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MORE EVIDENCE THAT AI EXCELS AT GENERATING BULLSHIT
29Apr23
I continue to find it mind-boggling that people seem to think that a good use of
AI tools like ChatGPT is to gather accurate information. Any cursory reading on
the topic should explain that ChatGPT is designed to predict language in
response to a prompt, not actually present information based on “knowledge” or
“intelligence.” I don’t pretend to understand how it really works, but it’s
pretty clear that it’s not a reliable alternative to a search engine.
And yet, people keep using it that way. I had an odd experience with it this
week in marking student essays: the prompt was to analyze a specific episode of
TV (that I provided access to) using two concepts we’d covered in class. One
student’s essay was well-written and the analysis was strong, demonstrating a
good understanding of the concepts – but the specific moments in the episode
they referred to were flat-out wrong, describing moments that never happened
(and the essay didn’t discuss what actually did happen). When I met with them to
inquire about this, they admitted being pressed for time and instead of watching
the (30 minute) episode, they had ChatGPT produce a summary of it for them to
analyze – which was completely inaccurate! So the writing and analysis was all
the student’s, but they used AI to avoid having to watch TV and hence analyzed
an episode that doesn’t exist!
One lesson: never take a short-cut to avoid watching TV! Another more broadly
applicable lesson: don’t use AI instead of a search engine! There are many
online summaries of this episode that are actually accurate (and still would be
much worse than watching the episode), but ChatGPT didn’t look at those. Instead
it generated a bunch of words and sentences that sound like they could be
feasible accounts of what happened in the episode.
This got me wondering whether ChatGPT could summarize some films and television
episodes effectively, and when it would just generate bullshit. As in my last
post, where I showed how it invented details about films to analyze racial
representation, there might be some instances when it succeeds in generating a
feasible summary. Is there a pattern to what would films or episodes work better
or worse to summarize? Experiment to follow…
Continue reading ‘More Evidence that AI Excels at Generating Bullshit’
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Filed under: Academia, digital humanities, Film, Teaching, Technology,
Television | 2 Comments
Tags: AI, bullshit, ChatGPT
SOME INTERESTING LIMITS TO AI FILM CRITICISM
26Jan23
Like many academics, I’ve been seeing a lot of concerns around how AI tools like
ChatGPT might impact the work academics do as teachers and scholars. I don’t
want to dive too much into those muddy waters, but I saw one post on Mastodon
that piqued my interest and led me to do some experimenting. Ryan Cordell, noted
digital humanist and literary/print scholar, posted the following thread:
> In our lab introducing AI writing to students I encourage them to probe the
> models—to try & find limit cases & places where the “wires” of the machine
> become visible. Some things they found…
> 4. ChatGPT is famously good at synthesis, but it’s often unable to combine
> critical ideas in new ways. If asked to produce a Marxist analysis of various
> texts, it often produces one paragraph of Marxist thought & one about the
> chosen text, but can’t combine the two concepts.
I responded (with a little touch of snark): “I wonder if #4 is a byproduct of
the training data. So much “critical writing” is effectively a paragraph of
theory and a paragraph of textual description, devoid of actual analysis.”
Ryan wrote back, “It was quite stubborn about keeping the two concepts separate
unless we asked about texts about which (I assume) there’s more extant critical
writing. It will write a Marxist analysis of Moby Dick, likely
channeling/plagiarizing existing writing in the training set, but if you ask for
a Marxist analysis of a relatively new TV show you get Marxism then TV show
summary/analysis—which makes sense given that it’s just putting words together
based on existing words that go together.”
Ryan’s last point is crucial: the AI is not doing any sort of analysis, but
rather using a huge dataset of writing (presumably the open web) to predict
what’s the best next word to write to fulfill the given prompt. And thus it
would make sense that making a coherent simulation of an analysis where there
are already good models to emulate in your dataset would be much more effective
than trying to invent something without decent precedents to draw upon.
And this got me thinking about running my own experiment to generate examples of
film criticism that may expose some of the limits and underlying possibilities
of ChatGPT.
Continue reading ‘Some Interesting Limits to AI Film Criticism’
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Tags: AI, ChatGPT, race
INTRODUCING CHARACTERS IN BREAKING BAD
14Jan23
I’ve produced and posted the final video (save the introduction) for my
videographic book, The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad. As discussed
below, this chapter has one of the most extensive written commentaries, which
I’ve reproduced to present and contextualize the video. (All the videos are now
available in tentative sequence on my Vimeo showcase.) I hope to finish the
introduction by the end of January, and then submit the full manuscript to Lever
Press! So this will likely be the last public update on this project for awhile
– I hope it is well-received.
INTRODUCING CHARACTERS: LYDIA AND TODD
A particular challenge for an ongoing television series is how to add new
characters to its ensemble late into its run. For programs with minimal
serialization, such as family sitcoms or police procedural, such introductions
are typically made to reinvigorate an ensemble or replace a departing actor,
often with mixed results. Probably the most infamous example of such an
introduction was Cousin Oliver on the final season of The Brady Bunch, a
character shoehorned into the family to provide a burst of youth to counter the
aging kids—the failure of this strategy prompted it to be later termed “Cousin
Oliver Syndrome” to mock this tendency on family sitcoms (Riesman et. al.). Such
a ploy was broadly enough known to audiences as to allow Buffy the Vampire
Slayer to mockingly play with the device via the introduction of Buffy’s
previously-unmentioned younger sister Dawn in its fifth season, a retcon later
explained by supernatural magic (Mittell, Complex TV, 86-7).
For series with more elaborated serialization, adding new characters often
involves expanding the scope of the storytelling. One extreme version of this is
The Wire, which notably added another institutional realm and an associated
large group of characters each season on top of its core portrayal of the
Baltimore police and drug criminals featured in the first season (which already
included at least 30 significant characters): dock workers in season 2,
politicians in season 3, a middle school in season 4, and the Baltimore Sun
newspaper in season 5. As I have discussed previously, The Wire embraces a
centrifugal approach to storytelling, spreading its fictional scope across an
expanding palette with a similarly expansive cast of characters (Mittell,
Complex TV). Adding characters to this ongoing storyworld was an ongoing process
that becomes regularized throughout its run.
