Die Like a Man: The Toxic Masculinity of "Breaking Bad"

I missed this article when it first appeared in October, but it's still a topic worth discussing now that nearly everyone has seen the Breaking Bad finale. The title of the article tells you what you are going to read, a review of the ways this epic television show portrayed a toxic form of masculinity defined by violence, power, and money.

I have no disagreements with any of that.

However, I want to suggest that there are other depictions of masculinity that are not so toxic. For much of the series, Walt and Jesse perform a strange dance of interdependence - many times Walt could have allowed Jesse to be killed and did not. And in one of the most difficult scenes early in the series, Walt allows Jesse's heroin addict girlfriend to die of asphyxiation in her sleep rather than save her, ostensibly to protect Jesse from his proclivity for addiction.

It's Jesse who represents the best of masculine values, in spite of the chaotic world in which he lives. He loves honestly and consistently. He does his best to take care of the young woman and her son that he loves and had to leave in order to protect them from the dangerous people in his life, including Walt. When he escapes in the final episode after Walt rescues him, we can imagine he will find the young boy (his mother, Jesse's love, is now dead) and raise him as his own.

Throughout the show, Jesse struggles with addiction, goes to rehab, and struggles some more with addiction. He is beaten nearly to death by Hank, Walt's brother-in-law, and then for much of the last season he is beaten and tortured.

Jesse never gives up hope. And he never loses his sense of right and wrong the way Walt does as he seeks more money, more power, and does so with violence - including putting out a hit on Jesse.

It's too simplistic to say that Breaking Bad presents and represents toxic masculinity - it reveals the full spectrum of masculinity, from tenderness to toxicity, often within the space of a single scene. 

Die Like a Man: The Toxic Masculinity of Breaking Bad

By Laura Hudson
10.05.13

Spoilers for the Breaking Bad finale follow.

“It felt right and satisfying and proper to us that he went out on his own terms; he went out like a man,” Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan shared in a recent podcast, describing the death of Walter White in the series finale.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we heard Hank – his prototypically macho brother-in-law – say something very similar during Skyler’s intervention, when he defended Walt’s decision to refuse both financial charity and cancer treatment: “Maybe Walt just wants to die like a man.”

What, exactly, does it mean to be a “man”? It’s a question that sits at the dark, warped heart of the entire series and its anti-hero protagonist. A nerdy chemist whose brains haven’t earned him any power or respect from the world at large, the terminally ill Walt decides that he’s finally going to get that power and respect through whatever means necessary (and whenever possible, using science). The show doesn’t just trace Walt’s arc from Mr. Chips to Scarface, as Gilligan famously described it, or from Walt to Heisenberg; it also maps his journey from being a “pussy” to being a “man.” And while he succeeds in his goals, it’s a transformation that comes at a high price.

If we really want to look at the definition of a man within the world of Breaking Bad, it’s easiest to start by looking at what it says a man is not: the Walter White we meet in the very first episode of the show.

By some measures, Walt has had a successful life: He’s incredibly brilliant (we’re told his research contributed to a project that won a Nobel Prize, not to mention Gray Matter Industries); he’s a teacher; and most importantly, he has a loving relationship with his family, and another child on the way. But Walt still feels like a failure, particularly because he hasn’t achieved the sort of financial success he believes he deserved.

Money and masculinity are deeply linked by the series. Not only does money signify the value of the person who earns it, but also the control and self-sufficiency that comes along with it. This link between manliness, money, and power is a dangerous one for people who accept it. Walt, after all, would literally rather die than accept charity, because taking money from Gretchen and Elliott would somehow make him feel like less of a man.

Later, when Walt says that cooking meth has cost him his family, drug kingpin Gus Fring suggests that perhaps he’s looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps in alienating his family, he was actually fulfilling a more important role: “When you have children, you will always have family. They will always be your priority, your responsibility. And a man, a man provides. And he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it. Because he’s a man.”

