6A — Friday, October 4, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
By Mark McClain
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/04/19
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
10/04/19
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Friday, October 4, 2019
ACROSS
1 Crossed the mob,
in a way
5 Insignificant
points
9 When repeated,
Second British
Invasion band
14 Second person
of old?
15 “No problems
here”
16 “... the __ of
defeat”: “Wide
World of Sports”
phrase
17 Steaming flow
18 Casual eatery
19 One spun by a
juggler
20 Deity worshiped
by backyard
chefs?
23 July 4th show
failure
24 Attach, in a way
25 NFL scores
28 Underground
support
31 “ASAP!”
36 7-10 split, to a
bowler?
39 Exploring toon
40 Conceals
41 Support for
driving and
kicking
42 Flying toys
43 Dumbo’s flying
aids
44 Distiller Walker’s
treatise about a
whisky grain?
46 Home of the
Senators
48 Ruckus
49 Double curve
50 Two-time U.S.
Open champ
52 Played the first
card
54 Hester Prynne’s
trademark milk-
producing farm?
62 So it could be
heard
63 Where I-90 and
I-79 meet
64 Rock’s Bon __
66 Fire sign
67 With 68-Across,
words before
“easy”
68 See 67- or
69-Across
69 With 68-Across,
studied
70 Army installation
71 Loch with a
legend
DOWN
1 Baseball Cards:
Abbr.
2 Melville captain
3 1960s-’80s Chevy
4 Bank employee
5 Words to a
growler
6 Apple on a desk
7 Vegan staple
8 Sport with disks
9 Togged out
10 Not-cute fruit
11 Large chorus of
cheers
12 Opposition prefix
13 Duma “Don’t
think so!”
21 Uses for warmth,
as wood
22 Dainty drinks
25 Cops as a unit
26 Marvelous
27 Get around
29 Eye-related prefix
30 Layers
32 Father of Thor
33 French
possessive
34 Low cards
35 Relief providers
37 To whom Rick
says, “We’ll
always have
Paris”
38 Orderly
42 Divided land
44 Put a stop to
45 Least spicy
47 Tidied the garden
51 A lot to pay
53 Tangy mustard
54 Filing tool
55 Dagwood
neighbor
56 Saloon __
57 Third of four
canonical
gospels
58 Thus
59 Fixes on the sly
60 Wander
61 Part of YSL
65 April 15 org., or,
as a plural, a
hint to four long
puzzle answers
This article contains spoilers from the series “Breaking
Bad.”
The first acquaintance Walter White ever killed almost
escaped with his life, twice. Walt (Bryan Cranston,
“Sneaky Pete”) strangled New Mexico-based, Latino
methamphetamine distributor Krazy-8 (Max Arciniega,
“Bosch”) three episodes into the five-season run of
“Breaking Bad.” Over the next several seasons, Walt
gets much more practice eliminating his opposition in
the drug trade and his murder methods becoming more
laissez-faire, but at the time Krazy-8 posed a legitimate
challenge to the nascent drug lord. His second, nearly
successful attempt to convince his captor that he deserved
to live was lengthy, involved. Life stories were exchanged
and morals were appealed to over the piss-bucket and
the meals Walt would bring to his prisoner, who was
bike-locked by the neck to a pole in Walt’s partner Jesse
Pinkman’s (Aaron Paul, “BoJack Horseman”) basement.
Krazy-8’s first escape attempt was much simpler, though,
as he merely limped down the road outside the suburban
house, illegitimately claimed by Jesse from his late aunt,
on foot. It is that scene — Walt driving down the road and
depositing Krazy-8’s body into the trunk of his Pontiac
Aztek — that haunts me.
How is that? In a show that includes shots of a man’s
face, half-intact, half-skeletal, after a bomb detonates, a
show with sequences inside a neo-Nazi torture chamber,
how did Krazy-8 getting caught and dumped in the
protagonist’s trunk get its staying power in my brain?
While the shock and vulgarity of the latter scene is much
less obvious, it is more affecting for its insidiousness, its
absurdity. Because one man plucked the other man he
hadn’t finished killing yet right off the street. A suburban
neighborhood in Albuquerque, by no means unpopulous,
had nothing to say in response. He got away with it
without the added stress of hiding it.
More than 11 years have passed since that episode
aired, just under six since the series finale, and now the
makers of “Breaking Bad” have another episode in store.
