Dustin Freeley places the series in the oft-harried existence of our modern daily lives, which includes social networks, smartphone technologies, and the growing ease with which we multitask. Exploring our modern cultural obsession with economies of “time,” Freeley analyzes the ways in which Breaking Bad expresses concerns about recouping wasted time, building a surplus of future time, efficiently utilizing present time, and dividing and constructing present time into multiple, simultaneous realities. In examining the commonly associated effects of crystal meth: euphoria, sustained energy, alertness, and a sense of power, the essay contends that these effects reflect latent social desires in our contemporary society. For Walt, facing his own mortality is a prison sentence wherein part of the punishment is recognizing time spent and time remaining. Freeley asserts that Walt’s choice to begin “breaking bad” is a symptom of our culture’s obsession with controlling, preserving, making up for, and extending time, as well as a side effect in a late capitalist society where time is often synonymous with commerce and wasted time represents lost time.
Locating Breaking Bad in the context of modern science and its practices, Alberto Brodesco examines the particular ways in which science is placed, displaced, and misplaced throughout the series. Breaking Bad provides its viewers with various legitimate scientific domains, like the high school classroom and the Gray Matter pharmaceutical company, as well as illegitimate ones: the RV, the domestic and industrial drug laboratories. Unlike the fictional mad doctor or scientist who is led by his insane desire to defy nature’s boundaries, Walt’s goals are more modest in design: he wants to leave his family wealthy when he dies. Following modern science’s principle of instrumental rationality brings him to make controversial decisions not only to cook meth but to watch Jesse’s girlfriend die or to poison a child. Walt’s alias “Heisenberg” provides an interpretive frame for all of Walt’s actions putting all of his rational actions under the guise of Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” which maintains that a scientist or meth chemist can never stand outside of their experiments or productions, and every scientist is confronted with the impossibility of directing his actions and thus, is confronted with unpredictability and chaos.
The second section, “The Politics of Breaking Bad” investigates how the popular series represents and intersects with the present-day politics of gender, race and ethnicity, able and disabled bodies, and social class. Brian Faucette maintains that the contemporary struggles and frustrations over American masculinity during a time of great cultural, economic, and social change are embodied in the character of Walter White. Relying on R. W. Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” he asserts that Walt, through his transformation into a drug lord and cold-blooded killer, finds freedom from normal domestic obligations and strictures that allow him to attain and recoup a traditional model of masculinity that celebrates aggression, violence, and ruthless behavior. This reclamation of traditional masculinity, albeit by untraditional means, expresses the inner desire of some men to reify what they perceive as having lost in present-day culture.
The politics of race and ethnicity are explored in Andrew Howe’s essay on Breaking Bad’s heterogeneous representations of Latin American identity. As a border narrative involving the illegal drug trade, many of the show’s villains are Latino. However, there is a wide variability in the portrayal of such characters, from the crazed, drug-addicted Tuco to the suave Chilean businessman Gustavo Fring, and from the axe-wielding Salamanca cousins to their wheelchair-bound uncle, Hector. Despite their villainy, these characters are thus humanized in that they do not conform to typical stereotypes usually on display in American television. Other characters within the series round out the project of broad-based depiction. DEA Agent Steve Gomez is a very nurturing character, not exhibiting any of the machismo typically associated with Latino culture. Interestingly, the macho swagger is supplied by Gomez’s partner, the Caucasian Hank Schrader.
Breaking Bad is, at one level, a show about the politics and consequences of unhealthy and unruly bodies, bodies that are undisciplined and disordered. Indeed, as the series progresses, Jami Anderson points out that each of the main characters has a body that is unruly or unreliable and each struggles to maintain control over his or her body while presenting a public pretense of control. Throughout the early seasons, Skyler certainly regards herself as a good wife and mother, especially when she is accusing Walt of deceitful behavior. Yet on several occasions, she seemingly cannot stop herself from smoking while pregnant. Walter Jr., whose cerebral palsy render his physical impairments most visible, voices the frustrations of a son who cannot understand the disappearance and reappearance of his father in the family home, or the cold war taking place between his parents. The stammering speech of Walter Jr. perfectly expresses the slurred rage of a character that wants to, but cannot, fully understand or take control of the situation he is in. Through its main characters and narratives, the series illustrates that human lives are by nature unruly lives.
“The Style and Reception of Breaking Bad” is analyzed in the book’s final section. The series’ aural, narrative, and visual stylistics make Breaking Bad a distinctive and even ground-breaking program on cable television. Pierre Barrette and Yves Picard contend that the series distinctive narrative style, which is dominated by non-verbal scenes and rich, stylistic imagery, is part of an emergent second degree style in which images prevail over sound, visuality over orality. The second degree style is demarcated by an enunciative logic wherein meaning is found through the accumulation and dissemination of layers of self-reflexive structures. Breaking Bad is a niche market product with content to provide entertain and a message to the public while the form is designed for the critical few who can discern its complex layers of meanings. One of the notable stylistic and narrative features of the series is its enigmatic teaser segments at the beginning of each episode. The teaser not only functions as an opening but also has significance in itself. Rossend Sanchez Baro asserts that the teaser expresses two of the show’s main characteristics: genre and style hybridization and the representation of the surreal in everyday life. Baro theorizes that Breaking Bad’s teasers not only serve to disorient and confuse audience expectations at the beginning of each episode, but can be seen as a segment that concentrates and expresses the essence of the episode and indeed the series.
Place as phenomenological and rooted in human experience is a stylistic feature in Breaking Bad. Ensley Guffey examines the use of place in the series as a central element of the show’s narrative demonstrating that the very nature of a human understanding of place allows certain key locations to function as vehicles for character and plot development and integral parts of storytelling in and of themselves. He points out that inanimate spaces are transformed in the series. For seasons one through three, a 1980s era Winnebago becomes a space for revelation, murder, and relationship-building between Walt and Jesse. Whereas in seasons three through four, a red basement filled with stainless steel, industrial equipment becomes the central site of narrative and character contention. Guffey shows that the series’ producers tap into the audience’s shared sense of place as meaningful space in order to create a depth of intentional emotional realism rarely seen in television. An additional distinctive style feature of Breaking Bad is its use of sound, music, and silence. Carlo Nardi analyzes the series’ construction of a distinct soundspace with a particular focus on songs and how they serve metadiegetically to comment on the story. He posits that these metadiegetic songs, by drawing attention to themselves and playing with cinematic conventions, possibly prevent any identification with either the narrative, the characters or both, to engage the audience member in what he calls “complicit identification” with the producer or director’s perspective, therefore appealing primarily to audience members with a strong critical sense.