Macbeth of Meth

Essay / 45 Min Read /Popular Culture

Originally published in Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream

SYNOPSIS

Breaking Bad refashions Shakespearean tragedy in the contemporary world, but by undertaking a comparison between that world and the heroic one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, they exposed how ignoble modern existence has become.

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I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. --William Blake, Jerusalem

One would make a fit little boy stare if one asked him: “Would you like to become virtuous?”—but he will open his eyes wide if asked: “Would you like to become stronger than your friends?” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Vince Gilligan—the creator and showrunner of Breaking Bad—famously declared of the show’s protagonist, Walter White: “We’re going to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.”[2] This was a clever formula for peddling the show to television networks, but it mischaracterizes the story Gilligan actually told. Walter White does not begin as Mr. Chips and he does not end as Scarface (especially not the Al Pacino Scarface referred to in the series).[3] Mr. Chips is the model of a good teacher, and he would never say “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter” to a high school student, the way Walter White does in 2/7, or write “Ridiculous” on a course assignment. Meanwhile, Pacino’s Scarface gets a lot more fun out of life than Walter White ever does (he takes more pleasure in killing people, for example). In one of the many ironies of his story, Walt finds that he cannot spend his ill-gotten gains without tipping off the authorities as to his criminal activities. Even buying an expensive bottle of Champagne—Churchill’s favorite—is too dangerous for the hypercautious Walter White (4/3). Imagine Scarface fretting over a detail like that. Walt never gets to be fully Mr. Chips or fully Scarface. He is always somewhere in between, a mixture of the two, and that is what makes him so interesting as a character. Even while trying to be a decent high school teacher, he takes his frustrations out on his students, and even while achieving legendary status as a drug lord, Walt clings to a curiously bourgeois way of life, desperately trying to live in the same house and stay married to the same woman. There are no cocaine-fueled orgies in Walter White’s life. In the final season, he ends up driving a Volvo, not a Ferrari. Walt would strike Pacino’s Tony Montana as hopelessly middle-class to the very end.

Gilligan has earned the right to describe his creation any way he wants, but in order to understand Breaking Bad, we must reject his categories as too simple. Mr. Chips is a pedagogical saint and Scarface a criminal sinner, the archetype of a gangster. But Breaking Bad is not a straightforward tale of good guys versus bad guys. From beginning to end, the show is suffused with moral ambiguity.[4] The name of the company Walt co-founds is Gray Matter Technology. We learn that this name results from combining Walt’s last name with that of the other founder, Elliott Schwartz (schwartz means “black” in German). This is a clear sign that Breaking Bad does not deal in the whites and blacks of melodrama, but only in shades of gray. The greatness of the show is precisely its moral complexity, the way it constantly unnerves us with the difficult choices its characters are forced to make. That is why audience reaction to the show remained divided up through the last episode. As Walt committed more and more heinous crimes, he lost the sympathy of many viewers. But Gilligan himself was surprised by how many fans—vocal fans—continued to root for Walter White right up until the end (count me as one of them).[5] Perhaps if Gilligan had not been thinking in terms of the sharp polarity between Mr. Chips and Scarface, he would have understood why many viewers, even confronted with Walt’s criminal acts, continued to feel for him and wished that he could find some way to salvage his soul.

Almost all the characters in Breaking Bad—certainly all the principal ones—are morally ambiguous. That means that most of the characters against whom Walt commits crimes are in one way or another morally compromised themselves, sometimes as flawed in character as he is. To be sure, sometimes Walt is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of innocent people (such as the boy killed in the course of the train robbery in 5/5). But this is far different from saying that Walt is the lone monster in a world of unequivocally good characters. Breaking Bad portrays a nasty world, populated by deeply troubled people, who, unhappy themselves, inflict unhappiness on others, sometimes violently. Each in his or her own way feels frustrated, unfulfilled, and envious, and thinks that he or she has been  dealt a bad hand by fate and thus denied the American dream. As a result, in Breaking Bad, the desire to be someone other than oneself is all-pervasive. Trapped in various forms of boring, middle-class existence, the characters fantasize about more glorious ways of life. Walt’s wife, Skyler, aspires to be a successful fiction writer, and, although she fails in print, in her real life, she turns out to be capable of spinning amazing yarns about Walt (see particularly 3/9). Her sister, Marie, is a kleptomaniac, shoplifting expensive items so that she can pretend that she is richer than she really is. Later in the series, she goes on a spree of visiting houses up for sale, creating false personas for herself with the real estate agents; for example, she poses in the more glamorous role of an astronaut’s wife.

Reacting to their frustration, many of the characters in Breaking Bad create new identities for themselves, sometimes merely for the sake of becoming someone different. In the spell of the American dream of the self-made man or woman, they feel a need to re-invent themselves.[6] For example, frustrated by his miserable family life, Walt’s son, Walt, Jr., insists on being called Flynn White. Walt’s sidekick Jesse Pinkman goes by the name of  “Captain Cook” in the drug business. The shady lawyer we know as Saul Goodman turns out to be really named Jimmy McGill, and he brags that he once convinced a woman that he was Kevin Costner (3/11). Like a good American, he wishes he were a movie star. A nerdy chemist named Gale, who becomes Walt’s assistant in manufacturing crystal meth, makes karaoke videos to get into different personas (4/4) and reimagine himself as a celebrity entertainer. The mastermind behind crystal meth distribution in the Southwest, Gustavo Fring, appears in public as an upstanding citizen, the owner of a chain of fast-food restaurants and a well-respected philanthropist. Gus prides himself on his ability to “hide in plain sight” by keeping his criminal identity secret (3/8). In 5/12 Marie’s therapist sums up the basic situation in Breaking Bad: “We all lead double lives to some extent. We all have secrets.” With all the imposture going on in the series, we once again see the dark side of the American dream.

Of course the greatest example of a secret identity in Breaking Bad is Walter White himself. To most people, he is a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher, who evidently would not hurt a fly.[7] But in criminal circles, he goes by the alias “Heisenberg,” the much-feared king of meth production in the Southwest and ultimately the world. One of the best ways of understanding Breaking Bad is in terms of a classic pop culture pattern—the archetype of the superhero with a secret identity—or, if you insist, the supervillain (with today’s superhuman figures, it is in fact hard to tell the heroes from the villains). Why has the figure of Superman been so popular? Because the story of Superman appeals to a basic male fantasy, especially an adolescent male fantasy.  You are a nobody. People do not give you a second thought; above all, women do not give you a second look. If only they knew the real you. They would acknowledge your superhuman potential and worship you. If only people realized that behind the mild-mannered exterior of Clark Kent lurks the potent figure of Superman. “I am not a nobody; I am somebody”—that is what the Superman myth allows the average male to fantasize. The same logic is at work in the secret identities of other superheroes, from Batman to Captain America, from Spider Man to the Incredible Hulk. The superhero myth is a variant of the American dream of reinventing one’s identity. Evidently, inside every American is a hero just waiting to bust loose—all he needs is a phone booth and a cape, and the sky is the limit.

“We all have seen our ambitions frustrated and know what it is to dream of their being fulfilled. One of the keys to understanding the widespread appeal of Breaking Bad is that the series taps into the same psychology that fuels the popular taste for superheroes and their secret identities.”

Breaking Bad offers a contemporary variant on the traditional pop culture theme of the superhero and his secret identity.[8] Walter White even changes costume to become Heisenberg—think of the importance of his signature porkpie hat. The choice of his alter ego is perfect for Walt. We learn in the first episode that he was “crystallography project leader for photon radiology” in an important scientific project, and he was given a plaque for contributing to research that eventually was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1985 (1/1). A mere high school chemistry teacher in an obscure New Mexico school district, Walt takes the name of a Nobel Prize winning scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Viewers can empathize with that. We all have seen our ambitions frustrated and know what it is to dream of their being fulfilled. One of the keys to understanding the widespread appeal of Breaking Bad is that the series taps into the same psychology that fuels the popular taste for superheroes and their secret identities.[9] Many people harbor an inner Heisenberg, and it is cathartic to watch a character who acts out his secret fantasies. In Breaking Bad, we get to experience vicariously what it would be like to indulge our aggressive drives and our feelings of superiority—to break free for once from all the normal rules and laws that hold us in check in civil society--and let our egoistic impulses run loose. In the story of Walter White, we are fascinated even as we are appalled by the results. Sometimes we turn to popular culture, not for a realistic mirror of our ordinary existence, but for an alternative to it—something more exciting, something more dangerous, something that appeals to our hidden fantasies. Because we have entered a fictional world, we can safely explore extreme possibilities that are denied to us in our everyday lives.

The curious production history of Breaking Bad offers another way of grasping this point. When Gilligan proposed that Bryan Cranston play the role of Walter White, executives at the AMC network balked at the prospect.[10] For seven seasons, Cranston had played the hapless father Hal in the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle on the Fox television network. Cranston had proved himself to be a master of comedy in playing the part of a henpecked husband, overwhelmed by his domineering wife Lois and by his mischievous, rebellious, and resourceful sons. The AMC executives could not picture the actor who played the bumbling Hal stepping into the role of the sinister Walter White. What they did not realize is that in fact Malcolm in the Middle provided Cranston with the perfect training ground for playing the Walt we meet at the beginning of Breaking Bad. He too is threatened with emasculation at the hands of a domineering wife, and he too is placed in one embarrassing and humiliating situation after another in his daily life. Indeed, Hal and Walt share a strange habit of showing up in public in their underwear (their tighty-whities) that calls into question their masculinity and at times even their sanity.[11]

If the AMC executives had studied Malcolm in the Middle carefully, they would have found that in season 2, episode 14 (“Hal Quits”), Cranston’s character gets fed up with his boring life and decides to fulfill himself by becoming an artist. In retrospect, it looks as if Bryan Cranston discovered his inner Walter White in this episode, or rather his inner Heisenberg. It deals with Hal undergoing a midlife crisis and quitting his job, which has become meaningless to him. In his artistic endeavors, he displays the kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior we associate with Walter White, and for once he stands up to Lois and becomes the domineering one in the relationship. Season 2, episode 25 (“Flashback”) provides another example of Hal getting frustrated with his subordinate situation at home and unleashing his anger on Lois, provoking their youngest son Dewey to worry that they will get divorced.[12] Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad turn out to be mirror images of each other.

Gilligan and his team evidently realized this connection between the two series. As a supplement to the last season of Breaking Bad DVDs, they created a hilarious alternate ending to the series. With a nod to famous dream sequences in Dallas and The Newhart Show, it turns out that the whole story of Walter White was just Hal having a bad dream. Cranston wakes up in bed with Jane Kaczmarek, the actress who played Lois in Malcolm in the Middle. Back in character as Hal, Cranston whines about all the horrible things he has done and all the horrible people he has had to deal with. Meek as ever, Hal says: “The only thing that made sense in the whole business is that I still walked around in my underwear.” Forever belittling Hal, Lois tells him: “You grow a beard and suddenly you think that you’re Osama bin Laden.” Evoking Gilligan’s formula for Breaking Bad, Lois dismisses Hal: “Go to sleep, Scarface.” As the scene concludes, the camera pans to Heisenberg’s trademark hat.

This vignette is a stroke of genius; it also embodies a genuine insight into what Breaking Bad is about. If the Hal of Malcolm in the Middle had a fantasy life, he would want to become someone like Walter White/Heisenberg.[13] Not wearing the pants in his own household (sometimes literally), ridiculed by his wife, and outsmarted by his own sons, Hal would long for a situation in which he could be the boss (“You’re not the boss of me now” is the refrain of the theme song of Malcolm in the Middle). Tired of the middle-class version of the American dream in the suburbs, Hal would fantasize about breaking out of his rut and becoming somebody, somebody who matters. The Breaking Bad team got it exactly right: Malcolm and the Middle and Breaking Bad are two sides of the same coin. They both interrogate the traditional American dream of middle-class suburban life. They both portray what it is like to be trapped in a frustrating family situation; they both explore the frustrations of middle-class existence in contemporary America—especially for men—it is just that the one show treats this material comically and the other show treats it tragically.

FROM ALBUQUERQUE TO DUNSINANE

Tragedy and tragic hero are in fact the concepts we need to analyze Breaking Bad properly. As long as we think in terms of Gilligan’s Mr. Chips and Scarface, we are looking simply for good guys versus bad guys. Gilligan implies that Walter White must be either a pure hero or a pure villain, and thus we must either root for him or against him. That is the way most of the dramas on television work—they are melodramas. But there is something between the good guy in the white hat and the bad guy in the black hat—and it is the tragic hero.[14] The fact that television drama rarely attains the level of genuine tragedy means that media critics do not have the concept of the tragic hero at their fingertips. But as many have noted, in Breaking Bad Gilligan and his team have attained an almost Shakespearean level of drama. Accordingly, we have to analyze the series in terms derived from high culture, terms seldom applied to popular culture, but appropriate in this exceptional case.

“The tragic hero is a hero—he embodies some form of nobility or excellence; he does impressive things for which we can admire him; he is a somebody, not a nobody; he is the kind of person who stands up for something and makes a difference.”

The tragic hero lies somewhere between the ordinary hero and the ordinary villain, and combines elements of both.[15] That is what makes him tragic and that is what produces the complexity of audience responses, so that some will root for him, some will root against him, and some will not know how to react. The tragic hero is a hero—he embodies some form of nobility or excellence; he does impressive things for which we can admire him; he is a somebody, not a nobody; he is the kind of person who stands up for something and makes a difference. In short, the tragic hero stands out from the ordinary run of human beings. But the reason this kind of hero is tragic is that, through an unfortunate set of circumstances, something goes wrong in his life, something gets out of kilter. He makes a mistake, he oversteps the normal bounds of human life, he pushes a principle too far, he overestimates himself, he dares to break a taboo. The results appall us. The tragic hero commits a crime; he violates a sacred bond, such as that of family or nation; he disregards ordinary moral considerations; he arrogates to himself the right to break the rules and laws that normally confine human beings and provide the foundation of peaceful social co-existence. With his transgressive actions, the tragic hero poses a threat to the very fabric of society. For that, he must be condemned and punished. And yet we do not react to the tragic hero the way that we do to the ordinary criminal. He has broken a taboo but we sense that he has not done so out of ordinary villainous motives. Even in his crimes, the tragic hero seems out-of-the-ordinary. Somehow the evil he does seems to be bound up with the qualities for which we originally admired him. What makes him a good man in our eyes in the first place somehow leads him to do something we cannot help regarding as evil. And yet we still sense something of the original goodness in him, and sympathize with him in his tragic fate. Showing that on some level he really does understand the character he created, Gilligan said of Walter White: “I love the idea of a good character, a good man, doing arguably bad things for a good reason.”[16]

That is the paradox that I believe Gilligan was groping for in his formulation of Mr. Chips turning into Scarface. But tragedy is not a matter of a good man simply turning into an evil man. Tragedy involves opposites somehow being joined in one and the same figure. What is so disturbing about tragedy is that it forces us to rethink the moral categories with which we conventionally view the world. This does not mean that tragedy produces moral relativism. The great tragedies like Oedipus tyrannos and King Lear do not teach us that there is no difference between good and evil. If anything, they re-enforce our sense that good and evil do exist. What tragedy teaches us is that it is not always as easy to separate good from evil as we would like to think, and that someone who is in some sense genuinely good can nevertheless end up doing something evil, even as he is pursuing a course of action that—however mistakenly as it turns out—he had reason to think of as good.

Before analyzing Walter White as a tragic hero, let us turn to a more familiar example of tragedy, Shakespeare’s Macbeth.[17] Many will justifiably balk at speaking of Walter White as any kind of hero, “tragic” or otherwise. After all, does he not do terrible things? He lets a young woman die before his eyes when he might have saved her life; he poisons a child; he participates in a robbery that results in the death of another child. The list of his crimes goes on and on, and indeed at the foundation of his new career, he is one of the worst kind of criminals—the manufacturer of a drug that ruins the lives of thousands of people and sometimes kills them. For many, these facts place Walter White beyond the pale—he is a monster, not a human being; people frequently refer to him as a sociopath. In the hopes of getting people to suspend their moral judgment for a moment and to reconsider their evaluation of Walter White, I want to remind them that we all know a famous figure in literature who is as criminal as Walter White and yet is generally accepted as a tragic hero—Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes often commit criminal acts. Othello murders his innocent wife; Coriolanus betrays his country; Brutus assassinates his friend Julius Caesar; and so on. And yet Shakespeare creates sympathy for all these tragic heroes and we admire them even as we are deeply troubled by the results of their actions. But in Macbeth, Shakespeare really seems to be pushing the envelop and seeing how criminal he can make a character and still present him as a tragic hero.[18] If even the murderous Macbeth can be a tragic hero, we might consider whether Walter White can be regarded as one, too.

