"The Bell Tolls for Thee" (i.e. How a Quick Shot of a Bookcase in 5x13 "Rabid Dog" Begins to Blow Your Mind)

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." -John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, "Meditation XVII"


Was re-watching a couple of Breaking Bad episodes last night, with no intention of writing anything about them (got all these jobs and like "real" people I've been spending my time with).

So, why all the books about horses? I feigntly recalled ready some hair-brained writings on the symbolic meaning of horses in BB, and quickly remembered this post I half-concocted a while back.



Diving into the multi-avenued rabbit hole of the bookcase in this episode, I decided to dive deeper into the other sequences, to see what other connections and messages were codified. Here's some of the notes I took while re(re)-watching the rest of the episode. Stuff got out of hand....


-Rabid Dog, point of no return, echo chamber.

Connection to "Caballo Sin Nombre"...in the cold open, all the horse books that are in the Schrader's house (sort of a Western homage, as well; but mostly that Biblical stuff, which also ties into "End Times" both in metaphor and in the crux of sacrificing family....the planter that once had the lilly of the valley in present, now barren, near the White pool.....Walter later reflects on the possibility of putting Jesse down near the pool (a different pool shows up in the Schwartz' place in "Felina" an episode that also calls back this episode (having Walter drink from a hose near the pumps, bringing back his bullshit story about the malfunctioning water hose; during this sequence he also leaves [this was credited by Gilligan as something they initially did to explain Walt's lack of a watch in the initial flash foward in 5x01, but says how it can also be read symbolically [END TIMES]; and also ties in Jesse and Skylar...Walt Junior).

Familia es Todo.

The cold open also calls back bicycles.... "Mandala" (again a spiral which contains recurrent themes and meaning), with Tomas, which later goes back to Half Measures, where Walt saves Jesse (he snorts meth off of a cd, which is also referenced in Rabid dog, Walt saving Jesse in that episode is, as I got at in this crazy post, echoed again in their final scene together, end times....when in RABID DOG, Jesse, with wire, goes to where Walt would be, the sequence also echoes the moment where he slowly walks up to the gangbangers...MAYBE A VIDEO WILL MAKE THIS CLEARER....also akin the the sequence at the end of ABIQUI, where he walks away from Tomas...again, bringing back Jane's speech about O'Keefe's repetiton of painting the same object, with different and more nuanced results....also like stuff with Gus, and when Walt walks to gus in the desert at the beginning of full measure...all linked....WHAT A FUCKING CRAZYINGLY TIGHT AND INTRICATE CLOCK WORK CINEMATOGRAPHY THIS SHOW HAS, more layers are revealed every time.... I re-watch an episode, or even re-watch a small scene...there's also the DANGER YELLOW in a post in the back ground...this scene of red herrings and periphera threats also ties back the the One Minute ending with hank in the parking lot)...the Civic center sequence also connects to the more light bench snafu that occurs in 2x08, better call saul.....

The civic center is mostly filled with the light blue color that has gained an ambiguous meaning throughout the show...meth and what not.... much more.

"I'm not doing what you want anymore"....so, at the end, when Jesse makes Walt tell him, "NOTHING HAPPENS until....YOU WANT THIS" it's his way of making sure he is merciful and doesn't kill Walt.

Right after the phone call, there's an ominous (and sorta heavy handed" ringing of a bell. What time is it....end times, baby! The statute of Ozymandia begings to fully crumble.

"I'm gonna hit you wher eyou really live" (Jesse has already started to plan the barrel of money sting [which is where Walt lives, and ya know, the barrels are sort of symbolic...really don't feel like I need to explain to anyone that's seen the series_

The end theme also incorporates the ringing of the bell...and ya know, ringing bells also have a pretty fucking huge significance in the show....end with the picture of the skull bell, Tio....2x02 grilled, which also brings in Hank....the linking of the three men...the writing on the show is obnoxiously brilliant...

