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Faculty Publications: Communication Communication
2020
Victims, Heroes, and Villains: Imaginary Beings in Contemporary Victims, Heroes, and Villains: Imaginary Beings in Contemporary
Television Serials Television Serials
E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.
Molloy University
, dpribram@molloy.edu
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1
E. Deidre Pribram
VICTIMS, HEROES, AND VILLAINS:
IMAGINARY BEINGS IN
CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIALS
Abstract: This chapter traces melodrama’s historical triumvirate of characters – victims,
heroes, and villains – to examine how they are applied in contemporary television serial
dramas. Looking in particular at the examples of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, the
author argues that the characterological trio now often exists within singular protagonists
who follow a narrative trajectory from victim through hero to arrive, ultimately, at
villainy. Collapsing the characterological triad into single protagonists marks a late
modern version of melodrama in which the possibilities for heroism are circumscribed,
leaving characters able to opt only for victimization or villainy.
Introduction
In the narrative modality known as melodrama, one of the most familiar, enduring
conceptualizations of characters exists in the triumvirate of victims, heroes, and villains,
historically personified as distinct entities. This characterological structure is pivotal for
melodrama’s central preoccupation surrounding notions of justice and injustice. Further,
melodrama has been considered a quintessentially modern narrative mode, developing
around 1800 to eventually spread across media (theatre, literature, film, television).
While the melodramatic mode survives and thrives in the present day, this chapter
explores how the characterological trio has transformed, in certain televisual cases, in
order to remain relevant for twenty-first century audiences. In recent dramatic serials, a
2
contemporary exemplar of melodrama, the previously well-defined characterological
triad has purposefully become blurred, as in the instances of The Sopranos (1999-2007),
The Wire (2002-2008), and How to Get Away with Murder (2014-present). The
characterological trio now also exists within single characters, as is evident in the crime
dramas, Breaking Bad (2008-2013) and its companion series, Better Call Saul (2015-
present), whose narrative trajectories are driven by the movement of their protagonists
from one end of the victim-hero-villain spectrum to the other, resulting in multiply
identified lead characters (Walter/Heisenberg; Jimmy/Saul Goodman).
I argue that the triumvirate continues to exist in most popular genres, as part of
the ongoing power of the melodramatic imagination towards making sense of our
sociocultural worlds. However, instances where the three personas of victim-hero-villain
exist in singular protagonists reflect a late modern loss of faith in the possibility of
heroism, in particular. Although defying one’s status as victim equates with heroism,
heroic virtue can no longer convincingly vanquish perpetrators, but must be met by the
same tactics used by villains to prevail. I explore how such shifts in fictional imaginary
beings signal a twenty-first century consciousness that, in the melodramatic mode, is
conveyed through emotional structures, in particular, via the multi-layered, multi-emotion
complex known as pathos.
When Good Guys Break Bad
A number of scholars have noted that no sufficiently systematic, inclusive model exists
by which to take account of narrative characterization.
1
Henriette Heidbrink attributes
this lack to “the diversity and complexity” of fictional characters as “plurivalent
3
phenomena.”
2
As a result, responses to questions regarding what factors most essentially
constitute characters have been similarly diversified, including a dizzying array of
suppositions in which characters are formulated as (or combinations among): “structures,
signs, trait-clusters, agents, rhetoric effects, plot functions, humanlike persons, mental
representations, imaginative beings, inhabitants of a fictional/possible world.”
3
I focus on
characters as “imaginative beings,” as that notion might be conceived through the lens of
melodrama, a specific but extensive and significant narrative modality.
Heidbrink suggests that a principal criterion in determining the value of any
approach to characterization rests in its practical usefulness in making sense of mediated
aesthetic figures.
4
Murray Smith takes the notion of theoretical utility a step further,
arguing that analytical approaches ought to also account for the widespread, popular
meanings and values characterization holds for audiences.
5
On this basis, one of the most
culturally resonant formulations centers around the triumvirate of hero-villain-victim,
bequeathed from melodrama. Reductive yet salient, due to its widespread familiarity and
ongoing application, characters in film and television remain routinely viewed and
reviewed through the framework of heroic “good guys,” villainous “bad guys,” or
vulnerable victims.
Following Peter Brooks,
6
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams,
7
and others, I
use melodrama to refer to a broad narrative mode that encompasses most of the popular
genres with which American audiences are familiar, including the crime, police, and
detective formats. Established around 1800, first in theatre, then literature, before
migrating to film and television at their inventions, melodrama is regarded as a dominant
aesthetic mode that, additionally, reflects a modern consciousness or imagination. For
4
instance, in his 1995 preface to The Melodramatic Imagination, Brooks describes
melodrama as a coherent imaginative mode that exists as “an inescapable dimension of
modern consciousness.”
