“Say my name.”
Released on the cusp of the streaming revolution, Vince Gilligan’s dark exploration into America’s morally grey criminal underworld is the quintessential anti-hero’s tale. When it first appeared in 2008, Breaking Bad managed to succinctly capture the brooding mood of the American public as the U.S. financial system was in the midst of melting down, while millions of jobs, homes, and pensions were eliminated almost overnight. Facing years of political stagnancy and corruption, a declining middle class, cultural malaise, and the rise of gargantuan soulless multi-national corporations spanning the globe, Breaking Bad came to represent the cynical, angry mood of the era. The show portrays an ordinary, awkward, high school teacher who quietly faces impoverishment, social resentment, and even his own mortality. Following an unexpected cancer diagnosis, he decides to use his intimate knowledge of chemistry in order to secretly begin cooking meth and earn some cash. Ostensibly, Breaking Bad explores the age-old schoolyard question: “would you steal bread to feed your family? And, if so, how far would you go? If you could get away with it, would you sell drugs to provide for your family?” Perhaps this is how it all begins for Walter White –little more than an innocent, quest to provide for his family—but this simple fiction quickly descends into a dark world of drug-dealers, cartels, gang members, and murderers. Put another way, Walt faces the same choice that Achilles faced in Homer’s Iliad –to either live a bold and brave life (as in Nietzsche’s injunction to “live dangerously”) or bide his time, survive a little while longer, eek out an existence, and perhaps die an old man.
By all accounts, an ordinary milquetoast, meek, underachieving, lower middle-class everyman, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), is a high school chemistry teacher who suddenly receives an unexpected terminal lung cancer diagnosis. His teenaged son Walter jr. (RJ Mitte) has cerebral palsy, and his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) is unintentionally pregnant while nearing forty. Meanwhile, for years Walt has watched his peers surpass him in every way –in terms of success, happiness, and wealth (Walt mentions that he earns $43,700 per year). With a health insurance plan that hardly covers the cost of his oncology appointments, a large mortgage left to pay off, and the ever-looming cost of college tuition for his son, Walt is irate at his lot in life. He feels stuck at the bottom of a ladder that he is forbidden from climbing –this is, in part, a reflection of the failed economic recovery following the 2008 financial crash which yielded a permanent underclass of people devoid of hope, many of whom turned to a life of drugs and crime. Realizing how little his life has yielded, Walt makes the fateful decision to use his own extensive knowledge of chemistry to begin cooking a flawless blend of methamphetamine (a trademark form of “blue meth”), knowing it will translate into easy money. This is how Walt begins to “break bad.” With death lurking around every corner, Walt is anxious about his legacy, even if he lives without fear now –but it wasn’t always this way for him. There once was a time when Walt led an impressive life. In the past, he co-founded a company called Gray Matter Technologies along with his friend Elliott Schwartz and his then-girlfriend Gretchen, but he sold out of the company for a mere $5,000 when he and Gretchen broke up (the details are never fully explicated). Gray Matter has since made Gretchen and Elliott billionaires, while Walt barely lives above the poverty line. Notably, the name Gray Matter was derived from a blend of Walt’s last name “White” and Elliott’s last name “Schwartz” (which means “black” in German) –an allusion to the morally gray themes of the show. But with his boring middle class life stuck on auto-pilot, Walt realizes he will soon leave behind a pitiful, indebted, forgettable inheritance for his family, and after watching television news programs and hearing stories recounted by his brother-in-law who works for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Walt finds a promising new path forward in drug-dealing.
It seems to me that the central question at stake in Breaking Bad is whether or not Walt can be considered a hero. Across five seasons of the show, we see Walt do some very bad things, acts which supersede even the worst of villains. However, there are also elements of Walt’s character which occasionally display courage and strength. From our comfortable perch in the audience, we can praise Walt for finding his inner sense of confidence, success, thumos, and for finally gaining control of his life again by pursuing a dream (is it an American dream?), especially when he makes a new name for himself and proceeds to build a vast empire, finally earning the respect he so desperately desires. Walt becomes a legend in the underworld, a giant among men echoing the classical heroic archetype in the vein of Achilles. But Walt is also frustratingly petty, frivolous, vain, erratic, tyrannical, and sleazy. Bryan Cranston masterfully captures this odd duality within Walt –at once donning sweater-vests for suburban children’s birthday parties in a display of modern meekness and impoverishment of spirit, while also secretly sporting a Buster Keaton pork pie hat and assuming the nickname of “Heisenberg,” the meth king of New Mexico, as a leathery-skinned, bald-headed megalomaniac like Lex Luthor; the hero of his own story. He is resourceful, relentless, and merciless. Appealing to the popularity of superheroes, Walt is a mild-mannered teacher by day and a fearsome warlord by night –he appears safe, meek, and humble on the one hand; while also strong, confident, and capable on the other. He straddles these virtues and vices in a morally ambiguous fashion, wandering along the boundary between good and evil, in both the desert and the city. In truth, his illicit project is less about money and more about having a purpose, a raison d’être (“I did it for me, I liked it,” he later confesses). He eventually devolves into a monstrous anti-hero throughout the show –yet we somehow continue to root for him, longing for him to succeed, secretly wishing for the lies to continue, as Walt increasingly pursues his own selfish Macbethian desires. And while, at first, he struggles to keep his meth-cooking a secret, in time, his friends all begin to pity Walt, something which greatly enrages him. He is frustrated because he is prevented from publicly displaying his immense power and prestige earned from within the shadows. Through it all, Walt remains an angry, embittered, and resentful man. Everywhere he looks across American culture, he sneers upward at his cultural superiors, loathing them with boundless antipathy, longing for them to face comeuppance, perhaps even face divine judgment (notably, in spite of modern Christian pieties, the burning desire for revenge still remains a potent impulse as many people in modern society still delight in the idea of judgement being delivered upon their enemies). Ever the attitude of the petty, Walt oozes this ugly brand of schadenfreude. In these moments, we see various scenes of Walt witheringly resentful of “elites” –people with money and power, images of a life he might have lived; but this perspective only drives him deeper into his evil ambitions. In this respect, Walter White represents the true anti-hero of our age, the fitting image of a nasty person filled with a mixture of both virtues and vices.
