Professor Malin publishes new essay in Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Professor Malin has published a new essay in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, entitled “Intimate Objects: Post-Network Television and the Object Oriented Aesthetics of Breaking Bad.” In this essay, I address questions of televisual point-of-view by attending to a unique set of camera shots used in the drama Breaking Bad. While point-of-view shots typically take the perspective of a character, some of Breaking Bad’s most innovative point-of-view shots take the perspective of objects instead. Here, viewers look at the characters of the program “from within” toilets, ATM machines, stoves, and even digital technologies such as GPS devices. In attempting to render the perspectives of these and other objects, Breaking Bad offers what I call an object-oriented aesthetics, which is both made possible by, and offers a reflection of, some of the aesthetic, technological, and economic intricacies of contemporary television. Ultimately, these shots contribute to the aesthetic and narrative complexity of Breaking Bad at the same time as they underscore the consumerist impulses of digital-era connectivity—illustrated by what I call an aesthetic of anti-absorption—which depends on just the complex blend of object and subject at work within these shots.