Walter White met the
father of Nucky Thompson at the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Future of Film” panel
discussion on April 22 at the School of Visual Arts Theatre in downtown
Manhattan. For those not addicted to cable TV’s current Golden Age, that would
be Bryan Cranston, three-time Emmy winner for his role as a high-school
chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin in the much-lauded “Breaking Bad,” and
Terence Winter, creator of HBO’s 1920s crime epic “Boardwalk Empire” and recent
Oscar nominee as the writer of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
The theme of the session
was “Psychos We Love,” an analysis not only of the television sociopaths the
public can’t get enough of, but how psychopathic tendencies are present in
highly functioning members of society including our leaders. Lending rather
startling expertise was James H. Fallon, PH.D, professor of psychiatry and
human behavior at the University of California, Irvine; author of The Psychopath Inside…and himself a
diagnosed psychopath. (More about that later.)
Moderated by ABC News’
Juju Chang, the program tended to ricochet between topics, attempting to
explain the attraction of the characters created by Winter and Cranston and
then veering off into Fallon-led explanations of how brain chemistry impacts
personality traits.
Winter likened our
fascination with movie and TV psychopaths to riding a roller coaster,
experiencing a momentary thrill and surviving it, living a dangerous life
vicariously through fictional characters without having to suffer the consequences.
One of the best movie examples of that vicarious thrill, he feels, is young
Michael Corleone’s first act of murder in The
Godfather.
Cranston contended that
poorly written heavies who are “just bad” aren't nearly as interesting or
effective as “someone who…I’m not sure if he’s good or bad. What strikes the
heart of a Nucky or Tony Soprano or my character is that there’s a mixture.
It’s really what human beings are.”
The actor analyzed his
now-classic Walter White persona as “a man who was given a set of circumstances
that created the type of person he became. His emotional core was calloused
over, and his [cancer] diagnosis exploded that core, gave him a sense of life.”
Of course, that “sense of life” led him to drug dealing, deception and murder.
For Cranston, the role was “catnip, what actors love.”
Cranston’s comedy chops,
known from his previous incarnation as the wacky father on “Malcolm in the
Middle,” came to the fore when Fallon freely admitted that a brain scan
confirmed he is a borderline psychopath and that his family line includes an
unusual number of killers going back to Lizzie Borden. Cranston feigned
palpable discomfort and panic, and a rictus smile when facing Fallon, and
circled a finger around his head (that familiar sign for “crazy”) when the
doctor said he especially enjoyed one of the goriest scenes from the first
season of “Breaking Bad.”
The audience gasped when
Fallon quoted a colleague who said he could easily spot signs of a psychosis in
a two-year-old (which prompted Cranston to imitate that child: “You don’t tell me when to use my inside voice!”)
According to Fallon, it all boils down to the chemistry in our frontal lobe and
the absence of empathy elements there. Fallon said he has trained himself to
overcome his psychopathic tendencies by consciously choosing selfless rather
than selfish acts, telling his wife, “You know, this is not from the heart.”
The discussion even
extended to Cranston’s current gig, playing President Lyndon B. Johnson in the
hit play All the Way. Many leaders,
in Fallon’s view, possess a megalomaniacal psychosis that enables them to
accomplish great things. Cranston agreed that LBJ “would do anything in his
arsenal” to make things happen, and wondered whether his great domestic
achievements would have been realized without those “negative” traits.
Winter, also one of the
lead writers of another TV classic, “The Sopranos,” ended the session by
speculating on the “reptilian brain” of the human animal. That potential for
fury and vengeance is something we all share, and isn’t it lucky that we have
avatars like Tony Soprano and Walter White to live out those urges for us?
—Kevin Lally
No comments:
Post a Comment