The Crystal Ceiling and the Mess Below: Fantasy and Erosion of Privilege in Breaking Bad

In this essay, I discuss how AMC’s award-winning series Breaking Bad creates an oscillation between the thematic and symbolic poles of messiness and cleanness, playing with this polarity and ultimately blurring it. This blurring is predicated upon the series’ peculiar construction of material objects – among which money – accumulated in space, as well as upon its “bending” time to create alternate realities. This has ramifications in sociohistorical and sociopolitical terms: Breaking Bad speaks to a number of concerns typical of contemporary neoliberalism, and carves a parallel reality, where messiness and cleanness relentlessly trade places, thanks to an investment in fantasy; this parallel reality is, however, rather than in opposition, in continuity with reality-as-we-know-it, in the sense that it constitutes only a temporary, or a partial, escape for its subject(s). In the end, I maintain, Breaking Bad suggests that fantasy as supplemental to reality-as-we-know-it is a mirror that both connects and separates privilege, and the right to a liveable life, from their slow but steadfast erosion in the current sociohistorical and sociopolitical situation.