Macbeth’s rap sheet rivals Walter White’s. He murders Duncan, the legitimate king of Scotland, while he is staying at Macbeth’s castle and should, under the law of hospitality, be protected, not assassinated. To divert guilt from himself, Macbeth frames two of Duncan’s servants for the murder and then kills them too. Macbeth goes on to order the murder of his friend and war comrade Banquo, and only by luck does Banquo’s son, Fleance, escape the ambush. Just like Walter White, Macbeth becomes inured to criminal acts as his story progresses. At first Macbeth carefully debates the issue of killing Duncan, just as Walt in 1/3 runs over the pros and cons of murdering the drug dealer Krazy-8. But murder comes easier and easier to Macbeth, just as it does to Walt, and eventually he goes on a killing spree. Macbeth has an innocent woman and her children killed when his forces assault Macduff’s castle. The bloodbath Macbeth unleashes is of Walter-White proportion: “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4.135-37).[19] Ultimately Macbeth plunges the whole nation of Scotland into a brutal civil war, thus becoming a monster in the eyes of his people (5.8.25). They see him as a “butcher,” married to a “fiend-like queen” (5.9.35). In the end, the Scottish people do not regard him as a hero—they cut off his head and display it as a warning to would-be usurpers in the future.

And yet this play is called Macbeth and the titular character is its hero. How can the murderous Macbeth be regarded as a hero? In fact, Macbeth is being celebrated as a hero at the beginning of the play for his triumphs on the battlefield. King Duncan calls him a “worthy gentleman” and “noble” (1.2.24, 67), and rewards him with a new title. Macbeth is glorified specifically for an act of the utmost brutality—cleaving a man in half and decapitating him (1.2.21-23). At the end of the play, he is condemned for his aggressive violence, but at the beginning he is praised for it.[20] The difference between the two situations is of course obvious. At the beginning, Macbeth is fighting on behalf of his legitimate king; it is an entirely different matter to kill that king and illegitimately usurp the throne in Scotland. The same act—killing someone—takes on a different meaning whether it is done legally or illegally. Actions that in wartime may be laudable may be condemned in peacetime.

But is the resolution of this paradox that simple? Scotland breeds Macbeth to be a fierce warrior and encourages his ferocity on the battlefield. Can the community turn around and legitimately condemn as murder in peacetime what it celebrated as “valor” in wartime (1.2.19)? It is easy to formulate the ideal we expect from the powerful; Shakespeare does so eloquently in Measure for Measure: “O, it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant” (2.2.107-109). But it is not easy to live by this ideal in reality. In a number of his plays (Othello, Coriolanus, Richard III), Shakespeare dramatizes the problem of a soldier carrying over the aggressiveness he displays in wartime into peacetime, with disastrous results. Of course in any conventional legal or moral sense, Scotland is right to condemn the tyrant Macbeth. But does conventional morality always tell the whole story about human nature? Shakespeare seems to be going out of his way to reveal a double standard operating in Scotland. Warriors in battle are judged by a code different from the one that governs them in peacetime situations.

Macbeth is a tragedy because it exposes a deep fault-line in our ethical standards, revealing a conflict between two different conceptions of the good (the prototypical tragic situation according to Hegel). At times we celebrate aggressive impulses and admire a man for his sheer strength and power, his ability to triumph in combat over others. The greatest monument to this attitude in our culture is Homer’s portrait of Achilles in The Iliad. At other times, we assert the need to tame aggressive impulses and we brand them as evil, as the most significant impediment to achieving social order. The greatest monument to this attitude in our culture is the portrait of Jesus in the New Testament, with his un-Achillean injunction to turn the other cheek. Macbeth turns on the opposition between these two ethics, one classical, the other Christian. This opposition is reflected in the very conception of what it is to be a man in the play.[21] Duncan’s heir Malcolm urges Macduff to let his anger at Macbeth’s murdering his wife and children motivate him to rise up against the tyrant, but Macduff hesitates to do so:

            Malcolm. Dispute it like a man.

            Macduff.                                          I shall do so;

                              But I must also feel it as a man.  (4.3.219-21)

Two very different conceptions of what it is to be a man clash in this exchange. One we associate with the pagan warriors of ancient Greece and Rome—the classical idea that a man must assert himself, fight for his reputation and his rights, take vengeance on those who wrong him, and prove his valor in the most direct means possible—overcoming his enemies in combat. All of this is summed up in Malcolm’s injunction: “Dispute it like a man.” But when Macduff says that he “must also feel it as a man,” he is referring, not to the aggressive side of human nature, but to the compassionate. Part of being a human being is to feel for others, and that kind of human warmth and sympathy works against wanting to crush opponents and see them grovel in the dust. Instead, we speak of turning the other cheek, an ethical position deeply rooted in the teachings of Christianity.

To portray a tragic conflict between pagan and Christian ethics, Shakespeare sets Macbeth at a special historical moment, when a pagan warrior community has been Christianized. The geography of the play reflects the fact that Scotland is at a crossroad. To the south lies the Christian kingdom of England, ruled by the saintly Edward the Confessor. To the north lies Norway, traditional land of the Vikings, from which, at the beginning of the play, pagan hordes are invading Scotland. Macbeth is caught between civilization and barbarism, Christianity and paganism. He is aware of how Scotland has been transformed—the “humane statute” of Christianity has “purg’d the gentle weal” (3.4.75). A fierce land of pagan warriors has been tamed by the new religion of peace. Part of Macbeth accepts this transformation, but part of him rebels against it and has contempt for the way Christianity has weakened Scotland’s warriors in its attempt to pacify his country. This contempt surfaces when he is trying to enlist two men to murder Banquo, who, he tells them, has thwarted their ambitions:

                                                            Do you find

            Your patience so predominant in your nature

            That you can let this go? Are you so gospell’d,

            To pray for this good man and for his issue

            Whose heavy hand hath bow’d you to the grave,

            And beggar’d yours for ever?  (3.1.85-90)

Macbeth taunts the two men: have you been made so meek by Christianity that you will not take your just revenge on Banquo? To Macbeth’s challenge, the murderers reply simply: “We are men, my liege” (3.1.90), showing that they know that it is their manliness that has been called into question. In effect, they are saying: “We are men, not Christians.” They will embrace the old pagan conception of manliness—a man defines himself by standing up for his rights and aggressively defending them. No Christian turning the other cheek for them.

Shakespeare keeps showing that two conflicting ethical systems are abroad in the Scotland of Macbeth. People have fundamentally different conceptions of what “good” means. Lady Macduff is troubled by the fact that her moral goodness provides no defense in a world of savage warriors:

            I have done no harm. But I remember now

            I am in this earthly world--where to do harm

            Is often laudable, to do good sometime

            Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,

            Do I put up that womanly defense,

            To say I have done no harm?  (4.2.74-79)

Lady Macduff articulates the Christian rejection of the warrior’s ethic. For pagan warriors, to inflict injury on opponents is a sign of strength and thus their idea of what is good; to turn the other cheek is a sign of weakness, and thus foolish and contemptible in their eyes; “weakness” is their definition of “bad.” For Christians, the opposite is true. Goodness is forbearance and meekness, while aggressive violence is the very definition of evil. Note that Lady Macduff thinks of her Christian morality as a form of womanliness, the opposite of the pagan conception of manliness as martial virtue.

Paradoxically, Lady Macbeth becomes the champion of this kind of manliness. She worries that her husband is too Christian to do what he has to do to become king; he “is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (1.5.17). Thus, as Macbeth later does with the murderers, Lady Macbeth challenges her husband’s manhood to his face, accusing him of being a “coward” if he does not seize the opportunity to kill Duncan: “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valor / As thou art in desire?” (1.7.39-41). Used to being celebrated as a valiant warrior, Macbeth rejects her doubts about his manliness: “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none” (1.7.46-47). Lady Macbeth is relentless:

            When you durst do it, then you were a man;

            And to be more than what you were, you would

            Be so much more the man.  (1.7.49-51)

As in the dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff, we see that the question: “What is it to be a man?” is at the heart of Macbeth, and two different answers—the pagan and the Christian—run throughout the play and are in tragic tension. Macbeth is tormented by doubts about his manliness. When Lady Macbeth ridicules his fear of Banquo’s ghost—“Are you a man?”, “What? quite unmann’d in folly?” (3.4.57, 72), Macbeth insists upon his manly courage: “What man dare, I dare” (3.4.98).

Macbeth’s tragic dilemma is that he is torn between two conflicting ethics, and cannot be a pure pagan or a pure Christian. He is a great warrior and has been lionized for his implacable cruelty on the battlefield. His wife keeps insisting that he live up to the warrior’s code and display the courage of a true man, fighting for his status in Scotland. At the same time, Macbeth is aware of the teachings of Christianity and the appeal of the virtue of meekness. That is why he hesitates at first to kill Duncan:

                                                Besides, this Duncan

            Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

            So clear in his great office, that his virtues

            Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d against

            The deep damnation of his taking off;

            And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

            Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin hors’d

            Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

            Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

            That tears shall drown the wind.  (1.7.16-25)

Macbeth may be a fierce pagan warrior, but notice how richly articulated his Christian imagination is in this passage. His poetry shows that he appreciates the Christian virtues of meekness and pity; he can feel them in his blood. Tragically for him, Macbeth has a Christian soul in his pagan warrior’s body.

Macbeth is a tragic figure because of this complexity in his character. He is tragically torn between antithetical conceptions of the good. He feels the pull of the pagan past, and the warrior virtues are celebrated in his country and held up to him as an ideal, above all by his wife, who questions his manhood if he does not pursue his ambition aggressively. At the same time, he feels the pull of Christianity, and the virtue of meekness is also held in high regard in his country. That is why, when he commits his crimes, he cannot do so with a good conscience. He is horrified by his own deeds, haunted before and after them by frightening images he himself produces of their criminality. Macbeth is not the simple “butcher” Malcolm accuses him of being. He is something far more complex, and that complexity maintains our sympathy for him and complicates our response to him, leaving us not knowing how to judge him. He does commit brutal crimes. But at first the Christian in him resists these deeds, and even when he plunges into a life of crime, he is haunted by what he has done. If Macbeth were not torn in opposite directions, his life would be much simpler. If he were fully a Christian, he would never commit the crimes he does. If he were fully a pagan, he would not be so tormented by his deeds and would proceed without hesitation. But the Macbeth Shakespeare creates is torn between two conceptions of what it is to be a man and that makes him a truly tragic figure.

TRAGEDY VERSUS MELODRAMA

In real life, we feel it necessary to condemn people who become tyrants like Macbeth, and take sides against them. But in the fictional world of drama, we have the luxury of temporarily suspending moral judgment and trying to understand and appreciate the inner complexity of a tragic hero like Macbeth. Macbeth has many admirable qualities and is respected for them initially in Scotland. He is a brave warrior and at first serves as a much-needed bulwark against the threat of domestic rebels and foreign barbarians in his country. The life of a warrior has made cruelty come easy to him, but he is not simply cruel. His imagination keeps confronting him with powerful images of the horror of cruelty, and as the plot progresses, he comes to understand that his ambition has led him to ruin his life and destroy everything that he once valued. We never see him enjoy being a tyrant. Because he is in fact sensitive to moral considerations, he is punished for his crimes internally by his conscience long before he suffers external punishment. We may at first be tempted to think that he and his wife are the only villains in Scotland. Yet Shakespeare reveals, not a black-and-white polarity in Scotland, but a continuous spectrum from good to evil, embracing many shades of gray in between. Is Banquo simply a morally good man? In fact, Shakespeare shows that Banquo, much like Macbeth, is gripped by ambition, and he cannot help thinking about the predictions the witches made about his sons’ ending up as kings (3.1.3-10). Like Macbeth, Banquo has trouble sleeping (2.1.6-9). He becomes an accessory after the fact to the murder of Duncan. He fails to reveal what he knows about the witches’ prophecies, despite the fact that he suspects that Macbeth had a role in Duncan’s death (3.1.1-3). In a cat-and-mouse game with Macbeth, Banquo in effect makes a deal to keep quiet about what he knows in return for future aid from Macbeth for his own ambitions (2.1.20-29).

Macduff also does not provide a purely good antithesis to Macbeth’s pure evil. In his eagerness to fight Macbeth, Macduff abandons his wife and children, with fatal results for them. His own wife accuses him of cruelty—“He wants the natural touch” (4.2.9)—and reproaches him for not caring about his own family. Macduff’s treatment of his wife and children arouses Malcolm’s suspicions. He worries about allying with a man who would betray his own family:

            Why in that rawness left you wife and child,

            Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,

            Without leave-taking?  (4.3.26-28)

Shakespeare does not portray a Scotland in which Macbeth is the only cruel and ambitious male. The country is filled with them. From the beginning, rebellious thanes pose a serious threat to the meek Duncan’s rule. One gets the sense that if any other thane had received a prophecy that he would be king, he might have acted just as Macbeth did. At the end, Ross, one of the thanes who triumphs over Macbeth, enunciates the same conception of manliness that induced Macbeth to murder Duncan in the first place. Ross is telling Siward, one of the English generals, about the death of his son in battle:

            Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt.

            He only liv’d but till he was a man,

            The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d

            In the unshrinking station where he fought,

            But like a man he died.  (5.9.5-9)

When Siward affirms the nobility of his son’s death and even calls him “God’s soldier” (5.9.13), we see that—contrary to being uniquely evil—Macbeth lives by the same manly ethic that prevails on both sides of the political conflict in Scotland.[22]

Macbeth is a great tragedy—and not a melodrama—precisely because of the moral complexities and ambiguities it portrays. True tragedy does not provide us with simple moral lessons, such as “pride goes before a fall.” Unlike melodrama, which simply appeals to our conventional moral beliefs and reaffirms them, tragedy is unsettling; it disturbs us and unnerves us by revealing that our ordinary moral categories do not necessarily or adequately cover the full range of human possibilities. The fundamental tragic aspect of life that Shakespeare points to is the perplexing fact that all forms of human excellence are not compatible with each other. In particular, moral excellence may be in tension with other forms of excellence. Not all goods are moral goods.[23] Our moral categories are so important in our daily lives that we would like to think that they are universally and unequivocally applicable in all circumstances, that all judgments are moral judgments. But as reassuring as that belief may be, it is simply not true. When I seek out a plumber, I am not looking for a morally good plumber: I want someone to fix my sink. I would not want him to cheat me (at least not too much), but fundamentally I am concerned about his skill as a plumber. Similarly, aesthetic judgment is not the same as moral judgment. In evaluating a work of art, I invoke something other than moral categories, especially with regard to its formal properties. And from cases like Caravaggio and Richard Wagner, we know that a morally dubious person can create great works of art. In extreme cases, our moral judgment may ultimately override our aesthetic judgment, but they are still separate forms of judgment, which is why they can come into conflict with each other.

Understandably, we do not like to think about the problematic character of the human condition that Shakespeare exposes in his tragedies. We keep making the same mistake over and over—we think that people we admire for entirely non-moral reasons—for example, our athletes and our entertainers—will be admirable in moral terms as well. But why should someone who happens to have a great voice be especially moral in his or her daily life? We say earnestly that our idols in sports and entertainment should provide good role models to our youth, and we should be thankful that they often live up to that responsibility. But sometimes people who become famous for non-moral reasons are corrupted by that very fame and start behaving immorally. Sometimes, as in the case of athletes, people are admired for traits—such as aggressiveness—that work against their behaving morally in their daily lives. The desire to have our heroes perfect in every respect—including morally—is an untragic view of life. It is premised on the questionable belief that all our values are perfectly compatible and never need to come into conflict with each other. Those who offer conventional moral interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays miss the point of tragedy, which is to show that our ordinary moral categories, as important as they may be, do not explain the whole of human life and may interfere with our understanding of other forms of human excellence.

I realize that many will reject my interpretation of Macbeth, and others will say that, if it is correct, then so much the worse for Shakespeare. They will insist that no matter what Shakespeare may have thought, Macbeth is an evil man and nothing else, and certainly no kind of hero.[24] Our moral judgments are so important in our daily lives that it is difficult ever to suspend them, even if someone says: “It’s just a play; lighten up.” We are used to watching plays and applauding heroes and hissing villains. That is why melodrama is one of the most popular forms of entertainment and dominates television, while genuine tragedy is so rare. In daily life, we may have to take sides, but the unreality of drama (however realistic it may seem) allows us to look at both sides of an issue and give each its due. Shakespearean tragedy gives us a glimpse into the depths of characters and the ways that opposing values may clash in extraordinary individuals. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are dangerous figures, not because they threaten us in real life but because they challenge some of our most cherished assumptions. In a curious way, tragic heroes are like our modern superheroes. In the safe space of the imagination, they get to act out our fantasies of behaving transgressively. They thus allow us to explore vicariously the darker realms of human possibility. That is why tragedy is cathartic. In the imaginary world of the theater, tragedy allows us to indulge and perhaps purge dangerous impulses that we normally have to suppress to live peacefully in everyday society. That is how tragedy can have a moral effect without being moralistic.

