I recently gave a short presentation at the ACLA on the idea of the work image, a concept that I wrote about on this blog and in my book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work. Some of this is just a summation and citation of what I wrote there, but I did manage to say a few things about some other television shows, like The Bear. Here is most of what I had to say.
Deleuze argues that montage is in indirect image of time, as the different images and sequences, all in part present an overall temporal transformation. The images and sequences of individual acts add up to a larger transformation of the whole situation that exceeds them. In Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul the montage is frequently one of work, of the transformations of day in and day out actions, often set to a piece of music. The music not only provides a soundtrack and a rhythm to the different scenes, but it also bounds it—when the music is over the montage comes to an end. The rhythm underscores that we are often seeing scenes of repetition, the process of cooking meth day in and day out or of serving as a public defender. As an indirect image of time, montage is as much a matter of qualitative transformation as quantitative accumulation. It is not just that the different moments add up to the passage of time, but something is transformed in the process. Montage is a visualization of the process by which quantitative change becomes qualitative change. Deleuze’s theory of montage was developed in relation to such pioneers of early cinema such as Griffiths and Eisenstein to transform the very way action and time were perceived. The montage lives on in Hollywood in a mostly bastardized form in which it is generally used to compress time, to suggest by a series of images a longer transformation, such as the training montage in boxing and martial arts films.
The work montage is a version of this, it aestheticizes monotony and repetition by connecting them with transformation. The formal characteristics of the montage, the repetition and transformation, reflect and comment on a particular way of weaving together the repetition of work into a larger strategy. As Richard Sennett argues working life often hinges upon “time’s arrow,” on an ability to make different days add up and accumulate to the building of wealth, seniority, and ultimately social standing. “Routine can demean, but it can also protect; routine can decompose labor, but it can also compose a life.” As Sennett argues this arrow is less an inevitable effect of the passage of time than it is the way in which time has been institutionalized and managed. As much as Sennett argues that time is the one resource left to those on the bottom of society who have nothing, this resource is not without its conditions. Time’s arrow has as its condition such things as seniority, union contracts, etc., that make it possible that the days add up to something that can accumulate in the form of savings and equity. The arrow of linear accumulation assembles the repetition of the day’s tasks into a quantitative accumulation transforming concrete labor, this or that activity, into a quantitative accumulation, not the abstract labor of capital but the days that add up into a savings or retirement. The shows differ with respect to their use of this particular visual strategy. Many of the montages in Breaking Bad are montages of days of work producing meth that adds up to an accumulation of wealth.
There is repetition as the same burners are started up and the same containers of meth are weighed but they add up to piles of money. One of the lingering images from the show is that of Walt and his wife Skylar, looking at a pile of money in a storage unit, a pile that has come in so fast that Skylar admits that she has stopped counting it and weighing it instead. Breaking Bad presents the fantasy that working, doing the same thing, day in and day out, and doing it well, will add up to an accumulation of wealth. Times arrow is harnessed. Saul is often less fortunate. His days repeat, representing clients, but never quite adding up to any real accumulation or transformation.
The second episode of the first season focuses on Jimmy’s attempt to build his reputation and career by taking court ordered public defender cases. Two particular images punctuate this montage. The first is Jimmy in front of the mirror in the courthouse bathroom straightening his tie and proclaiming “It’s showtime, folks!” or sometimes just “It’s showtime!” This scene is itself a reference to the film All That Jazz, as Roy Scheider playing Joe Gideon (a fictionalized version of Bob Fosse) begins each of his hectic overworked days with the same exclamation in front of the mirror. That All That Jazz is a story of a man working himself to death is something worth noting for those who catch the reference. For those who do not, the second repeating image underscores the same idea. The shots of Jimmy representing hopeless and penniless clients are also interspersed with shots of a coffee cup dropping from a vending machine. As Jimmy’s attempts to represent his clients get more and desperate and harried, and as the cuts get quicker and quicker, the cup dispenser malfunctions, suggesting at the visual level that breakdown and burnout as much the result of hard work as accumulated wealth.
