The Return of Literature Allusions?

For those of you who haven't seen it, Breaking Bad has an awesome new trailer.



What really makes this one interesting to me, is that it illustrates our continuing tendency to look backward in time for inspiration. Well, it always was said that there is nothing new under the sun, but I've never seen classical allusions in a trailer about a meth empire before. Though technically, it's a quote of a Victorian poem, in turn providing classical allusions, but that's a bit of a mouthful.

That said, the film world is hardly a stranger to classical references, even if they are often limited to the titles. Elysium, for example, refers to the ancient Greek afterlife; the fields of Elysium were the final resting place for the heroic and righteous. Morpheus, in the Matrix, is the name of the Greek god of dreams. Hell, even the Harry Potter series is an example; a good proportion of the names and spells are Latin puns, e.g. Remus Lupin refers to a) Remus, founder of Rome, who was raised by wolves, and b) Lupus, the Latin word for Wolf.

Of course, TV's always had a tendency to make literature references in the episode titles, especially in drama and science fiction series; hell, Star Trek (TOS) has at least four Shakespeare quotes for episode titles, and supernatural even has "It's The Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester"

 So do these literature references represent the return of an old trend? I rather think not- they just tend to work their way into our cultural phrasebook. I'm sure you've all heard of catch-22, but I for one never realised that Green Eyed Envy, was a reference to that American classic, the Great Gasby.