Well, the spin-off about Saul Goodman has been on everyone's minds for years now, but the announcement still unsettles me. I thought it would turn out to be a bait'n'switch, but...alas...
Can't the corporate interests that I'm sure pressured Vince to get on board with this understand that what is seen cannot be unseen? Saul has already decayed into such a ghoulish representation of himself. Do you notice how his presence as of 5x13 brought very little comic relief. Lately, he brings nothing but doom and gloom (trips to Belize, and Ol' Yeller metaphors). Even his face, with the damage that Jesse caused, is a death mask (and also an allusion to Jack Nicholson's character in Chinatown). And there are three episodes left in which he will likely be intertwined with absolute terror. Even the prospect of rewatching comic gems like "Better Call Saul" (2x08) seems like it will be devoid of laughter now that I know where Saul has headed... Yeah, so likely flop. Rating wise, it's gonna kill it, but it could likely be the kind of artistic compromise that contaminates the overall merit of the "Breaking Bad" universe. Didn't Vince learn, after witnessing the consequences of the Lone Gunman spinoff? Let's hope this news ends up being one elaborately twisted red herring.
In which I live out the paradox of having a work of art leave you both speechless and driven to a state of ecstatic glossolalia.
Breaking Bad has a Wilder Bunch, I think...
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, all represented separately; but also all the same sides of the same face (the actors on the show can actually emote that kind of Buddhist theory)
Battle lines being drawn, nobody's right, if everybody's wrong...Paranoia Strikes Deep, Into Your Life It Will Creep
I want to use the ol' kitchen sink, damn the torpedoes approach to this one (a night's rest and rewatching will certainly stimulate some sort of furhter extra-sensory babble and maybe a "return to form"). Expect the most earnest and pure wacko-paranoid abstractions I stumble through. So, first off, and to me, most pressing...why is the folllowing song Todd's Ring tone? I have several theories, I'll be back...maybe...
Pretty decent movie, really bad television show -It's poetry in motion She turned her tender eyes to me As deep as any ocean As sweet as any harmony Mmm - but she blinded me with science "She blinded me with science!" And failed me in biology
Barest meaning, Todd's ring tone is silly. It fits the strange 80s-Kitsch aesthetic of the cold open. This strange, surreal sequence, in which the audience sort of gets to experience the awkward backwardness of the Jack Klan (which sort of puts us in Lydia's shoes...I mean, high-heels-with-red-bottoms [same color red as the superlab scheme]), sets a tone that is in complete disjunct with the absolute stark intensity of the final desert showdown.
The ringtone also shows Todd's simpleness, and jibes with the strange erotic tension between him and Lydia earlier. Lydia is blinding us. Mr. White may also be the one who "hit me with technology."
However, I think a more intriguing interpretation of this song is a meta reason. The "she" in this is Michelle MacLaren, one of the great visionaries of Breaking Bad's creative team. Honestly, I think that her opposing "perspective" (she's similar to Kathyrn Bigelow, a female director whose craft maintains the emotional sensitivity of the maternal, but still captures the authentic visceral brutality that is often associated with hyper-machismo dude directors) is essential, and that she deserves as high praise as the other heavy hitters...Gilligan, Slovis, Schnauz, Dixon, MacDonald, Cranston, and Paul.
Therefore, maybe someone on the creative team snuck this song in as a subtle tribute to her. I think I and other reviewers have even used the exact phrase "poetry in motion" when describing the episode's MacLaren has helmed.
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Smatterings of My Feverishly Dysgraphic Notes
I will stay true to the foundation, and will be a dick and not order them chronologically. Pure laziness, really
Echoes down the halls
"Don't you touch MY MONEY"
"...that's the price"
"...How to flush him out"
"Blinded me with science..."
"No suffering, no fear..."
"...too many savages out there"
Andrea...accidentally well played...right into his hand. White would have made an exceptional poker player (Huell..."not so much").
Shit, Hank does too..
Hank has already been represented going full bore Vic Mackey, now...with the gory manipulation of Huell...the writers and visionaries are telling us that is also going full bore McNulty.
Huell's last name reminds me of Bonobo, or baboon. He is a racial burlesque. Maybe the show is racist, but with the intentional skinhead stuff...a grander order must be at work..
Don't be cruel to Huell!
Wait, how the funk did this episode make Huell a source of earnest sympathy and brief pathos...why do I even still bothering questioning its powers.
Fiery final line is said in the middle of episode, "Well..that's it. Game over."
Lies..."...Walt doesn't know that. Smug and alienating. The plot thickens as it expands and contracts into itself
Walt Jr. "reinforces the brand." Godfather subversions and visual motifs abound.
