Vince Gilligan pitched Breaking Bad as a show about change.
"Chemistry is the study of matter.
But I prefer to see it as the study of change."
He promised studios he would “turn Mr. Chips into Scarface.”
Based on that it sounds like Walter’s change was from good to bad.
But let’s look at the first time Walter was violent in the very first episode.
"Having a little trouble walking?"
We feel it’s justified -- the bully was making fun of his disabled son --
but look at Walter's face.
That is the expression of a man who has just realized something about himself,
and who is strangely pleased.
So Breaking Bad raises the question --
"Some straight like you, giant stick up his ass,
all of a sudden at age what, sixty,
he's just gonna break bad?"
was Walter White really good to begin with, and if not,
what did change in him?
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In the pilot we meet a man plagued by humiliations, small and large --
one underwhelming job, another job that’s even worse, veggie bacon on his birthday.
"It smells like...band-aid."
Walt doesn’t seem to be a bad man, but he is a bit of a pushover --
he lets his brother in law make fun of him,
"You're gonna man up or you're gonna puss out?"
his boss be rude to him,
and his students disrespect him.
Taking all of this lying down can be interpreted as being good,
because he is, after all, turning the other cheek,
but this virtue is passive.
Walt is good only through inaction.
"Walt, just say a word and I'll take you on a ride-along."
"Some day."
Walt is also a very talented chemist.
He contributed to science that was awarded the Nobel prize.
The fact that he is staring at that plaque at 5 in the morning is even more revealing,
and it tells us a little something about his ego.
The ego and talent hinted in Walt become evident
the first time we see him cook meth.
In that RV, Walter is Spiderman discovering his powers.
He is a new man -- a talented, passionate, demanding genius.
"This is art!"
He discovers what’s been missing in his life --
control over his existence, the belief that
his actions can change the world --
and after, he feels he can’t go back.
"I am awake."
Walt is hooked on his new sense of agency.
If before he couldn’t stand up for himself, now he can’t stand down.
Which bring us back to Walt’s face after that first fight --
You can almost see him thinking
"Hey, finally, I am having an impact on the world.
I matter."
Walter didn’t change from good to bad, exactly.
He went from inaction to action.
"Get up, get out in the real world and you kick that bastard
as hard you can right in the teeth."
Letting Heisenberg out feels good because Walt finally got to say --
"I am the danger."
As he enters the drug trade, Walter himself becomes addicted --
not to drugs, but to having power.
"I won."
Like an addict, he comes up with far-fetched excuses
just so he can stay in the game that makes him feel so powerful.
"You and I need to cook through to next Tuesday."
"Yeah?
And why exactly is that?"
"Our methylamine.
It's going bad."
"Eleven more drug deals."
"This is my formula.
This is mine!"
And he always needs one more hit before he quits.
"One cook."
"How much is enough?
How big does this pile have to be?"
True to the motifs of the show, Walt’s change feels like a chemical reaction --
a combustible combination of great unrealized potential and wounded ego
stews in the pressure cooker of a very stressful life,
and with the catalyst of a cancer diagnosis,
all this reacts to create a deadly, unstoppable explosion of violence.
Many viewers look for the turning point when Walter White stops existing
and Heisenberg takes over.
But the truth is that Heisenberg is part of Walt all along.
"What I need is for you to climb down out of my ass."
Walter White and Heisenberg are like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In Stevenson’s famous story, Dr. Jekyll creates the evil Mr Hyde
by finding a way to temporarily restrain all of the good in himself.
It’s the same with Walt -- Heisenberg appears like a monster within him,
and Heisenberg seems to have his own consistent personality traits,
distinct from Walter's.
The two even look very different.
Bryan Cranston is phenomenal at playing this fluid, almost split-personality type,
slipping between dad to supervillain in the twitch of a jaw muscle.
The names, Walter White and Heisenberg, have underlying significance
that puts them in opposition --
Walter White was a civil rights activist in the 30’s and 40’s,
and Heisenberg was one of the leading scientists in the Nazi Nuclear Weapon Project.
Heisenberg brings certain repressed elements of Walt to the surface.
First of all, there’s his talent as a chemist.
Whenever he’s using his chemical genius, he's always in powerful, decisive Heisenberg.
"This is chemistry.
Degrees matter."
Second, his pride and ego.
When Walter feels like his dignity is somehow being hurt,
there’s a glint of Heisenberg in his eyes.
Third -- his desire for ever-more power and agency.
"I’m in the empire business."
And fourth -- his affinity for violence.
This is connected to the desire for power,
because hurting other people to get your way
is an ultimate, extreme form of agency.
Heisenberg feels joy from violence, but he also expresses joy as violence.
Like Dr. Jekyll, Walt isn’t really in control of the monster inside him.
Here Walt has just found out he is in remission.
His reflection in the mutilated cover of the dispenser
feels like a Dorian Grey moment.
That monster face is what just came out of Walt.
Sometimes Heisenberg appears at inappropriate moments
"Sir, listen --"
"No, no, no.
You listen to me.
It's time for you to listen to me."
and threatens to blow Walt’s cover.
"Sir, calm down."
"Hellfire rained down on my home!"
Anytime he loses power, he can go from mild to monster in seconds.
"Bring the bottle back."
There is not one moment when he definitively turns in Heisenberg,
just as Dr Jekyll is tortured by the duality of his personality -- as he puts it --
“Even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
"But -- although they may look the same, they don't always behave the same.
mirrored images, right?
Active, inactive.
Good, bad."
Breaking Bad scares us with the thought that being evil and not being evil
aren’t as far from each other as we imagine,
because the two are really mirror images that both exist within us.
