Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is an American television crime dramatic series created and developed by Vince Gilligan. The series aired on AMC cable channel from 20 January 2008 to 29 September 2013 and reflected American middle-class anxieties during the period of the Great Recession (2007–2009). Many TV critics consider Breaking Bad to be one of the best television series of all time. Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a put-upon, underpaid high school chemistry teacher, who upon learning that he has stage 3 lung cancer decides to begin making and selling crystal methamphetamine with Jesse Pinkman, a former student, to secure his (White’s) family’s financial future. The series title is derived from a southern US colloquialism, “breaking bad,” which signifies a person who has decided to follow a life of crime or immorality. Gilligan has described White’s character transformation as being from the reserved schoolteacher Mr. Chips to the brutal drug lord Scarface. The series is set in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The program’s recurrent images of wide-open western vistas, deserts, and rugged outlaws have led some critics to label the series a modern neo-western. The show has fostered a strong audience following that has allowed Gilligan and AMC to produce the spin-off, prequel series Better Call Saul in 2015 and a sequel film, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, released on Netflix and select theaters in 2019. Sony Entertainment Television produced a Spanish-language version of the series, titled Metástasis, in 2014. Breaking Bad has served as fodder for important scholarship in media studies, cultural studies, and film and television studies. Scholars have focused their work on a range of topics, including Disability and Impairment, Economics and Social Class, Gender, Genre and Narrative, Pedagogy, Production Culture, Race and Ethnicity, and Science.

Violence and Hopelessness in the Colombian Novels La Virgen de Los Sicarios and Satanás

Colombia is a South American nation that has captured the imagination of the world. It is a land of beautiful colonial cities and towns, famous for coffee production, rich emerald mines, and the literature of José Asunción Silva and Gabriel García Márquez. Colombia’s beauty and rich literary history, however, are often overshadowed by the memory of Pablo Escobar, a notorious drug lord, and numerous deadly guerilla groups. Their roles in the international drug trade made Colombia the top producer and exporter of cocaine, which resulted in terrorism and violence that left the country one of the world’s most dangerous.1 In this article, I will explore how violence in Colombia has perpetuated the theme of hopelessness in the nation’s literature beginning in the mid-twentieth century. I will show this in three parts. Firstly, I will trace the history of violence in Colombia through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and show that a literary genre of violence was absent in the nation until 1946, when the period known as “la Violencia” commenced. Secondly, I will explore how hopelessness resulted from violence in Colombia beginning in the period of “la Violencia.” Thirdly, I will show how violence is depicted as an evil that traps the protagonists of the contemporary Colombian novels La Virgen de Los Sicarios and Satanás in a state of hopelessness due to their powerlessness to truly change themselves because of the frustrated society in which they live.

The Drunken Drug Lord

This chapter discusses the appropriate response of emergency physicians to requests to collect evidence, in particular, blood alcohol tests and ingested drugs, from patients for police and other law enforcement officers. The relevant ethical principles, legislation, and case law are reviewed. Recommendations are made regarding when and how it may be ethically appropriate to respond to such requests.

Displacing Drug War Violence onto Nonhuman Imaginaries

This chapter broaches the limits of the human from two entwined angles, examining the intersection of necropolitical violence and nonhuman animal tropes in Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos’s 2010 novella Fiesta en la madriguera. Villalobos’s novella is an influential text from the emerging narconarrative corpus in Mexico. The novella has received criticism from prominent critics and writers such as Oswaldo Zavala and Jorge Volpi who have charged that the text inflates the myths surrounding organized crime groups that have been perpetuated by the Mexican state. Drawing on previously unexplored influences from Latin American literary history, and marshalling theories of bio- and necropolitics, postcolonialism, and critical animal studies, this chapter advances a different reading of Villalobos’s text, averring that the author mobilizes the severed head of a highly symbolic animal (the hippopotamus) to launch a nuanced deconstruction of the figure of the drug lord and to recontextualize drug war violence by calling attention to the ways it is immanent to the drive of capitalism and (biopolitical) modernity (rather than outside of these broader processes).

Pablo Escobar and Colombian Narcoculture

In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s impact on popular culture, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky shows how his legacy inspired the development of narcoculture—television, music, literature, and fashion representing the drug-trafficking lifestyle—in Colombia and around the world. Pobutsky looks at the ways the “Escobar brand” surfaces in bars, restaurants, and clothing lines; in Colombia’s tourist industry; and in telenovelas, documentaries, and narco memoirs about his life, which in turn have generated popular interest in other drug traffickers such as Griselda Blanco and Miami’s “cocaine cowboys.” Pobutsky illustrates how the Colombian state strives to erase his memory while Escobar’s notoriety only continues to increase in popular culture through the transnational media. She argues that the image of Escobar is inextricably linked to Colombia’s internal tensions in the areas of cocaine politics, gender relations, class divisions, and political corruption and that his “brand” perpetuates the country’s reputation as a center of organized crime, to the dismay of the Colombian people. This book is a fascinating study of how the world perceives Colombia and how Colombia’s citizens understand their nation’s past and present.

Posthumanism in The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium

In her The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium, Nancy Farmer narrates the story of Matt, a clone created to extend the life of El Patrón, ruler of the autonomous country of Opium between the U.S. and Mexico. Donna White explains how Farmer employs epigenetics to show that genes do not determine one’s destiny, and every clone of El Patrón is different. At first Matt learns to acknowledge himself as human, but eventually he learns to accept his multiple subjectivites of animal, monster, saint, drug lord, clone, human, and even El Patrón. Even though El Patrón uses posthumanist biotechnologies to maintain his position, he thrives on the power humanist beliefs give him. Matt, meanwhile, retains some of these humanist values while moving to embrace his multiplicity.