Samurai Champloo 25 - "Evanescent Encounter (Part 2)"

Samurai Champloo's concluding three-parter, “Evanescent Encounter” has a lot of narrative work to do. On top of the task of bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion – a Herculean labour in any TV show, one that anime shows in particular have a habit of botching – it also needs to bring together a story that has been disparate and episodic, ranging over a host of genres and tones, and make it seem like all one satisfying progression to a climactic moment. The search for the samurai that smells like sunflower has been until this point something of a quixotic dream, maybe even a joke, the thin framing device used to put these characters together. Now, it takes central stage, and we need to believe that the sunflower samurai has been essential to the series all along.

Once upon a time, this would not have been a problem. In the age of fully episodic TV, a finale could just be a regular episode with perhaps a bit more in the way of dramatic stakes. It didn't really have to tie together the entirety of what had come before. But in our day even episodic series like Samurai Champloo make pretensions to an ongoing narrative, a narrative that must ultimately be settled. So these episodes take great pains to assert that the seemingly rambling narrative has actually been a seamless whole. One-off characters from past adventures are mentioned, and we learn that there's been a hidden force guiding our characters' mission this whole time. I'm not sure that this is entirely successful, nor do I think it needs to be: fragmented narratives are not intrinsically worse than singular ones, and offer pleasures and possibilities that one continual story does not.

“Evanescent Encounter” succeeds as a finale in another way: by taking the series's usual ideas and amplifying them, turning the rhythms of an episode into a movie-length maxi-adventure. While there are plenty of atypical installments, your average episode of Samurai Champloo has a kind of pattern: the central trio roll into town, hungry and broke, get split up, run into a character with ambiguous allegiances, there's some swordfighting, and ultimately they're the few that get out alive. The conclusion escalates all of these trends to their highest points.

The first part of “Evanescent Encounter” mostly concerned itself with the first part of this plot. Fuu leaves the group, as she has on numerous times before, but this time it is treated more seriously: after a rare harmonious night by the fire, she leaves a heartfelt letter and dismisses her two alleged bodyguards. Fuu leaving, which would previously be a comic beat to set up the plot, is here allowed to be a genuinely emotional moment. It is not the comedic act of an impetuous girl but the proverbial sparrow leaving the nest, with Fuu finally deciding to confront her problems on her own. Similarly, we have more and more important guest characters with ambiguous allegiances, and they seem even stranger than the usual crop. There's a samurai more skillful than any seen before in the series, and a trio of assassins that . And then of course there's the sunflower samurai, who has achieved a colossal presence in the series despite having yet to appear.

The second episode in this trilogy opens with a recap, a rarity in Samurai Champloo. The recap is mostly functional, but contains some interesting choices. We get almost all of Fuu's letter, set to quiet and contemplative beats and shots of Mugen and Jin walking in a daze through the town. This suggests that the emotive impact of Fuu's departure and the perhaps-final splitting of the party is what is really important, instead of the more plotty developments that occurred in the first part. Fuu's letter gets so much weight in the short recap because it is what we are supposed to have taken away from the previous episode. The music, rather than psyching the viewer up for a climactic fight, reinforces the sense of ambivalence and maybe even loss to Champloo's conclusion.

The beat changes to something higher-paced when the episode proper starts, and with it the seemingly climactic swordfight between Mugen & Jin and Kagetogi Kariya, the shogun's hired man and hence the bearer of institutional power. Kariya draws his sword in slow motion, while Mugen rushes forward, apparently more in time with the music. In the past, Mugen's wild fighting style has made him appear a force of nature, as in the chilling final scene of “Misguided Miscreants”. Here, it makes him look sloppy and careless next to Kariya's delicate swordsmanship, and Mugen's wide swings come nowhere close to drawing blood.

Fight scenes, when done properly, are really character moments – the way in which a character fights reveals something about their personality, or at least their history. So Mugen fights in a way that is powerful but undisciplined, willing to chanllenge orthodoxy and make a ruckus – as he does in his assault on Kariya when he tries to use a barrel of beans as a weapon. But none of this works against Kariya. Reflecting his placid character, a personality that almost doesn't register, Kariya appears to momentarily become a ghost and take Mugen by suprise.

Jin battles Kariya one-on-one later in the episode, and doesn't fare much better. The fight is your classic samurai duel, which is to say that it's basically symmetrical, with swords flying fast but always meeting in the middle – until one doesn't. Jin's style and ethos are too close to Kariya, the avatar of authoritarian power. He is exceptionally good at following the laws of swordsmanship, but this will never succeed against the man who writes the laws.

We learn via flashbacks that Kariya previously wanted to enlist Jin's school of samurai as assassins, and ordered Jin's master to kill his prized pupil. Jin surpasses his master in a quick late-night scuffle, but the real father figure here is the man who controlled his master all along, and who represents the state-supported system of honour that Jin has been cast out of. This bit of backstory resolves the moral ambiguity that's been with Jin since we learned he killed his master, putting his actions in the best possible light. In that, it is simply convenient storytelling, but it also serves a greater purpose: establishing Kariya as the paternal force that Jin has to overcome in order to leave behind societal rules and truly be his own person.

It's worth noting that Mugen and Jin appear to have the most success when fighting Kariya two-on-one, although this is quickly abandoned as not suiting honour or ego. Mugen and Jin are foils for each other, reserved and classical matched against of outspoken and wild. This is also reflected in their fighting styles. Jin's classical kenjitsu is more beautiful, but it lacks the kinetic energy that Samurai Champloo finds in Mugen's style and the hip-hop music it samples. To stretch the metaphor a bit too far, Jin is the classical chanbara element of the series, and Mugen is its anachronistic remix side. Fuu is, I dunno, it's emotional core, or maybe the act of creation involved in bringing the two together.

This is why it's crucial for the series that Jin and Mugen never resolve their delayed battle. This is not just because it would kill off one of the main characters. For Samurai Champloo to ultimately make one man's style victorious to the other would deny the power, both aesthetic and philosophical, that Champloo finds in the other. The series's entire ethos is the merging of the modern and the traditional, of chaotic creativity and orderly aesthetics. Mugen and Jin began the series alone and in mortal peril, and when the party seems to finally have separated for good their existence is almost immediately threatened.

This is underlined by the cut to Fuu on her own. While Fuu has her own strengths, she is physically the weakest of the group, and as such is vulnerable to any two-bit shogunate thug she runs across on her own. It should be said here that Samurai Champloo does not have the most progressive gender politics. Fuu often plays the role of the damsel in distress, with her stubborn pride and rambunctious affect being the only form of resistance she can offer in a world of violence. She is often sexually imperilled, as in the multiple times she is trapped in a brothel, and there are undertones of that in this scene. Fuu isn't even touched by her opponent's blade before she falls to her knees. Her yukata rides up and Fuu has to hold the fabric so as not to expose her crotch, highlighting her sexual vulnerability.

Her assailant crouches down next to her and appears to molest her. As much as Fuu has been sexually threatened over the course of the series, this is the only scene where she is actually abused. Absent her protectors, Fuu's spiritual strengths offer little protection against the world of masculine violence she finds herself in. When trying to escape, we see her running as fast as she can through the grass, but her pursuer only has to speed-walk. In a world defined by the physical, Fuu simply doesn't have the right body [1].

So of course, Mugen has to go to the island and rescue Fuu. There's a brief exchange between him and Jin in which Mugen clearly wants to be the one to fight Kariya, but eventually agrees to accept the less glorious mission of rescuing Fuu from a less impressive group of baddies. This would appear to be callousness on both men's part, but the subtext of the scene suggests that this is a careful negotiation that involves an evaluation of the relationships between the trio.

Throughout most of Samurai Champloo there's been little romantic tension between the main trio, especially considering that in different hands the same premise would have instantly resulted in a love triangle. The central characters even correspond to the archetypes in a two-suitors romance: the wild but sexy Mugen, the dull but dependable Jin, and the woman stuck between them. Samurai Champloo takes these characters' flaws to extremes: instead of being a sexy outlaw Mugen's wildness makes him an unappealing brute, while Jin's devotion to the straight-and-narrow makes him frightening, and Fuu's desire to postpone the conflict between the two becomes petulance. In this way, Samurai Champloo chooses farce over romance.