Only a few series follow The Wire’s ever-expanding model, such as Game of
Thrones broadening its geographic scope or The Leftovers relocating the main
characters each season; instead, most serialized dramas focus on a smaller
defined ensemble of characters defined by a single location. A more typical
approach can be seen in The Sopranos, where the focus remains consistent on Tony
Soprano’s interwoven dual family units of his personal domestic family and
professional mafia crime family. Most of that core cast remained constant for
all six seasons, with the notable exception of Tony’s mother Livia, who was
written out after two seasons due to the death of actress Nancy Marchand; her
familial role was largely replaced by the addition of Tony’s sister Janice to
the ensemble during the second season. Yet most seasons introduced one or more
new characters, primarily as antagonists, rivals, or love interests for Tony:
Richie Aprile and Furio Giunta in season 2; Ralph Cifaretto and Gloria Trillo in
season 3; Little Carmine Lupertazzi and Carlo Gervasi in season 4; Tony
Blundetto and Phil Leotardo in season 5. Most of these characters only last one
or two seasons before dying or otherwise leaving the story, allowing their
narrative roles to be filled by others to refresh the dramatic stakes.
Introducing new antagonists each season, often referred to as the season’s “big
bad” after Buffy’s development and explicit naming of this structure, allows for
continued drama and renewed storytelling momentum. Many series, especially those
foregrounding crime stories, embrace a similar approach to adding new characters
as antagonists each season to raise the dramatic stakes, including Dexter,
Justified, The Shield, Boardwalk Empire, and Homeland. In each of these series
and more, the addition of new characters work to complicate established
relationships and generate new story material to sustain the serialized drama.
Breaking Bad does not follow a seasonal big bad model for the most part. I have
argued that the series is structured by a force opposite from The Wire,
exhibiting “centripetal complexity” by pulling everything toward the
“gravitational center” of Walter White’s psychology and characterization
(Mittell, Complex TV, 223). While certainly Walt faces a series of adversaries
in his progression from chemistry teacher to drug kingpin, the narrative
structure is not designed to foreground these antagonists as in other comparable
crime dramas. The closest the series comes to a big bad adversary is Gustavo
Fring, who is introduced briefly in season 2 before becoming Walt’s employer and
rival; season 4 is the only one that is structured around the defeat of an
adversary, as Walt proclaims “I won” in the season’s final moments to signal the
end of the Fring era.
This video considers the aftermath of that victory by looking at how season 5
resets its narrative stakes once Walt sits atop the Albuquerque drug world. As
with most series, Breaking Bad introduces new characters to create fresh
dramatic situations, bringing Lydia Rodarte-Quayle and Todd Alquist into Walt’s
orbit and eventually onto his team as part of Heisenberg’s drug empire; neither
character serves as the season’s “big bad,” although both get pulled deeper into
Walt’s orbit and ultimately die as part of his climactic revenge plot. The video
takes a close look at the strategies that the producers use to introduce these
characters via writing, performance, and production techniques, offering
contrasting dramatic styles in presenting their personalities.
In many ways, this was my most challenging video to finish, as I grappled with
the overarching question that troubles so many academic analyses across all
formats: “so what?” I knew that I wanted to make a video to address the
introduction of new characters, as it is a crucial facet of serial television
storytelling, and one that differs from the models developed to analyze films.
Murray Smith emphasizes that one crucial facet of characterization is
recognition, as viewers need to differentiate a character with narrative
significance from an extra or a figure who appears only fleetingly, and films
use a range of techniques to help guide audience comprehension (Smith, Engaging
Characters). For ongoing television series, this recognition process is even
more complex because many characters appear only briefly before disappearing by
the next episode, or they might reappear after a longer hiatus unlike anything
in a standalone film—for instance, Elliot Schwartz appears in one first season
Breaking Bad episode, then reappears only in the two final installments. By
charting the ways that Breaking Bad introduces Lydia and Todd as two late-stage
characters, I hoped to provide an analytic framework for understanding this
process across television storytelling.
However I could not find a way to both explore the specific techniques from this
case study in sufficient detail, and argue for the significance of this process
for television more broadly without making an overly long video that lost its
analytic focus. After playing with many drafts and versions of the video, I
decided that to lean into the written component here to provide the broader
context and framework for the specific analysis. Each aspect of this chapter
aims to embrace what each format does best: the video offers a detailed account
of specific moments and choices from the series while conveying the impact and
experience for viewers, while the writing situates this analysis in broader
contexts of scholarship, history, and comparative strategies between Breaking
Bad and other series (as well as reflecting on my own methodology and process).
One of my overt goals for this book was to have every video be able to function
on its on, distributed through Vimeo and YouTube, coherent and effective (and
hopefully enjoyable) on its own terms. I hope that this video meets that bar,
even as I know that this written commentary is needed to fully accomplish my
critical goals. But that is one of the key benefits of this videographic book
format, allowing writing and video to work together in an integrated
presentation.
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Tags: breaking bad, character, videographicBB
SOME VIDEOGRAPHIC UPDATES
25Sep22
I just returned from a truly exceptional conference: The Theory and Practice of
the Video Essay at University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Not only was there the
simple joy of attending my first in-person conference in three years, but it was
best type of conference: a single-stream of presentations that help to connect
and build a community around a shared set of interests. The quality of the
presentations were stellar, and the resulting conversations were similarly
fantastic. I knew many people in attendance, mostly spanning years of
participation in the Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop (hopefully returning
in June 2023 – more info on that soon!), and there were many others whom I knew
only through online interactions or enjoying their videos from afar. Kudos to
organizers Barbara Zecchi & Daniel Pope for making it happen!
I was invited to give one of the keynote presentations at the conference, and I
framed my talk around the question “What is a Videographic Book?” I spent much
of it discussing my vision for the Lever Press series Videographic Books, which
resulted in many people sharing their ideas with me for excellent book-length
projects! Naturally I also discussed my own videographic book project, “The
Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad” – I showed a draft of the book’s
videographic introduction (which is not yet ready to publish on its own), and
debuted the newest video from the book: “Recording Bad.”
One of the key contexts that I discussed regarding this video was its process of
origination: unlike many of the chapters in the book, I did not anticipate doing
a video on this topic. Instead it emerged as an interesting element while
rewatching the series in Adobe Premiere in 2019 – I created a folder for clips
involving recordings, and let the idea simmer in the background as I worked on
other chapters. I knew I wanted to do a video that featured me directly
addressing the camera, mimicking a style fairly common in YouTube video essays,
so this seemed like the ideal subject matter to tackle. But I didn’t have much
direction on the overall design and point of the piece—until I was struck by a
different set of experiences speaking directly into cameras during the pandemic.
As always, feedback is welcomed, especially if there are issues or questions
that seem important to address in the written commentary accompanying this
somewhat oblique chapter.