"Run."
"I can't go to the police.
I can't stop laundering your money.
I can't keep you out of this house.
I can't even keep you out of my bed."
Walter White was refreshingly different from other powerful men onscreen in his time.
His maleness had nothing to do with sexual prowess.
From the first moment his tighty-whities made their famous appearance on screen
it's clear that Walter is no suave womanizer.
He's not a stud -- he's the quintessential dad.
"Sitting around, smoking marijuana, eating Cheetos
and masturbating do not constitute 'plans' in my book"
Fussy,
"You wouldn't apply heat to a volumetric flask."
very particular,
"There's the easy way and there's the right way, right?"
droning on about things
"I mean, does bubble gum belong anywhere near ocean spray?
No."
and just incredibly middle aged.
"I'm not the street guy, yo."
Walter’s dadness adds comic relief to balance out his descent into darkness.
Even at the height of his power as Heisenberg,
Walter is still not portrayed as alluring.
He doesn't take up with a hot younger woman to symbolize his new kingpin status.
"What?
Is he having an affair?"
"Walt?
Please."
This trope is subtly but deliberately teased in the one-on-ones he has
with the vice principal at Junior’s school.
There seems to be sexual tension, but when Walt acts on it,
"Hey!"
he’s immediately rebuffed.
Several times, after a successful deal,
Walter initiates sex with Sklyer because he’s aroused by his own power,
not because she is.
After his altercation with Tuco, he comes home and sexually assaults her.
In our visual culture, sex is often portrayed as another dimension of power --
if a man is powerful he must also exercise power over women.
"Sex is about power."
So at times Breaking Bad shows Walt acting out this idea
that our society has about powerful men and sexuality,
but it doesn’t work -- the show refused to glamorize Walter or excuse this behavior.
"I'm talking with Ted!"
At the start of the show we go along with Walter’s choices, morally speaking.
We assume that his thinking goes something like this:
a) he has, at best, a few years left to live,
b) he is the only one who can provide for his family,
c) meth dealers can make a huge amount of money in a short amount of time,
"How much money is that?"
"It's about seven hundred grand."
and d) as a phenomenal chemist, he can make excellent meth.
Thus would it not be selfish not to cook meth
and leave his family completely destitute after his death?
So Walter convinces himself that it is morally necessary to cook meth.
"What I do, I do for my family."
"I do it for my family."
"Protect your family."
"Family."
But over time, his actions grow increasingly harder to justify.
"I will not have my children living in a house where dealing drugs
and hurting people and killing people is shrugged off as 'shit happens.'"
Meanwhile, he stays remarkably committed to making up
explanations for why he does what he does.
"There are -- there are many factors at play there."
Walt will take any justification he can get his hands on,
even if it comes from someone whom he doesn’t respect at all.
"Get back on the horse and do what you do best."
As Heisenberg, Walt is very good at lying to others but he is best at lying to himself.
"You’re a drug dealer."
"No."
Heisenberg is like a devil on Walt’s shoulder,
convincing him that what he is doing is justified.
Heisenberg uses these mind games to hide from Walt,
so that he won't be pushed back down into oblivion by Walt’s conscience.
Walter’s moral philosophy is actually reminiscent of another literary classic --
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
The hero, Raskolnikov, decides to murder an old woman.
He comes up with a bunch of different reasons why he’s doing it --
for the good of his family, for the good of society,
or because fate gave him a sign.
But he eventually confesses:
I simply killed -- killed for myself, for myself alone.
Walt says almost exactly the same thing.
"I did it for me.
I was good at it."
Raskolnikov goes on to say he wanted to find out,
“Whether I was a louse like all the rest, or a man?
Would I be able to step over or not?
Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?
Am I a trembling creature or do I have a right...”
The same ideas are key to Walter’s philosophy.
"A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me?
No.
I am the one who knocks!"
So both split people into two groups:
the the trembling creatures who open the door and get shot,
and those who step over the line, who are the danger, the ones who knock.
"Get out!"
Walter was driven by a desire for power.
But at the end of it all he has nothing.
He lost his money, his family wants nothing to do with him,
his empire never came to be and his cancer is back.
But as AV Club’s Donna Bowman points out,
that Walt in the pilot didn’t know where true power lies.
It's not money, or an empire -- because those can be stolen or destroyed.
She writes: "True power lies in your name.
Your legend."
"Say my name."
"If you can make that bulletproof, then you are immortal."
"You're goddamn right."
By the time we reach the finale, the Heisenberg name is legend.
Walt is quiet, almost reserved, but Gretchen and Eliott Schwartz are scared senseless.
His name precedes him, so he can operate from the shadows.
Walt is calm because he knows he will get everything he wants, even after death --
his family will take his money even if they don’t want to,
Lydia will die and so will Jack and his crew.
On a whim Walt decides to save Jesse and so he does.
Even though his life has been stripped of every real value, his power is complete,
and so as Walter lies dying he is happy and peaceful.
Walt is never redeemed in our eyes.
"Just die!"
He doesn’t repent or feel the weight of a guilty conscience.
The only sadness he seems to feel dying is some bitter sweet nostalgia for his glory
days.
He did not made evil seem glamorous or sexy and mysterious.
So by avoiding glamour and forgiveness, even in its end,
Breaking Bad achieves what it set out to do --
show the transformation of a supremely insignificant man
into a significant but truly evil one.
"He poisoned a little kid!
Just as a move!"
The evil Walt became was like a terrible chemical reaction to the end --
it could not be stopped.
It just had to consume everything around it
until it burnt out on its own.
"It is growth then decay -- then transformation!
It is fascinating, really."
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