Remember back in 2000,
when Big Brother brought reality TV to North America and
everybody thought that this was the end of television drama? Or by
“everybody” perhaps I mean me. But I couldn't have been more
wrong. TV drama was about to undergo a renaissance, beginning with
HBO and Showtime and later extending to basic cable. First came The
Sopranos and Six Feet
Under, then
The Wire, Mad
Men, and now, Breaking
Bad. TV that's such a pop
culture phenomenon you can't escape it; TV that's everywhere; TV that
you have to watch or be profoundly exiled from the cultural loop.
It's not just what everyone's watching, it's what everyone has
to watch.
There
is a blanket consensus among TV critics, whether writing for
established, elitist magazines like The New Yorker
or for pop culture websites like The AV Club
and Slant, about the
quality of the trendiest shows that baffles me. It's not just that
there are no dissenting voices: there is nothing to temper the
breathlessly laudatory terms in which these shows are praised, as if
there weren't five centuries of Western literature to measure them
against; as if the “showrunners” (a term recently introduced into
cultural discourse) of premium cable shows invented drama roughly
three decades ago.
The
1960s French intellectuals who defended the value of studio-era
Hollywood cinema and their American acolytes, like Andrew Sarris, may
have been guilty of taking themselves as seriously, but at least they
were struggling against
a cultural consensus when they argued for the art of American movies.
In contrast, online TV critics are setting
the cultural consensus when they praise the premium cable show du
jour. And this strikes me as a shame, because I once hoped that the
internet might be a place where you could find writers with a healthy
scepticism towards cultural trends. But I couldn't have been more
wrong about that, either: the internet has turned into a place where
giddy praise of pop culture poses as pop culture criticism. And since
practically no one at all is paying any attention to the traditional
arts, pop culture criticism is
criticism today. And it's not good enough. Pop culture deserves
better criticism; it deserves more critical criticism.
In
fact, however, I'm less worried about pop culture than I am about the
state of criticism. A small portion of pop culture has become very
smart, but criticism has dumbed way down. Not its prose, not its
analysis of tropes, not its close readings – that's all as
sophisticated and earnestly thorough as you can ask for. But it's
dumbed down its expectations.
And
Then There's Robot Chicken
One
problem with regarding TV as an art form is that it offers nothing
new as a medium. To cinephiles like Pauline Kael it was a repetition
of cinema on a small scale, visual-kinetic storytelling with none of
the power and grandeur of the big screen. Technically TV shows are
serial drama, which was introduced by radio, but no one has ever
seemed much excited about that novelty in either medium. Yet it gave
rise to the familiar TV format, which may be summarized briefly as: a
group of characters have adventures. Although most TV shows have a
protagonist (the owner of the workplace where the show takes place or
the business the show is about; the character whose name is in the
title; the character who narrates; the normal one; the newcomer; the
boss or leader or captain or mother or father, although sometimes the
son if the show is after a youth audience; the one with the skill or
ability or problem the show is about; in the case of some comedies,
the star, even if their character isn't named after them and in the
title), TV shows are much less focused on the protagonist than either
the majority of novels written for adults or stage dramas. An
adventure-of-the-week show can have as few as two regular cast
members, the protagonist and the sidekick, and in a long-running show
the sidekick can be replaced. The pure soap opera (the daytime soap)
has no protagonist; it's about families and couples. Some sitcoms
give it away in their title that protagonist duties are shared (Mork
and Mindy, Laverne and
Shirley, Will and
Grace). The father is the
protagonist of most family sitcoms, but sometimes a sitcom really is
about the entire family, like The Simpsons.
If the daughter is the protagonist, you may have a sitcom-soap
hybrid, like Mama's Family.
Serial
drama, it seems, is a democratic genre at both its poles, the sitcom
and the soap, one made up of self-contained episodes in which at best
only the romance between the leads develops, the other of ongoing
dramatic developments: the sitcom is virtually always about a family
(whether nuclear or metaphorical); the soap opera is always about
multiple families. The affection the viewer feels for the characters,
which is necessary for the sustained interest the medium demands, is
built up by watching the family-like ways in which the characters
interact every week. In TV's implicit epistemology, “family” is
the only way in which we know how to relate to the rest of the world.
This has sometimes been mistaken for a cozy worldview, but the
nuclear, workplace, and friend families portrayed on TV have often
been deeply dysfunctional since long before premium cable.
