Walter White Wednesday 4

. . . which is also known as “Better Call Saul!”

Saul Goodman (played by Bob Odenkirk) is the slimiest example of the bottom-feeding creature known as a "shyster worm."  As Jesse so eloquently puts it, Goodman (who is definitely NOT a “good man,” heck, it’s not even his real name) is a criminal lawyer.  Emphasis on the first word in the term.  His ethics are suspect, his marketing tactics distasteful, and his office is tacky. 

And yet, I find myself liking the guy.*

A little disclosure is called for at this point.  I’m a lawyer, duly admitted to practice in both the state and Federal courts of my home state.  My dues are current, I regularly attend my continuing legal education sessions, and I’m clean as a whistle with the State Bar.  I know – and can quote chapter and verse from the relevant Rules of Professional Conduct to support my contention – that Saul is a sleazebag who is in violation of several important sections of the rules governing lawyer behavior.  But he’s such a good example of how not to be a good example that I’ve decided to take today's post to talk about him.

Lawyers are the butt of a lot of jokes - a few of them are even funny.  But the sad truth of the matter is that everyone hates lawyers until they need one.  Then the bottom feeder/ambulance chaser is suddenly transformed into the stalwart defender of the Constitution - and I've seen that happen over a simple speeding ticket!  Walter has much bigger issues to deal with and thus, viewers are introduced to Saul, who has a very (shall we say) flexible attitude toward the New Mexico Rules of Professional Conduct.

Professional responsibility is such a big deal in the legal profession that I had to pass two Bar exams before I was eligible to be sworn in to practice law.  One was a dreadful two-day affair that tested me on my knowledge of everything from secured transactions under the Uniform Commercial Code to estate law and civil procedure while the other focused entirely on my state’s Rules of Professional Conduct.  Trust me, the lawyer-client privilege is real and very nearly limitless.  There are a few boundaries and Saul skips gleefully over several of them, including taking an active part in an ongoing criminal enterprise.

But he does protect his clients’ money.  Funny thing, that.  The State Bar has the ability to punish misconduct by attorneys through admonishment, reprimand, censure, suspension and (most harsh) disbarment.  (Aside:  Being disbarred is an extremely serious punishment, since many lawyers really aren’t equipped to do much else other than practice law.  Seriously.)  At any rate, the single act of misconduct that is most likely to result in disbarment is misuse of client funds.  Don’t mess with client cash – ever.  (If you do - be prepared to pick up stakes and move to another jurisdiction and cross your thieving fingers that they'll take you.)  And on that point, Saul acts appropriately.  He takes his share off the top, but stores everything else safely for later pickup by his clients.  Saul is sharp, knows how to poke holes in a weak case (and the job of a defense attorney is to make the prosecutor do his job, which is to meet the burden of proof), and provides a zealous defense for his clients, which is another of the professional responsibilities of an attorney.

By the way, you can thank the Southwest United States for Saul’s goofy ads.  The 1977 case of Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (433 U.S. 350) was the landmark case which approved lawyer advertising.  Prior to then, it was thought that advertising by attorneys was vulgar and would “tarnish the dignified public image of the profession.”  (Really, I can’t make this stuff up.)  While I am all in favor of letting people know that they have the right to representation, I think a Pandora’s Box may have been opened with Bates.  I submit Saul Goodman's “Fatty Fat Fat” as Exhibit A.

*SPOILER ALERT – I try to keep these posts "spoiler free," so skip this if you haven't gotten to Season 3 yet.  If you have, read on.  I find myself especially liking Saul early in Season 3 when he buys the house viewers have come to think of as Jesse’s for our favorite currently-clean tweaker – and at a discount, no less!  Saul knows the law and he knows how to use it to his clients’ advantage and – like it or not – that’s what lawyers get paid to know.

Life On Other Planets

Of course, a film class designed around science fiction is going to have to deal with the idea of life on other planets.  Up until this week, we had only flirted with it - in Forbidden Planet, we're off Earth, but the alien race is long gone (although their advanced technology has been left behind) and in Invasion the aliens come to us, but we only see their "pods."  That changed with this week's assignment.