The camcorder scene after the books also brings "Mr. White" an inescapable recurrence (eternal recurrence)

"He was my teacher" also brings up Todd, who says something similar at the beginning of Tahaijille, the episode where the dominos really start to fall...that also echoes 

Photos of Taha are also seemngly in the hotel where the Whites stay, during the lady McBeth sequence.

"Civic plaza...we'll talk through everything once and for all...." the shakespearian moment "ROMEO AND JULIET" where things may have been resolved...but aren't....the continuity between the end camera movment and the beginning of the next episode...confessions...

MORE biblical connections "Mr. White...is the devil" Santa Satan...Jesse is just dyslexic

Meta commentary, "Whatever you think's gonna happen, I'll tell ya, the exact reverse opposite of that is gonna happen," unfortunately Jesse doesn't realize that statement is currently applying to himself.

Hank is aslo inadvertantly sealing his own fate through his hubris and manipulation (throughout the second half of the fifth season, Hank has been morphing into his own version of Heisenberg...so he sort of has it coming, kind of...same has been occurring to Marie and Skylar, as the scene in the hotel, and the therapist....untraceable poisions, a tie she would not be aware of at that point); when Jesse goes to take a piss, and Hank more or less tells Gomie that he doesn't care whether the "kid" lives or dies, dismissing him as an animalistic junkie, he is shot through prison bar like chair suff. Walt cares for Jesse, Hank doesn't. Hank forces Jesse into a spot where Walt desperately gets Jack involved. Jesse becomes a rat, going against his moral fiber; putting himself in a position where he becomes enslaved by Jack and crew, and loses Andrea....the karmic cycle is cemented in this episode.

"Pinkman is killed...we get it all on tape." As an out-of-focus image of Marie, cloaked in an innocent white bridal gown (with a splash of purple, obvily)....

ALSO TIE THIS BACK TO ONE MINUTE....where Hank is truly at his most heroic, also a moment tying the fates of Walt Hank Jesse and Gus, and the Cousins...CABALLO

Irony of the phrase "Civic Center"; also Ironic that in a show which either focused on the wide open expanses of the desert, or the confines of sterile meth labs, to have an incredibily pivotal scene take place in a spot like that.

In my slap-dash approach to scholarship, here's an explanation behind "death-bells" that I found on the Website "GradeSaver;" which is where I copied to Donne epigram from (the following explanation really jibed with what the series has to offer, and with Gilligan's religiosity, and with this blog's [and my philosophy] focus on vast inter-connectedness; so it's definitely pertinent, or something): 

"In the Catholic tradition, all humanity is connected in the Body of Christ, and all are equal before God; in the Afterlife, there is no more male or female, Jew or Greek. The Bible states that “we are many parts, but we are all part of one body in Christ” and that “there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”

The implication for the individual living on Earth is that he is part of a greater whole, such that the death-bell has deep and significant meaning for everyone who hears it. We are all in this life together and part of the same divine plan, so the bell does toll for the sake of all who have ears to hear it.

The toll for another’s death is also a reminder to the individual hearer to get his own affairs in order in the short time remaining before his own death. The civic-mindedness that comes from seeing oneself as part of a greater whole also provides direction for voluntary charity as an expression of spiritual devotion as one tries to live by divine standards."

"Something to Do With Death" - Breaking Bad's Mortal Coil

"You don't understand, Jill. People like that have something inside... 
Something to do with death."
-Cheyenne, "Once Upon a Time in the West," 1968

"Shut the fuck up, and let me die in peace." 

-Mike Ehrmantraut

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

-Norman Cousins

The post will (eventually) be a long one. It's about what death means within Breaking Bad (as the sub-title gets at, the shadow of Shakespeare's Tragedies will be constantly looming), and how that reflects the ultimate meaning of the lives we live ("the paths we take"), using the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone as a starting point; then inventorying every incident of death (and the related symbolism of various memento mori within the mise-en-scene and cinematography) throughout the series; while also tying in other television series to tie together the related ways they and BB portray the human condition of facing imminent demise. Some Freudian and Existentialist shit will show up, no doubt.