Suffice it to say, Breaking Bad is not a simplistic hero’s tale where things are “black and white.” As in the classical works of Greek tragedy, Breaking Bad takes place within a metaphorical borderland where a conflict of values is confronted by a lone protagonist who is striving to become exceptional –in this case Walt resides along the US-Mexico border, a region filled with fear and foreboding. North of the border sit sprawling comfortable suburbs, strip malls, and safe communities which are secretly rife with unlawful activity. South of the border resides a lawless desert where we find rural peasant farmers, cartel members, strange religious superstitions, and mythic Old-World violence. Walt’s drug-dealing allows him to experience both of these worlds, north and south of the border. And like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Walt makes a series of decisions which steadily transform him into a dark hero of sorts (increasingly aware of his own mortality and manhood, he ‘dares do all that may become a man’). But Walt is not a modern hero the likes of which we are accustomed to seeing. In many ways our heroes –superheroes like Superman—are the antidote to our current theological repressions which prevent our natural need to create new grand mythological heroes, gods, and demigods the likes of which were rife throughout antiquity. Walt’s heroism hearkens back to one of these antiquated extra-legal notions of heroism —machisimo, pride, vigilantism, strength, valor, and the warrior ethos. This ordinary suburban dad –in some ways the nightmarish alter-ego of Hal from Malcolm in the Middle— becomes a tragic hero, as well as a menace to society, one who lives dangerously, with high-levels of risk, and who carves out an empire of his own. And like all people in our culture who spend time ensconced in impassioned resentiment of “elites,” Walt desires respect and honor rather than love, pity, compassion, or forgiveness. He sees himself as an outlaw, a gangster, a warlord, a genius, and a fearsome general a la Napoleon Bonaparte. He wants to command obedience and authority. This is Walt’s understanding of the highest reflection of manhood. Why? Perhaps because, as his brother-in-law mentions, people always remember figures like Al Capone, Jesse James, and Pablo Escobar, but never the guy who catches them. The former figures become mythic legend, while the latter are forgotten nobodies. For Walt, what first begins as a simple dip into illicit activities –albeit slightly comical—soon devolves into an intricate web of lies leaving a trail of murdered innocents in its wake. With nods to The Godfather, Scarface, Fargo, as well as No Country for Old Men, this is a Western of the darkest variety (cue the wonderful homages to John Ford and Sergio Leone). It is a world where nothing is sacred, and very few people ever truly face punishment or requital. In spite of the expansive laundry list of atrocities, the world simply continues onward unabated. The indifferent wind blows over the desert the same regardless of whether or not Walt has hidden guns, money, or bodies in the dust. And no one ever really seems to face consequences (in a particularly revealing moment of denialism, Walt says, “I blame the government”). But the cruel irony of Walt’s descent into criminality is that it gives him a newfound sense of vitality, it offers him a far more fulfilling life made rich with excitement and opportunity. It provides what was lacking: upward mobility.
Walt is joined in his meth business by a “partner,” a clumsy former-student named Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Jesse serves as an amusing clown at first (i.e. the Sancho Panza to Walt’s Don Quixote), but as time passes, Jesse is shown to be one of the few characters who matures throughout the series. At least he believes that murdering innocent children is wrong, in contrast to more psychopathic characters like Gus Fring and Todd Alquist (in spite of his wrongdoing, Walt never seems to fully embrace this level of viciousness –he seems to know right from wrong up until the very end). Jesse’s story is expanded upon in an epilogue film called El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019).
