David Pierson - Breaking Bad

There was a time when, in the United States, Asia was viewed as the source of illicit drugs. Although opium had long since peaked by the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, it was not until after World War II that Latin America had firmly replaced Asia in the American consciousness as the source of drugs. The finality of this shift came at a time when the rise of a youth culture brought with it unprecedented divisions between generations, a distinction that would manifest itself most fully in the 1960s. Distrust of the youth and concern over the growing volume of Latino immigration combined following World War II in a renewed fear of marijuana and several decades later in a fear of Colombian cocaine. Not surprisingly, media portrayals of Latinos, which had long been tinged with racism, now began embracing specific stereotypes associated with the drug culture. Patterns of stereotypical portrayal have often been accompanied by political engagement among those combatting these patterns. Certain projects in film and television began to avoid conforming to normative and simplistic representations of Latino identity. Charles Ramirez Berg (1992) notes that there are positive and negative ways of going about this, but that representations that aim for complexity allow for a greater awareness among audiences (40-46). In Breaking Bad , Gilligan offers up portrayals of Latino identity across a very wide spectrum. It is important to note that, with the exception of Gustavo Fring, the majority of the Latino characters that populate his narrative are secondary in nature; indeed, the two main characters are Anglo. Gilligan’s project of portrayal is thus not oppositional filmmaking as noted by Chon Noriega, but instead one of cultural complexity. In other words, instead of Mexican-American filmmakers such as Luis Valdez and Cheech Marin, and Mexican filmmakers such as Alejandro Iñárritu, directors who have purposely shone a light on multi-faceted aspects of Latino identity, Gilligan has been more about investing his narrative with as much complexity as possible. In doing so, the series has undermined numerous Latino stereotypes, making the characters who populate Breaking Bad anything but average.

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What is so striking about Breaking Bad is how centrally impairment and disability feature in the lives of the characters of this series. It is unusual for a television series to cast characters with visible or invisible impairments. [1] Throughout this chapter, I will follow Susan Wendell’s usage of the terms impairment , disability , and handicap . Wendell is in turn borrowing the United Nations definitions, though with a reasonable degree of caution. An impairment is “[a]ny loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological, or anatomical structure or function.” A disability is “[a]ny restriction of lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner of within the range considered normal for a human being.” Handicap is “[a] disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or disability, that limits or prevents the fulfillment of a role that is normal, depending of age, sex, social and cultural factors, for that individual.” See Wendell’s careful and intelligent critique of both the value and limits of the U.N. definitions (Wendell 1996, chap. 1 [especially 13-19]; U.N. 1983). By “visible impairment” I mean any impairment that a non-familiar can become aware of with relatively little or no personal knowledge of that person. Examples of a visible impairment may include paraplegia, cerebral palsy or Down Syndrome. By “invisible impairment” I mean any impairment that a non-familiar could not become aware of by looking at or listening to someone or, perhaps, even working with someone, even for quite some time. Awareness or a person’s invisible impairments requires more personal and intimate knowledge of them. Examples of invisible impairments may include partial or perhaps even severe hearing impairment, Autism Spectrum Condition, or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) to name a few. On the rare occasions that television shows do have characters with impairments, these characters serve no purpose other than to contribute to their ‘Otherness.’ [2] Wendell (1996) states that, “Stereotypes of disabled people as dependent, morally depraved, superhumanly heroic, asexual, and/or pitiful are still the most common cultural portrayals of people with disabilities” (46). If disability appears in a novel, it is rarely centrally represented. It is unusual for a main character to be a person with disabilities, although minor characters like Tiny Tim, can be deformed in ways that arouse pity. In the case of Esther Summerson, who is scarred by smallpox, her scars are made virtually to disappear through the agency of love. On the other hand, as sufficient research has shown, more often than not villains tend to be physically abnormal: scarred, deformed, or mutilated (Davis 2010) Please see also Kent’s chapter on the images of women with disabilities in fiction and drama, Dahl’s article on the role of media in promoting images of disability, Harnett’s article on images of disability in popular television, and Gartner and Joe’s book on images of the disabled. Breaking Bad not only centralizes impairment, but impairment also drives and sustains the story lines.