The film sequel, “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie,” is set
for limited theatrical and digital release on Netflix Oct. 11,
a week from today. The only concern expectant fans seem
to have for “El Camino” is whether or not it will live up
to the original incarnation’s dramatic caliber, reminiscent
of the fanatic intellectual gridlock that blesses revered
stories’ adaptations into other mediums. Aren’t there
better questions we might hazard to pose?
I’m afraid we’re too enamored with Walt’s story and
the show’s glory to question it at all, including when we
look to what this film will have to offer. The untouchability
of the show and the untouchability of Walter White are so
entangled that the inner workings of the show, at times
problematic and overly romantic, are hidden. My aim is
to begin to untwine them, to bring them to light, so that
we might assess whether “El Camino” is being used as
an opportunity to revel in these fantasies further, or to
outgrow them.
The Suburbs: How to hide in plain sight
“I’m supporting my community. I hide in plain sight,
same as you,” says Gustavo “Gus” Fring (Giancarlo
Esposito, “The Get Down”) to Walt in a crowded hospital
wing, in an episode of Season 3 titled “I See You.” Both
men are waiting to hear about the condition of Walt’s
brother-in-law, Hank Schaffer (Dean Norris, “Scandal”),
a DEA agent who has just barely survived a violent
altercation with two men from the Mexican drug cartel,
twins Leonel (Daniel Moncada, “Justified”) and Marco
Salamanca (Luis Moncada, “Queen of the South”). To no
one else’s knowledge, however, Gus is also there to assess
the condition of the other survivor, Leonel, who was not
supposed to come out of it alive. Gus knows that because
he orchestrated the whole thing.
But let’s back up. Because, while it is true that
Gus was the man behind the attack, both Walt and
Gus share responsibility for the violence that almost
claimed three lives. Several episodes prior, Leonel
and Marco’s cousin Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz,
“Major Crimes”) was Walt and Jesse’s distributor.
Later kidnapped by the violent, volatile, drug-addicted
Tuco, Walt and Jesse try (unsuccessfully) to poison
him to save their own lives. In the end, though, they
don’t have to. Hank, who was tracking Jesse’s car
as part of an investigation of Walt’s disappearance,
ends up on the right side of a shootout with Tuco.
To avenge his death, the Salamanca family at first
turns their attention to Walt. But Gus, dependent on
Walt for his product of unrivaled purity, first warns
the Salamancas to wait until his business with Walt
has concluded, then redirects their attention toward
Hank, the man who actually pulled the trigger.
All that and yet there the two of them stand,
conversing in a sea of cops. Wearing clean button-
downs, untouched by the carnage of the battles they
mechanized. Hiding in plain sight. How do they do it?
Where does their camouflage come from?
It has something to do with their button-downs.
Something to do with the houses they drove from
to get there, the homes they will return to when they
leave, that won’t have cops parked in their driveways
when they get back. Not everyone can hide in plain
sight, can they? Could a Mexican-American man have
inhabited that same space in the hospital free of attention,
suspicion? Could Jesse — in his baggy, ever-oversized
sweatshirts and jeans, with his designation as resident
methhead? Hiding in plain sight requires a particular set
of conditions.The camouflaged must satisfy a number of
invisible checkboxes before their surroundings cooperate,
before they fade into the landscape. One of the foremost
checkboxes Gus and Walt fill (but Walt most readily) is
that of suburban existence, and the status that comes
with it. The suburbs have a hand in protecting these two
participants in the drug trade.
Let me be clear: I’m not talking about merely physical
plots of land on the outskirts of a city, or implying that a
picket fence will fend off the DEA. I’m talking about the
ideology and social constructions that are as foundational
to suburbia as the cement and steel upon which the
suburban homes rest. I’m talking about the suburbs as
a narrative about its inhabitants, which subsumes their
individual narratives and tells an incorrigible story of
good citizenship and clean records. I’m talking about the
people who are rarely cast for the narrative — particularly
people of color and unmarried folks. I’m talking about a
myth, but a powerful, historical, lasting one, with wordly
implications.
Historian Elaine Tyler May has written at length
about the distinct effects of postwar
suburbanization on the American
family. In “Containment at Home,”
the first chapter of her book
“Homeward Bound,” May evaluates
the role the suburbs were supposed to
play during the Cold War. They were
envisioned as a “bulwark” against the
most prominent political concern of
the day — that is, communism and
class relations. (It is not difficult to see
how this stolid bulwark might remain
in place even as the political climate
changes, deflecting our evolving
concerns.) The latter portion of the
chapter May devotes to analyzing
survey data from suburban-American
husbands and wives from the Cold
War
Era.