This week, the class explored Ridley Scott's game-changer Alien and this next week the class sees the sequel Aliens (done by James Cameron).  What comparisons I'm looking forward to reading!  The two movies have sparked any number of film geek debates regarding which is "better" and the answer changes depending on how you set up your parameters for "better."

It's undeniable that Scott changed the landscape with Alien.  You've got a crew of money-grubbing roughnecks who are working on a ship named after a Joseph Conrad novel when things go to hell without a handbasket.  In 1979, Ellen Ripely was something that just hadn't been seen - a woman who was perfectly at home making command decisions even when that involved shooting things.  The best part of this was that Ripley's gender wasn't seen an an issue - she was capable at doing her job and she stayed cool under pressure.  The fact that she was female wasn't part of the equation.  (Even now, we could do with a few more Ripleys and a few less damsels in distress, but that's my opinion.)  Gender is a big deal in both films - it's not coincidence that the computer system in Alien is called "Mother."

But in Aliens, Cameron goes from a horror/science fiction hybrid to an action/science fiction hybrid and Ripley isn't the Lone Survivor (a staple of horror films).  Instead, she becomes Action Mama Bear.  The stakes are higher, the crew are now trained soldiers (a group which includes some tougher-than-nails women), the monsters are ickier, and the Company cares not a bit.  So. Much. To. Discuss!  I can't wait to see what the class does with the two films - both are strong, strong movies on their own, but comparing them takes both films to a different level.  Plus, it's the only time we see both the starting point and a sequel, so there's that element to discuss.

NOTE:  The franchise is still going strong, with Scott taking up the reins again for Prometheus, which has a June 2012 release date.  The film is said to "share DNA strands with Alien.  Different reports call it a "prequel" or a "reboot" of the franchise.  The trailer certainly harkens back to Alien.  See what you think.

Alien Trailer (1979)

Prometheus Trailer (2012)

Meanwhile, I also checked out John Carter, which is based on the first of a series of novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan fame.   The film has an amazing cast, by the way - seems that quite a few folks wanted to get on board with this one.  I enjoyed the movie as what it is - a Disneyfied romance of Brave Earther and Valiant Princess.  Really, John Carter is a nice, goofy, predictable popcorn movie, and I don't mean that as a slam. The problem is this - so many people have ripped off Burroughs in the century since he wrote the Barsoom novels that it's hard to watch this and remember that he mined the vein first.  Instead, the elements come across as "hey, I've seen that somewhere before."  You have - Burroughs got there first on the page, but others beat him to the screen, so this film seems like a re-hash.

Servings from the cliche buffet include:  Carter is an ex-Confederate.  Trying to forge a life beyond the war which took his wife and innocent child, he has run off to the Wild West to seek his fortune.  The Apaches and the colonel of the local fort ("Fort Grant," by the way) have other ideas.  In addition to the Civil War and Wild West bits, there are some steampunk elements (especially in the design of the flying ships of Mars). On Mars, there are plenty of people who look mostly like us (just some exotic tattooing).  And there are four-armed, really alien-looking folks, too.  Language barriers  are taken care of with a sip from the Well of Plot Convenience.  There's an adorable and faithful "space dog" that will save Carter's bacon a time or two.  The flawlessly beautiful Princess of Mars (from a city named - I kid you not - Helium) is portrayed as smart and capable (good), but she must be rescued THREE SEPARATE TIMES from falling to her Certain Doom by Carter literally swooping in to save her.  There's a fight to the death in a space arena with Vicious Space Critters and the bringing together of traditional enemies by Carter's force of personality to defeat the great evil so the world can live in harmony.

Ellen Ripley would have handled things differently, I feel sure, but the movie is a cotton-candy-light romp.  Go enjoy.

 

Walter White Wednesday 3

. . . which isn't about Walter.

One of the many glories of Breaking Bad, which no less a pop culture critic than Stephen King named the best show on TV in 2011, is that it's not a one-trick pony.  Mind you, the Walt/Jess dynamic is one heck of a trick in and of itself, but showrunner Vince Gilligan takes us far beyond that.  Breaking Bad contains very well-crafted, three-dimensional characters in supporting, secondary, and even tertiary roles and that, much like a man wearing an octopus for a hat, is something you just don't see every day.

