[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by vesperae
on April 2, 2009, 4:02 am
AMC has a great new original series called "Breaking Bad", now in it's second season, which revisits the long standing film noir tradition of exploring just what sort of things we are capable of if subjected to just the right combination of circumstances.
The show is very dark, and in moments, very disturbing, but it transcends the recent cable television trend of p.m. soap opera titillation drek (like "Nip / Tuck", "The Sheild", and "Rescue Me") with very intelligent writing, directing, and acting. It also manages to be quite funny, despite the subject matter, and is chock full of just the sort of gallows humor that I tend to really appreciate.
A bit of set up, if you haven't seen the show:
Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is a grossly overqualified 40-something high school chemistry teacher of very modest means with extremely poor health insurance who learns that he has advanced, inoperable lung cancer. (He is ostensibly a non-smoker, BTW.) He has a teenage son with cerebral palsy, and a wife who is in the final weeks of a completely unplanned pregnancy.
Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), is a former student of Walter's who dropped out of high school to become a crystal meth manufacturer / dealer, and thanks to happenstance and Walter's obnoxious twit brother-in-law, who just happens to be a DEA agent, they cross paths shortly after Walter learns that he is dying.
Feeling like he has nothing to lose, Walter approaches Jesse about the possibility of using his expertise in chemistry to get into the crystal meth trade as a means of making a lot of cash in a short period of time so that he can leave something for his family when he's gone.
It's a fish out of water story that is bizarre, and yet, due to the quality of the production and the relatability of the characters, manages to be completely engaging.
I'm calling attention to the show here for two reasons.
First, it has been fascinating to watch the arc of Walter's character thus far - from an ordinary, unassuming, utterly average person beleaguered by mundanity to someone who suddenly sees his world in a new way, discovers his shadow side, and alternately relishes and recoils from his darker impulses; which is obviously relevant to a lot of the things that we talk about.
And second, because something specifically happened at the very end of the last episode that is absolutely relevant to this forum.
Recently, Walter and Jesse were abducted by a psychotic meth kingpin for a couple of days, and Walter had to find a way to account for his unexpected disappearance related to his secret life for the benefit of his wife and son. He decided to fake amnesia, which his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) didn't buy. She reacted to his disappearance and obvious cover-up as "the last straw" following his months and months of being constantly and inexplicably gone all of the time, and feeling neglected and angry, she started to go out without any explanation or indication of where she was going as a form of passive-aggressive payback.
The final scene of this week's episode (Season 2, Episode 4: "Down") showed Skyler leaving a local convenience store alone and returning to her car, where she struggled to seat her very pregnant belly behind the steering wheel. Once she was seated, she reached down to the console area next to her purse and lifted a cigarette and lighter into view.
She'd never smoked before on the show.
She looked over to see a woman seated in a car parked next to her give her a very disapproving look, glared back for a moment, and then returned her attention to the cigarette and lighter in her hands. After a moment of hesitation, Skyler lit up very deliberately, took a long drag, snapped the smoke very deeply into her lungs, and exhaled with a very intense look of satisfaction.
Her husband is dying of lung cancer. She's a very compassionate, intelligent, and well-informed woman who is otherwise very health conscious and certainly knows the risks of smoking while pregnant. She knows what she's doing is wrong.
But the only plausible explanation is this - that's exactly why she's doing it. After struggling to come to terms with all of the things that she can't control, and after all of the things that she's tried so hard to do right, there can be a profound sense of psychological release in a taking a moment and setting that all aside by deliberately taking a risk and doing something that you absolutely know is Bad...
which includes a brief excerpt of Skyler's smoking scene near the end of the clip:
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