But there have been glimmers of attraction between Fuu and Jin throughout, and a moonlight conversation between the two in “Evanescent Encounter Part 1” would seem to confirm a degree of affection. But Fuu ultimately ends their conversation with the ambiguous phrase “Because Mugen is... I'm sorry”. When Jin flashes back to the scene in Part 2, this is the only line he recalls. Jin seems to interpret this as Fuu refusing him in favour of her love for Mugen, but I think it's more likely that she recognizes that choosing one man to have an affair with would disrupt the essential unity of their trio[2]. This is akin to her refusal to allow Mugen and Jin to fight, postponing the inevitable choice that will collapse a dynamic trinity into an uncomfortable dyad. Jin sends Mugen after her, but perhaps it would be better if both ronin went together. In the end, their decision to separate ends up nearly killing all of them.

Fuu is kept captive in a ruined church, with a red cross the only undamaged thing in sight. This is as good a time as any to talk about the role Christianity plays in this plot. We learned in the last episode that the Sunflower Samurai was the leader of a group of reclusive and persecuted Christians. The struggle between Japanese Christians and the dominant culture has popped up in a number of episodes before, and is presented here as a fairly straightforward group of virtuous rebels.

It seems at first a little strange for a contemporary series to celebrate Christianity as a form of rebellion against the mainstream. But I don't think that it's the specific precepts and values of Christianity that Shinichiro Watanabe wants to praise. Rather, it's the presence of Christians in a predominantly Shinto society as a marker of cultural hybridity – the same hybridity that comes from, say, using hip-hop music in a samurai anime [3].

Samurai Champloo presents Edo Japan as a society on a doomed quest to enforce cultural purity. It sees the mixing and remixing of cultures as not just inevitable but ultimately beautiful. This is in evidence throughout the several episodes involving improbable encounters with foreigners (“Artistic Anarchy”, “Stranger Searching”, “Baseball Blues”). Samurai Champloo makes us aware of the shogunate's extensive and complicated attempts to regulate cultural exchange, and how the influence of Western society seeps through anyways. In “Evanescent Encounter”, this cultural warfare becomes literal violent combat.

Christianity is in itself not a force for hybridity and openness – the Old Testament in particular is obsessed with purity. In “Unholy Union” Samurai Champloo shows some skepticism to the religious impulse, while still portraying the Christians as more or less virtuous. But it also recognizes that even a conservative piece of culture can become revolutionary when it becomes hybridized, as in fact Japanese Christianity did during the Shimabara Rebellion. Similarly, the mostly flawed personalities of Mugen, Fuu, and Jin become something more – something disruptive – when they are put together.

Ultimately, these are really the values that Samurai Champloo celebrates – hybridity, openness, and rebellion against a hegemonic society. These values inform the show's style arguably more than they do the content of its stories. Champloo exults hybridity in both word and deed. It's possible to criticize this aesthetic politics as merely a neoliberal celebration of individual creativity, but I think that ignores that the series's protagonists never fare well on their own, and need each other in order to create a truly hybrid social unit. It's this kind of new, artificially-fashioned unit that Champloo tentatively suggests is truly heroic.

[1] I'd have to go back to check on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if the stories in which Fuu has the most power are the ones in which she is comically overweight.

[2] It's possible to take a pro-polyamory message out of this, as in this reading of the Hunger Games. If you're so inclined, that is.

[3]Japanese Christians play a similar role in Watanabe's series Kids on the Slope.

Attack on Titan 12: Wound -- The Battle for Trost (8)

Attack on Titan 12: Wound – The Battle for Trost (8)

So, this is the second of three Attack on Titan episodes about Eren lifting a rock.

That description is a little facetious, but not very. A lot of people have complained about the pacing of the series, and these problems crop up towards the end of the Battle for Trost arc more than perhaps any other. I'm not exactly sure why this bothers me so much – after all, Space Brothers has a similarly glacial pace, and I generally enjoy it as a way to chill out for 24 minutes a week.

But there's also no real aesthetic of urgency in Space Brothers, whereas there definitely is one in Attack on Titan. The best moments of the series are moments of total panic and confusion, where Titans have devastated the city and no hope is in sight. Attack on Titan sells the total despair and devastation of war better than almost anything else I've seen. But the flip side of that success is that the stalling techniques developed by long-running episodic series[1] are more egregious and seem like more of an affront to the visceral drama that the scenes of devastation promise.

Eren's resurrection as a superhuman has already undercut some of the grisly aesthetic of the early episodes, taking away the sense of consequence to the carnage by at first challenging and then reaffirming the central characters' invulnerability. When the colossal titan appeared behind Eren in the fourth episode, it was a dramatic jolt of immediacy: the narrative distance we expected to appear between the training arc and the next fight sequence was abridged abruptly, defamiliarizing the viewer from their genre expectations and establishing the uncompromising brutality of the setting. The later episodes in this arc make an opposite maneuver, stretching out the narrative distance we expect from such a seemingly simple task, and making Attack on Titan seem much more generic (in the non-pejorative sense) than it had before.

Still, what happens in this episode isn't total filler. The central drama, of Eren attempting to lift a boulder in order to seal the hole the Titans busted in a wall, is not as trivial as such a brief description makes it sound. I'm reminded of the famous Steve Ditko sequence in Amazing Spider-man, where Spider-man lifting a heavy metal object is transformed from a simple physical task to an expression of the human will.

Compare & contrast:

The labouring body has been aestheticized for political purposes by pretty much every ideology imaginable over the past century. Capitalists like Ditko used extreme physical labour to portray the individual claiming their own personal freedom. Communists romanticized the manual labourer as the source of revolutionary fervour. And fascists made the perfect labouring body an object of national desire through Olympia and other pieces of propaganda. Of course, most people who did (and do) manual labour would be surprised to discover that it was liberatory and noble instead of just painful and miserable.

Politically, Attack on Titan leans closest to fascism. Like many popular genre narratives, it adheres to Susan Sontag's ideas of fascist art in that it fixates on a single heroic individual, the need to obey him, and the idealizaiton of the body. But even moreso than your usual superhero narrative, Attack on Titan understands the role of the state and the role of the military in much the same way as fascist leaders in the 20^th century did, which is to say that the two should be basically coterminous, and that weak civilian leaders and soldiers who do not follow orders are responsible for societal weakness and must be purged. The series also demonstrates some of the fixations of fascist art and politics: the unfairness of borders (and with it the nobility of conquest) and the enemy as simultaneously subhuman and superhuman. Whatever its virtues may be, Attack on Titan is fascist in not just an abstract way but a way that is very specific to the history of fascism in the 20^th century, mimicking the self-justification of Japanese militarism and the aesthetics of the Nazi's Aryan idyll [2].

But Attack on Titan's use of the labouring body is distinctly different from what you would see in, say, the films of Nazi Germany. In Attack on Titan, the ideal labouring body is literally monstrous. Instead of becoming a shining example of Aryan masculinity, Eren can only achieve strength by turning into a dark, bestial figure. The colossal titan is the extreme end of this process: it is the most powerful creature in the show's universe thus far, and its muscles and inner organs are on full display, making it grotesquely embodied.  When Eren transforms into a titan, he is literally portrayed as on the border between humanity and monstrousity:

Eren's characterization also suggests that Attack on Titan feels uncomfortable with the actors and tropes that its right-wing ideology enshrines. Eren is, the anime tells us, everything that the remains of humanity needs in a leader: he is hard-nosed, incorruptible, willing to challenge the decadent complacency of his times even before the walls start falling, and completely merciless when it comes to the titans. His stated goal is to kill every last titan in the world – genocide, essentially. We're never given any reason to think that these qualities are not exactly what is required to face the titans. But at the same time, whenever Eren goes on a rant about how much he wants to kill all the titans, the anime is not shy about making him appear dangerously unhinged (and then later showing him how he is completely unprepared for combat). Mikasa's loyalty to Eren is both celebrated and made to seem more than a little insane.