So let's talk about Hank.

Hank Schrader (played by Dean Norris) is married to Marie.  Marie is Skyler White's sister, making Hank and Marie in-laws of Walter, so there's a family connection there.  The other connection Hank has with Walter is one Hank doesn't know about yet - Hank's the DEA agent in charge of Albuquerque's methamphetamine interdiction unit, so he's chasing ABQ's new kingpin of blue.  This can only lead to complications.

In lesser hands, Hank would be drawn either as a buffoon along the lines of Barney Fife, unable to track down what's right under his nose or as a bald Joe Don Baker as Buford Pusser, complete with axe handle and swagger.  Gilligan doesn't take either of those easy roads, instead giving viewers a far more complex and human character.

Hank - let's face it - can be a jerk.  He's brash, loud, politically incorrect (but at least an equally opportunity insulter), and often someone who causes a certain degree of eye-rolling and deep sighing.  But he's also really, really good at what he does, which is to catch the bad guys without hurting the few remaining innocents in his world.  This is made clear in the first episode of the show.  A bust has been set up (for a house we're going to become familiar with) and everyone is just waiting for the signal from Hank to swoop in.  Hank's rarin' to go, but he carefully and deliberately holds off on giving the order until a school bus has passed by.  This tells us two things - one, that Hank has paid attention to the house long enough to establish the route of the bus and know just when it passes through the neighborhood.   This tells us that Hank is methodical and willing to wait in order to get things right.  And two, he won't compromise the safety of innocents to make his bust.  Getting the bad guys matters - quite a lot, in fact - but he's not going to have to explain third graders as collateral damage.

So when Heisenberg appears in ABQ with his pure-as-prairie-light meth, Hank takes his time.  Everyone makes mistakes.  Everyone.  It's just a matter of time.  This is a fact that should scare Walt spitless, but Walt's tunnel vision has crippled his ability to see what's closing in from the sides.

But Hank is more than Super Cop.  Viewers learn that Hank is human, with all the sometimes messy human connections that most of us have.  He loves his wife (and Marie's got some qualities that strain that affection; I'll get into those in another post), is a surrogate father-figure to his teenage nephew, and he cares about Walt and Skyler.  He home-brews beer in his garage and he likes his life.  And he is not immune to anxiety and injury, although he tries mighty hard to bluff his way past all that bunk.  Hank feels deep bonds of loyalty to the men and women who work with him and to his family - Walt's actions have completely betrayed all of that and, by doing so, placed Hank and others in grave danger from serious Bad Guys (see, they're so bad, I have to capitalize!).

Hank will find this out - some things are inevitable and Walt makes some slips.  Hank's loyalty to his home life has kept him from asking too many questions (after all, this is his chemistry teaching brother-in-law, not some meth-making genius.  Only it is), but Hank's tenacity can't be distracted forever.  And when he does start running down those questions, loyalty to the two halves of his life (work and home) are going to be in direct conflict.  Which side will win out?  I'm betting on "work," but the window is still open for last-minute wagers.

They're Here!

This week, the film class took on the last of the "classics" on the syllabus.  (Also the last of the B&W films!)  A film that can be read as an indictment of the Red Scare and/or the dark shadow of the American dream, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a fascinating film to watch with a little background of the 1950s.  Often, when people think of the America of the 1950s, they think of an idyllic time captured in Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, conveniently forgetting that those television shows were not documentaries.  Life in the 1950s was as messy and complicated as any other time and America was wrestling with itself.  Conformity was prized and people chafed against that.  Racism was rampant, tranquilizers were prescribed at an alarming rate, states tried to regulate the content of comic books, and the consumer culture was booming.  At the same time, we were engaged in a messy not-quite-war in Korea and there was a growing fear that Communists were trying to take us over from within.  Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers tapped into the common fear that our society was being undermined by secret agents who looked just like us, but didn't feel emotions like us.

Set in the fictional California town of “Santa Mira” (which has been used in several other film projects), Invasion holds up well all these years later.  (It should – it’s been remade at least three times in the decades since it was first released.)  Who can you trust?  How do you know?  In a world in which even sleep is deadly, these questions become crucial to answer.  Invasion isn’t gory-scary, but it still packs a psychological punch that may leave viewers as restless as many Americans felt in the 1950s.

