Thomas F. Cook

I’ve come to realize because I’ve been watching about 18 or so seasons of Top Chef on demand, all of which I missed when I stopped watching television 10 years ago, that there are several types of reality shows.

The talent shows: these would be Project Runway, Top Chef, Blown Away (glass blowing), and there are probably some others are the upper tier of reality shows. (I’m not including the singing and “talent”‘ competitions for reasons below.) In these craft shows, there is less of a need to focus on characters and whether you like or dislike someone than there is to observe how they make their work and in some cases, art. I’ve always enjoyed these ones and I recognized right away that the main reason is that the focus was on skill, craft, talent and imagination. Sometimes you could get angry about a character. In the early iterations of Top Chef, I think the producers thought they had to imitate the conflicts of the lesser reality shows.

One I remember, is Marcel on Top Chef was a highly disliked “character” by both the people on the show and the people who watched it. He was an aficionado of chemical cooking, which is (put very simply) using acidic foods to “cook” delicate foods like eggs. And foam. Ugh. He put foam on everything which I think now, many years later, has gone the way of blackened fish. Anyway, they tried to shave his head on one episode and — this was kind of eye opening watching it so many years later — the guy who wrestled him to the ground was eliminated for having put his hands on Marcel. When they told him he had broken the rules and was leaving the show, his mouth dropped in disbelief. And I was thinking, again, of how bullying seems so very innocent to the people that perpetuate it. But in that same episode, after Marcel got away from the bigger guy that was holding him down, he went to his bedroom and slammed the door and was clearly very upset. Bullying is only fun for the person who does the bullying. I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand. But this is a very old episode and filmed long before “Me Too” and the trend to sue anyone who even puts a fingertip on your shoulder.

The second level of the reality show is the sort of “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” competition, where people mostly try to make it to the end and are sometimes put through meaningless tasks and feats of strength and so on. This would be Survivor, Big Brother, The Bachelor and other dating shows, and also I think, what are called the talent shows: America’s Got Talent and American Idol. The Miss America, Miss Universe, Mrs. America, Mr. Leather, all the state competitions (Miss Ohio, Miss California), and even the Little Miss competitions, also belong in this category. All of them are either simply endurance competitions or come very close to endurance, rather than talent. What is called “talent” is almost nothing of the kind, except in rare instances. And of course there is a whole “let’s make fun of these people,” aspect that I think includes the Little Miss and Mister competitions across the country.

[As an aside, one thing about the brilliant but all too brief, “Little Miss Sunshine,” was the end. And I listened to the directors commentaries about finding an ending and it was pretty clear they didn’t know what to do after the Hoover family more or less destroyed the entire competition. They’re all sitting outside an office because the bad guy (the woman who runs the show) has called the police and they are, presumably, being detained but not arrested. They are posed like they are in a handcuff chain, but in fact, they’re all just sitting there like that. The cop comes out, says, “You can leave if you promise never to enter Olive into another Little Miss competition in the state of California.” They agree and then make their getaway in their broken down VW. Why does the state give that woman the power to do that? I understand why they agreed with it. Nobody gets charged with disorderly conduct or something like, but really, since it was a private event, the pageant already had the ability to ban them from ever entering again. And being a private event, the worst the police could actually do was trespass them from the property, which would have been up to the hotel, not the pageant who rented the space. They could not be arrested or charged with disorderly conduct because it wasn’t public. They didn’t assault anyone except maybe the creepy MC. They just disrupted the event and stopped when the music went off. There was another encounter with the police in that show (Dean Norris from Breaking Bad, ironically), and it was another example of police overreach. Both episodes bothered me.]

The difference between the 3 types that I’ve identified, and there’s nuance in all of it, so you could say it’s a all a part of a spectrum of reality, is that when people of the most upper tier of these shows lose that week’s test, it is sometimes for a dish or dress or creation that is, by itself, absolutely stunning. It’s like when you have a year with five truly great, perhaps groundbreaking, films for best picture. It’s heartbreaking to see someone of that caliber get kicked off. And I’ve noticed that toward the end of these shows, the contests are, in fact, much consoled by the fact that they are cooking at the top level in the field. They just have an enormously talented group of competitors.

For the second group, you usually only care because you come to like or relate to the “character” the person is playing on the program. Survivor tries to promote the idea that these players are “cunning” or “strategic” but they’re not. It’s totally random, and some very astute cultural critic said, after the first episode of the first season of Survivor aired, that Richard Hatch, who sat in a tree and contributed absolutely nothing to the group, but could see what was going on, would ultimately be the winner. With Survivor and some of the others, I’m not really sure that anyone plays a good game. But they all act like they do. Lately the Mr. Beast contests, which generally start out with 1,000 people who are “given” 10,000 each, totalling $1,000,000 are narrowed down on day one to 500. The rule is that the people kicked out of the competition sacrifice “their” $10,000 into a pot, so on day one that pot is $500,000. It continues this way until there are only two contestants left and, shockingly, $998,000 in the pot. But what Mr. Beast did, at least in the second go around, is he gave people opportunities to take some of that pot along the way. This led to some of the dumbest people ever to appear on television complaining that the other contestants weren’t playing “fair.” By definition, that is simply not the case. If the guy offers you the chance to take $250,000 of the million dollar pot, take it. It’s not unfair because the contestants don’t set the rules. But Christianity being such a malignant influence and its belief that it owns “integrity” and “compassion” and “fairness,” this idea that playing according to the rules of the game is somehow dishonorable has seeped in.

