In season five, Walt, still in the powerful grip of the belief that his skills as a meth cook give meaning to his life, and a notable place, however infamous, in the world, must find a new lab space, one that he can exercise full authority over. This time Walt chooses to be transgressive, using the cover of Vamanos Pest Control’s house-covering fumigation tent to set up his meth lab within other people’s homes. In a very real way, Walt and Jesse have now become home invaders who violate the most intimate places of people whom they have never even met. Security and secrecy is provided by setting up a tent within the house being treated for pests and mixing the toxic outflow of meth production with the venting pesticide used in the house after the cook.
The invasive nature of Walt and Jesse’s new operation is clearly and chillingly emphasized by the noise of children playing nearby as the toxic gas from Walt and Jesse’s first cook is released into the neighborhood and the gas is vented into a backyard full of children’s toys and a swing set. This lab is not removed from the everyday places of the innocent. Walt and Jesse are not cooking in the desert anymore, or even underground, but right in the middle of residential neighborhoods. This transgression is not merely against personal place, but also against the larger social space of ordered life. The emphasis on the waste products of meth production tainting these places is important, for “often, when people, things and practices are seen as ‘out-of-place’ they are described as pollution and dirt” (Cresswell 2004, 103). Upper middle-class residential neighborhoods like the ones using Vamanos Pest Control’s house fumigation services are places which are theoretically intended to keep out chaotic, criminal, and impure elements. This idea is even more central to the places in which the most intimate aspects of our lives take place. These inherently ‘inside’ places are in part constructs that keep danger and dirt away and ‘outside.’ By breaking these boundaries, Walt’s new lab is not merely a place where poison is produced, it is poison itself.
Yet Walt seems immanently comfortable in this new lab and in his role as invader. When not actively involved in cooking, Walt, Jesse, and later Todd make themselves comfortable in whatever home they happen to be in at the time. Their breaks to rest, watch TV, and eat are transgressions into someone else’s private spaces. In Walt’s eyes, the lab is now truly his home, and the fact that it regularly changes location is irrelevant. Where ever the lab is, that place is home, Walt’s home, and the actual owners of the place, and the meanings those people attach to it, are of no consequence. It is perhaps the ultimate act of spatial transgression—the theft of another’s place.
THE DESERT
More than any other location in Breaking Bad it is the desert that evokes the idea of ‘space’: vast, amorphous, and strikingly devoid of memory. Indeed, the timelessness of the landscape denies memory. Even when littered with the debris of former human habitation the sense evoked is always of a place abandoned, left to revert to empty space, with no one to give meaning to the old tricycles, toys, farm equipment, bottles and rotting fences that remain. The desert, free of memory, is a place where anything can happen and everything is allowed. When a secure and private place is needed to cook meth, Walt and Jesse park their RV deep in the desert, far from prying eyes. When mortal threats must be made, Gus and Mike take Walt into the desert, which can swallow a new body as easily as it has all that have come before. When Tuco’s cousins cross the Mexican-American border, they do so in the desert, and it is in the desert spaces that they worship at the shrine of Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death.
The desert, then, is the ultimate outside space for most of the characters in Breaking Bad. This sense of the desert’s outsideness carries with it the idea of spaciousness. As portrayed in Breaking Bad, the New Mexico desert is truly vast, a feeling that is deliberately reinforced by cinematography which emphasizes the huge, open sky, and the smallness of human beings in this space.[92] Tuan (1977) notes that “spaciousness is closely associated with the sense of being free. Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act” (52). As mentioned above, Tuan (1977) also emphasizes the “threat of space” (6), as an integral part of this freedom. The Cousins coolly slaughter a truck full of illegal immigrants and their driver in the desert, and walk calmly away. Later it is at a house in the desert that they kill an old woman and slaughter a policeman with an axe. Tuco repeatedly fires a fully automatic weapon in the desert at any and every target he chooses, and it is in the desert that Gus promises to kill Walt’s infant daughter (“Crawl Space,” 09/25/11).
The deadly freedom and power found in the desert is a result of the space itself. Mostly uninhabited and uninhabitable, the desert is not a place of human experience, and thus cannot become a ‘place’ imbued with history, and a field of care. What happens there is quickly forgotten, and even the spaces where people live quickly fall into meaninglessness when they are abandoned. Yet as a space, the desert requires place to define it, and in Breaking Bad the desert very quickly becomes the place where death is done, and where murder goes unpunished and all but unnoticed (Tuan 1977). Soon, every scene filmed in the desert evokes unease in the viewer, and the show’s characters are always noticeably nervous when they find themselves there. Because anything can happen in that place, in the desert, and be swallowed up forever within that vast and empty space. Even children at play.
CONCLUSION
Breaking Bad’s continuing use of universal human experiences of place has created a narrative world in which the audience is fully invested. For five years the viewer has journeyed with Walter White and Jesse Pinkman through a succession of places, and shared their feelings of triumph, joy, grief, and terror in them all. In the episode “Live Free or Die,” (07/15/12), the audience is confronted unexpectedly with a Walt who is living under a false name, and using faked identification, having apparently been driven away from his home, family, and everything which is familiar to both him and Breaking Bad’s loyal viewers. This Walt is wholly out of place, cut off from all fields of care, and every meaningful setting with which he has been familiar. After four seasons of Walt’s desperate scrabbling for meaning and for his place in the world, he is now adrift. Homeless. Dangerous. What final place Walt will create for himself, and how he will carve it out of the world, remains to be seen. Whatever may happen, viewers around the world have become rooted in the diegetic world of Breaking Bad, and with the conclusion of the final season, that place will be sorely missed.
WORKS CITED
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. trans. Maria Jones. New York: The Orion Press, 1964.
Buttimer, Anne. “Home, Reach, and the Sense of Place,” In The Human Experience of Space and Place, edited by Anne Buttimer and David Seamon. 73-85. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.
Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
———. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Gilligan, Vince, Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn, Dean Norris, Betsy Brant, and R.J. Mitte. “Audio Commentary on Pilot Episode.” Breaking Bad: The Complete First Season. DVD. Creator/E.P. Vince Gilligan. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Inc., 2009.
2
For examples of this, see almost any of the RV cooking montages in seasons one through three and the montage of Jesse and Walt’s walk out of the desert in “Seven Thirty-Seven” (03/08/09).