Film Studies

Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

Vince GilliganVince Gilligan

Bad Boy

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

The Imagination Will Be Televised

Vince GilliganVince Gilligan

Bad Boy

Film Studies

Film Studies

Film Studies

Bad Characters

Film Studies

Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

Film Studies

Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

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Bad Characters

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

Bad Characters

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Characters

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Characters

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Film Studies

Bad Characters

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

Bad Characters

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

Local Color. Contemporary American television is undergoing what we might call a “local color” movement, a mediated echo of a 19th century literary school. Once most of American television was set, and filmed, on the coasts; now a fairly successful sitcom can be called The Middle (ABC, 2009- ) and set in Indiana (though filmed in California). Now television is enriched by series like Justified (FX, 2010- ), which takes place in Kentucky (though filmed in Pennsylvania and California) and Big Love (HBO, 2006), which transpires in Salt Lake City, Utah (though primarily filmed in California). Both draw on local color in atmosphere, story, and character and invite national and international mindsets to occupy new imaginal geographies. Not since The Sopranos—set and filmed in New Jersey—however, has location, location, location been more integral to a dramatic series than in Breaking Bad, which turns Albuquerque and the American Southwest into a setting that functions as both text and context. [Go here to explore a Flickr album of Bad locations.]

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

The Claustrophic. Breaking Bad has shown itself to be especially adept at suffocating, claustrophobic narratives, what Donna Bowman deems “harrowing ordeal episodes”: Walt’s night spent in Jesse’s basement with Krazy 8, whom he is supposed to kill (“...And the Bag's in the River,” 1.3); the terrifying, insufferable day Walt and Jesse endure in the captivity of crazed, methed-up drug kingpin Tuco (“Grilled,” 2.2) and his paraplegic, bell-ringing Uncle Teo; Jesse’s gone-awry attempt-at-revenge stand-off in the decrepit house of druggie Spooge, his skanky toothless, vindictive, rock whore wife, and a pity-inducing child (“Peekaboo,” 2.6); the no water, battery-dead, stranded-in-the-desert after an epic cook ordeal of “4 Days Out” (2.9); Walt and Jesse’s overwrought, paranoid search for a buzzing contaminant in Gus Fring’s secret, subterranean, state-of-the-art meth lab (“Fly,” 3.10). These episodes serve as narrative punctuation marks in the series, and their oppressiveness bleeds over into the other, more mundane stories Bad tells.

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

Tour de Force Set-Pieces. The DEA, including Walt’s brother-in-law Hank, discover that a tortoise ambling along through the desert near El Paso, Texas carries atop its shell the severed head of a drug cartel figure known as “Tortuga” who has sold out to the Feds. "You look like you never saw a severed human head on a tortoise before," Hank’s superior proclaims in a quintessential moment of Bad humor, just before the booby-trapped monstrosity explodes, killing or injuring all but Hank, who had fled the scene to vomit. Scene after Bad scene exhibits all the story-boarded complexity, the visual passion, the multifaceted mise-en-scène of the best movies. Consider the following, highly cinematic, evocatively lit and edited scene from the penultimate episode of Season Three. (The spoiler-averse should perhaps avoid watching the clip.) Suffice it to say, that after this moment, nothing on Breaking Bad, can ever be the same again.

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

The Titles. Bad titles are clever and complex. One—“Kafkaesque” (3.9)—evokes the Austrian writer whose fictions (Metamorphosis, The Trial) helped us to recognize 20th Century absurdity. Several others are movie-derived allusions: the second and third episodes of Bad’s first season—“Cat’s in the Bag . . .” and “. . . And the Bag’s in the River“ break in two a Burt Lancaster line from The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957). “No-Rough-Stuff-Type-Deal” (1.7) is a Jerry Lundegaardism from Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996). “Crazy Handful of Nothin’” (1.6) has its origin in a line from Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) in which Dragline (George Kennedy) uses the name to describe Paul Newman’s title character. “Bit by a Dead Bee” sounds like a quotation, and indeed it is: a line from the Hemingway adaptation To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944).

