One thing I did like is the opening series of shots. I thought the pan up from the lizard to the pan across the lush lawns to a slow focusing on Chuck's foil blanket showed both a really nice sense of what makes a shot visually appealing, beautiful if you will, and how to simultaneously set a scene. And I liked the moral quandary posed to Jimmy by Chuck's situation. Do you follow his wishes, enabling him to keep up the pretense of whatever it is that's going on with him, or do you go against his wishes and get him real help that might actually get to the bottom of what's going on? I really liked the way when Chuck first gets home, he seems almost unable to move, and then after the conversation in which Jimmy promises to play by Chuck's rules, Chuck almost jumps up to go make coffee.
One thing that did bother me about Chuck's condition is the characters' willingness to buy into the science of it. Now, I understand it's a quack condition, that Chuck is going to be a terribly unreliable narrator when discussing it. In his own words, he calls it electromagnetic hypersensitivity and talks about it being a reaction to the electromagnetic fields that electronic devices produce. Being inside his house is supposed to help him. The problem is that wood, or even concrete, doesn't block electromagnetic fields. If the power lines outside his house are a problem, then being in a house won't solve it. If the electronic devices in his hospital room are a problem, then the electronic devices in the room next door should be a problem too. If the electromagnetic radiation from artificial lights is a problem, then sunlight contains the same frequencies of radiation, as does the light from a white gas lantern. And what about radio waves? Obviously, we all know, that those penetrate to the interior of houses.
Now, of course, it's reasonable that Jimmy and Kim and Chuck don't know this off the top of their heads. But I'd expect at least one of them, or one of the psychologists Chuck purportedly saw, over the course of this multi-year episode, to have spent two minutes googling and come to Chuck to confront him with the dissonance of his condition. To me, something feels off in the way the science behind this condition is handled, and I expect better from a show with Breaking Bad in its DNA. If I were writing the episode, I would have tried to turn this to my advantage by reducing the length of the bits that I described above as slow and focusing on the hospital scene. Maybe Jimmy and Dr. Cruz team up to confront Chuck, who prides himself on his lucidity, on the science behind the condition. Maybe Jimmy sits down with Chuck and has a real heart-to-heart about whether or not he wants to continue this way. Maybe Kim and Jimmy have a more detailed conversation in which we actually find out what Jimmy sees as the pros and cons of each path rather than just getting an unexplained decision to take him home and then a reversal when Howard shows up that feels petty and thin. Maybe when Chuck jumps up to go make coffee, Jimmy confronts him and asks him if he actually really wants to get better, if the trips to psychologists didn't work out of stubborness. I think there are so many opportunities to explore really interesting issues about forced medical care, the failure of our medical system to deal with cases that have even a modicum of complexity, helping someone vs enabling them, the complex psychology of mental illnesses and normality, how you go about deciding what's best for someone. We get a tiny taste of this, but instead end up mostly with some cheap, cringe-worthy laughs about a sexually suggestive talking toilet.
Really quick, I did find it interesting that this episode and the previous episode had themes that mirrored each other. The last was really about how everyone's a crook, from Jimmy, Marcon, and the bar patron they con, to the Kettlemans, to Nacho, to HHM, back to Jimmy himself with his publicity stunt. This one is about how everyone's a kook. From Jimmy's three crazy clients that open the episode, to his brother, to Jimmy himself. And I expect this to be one of the overall themes of the show, how human beings are such bizarre creatures. We believe weird things, we want certain things, but behave in ways that prevent us from getting them, we make up strange mental illnesses for reasons our conscious minds won't acknowledge, and so on.
Which brings me to the pair of points I want to end on, both revolving around the narrative we see that Jimmy has built for himself, or maybe the course of his life that he cannot escape. After all, the early part of the episode shows us the results of his publicity stunt. A bunch of kooks for clients, none of whom suggests that he's going to break out of being the kind of lawyer that criminals hire. This reminds me of the posts I wrote a while ago on the Dunning-Kruger effect, that is, the cognitive bias that causes people who are bad at a task to overestimate their ability on it. This leads to, for instance, sizable majorities of Americans describing themselves as terrific drivers. Another way of framing Dunning-Kruger is to point out that if you can't see what you're doing wrong, you'll never be able to correct it. This is the way I want to frame it when looking at Jimmy. He can't see himself, his techniques, for what they are: stunts, schemes. It's a shame there's no mention of any law firm other than HHM because what Jimmy needs, to me, is to be part of a professional organization for a stretch of time, to learn from them and absorb the culture of professionalism and success. While I sympathize Jimmy's disdain for this kind of corporate law machine, and he might well refuse to sign up, it seems like it's on Chuck to guide him in that direction.
The opinions of family members can play a large role in determining the narrative we build for ourselves. This condition Chuck's developed, the moral absolutism we see at the end when he essentially shames Jimmy for advertising, are naked attempts to control Jimmy. A large part of Jimmy's actions, his narrative, seem to be to escape from Chuck the moral scold. I'm not quite sure what to make of this yet, but I do think it's a shame we know so little of their relationship. Why is Jimmy so attached to Chuck, why does he look up to him so much as to say he's smater than himself? Why does Chuck care so much about Jimmy that he creates a psychological condition to try to control him? I expect we'll learn more about their relationship as the show continues, but I expect these questions will never be answered. Since they'd reveal so much about why Jimmy, and Chuck, end up on the path they're on, I think that's a real shame.
No comments:
Post a Comment