Unsurprisingly,
these
firsthand accounts of the costs and
benefits of suburban life suggest that
suburbanites maintained a good deal
of faith, however unrealistic, in the
pacifying effect of the suburbs. One
man in particular, Joseph, husband
of fellow interviewee Emily, was
recorded going on a jaded rant in
which he remarks, “Love of neighbor
… get him before he gets you.” May
follows with an interpretation of how
Joseph’s outlook on the world affects
what he expects from the suburbs in
turn: “Joseph’s cynicism toward the
wider world made him place even
higher hopes on the family to be a
buffer.”
I think May’s term buffer might
be a more precise representation of
what suburban status offers. What
buffer accounts for that camouflage
doesn’t is that the protection goes
in two directions. The protective
sphere of the suburbs absorbs the
shock of social ills, but also deflects
accusations of complicity in those
ills. The suburbs are presumed “safe”
from the outside world, so it follows
that the outside world has nothing to
fear from them. This cycle of mutual protection is only
sustainable, however, when it’s left untouched, unspoken
of. Don’t let in anyone new, anyone who doesn’t look the
same, and no flags will be raised.
Jesse Pinkman may have grown up in the suburbs,
but he loses that source of protection four episodes into
the series. His parents have no tolerance for his drug
addiction and selling and will not let him inhabit their
sanctum. The irony is that their younger, high-achieving
son Jake (Benjamin Petry) uses drugs as well — he just
hides it better. In Season One, Jesse asks to stay with his
parents for a couple of days, but when their housekeeper
finds a marijuana cigarette in his bedroom, they kick him
out. Before he leaves their house for the last time, Jake
runs outside and thanks his big brother for covering for
him — the cigarette that lost Jesse his suburban family life
was actually Jake’s.
Walt’s role in his suburban household is more
gridlocked. He’s the provider, the father of two children.
Even when his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn, “Shades of
Blue”) figures out where Walt’s additional money comes
from, she does not turn him in. She tries multiple times to
divorce him, but he almost always finds a way back into
their home, to the point where it seems inevitable, or at
least by social design. Walt does not go on the run until
the third-to-last episode of the series, after his wife and
son find out that Walt’s actions led to his own brother-in-
law’s death.
Whereas Jesse loses the protection of suburban
existence almost instantly, Walt never quite does until the
very end. And it shows.
Selective silences in “Breaking Bad” (after
Langston Hughes)
Héctor Salamanca (Mark Margolis, “The Affair”)
doesn’t speak. He appears to have suffered a debilitating
stroke sometime before Walt entered the drug trade; he
lives in a nursing home and uses a wheelchair. Instead of
speaking, he communicates primarily through the use of
a bell: a ding means yes, silence means no. The only time
we hear his voice is in flashbacks, in which he speaks his
native Spanish.
When characters confront him about his past as a
member of the cartel in Mexico, or to inform him of
the repercussions from his fraught past that his family
members now have to bear — I’m thinking of a scene
when Gus shares that he just murdered the last of Don
Salamanca’s descendents, terminating the Salamanca line
for good — all the elderly man can do in response is breathe
more vigorously, curl up his lip and dart his eyes around
the room in a wild fury, not unspeakable, but unspoken.
Echo:
Why are
Only white drug dealers
Allowed to speak?
Don Salamanca’s twin nephews Leonel and Marco
do not speak, either. That is never explained. They
communicate through nods, glances and choreographed
acts of violence. We hear their voices in one flashback,
speaking Spanish, and perhaps one other scene. Aside
from that, we never hear why they do the horrific things
they do.
Echo:
Will we ever
Listen
To Latinx voices?
The perimeter of Walt’s drug empire is always quiet,
untouched until he and his associates arrive. It made
for some beautiful, disarming cinematography: open
desert, terracotta-tinged landscape, the lone vehicle
coughing out its cloud of dust as it makes its way across
the screen, uncontested. It is with shame that I admit it
did not hit me that these supposedly empty lands are
actually reservations until Walt says the title of Season
5, episode 13 — “To’hajiilee” — aloud and adds that it’s
the name of a Native American settlement. The random
Native American character, usually performing a Good
Samaritan function, showed up here and there, but not
enough to make their existence felt or relevant, to the
purposes of the show.