Adventurous
TV doesn't so much challenge the established genres and sub-genres as
see what can be done with them: it's a question of how dark and
complex the writers can make the soap, how dark and messed-up they
can make the sitcom. TV is only ever dark and complex relative to TV,
not to other media (messed-up, I'm not sure about); and as for
experimental, the closest you'll get to that other than half a dozen
Twin Peaks episodes is
the pop surrealism of some children's fantasy programming and
animation. I'm thinking of British fantasy from the 60s and 70s and
Henson's Muppets in the 70s (Looney Tunes shorts, being made for
theatrical release, don't count); but for a contemporary examples
there's the stop-motion-animated Robot Chicken,
which updates the pop nihilism of MAD
magazine in the 50s in ways so vulgar and deranged that Robert
Warshow might have taken back his endorsement of Krazy Kat
if he knew where this was going. But then, we're post-South
Park, and post-internet.
“She
Wouldn't Even Harm a Fly”
Breaking
Bad is the first critically untouchable TV series that hasn't
made me fear for the critics' sanity. It's not that I think it's
notably well-written, and I wouldn't quite count myself a fan, but at
least it's not just another campy soap, like Mad Men or the
colossally stupid Downton Abbey. I like Breaking
Bad but I don't love it; I watched the first four seasons
on Netflix in a couple of weeks with half-attention, but I kept
watching.
Warning:
SPOILERS for up to the end of Season Four.
The
show starts out with a premise combining the premises of two premium
cable hit shows, Weeds and Dexter: a genteel white
parent launches a career in drugs to get money for their family and
must make their way in the violent but authentic world of the
non-white Other; in the process developing a criminal double life
under the nose of a sibling who works in law enforcement. On my
Netflix home page, Dexter and Walter glower out at the viewer like
the white dude badasses they are.
In
no time at all, however, Breaking Bad has virtually nothing to
do with drug manufacturing or dealing. Walter no sooner cooks a batch
than all hell breaks loose and he spends the rest of the season
struggling to survive. If the show is about anything, it's about the
relationship between Walter and his “partner,” Jesse, a former
high school student of Walter's. But where that relationship comes
from or what it's about is, again, enigmatic.
Walter
and Jesse's relationship is about the only humanly recognizable one
in the series; it's certainly the only relationship that seems to
have any meaning for Walter, despite his posturing about his family,
whom he pursues with the tenacity of a stalker after his wife,
Skylar, discovers his double life and tries to leave him. He seems to
view his family as possessions, and as we'll see, he treats Jesse the
same way, but at least there's passion in his grotesquely abusive and
destructive relationship with his partner. His wife is viewed
satirically from the outset as a spouter of platitudes, only taking
on a certain dignity and interest after she goes over to the criminal
side of the plot, while his son is barely characterized – moody
teenager, victim, or daddy-worshipping angel as the plot demands. For
his part, Walter seems incapable of relating to them except through
lies and platitudes. None of these family members know each other,
which makes it difficult to believe that any very valuable
relationship exists between them; instead I often felt during the
first two seasons that I was watching a satirical Douglas Sirk-style
characterization of a middle-class family, except that the effect
didn't seem altogether intentional.
For
me the show kicked into gear in the third season, with the
introduction of Gus, and really started to fly in the fourth season,
with the establishment of a chess game between Mike and Gus on the
one hand and Walter on the other, with Jesse as pawn. By this time
most of the drama was going on between Walter, Jesse, Mike, Gus, and
Saul, with Gus as an entertaining villain and Saul as an entertaining
comical crooked lawyer. Obviously, this is a show that's all about
men and their world of one-upmanship; Skylar and her sister are the
only regular female cast members in the whole series, and
except for Jesse, none of the men in the criminal plot seem to ever
give women a thought. It's hinted that Gus's relationship with his
murdered partner was homosexual, which extends Gus's function of
Clare Quilty-like double for Walter to Walter's relationship with
Jesse. Certainly, whenever Jesse tries to establish a heterosexual
life for himself, independent of Walter, Walter attacks it –
responsible for his crossing of the Moral Event Horizon at the end
of the second season and again at the end of the third. In the first
instance, he's just getting rid of a “Yoko,” as Saul sulkily dubs
Skylar after she takes charge of her husband's money laundering (she
was a bookkeeper, you see), but the second and, in dramatic terms,
morally graver attack – that's got to be pure spite.
