TV’s greatest show ever (nearly four years after the end of the series, I consider none of its recent competition to be in remotely the same league) has much to teach writers. Creator Vince Gilligan’s show mounted, over more than 60 hours, what I consider to be the most sustained artistic critique of capitalism ever, in a perfect blend of form and content. Breaking Bad’s outstanding team of writers — Moira Walley-Beckett, Peter Gould, Thomas Schnauz, George Mastras, Gennifer Hutchison and others — had much to do with it, but their scripts were realised to perfection only because of the genius of cinematography, particularly with Michael Slovis taking charge from season two onwards.

The show brought a full range of high modernist techniques to television, so in essence we are watching one 60-hour movie, especially since its visual language is consistent from the first moment to the last, despite the large number of collaborators involved.

The frequent montages — of meth cooking and distribution — are a form of storytelling, compressed and dynamic, that writers can learn much from, as is true of any of the techniques of cinema. Of course, ever since the advent of cinema, writers have been profoundly influenced by the young art form, as we saw in the simultaneous rise of the cinema and modernist writing in the early 20th century. Still, at this late date, writers would do well to keep certain distinctions of the cinema as art form in mind.

Writers usually tell a story with the development of character in mind: the character must progress morally, find a different way to fit into society — or outside it. A story implies the passage of time, from a point of origin to an endpoint and perhaps beyond. Character unfolds in discrete stages, a little bit here, a little bit there, until a bigger picture emerges. We feel a novel is successful if we know the character as well as the character knows herself, or even better. We forgive the writer a lot if she develops character to our satisfaction.

But what if writers, taking a cue from BB, took the opposite tack and made character not an independent entity, but unfolded it through visual style, namely the pictorial aesthetic of a culture at any given point in time? We might think this would take away some of the character’s individuality, but would it really?

When Walter White adopts the persona of Heisenberg, he is absorbing neoliberal capitalism at its most extreme: amoral, given to violence as a riposte to stasis, assimilating the ‘uncertainty principle’ for personal profit. Walt cannot see other human beings for who they are once he becomes Heisenberg, because postmodern capitalism — and science — cannot take the human seriously. Thus, character develops not in measurable fragments (though it superficially appears to do so) but stems from deep within a culture’s unbreakable mode of representation to itself.

Does this mean that a writer, in order to write effectively within the current neoliberal order, must give priority to the visual and the rest will follow? To a certain extent, yes.

Suppose a writer were to chart out, in realist vein, the motivations for Walt to ‘break bad.’ He is diagnosed with lung cancer, and is motivated to produce meth and provide for his family before he dies, particularly as he laments his lost opportunity to make billions with Grey Matter Technologies. The writer, operating in this mode, would have to explain motivations and rationales in a psychologically consistent manner. The writer would describe Walt slowly being consumed by the hunger for money, not knowing where to stop, letting his greed destroy lives, his own too. Perhaps this already reminds us a little of Frank Norris’s seminal naturalist novel McTeague (1899)?

But what if the writer chose to give in to the material reality of the lab, the satisfaction that cooking meth provides — particularly the first cook in the beautiful New Mexico desert? What if the lab, as a complex physical entity embodying scientific processes as the culture understands it at the time, becomes as important as Walt’s changing desires and goals? Now we are forced to see Walt as being at one with the chemical reactions he’s obsessed with. Now we notice correspondences that we had ignored before. Now we see his character as corresponding to that of others.

Perhaps nothing explicit need be said in a psychological fashion, but simply the objective presentation of chemical processes, cultural signifiers standing on their own, characters relating to aspects of their cultural territory (like Tuco in the drug trade and later Gus Fring and Lydia, or Hank at the DEA office, or Todd with his gang of Nazis). A culture’s distinct components deserve individual respect, a pure painterly interpretation, a limited but detailed composition, rather than always worrying about the central character’s relationship to these independent aspects of culture.

BB was notable for adopting modernism’s great scepticism toward the stability of time and space — as was true of modernist science, too (hence, again, Heisenberg). Our attitude towards time and space has everything to do with ‘cutting’ in cinema terminology, that is, the editing of scenes in written prose, or ‘shots’ within scenes, that is, moments in a scene.

To go back to BB’s montages I mentioned earlier, these serve as meta-commentary on character development. The seminal Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was the great theorist of montage, taking it almost to a first principle, but what remains interesting for writers is the attitude Eisenstein — like BB’s creators — shows toward a dynamic interpretation of time and space. Often, operating along the axis of psychological realism, most of the interesting reality we inhabit is ignored because we take time and space as relatively stable.

All this is barely a start on the techniques writers can learn from carefully observing a show such as BB. The point is that physical reality is, always and everywhere, painterly and already self-composed (as Michelangelo Antonioni, the greatest of all the modernist directors, quite clearly showed).

Why should this be so? There is nature (the New Mexico desert) and there is science (the various labs). Yet doesn’t science originate from nature? Doesn’t character originate from both? Character, ultimately, cannot be explained — as is true of Walter White after 60-plus hours of ‘explaining’ his character. Walt is not either Heisenberg or ‘himself’ at any given time; instead he is neither and both at the same time. For any writer, this mystery, fully realised on screen, is worth pondering.

The columnist is the author of Karachi Raj and Soraya: Sonnets. His book on literary criticism, Literary Writing in the 21st Century: Conversations, was published recently

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 28th, 2017