What Only Soldiers Understand (On Youth and Male Friendship)

Sebastian Junger has a new film about the same group of soldiers he followed in the award-winning documentary, Restrepo. It's not really sequel, however, even though it uses the same cache of interviews he drew from in the last film. Korengal, which takes its name from the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan where he followed the 15-month tour of the platoon in 2010, is more a story about male bonding among young men. There was some of that theme in Restrepo, but here it is the focus of the film. Sounds promising - I look forward to seeing it.

What Only Soldiers Understand

Christopher de Bellaigue
August 20, 2014


Outpost Films A soldier on patrol in Sebastian Junger’s Korengal
The acclaimed documentary Restrepo, which was made in 2010 by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, followed a platoon of US soldiers during their fifteen-month tour of duty in the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan. Released during President Obama’s Afghan “surge,” when there were some 30,000 US troops deployed in the country, the film took its name from Private First Class Juan Sebastián Restrepo, who was killed by the Taliban and immortalized in the name of an American observation post — “OP Restrepo.” The film began with a Taliban ambush and featured explosions, grueling patrols, and the slam of bullets into wood, earth, and metal. Restrepo conveyed with a relentless, almost monotonous immediacy the experience of combat — and this for an audience that was, in every sense, thousands of miles away.

Korengal is a new film that follows the same soldiers over the same period of time and draws from the same corpus of footage and interviews. But Korengal, while clearly related to Restrepo, cannot be considered its sequel; it might be misleading even to call it a war film. The film contains allusions to the death of PFC Restrepo, but the viewer is more aware of a second casualty, whose voice can occasionally be heard from behind the camera. By the time Sebastian Junger came to gather his material into Korengal, his confrere Tim Hetherington had been killed (while following another war, this one in Libya) and the US was preparing to pull out of Afghanistan. To some degree, the film is Hetherington’s memorial.

Korengal’s subjects are youth and male friendship, and it deals in a peculiarly profound way with the unsettling sense that a young warrior experiences, after fighting alongside his brothers-in-arms, that he knows all the joy and agony that life can offer. “I’d rather be there than here,” says one of the film’s unsuspecting heroes, the elfin, soft-spoken Misha Pemble-Belkin, after his tour has finished; “I’d go back right now if I could.” His nostalgia is echoed by others who spent their entire deployments despising their surroundings and longing for home, and insights of this kind into human frailty and illogic lift Korengal into a rare category of achievement.

Junger is outstanding at evoking the diabolical thrill of battle. “Until you hear the snap of a bullet go by your head” — and here Specialist Kyle Steiner, another of the film’s stars, permits himself a knowing, almost superior smile –- “there’s nothing else like it.” The film’s pivotal scene is a single firefight built into a mesmerizing homage to combat, complete with thumping, cod-Irish score and whoops of bloodlust. “I’m on fucking fire!” someone yells amid the mayhem. We all are, and we can be pretty sure the Taliban shooting back feel the same way — only their shouts are a little different, more in the line of, Allahu Akbar.

After the high of engagement comes the low of enforced inaction, boredom, and jangling nerves. Some of these men only recently grew into their bodies, and they hardly know what to do with themselves. They wrestle like lion cubs, play video games, mistreat a guitar, and conduct inane conversations (would George Clooney beat Fabio in a fight?). And, like generations of soldiers before them, they smoke.

There is an affecting scene when one of the soldiers confesses that he is afraid that God hates him because he has committed sins while in battle. But Korengal does not mention religious faith as a possible psychological buttress , and whether this reflects the predilections of the filmmakers or the skepticism of the men is not clear. If the answer is the latter, then a want of belief may be one of the few things that distinguish the men of Second Platoon, Battle Company from their predecessors in war. Given the psychological damage to which many of them confess, it may not be a good thing.

More than the deaths, lost limbs, and broken ankles (plenty in the scree-covered mountainsides) that punctuate the deployment, it’s this vulnerability that interests Junger and Hetherington. In Specialist Miguel Cortez they have a perfect case to study. Cortez is the kind of man whose cracks show through his too-ready smile, and whose eyes flee when he thinks dark thoughts. As the deployment wears on it’s Cortez who begins to court death, and who has to be told by his comrades that by endangering himself he is endangering them. And it’s this same, magnificent Cortez who wins a Bronze Star Medal for valor, and who says (again with that disarming smile), “I would actually throw myself on a grenade [for them], and the guys know that I would, without hesitation.”

