It's how I think.
And the underlying obsession here that ties these strands together is mostly for the various processes that take a cultural product from germ to fully-realized idea to production to receiver. In other words, when it comes to culture I'm interested in not just the proverbial sausages but in learning how they're made and how they're consumed (incidentally, both of which, in the case of actual sausages, are horrifying). And so the official Breaking Bad Podcast and the various reviewers have been invaluable to me, and I invest wild amounts of time soaking in everything I can about the creative process and critical reception of my favorite show.
(By the way, probably the most refreshing part of the Podcast is that Vince Gilligan is the first to admit his relative cluelessness about where the story is going in broad strokes. The writers seem to love letting characters dictate the causal action, leading to realistic plot and characterization. "Where's Walt's head at now?" is always the central impulse. They don't always know where that "chessboard approach" will lead them. So that's, uh, the one thing I have in common with Vince Gilligan as a writer!)
But anyway, precisely because of my obsessive way of looking at things, I tend to think and empathize more with creators and editors and critics (and the most dedicated fans) than I do with "the rabble" - that is, the casual fans - if you will. Most people don't take cultural objects that seriously; when the public-at-large does invest in culture, it's usually in more accessible, simple stuff. And it can be hard for me to relate.
That said, it saddens me that some reviewers are taking to task the casual and misguided viewers of Breaking Bad that are apparently missing the main thematic points of the series. Not just that but these reviewers have coined a sticky pejorative: "Bad Fans". These so-called Bad Fans root for Walter White unquestioningly, no matter what evil he perpetrates. Bad Fans go out of their way not just to root for Walt but to elaborately justify his evils every step of the way. Here's a typical quote:
If you seek to deny or minimize the parts of art that don't fit your reductive interpretation of Walt as a basically decent man, or a man who moves with a purpose and is somehow "badass," as opposed to the complex monster the show has actually presented over five seasons, you are in fact, as Nussbaum wrote in her piece on the scene, watching the show wrong. In fact, you're trying to turn a smart show into a stupid one. And you really should ask yourself why.
--Matt Zoller Seitz, "Seitz on Breaking Bad, and Why Viewers Need to Whitewash Walter White"There's a lot of validity in this sentiment. Some people just plain aren't watching very closely to a show that has paid inordinate attention to detail. But there's also a nougat of real, undeniable conflict there: Critics and a large group of fans tend to see Breaking Bad as a giant, brilliant thematic science experiment that explores the idea of someone deciding to fundamentally change their nature, and if not their nature then nearly all the external trappings by which we define a life. We see the consequences, cosmic and personal, of Walt slipping into the dark side, outside the law, his formerly innocuous livelihood now in drugs, his once-milquetoast M.O. increasingly murder and machination.
And another large and vocal group of fans tends to root for Walt, or to root for and against characters in general, to focus on the awesome train robberies and miss or ignore the children shot, to focus on the action and miss the characterizations, to focus on plot and surface elements instead of thematic elements. In short, these "Bad Fans" watch Breaking Bad more like a traditional television series that happens to be of a very high quality. One suspects that these fans, gifted a bottle of champagne, would promptly mix it with Pepsi.
While there is some validity in Seitz's piece, I guess my first real complaint with this dichotomy is that it ignores the obvious third way out: Viewers are at any times entitled to reject the stated central themes and narratives of the show. If this is science, then experiments must be allowed to fail at your own personal Bunsen burner. And if the thematic stuff might fall apart for you as a viewer, maybe you'd seek instead to focus on less sophisticated elements. The same is true for characters, direction, plot, and all that. Maybe Jesse's character just doesn't work for some people. No harm, no foul.
Besides, even if you'd fully engaged with every component of the series? Even then, Breaking Bad creates meaning by making this full engagement difficult. The show trafficks deliberately in contradictory motion between one of its central themes and one of its central goals of perspective: Breaking Bad on one hand shows the vast and overwhelmingly negative moral consequences of Walt's decisions, and on the other shows the entire series essentially from Walt's perspective. Walt is central to almost every significant action in the series, and these actions and their effects are typically shown from the perspective of Walt. Giving Walt the protagonist's perspective is designed to create pity and empathy for Walt's choices even as the havoc caused by his choices are in mind appear right in front of him, usually just one scheme gone right or wrong away. So watching the show thematically, aesthetically, or "stupidly" necessitates at all times rejecting one of its cores or accepting all its cores only through ironic pressure. You're meant to be kept in a state of tension between judgment and empathy at all times. Yes, Walt's beyond saving, but he wants to talk to his son and help his wife and kids. Sure, Walt's doing it for his family, but he's also murdering someone to get there.
And yet... that conflict between judgment and empathy for Walt, while immensely rewarding and thematically interesting... doesn't necessarily mean you have to feel that way to get a full experience from the show. After all, the perspective for engaging with the show that an individual takes might seem like "I'm rooting for Walt at all costs." But as an intellectual exercise that these people are engaging in, aren't those mental gymnastics precisely what the show is about, from a different angle? Walt's rationales, the lies that get out of hand, the way lies erode trust and destroy family, the sympathy for the devil produced solely because the camera is placed behind him, and so on. If fans blindly defending Walt's arrogance at all costs is unrealistic and sociopathic, then why is it at all realistic or sympathetic for Walt himself to do the same? After all,just like the "Bad Fans", Walt himself blindly defends his actions with sophisticated smokescreens of lies and rationalizations. Isn't that quite a human response to the enormity of the evil he would otherwise have to claim at all times? Isn't that smokescreen of lies quite a human response that speaks to our sense of self-preservation - that Walt, no matter what he's done, simply can't be terrible, for if he is, then how can he defend going on living? And when you put the viewer in Walt's position, isn't it quite a human response to follow him every step of the way? That's what the "Bad Fan" is doing, he's just doing it more earnestly than critics, critics that understandably recoil with judgment at Cranston's emotionally draining faces of evil.
