The Experience of Brutality: Breaking Bad, Death Metal, and an Inquiry into Experience as Such

This intriguing post by Phil Walsh got me thinking about the meaning of Breaking Bad. I’d agree with Phil that the specific plotline of Breaking Bad he refers to is about belief and its pitfalls. But perhaps more interesting to me is trying to answer the question Phil begins with: What is Breaking Bad (as a whole) about? 

The juxtaposition of Breaking Bad to The Wire Phil makes in his initial move drives home the a key distinction between the two. The Wire is most definitely about something, perhaps more so than any other television series. It’s about the failure of the War on Drugs, it’s about systemic racism, it’s about the inhumanity of capitalism, it’s about government corruption, and so on. Whether the series was conceived of as such or not, by its end it was simply the most sustained and nuanced artistic indictment of the fundamental failures of the United States ever produced.

Breaking Bad, on the other hand, is not so clearly about anything. Certainly we can say that it too takes on capitalism and the American Dream, but I’d argue that the show is no way committed to any kind of real critique. And I’m sure someone so inclined could offer a more symptomatic reading of the show, but essentially such a reading would offer little more than the straight ahead version would. Suffice to say that the show doesn’t really have a thematic center in the way The Wire or even The Sopranos or Mad Men does. Such an observation could lead us to say that perhaps Breaking Bad is centrally inferior to these other series, but Breaking Bad does have another kind of center, even if it lacks a thematic one. The strength of Breaking Bad ultimately lies in the show’s character. That character, in my view, is the more or less single-minded pursuit of a visceral audience experience. 

What Breaking Bad does better than perhaps any show ever is put the audience through an experience. That experience (which I’ll say more about in a bit), a kind of gut-churning yet strangely delicious punishment, may seem at first to be a classic example of Aristotelian catharsis. I think such a characterization has some banal validity to it, but that it misses the fundamental point. That is to say that Breaking Bad does not operate on the logic of catharsis even though it trades in, and on, catharsis. Instead, the logic of the show is the experience of what is called in heavy metal parlance brutality. 

What is “brutality” in this context? Allow me to take a brief detour into death metal. Death metal is, I think it fair to say, taken seriously by just about no one who is not a death metal fan. The reasons for this are obvious: absurd vocals, childishly grotesque cover art, a general lack of melody (melodic death metal notwithstanding), lyrical obsession with violence, troglodytic looking band members, transgression for the sake of transgression. Indeed, the only scholarly work I’ve ever run across done on death metal is of the sociological “look at this subculture” variety, an approach both not very enlightening and also essentially condescending. Herein, though, I propose to take, if only for a moment, death metal on its own terms. 

What is the defining characteristic of death metal, its essence (essentia) if you will? Certainly like any other genre of cultural production, death metal has its generic rules and characteristics, which, it must be said, are often slavishly followed. We might say that a certain type of vocals (“the death grunt”), down tuned guitars, “blastbeats,” violent lyrics, etc. etc. make up some of these characteristics. But at its heart, in its essence, death metal must be brutal. A song can be brutal and not be death metal, but a song cannot be death metal unless it is brutal. 

So what is brutality? It’s not such an easy question to answer. It’s important to note that brutality is not about the violent imagery in either death metal lyrics or on the album covers. These paratexts, and lyrics are generally paratexts in death metal as they are indecipherable when sung and exist only as a supplement to the music, certainly can contribute to brutality but they cannot produce it. An Amy Grant record with a Cannibal Corpse cover is not brutal, nor is the melody to “When I’m Sixty Four” paired with the lyrics to “Immortal Rites.” Brutality resides in the music itself, then. But it is not reducible to a certain formula of chords, notes, time signatures, instruments, a style of singing, or distorted amplification, even if it relies on each of those. For example, of the so-called Big Four of thrash metal, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer, all of which use essentially the same sonic palette, only Slayer is brutal. 