Complexities of this kind are the stock-in-trade of Korengal — the product of a close, compassionate interest by Hetherington and Junger in the soldiers around them. There is a fascinating diversion into the racial bafflements of Specialist Sterling Jones, for instance. He is one of the few black men in the whole company — because, as he says sardonically, “black people don’t jump out of planes.” Jones believes he is disliked by his white comrades, which makes his motivations for fighting all the more surprising. “I’m not doing this for recognition from my country,” he says. “Truthfully, I could give a shit what anybody thinks — except for those guys to my left and my right, because that’s what it’s about…that’s why in a deployment you see people run out under fire to go pull their buddy back.”

The irony about Jones is that his mother had urged him to join the army, and he had protested. Pemble-Belkin is the opposite. His parents were Oregon hippies who disapproved of him playing soldiers. Now he smiles angelically and asks, “What’s not to like about a giant machine gun?”

A second telling absence in Korengal is politics. Officers and NCOs dutifully repeat the message of bringing civilization to a benighted people, but for the rest the war seems almost like a sealed exercise, justified in personal, rather than patriotic terms. They certainly feel no sympathy for the locals, and why should they? As Steiner puts it,

Hearts and minds is out the window when you see the guy shooting at you and then he puts his wife and kids in front of him knowing full well that we won’t shoot back. Or the guy who shakes our hand, takes the ten bags of rice we give him for his family and the school supplies…and immediately walks up the mountain and shoots an RPG at us, and walks back down and smiles the next morning when he’s walking his goats…

Fuck his heart. Fuck his mind.

It is a remarkable commentary on modern warfare waged by a democracy that a film like Korengal can be made, with the full cooperation of the US military, and without anyone getting into trouble for an excess of candor.

Later on, after the deployment, Steiner is under pressure from his family and his girlfriend. He is back home, but it seems that he is not fully present. “You’ll never understand,” is his somewhat tetchy response. “It’s not your position to understand.” Steiner wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the helmet that protected his head from a Taliban round. He is the kind of man who would cross the country to help a former comrade change a tire –- “in a heartbeat.” Now he delivers himself of an aphorism that expresses his feelings brutally: “You may have your family’s blood running through your veins. You didn’t shed it with them.”

Even for the survivors, war is a kind of death.

Brief but interesting article. Between 18 and 41 years of age, I spent considerable periods living alone, and I liked it. If I were to end up living alone again someday, I know I would be okay.

I guess I am one of the men this article is about.

How Living Alone Will Transform Men

By Bella DePaulo, Ph.D
Single at Heart at PsychCentral

 

Writings about single life – both popular and academic – focus overwhelmingly on women. Because marriage, traditionally, is supposed to be more important to women than to men, in theory more central to their identities and their happiness, single life should be especially problematic for women. Research begs to disagree about the happiness presumption, but no matter. Angst-filled writings about women living single continue to proliferate.

Alongside the tired old tales of those “poor” single women is a counter-narrative. It is one of strength, fulfillment, and independence. That story is often told of single women who live alone.

By living alone instead of with a husband and children, women are liberated from traditional roles and expectations. They are no longer the short-order cook, the cleaner-upper, and the laundress for a house full of family. They are freed of the emotional work of shoring up egos and soothing bruised feelings. They don’t have to account to someone else for the money they spend. They also learn how to do the kinds of things that husbands traditionally did – or they find someone else to hire or to help.

What is less often noticed is what men get out of living alone. That has changed with Lynn Jamieson and Roona Simpson’s academic book, Living Alone: Globalization, Identity and Belonging. They point out that as more and more men (and women) live alone in their early adult years, they are learning all sorts of skills that used to be the bailiwick of the other gender. In married life, for example, women were traditionally the “kinkeepers” and the social schedulers. They kept in touch with family, kept up with friends (if the friends had not been ditched), arranged social gatherings, and covered all of the other socioemotional tasks of the couple.

In their interviews with people living alone and in their review of the relevant writings, the authors found that most young men living alone are doing just fine. They have networks of friends and relatives and keep in touch with the people who are important to them. They don’t need a wife to have a social life or meaningful human connections.

That is important in and of itself. But it is also significant for what it suggests about the future. Right now, if you study people who live alone, as the authors and others have done, what you typically find is that most solo dwellers are doing fine. There is an exception, though – when there are people who conform to the stereotype of the sad, lonely, and isolated person living alone, those people are disproportionately older men, particularly those who are unemployed or in poor health. Maybe today’s young men, when they get a lot older, will do a lot better if they live alone. They will already know how to have a good life while going solo.