Anyway, this second group reminds me of the work I referenced, “They Shoot Horses Don’t They,” a movie based on a book by Horace McCoy, which starred Jane Fonda back in 1969. It was about a dance marathon,, which they used to have all over the country, where people would try to dance for days on end and other people would pay money to come see them and root for their favorite team to win, and so on. Those competitions flourished during the Great Depression and their re-emergence twenty or twenty five years ago as reality shows made me think that we were entering another era of economic desperation — where the haves have taken away so much from the rest of us, in the form of credit, mostly, that people have resorted to these competitions to try to make ends meet.

And then there is the trash reality show, which I would attribute almost exclusively to Andy Cohen, who apparently owns, somehow an entire cable network channel called Bravo. Bravo was founded to “bring the fine arts and performing arts” to the vast cable television world where every conceivable thing was going to have a channel. I remember a teacher (this was in 1982, before cable came marching into our homes — releasing cable into our world was another long political story full of grift and payola and corruption, but it’s too long to go into) talking about a channel where you could learn French or another language; or a channel to study physics. In fact, I think they started off this way: the History channel, the National Geographic Channel, Turner Classic Movies, News channels, and so on. But cable is just a vast network of commercials now, and even HBO “it’s not television” doesn’t really exist anymore. But the “real housewives” of ______ name your city, seems to me to be a pointless exploitation of the worst. It’s gay cruelty without the camp, and without the camp, gay cruelty is just Joan Rivers in her “Fashion Police” show which was, obviously, on cable, on E! online.

[E! was originally a cable station called “Movietime,” which was, no lie, an advertising channel that showed movie trailers and previews for upcoming entertainment. That’s all it did. But a lot of people like movie trailers because they’re, I guess, mini movies in a way. It’s like reading an advance notice about a book you think you’re going to love, or, one that’s going on today 9/9/26, this Elizabeth Holmes documentary that just premiered at Telluride Film Festival. Movietime was taken over and turned into something more gossip oriented, culminating, in my opinion, with the disgusting sight of Joan Rivers at her absolute meanest. She was always mean, but in exactly the way that gay men can be mean, but maintained, like most gay men, a bit of respect for the people she ripped to shreds. Kathy Griffin still does it, although I she’s a little edgier and there are plenty of times Kathy Griffin laces into people she doesn’t respect at all. Anyway, like all this cable and political, it degenerated into an unthinking bowl of shit.]

Season 4

I’ve lost all my notes so I’ll just go by what I remember and what I can recall from Wikipedia’s descriptions of each episode.

I couldn’t remember when it was that Gus Fring, played by Giancarlo Esposito, walked in and casually slit the throat of his watcher.

It was the beginning of this season. That watcher’s name was Victor and he had proven to Walter, I guess, that he could make meth just as easily as Jesse. The whole point of killing Gale in the previous season was to protect Jesse and Walt. (Remember that Walt always has his self interest at the forefront of his mind. He may have protected Jesse in having Jesse kill Gale, but Gale was being trained to replace Walt, in the long run. This small theme (that Walt is the only one capable of making this meth), comes up several times.)

Body count = 200.

In episode 4, I think, Mike is riding in the cargo hold of a truck which gets attacked by people from the Salamanca gang, I believe. They kill the driver. Shoot up the truck. Mike was able to flatten himself to the ground enough that he was grazed on the ear, and then when they open the truck he kills the 2 goons.

Body count = 203.

The Salamanca gang uses gas to kill two of the men guarding the chicken truck that’s transporting meth in its containers. Body count = 205.

In one of these episodes which lead to a long arc, Walter creates ricin in the lab, puts it into a tiny vial and tries to persuade Jesse to kill Gus. He has an opportunity when Gus, Mike and Jesse go down to meet the Salamanca gang, but he refrains or is interrupted. Jesse has been hiding this vial in a cigarette, which he keeps upside down in his carton so he knows which one it is.

In a flashback, we learn that Gus and his former lover, Max, approached Hector with their crystal meth and Hector, who is now the bell ringing invalid in the nursing home, had Max shot through the head and forced Gus to watch him bleed out. This explains some of the long running hatred between the cartel and Gus. It also explains, to an extent, Gus’s meticulous nature, and it confirmed that he is gay. Body count = 206. (But this one wasn’t related to Walter in any way.)

A sniper attacks Gus’s distribution operation and one of his guards is killed. Count = 207.

Episode 10 of this season is called “Salud” which is a toast, like to your health, I guess. It’s also the season where Gus poisons almost the entire Salamanca gang [I know I’m getting these names wrong. This is not the Salamanca gang, it is the Mexican cartel, and Don Eladio, who had killed Max so many years ago, is the leader of it.] It begins as an episode where Jesse is brought down to Mexico to cook meth as pure as Walter White can and then Jesse learns he is being “sold” in a sense, to the cartel. (Another theme that will come up later in the series, toward the end: slave labor.) Gus prevents Jesse from drinking the tequila, but he drinks it himself because he has taken some pills to help counteract the poison. It barely does, but it does the job by killing Don Eledio and all the other bosses. I believe I counted 9 or 10. One person has to be killed because he didn’t drink the tequila. The Wikipedia page says Jesse commits that killing which I know must be true or it would have been done by Mike. So body count is now 217 or 218, depending. Don Eladio is played by Steven Bauer who didn’t have too much of a career after being so prominent in Scarface with Al Pacino. A quick glance at the wikipedia entry for the character explains that the cartel is made up of 3: Hector Salamanca, Juan Bolsa, who is killed in one of the earlier seasons, before the creation of Gus’s superlab, and the Salamanca psycho twins that were killed earlier. Don Eladio took over and was the one who started ordering the shooting up of the delivery trucks, and the sniper who killed one of Gus’s guards.

