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shadowkat[ETA: Sorry, I suck at titles tonight and damn, I need to go to bed.]
1. Breaking Bad
Remember whatever we do or have done...we do it for the best reason of all, the only reason..family. - Walt to Skylar
I think that's the quote. Never been great at remembering quotes. You should see me with lyrics.
The quote made me think of Macbeth, although no such quote exists in that wonderful play. I have my favorites amongst the Shakespearean plays and MacBeth is one, still considering seeing Cummings one man show.
Ah, Walt, you seem to have lost your conscience somewhere admist the justifications.
And what you did to Jesse....I was afraid you'd done last year and prayed you hadn't. For it may well be your most unforgivable act.
In this episode we watch as Walt struggles to justify it to Jesse, stating whatever we did it was for the best, it worked out okay, things are as they were meant to be - we're at our best when we are protecting each other's backs. Yet, I agree with Mike who took one look at Walt and sees a ticking time bomb. Mike's a professional...who is a mixed bag of contradictions, as is Mike's partner in crime, Lydia, who while ordering Mike's death and his men out of fear for her own survival, begs him when he comes to kill her - to spare her child and not to make her disappear, not to let her daughter think she'd abandoned her. She'll scream, get her daughter killed first. Family...comes first. Or does it. Do any of these people care about their families? The only one's who seem haunted by conscience...are Jesse and Skylar. Jesse scared to death that someone will happen upon the poison and take it by mistake and Skylar who is drowning in guilt and fear for what happened to Ted and the others and why. Saul mentions a way out - leave now, he states, go when you are ahead. But Walt differs - he's broke, and in debt to Jesse. How is he ahead? Well, you are still alive states Saul. Too true. We all are...Saul seems to mutter with his eyes. At least for now.
What I love about Breaking Bad is we see the choices that Walt makes. And the options along the way to his own ruin. We watch him make that journey and see why. What he could have done differently and why he doesn't do it, and the unintended consequences of it.
The reason he doesn't choose charity, choose to tell Hank, to rely on family - is explained in detail at various points - the sins of pride and vanity, and to a degree how he was made and how he was raised. Watching Walt's journey sheds light on others...such as the lunatic in Colorado who shot all those people. How someone can go down that road.
It doesn't happen all at once. Any more than it did with MacBeth. It is step by step.
Bit by slow bit.
You watch as Walt painstakingly takes out the reisin poison that Jess hid in the cigarette, fills another similar container with salt and places that in a similar cigarette to fool Jesse, then hides the original poison behind an electrical outlet in his house - impossible to find. Why he kept it and did not dispose of it, I don't know. And that may well be the creepiest bit. Creepier still is how he goes over to Jesse's house and spends an entire day searching the entire house, top to bottom, with Jesse hunting the poison filled cigarette that Jesse fears some poor innocent person ingested. Finally, Walt suggests that Jesse look in the Romba vaccuming device...and they find Walt's dummy cigarette, demonstrating the lengths Walt went to scam Jesse. Jesse breaks down in tears and we see in Walt's eyes regret and pain, but for an instant. He justifies it again.
The road to hell is paved with justifications.
Everything Walt does is to protect his family. But is it? It may well be to protect his family's image of him. Which is what he told his son in the episode Salud, but his son, tried to tell him - that this is not the image the family wants. It's ironic really, the Water White - that Walt is proud of is the one that frightens his family and doesn't feel real. The Walter White, Jesse and his family loved is Mr. Chips. That was the man, even
Mike to a degree respected.
How we see ourselves is often through a warped funhouse mirror. For Walter White there was no other path to take...his pride would not permit it. And economic factors set him down it.
I see the same things happen with real people. The man in Colorado who shot up a movie house - his soul consumed with pride, self loathing and rage. Joe Paterno...who died of cancer, but allowed the cancer of pride to eat away at his soul...pride of a legacy that he bent over backwards to preserve and ironically has been destroyed by his very attempts to preserve it. By our choices...we doom ourselves.
"What's done cannot be undone."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5. 1
Indeed. It cannot.
Sigh, clearly I turned a corner somewhere along the way and decided Breaking Bad was worth blogging about. I don't blog about everything I watch or read, seriously who has the time?
2. Regarding the analysis and meta and discussion of cultural media, I've decided part of the problem with discourse is how we differently we are viewing or analyzing the media. Realized this when I was discussing characters and how people idealize them or "woobiefy" with selenak, and when I was reading a thread on Mark Watches...where the commentators were bemoaning the fact that people aren't interpreting the series through the sociological lense or seemed blatantly unaware of the sociological issues at play here..or were simply romanticizing (woobiefying) a nasty character without noticing how horrible the character's actions were.