~ Bella DePaulo (Ph.D., Harvard; Visiting Professor, UC Santa Barbara), an expert on single life, is the author of several books, including "Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After" and "Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It." Dr. DePaulo has discussed singles and single life on radio and television, including NPR and CNN, and her work has been described in newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and magazines such as Time, Atlantic, the Week, More, the Nation, Business Week, AARP Magazine, and Newsweek. Visit her website at www.BellaDePaulo.com.

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One of the issues I have experienced in my own life, and seen in the men I coach or see in therapy, is that after high school or college, we often have a hard time making new friends. If we take a job in a new city, and we are alone, it can takes year for many men to make even a couple of friends.

In this recent article from Salon, Lisa Wade looks at the issue and some of the reasons men struggle to create intimate friendships, the kind where we can be open about fears, hopes, struggles, and successes. We NEED these kinds of friends.

American men’s hidden crisis: They need more friends!

Men aren't making the same kinds of intimate friendships many women have -- but they want to

Lisa Wade
Saturday, Dec 7, 2013 

Of all people in America, adult, white, heterosexual men have the fewest friends. Moreover, the friendships they have, if they’re with other men, provide less emotional support and involve lower levels of self-disclosure and trust than other types of friendships. When men get together, they’re more likely to do stuff than have a conversation. Friendship scholar Geoffrey Greif calls these “shoulder-to-shoulder” friendships, contrasting them to the “face-to-face” friendships that many women enjoy. If a man does have a confidant, three-quarters of the time it’s a woman, and there’s a good chance she’s his wife or girlfriend.

When I first began researching this topic I thought, surely this is too stereotypical to be true. Or, if it is true, I wondered, perhaps the research is biased in favor of female-type friendships. In other words, maybe we’re measuring male friendships with a female yardstick. It’s possible that men don’t want as many or the same kinds of friendships as women.

But they do. When asked about what they desire from their friendships, men are just as likely as women to say that they want intimacy. And, just like women, their satisfaction with their friendships is strongly correlated with the level of self-disclosure. Moreover, when asked to describe what they mean by intimacy, men say the same thing as women: emotional support, disclosure and having someone to take care of them.

Men desire the same level and type of intimacy in their friendships as women, but they aren’t getting it.

***

In an effort to understand why men’s friendships are less intimate than women’s, psychologist Niobe Way interviewed boys about their friendships in each year of high school. She found that younger boys spoke eloquently about their love for and dependence on their male friends. In fact, research shows that boys are just as likely as girls to disclose personal feelings to their same-sex friends and they are just as talented at being able to sense their friends’ emotional states.

But, at about age 15 to 16 — right at the same age that the suicide rate of boys increases to four times the rate of girls — boys start reporting that they don’t have friends and don’t need them. Because Way interviewed young men across each year of high school, she was able to document this shift. One boy, Justin, said this in his first year, when he was 15:

[My best friend and I] love each other… that’s it… you have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. It’s just a thing that you know that person is that person… I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect and love for each other.

By his senior year, however, this is what he had to say about friendship:

[My friend and I] we mostly joke around. It’s not like really anything serious or whatever… I don’t talk to nobody about serious stuff… I don’t talk to nobody. I don’t share my feelings really. Not that kind of person or whatever… It’s just something that I don’t do.

What happens?

During these years, young men are learning what it means to be a “real man.” The #1 rule: avoid everything feminine. Notice that a surprising number of insults that we fling at men are actually synonyms for or references to femininity. Calling male athletes “girls,” “women” and “ladies” is a central part of motivation in sports. Consider also slurs like “bitch” and “pussy,” which obviously reference women, but also “fag” (which on the face of it is about sexual orientation, but can also be a derogatory term for men who act feminine) and “cocksucker” (literally a term for people who sexually service men). This, by the way, is where the ubiquitous slur “you suck” comes from; it’s an insult that means you give men blow jobs.

So men are pressed — from the time they’re very young — to disassociate from everything feminine. This imperative is incredibly limiting for them. Paradoxically, it makes men feel good because of a social agreement that masculine things are better than feminine things, but it’s not the same thing as freedom. It’s restrictive and dehumanizing. It’s oppression all dressed up as awesomeness. And it is part of why men have a hard time being friends.

***

To be close friends, men need to be willing to confess their insecurities, be kind to others, have empathy and sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest. “Real men,” though, are not supposed to do these things. They are supposed to be self-interested, competitive, non-emotional, strong (with no insecurities at all), and able to deal with their emotional problems without help. Being a good friend, then, as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.