This is not to say that Attack on Titan's fundamental queasiness about the actions of fascism make it progressive. I don't believe that it is, as some have argued, a deconstruction of the typical shounen narrative. It is still quite frequently didactic about the necessity of military vigilance and intolerance towards the enemy, and gives no sympathy to the straw-men characters who represent weak hearts and clouded minds. Moreover, the fundamental scenario it presents – fighting an enemy that actually is inhuman and actually is a threat to your existence – is one in which the precepts of militarism seem almost natural.

So what's going on here?  I'd like to think that this is a bit of natural humanity surfacing even within the strictures of reactionary ideology. But we also need to recognize that you can simultaneously recognize an act as having some kind of moral taint and still advocate it. Glenn Greenwald says this frequently about torture: those that advocate for it don't do so on the basis that torture is morally right, but rather that it is unpleasant but necessary to fight the greater evil. Advocating extreme measures (torture, fascism, turning into a giant monster) are thus less a sign of moral turpitude than a sign of toughness. Presenting these measures as morally ambiguous is not necessarily progressive, as it often rescues them from being clearly unacceptable.  In the beginning of "Wound", Dot Pixis remarks that he's willing to be labelled a murderer for ordering his men to distract the titans.  The way this is formulated, as Pixis ruining his reputation for the greater good, turns what could be seen as a barbaric act of brutal command into a heroic sacrifice.

But understanding Attack on Titan's unease with its own ideology helps to justify the structure of this episode. “Wound” is all about resolving Eren's indecision as to whether or not to become a monster in order to fight monsters (to use extremely tired language). But to have Eren mopily contemplating this decision, Hamlet-like, would go against not just his character but also the virtues that Attack on Titan holds dear. So instead hesitancy is dramatized by Eren losing control of his monstrous form. Titan-Eren lashes out at the humans he holds dear, and literally hurts himself, punching himself in the face while trying to get at Mikasa. His hands and face steam after the impact: not only is the damage self-inflicted, but it makes the tools he needs to use invisible beneath the smoke.

On the inside, Eren faces the dilemma through a dream of a picturesque familial life. In his semi-conscious stupor, he is allowed to face the questions that his much-praised determination and single-mindedness would normally not allow him to consider. The people he sees in this vision are all in some way associated with pain and dysfunction: his father was distant and possibly experimented on him, his mother was killed by the Titans, and Mikasa has turned into a jaded and obsessed warrior. But here, they are all part of an idyllic, personally functional family. Precisely for this reason, they can't really do anything: they are static, only passively beckoning Eren to them.

This is the temptation of accepting life within the walls and of trying to make the best of what you can. For political actors of any type, at least those who have the privilege to “not care about politics”, there is always the temptation to slide back into a passive life, espousing your radical opinions over dinner but never doing anything to implement them. The universality of this situation means that it cuts both ways: there are some people just focusing on their own lives who should undoubtedly be taking to the streets (myself perhaps included), while there are other political actors who you wish would have chosen the passive family life instead. And indeed, only a dogmatist could argue that family, friends, and hobbies are meaningless pursuits which only serve to distract people from the One True Cause.

But Attack on Titan is a dogmatic series that takes place in a dogmatic world. The humans of the series are constantly threatened by the titans' assault, so for them the domestic life that Eren envisions is never an option. Even if Eren decided to settle down instead of fighting, he could never attain that domestic idyll: the people involved are missing, dead, or irrevocably changed by their experience of war. We see people resort to cowardice every episode, but they have increasingly little space to run to: in such an environment, bravery becomes not a virtue but the only available option.

So why does “Wound”'s drama hinge on Eren making a false choice? When Armin stabs Eren and leads him back to consciousness [3], he does not try to convince Eren that the domestic idyll he sees is an illusion. Rather, he argues that Eren doesn't even really want that domestic idyll: he wants to go beyond the walls. Perhaps Eren could stay there forever in that Titan, living out a peaceful agrarian existence in his mind. Attack on Titan maintains that this would be a sin. By the end of the episode, Eren is reminded of his ambition to go beyond the walls, to conquer the territory as a sign of his human will.

This plot also suggests that Eren is not fully in control of himself or the forces he has unleashed. This is mirrored in a subplot about Jean's gear jamming down in the middle of battle. For as much clear aesthetic pleasure as Attack on Titan takes in the aerial assault gear, it seems to break an awful lot: we've already seen it happen twice, plus one instance of the gear running out of gas in mid-fight. Much like Eren's Titan transformation, the tools of war are unreliable and unsavoury, but in the Manichean drama of Attack on Titan they are the only tools that can be used.

By looking at the series's larger ideology, the seemingly uneventful “Wound” begins to seem more important. Eren has already made his decision to go beyond the walls and eradicate the Titans, but “Wound' tests his resolve by offering him a genuinely desirable alternative. Moreover, it reaffirms Attack on Titan's political commitments by confronting and ultimately appearing to resolve its discomfort with the tools of fascism. “Wound” is still perhaps a filler episode, but it is often filler episodes that give us the clearest glance at a show's central priorities and ideas.

[1]I've talked about this previously, but due to a mixture of budget and concerns about catching up with the source material, long-running shounen series like Naruto and Bleach have perfected the art of making a fight last ten episodes without actually animating two hundred minutes of action. Flurries of activity are paced out with flashback sequences, monologues, and commentary from minor characters standing on the sidelines. This episode uses a lot of these techniques in order to draw out what is not a lot of story material. Such techniques seem much more unnecessary in a limited-run series like Attack on Titan than in a weekly serial, of course.

[2] In an earlier episode it is revealed, almost as a sidebar, that all of the Asian population was wiped out by Titans, leaving the almost exclusively white world in which the series is set.

[3] You could probably do a whole thing with the homoerotic imagery of this scene, namely Armin penetrating Eren from behind, but I don't feel like it.

Samurai Flamenco 2: My Umbrella Is Missing

We're all familiar with the superhero genre, and the kind of ethical calculus that it's made cliche. Over and over again, in comics and in movies, we learn that with great power comes great responsibility, that we need to break the law in order to enforce justice, and that it is up to heroic individuals to make the world safe for the rest of us. This has become so generic that we no longer notice its odder elements: how superheroes violate law and order in order to uphold it, or how they are simultaneously a symbol of patriotic strength and national weakness.

Samurai Flamenco makes these contradictory elements of the superhero myth visible. The titular hero is obsessed with pursuing law – not the abstract Platonic ideal of law that most heroes hold themselves to, but obscure bylaws and regulations. It deals with the modern experience of law and governmentality, in which control appears not as a massive centralized god, good or evil, but through a thousand petty fiefdoms. The comedy stems from Samurai Flamenco (the character, not the series) mistaking the reality of law for the fantasy, and engaging in a quixotic quest to punish jaywalkers and litterers across Tokyo. This is goofy humour, but it wouldn't be funny if it didn't draw on deep and somewhat dark contradictions in our world.

The first episode of Samurai Flamenco established the outlandish premise of the series and focused on the collision of Hazama's idealism and reality. This collision occured in both the physical confrontation between Hazama and the wayward youths and the conversations between Hazama and the skeptical Goto. “My Umbrella is Missing” goes more into the ethos of Hazama's quest, taking it seriously in a way the first episode didn't.

The episode opens with a run-in between Flamenco and a middle-aged woman who takes her garbage out thirty-five minutes too early. Flamenco already has a prepared speech, which comes off as compensation: he proclaims that “They call me Samurai Flamenco”, as if he did not create the identity for himself, and insists that “I am not a suspicious character”. Instead of the hero meeting the call of danger, as Joseph Campbell would have it, in Samurai Flamenco the heroic persona comes first and then later searches for danger.