I hope that these considerations can serve to open up fresh perspectives on Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan is no William Shakespeare. I would be the first to grant that Macbeth is a greater work of art than Breaking Bad. But still, I believe that Gilligan and his team are dealing with genuinely tragic material in the series and probably have come as close to Shakespeare’s level as any show in television history. I want to turn now to analyzing Breaking Bad, bearing in mind what we have learned from Macbeth. At a minimum, I hope that we can come away from Macbeth with the understanding that we can be fascinated by the case of an ostensibly good character who goes on to commit evil. Even though we may lose our sympathy for him as he plunges deeper and deeper into a life of crime, we can still feel for his humanity, if only because we see how tormented he is by his own realization of the horror of what he has done. This is, I believe, a good characterization of our reaction to Macbeth and it is also a good characterization of our reaction to Walter White. Only on these grounds can we explain the fact that puzzled Vince Gilligan—that a substantial portion of his audience continued to sympathize with and even to root for his Scarface. As the history of great literature has repeatedly demonstrated, the most interesting characters are not necessarily—or perhaps even typically--the most moral.[25] What great writers can do is precisely to show us that—on closer inspection—people who commit evil deeds may not be the monsters we at first think they are.[26] There may be no more gripping spectacle than a character with great potential for good who nevertheless turns to evil, or in Gilligan’s terms, “breaks bad.” Like Macbeth, Walter White is caught between antithetical ways of life, which draw him in opposite directions. We will see several ways in which Macbeth can illuminate Breaking Bad. In particular, we will see that the issue of manliness, so central to Shakespeare’s play, resurfaces in Breaking Bad in a form we now call “masculinity,” and it is an equally if not more problematic force in the contemporary world.[27]

PURSUING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Breaking Bad is the story of a man who fails to achieve the American dream in two of the versions that we have been following in this book. He fails to create a happy home for himself and his family, and he fails in his entrepreneurial attempt to go into business for himself. When we meet him in the first episode, Walter White is slogging away at domestic life and might even seem to have achieved something of the American dream in one traditional sense. He is intelligent and well-educated, and works in the respectable if unglamorous profession of high school teaching.[28] He has a home in the suburbs with two cars and one child (with a second, we soon learn, on the way). He has a small circle of relatives and friends who care about him. Many would envy his circumstances. But the more we learn about Walt, even in just the first episode, we see that his apparent suburban happiness is an illusion. He eventually discovers that the foundation of his home is literally rotting away.

As for Walt’s job, it is a source of frustration for him, rather than of pride. Most of his students treat him with indifference and sometimes contempt. They do not appreciate his remarkable knowledge of chemistry. All they want to know from him is: “Is this going to be on the midterm?” (1/2). That is why Walt never comes close to Mr. Chips status. Like many people overqualified for their jobs, he takes his frustration out on his students, speaking to them condescendingly and sarcastically, and he repays their contempt for him with nasty comments on their papers and exams.[29] A particular source of Walt’s frustration is the fact that, because he is a high school teacher, he is not paid well, certainly not as well as his qualifications as a chemist would warrant (we learn in 2/3 that Walt makes $43,700 a year). To make ends meet, he is forced to take a second job even further below his dignity—in a car wash, where he is exposed to the humiliation of having to take guff from his crude boss and to behave obsequiously to some of his students, when they show up as customers and take advantage of the role reversal.

Compounding Walt’s frustration is the additional fact that, as we gradually learn, he could have been a very rich man. The high tech company he co-founded has since gone public and reached a $2.16 billion capitalization. But for reasons that are never made fully clear in the series, Walt allowed himself to be bought out early in the history of Gray Matter Technology for a mere $5000.[30] Evidently Walt let personal feelings interfere with his business judgment and, in a fit of pique, he missed out on the biggest financial opportunity of his life. Walt tells Gretchen Schwartz in 2/6: “My hard work, my research—you and Elliott made millions off it.” It is not just the loss of money that bothers Walt. By his early exit from Gray Matter, he lost his chance to share in what has come to be one of the highest forms of glory in contemporary America—the new American dream is to become a star in the high-tech world. As Walt explains to a psychiatrist in 2/3: “I have watched all my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable.”[31]

Breaking Bad thus exposes another fault line in the American dream. Financial success has always been one of its components, but the path to that success has been defined differently. Is it a matter of “a penny saved is a penny earned” or “strike it rich”? The standard middle-class vision of accumulating wealth gradually by means of hard work, steady saving, and prudent investment has always been at odds with the grander dream of making the one big killing in a business venture or hitting the jackpot in some form of gambling. Some of the most enduring images of the American dream have taken the form of quick paths to vast wealth—the California Gold Rush, the Wall Street bull market, or the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley. Some versions of the American dream focus on security and seek to avoid any form of risk-taking, while other versions embrace risk-taking as the only route to a big pay-off. Walt’s failure to succeed in business is never fully explained, but from what we see of his character, one element of it was probably a failure of nerve. He did not have enough faith in himself or his business plan, and settled for an early buyout, leaving Elliott and Gretchen Schwartz to take the risks and reap the rewards of true entrepreneurship. Both financial versions of the American dream escape Walt. He cannot use a middle-class job to make the money patiently that he needs to support his family. But when he gets his one chance to strike it rich in one heroic enterprise, he gets cold feet and misses the opportunity to join the ranks of high-tech billionaires.

Having failed in financial terms, Walt falls back on his family for fulfillment—but he still does not find it. He has a loving relationship with his son, Walt Jr., and it would be wrong to say that his son is a disappointment to him. But Walt Jr. is unfortunately afflicted with cerebral palsy and his physical limitations mean that the two do not get to share certain experiences that are usually thought of as basic to the father-son bond. Walt will never get to cheer on Walt, Jr., at an athletic event, for example. Walt’s relationship with his wife Skyler is also less than ideal. They love each other, but right from the beginning we sense a staleness in their marriage. They have settled into comfortable day-to-day routines, while all the passion, especially the sexual passion, seems to be drained from their lives. And we soon begin to wonder who wears the pants in the White household.[32]  Skyler is a master of passive-aggressive behavior and knows how to manipulate Walt to get what she wants out of him.[33] She can be condescending to Walt, and generally does more to tear down his ego than to build it up. At one particularly bitter moment, Walt says to Skyler: “You never believed in me. You were never grateful for anything I did for this family” (5/14). Walt’s relatives, especially his brother-in-law Hank—a gruff DEA agent—also fail to treat him with the respect he thinks he deserves. A would-be alpha male, Hank is always calling Walt’s manhood into question.

Walt’s comfortable though stultifying existence is shattered by a diagnosis of lung cancer. This development sparks the existential crisis that gets the plot rolling in Breaking Bad. Walt is forced to face the fact of his own mortality, which reveals to him the meaningless of the life he has been leading. Has he accomplished anything in his life? What will be his legacy? In particular, will he be able to leave any money to his family? Breaking Bad is solidly grounded in the financial plight of its hero. The show mirrors the difficult financial circumstances of the American middle class during the Obama years. The series is not making a political statement and certainly not a partisan statement. But it does a remarkable job of portraying how hollow the economic “recovery” after the 2008 financial crisis seemed to be to a large portion of the American population, who felt that they had lost all chances to achieve the American dream.[34] There are several references in the show to the weakness of the economy. In explaining in 2/6 why Elliott and Gretchen cannot help him financially, Walt tells Skyler: “The economy’s in the toilet, we all know that. All those big banks. Fannie Mae.” In 2/11, Skyler’s boss Ted says the same thing: “The economy’s in the toilet. China’s undercutting us at every turn.”

Many of the economic problems that have emerged as political issues in recent years are evident in Breaking Bad. We see the development of an underclass that resorts to drugs out of the despair of poverty. We see the impact of globalization—specifically multinational corporations—on ordinary people’s lives. Something sinister that happens in Germany or the Czech Republic has an impact on what happens in Albuquerque. In the midst of all the depressing economic trends, high tech entrepreneurs like the owners of Gray Matter prosper beyond their wildest dreams, thus exacerbating the tensions between the haves and the have-nots and leaving Walt bitter about the economic system. Even the politically contentious issue of the Mexican border surfaces in Breaking Bad. Walt’s conflict with the Mexican drug cartel puts him in great danger, an extreme example of how various forms of foreign competition have been threatening the American worker.

But the issue that truly marks Breaking Bad as the signature television series of the Obama years is health insurance.[35] In retrospect, there is something supremely appropriate in the fact that a show that ran from 2008 to 2013 really put to the test the principle: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” As the series opens, Walt is already having financial troubles paying Walt Jr.’s medical bills—hence his second job—and his cancer diagnosis is all the more troubling because his medical insurance will not cover the treatments he will need. Later in the series, Hank ends up in a wheelchair as a result of a gun battle, and he and his wife must fret over the fact that his government medical plan does not cover the kind of intensive physical therapy he wants (which may be the only way for him to walk again, at least quickly). It is remarkable how much of the drama in Breaking Bad turns on the quintessentially middle-class issue of the inadequacy of one’s health insurance. Marie speaks for early 21st-century America when she says in 5/3 of Hank: ‘’God knows where we’d be if we’d had to go through his health plan.” The only organization in the series that has excellent health insurance is Gray Matter (1/5), thereby exacerbating the gap between the 1% and the 99%.

Thus Walter White is initiated into a life of crime out of financial considerations. Afraid that he will leave his family bankrupted by his medical bills, he would like to find a way to cover his hospital expenses and also to bequeath his family a substantial sum that would make them comfortable for life, and, in particular, pay for Walt Jr.’s medical treatment and also for both his children’s educations. This initial obsession with the bottom line is very middle-class, not the sort of thing we associate with Scarface (who probably never worried about his medical coverage with the cocaine cartel). When Walt discovers the street value of crystal meth, he thinks that he has found a shortcut to accumulating large amounts of money. He can put his skills as a chemist to good use, synthesizing drugs to supply a lucrative market. Walt claims that he turns to crime for the sake of his family, to provide for his wife and children. His motives turn out to be much more complex, but in any overall judgment of his character, it is worth bearing in mind that, in the beginning, his motives were relatively innocent. He knows that what he will be doing is illegal, but he naively believes that he will be able to confine his activities to a laboratory, simply synthesizing chemicals just the way he does for his high school classes and leaving to other people the sordid and dangerous business of actually selling the drugs. Walt has no idea what drug dealing really involves and does not foresee the web of violent crime into which he is being drawn. It is fair to say that the Walter White of Season 1 has no idea that by Season 5 he will be involved in robbing a train and killing an innocent boy.

It is the genius of Breaking Bad that it comes up with a scenario that makes it plausible that a decent man like Walt would turn to meth manufacture, and we can sympathize with him because his family’s good seems at first to be his only motive. He has spent his whole life on the right side of the law, unacquainted with criminals; in 1/6 Hank tells him: “You wouldn’t know a criminal if he checked you for a hernia.” It is precisely Walt’s innocence, his unfamiliarity with crime, that makes him believe that he can dip into criminal activity and not have to change his way of life fundamentally. At first he believes that drug dealers can be dealt with rationally; he says of Jesse’s drug distributor: “He’s a business man; it would therefore seem to follow that he’s capable of acting out of mutual self-interest” (1/2). But events move swiftly in the criminal world, and Walt’s education in how different it is to be on the wrong side of the law begins almost immediately. Already in the first episode, he finds himself having to kill people to protect his own life. Because he is dealing with hardened criminals, Walt can frame his actions as self-defense, but it should be a clear sign to him that he has gone down the wrong path. He learns that actions have consequences, and that manufacturing crystal meth cannot be a mere sideline to supplement his income. At many points in the series, Walt tries to renounce his criminal activities, but for one reason or another—chiefly involving his fear and greed—he is drawn back in. He can say at many points that he is forced to commit crimes because he is dealing with criminals, but it was his choice to become involved in the criminal world in the first place. And as happens with Michael Corleone in the Godfather films, Walt’s excuse that he is doing everything for his family begins to wear thin, especially when it becomes clear that he is actually harming his family, rather than helping it.

As the series progresses, it becomes evident that Walt’s motives go well beyond the good of his family. He takes pride in his new job—he is determined to manufacture the finest crystal meth in the world. In 3/4 he insists: “I am not going to lend my name to an inferior product.” It is no mean feat to be able to produce crystal meth of almost 100% purity (99.1% according to Hank in 1/4), and knowledgeable people in the drug trade appreciate the quality of the product Walt synthesizes as Heisenberg, not to mention its beautiful blue color. If there were a Nobel Prize for synthesizing crystal meth, Walter White would be on a plane to Stockholm to collect it. He is convinced that all his life he has been wasting his talent on cheap demonstrations for bored high school students. Now he is finally accomplishing something. The purity of his meth makes it safer to use and also gives it a bigger kick.[36] In the great tradition of the American entrepreneur, Walt is offering the public a superior product, and he thus beats out all his competition and is rewarded in the marketplace. Many people try to equal Walt’s achievement as a chemist—Jesse, Gale, Todd, to name a few—but no one manages to do so. When he temporarily refuses to continue making meth, Saul Goodman says in 3/2: “Talent like that and he flushes it down the toilet. It’s like Michelangelo won’t paint.” Walt can truly say that he is the world’s greatest crystal meth manufacturer, and that gives him a kind of fulfillment that his career as a high school teacher never came close to equaling. As he says in 5/7: “Being the best at something is a very rare thing.”

“I AM THE DANGER”

Walt’s preeminence as an illegal drug manufacturer is surely a case where a human excellence is not a moral excellence. To its credit, unlike many movies and television shows, Breaking Bad does not glamorize the drug trade. In the story of Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s former student and sometime “lab assistant,” the show portrays the damage meth addiction can do to a decent young man, who once had a promising future. The episode called “Peekaboo” (2/6) with its grim and gruesome portrayal of a grotesque meth-head family, offers perhaps the most powerful anti-drug commercial ever created.[37] In contrast to what happens with cocaine use in De Palma’s Scarface, Breaking Bad never presents meth use as enjoyable. That is one of the many reasons why Walter White never really becomes Scarface. The typical gangster movie tells the story of its protagonist’s rise as well as his fall. We get to see Tony Montana at the top of his game, enjoying the fruits of his crimes, in orgies of sex and drugs.[38] Walt should be so lucky. His life as a criminal has a downward trajectory from the beginning. He is always working frantically and like a dog to meet his production quotas on time, and he never gets to take any pleasure from all the money he has earned. It becomes a literal burden to him when $11 million of it in cash ends up in a single barrel, which he must painstakingly roll across the desert, like the Sisyphus of the Southwest (5/14). Still, Walt does take pride in his work and finally has the satisfaction of being good at something, indeed the best. I would not say that we can unequivocally admire Heisenberg, but we can see why Walt cultivates his secret identity. His life was so devoid of accomplishment that we can understand why he seizes the opportunity to stand out in any way in the world.

But Walt’s motives for a life of crime go even deeper, to the point where he gradually learns to embrace his inner criminal. The Walter White we meet at the beginning of the series is a hopeless and hapless nobody. Although he is intellectually superior to almost anyone he meets, he lets everyone push him around—his wife, his brother-in-law, his boss at the car wash, his students. It is a sad spectacle and makes us sympathize with Walt. He deserves better. The fundamental problem is that Walt is a coward. He will not stand up for himself and his rights. It is more a mental form of cowardice than a physical. The setbacks he has suffered over the years have made him lose faith in himself and he is too ready to compromise, to make due with second- or third-best in life. He is just about the last person we would think is capable of succeeding as a criminal. If he cannot stand up to a car wash owner, how is he going to handle a vicious drug lord?

And indeed Walt does seem at times grotesquely out of his element in the criminal world. He and Jesse come across as the Three Stooges Minus Curly in some of their early bumbling efforts to execute their nefarious schemes (see especially 1/7).[39] Confronted with killers like Krazy-8 and Tuco, Walt is understandably overwhelmed with fear. From our first impressions of him, it is hard to believe that he would survive even a few days in the world of Krazy-8 and Tuco, let alone be able to deal with a criminal mastermind like Gus Fring and the entire Mexican drug cartel. And yet for all Walt’s inadequacies, he eventually triumphs over his criminal opponents, including Gus, and he is able to keep the law enforcement officers out to get him at bay as well. It is partially Walt’s intelligence that allows him to outfox his enemies on both sides of the law. Once again one of his excellences comes to his aid, as he thinks up ingenious schemes to defeat or neutralize the people who threaten him. There is more to Walter White than we thought—more to Walter White than he himself thought. This seemingly pathetic pushover comes to surprise us with his resilience, resourcefulness, and sheer strength of character. He becomes a force to reckon with.[40] He not only outfoxes his opponents; he also outfaces them. Beginning as the mild-mannered Walter White, he becomes the implacable Heisenberg, who can transfix the most threatening criminals with an icy stare, not to mention a dash of fulminate of mercury.