Of course, not all men buy into these prescriptions for male behavior, but these expectations do influence most men’s friendships at least a little bit. They mean that, to make good friends, men have to take risks. In a context in which being a man is good and being friendly is being womanly, each time a man tries to form intimate bonds with another man, he potentially loses status. Men who want truly close friends have to fight the instinct to protect their standing above all else. This isn’t easy, as they’ve been told for a lifetime that their status as male, and their place in that hierarchy, is a significant part of why they’re important and valuable human beings.

Men also have to find other men who are willing to take those risks with them. Knowing who to reach out to isn’t always easy, as men often wear a masculine guise, a mask that projects masculinity and hides the things about them that are disallowed. In one study of men’s experiences, one college-age man explained: “I am more of an emotional person. … I never really felt much like who I [pretended to be] because I [was]… putting my man face on.”

It’s tough to know who to reach out to and it takes courage to do so. Complicating things further, men can feel threatened by the initiation of intimacy and strike back to protect their own guise. Another college-age interviewee explained, “If a guy starts opening up to another guy, he will joke around like, ‘You look like you are ready to make out with me.’” “I have done it,” he confessed.

Finally, because men often don’t have a lot of practice being a good friend, men who value friendships with other men may have to teach others how to be friends. They may have to model friendship for other men or be understanding when their friends fail them and respond with greater disclosure instead of anger or dismissal (e.g., “it hurt my feelings when you didn’t call to see how my surgery went”). This calls on great emotional reserves, but it’s worth it.

***

Having a friend to whom you can disclose your feelings a major determinant of well-being. People with friends are healthier. They’re less likely to get common colds, to develop fatal coronary disease, to develop physical impairments or reductions in brain functioning as they age. People with friends are more likely to survive the death of a spouse without any permanent loss of vitality. Medical doctor Dean Ornish explains:

I am not aware of any other factor — not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery — that has a greater impact on our incidence of illness, and [chance of] premature death.

Depending on which research you consult, people with good friends have a 22-60% lower chance of dying over a 10-year period.

People with friends are happier, too. Friendship is correlated with a more joyful life. If a person is depressed, having a friend interact with them regularly is as effective at treating depression as antidepressants or therapy. In old age, friends are more important than grandchildren for maintaining morale. According to sociologist Rebecca Adams, friendship is more strongly correlated with happiness than relationships with a spouse, children, parents or siblings.

Guys, it’s time. Man up and make some friends. We can’t do it for you. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but there’s every reason in the world to make friendship a priority. 

~ Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the principal writer for Sociological Images: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/. You can follow her on Twitter @lisawade and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisawadephd. More Lisa Wade.

Andrew Lanham - Walter White's Heart of Darkness - Heisenberg's Moral Uncertainty

Last night, Breaking Bad returned for its final eight episodes. Earlier that day, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Lanham examines the moral uncertainty of the world Walt/Heisenberg inhabits, especially his own ability to rationalize, calculate, control, and rewrite the script of his life.

That Walt can justify to himself the killing and the drug manufacturing - often through self-deception - does not alter the fact that he is a man who is free from conventional reality. In the language of psychologist Robert Kegan's adult development model, Walt has become self-authoring.

Walt desperately wants to control his life story as precisely as the chemicals in his meth lab, but his words betray him. On some level he knows he cannot control others, and that knowledge fuels his desperation. In “The Fly,” Breaking Bad’s most overtly ruminative episode, Walt wonders if he can find a way out of the deep mess he’s in. “I truly believe there exists some combination of words,” he tells Jesse. “There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that would explain all of this. I just can’t ever seem to find them.” Walt thinks that if he can discover a sequence of words as perfectly ordered as the crystal patterns he discovered in grad school, he can justify all his actions to Skyler and repair his broken family — perhaps even alter the unalterable wrongs he has done. 

Breaking Bad doesn't offer easy answers - Hank is the protagonist, although in some episodes (for example, when he let Jesse's girlfriend drown in her own vomit rather than simply turn her on her side), it's very difficult to even like him.

Aside from all of this, one of the most fascinating aspects of the show for me has been the friendship (?) between Walt and Jesse. They have beat each other nearly unconscious, sworn to go their separate ways, and each has put himself between his partner and death. Maybe we will finally find out if Walt really does care about Jesse or if he has only been using him.

It will be interesting to see what fate Vince Gilligan has in store for Walt and Jesse.

Walter White's Heart of Darkness

by Andrew Lanham

Does any space remain for moral judgment?

