Cannot unsee

[lizbee]

This week, at the behest of suburbannoir, I started watching Breaking Bad.  (We have a thing where I watch one of her favourite shows, she watches one of mine, etc.  Last year I watched The Wire for her, and she watched Babylon 5 for me.  SHUT UP, THEY ARE TOTALLY COMPARABLE.)

Anyway, I'm only four episodes in, but it's the internet, I've seen pictures from future seasons and whatnot, and I already know that Skyler is the very worst character in the history of storytelling (on account of how she's a woman, and has opinions, and expects to be treated with respect, as far as I can tell), and according to The Guardian, the whole show shamefully appropriates the drug culture of people of colour (and only PoC) and turns it into a white middle class fantasy, and worse, isn't even an accurate depiction of the meth industry! 

(Which I can vouch for.  I've transcribed cases involving meth cooks and users, and either way, the transcript tends to come out looking like this:

SUSPECT:   ...(INAUDIBLE)... fuckin' ...(INAUDIBLE)... cuntin' ...(INAUDIBLE)... fuck - - -

And let me tell you, I am SHOCKED and APPALLED that television, of all media, would enhance the truth.)

The actual point, however, of this post is this:

Yep. Good luck getting that one out of your head!  And don't do meth.  It's legit nasty.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

So all of the white meth users and meth cooks back where I'm from who left the toxic remnants of meth labs scattered around my home town were also appropriating the drug culture of POCs? Or was I imagining them as part of a white middle class fantasy?

[attackfish]

Imagining dear, just like my brother imagined living next to a meth kitchen and kidnapping their abused and neglected dog, and just like I imagined that my high school had all the best drugs, because the kids had the money to afford them. And all those heroin addicts I was friends with since grade school, or related to and known my whole life? Figments of my white middle class imagination too.

[lizbee]

I imagine you were, yes!

Also, it is totally not racist at all to suggest that drug use and dealing is exclusively the domain of people of colour. NOT. AT. ALL. /sarcasm

[prof_pangaea]

but meth is like the whitest drug there is!

[lizbee]

Actually, I wasn't sure if that only held true in Australia!

[wolfy_writing]

That's what I was thinking!

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, without the help of The Guardian, I would not have realized that "He can't be a drug dealer, he's white!" was the opposite of racism, instead of just plain racism.

[nonelvis]

PERFECT.

[lizbee]

It kind of makes me want some kind of fic, only it would last a whole paragraph before Lin shut that thing down.

[attackfish]

*Tries hard not to laugh at the idea that drug culture is entirely a POC thing that white middle class people have no involvement with, given that I'm a white middle class girl with addicts all over my family.*

The thing that kills me about Breaking Bad is that I'm from Albuquerque, and I was much much closer to the drug culture there then I would have liked. Yeah, meth exists there, and it's a problem, but not more than anywhere else, and the drug everybody worries about is heroin. Heroin is a huge deal in Albuquerque because the major town for the cartels to bring it up from Mexico and then distribute it from is right near by, and we're the nearest city. It's dead cheep, and it's everywhere. Between Breaking Bad and In Plain Sight (which I love) and their whole storyline with Mary's sister being involved with the meth dealer, everybody thinks Albuquerque=meth, which given that we have a horrible, horrible drug problem, and it's not meth, is kind of sickly ironic. Also, I couldn't believe the sister and the meth dealer storyline. I would have had a much easier time buying it if she were smuggling heroin instead.

[lizbee]

I didn't know that! In Australia, at least, there's a lot of flailing about meth because it's so easy to manufacture, whereas heroin has to be imported. So meth is dead cheap here, by drug standards.

[prof_pangaea]

meth is dead cheap throughout most of the US, because of its ease of manufacture (and the southwest is definitely brimming with it, although i'm not sure where the meth capital of the country is at the moment). not to speak for attackfish, but i gathered than heroin is unusually cheap in albuquerque because it's so close to an important distribution point, not that it's universally about the same price as meth across the country. i mean, i would assume not, my mom had to pawn a lot of jewelry to support her heroin habit, and that was 13 years ago.

[attackfish]

Yes, exactly. Heroin is extremely cheep in Albuquerque not in the US as a whole. Price has come down in the last few years, since the Taliban lost their total control over Afghanistan (Whatever else they did, they kept Afghanistan out of opium production) but it's not a cheep drug. Except in Albuquerque. The city is also crawling with heroin distributors.

Actually, the ease of manufacture is why I couldn't buy Mary's sister smuggling meth to New Jersey like I could heroin. Meth can be made anywhere. There's no reason to lug it cross country. Heroin can't.