Nothing too intense. 

So yeah, a giant beast of potential incoherence it shall be!

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-But here's the huge factor that separates the operatic visions of Leone and the universe of BB: there is almost never an even deul between death-locked opponents. The murders faciliated by Walt are detached. One of the most pivotal deaths in the entire run of the series occurs off-screen, and involves a sympathetic man pleading for his life. The only true Western show-downs are afforded to Hank, who is the most typical "hero" of show.

Production Cannot Stop - Better Call Saul

"Nothing stops this train...nothing."
-Walter White, 5x04, "Fifty-One"

Well, Better Call Saul, is on the horizon (scheduled 2015 release date), and the internet hyper machine is already churning out razzle-dazzle intrigue. Out of a purist sense of artistic holism, I am pretty ambivalent about a series that continues to thread more fabric out of the Breaking Bad universe, even if the show does take on a different tone and avoids any sort of revisionism or misplaced characterizations.


Even Gilligan, who co-wrote the pilot of the spin-off, has his doubts, saying, “If it’s After M*A*SH rather than Frasier, it won’t be for lack of hard work and wishful thinking and a lot of smart people doing their best, but you just don’t know until the world takes it...It may turn out that this was a mistake to do this.”

Though, a recent AV Club parody-piece got at something that actually jibes pretty well with the over-arching quasi-mystical bull-shitery that it splatter throughout this blog. I'm gonna just plop a big text block next, because, fuck it:

"Better Call Saul is set to debut the first of its two promised seasons next year, and we already know that it will feature appearances from Breaking Bad characters we thought we lost, before we learned that nothing stays dead anymore, ever since we moved all our TVs over this Indian burial ground. And according to a new interview with executive producer Peter Gould, those possibilities are endless, seeing as Better Call Saul exists outside of time, like all immortal beings. 

'One of the great things about having a timeline which is flexible is that perhaps some of it takes place before Breaking Bad, during Breaking Bad and after Breaking Bad,' Gould said of the show’s philosophy of eternalism, in which scenes will alternate back and forth over several decades, rather than just taking place in the 1980s as initially suspected. In Saul’s world, all of the events before, after, and even during Breaking Bad are happening simultaneously, all of their awful consequences looping endlessly across the infinite. And like God himself standing outside the block universe, this means no one is truly dead to Peter Gould—not even Walter White, who he believes will return in some capacity, simply because he wills it."

I tell you what I wish was a real thing; something that would be a worthy spin-off...HUELL'S RULES, BABY!

Further Readings (less rambly):
"It's time to begin overanalyzing the First Better Call Saul set photos," Sean O'Nell, The AV Club.

Breaking Bad's Color Scheming: (Un)mellow Yellow

The three primary colors

For much of the series, the presence of isolated yet prominent swathes of yellow usually signals impending doom. This type of cinematographic coding is reminiscent of the use of oranges within The Godfather Trilogy  (the series makes numerous explicit and implicit references to Coppola's films...maybe I'll investigate in a future post, but the thematic interconnections should be pretty clear if you've seen the movies).

A direct homage to the "orange" foreshadowing is made in 4x11, "Crawl Space." When Skylar attempts to convince Ted Beneke to use the money she gave him to pay off his IRS debts, a bowl of oranges is in the background behind Ted, seemingly innocuous. Later on however, when we pity the fool as he is held captive by Saul's "A-Team", the oranges become more prominent.

...Apparently they made him an offer that he couldn't refuse...

http://www.ibtimes.com/breaking-bad-color-theory-subtle-symbolism-meanings-behind-colors-amcs-hit-series-photos-1411632

http://www.stylecaster.com/breaking-bad-colors-theory/

http://www.erinenberg.com/1/post/2012/09/the-colorful-world-of-breaking-bad.html
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Shakespeare and Breaking Bad

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
-Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Of all the over-arching themes within the increasingly expanding network of Breaking Bad criticism, the series' connection to the plays of Shakespeare strikes a strong cord in the cacophonous symphony of my preexisting literary obsessions.