The "Bad Fan" empathizes with Walt more than the "Good Fan" but, can we ask why that preference necessarily a bad thing when we're talking about fiction? Like, after all, why is Vince Gilligan's clockwork Western-morality-and-comeuppance universe more important than its central subject's fundamental perspective? Put it this way: Poseidon is certainly greater in power and moral scope than Ulysses, but that doesn't mean we have to side with Poseidon's view of the world. We don't have to privilege the morality of the show's universe over the morality of Walter White. See, Walt is a fictional character, the ideology of Gilligan's universe is a fiction, and when Gilligan is butting heads between Walt and that ideology deliberately, it's not necessarily a misread to take Walt's side. In fact, if you're inclined to take Walt's side from the beginning, it's not necessarily a misread to keep taking Walt's side. In fact, if you really are inclined to take Walt's side from the beginning and you take the show's vision of Walt's transformation as an experiment at face value, isn't it most honest in scientific terms to stick to Walt model? After all, the point of science is to build knowledge, and I don't see any shame in taking Walt's model to its fullest conclusion just to see how it pans out, however irredeemable his actions are in Western morality and in the morality of the show's universe.
Whatever the case, we've actually had this debate before in basketball culture, over the so-called "liberated fandom" idea (and meme-friendly phrase) coined by Free Darko several years ago. Seriously, it's quite similar. Acolytes of this "liberated fandom" tended to reject the territorial nature of traditional fandom. Liberated fans felt uneasy with the notion of unquestioningly rooting for a team based on where they were born. At the very least, you didn't have to make a crap hegemony out of rooting interests - if you don't like the way Kobe plays? Feel free to hate him and hate watching him, even if you are a die-hard traditional Lakers fan. Do you like defense? Root for the Bulls and stop rooting for them as soon as trade your favorite defensive player away! Don't root for anyone. Root for styles, root for individual players that see the floor for 5 minutes, root for ideologies. Root for politics, root for irrational confidence. Root for honestly whatever you want, and don't get too entangled in how you're supposed to feel according to curmudgeon sportswriters and homers at the bar. Because, as they say, the world is yours.
I'm probably getting this a bit wrong, because "liberated fandom" is probably best defined almost tautologically as "the type of perspective and aesthetics typical of blogs like Free Darko". But the key word is "liberated" and, if you read Free Darko (especially Bethlehem Shoals and Eric Freeman), you'll get exactly what I'm talking about. And for me, yeah, I totally glommed onto this perspective because of the aforementioned weirdness of perspective I bring to the table.
Whatever the case, there was and is conflict over liberated fandom. Sure, American fans of every sort decide to root for random Premier League teams, but there is in every sport that pressure by traditionalists to root for a team ever-present in sports, as if you're not really getting the full experience unless you're actively playing the fandom roulette with your soul and living with your decision until the end of time. And these traditionalists tend to see "liberated fans" as being overly invested in the aesthetic element, insufficiently invested in the tribal element, and overall, being what one might call hipsters, constantly co-opting teams and players and brands to promote their own sense of hipness and fashion and politics and ideology, front-running when convenient to their image, rooting for the underdog when convenient to their image. The world may be yours, but you still gotta own it, countered the traditionalists. Not that this perspective was altogether accurate or fair, but it was at least justified. Shoals himself seemed to have whimsy and fickleness in spades, which from an aesthetic perspective, makes reading him a treat and pinning him down when you disagree in substance a nightmare.
And in the end it's just an irresolvable conflict (this sentence is how I will end all my movies, including this parenthetical). Traditionalists tend to see the pleasures liberated fans get as being phony, unearned, fickle, superficial, and overly ironic, while liberated fans tend to see the traditional fans as being territorial, loyal-to-a-fault, mired and miring, and acting as mindless shills or critics of their teams based almost entirely on allegiance.
But here's what's not irresolvable. Here's the energy that always stirred that conflict. Here's the indisputable center of the debate: Basketball is a really fun sport to watch, and that fun carries with it powerful emotions, aesthetic pleasures, moments earned and unearned, moments ephemeral and eternal, narratives that stretch for days, debates that rage for years, continua of perfect basketball, continua of fascinatingly imperfect basketball, and discrete, unforgettable players, coaches, personalities, and people. Geometries, systems, feelings, athletes, cleverness, intuition, power, speed, limitations, purpose incarnate and yet still rebuffed. And yes, in the final tally, victories, defeats, and all the immeasurable stuff in between. And whatever the hell Game 6 was.
And both sides of the fence labeled LIBERATION can get behind that. You still have that game on, you still get those feelings, you still make those observations, you still find things that make that sport worth your time and attention.
So when I see the comparatively clumsy debate of "Good Fan" vs "Bad Fan" on an explosively brilliant series that seems to do everything right for both groups, and at full-volume and at peak creative powers in every single facet, forgive me if I roll my eyes and ask for a less judgmental dichotomy that recognizes how viewers actually watch vs. how they're supposed to watch something. Because clearly everyone that watches is getting some sort of meaning out of that masterpiece on AMC, and given that we're all at different stages in life and enlightenment and watching with different preconceptions, we are going to get different types and levels of meaning and enjoyment out of what we're watching. Saying that earnest viewers are "you're trying to turn a smart show into a stupid show" ignores that those viewers of that "stupid show" are still getting a damn good show. Personally I tend to think those "Bad Fans", while mostly casual and unengaged, might simply have hit on to odd, unintended facets of the show that work on the themes of the show in an odd way to create a different, equally smart show, and their interpretations might just help a "Good Fan" or two to understand the show's broad, deep appeal.
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