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