To limit my high highfalutin ramblings (there's already enough Shakespearean rhetoric tossed throughout the site,...and at the bottom of this post I'll keep a series of links to other articles about the connections), the post will be reserved as a running reserve of pertinent Shakespearean epigraph(ic)s.

While it may take a bit to do this properly, I'll begin listing each episode, and will provide a passage from Shakespeare that seems pertinent and elucidating. In sketching out the connections, this section will serve a dual purpose in by also exploring the meanings behind each episode title. "The Name of the Rose" being a refutation to believing that flowers would smell just as sweet under arbitrary classifications; the titles serving as narrative encapsulators, with just as much craft behind them as with the other aspects of the writing.

Season 1

-1x01 "Pilot"

-"To be, or not to be, that is the question: 

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 

the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles"

 - Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

To cook, or not to cook....?

This oft tread beginning of Hamlet's famous existential soliloquy seems a good place to start, since the primary questions of Breaking Bad dealt with the choices Walter White made when faced to the immanency of his own finite mortality mortality.

Like Hamlet, Walt weighs his angst and sorrow against the passivity of uncertainty (Walt's ambivalence becomes Heisenbergian; but still often maintains the theological deepness of Hamlet's ponderings). Hamlet was literally considering suicide, whereas in the pilot episode Walt has to consider a choice that may destroy his soul. Hamlet's choice was about death over life (as Camus famously treated, this is the only real philosophical question), but Walt's a choice about transformation in the face of his demise; yet both concerned with what develops after decay.

 Hamlet holds a bodkin and gives his speech while alone in the hollow caverns of a castle; while Walt's analogous moment occurs silently by the metaphoric swimming pool of a backyard. Each burning matchstick a potential catalyst to his choice to resist "outrageous fortune" and attempt to oppose his "sea of troubles."

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Season 2

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2x08 "Better Call Saul" 

-The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
(2 Henry VI, 4.2.59), Dick the Butcher to Jack Cade

2x09, "4 Days Out"
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2x10, "Over"
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2x11, "Mandala"
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2x12, "Phoenix"

-My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth
A bird that will revenge upon you all: 
And in that hope I throw mine eyes to heaven,
Scorning whate'er you can afflict me with.
3 Henry VI (1.4.35-8)

2x13, "ABQ" 

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
-Richard III

Season 3

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-3x08 "I.C.U. "The world is still deceived with ornament. 
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, 
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, 
Obscures the show of evil? 
(The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.80), 

3x10 "FLY" Gloucester:
I' th' last night's storm I such a fellow saw,
Which made me think a man a worm. My son
Came then into my mind, and yet my mind
Was then scarce friends with him. I have heard more
since.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.
King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 32–37
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Season 4 

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Season 5

"Rabid Dog,"
Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent: 
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, 
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At game, a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't;
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black 
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays:
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days. 
Hamlet (3.3.77)

5x15, "Granite State" 

"Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me"
-Richard II, V.v5.5 43-49

5x16 "Felina" 

-"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits and 
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk
To still my beating mind." 

-Tempest, IV.i, 146-162


"Breaking Bad's Shakespearean Final Act," Salon 
"How Shakespeare would end Breaking Bad," The Atlantic
How Breaking Bad Broke Free of the Clockwork-Universe Problem," The A.V. Club

The Name of The Rose is A Musical Underture: Caballo Sin Nombre

“Get back on the horse and do what you do best.”

    – Saul Goodman

Ross: And Duncan's horses—a thing most strange and certain— 

Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, 

Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, 

Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make 

War with mankind.

Old Man: 'Tis said they eat each other.

     -William Shakespeare, Macbeth, II.iv

Song Used

"Horse With No Name," by America, 1972.

