In terms of it's pop cultural significance, my home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has very few and very odd claims to fame. For instance, Mike Judge was so inspired by the ineptitude of Albuquerque's public education system that he named the high school in Beavis and Butthead after our very own Highland High. For Nicholas Roeg's cult classic film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie plays a space alien sent to Earth on a mission to find a way to send water back to his dying planet, he chose to set the film in Albuquerque because of the surreal, otherworldly quality of the downtown and university area, as well as the state's notoriously lax labor laws. In addition to being the place where rapper/automobile enthusiast Xzibit spent most of his formative years, Albuquerque is also the birthplace of a bevy of B- and C-list actors including Freddie Prinz Jr., French Stewart, Annabeth Gish, and Neil Patrick Harris. However, the city is probably most famous for being the place where Bugs Bunny consistently makes wrong turns as he traverses the globe via his endless network of burrowed tunnels. And while this probably had less to do with the geography or culture of the city and more to do with the inherent humor of Mel Blanc making that "koykee" sound at the end, it always made sense to me that Albuquerque was always the stopping-off point and not the destination for the wascally wabbit.
Recently though, the city has found its own little pop cultural niche in a new show on AMC called Breaking Bad, set and shot on location almost entirely in Albuquerque. In the past year AMC has set about reinventing itself as a sort of cable version of HBO, and given how unequivocally awesome Mad Men is and how terrible HBO's recent crop of original series have been, it should maybe be the other way around. Breaking Bad is their second original series, which they wedge in between extended marathons of forgettable action movie of the 80s, and the show is, in most regards, just a darker, grittier, more macho version of Weeds, following the story of a high school chemistry teacher (played by the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) that decides to start selling crystal meth to support his family after he finds out he's been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. But whereas Weeds works from the idea that its titular drug is basically benign and primarily serves to illustrate the squareness and hypocrisy of the community's uptight, conservative residents, Breaking Bad goes to lengths to illustrate the most abject features of meth culture in Central New Mexico. The show feels a little gimmicky at times (I mean, how often can you use some clever chemistry trick make stuff blow up before it just becomes schtick), but it's surprisingly well done. It's edgy without being obnoxious, it's grim without being bleak, and Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are like an original dark-comic, meth-cooking odd couple. But more than anything I just enjoy seeing my hometown rendered on-screen with such frightening accuracy.
I've certainly watched enough episodes of Cops: In Albuquerque to know that the city has no shortage of ridiculous stories involving the meth trade, but I have to give the show's creators credit for never turning the city into a cartoon, like the fictitious community in Weeds, or making it seem like just some generic drug-addled Southwestern city. Though it's difficult to understate the poverty and dark underbelly of the city of Albuquerque and the state of New Mexico as a whole, it's not without its whitewashed suburbs, and everything in between. In addition to being the city where most of the mechanical components of our nation's nuclear stockpile were made, Albuquerque is also notably the city where Bill Gates chose to start Microsoft (who, like Bugs Bunny, felt no need to stick around). And what better metaphor for the duality of the city than a brilliant chemist coming together with an enterprising tweaker to cook batches ultra-pure crystal meth.
Still though, my favorite part of the show is the way it uses the minute details of the city that probably go unnoticed by anyone that didn't grow up there, but, at least for me, add a whole other level of humor to the show. Indeed one of the strongest memories I have of the city is the lower-middle-class 70s-era houses with washed-out color-schemes, shag carpeting, and wood paneling on the walls, like the houses that I grew up in, that Breaking Bad uses in much the same way Little Miss Sunshine (also set in Albuquerque) does, as a way of illustrating the stagnation and downward social mobility of the family. In the first episode of the show, when the main character is working at a car wash after school to make ends meet, it should just be sad and pathetic, but the fact that he's working at that one weird car wash on Eubank and Menaul with wood-chip siding that kind of looks like an airplane hangar actually makes it funny. Also, I don't think I've seen a more perfect once-scene description of the city of Albuquerque than a middle-aged white guy buying crystal meth out in front of the Dog House (mmmm. . . Dog House). Of course, the scene in one of the more recent episodes where the main character has sex with his wife in his car outside of his high school's science building (which is, in fact, the Eldorado High School science building, built during my freshman year there) is nothing short of surreal.
