Breaking Trauma's Empire: Trauma And Resolution In Boardwalk Empire And Breaking Bad

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to analyze the performance of trauma and its resolutions in television, generally, and in Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad, specifically. The first chapter of this project analyzes Jacques Lacan's theory of trauma and introduces his terminology. In addition, the first chapter connects trauma's atemporality with Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad and explores Julia Kristeva's discussion of division and the abject. Subsequently, it analyzes the repetitiveness of trauma, its quilting point, and the emotion of abjection as the nature of trauma. The first chapter ends in a discussion of television's involvement with trauma, what television can achieve, perform, and manipulate, and how television can have it "both ways." The second chapter analyzes several performance of trauma and three resolutions to them in Boardwalk Empire. These resolutions are 1. the reinstantiation of fantasy, 2. suicide, and 3. a lesson on the impossibility of exclusion. The third chapter examines the performance of trauma and one resolution in Breaking Bad: repression. The fourth chapter compares and contrasts the television series and their resolutions and discusses their disparate cinematographies. The paper ends with an analysis of the inherent violence in resolution and the connections between heroes, villains, trauma, and resolution.