When I first wrote about Breaking Bad, I'd only seen the one season on dvd. <1> Having viewed the complete series now, Bad is television drama that retains its noir sting. There are flashes of confrontation and violence that bring the Western into the equation as well. But no matter the genre conventions it uses, the show is always engrossing television, superbly written, acted and produced.
II.
Breaking Bad is also popular art that invites serious discussion. Issues of morality in contemporary America are boldly raised, and powerfully dramatized by the show. At its centre, there is the character of Walter White. Speaking of character in a fictional work involves identifying traits, and considering how those traits change, or become reinforced over time. But what does it mean when a character is most present when his character is most absent?
I mean that it allows White to turn from character, into cypher. <2> Whereas character is usually developed by the interaction of an individual with social figures and factors, a cypher can be self-made. White then breaks the codes of established law and morality, and displaces them with his own encoded compulsions. It allows White to keep his criminality secret as long as he does, and charges his new role as a gangster.
III.
Bryan Cranston's performance as Walter White is attentive to reminding us of White's vulnerabilities throughout the series. Among the many images that will stay with me is that of Walter White thus, crying out in helpless grief. To be sure, his is an agony caused by bearing the full fruit of his actions. But I was also seeing the agony that may be caused by extinguishing character and self, and the consequences that follow for the soul.
__________
<1>"Running Between the Raindrops". BMT, November 2013.
<2>"Cypher", from the Arabic sifr meaning "zero", or, nothing.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
A Second First Essay
There is a point beyond which the clutter in one's space can no longer go unremarked. Trying to tidy things by moving some paper-choked boxes around, I came across an old folder of undergraduate essays. There it still lay: my first university essay on a literary subject: a required consideration of Willa Cather's compelling story, "Paul's Case". The following will be, I suppose, an elective consideration of "Paul's Case". <1>
II.
Reading Cather's story again these years later, I noticed a detail I don't recall raised in our lectures or tutorial group. It comes early in the narrative, after Paul has just finished delivering one of his sub-Wildean performances ("there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin...and a red carnation") to a group of faculty at Pittsburgh High School. After Paul bows "gracefully" from the Principal's office, it's his Art teacher that notes Paul was born "only a few months before his mother died".
III.
Paul doesn't have much of a relationship with his parent that remains, and seems to work hard at keeping it that way. Coming home late one evening, for example, Paul actually prefers breaking in through a basement window than to be "accosted" by his father for explanations, if he were to enter their house through the main entrance. In a certain way, Paul only tolerates his father by the nature of their bond - and his father would seem to return the sentiment. Paul is only too aware of being compared to another neighbourhood young man, whom his father "daily held up to Paul as a model...a young man with a future". Paul will have none of this, his father's attempt at sensible guidance, as he is being led by a sensibility (or a sensibility in the making) of his own.
Having the sensibility of an aesthete, Paul suffers and humours the banal and tiresome routines of his middling circumstances, so that he can escape to the world of art and beauty. The access to his preferred society comes from Paul's part-time job as an usher at Carnegie Hall. Only here, he "really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting", and when the orchestra played "the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto...his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired." But because of his various delinquencies, Paul loses his job at the Carnegie. He responds by running away to New York on stolen money. Cather resolves Paul's truancy there in the big city, with a most sombre conclusion.
IV.
Let us come on back now to the detail of Paul's mother passing away, just months after his birth. Was this Cather only emphasizing the sense of Paul's isolation and estrangement? Given the precise highly-wrought text, it's hard to think it a crude emphasis, certainly. Willa Cather has made sure though that Paul have no mother to turn to. Such a maternal presence might have proved crucial, in Paul's case.
__________
<1>Cather, Willa. "Paul's Case". The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (1986).
II.
Reading Cather's story again these years later, I noticed a detail I don't recall raised in our lectures or tutorial group. It comes early in the narrative, after Paul has just finished delivering one of his sub-Wildean performances ("there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin...and a red carnation") to a group of faculty at Pittsburgh High School. After Paul bows "gracefully" from the Principal's office, it's his Art teacher that notes Paul was born "only a few months before his mother died".
III.
Paul doesn't have much of a relationship with his parent that remains, and seems to work hard at keeping it that way. Coming home late one evening, for example, Paul actually prefers breaking in through a basement window than to be "accosted" by his father for explanations, if he were to enter their house through the main entrance. In a certain way, Paul only tolerates his father by the nature of their bond - and his father would seem to return the sentiment. Paul is only too aware of being compared to another neighbourhood young man, whom his father "daily held up to Paul as a model...a young man with a future". Paul will have none of this, his father's attempt at sensible guidance, as he is being led by a sensibility (or a sensibility in the making) of his own.
Having the sensibility of an aesthete, Paul suffers and humours the banal and tiresome routines of his middling circumstances, so that he can escape to the world of art and beauty. The access to his preferred society comes from Paul's part-time job as an usher at Carnegie Hall. Only here, he "really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting", and when the orchestra played "the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto...his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired." But because of his various delinquencies, Paul loses his job at the Carnegie. He responds by running away to New York on stolen money. Cather resolves Paul's truancy there in the big city, with a most sombre conclusion.
IV.
Let us come on back now to the detail of Paul's mother passing away, just months after his birth. Was this Cather only emphasizing the sense of Paul's isolation and estrangement? Given the precise highly-wrought text, it's hard to think it a crude emphasis, certainly. Willa Cather has made sure though that Paul have no mother to turn to. Such a maternal presence might have proved crucial, in Paul's case.
__________
<1>Cather, Willa. "Paul's Case". The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (1986).
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