|
|
|
January 11th, 2010
10:30 am - Breaking Bad and A Serious Man
Charlie Brooker's article in the Guardian today is about Breaking Bad - well, it's central to his metaphor, with a Youtube link - so I continue to be confident in my prediction that it's going to be what all the cool kids watch and/or talk about. Oh yes.
Breaking Bad has several interesting but I think coincidental similarities to A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers' latest film. That's about a Physics professor who contracts lung cancer and I think it is about uncertainty. Breaking Bad is about a Chemistry teacher who contracts lung cancer, and adopts the street name Heisenburg. Slightly obvious code perhaps. Towards the end of the second series Breaking Bad starts to lose touch with normality, in inexplicable occurrences which seem to have an elusive meaning, very much like the Coens' films.
But I think Brooker, for the purposes of the piece, makes the overall feeling one of millenial decadence instead of anguish.
|
The main character in A Serious Man doesn't have lung cancer, his wife separates from him? I should have fleshed out the description more. He takes the lung cancer test at the start of the film, and it's implied that he receives a positive test result a few seconds after the film finishes. In a way that frames the uncertainty of the whole story (I think).
I won't say anything on 'his wife separates from him' but that's another area of uncertainty in Breaking Bad. I don't think the two have influenced each other, I think they developed separately, but there are some parallels. Huh, I missed that somehow. I mean, I know he was getting checked out by the doctor at the start and was called with some bad news at the end, but hadn't realised he was being tested for lung cancer in particular. Yes, well I tend to create gappy models :-) |
|
|
|
|
LiveJournal.com |