The montage of the work image does not just stage the relation between repetition and transformation, between the quantity of days adding up and a qualitative change, but it does so in such a way that the connection between the two between the repetition and transformation is never guaranteed. Pounds of meth add up to the accumulation of a fortune but days spent putting on a show representing clients are as disposable as coffee cups. As Sennett argues the accumulation of wealth is not just the effect of time’s arrow, of the linear accumulation of time, but necessarily has its institutional and material conditions. Days can only accumulate under particular conditions. Here it is worth reflecting on the differences of Walt and Jimmy. Walt produces a product, albeit an illegal one, given the conditions to distribute it he is able to accumulate wealth in the same way that bags of meth add up. Jimmy is in a different situation, he provides a service, one that relies on his image or reputation. There is no linear accumulation of cases, but one particular case could transform his career. This is what happens when a Jimmy meets with one his clients, Mrs. Landry to draw up a will. In his discussion with her Jimmy happens to learn that Sandpiper Crossing, her retirement community, is overcharging its clients. This eventually becomes the basis of a large class action suit. Jimmy’s life as a lawyer, both legal and illegal, is one defined not just so much by the linear accumulation of days that add up but by the chance encounter of events that transform into possibilities. These are two different types of labor and two different ethics. The first is a work ethic of thrift and hard work. The second is an ethic of probabilities and calculation. Both shows focus on characters who calculate and strategize, but calculation takes on a different shape for Walter and Jimmy. Walt calculates quantitative accumulation, initially calculating to the dollar how much he will need to raise to protect his family and latter understanding his value in terms of combination of pounds of meth multiplied by its purity. Jimmy calculates as well, but he deals less with quantities of products than qualities of relations, with possibilities that can be engaged with people, rather than things that can be measured.
What is at stake in the distinction between Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad is not just the relation of prequel to original, but a matter of two different strategies of work, and two different fantasies of work. As much as Breaking Bad deals with contemporary realities of the drug trade and of underfunded public workers, these inform its backdrop, its image of work is a nostalgic one. It is about making things, even if those things are illegal, and how skill and ability to make things can produce autonomy and independence, despite the almost fordist like nature of the production process in the show, its fantasy is that of the independent artisan. The ability to produce things directly translates into an ability to make one’s way in the world. In contrast to this Better Caul Saul is about a kind of work that does not act on things, but on people. Such work is much more uncertain, the wrong relationship can burden one forever, and Jimmy spends much of the show burdened by his brother’s opinion that people do not change, that he will always be a conman. The shift to work that can be broadly characterized as services, including practicing law, entails a return to personal forms of domination because of the continent and subjective nature of the service. As a worker one is dependent both upon the general structure of employment and the specific power of the boss: As work becomes more subjective, concerning talents and abilities, the specific power of the boss increases. This increase in the power to be unmade by a bad encounter, a bad memory, has its corollary in the fact that it only takes one good encounter, the right client with the right case, and one’s career could be made.
The two shows images of work are two different fantasies of how one can make it, and be made by work, in the first there is a linear accumulation of money and power, brought about by the skill of dealing with material world, in the second there is the idea of the contingent encounter that could make one’s career.
The work image, as I have called it, something that has become prevalent in modern prestige shows, can be considered something that not only weaves together time, pulling together the quantitative accumulation and qualitative transformation, but also fantasy, hope and fear. To take one contemporary example, FX and Hulu’s The Bear, a show which is both about a group of people, led by Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto, transforming a sandwich shop into a high end restaurant, and it is also about the same group of people as the struggle with grief and loss. Work is at the intersection of these two narrative threads. Work is both a means of material success and a practice on the self, self-expression and self-transformation. The work, and the images of work, are at once about material success and spiritual healing. Jennifer Silva in her book, Coming up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, the contemporary failure of work to cohere in any kind of arrow, any kind of linear progress and development, has led to a redefinition of work as a process of spiritual transformation. As Silva writes, summarizing her findings.
At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health. Rather than turn to politics to address the obstacles standing in the way of a secure adult life, the majority of the men and women I interview crafted deeply personal coming of age stories, grounding their adult identities in recovering from their painful pasts--whether addiction, childhood abuse, family trauma, or abandonment and forging an emancipated, transformed and adult self.
The Bear is a show which is persistently ambiguous about what these images of work, of cooking, cutting, and arranging food, are supposed to be images of, are they of an attempt to arrive at external success, a restaurant, or are they images of an internal struggle, an attempt to recover from grief. If Breaking Bad can be understood as a fantasy of skill and production, a return of an idea of what it means to work, and the status it produced, and Better Call Saul can be understood as both the fantasy of the one client that can change everything and the fear of being doomed by one bad encounter, then The Bear is one in which work is as much a personal transformation as it is an economic relation. With the latter work has more or less collapsed onto itself, at the moment in which it is separated from economic certainty is the moment when it takes on a spiritual significance.
No comments:
Post a Comment