Poor Jesse: A BREAKING BAD Fanvid

26Aug19

This weekend, a teaser dropped for what had been only rumored-about for the past year: the Breaking Bad movie!

Named El Camino, presumably for the car that Jesse drives off to escape his Nazi prison in the series finale, the film presumably focuses on Jesse’s life after Breaking Bad.

While  we’ll have to wait until October to know more details, the news inspired me to share my latest video for my Breaking Bad audiovisual book. “Poor Jesse” is a fanvid, following the vernacular of that form by remixing images and some sounds from the series to a single music track. A few notes follow below after watching it (with the sound turned up loud!):

From the early origins of my videographic Breaking Bad project, I knew that one of the chapter should be a fanvid. I’ve written previously about vidding as a fan and critical practice, and I felt that making one would be a good way to understand it more fully. Additionally, I’ve had long conversations with Louisa Stein, Melanie Kohnen, and others about the boundaries and similarities between vidding and videographic criticism, so I felt it was important to include this vernacular form in the book as an example of its critical possibilities. There was no question that I wanted it to be about Jesse, as he’s the character I have the most affective bond toward, and the one whose arc is most about the feels. And the choice of song – a live version of Wilco’s “Handshake Drugs” – was a no-brainer, as they’re one of my favorites and the live performance of this song captures their sonic range from catchy jangle to wall-of-sound that mirror’s Jesse’s arc.

When rewatching the series in Adobe Premiere, I struck gold when I saw “Thirty-Eight Snub,” the second episode in the fourth season (and at #35, slightly past the halfway point). As Jesse sonically tortures himself after his multiday rave peters out, I knew that this scene would be the spine of the video. I then designed the chronological structure to move from his memories of past torments and infrequent smiles to foreshadowing crises to come. The choice to focus all the images on Jesse (and mostly his face) flowed from my admiration for Aaron Paul’s expressive looks and my desire to connect everything to the character’s emotional life. And the final shot feels particularly apt with El Camino on the horizon.

I’m extremely thankful for the feedback I got from Louisa Stein, Casey McCormick, and especially vidder extraordinaire Luminosity. I was definitely out of my comfort zone in producing this one, and their comments gave me confidence that it was worth the effort. As to whether such vidding does function as videographic criticism… I encourage people to weigh in via the comments!

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Filed under: digital humanities, Fandom, Television, Videographic Criticism   |  3 Comments
Tags: breaking bad, character, vidding, videographicBB