By Tanja Bresan.
Sharrett’s deep dive in his book uncovers what drives the show: a similar original sin manifesting in America’s white males with their driving force: toxic white male privilege.”
Christopher Sharrett’s recent entry into Wayne State’s University Press’s TV Milestones series examines Breaking Bad, one of the most critically acclaimed television series of the last decade that has received little scholarly research. Breaking Bad deals with the mythos of the American Dream, seen as the wasteland of western civilization as mirrored by its main protagonists and symbolized by a landscape of angry, lost, and barren terrain. As the author points out,
Breaking Bad is probably the most uncompromised fictional rendering—certainly for a TV show—of the white American male’s rage in the early twenty-first century. It is equally perceptive about the disintegration of the family and community.” (17)
Sharrett’s deep dive in his book uncovers what drives the show: a similar original sin manifesting in America’s white males with their driving force: toxic white male privilege. Sharrett’s comprehensive and somber examination points out significant and key elements the series contains, and its engagement with several different genres: the crime film, the western, the melodrama, and a bit of science fiction (25).
The book’s first chapter, “The Revenge of the Husband-Father and the Case of Walter White,” deals with understanding White’s progressive physical and spiritual decline and at the same time the rise of his newfound purpose and career as a drug-king. The second chapter, “Los Alamos,” introduces the landscape of Walter White’s demise. The landscape is abstract, vast, and shapes the behavior of the characters, their needs and routines. The third deals with the central relationship of the series, the one between Walter and Jesse. Their dynamic is everything but an ordinary antihero paring. They evolve or rather dissolve by the end of the series, from cooking partners to mortal enemies. The older man/young partner myth is a central narrative for Western culture, and the author uses western icons Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as an example to emphasize their connection in the penultimate chapter.
In the end, both the series and the examination of it recognize that rage is the immature heart of the American male psyche, an impulse and emotion that negates all others and leads horribly and inexorably to the destruction of all but those with greater rage, and then finally disintegration (like cancer) and self-immolation. Walt’s violently amoral criminal career leads to his settling of nothing more than his original score: a lack of recognition for his intellect by the pair who stole his best ideas and his probable true-love interest. But it’s this selfish rage that lays bare the emptiness of White, and his country’s imagined exceptionalism. Drugs and gangster-capitalism are just the symptoms of an immature and empty moral landscape based on the childish nature of a youthful, arrogant, and patriarchal nation.
Tanja Bresan holds a masters degree in art and cultural studies from the University of Arts, Belgrade. Her writing on film had appeared in several online journals including Berlin Film Journal and IndieKino Berlin.
It is good that this monograph has received notice but could not a more in-depth review have appeared that would have done better justice to the complexities rather than this journalistic comment?