This seems particularly prescient, because it’s the exact model of manhood that Walt embraces. By the time the finale rolls around, Walt is so alienated from his family that they neither want to see him nor accept his money, and so he must funnel his drug fortune to them without their knowledge, ensuring he receives no credit — no appreciation, respect or love. In Walt’s mind, the measure of a man isn’t his relationship to his family, but rather his ability to support them financially. Faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and the decision about what sort of legacy he truly wants to leave behind, Walt sacrifices the former for the latter. (Of course, as he admits in the final episode, it isn’t simply about the money, and it isn’t really for his family. Leaving them the money isn’t an act of altruism so much as it is an affirmation of his own power and identity: being a man who provides.)

Masculinity in Breaking Bad is a brittle thing, one so terrified of weakness that any display of vulnerability must be punished, and any slight against another man’s power answered with violence – or else perceived as a weakness. We see it in the hyper-masculine culture of both the neo-Nazis and the drug cartel, where the air is always dripping with machismo and vengeance is considered an almost sacred duty.

This model of manhood also requires control not only over your own life, but over the lives of others. Think about all of the most iconic moments of the show, the badass lines that made us want to pump our fists: “Say my name.” “I am the danger.” “I am the one who knocks.” “I won.” Every single time, it’s about dominance – not just about having power, but about taking power away from someone else.


The series begins with what seems like an odd image: a pair of pants, flying through the air. Much of what follows is about who gets to wear them. When Skyler shows up unexpectedly to threaten Jesse for supposedly selling weed to Walt, Jesse is quick to insult Walt’s manhood: “Good job wearing the pants in the family.” As time goes on, however, and Walt slowly dominates Skyler to the point that she would rather try to drown herself in a pool than speak up against him, the new status quo becomes clear: He’s wearing the pants now.

It’s also worth noting that when Hank finally discovers the truth about Walt, it’s while Hank is sitting on the toilet – literally, getting caught with his pants down. And while Walt may not have wanted Hank to die, Walt almost surely thrills a little to getting away with all his crimes under the nose of the man who used to condescend to him, enacting his own twisted version of the movie where the nerd gets one over on the jock. Once the truth is out and Hank assaults him physically, Walt fires back with a chilling warning, letting Hank knows that he is no longer a man to be trifled with: “If you don’t know who I am, then maybe the best course is to tread lightly.”

Their conflict is one of the most interesting in the show, not only because Hank serves as the uber-masculine counterpoint to Walt – the Charles Atlas to Walt’s skinny kid getting sand kicked in his eyes – but because their pissing contest in the garage isn’t just about who has more power. It’s about which brand of power is superior: brains or brawn. Ultimately, Walt doesn’t subordinate Hank by lifting weights, getting buff and beating him in a fistfight. He wins by outsmarting him, like Walt always does.

When we first meet Walt, he’s an object of ridicule to his students, trapped in a low status loop where his intellect isn’t valued and confers no power to him. The first sign that he is transforming into someone different is when he begins to push back, and lash out at the bullies around him – and of course, he does it with science. When slighted by a jerk in an expensive car, Walt manipulates the engine and causes it detonate. When a drug lord beats Jesse and takes their money, Walt shows up with an explosive designed to look like meth and blows up the building. When the feds get hold of the incriminating tapes from the superlab, Walt rigs a truck with a supermagnet, and uses it to erase the evidence from outside the building.

Walt and science, making everyone their bitch since 2008.

Which leads us to perhaps the most interesting and gender-charged word on Breaking Bad: “bitch.” Yes, yes, it’s just a word. But it’s also coded with some very gender-specific ideas about power and dominance – who has it and who takes it – that are fundamental to the conflict at the heart of Walt’s transformation.

The easiest way to deconstruct a word is to think not only about what it means but what it does, and how it does it. When you call a woman a bitch, you’re saying that she’s difficult, unaccommodating. By that standard, Walter White would be possibly the biggest bitch of all. Of course, that’s not the way it works. When we apply a female slur like “bitch” to a man, something strange happens. It stops meaning that someone is difficult or unpleasant – words that for men more easily be seen as signs of strength – and instead becomes an indicator of weakness and cowardice.