This is Walt’s real “achievement” in Breaking Bad and the way he can be said to become a “hero.” I know that many would insist that this is the way that Walt becomes a villain, but there is one sense in which we can legitimately speak of Walt as a hero.[41] Once he becomes Heisenberg, he is no longer a coward. His transformation is about as magical as that of Clark Kent into Superman. A man who lets himself be bullied by the ordinary people around him learns to stand up to some genuinely dangerous criminals. He takes satisfaction in that. Walt’s original turn to crime was purely instrumental. He surely was not seeking out a criminal way of life; he was just looking for a way to make a lot of money quickly. If anything, he regarded having to deal with criminals as the downside of his newly chosen profession. But gradually Walt comes to enjoy life among hardened criminals for its own sake. He enjoys the challenge, the competition, the chance to prove himself against other men. He takes pride in outsmarting them and outmaneuvering them. Walt comes to relish the pure act of transgression, of breaking the law to demonstrate his superior status, to show that he is above the law. Walt has built up many frustrations with society over the years; it has not given him the rewards he deserves, and it has denied him the American dream. His life as a criminal allows him to strike back against the conventional world that has held him back for decades from making a name for himself.

Walt’s cancer plays a crucial role in his transformation into a would-be superman. At the beginning of the story, he is not afraid of dying; he is simply not thinking about dying at all. That is why he is wasting his life; he has no sense of urgency about making something of himself. But when Walt thinks that he is going to die—and not just in some vague, far-off future, but on a fast-approaching date—he is energized to leave a legacy behind. The threat of death paradoxically brings him to life. Moreover, knowing that he may be about to die liberates him from many of his normal fears. If he risks his life, he is thinking that he does not have that much time to live anyway. As Walt says in 2/8: “I have spent my whole life frightened of things that could happen, might happen, might not happen. . . . Ever since my diagnosis, I sleep just fine. I came to realize that fear—that’s the worst of it, that’s the real enemy.”

Walt takes pride in his skill as a drug manufacturer, but he takes even greater pride in becoming master in the dangerous world of the drug trade. He responds to the many challenges he faces and does not back down from a fight. All his conflicts are highly personal—mano a mano, as several of his bitterest enemies would say. His great moment of recognition comes in 4/6, when Skyler is worried about all the threats to his life. In perhaps the most famous lines in the series, Walt responds to Skyler’s concern: “You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger! A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think of me? No. I am the one who knocks!” This from a man who at the beginning of the series was afraid just to handle a gun, provoking Hank to say: “That’s why they have men.” Now instead of being the man who cowers in fear, Walt is the cause of fear in others.[42] Ultimately he proudly proclaims his superiority: “I’m the man who killed Gus Fring” (5/7).

“I am the danger! . . . I am the one who knocks!”—that is the contemporary equivalent of the traditional tragic hero’s assertion of his greatness. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes often die with a moment of self-affirmation on their lips, as witness Coriolanus:

            If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there

            That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

            Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles.

            Alone I did it.  (5.6.113-16)

Walt has finally become a man in the sense of manliness we saw in Macbeth (“Dispute it like a man”). In the last episode (5/16), Walt is finally willing to admit that everything he did was not for the sake of his family but for himself, for his own ego. In another moment of tragic recognition, he confesses to Skyler to clear the air: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was . . . really—I was alive.”[43] The middle-class Walter White we see at the beginning of the series has to think of everything as instrumental. If he is manufacturing drugs, it must be to get money for his family. By the end of the series, Walt realizes that what he really wanted was to become a certain kind of man, a man who can stand tall in any company, a man who makes a difference. He was good at being a drug lord, and it made him for the first time feel alive. He has finally become the star of his story, no longer a bit player in his own life. When his family originally pressured Walt to seek treatment for his cancer in 1/5, he balked at having the decision made for him by others: “Sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own choices. . . . My entire life—it just seems I never . . . had a real say about any of it.” As Heisenberg, Walt finally takes charge of his life. He is no longer the passive man to whom things happen; he is the active man who makes things happen.[44]

Walt comes to think of himself not in middle-class terms but on the model of great heroic figures out of the past. In the fifth season, he says to Jesse: “You asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I’m in the empire business.” The idea of Walter White as the Napoleon of crime may be a stretch, but he can plausibly compare himself to the contemporary emperors of finance, the high tech entrepreneurs of companies like Gray Matter. One of the reasons that Walt takes such satisfaction in his criminal career is that he looks upon himself as building a successful business. When he was young, he failed to take advantage of the entrepreneurial opportunity offered by Gray Matter. But as a drug kingpin, he hoped that he could rival Elliott Schwartz. Again, it is not so much the money that matters to Walt; it is what it represents. He pursues the American dream: owning his own business. Above all, he wants to be his own boss. He cannot stand having to work for someone else, including a drug lord like Gus.[45] In 4/6 he takes a special satisfaction in buying out the car wash he used to work at, and reversing roles with the humbled ex-owner Bogdan, who has to admit: “So you’re the boss now.” In 5/6, Walt says proudly to Skyler: “Finally we’re self-sufficient. And no one to answer to.” He thinks that he has achieved his goal. He glories in what he actually accomplishes—by dint of his skill and hard work, and triumphing over all his competitors, he builds a business empire whose revenue would justify a NASDAQ listing (4/6). His business is of course illegal, but, as we saw with the criminal empire of the Corleones, developing it still requires many of the virtues that lead to success in any business.[46] Using technical business terms like distribution, infrastructure, high margin product, and risk/reward ratio, Walt often sounds like a conventional businessman, for example, when he tells Jesse in 2/7: “We’re not charging enough. Corner the market, then raise the price. It’s simple economics.” Walt is a criminal but he is not a run-of-the-mill criminal, not a petty thief. He is Heisenberg and, as he shows in the episode “Say My Name” (5/7), that is a name to conjure with. Whatever else may be said for or against him, Walter White is impressive as a criminal, displaying several forms of human excellence that would redound to his credit in more conventional—and legal—endeavors.

JUDGING A MAN BY THE COMPANY HE KEEPS

Is Walter White a tragic hero? Someone who rejects this idea cannot simply point to the number of murders for which he is responsible. Hamlet—sweet, gentle Hamlet—is a tragic hero, and yet he is directly responsible for the deaths of Claudius (his uncle), Polonius (his almost father-in-law), Laertes (his almost brother-in-law), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (his college classmates), and he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of Ophelia (his beloved) and Gertrude (his mother). Walt has more in common with Shakespeare’s tragic heroes than his murder record. Like them, Walt has many admirable qualities—his intelligence, his resourcefulness, his perseverance, his indefatigability, and his courage. He puts his virtues in the service of illegal and immoral causes, but that means that his evil deeds are bound up with his best qualities.[47] Contemplating his fate, we are confronted with the fundamental experience of tragedy—the sense of tragic waste, the disturbing insight that qualities we admire in people can be put to the wrong use. We want to say: “If only Walter White had put his virtues to good use!” In 4/5 Hank expresses just these sentiments with regard to Gale, when, finding him murdered, Hank thinks that he was Heisenberg: “He was a genius, plain and simple. If he had applied that big brain of his to something good, who knows how he could have helped humanity, or something like that? I mean, how many actual geniuses are there in this world? If he’d taken his life in a different direction, who knows?” Walt is so upset to hear Gale praised for what he himself accomplished that he tells Hank: “This genius of yours, maybe he’s still out there.” Hank was ready to close the case, and Walt might have been safe. But his pride overcomes his prudence (with the help of a little alcohol), and he goads Hank into continuing the search for Heisenberg. Walt values his reputation over his safety. His tragic fate is that only a diagnosis of cancer awakens him from his apathy, and a life of crime seems to him to be his only option for striking it rich quickly and obtaining the status he covets.

In evaluating Walt, we need to compare him to the other characters in the series. Breaking Bad does not offer us an ideal world, filled with good people, among whom Walter White stands out as the epitome of evil. By comparison with many of the criminals he associates with, Walt comes across as a halfway decent human being. If you are looking for a psychotic killer, try Tuco Salamanca, or for a sociopath, consider Gus Fring.[48] Walt does not relish killing people the way Tuco does, and he never displays the cold-bloodedness of Gus. To see murder treated as a calculated business decision, we have to look at the way Gus kills Victor in 4/1. There is a steeliness in Gus’s eyes at this moment that is truly chilling. People often say of sociopaths that one stares into their eyes and sees nothing—a total blank.[49] This is true of Gus, but it is not true of Walt. Many say that Walt’s worst moment comes when he watches Jesse’s girlfriend Jane die as she chokes on her own vomit during a heroin-induced stupor.[50] Just look at Walt’s eyes during this scene and try to maintain that he is a sociopath. Of all Bryan Cranston’s Emmy-award winning acting in Breaking Bad, perhaps his greatest accomplishment is what he does with just his eyes alone in this scene to convey a sense of the inner torment Walt is going through as he watches Jane die. In his autobiography, Cranston revealed that he forced himself to think of his own daughter during this scene in order to nail the depth of Walt’s feelings.[51] What Walt does in this scene is morally wrong, but he does not do it cold-bloodedly and without remorse; indeed this moment haunts him for the rest of his life, leading him, for example, to want to confess to Jesse what he did.

In several situations, Walt hesitates before murdering someone and he has second thoughts about many of the crimes he commits. Like Macbeth, Walt never fully embraces evil as his good; to the bitter end, he remains conscious of the distinction between good and evil. To be sure, he constantly comes up with explanations and excuses for the evil he does, but he would not feel the need to defend his actions if he were not aware that they appear to be morally wrong. True sociopaths do not show regret or remorse or offer excuses for their crimes; they just do them.  Walt, by contrast, feels uncomfortable with many of the criminals he has to work with, and he is wracked by remorse. He could say along with Lady Macbeth: “Nought’s had, all’s spent, / Where our desire is got without content” (3.2.4-5) or along with Macbeth: “To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself” (2.2.70). It takes the poetry of Shakespeare to capture the despairing mood of Walter White in the frozen wilderness of New Hampshire in season 5:

            I have liv’d long enough: my way of life

            Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf,

            And that which should accompany old age,

            As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

            I must not look to have.  (5.3.22-26)

With the words “tomorrow. . . tomorrow,” Breaking Bad actually quotes Macbeth in 5/15, calling attention to the most famous speech in the play, which could well serve as a motto for Walter White’s story:

            To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow

            Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

            To the last syllable of recorded time;

            And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

            The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

            Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

            That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

            And then is heard no more. It is a tale

            Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

            Signifying nothing.  (5.5.19-28)

It is a tribute to the quality of Breaking Bad and to the depth of Walter White as a character that it does not seem incongruous to quote these words of Macbeth in connection with him.[52]

Even the supposedly virtuous characters in Breaking Bad are not so perfectly good that they make Walt look like evil incarnate. Walt can certainly be criticized for his actions, but so can many of the people he harms. Viewers and commentators become very sentimental about Jane Margolis, but she is after all a heroin addict and she seduces Jesse into trying heroin too. She has no compunctions about blackmailing Walt to get money to buy more drugs (2/12). For all of these failings, she does not deserve to die, but she is not exactly a paragon of virtue. Walt’s main antagonist among the “good guys” is Hank, and he if anybody should stand for law and order in the show. But Hank proves willing to break the law in pursuit of his personal goals and vendettas, and he himself admits that he was wrong to beat Jesse as savagely as he does in 3/7 (when he takes all his pent-up frustrations out on the young man). In 3/7 Hank says: “What I did to Pinkman—that’s not how I’m supposed to be, that’s not me.” And he admits further: “I’m not the man I thought I was.” Moreover, Hank is a braggart and a blowhard. It would be wrong to set him up as a pure hero as opposed to Walt as villain.[53] In many ways, Walt is a better human being than Hank.[54] At the beginning of the series, Hank puffs himself up as courageous in opposition to the cowardly Walt, but their roles are reversed as the story develops. When the would-be cowboy Hank gets a glimpse of the real Wild West in El Paso, he ends up with a bad case of PTSD. Walt starts out looking cowardly but turns out to be courageous; Hank starts out looking courageous but turns out to be cowardly.[55]

One of the common criticisms of Walt is that he becomes a liar. But just about everybody in Breaking Bad lies, almost routinely, including Hank. He will not admit that his assignment in El Paso scared the daylights out of him. His wife Marie is a pathological liar. Gus’s whole life is a lie, and, as we have seen, living a double life is epidemic in the series. The person who is most offended by Walt’s lies and by the double life he is leading is Skyler. But she lies as frequently as Walt does and literally becomes his partner in crime. Like Banquo, she shows that a seemingly innocent character may be tempted by the fruits of crime when confronted with the option. Skyler has an affair behind Walt’s back and becomes heavily involved in laundering the money he makes in the drug business. Her machinations almost get her boss Ted killed when she is trying to avoid having Walt’s criminal career exposed. As Shakespeare does in Macbeth, Gilligan and his team avoid a sharp polarity of good and evil characters in Breaking Bad. They could easily have stacked the deck against Walt by making characters such as Skyler and Hank more attractive than they are. As it is, the show presents us with a spectrum, in which very few characters are all the way over on the side of good, and most exist in the vast gray area between pure good and pure evil. Walt is not the most evil character in Breaking Bad. If he strikes us as a morally ambiguous figure, the reason is that he lives in a world rife with moral ambiguities.[56]

IN QUEST OF A TRAGIC ENDING

The consequences of Walt’s decision to become Heisenberg are horrific—even for himself—but one can understand why he is tempted to make that choice. The original Walter White is a milquetoast, not much more of a man than the Hal of Malcolm in the Middle. In his all-around helplessness, he is pitiful and pathetic. He gets the idea of becoming a criminal when Hank takes him along on a drug bust with the injunction: “Get a little excitement in your life” (1/1). Walt desperately wants to be more of a man, even at the risk of exposing himself to high levels of danger. In that respect, the choice between the original Walter White and Walt/Heisenberg is a variant of the fundamental tragic choice. It goes all the way back to the Iliad and Achilles’s choice. He can live to an old age but only in ignoble obscurity or he can die young but achieve immortal fame for his noble actions. Walt’s cancer diagnosis in effect forces a modern variant of Achilles’s choice upon him. He can continue to eke out his safe life as a prudent, middle-class man, or he can choose to break out of this rut and make something of himself.[57] Tragic heroes do not do the safe thing. They take chances; they are daring; they do not follow the ordinary rules. In one way or the other, this is true of all of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, from Romeo and Juliet to Antony and Cleopatra, from King Lear to Othello, from Macbeth to Coriolanus. If Romeo and Juliet were prudent, they would find partners more acceptable to their parents, enjoy a big wedding in Verona (though not to each other), collect the gifts, and settle down to a long, comfortable, and boring life as husband and wife. But then nobody would ever have heard of them. They would sink into the anonymity of all the happily married couples in Italy. Instead, Romeo and Juliet throw caution to the winds; they refuse to compromise with society’s demands; and they sacrifice their lives for each other, rather than accept a long-lasting but tepid love. Instead, they achieve everlasting glory as the noble archetype of two lovers. Their love burns brilliantly but briefly, as Juliet understands: “It is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden, / Too like the lightning, which does cease to be / Ere one can say it lightens” (2.2.118-20).

What makes a character tragic is that he or she stands for something out of the ordinary, however imprudent that may be. Nietzsche’s “live dangerously” is the motto of tragedy.[58] Fortunately for the peace and survival of society, in real life most of us are unwilling to make such tragic choices. But tragedy appeals to us precisely because it allows us to experience vicariously and therefore safely what we cannot afford to do in our daily lives. Tragedy thereby expands our sense of human possibility, even as it reminds us why we ordinary people normally choose to live within a narrower range of practical options.

For most of his life, Walter White played by the rules, and look where it landed him. He accepted failure and wasted his potential. As Heisenberg, he finally tries to be somebody, and even though he ultimately fails in his goals—and chooses the wrong goals in the first place—at least he makes a name for himself and reveals his long hidden potential. He is defeated in the end, but he goes down fighting; he could say, along with Macbeth, “Blow wind, come wrack! / At least we’ll die with harness on our back” (5.5.50-51). That helps to explain why many viewers continued to side with Walter White and rooted for him to the end—not to succeed as a criminal but to die with dignity, like a tragic hero.[59]

And Walter White does die with dignity—Gilligan and his team made sure of that. As the Breaking Bad episodes began to count down to the finale, I started to worry about how it would all end. It was clear that Walt was going to have to die but the question was: how? I could imagine several scenarios. Gilligan and his team could have had Walt go postal. He is compared to the Unabomber in the last episode (and looks like him). As a frustrated intellectual, Walt, like Ted Kaczynski, could have directed his hostility against the System at random targets or at society at large. He could have set off bombs in downtown Albuquerque (in fact he evokes that possibility as a way to keep the police preoccupied and off his trail).[60] As a terrorist, a Timothy McVeigh type, Walt would have left a truly tainted legacy. Or one can imagine an ending to the story in which Walt would have lost everything that mattered to him. Skyler, Walt Jr., and his little daughter Holly might have been killed in the crossfire of a gun battle with the police. That would have left Walt a complete and utter failure (perhaps to the satisfaction of some of his moral critics).