August 11th, 2013

WAY BACK AT THE BEGINNING of Breaking Bad, before we all became addicted to watching his ultraviolent escapades, Walter White stumbled enigmatically onto the small screen wearing just tighty whities and a gas mask. He hyperventilates, his gaze darting around the New Mexico desert like a small rodent caught in the open. A siren sounds in the distance, driving Walt back into his wrecked RV where he pries a gun from a corpse on the floor, shoves it in his underwear, and grabs a camcorder from the glove compartment. Emerging back into the harsh New Mexico sunlight, he aims the camera shakily at himself: “There are going to be some things that you’ll come to learn about me in the next few days,” he says, addressing his wife and son, but “no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.”

Tonight Breaking Bad returns to AMC for its final eight episodes. We’ve come to learn many things about Walt over the last five years, including how he wound up half naked in the desert, but I think we’re still trying to figure out what is really in his heart. On the surface, Walt appears to pursue power and money for the protection of his family with a cold and calculated rationality. His actions seem to make sense. On closer inspection, however, Walt’s motives begin to appear paradoxical, as his simultaneous desires for power and family intertwine and compete until they are literally at cross purposes. As a result, Walt’s intentions and emotions remain unreadable.

With Tony Soprano, we always knew why he did what he did — a mere glance from James Gandolfini would tell us when Tony’s anger was taking over at the helm. But we can’t similarly get inside Walt’s head. Walt is never subject singly to any one desire, so he seems to choose his own motivations, as if he’s free not only to decide what to do next, but to control what desires will shape his very character. A version of Nietzsche’s superman, Walt is the American ideal of self-determined individualism taken to a terrifying extreme.

Diagnosed with cancer and unable to pay his bills, Walt reinvents himself as a brutal drug lord, using his skills as a high-school chemistry teacher to cook higher-quality (and bluer) crystal meth than anyone on the street has ever seen. Breaking Bad’s creator Vince Gilligan says he wanted to tell a story that would turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. By itself, such an exploration of human mutability would be an admirable artistic project: in a world where we all too easily demonize others because of political, racial and religious differences, we need reminders that everyone has the potential to act monstrously, including ourselves. The radical degree of freedom with which Walt recreates his own identity, however, makes a far deeper claim about what it means to behave badly in the modern world. Walt’s power to transform his basic character, the extremity of his self-determination, calls into question, I would argue, our foundational notions about good and evil.

In a New York Times Magazine profile, Gilligan admits to a need for “biblical atonement, or justice, or something” for crimes like Walt’s. Many fans and critics of the show similarly embrace the language of sin and evil in their understanding of Walter White. Walt’s continuing ability to determine who and what he will be, though, belies such biblical, moralizing conclusions. His identity remains mutable, making it impossible to pigeonhole him into metaphysical moral categories of good or evil. In a world where we all determine who we will be, there’s no reason to believe people are essentially good or evil — at the most there are good or evil effects of our actions, and often there are both. Walt’s freedom thus threatens to corrode the very idea of moral personhood just as decisively as he dissolves his murder victims’ bodies in hydrofluoric acid. So, as Breaking Bad’s final episodes unfold, expect to wrestle with a question more usually associated with philosophy seminars than with primetime TV: in our increasingly secular, individualistic age, how can we find ways to hold on to ideas of right and wrong?

¤

In casting Bryan Cranston as Walter White, Gilligan picked an actor whose career arc dovetails uncannily with his character. For seven seasons on Malcolm in the Middle, Cranston played a likeable milquetoast of a modern father, a subservient husband whose rebellious younger days lie far behind him. As Walt morphs from such a family man himself into a power-hungry killer, Cranston’s acting subtly conveys how both identities continue to inform all of Walt’s actions. With potently ambiguous expressions and body language, Cranston refuses to show us the inner life that Gandolfini doled out so generously, and we are as in the dark about Walt’s true intentions as someone he is about to murder. Perhaps the most enjoyable (and disturbing) part of the show is trying to decipher what’s going on behind Walt’s craggy visage.

Let me tease out one particularly important example. In the second-season episode called “Over,” Walt’s cancer enters remission and the family celebrates. Walt, the teenaged Walter Jr., and Walt’s DEA agent brother-in-law Hank sit by the pool with a bottle of tequila. Dazzled as ever by his macho uncle, Walter Jr. attends closely to Hank’s story about a giant tortoise crossing the desert with a human head on its back. Rigged by a Mexican drug cartel, the tortoise explodes once it reaches a circle of DEA agents, and Hank explains that this was the cartel’s way of sending a message: the head belonged to a snitch named Tortuga. Groping for the word “symbolic,” Hanks turns to Walt, the brains of the family. “It’s not a metaphor, not an analogy, it’s a, Walt, what’s the word I’m looking for?” he asks. Walt glares silently ahead, and Hank settles for “poetic,” repeating the word softly to himself. As he refills their shot glasses, Walt contemplates his 16-year-old son’s cup, tosses its no doubt benign contents in the yard, and fills it with tequila.