8
Forged against a backdrop of industrialization, urbanization,
escalating economic inequities and hardships due to capitalism’s burgeoning forms of
mass production and mass consumption, alongside the rise of mass media, melodrama
was, and remains, inextricably linked with modernity.
Melodrama’s modern consciousness can be identified in its preoccupation,
following the mode’s solidification in the wake of the French Revolution, with
“Enlightenment values of freedom, equality, and justice.”
9
Regardless of greater or lesser
success in specific instances, melodrama’s broad intent impels it to strive towards “a
better justice.”
10
To the extent that the playing out of various renditions of justice and
injustice serves as a central melodramatic concern, it becomes evident that the crime,
police, and detective genres hold particular relevance for the melodramatic project. Stated
conversely, detective, police, and crime narratives, deriving from their “parent,
melodrama,”
11
are permeated with varying arrangements of justice and injustice.
12
Over the course of the nineteenth century, melodrama served as a “central cultural
paradigm” across a number of European and other societies, based on a foundation of
“the conflict of manichean opposites.”
13
Manichean opposites reference an imaginative
worldview divided into clearly demarcated, polarized forces of good versus evil.
Historically, melodrama’s imaginative values were enacted by today’s still familiar
triumvirate of characters: victim, hero, villain. Connected to the worldview of binary
opposites, each member of the triumvirate was traditionally depicted as a distinct entity
with its own proper traits and behaviors while, at the same time, remaining entirely
5
dependent on the other roles in order to stake out its respective terrain. In the historical
melodramatic system:
innocence and villainy construct each other: while the villain is necessary
to the production and revelation of innocence, innocence defines the
boundaries of the forbidden which the villain breaks.
14
Thus, virtue became delineated by the forces of evil that surrounded and threatened it,
just as villainy was identified by the innocence that stood steadfast in its face, regardless
of ensuing pain or punishment.
A further line of demarcation among the characterological triad concerned the
methods open to its respective members. “By definition,” as Gledhill recounts, in
nineteenth century melodrama, the innocent hero “cannot use the powers available to the
villain; following the dictates of their nature, they must become victims.”
15
While all
manner of malfeasance was unleashed by agents of villainy, heroic forces could not
respond in kind without undermining their very standing as heroic. Instead, they had no
recourse but to take up the limited actions – or inactions – accessible to the virtuous. As a
result, heroes could easily evolve into innocent victims, while innocent victims suffered
in stoic passivity unless and until forces intervened to alter the trajectory of their
existences, providing opportunities to defeat villainy by virtuous means.
16
The purpose of
this analysis is to track the changes within contemporary melodramatic protagonists from
victim to hero to villain, and to consider in what ways these transformations are reflective
of a late modern imaginative worldview. Returning to Heidbrink’s panoply of character
conceptualizations, I deploy fictional characters to refer to “imaginative beings” as the
figures appearing in mediated narrative contexts that are able to call up cultural concepts
through various aesthetic strategies. They are imaginative beings, not in the simple sense
6
of the products of a creator’s imagination, but in the full implications of melodrama’s
appeal to a modern worldview, enacting particular sensibilities.
Melodrama continues to survive and, indeed, flourishes because of its capacity to
adapt to changing eras and conditions. The mode has realigned, in keeping with the
altered social circumstances from nineteenth century to twenty-first century modernity,
responding with a commensurately different imaginative worldview. Late modernity’s
events occur on an even more vast scale, including globalization, the widespread effects
of neoliberalism, the advent of authoritarian forces in varying locations around the world,
and extensive mass migration accompanying other intensifying “masses” (production,
consumption, mediated communication).
17
Yet these changes do not entail that the
melodramatic imagination must disappear. On the contrary, the terms of the mode’s
aesthetic and cultural paradigm are amended for late modern audiences, while remaining
recognizably melodramatic. Twenty-first century melodrama continues to seek a better
justice, in ways that resonate for its current audiences, as we can see in the examples of
the crime drama Breaking Bad and its spin-off, Better Call Saul.
Both residents of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Walter White and Saul Goodman’s
alter (original) ego, Jimmy McGill, the protagonists of their respective series, set out on
their narrative trajectories from the position of victim. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is
victimized by the circumstances of his health, diagnosed with lung cancer at age 50
although he has never smoked. Additionally, he suffers through his economic plight as an
underpaid high school teacher forced to work a second job at a car wash and by his low
social status, going without recognition although a gifted chemist. Finally, his personality
renders him a victim because he is too meek and mild-mannered to stand up to anyone. In
7
the series’ first episode (“Pilot”), we watch as Walter is humiliated by his boss at the car
wash, and by a student whose vehicle he is forced to wipe down. In later episodes of
Season 1, we feel sympathy as Walter undergoes radiation and chemotherapy, is affected
by harsh side effects, and must pay $90,000 out of pocket for the treatment.
18
He is
further humiliated when his former, highly successful business partner offers him a job
out of pity, and then treats him as a “charity” case, in Walter’s description, by offering to
pay for his medical treatment outright.