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Criticism | Leave a Comment
Tags: breaking bad, conferences, videographicBB
SYMPATHIZING WITH STORYTELLING IN BREAKING BAD
07Jul22
Today I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote address at the Television
Aesthetics conference at University of Kent in the UK, entitled “Television
Aesthetics, Videographic Criticism, and the Case of Breaking Bad.” Well, not
exactly “at” the conference – my Tuesday flight out of Vermont was so delayed
that it prohibited me from getting to England in time to make my talk! So we
pivoted to Plan B and I gave a Zoom talk, which went well enough, but it would
have been far nicer to actually attend my first in-person academic event in over
two years…
As part of my talk, I showed four videos** from my Breaking Bad videographic
book, including the debut of my newest video, “Sympathizing with Storytelling in
Breaking Bad,” which I made specifically for this conference. The video directly
engages with questions around narrative sympathy and character engagement in
ways that build on the excellent work of two of the conference hosts at Kent,
Murray Smith and Margrethe Bruun Vaage. Given the more academic nature of the
conference, the tone of the video skews a bit more scholarly in its approach and
tone than many of the other chapters in the project. Let me know what you think!
** The other videos I screened were “Focusing on Hank (& Marie)” to exemplify
close visual analysis, “Sounds of Silent Mike” to center on sound, and “Knock
About,” which I presented as a predecessor to this new video that offers a
distinctly different rhetorical take on similar material. Unfortunately, due to
a Zoom glitch, “Sounds of Silent Mike” had the bottom captions cut-off at the
conference screening – thus those viewers only saw/heard the clips compiled in
the piece and could not read my analytical text. This problem was only revealed
in the Q&A, as they thought it was just an experimental compilation of clips of
Mike being quiet – I wish I could have had more of a conversation about how that
worked for them!
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Tags: breaking bad, character, videographic criticism, videographicBB
MEDIA MIRRORS: A NEW WEBSITE
28Apr22
I am excited to launch a new project called Media Mirrors: Critical Analysis of
Film & TV and Film & TV! This website collects undergraduate student writing
that has emerged from my course Key Concepts in Film & Media Criticism. The site
emerged from a decision many years ago to encourage my students to write papers
that would be aimed at regular readers, not just me, and the process leading to
the publication of the site has been long and winding.
This project emerged from work I was doing around 2015 around the Digital
Liberal Arts – one of the key insights emerging out of those conversations
concerned the power of getting students to create scholarly work that was
addressing a public audience. That has been one of my main goals in embracing
videographic criticism (both as teacher and creator), and I began thinking how
best to pivot my writing pedagogy to encourage students to write for the public.
I was also collaborating with a group of Middlebury colleagues on a grant from
the Davis Educational Foundation to support curricular innovation to better
prepare students to produce digital capstone projects, where I worked to help
students write in a rich online multimedia environment.
A key light bulb moment for me was when Middlebury hosted UC Berkeley professor
Scott Saul to discuss his digital history innovations in 2018. In addition to
his great online research projects, Scott presented about his curated student
project about The Godfather, where students contributed short essays to a larger
prismatic website about the seminal film in a course about America in the 1970s.
Hearing and reading about Scott’s process and successes in cultivating online
writing practices for students crystalized what I wanted to do for my own
project: curate a website for my students’ critical writing about film and
television.
I embedded this project within a course that I taught for the first time in
Spring 2020, taking over an upper-level writing-intensive course on film
criticism from a retiring colleague. I reframed the course to include film and
television criticism, and had students dedicate all of their semester to
developing a single lengthy piece of critical writing over a number of stages,
with the intent that I would publish accomplished works on a curated website. Of
course “Spring 2020” meant that plans soon went awry, and I gave up the hopes of
getting truly polished works out of the class, and hoped to revisit the planned
website when I next taught the course.
In Fall 2021, I taught the class again with a new angle: all of the films and
television we would watch were about films and TV themselves. I thought such
reflexivity was well-suited the concepts we’d explore, and also allowed me to
screen some of my all-time favorite films & TV to teach (including Singin’ in
the Rain, The Player, Adaptation., Barton Fink, Mulholland Drive, and UnREAL). I
also added the stipulation that students must choose their own case studies
about a similarly reflexive film or television program. Here is the core writing
assignment I gave my students:
> The main assignment for the course is a long-form writing project: each
> student is to complete a piece of online critical writing for a public
> audience focused on a particular film or TV program of their choosing,
> totaling at least 4,000 words. The analysis must engage with at least three of
> the main units in the course (textuality, genre, narrative, authorship), and
> use the multi-modal possibilities of online writing by incorporating images,
> clips, and/or digital navigation strategies, as well as links & citations to
> external resources. While the object of criticism is left for students to
> decide, all films and television programs should be narrative works that are
> about films or television—Professor Mittell has compiled an extensive list of
> examples to choose from.
>
> This project will develop throughout the semester, with specific components
> due at assigned dates. These components will be assigned throughout the
> semester, including a proposal, an annotated bibliography, and at least 3
> modules of the critical analysis covering the concepts of textuality, genre,
> narrative, and authorship. Additionally, each student will work in an
> “editorial team” of 3-4 students who will read, offer feedback, and edit each
> other’s writing. This development process will be done in Google Docs,
> composing, editing, and revising in real time. The final version of the piece
> will be formatted for a new website, with the strongest essays being published
> in an open-access, publicized site for a general readership.
Despite the ongoing challenges of COVID, students rose to the occasion and
produced some great pieces of critical writing! I’ve selected four (out of the
class roster of 15) to publish here, covering All that Jazz, Boogie Nights, Once
Upon a Time in Hollywood, and 30 Rock – there were other strong essays as well,
but those students were not able to commit to making the necessary edits for
publication (yet). I’m also including one exemplary piece from Spring 2020,
Michael Frank’s essay on One Cut of the Dead, which coincidentally was about a
highly-reflexive film – Michael’s project introduced me to this amazing movie,
which I added to the syllabus and taught his essay (and encourage everyone to
watch it with as little contextual information as possible and then read his
essay!). I’ve also published an excerpt from my 2017 book Narrative Theory and
ADAPTATION., which obviously pertains to the theme. I will continue to add to
the site as my students produce similarly great writing, hopefully in the Spring
2023 iteration of the course.
I hope this site proves to be useful, whether for readers seeking out insightful
criticism on these topics or other teachers looking for inspiration in engaging
students in online writing. I welcome your feedback on the project or individual
pieces, as well as suggestions for other films and TV to add to my master list!
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Tags: 30 rock, adaptation, all that jazz, boogie nights, digital humanities,
digital publishing, one cut of the dead, pedagogy
THE SOUNDS OF SILENT MIKE
21Apr22
I’m excited to share the next video in my Breaking Bad project, “The Sounds of
Silent Mike,” focused on fan-favorite character Mike Ehrmantraut. This was a
nice palate cleanser for me, after spending around a month laboring on my last
video, “Breaking Genre“—this video only took two days of editing to produce, as
its scope, speed, and parameters were much more manageable. I hope the efforts
were worth it.
