And because such power relations appear everywhere in the social field, often occurring in minute and ordinary ways, he selects a suitably mundane anecdote as his example. His anecdote constitutes an instance of what he designates as “verbal communication” rather than amorous, institutional, or economic relations. At the outset the older participant possesses the ability to intimidate the younger. By the end, however, some modification has occurred so that the younger now intimidates the elder. In this minor event, the kind that transpires multiple times a day in every person’s life, the recalibration of a power differential, however small, has taken place.
Perhaps initially age is associated with wisdom and the older party is treated with, and expects, the power to intimidate that attaches to respect or veneration. Then, in the process of conversation, alternative implications of age are taken up. Age may emerge as the sign of generational change in which the involved parties either wish to or are forced to recognize the passing of expertise from one generation to the next. Intimidation by a younger other may be precipitated through being made aware of one’s own dwindling intellectual powers or influence. The meaning of ‘age’ modulates over the course of the conversation. Initially, the power to intimidate through age belongs to the older individual but during their discussion alternate meanings are produced and negotiated, with the result that the advantage of age—in the sense of being able to intimidate—shifts to the younger individual.
However, what Foucault fails to specify about his anecdote is that the relations of power he describes are enabled and enacted through emotions. Emotional dynamics render possible the negotiation and exchange of altered relations, in this instance whether through fear, awe, respect, sadness over diminished vigor, or other feelings entirely. Further, the emotions engaged and exchanged are quite likely different for each of the participating parties. Yet, regardless of the specific emotions put into play, they function as strategies in the circulation of power relations.
Foucault describes transactions of power relations as the ongoing set of circumstances “in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other” (292). I am suggesting a somewhat different understanding, in which such power relations refer to situations in which one person attempts to affect the conduct of others. In Foucault’s example, age is saturated with emotional meanings that become realized once they are felt. Emotions fluctuate, meanings are transmitted and accepted, rejected, or amended with the result that power differentials, however slight, become altered. The interrelationality of emotions, meaning, and power enables such routine, unceasing transactions. Emotions are strategies that allow such moves and counter-moves, negotiations and exchanges to occur. In order to elaborate on power relations as emotional strategies, I now turn from Foucault’s simple anecdote to the more complex narrative of AMC’s Breaking Bad.
EMOTIONAL ACTION
I have argued elsewhere that emotional action—usually described as ‘talk’ or character interaction—constitutes a form of narrative action as significant as physical or bodily endeavor (Pribram 2011). Yet acts of physicality are normally what we refer to when we speak of filmic or televisual action.
However, emotional action, like bodily activity, shapes and propels a narrative. If we understand action as that which impels and, ultimately, resolves the narrative problems posed, then narrativity is more accurately understood as a dialectic relationship between emotional action and physical action. In these terms, a narrative becomes the accumulated effects of both forms of action. In contrast, film and television studies largely have established an erroneous dichotomy based either on emotional talk or physical action, rather than tracing the crucial relationship between them as equally productive modes of action in popular narrative forms.[1]
The relationship between emotional and physical action is made evident in the initial episodes of the series, Breaking Bad, because the usual trajectory of developing characters through dialogue and interaction with other characters, which then builds to resolution through physical confrontation, becomes reversed. In the most familiar analysis of narrative structure, character development through the establishment of social and emotional stakes exists in order to ‘set-up’ some later climactic physical confrontation. In this configuration, physical acts are viewed as that which generates the resolution of the social and emotional stakes earlier placed in jeopardy.
In contrast, the first episodes in season one of Breaking Bad sustain a series of fast-paced, exciting events culminating in the talking sequence or “verbal communication” between Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Krazy-8 (Max Arciniega) in the third episode, “…And the Bag’s in the River” (2/10/08). The normal narrative sequence is inverted so that physical action serves as establishing activity that leads to an emotional dramatic payoff.
Focusing only on the scenes that involve Walter, the pilot episode of season one (1/20/08) begins with a mysterious pair of pants falling from air to ground in slow motion, followed by shots of an RV driving frantically. In the front, sit a pantless Walter and an unconscious Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), both wearing gas masks. In the back, we spot two male bodies on the floor—either unconscious or dead. They slide around uncontrollably in response to the frenetic movements of the RV. Presented as a series of quick cuts and rapid changes of camera angles, Walter then accidentally runs the RV off the road as, in the distance, we hear police sirens. Walter grabs a gun from one of the male bodies and exits the RV, where he videotapes a farewell message for his family. He then raises the gun, aiming it at what we assume are the oncoming police. We then cut to the events leading up to this moment beginning, as a title tells us, “Three Weeks Earlier.”
In swift succession, we see Walter turn fifty, teach a high school chemistry class, work a humiliating second job at a car wash for the sorely needed money, suddenly pass out and get taken to the hospital by ambulance, and learn he has inoperable lung cancer. Later, he goes for a ride-along with his DEA brother-in-law, Hank (Dean Norris), to the take down of a meth lab. Here he encounters his former student, Jesse, who has managed to escape the drug raid. Cornering Jesse later, Walter threatens to turn him into the DEA if Jesse refuses to partner with him in making and selling methamphetamine. Having no choice but to agree, Jesse purchases an RV in which to cook the meth, which the two do in the desert beyond Albuquerque.
Jesse takes the pure-grade crystal meth to Krazy-8 to sell. However, he is forced by Krazy-8 and Emilio (John Koyama) at gunpoint to lead them to the RV in the desert to show them where he obtained the drugs. In order to save his and Jesse’s lives, Walter agrees to show Krazy-8 and Emilio how to make the pure meth. Instead, he concocts a mixture that causes an explosion, rendering Krazy-8 and Emilio unconscious and presumably dead or dying, while he and Jesse escape by donning gas masks.
1
For example, see D’Acci (1994) on the television series,