COMING SOON:  We leave our study of classics behind and dive into a brave new world of genre mixing with Ridley Scott’s Alien.  While more violent and gory than anything we’ve seen up to now, Alien is justly renowned for its mastery of what you THINK you saw.  Cramped spaces, an entirely new sort of female character and a horror that is truly horrible – Alien has it all!

Walter White Wednesday 2

Welcome the the second Walter White Wednesday!  I'll be posting specifically about various aspects of AMC's magnificent Breaking Bad on Wednesdays for the foreseeable future.  This particular post is also known as "Show Me the Money!"  as I take a look at a central question asked by the show - what makes a law-abiding citizen turn to crime?

You have to have some degree of sympathy for Walt – at least at the very beginning.  Here’s a man who’s done everything he’s supposed to do.  He’s gifted with an amazing brain for chemistry.  He’s with the same woman he’s been with for about twenty years and clearly still finds her to be quite a catch.  He’s got a teenage son who respects him and a new baby girl about to arrive.  He believes a man is supposed to provide for his family.  Yet his demanding job offers him little in financial rewards or prestige, so he works a second job at a car wash, where a jackass student lords it over him and Walt just has to suck it up instead of laying the little brat out on the pavement.

His solution is to turn to making crystal meth. 

Crazy?  Well, yes.  But as an old Glenn Frey song puts it, “It’s the lure of easy money/It’s got a very strong appeal.”

Yes, it’s true that Walt’s job is crap.  The glory of chemistry is lost in the teenage wasteland.  And the cherry on the sundae?  He’s been handed a death sentence called Lung Cancer.  (To add to the suckage, Walk doesn’t even smoke.)  Why leave his family destitute when, with a little smudging of moral lines, he could set them up to live comfortably after he’s gone to the Great Laboratory in the Sky?  That’s tempting.  But don’t be fooled by this plaintive cry.  Walt’s not doing this for his family – not really.

Walt wants what all gangbangers want.  Money, sure, but far more important and integral to Walt is something the Queen of Soul sang about around the time Walt was learning that fires need oxygen.  Walt wants R-E-S-P-E-C-T.  Just a little bit.  And if Walt is the fire, this desire for respect is his oxygen.

Walt’s a man who understands the mysteries of chemistry and he’s surrounded by people who couldn’t care less about those topics.  His quicksilver mind and blade-sharp abilities are not appreciated by the movers and shakers of polite society.  The only people who hail Walter White as a master artist are people who have a deep and abiding appreciation for crystallography, albeit of a very particular and felonious kind - meth users and dealers.  Instead of trash meth mixed from lye and match strike plates, Walt can make stuff so pure it tempts the angels.  Is it so wrong to take pride in your work?

That’s the crux of it.  Walt’s not veering off the straight and narrow to leave a nest egg behind for his family.  This plan is about him, pure and (mostly) simple.  Walt wants to be respected.  He wants to be seen as smart and sharp. Maybe even viewed as a little dangerous.   As someone you want to be friends with because crossing him is something that – woo, boy! – you just don’t want to do.

The problem with this is that it has nothing to say about how WALT views himself and everything to do with how he sees OTHERS viewing him.  For someone who prizes control so much, he’s cedes control to a whole heap of other people, for how they view him determines how Walt views himself.

And that's a train that will jump the tracks.

Knowledge Is Power - But Are We Ready For It?

This week, the film class got to see Forbidden Planet.  It's a fun one - and their first one in color.  (I trick them by moving back to B&W next week, but shhhhhh!)  I like so much in this movie - we're finally out among the stars instead of staying at home on Earth (and that's us in the flying saucer.  Maybe we got the design from the Roswell crash site).  We meet one of the most recognizable characters in science fiction - Robby the Robot - and we see Asimov's Laws of Robotics in action.  There are similarities to point out between this tale and Shakespeare's The Tempest, with Planet using Clarke's Law and advanced scientific knowledge substituting for Prospero's magics.  (Sites selling research papers love this one - I guess it seems hip.  See here.  And here.  Write your own stuff!)  And - oh, yes - "monsters from the Id!"  That never fails to get some good discussion going as we talk about what our own monsters from the Id might look and act like.

