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Monday, August 09, 2021

Applied Surrealism in "Breaking Bad"

There seems to be an unconscious Surrealistic dream side to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” that can suddenly express itself like lightning. 

For example, the Surrealist artist (and advertising man) René Magritte, who is best known for his bowler-wearing everyman posters, is also well-known for his painting of a pipe, called “La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)” (1929), or “This is not a Pipe.” The philosopher Michel Foucault (whose ideas also appear throughout the shows) wrote an essay about it. 

From the link
: According to Foucault, what renders Magritte’s figure “strange” is not the contradiction between the image (the pipe) and the text (“This is not a pipe”) because a contradiction can exist only between two statements. … [T]here is only one statement and one simple demonstration but, through our own habits of reading, we assume a “natural” connecting of text and drawing. … Rather than reading the painting as a sign with its label, Foucault asserted that Magritte’s painting was a calligram, “secretly constructed and carefully unraveled.”


So, where does “Breaking Bad” talk about what something isn’t? Oh yeah!

 

Tuco: “So let me get this straight, I steal your dope, I beat the piss out of your mule boy, and you bring me more meth? That’s brilliant!” 
Walt: “You got one part of that wrong. This is not meth.”

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