TV shows “Weeds” and “Breaking Bad” have more in common than plots about middle class people in the drug business &- they also bring up some tricky questions about how Mexicans are portrayed in that business, one Boston University professor said on Thursday.
Deborah Jaramillo, an assistant professor of film and television in the College of Communication, presented research on drug dealing in television to a group of more than 50 people in COM for a discussion called “Dead Mexican!: The Traumatized Suburbanite and the Violent Narcotraficante.”
Both “Breaking Bad” and “Weeds” show similar stories of white suburbanites who make the choice to descend into the drug underworld, and both take place close to the Mexican border, where drug-related crimes are prevalent.
Drawing on this, Jaramillo started off the lecture by talking about how she has been influenced by Mexican culture and television her whole life.
“I watch what a lot of people would consider a lot of television. I try to watch 20 to 30 hours a week,” Jaramillo said. “I was born and raised in a town in Texas 15 minutes from the border. It is interesting to me that these programs are incorporating the Mexican drug culture.”
Jaramillo focused in part on how Mexicans are presented in the two television shows.
She showed the crowd two clips, one from “Weeds” and one from “Breaking Bad,” each illustrating two dead Mexicans.
“I saw a conversation emerge between them. There was a television conversation about Mexican characters and how U.S. television incorporates these characters,” Jaramillo said.
After explaining how a new paradigm has appeared in television &- that of the white person’s idea of an anti-hero &- Jaramillo talked about the unique nature of the violence that is depicted throughout the two stories.
Jaramillo also commented on the accuracy of the two shows.
She said that there was some accuracy to the plot of “Weeds,” for example, but that it was written with a mainly white audience in mind.
She then diverged to the sub-topic of corridos, a type of narrative folk song that is used in “Breaking Bad.”
Drug dealers commission songwriters to compose corridos, or narcocorridos, to make them seem heroic, Jarmillo said.
In “Breaking Bad,” corridos frame the episodes, structuring the narratives, Jaramillo said.
The songs announce impending death, while the images function as an intertextual tribute to the tradition of the narcocorridos, she added.
When discussing “Breaking Bad,” Jaramillo said that throughout its third season, the show went deeper and deeper into drug politics.
“Weeds” relies less on drug culture and more on drug-related events that have been happening in Mexico.
For example, the character Esteban Reyes, a corrupt Mexican politician, directly relates to actual corrupt Mexican officials.
“They are surely new spaces for complexity in the Mexican character while some old assumptions are still intact,” Jaramillo said.
Jaramillo said that she had been working on her research paper since the spring.
Some students at the event, many of them fans of both the shows, said they enjoyed the discussion.
“I thought it was a really interesting connection that she made. I’ve never though to make this connection before,” said Sarah Sassen, a freshman in COM who attended the seminar.
Thea Di Giammerino, a freshman in COM said she attended “because it seemed really interesting and different.”
John Bogulski, a COM graduate student, watches both “Breaking Bad” and “Weeds.”
“I find this kind of research really interesting,” Bogulski said. “It is really interesting to see how these kind of topics are represented in modern cable shows.”
The discussion was a part of the Communication Research Center Colloquium Series.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