And I thought, well, not everyone analyzes or views things through the same lense or pair of glasses. Some of us wear bifocals, some tri-focals, some reading glasses, some contacts, and some thick glasses.
It's not just that people are perceiving different sociological issues or interpreting the sociological issues differently, no, they may not even be looking at it from that perspective at all. The sociological angle may not have even occurred to them or if they are like me? They may have decided to blatantly ignore it. I prefer not to look at media through the sociological angle if I can avoid it (you can't always)...not a fan of sociology, and find analyzing from that perspective or lense to be fraught with peril and inadequate assumptions. Mileage varies on this I know and no offense to the sociology majors on my flist. My experiences with the field weren't positive ones.
At any rate...I always tend to look at things from a psychological angle first, and philosophical one second. Sociological one last if at all. I'm usually, not always blatantly oblivious, to the sociological perspective unless of course...the show is The WIRE and it is clearly written to be analyzed in that manner. And even the Wire, I tended to prefer the psychological lense, which should tell you something.
Buffy? I blatantly ignored the sociological issues. Could care less. The whole addiction metaphor bit? Eh. Bored now. And I did not interpret the series from a literal angle. In short - my take was simply this - vampires don't exist in reality, which means you can basically do whatever you please with them in fiction. No rules. Skies the limit. Just try to be a little consistent. I tend to be fairly forgiving of tv regarding consistency issues, if I wasn't I couldn't watch soap operas.
And vampires along with the other demons were meant to be metaphors. In a series about growing up? Metaphor for not growing up, for remaining forever young, forever hormonal, forever adolescent...and free to do whatever you pleased. I did not see them as serial killers - because hello they were vampires. Instead I saw them on the psychological level - as that dark impulse or id, the shadow self. Faith? I saw somewhat the same way, although she didn't interest me that much because too obvious a metaphor...Spike was a more interesting metaphor. And I liked the mythological aspect - the idea of the heroine going into the underworld.
My other basis was philosophical - for me Spike was the quintessential existential hero. I saw more parallels with Burgess' Clockwork Orange and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Buffy than I did Silence of the Lambs or Kubricks Clockwork Orange. Also saw a lot of Michael Foucault and Camus, along with Jung and Freud. The Post-Modern hero was exemplified in the series not the classical one, which suited me. I'm not a fan of the classical hero who goes by destiny and legacy, and is about pride. The series Breaking Bad much like Angel feels like a post-modernist deconstruction of the classical hero depicting how in reality the traits people loved about him take us down a dark and winding road to ruin. If you put legacy and family and pride above everything else - you lose yourself and your humanity along the way.
Again mileage varies on this. I know many people on my flist who love the classical hero to pieces and view this quite differently than I do, I respect that, we don't have to see eye to eye as it were.. I prefer the one who questions every thing and snarks at the universe. Because I tend to do that myself at times, so it makes sense to me. I liked Buffy for the same reasons, she was a post-modernist hero. And the post-modern philosophers fascinated me. I'm the sort who isn't as interested in the past, which I figure is over and we can't change all we can do is learn from it and move on and hopefully not make the same dumb mistakes, and is far more interested in the present - which I have control over, and figures the future will be better or at the very least interesting and different.
So..the sociological and at times heavily moralistic take on the series...grated. Mostly because along that path lies character wars I think.
Far more interesting and less blood pressure spiking to discuss the psychological and philosophical view of Willow and her magic, than well, Willow's addiction to magic as if it were drugs and how Tara's death and Willow's turn to the dark side represented a time-worn sociological cliche - the Evil Lesbian or the Lesbian's Death aka The Celluoid Closet... OR for that matter...the moral consequences and ethics of Buffy leading a bunch of teen girls against an army of insane vampires, ending in her sharing her power with all of them and all the girls who are like her around the world, providing them with a means of defending themselves against whomever may come after them just for being a potentially powerful girl...as if she were doing it in the real world where vampires and monsters don't exist and the worst thing you have to fight is guy with a machete - which actually is worse come to think of it, but never mind. Much prefer to see it through the psychological lense. Less depressing and less rage inducing and less stressful. I think some people just like to fight on the internet? Or maybe, they really are into this whole I'm morally better than you are gig? Then again, maybe not. Maybe they are asking legitimate questions. But not everyone wants to ask them. Some want to play.
But I think much of the conflict comes from the two views going up against each other.