Below is the video, followed by a short contextualization that I intend to
publish with it as part of the larger “Chemistry of Character” book (I recommend
reading it after watching the video). One additional thought I had in putting
this together (and in conversation with Chris Keathley after he watched a draft)
is how this video might function (or not) as “standalone scholarship”—many of
the videos in the project are designed to stand-alone, and could even be
published as a journal article at a place like [in]Transition (“Focusing on Hank
(and Marie)” was in fact published in Mise-en-scène.). Some of the other videos
I’ve made are clearly less scholarly and more experimental, such as my TV
Dictionary entry or “Knock About” piece, both of which function as more
interstitial videos between more elaborated chapters. “The Sounds of Silent
Mike” is more substantive and analytical than those, but arguably less
elaborated than something like “Breaking Genre” or “Walter’s Whiteness.” So I’m
curious how people might characterize this piece in terms of norms of
scholarship, criticism, and publishing—is it a standalone academic video essay
or more a part of a larger project? I welcome your thoughts and comments on
those definitions, and anything else arising from this video!
And one last bit of news before the video: I’ve been working with Lever Press to
develop a new book series called Videographic Books, designed to publish
long-form audiovisual scholarship like this Breaking Bad project. If you have
something in the works, check out the page and reach out to me with your idea!
Contextualization:
One challenge of making videographic work about Breaking Bad is how to convey
one of the program’s most important facets: patience. For a series known for
high-tension action sequences, a good deal of time is spent portraying very
little happening: characters waiting for their next move, engaging in a
slow-moving tedious process, or otherwise being more dormant than typical for
television drama. But videographic criticism is built upon editing things down,
distilling them to key moments and juxtapositions that aims to move quickly and
efficiently. Thus it is a challenge to portray the temporal patience represented
on Breaking Bad, and the patience demanded of its audience, in a video essay.
“The Sounds of Silent Mike” tries to tackle this challenge by placing the focus
on sound, especially Mike’s nonverbal sounds and silences. The goal is by
calling attention to such silences, viewers of the video are attuned to the
presence of patience in watching Mike—whether he is skipping stones in a river
or methodically clearing a building of cartel enemies. For viewers of the
series, our memories and impressions of characters are often tied to specific
sounds, and for Mike, this signature ranges from silence to short words, sighs,
and grunts, all presented with a sense of patience.
While it is never explicitly mentioned in the video, Mike’s characterization
stands in contrast with other characters in the series largely through their
different approaches to sound. This contrast is most stark compared to Walter
White and Saul Goodman (and Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul), both of whom are
noted by their propensity to speak their way out of problems, often impatiently.
Both Walt and Saul/Jimmy are blessed with the ability to convincingly lie at
will, and they both use that talent to escape tough situations. In contrast,
Mike often accomplishes his goals in silence, whether quietly taking down
enemies in a warehouse or escaping the cops in a playground.
Of course, Mike’s voice and non-verbal sounds are dependent on Jonathan Banks’s
performance, building on both his natural gravely tone and his interpretation of
Mike’s sonic presence. The video does not try to differentiate what elements
come from Banks versus the writers’ narrative designs versus the production (and
post-production) team’s efforts—clearly these techniques and choices reinforce
each other, creating a distinctive sonic footprint. In total, this video aims to
make us aware of the net effect of these elements, both in constituting Mike’s
character and contributing to a larger appreciation of the program’s use of
sound.
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Tags: breaking bad, character, sound, videographic criticism, videographicBB
BREAKING GENRE, OR HOW TO CATEGORIZE BREAKING BAD
31Mar22
Earlier today, I debuted my newest video essay at the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies conference – alas held online rather than in Chicago as planned. It was
part of a great panel on “Genre in the Age of Transmedia,” where the
presentations included both typical papers and videographic pieces. I screened
this new video:
In thinking about genre, I said a few words after the screening about genres of
video essays. Part of the design of my larger audiovisual book project, “The
Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad,” is an attempt to explore a wide range
of videographic styles, modes, techniques, and genres. Previously posted videos
include works that follow norms of fan video, supercuts, deformations, and more
explanatory scholarship. I hope that the final book’s wide range of styles and
genres helps provide a kind of exemplary taxonomy of the possibilities of
videographic criticism, as well as pointing toward modes that have been as yet
unexplored.
“Breaking Genre” was produced with the goal of following a particular
“YouTube-style” of video essay, embodying energetic and playful voiceover-driven
argumentation (hence embedding my YouTube post rather than the typical Vimeo
one). In particular, I was inspired to emulate the amazing work of Grace Lee, my
favorite YouTuber, while acknowledging that I’ve certainly fallen short of her
heights. (If you haven’t seen her spectacular “What Isn’t a Video Essay?“, get
on that!) In many ways, this style is outside my scholarly comfort zone, but I
found that it allowed me to embrace creative facets that typically are absent
from most scholarship: a playful sense of humor, absurdist asides, running gags,
and a manic energetic performance. I’m quite happy with the product that emerged
in that vein – but it took a lot of work! So let me offer my utmost respect to
Grace and other YouTubers who work in this style on a regular basis…
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Tags: breaking bad, scms, videographicBB
SKYLER’S NIGHTMARE
17Feb22
Last week I shared the epic five-part miniseries “Skyler’s Story,” retelling
Breaking Bad from Skyler White’s perspective via a hybrid of women’s melodrama
and experimental dual projection film. It took me weeks of work to assemble the
160-minutes from hours of footage, and thus I certainly felt a sense of
accomplishment in completing the series, and thought that I would be relieved to
be done with Skyler’s portion of my larger Breaking Bad project. But I had more
to say.
As I was working on the Skyler videos, my colleague David Miranda Hardy asked if
I might make a “synopsis” version of the miniseries, as certainly most viewers
would not take the time to consume the set of videos in their entirety.** That
idea kept bouncing around in my head as I completed and posted the series, and I
tried to envision the role of a shorter Skyler video in the larger project. The
approach that took hold was to capture the harrowing emotions that abound for
Skyler, especially in the final season, and create a video that both reminds
viewers of her story and creates a nightmarish non-narrative viewing experience.
Thus I present “Skyler’s Nightmare”:
In editing this video, my first inspiration was to try create an experience
resembling the final act of Mulholland Drive for Skyler, where the narrative
fractures and her identity is upended. I soon realized that trying to
renarrativize her story out of series footage was not going to work, but I did
aim to capture a Lynchian affect as inspired by both Mulholland Drive and Twin
Peaks: The Return. Then Sharon Van Etten’s music came up on shuffle, and I
realized that her voice captured exactly what I was going for: “Your Love is
Killing Me” was Skyler’s perfect musical accompaniment, and the fact that Van
Etten briefly appeared in TP:TR was an ideal intertextual link.
