Quote:
Originally Posted by NewChief
As middle-class WASP fantasies go, "Breaking Bad" is as potent as Walt's blue meth. And the show is torn between mocking and indulging Walt's fantasies (and the audience's). For every witty touch like the super-low-angled gunfighter shot of Walt walking to buy a can of soda with his vanquished ex-boss' first dollar, there's a creative choice that smacks of unironic wish-fulfillment, like the way that Mexico is always photographed, "Traffic"-style, through intense red-brown filters that make it look like the surface of Mars. (Mexico -- it's like another planet!) Each time Walt refuses to be intimidated by a Gus or a Mike or a Tuco, turns the tables on them and makes them squirm for a change, the show adds another panel to pop culture's gallery of beleaguered white guy fantasies -- a gallery that includes Dirty Harry's stare-downs with trembling black hoodlums and Christian Slater in "True Romance" confronting Gary Oldman's Drexel the Pimp (himself a white man doing a minstrel show version of black street swagger).
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This paragraph is bullshit. Utter bullshit. The author is really speaking to the aspects of the show that some people like for the wrong reasons (some of which are in this thread), but I'm having a hard time believing that the author truly thinks the show's appeals to those people sincerely.