(no subject)
Breaking Bad 1.1
We're trying to identify the colors before seriously guessing at what they mean, but Gilligan & co. are definitely doing a scheme.
In almost every scene something is conspicuously blue, green, yellow or red. And it's usually just one something - sometimes two of the same color.
A mega-key scene for the scheme seems to be the first chemistry class, the one where the camera's positioned so that the flames are "inside" Walt when he turns on his burner. He speaks of everything going through processes of birth, decay and then transformation, and of everything being a mixture of the same basic substances. Before him on his desk during this lecture are three spray bottles, lined up. They're red, yellow/green and blue/purple. (These slashes indicate my confusion, I'm afraid - Julie and I are naming colors aloud and I am relearning I'm not just colorblind but colorblind as fuck. I apparently think a lot of yellows are green that aren't. And have always known I was completely hopeless about dark blue and purple - I seriously thought navy blue WAS purple till I was about ten. I just assumed it was some kind of grown up joke about the Navy.) We see an electric blue spray bottle by an electric blue-clad Skylar in a later scene - perhaps indicating that she or something she's identified with is one of the ingredients that mix to form Walt?
A small part of my Color confusion may be the show's fault, as they're using a lot of dark yellows, and often in close proximity to greens. It isn't yet clear if these are being disambiguated from green on a signal level.
Walt wears light to medium greens, sometimes browns, sometimes dark yellow. His car is green.
Jesse wears a lot of red. I think his car is red? He hides it under a blue tarp.
Skylar wears blue, and usually a light shade, but her dress is very dark in the scene with Marie, who also wears very dark blue. Blue objects are also highlighted inside the White house. The car wash interior is also blue-heavy.
Hank wore either black or very dark blue at the bust, along with all the other agents. They had yellow letters, blue sunglasses.
Emilio was all in black. Bogdan wears black in the scene where Walt is provoked enough to make a scene and quit.
Krazy 8 wore white at first, had a green living room and green car. His dog was being trained to attack a red dummy, which may just be to highlight red-clad Jesse's peril. The busted meth house was also green/sage - Hank and Steve have an argument about this. Green objects/lighting are notable inside the meth lab as well as during the Winnebago cooking scenes. Also green was the gown of the rich-looking, maybe Gretchen-like (?) woman Walt is looking at when he falls down immediately pre-diagnosis.
The Blue hasn't shown up yet but it will obviously be blue. Walt does wear white underwear and has a white shirt peeking through now and then. Jesse wears black sometimes but red or white are usually poking through at the edges.
This is all done much more primitively than in Better Call Saul, of course, but they're filtering - and muting most other colors - so these few jump out.
Unavoidable working hypotheses are that green is money or money-mindedness, red is crime or the desire to be a criminal, blue is the safe or right way to do things, black is badness or the desire to appear bad, white is innocence or decency.
Not many data points supporting that last one yet, since Krazy 8 is not particularly innocent in this episode, but given his story arc introducing him as white is suggestive. He doesn't seem to have any evil designs on Walt, past, y'know, being a drug dealer out to purchase meth, until told he's DEA by Emilio - who does seem cruel and violence-relishing from what little we see of him. He expresses regret at having to kill him, and I guess the attack dog is mostly there to protect him from robbery by fellow drug world denizens?
Walt uses red phosphate to poison the drug dealers. Since it's not obviously the case, though certainly a strong possibility, that they'll still kill him once they have his recipe this could be considered one of his first "breaks," and it's definitely his first fatal act of violence.
The woman in green has always seemed like a key moment to me. She's getting in her car to drive away. Perhaps the green suggests she represents, in part, the dream of earning enough money to support his family by legal means? I think the greens after that scene are darker, more like leaf green, when they're not at that yellow/green border that messes me up.
That's one of my big questions, going forward: what's up with yellow? Also blue. I'd more or less settled on their meaning in Saul, but am kind of troubled to see at least blue so active here in such a lawyer-free context. The spray bottles scene makes one wonder if we're supposed to be looking for three basic elements to Walt's motivation as a criminal. Since money's not a primary color maybe it somehow joins two others? Here at the start our only real clue that he wants to be Scarface is his bracing himself for a suicidal shootout when he thinks the police are coming for him. We know he loves his family (he claims this is the only thing in his heart, on the confession tape - while wearing bright green), so that's presumably one basic component. He wants revenge on people who don't respect him and his, which at the root may just be the desire to be feared. What else? He wants to live. Does he also want to die? Jesse's path is obviously self-destructive and self-hating, to a large degree. So maybe red's that? And yellow'd be, what, desire for power? But blue wouldn't be desire for safety what with the meth, surely. Love? Hard to imagine that the car wash would stand for love, though I guess putting up with it has been a loving act? But the big reveal in the series' last scene is that the Blue has been a variety of love, self-love, all along, so there's that.
Yellow's biggest moment in the episode is a fire hydrant and a passing bus being highlighted prior to the yellow-labeled DEA's raid. A warning to Walt to go no further would fit the rest of the scene. Is this on some level a traffic light scheme? What would blue even be in that? One's origin? Destination?
The Winnebago has a green stripe but I think it's in with yellow and brown ones? Camouflaging its true purpose? Did the brown jackets, sweaters, overshirts suggest muddled motivation, none at all? I wonder if the design governs in things so small, at least so early.
Non color-related: Los Alamos is directly mentioned in the pilot! Walt wants to go there to see an exhibit with the latest Mars photos. So modern science is being directly associated with the nuke test site. Obviously that connection occurs to all of us at some point, but I forgot we were so blatantly nudged to so early on.
