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ACF Critic Series #29: Breaking Bad
Here’s my new podcast with Paul Cantor, on the Macbeth of Meth! We talk about The Dark Side Of The American Dream — go buy the book, folks. It’s about tragedy in pop culture, from Huck Finn to The Walking Dead (which we’ll get to next week). We talk about the American Dream — especially the middle-class suburban dream of the post-war era–and what happens when it doesn’t work out. Especially during troubled times, like nowadays, people turn to darker stories and are more interested in the tragic side of life. So all of a sudden mere villains ascend by the path of the anti-hero to the full status of tragic hero, trying to out-American America, so to speak.
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Unless another show blows me away, I believe Breaking Bad will be my favorite show for a very long time. Vince Gilligan is amazing.
That health insurance part hahaha
Excellent podcast. Good insights from you and Paul. Breaking Bad remains my favorite series. Ozymandias may be the single best episode of series TV.
A couple of additional thoughts. I agree with your discussion re thwarted masculinity. However, Walter also suffers from his stubborn pride. He quits the high tech startup because his pride is hurt. He refuses the offer to pay the costs of his cancer treatment out of pride. It’s a theme that continues throughout the series. It’s part of what makes Mike Ehrmantraut so worried about him.
You mention that no institutions come through the series intact, specifically mentioning the DEA. Although it may not, Hank does. Or rather, Hank goes from being an obnoxious blowhard at the start of the series to being someone with character and integrity.
I saw an interview with Vince Gilligan in which he said the health insurance issue had nothing to do with politics but was a vehicle to explain Walt and get people on his side. The irony is that generally speaking government employees, like teachers, have the best health care insurance available. In fact, I remember someone actually got a copy of the insurance coverage for Alberquerque school teachers and Walt’s treatment definitely would have been covered!
Good to hear from you again–I did not know you liked it that much!
Good point–we should have got to this. Really, Walt was always the kind of blushing tyrant.
Yes, Hank gets better–he really is a counterpoise, another way of dealing with the crisis of American man. More of a Stoic, really.
So Gilligan improved on reality–I didn’t know that! Good for him, because it’s one of a few issues that defines social troubles in this generation!
Comment before listening: You could probably talk an hour about each episode.
Huck Finn tragic? Nuts.
The only tragedy is when Huck reveals that his fate is to be adopted and “sivilized” by Aunt Sally if he doesn’t light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.
It’s not Huck himself, who’s natural. The huckleberry doesn’t require cultivation. The closest he gets to tragedy is his inner conflict: Is a black man a friend or property?–morality, American habits & politics, tell him slave, but his natural side resists… That part could become tragic. But it’s the portrait of the South, but also of each of the communities left behind by Progress; the violence, for example. It’s not a pretty portrait of America, because it’s a portrait of communities Americans normally look away from.
He resolves it though.
Huck writes a note to Miss Watson telling her where she can find Jim. Now, he has to decide between what he has been taught his moral duty is and his friendship with Jim.
That part is the key to the book. His realization, when the slave-catchers are closing in and Jim has been shot, that his blood is red, just like a man. Because that realization comes along with the additional realization that not only is Jim a man, but he is the only man in Huck’s life who has ever cared about him, and looked out for him, going back long before they ran off together. Really, the only truly decent man he has ever known.
Which makes it a horrendous shame that it is being removed from schools as racist, when it is just the opposite.
Judge, Americans don’t like to be reminded of their faults. To admit Twain’s greatness requires first to admit these faults. If they’re just the faults of dead Americans from a different world, they can all be forgotten, so also the faults.
The only reason to read classics is, if we’re not too good for them. If we’ve not Progressed beyond needing them. If we still have the old faults, in short.
Running away from the past is America’s favorite pastime. Why Twain, who was so immensely successful, was nevertheless so angry & critical…
Twain had a lot of personal tragedy. His dad died when he was young. He got his brother Henry a job on a steamboat. The steamboat’s boiler exploded and Henry died of the injuries he received. Twain blamed himself. His daughter Suzy died young.
In financial matters, Twain invested in an early attempt to create a typesetting machine. It failed to flourish. The publishing house that he founded to produce The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant did well initially, but subsequently foundered. There were pirated copies of his works everywhere; copyright enforcement was hard to maintain.
All that could make a man bitter.
That’s true. Some of that is just how hard life is; other parts, how fickle, movable things are in America. But Cantor’s right especially about Twain’s hatred of England & Shakespeare–Americans with the money & interest forever imitating the Old World instead of trusting in homegrown genius. A people that loved him, but never honored him…
In the generation after Twain, a lot of great talent realized America was deadly, so they left for the Old World. Pound, T.S. Eliot, Henry James before them; all those lost generation types afterward. What’s the point of loving a people who will never love you back? America would have been in a much better position to fend off moralistic delusions of Progress if talented writers had been loved enough to feel they should champion the country…
In a way, America settled into genre fiction. Great talent moved away from letters for the most part–except a few, who were mostly trapped–& mediocre types achieved more success, which is still the case now. But great talent learned the lesson & especially never again did another great comedian appear in America. Why bother trying?
It’s that way now, too. Talent bleeds American, but it’s so obvious there’s no way to attract an audience; no way to deserve well of the country… That’s the ugly truth behind the Progressive bent of talent; some of it is moralism, but mostly it’s a tantrum to show they don’t need the country either.
Perhaps conservatives will learn that they need to honor & reward talent; it’s a good time for that, since the alliance between ambition, to say nothing of con men, & Progress is collapsing. But conservatives usually throw money at politics. Organized Philistinism.