In short, calling a man a “bitch” is designed to diminish his power by comparing him to a woman. It implies that women are weaker and less powerful, and also that they are to be used and dominated. “Bitch” is linked to exploitation, to submission; if you make someone your bitch, you force them to submit to your will, in one way or another. (Despite being the most famous and popular insult of Jesse Pinkman, it’s worth noting that Jesse almost never uses the word to describe women.)

Similarly, “pussy” is a word used almost exclusively against men, for the very reason that it reduces them from masculine to feminine, from a higher level of power to a lower one. What these words tell us is that men aren’t just defined by what they are; they’re defined by what they’re not supposed to be. Over and over again, men in Breaking Bad send and receive the message that the last thing they want to be is women.

Jesse: The face of toxic masculinity
Jesse is highly aware of the very narrow cultural script for being a man, and certainly knows how to act it out. This is a guy who feels perfectly comfortable grabbing his crotch and telling Walt to “speak into the mic, bitch!” But despite his flaws and his posturing, he’s always been a good guy: compassionate, caring and even sensitive. Deep down Jesse is more creampuff than criminal, unable to take part in the sociopathy of the people around him and deeply traumatized when forced to commit violence. (Walt, meanwhile, just whistles.) We see Jesse cry on more than one occasion, and he has a particular soft spot for children, both very stereotypically feminine traits.

Needless to say, Jesse is punished for them. Expressing emotion is seen as weakness and liability, and the reason that Jesse ultimately ends up broken, enslaved and exploited by the final episode. Despite his attempts to ward off subordination with masculine posturing — like calling everyone in earshot a “bitch” — that’s exactly what he becomes. Manipulated by a long series of more powerful men, by the end of the series Jesse is shackled in a cell while the men around him watch videos of him weeping during his confession for entertainment. “Does this pussy cry through the whole thing?” asks Jack.

In many ways a boy trying to become a man, Jesse is the male face of the damage that toxic masculinity does – the cost it extracts not only from women but from men. He shatters against the rocks of the masculine ideal, and it’s doubtful he will ever be able to put himself back together. Taken to its furthest extent, this brand of masculinity punishes men for acting like Jesse, and instead produces men like Walt – and even Todd.

The irony of this perspective on masculinity is that for all its insistence on the importance of power — both having it and taking it — it often makes the people who adopt it weaker. Or as Walt Jr. says, when asked to discuss his father’s refusal to accept charity or get treatment for his cancer: “You’re a pussy.” (Of course.)

When Hank refuses to acknowledge his PTSD – or accept his physical weakness after his shooting – he prevents himself from healing both emotionally and physically. When Heisenberg’s crimes are pinned on Gale, Walt tells Hank that the other chemist wasn’t good enough to pull it off because his pride won’t allow him to give up the credit. And in the end, masculine pride is what makes Walt’s final act of revenge possible: By suggesting that Jack might have partnered with a rat — impugning his honor — Walt is able to delay his own death long enough to activate his machine gun.

Many have argued that Breaking Bad is an indictment of Walt, a critique of the male power fantasy rather than a celebration. How we respond to the ending and whether we’re still rooting for Walt in those final moments is indeed a measure of our own complicity – or Matt Zoller Seitz puts it at Vulture, “it’s an ending that leaves us alone with a mirror.”

While we may want to cheer for the character we’ve been identifying with for so long, what are we really cheering? What standards of success are we tacitly endorsing when we feel just a little bit pleased that Walt got to live — and die — “like a man”? The masculinity described in Breaking Bad is something deeply pernicious, a cultural dogma that damages, warps and limits men, isolating them from their emotions and from others. It promotes violence, retribution, and a hierarchy built upon the backs victims both male and female. Sometimes, it kills them. As Silpa Kovvari at The Atlantic observed, the masculinity of Breaking Bad represents “standards to die by, not to live by.”

