Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Aug 16, 2022 16:56:41 GMT -5
I'm still not sure I completely buy the courtroom confession as Jimmy truly emerging from a Saul cocoon, instead of him wanting it to appear that way (or even just wanting it to be true). But he's certainly happier in prison than as Gene.
IMO Jimmy's "confession" is a scheme like all his others, and with the same motivations. It's just that after six seasons of watching him do so, it's become clear (at least, to me - again, just my take here) that what Jimmy wants out of his schemes is not so much money or status or even justice/revenge (although they're all factors), but the connection to others that he feels he can't get as just Jimmy McGill the fuckup without the buffer of a persona.
I do think it's symbolic that the two elements of the Gene scenes that are in color are the Saul commercials and the cigarette he bums with Kim. I can't articulate quite *why* that feels so right but it does.
The two moments in color represent the dual driving forces in the decisions Jimmy makes. The commercial reflecting in his glasses represents Saul, the man who has embodied the logic of capital to the utmost: a man who has not only acceded to the cash nexus replacing the social bonds between human beings but also actively embraces this a social order where the person is the object and the money traded between the two is the subject. The glowing cigarette ember represents him as Jimmy, the man who, in spite of his many, many flaws, was a kind and considerate person who used legal and extra-legal means to help others (not that this genuine desire to help others wasn’t almost invariably tied up with other more self-serving motivations, because even at his best, his actions almost always were), and who cared more than anything for the people closest to him. And I think the cigarette ember represents that. Kim and Jimmy were bad for one another in a lot of ways (as Kim said when she told Jimmy she was leaving him), but they were each the one person the other cared about more than anything else in the world, and the fact that they were willing to slowly give themselves lung cancer to share a cigarette with that person is a beautiful metaphor for that.