The whole series, in some sense, is a fight between Gus Fring and the two men who ran the cartel. Walter’s accidental involvement, which is where our point of view is, and really begins, in a sense, with Jesse, just makes it possible for Gus to take his revenge. By having a chemist who can make a better product, Gus has the power to strike back after twenty years.

Finally, in the last episode, after a whole of plot twists and turns, Walter, in order to kill Gus, persuades Hector Salamanca to connect a bomb to his bell. Gus goes to visit Salamanca to torment him, along with his bodyguard Tycus who replaced Victor, the one that Gus killed with a box cutter. With Gus standing in front of him, Salamanca rings the bell repeatedly until the bomb goes off, which kills Tycus, Salamanca and blows half of Gus’s face off. Gus walks out of the room, but keels over and dies. Later in the episode, Walter rescues Jesse who has been kidnapped and, for the second time, forced into slave labor to make methamphetamine. The two men who kidnapped him — I’m not sure who they work for. They may work for Gus who they don’t know yet is dead. In any case, Walter kills both of them and rescues and Jesse, and in order to prevent his brother in law Hank from discovering anything, they burn down the lab.

I’m not sure if either of them knows this, but they have independently been saving each other from being killed. First Walter insisted that he needed Jesse to cook (and that was probably true because of the physical demands it made on him) and later, Jesse refused to cook anything if they were to kill Walter. So despite their almost constantly hostile and even violent relationship, there is an attachment between the two of them that really exists.

Body count for this season: 222 or 223, including the flashback killing of Max from twenty years ago.

The article in the Times today is about Trump outpacing the court in illegal construction, etc. Building it before they can decide. This is his normal speed of business — at least as far as construction goes.

And if you listen to him, he always talks about it — “We’re ahead of schedule, under budget,” and so on.

Doesn’t matter if it’s true — nothing does in his world. It’s what you say that matters. And in construction, the almost uncountable business failures he’s had, and even the wars he’s started, it’s always got to be done fast and quick. Now, now, now. Psychologically, he probably thinks that if he doesn’t push it through quickly, it’ll be bogged down in paperwork, which is often the case of most construction jobs. But… there’s only one construction job I can think of in New York City which actually never got completed. And that’s because the tower started to lean and the project was declared unsalvageable (it’s still down there near the South Street Seaport, empty and probably in danger of collapsing one day).

But when he purchased the old Bonwit Teller building, he had promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he would preserve several pieces of the building, including the art deco relief work was at the top.

Well they tore the building down and he didn’t keep his promise. (Wasn’t in writing, but he probably wouldn’t have cared if it was.) He claimed they were useless and ugly. This was one of the first stories I heard about his criminal mind. So the fact that he’s pushing this new construction at breakneck speed is not unfamiliar. The ballroom might be finished before he dies, but fortunately — you just have to look at Las Vegas — everything constructed can be torn down. Las Vegas is a little weird in that it seems to think that it should be torn down. Most places, including D.C., like a mix of new and preserved.

One of the oldest “things” in New York City is not McSorley’s pub or 6 Weekhawken Street, it is the Battery Park fence. It was erected in 1771 so it is 255 years old this year. Bowling Green itself was formed in 1733. There had been a statue of King George III and the fence’s posts were all topped with crowns. During the revolution, the statue was torn down and all the posts’ crowns were knocked off. No kings! No kings!

But the fence remains.

The ballroom will come down in my lifetime. The “arch” will not be built. The gilding will be removed. One way or another, it all comes down. This is the law of entropy.

My will states that I should be cremated and then my ashes and the ashes of my dogs buried together with a marker in a cemetery in upstate New York which has been, to a small extent, a family cemetery.

But in an article about “art coffins” that they make in Ghana, I almost want to change that to the Premum Obama Finest Lagar Beef coffin.

I think in some cultures — many cultures in fact — death is as scary and frightening as it is to those of us in the United States, who are fat and lazy and uncomfortable with just about anything that challenges us. But I think because it’s more open there, people, in general, treat death with the same imagination that you get with music.

The news that Galliano has withdrawn from the Met Gala costume party is good news, although what we’re getting, of course, is not the actual story. What almost certainly happened, especially after Alice Tisch wrote to the board and told them to drop him, (What they made public is that her email said it was a ‘failure of governance’), is that they told him to gracefully withdraw, and he did. But it prompted me to try to find my review of the movie/documentary they made about him that I saw at The Quad. The movie seemed self serving and Galliano seemed like one of those sorry/not sorry types.

(E.G., he had presumably never heard of the holocaust and didn’t know what it was, according to the rabbi that had given him his cultural lessons. Except his conviction was for praising Hitler, and telling some other patrons at this cafe that they would have been in the gas chambers. So right there, even after his conviction, he was lying to the rabbi. He wasn’t seriously interested in finding out why he was so offensive. He hates Jews then and he hates them now.)