Having been confronted by an enforcer of minor laws, the woman goes to the police. This seemingly natural response shows how deeply engrained law has become in our psyche: the only response to its imposition is to turn to other forces of law. The police initially decline to pursue Flamenco, but their very act of calming resident fears turns them into another version of Flamenco: their chief business is attempting to suppress harmless acts. We then see Goto putting out his own garbage early, suggesting the kind of everyday hypocrisy that problematizes Goto's own claim to be an enforcer of the law.

This is what Samurai Flamenco draws its humour from: the essential meaninglessness, or at least fluidity, of the term “crime” or “criminal” in everyday life. We are all criminals, whether it be copying a file in the wrong way or driving at a steady 10 miles above the speed limit. In this way the system of law draws us all into its web, ensuring our daily interaction, visible or invisible, with the state. But despite the fact that we all break the law, we also have a kind of reverence for it, as seen in figures like the superhero. We believe in a platonic ideal of law and order that has little relation to the petty bureaucratic regime – and it is this gap between ideas and reality that Samurai Flamenco finds so hard to grasp.

This episode chooses a curious example of everyday crime: umbrella theft. I'm assuming that this is a Japanese cultural thing, as I've never heard North Americans describe taking someone else's umbrella on a rainy day as normal behavior. To us, it would appear to be a tremendous imposition on private property, even if the money value lost was negligible. Thus we have an episode in which all of the characters wonder why Hazama cares so much about stolen umbrellas, while the Western viewer wonders why they care so little. Ironically, this destabilizes the idea of law even more, making clear to a Western viewer that both the particularities of law and the social enforcement of it differ between societies. If even the abstract idea of Law is different in different places, then perhaps it does not exist at all.

At its root, the umbrella theft depicted in this episode is a version of the “tragedy of the commons”. This idea, so often repeated by the defenders of capitalism, is that private property is necessary in order to compel people to behave responsibly. As the usual example goes, if no one is the owner of a field used for grazing, no one will have motivation to maintain that field, and eventually the utopian idea of a common field will go to waste. Similarly, by ignoring the protections of private property, umbrella theft leaves well-meaning individuals to get caught in the rain, as with the sick child in the story Hazama tells.

Our superhero's origin story, in addition to being humorously mundane (the tragic death is instead a tragic flu), can also function as an origin story for capitalism. This episode stacks the deck by attaching a charm from Goto's absent girlfriend to his stolen umbrella. The umbrella is not just a device to keep dry, but stands in for a genuine human relationship. For Goto, the love of his long-distance girlfriend is conveyed entirely through objects, whether it be the charm or the cell phone on which she sends him text messages.

“My Umbrella is Missing” transforms the capitalist norms of private property into affective relationships [1]. The climax of the episode consists of Flamenco racing a train in order to recover Goto's umbrella. This reverses the imagery of popular quasi-anticapitalist narratives: we have human physicality against cold machinery and personal relations against an indifferent society, but the right to property [2] is identified with the heroic individual and romantic relationships, while the cold machine is identified with a kind of descent into communitarian anarchy. This kind of reverse Ludditism is not new, but was predominant in capitalist art during the Cold War, with the heroic entrepreneurs of Atlas Shrugged being perhaps Exhibit One.

Obviously Flamenco's quest is meant to be silly, but the musical cues and Goto's reactions in this episode suggest that there is a kind of nobility to it. It may be quixotic, but Quixote was after all fighting for moral values. The moment we are supposed to begin thinking that there is something to Flamenco's quest is not when he is standing up for collectively-determined bureaucratic rules such as garbage collection dates or noise ordinances, but when he is standing up for our right to our possessions. The umbrella plot suggests the possibility of a Samurai Flamenco that is fundamentally reactionary in the same way that most superhero narratives are.

But I think there's also a progressive, or at least disruptive, Samurai Flamenco, that has a habit of picking away at easy narratives. The deconstructionist bent of the show is on full display in the scene in which Hazama performs in a video for the idol group Mineral Miracle Muse (the name a parody of Morning Musume). We were first introduced to MMM in the ending credits, which initially seemed like the ED to an entirely different show. That show would be the cliche idol show that exists for little other purpose than to have cute girls acting moe. Credits sequences, like music videos, are more or less narrative-free images. Even in more or less realist shows, the credits often indulge in spectacle, with a prime example being in fact the opening credits of Samurai Flamenco, which depict Flamenco battling a giant robot.

The ending credits in the first episode present us with a spectacular image of idealized femininity. We don't understand why we're seeing the image, but at the same time the image itself is immediately comprehensible, thanks to the larger culture we're immersed in [3]. In the second episode, we see the creation of the image. Rather than existing in itself, the image is placed within the context of economic production. We get to see not just the cameras that shoot the idol singers, but the financial and professional forces that shaped the video.

Of course, the knowledge that music videos are produced instead of appearing out of the ether is hardly deconstructionist. The narratives of creation have themselves become vital images in our culture: the brilliant artist hard at work, the Behind the Music narrative arc. What's new in Samurai Flamenco is Hazama's total disengagement with the image he's part of.

Hazama seems to be on autopilot for most of his work as a model. He allows his pushy agent to construct his public image. Hazama is more concerned with another public image, that of his masked alter-ego. While speakers are playing MMM's upbeat pop music, Hazama is singing along in his head to a sentai hero's theme song. At first we don't hear either song, making the group's dancing appear hollow and disconnected. Then, we hear both songs at once. Both are commercial products contained within a spectacular image: the pop album and the action figure. But the juxtaposition makes both appear ridiculous and jarring. These pop-cultural images are very familiar to us, but Samurai Flamenco juxtaposes them in order to make us hear them anew, and recognize them for the empty spectacles that they are.

I haven't seen the rest of Samurai Flamenco, but I've heard from ripples across the Internet that it takes a rather darker turn in later episodes. This doesn't really surprise me. The first two episodes of the series are overtly comedic in tone, but the comedy is based on some pretty bleak ideas. It is not just that we will never live up to our dreams, or that our dreams are ultimately only empty images. It is that our dreams are ultimately just as sad and petty as the rest of our lives. Hazama risks everything to fight for truth and justice, and ends up harassing people about their recycling. American TV has recently been consumed by dramas about the question of means versus ends, or whether evil means justify a good end. Samurai Flamenco doesn't let that good end be – instead, it reveals law and morality to be an elaborate joke. The darkness is not what we do to reach our goals, but the goals themselves.

[1] Most advertisements do a similar thing, transforming a consumer object into an affective statement or the embodiment of a personal relationship.

[2]Technically speaking, an umbrella is a possession, not property in the typically Marxist sense. No communist is going to want to take away your umbrella. I'm arguing that in this narrative it serves as a symbol for genuine property, such as the land in the traditional “tragedy of the commons” story.

[3]For Western viewers not familiar with anime tropes or idol culture, this may instead be another cultural gap.

Doctor Who 6-06: The Almost People

Freud used the double or the doppelganger as one of the clearest examples of the uncanny there is, and it's been a staple of horror fiction for centuries. Doubles and clones have also been rich fodder for science fiction for quite some time, provoking social commentary and philosophical musings. Doctor Who borrows liberally by both genres to make its concoction of space-time fantasy work, and so it's not surprising that it would have its fair share of duplicates. We've already had a forged Rose (in “New Earth") and a clone Martha (in “The Sontaran Strategem”), to say nothing of the uniform replication of the Cybermen or the Daleks, and that's just off the top of my head. In the sixth-season two-parter consisting of “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People”, Doctor Who addresses the idea of the double much more directly, giving us an extensive cast of characters and then giving all of them an almost-but-not-quite doppelganger, including a double Doctor.

Why is the doppelganger so unnerving? “The Almost People” practically takes for granted that it is, especially in the originals' reaction to their copies. Theoretically, another copy of yourself ought to be one of the least threatening things imaginable – after all, there's nothing you know more thoroughly than yourself, and a duplicate should have the same interests and personality as you do. But this is not the case.

Freud suggests that doubles, whether in the form of dolls, puppets, or more supernatural entities, scare us because they are almost-but-not-quite human. In “The Uncanny”, he writes that “the 'double' was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as Rank says”. The double is originally, according to Freud, formed as a defense mechanism against the limitations of the mortal body, such as an imaginary friend or the religious conscience. If we can replicate ourselves, we do not have to accept death.