Season
Four's admirably constructed, darkly comic melodrama of manipulation
reminded me of the chess game between Maggie, her father Adam, and
her friend and stepmother Charlotte in Henry James's The Golden
Bowl, in which Maggie marries off father and friend only to
discover that Charlotte is having an affair with Maggie's husband;
she then has to figure out how to vanquish Charlotte and win Amerigo
back, in a long and exhausting mental game in which no one may be
directly confronted and in which every move Maggie makes against her
rival compromises her impeccable moral credentials. Similarly, after
Gus moves against Walter by using Mike to seduce Jesse away, Walter
must figure out how to win Jesse back, which he does in a desperate
gambit that delivered the best season finale audience anagnorisis
I've seen since “Death is my gift” on Buffy, though to
very different emotional effect.
Again,
there's no explanation for the destructive passion that exists
between Walter and Jesse. Walter is either telling Jesse he's shit or
saving his life, and it's hard to understand why he does either, and
impossible to understand why Jesse remains loyal to Walter: he
behaves like Ariel but gets treated like Caliban by Walter the
irascible chemist-magician. Their sadomasochistic relationship fills
up practically the whole universe of Breaking Bad, in a grand
tradition of love-hate fictional character relationships that extends
from Lovelace and Clarissa to George and Martha to, oh, Sam and
Diane. In a couple of striking episodes that evoke the starkness,
simplicity, and claustrophobia of modernist theatre, “Four Days
Out” from Season Two and the even more stylized “Fly” from
Season Three, Walter and Jesse respectively spend the episodes stuck
in the middle of the desert facing likely death under absurd
conditions (all because Jesse forgot the key in the ignition of the
RV) and trying obsessively to kill a fly in Gus's lab, which with its
bulky equipment and shiny red floors looks like some circle of hell envisioned by Samuel Beckett via 1970s sci fi. I can't
recall the last time a TV show was confident enough in its writing,
or in writing, to offer up episodes consisting entirely or
almost entirely of dialogue between the two main characters. I only
wish I found the characters compelling enough to remember any of that
dialogue, instead of finding them vaguely, distantly fascinating.
The
Great Man and The Girl
Speaking
of destructive, obsessive relationships: I was surprised by the
furor, particularly in England, over the HBO-BBC TV movie The
Girl, about the relationship
between Tippi Hedren and Hitchcock. The British are sure protective
of their cultural institutions, and in this case it's turned into
cries of “How dare that little slut make up stories about a great
man” vs. feminist rejoinders of
“How dare you men not believe a woman who says she was sexually
harassed?” Step right up and choose an archetype to irrationally defend:
the victim-woman or the great man.
For
my part, I heard the stories about Hitch and Hedren years ago,
mainly, I think, in Camille Paglia's BFI monograph on The
Birds. That's because I am
actually a Hitchcock
fan, and do occasionally read a book about him. Hedren's stories
seemed perfectly plausible given other things known about Hitch
through his own admission as well as what anyone can see: that he was
repulsive in appearance and had never had sex with anyone but his
homely wife, in a marriage that, by the time of The Birds,
had been celibate for years.
As
for why other Hitchcock blondes didn't have the
same experience with him, that makes perfect sense to me as well:
Hedren was nobody when Hitchcock cast her in The Birds,
whereas after Psycho
he'd risen to a position of unprecedented power in Hollywood. He
simply couldn't have gotten away with it with any of his other
leading ladies. And then, too, as a nobody with the quality of
impassivity that Hitch had always valued in his blondes, Hedren was a
blank slate; Hitchcock may have thought he could play Svengali (an
obvious reference that The Girl
makes at one point) like Scottie in Vertigo.
However, since he was dealing with a real woman, not a character
written for him, he was in for a rude surprise.
Believing
all of this as Hitchcock (and I do happen to believe Hedren's
stories, which does not, of course, mean I'm right) has had no effect
whatsoever on my opinion of him as a filmmaker: I think he's a
genius. If anyone finds such stories shocking in association with
Hitchcock, they evidently haven't been paying a lot of attention to
his best films, which are precisely about sexual obsession,
voyeurism, and the physical and/or psychological torture of his
blondes. Not that it follows that an artist will act out the
obsessions of his art, but surely Hitchcock fans shouldn't find it
surprising that a human being
could act as the Hitchcock character does in The Birds.
