"Hi, baby.
I'm your Aunt Marie."
Marie Schrader tends to get the least attention
of the four adult members of the central family in Breaking Bad,
which would not please Marie.
"Now I'm supposed to go, 'Hank, please what can I possibly do
to further benefit my spoiled, kleptomaniac, bitch sister
who somehow always manages to be the center of attention?'"
But it’s a big mistake to overlook her because Marie holds a key
to understanding the show as a whole.
As we’re watching, we start to realize
the writers use Marie to offer a secret, warped mirror of Walt himself.
"You're a thief."
"Excuse me?"
"And a liar, making stories up about yourself.
What's wrong with you?"
Through Marie, the show explores central questions of Walt’s story --
like, why do people do bad things?
And where’s that line separating selfish and spiteful from truly evil?
In Walt these questions take on a grand dramatic tone;
in Marie, they’re repeated on a smaller, more comic scale.
"Don't worry, I wouldn't hurt anybody, but it just...
it just feels good to think about it."
Thus the character unlocks a hidden commentary
that makes us re-evaluate our initial take on Walt’s journey
and sheds some light on what makes a person break bad, or stop short.
So here’s our take on why Marie Schrader is Walter White, Lite.
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And back to Marie.
Skyler and Hank are both, to some extent, Walt’s antagonists --
they’re often in clear opposition to him, either knowingly or unknowingly.
Meanwhile, Marie actually has a lot more in common
with her brother-in-law
than first meets the eye.
"I think you should do whatever you want to do."
"What?"
Comparing Walt and Marie can help us understand Walt’s motivations for breaking
bad.
If you look at the fourth episode of Season 1,
it contains a very revealing sequence of events that sheds some light
on why Walt does what he does.
Skyler tells the family about Walt’s diagnosis,
and Hank, though he means well, says the worst thing he could say to Walt.
"Whatever happens, I want you to know that I'll always take care of your family."
Hearing this, Walt feels powerless and emasculated.
Later, a guy swipes Walt’s parking spot.
"Hey!
Oh come on!"
And when Walt runs into the guy again, he sets fire to the guy’s car.
Unhappy that he can’t provide for his family --
and, more to the point,
that the world sees him as a man who can’t provide for his family
and who will just stand by as his parking spot is stolen --
Walter asserts himself.
Marie has a parallel situation an episode earlier.
First she complains that her shoes are ugly.
"These shoes make me look like I should be changing bedpans,
like I should be squeaking around bringing soup to some disgusting old person,
then take the bus home to my 16 cats."
Then she goes window-shopping, is annoyed by a rude salesperson,
"Excuse me, ma'am.
Ma'am.
You need to be wearing footies before you try those on."
"I'm extremely clean."
"Yeah, well, I'd really appreciate it."
and, on impulse, it seems, walks out of the store
wearing shoes she did not pay for.
Both Walt and Marie feel unhappy with who they are,
and more specifically with the fact that others view them in a way they don't
like.
Both act out of spite, to punish the people they think slighted them.
They begin breaking the law as an instinctive response
to feeling their egos bruised and their worth not recognized.
And as they go on,
their deeper psychological desire is very much the same, too.
Bryan Cranston once said about Walter White turning into Heisenberg:
"Personally I feel it had happened in the very first episode
when he attempted to become someone he wasn't."
So according to Cranston, Walter’s fatal flaw is wanting to
overstep the boundaries of who he is -- to become something he’s not.
Marie’s stealing is a similar overstepping --
she is very literally disregarding the boundary between “mine” and “yours.”
And Marie goes even further in trying to become someone else.
"Any children?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, a little boy."
"Oh, how old?"
"He turned 4 in May.
He’s a Gemini."
In Season 4, when her relationship with Hank is struggling,
she finds solace in a new, more elaborate ritual --
she goes house-shopping, pretending to be a different person in each house she visits,
"Tori Costner."
"Charlotte Blattner."
"So nice to meet you, Charlotte."
and stealing little trophies along the way.
Marie wants to be seen as a creative, glamorous and happily married woman,
"My husband is an illustrator, so we traveled a lot --
Paris, Italy, Denmark.
It was before the kids were in school, so it was easy to pick up and go."
while Walter wants to be seen as the great and mighty Heisenberg.
"I am the one who knocks."
Yet both are driven by the ambition to swap a dissatisfying life
for a better one, via shortcuts.
"Between his pension and the income I bring in from hand modelling,
we're, you know, comfortable."