Better Call Saul functions as a prequel, primarily taking place in the six years
prior to the events of Breaking Bad. Its main character, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk),
also sets out as a victim: a nice guy with a past as a small-time con artist and a
questionable law degree (online from the University of American Samoa) who initially
seems too weak to thrive in a cutthroat legal world. When we first encounter Jimmy, he
works as a public defender, earning only $700 per case, while attempting, with little
success, to establish his own private practice from a cramped room where he works and
lives, in the back of a nail salon. In terms of personal strengths, while Walter is a gifted
chemist, Jimmy possesses the gift of gab. His victimization occurs most notably at the
hands of his brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), a brilliant attorney who suffers from a
debilitating psychological illness. Jimmy takes care of Chuck physically, emotionally,
and financially, the latter accounting for Jimmy’s economic woes. Despite the latter’s
dutiful and devoted efforts, Chuck works to undermine his younger brother’s
accomplishments as a lawyer, succeeding through his machinations in having Jimmy’s
legal license suspended.
8
That the protagonists of both shows begin as victims is crucial in enabling them to
inhabit the role of hero, in which each of them takes up illicit activities in order to escape
victimization. In Walter’s case he becomes a manufacturer of crystal methamphetamine.
For his part, Saul/Jimmy establishes a practice as legal representative to lawbreakers,
specializing in those involved in drug trafficking. Gledhill argues that the melodramatic
hero can always turn into victim when the tactics available to the villain exist beyond the
realm of possible behaviors for a heroic character. However, the reverse sequencing also
exists, as we see with Walter and Jimmy, in which victims, in addressing their own
victimization, take up the heroic mantle.
19
Because hero-villain characters originate as
victims, their villainy must be learned, as in the cases of Breaking Bad and Better Call
Saul. Further, their status as victims renders their ultimate villainy palatable, at least for a
time, in addition to clearing a space for the intermediary emergence (between victim and
villainy) of their heroism. In the next section, I consider how the heroic phase in
contemporary TV serials can be quite fleeting. That is, heroism may well operate as only
a transitional phase in the trajectory from victim to villain.
The Delights of Villainy
Melodrama’s villains have long provided audiences with pleasure. Helen Day-Mayer and
David Mayer describe the villainous figures of nineteenth century theatrical productions
as “the engine of melodrama.”
20
Jeffrey Mason builds a similar argument, emphasizing
the necessity of depicted evil to a melodramatic imaginative worldview. In the latter’s
analysis, classic melodrama configures a stable, morally ordered, virtuous world,
depicted as the norm in the dual sense of idealized vision and the place of return at
9
drama’s end. In the most familiar, tradition-worn structure, melodrama serves as “the
arena wherein hero and heroine contend against villain, and the forces of virtue ultimately
defeat the forces of evil.”
21
In order to achieve this imaginative organization, dramatic crisis occurs when the
stable world is threatened, exposing the vulnerability and fragility of the portrayed
idealized world. Thus “virtue” represents “the world as it should be, stable, safe, and at
rest” while “evil” functions to shatter “complacency and calls any order into question.”
22
The complacency of the virtuous world, at times rendering it a banal locale, explains why
the villain so often becomes the most compelling character. His, or more rarely her,
capacity to upend norms instigates events and, thereby, villainy functions as the engine
that drives melodramatic dramaturgy. It is evil that intrudes, invades, and constantly
threatens, rendering the drama possible in the first place.
However, in certain strands of twenty-first-century televisual melodrama, villainy
endures but heroism exists in a much-diminished capacity as a viable means towards
evil’s vanquishment, if we understand evil as any perceived form of injustice. Such
forces of evil are alive and well in late modern serial melodrama, with villains continuing
to threaten and, in doing so, still delighting audiences. Heroism constitutes the gap in
current imagination in the example of these serial television dramas. Evil can no longer
be naively confronted by heroic innocence but must be matched, step-by-step, with
villainy in order to succeed.
If the struggle in traditional melodrama between virtue and evil is
“irreconcilable,”
23
because one social force must succeed at the cost of the other,
nowadays they are irreconcilable in a different sense. Villainy endures but naïve heroism
10
is no longer a sufficiently viable means towards its demise. Gledhill’s “by definition”
concerning heroic behavior in which melodrama demands that the innocent hero “cannot
use the power available to the villain” no longer operates as axiomatic and, therefore,
neither does the innocent hero as historically understood, although villain and victim
remain intact. Thus, certain characters continue to exist as protagonists but no longer as
heroes in the ways they have been historically conceived, as is evident in the case of
Walter White.