Complex's feature on "13 Great Songs from Breaking Bad'" mentions "Horse with No Name," but doesn't really elucidate much content. Here goes anyway:

"This band had the audacity to call themselves America, but we'll hand it to them because "A Horse With No Name" is as Americana as deep fried chili cheese nachos and a 44 ounce Coke. From the band's eponymous debut record, "A Horse With No Name" is tale, a desert odyssey of sorts. Folksy acoustic guitar strumming and drum circle percussion provide the instrumentation. But, the most notable aspect of the tune is the "la, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la" refrains throughout. Even four decades after it was composed, the song is instantly recognizable with drunk-at-the-bar-sing-along capabilities."

Song's Meaning within Context of Episode

Episode 3x02 has one of the several Spanish language titles that crop up throughout the series.  

Song's Greater Meaning within and throughout Series

Not speaking to authorial intent, but this particular song is very appropriate for the series and the nature of proving "The Meaning of Breaking Bad is the Meaning of Life" (I'm getting to it...). Divergent readings and elusive meaning shroud America's song, as is the case with much of Breaking Bad's aesthetic.

ShinyAeon writes, "However...there's another metaphorical horse that fits the lyrics of this song even better than the creaky old drug interpretation: the shaman's horse, which is another name for the sound of the drumbeat that carries the shaman into a trance state, into the otherworld on a visionary experience. Such a horse has no name because it isn't flesh and blood, it's a spirit horse made of sound.

To me the song is about a kind of vision quest in the desert...or else a mundane trip that (due to a little too much sunlight or too little water) became a visionary experience to the traveler, and caused a spiritual awakening."





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America's song fits into the broad Western Genre iconography



Another song used in this episode is "Magic Arrow," by Timber Timbre. This plays during the scene where Mike bugs the White household, as Walt simultaneously breaks back into the home he'd been in exile from (by eking through the crawl space, a location that gained symbolic resonance in 2x10 "Over," and will later before a transformation nexus at the end of 4x11 "Crawl Space")

"And you saw it from that vantage point
Perimeter scratched on the nation's native hide
And we saw those christian clippers glide
Over white caps and white sails high
Over white knuckles
And you were fine till you saw the pale horse ride
Open up it's gait across the ocean floor
You were fine till you saw the white rider take
And take some more"



HOW WIKI EXPLAINS A PALE HORSE:
When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come and see!" I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hell was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
— Revelation 6:7-8


I doubt this was planned, but there's more connections that can be made (more like "forced"), According to Wiki, "The color of Death's horse is written as khlōros (χλωρός) in the original Koine Greek,[15] which can mean either green/greenish-yellow or pale/pallid.[16] The color is often translated as "pale", though "ashen", "pale green", and "yellowish green"[13] are other possible interpretations (the Greek word is the root of "chlorophyll" and "chlorine"). Based on uses of the word in ancient Greek medical literature, several scholars suggest that the color reflects the sickly pallor of a corpse.[3][17] In some modern artistic depictions, the horse is distinctly green[18]"

Bringing all these fragments and hypothetical assumptions back into it, what does the song say .

When Saul tells him 

Breaking Bad's Karmic Cosmogony - Let the Schizoanalysis Unravel!

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
-Sigmund Freud

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

                                                                                          -Carl Jung

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. 

― Carl Sagan

Alright, I had some space. Loving something is like grasping a butterfly; at a certain point you have to let it fly away from your fingertips...lest you risk immediately destroying some beautiful. Sometimes the motivation to write about it flutters out of your visual field (maybe the creature dies off in the distance, and is reborn as an occasionally manic sloth...imaginary spirit animals are weird like that).

So....in my last post, the final images of the finale ("Felina," in case instituional memory loss has taken hold...a Breaking Bad Bender can occasionally lead to fragmentation of consciousness and hazy memory recollection...occasionally) accidentally sparked some trippy theories and mind-melting patterns.

I still stand by them, and will even use the quantum-spiritual-meta-spiral as a solid spring board for some even more out there interventions and divergent diddlings. I've tried my hardest to always stay faithful to the content of each episode, but there's so much transcedent gold on the surface that warrants some grand schemeing. We may accidentally get at the truth. And if it's weird, than remember a famous mantra from the show that gave Gilligan his powers...