Doctor Who literalizes this through the “gangers”, low-grade copies of human beings who are used to do hazardous work [1]. Humans can manipulate perfect copies of themselves, preserving their real bodies from any danger. In the cold open of “The Rebel Flesh”, a worker falls into a vat of acid and everyone casually jokes about it. His ganger disintegrates, but his original body is left alive. In Doctor Who, as in Freud, doppelgangers are literally a way to bypass death and the limitations of the mortal body.

But if this is their purpose, then such duplicates are inevitably doomed to fail, because nobody can live forever (although it would be nice). If we create an immortal doppelganger, Freud argues, then we inevitably become horrified of it. It is ultimately not like us, because it lacks a key aspect of human experience, mortality. This difference ultimately brings home the fact of our own death, and creates the sensation of the uncanny. This is why immaculately embalmed corpses are so uncanny. As Freud puts it, “From having been an assurance of immortality, [the double] becomes the ghastly harbinger of death”.

This is of course a very specific narrative to suggest as an universal human development, which is why I'm usually a little queasy about Freudian readings. But even if we don't read Freud as speaking to the universal human condition, he undoubtedly speaks to the anxieties of the Western European intellectual culture he was a part of. Freud read texts, such as the stories of E. T. A. Hoffman, and authors of fiction in turn read Freud and were influenced by him.  Doctor Who is also a part of this culture, or at least a distant cousin. If there isn't an episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor and Siggy fight some monster together, there probably will be one day. The gangers match up too closely to Freud's theory of the doppelganger for it to be entirely coincidental.

This two-parter dramatizes the persistent fear that makes the doppelganger uncanny: that it can never fully be classified among the other immobile objects that you use, that it might just cling to a life of its own. This is why there are so many horror stories about animate dolls and mannequins (including the first episode of new Who). The workers here learn that not only has the Flesh become animate through a freak accident, but that it was always in some ways alive.

Amy has to deal with a similar anxiety when confronted with the sight of two Doctors. The perfect duplication of a man she knows and loves calls into question the idea of individuality and personal essence that is so essential to our contemporary understanding of the human self. The public anxiety about cloning has perhaps the same rationale: if it's possible to make an identical copy of me, then I become no longer myself but simply one of a potentially infinite number of iterations of the same DNA, interchangeable with any number of others. This is also why, by some accounts, twins are uncanny (The Shining, anyone?) For Amy, seeing another Doctor with the same tics and eccentricities as the one she loves calls into question the validity of that love, which is forced to either distinguish between identical objects or admit that it is not a love for an individual but for a series of infinitely copyable characteristics.

Amy reacts by choosing the former option, assuming that the flesh-created Doctor is a fake and treating him as an unreliable copy. She tries to assert the singularity of the Doctor's identity, noting that “there can really only be one” and calling the Flesh duplicate “almost the Doctor” (a PhD candidate, maybe?) Later in the episode, the two Doctors reveal that they have tricked Amy and that the one she thought was the original was actually the Flesh copy. The episode presents this as Amy being taught a lesson in not being prejudiced against clones or whatever, but I think there's something horrifying in this plot. Amy's relationship with the Doctor, whose strength has been a central point of many prior episodes, appears here as a directionless prejudice that can be easily confused. The only way to maintain genuine relationships, “The Almost People” suggests, is to accept that the ones you love can be replaced by those with similar enough characteristics. This is the happy ending of one of the episode's subplots, in which a child's father is replaced by a loving ganger, and it also echoes the happy ending given to Rose in an earlier season, in which she was given an incomplete copy of the Doctor that could serve as a lover in a way the real one couldn't.

I don't want to say that this message is wrong, but I don't think it's as self-evidently right as “The Almost People” suggests. The episode largely uses a liberal human rights framework to approach the ethical dilemma suggested by the gangers. The gangers, the Doctor maintains, are simply another oppressed group that needs to be recognized as legitimate and integrated into humanity. While “The Almost People” uses the gangers and their uncanny doubling to create horror and intrigue, its ethical argument suggests that their being duplicates is sort of irrelevant: they are just as legitimate and deserve the same rights and respect as any other liberal subject. This would seem to contradict, however, the ways in which the script also treats the gangers as interchangeable with the originals. This is neither the first nor the last time that Doctor Who features a contradiction between the ideological underpinnings of the genre sources it draws on and the liberal-pacifist ideology that it itself wants to espouse.

As much as this episode's script urges us to treat the gangers as every bit as deserving of humanity as the originals, it also plays up the uncanny horror of the copy. The gangers have trouble holding onto their fully human form, with their faces frequently melting into gooey masks. This is almost textbook uncanny, with the half-formed faces being just close enough to humanity to inspire horror.

The duplicitous Jennifer is singled out as especially monstrous. In an early scene, she is the only one to bear a half-formed face while the other gangers, who are alienated by her revolutionary rhetoric, all look fully human. Later, Jennifer turns into an ogreish monster and begins destroying everything in sight. This undercuts the message of tolerance and equality just a bit. After all, it's not like any of the original-recipe humans turn into giant monsters. This ending fulfills the genre requirements of a Doctor Who story, but it also ultimately suggests that maybe the subaltern [2] – at least its most strident and resistant members – is ultimately a little monstrous after all.

Jennifer's ultimate fate helps to reveal the political ideology underpinning “The Almost People”. In this two-parter the Doctor is depicted as being the force of external rationality keeping two prejudiced extremist groups from killing each other out of irrational hatred. This is the role that Western countries like to imagine themselves playing in global politics[3], and the Doctor acts as the Western power par excellence. The Doctor, white, male, outstandingly intelligent, possessor of advanced technology, looking pristine in his suit and tie, stands in a clear contrast to the workers that he makes peace among, who are dirty, lower-class, and predominantly female. As in the similarly-plotted two-parter from season 5, the two warring factions are lead by irrational war-mongering women, who bring the sanguine men along for the ride. While there certainly are female war-mongers, some serving in the Obama administration as we speak, Doctor Who's focus on them would seem to go against the millennia of very masculine warfare. To convey that war is bad, Doctor Who codes it as either inhuman (the Daleks, to take one example) or feminine.

By presenting the revolt of the gangers against humans as being simply a case of two equally-prejudiced groups who need to set aside their differences, Doctor Who uses the liberal framework of discrimination to demonize class struggle. When Jennifer talks about leading a revolt to free the billion gangers used as slave labour in India, this is portrayed as megalomania.  The ganger man who just wants to see his family is moral; the woman who wants to affect larger political change is not.  The revolt is not even hours old before it becomes Just As Bad as the oppression it fights against.

“The Almost People” depicts the gangers as having gone through a tremendous experience of pain, suffering and exploitation. It takes this seriously as both injustice and a psychic wound that affects all of the gangers and even the Doctor. What is most damaging, the script suggests, is the ongoing denial of their humanity in the service of profit and the safety of the privileged. This is why characters in the episode talk obsessively about the eyes of dying gangers, a vision of raw suffering humanity which haunts their dreams. In this there are clear parallels between the gangers and the labouring masses around the world that work unseen all day so that the First World can kick back and watch a science-fiction show.

But because of its ideological framework, determined by both the liberal sympathies of its writer and its position as a BBC institution, Doctor Who is forced to present this exploitation as identity-based prejudice instead of class oppression. Its solution for the subaltern is to shake hands with the oppressors, team up with a liberal-minded white man, and to perhaps go to the newspapers to tell their side of the story – the “spreading awareness” means of politics. I'm not saying that we need to ignore questions of prejudice, or that they can ever be fully explicated from economic questions – the persistent Othering of people in the global south, for instance, makes their economic exploitation much less troubling to the first world. But Doctor Who's inability to grapple with economic class means that we end up with an episode that purports to champion the humanity of the subaltern, and ends up with that subaltern literally turning into a monster that has to be stopped. The science-fictional nature of this subaltern means that liberalism is much more nakedly present here than it probably would be in a BBC show about a real-life oppressed group[4]. Instead of covering this ideology up with equivocation, Doctor Who distracts from it with the usual litany of heroic sacrifices, half-hearted romance plotlines, and long minutes of people running down hallways.

