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Record W4321512462 · doi:10.1386/jptv_00083_1

Resentment and ressentiment as motivating forces in Better Call Saul

2022· article· en· W4321512462 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
David Pierson

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Popular Television · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLaw in Society and Culture
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsResentmentCharacter (mathematics)FeelingBrotherHatredPsychoanalysisLawAestheticsPsychologySociologySocial psychologyPhilosophyPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article argues that the philosophical and psychological concepts of resentment and ressentiment serve as compelling motivational forces in the lives and actions of the central characters that comprise the American TV series Better Call Saul (2015–22). For Nietzsche and Scheler, ressentiment involves the internalization of hostile affects that tend to reinforce a sense of powerlessness and feelings of inferiority. Unlike ressentiment, which can linger for a long time, resentment is an active and immediate mode of resistance that supports its stance against the conformist tendencies of passive or reactive forces. Resentment, if properly directed externally, can serve as an empowering and a creative, active force in a character’s life. For Jimmy McGill, resentment functions as a primary catalyst for his eventual transformation into the unethical, yet prosperous, criminal attorney Saul Goodman. Resentment, if directed inwards, can produce debilitating effects such as Jimmy’s older brother Chuck’s incapability to move past his hatred and envy over his younger brother’s past actions and successes as a lawyer. This article illuminates the role and character of resentment and ressentiment as affective forces for characters in television melodramas.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.572
Threshold uncertainty score0.633

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.307
Teacher spread0.290 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2022
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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