Years ago, when TV started to regularly feature debates on the subject, it seemed we might outgrow the need for our constitutional monarchy. Sadly, they seem more a fixture of our way of life than ever.
The Queen has been celebrating 60 years of uninterrupted employment. She's done well, hasn't she? Apparently, so well that she is loved and admired the world over. Mostly for her staying power, or what commentators are calling continuity. Just to think she could have packed it in, or maybe been replaced for under performing. Except, she can't be. It's pretty much her gig until she croaks it.
Why do we fawn over the “achievements” of royalty?
Is it that we truly believe being incumbent in a job, where the only qualification was your birth right, that requires little to no actual work, where your personal life is one spent in opulent and private luxury, really represents a magnificent and selfless achievement?
Oh, but they can’t have a normal life. You enjoy your normal life to the extent that you look up to them in awe, and count them unlucky to be so venerated? What is this normal life and what are they missing out on? Shopping with members of the public?
Ah, they can’t marry who they like. Yes they can, and we love it when they do, the romance of it all. In fact, we offer the same vacant eyed adulation to the newly grafted on members of this special club. The blue blood required to make you special, divine even, and link you to tradition and history, in the ways we’ve been told justify the monarchy, seems unnecessary, as it’s all the more exciting when the “ordinary” are married in, and instantly become super human as a result.
Ah, but they can’t get divorced. Yes they can and they can remarry and carry on.
They live in a goldfish bowl, really? I thought they lived in several huge palaces, which they own and yet are maintained by taxes. As for it being transparent, so that we can watch them swimming inside, I haven’t myself been able to witness any private royal moments. What you do see is all public engagements, and by and large the press are very deferential to the royals.
60 years of selfless dedication to a life of service. That's what they're saying. Selflessly, carrying on serving as queen. I hope that when a doctor, or nurse or fireman retires, we have a huge public outpouring of sympathy and celebration for their life of selfless dedication to service. Otherwise, it seems we really put much too higher price on waving from the back of a carriage.
Friday 7 June 2013
Saturday 18 May 2013
Breaking Bad's Black Heart
There is a black heart at the core of Breaking Bad. Not because it deals with the ugly side of life. Not because its protagonist is shown to be deeply flawed, eventually bordering on evil (if such a term is ever relevant). No, it deals excellently with darkness and the forgotten choices of the desperate and the weak, and those who prey upon them, while they slip through the cracks. Ideas and actions can be evil, even if it's overly simplistic to tar people with that label. Evil things do happen in Breaking Bad. That's not the issue, for me. It's just that the writers clearly believe something that I personally don't. In fact they believe something that I believe to be evil. They believe in damnation, and they do not believe, it seems, in redemption.
What appealed to me at first about Breaking Bad, was that it seemed to be about how slim the line is between good and bad. That through circumstance, and increasingly poor decision making, anyone could fall from grace. It appeared to be a tragedy about a good man's fall. Placed in a world he didn't fully understand, Walter makes poor choices; at first to survive, and later to thrive, in that environment, having been almost complete taken over by his new life and surroundings. Fear and panic guide him, it seemed. Fear of losing everything he was trying to support, if the means by which he's trying support it are discovered. Panic in the moments when that fear seems to be realised. Could he turn around, or is the notion of his better self now only useful as a rationale for his increasingly evil actions?
What started out, for me, as a bold story of how good and evil are not useful terms because, given the wrong circumstances, anyone can flit between both. And, that understanding and empathy are always to be applied because nobody is evil and no one truly lost: context is everything. Has now shown itself to be about how people's true selves are not fully known, even unto themselves, until they are tested. That may be a simple truth: we don't know who we are without experience. Yet, here, it's used to explain why badness happens. In other words we are fated to be one thing and can expect no redemption. At first, Walter makes a seemingly naive choice to profit from a criminal undertaking, without fully grasping what he will lose in so doing. In later episodes, flash backs are increasingly used, to alter his motives and to reveal that: he was always this way, he always was arrogant and wanted to be a big shot. His apparent new self was, in fact, his true self.
