by Eugen Zentner
Just in time for this year's Berlinale, another series has been released that packs a punch. Better Call Saul, a spin-off of the hit series Breaking Bad, tells the story of lawyer Saul Goodman, who transforms himself from a lousy defence lawyer into a criminal shyster. Quality American series have been on everyone's lips for some time now and are more attractive than ever, with fewer and fewer television viewers able to resist them. But they are not the only ones who are enthusiastic about the great entertainment from the American production studios; the arts pages and even academia are also devoting a certain amount of attention to this topic. And hardly a week goes by without a new series attracting the masses to the screen. And now it's Better Call Saul. Why the hype?
Al Capone (police photo from 1931)
The reason, according to the general tenor, is their literary writing style. You could also say that quality series represent the new literature, which is characterised by double coding and the ability to engage the intellect through complex character and plot design without neglecting entertainment. Quality series therefore fulfil what Leslie Fiedler called for almost fifty years ago: cross the border, close the gap! And what contemporary novel can make that claim?
The fact that most US series manage the balancing act between high and low culture is possibly due to the production conditions, which include several scriptwriters developing a story together in the so-called writers' room. A showrunner serves as a conductor who coordinates ideas and gives the series a special grade. One specific feature is horizontal storytelling, as the film industry refers to the development of both the plot and the characters across episodes and seasons. Parallels to literature can already be seen here. But quality series do more than that; they play with different narrative perspectives, experiment with the narrative structure and are characterised by a sometimes huge cast of characters. They break with genre conventions, make reference to popular culture and address social issues.
Organised crime seems to be one of the most popular among them. The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad alone, three series that have caused the biggest stir to date and now enjoy cult status, revolve around this topic. And why not? After all, as Manuell Castells pointed out, organised crime is an integral part of network society that cannot be eradicated. There's no help here from academia, which consistently refuses to take this issue seriously. Hollywood is already doing more in this respect and is reminiscent of real-life gangster celebrities, whom it stylises into new heroes. There is certainly no shortage of such heroes in history, because America in the 1920s produced such high-profile mobsters that Achilles, Odysseus and other protagonists of Greek mythology pale in comparison. While they used to populate dramas and novels by renowned writers that drew on antiquity to depict universal aspects of human existence, mobsters, as mafiosi are called in America, are now outranking them by appearing in films and quality series everywhere.
These shady characters are thus the heroes of today, who can easily compete with Homer's Olympic gods. Their cradle is the Prohibition era in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, the Iliad of organised crime, as it were, which Martin Scorsese tells in his own way in the series The Boardwalk Empire. The director brings together the greatest figures of the underworld and turns it into a gigantic epic. Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein, a notorious gambler and mastermind in all aspects of organised crime, deserves a special mention. The best up-and-coming gangsters learnt from him, including Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, "Bugsy" Siegel and Frank Costello. Consequently, they could not be missing from Scorsese's gangster saga, nor could Al Capone alias "Scarface", to whom many a monument has been erected in the film industry. While Capone cultivated the illegal alcohol trade in Chicago at the time and coined the term money laundering by being the first to invest income from dubious transactions in launderettes, "Lucky" Luciano laid the foundations for a mafia structure modelled on the Cosa Nostra in New York. Organised in five New York families, this system still exists today and has always been a treasure trove for ambitious directors. Luciano's childhood friend Lansky was also very active at the time and was regarded as incredibly intelligent and honourable, at least as far as business among mobsters was concerned. Because of this character trait, he was eventually nicknamed "The Honest". Lansky is the Odysseus of gangsters, while his friend "Bugsy" Siegel was known for his quick temper and muscle power, which is why he can rightly be described as the Achilles of Hollywood. Because both of them had Jewish roots, they were barred from joining the Italian mafia, but that didn't stop them from making money from the business and founding their own syndicate under the Kosher Nostra label.