But I realized when I looked at “the dashboard” of my review web site or whatever this is supposed to be, that I’ve got more than 200 pages and I have no way of finding anything. So I’ll be looking to add a search bar, using Duck Duck Go, I hope. And not google. Fuck you google, for going along with Trump’s lunatic Twitter presidency and renaming Lake Ontario on your maps. Did he even bother to sign an executive order this time? Or was it too much effort to take his dick out of your mouth to see if it actually needed to be done. Sorry to disturb you at work, Stormy Google.

Bing didn’t. See below.

Judy Bernly: “Don’t you tell me what I can or can’t be serious about, or what is or isn’t me! If I want to play S&S and M&M and all those other bondage games, or even smoke pot, that’s my business!”

December 21, 1937. Jane Fonda. 88
Jan 19, 1946. Dolly Parton. Died today, 2026. 80
September 1, 1939. Lily Tomlin. 86
January 3, 1932. Died May 2024. Dabney Coleman. 92

What a loss for the world and for readers and sensible people. And what fun that movie was.

Season 3

Anna Gunn (pictured) got the worst of it in this series: both as the character she played (Skylar White) and the actor in real life. While Bryan Cranston soared into the heights of acting fame and Aaron Paul became someone nearly everyone wanted to bed, she became — and still is to some extent — someone those horrible fans actually loathed.

It’s pretty common for people to confuse the actor with the acting, but I think the hatred of the character is what fueled the hatred of the actress, and I think they, the fans, are utterly and moronically wrong about both the character and the actor.

I’m up to season 3 and this season is really where the series starts to slow down, starts meandering, goes off on paths that might have a tangential relationship to the basic theme. Part of the problem with any long running and successful series is that actors and their agents start demanding more screen time, money and involvement in the plot. The union rules in England vs. the U.S. are extremely different, so it makes more sense for the English produce a show that is basically a single season of six episodes, like “Baby Reindeer,” or, in the case of a hit show like “Downton Abbey” a story line that kills off or gets rid of the actors who have offers to do other work. (I’m not sure it worked out for Dan Stephens, but so be it.)

But the main point of this season, I think, other than drawing Walter and Jesse further into this drug world, is to lure Skylar into the crime. When she intuited at the end of Season 2 that her husband is a drug dealer, (he’s a distributor, not a dealer, Walter insists, which kind of reminds me of those gay men from ages ago who insisted they would never ever be passive in that kind of a relationship, but only the active one, or the one penetrating).

Skylar tells her lawyer about all of it and the lawyer states unequivocally “leave immediately.” She doesn’t, of course. But, as the lawyer tells her, the instant she doesn’t leave she becomes an accessory after the fact.

[There was a great moment in the relatively poor television version of the Bernie Madoff story where the two sons visit their lawyer and explain that their father has admitted to running a massive ponzi scheme. But it’s okay, they say, because “dad’s” going to make sure everyone’s taken care of before he turns himself in. The lawyer immediately stops the conversation, mid-sentence and says, “You’re talking about an ongoing crime.” They were so spoiled and deluded they didn’t even think about the fact that “making things right” is just “making things right with stolen money.” And once they know, their only choice, if they don’t want to go to jail, was to turn him in immediately. I believe they did. But in that sad true story, both sons died – one of suicide, and Madoff died in jail. Only the wife survived, and she had nothing left, except whatever they allowed her to keep.]

Well Skylar in this case thinks she’s protected because she won’t have to testify against her husband. Already she is starting to think like a criminal. But what she fails to take into account is that they can prosecute both of them without requiring either to testify against the other. Her naivete leads her to committing crimes and eventually entering into the money laundering aspect of it drug dealing. But with her, I didn’t think there’s any indication that she consciously wishes to break bad — and that is probably one of the over-arching themes of the show. Did Walter go bad because society mistreated him at every turn, or did he break bad because he really wanted to. Anthony Bourdain, in the documentary that came out just after Covid restrictions were lifted, talked about how he knew he was going to become a heroin addict and didn’t have to, but that he wanted to. I’m not a Bourdain guru like some people, but I thought this was beautifully honest. That same question is going to rise in importance as this series goes on. It might even be the final question — the dying question.

Now, onto the body count. Where were we. I believe we were at 175 bodies that can be directly or indirectly attributable to Walter White’s decision to start cooking crystal meth and his pride which appears to be a wound that will not heal or even close up a little.

The end of Season 2 introduced Saul Goodman (every criminal needs a lawyer), Mike, the cleaner, and Gustavo Fring (Gus), who is one of the two main dealers in the area — the other dealer that controls the territory is a Mexican group called the Salamanca Cartel. The beginning of this season introduces “the twins” — nephews of Hector Salamanca, who are there to avenge their cousin Tuco’s death. (Remember that Hank was the one who killed Tuco.) The twins in either episode 2 or 3 of this season are recognized as they try to use an illegal migrant truck to cross the border. I guess because they were recognized, they kill everyone on the truck and the driver of the truck as well. The dialogue later said 9 bodies plus the driver. I counted 12 people in the truck plus the driver, but I’ll go by the dialogue. So

Body count: 185.

