ON BREAKING BAD AND ATTENTIVE VIEWERS

 

“Fifteen years ago, when I was conceiving of Walter White, I looked around and thought, Well, what is current TV? It’s mostly good guys,” Gilligan said. “But now I’m looking around, thinking, Gee, there’s an awful lot of bad guys on TV, and not just on shows but on the news.”

Recently I came about a New Yorker article on the writer Vince Gilligan. What a guy. Admirable writer. Seems humble too. 

I have the urge to write some comments about the characters from Braking bad and writing characters in general, in my view. I do not claim I possess any knowledge of dramatization techniques. I am simply trying to pour out observations as a viewer. 

My comments and observations shall be related to the text that can be found here 

“Fifteen years ago, when I was conceiving of Walter White, I looked around and thought, Well, what is current TV? It’s mostly good guys,” Gilligan said. I agree more or less. In the movie industry, Joker becomes a study of how villains come about. I bet there are other movies covering the same subject but rarely. For TV shows, the villain can be a great opponent but is not the main character, unlike in Breaking Bad. Is Walter White the only one of its kind?

After some years Mr. Gilligan's conclusion goes like this “But now I’m looking around, thinking, Gee, there’s an awful lot of bad guys on TV, and not just on shows but on the news.” I agree up to a point. The news relish in villain sociopaths, etc. That`s "normal". Maybe it is time for a James Stewart type of character. It`s overdue if you ask me. We crave warm simple emotions, not the cheese sentimentality with shallow characters. When particular successful writing appears other production houses want to emulate it. This happens in Serbian cinematography and TV as well. It is ok to borrow or follow a path but without a clue how to be original about it as well. If you ask me I skip watching emulations. Period.

I had a hard time acclimatizing to Breaking Bad. I don`t know why. Maybe because Walter White was an anti-hero and because it was not clear what was his real motivation for becoming Scarface. The character is definitely anger-driven. But what was he angry at? The establishment, family, society, and police authority? Maybe it is all at once what drove him to get transformed from a loveable school teacher to a criminal mastermind. From a seemingly humble person to an ego-maniac with grandeur delusion. 

Then I realize that he was angry/envious of his rich friends. He was angry about getting cancer and saw that as the last straw in his being underappreciated by his students, and the uninvolved faculty. The final drop after seeing himself as unimportant and mediocre was cancer. So his anger drives him to instead of accepting his friends' money set out to create his own opportunities that start with lies. Had he accepted his more successful (in his eyes successful) friends' money, there would be no story after that. So his anger, resentment, and pride were fuels to what happens next. 

I think the majority of people in the audience are fed up with being looked upon or treated as small, insignificant, and mediocre so they easily identified themselves with this frustrated, angry small man who with the sheer brilliance of his mind rose to power. Still, I cannot decide what his purpose is exactly, and the purpose of his character in the story.

Maybe the writer wanted to subconsciously or intentionally warn us that even a good seemingly upstanding citizen can become a monster if he is not clear about who he is or what his purpose is in life. Evil doings have their consequences, and once in the game, there is no easy way out like it has been suggested in Ozark.

My takeaway from this is - from a loose translation of a Serbian proverb - "he who deals with the devil, will bang his head against the wall". The devil here is pride, grandeur, arrogance, proving that you are not small, and manipulation, which all cause the anti-hero`s consequent downfall. 

I can only imagine how the younger generations completely missed this point. They probably identify with Walter White which indulges their sense of inferiority complex. We all have it, but channel it in different ways. We tend to play by the rules for moral or ethical or religious reasons, but secretly we dream of tricking the system we love to be a slave to. Not Walter White, because he is a doer. So we identify with him. Up to a point. 

Back when the show first aired, Skyler was roundly disliked. I think that always troubled Anna Gunn [who played Skyler]. And I can tell you it always troubled me, because Skyler, the character, did nothing to deserve that. And Anna certainly did nothing to deserve that. She played the part beautifully.

 What shame viewers missed the point of her character. Then we come to the resentment the audience displayed towards Anna Gunn`s character which she brilliantly portrayed. She to me is the real hero. Why? Instead of running away from her troubled husband, she jumps right in to help him get out of everything. Isn`t that sacrifice that people in this day and age seem to have forgotten the meaning of? What woman in real life would stay by her rogue husband and not take her kids away from him? Unfortunately, the audiences are groomed to be shallow.