In his book In the Break, Fred Moten uses Freud's idea of the double in a more radical way. Moten reads black art as the “revolt of the object”, in which that which was previously treated as an object asserts its subjectivity. This is the underpinning of countless sci-fi stories in which computers, robots, or some other friendly new technology comes to live and rebels against its owners – the seminal example is probably Hal's rebellion in 2001. This exploits our psychological need for the classifications between subject and object: if the things we treated as senseless and inanimate, the things we abuse every day for our own purposes, became able to act themselves then not just our sense of the object but also our sense of the subject would be called into question. Drawing on Moten's idea of the “revolt of the object”, we can see such plotlines as also addressing post-colonial anxiety about the revolt of the last group of people we thought were objects. Science-fiction stories like 2001 allow white people to relive this revolt in a way that makes their own position sympathetic instead of monstrous.

As a description of this two-parter, “the revolt of the object” is apt to the point of literalness. In these episodes, Doctor Who makes the link between revolt-of-technology plots and the revolt of the oppressed explicit: the gangers are both a new, uncanny technology and a group of subaltern workers. They stand in here for the global poor who work 18-hour days stitching our clothes, and as Moten would suggest they finally gain a modicum of power when they gain the ability to speak. For the first time the gangers are able to vocalize the oppression and trauma that they could only convey through the looks in their eyes. The Doctor says that once the world finds out what's been happening everything will change. This a little naive – after all, we have a pretty good idea of what that “Made in Indonesia” label means, but we usually buy the shirt anyways and go on with our days – but even absent other changes the subaltern claiming its voice is at least a small victory.

Thus far I've been reading this episode as a piece of metaphors, in which the gangers are simply a device for talking about psychological drives (as read through Freud) and political positioning (as read through Moten). But it would be too simplistic to say that the gangers are the same as a sweatshop worker, or even the same as one of Freud's dolls. What makes fantasy so thrilling and strange is that its creations are never quite reducible to a symbol for something that's safely real. Even in the most didactic of science fiction, the speculative elements have some quality about them that a social treatise would not.

So if I want to read the gangers as a metaphor for the global poor, this is complicated by the ways in which the gangers are not like the global poor – namely, in how they exactly duplicate and in some ways share an identity with the privileged class. This is not the case with colonialism and its contemporary counterpart, where people in the colonized world were considered less-than-human because of their differences. Examining these differences opens up a third level on which we can analyze this episode, a level which is perhaps more flattering to its creators. What does “The Almost People” suggest about human consciousness and individuality?

At many points in the episode, the gangers and their originals almost seem to share a single brain. This is most obvious in the Doctor and his double, who finish each other's sentences and turn out to be indistinguishable even by those close to them. Their manic scheming has the ring of masturbation, with the usual exchange of fancy and skepticism that takes place between the Doctor and his companions being reduced to an endless feedback loop of whimsy. Doctor Who tells us over and over again that the Doctor is special, that he is sui generis, the last of his kind, so it presents the cloning as not something that diminishes the Doctor's specialness (as Amy understands it) but as something that expands it. There are two bodies, but they share the same name, the same persona, and the same identity.

This profound sameness extends to the workers that turn against each other.  One character remarks, with a hint of melancholy, that she can predict her ganger's actions because they're exactly what she would do. One subplot concludes with a ganger taking the original's place in his family, as though the two were completely interchangeable. This seems to cut against Doctor Who's usual liberal moralizing, employed awkwardly in this story, that we need to accept those that are different. In “The Almost People”, the problem lies in accepting those that are the same.

This formulation takes us away from any comprehensible political allegory and towards a more psychological understanding of what the workers are so afraid of. In “Amy's Choice”, Doctor Who suggested that the one in the universe who hated the Doctor most was not Daleks or the Master or any of the countless Who villains over the years, but in fact the Doctor himself[5]. Following this logic, the Flesh forces us to confront those aspects of ourselves that we would rather not – our capacity for cruelty and persecution, for instance. Given this, the doubling becomes a kind of moral crucible, where good characters such as the Doctor and the noble father prosper, and evil characters such as Jennifer reveal their inner perfidy.

The double is horrific because it makes us see ourselves too clearly. Investing humanity in the basest tools of production makes us realize the ways in which we are ourselves tools of a larger production machine. We like to subconsciously believe that we are unique, and from our perspective we are: we are the only accessible subjective mind in the universe. But the double reminds us that we are ultimately just one of a set, an object like any other. These are directions that the episode never really addresses, perhaps because they would be insoluble in 45 minutes, but also because it would upset the minority rights framework the episode keeps trying to use. This is the central contradiction in not just Doctor Who but in so much contemporary genre fiction: the urge to support the liberal project of peaceful reconciliation and tolerance[6] buts up against the need for horrific, perhaps purely evil monsters. Hence we have the ungainly insistence in other episodes that the Daleks are pure evil, but it would still be wrong to kill them.

There is another tension underlying this episode, albeit one that the viewer has likely forgotten about until the end. The question of Amy's quasi-existent baby has hung over the first half of the sixth season, albeit mostly in the form of the Doctor staring at a scanner at the end of the episode. The frenetic end to “The Almost People”, almost disconnected from what has come before, comes as a narrative version of Freud's return of the repressed. The episode has lulled us into a sense of security. As savvy viewers, we have assessed that this is not a “mythos episode”, not written by Stephen Moffat, and the plot is fairly standard Doctor Who fare. The last thing we expect is a major meta-plot development after forty minutes of episodic narrative. Moffat pulled this trick before in “Cold Blood”, but it still feels startling here.

It turns out that Amy, who most voiciferously insisted that there could only be one doctor, has herself been inhabiting a Flesh copy of herself for the whole season. This demonstrates nicely the frightening possibilities opened up by the doppelganger: having been confronted with the unstable identity of the Doctor and the workers they rescue, Amy's identity itself becomes unstable, with her conscious life split between two bodies [7].

Interestingly, after spending two episodes telling us that gangers are autonomous creatures that deserve rights, the Doctor liquidates Amy's ganger without any compunction. This seeming contradiction points us towards both the limitations of Doctor Who's liberal human-rights framework and the broader connotations of doubles. The ganger, when used by the Silence to falsify Amy's memories and invade her body, is ultimately too horrific and uncanny to be reconciled with our definition of humanity. Here the ganger is not a kind of replication but a kind of theft: it has stolen Amy's self-knowledge by deconstructing the identification between body and mind.

This twist is also compelling because it taps into broader psychological fears about pregnancy. Pregnancy is a kind of duplication and also a kind of theft, in which one's body becomes not entirely theirs. This ordinary psychological uncertainty is translated into the hyperbolic language of science fiction, in which Amy's pregnancy makes her both literally a duplicate and literally hostage to an alien force which denies her her own body. The process of creating another human is neither as physically easy as the technology of the Flesh would make it appear, nor as psychologically easy as the Doctor's moralism would: it involves an encounter with the limits of the self.

“The Almost People” is then ultimately a story about biopolitics, about how regimes of truth, whether the medical fascism of the Silence or the bourgeois moralism of the Doctor, try to tame the uncanny possibilities of bodily replication. While these attempts triumph in the timespan of the episode, they are both ultimately destined to fail, and their failures are embedded in this story's many contradictions. Like many Doctor Who villains, “The Almost People” unleashes a force which it ultimately can't control.

[1] While the gangers aren't as autonomous as replicants (or at least they're not supposed to be), this story has more than a passing resemblance to Blade Runner.

[2]Belatedly I realized that readers outside of academic circles might not be familiar with the term “subaltern”. As Wikipedia defines it, the subaltern is “the social group who is socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial homeland”. The subaltern refers to people and cultures that are considered less important and perhaps even inhuman in colonial society, i. e. the colonized. I kind of wish I was more familiar with Gayatri Spivak, as her ideas about the subaltern voice seem quite applicable to this post.

