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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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.