I don't actually believe I've posted about Breaking Bad before on this blog. In all honesty, just putting together a post about the show (of which I have three more episodes, the next of which is the infamous Ozymandias) as I'm about to finish it makes me a little overwhelmed.
The show is dense, and Walter White is one of the most fascinating villain protagonists I've ever seen.
Jeez, where to start?
On a grand thematic level, Breaking Bad is very much about the American dream, masculinity, and pride in one's abilities.
If you somehow don't know what the show's about, or would just like to hear how I'd describe it, the show is about Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a meth cook after (though not necessarily because) he discovers that he has inoperable lung cancer.
Yet this description is perhaps misleading. The image that I think most people would get from this is that Walter is more or less a good guy who is turning to this trade out of desperation. There's a popular meme that in Canada, the show wouldn't work because they have nationalized healthcare, but honestly, I think it would just require Walter to come up with a different excuse.
We never get a totally complete story of Walter's backstory. He's clearly a gifted chemist, and we know that he was among three people to start a company called Gray Industries (the name being a joke on the blending of his name and his partner's, who is named Schwartz.) There was clearly a falling out between the three founders (the third being Schwatz's now-wife, who had probably been involved with Walt previously.) The point is - for whatever reason, he left the company just before it took off and became a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
Walter is driven by a desire to be a paragon. He wants to be the provider for his family, and he wants to leave a legacy that his children will always look up to. He is absolutely invested in being a paterfamilias, and he detests being someone else's subordinate. And meth is his ticket out of there.
Or so he thinks. Given his professional background, he's a far better meth cook than the average cook, but he doesn't have the criminal connections to get into the business. For that, he uses a former student who he knows is also a cook, Jesse Pinkman - technically, it's Jesse who teaches him how to cook crystal meth, but Walt, the experienced chemist, very quickly overtakes Jesse's original recipe.
The entire series from that point forward in the pilot is more or less a chain reaction of consequences. Walter is very smart and very clever, but while he wants to see himself as a planner, in fact he is more of a brilliant improviser. This has a tendency to put him in difficult situations, and one of the joys of the show is watching him scramble to get out of them.
Of course, part of the horror of the show is seeing what depths he's willing to sink to in order to do what he wants to achieve. We're introduced to Walter White looking like a dead-on live-action version of Ned Flanders - green sweater over a buttoned shirt, khaki pants, glasses, mustache. He's the very image of a nonthreatening man, and his life at that point reflects it. He is a teacher at a public school - a good one, it looks like, but you'd think at the very least he should be teaching graduate students. He has to work a second job for a man who keeps giving him more manual labor to do. And he has a son with cerebral palsy, which obviously isn't the son's fault, but it reinforces the notion that Walter is living a harder, less ideal life than what Walter envisions.
The thing is, Walter has that perfectly American personality trait: Exceptionalism. We Americans have a culture that always pushes us to stand out and be unique - to strive to be the best at what we can be. Now sure, that can motivate people to achieve great things, but by necessity, it also means that the vast majority of Americans are going to be disappointed in life. After all, there can only be one "best" at any given thing. When we meet Walter, he is not the best.
But in the production of crystal methamphetamine, he finds an avenue in which he can be the best. Early on, at the end of the first season, Walter creates a persona - at first purely as a pseudonym for dealing with criminals he'd rather not known his real name - Heisenberg. (I'm sure that there's a ton of thematic reasoning for naming himself after the German physicist, but for now I'm going to hold off on that.) As the bodycount rises and Walter's famously blue meth (a consequence of a different chemical process that has now apparently made blue meth more popular in the real world) makes more and more money, Heisenberg and Walter's exceptional legend grows.
The chain of consequences does have its interruptions. There are times when it looks like Walter could just drop out, enjoy the fortune he has made and return to a relatively normal life, only now with the money to be comfortable - to pay off his medical bills and then some, and to leave his family not wanting.
But two major things get in the way of this. The first is the one that we get the most examples of in the show - for Walt, it was never about the money. Through making drugs, Walter gets to be that paragon he always felt he should be. He is clearly the best meth cook in the world - even the Mexican cartels want his recipe and techniques. He has leverage with that skill, and power as a consequence of that leverage. He's not in it for the money - it's the fact that he knows, and others know, that he is the best in the world at what he does. This egotism shows through in other ways - for one thing, he's hesitant to even launder his money in a way that makes it look like it's coming from other people.
What season five shows us is that even when Walt can get a hold of his own ego and realize that he's made enough money (literally more than he can count,) and that he's made his mark, the actions he's taken are irreversible. There are actually some scientific principles at work here. Every chemical reaction can be done in reverse - water and carbon dioxide and some energy can give you glucose and oxygen, and then you can take glucose and burn it with oxygen to release that energy with your initial ingredients - but entropy always increases.
Walter's efforts to reverse the process that turned him into a drug kingpin seem to be working, but the chaos that he has churned up over the past five seasons have left the world a different place, and no matter how hard he tries, he can't separate out that contamination from his peaceful, model citizen life that he wants to return to.
I'm sure I'll have more thoughts when I finish the series. There's tons to talk about (I barely even mentioned Jesse, who is another fascinatingly complex character,) but for now I'm going to mentally prepare myself for Ozymandias. I heard Mizumono, Hannibal's season two finale, described as the show's Ozymandias, so I'm more than a little terrified.
No comments:
Post a Comment