The End of American Exceptionalism Through Two Family Sagas: Breaking Bad and Ozark in the Face of Neoliberal Collapse

Abstract

When commenting on the politics of Breaking Bad (Gilligan, 2008-2013), on the capacity of this extremely popular TV series to capture the crisis of the American dream and of the heteropatriarchal family, Mark Fisher (2013) asked to imagine the events of the story to be set in a country with well-structured welfare, and specifically health-focused, institutions. In this hypothetical scenario, after the revelation that Walter White (Bryan Cranston), notable main character, was affected by a lethal lung cancer, the doctor would have only added that the free treatment was going to start soon; end of the story, problem solved (at least the most urgent one). No moral dilemma, no character’s arc describing a tragic trajectory of always bloodier moral compromises; Heisenberg, the drug kingpin acting as alter ego of the protagonist, and revelation of the multiple sides of his personality, would have never been born: no rise of his criminal status and success, fall, and final partial redemption would follow as well. This simple thought experiment shows us how easy is to connect fictional scenarios, dramatic situations, characters, and tropes with a larger social context, in order to map and identify the ways they may reflect contextual anxieties, fears, and affective tensions. At the same time, understanding and highlighting this link is also helpful for the purpose of evaluating the ways in which a specific audiovisual object dialogues with a larger ecology of emotions, concepts, social and political ideas, while contributing in changing the landscape where it operates.