[3] This is obviously visible in contemporary discourse around Libya and Syria, but in TV terms it can be seen perhaps most nakedly in the first-season West Wing episode “Lord John Marbury”, in which the collective colonial powers have to keep the brown people from destroying each other out of religious hatred. This stands in contrast with neoconservative justifications of war, which do their best to present the countries we bomb as threats to the homeland: when liberals bomb other countries, they do so for those countries' own good.

[4]I would say that no one would argue that black revolutionaries were just as bad as the people that enslaved them, but then again, Bioshock Infinite.

[5]This would seem to be contradicted by the meeting of the two Doctors in this episode, and the other times where the Doctor is delighted to encounter a peer.

[6]Of course, in practice liberalism offers this peaceful reconciliation as a moral imperative only in certain situations. To protest an American war, smashing a cop car is an unacceptable step into violence; to protest a Syrian war, carpet bombing is an acceptable response.

[7]We also get duplicate Amys in “The Girl Who Waited”, “Amy's Choice”, and probably some other episodes that I can't remember now. It's something of a motif.

Breaking Bad 5-11: The Confession

If Community is, as I argued earlier, an attempt to address the difficulties of making a sitcom in the age of postmodern irony, Breaking Bad is at least partially trying to solve the problem of making a serious drama in a world which is so predominantly absurd. Walter White wants to be Scarface, but he is always hamstrung by the ridiculous accouterments of late capitalism – purple coffee machines, Roombas, cars that bounce, etc. Nowhere is this more in focus than the scene in “The Confession” where Walt and Skyler meet Hank and Marie in a cheesy Mexican family diner. The conversation is the stuff of high drama, with terse insults, implicit threats, questions of morality, and the hefty weight of a shattered family. And then there's the hapless waiter who keeps poking his head in asking if the mortal enemies would like some guacamole (they make it at tableside, you know). And there's the general atmosphere of the restaurant, as silly as the conversation is serious. Breaking Bad creates humour through these juxtapositions, but it also highlights both the everyday inanity of the world around us and the over-the-top seriousness of Walter's personal drama. Walter is a man who could never honestly laugh at himself, but for as much as Breaking Bad draws us into the drama of his situation, it also makes him laughable.

This is highlighted in not just the Mexican restaurant scene but through the show's visual style. Breaking Bad is constantly shot at weird, almost distracting angles, as if to jar us and remove us from the action. Towards the start of this episode, we get a birds-eye view of the Whites' bathroom. This angle reduces the everyday beauty and grooming products to abstract geometric shapes, thus turning an ordinary bathroom into something absurd. The preponderance of these circles highlights the ridiculousness of our consumption-oriented lives – who really needs all of those kinds of face cream, much less Walter and Skyler White? Walter is the central spoke of Breaking Bad's critique of capitalism, showing how the desire to be an entrepreneur and a self-made man leads inevitably to monstrousness, but shots like this add a more subtle layer of criticism.

In the scene above, Walter is desperately looking for some way to disguise the cut he received collapsing in the bathroom. “The Confession” as a whole is about this type of illusion, most notably the ever-increasing web of fictions that Walter conjures up in order to hide and excuse his actions. Even when he isn't actively lying and trying to cover up his criminal activities, Walter is always playing a role, always trying to game someone, whether it be convincing his son that he's an affable family man or convincing his array of partners that he is a respectable businessman. At this point there's very little of Walter's life that isn't some kind of lie

So it's no surprise that, when threatened by Hank, Walter conjures up another elaborate story. This is the titular confession (or one of them), a videotape that implicates Hank as the mastermind of the whole meth operation. This is perhaps the apex of Walter's performances: he seems more honest sniveling about how he hates being under Hank's thumb than he does when portraying something close to the truth. Perhaps recording this tape allows Walter to take on his favourite role, that of the victim buoyed along at the whims of circumstance. Or maybe he's getting out some real, repressed guilt and sadness over what he's done. Or maybe he's just become a consummate liar.

“The Confession” also shows us Walter at his worst. In one scene he comes into the car wash, looking for a gun hidden in the ice tray of a pop machine. He mumbles something about having to check the latch on the machine, and makes a lame excuse to leave. Walter is not convincing to anyone here, and he seems at his wits' end, his storytelling prowess completely exhausted. What's striking is how these lies are just unnecessary. Walter owns the car wash – he can poke around there wherever he wants, without needing permission, and it isn't as though he needs to lie to Skyler any longer about his criminal activity. But Walter is almost addicted to spinning stories, needing to come up with a benign reason for everything he does. He keeps things from people just out of habit, or just to revel in his power over others.

This is something Breaking Bad takes from The Shield: the endless web of lies and schemes that eventually build up a momentum all their own. Walter White, like Vic Mackey before him, believes that he is in control of the violence and deceit that surrounds him, but in reality he is simply being carried along by the tide of events. In “The Confession” we get to see Walter cool and in control, but we also get to see him in a panicked rage, traumatized by the ability of other humans to act in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. If the fifth season has revealed anything, it's that Walter is ultimately a pawn to much larger forces than him, which refuse to let him stop what he has started. The Madgrigal conglomerate is one of these forces, and you can maybe count the neo-Nazis among them too, but there also seems to be a kind of entropic force that is propelling all of these individuals to a violent collision.

Setting is crucial to Breaking Bad. The city of Albequerque, already rendered a little ridiculous by its name (or maybe just the associated Weird Al song), is depicted as the epitome of late capitalist grandeur and absurdity. It is a plastic city of suburbs and tenements built in the desert, a futile attempt to impose civilization on the natural forces of chaos represented by the desert[1]. The desert haunts every street of Albequerque, and this is reflected in the show's cinematography. In several interior scenes it seems as though the desert is right outside, about to burst through the windows of the complacent civilians.

The desert is also the setting for a crucial scene in this episode, in which Jesse finally confronts Walt and begs him to “Stop playing me for once”. Over the course of the series there have been many rendezvous in the middle of the desert, and they're generally the site of business dealings between Walter and the various gangs he is involved with. The desert is where all of Walter's stories dissipate and raw power reveals itself. It is, so to speak, the desert of the real.

But Walter is blind to the encircling forces of chaos. He sees the desert as just another tool to be used: a convenient space to cook meth undisturbed or to bury a couple barrels full of cash. Even this late in the series, with his double life unfolding all around him, Walter still believes he can put everything in order through his intellect alone. And so when Jesse offers him a possibility to speak honestly – downright pleads for him to do so – Walter just continues with the sales pitch, telling Jesse that assuming a new identity far away is what's best for him.

Walter adopts his fatherly aspect for the talk with Jesse, which is the same persona he takes on in his rare chats with Walt Junior. This is the good-natured “Mr. Chibs” family man Mr. White that we saw at the beginning of Breaking Bad. The scene is shot like a family drama, the adult and wayward child leaning against the bumper of the car, sun gleaming warmly off Walter's forehead.

This is just an illusion, a mask that Walter puts on when it is convenient, but the same could be said for the growly, threatening Heisenberg. At this point Walter White is an identity without an authentic self beneath it. We know that he does care for Jesse – he's done too much to save him over the course of the series for it to simply be a relationship of convenience – but Walter couldn't be honest towards Jesse if he tried. Bryan Cranston's acting is skillful enough that every side of Walt (the sitcom dad, the growling antihero) seems equally real and unreal, up to and including the patently false repentant Walter of the “confession” he makes to Hank.

Perhaps there is something genuine in Walter's speech to Jesse. Getting away from Albequerque and in particular away from Walter White might ultimately be best for Jesse, even if it would tear him away from what's left of his meaningful relationships (Andrea, Brock, maybe Badger and Skinny Pete). But what really comes through in the speech is Walter's own longing for the new life that he promises Jesse. When Walt says “Maybe it's time for a change”, it appears for just a moment to be the realization that has been eluding him for the entirety of the series. When he talks about “finding a job you're good at”, there are echoes of Walter's lost potential as a chemist, which has become the original tragedy in the way Walter narrates his life. Walter imagines adopting a new identity as the ultimate act of masculine industry that would prove his creative mastery more than any pure meth would.