When Walter defies his status as victim by taking control of the direction and
conditions of his own life, he turns heroic, rooted on by audiences despite the fact that he
seizes power over his existence by applying his chemistry skills to cooking meth. In fact,
how this occurs is carefully managed narratively, in order to be able to see him as heroic,
to root for his cause, at least for a while. Walter’s initial efforts in the drug trade
culminate in a series of disasters, encompassing the first three episodes of Season 1.
Fiascoes include poisoning two drug dealers (Emilio and Crazy 8) in order to save
himself and his partner-in-crime, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), from execution, and then
having to purposefully murder Crazy 8 (Max Arciniega) who survives the poisoning, so
that Walter quickly racks up his second killing. Additionally, Walter and Jesse find
themselves cleaning up the acid-drenched, decomposing blood and guts of Emilio’s (John
Koyama) remains, a viscerally disgusting sequence composed through skillful
cinematography (for example, shooting upwards through glass flooring). The
significance, here, is that Walter’s initial excursions in the drug business are neither
empowering nor pleasurable but, instead, horrific. Indeed, he spends most of his time
nerve-wracked, for instance, passing two excruciating days and two full episodes (“Cat’s
11
in the Bag…;” “…And the Bag’s in the River”) before working up the courage to choke
Crazy 8 to death.
At the outset, Walter does not take to villainy easily. The displeasures of his new
enterprise help configure Walter as initially heroic rather than villainous because he
pursues his chosen course despite the almost insurmountable difficulties involved, and
because he does so for a worthy cause: paying for his cancer treatment. In working to
establish his heroic position, Walter’s moments of exhilarating empowerment for most of
Season 1 occur in the shape of events not connected to him making or selling meth, for
example, when he stands up to bullies who are making fun of his disabled teenage son,
quits his demeaning car wash job in a pique of righteous fury, or blows up the expensive
sports car of an affluent, obnoxious businessman because he steals Walter’s parking
space, talks too loudly on his Blue Tooth device in public places, and makes ugly, sexist
comments.
In contrast, Walter’s most prominent Season 1 victory within the context of the
drug business takes place in Episode 6 (“Crazy Handful of Nothin’”). Walter’s first
confrontation with Tuco (Raymond Cruz) marks the onset of the former’s villainy as
much as it displays an empowering heroism we can cheer on. After Tuco has severely
beaten Jesse and kept their $35,000 worth of meth without payment, Walter brazenly
shows up at Tuco’s headquarters alone, demanding the money. Walter, in his first
appearance as his alter-ego Heisenberg, creates a large explosion using fulminated
mercury cleverly disguised as crystal meth, then threatens to blow up all of them, himself
included, if Tuco does not comply with his demands. Of course, Tuco complies and
Heisenberg wins. And of course, the audience cheers on this dazzling feat. The difference
12
in this encounter does not lie in the degree of violence – no one dies – but in the pleasure
Walter derives from it.
The confrontation with Tuco displays the double-edged dynamic of
heroism/villainy, not because Walter pursues a particularly egregious course, as so many
of Walter-as-Heisenberg’s future actions will prove to be, but due to the fact that what
occurs is no longer an unpleasant or even horrific means to an end for Walter: it
transpires as an end in itself. His deep pleasure in the victory is palpable when Walter
gets back into his car, after the encounter, emitting satisfied groans and a smug half-smile
as he drives off and the episode ends. Lest we miss the transformation that occurs in this
sequence, the encounter with Tuco is the first time Walter appears bald in public and the
first occasion that he invokes the name, Heisenberg.
24
The significance of this turning
point is that, for some modern-day protagonists, heroism without villainy no longer
remains possible. In order to survive, many late modern heroes must use the same power
accessed by villains, thereby undercutting the very existence of heroism. As
Walter/Heisenberg grows increasingly evil, each viewer must decide one’s personal
breaking point. Does the audience member opt to go along with Walter for the entire
narrative ride? If not, at what juncture have Walter’s actions become unacceptable,
exceeding all permissible moral bounds so that audiences feel compelled to break away,
to no longer regard him as someone to cheer on? The trajectory of the series is a narrative
game of sorts, testing viewers through their own moral discomfort, in order to find out
how long they can sustain the hero-villain dynamic, before conceding that perpetrator or
victimhood is all.
13
At the opening of the same episode in which Heisenberg confronts Tuco, Walter
and Jesse begin cooking again, following a hiatus after having killed Emilio and Crazy 8.
As they return to their meth business, Walter turns to Jesse, insisting, “No matter what
happens, no more bloodshed, no violence.” Walter’s naïve words remind us that late
modern protagonists who set out as victims must learn their villainy. However, Walter’s
words serve a further narrative purpose; if innocent heroism is no longer admissible, a
late modern imagination continues to frame the world in its shadow. Such contemporary
melodramas still cast their moral universe in terms of the old characterological trio of
victim, hero, villain. Even when positioned as no longer tenable, the equation as social
consciousness endures, even if it fails to operate as it used to. American television series
like Breaking Bad suggest an era in which we still wish to believe in the possibility of
heroism, the recognition of villainy, and the unfairness of suffering victims. Yet we no
longer feel able, with the same ease or certainty, to identify which is which. Contrasting
an earlier melodramatic outlook, a number of twenty-first century TV serials frame a
sociocultural horizon in which the suffering and heroic do not inherit the earth. Power
resides with the hardhearted, those willing to go to any extreme and, so, only those
prepared to take up villainy can function “heroically,” while the rest remain victimized.