I tried not to embrace as much of a pure “fanvid” aesthetic as I had strived for
in “Poor Jesse“; instead I interspersed more dialogue and scenes from the series
alongside Van Etten’s music, decentering the lyrics a bit more than for Jesse’s
Wilco song. The final 20 minutes of “Skyler’s Story” episode five struck me as
the most powerful part of the miniseries, culminating her arc with the climax of
Breaking Bad‘s masterpiece episode “Ozymandias,” and thus I built this edit
around that episode and Skyler’s other harrowing classic “Fifty-One”—both of
which were majestically directed by Rian Johnson.
Thanks to both David and Ariel Avissar for their feedback on this video—both
suggested some (quite different) major rethinking that I mostly refused, so I
take full responsibility for its lingering flaws!
** A quick note: more than a week after posting “Skyler’s Story,” I looked at
the viewership stats—not surprisingly, they are quite low and dwindle as the
series progresses. (As of this moment, the final episode has gotten only 9 views
and only 1 completion!) I’m not surprised or disappointed (much) by this, as I
always new that this part of the project would be of interest to a comparatively
niche audience. But if you think it sounds interesting at all, please check them
out!
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Tags: breaking bad, character, remix video, videographicBB
SKYLER’S STORY: A VIDEOGRAPHIC MINISERIES
07Feb22
From the earliest conception of my audiovisual book, “The Chemistry of Character
in Breaking Bad,” I imagined that I would do a video on Skyler White, with the
goal of situating her story at the narrative center of the series. In the first
project proposal back in 2018, I wrote this chapter summary: “Skyler’s Story:
Walt’s wife is central to the unfolding narrative, serving as his goal (to
provide for his family), his foil (obstructing his criminal plans), and his
collaborator; this video retells Skyler’s story via her experiences of his
actions, and considers her often-hated persona in a new light.”
Today I’m excited to share the results of many months of work with the debut of
“Skyler’s Story: A Videographic Miniseries.” Beneath the fold, I share both the
first video in the series, and a draft of the textual component that will
accompany the videos in the audiovisual book. Today is Monday, and thus I’m
posting the first episode; each morning (EST) for the rest of this week, I will
add another episode to the post, with the entire five-episode series posted by
Friday, February 11. It is up to you whether you space out your viewing via a
serialized daily ritual (purposely evoking the norms of the American daytime
soap opera), or wait to watch all the episodes back-to-back in a deep dive into
Skyler’s story.
However you choose to watch (although I do recommend using headphones and
watching on a large monitor), I thank you for your time, and welcome all
feedback on the videos and/or written component. Enjoy a healthy dose of Skyler!
Continue reading ‘Skyler’s Story: A Videographic Miniseries’
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Tags: breaking bad, character, videographic criticism, videographicBB
MORE ADVENTURES IN UNGRADING
24Jan22
As my blog has become more intermittent over the past few years, one topic seems
to still get lots of traffic: rethinking grading. I first started experimenting
with grading (and writing about it) around five years ago, and I’m proud to say
that I have not “graded” an assignment since! But the ways that I’ve practiced
ungrading has changed a fair amount and warrants revisiting.
Back in 2016, my approach to ungrading was focused on specifications grading,
the system of evaluating every assignment as Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory in
meeting the assignment’s outlined specifications. I have continued using that
system for my introductory Television & American Culture course, where a
comparatively high number of students (around 35 each semester, which is “large”
for Middlebury) and a large amount of content to cover makes it (mostly)
effective. During COVID times, I shifted the course to include more remote
instruction, including recorded lecture videos (off-set by reducing the length
of in-person scheduled meetings) and numerous asynchronous “engagement
activities” that students can choose from to demonstrate their ongoing
engagement with the material. Even as I taught the course fully in-person in
Fall 2021, I retained a lot of the online components to allow more flexibility
for when students may have to miss class due to illness (which happened
regularly) or otherwise had trouble keeping up with the regular workload during
times of high stress and uncertainty—my guiding values in course design is to
prioritize student agency, flexibility, and transparency, and this system
emerged from that foundation.
However, I’m planning on rethinking some of this course’s structure the next
time I teach it in Spring 2023. Some students seemed to treat the flexible
micro-assignments too much as “boxes to check” on their bingo cards rather than
opportunities to engage in the material in thoughtful ways—even with low-stakes
Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading, many were still driven more by the
extrinsic motivation to accumulate points rather than to dig into the topics,
and I spent too much time replying to messages about points and deadlines,
rather than ideas . So I’ll likely reduce the number of engagement activities
and design them to be more meaningful and… “engaging.” I also need to shift the
timing for the final essay so that it doesn’t fall amidst the crunch of finals,
leading too many students to under-perform and sacrifice opportunities for
feedback and revision. And I am going to read more about labor-based grading to
see if I can adapt some of those approaches to suit this course design. But I’m
certainly not going back to grading assignments!
While specifications grading has remained a mostly effective system for my
introductory course, I found that it did not work in my other classes. In 2016,
I wrote about redesigning one of my advanced seminars with specifications
grading, and I realized that I never followed-up to reflect on how it worked. In
short, it didn’t. The model of numerous small assignments grouped into tiered
bundles for final grades doesn’t really work for an advanced writing-intensive
seminar, and the effective pedagogy within the course around both theoretical
content and writing seemed completely detached from the regimented counting of
assignments and outcomes. So I knew that I needed another way to determine
grades for my seminars, which is most of my teaching outside of the introductory
course.
Thus the next time I taught the course in Fall 2019, I fully embraced the
ungrading model that I had been reading about, largely from Jesse Stommel and
later in Susan Blum’s book, as well as hearing from colleagues who had similarly
abandon traditional grading. Spoiler: it was a huge success, and I’ve adopted it
for every other seminar I’ve taught since. Here’s the explanation of ungrading
from that first syllabus, which I’ve left mostly intact in future semesters:
> This course uses an unconventional approach for assessing student learning
> roughly termed “ungrading.” You will not receive a “grade” for any single
> assignment, with only a final course grade registered into Banner [our student
> record system]. While Professor Mittell will register that grade, he will not
> assign it—you will. Such self-grading means that students are fully
> responsible for their own learning, and it is meant to fully sever the link
> between that learning and the “outcome” of grades. This grade will emerge
> through ongoing conversations between each student and Professor Mittell;
> while he reserves the right to alter the grade that a student assigns, it is a
> sign of mutual trust and shared responsibility for learning that he does not
> anticipate doing so.
