Media historians describe American film and the television series as a form of mythmaking driven by the contemporary issues facing the nation. As cultural tales, they provide examples of cautionary stories that address Americans’ prevailing concerns. For example, in the period 1940-1960 the science-fiction genre of film and television burst into prominence as a direct result of the atomic bomb. This new weapon’s immense destructive power, able to wipeout entire cities, brought science and its abilities to construct such advanced devices to the film industry’s attention. In Japan, the film industry birthed Godzilla, a creature formed in the wake of an atomic explosion. In the 1953 film War of the Worlds, the atomic bomb was used to demonstrate the invading Martians’ might as the nuclear blast proved ineffective.
The same remains true today but the fears pushing the mythmaking process are caused by economic worries and income inequality. Two popular television shows that relied on the theme of consistent income inequality are The Wire and Breaking Bad. While both series appear to focus on the American drug war, the engine driving both shows is income inequality.
The Wire began its five season run on cable television’s Home Box Office network in June 2002, and quickly gained notoriety among critics for its superbly written and acted characters. Taking an unflinching look at the drug industries money-trail and influence in the city of Baltimore, its stories touch on politics, labor, education, and print media. The series’ characters provided a believable level of ethnic diversity, while its positioning on HBO shielded the show’s writers from the censorship hoisted onto broadcast television. By placing the violence in context, the show allowed viewers to sympathize with both victim and killer. All these elements combined to produce a gritty inner-city police drama that makes a damning statement about income inequality, the poor’s forced participation in the underground drug economy that is the only form of work available to them, and the violence that accompanies both components.
Show creator David Simon populated The Wire’s dystopian world with characters whose personal stories resonated with the public. It brought viewers too genteel to have ever visited an inner-city ghetto into abandoned and condemned tenements where the children living within served as surrogate parents to even younger children by slinging drugs on street corners to buy food and clothes. In contrast to the very poor, the political elite search for the means to more power and money. Whether it is the labor union president trying to save his workers’ jobs, or the smartest, fiercest, and gayest stickup man, all the characters are driven by income inequality. It is a world, in short, where a six-year-old boy can go from playing in the streets one moment, and shooting the very same stickup man in the back of the head the next.
The show’s writers held no punches when portraying its police characters as flawed human beings who alternately create serial killers in order to acquire more work hours and resources for fellow officers, while also creating fake snitches to make a few extra bucks. Police officials eat unhealthily, drink heavily, and curse creatively, in response to pressure from above demanding lower crime statistics. While The Wire falls into the genre of a crime drama, only one police character fires a weapon throughout the entire series, on three separate occasions, and each time in error.
Gunplay is an episodic constant, but overwhelmingly and depressingly, a child usually holds the weapon. It is through these children that the show argued for social change, as the viewer watched a tug-of-war between the police, educators, parents, and drug bosses, for the hearts and minds of the majority black adolescents. Bombarded on all sides by conflicting information, the characters evolve survival strategies to navigate the dangers of an inner-city ghetto, passing the information on to the next generation in a perpetual loop of ingrained poverty.
The simple solution provided by show writers is the legalization or relaxed regulation of the drug trade, but this is a bandage approach for the much deeper wound of income inequality. A problem that flows across the barriers of age, race, and gender, with impunity, it remains a constant worry for large portions of the nation’s population. The Wire invited viewers to take a front row seat while it imagined the slow decline of an American city in the grip of two economies, one of which is illegal.
In contrast to the ethnic diversity found on The Wire, a majority of the characters on Breaking Bad are middle-class whites, perhaps foreshadowed by the protagonist’s name, Walter White, performed admirably by Bryon Cranston. Hispanic performers serve alternate roles such as assassins, kingpins, bodyguards, drug dealers, and Drug Enforcement Agency underlings. The show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, placed the crime drama in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which may provide a reliable excuse for the lack of diversity.
Broadcast on American Movie Classics beginning in 2008, Breaking Bad also had a five-season run that ended in 2013. It won a multitude of awards for writing and acting, and became a national phenomenon that spurred real-to-life copycat behaviors akin to that of the movie Scarface. Airing on the heels of the economy’s collapse, Gilligan situated Walter White in a majority of Americans worst nightmare. He is a late middle-aged high school chemistry teacher, who works part-time at a car wash in order to provide for his pregnant wife and cerebral palsy inflicted teenage son. To complete his Job-like misery, White is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
Gilligan presented his viewers with a story that required virtually little need to employ suspension of disbelief because the situation plays out daily in American life. White looks beyond his death to how it will affect his family’s future. His health insurance plan is woefully inadequate, and the cancer treatments needed to keep him alive will sap his family’s savings, leaving them deeply in debt long after his death. In a nation that measures personal success in fiduciary terms, White is an utter failure, and by extension, so is the family.
The need to provide for his family beyond death drives White into the same underground drug economy of The Wire, where he temporarily serves as a methamphetamine producer, before adding distribution to his resume. Viewers followed a bungling White naively stumbling into the local drug scene with a product far superior to the competitors, because he believed the fast cash promised his family long-term financial security. However, as White’s success brings in literally barrelfuls of cash, the power that accompanies financial prosperity seduces him into overreaching for more, placing him at odds with friends and family members.
Aaron Paul brilliantly portrays Jesse Pinkman, White’s frequently reluctant, morally conflicted, and physically abused partner and former pupil. Treated with disdain by White, who unapologetically manipulates Pinkman and those closest to him, Jesse empathizes with the victims left in the wake of his partner’s destruction. Searching for stability, Pinkman’s first major purchase is his aunt’s home from unwitting parents who have written off their son as a loser, but are tricked into selling at a grievously below market price. He provides the Yin to White’s Yang, literally tossing away bricks of cash in newspaper delivery fashion to the residents of Albuquerque, while his partner opts to hoard his stash in the ground.
By the series’ end, White is feared and reviled by the wife and son he cherishes, banished from the family as a bad memory to be outlived and forgotten. Gone is the once-adored chemistry teacher who endured bullying by his boss at the carwash, replaced by a calculating murderer who is willing to place children in harm’s way in order to reach his own goals. The delusion remains to the last, as he admits to enjoying the work, and being good at it, just prior to his shooting death, despite all the destruction surrounding him.
The trope of income equality and its accompanying fears are constants that American scriptwriters depend upon to spark the viewer’s imagination and create a successful cautionary myth. The Wire and Breaking Bad presented the drug trade as both the problem and solution to climbing the economic ladder. The former questioned the need for an underground drug economy by comparing it to prohibition, supporting drug legalization, and preferring treatment to incarceration. The latter unabashedly condemns the drug trade and condemns all it touches to shame, degradation, and death.
However, remove the plot device of an unjust economy and the myth falls apart for lack of context. The desperate fear of hunger and security become irrelevant in a world that focuses on helping the weakest, instead of glorifying the wealthy as models of success. What does it say about our culture that the most common American fear is also its favorite film and television plot device? Will future generations look back on both shows in confusion because the trope no longer makes sense? Just as science destroyed the creationism myth, perhaps the day will arrive when local and federal government efforts to eradicate poverty prove successful, and another plot device will fall by the wayside.
Street with no name 