Walter Jr. smiles sheepishly at his uncle, then looks at his dad for direction. “Go ahead,” Walt intones. They knock back their shots, Walter Jr. coughs, and Hank pats him companionably on the back. Walt studies the glasses for a moment, then refills all three. When Hank starts to protest, Walter Jr. glances hesitantly at his uncle, and Walt snaps at his son, “What are you looking at him for? We’re celebrating.” So Walt and Walter Jr. drink again, and Walt moves to refill the glasses once more. Hank covers Walter Jr.’s with his hand, but Walt pours anyway, splashing tequila across Hank’s fingers. Hank grabs the bottle and stomps away, trying to return the situation to normalcy — “I think we been Bogartin’ this puppy long enough.”

Still seated, his voice low, Walt grinds out, “Bring the bottle back.” Hank remains where he is, and Walt shoots to his feet, the two men locking eyes. “My son, my bottle, my house,” Walt barks. The camera hovers over Hank’s shoulder, watching Walt’s face, his head tilted forward, his eyes staring up. “The bottle. Now.” We have seen Walt’s murderous side before, but never in his own home, and Walt’s family has to be wondering who this man is. Hank puts a hand on Walt’s shoulder, but Walt smacks it away and steps closer, his face now ominously filling the screen. Suddenly, Walt Jr. vomits, and the tension diffuses. While Hank and Walt’s wife Skyler look after the boy, Walt sits calmly down to sip another shot. His mouth flirts with a self-satisfied grin, but his lips don’t quite make it there, flickering like a bad fluorescent light between grin, grimace, and a neutral expression as cold as an EKG flatline.

“That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts,” Nietzsche wrote, and I don’t think words can adequately express the complex emotions we see on Walt’s face. We can of course guess why Walt insists that his coddled son drink the liquor and attacks Hank for intervening. Walt’s intoxicated himself, and he’s simultaneously elated and disappointed at surviving cancer. He also despises Hank for not figuring out his secret identity (while being relieved at the same time), and, more importantly, he hates Hank for being a better father figure for Walter Jr. Finally, Walt wants to exercise the same control within his family that he does in his drug business, and he wants both his son and Hank to know the kind of power he wields in the outside world. These complex motivations, however, conflict violently with one another. Walt exalts in fooling Hank by momentarily revealing the vicious side of his secret identity, threatening to blow his own cover, just as he celebrates beating cancer by abusing the family he didn’t want to leave behind, just as he tries to reclaim and un-coddle Walter Jr. by doing him harm. The power Walt has discovered to protect and enrich his family thus works precisely and paradoxically by tearing his family apart. Walt’s motivation seems to erase itself, and this, I think, renders it ultimately inexplicable. Nevertheless, Walt’s flickering expression makes it undeniably clear that Walt feels his reasons for acting, even if we can’t quite make sense of them.

In the essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” T.S. Eliot calls Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy an “artistic failure” because, he argues, Hamlet’s emotional response to his situation exceeds the reality dramatized within the play. Instead of single-mindedly seeking revenge on his murderous uncle and complicit mother, Hamlet dithers and devolves into half-mad speeches, before the play takes a sharp turn and ends with a body-strewn stage. Eliot thinks the angst that delays Hamlet’s revenge transcends any of its possible motivations and that as a result neither we, nor Hamlet, nor even Shakespeare can quite comprehend Hamlet’s actions. The Danish Prince, Eliot writes, is “dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” Walt’s motivations similarly exceed “the facts as they appear,” but rather than making Breaking Bad (or Hamlet) an artistic failure, these inexpressible, conflicting emotions make Walt seem alive, a breathing, thinking individual onscreen. Hamlet says “I have that within which passeth show,” and Cranston’s acting, with its acknowledgment of the multifarious and self-contradictory impulses that lie behind a single expression, similarly implies that, even if he wanted to, Walt couldn’t come clean to his family. Walt assures Skyler and Walter Jr. that he only had them in his heart, but Nietzsche warns us that words can never capture what we truly feel inside.