So if brutality isn’t about imagery, or even about a specific sound, what is it about? Brutality in death metal is a way of referring to an experience one has when listening. That experience is oppressive, gut wrenching, and exhausting. This exhaustion is the only true resemblance to the cathartic that brutality exhibits. One is happy in a strange way when the album, or even the song, is over. One has been through a difficult journey, one has been sonically abused, and there is relief when it stops. But this is no purgation, and the structure of death metal songs and albums have more in common in their pummeling intensity with the Theater of the Absurd’s rejection of plot and structure than they do with the dramatic unity of verse-chorus-verse pop music.  

But brutality is also, and there is no better word in English, delicious. And this deliciousness is key to defining brutality. An uninitiated listener can experience the effects laid out in the previous paragraph. Indeed for him or her if death metal is played at loud enough volumes, the experience may in fact be physically painful and disorienting. A death metal aficionado will have a richer experience, though: one that is negative, but not entirely so, because that negativity is tempered with a strange kind enjoyment—what I’ve called deliciousness. That enjoyment stems in part from familiarity, of course. A person who has never really listened to death metal will be likely be taken aback by it, while a familiarized listener will know what to expect by and large. But familiarity is not the only factor, and it is certainly the case that one can become familiar with death metal without ever coming to enjoy it. The unpleasantness may diminish over time, of course, but the non-fan will never have the full experience of brutality because he or she will miss out on this pleasure. Indeed, many partners of death metal fans have no doubt have firsthand knowledge of this phenomenon. 

Now, it is precisely this experience of brutality that is the central characteristic of Breaking Bad. Indeed, brutality, understood in this way as a specific kind of experience, is what Breaking Bad is about. It is worth our time, then, to address some conceptions of experience and how they might typify the experience of brutality I’ve discussed in death metal and Breaking Bad. Here I’ll make reference to a debate in some twentieth century German philosophy about two kinds of experience: Erfahrung and Erlebnis. 

Although neither inaugurated the debate, perhaps the most well-known discussions of this division can be found in Walter Benjamin’s “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Very roughly speaking, the word Erlebnis means something like a personal, subjective experience that occurs at a particular moment in time. In both Benjamin’s and Gadamer’s argument, this is the ahistorical, incommunicable experience of interiority so pervasive in modernity. The word came into use in German in the nineteenth century ostensibly to describe what was really a new understanding, and perhaps a new genus, of experience, or so the argument goes. Erfahrung, on the other hand, is the older German word for experience. Again, for both Benjamin and Gadamer this experience is one that is traditional and historical and thus communal and communicable. 

A useful illustration of the difference might be found in a gloss of Gadamer’s take on Hegel’s famous pronouncement from his Lectures on Aesthetics: “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” For Hegel, art has ended in the “romantic” (i.e. Christian) era precisely because in that era art becomes entirely the province of experience as Erlebnis. The experience of art become aesthetic and thus becomes entirely personal, subjective (in the sense that the subject is the adjudicator [think of Kant on beauty]), ahistorical, private and essentially incommunicable. It is this understanding of art on which we operate today. Classical art (the art of the Greeks), which Hegel considers to be the highest form of art, on the other hand allows for experience as Erfahrung. The experience of art enjoyed, supposedly, by the Greeks was one in which art was not cleaved off from spirit, society, tradition, and history. One did not go to a museum, look at an artwork, and have an experience (Erlebnis). Instead, the experience of art was always already communal and, following Charles Taylor, we might say “embedded” in society, history, religion, etc. 

