The Last Door and Breaking Bad
7:00 AM |
| Georgia O'Keeffe, My Last Door, 1952 |
“If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”
---- Georgia O'Keeffe
This was not her last door, as Georgia O’Keeffe painted nearly twenty versions of the door during various times in a series titled Patio. All of them were dedicated to the same door in her second New Mexican home in Abiquiu, now owned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the place where Jesse and Jane visit in this flashback. This scene with Jesse and Jane carries so much sentimental value since Jane’s death in season two—the art exhibit Jane keeps nagging Jesse about, Jane’s lipstick traces on the butt of her cigarette, even Jesse’s annoyingly loud yellow clothes seems to remind us of a happier time. Contrary to what Walt believes, Jane has plenty of good influences on Jesse, dating her is like taking a college-level course for him, artistically speaking.
First thing we see in the opening flashback is My Last Door with two silhouetted figures standing in front of it (unfortunately not included in the clip). Once in the car, Jesse argues that O’Keeffe painted that door to perfection while Jane insists that each time was different, and it was about making that feeling last. The painter herself remarked, “I work on an idea for a long time. It’s like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily.” This fixated feeling did not stop at her “last door.” O’Keeffe passionately believed colors’ effect on emotional connection with subjects, considering her last door is depicted entirely in black and white, it suggests O’Keeffe had dropped her paintbrush on a bad note with her door. Many other paintings in the same series are identical in composition, the only difference lies in her choice of color, as if the viewer is traveling in a visual documentation of the ups and downs in her relationship with the door.
This rare colorless painting of O’Keeffe’s echoes with Jesse’s ongoing abasement. The show has never let go of an opportunity to add to Jesse’s misery—kicked out of his family, beaten up by Hank, Jane’s death, later Gale, Brock, and Andrea...He tries over and over again to do the right thing, and in his mind, O’Keeffe does the same trying to achieve aesthetic perfection of a door. In the first half of season three, Jesse laments on Jane’s death in his own ways, a fact strongly emphasized through his wardrobe change, another amazing quality of Breaking Bad. He starts dressing predominately in black, and gone are his cheerful combinations of yellows and reds. Like the black negative space, Jesse slowly falls into a downward spiral.
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