This seems to have been the idea from the start. The creator of the show, Vince Gilligan, has this to say about what he wishes for people who do terrible things:
Can't not believe there's a hell. Can't not believe in the most evil idea man has ever imagined. That in secret, and forever, some power that won't reveal itself until you've been judged, will punish you with endless torture.
This seems a popular notion and synchronises itself nicely with much of the shows audience. They have uniformly hated Walter and wait eagerly to see his eventual downfall and for biblical justice to be served. Definitive justice as a revenge or balance for all previous wrongdoing.
The appeal here seems to be in enjoying the horror at his actions and in believing that they represent a simple truth: there are bad people and they do bad things. Rather than feeling sadness at his downfall and believing the show operates on the complex truth: that bad things can happen to anyone and for no good reason but all of us deserve to be understood.
As I say, I've stopped believing that the show represents anything. I feel it has blackness at its core. It's pandering to the capital punishment crowd and offering them a gore story about how an evil man reveals himself. They could be anywhere you know and we won't be safe until we shoot them between the legs with huge volts of electricity, for they are a cancer and must be cut out. Well, I don't believe that and I'm not entertained by that notion. I can't just watch the story of a bad man doing bad things. There's just no point.
What appealed to me at first about Breaking Bad, was that it seemed to be about how slim the line is between good and bad. That through circumstance, and increasingly poor decision making, anyone could fall from grace. It appeared to be a tragedy about a good man's fall. Placed in a world he didn't fully understand, Walter makes poor choices; at first to survive, and later to thrive, in that environment, having been almost complete taken over by his new life and surroundings. Fear and panic guide him, it seemed. Fear of losing everything he was trying to support, if the means by which he's trying support it are discovered. Panic in the moments when that fear seems to be realised. Could he turn around, or is the notion of his better self now only useful as a rationale for his increasingly evil actions?
What started out, for me, as a bold story of how good and evil are not useful terms because, given the wrong circumstances, anyone can flit between both. And, that understanding and empathy are always to be applied because nobody is evil and no one truly lost: context is everything. Has now shown itself to be about how people's true selves are not fully known, even unto themselves, until they are tested. That may be a simple truth: we don't know who we are without experience. Yet, here, it's used to explain why badness happens. In other words we are fated to be one thing and can expect no redemption. At first, Walter makes a seemingly naive choice to profit from a criminal undertaking, without fully grasping what he will lose in so doing. In later episodes, flash backs are increasingly used, to alter his motives and to reveal that: he was always this way, he always was arrogant and wanted to be a big shot. His apparent new self was, in fact, his true self.
This seems to have been the idea from the start. The creator of the show, Vince Gilligan, has this to say about what he wishes for people who do terrible things:
If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for Biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. 'I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.
Can't not believe there's a hell. Can't not believe in the most evil idea man has ever imagined. That in secret, and forever, some power that won't reveal itself until you've been judged, will punish you with endless torture.
This seems a popular notion and synchronises itself nicely with much of the shows audience. They have uniformly hated Walter and wait eagerly to see his eventual downfall and for biblical justice to be served. Definitive justice as a revenge or balance for all previous wrongdoing.
The appeal here seems to be in enjoying the horror at his actions and in believing that they represent a simple truth: there are bad people and they do bad things. Rather than feeling sadness at his downfall and believing the show operates on the complex truth: that bad things can happen to anyone and for no good reason but all of us deserve to be understood.
As I say, I've stopped believing that the show represents anything. I feel it has blackness at its core. It's pandering to the capital punishment crowd and offering them a gore story about how an evil man reveals himself. They could be anywhere you know and we won't be safe until we shoot them between the legs with huge volts of electricity, for they are a cancer and must be cut out. Well, I don't believe that and I'm not entertained by that notion. I can't just watch the story of a bad man doing bad things. There's just no point.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