The inaccessibility of Walt’s inner life has serious consequences for his self-determination. Last year, Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books that, like Milton’s Satan, Walt chooses to become evil and invite divine retribution. The Satan of Paradise Lost claims to choose how he sees the world — “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell,” he says, so reminiscent of Hamlet’s “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But Satan ultimately experiences the world that God created, and his choices serve the demands of a plot that God, as divine author, foreordained. Satan’s really not so different from sitcom characters who are subjected to the demand for comedic situations. Walt, in contrast, exceeds the situations in which he finds himself. His mind truly is “its own place,” set back from the world around him, as impenetrable and irreducible as Kurtz’s “the horror” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This extreme subjectivity opens a space for Walt to author himself. In the show’s first episode, when Jesse asks why Walt decided to “break bad,” Walt responds, simply, “I’m awake.” Walt’s become aware that he can abandon his middle-class, middle-age life story and start over in medias res. He’s awoken to the fact that he can rewrite his own script as his story unfolds.

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Walt’s freedom to reinvent himself comes from his sudden discovery, rather like Dorothy with her ruby slippers, that he’s long had the power to write and rewrite the world around him in spectacular ways. Most obviously, his mastery of chemistry gives him an immediate advantage in the criminal underworld. In the very first episode, two drug dealers invade Walt’s mobile meth lab. They plan to kill him, but they want to learn his meth recipe first and foolishly let him handle chemicals. As Walt explains to his protégé Jesse: “Red phosphorous in the presence of moisture and accelerated by heat yields phosphorous hydride. Phosphine gas. One good whiff and — poof.” And poof go the drug dealers. Four episodes later, in “Gray Matter,” we learn that in grad school Walt was “the master of crystallography,” using synchrotron radiation to obtain “purer and more complete patterns” of how substances are composed. As a dealer, Walt leverages this expertise to build his empire on a “purer” crystal meth than anyone else can manufacture, turning the chemical formulae and crystal patterns he used to write on his high-school chalkboard into real-world weapons and hard-core drugs.

A born scientist, Walt also sees human beings through chemistry’s lens. A flashback in “And the Bag’s in the River” shows Walt in grad school with his romantic interest Gretchen. They’re alone in a classroom, and he displays a lost vitality and vulnerability as he and Gretchen discuss the human body’s chemical composition. Walking to the chalkboard, Walt says, “Let’s break it down” — while present-day Walt is busy decomposing a drug dealer’s body in hydrofluoric acid. Reversing the dealer’s disintegration, flashback Walt composes a human being by writing elemental symbols — C, H, O, etc. — much the way the Br of bromine helps compose the words “Bryan Cranston” in the opening credits. When he’s finished writing, Walt tells Gretchen, “The whole thing adds up to 99.888042 percent … We are .111958 percent shy … There’s got to be more to a human being than that.” Gretchen proposes that the missing element might be the human soul, but Walt scoffs, leaning flirtatiously over her: “The soul? There’s nothing but chemistry here.” Even in one of his most tender, humane moments, he declares that he can fully understand humanity through chemical equations.

But just as Walt romantically doubles the meaning of “chemistry” in his flirtation with Gretchen, his choice of Heisenberg as his alias acknowledges that words and actions are ambiguous. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that we can’t determine a particle’s exact position and velocity simultaneously, and Walt clearly enjoys the implication that he, as Heisenberg, likewise can’t be understood through external observation, as we and the other characters in the drama are viewing him. His adopted name emphasizes the unpredictability that allows him to freely rewrite his own identity. By adopting an alias that points to the limitations of knowledge and interpretation, however, Walt also unintentionally suggests the possibility that his chemical equations can’t completely explain and control the people and events around him. If his own words and actions are ambiguous, other people are free to interpret him as they will and to write their own life stories in ways that Walt can’t predict.

As a short story writer, Skyler is the one with the talent for manipulating words, but her efforts to understand and gain some control over her life through language similarly go astray. At the start of his life as Heisenberg, Walt covers up his drug dealing and emotional distance by claiming that he’s been smoking marijuana. Trying to figure out if she’s being played, Skyler asks her sister Marie if pot can change someone’s mood. Skyler assures Marie that she is “strictly asking about a story that I am writing,” but Marie, too, wonders if she is being played and interprets Skyler’s question as an indication that Walter Jr. is smoking dope. Marie tells Hank, who thinks he can’t be played when Walter Jr. denies smoking pot, and he takes the kid on a tour of the dark side of town, where they meet a prostitute who is, coincidentally, a friend and accomplice of Walt’s partner Jesse. As fiction and reality raggedly overlap in this comedy of errors, the stories that characters tell to understand and order their lives can be easily misinterpreted by others, who inevitably set off their own unpredictable chains of events.