>
> Even though there will not be grades, there will be lots of feedback,
> evaluation, assessment, and revision—these will all hopefully be channeled
> toward maximizing learning. Students will create an individual learning plan,
> write self-reflections on their learning, meet with both peers and Professor
> Mittell to discuss their progress, and undertake revisions based on feedback.
> Since all students who pass the course will have achieved the goals for
> College Writing, the expectations for success are quite high. In exchange for
> students’ hard work, Professor Mittell agrees to take however much time is
> needed to ensure students understand expectations and practices, and are
> poised to succeed to their desired goals. His goal is to help each student
> achieve their learning goals, and to be transparent about expectations for
> learning throughout the semester.
Students were a bit skeptical of this approach, as having that much agency and
flexibility was quite novel, and many thought there must be a catch—given that
each of them arrived at an elite college via a system where maximizing grades is
seen as the ends, not the means, this approach produced some serious culture
shock. But after giving a brief overview in the first week, I stopped talking
about grades and focused on the material and writing assignments (another
drawback of the specifications grading approach is that since it is complicated
and unconventional, you need to spend a good deal of time explaining and
reviewing it, as students want to “get it right” – even as I try to decenter
grades, I end up discussing them a lot). In this ungraded seminar, whenever
students asked about grades, I simply said, “focus on the material and we’ll
discuss your grade at the end of the semester.”
And that’s what we did. Students did a brief assignment for the first week,
writing a “Statement of Learning Intentions”: they were asked to read through
the syllabus and submit a short reflection “that outlines what they hope to
learn through this course, and how they hope to accomplish those goals.” Then at
the end of the semester, they submitted another reflection essay, looking back
at their initial statement, reviewing the course learning goals, and reflecting
on their own engagement throughout the course. These two documents became the
basis for individual conferences that I had with each student to conclude the
semester, where we discussed what they learned in depth and dived into their
writing projects. Each conference concluded with me asking, “So, what grade do
you think best reflects your learning?”, as guided by these learning goals from
the syllabus:
> The course design is based around a series of core learning goals, assembled
> in a hierarchy of sophistication. Students will highlight their own learning
> goals from this list, as well as devise their own. These are roughly grouped
> in tiers that correspond to expected grade levels, with each student expected
> to reflect their particular goals via written and conversational reflection.
>
> All students who pass the course (C) will demonstrate the ability to:
>
> – Describe how various theoretical approaches approach the study of popular
> culture
>
> – Apply specific vocabulary and concepts to examine popular culture
>
> – Read dense theoretical writings and summarize their core ideas
>
> – Communicate their ideas orally and via writing with fluency and clarity, per
> college CW standards
>
> – Revise their writing to improve both ideas and communication, per college CW
> standards
>
> Students who achieve a higher level of accomplishment (B) will also
> demonstrate the ability to:
>
> – Analyze popular culture with original insights, effective use of sources,
> and connections to theoretical models, different examples and cultural
> contexts
>
> – Engage in serious conversation about often fraught topics with an ethos of
> mutual respect and generosity
>
> Students who achieve the highest level of accomplishment (A) will also
> demonstrate the ability to:
>
> – Create, substantiate, and communicate an original analytic argument that
> synthesizes multiple facets of popular culture, appropriate types of evidence,
> and theoretical approaches with sophistication
>
> – Meet class expectations per the assigned schedule with consistency, and
> provide strong support to peers to facilitate our learning community
These conferences proved to be one of my favorite pedagogical activities I’ve
ever done, providing real closure on the semester and a chance for substantive
conversation about a student’s learning. We typically get fully engaged in the
course content and student writing that when I bring up the inevitable, it feels
like a disruption: students don’t really want to talk about the grade either!
They typically hem and haw about needing to sum everything up with a letter that
feels so reductive (welcome to the worst part of grading!), and then tentatively
present a grade, or often a range of two options. We go back and forth a little,
but usually I enter the grade they suggested into my spreadsheet, and they
depart with a real sense of closure.
This approach to ungrading appeared to be quite successful to me and seemingly
to my students as well, and I have adopted it for all of my other courses since:
Videographic Film & Media Studies, Key Concepts in Film & Media Criticism, and
my department’s senior tutorial that mentors senior thesis projects. It proved
to work well with both in-person and teleconferenced meetings, and has helped
all of these classes focus on learning rather than assessment. These closing
conferences are really the highlight of the semester, as I come away impressed
with most students’ learning and their own articulation of their engagement with
the material. I’ve found that students are typically honest about their
struggles and successes, and I can usually help emphasize the latter in a way
that leaves them feeling good about the course.
Whenever I discuss this ungrading approach with colleagues, they usually want to
talk about what grades students give themselves. Honestly, this is the least
interesting part of the approach to me—I want to focus on how it facilitates
learning, builds community, and encourages reflection. But since academia has
put so much stock in the outcome of grades being the marker of “rigor” and
student success, that ends up being the focus for many. So far, the grade
distribution in my ungraded seminars closely matches the breakdown from my
traditionally graded days, with a bit of a shift upward but still a solid range
of grades from A to B– (in these classes, Cs or lower have always been quite
rare, due to students not completing significant work). My seminar this past
fall had significantly higher grades, but that was an indication of a great
group of students who did excellent work (more about that work in a forthcoming
post)—this is a clear case of “learning inflation,” not “grade inflation”!
Before trying this approach, I’d read that self-assignment leads to students
often suggesting lower grades than faculty feel are appropriate, and that has
been my general experience. I go into each meeting with a ballpark sense of what
grade feels most appropriate to me, and sometimes our reflective conversation
shifts that sense (almost always upward, as students can demonstrate deep
engagement via these conversations); students’ self-grades are almost always at
or slightly below my assessed level. When students undershoot my assessment, I
can articulate their strengths, hopefully helping students value their own work
more, and acknowledging that I recognize their efforts—since such low
assessments are often from students who lack confidence or struggle with
extraneous factors, such conversations feel impactful.
The ungrading literature also commonly mentions that women and students of color
can undersell their accomplishments, while white guys tend to self-inflate. In
my very limited sample size, I have not seen that. My most memorable moment
around this was in a conference with a white female student who had done solid
but unexceptional work throughout the semester, and I’d come to our meeting with
a B+ in mind. In our conversation, she asserted that she thought she’d earned an
A; when I offered a little hesitation, she proceeded to go through the learning
goals to highlight her hard work, her growth, and her progress—and I was
convinced that her learning process earned an A, even if her essays were not As
in my conventional rubric. Such self-advocacy and reflection seems like an
important outcome for students whose perspectives are structurally marginalized
in academia, and I do what I can to acknowledge such contexts and encourage
those students.