For example someone who views vampires literally as walking corspes out of a Bram Stoker novel is going to have huge problems understanding someone who sees them as metaphors for immortality...or death devouring life. Life and death in a passionate and impossible metaphorical dance. Light and shadow. Persphone and Hades. Or those who see it as a deadly immortal predator and a mortal human one. How you view it, has a lot to do with how you react to the text. If you see it literally...you aren't going to understand someone who sees it purely metaphorically. From your perspective the other guy is possibly looking through a funhouse mirror at the text and is reading it all wrong.
And if you see it through a sociological perspective - where either the vampires are metaphors for a disenfranchized other (not sure how people do this but they do) or representive of an invading imperialist or serial killers or rapists...or the privileged elite...take your pick, you may have issues wrapping your brain around those of us who viewed them as basically shadow selves or internal demons that Buffy had to find a way of recognizing, accepting and moving past. Or maybe people who didn't analyze the show at all and just saw two fascinating fictional characters on the screen and really didn't think that hard about it. They may even have romanticized one. Some people, I know this may come as a bit of a shock, don't think that hard about tv. They just fall in love with characters. They may even romanticize or idealize them. Or just focus on the good bits.
Because...it relaxes them after a really nasty day. And they need that escape.
One of the things I found disturbing on both the 50 Shades thread on Good Reads and the Mark Watches threads was a tendency to judge people who were had built a community around a tv show or book to escape into. They were trading fanfic. Icons. Going to cons. And had become close friends. The show and/or book was something safe for them to talk about and obsess on, a common denominator. Good things come out of this - they support one another.
Yet, people judge them harshly. Why exactly? Life is isolating, difficult, boring, and stressful. We need to find ways to destress and connect. This is one of the various harmless ways of doing it. It's far better than the alternative.
I think the problem we have in discourse is this assumption that everyone is looking at the object in the same way we are. No one will read this post that I'm writing the same way. It is actually the most fascinating thing about posting. 10 people will react in 10 different ways. I bet half will just read the bit on Breaking Bad, possibly 30% will read both, and maybe the other 30% will read this bit. Or maybe the opposite. It's amazing how many ways people can interpret one basic sentence. It does make discourse or communication dicey. How do you convey what you wish to convey without being misinterpreted? Very carefully, I think, and even then...
1. Breaking Bad
Remember whatever we do or have done...we do it for the best reason of all, the only reason..family. - Walt to Skylar
I think that's the quote. Never been great at remembering quotes. You should see me with lyrics.
The quote made me think of Macbeth, although no such quote exists in that wonderful play. I have my favorites amongst the Shakespearean plays and MacBeth is one, still considering seeing Cummings one man show.
Ah, Walt, you seem to have lost your conscience somewhere admist the justifications.
And what you did to Jesse....I was afraid you'd done last year and prayed you hadn't. For it may well be your most unforgivable act.
In this episode we watch as Walt struggles to justify it to Jesse, stating whatever we did it was for the best, it worked out okay, things are as they were meant to be - we're at our best when we are protecting each other's backs. Yet, I agree with Mike who took one look at Walt and sees a ticking time bomb. Mike's a professional...who is a mixed bag of contradictions, as is Mike's partner in crime, Lydia, who while ordering Mike's death and his men out of fear for her own survival, begs him when he comes to kill her - to spare her child and not to make her disappear, not to let her daughter think she'd abandoned her. She'll scream, get her daughter killed first. Family...comes first. Or does it. Do any of these people care about their families? The only one's who seem haunted by conscience...are Jesse and Skylar. Jesse scared to death that someone will happen upon the poison and take it by mistake and Skylar who is drowning in guilt and fear for what happened to Ted and the others and why. Saul mentions a way out - leave now, he states, go when you are ahead. But Walt differs - he's broke, and in debt to Jesse. How is he ahead? Well, you are still alive states Saul. Too true. We all are...Saul seems to mutter with his eyes. At least for now.
What I love about Breaking Bad is we see the choices that Walt makes. And the options along the way to his own ruin. We watch him make that journey and see why. What he could have done differently and why he doesn't do it, and the unintended consequences of it.
The reason he doesn't choose charity, choose to tell Hank, to rely on family - is explained in detail at various points - the sins of pride and vanity, and to a degree how he was made and how he was raised. Watching Walt's journey sheds light on others...such as the lunatic in Colorado who shot all those people. How someone can go down that road.
It doesn't happen all at once. Any more than it did with MacBeth. It is step by step.