The Pathos of Injustice
According to Jens Eder, heroes and villains are those fictional beings who operate within
“a system of values.”
25
Heroes and villains are the creatures belonging to the world of
melodrama; its system of values references a worldview embedded in moral concerns.
Chief among these concerns rests the expressed wish for justice, fairness, and equity.
14
Additionally, in order to enact its values, melodrama’s worlds are configured through
emotionality and emotional relations.
Although melodrama trades in a wealth of sentiments, the emotional organization
most closely associated with the mode is found in the operations of pathos. Gledhill
explains that pathos is not an emotion – equivalent to pity, sympathy, or compassion –
because pathos entails the audience knowing (and feeling) more than the character does.
26
Rather, pathos functions as an emotional structuration that involves three layers or tiers.
First, audiences must recognize the specific feelings experienced by a suffering victim,
perhaps terror, grief, or a deep sense of isolation. Second, viewers respond to the
character’s suffering, with pity, sympathy, compassion, or other emotions. Third, and
pivotally because we understand more about the character’s circumstances than he or she
does, we may feel anger, sorrow, guilt, or frustration for the causes of the wronged
person’s pain. In other words, pathos involves recognizing, responding to, and critiquing
the social or other sources of characterological suffering, and doing so through our own
emotional reactions.
27
Initially, Walter’s and Jimmy’s circumstances evoke pathos. But as they take up
increasingly pernicious positions, pathos shifts to the characters whom they, in turn,
render victims. The protagonists’ emotional position in both series changes along with
their status from victim to villain, whereby they become the source, rather than the
recipients, of the pathos we critique. The trajectory of Better Call Saul follows the
inverse narrative line to Breaking Bad in that we know where Jimmy ends up: as
“criminal lawyer,” Saul Goodman (in Jesse Pinkman’s apt stress point). In contrast to
Breaking Bad’s narrative drive that keeps viewers wondering the ultimate extent of
15
Walter’s corruption, Better Call Saul is impelled by curiosity as to the circumstances that
lead Jimmy to his given, eventual destination as Saul. Whereas Walter breaks bad in the
first episode of the series, and becomes Heisenberg in Season 1, it takes a full four
seasons for Jimmy to officially take on the persona of Saul Goodman. Events until the
finale of Season 4 (“Winner”) function as a kind of lengthy backstory that viewers wait
out, whether patiently or not.
Additionally, Saul’s dark side never grows as egregious as Walter’s, in that the
former doesn’t, himself, commit violent acts. Instead, Jimmy/Saul perpetrates cons and
serves as legal representative for people whom he is fully aware are violent criminals.
Saul’s immoral acts concern what he knows and facilitates more than what he does. Thus,
Saul’s villainous acts are more nuanced than is the case with Walter.
28
However, the two
series share in common a narrative arc that follows their main characters’ movements
from victim to hero to villainy. The heroic stage concerns fighting back: taking on the
world rather than reconciling oneself to being one of life’s victims. Additionally, in both
cases the turning point to narrative villainy takes place through an emotional event,
signaled by the emergence of their new personas, Heisenberg and Saul Goodman. In
Walter’s case, as we saw, Heisenberg appears as the outcome of Walter’s felt pleasure in
his successful confrontation with Tuco. In Jimmy’s instance, Saul emerges as chosen
identity at the emotional expense of Jimmy’s colleague and romantic partner, Kim
Wexler (Rhea Seehorn). Specifically, Jimmy’s choice to become Saul shifts the pathos
inherent in the situation from Jimmy to Kim.
On the first occasion Jimmy applies to get his suspended law license reinstated
(Season 4, Episode 9, “Wiederschen”), not long following Chuck’s suicide, Jimmy fails
16
to mention his older brother who is much admired by the members of the panel. Instead,
when asked the leading question, who has been a significant influence on Jimmy in terms
of the law, he responds flippantly with, “The University of American Samoa. Go Land
Crabs,” rather than crediting Chuck, the answer the panel seeks. Jimmy’s reinstatement
petition is turned down on the grounds the panel found him to be “insincere.”
Much of Better Call Saul’s reinstatement subplot revolves around the emotional
issue of sincerity and insincerity. When Jimmy explains to Kim what transpired, he is
adamant he was being entirely sincere throughout the hearing; that he failed to mention
Chuck because the latter had nothing to do with the matter at hand. As so often when
emotions are concerned, ambiguity prevails in how to interpret Jimmy’s explanation.