What I feared most was a sentimental ending to Walt’s story. He would die, but before that he would be reconciled with Skyler and Walt, Jr., tearfully reunited with his family, confessing his crimes, and begging for—and receiving—their forgiveness. Walt would renounce Heisenberg and return to his inner nerd. For me, that would have meant that Walt re-embraced his mediocrity and repudiated everything that had made him heroic. All these endings were possible, and from what I know about the way Gilligan and his team work, I am sure that they considered all of these and more.[61] By what they chose to reject and what they chose to use as the ending of the series, they revealed what they really thought about the Walter White character. In the process, they crafted what I regard as the perfect conclusion to Breaking Bad and a truly tragic ending.[62]

In “Felina” (5-16), Walt’s violent impulses are still at work, but they are controlled and carefully targeted. He does not kill indiscriminately. In one of his clever technological schemes, he manages to take vengeance on the last of his enemies, gunning down the neo-Nazi gang with whom he got entangled (and who robbed him). In this case, his murders seem to be an act of justice.[63] He shows his decency by making sure to save Jesse’s life and pointing him the way to freedom. Although Walt is not reunited with his family, in an earlier episode (5/14) he found a clever way to clear Skyler of all criminal charges, and, drawing once again on his cunning, he comes up with a scheme to intimidate Elliott and Gretchen Schwartz so that he knows that they will deliver $9,720,000 to his children when they come of age (5/16). Some of his ill-gotten gains will go to the good of his family after all. As it turns out, in shooting his last enemies, Walt fatally wounds himself. Like several of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Walt in effect commits suicide. He does not have to suffer the humiliation of police arrest and a long trial in front of a hostile and uncomprehending public. He dies in the only place where he feels at home—in a chemical laboratory—and where he came closest to achieving fulfillment.[64]

This is not a happy ending to Walt’s story, but it is, I believe, a truly satisfying one. I breathed a sigh of relief as the last episode unfolded and I saw that Gilligan and his team had found a way for Walt to die that would not diminish him in our eyes, but that would in fact bring out some of his best qualities, including his resourcefulness and his genuine love for his family—and, above all, his willingness to take responsibility for all the harm he had done, just the way a tragic hero would.[65] I have faulted Vince Gilligan for analyzing his creation in terms of Mr. Chips and Scarface. Gilligan is not the best interpreter of his own work, perhaps because he does not have the concept of the tragic hero at his disposal.[66] But Gilligan the artist is far greater than Gilligan the commentator. As an author, Gilligan knows instinctively how to create a tragic hero and above all he proved that he knows how a tragic hero dies. Several great television series have disappointed us with their final episode (The Sopranos is a case in point). But “Felina” is one of the greatest of all Breaking Bad episodes. Nothing reveals the tragic status of a hero as much as his death does, and Walter White dies like a tragic hero. As with any tragic hero, Walt’s defeat is at the same time a triumph over his enemies and his own baser instincts and reminds us why we admire him.[67] In its portrayal of Walter White’s death, Breaking Bad maintains the Shakespearean level of its drama to the very end.[68]

CRIPPLED MASCULINITY

Having done my best to make a case for Walter White as a tragic hero, I can understand why many people would feel dissatisfied with my argument. There still seems to be something wrong with treating Walter White as a hero, tragic or otherwise. He displays certain virtues, but they are in the service of illegal and immoral activities. Is there anything genuinely noble about what he does? His main goal is making money, and his triumphs, such as they are, come over low-life types—mainly other criminals. Aristotle insists that the tragic hero be well-born and his actions must have a “certain magnitude.”[69] His conception of tragedy is aristocratic in nature, and Shakespeare seems to fulfill the ancient Greek criteria by choosing only kings and queens, princes and princesses, great generals and people of high rank as his tragic figures. What happens to them affects a whole kingdom, or, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, an entire civic community. As for Macbeth, he begins the play fighting bravely and nobly for his country. Manliness seems more admirable when it takes the form of public spiritedness and serves the common good. The tragic hero devotes himself to a cause, but can it be just any cause and not specifically a noble one?

This is one reason why it has become more difficult to set genuine tragedies in the modern, democratic world, where people’s activities are generally confined to private life and lack the magnitude Aristotle expects of tragic action. Traditional forms of nobility are hard to find in a democracy, a form of government that fundamentally rejects the principle of aristocracy. Titles of nobility are in fact explicitly outlawed in the United States Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8). Our American superheroes are democracy’s answer to the aristocratic heroes of the past, who, like Achilles, were born to nobility, if not semi-divinity. By contrast, the superhero is typically an ordinary person who acquires a superpower only by virtue of an accident that could have happened to anyone—a stray blast of nuclear radiation, for example. In accordance with democratic principles, the American superhero is elevated to heroic status, not by noble birth, but by something arbitrary—as if by lottery. That is why it is appropriate that Walter White/Heisenberg is a variant of the superhero myth. In a democracy, the heroic figure should be hidden in and spring out of an ordinary citizen.

Still, that emergence takes time, and Walter White starts off small and cuts an unimpressive figure initially. He and Jesse begin as smalltime crooks, and in early episodes their behavior seems comic rather than tragic. Very little beyond the petty cash flow seems to be at stake in their initial drug deals. Breaking Bad does its best to elevate Walter White and give some gravitas to his story. He is of course not an aristocrat by birth, but he is a scientist, one of the new forms of aristocracy the modern world has produced (if you win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, you get to hobnob with Swedish royalty). As Walt’s drug trade expands, his activities take on a certain magnitude. He ceases to be a petty criminal and becomes a drug lord, a drug kingpin.[70] The metaphors we commonly use to describe drug dealers lend a certain aristocratic aura to their activities. When Walt’s meth manufacturing begins pulling in $80 million a year, we can start to talk of “serious money,” and, as we have seen, he speaks of himself as building an empire and compares himself to another form of aristocracy in the contemporary world—the high tech entrepreneur. As the plot progresses, Walt’s actions begin to have national and even international repercussions. By the fifth season, his story generates headlines in the national media. Does this allow us finally to speak of him as a tragic hero, the Macbeth of Meth?

I confess that even I have my doubts about this and have trouble applying the word noble to Walter White. He is confined to a rather shabby world, with few if any outlets for what is traditionally viewed as heroism. Walt does not get to use his talents in the service of his country; he never thinks in terms of public service; he never goes to war, for example. The only form of war in Breaking Bad is the War on Drugs, and it is presented as a rather shabby business, with the DEA—especially Hank—disregarding the law, pursuing self-aggrandizing agendas, and often descending to the level of the criminals it is fighting. Can we really speak of any form of genuine nobility in Breaking Bad?

The absence of outlets for traditional heroism in the world of Breaking Bad may be the deepest theme of the series. If Walter White is heroic, his heroism seems to be twisted, bent out of shape, almost beyond the point of recognition. Breaking Bad is about the distorting and deforming of heroism in the contemporary world. The old heroic impulses are still present—the pride, the masculine aggressiveness, the drive to distinguish oneself, the overpowering urge to compete, especially against other males. But in the world Gilligan and his team have created, heroic impulses seem to go awry. They are unable to find healthy means of expressing themselves. In particular, what we discussed as the problem of manliness in Macbeth appears as the problem of masculinity in Breaking Bad, specifically what is now called “toxic masculinity.” In a world in which masculinity is widely regarded as toxic, it becomes difficult for masculinity to develop properly and find the right outlets. Indeed, at its core Breaking Bad is a story of crippled masculinity—a motif that provides one of the central and pervasive symbols in the series.[71]

Walter White is crippled by his cancer. It lands him in a hospital bed and a debilitating regimen of chemotherapy. His loss of hair is symbolic of a loss of masculinity. He worries that as his disease progresses, he will become an object of pity to his family. Walt Jr. is crippled by cerebral palsy. In a misguided effort to protect his sense of his masculinity, Hank attributes Walt Jr.’s need for crutches to a football injury, and needlessly brags on his behalf: “He’s got an arm like a howitzer” (1/2). Hank only succeeds in reminding Walt, Jr. of what is missing from his teenage years, the chance to prove himself a man on an athletic field that most adolescent boys covet. For a good part of a season, Hank himself ends up crippled, in a wheelchair. Caught in a shootout with assassins from the Mexican cartel, Hank is paralyzed from the waist down, raising the dreaded specter of sexual impotence. Hank’s sense of himself as a man is undermined by his confinement to a wheelchair and his inability to take care of himself in daily tasks. His injury infantilizes him, as he allows his wife to nurse him and he retreats into the childish world of his mineralogy hobby. Finally, Breaking Bad is haunted by the ominous figure of Hector “Tío” Salamanca, a former drug lord crippled by a stroke and condemned to life in a wheelchair. Once a potent figure in the drug world, Don Hector is reduced to a shell of his former self and must watch impotently as Gus Fring destroys his family one by one. Only through the help of Walter White is Hector able to weaponize his wheelchair, turning his weakness into strength, and finally achieving his revenge on Gus, the opponent whose masculinity he questions by referring to him contemptuously as “chicken man.”

These pervasive images of crippled men in Breaking Bad are telling us something—the world of the series is not a healthy one for males. Masculinity is not allowed to develop properly and, even once developed, it tends to be deformed, prevented from full flourishing. We should sense that something is wrong when we realize that the most masculine men in Breaking Bad seem to be the criminals. We are troubled to see the traditional manly virtues perverted into criminal forms. Aggressive males like Tuco have hair-trigger responses to any threat or challenge to their authority, and they are likely to resort to violence at the slightest provocation. The Mexican and Mexican-American drug dealers are involved in an ongoing blood feud, which leads to mounting violence among men anxious to prove their masculinity. There is an ethnic dimension to this development in the show. With their origins south of the border, the drug dealers are generally portrayed as having what has traditionally been regarded as Latin tempers.[72] They are obsessed with appearing macho and are unwilling to back down from a fight.

Like the mafia in the Godfather films, the Mexican drug cartel seems an atavism, a holdover from an earlier era, more primitive than modern America. The Mexicans are, for example, more religious than their American counterparts. Religion does not appear to be an important factor in the lives of Walter White and his family and friends. But the assassins who come up from Mexico to kill Walt first make a pilgrimage to a makeshift shrine to seek a blessing on their efforts in what seems like an archaic ceremony (3/1, 3/7). The Salamanca cousins seem to be a throwback to a more violent, less lawful past, when men settled their disputes on their own. They are displaced in genre. With their fancy boots, they seem to be stepping right out of an old-style Western and into a modern American suburb, where we would expect law and order to prevail. What might have been acceptable—and even heroic—on the legendary streets of Laredo seems both out-of-place and deeply threatening in a suburb of contemporary Albuquerque. The more archaic the characters in Breaking Bad seem and the more they embody traditional forms of masculinity, the more they seem dangerous and criminal. Masculinity is stigmatized as machismo in the series; it is presented as a force that is both foreign to and outdated in contemporary America.[73]

BORDERLANDS

Breaking Bad thus turns on the same kind of historical and geographic contrasts as do the Godfather films and Macbeth. Albuquerque is presented as a borderland, poised between civilization and barbarism, between the present and the past. All the John Ford cinematography in Breaking Bad gives a Western feel to the series.[74] The drug trade and its gang warfare, together with the War on Drugs, have returned New Mexico to the Wild West, complete with feuds, gunfights, and vigilante justice. Albuquerque appears to be poised perilously on the boundary of civilization, surrounded by a hostile nature that cares nothing for human life.[75] And the border between Mexico and the United States functions the way the border between Scotland and England does in Macbeth, dividing barbarism from civilization. Mexico is the home of vicious drug cartels, run by quasi-feudal lords, whose henchmen turn to bizarre religious rituals to carry out their criminal tasks. Albuquerque is the home of middle-class American suburban life, dotted with malls, car washes, law offices, and clinics.[76] El Paso is the place where these two worlds intersect, and going there is like a journey into the primitive past, into a Conradian heart of darkness. In 2/8 Hal says: “It’s like Apocalypse Now there. Colonel Kurtz holed up in his jungle.”

Like Macbeth, Walt is positioned between two different worlds, which embody antithetical codes of conduct and which pull him in opposite directions. Walt comes from suburban America, where, as the story begins, he is leading a perfectly ordinary middle-class existence, absorbed in the typical bourgeois concerns of making a living and supporting his family—entirely legal and respectable activities, if a little dull. Through a strange sequence of events, Walt is suddenly exposed to a world of criminals who operate outside the law and make vast fortunes doing so. Walt is alternately attracted to and repelled by this criminal world. From this point on, he can never feel completely at home in either the middle-class world or the criminal. If he were simply loyal to his middle-class origins, Walt would not have embarked on a life of crime in the first place. If he could fully go over to the criminal world—if he truly became Scarface—Walt would become much crueler but his life would also become much simpler. If it were not for the persistence of his middle-class moral scruples, he would, for example, have no problem with having Jesse or Hank killed, thereby eliminating many of his difficulties. In 3/12 Gus Fring’s fixer, Mike Ehrmantraut, cautions Walt against half-measures. In fact, Walt’s divided nature means that he lives a life of half-measures. For all his involvement in the drug trade, Walt views the criminal world as something foreign to him, something to be held at arm’s length, never fully to be embraced.

Once again, it is important to stress that Walt never really becomes Scarface. He remains too middle-class for that. As much as he is drawn to a life of crime, Walt is never able to glory in it the way Scarface does (unlike, for example, the original Scarface, Al Capone, Walt never gets the prestige of being identified as Public Enemy #1). Walt is too cautious as a criminal ever to enjoy fully being one. Although Walt thrives on the danger of his criminal life, he comes across, like Hyman Roth in The Godfather II, as a curiously bourgeois gangster. He becomes obsessed with that most middle-class of concerns—security, and, as the witches say in Macbeth “security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy” (3.5.32-33). If Walt were willing to live with the level of danger that is normally part of being a criminal, he would paradoxically be much more at ease. Instead, his perfectionism and his rational scientific worldview lead him to demand perfect security for himself. He wants to control all events and guarantee exactly the outcomes he desires. Ironically, Walt’s Heisenberg will not accept the Uncertainty Principle.[77] To eliminate all possible threats to his safety, he has to forestall attacks from everyone he deals with, and that forces him to initiate pre-emptive strikes against all potential enemies, a mission that leads him into an endless cycle of violence that comes back to haunt him and condemns him to a life of perpetual anxiety.[78]

One could sum up Walt’s problem by quoting Macbeth: “To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus” (3.1.47-48). Achilles would never put such an emphasis on his safety. He glories in his willingness to risk his life, and scorns any concern with mere survival. Macbeth originally shares Achilles’ form of heroism. At the beginning of the play, he is described as “disdaining Fortune” (1.2.17) and he is willing to take his chances on the battlefield, as any brave hero would. But the witches introduce Macbeth to the idea of a providential order, in which his success is foreordained and thus assured. With their riddling prophecies, they convince Macbeth that he is invincible and invulnerable. In his quest for absolute security, he believes that he must anticipate all threats and eliminate all possible opponents. He is thus drawn, like Walter White, into a sequence of murders that eventually rebounds upon him and destroys him. Like Walt, Macbeth can never leave well enough alone. He is seeking a form of perfect security that no human being can ever achieve.

Macbeth is at heart a pagan warrior but one who paradoxically brings a Christian concern for the “eternal jewel” of his soul (3.1.67) to his criminal deeds, and thus he becomes even crueler in his attempt to control his fate. Similarly, when Walter White becomes a criminal, he brings along his middle-class concern for security and ends up trying to wipe all his enemies off the face of the earth. The ultimate toxic brew in Breaking Bad is a cocktail of middle-class anxiety mixed with would-be heroic criminal impulses. As in the Godfather films, the ethnic criminals in Breaking Bad come across as old-fashioned and out-of-place in contemporary middle-class America. But they are to some extent restrained by their antiquated sense of honor. They are destroyed in Breaking Bad by the forces of modernity—a new kind of criminal enterprise, bound up with and perhaps indistinguishable from multinational corporations like Madrigal. In some respects, Walt is more criminal than any of the Salamanca clan because he goes about his crimes with middle-class efficiency. In a world in which masculinity is viewed as alien and outmoded, all his aggressive impulses, which might have been channeled into noble activities, are diverted and distorted into crime. 

Even the traditional masculine ideal of professionalism gets perverted in Breaking Bad. Gus Fring and Mike Ehrmantraut are ruthless murderers, especially Gus, but, unlike the many bumbling characters in Breaking Bad (including at times Walt and Jesse), at least Gus and Mike can be counted on to get the job done.[79] In a world filled with slackers, especially among the younger generation, we are forced to have a certain admiration for the characters who are not always waiting around for a free lunch. Beginning with its portrait of an American high school, Breaking Bad develops a very negative view of today’s youth and its unjustified sense of entitlement. Characters like Jesse want to enjoy the American dream; they just do not want to have to do anything difficult to achieve it. Whatever else may be said against them, Gus and Mike do not think the world owes them a living. Mike is Gus’s “cleaner.”[80] If a crime scene needs to be scrubbed to baffle the police, Mike is Gus’s go-to-guy (also Saul Goodman’s). Gus’s professionalism is frightening. When he slits Victor’s throat, he acts as if it is just another day at the office for him; he finally tells the stunned bystanders: “Well, get back to work” (4/1). But one has to be impressed by his ability to keep his cool, even in the most difficult circumstances, culminating in his final moment, when, with half his face blown off by Walt’s bomb, he pauses to adjust his tie just before collapsing dead on the spot. Gus is evil, but the way he dresses, the way he maintains his calm demeanor, the way he never allows personal issues to cloud his business judgment—in all these respects, he is the epitome of professionalism.