Bit by slow bit.
You watch as Walt painstakingly takes out the reisin poison that Jess hid in the cigarette, fills another similar container with salt and places that in a similar cigarette to fool Jesse, then hides the original poison behind an electrical outlet in his house - impossible to find. Why he kept it and did not dispose of it, I don't know. And that may well be the creepiest bit. Creepier still is how he goes over to Jesse's house and spends an entire day searching the entire house, top to bottom, with Jesse hunting the poison filled cigarette that Jesse fears some poor innocent person ingested. Finally, Walt suggests that Jesse look in the Romba vaccuming device...and they find Walt's dummy cigarette, demonstrating the lengths Walt went to scam Jesse. Jesse breaks down in tears and we see in Walt's eyes regret and pain, but for an instant. He justifies it again.
The road to hell is paved with justifications.
Everything Walt does is to protect his family. But is it? It may well be to protect his family's image of him. Which is what he told his son in the episode Salud, but his son, tried to tell him - that this is not the image the family wants. It's ironic really, the Water White - that Walt is proud of is the one that frightens his family and doesn't feel real. The Walter White, Jesse and his family loved is Mr. Chips. That was the man, even
Mike to a degree respected.
How we see ourselves is often through a warped funhouse mirror. For Walter White there was no other path to take...his pride would not permit it. And economic factors set him down it.
I see the same things happen with real people. The man in Colorado who shot up a movie house - his soul consumed with pride, self loathing and rage. Joe Paterno...who died of cancer, but allowed the cancer of pride to eat away at his soul...pride of a legacy that he bent over backwards to preserve and ironically has been destroyed by his very attempts to preserve it. By our choices...we doom ourselves.
"What's done cannot be undone."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5. 1
Indeed. It cannot.
Sigh, clearly I turned a corner somewhere along the way and decided Breaking Bad was worth blogging about. I don't blog about everything I watch or read, seriously who has the time?
2. Regarding the analysis and meta and discussion of cultural media, I've decided part of the problem with discourse is how we differently we are viewing or analyzing the media. Realized this when I was discussing characters and how people idealize them or "woobiefy" with selenak, and when I was reading a thread on Mark Watches...where the commentators were bemoaning the fact that people aren't interpreting the series through the sociological lense or seemed blatantly unaware of the sociological issues at play here..or were simply romanticizing (woobiefying) a nasty character without noticing how horrible the character's actions were.
And I thought, well, not everyone analyzes or views things through the same lense or pair of glasses. Some of us wear bifocals, some tri-focals, some reading glasses, some contacts, and some thick glasses.
It's not just that people are perceiving different sociological issues or interpreting the sociological issues differently, no, they may not even be looking at it from that perspective at all. The sociological angle may not have even occurred to them or if they are like me? They may have decided to blatantly ignore it. I prefer not to look at media through the sociological angle if I can avoid it (you can't always)...not a fan of sociology, and find analyzing from that perspective or lense to be fraught with peril and inadequate assumptions. Mileage varies on this I know and no offense to the sociology majors on my flist. My experiences with the field weren't positive ones.
At any rate...I always tend to look at things from a psychological angle first, and philosophical one second. Sociological one last if at all. I'm usually, not always blatantly oblivious, to the sociological perspective unless of course...the show is The WIRE and it is clearly written to be analyzed in that manner. And even the Wire, I tended to prefer the psychological lense, which should tell you something.
Buffy? I blatantly ignored the sociological issues. Could care less. The whole addiction metaphor bit? Eh. Bored now. And I did not interpret the series from a literal angle. In short - my take was simply this - vampires don't exist in reality, which means you can basically do whatever you please with them in fiction. No rules. Skies the limit. Just try to be a little consistent. I tend to be fairly forgiving of tv regarding consistency issues, if I wasn't I couldn't watch soap operas.
And vampires along with the other demons were meant to be metaphors. In a series about growing up? Metaphor for not growing up, for remaining forever young, forever hormonal, forever adolescent...and free to do whatever you pleased. I did not see them as serial killers - because hello they were vampires. Instead I saw them on the psychological level - as that dark impulse or id, the shadow self. Faith? I saw somewhat the same way, although she didn't interest me that much because too obvious a metaphor...Spike was a more interesting metaphor. And I liked the mythological aspect - the idea of the heroine going into the underworld.