They all grew up in poor circumstances, but nevertheless achieved fame, power and money. This also qualified them for the role of the film and series hero who keeps the narrative of the American Dream alive to this day. The dishwasher who manages to rise through the social ranks thanks to hard work is a chameleon in Hollywood. In the end, he does become a millionaire, whatever background he comes from. Recently, however, it has been observed that these heroes have been able to summon up enormous criminal energy and utilise it for their rise. The shyster lawyer Saul Goodman has already given us a taste of how this works in Breaking Bad, where he constantly surprises us with new ideas and opens one illegal back door after another for his client Walter White. In his own series Better Call Saul, he will now provide a further glimpse into his art. Saul Goodman, however, is nothing other than an admission of those mobsters whose criminal energy takes on enormous proportions and can be marvelled at not only in Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire. Time and again, they appear as characters in films and series dedicated to the theme of organised crime. Gangster Wars, Mob City and The Gangster Chronicles are just a few examples, which can be supplemented by films such as The Lost City, Mobsters and The Untouchables. There are also countless gangster dramas in which the characters are based on real-life mobsters. This applies to Casino, Donnie Brasco and Once Upon a Time in America just as much as it does to The Sopranos, HBO's super-series. It is also about an Italian-American mafia family in New Jersey that actually exists, albeit under a different name. And as if that wasn't enough, all the film biographies have been made in which the lives of those gangster greats are told in fictionalised form.
This even applies to more recent mobsters, who are just as suitable as pop icons. They also mastered the art of self-promotion and knew how to win sympathy with coolness. For example, the performances of John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino family, who controlled almost all of New York in the 80s, are unforgettable. Gotti loved the attention and took every opportunity to showcase himself as a powerful godfather. He always dressed up, wore exclusive bespoke suits and had his hair trimmed every morning by his private hairdresser. He sought out the camera like a man possessed, smiling mischievously into it to demonstrate his power, not without coquetry. The countless attempts by the public prosecutor's office to put him behind bars prove that his power was great. But one charge after another rolled off Gotti's back, earning him the nickname Teflon Don. And so the charismatic and monomaniacal mobster rose to become a pop icon, celebrated by the public. He had more fans than many Hollywood stars and enjoyed the show that occasionally took place after sentencing hearings, when the crowd outside the courthouse played the melody from Francis Cappola's Godfather and chanted his name. That's great cinema, that's the stuff directors are looking for. Guys like Gotti are an ideal cast for today's quality series because, as postmodern heroes, they are ideally suited to bridge the gap between high and low culture. They are psychologically complex characters who, like Medea or Agamemnon, are just as suitable for a sophisticated reception, but they also prove to be cool attention-seekers, whose hearty sayings may arouse base instincts, but guarantee good entertainment. The mobster draws its appeal from this ambivalence, which even the educated middle classes find hard to resist. The US television programme provider HBO was also aware of this and had Gotti's story filmed in 1996 after the Godfather of Manhattan was sentenced to life imprisonment after all. A few years later, this scheme was still promising, which is why another mafia film was made, only this time Paul Castellano, Gotti's predecessor, slipped into the role of the hero as the boss of the bosses. The biography of such high-calibre mobsters offers everything that is necessary for contemporary postmodern cinema: a drama structure with exposition, peripeteia and catastrophe. This puts them on a par with Odysseus and co., but they can also be utilised for the "from dishwasher to millionaire" narrative, especially as the mobsters have a characteristic that fits in well with today's neoliberal climate: criminal energy. After all, it is necessary in order to withstand the competition. So arm yourself if you can and learn from Al Capone and others who also empowered themselves. They show how empowerment works better than those Greek demigods, which is why heroes outside of the Honourable Society are now being created in their image. Saul Goodman is another one of these.
The development and cultivation of criminal energy is not just one, but the cardinal virtue of the present day. It's just that you're not allowed to say it. And nobody knows this better than homo academicus. But unlike Luciano, Lansky or Al Capone, he has not yet managed to appear as a hero in the quality series. Why not? There are some who would certainly have what it takes, such as Pierre Bourdieu, the wildest of the academic bulls. After all, he too made it from a poorly educated boy to an intellectual rich in knowledge. Even today, cohorts of students take him as their role model and dream of the great cultural capital. Born the son of a postal worker, he followed a formidable educational path, fought his way through the École Normale Supéreiure, researched at the École des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales and then taught at the Collège de France. He climbed steadfastly and unscrupulously up the social ladder until he was finally crowned the capo dei capi of practical theory. Nevertheless, it was not enough for Breaking Scientist on pay TV. In contrast to Bourdieu, mobsters like Gotti not only climb the ladder, but also consistently utilise their fall height by plunging down at the zenith of their career and cathartically admonishing them not to overdo it with self-empowerment. Ultimately, these are the subtle differences! And that's why Bourdieu's story is as unsuitable for a TV series as Al Capone is for an ethnographic study in Kabylia. What's more, mafiosi beguile with casual dialogue that can be appreciated in a completely different way to Bourdieu's gibberish. Here is a sample: "The structures constitutive of a specific type of environment (such as the conditions of existence that characterise a class), which can be empirically understood under the form of regularities associated with a socially structured environment, generate habitus forms, i.e. systems of permanent dispositions, structured structures that are capable of acting as structuring structures."