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

In keeping with the series’ local color, titles in Spanish appear frequently: “Negro Y Azul” (black and blue) (2.7), for example, or “No Mas” (no more) (3.1) and “Mas” (more) (3.5), and "Caballo Sin Nombre" (horse with no name) (3.2). The episode "Abiquiu" (3.11) takes its name from a small New Mexican town where painter Georgia O’Keefe had a studio (O’Keefe’s work is discussed in the episode by Jesse and Jane). Four episode titles from Season Two reveal, when strung together, the mystery of the season’s incrementally recurring teasers and the season’s climactic event:“737” (2.1) “Down” (2.4) “Over” (2.10) “ABQ” (2.13)

Bad titles are consistently clever, self-referential, intertextual, highly literate, very much appropriate to the series whose narrative segments they name.In 1980, “No mas” became part of American vocabulary when Panamanian boxer Robert Duran walked away from his championship fight with American Sugar Ray Leonard by announcing to the referee “No mas”—no more, this losing by a TKO (technical knockout).

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

Better call Saul: Minor Characters. As in HBO dramas like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Six Feet Under, and the best of network television as well, from Buffy to Lost, Bad takes considerable care to make even its minor characters wonderfully rich and three- perhaps even four-dimensional. Sleazy “criminal” attorney Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Mike the Cleaner (Jonathan Banks), for example, are two of the most interesting minor players on television today. Both are made indelibly real with a few strokes of the Bad writers’ pens. (Think of Saul’s intertextual lament about Mike’s betrayal of him in “Full Measure” or cold-blooded killer Mike’s delivery of balloons for his granddaughter’s birthday just prior to the slaughter of three drug cartel henchmen.) Both deserve Emmys for Best Supporting Supporting Actor in a Drama (if there was such an award).“That's like Thomas Magnum threatening the little prissy guy with the mustache [Higgins],” Saul kvetches. “I am seriously rethinking my pricing. . . .”

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

The Cold Opens. Perhaps Breaking Bad’s most emphatic, most distinctive signature has been its visually stunning, narratively ingenious (and enigmatic) “cold opens.” Pre-title teasers without pre-established contexts, these minisodes demand we be seated and in place the second a Breaking Bad begins, and they leave us riveted, not even thinking about changing the channel.

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

As the series’ most astute critic Donna Bowman suggests (in contemplating “Fly”), Breaking Bad 

is a remarkable show because of its capacity to craft top-notch chapters out of many different kinds of situations and intensity levels. There are fantastic episodes that are action-packed, contemplative, concentrated, diffuse, and even nearly static. . . . Gilligan and his team produce television whose riveting effect cannot be reduced to any one of the elements out of which narrative is constructed. As with chemistry, it's the interactions and changes—small or large, visible or invisible—that carry the deepest meaning.

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

The periodic table—Bad’s graphic seed crystal—thus stands as more than just a foundational logo. Recall how, in the production credits superimposed in each episode on the scenes that emerge often seamlessly from those often brilliant, often cold opens, the chemical symbols buried in, first the title of the show itself, then the very word “Created,” then the names of each contributor, from key actors to the casting director to the director of the episode, are foregrounded in green, as if each contributed to Bad’s complex alchemy, as if each were involved in some elemental synergy, collaboration and quality at its finest.

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

is the greatest job in the world. Yeah, it’s exhausting, and there’s not enough time, and you can get hung up very easily on all the things that are wrong and all the things that didn’t work out quite like you’d hoped they would. I’ve fallen victim to that before and I’ll probably do it again. But if you’re being honest about it you have to say to yourself, “I’m the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.” It’s amazing. Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you’d write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.

“My writers and I,” Gilligan adds, “sit around and dream this stuff up and then we see it executed a week or even days later, and it’s a wonderful feeling and it’s magical.” Breaking Bad is full of that magic.

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Cold Open

At 37:00

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