Perhaps Jimmy was – or genuinely believes himself to have been – sincere at the hearing,
as he insists. Equally plausibly, however, Jimmy’s answers were conditioned by his anger
at Chuck: for killing himself, for Chuck’s machinations that caused Jimmy’s law license
suspension in the first place. If the latter, then Jimmy denies his actual feelings, apparent
to the panel and Kim, if not to himself.
The question of sincerity and insincerity recurs when Jimmy appeals the panel’s
decision, in the finale of Season 4 (“Winner”). On this occasion, using his verbal gifts
Jimmy delivers a passionate statement to the appeals board concerning his admiration for
and indebtedness to Chuck. His words mesmerize the members of the appeals board and
bring Kim to tears. Indeed, Kim’s response is pivotal to the outcome of the reinstatement
sequence. As Jimmy speaks, seven cutaways occur to the four members of the appeals
panel as they listen, but these are exceeded by the eleven cutaways to Kim, all in medium
close-up, including her tearing up in response to Jimmy’s apparently moving words.
17
Immediately following, the sequence cuts to an elated Jimmy and Kim in the hallway
outside the appeals venue. Both are jubilant at Jimmy’s victory but, as it transpires, for
different reasons. Kim expresses her pride: “I knew you could do it. I knew you had it in
you.” In contrast, Jimmy boasts, “Did you see those suckers? That one asshole was
crying, he had actual tears,” shocking Kim into silence because she, too, had believed in
the sincerity of his performance. Jimmy’s revelation of his feelings renders Kim, with her
tears, just another one of the asshole suckers.
The narrative impact of the reinstatement sequence does not exist because Jimmy
has conned another group of marks, this time legal professionals; the problem is that he
cons Kim, the person whom he is closest to and who, as she makes clear and unlike
Chuck, most believes in Jimmy. At this moment, pathos shifts from Jimmy to Kim,
because he fails to recognize the betrayal that his behavior creates. However, the
audience identifies the betrayal involved and, thus, her shock and hurt become the focal
point of sympathy, even if we believe Jimmy deserves to regain his law license. To
underline the point, at this moment in time Jimmy announces that he refuses to practice
law under the name McGill and, so, will officially become Saul Goodman. As he departs
with a county clerk to sign the forms that will legally change his name, the episode and
season ends on a wide shot of Kim left alone, looking stunned and lost.
In traditional melodrama, a fictional being cannot be an insincere hero; that would
be using the tools and techniques available to villains (dishonesty, manipulation, deceit).
Kim wants to believe in Jimmy as hero (“I knew you had it in you”), which explains why
Jimmy having conned her feels like such a betrayal. And Jimmy spends most of the first
four seasons of Better Call Saul aspiring to accept the possibility of heroism, thinking he
18
can play it straight and succeed as a lawyer, until Chuck’s death in addition to the loss of
his right to practice law convince him otherwise. Thus, he opts for feigning the sincerity
the appeals board expects, following his first, dismal failure at regaining his license.
We witnessed a similar effort at naïve heroism with Walter, in his attempted
avowal to stay in the drug trade, earning the money he needs for his medical treatment
and to provide for his family, without perpetrating violence. Walter’s commitment
doesn’t even last the televisual hour before he finds himself confronting Tuco by means
of a spectacularly violent explosion and, in the process, learning he likes the power that
violence brings. Walter’s conviction that he can engage in a criminal enterprise without it
changing or tarnishing him is foolishly naïve to the point of delusional. Both Jimmy and
Walter prove self-deceptive in believing that circumstances could be otherwise. The error
of their ways is to have faith they will be given a chance, that the world in which they
exist will somehow turn into a fair or kind place. In the imaginative world of twenty-first
century modernity, as seen on television, the hero cannot maintain his or her innocence.
If the protagonist refuses the position of victim, he (in our examples) takes on the role of
victimizer.
We recognize the doubled identity of both series’ protagonists: the victims,
Walter and Jimmy; and the ultimate villains, Heisenberg and Saul Goodman. In fact, each
character has a third persona, that of failed hero. In the fifth and last season of Breaking
Bad, a defeated Walter/Heisenberg returns to Albuquerque as Mr. Lambert from New
Hampshire. His purpose is to secretly leave behind money for his family and, in that
process, he performs the partially redemptive, last-minute act of rescuing his former
partner, Jesse. Better Call Saul’s post-Saul Goodman persona is broken-down Gene,
19
manager of a Cinnabon franchise in Omaha, Nebraska. As Gene, Jimmy/Saul leads a
quietly respectable, working-class existence, hiding out in his new life of obscurity while
constantly fearful of discovery. All three identities – victim, villain, and failed hero – are
necessary to the contemporary elaboration of melodrama’s core concern, “the pathos of
injustice.”