Further expansion on Todd and Walt Jr.'s (and Jesse, later on and as previous) twisted parallelism narrows the focus of the why?
"Booger-Powder"...heh heh
"Circus Clown of a boss..." Saul, boss of Clown Town. The true "Kingpin" of the BBiverse
Hmmm, pretty funny interludes, cut short, though...signs of the coming apocalypse.
Doing what Mr. White taught you Todd? It's bound deeper into the hell mouth, better stopped being an option time out of Walt's mind.
Perverse style to the cold open
Imprisoned frames
Lydia and Todd have a dark and perverted romantic scene. Sort of reminded me of Top Gun as envisioned by Gus Van Sant.
I'm very a Freud, with these forebodings...
Episode cuts to quick of one of the show's numerous deconstructed dualities...competence versus incompetence. Masculine displays of bravado, versus the earnest and vulnerable courage needed to really BE a Man. So, also a impotence versus potence thing (just like the purity of White's meth, that's why Jack is pissed...he knows Heisenberg packs a bigger "one")
For instance, Todd and the Jack Off Flunkie Bigot Brigade are stupid, but they are better equipped for the dark avenues of life, because of it. Walt choose to do the right thing...but, like every monomaniacal and misguided thing he needed to do, it was far too late.
All the shows previous heroes are bristling with unseemly anti-matter, but they become upended by the moral compromising of the men they claim to be (and the women and children (or Jesse and Todd, two lost children...they suffer the sins of the fathers, and help them commit it, too...)
...pretty twisted deconstruction of the nuclear family ideology-mythology...pretty crazy vision you have here, show.
It's like the show is somehow holding every possible Ace in the world...or at least, their final Aces in the Hole are so immaculate that everything else is retroactively made all the purer
...yep, likely that last part
Walt and Jesse somehow became friends again (...wait for it, I swear it actually happened)
I am still not sure about the exact science, but Michelle McLaren out did that minute of furious and hyperreal spectatorship she had previously crafted with the final confrontation of 3x10 "One Minute" and created the most rich and aesthetically dense scenes I can recall (and I am cursed with vividly remembering most of 'em).
The show knows every possible permutations of how the final stand-off (which starts once Walt gets on the phone with Jesse...in a scene ripped straight from the X-File's episode Drive...the thing that brought Vince and Bryan into each others lovingly gnarled artistic arms.
At that point, every possibility is likely. My primary instinct was that Walt and Jesse would posse up, just because every other party there is their anathama, and I think the show does this thing that, once Jesse realizes the history behind the spot (it's the impossible to pronounce title of the episode, so I mean, it means a lot...), he actually understands fully how Mr. White is, and that he actually isn't completely lost.
This deep down gives Jesse hope for his own desperate redemption.
In a lawless world with no hope and the writing on the walls, drifting buddies all aspire to go out like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...but then again, anything goes, really
"Just because you shot Jesse James...don't make you Jesse James"
"Do not come"
Not a rat, "he just won't listen to reason." White, in a rare occurence, is awkward and lost for words. HE KNOWS WHO HE IS ALREADY
That's why, when Hank repeatedly says "Walt, come out"...it's likely a signifier of some performative speech act.
Heisenberg sort of wants to either A. Let Jack kill all the threats to the "White Empire" or
B. Do the job himself.
Yet, he realizes what the tableau actually means (McLaren definitely cranks up the Leone to make a point via disjunct).
But Mr. White won't let him, mainly because of Jesse (he probably would be okay with Hank's accidental demise, honestly, in the dark of his heart; if Jesse dies, then Walt would likely kill himself
Yup, these two have an increasingly Badder Bromance
Instead, Walt comes back (...for a bit). The scene gets silent, and the camera does that painstakingly slow zoom it did with Gus...before he has his "face taken off" (...a ha!). I actually expected the song "Goodbye" to be faintly playing
McLaren and the writers likely know this association, so the silence makes it more epic and unnervingly enigmatic (the close up shot of White's bald mug is my favorite reoccuring motif...it can instantly let the viewer know where Walt's head is at, even when he is in the throes of complete denial
During the slow walk, we all expect the tables to turn. Heisenberg must have planted a bomb (there are enough subtle cues to reveal how painstakingly crafted the cerebrally visceral tension becomes.
Walt has sort of resigned himself to sacrifice (I mean, when he holds up his arms, likely sparking recognition in Jesse's own self-image (at least, between the iconography the show provides the audience)
Of course, when Jack actually fucking shows up, whatever benign or malign allignment is still happening is fully aborted
Walt sees the impending doom (christ, like every scene of this episode was dripping with impending doom and eerie lighting...I think most will have to watch the last scene alone about 10 times to pick up on every little nugget of cathartic artsy gold!
