A few days ago I finished watching through Better Call Saul – the mostly-prequel-seguing-to-epilogue of Breaking Bad. It’s a strange and complicated series, and it’s given me a lot to think about. On balance I feel it’s significantly more interesting than Breaking Bad, but they share a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses and I find those similarities, and contrasting differences, fascinating. I’m going to be discussing these stories in very general terms: No specific plot points will be spoiled, but if you want to go into either series completely blind you may wish to do so before reading ahead.
The biggest undermining issue of both these series is that while they are nominally about crime and violence they have a relatively simplistic and childish perception of these topics. This has become a more noticeable issue over the decade and change since the premiere of Breaking Bad: Conversations about the failures and biases of policing, the evils of the decades-long “war on drugs”, and the conveniently slippery definitions of crime and who’s defined as a criminal are more mainstream and commonplace now. Many of these conversations focus on the impact of television shows, which are still overwhelmingly a playground for copaganda and other trite and simplistic cultural narratives – and sadly Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are, while often thoughtful and insightful shows, hardly exceptions to this rule, thoughtlessly following the same tropes, building from the same unexamined axioms. Another acclaimed drama, The Wire, concluded right around the same time Breaking Bad premiered – and while there are still many valid criticisms to be made of the limitations of The Wire’s vision, it featured a much more nuanced understanding of the systemic underpinnings of crime and violence. I suspect the reason why the creators of Breaking Bad weren’t too interested in these specifics was because they wanted the theme of the show, as signified by the title, to be how the descent into evil, into badness, happens – and thus thought introducing discussions of the slipperiness of these concepts would just confuse the matter. Regardless, I think it causes some issues, and it frustrates me: Though I think we inevitably have to choose certain narratives to emphasize and de-emphasize in art, it’s worrying to me when American-made art in particular chooses to gloss over activities we are glibly culpable in such as brutal punitive justice and armed conflict.
Either due to the passage of time and advancements of the conversation or due to the shift of subject matter of the show, Better Call Saul is somewhat better on this front. The main characters of the show are motivated by, among other things, a sense of being the correctives for various sorts of societal injustice – whether it be the injustices of those crushed and entrapped by the criminal legal system, or the elderly cloistered and exploited by hucksters pretending to act in their best interests, these characters are motivated by a drive to stand up to the system that has mistreated them and their loved ones – which creates quite a fraught tension as, being lawyers, they have a sworn duty to uphold that system. Because of this there are many mentions of the system “being broken” or “failing people” – but, most often, the system as it is shown is portrayed as mostly functional, with perhaps a few unfortunate people falling through the cracks here and there – rather than, as in reality, consisting entirely of a giant crack that swallows lives like a gaping maw. Perhaps this is because of the limitations of the vocabulary of television writing; or perhaps because of both series’ conception of what a criminal is. The people who are shown to be victimized by the system are largely innocents or people guilty of small-time crimes being handed oversized sentences. Overwhelmingly, though, the characters portrayed on the shows who break the law, those who break bad, the criminals, are of one of two archetypes: The idiot or the supervillain. Both of these, the inveterate fool who can never be dissuaded and the brilliant mastermind who will always require massive resources to contend with, are effectively themselves arguments for why the current system of brutal carceral justice is not only not broken but is necessary. It is the same formulation as used by more overt copaganda shows, only told from a different perspective.
For all these failures to contend with the specific systemic cruelties of the law, though, Better Call Saul is very interested in the abstract concept of the limitations of the law – to the extent that one character in particular, Chuck McGill, brother of Jimmy McGill (aka Saul Goodman) is effectively a living avatar of the law and embodies its failings. Chuck believes in the law in a very fundamental way – it’s not that he doesn’t know of its limitations, but that he believes the points of failure are where the law touches humanity, that the law itself is, at its core, perfect, pristine. He’s correct insofar as that anything can be perfect and pristine when it exists purely in the conceptual realm: When you try to apply any such thing to human reality it will reveal gaps, problems, messiness. Chuck can normally overlook such trifling contradictions – but with Jimmy there, heightening every contradiction, revealing every hole, demonstrating the failures of his absolutism? The structure cannot stand. Chuck knows he is out of his element and feels it in a very fundamental way, manifesting in strange anxiety disorders and fits of righteous anger. Jimmy, for his part, knows he can never be perfect – if not because of his present actions, than because of the past, eternally written in stone by the steel trap mind of Chuck.