As
a movie, The Girl is
not very interesting if you already know the stories: although I only
caught about an hour of the movie on HBO, it adds little to what I've
already read and appears to be directly dramatizing incidents
recounted by Hedren or others, with loads of exposition and little
attempt to interpret the material. (There's a bit of pop psychology
here and there, but it's talk, again; the motivations aren't
dramatized.) However, I “got” the dramatic interest the story
does have even from that partial viewing: I understood that the
movie was about a battle of wills between a powerless and vulnerable
but strong young woman and a powerful young man, in which the woman
refuses to be crushed. The value of the movie is in providing
inspiration for other sexually harassed young women – or really for
anyone struggling with a huge power imbalance in a relationship, to
which men are hardly immune. The interviews I've now read on the
internet with Hedren on the movie have confirmed that this was the
intention. It pains me to think that you would have to be a woman to
understand and appreciate what the movie was doing, but from the
reaction of male reviewers and commenters on the internet,
for whom the movie is character assassination or at least
“one-sided,” it appears to be the case. A movie about Hitchcock
that's not about Hitchcock?
Then the title wasn't kidding.
The
reaction to the movie is ultimately more interesting than the movie
itself – and so are Hedren's interviews, in which she fills in more
of the picture and of her perspective. She speaks, for example, of
how her moral and religious upbringing gave her strength in the situation, which was not apparent from the hour or so of The Girl
I watched. Ultimately, the Hedren-Hitch story is an inspiration for
young women in a curiously conservative way. Hitchcock's movies with
cool blonde heroines inherit the rape theme of the British novel that
goes back to Clarissa,
but the Hedren-Hitch relationship, as recounted by Hedren, much more
closely resembles the plot of Clarissa
than anything he put on film – with the difference that instead of
being sexually irresistible, like the diabolical Lovelace, Hitch was
the opposite. Hedren was not only physically, but also morally
repulsed by his sexual attention, and no doubt Hitch bombarded her
with vulgarity all the more in an effort to break down the reserve that attracted
him.
The Pleasures of Incomprehension
In
the article “Child's Play,” New Yorker
TV critic Emily Nussbaum notes that despite Vince Gilligan's daring
in pulling the moral carpet right out from under Walter at the end of
Season Four, fans have found ways to justify Walter's reprehensible
action – an action that makes him arguably worse than his supposed
double, Gus, or at least every bit as bad. I'm sure this is nothing
new; I'm sure the readers of Clarissa
found ways to justify Lovelace's rape of the heroine. They must have,
since fans (surely female readers among them, who were surely
Richardson's main readership) wanted Clarissa to forgive and agree to
marry Lovelace. Never mind if the writer wants to portray a
character's tragic moral downfall; the reader/viewer's desire for two
characters with chemistry to get together and live happily ever
after, or to root for the protagonist, trumps all merely fictional
crimes, no matter how great their magnitude.
Didn't
Nabokov definitely prove that in Lolita?
We forgive Humbert the ultimate taboo crime because he's the sole
protagonist, the narrator in fact; we're stuck with his point of
view; and he's charming. How much do we forgive Walter because he's
positioned as “normal”
and “safe”? He's a WASP, middle-class, middle-aged high school
teacher and husband and father with children, and so, even though
we've had more evidence of his anger management problems and seen him
commit worse crimes every season, we continue to assume that he must
be a good guy after all. Whereas what we learned in the
paradigm-shifting Season Four finale is that we weren't on the side
of good (however deeply compromised); we were simply, contingently,
on a side in a war
between identically vile individuals.
Like much of the best television drama of recent decades, Breaking Bad succeeds in keeping the
objective stakes for the characters high, delivering dramatic
gratifications unknown to stage drama since the Greeks and certainly
absent from 20th century stage drama, whether in its
middle class or avant-garde manifestations. Because of our pleasure
in these high objective stakes, we forgive TV drama the silliness of
fantasy – plots about saving the world from evil or overthrowing
psychotic drug lords. My problem with accepting Breaking Bad
either as “great TV” or great drama, period, isn't so much that
Walter is too awful and Jesse too passive for me to care much about
them, as that I don't understand what the stakes of their
relationship are. I know why Clarissa and Lovelace can't live
with or without each other; I understand the fantasy and mutual
disappointment that bind George and Martha. But I don't understand
what Walter and Jesse need from each other, practically or
psychologically, and even in TV land, “subtextual homoeroticism”
can't explain everything.
It's not unlike my
reaction to this year's critically-acclaimed film The Master,
which was also about a warped father-son love affair between an
aimless younger man and an older man who at least offers the
semblance of authority, although in this case it was the younger man
with anger management problems. At least, however, the reviews of The
Master that I found online through Rotten Tomatoes acknowledge
how tremendously strange the film is. So far I'm willing to say about
Breaking Bad: it's strange, and I'm not quite sure how I feel
about it. I think I might like TV criticism
better if it would linger with me in incomprehension more often, rather than rushing to a verdict. It's safe
to say that until you don't understand everything, you don't have an
art form.