Mike is a more attractive character than Gus, and in his own way even likable. In the Breaking Bad prequel, Better Call Saul, we hear more about Mike’s origins and back story and learn that he is a basically decent human being who has been drawn into the criminal world as a result of corruption in the Philadelphia police department and the death of his son.[81] Moreover, unlike Walt, Mike really is involved in crime for the sake of providing money for his family, in his case his widowed daughter and his granddaughter. Mike’s forthrightness and gruff honesty are admirable qualities, and make us sympathize with him. He is given an especially poignant death scene. It is very tempting to look at Mike Ehrmantraut and say: “This is a man.” He is at least the sort of person one knows one can rely on. It is part of the overall tragic effect of Breaking Bad that Mike, perhaps its most manly character, is drawn into the criminal world for want of a more suitable outlet for his masculine virtues.

One might think that masculinity would be portrayed more positively among the “good guys” in Breaking Bad, the DEA and other law enforcement officials. After all, their masculine virtues ought to be in the noble service of the law.[82] There is a kind of male camaraderie among Hank and his fellow DEA officers, and they do rally to each other’s aid in times of need. In that respect, they fit the standard pop culture model of cops on the buddy system. But in Breaking Bad, a dark side can be observed in the male bonding of its forces of law and order. The DEA officers in Albuquerque and even moreso those in El Paso behave like adolescent males in a pissing contest. They are highly competitive, and are always trying to outshine each other. They are visibly in contention for promotions, transfers, and other professional rewards. They tease and make fun of each other in ways that do not contribute to the success of their missions. In particular, they take delight in questioning each other’s masculinity. In a typical moment, Hanks says to his partner Steve: “I didn’t know you had balls” (5/10).

Hank is the worst of all the “good guys” in these respects. As we gradually learn, he is deeply insecure about his masculinity and overcompensates by constantly playing the glad-handing, “hail fellow well met” role. He is also continually bragging and showing off, both at home and at the office. He is the most obnoxious character in the series. His overconfidence and misplaced belief in his masculine virtues lead him to get in over his head in a dangerous border assignment in El Paso. When confronted with a spectacular example of the Mexican cartel’s brutality—the head of an informant named Tortuga appropriately mounted on a tortoise’s back—Hank shows his inexperience and weakness by promptly throwing up. The hardened DEA agents tease Hank mercilessly for his cowardice: “What’s the matter, Schrader? You act like you never saw a severed human head on a tortoise before?” (2/7). They are killed when it turns out that the giant turtle conceals a bomb, and that explosion shatters what remains of Hank’s self-confidence as a man. The agents of law and order in Breaking Bad mirror the criminals in the way that their masculinity puts them at odds with each other and at times interferes with their getting their job done properly.[83] Hank especially is a loose cannon, letting his personal feelings, above all, his professional frustrations, cloud his judgment as a law officer and lead him into highly unprofessional actions, such as beating up Jesse (3.7).

Hank’s position as a representative of the law is further compromised by his own flirtations with illegality. We learn in 1/7 that he likes to smoke Cuban cigars, which at the time were banned in the United States. Defending himself in a conversation with Walt, Hank explains (sounding very much like a drug addict): “Yeah, well, sometimes forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest.” This answer provokes Walt into raising the issue we saw explored in the Godfather films in Chapter Three—whether something is outlawed because it is objectively wrong, or regarded as wrong only because it is outlawed by the government. Walt obviously has a stake in this debate and presses the point: “What’s legal—what’s illegal. Cuban cigars, alcohol [pointing to the whiskey bottle]. You know if we were drinking this in 1930, you’d be breaking the law. Another year, you’d be okay. Huh, who knows what will be legal next year?” Hank wants to know if Walt has pot, cocaine, or heroin in mind, but he claims only to be making a general point: “I’m just saying it’s arbitrary.”  As we saw in the Godfather films, the inconsistency with which governments ban various substances weakens their claim to be upholding anything other than their own arbitrary decrees.

The Godfather films have an easier time questioning the validity of Prohibition. Alcohol is widely consumed in the United States and accepted in polite society. Besides, by now, Prohibition is ancient history in America.[84] But the crystal meth epidemic is still making headlines today. The last thing Breaking Bad wanted to do was to mount a defense of the meth trade. Aside from the one moment when Gale offers his libertarian defense of his meth making activities, the show is generally quiet on the subject and does not suggest at all that meth-making is a victimless crime (indeed it makes a point of showing some of the victims). In fact, in 1/7 Hank thinks that the case of meth will clinch his argument against Walt’s claims about the arbitrariness of the government’s making certain substances illegal and not others: “Sometimes there is stuff that is legal that shouldn’t be. I mean friggin’ meth used to be legal. Used to sell it over every counter in every pharmacy in America. Thank God they came to their senses on that one, huh?” Most Americans would agree with Hank on this point, and yet he has raised an inconvenient fact: at one time meth was perfectly legal in the United States and widely prescribed by legitimate doctors.[85]

Thus even Breaking Bad raises some doubts about whether the government can claim the moral high ground when it comes to the meth issue. But the show never goes as far as the Godfather films in portraying government power in a negative light. There is no officer of the law in Breaking Bad who is as corrupt as Captain McCluskey in The Godfather I or a political figure as reprehensible as Senator Geary in The Godfather II. The forces of law and order in Breaking Bad may at times be incompetent or overzealous, or otherwise fail to measure up to the highest standards of professionalism. But generally the law officers are honest and devoted to duty. Yet Breaking Bad still does not feature a figure of the stature of Eliot Ness (even though Hank is treated like him by his colleagues in 2/3 after his successful drug bust). By the standards of a traditional TV cop show, Hank and his colleagues are not sterling representatives of their profession; they are not the Untouchables. Far from seeming noble, they often come across as petty, mainly concerned with stroking their own egos. They have a good deal of masculine aggressiveness, but they do not consistently and reliably channel it into noble forms of public service. The impression that something is wrong with masculinity in the world of Breaking Bad is not erased by the behavior of the representatives of the law.

THERAPEUTIC CULTURE AND THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY

Masculinity thus repeatedly appears as toxic in Breaking Bad, and it would be hard to find an example when it takes a purely healthy form. There are several reasons why masculinity is not properly nourished in the world of Breaking Bad. Masculinity is traditionally developed in the family, where a man gets to be treated like a man, but only if he accepts a responsible role as a husband and a father and learns to moderate his aggressive impulses. The family does not appear in a good light in Breaking Bad. At its heart, the series chronicles the story of two failed marriages, Walt and Skyler, and Hank and Marie.[86] Hank’s frustration with needing Marie to take care of him when he is in a wheelchair is the response of a man who was never happy in the first place to become dependent on a woman in marriage. Marie’s unhappiness with having to put up with Hank’s male bravado and then with his sense of male inadequacy surfaces in her compulsive need to adopt fictional identities and to fantasize a better husband for herself (specifically a true hero, an astronaut).

Walt and Skyler both suffer from a case of failed expectations in marriage. Flashbacks reveal that, when younger, they expected to do much better in life, especially in financial and material terms. In a flashback in 3/13, we see them moving into their first house, and they are already thinking of something larger. Walt says “we need to set our sights high” and adds: “Let’s stretch our price range.”  They are truly in the grip of the version of the American dream that focuses on home ownership. As Walt says: “Why be cautious? We have nowhere to go but up.” Although Walt never says so, one senses that he probably blames his family for holding him back from doing more with his scientific talents. Skyler’s eagerness to get involved in Walt’s criminal enterprise and her desire to take command of the finances indicate that she feels frustrated with her life as a suburban housewife (remember that she failed as a fiction writer). Skyler is constantly looking for ways to undercut Walt and his authority in the family, especially over Walt Jr. Far from nurturing Walt’s masculinity, she works to emasculate him.[87] There are strong suggestions in Breaking Bad that when masculinity goes unnourished at home, it will express itself in distorted ways elsewhere. I am not saying that Skyler drives Walt into a life of crime, but the way that he seeks fulfillment as Heisenberg is related to the fact that he does not feel like a man at home.

Walt, Jr. functions as a symbol of the way that masculinity goes unnourished in the world of Breaking Bad. Unfortunately because of his disability, he does not get to participate in the kinds of activities (mainly sports) that normally help adolescent males develop their sense of masculinity. Walt loves his son, but he is not a good father to him. In many respects, Hank—even with his false displays of masculinity—does a better job of being a father figure for Walt Jr. It is a sad commentary on Walt Jr.’s situation that, even as inadequate as Hank is as a man, he offers Walt Jr. a better male role model than his own father does. Walt is evidently upset that Walt Jr. is not growing up fast enough as a man. At one particularly ugly moment, a frustrated Walt forces tequila on Walt, Jr.—over Hank’s objections—to such an extent that his son throws up in the pool (2/10). Jesse also is searching for a proper father figure throughout Breaking Bad, since his own father lavishes his care on Jesse’s younger brother. Unfortunately for Jesse, he finds only criminals to mentor him, first Walt and then Mike. To the extent he mans up, it is only as a criminal. The lack of proper male role models in the world of Breaking Bad is emblematic of the way that masculinity does not get support from contemporary culture and is sometimes distorted into criminality.

One of the less noticed but brilliant achievements of Breaking Bad is the way that it portrays—and raises doubts about—the therapeutic culture of contemporary America. The story line is filled with twelve-step programs, all the way from Narcotics Anonymous to Gamblers Anonymous. With all the unhappiness, dissatisfaction, frustration, and insecurity the characters experience, addiction of various kinds is a widespread problem in Breaking Bad—and drugs are only part of a larger problem. Confined to his wheelchair, Hank even gets addicted to his mineral collection. Marie’s kleptomania is a form of addiction, and she gets therapy for it. Jane undergoes therapy for her heroin addiction (unsuccessfully). Jesse undergoes therapy for his meth addiction (unsuccessfully). Walt undergoes therapy for his fictional addiction to gambling (4/4; successfully only because he was never addicted in the first place). Walt also goes to a cancer support group (1/6) and in 2/3 he undergoes a psychiatric exam. In 4/6, he speaks disparagingly of Dr. Joyce Brothers, who helped disseminate therapeutic culture on television. Saul Goodman brings up the king of TV therapists when in 3/2, he speaks of “Dr. Phil.” A hilarious scene early in the series (1/5) features one of the standbys of therapeutic culture—an intervention. Walt’s family and friends stage one to get him to seek treatment for his cancer. As the characters pass around the “talking pillow,” they mouth all the clichés of modern psychotherapy. In a scene of mass therapy, Walt’s high school fills its gymnasium to try to come to terms with the students’ grief over the air disaster at the end of season 2. Marie speaks for the whole world of therapeutic culture when, in 5/8, she tells Skyler reassuringly: “I’m so proud of you for going to therapy. It can be so helpful. Such a good tool.”

In many respects, this therapeutic culture does more to undermine traditional notions of good and evil than anything Walter White does. Jesse is shocked when one of his therapists tells him that he has gotten over the guilt of having been responsible for the death of his own daughter (he accidentally ran her over with a car; 3/1). In 4/7, Jesse’s therapist gives voice to the mantra of his profession: “We’re not here to sit in judgment”—a position that undermines morality and the need to take responsibility for one’s deeds. Walt does judge himself and at least on some level, he knows when he is doing something wrong. Breaking Bad portrays Walter White in a good light for finally owning up to his crimes and taking responsibility for them. In 4/6, Walt Jr., thinking that his father is suffering from an addiction to gambling, says that he has learned from reading online that this is a disease, like alcoholism. Therefore Walt Jr. concludes, his mother is not entitled to be angry at Walt. Rejecting this cheap psychologizing and easy way out, Walt insists to this son: “What is going on with me is not about some disease. It’s about choices, choices that I have made, choices I stand by.” Therapeutic culture runs counter to this kind of tragic recognition, as it frees people from the obligation to do what we mean when we tell someone to “man up.” While the therapists in Breaking Bad let people off the hook when it comes to their responsibilities, it is paradoxically the most sinister character, Gus Fring, who in 3/5 speaks the most moral words in the series (sounding remarkably like Vito Corleone), about the obligations of a man to his family: “A man provides for his family. . . . He does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. And he simply bears up and he does it. Because he’s a man.” Even the lone wolf Gus understands the connection between true manliness and the family.

Compounding the problem is the way that therapy is taking the place of traditional religion in contemporary America; arguably it has become the new religion.[88] At the high school group therapy session, one student is troubled about the plane crash: “Why did it happen if there’s a God?” (3/1). “Could we just keep it secular?” is the impassioned plea of the aggressively secular school authorities, who feel compelled to keep religion out of the public sphere. Jesse’s therapy sessions take place in a church. The implication is that therapy is substituting for traditional religious consolations and teachings. In Breaking Bad, religion maintains its power only south of the border. The cartel assassins still believe in saints. But not a single American character in the series experiences religion as a vibrant force in his or her life. Breaking Bad presents a contemporary America in which the churches are empty and the therapy sessions are full.[89]

The therapeutization of America does not bode well for the traditional masculine virtues. A principal form of contemporary therapy is anger management. One can think of several characters in Breaking Bad who might have benefitted from an anger management session or two. But psychotherapy really seeks to eliminate anger, not to manage it. Therapeutic culture looks askance at impulses of anger, treating them as the source of conflict among human beings. The goal of therapy is to produce a peaceful, compliant world, in which everybody will be nice to each other. That means that therapeutic culture is fundamentally at odds with masculine aggressiveness. It does not seek to channel masculinity into acceptable or even higher purposes.[90] It does not hope to use masculine aggressiveness to create soldiers, for example, to get them to direct their anger against the enemies of their country and thus to fight nobly for it, as Macbeth does initially. The aim of anger management is to get rid of it, or at least to suppress its manifestations, not to give it new and more suitable forms of expression.

Therapeutic culture is thus fundamentally at odds with the tragic view of life. Tragedy recognizes basic tensions in the human condition that cannot be eliminated without narrowing the range of what it is to be human. To do away with anger would make human beings more peaceful, but also less powerful. Aggressive impulses can lead to destructive conflict, but they can also fuel some of the most heroic achievements. Remember what we saw in Shakespeare’s tragedies—the qualities a man may need in wartime may create problems for society in peacetime. The tragic insight is that not all forms of human excellence are compatible. Breaking Bad reveals the dangers of regarding masculinity as simply toxic, and not allowing it its legitimate place in human life. If you deny the value of masculinity and in effect criminalize it, you may drive especially masculine men to become criminals. That is, if you deny men legitimate outlets for their aggressive impulses, they may seek out illegitimate outlets. That is the story of Walter White. For his whole life, he has been forced to bottle up his aggressive impulses. When they are finally released, they go wild and are dangerous to him and everyone around him.

“His tragedy is that traditional tragedy is no longer available to him because traditional masculine heroism is no longer available to him.”

In the end, I would not insist on calling Walter White a tragic hero in the traditional sense. Perhaps his story may be best understood as a peculiarly modern form of tragedy, a kind of meta-tragedy. His tragedy is that traditional tragedy is no longer available to him because traditional masculine heroism is no longer available to him. Walt’s tragedy is that he harbors genuinely heroic impulses, but in his society, with a therapeutic culture that denies the value of heroic virtue, he cannot find a way of giving healthy expression to his masculinity. Faced with the choice of being a mild-mannered Clark Kent or to find some form of becoming Superman, Walt opts for the dangerous choice of the criminal Heisenberg. He is destroyed as a result, but we are left thinking that he could never have fulfilled himself in his original safe role as a peaceful but inconsequential human being. I am inclined to say that Walter White is a peculiarly modern variant of the tragic hero, but in the end I would settle for paying Breaking Bad this tribute: In a brilliant anatomy of contemporary America, Gilligan and his team lay bare the psychodynamics of a therapeutic culture that brands traditional masculine virtues as toxic and thereby deforms their expression into something ugly and criminal.

To sum up the achievement of Breaking Bad: Gilligan and his team found a way to refashion Shakespearean tragedy in the contemporary world, but by undertaking a comparison between that world and the heroic one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, they exposed how ignoble modern existence has become. The world of middle-class virtue, as admirable as it may be in itself, does not exhaust the full range of human possibilities or satisfy all the longings of the human soul. That is one reason why the American dream became problematic when it took a narrowly middle-class form in the middle of the twentieth century. At its roots, the American dream is a democratic idea and therefore an anti-aristocratic one. It is supposed to be equally available to all Americans, no matter the circumstances of their birth. And yet in some formulations, a component of the American dream is to distinguish oneself, to rise above the crowd, and that is an aristocratic notion. As we saw in Huckleberry Finn, memories of Europe haunt Americans, leading them to long to recapture an element of nobility and hence of aristocracy in their democratic lives. That longing may mislead them into imposture and even criminality. Breaking Bad tells the tragic story of a man who cannot achieve fulfillment in ordinary middle-class American life, but he cannot find a legitimate alternative to it. In his quest to rise above the average American, Walter discovers that traditional modes of heroism are not open to him, and he is seduced into a criminal career to achieve his goals and make a name for himself. But to be a drug lord is not a genuine form of aristocracy, not matter how much money Walt makes, and his quest to distinguish himself proves to be self-defeating. In the way that Walter White gets caught in the crosscurrents of democracy and aristocracy in American life, Breaking Bad provides a profound commentary on what we have been calling the dark side of the American dream.