The show doesn’t really believe in Chuck’s logic, but it still sometimes reifies it in strange ways. As the show progresses, every moral inaction and immoral action rolls over into progressively worse and more dangerous consequences – partially for the simple reason that at some point the story of Better Call Saul must become the story of Breaking Bad, which operates on this logic, of doing evil bringing evil into your life. It feels conflicted, though: So much of the series seems like a meditation on the impossibility of telling the difference between what a good or bad action is, on how something that seems like one can shift into the other, it seems artificial to transition into this moralizing stance, to suddenly create a world of moral immediacy where every immoral action is punished by a causal Rube Goldberg machine. Perhaps that is the message: In our life we do so many small good and small bad things, and most of those basically wash out, and we’ll probably never know which are which – but we can also exploit this ambiguity to excuse ourselves doing something really, genuinely, obviously bad when it comes along, and it can be hard to tell that that’s what we’re doing.
Breaking Bad, for all its acclaim, has what is really quite a simple moral message: Pride will destroy you from the inside out. Pride will lead you to deny your weaknesses, to reject help, to try to incompetently solve every problem yourself, to keep on doing stupid things for stubborn reasons, to pick fights with people who threaten your ego. Walter White is a very straightforward character – somewhat sympathetic simply in that we’ve all found ourselves doing something foolish out of pride, but fundamentally kind of a stupid genius who just ruins everything for everyone. Jimmy, aka Saul, aka Gene, aka Jimmy, has his own struggle with pride – he feels shame at lacking the perfection of his brothers outlook, for feeling emotions, for feeling hurt and confused, and reflexively lashes out to protect himself. Given time this was probably something he could have worked through, one way or another – but, and I think this is where Better Call Saul really distinguishes itself as more thoughtful on the logic of moral transgression, evil doesn’t really come from a person, it comes from a relationship. Without Jimmy Chuck would have probably gone on being a very boring lawyer; without Chuck Jimmy would have gone to prison and/or been a small-time crook who was good to his friends and annoying to his enemies; without Kim Jimmy would have stayed in the mail room, content in being a lovable goofball, and without Jimmy Kim would have probably also been a boring lawyer who never does anything very good or bad. So it goes on, the Salamanca’s creating Gustavo’s cruel cold yearning for revenge, Mike refining it into something nearly perfect with a sure hand of experience and personnel management, Ignacio thanklessly laying the foundation, all eventually creating the powderkeg to meet Walter White’s arrogant spark.
At the same time, these experiences, these intersections of neuroses and compulsions, these relationships, are what it’s all about. Connecting with people, understanding and being understood, these are what we need, these are what we build. It’s not like we can phase them out – but we can, perhaps, be vigilant of where these paths may be leading us, whether we must turn about – or, perhaps, just fork off onto another road altogether.
[…] After watching through Better Call Saul I apparently decided I still didn’t have enough anxiety in my life and subsequently binged through Barry – a comedy series following a hitman, played by Bill Hader, who stumbles into a Los Angeles acting class while following a target and subsequently decides to become an actor. I’m going to discuss the broad narrative themes and arc of Barry but won’t be going into much detail, so this all should be fine for the spoiler-averse. I was initially put off by the show’s premise, as comedies about violence are a mixed bag: They can serve to trivialize violence or to portray its innate absurdity, serve to apologize for those who enact it or to humanize them – and these descriptions probably sound rather similar on first glance, which itself illustrates the problem. Violence is a powerful and complicated thing, and doing it justice is a sophisticated challenge, one exacerbated by the challenges of creating a good comedy. […]