We also meet Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), initially a comic relief character –a comfortably racist, crass, football-loving, beer-swilling, all-American cop with a slight temper problem. He speaks like a fraternity brother, telling off-color jokes and appearing fully confident in his abilities to catch all the “bad guys.” In spite of Hank’s work as a DEA agent, he is happy to bend the rules on occasion –he smokes an illegal Cuban cigar with Walt. His wife is a hopelessly nervous and dissatisfied kleptomaniac named Marie. Indeed, all of these characters seem to be searching for an alternative to their own lives. At any rate, Hank represents the archetypal American man in contrast to Walt, who is a disrespected weakling and despised at every turn –from his wife, to his school, to his second job at a car wash. But it is not fair to blame Walt’s criminality on society or circumstances –not every down-on-his-luck guy turns to drug-dealing. Throughout the series, a dangerous poker game unfolds between Hank and Walt. Hank represents the authority of government agencies like the police and DEA –a pesky collection of the flies standing in the way of good old-fashioned American business– while the free-flowing libertarian economy only serves to funnel drugs which satiate the baser desires of a culture in moral decay. In time, Hank’s confidence is entirely shaken since he cannot seem to track down the “bad guys” like he imagined. He gets himself into a shoot-out with a crazed member of the cartel named Tuco; and he witnesses the severed head of a DEA informant named “Tortuga” explode on the back of a turtle which kills several agents; then two axe-wielding twins hunt down Hank with plans of brutally executing him –and after barely surviving, Hank begins to suffer from PTSD while his personal and professional life takes a horrid turn and he is bedridden, recovering from multiple injuries. Unlike the friendly sheriff in countless old western shows, Hank is just one man facing down an avalanche of evil –the international meth trade. In the end, Hank is killed by a creepy pack of remorseless neo-nazis.
The market for meth is displayed against the backdrop of a parched, sun-baked southwestern desert, an endless expanse that was once home to many a fabled cowboy Western of yesteryear, but in Breaking Bad the west is an anarchic, a-moral dumping ground for drugs, trash, and corpses –a land of many dark secrets. But as with the Corleone family in The Godfather, this troubled is brought to order by old world virtues of respect and honor. Perhaps these virtues are best exemplified in the character of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), a cold and calculating rationalist, an orderly yet cautious tyrant with an occasional flair for the dramatic, whose surveillance reach is seemingly limitless. He hides in plain sight under the guise of his business Los Pollos Hermanos, and he deeply respects the bonds of family and friendship. But even Gus Fring falls prey to Walt and his fragile pride and ego.
Other notable characters in the show include Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a former Philadelphia cop who serves as head of corporate security for Gus Fring’s Los Pollos Hermanos. He is an old hand, a veteran tough guy, pre-eminent expert who is simply trying to earn a large sum of money to provide for his granddaughter. His steady-handedness stands in stark contrast to Walt’s frantic behavior. Another character of note in the show is Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), a shady, unscrupulous, crude parody of a trusted consigliere like Tom Hagen in The Godfather. Saul is a cheap lawyer who has been scraping through the gutter, defending scummy criminals, and serving as a resource for all things that “break bad.” His story is further expounded upon in another six-season prequel series entitled Better Call Saul.
While Breaking Bad runs the risk of fetishizing a morally depraved lifestyle, persistent scenes of meth-dens and junkies and overdoses remind us of just how horrid this “business” truly is. The social contagion of drug-dealing cannot simply be contained or confined to mere business activity, and comfortably relegated to a separate world. Instead, it seeps into everyone’s lives and cannot be erased. For example, at the beginning of the show, Walt’s family lives in a state of steady disarray –indeed the very foundation of his home is quite literally rotting away—and his relationship with his son and wife is distant, but once he joins the criminal underworld, everything grows much worse and everyone in his orbit either becomes a friend or an enemy. As the show comes to an end, Walt narrowly escapes to a remote cabin where he lives like the Unabomber, only to return to society in a harrowing hail of fury to ameliorate his damage. He leaves a pile of money for his children on behalf of Gretchen and Elliott, he speaks with his wife Skyler, and rescues Jesse from imprisonment by the gang of neo-nazis. In fighting monsters, Walt eventually became a monster himself –but does he die a monster?
Breaking Bad is a tragedy because it exposes a fissure between competing notions of the Good –Walt’s desire to provide for his family and live in the “pursuit of happiness” (i.e. the chance to earn the magnanimity and respect he desires), and also his plan to continue what he has accomplished, to build a legacy, and leave a meaningful inheritance for his family. But it goes without saying that Walt’s project has unleashed a torrent of ugliness upon the world. With Breaking Bad, we are reminded that tragedy allows us to indulge and purge certain dangerous instincts that are ordinarily suppressed in order to protect the order of civilization. While not always offering a simple moral lesson, tragedy can have a moral effect by allowing us to witness things that are horrifying. Using the fictive world of the imagination, tragedy shreds the thin veneer which separates civilization from savagery, or safety from barbarism. By allowing us to vicariously live through this dark fantasy, an Aristotelian catharsis only comes at the end with the death of Heisenberg. He dies not as a man groveling in tears, begging for forgiveness from his family and praying for reconciliation, but rather, as a tragic hero in the ancient sense and a villain in the modern sense, striking back at his enemies, avenging himself like Orestes or Odysseus. From the beginning, his death was always going to end this way, and while it may not be a pleasant Hollywood ending, it is nevertheless a satisfying conclusion.