[1] William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 252 (Jerusalem, Plate 91, lines 54-55). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (NY: Vintage, 1967), 485 (#918).

[2] Quoted in Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 340.

[3] For references in Breaking Bad to the Brian De Palma film Scarface (1983), see season 1, episode 6 (hereinafter to be cited in the form 1/6) and 4/5. In 5/3, we see the Breaking Bad characters actually watching a scene from Scarface on television. Walter and his son bond by repeating together the famous line: “Say hello to my little friend.” Ominously and prophetically, Walt observes: “Everyone dies in this movie.” All quotations from Breaking Bad have been transcribed from the DVDs of the series. On the importance of the De Palma Scarface in Breaking Bad, see Dennis Thompson, ed., Breaking Bad: The Official Book (NY: Sterling, 2015), 76.

[4] As the actor who played Walter White—Bryan Cranston—said of the series: “One of the things that made the show so compelling was this lack of bright moral lines. No indispensable turning points. No easy answers. We put the moral burden as much on the audience as it was on Walt” (Bryan Cranston, A Life in Parts [NY: Scribner, 2016], 205). On this point, see Lara C. Stache, Breaking Bad: A Cultural History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 16. Throughout these notes, I grant a certain authority to comments from both Bryan Cranston and Vince Gilligan as the two people most responsible for creating the character of Walter White. But I do not offer them as the ultimate authority on the subject. As they would both agree, what they say about Walter White is not the absolute truth, and, for that matter, they often disagree about the character.

[5] In response to the claim that “for some viewers [Walter White] remains the unquestionable hero of the piece, the guy they like and root for no matter what,” Gilligan responded: “I have to say it does surprise me. . . . I thought it’d be interesting as an experiment to create a television show where a major point of the show was change—to see a good man transform into a bad man. I figured what would happen is that we would lose sympathy for Walt with every subsequent episode we produced—that people would start to sympathize less and less with Walt. . . . But there are some people who, come hell or high water, will never lose sympathy for Walt. Some lost sympathy way back in Season 1, and bell-curve-wise, the average person lost sympathy around when he watched Jane die and didn’t intervene” (Sepinwall, Revolution Was Televised, 359-60).

[6] See Dustin Freeley, “The Economy of Time and Multiple Existences in Breaking Bad,” in Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, ed. David P. Pierson (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014), 43.

[7] In 3/4 Skyler’s boss Ted actually refers to Walt as “mild-mannered.” As for the fly, in 4/10, Walt spends a whole episode trying to kill one and fails (Walt’s sidekick Jesse has to do it).

[8] Others have made this point. See, for example, Thompson, Breaking Bad, 76, who refers to the show as “a monster-mash of different genres, drawing on horror, crime drama, Western, coming-of-age narratives, and even superhero stories.”

[9] See Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (NY: Penguin, 2013): “[Walter White’s] journey becomes a grotesque magnification of the American ethos of self-actualization, Oprah Winfrey’s exhortation that all must find and ‘live your best life’” (268).

[10] Cranston, Life in Parts, 196, 201.

[11] Ibid., 198-99.

[12] For other parallels between Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad, see Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, TV (The Book) (NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 202. Uncannily, in “season 3’s ‘Health Scare,’” “Hal becomes convinced he has cancer.” Bryan Cranston discusses the parallels between the two series in his 2015 interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio (Season 19, Episode 20).

[13] See Sepinwall and Seitz, TV (The Book), 49, who talk about Walt “as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for generations of middle-aged, married white men;” the show “does feel like a fantasy/nightmare of the American patriarchy in decline.”

[14] In her opening chapter, Lara Strache raises the question of whether Walter White is a hero, a villain, or an antihero. After surveying a wide range of critical opinion on the subject, she concludes: “To me, Walter White dies not as an antihero or a villain, but as a tragic and complex human figure” (Strache, Breaking Bad, 16.)

[15] Since this is a book on popular culture, I do not wish to burden it with much in the way of literary theory. For the record, the concept of tragedy I am operating with is a synthesis of the ideas of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Aristotle’s view of tragedy can be found in his Poetics. Hegel’s scattered writings on tragedy have been conveniently collected in English translation in Anne and Henry Paolucci, eds., Hegel: On Tragedy (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1975). This volume also contains A. C. Bradley’s essay “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” which is perhaps the best introduction to the subject. For more on this subject, see Mark William Roche, Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988).  Hegel’s theory of tragedy is particularly important for the way it cautions us against a strictly moral analysis of Breaking Bad. For Hegel, tragedy occurs when two legitimate principles come into conflict, and there is no way out of the situation without incurring some form of guilt. The prototype of tragedy for Hegel is Sophocles’ Antigone, in which Antigone, standing up for her brother Polynices’ right to a decent burial, represents the principle of the family, while her uncle Creon, forbidding the burial of Polynices because he was a traitor to Thebes, represents the principle of the city or the political community. Hegel locates tragedy precisely at the point where two different moralities come into conflict, or morality comes into conflict with another principle, such as political necessity. Thus, for Hegel, tragedy involves the conflict of two goods, and in truly tragic situations, there are never simple moral answers to the dramatic dilemma. That is why tragedy can be so unnerving and upsetting to our conventional notions, but also why it lays bare the profound complexity of the human condition.

[16] Quoted in David Bianculli, The Platinum Age of Television (NY: Doubleday, 2016), 203. In talking about his choice of Bryan Cranston to play Walter White, Gilligan said: “We needed an actor the audience could sympathize with, even in his darker moments“ (ibid.). On some level, Gilligan realized that even a dark character like Walter White can maintain an audience’s sympathy.

[17] For another attempt to understand Breaking Bad in terms of Macbeth, see Ray Bossert, “Macbeth on Ice,” in Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living through Chemistry, ed. David R. Koepsell and Robert Arp (Chicago: Open Court, 2012), 65-77.  Many others have noted parallels between Breaking Bad and Macbeth. Indeed, as Walter White grew more sinister, the topic erupted on the Internet. Google “Breaking Bad and Macbeth” to see the range of responses, which vary from insightful to amusing to quirky. Macbeth has been used in another television crime story, HBO’s dark comedy Barry, in which Bill Hader plays a hit man who improbably finds himself acting in a smalltime production of Macbeth in the Los Angeles area.

[18] The great Shakespeare critic A. C. Bradley understood that Macbeth is the ultimate test case of Shakespearean tragedy and hence tragedy in general. In his essay on “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” he argues that Macbeth is not a criminal (or at least not simply a criminal), but a character caught in the kind of conflict between two goods that Hegel saw as the cornerstone of tragedy. See A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), 87-90.

[19] All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) and are cited in the text by act, scene, and line numbers.

[20] Bossert writes: “These all seem good enough values to hold in medieval Scotland where King Duncan describes Macbeth’s ability to cut a man in half as making him a ‘gentleman,’ but they also end up being the things that turn Macbeth into a monster” (“Macbeth on Ice,” 68).

[21] For a systematic exploration of this theme in Macbeth, see José A. Benardete, “Macbeth’s Last Words,” Interpretation, 1 (1970), 63-75.

[22] For a fuller development of my interpretation of Macbeth, see my essay “Macbeth and the Gospelling of Scotland,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed. John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2000), 315-51. For the larger context of this interpretation, see my book Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 148-55.

[23] Bradley clearly articulates this point in his analysis of Macbeth: “It is not a question merely of moral goodness, but of good. . . . And such bravery and skill in war as win the enthusiasm of everyone about him; such an imagination as few but poets possess; . . . a determination so tremendous and a courage so appalling that, for all his torment, he never dreams of turning back, . . . are not those things, in themselves, good, and gloriously good? Do they not make you, for all your horrors, admire Macbeth, sympathise with his agony, pity him, and see in him the waste of forces on which you place a spiritual value? It is simply on this account that he is for you, not the abstraction called a criminal who merely ‘gets what he deserves’. . . but a tragic hero.” As we will see, with the necessary adjustments, Bradley’s analysis of Macbeth can be applied to Walter White.

[24] Bradley specifically cautions against this move: “it is dangerous to describe tragedy in terms that even appear to exclude Macbeth, or to describe Macbeth . . . in terms which imply that it portrays a conflict of mere evil with mere good” (Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 90). For Bradley, any definition of “tragedy” that does not allow for including Macbeth in the category must be wrong.

[25] This principle is enunciated in Breaking Bad when Walt’s brother-in-law Hank gives his son the book Killing Pablo (about the infamous Colombian drug lord). In 3/8 Walt Jr. comments: “Uncle Hank says ‘everybody knows who Pablo Escobar is, but nobody knows about the guys who brought him down. . . . Good guys never get the ink like the bad guys do.’” Hank is no doubt thinking of himself compared to Heisenberg.

[26] To the people of Scotland, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth at the end appear to be a “butcher” and a “fiend-like queen.” That is very much an external view of them. By giving us access to a deeply interior view, Shakespeare makes us see that they are something much more than mere monsters, something much more complex. We will see that Gilligan does something similar in Breaking Bad. Had Walter White been brought to trial, we can imagine how the press would have treated him; they would have reduced his complex story to the simple headline: “Crazed High School Teacher Is Evil Drug Lord Heisenberg.” In the course of the five-season series, we come to know a lot more than this about Walter White, thanks to the Shakespearean scripts Gilligan and his team produced, and he becomes a human being for us, not a mere monster.

[27] Bossert sees that the problem of “masculinity” links Macbeth and Breaking Bad; see especially his comment about Walt’s “deep, troubled insecurity about his own lost masculinity” (“Macbeth on Ice,” 71). For more on the problem of masculinity in Breaking Bad, see Brian Faucette, “Taking Control: Male Angst the Re-Emergence of Hegemonic Masculinity in Breaking Bad,” in Pierson, Breaking Bad,73-86.

[28] At a birthday party for Elliott Schwartz in 1/5, Walt explains why he is no longer with Gray Matter Technology: “I went into education.” Someone asks immediately: “What university?”, assuming that no one with Walt’s credentials would go into high school teaching. For an insightful analysis of why Walt may have gone into teaching high school, see Cranston, Life in Parts, 199-200.

[29] See Sepinwall and Seitz, TV (The Book),48: “Walt exudes the specific resentment of a man who thinks himself entitled to more than he already has and hates every instant spent in the company of those he deems intellectual or moral inferiors.”

[30] Walt’s fullest explanation of the Gray Matter business comes late in the series in 5/6: “I co-founded Gray Matter. Actually I named it. We were going to take the world by storm. Something happened. For personal reasons I decided to leave the company. I took a buyout for $5000. $2.16 billion as of last Friday. I look it up every week. I sold my kid’s birthright for a few months’ rent.” Walt turns out to be more obsessed with the loss of his stake in Gray Matter than he at first appears to be. Walt’s bitterness is only increased when, in the penultimate episode (5/15), he accidentally sees Elliott and Gretchen on The Charlie Rose Show on a barroom television. Faced with all the bad publicity of being associated with the criminal Walter White, Elliott, trying to shore up Gray Matter’s falling stock price, denies that Walt ever had a significant role in the company, describing him as “a person who was there early on but had virtually nothing to do with the creation of the company and still less to do with growing it into what it is today.” This statement confirms Walt’s conviction that he has never gotten the credit he deserves in life. For yet another explanation of what really happened among Walt, Elliott, and Gretchen, from Vince Gilligan himself, see Stache, Breaking Bad, 14.

[31] In 2/6, Walt lectures his class about a chemist named H. Tracey Hall at General Electric who came up with a process for producing synthetic diamonds, which made the company an “incalculable” fortune. As for Hall, GE rewarded him with only a $10 bond. Walt obviously identifies with Hall as a mistreated genius. For more on Tracey Hall, see Ensley F. Guffey and K. Dale Koontz, Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad (Toronto: ECW Press, 2014), 95-96.

[32] In 1/2 Walt’s former student and criminal sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, sarcastically compliments Walt: “Good job on wearing the pants in the family.”

[33] In 4/3 Walt says to Skyler: “This is so passive aggressive.”

[34] Sepinwall refers to Walter White as “the recession era’s everyman” (Revolution Was Televised, 357). On the way that Breaking Bad mirrors the financial crisis that began in 2008, see also Thompson, Breaking Bad, 1-3 and Camille Fojas, Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 32-40. Martin, Difficult Men, 272, observes that the recession left “many previously secure middle-class  Americans suddenly feeling like desperate outlaws in their own suburbs” (this mood was reflected in Showtime’s dark drug comedy, Weeds, which in many respects parallels Breaking Bad).

[35] The main rival for the “signature television series of the Obama years” would be The Walking Dead, which provides another bleak picture of this time period. For a detailed analysis of this series, see Chapter Five, which shows that in its own way this series also raises the issue of health care. The chapter also analyzes the way The Walking Dead portrays the conflict between the haves and the have-nots in America. For more on the issue of health insurance in Breaking Bad, see Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 32-33 and Stache, Breaking Bad, 56.

[36] In 3/6 Walt’s lab assistant Gale tries to defend their criminal activities on the grounds of the quality of the product they manufacture: “I’m definitely a libertarian. Consenting adults want what they want, and if I’m not supplying it, they will get it somewhere else. At least with me, they’re getting exactly what they pay for. No added toxins or adulterants.” Gale provides an illuminating mirror to help us understand Walt. Similar frustrations about an academic career drove him to crime, as he tells Walt: “I was doing it the way you are supposed. I was doing my doctorate at Colorado, NSF research grant. I was on my way, jumping through hoops, kissing the proper behinds, tending to all the non-chemistry that one finds oneself occupied with. You know that world—that is not what I signed up for. I love the lab. Because it’s still magic.” When Walt agrees with Gale about the magic of chemistry, we get a glimpse of why he did not pursue a conventional academic career at a research university.

[37] For details, see Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 92-93. For more on the depiction of drug use in Breaking Bad, see Stache, Breaking Bad, 70-73.

[38] The character in Breaking Bad who most resembles Tony Montana is Don Eliado, the head of the Mexican drug cartel. His pool is the site for parties almost as sybaritic as Montana’s. In a link to the Brian De Palma film, Don Eliado is played by Stephen Bauer, who played Montana’s best friend Manny Ribera in the 1983 classic. The other actor in Breaking Bad who appeared in Scarface is Mark Margolis, who played Hector Salamanca.

[39] We see a shot of the Three Stooges on television in1/2 and then again in 5/3. Walt and Jesse are referred to as the “Two Stooges” in 2/3. In 5/7, Saul Goodman speaks of “the law firm of Moe, Larry, and Shemp.” The frequency with which the Three Stooges appear in a dark show like Breaking Bad may seem strange, but it actually reflects Vince Gilligan’s instinctive understanding of tragic form. Like Shakespeare, Gilligan realizes the need for comic relief in a tragedy. See Thompson, Breaking Bad, 80. Breaking Bad is filled with moments of comedy that help set off the pathos of its moments of tragedy. The Three Stooges serve as Gilligan’s equivalent of the famous drunken porter in Macbeth. For more on comedy in Breaking Bad, see Thompson, Breaking Bad, 80 and 150 (he points out that a number of the actors in the series also have careers as standup comedians, including Bob Odenkirk, who plays Saul Goodman). For a highly theorized discussion of comedy in Breaking Bad, see Gertrud Koch, Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even, trans. Daniel Hendrickson (Zürich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2017), 45-55. Koch appears to overstate the comic nature of the series: “Not just at the end, but throughout White has also been a comedic figure” (47)

[40] For a similar view of Walt as a “twenty-first century geek hero,” see “A Fine Meth,” the introduction Koepsell and Arp wrote to the collection of essays they edited, Breaking Bad and Philosophy, vii-ix. They compare Walt to traditional literary—and tragic—heroes, such as Macbeth, Faust, and Milton’s Satan (a hero at least in William Blake’s interpretation of him).

[41] For a concise and effective statement of the opposing view, that Walter White is just a villain, see Jonah Goldberg, “Life and Death on Basic Cable,” National Review, August 19, 2013, 39-42.

[42] Walt reveals his thinking about himself when he tells Jesse in 1/7: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life. But what kind of life will it be? A life of fear? . . . of never once believing in yourself?”

[43] For a thorough discussion of these few words, see Sepinwall, Breaking Bad 101, 267-68.