I realize in hindsight that the show was rigged, in the sense that the storytelling was solely through Walt’s eyes, even in scenes he wasn’t present for. Even Gus, his archenemy, didn’t suffer the animosity Skyler received. It’s a weird thing. I’m still thinking about it all these years later.

My impression was not that the story was told solely through Walt`s eyes. To me, the story proceeds from all characters and their decisions. My favorite characters are Skyler, Saul, and Jesse. Skyler for being a strong woman, Saul for being a sly goofy lawyer, and Jesse for outgrowing his spinelessness. 

If there’s any secret to our success, I think it’s that. The TV shows we love are populated by characters who seem real to us. We don’t have to agree with them, but we get where they’re coming from. We comprehend them on an emotional level.

Exactly, so that is why characters can be either understood or misunderstood by the audience. Because the audience can overreact like in the case of Skyler. They missed the fact that she changed, and why the change, which is completely beyond me as to why they missed that. They just projected their probably biased emotional responses. Maybe due to shallowness or lack of experience or both on the part of some viewers (teenagers?). Interesting psychological and sociological phenomenon. 

But you can’t do that by forcing them like square pegs into round holes. It sounds kind of artsy-fartsy, but you’ve got to listen to them. By that I mean you’ve got to be honest about what they would do next in any given situation. It was much more rewarding for us in the writers’ room when that kind of thinking led us to realizations such as Chuck’s resentment of his kid brother.

"...but you’ve got to listen to them" or your characters, in my opinion, will be highly formulaic robots with no perks, anticks, etc of their own, i.e. idiosyncracies. That is what I want to see as an audience. Also, I do not want to see anything forced, but organic. Even if a character does not change there has to be a reason for that within the dramatic structure. Sounds logical to me.

Sometimes, that takes you to some very unexpected plot destinations. Some of our very best ideas came at the eleventh hour, many seasons into both shows. In hindsight, I like the way we did it. The longer it took, the more nervous it made us that we didn’t have a clear road map. But we found our way.  

Exactly. You are learning as you go. It is frustrating. If I were a writer I would prefer ideas to fall into my lap just like that. So I do not have to sweat about the characters or worry if they are too formulaic or shallow.

It was a struggle, but we purposely didn’t know how things were going to end at the beginning. We didn’t even know halfway through, probably.

This reminds us of how some authors write novels. Movie scripts need to be clear-cut regarding the structure; the paradigm must be followed through because the audience will get bored. I agree to some extent. Hollywood demands that. They stifle creativity. Period. You need to be very clever to outsmart that. It seems that TV offers more creativity. It seems. Netflix does not, for instance, in my opinion. Maybe to some authors but not to everyone else.

When I first started writing, I was as guilty as anybody of editorializing. I had this fear of “Gee, the audience won’t get it.” I felt I had to explain all this stuff. . . . But eventually you learn to relax. You realize you can learn just as much from a character by what they don’t say.

In my opinion, a lazy audience will never understand. I do not think anyone has them in mind while writing. The viewers are in my opinion groomed by Hollywood to expect a certain kind of structure. So we become impatient and bored once, let`s say, a Dickensian type of structure or story-telling appears. I do not have a problem with the paradigm, but with writing that worships the paradigm like a god.

ATTENTIVE VIEWERS

The main blessing of binge-viewing, I think, is that it accommodates serialized storytelling. It also allows writers to incorporate a great deal of detail that gets picked up on by attentive viewers. 

Attentive viewing also implies that I need to forget the paradigm that I falsely and foolishly expect to be a bedrock of TV series and focus on the characters and the story as it is being rolled out without any expectations. Sort of living-in-the-moment type of thing. That is why Breaking Bad was an acquired taste for me. Because I have become a lazy viewer. In my defense, I am an attentive viewer once I get over my initial laziness. 

For my next show, I’d like the lead character to be an old-fashioned hero, an old-fashioned good guy.

 Finally. In my opinion, we need characters like that. Dickensian, Dostoyevskean, Shakesperean, if possible, which is a long stretch. I think we need good guys, justice to triumph, and bad guys and behavior to be punished. I want to see bad guys that change for better by sacrificing their lives if need be. There are too much of tough criminals who never change for the better but get killed just because the writers do not want to bother with them anymore. We want pathos. Not shallowness of emotions. Not sentimentality nor cheesiness. We want pathos. It is an archetype and people recognize that instinctively.