No, Bourdieu remains a practice-theoretical petty criminal and is unworthy of Al Capone, who always appeared eloquent, flirted with the camera and knew how to enthuse journalists just as much as the masses behind the screens. His charisma was proverbial, his charm legendary, even if behind the scenes he often swapped his big cigar for an even bigger baseball bat and occasionally gave the odd adept a lesson in loyalty and fidelity. Truly a humanist professor of the martial arts! A true Master of Martial Arts in the best university tradition, where heads have always rolled. In this respect, such a hero, indeed an intellectual Al Capone of the academic underworld, could also be found in this field, who could serve as a series star. There are at least quite a few with potential, above all the Good Fellas of the Frankfurt School. This Murder Inc. of German post-war philosophy was expanding its influence at an impressive pace and controlled the largest territory of the academic intellectual landscape. Its godfather Max "The Butscher" Horkheimer was anything but squeamish and, as we remember, silenced many a young scholar. And it was none other than Habermas who experienced this terror first-hand. However, the fact that he managed to save himself by mobilising his contacts with Gadamer and finding shelter in the Marburg clan by making use of his communicative rationality gives us an idea of the qualities the shrewd Habermas must have possessed in order to become the Don of Francoforte after Horkheimer's death.
Adorno, Habermas's mentor and Horkheimer's mentor, who, as the underboss of the Frankfurt Gang, intimidated the Federal Republic of Germany with sentences like this one, would certainly also be suitable for the series: "Attempts at formulation which, in order to hit the point precisely, swim against the usual linguistic splash and even endeavour to capture branching intellectual connections faithfully in the structure of syntax, arouse anger through the effort they impose. The linguistically naïve attribute the disconcerting aspect to foreign words, which he blames wherever he doesn't understand something." Oh yes, his weapon was the word. If this applies to anyone, then it applies to Theo the "Kugelblitz" Adorno, the cruelest of the cruel, who agitated against the status quo in the 1960s and thus became a feared public enemy. Meanwhile, his fellow campaigner Marcuse, also known by the nickname "homo multidimensionalis", stirred up the American student body and ran the business of the Frankfurt clan on the other side of the Atlantic. Ah, tempi passati! These gangster greats are guaranteed a place in the Hall of Fame of the academic underworld, but is that enough to turn their story into a film, or even a quality series? Hardly! After all, anyone who - like "Kugelblitz" Adorno - is so easily rattled when it counts and can't stand the sight of a bare-breasted student is simply useless as a pop icon.
And that's why we watch series week after week where it's not Horkheimer and Adorno who keep viewers in suspense, but Al Capone, "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky and "Bugsy" Siegel. They and other mobsters still hold themselves up as charismatic heroes who teach self-empowerment and image-building with style and humour. A new generation of protagonists, who are beginning to take up the mobsters' legacy in an exemplary fashion in quality series, are now demonstrating how this can be realised in a wide variety of social fields. In Breaking Bad, Walter White has already developed from a humble chemistry teacher into a ruthless drug lord. Now Better Call Saul will tell a similar story, with the difference that this time we get to witness the criminal development of a lawyer. So as long as this criminalisation of the social and gangsterisation of heroes continues on pay TV, there is still hope that an academic mobster will soon conquer the series formats. Because the criminal energy of the scientist really isn't from bad parents.
(Image: Wikipedia, FBI photo)
Eugen Zentner, Dr phil., is a fellow at the DFG Research Training Group "Self-Formations" at the University of Oldenburg.
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