[44] Cranston perceptively speaks of Walt’s “wanting to feel like he’d really lived, like he’d really been a man” (Life in Parts, 206). In his Inside the Actors Studio interview, he says of Walt: “For a man who was once a milquetoast to be able to spread his chest and feel the sense of intimidation upon others, that’s a very powerful, intoxicating feeling.”

[45] Vince Gilligan said of Walt: “He prefers to think of himself as the master. That is what chafed so much in the season where Walt was under Gus Fring’s thumb” (quoted in Stache, Breaking Bad, 151).

[46] Gale blurs the line between legal and illegal businesses when, in 4/1, he says of Gus’s spanking new drug lab equipment: “At Pfizer, at Merck, that would be right at home.”

[47] Compare what Bradley says about Macbeth: “The tragic effect depends . . . on our feeling that the elements in the man’s nature are so inextricably blended that the good in him, that which we admire, instead of simply opposing the evil, reinforces it. Macbeth’s imagination deters him from murder, but it also makes the vision of a crown irresistibly bright. If he had been less determined, nay, if his conscience had been less maddening in its insistence that he had thrown the precious jewel of his soul irretrievably away, he might have paused after his first deed, might even have repented. Yet his imagination, his determination, and his conscience were things good” (Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 88-89).

[48] On Gus as sociopath, see Jeffrey A. Hinzmann, “The Riddle of Godfather Gus,” in Koepsell and Arp, Breaking Bad, 105-107.

[49] Giancarlo Esposito, the actor who played Gus, says: “The moments when Gus is really demonstratively powerful and frightening are when his eyes go dead” (quoted in Stache, Breaking Bad, 124).

[50] See, for example, Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 129-32.

[51] See Cranston, Life in Parts, 1-3. Having created the part of Walter White, Cranston is arguably the world’s greatest authority on the character, and thus this whole passage is fascinating because it reveals the complex thoughts that were going through Cranston’s mind as he played the scene of Walt watching Jane die. Indeed, Cranston chose to open his autobiography with three pages devoted just to this moment, which he calls the “the most harrowing” scene he has ever acted (3). Playing the scene was evidently so difficult for Cranston that he comes back to it later in his autobiography, and gives an even more detailed analysis of this scene. Cranston reveals that, as originally written, it painted Walt in a darker light. “Vince Gilligan originally thought of Walt as a more active, aggressive murderer” (202). The original script called for Walt to push Jane over on her back deliberately and thereby to cause her to choke on her own vomit (204). Cranston, as well as the studio and the network, argued that this plot development was going too far and would cause the audience to lose all sympathy for Walt. As Cranston explains, Gilligan “listened and came to agree. He devised a slightly less damning way for Walt to be involved in Jane’s death” (205)—by jostling Jesse in an effort to wake him up, Walt inadvertently causes Jane to turn over on her back. This is an excellent example of how much careful thought went into the creation of Breaking Bad and how much it was a collaborative process—and all the better for it. As Cranston writes: “Studios and networks have a reputation for diluting the creative process with their notes. Decision by committee. . . . But extra eyes on a story line can actually be useful and generative, and throughout the run of Breaking Bad our studio and our network helped us make the story better” (205). Gilligan initially wanted to portray Jane’s death in a way that would paint Walt as a much darker character, but by persuading him to change the story, Cranston and others retained the ambiguity and complexity of the character. For alternate accounts of this matter, see Sepinwall, Revolution Was Televised, 358, and Bianculli, Platinum Age, who quotes Gilligan saying: “the original version was, [Walt] actually shoots [Jane} up with more [heroin]. He was more active in his culpability. . . and I’m glad that I got talked out of that one.” Stache, Breaking Bad, 25 supports this account.  For a balanced assessment of Walt’s culpability in Jane’s death, see David R. Koepsell and Vanessa Gonzalez, “Walt’s Rap Sheet,” in Koepsell and Arp, Breaking Bad, 7-9. On this scene, see also Sepinwall, Breaking Bad 101, 87-90. The scene of Jane’s death is one of the most discussed and disputed moments in Breaking Bad, and viewers will undoubtedly never agree about it.

[52] See Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 398.

[53] Bryan Cranston accurately describes Hank as a: “dickish, emasculating brother-in-law bragging about his exploits as a DEA agent” (Life in Parts, 192).

[54] Once again I find myself in disagreement with Vince Gilligan, who admires Hank: “Hank is a very good DEA agent. In my mind, that’s what Hank is: he’s very good at his job and he’s very much a straight arrow” (interview in Thompson, Breaking Bad, 54). For a defense of Hank, see Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 167-68 and Stache, Breaking Bad, 141-45.

[55] For a similar interpretation, see Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 107.

[56] Sepinwall does a good job of summarizing how morally ambiguous many of the characters in Breaking Bad are. See his Breaking Bad 101, 175-76: “Gus has a tragic origin story that makes him seem both human and more like Walt and/or Jesse, but he’s also been responsible for many deaths. . . . Skyler has on some level been trapped by circumstances, but also has chosen to go deeper and deeper into Walt’s world. Jesse has been manipulated and used by Walt from the beginning of their professional relationship, but he tried to use a twelve-step group as a drug client base. Hank is obsessed with Gus as much out of his own sense of ego as of any desire for justice. The good guys have deep flaws, and the villains have moments of abundant humanity.” This is excellent analysis, but one wonders why, after all this, Sepinwall continues to divide the world of Breaking Bad simplistically into “good guys” and “bad guys.” The truth is: all the major characters in Breaking Bad are in some ways presented sympathetically as human beings, but all of them are also deeply flawed and do morally dubious things at one point or another. This is what makes Breaking Bad a work of art and not a run-of-the-mill TV series. I sense that habits viewers developed, perhaps over decades, watching television when it was a morally simplistic medium have carried over to the new era, when television has developed the moral complexity of great literature of the past, such as Shakespeare’s plays and Dostoevski’s novels. Viewers nostalgically cling to the time when television characters did divide easily into “good guys” and “bad guys.” Although Dostoevski does make careful moral distinctions among his characters, would one ever go through The Brothers Karamazov trying to distinguish “the good guys” from the “bad guys”?

[57] In 3/12 Skyler formulates another version of Achilles’ choice: “I’ll tell you what, Walt, I’d rather have them think I’m Bonnie What’s-Her-Name than some complete idiot.” Skyler thinks it is worse to be viewed as a fool than as a criminal.

[58] For this phrase, see Book Four, section 283 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science.

[59] Once again, Cranston shows insight into the character he brought to life. He grasps the difference between judging Walt morally and appreciating the challenge he faces: “Walter White was more alive in the last year of his life than he had been in the previous fifty. He went from utter failure to great power. . . . I don’t agree with the decisions Walt made or the actions he took, of course. But I feel for him. If you have two years to live, you don’t let them cut your balls off. You go out fighting” (Life in Parts, 233). Here Cranston catches the essence of a tragic hero, as he also does in his Inside the Actor’s Studio interview, when he says of Walt: “He went out on his terms.” From comments such as these, we can tell why Bryan Cranston was able to do such a great job of playing Walter White. It sounds as if he was better able than Vince Gilligan to identify with the character.

[60] In 5/16, a neighbor says of Walt: “He looked exactly like the Unabomber.” Marie tells the police: “He’s going to blow up City Hall. He has some kind of manifesto he wants to see on the 6 o’clock news.”

[61] In fact, David Bianculli reports of an interview with Gilligan: “Alternative endings were considered, in which Walter White would be carried off to jail in handcuffs, or, perhaps worse, get away with all his crimes. [Gilligan said:] ‘We even had thought of ending the series with everyone else that he loves dying all around him, and he is the only one, perversely, that survives. Like a cockroach, and his hell, his torment, is that everyone else dies. But that seemed a little too consciously ironic to go in that direction’” (Bianculli, Platinum Age, 205).  When an interviewer asked Gilligan whether he considered having Walt die of his cancer, Gilligan replied: “When it came down to it, it seemed most fitting for Walt’s end that it wasn’t the cancer that got him, but a death of his own making. It seemed appropriate for the character, and the journey we had taken him on, for Walt to have an active hand in his mortality” (Thompson, Breaking Bad, 62). Gilligan does not say it, but what he is talking about is what is “fitting” and “appropriate” for a tragic hero—who should be active in his own fate.

[62] On the aptness of the ending, see Sepinwall, Breaking Bad 101, 264-70, for a thoughtful and provocative discussion; he considers whether either of the prior two episodes would have made better finales.

[63] Stache astutely observes: “The fact that the bad guys at the end of Season 5 were unlikable, morally repugnant animals provides one reason why so many fans remained Team Walt until the end” (Breaking Bad, 130).

[64] On this point, see Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 308.

[65] Unlike many analysts of the show, I do not believe that Walt’s final confession that he enjoyed being Heisenberg utterly negates his earlier claims that he did what he did for his family’s sake. Breaking Bad is fundamentally about mixed motives in human beings. Much of what he does in the last few episodes clearly shows that Walt is still concerned about his family.

[66] Oddly enough, Gilligan does choose to invoke the tragic when he speaks of Better Call Saul: “we’ve realized more and more, that this show is a tragedy. And the tragedy comes when Jimmy McGill disappears and Saul Goodman appears” (Bianculli, Platinum Age, 207). In fact, Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is the opposite of a tragic figure—he is the quintessential survivor; he has no principles for which he would risk his life. That is why he is still alive at the end of Breaking Bad.

[67] Gilligan has admitted that in the end, much to his surprise, Walt redeemed himself: “Walt found surprising ways—surprising to me at least—to redeem himself, at least a little bit. That’s not to say he completely redeemed himself. He couldn’t come back from the decisions he made; he’s more villain than hero in the end. But, it surprised me he came back even partially. He found heartfelt ways of making amends and made a start back from the place he’d gone to. I was so down on him for the last season or so because he’d become such a bastard. It was a happy occurrence that he turned the corner toward redemption. If he never had the time to make it there, he made some solid steps—and that’s something” (Thompson, Breaking Bad, 64).  Once again, Gilligan is trapped in the conventional categories of “hero” versus “villain,” and does not allow for the possibility of a “tragic hero.” In fact, he gives an excellent description of the way a tragic hero dies, especially in Shakespeare’s plays. Walt does a lot more to redeem himself than Macbeth does. One has to wonder whether Shakespeare was ever “down” on Macbeth. Gilligan made another revealing comment in his interview with David Thompson: “It’s an odd thing, but the longer the show went with Walter White, the less sympathy I had for him. It was an irony that I had been so worried in those early days about him being likable, but at the end of it all I honestly believe I liked him less than the average viewer of Breaking Bad. I talked to my own mother and my longtime girlfriend, and they’d say, ‘I was so sad to see Walter die’ and I think, ‘Really? He got off easy!’ He was going to die from episode 1 on—we’re all going to die—and he died on his own terms; he went out more or less as a hero.” Here I can finally agree with Gilligan—he gets the force of the show’s ending exactly right. He also said of the great “Ozymandias” episode (5/14): “It really wrapped things up very tragically” (quoted in Sepinwall, Breaking Bad 101, 258).

[68] The satisfying nature of the show’s genuinely tragic ending is one reason why many have judged Breaking Bad the best television series of all time. See, for example, Stache, Breaking Bad, xv-xvi.

[69] Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 15, 31 (Chapters 4 and 7, 43b25 and 50b30).

[70] In 1/4 Hank announces “Albuquerque just might have a new kingpin,” only to have the camera cut to a shirtless Walt shaving in his tighty-whities and looking somewhat less than regal. Invoking aristocratic imagery in 2/7, Jesse tells his criminal crew: “We’re going to be kings. Well, I’m going to be king. You guys will be princes and dukes.” Suddenly, we are back in the world of the fraudulent king and duke of Huckleberry Finn. Even average Americans crave these aristocratic titles.

[71] For a discussion of the more general theme of disability in Breaking Bad, see Jami L. Anderson, “A Life Not Worth Living,” in Pierson, Breaking Bad, 103-118.

[72] For a fuller discussion of the portrayal of Latino characters in Breaking Bad, see Andrew Howe, “Not Your Average Mexican: Breaking Bad and the Destruction of Latino Stereotypes,” in Pierson, Breaking Bad, 87-102.

[73] The many references to and quotations from films like The Godfather and Scarface in Breaking Bad create the impression that for many characters in the series, gang violence and the masculine aggressiveness that produces it are a thing of the past—something that ordinary Americans like the White family see only in old movies on television. With a long history in film already, the gangster appears as a belated figure in Breaking Bad.

[74] There are a number of Western-style gunfights in Breaking Bad; see, for example, 3/12 and 5/2. Episode 5/5, “Dead Freight,” is an hommage to Edison’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery (dir. Edwin Porter), often regarded as the first film Western. On Breaking Bad as a “modern Western,” see Thompson, Breaking Bad, 78-79.

[75] For the importance of the desert in Breaking Bad, see Ensley F. Guffey, “Buying the House: Place in Breaking Bad,” in Pierson, Breaking Bad, 169-70.

[76] In another geographic comparison, Sicily is to New York in the Godfather films as Mexico is to Albuquerque in Breaking Bad.

[77] On this point, see Thompson, Breaking Bad, 71.

[78] Michael Corleone is subject to similar psychological pressures in the Godfather films.

[79] See Stache, Breaking Bad, 116: “Vince Gilligan comments that perhaps viewers like the bad guys because they are good at their jobs, arguing, ‘What is it people like about Darth Vader? Is it that he’s so evil, or that he’s so good at his job? I think it might be the latter.”

[80] Cleaning is an important motif in Breaking Bad. Walt’s obsessive efforts to clean his body, his house, and his pool (not to mention laundering his money) reflect his growing sense of his own corruption and the moral pollution that surrounds him.  The motif of obsessive cleaning in Breaking Bad calls to mind Lady Macbeth’s famous words: “Out, damn’d spot! . . .  What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” (5.1.35, 43).

[81] If we knew the full back stories of all the characters in Breaking Bad, we might sympathize with more of them. In Walt’s encounter with Krazy-8 in 1/3, we learn that this vicious criminal once took classes in business administration at UNM. He wanted to become a musician, but his father told him that there was no money in it. In these respects, Krazy-8’s story resembles Walt’s. We get the barest hints of Gus’s back story and must wonder what really happened in Chile. Gus seems at first to be doing everything out of purely financial motives, but we gradually learn that he is seeking revenge on the Salamanca clan and the drug cartel for having killed a dear friend. The Breaking Bad prequel, Better Call Saul, is slowly filling us in on the back stories of its characters.

[82] In search of some form of nobility in Breaking Bad, one might be tempted, since there is so much law-breaking in the series, to turn to the majesty of the law, that great bulwark against the forces of criminality that threaten to destroy civilized society. The problem with this approach is that the chief representative of the law in Breaking Bad is Saul Goodman. The inflatable Statue of Liberty sitting atop his strip mall law office provides a wry comment on the American dream. In The Godfather I, we see the real Statue of Liberty several times—still a symbol of America’s promise to its immigrants. In Breaking Bad, we see only a cheap simulacrum of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps a symbol of how the American dream has declined in the twenty-first century. Similarly, the mock-up of the United States Constitution in Saul’s office makes a mockery of the document, as he often does in court when defending his criminal clients.

[83] See David P. Pierson, “Breaking Neoliberal? Contemporary Neoliberal Discourses and Politics in AMC’s Breaking Bad,” in Person, Breaking Bad, 26.

[84] In 2/5, we learn that Hank would have made a fine bootlegger; he brews his own beer, called Schraderbräu. This episode pointedly juxtaposes Hank’s legal beer-making with Walt’s illegal meth-making, hinting at some form of equivalence between the two activities.

[85] In fact, Hank underestimates the point about the government’s varying attitudes toward meth—the US government was once a meth pusher itself. The development and industrial production of meth was actively promoted by governments on both sides during World War II; countries including Germany, Japan, and the United States distributed the drug to their soldiers to fight combat fatigue and to spark combat performance. See Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 50.

[86] For a positive view of the marriage of Hank and Marie, see Guffey and Koontz, Wanna Cook?, 172, 183.

[87] Jesse refers to Skyler as a “ballbuster” in 1/4. In 3/5 Hank asks his partner: “Did you leave your balls in your wife’s purse?” Fear of emasculation by women is endemic among the men in the series.

[88] Therapeutic culture seems to play the role in Walter White’s tragedy that Christianity does in Macbeth’s. The values promoted by therapeutic culture—niceness, kindness, affability, the absence of anger—are inherited from Christianity. As we have seen, Macbeth believes that men in Scotland have lost their manliness because they have been “gospelled.” Similarly in Breaking Bad, the various twelve-step programs are designed to neutralize the masculinity in anyone who deviates from social norms. If Macbeth had lived in 21st-century Albuquerque, his friends might have organized an intervention so that he could learn to deal with his “vaulting ambition” problem. If one sees that “criminality” has replaced “martial heroism” and “therapy” has replaced “Christianity” in Walter White’s life, one gets a measure of the debasement of the modern world.

[89] In 4/12 Jesse and Gus meet in an empty chapel.

[90] For a critique of contemporary notions of masculinity, and a defense of traditional notions of manliness, see Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).