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El Camino: Where did all the brown people go?
The eagerly awaited Breaking Bad film “El Camino” debuted recently on Netflix. And while public reception has been mixed, I thought it was a satisfying and well executed farewell to the character Jesse Pinkman. But while sitting on the couch watching the end credits roll, I couldn’t help but ask myself “where did all the brown people go?”
The city of Albuquerque is as much a character in the Breaking Bad universe as Walter White, Saul Goodman, and Hector Salamanca. And throughout the entirety of Breaking Bad (and now in Better Call Saul) the presentation of Albuquerque has always felt authentic. The locations, the dialogue, and most importantly the people of Albuquerque looked and behaved as they do in real life. Our city felt lived in, populated by people we all know (often literally).
Yet all of this seemed to be missing in El Camino.
Albuquerque felt empty, its role as character conspicuously absent. It just didn’t feel…right. I think this had a lot to do with the noticeable absence of brown people on the screen. I mean seriously, how can you set a film in Albuquerque and not have any brown faces appear as main characters? Instead, what we got was a collection of characters that felt completely out of place in Burque. The junk yard owner, the cops, the douchebags who ran the welding company… none of these…
