Breaking Down Breaking Bad: Critical Perspectives

by Matt Wanat (Editor), Leonard Engel (Editor)

The story of Walter White's transformation from chemistry teacher to drug lord has captured the imagination of television viewers around the world. This collection of essays sets the series in the context of American culture, analyzing its reinvention of classic themes in literature. A protagonist who sets out on a quest and discovers things about himself and the world is a common enough convention in American storytelling. Typically the hero encounters evil along the way and acquires worldly wisdom. Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad , offers a dynamic variant of this quest, posing the question of how far a desperate man facing death will go in order to achieve a sense of self and financial security for his family. Going beyond the obvious ethical issues that have preoccupied viewers and critics alike, the essays in this book cut across disciplines, delve deeply into contemporary issues, and explore the pure pleasure and entertainment value of the series.

232 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2016

Reviews

[Curmudgeon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Breaking Bad. I like watching Breaking Bad (and Better Call Saul), I like talking about the characters and the writing and the cinematography with other people (provided those people don't unironically think Walter White is a good guy), and I like reading essays and blog posts and articles and other things that people have written about the series and its spin-offs online. I'm glad that there's enough cultural interest in the Breaking Bad Cinematic Universe to spawn attempts to analyze various aspects of it in more detail, to the point where several books of essays have been written about the series. This is the first one I read, and it was somewhat disappointing. The articles were a real mixed bag. The worst, by far, was a pompous 33-page slog through the series' "aesthetics of brutality", which mostly seemed to focus on definitions of what death metal is, and how two German words for the same concept differ slightly in their philosophical implications for how someone is effected by an experience. (I am making it sound better than it really is, I swear.) Many of the other articles touch on interesting topics, but some weren't detailed enough to do justice to their theses--if only some of them had been a little longer instead of the "brutal" one! The most interesting were probably 3, 4, 8, 11, and 12. There are twelve essays total, roughly half of them were somehow thought-provoking or enlightening, so it all averages out to a pretty, well, average book.