Echo:
How many people
Did “Breaking Bad”
Silence?
In “Breaking Bad,” identity and place of origin quietly
dictate not only what you are able to get away with, but
also how much of a story you get to have. This reality has
large, obvious, somatic manifestations in the physical
violence different bodies are susceptible to, even though
many of them operate within the same economy; I
could compare Walt’s wound log to those of many other
characters, and the results would be similar, if not more
dramatic. But there are also subtler manifestations of
this insidious determinism, equally worth noting, in the
violence others’ stories and ethnic identities sustain.
Revoking the power of a disenfranchised people
to tell their own story is an injustice. To continue
this disenfranchisement in today’s political climate,
however, would move from unsettling to outrageous, to
corroboration in today’s more concerted destruction of
immigrant and indigenous peoples. “El Camino” would
do well to begin the work of refusing these silencings.
To start, perhaps it should remember its very title comes
from the language of the characters it tried to silence for
five seasons.
The other Heisenberg effect
“I think the reason why viewers, myself included,
continue to root for Walt, even in this tough final season,
is that he continues to serve as a fantasy figure,” said
Dr. David Pierson, a professor of media studies at the
University of Southern Maine, in an interview published
by Pacific Standard two days before the “Breaking Bad”
series finale “Felina” aired in 2013. “By living a double-
life and identity as Heisenberg, he is able to take charge
of his life, to become more assertive and to become a self-
sufficient entrepreneur. For the first time in his life, he is
able to effectively use his talents as a chemist to build an
empire. He also does it for the right reasons, to secure his
family’s future for a couple of generations.”
Contrast Pierson’s latter assessment with one of
the final confessions Walt makes to his wife Skylar in
“Felina.” He begins, “All the things that I did, you need
to understand — ” She cuts him off: “If I have to hear,
one more time, that you did this for the family … ” He
interjects. “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And
I was really … ” After a long pause: “I was really alive.”
So yes, there were times, thankfully, when the show
wrested awake from the fantasy Pierson describes,
moments of consciousness, of reflexivity. A lot of these
moments were clustered in the final two seasons of the
show — which are also arguably the best two. I believe
it happened every time something forced Walt to lose
his illusion of control, of invincibility; these moments
seem to coincide with times when the writers also
remembered Walt’s situation was a cautionary tale,
rather than a fantasy for viewers to crave.
There were of course, other times, when Walt’s
invincibility high was so potent, we got a secondhand
high. The finale of Season Four embodies this, when
Walt finally outsmarts Gus, leveraging Jesse’s loyalty
and Don Salamanca’s revenge wish in the process, and
kills his biggest rival to date — he then declares over the
phone to a suspicious Skyler, “I won.” These were the
moments that engendered Walt’s aspirational quality,
as well as irrational hatred for characters who disrupted
his fantasy. We might call the sum of these moments
the other Heisenberg effect: Writing that made Walt’s
invincibility seem the result of his intellect alone
changes the nature of his reception by audiences.
At any point, “Breaking Bad” was in flux between
reveling in Walt’s fantastical double-life and exposing
the dramatic moral compromising and social positioning
that granted Walt the ability to lead those two lives in
turns. While the show may be a combination of both,
what is the net effect? I’m not positive the moments of
reflexivity sufficed to force its audience into the same
consciousness, the same awakeness. Fantasies have an
inertia that is difficult to overcome. It seems to be the
inertia that rests on the minds of the sizable proportion
of audience members who expressed severe hatred
for Skyler White — likely on the basis of her continual
resistance against Walt’s manipulation. Among these
fans are Facebook users who created a “I Hate Skyler
White” page on the site, and a man who expressed a
desire to kill Anna Gunn — the actress who plays Skyler
— online, as Gunn herself noted in an op-ed for The New
York Times. I think it’s safe to say that it will take more
than two seasons and a handful of lucid moments to
undo these kinds of illusions.
Rethinking ‘Breaking Bad’ (before you watch the film)
JULIANNA MORANO
Daily Arts Writer
FILM LONGFORM NOTEBOOK
AMC
It has something to do with their button-downs.
Something to do with the houses they drove from to
get there, the homes they will return to when they
leave, that won’t have cops parked in their driveways
when they get back.
I’m afraid we’re
too enamored
with Walt’s story
and the show’s
glory to question it
all, including when
we look to what
this film will have
to offer.
Read more at
michigandaily.com