The literary and artistic worlds of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad

And just like that, it ended; Better Call Saul aired its final episode last week, wrapping up one of the most triumphant runs in recent TV history. It may have started as a _Breaking Bad_ spinoff but today there are few who would dispute that Vince Gilligan’s ambitious morality play about lawyer Saul Goodman’s (Bob Odenkirk) rise and fall has comfortably improved upon the mothership. The creator and showrunner of both these shows, Gilligan is a film nerd par excellence and classic cinema references are strewn liberally across both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. In the latter, for example, oranges were famously used as a harbinger of death, alluding to the same device being used by Francis Ford Coppola in the Godfather movies; Vito (Marlon Brando) is carrying a bag of oranges at the market when he’s shot several times. When he eventually dies of a heart attack many years later, he’s making faces using orange peels, for his grandchildren’s amusement. Better Call Saul is inspired by the vintage Hollywood crime movies of the 1940s and 1950s, and the lovable rogues, conmen and tricksters found in these movies; Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman sees a little bit of himself in them. Like them he fancies himself—at least towards the beginning of the show—as a crook with a heart of gold. But both of these shows are also complex, multi-dimensional texts that use a wide array of literary and artistic allusions as well, drawing from both classical and modern sources. Walt Whitman, Georgia O’Keefe One of the biggest literary gambits Breaking Bad ever played was the story arc involving American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass. In the show, high school teacher and covert meth cook Walter White has an assistant named Gale Boetticher (David Costable), forcibly assigned to him by the drug-lod Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). During the course of their many cooks together, the soft-spoken, nerdy Boetticher develops a crush on the older, more self-assured White (Bryan Cranston). At one point, Boetticher gifts a copy of Leaves of Grass to White, with the following inscription: “To W.W., my star, my perfect silence”. This is a reference to an earlier moment when at the end of a cook, Boetticher recites the entirety of a famous short poem by Walt Whitman, called ‘The Learn’d Astronomer’. “When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”   This is pretty old-school courtship, as that last line (referred to in the inscription) shows. It is also in line with some of the queer themes found in Leaves of Grass — among other things, Whitman is a queer icon, whose joyous and unabashed celebration of sensuality in these poems inspired a legion of imitators. Writing about the homosexual encounters described by the poet in Leaves of Grass, Mark Doty argued, in a Lithub essay, that Whitman’s was a utopian, egalitarian vision where “the love of equals” is emphasized. Remember, Boetticher saw White as a fellow chemist, a lab junkie (the term assumes special significance in a show about drugs and addiction) who became a chemistry because of the sheer thrill of scientific work, not because of monetary of pragmatic concerns. “The boys didn’t think they were queers, and presumably most didn’t go on having sex with men; that was not an available position for them, just as it wasn’t supposed to be such for Whitman. His poems suggest an erotic life that is centered around encounters (often outdoors, but not always) with working-class guys and with younger men. He is at some pains to construct this as an experience of the love of equals, because this notion, a same-sex relation founded on equality (and not the Greek model of transmission of knowledge from older man to younger, or the Renaissance model of boy-loving, or a sort of fin-de-siècle notion of the sensitive aesthete enjoying the more animal sexuality of working-class youths, as in Oscar Wilde’s “feasting with panthers”) is entirely new.” Then of course, there’s the iconic scene from Season 3, a flashback scene where Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) remembers going to the Georgia O’Keefe museum with his now-deceased ex-girlfriend Jane Margolis (Krysten Ritter). Margolis patiently explains why O’Keefe, one of the most popular American artists of the 20th century, would paint the same thing over and over again in different lights; in this case, doors. Take a close look at this exchange that follows: Jesse Pinkman: You know, I don’t get it. Why would anyone paint a picture of a door, over and over again, like, dozens of times? Jane Margolis: But it wasn’t the same. Jesse Pinkman: Yeah, it was. Jane Margolis: It was the same subject, but it was different every time. The light was different, her mood was different. She saw something new every time she painted it. Jesse Pinkman: And that’s not psycho to you? Jane Margolis**:** Well, then why should we do anything more than once? Should I just smoke this one cigarette? Maybe we should only have sex once, if it’s the same thing. (…) Should we just watch one sunset? Or live just one day? Because it’s new every time. Each time is a different experience. That last line about “each time is a different experience” really seals the deal for me—it betrays what this conversation is really about, which is the nature of addiction and addictive behaviours. At the same time, it can also be used to describe great obsessions of the artistic kind, which is where O’Keefe’s door paintings come in. When the viewer is watching this scene, they already know Jane’s eventual fate—she dies of a fatal overdose after several unsuccessful attempts at rehab and sobriety. This adds an especially poignant touch to this flashback; the tragedy and pathos sometimes associated with great art converges with the tragedy and pathos of one life in particular, that of Jane Margolis (who is, after all, an aspiring artist herself, constantly showing Jesse her recent exploits on the sketch-pad). Caravaggio, Hopper and Zeus  Better Call Saul wears its artistic allegories on its sleeve. Right from the first season, the show’s lighting and camerawork has been informed by a range of artists, medieval and modern, from Caravaggio to Edward Hopper and beyond. Caravaggio (1571-1610) was known for his dramatic use of lighting to achieve a more realistic representation of the human condition. His men were both physically and emotionally tormented by the consequences of their difficult choices. Light and shadow, therefore, were in constant interplay in his paintings — they were not conspicuously lit up in halos like the works of his Renaissance predecessors and contemporaries. Caravaggio and the Baroque painters he inspired are a direct inspiration for the way Better Call Saul frames the faces of its characters, especially in partially lit close-range shots as they grapple with their own choices. “Painting a biblical allegory of light versus darkness directly onto the faces of its characters, Saul captures life not as a gray marriage of black and white, but as a constant juxtaposition of the two at their purest. There’s no middle-of-the-road Tuco; there’s the man who scrubs his grandmother’s carpets and the man who stains them with blood.” Another major influence, as director Peter Gould revealed in a recent interview was Edward Hopper, whose famous painting Nighthawks—referenced in a slew of 20th century films and TV shows—also informed the way Better Call Saul often shot Jimmy and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), “an island of light amidst a sea of darkness” as Gould put it. But perhaps the most tongue-in-cheek and on point artistic allusion in the final season of Better Call Saul happens in the first episode itself, when we see the raid on Saul Goodman’s Breaking Bad-era house, which is an exercise in pretentiousness. Baroque canvases line the house, among them a painting called Minerva and the Triumph of Jupiter by French neoclassicist René-Antoine Houasse (1645-1710). In this painting, Zeus hovers above every other celestial being, wielding a thunderbolt. This is a direct reference to something Jimmy/Saul once said in a rage-fuelled tirade in Season 2: “Lightning bolts shoot out from my fingertips!”, Jimmy yells and the Zeus painting is a call-back to this precise moment. Both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad were so very good at this; using literature and art to dovetail back to the episode’s big themes, using subtext both efficiently and in a wryly humorous way. The 12 years or so they spent at the top of the TV tree will be missed. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.