Regardless of whatever personal triumph it represents to him, Walt’s is a Pyrrhic victory; he has achieved power only by stripping it from others, and perpetuating the same ruthless system that once humiliated him and treated him as worthless.

If we learned anything from the kind, brilliant Gale, it’s that the Walter White who dies at the end of the show would have had no problem shooting the Walter White of the first episode in the head if he got in his way. When the nerd who was bullied becomes the bully, should we really feel a sense of satisfaction? Or should we take a deep, soul-searching look at the sort of system that makes underdogs like Walt feel like the only way they can be men is by destroying and dominating everyone around them?

Breaking Bad was a show about a man with greatness inside him, and who believed that the only way to achieve it was by becoming the sort of man who whose greatness would be acknowledged and respected. While it’s obvious that Walt isn’t a “good” guy by the end, to many people he was still a sympathetic one. It’s far easier to high-five Walt for climbing to the top of the masculine power pyramid than to reexamine whether we should be tearing it down. Not only because of the collateral damage it does to people like Skyler and Andrea, but the damage it does to the men who attempt the climb.

While Gilligan has voiced his criticism and even contempt for the man Walt becomes on numerous occasions, the final installment is nothing if not a victory lap. Yes, Walt pays for his decisions in many ways, but it’s telling that all of those costs get extracted in the episodes preceding the finale. Taken on its own, the last episode of the show reads more like wish fulfillment than condemnation, as Walt dies surrounded not by his failures but by his triumphs, by the chemistry he loves rather than the family he sacrificed, and with a smile on his face. You can (and probably should) step back and view Walt’s final form as a critique, as something that ends in emptiness, but somehow that’s not the feeling the finale imparts. The show ends not by inviting introspection, but rather, as Gilligan said, offering satisfaction:

“As bad a guy as he has been, and as dark a series of misdeeds as he has committed, it felt right and satisfying and proper for us that he went out on his own terms. He went out like a man.”

Indeed he did.

Reviewing the Final Episode of Breaking Bad

[WARNING: Spoiler alert - if you have not seen the finale do not read this post.]

NOTE: This post also appears at my other blog, Integral Options Cafe.

As the music played and the camera panned away from Walt's body, I felt a kind of relief, as though I had been holding my breath for five seasons waiting for the conclusion that was inevitable at the beginning of the show.

And still I am haunted (as much as one can be by a television show) by the vagueness of Jesse's fate. He was, for many reasons, my favorite character on the show. Perhaps I identified with his troubled family background and retreat into drug use (all too familiar in my youth), or I saw in him the path not taken when I decided to get my act together, quit the drugs, and go back to school.

More than that, Jesse was the heart of the show in many ways. He FELT the things the happened, the killings, the manipulations, the torture. Walt was able to compartmentalize it all, rationalize it all, but not Jesse - he was tormented by the things that happened, the things he nonetheless participated in. If Walt was the brain, Jesse was the heart.

I want a whole new series, set two years after this finale, with Jesse as the central character, possibly raising Brock as a single father now that Andrea was killed. I won't get that wish. But I like to think that is the path Jesse took following his primal scream of freedom, loss, suffering, frustration, relief, and maybe even happiness that he survived.

I liked the finale. How about you?

Here are several of the multitude of morning-after evaluations of the most talked about series finale in years.

Two from Salon:

Was the “Breaking Bad” ending too neat?

The show's finale was well-received, but some critics wonder if it was true to the characters and the show 

By Prachi Gupta

 

AMC’s epic crime drama “Breaking Bad” has come to its bloody end, and so far, reception from television critics has been overwhelmingly positive — good news for show creator Vince Gilligan, who had predicted that it would be “polarizing.” On “Talking Bad,” which aired immediately following the finale, Gilligan said that unlike “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad’s” finale episode, “Felina,” needed to tie up lose ends. “This show was intended all along to be very finite. It’s a story that starts at A and ends at Z, as it were. It’s a very closed-ended thing.” 

