“Breaking Bad”: White supremacist fable?

If you judged by TV and movies alone, you’d think “pure” drugs were seeping out of American society’s every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents gone rogue. Even if suburban 15-year-olds don’t ask their dealers for THC percentages after seeing Oliver Stone’s Savages — and smart money says some of them are — craft beer isn’t the only boutique intoxicant buzzing around the nation’s subconscious. In the shadow of the high-fructose-corn-syrup backlash, everyone from the Olive Garden to the proverbial Brooklyn popsicle startup is trying to cash in on craftsmanship. Meanwhile, screenwriters (clever advertisers in their own right) have found that the easiest way to hook viewers on drug-dealer protagonists is to sell crack as small-batch artisanal rock cocaine.

Would AMC’s Breaking Bad be as popular if high school chemist turned meth cook Walter White made an average product instead of his “99 percent pure” blue glass? From the pilot on, the quality of White’s output has driven the show’s narrative arc. As a careful midgrade cook with DEA connections, he could have flown under the radar in a community overrun with the stuff and taken care of his chemo costs and family just fine. But what makes White more attractive than your garden-variety tweaker to both international cartels and viewers alike is his craftsmanship and attention to detail. He brings class to the New Mexico meth scene.

For a show set in the dirty world of methamphetamine, Breaking Bad is obsessive about cleanliness. Hardly an episode goes by without a discussion of potential impurities. The equipment always seals perfectly, the vats stainless steel. But that’s how you make meth! No, it’s not. That’s how Walter White makes meth on Breaking Bad.

White isn’t some junkie cook; he’s a scientist. The exurbs are going crazy for the special meth that only he can make because it’s pure and a scientist made it with stainless steel and it’s blue. That’s how a timid high school teacher became a regional drug kingpin over the course of a year. The point isn’t that the show is unrealistic or hard to believe, but the narrative function of the ways in which it is: Which disbeliefs are viewers asked to suspend, and which ideologies are they encouraged to retain?


much more at the link:
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/12/breaking_bad_white_supremacist_fable/