The key psychological similarity that Walt and Marie share is
an inflated yet fragile ego.
"You were returning it?
Why would you return it?"
We’ve talked Walter’s ego at length in earlier videos.
"Bring the bottle back."
Marie has an ego that could probably compare, even if it’s not as obvious.
"When you watch this 20 years from now, I will look exactly the same as I do now.
I know it is amazing.
I have aged shockingly well, haven't I?"
Her self-centeredness manifests most often in her insensitivity
to the people she’s talking to.
"I was talking to Melinda, Hank's boss's wife.
I told you about the one with helmet hair and permanent lip liner.
Anyway, she was saying that when they were there --"
"Shhh!"
She can’t read a room to save her life.
"Yeah!
Hey!"
And one quirk that expresses Marie’s egomania is
her famous obsession with purple.
Betsy Brandt, who plays Marie, once explained that each cast member was
assigned their own distinctive color at the beginning of the show,
but that she was the one who suggested taking Marie’s love of purple
to the extreme.
She said, quote, “And they just ran with that.”
Purple is associated with royalty,
so it's fitting that the color makes Marie feel special and important.
Like a child, she equates herself with her favorite color --
surrounding herself with it is a way of remaking her world in her own image.
Of course, this is a superficial and largely imaginary pursuit --
which is more evidence that Marie is a lighter version of Walter.
He’s trying to bend the whole world to his will,
even taking and destroying lives to build his empire,
whereas Marie's crimes are largely victimless.
She indulges her egotistical whims in a more solipsistic fantasy space.
Yet the comparison between the two leads to the important observation
that what Walt’s doing is just as childish and deluded,
if far less harmless.
Marie and Walt are also both prolific liars.
"You better just back off, okay?
My husband is a DEA agent."
"I thought he was an astronaut or an illustrator.
You better get your crazy lies straight."
And they excel especially in lying to themselves.
"You’re a drug dealer."
"No, what, how--"
"The shoplifting.
You're not going to admit this, are you?"
"I can't really admit to something when I have no knowledge of what it is
that I'm admitting."
They seem to have a defensive barrier
that helps them repress what they really feel deep down.
And that self-delusion results in a lot of misdirected emotions.
When Hank is in the hospital, Marie’s anxiety over his health
surfaces as a rant about the hospital cafeteria forks.
"We're in a hospital.
Do you think that sick people aren't eating with this bacteria-infected silverware?
My God, how are you supposed to survive this death trap?"
Walt has a very similar hygiene-related obsession in the famous “Fly” episode.
"This fly is a major problem for us.
Now, we need to destroy it and every trace of it.
Failing that we're dead."
Of course, it’s not the fly Walt is really worried about;
he’s concerned over his increasingly dangerous stalemate with Gus.
But both Marie and Walt are so good at keeping themselves in denial,
that sometimes they don’t even know when they’re doing it.
"I have no idea what the hell you’re even talking about."
So the parallels between Walt’s and Marie’s psychological makeup are striking:
the dangerous ego, the lying to themselves, the impulsivity and spitefulness,
the need for recognition,
and the feeling that they’re entitled to be more than they are.
It’s no coincidence that both Marie and Walt
try to steal Holly from Skyler in Season 5.
"Give me my baby."
"Skyler, we're not leaving without her!"
"Walt, no!
Let her go!"
Both have such big egos and ability to delude themselves
that they confidently overstep boundaries others would consider sacred and untouchable.
In season one, we learn that Walt’s not the only member of his family breaking the
law --
"You know that tiara that Marie gave us?"
"Hmm."
"Well, she stole it."
The audience thus gets to feel out each of the main characters’ approaches
to morality,
and their reactions to Marie foreshadow what Walt will face
from his family in the future.
Skyler’s response to her sister’s shoplifting lets us fast forward in our minds
to the moment when she’ll inevitably find out about her husband --
and we can see it’s not going to be pretty.
"Your lies.
To me.
The shoplifting.
All of it.
Did you really think it was all just neatly gonna go away?"
"Well, if you hadn't tried to return it --"
"Apologise."
Her reaction to Marie tells us that Skyler’s morality is pretty rigidly
unbending --
this is not a woman who will rush to make excuses for her family's transgressions.
"You knew about this."
"W-We're working on it."
Meanwhile, Hank, the tough DEA agent who treats his perps like scum,
"Sit your ass down!
Comprendé?
Sientate!"
is nothing but supportive when it comes to his wife’s “issues.”
