Looking for Signs of 'Breaking Bad' in Vince Gilligan's 'X-Files' Episodes

 

Over at Indiewire's TV section, I write about my favorite childhood series, The X-Files, and revisit the episodes penned by Breaking Bad showrunner Vince Gilligan. Turns out he's always been exploring monsters in interesting ways. Read it here.

Drive: Le Getaway

Drive

Directed By: Nicolas Winding Refn

Written By: Hossein Amini, based on the novel by James Sallis

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Issacs, Christina Hendricks, and Ron Perlman.

Director of Photography: Newton Thomas Sigel, Editor: Matthew Newman, Production Designer: Beth Mickle, Original Music: Cliff Martinez

Rated: R for the type of violence you only see in the movies.

Read an interview with director Nicolas Winding Refn

            In what is probably the most self-conscious moment in Drive, Albert Brooks, playing a Jewish gangster, tells Ryan Gosling, “I was a movie producer in the 80s. Action films, sexy stuff—one critic called them European.” And while Drive is soaked in the visual style of American neo-noir, the world of Miami Vice and To Live and Die in L.A., its sensibilities and emotions feel ripped out of a 1960s Antonioni picture. Here’s a film about a man who must do what he does because it is all that he knows. It’s the type of self-conscious minimalist work that has lofty ambitions on recreating our knowledge of what it means to be an “action film.” But in reaching those lofty goals, Drive has the look of a sleek muscle car that is a beauty to look at, but hollow inside.

            The film is the first American film from director Nicolas Winding Refn, a Danish “auteur” with a knack for making self-conscious deconstructions. Best known for a Kubrikian exploration of violence called Bronson (which launched the career of Tom Hardy), a better vantage point for Drive would be his previous film Valhalla Rising, an ode to Tarkovsky that was a dumb-as-a-doorknob allegory that visually dazzled but offered little insight to its story of a one-eyed Viking. Mr. Winding Refn is a pure genre expert—he understands the little details that make us giggle with delight, like hearing the sounds of the leather gloves gripping the steering wheels. But he’s also too obsessed with his own allegories that Drive seems to offer little but a simple reconstruction. It’s the best action movie you’ll see this year, but it’s ultimate meaning is inauthentic.

Breaking Bad: Death of a Chemist, Birth of a Monster

Breaking Bad

Created By: Vince Gilligan

Starring: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn, and Dean Norris

Writers: Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Geogre Mastras, Sam Catlin, John Shiban, Moira Walley-Beckett, J. Roberts, Gennifer Hutchison, and Thomas Schnauz.

Directors: Andrew Bernstein, Michelle Maxwell MacLaren, Vince Gilligan, Colin Bucksey, Bryan Cranston, Johan Renck, Terry McDonough, and Michael Slovis

I don’t write about it often, but I try and keep up with a number of shows. There are television shows that accomplish a lot in their serialized hours, and much of the best that the moving image has to offer is now seen in the comfort of our homes. Mad Men has revitalized the cultural legacy of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit era. Parks and Recreation has found a constant source for satire in small town government with its amazing ensemble of comedians. And many of the best shows are complete and now on DVD, including the politically charged Battlestar Galatica, the depressingly hilarious Party Down, and the short-lived sci-fi western Firefly (I have yet to sit down with David Simon’s expansive crime drama The Wire, but plan to…eventually).

All of these shows are reimagining the television as a writer’s medium for delivering smart comedies and dramas that speak to our age. However, none are doing it as well, and with such audacity, as Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, which is now returning to AMC for its fourth season. Breaking Bad has a smaller scope than many of the other shows that have been canonized by television gurus, but its intimacy with its characters has allowed it to transcend its premise and deliver some of the most intense, though-provoking, and morally challenging television ever produced.