29
Pathos, then, conveys the story through emotion. And while it usually involves
the sympathetic sentiments, like pity, empathy or compassion, it operates as an
organizational mechanism, incorporating a potentially enormous range of feelings,
among which the villains’ are essential. Day-Mayer and Mayer speak of melodrama’s
long line of victims, destined to encounter villainy in the shape of “malice, avarice, lust,
envy, and cruelty.”
30
What once may have been considered sins, we now recognize as
emotions. For Mason, fear of villainy is the “generative impulse” of melodrama, the
engine that keeps dramatic events hurtling forward.
31
In Episode 1 of Season 5 (“Live
Free or Die”), Walter has killed his principal nemesis, clearing his way to becoming drug
kingpin, and making it safe for his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), and their kids to return to
their home. Shortly after her return, Walter hugs Skyler and she freezes, too petrified to
object or move, too terrified by what he is capable of doing. Walter, knowing this, enjoys
the power he now exerts over his wife, the power to frighten her into submission. That is
the villainy upon which pathos depends. Following Patrick Colm Hogan’s argument, Jens
Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider suggest that contemporary storytelling may be
generated upon the basis of “a restricted set of human emotions.”
32
On the contrary, it is
the complexity and heterogeneity of emotionality that helps account for melodrama’s
ongoing vigor and proliferation.
20
Conclusion
What then do these contemporary examples of melodramatic TV serials depict about the
twenty-first century imagination? What is it we now do with imaginary beings?
According to Matthew Buckley, one of the numerous ways melodrama operationalized its
potent version of modern consciousness was that it “conditioned the modern world’s
active structures of feeling.”
33
Twenty-first century melodrama continues to activate our
contemporary structures of feeling, even as those structures differ from nineteenth and
early twentieth century renditions.
Certainly we remain sensitive to the vulnerability, fragility, and precarity of
society’s victims. And if we understand evil as any form of injustice, we continue to
experience narrative worlds rich with a variety of villainous perpetrators. The principal
difference rests with the hero persona. In the examples discussed, victims and victimizers
no longer depend upon heroes, the least feasible role in the traditional triad for late
modern consciousness. Victims and villains still constitute prevalent characters but there
exist fewer plausible heroic constructions. In these narrative worlds, one can be either
naïve (formerly innocent) and so victimized, or the perpetrator of victimization.
Currently we imagine villainy must be defeated by near-equal pernicious means.
Some of our most popular televisual narrative worlds are populated by victims and
perpetrators, with barely a sustainable hero among them. No intermediary or intervening
heroic position exists upon which to stand, at least not for any significant duration.
Arguably, then, the late modern imaginary becomes an even more polarized worldview.
Simultaneously, however, we cling to the terms of the traditional equation of a moral
21
triad because we cannot see our way clear to a viable alternative. The triumvirate of
characters, and the system of values it represents, holds firm even if the original terms of
a stable, orderly place to return to at drama’s end can no longer be accomplished.
Without an alternate, equally compelling vision, we continue to long for a system of
values dependent upon heroes who will fight on behalf of victims by virtuous means, in
order to defeat perpetrators of injustice, even as we recognize the limitations of that
worldview. The result is a complicated relationship with today’s protagonists, in which
we often prefer our victims as rather villainous, and our villains as failed heroes.
22
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and
the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995 [1976].
Buckley, Matthew. “Unbinding Melodrama.” In Melodrama Unbound: Across History,
Media, and National Cultures, 15-29. Edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda
Williams. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Corrigan, Timothy, and Patricia White. The Film Experience: An Introduction. Boston,
MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.
Day-Mayer, Helen, and David Mayer. “Performing/Acting Melodrama.” In Melodrama
Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures, 99-113. Edited by
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. New York: Columbia University Press,
2018.
Eder, Jens. “Understanding Characters.” Projections 4, no.1 (2010): 16-40.
Eder, Jens, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider. “Characters in Fictional Worlds: An
Introduction.” In Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary
Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, 3-64. Edited by Jens Eder, Fotis
Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
Gledhill, Christine. “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.” In Home Is Where the
Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, 5-39. Edited by Christine
Gledhill. London: BFI, 2002 [1987].
Gledhill, Christine. “Signs of Melodrama.” In Stardom: Industry of Desire, 207-229.
Edited by Christine Gledhill. London: Routledge, 1991.
Gledhill, Christine and Linda Williams, eds. Melodrama Unbound: Across History,
Media, and National Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Heidbrink, Henriette. “Fictional Characters in Literary and Media Studies: A Survey of
the Research.” Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings
in Literature, Film, and Other Media, 67-109. Edited by Jens Eder, Fotis
Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
Lotz, Amanda. “House: Narrative Complexity.” In How to Watch Television, 22-29.
Edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University
Press, 2013.
Lyman, Peter. “The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics.”
European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 2 (2004): 133-147.
23
Mason, Jeffrey. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1993.