The psycho twins also kill a lady in order to steal her mini van. +1 Donald Margolis (Jane’s father) is heard over the radio that he killed himself after the air traffic disaster: +1. In episode 7 of this season, the twins are encouraged to go kill Hank (not Walter) by Gus Fring, but Hank first pins one of the twins with his car and then manages to shoot the other twin in the head. An anonymous woman is killed but I can’t remember why. I also have in my notes “Miss Paketewya” and “Indian cop” killed by psychos. After this shootout, Hank is gravely injured, one twin is dead and the other has lost his legs. So I’m going to +4 not including the one twin because he isn’t dead yet.

Body count: 191.

But in the next episode, Mike injects the still living twin with something that gives him a heart attack, and a character named Bolsa, who has become Fring’s enemy, is surrounded by Federales and he and his body guards are all killed. +4 or more (I’ll have to watch it again).

Body count: 195.

Through various plot twists, Jesse meets a young woman who will become important to him. But right now her importance is that she has a son named Brock and her little brother named Tomas. Tomas is the one who killed Combo. Combo was killed because he was in someone else’s territory and they made a little kid do the killing. After some fights and so on, the drug dealers kill little Tomas, (+1) so Jesse vows to kill these drug dealers. This time he comes close, although you have the distinct sense that he will not be able to do it, or that he will fail and get himself killed. But before he can do anything, Walter runs the druggies over with his car. He jumps out and shoots the still living one in his head. He does this with almost no hesitation. (+2)

Body count: 198.

And finally, at the end of season 3, Jesse kills. He has to or he will be killed himself. Walt warms him through some trickery that if he doesn’t kill his new assistant (an oddball character named Gale Boetticher) they will kill him. Jesse’s only way to stay alive is to be Walt’s assistant and with Gale being a possible and better replacement, he has no choice. Oh, and they are also grooming Gale to become Walter’s replacement as well, so Walt isn’t exactly looking out for Jesse at this moment. In fact, I think before Walter is brought back to the lab by Victor (the new watchman after Gus killed the first one for no reason at all), he was on his way to kill Gale himself.

Anyway, Jesse has, basically, a 20 minute head start because of where they are in the city. The season ended on a kind of cliffhanger because they never showed Jesse actually shooting Gale. But he did and Gale is +1 for the 3rd season.

I think Aaron Paul won his first Emmy for this season or episode.

Body count: 199.

-30-

Season 2

In the second season, we are introduced to an insane, psychopathic, distributor named Tuco. Tuco is a character who loves to kill — probably gives him some sort of sexual endorphin filled rush which is why he has no qualms about doing it over and over. His relationships are all transactional — he beats one of his “lieutenants” (I’m making up ranks and things) because he made an innocuous statement which Tuco misinterpreted or purposely got enraged over, and then, a few minutes later, comes back and throws the body on the ground and screams at him (the corpse) that was too much of a bitch to take a beating. The other lieutenant dies in a freak accident, but this just makes Tuco laugh. For the series, the body count is now 4.

It also, incidentally, makes Hank, Walter’s brother in law, laugh. These two are supposedly on the opposite sides: one bad and one good. Hank poses for a picture with the headless body, thumbs up like Trump with his weird ass thumb, and kind of the way those horrible soldiers in Iraq posed with the Iraqi hostages with their thumbs up and grins. [And we wonder why people in the south gathered around a lynched black body hanging from a tree to have their picture taken. They were the same, they just weren’t part of the “thumbs up” culture.]

The series did a little bit of regression here, I think. Walter becomes a little bit more scared than he was in the first season — he seems to be a little bit too shocked at some of Tuco’s behavior, given that he’s already killed 2 drug dealers himself. But this regression was probably necessary because by now they knew the show was a hit and they probably had a showrunner involved who was planning how to tell the multiple stories over 5 seasons, etc. You can’t start at the end, so they stepped back a little and made both Jesse and Walter a tiny bit more frightened and naive.

Jesse has a fight with Walter in one of these episodes, and starts to choke him, but he backs down. He does not kill. Later, in the episode where they’ve been kidnapped by Tuco who is going to take them down to Mexico to escape the DEA, Jesse shoots Tuco in the stomach during a scuffle. But it isn’t Jesse who kills him. In fact, Tuco doesn’t seem to be very much bothered by the stomach wound and has a shootout with Hank who has come to this remote location to look for Jesse — having found a few clues that tie Jesse to Walter. Hank is the one that shoots Tuco in the head, calm and steely, and kills him. Body count: 5. This is helpful for Walter and Jesse, as they get away from someone who was undoubtedly going to kill Jesse for being useless and kidnap Walter to Mexico. But in furtherance of the plot, it creates a gap in the distribution market. Tuco was the distributor in the Albuquerque area — the one who brought the drugs up from a Mexican cartel near Juarez and had a network of dealers and second level dealers to sell it to all the meth heads in Albuquerque. Without a distributor, Walt and Jesse can’t make 2 pounds of meth every week and sell it for $36,000 a pound, or whatever they’re getting.

The interaction with Tuco, however, leaves them shaken to the core. In spite of the fact that earlier in the series, when Tuco stole all their money as well as their drugs, Jesse, who was told by Walter to go get their money, got beat up — I may be remembering this wrong — and ended up in the hospital. Walter, who is going by the name Heisenberg, goes to the same gang hideout with what is, supposedly, a bag of crystal rocks. (They call it glass because it isn’t cloudy). Walter demands his money but Tuco attempts to throw him out. At that moment, Tuco decides to smash the “crystal” but it turns out to be an extremely potent explosive. The entire place it destroyed — Walt hit the ground knowing what would happen — and walks away with his money and his drugs. So being that shaken when Tuco was on a machine gun rampage with his brother in law doesn’t really make that much sense. But we’re talking trivial details.

