Gallery: Tighty Whities and Singed Teddy Bears: Breaking Bad Props Get a Museum Exhibit
01Making Bad: An Evening With Vince Gilligan
How do you create an evolving, morally complex character using only colors, clothing, and some common household items? AMC, Vince Gilligan, and the crew of presently returning, soon-to-be-ending meth opus Breaking Bad did it, then put it on display at the Museum of the Moving Image. Off the beaten New York City path in Astoria, Queens, the Museum houses over 130,000 artifacts from the film and television industries. Its core exhibition, where the new Breaking Bad collection is nestled, covers over 15,000 square feet with props, costumes, makeup, and technical equipment that cover the production, promotion, and exhibition of the moving image throughout its more than 100-year history. Museum curator and cultural anthropologist Barbara Miller set up the *Breaking Bad* shop as a sub-exhibit dedicated to the costumes, makeup, props, and other objects used to wordlessly communicate the interior world the of now-iconic chemistry teacher-turned-kingpin Walter White and his complexities. Miller gave WIRED a private tour (or mini-tour, more like) of the collection she hand-picked from wardrobe boxes, prop rooms, and designer portfolios behind the scenes of one of the most nuanced dramas on television. Click through the gallery above for more highlights from the exhibit. Some __spoilers__ follow. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for AMC)
02meth-bear-book
Everything under the glass evokes entire storytelling arcs within the plot, said Miller. The display includes the inscribed, potentially damning copy of *Leaves of Grass*, the beakers and tubes used to cook Walt and Jesse's first meth batches, Walt's yellow-paged notebook lined with doodles and implicating notes to self, and the heavily symbolic, hellish teddy bear that plops into the White family pool after a dramatic plane accident. (Photo: Museum of the Moving Image)
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A behind-the-scenes video plays to the left of this case that shows that this particular bear was one of a collection of several, equally hellish pink teddies used as props through various episodes. (Photo: Sam Suddaby / Museum of the Moving Image)
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The copy of Walt Whitman's *Leaves of Grass*, signed by "G.B." (Gale Boetticher) that leads Hank to (finally, *finally*) suspect Walt, not the now-dead Gale, is Heisenberg. (Photo: Sam Suddaby / Museum of the Moving Image)
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The tighty whities: a "Before" snapshot of Walter Whitman, Good Family Man Gone Bad. (Heisenberg definitely wears boxer briefs.) (Credit: Sam Suddaby / Museum of the Moving Image)
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The simple high-school chemistry set that Walt and Jesse first cook with. It's yellowing and drab, but clearly it makes good meth – wait for it – *just like Walt*. (Also – Yeah, that's totally rock candy back there. Obviously.) (Photo: Sam Suddaby / Museum of the Moving Image)
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"The creators of the series were very, very deliberate with the props they chose," says Miller, "and that's how they really tell the story on this show." The PET scan, pill bottles, and inhaler characterize Walt's powerlessness in the face of cancer, the grim physical realities that initially fuel his entry into the drug business. (Photo: Sam Suddaby / Museum of the Moving Image)
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Walt's phone and dummy cell phone, which embody his deception to Skyler. The cigarette box that carries the adjacent tiny tube of ricin – more deception. And of course, the different goatees and mustaches that evolve with his character (notice he has a mustache only, in the beginning, but grows a goatee as he spirals farther into damnation – because the Devil wears a goatee, maybe? – and as he loses his hair.) (Credit: Sam Suddaby / Museum of the Moving Image)
09costumes-palettes
"I was an avid viewer of the show before I was asked to do this, so when I went back and re-watched the episodes, I had to delve more deeply," Miller says. "I knew I wanted Tyvek suits, but which exact suit? Did they wear aprons with that particular suit? What about the boots and gloves? You really don't want the fans to go, 'They don't know what they're doing!'" (Photo: Museum of the Moving Image)
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The color palettes are clearly one of Miller's favorite elements of the set: as Walt progresses down his sinister road to hell, his clothes get darker. The primary-color palette, if you didn't guess, belongs to Jesse, while the blues, heathered greens and greys are Skyler's – she's in a bit of a grey area. "The fact that his clothing items stay the same, I think, symbolizes that Walt's essential nature isn't changing," says Miller. "He's been this way the whole time; new, darker facets are just coming to the surface." (Credit: Sam Suddaby / Museum of the Moving Image)
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Impressionistic portraits of the White family, as displayed in their family home: the external face to what, beneath the surface is actually a complex family that keeps getting darker and darker while keeping the neighbors fooled. (Photo: Sam Suddaby/Museum of the Moving Image