In the face of such unpredictability, Walt desperately wants to control his life story as precisely as the chemicals in his meth lab, but his words betray him. On some level he knows he cannot control others, and that knowledge fuels his desperation. In “The Fly,” Breaking Bad’s most overtly ruminative episode, Walt wonders if he can find a way out of the deep mess he’s in. “I truly believe there exists some combination of words,” he tells Jesse. “There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that would explain all of this. I just can’t ever seem to find them.” Walt thinks that if he can discover a sequence of words as perfectly ordered as the crystal patterns he discovered in grad school, he can justify all his actions to Skyler and repair his broken family — perhaps even alter the unalterable wrongs he has done. But Nietzsche’s warning about language comes to mind once more: words can’t capture what we truly feel, and we can’t control how others will hear even the most perfect story we might tell.

So it is fitting that literature, in the end, looks like it will prove Walt’s downfall. When last we saw him, in the episode “Gliding Over All,” Hank was sitting on the toilet, finding Walt’s copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After five years of searching, the answer to the riddle of the blue meth falls right into Hank’s lap: he opens the book and reads an inscription that connects Walt with Heisenberg. “Gliding Over All” is also a Whitman poem that aptly concludes with the line “Death, many deaths I’ll sing,” pointing to the multitudes that Walt and his near-perfect meth have already killed and the additional victims we can expect in the final eight episodes. That Hank, who once dubbed an exploding tortoise “poetic,” uncovers Walt’s secret in a volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry ironically emphasizes once again the severe limits of Walt’s ability to author himself. Walt has discovered a radical kind of freedom, but this freedom does not prevent others from intervening in his life story, perhaps even bringing it to a catastrophic conclusion.

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Writing for Grantland, Chuck Klosterman says that in Breaking Bad “morality is a continually personal choice.” But Klosterman resists the implications of such choice by claiming that “at some point [Walt] decided to become bad,” as if at that unspecified moment Walt chose to stop choosing, solidifying instead into a statically evil character. James Meek and Emily Nussbaum, in the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, similarly rely on essentializing language about heroes and villains to explain the show, reducing Walt to a stereotypical bad guy straight out of an old western. And reaching a bit wider, Kuo and Wu claim that in Breaking Bad’s “moral universe […] metaphysical truth exists,” while Gilligan himself admits what many viewers must also feel, a transcendent “human desire for wrongdoers to be punished.”

But if these critics all agree that Walt chooses how he will behave, and in so doing chooses who he will be, then he can’t choose to become stuck in a static role as a villain. There are no such static roles, Breaking Bad implies, no metaphysical categories of good and evil, only continual choice and personal becoming. Hank’s discovery of Leaves of Grass might feel like a deus ex machina manifestation of Breaking Bad’s “moral universe,” but in the world of the story it merely signals that Walt has become so confident and comfortable in his criminality that he leaves a damning book sitting in plain sight. And if Walt gets his expected comeuppance in the final eight episodes, it will be the result of contingent human actions by himself and others, not some foreordained karmic payback. Once we define human experience as individual and free, that is, Breaking Bad warns us that we can’t retreat into quasi-religious categories of good and evil to wish punishment on the people who scare us. Self-determination means that no one can be essentially good or evil, and this in turn precludes any kind of metaphysical punishment.

If biblical categories of good and evil no longer apply in Breaking Bad, or in a culture like ours that’s similarly built around the irreducibility of individual experience, does any space remain for moral judgment? The show, I think, tries to find a way to answer yes. Breaking Bad insists that we look directly at the violent consequences of Walt’s choices: it depicts the suffering and deaths he causes in all their brutal reality, be it the strangulation of a murderous drug dealer or the unplanned shooting of an innocent boy who happens to ride his bike in the desert on the wrong day. Watching Walt and some of his associates try to minimize or suppress their own gut-wrenching reactions to the death of a child only invites us as viewers to feel it for them. And by rejecting the safe categories of good and evil with which we usually make sense of human actions, Breaking Bad urges us to use such visceral reactions to violence to judge Walt in the here and now, without deferring to divine retribution. At the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow refuses to tell Kurtz’s fiancée what really happened in the jungle because “it would have been too dark — too dark altogether.” Breaking Bad chooses to show us the pain and devastation, all the darkest things that come from human freedom. How this experience shapes our hearts is up to us.

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Andrew Lanham is a DPhil student in English literature at Oxford University, where he is a Rhodes Scholar.