The plan Walter comes up with to explain his “absence” without revealing that he had been kidnapped, is to get naked and stand in the middle of a gas station candy and soda store. For this he has to go an extensive series of counseling and during one of his sessions he “confesses” to the therapist that he made it up, because he was sick of people fussing over him and he was sick of the medicine and he was sick of the nausea. So he left, and then used the naked episode to try to convince people he had a fugue episode. This isn’t actually true, but it’s a believable truth to a therapist. At this point, Walter has lied so often: to his wife, to himself, to his son, to Hank, to Jesse, the school where he teaches, that you almost get a sense of the good lying and the bad lying. Like when he makes up reasons for his wife, they are utterly unbelievable and everyone can see right through the lie. With the lie to the therapist, there’s a bit of truth in there, and so the lie is delivered more successively by the actor and it is, almost, believable. If we didn’t know the rest of the story, we’d probably accept it as true.

We have to remember that almost all of us listen to things that people say and believe what they say. It’s practically impossible to do otherwise. I’ve known some (maybe one person, actually) people who never accept what people say at face value. But for most people, if someone comes in and says, “Oh look what I bought at Sax this morning,” we believe an almost uncountable number of things that person just stated. We believe that person went to Sax, in the morning, bought something there, had an uneventful rest of the day, and is now showing it you. They could have stolen it from Sax. They could have stolen it from another store. They might have been arrested, been caught in an accident. Someone could have given it to them. Maybe it’s an old purchase and it wasn’t today at all. Maybe they’re trying to distract you from something completely unrelated to a purchase. But we believe, for the most part, the things people say because that is our nature. It would be next to impossible not to believe that people are generally not trying to fool you or lie to you. They might be exaggerating, engaging in some hyperbole, telling a tall tale, talking about the fish that got away — but we kind of enjoy that sort of lie.

Since this analysis was really meant to look at how the series deals with “Good and bad” — Walter’s descent into badness or maybe even evil — Walter is the obvious character, but Hank’s character, in my opinion, essentially starts out bad and, maybe as he goes on, becomes a little bit more good. He is a horrible racist even though he has a Mexican partner who puts up with being called a Beaner. He’s a pretty terrible husband. And what’s most awful, in my opinion, about Hank is what a lazy thinker he is. In the rest of the season, we’ll come to see that he’s actually a pretty clever agent. There is a person who the gang (at this point in the season it’s Walter, Jesse and a new character, Saul, the lawyer) hires to pretend to be Heisenberg and takes money in order to go to jail. Hank, alone, doesn’t buy it. That’s because he has good instincts and probably the same instincts as criminals have. He is blind to his brother in law, right now. But, culturally, he is so irritatingly middle class, middle America. He’s part of the very large group of people who think Hillary Clinton was talking about them when she referred to half of Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables.

[Incidentally, that phrase probably cost her the election. It doesn’t seem possible that something so small could change the outcome, but I think it did. For one thing, every supporter of Trump thought they were in that basket. She clearly said, “half” his supporters, but that’s not what they heard and she should have known that nobody would make the distinction between one half and the other. Secondly, it was a beautifully written phrase: memorable, sharp and accurate. It has lasted, probably, beyond any other phrase of that season. Make America Great Again has become a movement, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful, sharp or accurate. You could probably substitute “Great” for “White” and get at the real meaning. Deplorables was effective because it was true, while Maga is just a disguised and invented nostalgia. Anyway…]

Hank’s wife is a shoplifter who cannot admit she has a problem, but she also is extremely judgmental and a racist, so she is full of “bad” while pretending to be middle class and hypocritically judging all the other bad people: Mexicans, drug dealers and so on.

Jesse is my favorite character and it could be because Aaron Paul is such a lovable actor, not because the character is someone you would want to fall in love with. If there’s any of the bobble heads I’d all in love with it’s probably Badger. But I think Jesse’s role in the entire series is probably as “pretend bad.” He is possibly, one of the only good people on the show, and I’m including the CP son who became a kind of disability spokesperson and hottie when the show was running.

Also in this season, Jesse found a girl living next door to him whose name is Jane and is a “recovering” drug user (heroin) — she likes to lace her heroin with a little crystal she says. After meeting Jesse, she falls off the wagon very quickly and becomes re-addicted to heroin, with all the messiness and crap that goes with it. Her father is Q, from Star Trek — John De Lancie. He is, perhaps, very close to the end of his patience with her. All drug addicts of this nature end up exhausting their parents ability to keep caring. In any event, Walter, who has made an acquaintance with someone who can sell their enormous quantity of blue crystal meth, has to break into Jesse’s apartment to steal it. Jesse reveals where it is in a heorin and meth drug haze that he won’t remember, and Walter gets the stash. Then Walter sees Jane start to vomit and choke on her own puke. He rushes over to help her — turn her on her side — but then stops and lets her die. None of this would have happened had Walter not shaken Jesse to try to wake him up and find out where the crystal was. In doing so, he knocked Jane over onto her back and she had earlier mentioned to Jesse that they had to sleep on their side in case they puked while they were sleeping in their high.