So according to Benjamin, Erfahrung died along with the lyric poet and the storyteller and the aura, in modernity. It cannot return. Only Erlebnis remains. For Benjamin, this is not an entirely negative assessment. In “Some Motifs,” Benjamin yokes Erfahrung to remembrance, a voluntary reconstruction of the past that is historical only in the dead sense that it seeks to apply will, and perhaps a post-hoc telos, to the past. Erlebnis, in its radical ahistoricality and specific temporality, is involuntary and can “shock” us. Erlebnis has the potentiality of radical trauma, and Benjamin thinks that that traumatic potential is the only revolutionary hope. Erfahrung, then, is willed, safe and static (he uses the model of consciousness, e.g. the ego) while Erlebnis is dangerous and shocking (the model of the unconscious, e.g. the id). 

According to Gadamer, though, in modernity we have made the error of valorizing the interiority of the subject and thus we have lost our traditional understanding of experience as Ehfarung and gone down the dangerous path of Erlebnis. For Gadamer then, and in contradistinction to Benjamin, a proper re-grounding, a change in comportment to our horizons can bring us back to experience as Erfahrung. He does not see the radical potential of Erlebnis, nor would he endorse such if he did. 

So the question we come to is: How can we understand the experience of brutality in Breaking Bad, and perhaps death metal, on these models? We might say with Benjamin that only the non-fan of death metal could truly experience a shocking Erlebnis at its ugly hands. The very deliciousness I mentioned above would appear to be some way of recuperating the trauma, of consciously processing an unpleasant experience to remove its radicality. The same would go for Breaking Bad, and perhaps Benjamin would argue that Breaking Bad possesses no real ability to traumatize us, to evoke radical Erlebnis. Because unlike death metal, Breaking Bad is, in its style and genre, entirely familiar to most viewers. Unlike the shock of Erlebnis we might have when viewing a Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke film (although once you’ve seen one, the genuine Erlebnis may not be possible), Breaking Bad is always safe in its delicious brutality. That is, there is always the Ehfarung of genre to protect us from shock and trauma.

Or we might say with Gadamer that the Erlebnis of brutality in Breaking Bad is merely a thrill ride with no real substance. It’s a kick, as Jack Kerouac might have said, and that’s it. What’s worse is that that kick is fundamentally fleeting, subjective, private and thus deeply privative. All the Erlebnis of brutality does, Gadamer might argue, is turn us back into our selves by giving us an oddly sensual pleasure I called deliciousness, while at the same time engaging our inner sadists. Death metal, and the appreciation of it, I imagine Gadamer would think, is the logical end point of all this: the nihilism of subjectivism and aesthetics in its final form. 

What I want to argue though is that what the experience of delicious brutality in Breaking Bad, and in death metal, points to is a central incoherence in the division of Ehfarung and Erlebnis. In order for us to have the experience of brutality as I’ve typified it, we have to have a certain level of familiarity with generic conventions. We have to know what to expect and we have to know how to process what comes. This is experience as Ehfarung. When we do have that familiarity, the proper experience of Erlebnis becomes possible. That depth of that experience, though, cannot be exhausted by calling it Erlebnis, for it is both private and communal at the same time. It is private in the sense the experience of brutality is fundamentally an aesthetic one in the Kantian sense (albeit properly perverted). It is communal in the sense that in order to have this experience, we must take part in the project of human culture whether we are aware of it or not. This apparent Erlebnis is also both ahistorical and deeply historical. It is ahistorical in the sense that it is momentary, a passing inner state that gives us no real knowledge. At the same time, it is historical for the simple reason that it requires of us attunement to generic precedent, to the duration of genre if you will. In the case of brutality, then, and in Breaking Bad, Ehfarung serves as the ground for Erlebnis. What appears to be the worst kind of subjective aestheticism (to Gadamer) or a fundamentally de-radicalized willful grasping of what should irrupt from the unconscious (to Benjamin) actually shows that experience as Ehfarung and experience as Erlebnis are meaningless in isolation from each other. What we see instead is that they are interdependent conceptions with neither eclipsing the other and neither sufficing to typify the experience of brutality. 

Thus to the extent that Breaking Bad is about the experience of brutality, it is also about how Erlebnis and Ehfarung are perhaps less contradictory than they may appear.