spoiler
:walter-shock: It turns out the REAL skinheads were inside of us all along
"Teacher fucked by capitalism turns to cooking meth to survive" could've been a good show if they hadn't made him a Randian superman who's better at drugs than people who've been in the trade for years and have an according amount of wealth, power, and connections
I'm tired of American TV and film's incessant need to make everything slick and stylish. Less caricature and more portraiture, please
I mean, he's not really meant to be cool or sympathetic, right? The show makes it clear from the start that he isn't cooking meth to survive, he has people offering him help in a variety of forms which he always refuses. It's more about how this middle class white American boomer feels emasculated by his mediocre life, and then his massive ego causes him to ruin every relationship he has in a quest to feel "successful." It's about the perils of petit bourgeois values.
I mean, he’s not really meant to be cool or sympathetic, right?
Correct, but where is that one tumblr post about how it's impossible to satirize masculinity? Because dipshits will ALWAYS sympathize with a masculine, "badass" lead character no matter how blatantly obvious that the message is that he's hurting himself and/or other people by doing this shit.
See Homelander in "The Boys" who some people think is unironically an Anti-Villian against "soy" Hughey.
I definitely get why people like characters like walter white, but homelander just baffles me. What makes the character interesting imo is the juxtaposition between him being incredibly powerful but also a complete manchild. But this also means he comes off as a really pathetic dude whenever you look away from his superpowers or extremely privileged position. (hey, that's almost like a lot of powerful people irl)
I mean ... getting to a place where you can stan Homelander demands conscious effort
...or they will be turned off by it because the character is "doing everything wrong according to our line of thinking and philosophy". I've noticed people analyzing things through the leftist lens, deciding it has "bad politics" and tossing it aside.
Not everything is going to advance our agenda. Sometimes it's just fun to watch a show about someone crashing and burning
I think it's the ol' Ricky Morty problem. In a value system as sick as the US', satire is defanged by constant contradictions
Even in cases like Breaking Bad and Ricky Morty where the creators make multiple decisions to unambiguously show their protagonist as miserable and destructive to everyone around them, that message doesn't reliably reach the audience. Randy shit is so mainstream that it's not really out of the ordinary for an intended message to be, "This guy may be a terrible person, but look how strong and skilled and cool and
cruelfunny he is. That's what's really important, others just don't understand him." So as ever in US media, the creator's intent is made secondary to the viewers' predispositionsHeres an article on critique, which might illuminate why so many people can say "well Walter is written as a bad person," over and over again while others can't read it that way
"Now the fact that this is a story about a process of change might make us think that it can’t fetishize. After all, Walter’s transformation isn’t invisibilized or made opaque, but centered and explained: Walter isn’t born an emperor of methamphetamine; he becomes one. However, from the opening credits it’s understood that breaking bad is the only transformation possible for him. The show bombards us with elements that railroad us into accepting that there were no alternatives. In this way, Walter’s process of change is itself fetishized. Though it is explainable and situated in time, it isn’t avoidable. Moreover, Walter never understands the laws of his own development. He’s passive and blind with respect to his own motives. He’s eternally condemned to a process of change that he can’t understand or control. Whereas in Marx the project of observing the enemy is subordinated to the goal of defeating him, in Breaking Bad observing Walter’s transformation is an end in itself. It’s not about empowering the audience to fight this villain, it’s about getting to know him as a person so that we can, in the final analysis, accept him."
https://redsails.org/algunos-recursos/
That's a good point I hadn't thought about. No notes
He's definitely not some Randian Superman. He's good at exactly one thing: making really pure meth. And then like every dudebro he thinks that because he's skilled in one domain all others are just as easy to navigate, and he gets constantly rebuffed nonstop and can't ever back down because of his ego.
Walter is incredibly incompetent and would have been arrested, killed, disappeared, or worse a dozen times over the show if not for impossible luck or pure desperation due to being in a situation that was entirely his fault.
I always remember how, in the last couple seasons, they went from having Gus' industrial lab, immense connections, and sophisticated network to Walter making meth in rando's living rooms while running a fraudulent pest control business and desperately trying to get scummy lowlifes and nazi skinheads to move his product.
But for some reason everyone was like "Walt made that one random guy call him Heisenberg, what a badass."
it's been too long since I saw the show but I'm pretty sure he'd have been way better off if he just fucking kept paying the families of the people he had the nazis murder
I'm like 70% sure there was a reason he couldn't do that but I can't remember
Wait I remember now, the lawyer who was doing the actual paying off got himself arrested and they couldn't keep showing up at the bank to do the drop offs anymore. I think
I think I don't care for the selection of race track. Next time I want moo moo meadows
I only watched the show after it finished airing, and could never get into it because of how stupid Walter was. Just take the fucking money from the guy who betrayed you 30 years ago, literally who cares. It could all have been avoided trivially but no muh masculinity.
That's a feature, not a bug. So many people expect Scarface when they're watching it, but it's a show about how incompetent and proud this man is.
Same thing with the Skylar hate. "She's so annoying" is a take uttered by people with no analysis skills.
All that being said, Better Call Saul > Breaking Bad
I understand it was a deliberate choice, I just found it frustrating and every time there was some new crisis I just thought "should've taken the money, huh". But this is mostly a personal hang-up about characters making choices that are obviously bad; I also disliked Uncut Gems for more or less the same reason.
Oh, me too. My wife and I are always like "just go cook the meth, idiot" when he's got that nice rig that Gus gives him in the laundry building. I get he wanted artistic license and a bigger piece of the pie or whatever, but ALL HE HAD TO DO was show up, punch in, cook that shit, go home. A million dollars a cook.
You'd think he'd be happy just doing chemistry and getting paid
![[Extreme spoilers] Finally finished Breaking Bad. Here's my only thoughts](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/LelQD7l2AP.png){kind=link}