"We gotta support the shit out of her."
So we see that he has a soft spot when it comes to family --
and that will come into play later when it takes him so long
to realize the truth about Walt, even when it’s in front of his eyes.
We see that Marie’s own moral code isn’t lax or forgiving,
"Maybe you should just go ahead and die then."
except when it comes to making room for herself as an exception.
She’s outraged at the idea that Walter Jr. is,
she wrongly believes, smoking pot.
"Walter Jr."
"Yeah, what about him?"
"Marijuana -- he's smoking it."
but she shoplifts a pair of shoes immediately after this conversation.
So her behavior shows how easy it is to excuse yourself while judging others --
and that gives us a preview of exactly the kind of hypocrisy
we’re going to see later magnified in Walt.
"I am not a criminal.
No offense to any people who are."
Walter’s own reaction to Marie’s crimes is deeply revealing --
trying to justify his own behavior, he reinterprets Marie’s.
"Oh, well.
People sometimes do things for their families."
"People sometimes do things for their families?
And, what, that justifies stealing?"
This exchange is so interesting because we can see that Walt is
already using Marie’s compulsion as an opportunity to practice his skills
of rationalization --
something he will eventually turn into an art form.
"That is college tuition for Walter Jr.
And Holly."
So in the end, what separates Marie and Walt?
Why does Marie never kill anyone, poison any children,
or torture her nearest and dearest?
Surely if they are really so similar, she would have done something
worse than stealing a few knickknacks?
Well, there are three significant things that Marie doesn’t have,
which weigh greatly on Walt:
the deadline of a cancer diagnosis breathing down her neck;
the unrealized potential of wasted scientific genius;
and the pressures of society’s expectations of masculinity.
These factors separating Walt's story from Marie's
suggest to us that at least part of what leads someone down a darker path
is circumstance -- environment.
But Marie also has a very important thing that Walt doesn’t,
and that’s a consistently loving, resilient marriage.
Her truest redeeming quality is her devotion to her husband.
And maybe it’s largely thanks to his patient support
that Marie stays mostly true to her better side.
"Marie!
Do it now.
Give her back."
Marie and Hank constantly berate each other,
"I must've said Cheetos like ten times.
You need me to write it down for you?"
"No, and I don't need you to be mean about it either, Mr. Grumpy."
but they also understand each other without words
and share their own intimate language.
"If I can get the groundhog to see his shadow --"
"It's not going to happen.
I'm sorry."
"I'm betting it will, and if he does, you check out of here."
They’re an unlikely contender for the title,
but we might argue that these two make one of the the sweetest TV couples out there
--
in their own way.
"Pain is weakness leaving your body."
"Pain is my foot in your ass, Marie."
"Hey, if you can get your leg up that high, I say go for it."
There’s a chicken-or-the-egg mystery here --
is it the strength of their relationship that keeps Marie from succumbing to her bad
side,
or is it because Marie is more good than bad that their relationship stays more nurturing
than Skyler and Walter’s?
Either way, Marie gives us the answer to why most people with the potential to break
bad
don’t turn into Heisenbergs --
true connection to others keeps us tethered to our better selves.
Characters are not supposed to be real people.
They’re elements in a story --
collections of traits and motivations deliberately crafted to move the narrative
along
and illuminate its key themes.
Marie’s character is designed to double the issues we see in Walt's personality,
but in a smaller, unthreatening form.
Think of it this way --
if Heisenberg were a T-Rex, Marie would be a little, mini T-Rex.
Now, if you shrink down a big scary dinosaur to the size of a lapdog,
the fearsome creature becomes essentially harmless,
even funny and ridiculous.
"Welcome to your baby shower, Esmeralda!"
Walt wants the universe to look upon him with fear and awe --
yet this little yappy mirror of him in Marie undermines that mighty image
and forces us to wonder --
is Heisenberg’s ego trip not a little bit silly and pitiable after all?
"He was... naked, naked in a supermarket?
It wasn't Whole Foods, was it?"
In the end, this kleptomaniac radiology technician
with a penchant for purple is the “Heisenberg everywoman” --
proof that you don’t have to be exceptionally talented
or diagnosed with cancer to have Heisenbergian egomania within you.
But even if you are an unpleasant, selfish person in many ways,
it’s not a done deal that you can’t lead a good life.
If you're ever in doubt,
clinging to your bonds with the people you love
will help you stay on the right track.
"The officers spoke to the homeowners and they're not gonna press charges."
"Good, I won't either."
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