It’s an inspired use of the famous Four Corners Monument that marks the quadripoint of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. This bird’s-eye view of Skyler White visually renders her as a piece in a board game: It’s her move and she doesn’t know which way to go. We’re not sure if these are necessarily the 12 best shots in the history of the show-that’s something to argue about on Twitter-but taken together, they represent a startling mosaic of image-making. Walter White’s ego and delusions of grandeur created a context for Gilligan’s aesthetic: From the very beginning, a kind of stylized megalomania was built into Breaking Bad’s DNA on a molecular level. Even if, at times, the show’s color-coded production design and inventory of symbolic objects could seem heavy-handed, the overriding impression was one of thoughtful, mischievous showmanship, with every directorial choice calibrated to serve-or heighten-the material. It’s not so much that Breaking Bad’s imagery was “cinematic” as that it displayed a belief in the ability of single frames to convey emotional and intellectual information, even on a small-screen scale. For five seasons, creator Vince Gilligan and cinematographer Michael Slovis cultivated an expressive, eccentric, scrupulously slick look apart from other narratively or thematically similar dramas.
Whether or not you think that Breaking Bad has a claim to being the best television show of the post- Sopranos era, a case can certainly be made that it’s the best looking.
0 kommentar(er)