[umadoshi]

We have a thing where I watch one of her favourite shows, she watches one of mine, etc.

That right there is a beautiful friendship.

[lizbee]

I like to think we both get something out of it, although her great taste in TV means I'm probably winning.

[sabotabby]

Breaking Bad is so great. I would say that it's the greatest.

I feel like one of Skyler's last defenders. I got my mom hooked on the show and I constantly have to argue why Skyler-hate is irrational and misogynist.

[lizbee]

You can't be the last, because before I even watched the show, I knew three or four people who would regularly rant about how Skylar is unfairly maligned and generally punished for expecting to be treated like an adult.

[sabotabby]

The things she does are way less awful than the things Walter does, and while she's sanctimonious and hypocritical, he is exponentially more so. And yet she gets way more hate. This is wrong and makes me give fandom the stinkeye.

[sabra_n]

Huh. I have to say, that's the first time I've heard of anyone saying that Breaking Bad appropriates "PoC drug culture"(!). I have heard objections to the way PoCs are only cast as enemies in the show, but that's about it.

[lizbee]

See, that's a criticism that doesn't surprise me at all! With the exception of Hank's Latino partner in the DEA, so far all the good guys have been white. And I haven't heard much to suggest that changes in any big way.

[nonelvis]

It doesn't, unfortunately, though I will say that IMO the most interesting character the show has other than Walter White is a PoC. You'll meet him in S2.

[skywaterblue]

This is true.

[aberration]

Well, that's an excellent follow-up to the Walter White murder nightmares I was having earlier this week!

[angrymermaids]

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how Breaking Bad could possibly appropriate POC drug culture when meth is overwhelmingly stereotyped as a white person drug. Specifically a middle-class white person drug. I can't. (Haven't seen the show, but my brother loves it.)

Here in white-ass Nebraska, I always see cops hanging around the tanks of ammonia that goes into corn fertilizer by day and meth labs by night. I guess people try to sneak up and siphon it off when no one's looking.

[skywaterblue]

The problem I have with Skyler is that she's about as well-cast as Mandy Hampton in the West Wing. I should defend her, because she's theoretically an interesting female character and I dislike being on the same side as most of these people, but really. She has no chemistry at all with the main lead and is mostly inert in pretty much everything else the show gives her to do.

[lizbee]

I thought Mandy was a really good character who got a rough deal because she kept criticising Sorkin's Gary Stu.

[skywaterblue]

Except that Mandy was written and cast primarily by Sorkin himself, and later Amy is just Mandy mark 2 with a more charming actress. (In fact, Mandy is just one in a series of 'opinionated brunettes who have a past with Sorkin's Gary Stu and with whom Gary Stu has unresolved feelings'. See also Amy in West Wing and Mac on Newsroom.)

That said, I actually am not a Mandy hater because she does interest me, probably because I like the actress in other things. Skyler doesn't, and I have a drinking game where you drink when the actress makes an expression that isn't one of the following: 'mouth slightly downturned, eyes aglaze in the middle distance'. Or 'lower lip hanging impotently downward in futile protestation of something'. You don't drink very often.

Skyler-the-character has kind of a bum deal, though, in that she's ostensibly the lawful good character, but it would absolutely break the narrative adventures if she was ever allowed to act on it. So the writers come up with ever more inventive ways to have her uselessly object to the main drive of the story and very involved sideplots. Some of the sideplotting is more effective than others, and they have - by the start of the fifth season at least - found a character she bounces off well, but unfortunately she's basically a big third wheel for most of the series.

[lizbee]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on Mandy and Skyler.

[abigail_n.livejournal.com]

This (http://tigerbeatdown.com/2012/07/24/the-whitest-show-on-tv-11-statements-about-amcs-breaking-bad/) is a pretty good (albeit spoilery) discussion of Breaking Bad's problems with race. The issue isn't cultural appropriate (a rather bizarre criticism to make since just about every drug dealer on the show who isn't Walt is a PoC) but the near-absence of non-white people except as criminals (this is apparently especially egregious given the demographics of Albequerque), and even more than that, the way PoC are treated as disposable obstacles in Walt's path. There's a pair of characters in the third season, for example, who are basically inhuman - they have no thought, no feeling, no desire and no motivation except getting Walt, and they are literally taken apart on their way to him (which barely slows them down, since again, they're not human enough to care about themselves or each other). That level of dehumanization just doesn't exist for the white characters.

It's an excellent show, but its failure on this front leaves a bad taste in my mouth.