shows that dissect the traditional male role so critically and realistic.
There is lots of stuff on tv about the change in the female role, there is even lots of stuff that criticises abusive male gender stereotypes. But some traditional ones like that "provider" fantasy that is dissected so mercilessly on BB, or the "successful businessmen" of MM are still held idealized most of the time.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 02:37 pm (UTC)I don't think this is true. Actually most shows deal with this in some aspect or another and have since the 1960s.
As have more than one major film. Quite a few Michael Douglas films are about this in the late 1980s. It's actually a really popular trope in the US.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 03:03 pm (UTC)Numbers.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 03:12 pm (UTC)But they do keep this feeling of chemistry. The kind of crazy, extended lab time gives you.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 03:09 pm (UTC)Really? They deal with men, sure. But analyzing male stereotypes in a profound way? I can remember only very few movies that do that and they are not that specific (Fight Club maybe and American Psycho, but both of them in the end deal more with a society, supposedly sick with superficiality, not really with typically positive male stereotypes).
I have not seen many Michael Douglas movies though, since I loathe him with passion, but aren't they usually about hubris at the most?
no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 03:24 pm (UTC)There was one in the late 1980s - where he even looks like Cranston and it takes place in the LA Riots - can't remember the name of it. Also the Wonder Boys. There's also been quite a few Paul Newman films that have played with it - including Nobody's Fool.
Also, Jack Nicholson did a bunch of them in the 1970s and 60s. Five Easy Pieces. We also have Jack Lemmon - who did a bunch, and Walter Matthew. And of course there's the recent Revolutionary Road.
It's big in American movies. I've seen it done so many times and in so many different ways in American books, films, tv shows, and country music.
I'm drawing a blank on titles at the moment - but give me some time, I can probably come up with a list. The struggling American Male who is disappointed by the American Dream and can't quite provide for his family - is a huge theme in American stories. John Updike's Rabbit series is about that - and there are films made of it, along with Phillip Roth. Stephen King's horror films - The Stand through The Shining - look at it from a horror angle.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 03:36 pm (UTC)The struggling American Male who is disappointed by the American Dream and can't quite provide for his family - is a huge theme in American stories.
But really in a sense that questions the idea that the man should be the one providing?
Because that's the bit I love so much about both Mad Men and BB. You see people who get eaten by stereotypes. On BB Walts need to provide is clearly a kind of madness. It destroys his marriage instead of saving it.
And that little bit, the bit where the show seems to say that if he just could let that go, if he could believe Skyler is able to pull her weight in the relationship, rely on her and still retain his self worth, he would be a much better man, that is something I find very rare. This total bullshit calling on "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do".
no subject
Date: 2011-02-06 11:32 pm (UTC)1. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit - Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones (this hits the themes of both Mad Men and Breaking Bad)
2. Billy Wilder's The Apartment - very similar to Mad Men
3. Kevin Spacey in Alan Bell's American Beauty
4. Michael Douglas in Falling Down - go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Down
5. Friday Night Lights - actually is a good example, albeit not in the lead role - Tim Riggins and his brother chop up cars, ending with Riggins an ex-football hero going to jail for it. His brother gets roped into it to support his pregnant wife and pay the insurance bills
6. Raising Hope plays a bit with the trope but in a comedic manner
7. There's also the classic The Honeymooners - which makes fun of it. Or All in the Family - by Norman Lear, which also addresses this issue.
8. Jack Bauer from 24
In books:
1. John Updike's Rabbit series, they also made this into a film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit,_Run
2. John Cheever's stories
While they admittedly do it in different ways. It's not a new trope.
Another film - Mr. Mom - where Michael Keaton loses his job and his wife provides instead. It focuses completely on Michael Keaton.
It challenges the same trope but not quite in the way you expect.
There's no shortage of tv shows, films, and books regarding the difficult struggle of white men to be the providers for their families and not letting anyone help them.