The windows into the soul of Better Call Saul
Breaking Bad spinoff series uses paintings to give clues to characters’ destinies
In the first and final seasons of the TV phenomenon that was Breaking Bad, the same painting crossed paths with protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and not by chance: it depicted a man alone in a boat, rowing from a beach where a woman and two children were bidding him farewell, and its symbolism — that of someone willingly pulling away from their family — was an unmistakable link to the show’s core.
The painting’s appearance twice within the series’ larger world was a terrifically sly, small-detail nod to viewers paying attention to everything showrunner Vince Gilligan and his crack team of producers put before them.
But when the smash hit and critical darling wrapped its 62-episode run in 2013, Gilligan & Co. didn’t let that meticulous attention to their craft drift into the brilliant New Mexico horizon. They carried it into their next project: AMC’s prequel spinoff Better Call Saul, on which Gilligan collaborates with Breaking Bad writer/producer Peter Gould.
They have continued a subtle, savvy employment of pictures — wall art and the still image — as windows into characters’ souls and destinies.
By and large, art in Better Call Saul was obscured by shadow in its first season, but so was one of the plot’s key components. (Fair warning: spoilers are ahead.) Whenever audiences saw a picture or painting, it was usually in the home belonging to Chuck McGill (Michael McKean), brother of series centrepiece Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk).
Chuck’s psychosomatic “allergy” to electromagnetism leaves his house shrouded in darkness and that includes his extensive art collection. As a result, we either saw only frames or art that was half-lit. We didn’t have the full picture, either, of the overarching story.
Now, four episodes into the series’ second season, Better Call Saul’s relationship with art has become a portal into Jimmy and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), its two characters with the biggest roles in the Breaking Bad universe. When Jimmy moves into a new office as an attorney with burgeoning law firm Davis & Main, there are two framed works in the room: a picture of a boxcar, stopped in a desert, with the centre open to reveal a complete lack of cargo; the second is a painting of a man, falling backward, with no hands and a potted plant in place of his head.
The empty train car seems to signify the emotional hole in Jimmy while also bringing to mind one of Break- ing Bad’s most memorable robberies: the pilfering of a train in its final season. The falling body represents the ongoing plummet, personally and professionally, of a man nicknamed “Slippin’ Jimmy” in his formative years.
Like the falling, handless man, Jimmy isn’t entirely in control of his fate, and the plant where his head should be reinforces that the character is still growing. It also serves as a wonderful connection to one of Walter White’s most heinous schemes in Breaking Bad, a scheme Saul helped him pull off.
Arguably the most outstanding use of art in Better Call Saul relates to Ehrmantraut, the grizzled ex-cop turned enforcer/clean-up man for Albuquerque’s criminal elements. In the third episode of Season 2, Ehrmantraut is looking to buy a gun and enlists an illegal weapons dealer (Jim Beaver, who played the same role in Breaking Bad). The two men meet in a nondescript hotel room. Mike picks up a gun and points it at a painting on the wall.
“You seem to know this one,” the salesman says in reference to the gun — although, in a few more seconds, we’ll see it’s not just the gun with which Mike feels familiar.
He’s pointing the weapon at a picture of a winding stream eerily similar to the New Mexico valley where he’s killed by White in Breaking Bad. The sense of foreshadowing is overwhelming.
In Breaking Bad, the painting of the rowing man debuted when White’s cancer is diagnosed, and appeared for the second time when he had morphed into crystal meth kingpin Heisenberg and lowered himself to partner with a gang of neo-Nazi murderers. Put differently, he initially encountered the art when the rot in him was physical and then again when the disease that had overtaken him was spiritual.
As Better Call Saul continues unfolding — and Jimmy’s life continues unravelling — audiences should be on the lookout for more art as signifier of the bigger story.