Through my ungrading practices over the past two years, I have tried to let go
of the conventional rubrics I bring to these conferences. I try not to think of
the grade as the culmination of my work with the student that semester, but
rather a reporting requirement that my institution imposes on that work. I don’t
approach these conversations to police the grades students assign themselves—if
I come to a conversation with a pre-assessed grade of B, and a student makes the
case for a B+, I enter the B+ into the spreadsheet. One of the byproducts of my
turn to ungrading is that I’ve come to an important realization: this does not
matter to me. I have absolutely no investment in keeping the class GPA below
some arbitrary number, nor making sure that student grades somehow are “true” to
an abstract standard. I want the grade to indicate the student’s sense of their
own learning, but once it’s entered into the college’s system, that letter means
nothing to me. What matters is their learning and our relationship, and I’ve
tried to make these letters get out of the way of what really counts.
Thus I plan to continue this ungrading approach for all subsequent smaller
courses, including a first-year seminar in Fall 2022—it should be quite
interesting to see how students take to ungrading in their very first college
course. I’ve thought about adopting ungrading for my large intro course, but I’m
not convinced that I can do it in a way that maintains what works best—the
intensive feedback, ongoing conversations, and final conferences—while ensuring
that students remain engaged through the amount of material that the course
covers. I have a colleague who ungrades his intro course, and I know other
faculty like Susan Blum do the same for even larger courses. So maybe that will
be the next step on my journey…
If you’re an academic who’s made it this far and are intrigued, I highly
recommend reading more from Jesse Stommel and see how this approach might fit
with your own courses. I hope to see more fellow travelers on this journey away
from grading!
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A BIT OF GOOD NEWS
11Jan22
It’s been more than two years since I posted to this blog, but I’m back with
some good news.
Obviously, it’s been a not-great couple of years of silence, although
comparatively I have little to complain about personally or professionally.
Things have sucked, but far less for me than for many people. But for 2022, I
hope to try to make things suck less in part by communicating more – hence, back
on the blog! (And if you want to pretend that I’m not reviving this throwback
format and started a trendy newsletter instead, feel free to get an email
subscription to the blog in the right sidebar…)
I write today with one big bit of good news gesturing toward the future, and a
few smaller updates from the last couple of years. Today’s big news is that I
received a NEH/Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication to support my academic
leave for Spring and Summer 2022, as I’ll be working on my audiovisual book,
“The Chemistry of Character on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul“! Dedicated
readers might remember that I’ve been working on this project for awhile,
launched during my last leave in 2018. Back then, it was solely focused on
Breaking Bad, and I had ambitions to finish the project in 2020. However, 2020
had other ideas. So now I’m back on leave and tackling the project, which has
expanded to include the prequel.
Back in 2018, I also applied for the NEH/Mellon fellowship (twice, actually),
and despite the fact that the reviewer comments were uniformly excellent, I did
not get funding. This year, I applied again, knowing that the odds were slim, so
the news of my award just before Christmas was a huge surprise. Beyond my own
personal pride and excitement, I am particularly gratified for what it signals
that the NEH would fund this project—this fellowship specifically supports
scholarship that results in a digital publication, spanning a wide range of
fields and approaches. But based on the descriptions of funded projects, most
work would be considered fairly “traditional” in terms of humanities
methodologies and topics: digital editions of notable literary texts, history
monographs with embedded multimedia, and the like. I presumed that the main
barrier for projects like mine getting funding (given the reviewer praise) was
that the larger NEH board was skeptical of either television studies as a
worthwhile subfield of the humanities, videographic criticism as a legitimate
mode of scholarship,** or (most likely) both. Thus I regard this award less as a
single success for me than a broader signal of these dual legitimacies, and
hopefully a sign that there are more opportunities for such work to be supported
going forward!
** I should note that the NEH has certainly supported videographic criticism
previously, particularly in funding our Scholarship in Sound & Image workshops.
But those grants were through the Office of Digital Humanities, which tends to
be more open to experimentation that the main NEH Fellowship program.
To celebrate the launch of my leave and fellowship, I made the following short
video as part of the larger project, as well as a contribution to Ariel
Avissar’s videographic TV Dictionary collection. These videos follow the
straightforward parameters of choosing a word and exploring the juxtaposition
between the word’s definitions and clips from a television series. Given the
focus of my book, “character” was an obvious choice:
This piece joins the other videos I’ve published as part of the audiovisual book
in progress – keep an eye out for more videos posting there in the coming
months!
As promised, I have a few other updates and news to share from the past two
years:
Speaking of the Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop, we had to cancel our
scheduled workshops for 2020 and 2021, but are optimistically planning to run
one for June 2022 (with required vaccinations, of course). If you are interested
in coming to Vermont for “videocamp” to learn to make video essays, the
application deadline is February 1.
One of the first COVID cancellations to hit me personally was SCMS in April
2020. It was particularly disappointing because it meant that Christian Keathley
and I were not able to attend the conference to receive the society’s first
Innovative Pedagogy Award, which we won for our collaborative work running the
workshop, teaching videographic criticism undergraduates, and publishing our
pedagogical work. We did get these snazzy awards mailed to us though…
While my research productivity during the COVID years has been excusably weak, I
have had a few publications released during the blog’s unplanned hiatus:
* The revised edition of How to Watch Television was released just as COVID
shut things down in Spring 2020 (again, another opportunity to celebrate at
SCMS was lost). For this new edition, Ethan Thompson and I solicited 21 new
chapters, each analyzing an episode or two of television to exemplify a
critical approach—we gathered all new contributors (beyond me & Ethan),
particularly trying to find work focused on a diverse array of programs and
topics. We’re really proud of the results, and reports are that the new
chapters work well in the classroom! We left around half of the original
essays in the book, and as a bonus, moved all the “retired” first-edition
essays to NYU Press’s website for open access. My own contribution to the new
book is a chapter on Better Call Saul as a “prestige spinoff,” considering
the tensions between televisual legitimacy and derivative work.
* The peer-reviewed journal article is not a form I’m particularly invested in,
as most of my shorter-form writing tends to be for book projects (or once
upon a time, blog posts!). But one of the publications I am most proud of
came out in 2021 in the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly as part of a
theme issue on audiovisual digital humanities: “Deformin’ in the Rain: How
(and Why) to Break a Classic Film.” A sequel of sorts to my chapter
“Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method,” this new essay
expands my thoughts on the possibilities of videographic deformations to
unlock new ways of engaging with media. The essay contains more than a dozen
examples of deformations of Singin’ in the Rain, and written commentary on
the processes and outcomes of these experiments. If videos like this intrigue
you, definitely check out the essay!