My other basis was philosophical - for me Spike was the quintessential existential hero. I saw more parallels with Burgess' Clockwork Orange and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Buffy than I did Silence of the Lambs or Kubricks Clockwork Orange. Also saw a lot of Michael Foucault and Camus, along with Jung and Freud. The Post-Modern hero was exemplified in the series not the classical one, which suited me. I'm not a fan of the classical hero who goes by destiny and legacy, and is about pride. The series Breaking Bad much like Angel feels like a post-modernist deconstruction of the classical hero depicting how in reality the traits people loved about him take us down a dark and winding road to ruin. If you put legacy and family and pride above everything else - you lose yourself and your humanity along the way.
Again mileage varies on this. I know many people on my flist who love the classical hero to pieces and view this quite differently than I do, I respect that, we don't have to see eye to eye as it were.. I prefer the one who questions every thing and snarks at the universe. Because I tend to do that myself at times, so it makes sense to me. I liked Buffy for the same reasons, she was a post-modernist hero. And the post-modern philosophers fascinated me. I'm the sort who isn't as interested in the past, which I figure is over and we can't change all we can do is learn from it and move on and hopefully not make the same dumb mistakes, and is far more interested in the present - which I have control over, and figures the future will be better or at the very least interesting and different.
So..the sociological and at times heavily moralistic take on the series...grated. Mostly because along that path lies character wars I think.
Far more interesting and less blood pressure spiking to discuss the psychological and philosophical view of Willow and her magic, than well, Willow's addiction to magic as if it were drugs and how Tara's death and Willow's turn to the dark side represented a time-worn sociological cliche - the Evil Lesbian or the Lesbian's Death aka The Celluoid Closet... OR for that matter...the moral consequences and ethics of Buffy leading a bunch of teen girls against an army of insane vampires, ending in her sharing her power with all of them and all the girls who are like her around the world, providing them with a means of defending themselves against whomever may come after them just for being a potentially powerful girl...as if she were doing it in the real world where vampires and monsters don't exist and the worst thing you have to fight is guy with a machete - which actually is worse come to think of it, but never mind. Much prefer to see it through the psychological lense. Less depressing and less rage inducing and less stressful. I think some people just like to fight on the internet? Or maybe, they really are into this whole I'm morally better than you are gig? Then again, maybe not. Maybe they are asking legitimate questions. But not everyone wants to ask them. Some want to play.
But I think much of the conflict comes from the two views going up against each other.
For example someone who views vampires literally as walking corspes out of a Bram Stoker novel is going to have huge problems understanding someone who sees them as metaphors for immortality...or death devouring life. Life and death in a passionate and impossible metaphorical dance. Light and shadow. Persphone and Hades. Or those who see it as a deadly immortal predator and a mortal human one. How you view it, has a lot to do with how you react to the text. If you see it literally...you aren't going to understand someone who sees it purely metaphorically. From your perspective the other guy is possibly looking through a funhouse mirror at the text and is reading it all wrong.
And if you see it through a sociological perspective - where either the vampires are metaphors for a disenfranchized other (not sure how people do this but they do) or representive of an invading imperialist or serial killers or rapists...or the privileged elite...take your pick, you may have issues wrapping your brain around those of us who viewed them as basically shadow selves or internal demons that Buffy had to find a way of recognizing, accepting and moving past. Or maybe people who didn't analyze the show at all and just saw two fascinating fictional characters on the screen and really didn't think that hard about it. They may even have romanticized one. Some people, I know this may come as a bit of a shock, don't think that hard about tv. They just fall in love with characters. They may even romanticize or idealize them. Or just focus on the good bits.
Because...it relaxes them after a really nasty day. And they need that escape.
One of the things I found disturbing on both the 50 Shades thread on Good Reads and the Mark Watches threads was a tendency to judge people who were had built a community around a tv show or book to escape into. They were trading fanfic. Icons. Going to cons. And had become close friends. The show and/or book was something safe for them to talk about and obsess on, a common denominator. Good things come out of this - they support one another.
Yet, people judge them harshly. Why exactly? Life is isolating, difficult, boring, and stressful. We need to find ways to destress and connect. This is one of the various harmless ways of doing it. It's far better than the alternative.
I think the problem we have in discourse is this assumption that everyone is looking at the object in the same way we are. No one will read this post that I'm writing the same way. It is actually the most fascinating thing about posting. 10 people will react in 10 different ways. I bet half will just read the bit on Breaking Bad, possibly 30% will read both, and maybe the other 30% will read this bit. Or maybe the opposite. It's amazing how many ways people can interpret one basic sentence. It does make discourse or communication dicey. How do you convey what you wish to convey without being misinterpreted? Very carefully, I think, and even then...