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

Whoa...far out, man!

Time to step back and view the series as a complete entity. Gestalt it up, and see what the grand patterns mean. Things are going to get stranger, and I don't want to confuse some of the impending theoretical onslaught with purposeful narrative intent. I tend to go back to Gilligan as the deistic auteur of the series, but the collaborative nature of television creates a series of interconnected yet divergent clergy and prophetic pieces.

Like the head-in-the-clouds idealist that I often am...I made a lot of lofty and seemingly unrealistic promises after I first  created this site. There were countless mystical fragments and fanciful meanderings. To use an idiom Gilligan's dropped before, the chickens will come to roost. This is a sloppy process, but I'm working on piecing together an incomplete puzzle to show that "the meaning of Breaking Bad is the meaning of life."

No worries, those that could care less...there will still be some less-alienating hijinks and more-coherent content added...but it's pretty much been improv-ed from the get-go.


Some seemingly random yet seam-ingly related academic (i.e. alienation-epidemic) frameworks to haphazardly establish...

Subtitle: Haphazardly Established Frameworks.

*Constellation Structure*
-Theodor Adorno.... to warrant such a heady and fragmentary way of interpreting the show (and to justify it as more than just sloppy exposition), the very holisitic structure of the show must necessitate this kind of divergent pattern.

Breaking Bad initially begins to weave this fabric through a strict adherence to science as a metaphor (again...think of the issues of purity and decay within the crystal product as a meth-aphor for grander questions of existence and minute representations of everyday life). With the third season, the show crystallized its thematic undercurrents, using the cosmic cluster-fuck of the plane-collision as a springboard to more surreal scenarios and on overly operatic order.

*Postmodern Spirituality*

"It's certainly possible to lead a solipsistic life, one that boasts, 'Hey, I'm making it real. Who's it going to hurt?' This mentality allows us to think that our actions and inactions take place in a vacuum, but even the faitnest conscious sense of our infinite interconnectedness makes that almost impossible...Whatever we do, there is another generation waiting to learn from our legacy. It is they who must live in the world we make." -                                      -Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition; Living a Life of Meaning and Worth 175

I've got a smattering of posts and references that have tried to deconstruct the perverse religious

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. 

― Carl Sagan,

*Eternal Return Mythos.*..

Remember that Jungian bastardization of Eastern philosophy I pasted in the last post? It's still in play

Some of this is stuff I dug before delving into Breaking Bad, but a lot of this I stumbled upon recently. I tried to avoid a top-down approach with these philosophers, feeling like the show itself should guide me toward the appropriate conceptual nexus...rather than forcing profound-seeming-but-shallow theories into the text

*Schizoanalytic Boundaries* (this is a real thing; not one of my obnoxious Seussisms).*

-Discontented Content and Disordered Context
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A more well established metaphor that should make things clear is structural paranoia in literature.

I'll pull favorites here, and point to Thomas.

Frederic Jameson has written an interesting essay on of ... (Geopolitical Aesthetic being one of the many outside sources that inadvertently influences my approach with the "BrBaBlog")

(thinkers like Franz Fanon have gone as far as to psychoanalysis large and complicated social units, seeing institutionalized racism as a mental disorder...one that contaminated both a colonizer and the other...regardless of the biological realities of melanin and cultural nuance).

Freud civilization and it's discontents....

What is Breaking Bad. What does in mean. Structural.
I'm sorry to drop this esoteria, but it's important, and despite it being inavoidably mind boggling, I feel a call out to some old time radical philosophers will make it slightly less heady than my  jumbled jargon.

Deleuze and Guittari


I'll use a single conceptual "thread" to follow through on attempts to "deconstruct the intertext of the show's aesthetic iconography" (I'm dead serious about this, luckily pictures/clips and digressively foolish hyperlinked puns will help make the "show" more fun than my "tell").