Beyond that book and essay (which required a level of labor rivaling a short
book!), my other work is either still in-progress, or the less tangible realm of
teaching, chairing a department, and parenting during a pandemic. It’s been
quite a couple of years! But I hope to keep this blog updated with some more
thoughts about ungrading, sharing some of my students’ excellent work as writers
and videographic critics, and new videographic content of my own (plus some of
the “just TV” thoughts in the site’s title – maybe with my reaction to the
upcoming conclusion to Station Eleven?). Stay tuned!
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Sabbatical, Television, Videographic Criticism | 1 Comment
Tags: breaking bad, videocamp, videographicBB
THE VIDEOGRAPHIC ESSAY: AN OPEN ACCESS SITE!
21Dec19
In the spirit of the season, I am pleased to announce a gift to anyone who wants
it: a new open access, multimedia site, The Videographic Essay: Practice and
Pedagogy, available at videographicessay.org. This site collects both
previously-published and new versions of writings by Christian Keathley,
Catherine Grant, and me, as well as numerous examples of videographic work. We
encourage anyone interested in videographic criticism to use this site in
classes, scholarship, and personal development – and let us know if you have
ideas to help the site grow and flourish!
The website emerged directly from the summer videographic workshop, Scholarship
in Sound & Image, that Christian Keathley and I have been offering at Middlebury
for the past few years. We are now accepting applications for June 2020, so we
encourage faculty, graduate students, and academic professionals to apply if
they want to learn more about this approach to scholarship – and spend two
intense and rewarding weeks in Vermont this summer. I hope to see some of you
there!
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Publishing, Teaching, Videographic Criticism | 1 Comment
EL CAMINO: NECESSARY OR SUFFICIENT?
11Oct19
I took advantage of one of the (many) perks of my job and took over our
high-quality screening room this morning to watch El Camino, the Breaking Bad
movie that dropped today – this was probably the closest that Vermont will get
to a theatrical release! I have some non-spoilery thoughts, followed by a few
well-marked spoilery ones, including one major critique of the movie:
My first reaction was that El Camino was a two hours well-spent. It is pretty
much just fan service, but as a fan, I felt well-served. The story it told was
compelling if not that essential, and like any other Breaking Bad episode, it
was beautifully shot, performed, and written. While the many cameos were
variously effective, the bottom line is that spending two more hours with Jesse
Pinkman is sufficient for my entertainment needs.
A number of reviews I’ve read seem to feel similarly: it’s good, but ultimately
“unnecessary.” As Matthew Gilbert starts his review:
> Here’s the question that dogs every TV sequel, prequel, and revival: Is it
> necessary? Does the material — in this case, “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie”
> — justify revisiting the original narrative? Was it worth undoing the ending
> of the series — and risking the greatness of its legacy — to deliver yet
> another chapter?
This piece and others got me pondering about this word “necessary” – what might
such a description mean for a television series? In a Twitter conversation with
critic Daniel Fienberg, whose review also called it unnecessary, he suggested
that for series that don’t end on their own terms, like Deadwood or Gilmore
Girls, a revival feels a lot more necessary than a show whose finale is roundly
hailed as both satisfying and conclusive—like Breaking Bad.
But what do we “need” from a television series? For a series that is cut short
or takes a bad turn in the hands of replacement writers, it might be about
answering narrative questions about what happens next, or paying off the arc of
a character that seems incomplete in the original. But unless a character dies,
there’s always more story potentially to be told – and how can we judge whether
that story is “necessary”?
For Jesse Pinkman, the consensus seems to be that it is not—knowing how he
escaped the next set of calamities that follow his liberation from a neo-Nazi
torture camp seems far less important than the feeling of hope that we felt as
he drove off in his El Camino back in 2013. But the fact that El Camino‘s story
is inessential doesn’t make it any less pleasurable: while Breaking Bad‘s
narrative drive toward “what happens next” might be its main motor, the joy of
the ride was the combination of the program’s stylistic verve and the characters
who inhabit its world.
Spending another two hours with Jesse Pinkman is not necessary in any real
sense, but neither was spending the first 60 hours with Walt and Jesse, and
Skyler and Hank and Marie, etc. Not necessary, but certainly sufficient.
OK – now there be spoilers, including my biggest critique of the movie:
Continue reading ‘EL CAMINO: Necessary or Sufficient?’
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Filed under: Television | Leave a Comment
Tags: breaking bad
POOR JESSE: A BREAKING BAD FANVID
26Aug19
This weekend, a teaser dropped for what had been only rumored-about for the past
year: the Breaking Bad movie!
Named El Camino, presumably for the car that Jesse drives off to escape his Nazi
prison in the series finale, the film presumably focuses on Jesse’s life after
Breaking Bad.
While we’ll have to wait until October to know more details, the news inspired
me to share my latest video for my Breaking Bad audiovisual book. “Poor Jesse”
is a fanvid, following the vernacular of that form by remixing images and some
sounds from the series to a single music track. A few notes follow below after
watching it (with the sound turned up loud!):
From the early origins of my videographic Breaking Bad project, I knew that one
of the chapter should be a fanvid. I’ve written previously about vidding as a
fan and critical practice, and I felt that making one would be a good way to
understand it more fully. Additionally, I’ve had long conversations with Louisa
Stein, Melanie Kohnen, and others about the boundaries and similarities between
vidding and videographic criticism, so I felt it was important to include this
vernacular form in the book as an example of its critical possibilities. There
was no question that I wanted it to be about Jesse, as he’s the character I have
the most affective bond toward, and the one whose arc is most about the feels.
And the choice of song – a live version of Wilco’s “Handshake Drugs” – was a
no-brainer, as they’re one of my favorites and the live performance of this song
captures their sonic range from catchy jangle to wall-of-sound that mirror’s
Jesse’s arc.
When rewatching the series in Adobe Premiere, I struck gold when I saw
“Thirty-Eight Snub,” the second episode in the fourth season (and at #35,
slightly past the halfway point). As Jesse sonically tortures himself after his
multiday rave peters out, I knew that this scene would be the spine of the
video. I then designed the chronological structure to move from his memories of
past torments and infrequent smiles to foreshadowing crises to come. The choice
to focus all the images on Jesse (and mostly his face) flowed from my admiration
for Aaron Paul’s expressive looks and my desire to connect everything to the
character’s emotional life. And the final shot feels particularly apt with El
Camino on the horizon.
I’m extremely thankful for the feedback I got from Louisa Stein, Casey
McCormick, and especially vidder extraordinaire Luminosity. I was definitely out
of my comfort zone in producing this one, and their comments gave me confidence
that it was worth the effort. As to whether such vidding does function as
videographic criticism… I encourage people to weigh in via the comments!
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Tags: breaking bad, character, vidding, videographicBB
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