(Personally, I like this one best - a monster who knows what he wants and when he wants it.  NOW!!)

Key to Planet is the conflict posed by the existence of advanced knowledge.  Are we ready to handle the consequences of using that knowledge?  Who is charged with making that determination?  What gives them to right to decide for the rest of us?  And just how stable are those making these decision-makers to begin with?  Who, as Juvenal wondered, watches the Watchmen?

All good questions, especially in the post-WW2 world that had seen the destructive force of the atomic bomb and the sheer inhumanity of Nazi death camps and of experimentation sites such as Unit 731.  Genies are very difficult to put back into bottles, after all.  And maybe some knowledge needs to stay on a very high shelf from grasping hands.

COMING SOON:  Next week, the film class goes back one year from Planet to see what was going on at home while the United Planets Cruiser C-57D was far, far away.  Things were tense.  America was in the deep freeze of a Cold War with the Soviets and neighbors spied on neighbors for any hint of un-American behavior.  Can't let those Reds get a toehold or soon everything that we know and hold dear will be stripped away!  One key to safety was to conform.  Twilight Zone would do some very interesting things with this theme in 1960's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (which uses a few props from Planet), but first the aliens came to the small California town of Santa Mira.  Get ready for Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

Walter White Wednesday

Here it is, 2/22, and I've been saying I'd start a weekly Breaking Bad post that was to be known as "Walter White Wednesday."  I'm sure there's some significance to the fact that this first post is being launched on Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the season of Lent, but I'll leave that for others to analyze.

What does it mean to “break bad”?  The phrase has been around for a while - see the link for details.

Breaking Bad’s Walter White begins the series as a nearly comic Sad Sack character.  He’s doing the best he can to support his family, which consists of a wife who is unexpectedly pregnant and a teenage son who uses crutches due to cerebral palsy.  Walter had dreams of glory which have been dashed on the shoals of life and, while he has a plaque thanking him for his contributions on work that led to the Nobel Prize in chemistry (which was actually given to someone else), he’s making ends meet by teaching high school chemistry to bored teens in Albuquerque.  Well, he’s making ends almost meet – he works a second job at a car wash.  We know this guy.  Often, we are this guy.

Then Walt gets some devastating news, which turns him into a man with little to lose and a fierce determination to make sure his family is taken care of.  Here’s where some people open up to their circle of family and friends.  Pickle jars are placed on counters and fish fry dinners spring into being to help out.  But Walt’s a rugged individualist – a type that we Americans like to think “tamed the West” by self-reliance; the whole “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” trope.  So Walt comes up with his own nifty plan to make a lot of money quickly. 

By the way, this myth about the bootstraps is just that – a myth.  You know who tried to travel through the hostile West without help?  No, and neither do I because snakebite, heatstroke, blizzards, and/or dysentery turned them into bleached bones before they got to Utah.  And so it is with Walt – his plan is one that will propel him into darkness, lies, and crushing violence.

It has been argued (by my co-author, Ensley F. Guffey, as a matter of fact) that Breaking Bad can be viewed as a televisual illustration of criminologist Lonnie Athens’ theory of violentization, a theory which holds in part that violent criminals become that way not due to poverty or some sort of genetic “bad seed,” but rather due to a process over time, what Joyce Carol Oates refers to in this link as “a kind of apprenticeship into brutality in which the budding criminal is complicit.” 

The complicity is key – Walt may feel that his actions are driven by a desperate desire to do good, to provide for his family (which is something Walt keenly feels he is supposed to do), but very quickly it becomes evident that he has other desires driving his actions.  Chief among these are the twin desires to achieve respect and to be in control.  Breaking Bad shows us a man who thinks he’s doing the wrong thing for the right reason; that desperate times call for desperate measures.   In reality, Walt’s not being driven; he’s firmly sitting behind the wheel.

Choices.  Consequences.  Ownership of both.  Walt is as blind to this as if he’d had his eyes punched out and his failure to see will both corrode his soul and lay waste to the very life he thinks he’s trying to save.