A recent post about Jane's blue dress reminded me how many people talk about the repeated use of the color blue in this show, but so few people seem to talk about what it means. So, here's my take. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
The key to the puzzle is the many, many scenes that take place around swimming pools. Walt's pool is a status symbol for him: one of the reasons he bought this house despite its small size. Hosting a good pool party is one of his favorite things in the world. Nobody ever seems to swim in Walt's pool (or any other one as far as I remember). It's just there to be admired: an oasis in the New Mexico desert.
Why all of this? Consider the first scene when Gretchen and Elliot are introduced. Their party and their pool are enormous making Walt feel envious and inferior. In the same scene we see Walt and Skyler embarrassingly overdressed in blue, having "missed the beige memo" in their attempt to fit in with the hoi polloi. Everything you see in that scene--ostenatious wealth, the lifestyle, the social status--is what Walt feels entitled to because of his genius and his work with Grey Matter. But instead, the world served him a shit sandwich. As the series begins, the pool is languishing in neglect along with his hopes, forcing Walt to hold his only non-pool party in his living room in the pilot episode.
So, he starts cooking meth as beautiful and blue as his dreams. But of course, it's actually a filthy business, and in fact his own literal pool winds up tainted again and again. The first time the meth business intrudes on Walt's house is when Jesse barges in and dumps dirty money in it. (He's not the last.) Then Walt's behavior leads his son to vomit in it (don't click that link); and finally it's filled with wreckage from the plane crash. Gus has a similar experience: a pool full of Hector's piss and his partner's blood marks the turning point when his hopes and dreams turned toward vengeance.
Later in the series it turns darker, both literally and figuratively. We start to see nighttime pool scenes instead of daylight. The lit pool replaces the sun and the blue sky as the main source of light, creating an appropriately chilling ambiance as the water nearly drowns Skyler. In one of the last pool scenes, a big hotel pool--which always reminded me of this lab equipment--seems to mock Walt's dreams as his family is driven from their home by Jesse's aborted arson attempt. (The last few pool scenes show Walt's pool empty and full of graffiti, Walt waiting by a small, dark fountain to ambush Gretchen and Elliot, and lasers passing over Gretchen and Elliot's pool).
So, this turned into more of a "swimming pool" post than a "blue" post. But I think these are the ideas to which all other uses of the color blue are referring in some way. False hopes and dreams; a false vision of purity and happiness, sort of like the famous green light from The Great Gatsby, for those familiar with it. When Jane's father picks a blue dress for her funeral, he's remembering the idealized daughter of his dreams, destroyed by drugs and Walt's ambitions. Skyler's name is perhaps a contrast? For most of the series she remains actually pure, in contrast to the chlorinated purity of Heisenberg. (There's no shortage of clear blue sky, especially in the classically Western desert scenes; there's probably something to say about this, but I'm not sure what that would be.) Maybe you folks have some other good examples?
Submitted February 01, 2018 at 08:24AM by WheresMyElephant http://ift.tt/2DWaoWs
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