Body count: 6.

Other bodies that I don’t need to enumerate because they don’t relate to Walter turning to evil (yet): Combo — a small time dealer that gets shot on the street by a little kid in a bike (this kid will become an important plot point later) — 7. An informant named Tortuga (Spanish for tortoise) who gets his head chopped off by a cartel and attached to a land tortoise in the desert: body count 8. And then Jane’s father, having a nervous breakdown while trying to run an air traffic control screen, allows two planes collide in mid-air, right over Walter’s house and neighborhood, 167 passengers. I’m doing body counts based on associations as well as direct killing by Walt.

Body count: 175 — just about all of these people would be alive if Walter White didn’t decide to cook meth to make some money to pay for his cancer treatment and to leave his family some $$$ when he found out he was terminally ill.

-30-

I mention this movie (the photo is from the CD) only because the writer and director was Dirk Shafer, who made a name for himself by becoming the first Playgirl nude model to come out as gay.

He made this movie in 2001 and it was released in the usual handful of small independent theatres like the Quad in New York City. It grossed $200,000 or thereabouts.

I remember being very affected by this movie, for a number of reasons.

The first is that I thought it was almost unbelievably bleak and true. Another movie that came out around the same time was called Hard On and it was praised and talked about the struggles of a young man with a conservative family trying to find his way in the Australian gay scene. But if you look closely at that movie, every single sexual episode is disgusting or borders on rape. There is nothing actually kind in the gay world of that movie. But his family life softens the blow, so to speak. And I think people were fooled by the bleakness of that film into thinking that it depicted a struggle.

This was brutally honest, I thought. It showed in almost a casual way, how the joy of doing drugs and having as much sex as you want, as well as being beautiful and reveling in the hedononism of gay male body worship and sexuality can snare a person. These were the sorts of things that I thought would be addressed, maybe obliquely, in the Christophjer Nolan version of The Odyssey. In that journey, in the ancient epic poem I mean, Odysseus is constantly distracted by sex and drugs and temptation on his way home to Ithaca to be reunited with Penelope. The episode with the Cyclops takes a year I think, and I believe it takes another year to deal with the sorceress Circe. His time with Calypso goes on for almost 7 years and for most of those 7 years he simply doesn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing, so drugged up he is by the Lotus flowers.

Well he doesn’t really want to get there, does he? He’s having too much fun. But that wasn’t in the Nolan version, which is absolutely fine with me.

Anyway, Circuit was just about as true as I’ve ever seen. The fact that it’s bleak does not stain the gay community unless you have a singular worry about perception — like we can’t say anything “bad” about the gay community because it betrays the struggle. That, to me, is a useless concern about what straight people think. That’s like being an atheist and worried that Christian Fundamentalists aren’t going to like you.

The other reason it impacted me is I had almost exactly the same desire: to be swept up in male beauty, drugs, drinking, dancing and sex. I wanted the hedonistic life and was never able to have it, probably because I didn’t have the look and could only partake from the side so to speak. I could never really plunge in. Plus I have this sort of trigger I guess that prevents me from being too stupid or pulls me back from total indulgence. That’s ultimately why I quit drinking. It was getting too close for comfort to being a problem. (Some would say that that IS a problem.)

And then I was thinking about this movie the other day because I came across the soundtrack in my list of albums [the soundtrack was justifiably criticized for being a brilliant compilation of dance music but they didn’t fade from one to the other, the way dance music is supposed to be. They just played one song. It ended. And then they started the next. A dance compilation needs to be one long track from song to song. But maybe they didn’t have the money or the talent to do that.] So I looked up the movie, thinking that I’d like to see it again, and learned that Dirk Shafer, the writer and director, had died in 2015 about 11 years ago. He was 51. He died in his car and the cause was methamphetamine and cocaine toxicity. I think this means it might not have been an overdose, but he had been doing it for so long that he had a heart attack from it — probably from the coke. After writing and directing this movie he became a pilates instructor. He wrote nothing else. He had a boyfriend, I think. I was terribly saddened to hear this. It kind of makes me think that maybe he was always addicted to crystal meth — even back when he made this movie. Since one of the characters dies from snorting some drugs laced with cyanide or something like that, he almost wrote his own end.

Only one of the producers seems to have continued in the movie field, and I couldn’t find anything else about the actors or most of the people involved in the production. Maybe they changed their names. Or maybe this was a one off adventure for most of them. But I will always like this movie and I’m glad he contributed it. Nothing changed of course and the few reviews on IMDB are all about how depressing it is. I have no idea what the circuit scene is all about now, but I imagine it’s pretty much the same: lots of drugs and sex and extraordinarily beautiful men. But now with Prep!

Season 1

And I’m guessing you’d have to add to Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul (pictured) and Anna Gunn to the “creator’s” list, because I don’t think this show would have achieved the same greatness as it did without them. You possibly could have had a different person as his wife, but part of what they all achieved was something that was earned through time and growth as actors. In her case, it came to be the ability to be one of the most unjustifiably hated actors on the show, and maybe of all time. But we’ll get to that because I’m rewatching it, and as I go through it, I want to make some observations that I didn’t notice the first time around.