Patulny and Olson. “Emotions in Late Modernity.” In Emotions in Late Modernity, 8-24.
Edited by Roger Patulny, Alberto Bellocchi, Sukhmani Khorana, Rebecca Olson,
Jordan McKenzie, and Michelle Peterie. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.
Pearson, Roberta. “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the
Televisual Character.” In Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope, 39-56.
Edited by Michael Allen. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.
Pribram, E. Deidre. Emotions, Genre, Justice in Film and Television. New York:
Routledge, 2013 [2011].
Shepherd, Simon. “Pauses of Mutual Agitation.” In Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen,
25-37. Edited by Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill. London: BFI,
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Smith, Murray. “Engaging Characters: Further Reflections.” In Characters in Fictional
Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media,
232-257. Edited by Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider. Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2010.
Williams, Linda. “’Tales of Sound and Fury…’ or, The Elephant of Melodrama.” In
Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures, 205-217.
Edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018.
24
1
Henriette Heidbrink, “Fictional Characters in Literary and Media Studies: A Survey of the
Research,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and
Other Media, eds. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 67; Roberta
Pearson, “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character,” in
Reading CSI: Crime TV under the Microscope, ed. Michael Allen (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 39-56; Jens
Eder, “Understanding Characters,” Projections 4, no. 1 (2010), 37; Amanda Lotz, “House: Narrative
Complexity,” in How to Watch Television, eds. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: New York
University Press), 23; Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience: An Introduction
(Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 224.
2
Heidbrink, “Fictional Characters in Literary and Media Studies,” 67, 104.
3
Ibid., 96.
4
Ibid., 91.
5
Murray Smith, “Engaging Characters: Further Reflections,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds:
Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, eds. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and
Ralf Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 233.
6
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of
Excess, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995 [1976]).
7
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National
Cultures, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
8
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, vii.
9
Linda Williams, “’Tales of Sound and Fury…’ or, The Elephant of Melodrama,” in Melodrama Unbound:
Across History, Media, and National Cultures, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2018), 214.
10
Ibid.
11
Simon Shepherd, “Pauses of Mutual Agitation,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, eds. Jacky
Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), 25.
12
I have referred to the genre-set of police, detective, crime, gangster, legal, and similar mediated
narratives as the ‘justice genres’ for this reason. E. Deidre Pribram, Emotions, Genre, Justice in Film and
Television: Detecting Feeling (New York: Routledge, 2013 [2011]).
13
Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies
in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 2002 [1987]), 19-20.
14
Ibid., 21.
15
Ibid., 30.
16
Although this describes strong tendencies in nineteenth century melodramatic characterization, it is not
inclusive of all instances. Day-Mayer and Mayer point out that, from the 1860s, certain lead actors took on
the doubled identity of both hero and villain, for example, in stagings of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Day-
Mayer and Mayer, “Performing/Acting Melodrama,” 103-104.
25
17
For an account of late modernity, see Roger Patulny and Rebecca Olson, “Emotions in Late Modernity,”
in Emotions in Late Modernity, eds. Roger Patulny, Alberto Bellocchi, Sukhmani Khorana, Rebecca Olson,
Jordan McKenzie, and Michelle Peterie (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 8-24.
18
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) did not pass until 2010, so the White’s
depicted problems with health insurance were quite plausible in 2008.
19
It is quite common in action films or police series for heroes to engage in the struggle for justice on
behalf of others as victims, such as the targets of murder or rape. Here, I’m particularly concerned with
protagonists who take action against their own victimization. Although beyond the bounds of this chapter,
to confront their own rather than others’ victimization could suggest, first, a certain self-centered, self-
absorbed kind of protagonist and, second, perhaps plays into a disturbing politics of grievance on the part
of white men, as one of the series’ structures of feeling.
20
Helen Day-Mayer and David Mayer, “Performing/Acting Melodrama,” in Melodrama Unbound: Across
History, Media, and National Cultures, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018), 103.
21
Jeffrey Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993),
17.
22
Ibid., 18.
23
Ibid., 17.
24
Walter names himself after Nobel Prize winning physicist, Werner Heisenberg, best known for his theory
of quantum mechanics.
25
Eder, “Understanding Characters,” 31.
26
Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field,” 30.
27
Christine Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill
(London: Routledge, 1991), 226.
28
I write this after the end of Season 4 so, of course, do not know if this pattern will hold true for the entire
run of the series. Additionally, much of the violence in Better Call Saul revolves around the parallel
storylines focusing on Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), rather than Jimmy McGill.
29
Peter Lyman, “The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics,”
European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 2 (2004), 145.
30
Day-Mayer and Mayer, “Performing/Acting Melodrama,” 103.
31
Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America, 17.
32
Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider, Characters in Fictional Worlds, 24.
33
Matthew Buckley, “Unbinding Melodrama,” in Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and
National Cultures, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018), 16.