But ultimately Walter fails to convince either Jesse or himself. To take the option of disappearance would mean destroying the suburban domestic life that Walter has tried so hard to maintain. Even if he took his children with him, there would be no way to maintain the lie of a normal family. Walter does assume a new identity later in the season, when there is no possibility of his domestic life surviving, but even then he finds it unsatisfying. He can never really begin a new life, whatever his documents say: his existing attachments and experiences stay with him.

Similarly, even if Jesse got in that nondescript car, his traumatic losses would still be with him, as would his lack of education or skill in anything but meth-cooking. But even when Jesse calls him out, Walter clings to his fantasy of self-reinvention. This is a reflection of his broader need to believe in his power to determine his own universe through hard work and masculine self-assertion. It's telling that Jesse describes Walter's speech as labour, specifically “working me”. If you want to go even broader, this reflects the American capitalist desire to refuse to believe in impossibility. There is always a frontier, always a new place to expand (Mexico! The Czech Republic!), and you can do anything if you put your mind to it [2]. In some ways Walter proves this last maxim right: he has achieved a great deal, apparently dragging himself away from death at the same time he becomes an improbable success in his chosen business. But he cannot reinvent the world, nor can he reinvent himself. Walter's speech to Jesse appears first as candid advice, then as a manipulative ploy, then as an inadvertent confession. But as a confession, it ultimately gives us only another lie – the one that Walter

It is perhaps this final inability to be genuine, more than Huell's sticky fingers, that ends Jesse's faith in Walter and allows him to finally realize how cruelly he has been manipulated over the course of the series. Jesse is perhaps most notable for his inability to lie or dissemble: he really is what he appears to be, and all of his vulnerabilities and doubts are immediately on the surface. This is what makes Walter and Jesse such a dynamic combination of characters, but also what makes their relationship so toxic: Jesse, in his strange naivete, cannot imagine the extent to which Walter is manipulating him, while Walter looks down on Jesse for precisely the vulnerabilities that make him so easy to use. And Jesse's openness colours his reaction to the sudden, bolt-from-the-blue revelation of Walter's betrayal. Jesse doesn't plot an elaborate revenge scheme, as Walter might. He doesn't get in the car and thank his lucky stars, as Saul Goodman undoubtedly would. Instead, he grabs a tank of gas and goes after the one thing that matters to Walt more than money: his idealized domestic life.

The scene in which Jesse comes to this decision is shot in a quite interesting manner. This scene needs to do something very difficult in conveying a character's internal thoughts visually. (A lesser show would resort to a voice-over or a contrived conversation to do the same work). The scene begins with a long shot, in which most of the frame is taken up by the setting. Jesse is an almost-insignificant blot on the larger, desolate plain. This surely mirrors his frame of mind: he is powerless in the grand scheme of things, controlled by forces larger than himself.

I'm not sure what part of Albequerque this is[3]. The large objects hanging above Jesse look like a mass of cement dividers, but they also resemble gravestones, which would seem much more natural to be sitting in a row on a hill. The deaths of those close to Jesse (Jane, Mike, almost Brock) literally hang above Jesse's head. Or maybe these are the deaths he has caused: Gale, but also the countless ones who have died because of the meth Jesse so expertly cooked, their only remains an unmarked grave.

The scene cuts between these long shots and media-length shots in which Jesse is more prominent, but still not completely free of his environment (as he would be in a close-up). Jesse is at first ruminative and uncertain, his expression matched by the slow and uneven drumbeats on the soundtrack. He begins searching for his cigarettes. This is both a symbolic motion and a literal one: he is searching for a solution to his problems, but his literal inability to find even his pot will cause a major revelation. Drugs have always been a coping mechanism for Jesse, albeit an unhealthy one, but here at his lowest point they have abandoned him.

What's striking here is that Jesse's first reaction to the missing cigarette is not anger or confusion but panic. Jesse desperately wants the cigarette to be there – not just to take the edge off, but to assure him that he understands the world around him, and that Walter wasn't actually behind Brock's poisoning. Despite his strong distrust of Walter, Jesse still wants at some level to believe in him. The camera plays in to Jesse's panic, swooping around him, examining every possible angle for hope that his suspicions aren't true.

But eventually Jesse's expression becomes resolute, and he walks away from the offer of asylum. Once again, the petty detritus of modern life stands in uncomfortable co-existence. “The guy”, for all he represents a new life and the impossible promise of reinvention, and carries a larger-than-life underworld aura, is ultimately a middle-aged man driving a boring red car that is nearly identical to the one that follows behind him. Jesse's momentous decision involves rolling a wheelie suitcase past a pile of concrete dividers. If there is drama to be had in the modern world, this is it, both tragic and ridiculous – a dynamic Breaking Bad embraces wholeheartedly. This scene is a credit to both Aaron Paul and episode director Michael Slovis, who convey wordlessly one of the series's most important moments, the final break between Walter and Jesse.

As I've said, many of the characters Walter meets in the drug underworld act as alternate versions of himself. Jesse is the complete opposite, a photo negative, but many characters function as ways of teasing out Walter's philosophy, the introduction of white-collar middle-class morality and work ethic to criminal enterprise. Characters like Gus, Mike, and Lydia, are alternate versions of Walter, and their failures suggest that making meth a respectable business requires more than a lab coat and pale skin. On the other hand, you have Todd and his Nazi clan.

The cold open concerning said group of neo-Nazis is perhaps the starkest contrast to Walt's constant deceit of himself and others. This is another scene that draws on the contrast between the rawness of the criminal world depicted in Breaking Bad and the fakeness of everyday life. Todd loudly recounts the story of the train heist (a moderately edited story, it should be noted) in a public area, not stopping when the waitress stops by to gawk at Uncle Jack's swastika tattoo. Walter, while prone to bragging in the right circumstances, would never do so in such a public environment. But Todd and Uncle Jack have no illusions about what they are, nor do they have any illusions that they present to the world. Their boisterous repartee is almost endearingly open – there's no sign of the layers of mind games that characterize Walt's relationship with Jesse, or the endless denial and estrangement between Walt and Walt Jr. Fitting with Breaking Bad's dark humour, the only example of a fully functional family we have on the show is a bunch of white supremacists.

In the bathroom of the diner, Jack makes a comment about how the inability to smoke on airplanes is a sign of how far downhill he country has gone. This foreshadows the moment later in the episode where Saul's own no-smoking rule indirectly causes Jesse to realize how Walter has betrayed him. There's a strange kind of logic in connecting Jesse to the neo-Nazis, as they're probably the two most honest forces left standing on Breaking Bad. They're also both forces that Walter White believes he can control with rhetoric, but whose raw and violent emotions prove to be ultimately beyond his harnessing.

“The Confession” is a tricky title, as there are several long speeches which present themselves as confessions but are all in some way deceitful – Walter admitting he has cancer to Junior (truthful but not honest), Walter blackmailing Hank with a just-true-enough account of his misdeeds, and Walter's manipulative speech to Jesse which presents itself as a genuine longing for freedom. At this point, it would be hard to dub any of these confessions true or false, as that would suggest there is an “authentic” Walter White deep down somewhere. On the other hand, Todd's bragging tale, while withholding some crucial facts, is perhaps the most genuine confession of the lot. It is also, of course, totally sociopathic. And this is perhaps the most troubling, and the most brilliant, part of “The Confession”: it suggests that the truth may be even uglier than the lies.

[1] Albequerque is also located in New Mexico, near the border, and Breaking Bad problematically uses Mexico and Mexicans to represent this untameable chaos.

[2] It's become increasingly difficult over the show's run to view Breaking Bad as primarily a commentary on capitalism. Walter White seems like such a singular character that it is difficult to generalize his personality or see his actions as representative of a larger group. Maybe this makes him a comedic figure in the medieval sense: a larger-than-life figure that embodies the smaller vices and delusions within us all.

[3] Surely you don't expect me to do research for this thing. This is close reading, man.