I didn’t watch it when it ran. I don’t think I’ve watched any series during its run, except maybe Seinfeld, and when I started watching that I had already missed 3 years of it.

[N.B. Because of the length of my posts, and my overwrit

Speaking of which, Seinfeld is almost where you have to start, because both Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn had roles on that show. Cranston was a dentist — Tim Whatley — and was he always the same dentist, because sometimes he seemed like he was a different dentist? Anna Gunn was one of Jerry’s many, many dates who he believed, because of George, was secretly dating his cousin Jeffrey, from the parks department. (It turned out to be a meter woman kissing the forehead of a horse.) Jeffrey was the cousin who seemed to have this fantastic and varied career of whatever Uncle Leo, presumably Jeffrey’s father, wanted to throw in Jerry’s face, like getting the lead in The Parks Department production of The Mikado. (What!?)

Anyway, before I get lost in Seinfeld absurdity, Breaking Bad is a term that Jesse Pinkman, Walter White’s former chemistry student, uses to help us understand what the pilot/series is about. “You want to break bad?” means, “purposely go from being a good person to a bad person.” I’m not sure if it was a real term when they used it, but Jesse, who understandably confused by his former chemistry teacher telling him out of nowhere that he wants to cook methamphetamine, asks him why.

What Jesse actually is bringing to the surface, and which will color every single thing for the rest of the series is the fact of that Walter is proud. He is too proud. He cannot explain why he wants to cook meth, he just wants to do it, no questions asked. He is too proud to say that he has cancer. He is too proud to say he is dying of cancer. He is too proud to say that he doesn’t have good health coverage that won’t pay for his cancer treatment. He is too proud to say that he can’t afford to pay for his coverage. He is too proud in every which way imaginable. Breaking Bad is actually a question. Why are you breaking bad? And maybe in a less plot-oriented way, “Why are you becoming bad?”

Just to get it out of the way, the premise is that Walter has inoperable lung cancer. It’s treatable with chemo and radiation, but it’s essentially stage 3b which is not quite hopeless but which, again through Jesse, we learn that it’s spread to his lymph nodes so there are probably multiple tumor growths.

First important note. This show was filmed before Obama was president and he and Nancy Pelosi, plus a majority of democrats, created Obamacare. He might never have “broken bad” had Obamacare existed. But this is a question which, in the second season in episode 6, I think it is, where Walter asks his brother in law Hank, what makes people become criminals. But this point, Walter is also wondering “Why?” Being such a jerk he probably thinks that it was someone else’s fault, and I think it was also in episode 6 or 7 when he gets a visit from a former colleague who he believes ripped him off. He will ultimately throw all the blame for his downfall at this woman and her husband and ultimately, at the woman herself, for not preferring him. Pride again.

Second important note. Although their roles were still teacher and student — kind of a relationship that doesn’t really change no matter how old you get — there is a critically important moment in the 2nd episode where Jesse and Walter flip a coin. The coin toss is to see which person is going to get rid of the body of Emilio by melting it in a heavy duty plastic bucket, and the much more horrible task of killing the gangster they have chained by the neck in the basement. Walt loses the toss and has to kill the gangster, while Jesse goes to Home Depot to look for a bin.

Even though he has technically already killed one person, Emilio, by causing an explosion of poison gas in their mobile meth lab, that killing was done out of desperation and when Walter was about to be killed himself. It was not a cold blooded killing and, in fact, when they thought both Emilio and “Krazy 8” were dead, he, Walter, wasn’t spending too much time feeling bad about killing these two drug dealers.

In the 3rd episode, they take to their tasks. because he couldn’t find the right size plastic bin, Jesse does his part by pulling up Emilio’s body into the bathtub and filling it with acid. (The tub later develops an enormous hole, dissolves the floor underneath, and the entire mess of body and guns come crashing through to the next floor. Some of that mess leaks through to the basement where Krazy 8 is being held prisoner.)

Walt, however, almost gives in to his human empathetic impulse to let Krazy 8 go, because they’ve had a few conversations, Walt has cut the crusts of the bread off the sandwiches he’s given him, and Krazy 8 has guessed without prompting that Walt has cancer. This is the first Walt has been able to talk about it aloud. Then, just as he’s about to let him go, Walt realizes that Krazy 8 still intends to kill him, so he grabs the bicycle lock that’s latched around the guy’s neck and pulls on it, choking him until he is dead.

Though their relationship may have been defined by the teacher/student dynamic, this coin toss determined Walter White’s fate to become a killer and a murderer. I don’t know what his “body count” will be by the end of the series, but by episode 3, it’s already 2. Jesse is not a killer, and it’ll be interesting to see if he ever kills in the series, because I actually can’t remember him killing anyone, while I do remember Walter White impassively watching Jesse’s girlfriend die from choking, I think it was, as well as his killing an entire cartel through some Odysseus like trick, and then a kind Hamlet-like, “kill em all” scene at the end of the series.

Breaking Bad is a series about the fall from good to evil, but so far — six episodes into this rewatching — it is a “breaking bad” brought about by excessive pride. He uses the excuse that he must provide for his family after his death, as well as pay for the cancer treatment in an era when no one had access to adequate health insurance.

But as will become clear, especially through his relationship with his wife, it is Walter’s excessive pride that causes him to go bad. The original definition of pride was “belief that you can exist without the aid of God.” At least that’s what a teacher told me. I’ll look it up.

-30-