He doesn't want the twisted realities of his dark dream to actual happen at that point.
The mind fuck is that, and its real obvious, that earlier, he kind of did want it to go down like that; his inner evil logician (then again, aren't they all...) probably just couldn't see any way to clean up the aftermath (maybe he'll have it figured out soon...or be in permanent exile from the hell-on-earth he has reigned done...that lucky unlucky bastard.
I think, after seeing the next episode, more will be known.
A part of me thought I knew what was (the consequences, they are coming, Walt from 4x12) coming, then I thought I didn't, then I felt like I saw it, then the show ripped it away from me. They know this
Because right when the audience, and Nazi players, wishes for everyone to die just so the stylistically unsexy (PoMo Peckinpah mixed with Michael Bay kind of gross) unrelenting gunfire will end. Right when any denouement, even if everyone was viciously killed (...as Walt knows all too well by now, there are fates worse than death).
So like right when you just want that resolution, need to know how and if the house of cards will ever be rebuilt, the shows does that thing that it knows its audiences hated about the Sopranos final;
It has to audacity to not even finish the
Well, the next episode is probably gonna jump the shark. Yep, it's all an elaborate prank. Who the hell is directing this likely clunker anyhow....Rian Johnson...hmmm. "Fly" me to the Fucking "Moon." Hey, once Walt goes from "Fifty-One" to "Fifty-Two," his numerology symbology will denote a full deck!
OMGSHITFANBOYITSGONNABEEVENBETTERTHANITHASBEENBEING!!!!!.... More Epic than even the following pictures...but in the same spirit...
Important stuff: makes one realize that even the yarn that is seemingly the most well crafted still had to go through a process of excising unseemly threads.
My buddy Nick Bacon (the cat that first turned me on to the show) gave me this mid 20th-century philosophical text called Critique of Everyday Life, by Henri Lefebrve. He "lent" me this book like 3 years ago. Because guy friends often have an obstinate cloud of stubborn resistance between them, I didn't actually get around (it was his fav Philosopher, and he'd fellatiate the think [rhetorically and metaphorically, of course] so much that I kind of felt like I'd heard enough to not need to read the text). Anyway, I finally get around to reading it, and within the first few pages there are these long passages that strike me. They seem to speak to art; and they seem incredibly pertinent to Breaking Bad; as well as to my grand crazy scheme to prove the tao "The Meaning of Breaking Bad is the Meaning of Life." I'll just post the sections here, for now, and see if they resonate... ------- Using the example of creating a philosophical timeline through icons of demarcated fashion trends, Lefebvre quotes Baudelaire (who is channeling Marx's dialetical diatribes), "'and if to the illustration representing each age he were to add the philosophical thought which that age was mainly preoccupied by or worried by, a thought which the illustration inevitably reflects, he would see what a deep harmony informs all the branches of history'" (106). Lefebrve then explains, "To Baudelaire the unity of the world appears in the narrow, abstract form of the symbol hidden behind the thing. He says elsewhere that beauty always has 'a double composition.' This duality of art is a consequence of the duality of man: on the one hand an eternal element, on the other a 'circumstantial' element, which will be separately or at one and the same time 'the period, its fashions, its morals and its appetites'. When the eternal appears in the circumstantial--the marvelous in the familiar-- the result is a beautiful work of art...the ability to extract the phantasmagorical from within nature" (106). "Among the various aspects of man's duality, that of art and nature corresponds to those of town and countryside, make-up and unpainted skin, clothes and body. The duality of the eternal and circumstantial of spirit and matter, is also the duality of good and evil, of the individual and the crowd. Baudelaire, who did not discover duality and who never pretended to have done so, is mainly concerned with intensifying it until it reveals a sort of unity within its extreme and painful tensions: a confused unity-- not conciliation, or synthesis, or supersession, but more of a scholarly confusion where contradictions are resolved through a painful, relentless struggle so intense that it leaves the mind in ruins" (107). "...He wants the artist to confront the everyday-- and even if necessary to tear through it to reveal the living spirit enshrouded within, not above, or beyond, but within-- and in doing so to liberate something strange, mysterious and bizarre..." (107).