We're trying to identify the colors before seriously guessing at what they mean, but Gilligan & co. are definitely doing a scheme.
In almost every scene something is conspicuously blue, green, yellow or red. And it's usually just one something - sometimes two of the same color.
A mega-key scene for the scheme seems to be the first chemistry class, the one where the camera's positioned so that the flames are "inside" Walt when he turns on his burner. He speaks of everything going through processes of birth, decay and then transformation, and of everything being a mixture of the same basic substances. Before him on his desk during this lecture are three spray bottles, lined up. They're red, yellow/green and blue/purple. (These slashes indicate my confusion, I'm afraid - Julie and I are naming colors aloud and I am relearning I'm not just colorblind but colorblind as fuck. I apparently think a lot of yellows are green that aren't. And have always known I was completely hopeless about dark blue and purple - I seriously thought navy blue WAS purple till I was about ten. I just assumed it was some kind of grown up joke about the Navy.) We see an electric blue spray bottle by an electric blue-clad Skylar in a later scene - perhaps indicating that she or something she's identified with is one of the ingredients that mix to form Walt?
A small part of my Color confusion may be the show's fault, as they're using a lot of dark yellows, and often in close proximity to greens. It isn't yet clear if these are being disambiguated from green on a signal level.
Walt wears light to medium greens, sometimes browns, sometimes dark yellow. His car is green.
Jesse wears a lot of red. I think his car is red? He hides it under a blue tarp.
Skylar wears blue, and usually a light shade, but her dress is very dark in the scene with Marie, who also wears very dark blue. Blue objects are also highlighted inside the White house. The car wash interior is also blue-heavy.
Hank wore either black or very dark blue at the bust, along with all the other agents. They had yellow letters, blue sunglasses.
Emilio was all in black. Bogdan wears black in the scene where Walt is provoked enough to make a scene and quit.
Krazy 8 wore white at first, had a green living room and green car. His dog was being trained to attack a red dummy, which may just be to highlight red-clad Jesse's peril. The busted meth house was also green/sage - Hank and Steve have an argument about this. Green objects/lighting are notable inside the meth lab as well as during the Winnebago cooking scenes. Also green was the gown of the rich-looking, maybe Gretchen-like (?) woman Walt is looking at when he falls down immediately pre-diagnosis.
The Blue hasn't shown up yet but it will obviously be blue. Walt does wear white underwear and has a white shirt peeking through now and then. Jesse wears black sometimes but red or white are usually poking through at the edges.
This is all done much more primitively than in Better Call Saul, of course, but they're filtering - and muting most other colors - so these few jump out.
Unavoidable working hypotheses are that green is money or money-mindedness, red is crime or the desire to be a criminal, blue is the safe or right way to do things, black is badness or the desire to appear bad, white is innocence or decency.
Not many data points supporting that last one yet, since Krazy 8 is not particularly innocent in this episode, but given his story arc introducing him as white is suggestive. He doesn't seem to have any evil designs on Walt, past, y'know, being a drug dealer out to purchase meth, until told he's DEA by Emilio - who does seem cruel and violence-relishing from what little we see of him. He expresses regret at having to kill him, and I guess the attack dog is mostly there to protect him from robbery by fellow drug world denizens?
Walt uses red phosphate to poison the drug dealers. Since it's not obviously the case, though certainly a strong possibility, that they'll still kill him once they have his recipe this could be considered one of his first "breaks," and it's definitely his first fatal act of violence.
The woman in green has always seemed like a key moment to me. She's getting in her car to drive away. Perhaps the green suggests she represents, in part, the dream of earning enough money to support his family by legal means? I think the greens after that scene are darker, more like leaf green, when they're not at that yellow/green border that messes me up.
That's one of my big questions, going forward: what's up with yellow? Also blue. I'd more or less settled on their meaning in Saul, but am kind of troubled to see at least blue so active here in such a lawyer-free context. The spray bottles scene makes one wonder if we're supposed to be looking for three basic elements to Walt's motivation as a criminal. Since money's not a primary color maybe it somehow joins two others? Here at the start our only real clue that he wants to be Scarface is his bracing himself for a suicidal shootout when he thinks the police are coming for him. We know he loves his family (he claims this is the only thing in his heart, on the confession tape - while wearing bright green), so that's presumably one basic component. He wants revenge on people who don't respect him and his, which at the root may just be the desire to be feared. What else? He wants to live. Does he also want to die? Jesse's path is obviously self-destructive and self-hating, to a large degree. So maybe red's that? And yellow'd be, what, desire for power? But blue wouldn't be desire for safety what with the meth, surely. Love? Hard to imagine that the car wash would stand for love, though I guess putting up with it has been a loving act? But the big reveal in the series' last scene is that the Blue has been a variety of love, self-love, all along, so there's that.
Yellow's biggest moment in the episode is a fire hydrant and a passing bus being highlighted prior to the yellow-labeled DEA's raid. A warning to Walt to go no further would fit the rest of the scene. Is this on some level a traffic light scheme? What would blue even be in that? One's origin? Destination?
The Winnebago has a green stripe but I think it's in with yellow and brown ones? Camouflaging its true purpose? Did the brown jackets, sweaters, overshirts suggest muddled motivation, none at all? I wonder if the design governs in things so small, at least so early.
Non color-related: Los Alamos is directly mentioned in the pilot! Walt wants to go there to see an exhibit with the latest Mars photos. So modern science is being directly associated with the nuke test site. Obviously that connection occurs to all of us at some point, but I forgot we were so blatantly nudged to so early on.