Funny, I actually caught the latest episode when it initially aired, and watched it three more times, but nothing too pressing strikes me to write about. I'll definitely go back and vivisect it, but this episode struck me the same way "End Times" did (though, I felt that 4x12 had a lot more thematic fat and succulent stylistic gristle; but that's just a personal taste), in that it seems best to truly hunt for clues after the next episode at least. Don't get things mixed up, even if there was something about "Rabid Dog" that didn't strike me as fully in line with the show's current atmosphere and style (long time writer Sam Caitlin took the directors helm for the first time, and his unique viewpoint shows...perhaps a bit too strong), this is a crucial episode. The final chance for a bloodless conclusion (...and really, despite knowing that horrible things will happen, likely to characters we've cared about more consistently than Walt; we still all somehow hoped there could be a resolution between Jesse and Walter) was averted, simply because Jesse had internalized the paranoid delusions of his teacher, and projected his fear of the boogey-man, when really Walt was preparing to cleanse himself completely of sin, with his surrogate son (and the DEA) being witness to his ultimate confessions. What this episode encapsulates for me is the stylistic theme that the show has been cranking; the symbolic and literally shadow that Walt has cast over all those he claimed to be protecting, aside for the numerous others he has indirectly devastated (keep in mind all those tweaked and suffering cats from the Czech Republic that the viewer isn't even privy too). Even character has been filmed in stark chiaroscuro lighting, accentuating the dark parts of their being that have been exposed by the "light" of Mr. White. Primary Tao: In which the show's universe becomes a perverse analogy to that trippy scene in Being John Mallcovich, where Malkovich enters his own head, and sees crowds of people with his head superimposed onto their; Walter White's world has become a phantasmagoria of his own decayed soul. Like that part in Inception where foot-soldiers of the minds subconscious would attack threats inside someone's dream.
Yes, Johnny-Cum-Lately again for this episode, but I have realized that in order to have full immersal in my Breaking Bad experience, I must only watch when the time is right, and when my karmic check book is properly balanced; so yeah...ZEN Initial Splatter...more to come
Primary Tao (i.e. Improved Operation Cold-Open Deconstruction [i.e. "A Million Shades of Tarantino"):
So yeah, even the "previous on Breaking Bad" clips are artfully juxtaposed. At the end of it, the name "Jesse Pinkman" is said (by Gomie in episode 5x10). The Cold Open begins with a cigarrette being lit, I immediately thought of the Ricin cigarrette, and of Jesse (the show had previously used a close-up shot of him lighting up in 4x10 "Fly," and I think it is actually a recurring visual motif [denoting desperation and avoidance].
But it's Todd instead, Jesse's doppleganger (though, that probably isn't the appropriate term, since Walt Jr. is in the mix, as well; but something like metaphoric-triplet seems pretentious). Further solidi-factions of the bizarro form:
He calls Walter, referring to him as "Mr. White" (like Jesse).
He's standing in front of a bizarro version of the "Dog House" cafe that Jesse used to frequent. There's a conveniently demarcated sign that says "ROUTE 66," to really see the whole satanic undertones of the Neo-Nazi versions of the "Will to Walter White Power."
The scene cuts inside of the cafe, where Todd is regaling his uncle about that lovely yarn in which Todd gained one jarred tarantula and the world lost one precociously innocent child. Jesse used to have brazen and bravado-infused profusions of his daring-doings in a cafe (that "Darth Vader" scene he shares with Skinny Pete and Badger in the third season)
However, the Cafe-composition and mise-en-scene parallels the Denny's diner scene with Walt and Jesse at the end of 4x01 "Box-Cutter."
Todd's Uncle (Michael Bowen) has already been codified as one of Walt's many alter-egos, probably the most heinous actualization of Walter White's propensity for evil, and its made even more clear with this sequence.
Still really don't think that every artistic choice on the show is, at this point in the series, there for a specific and meticulously magical reason? The song that plays (presumably from the truck of the Neo-Nazi dukes-of-Hazardous-material brigade) says "Romp, stomp, romp and stomp tonight." Guess what I think of, a "Romper Stomper."
...and they're entering New Mexico...
Fiery Finale (so real this time...)
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"
So yeah, Walt predictably gets the frozen thirty eight snub from the Coca-Cola machine ("Do you really want to live in a world without Coca-Cola"), hereby further connecting the thematic ties between corporate capitalism, drug manufacturing, satanic impulses, bad faith, and violence.
The Wild West showdown continue to commenceth, with Pinkman barnstorming the shit out of Casa de Blanco. The camera work echoes the end of 4x13, when Jesse and Walt burnt down the superlab. Uh-oh, echoes-ios-ios!
Surely Pinkman wouldn't actually burn down Mr. Chip's...I mean Mr. Scar...I mean Mr. White's house? They're buddies...right?...
Hey, about that flash-forward....
So yeah, the main reason this episode is so textually and intertextually rich is being the show's god-father, THE GRAND KING OF CINEMATOGRAPHY: MICHAEL SLOVIS (i.e. Stanley Kubrick Reincarnate), directed it.