* * *

In the end, Walt won

Whether he was a hero or a villain, Walter White got nearly everything he ever wanted

By Neil Drumming

“When I pop the trunk, hit the deck.” — The Beatnuts, “Reign of the Tec”

Last night, we witnessed the end of AMC’s “Breaking Bad.” I’d been dreading that moment for a week and not just because I am a faithful disciple of the program and hate to see it disappear from my Sunday ritual. I was dreading the finale because I knew that as soon as the credits rolled I would have to craft some sort of coherent and cohesive reaction to something that had taken me years to consume and would likely take days if not weeks to digest.

 * * * * *

Two from Rolling Stone:

Lessons of the 'Breaking Bad' Series Finale

Five takeaways from the last episode of a modern saga



By Scott Neumyer
September 30, 2013

Breaking Bad premiered its first episode on AMC in January 2008. Five years, five seasons and 62 episodes later, one of the greatest television dramas of all time came to an end last night as Vince Gilligan's landmark series took its final, bloody bow. In a TV landscape that has, in recent years, found it difficult to satisfyingly wrap up beloved shows in a way that hits the right emotional notes while also tying up loose ends, Breaking Bad's final episode may prove to be one of the most fulfilling and well-made farewells ever. And while we're sure to keep "Felina" on our DVRs for repeated close inspection of the episode over the next few weeks, here are a few quick takeaways.

* * *

'Breaking Bad' Finale Recap: Heisenberg Certainty Principle

Like Walter White's meth, the finale's formula was flawless – but is that a good thing?

By Sean T. Collins

September 30, 2013 

Jesse Pinkman built the perfect box. He sawed it off, sanded it down, hammered it together, smoothed it out, and carried it away with all the pride of a first-time father. This is the fantasy-memory he retreated to when reality became too broken for him to face at last – the one time in his life when he felt he accomplished exactly what he set out to do, the one time he made everything fit.

For better or for worse, that box is Breaking Bad.

* * * * *

From Vulture:

Breaking Bad Series Finale Recap: ‘Do It Yourself’

By Matt Zoller Seitz

"Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!" – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

"Hello, Carol."

That is, if I'm not mistaken, the first line in the final eight-episode stretch of Breaking Bad, uttered at the end of the prologue in "Blood Money." We heard the name of that previously unmet neighbor, Carol, again in "Felina." The episode's title is an anagram for "finale" as well as a reference to The Girl in Marty Robbins's classic "El Paso," whose lyrics are echoed in this chapter's Western-ballad-like tale of an outlaw dying an outlaw's death. In a phone conversation between Skyler and Marie about Walt's return to Albuquerque, series creator Vince Gilligan, who wrote and directed this series ender, repeated her name and even had Skyler situate her geographically. "Hello, Carol": or hello, Carol. As in A Christmas Carol.

* * * * *

From NPR:

'Breaking Bad' Lands Its Finale A Little Too Cleanly

by Linda Holmes

September 30, 2013

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan signaled in interviews leading up to Sunday night's series finale that those who craved some redemption for Walter White were the ones most likely to leave happy.

"We feel it's a satisfying ending," Gilligan told Entertainment Weekly. "Walt ends things more or less on his own terms."

For Gilligan, those things were self-evidently connected: the satisfaction of the ending and the degree to which the terms of that ending are set by Walt. And that's probably true for broad segments of the show's legions of fans who continued to root for Walt at some elemental level, or least to root for him to become root-able again.

Walter White and White Male Priviledge

Walter White has been the (anti-)hero of Breaking Bad for much of its five seasons. But his son, Walter, Jr. (who changes his name to Flynn early on in the show, then changes it back to Walter, Jr. when his father and mother split up [taking his dad's side and even wanting to live with him], then finally changing it back to Flynn in the final season) is the real hero of the show according to Anna Mae Duane at Salon.

Flynn is by birth a flawed human being (he has cerebral palsy), and he has learned in his brief life that nothing is perfect - a lesson Walt surely needs to learn and never did.

If Walter White, the great manipulator both of chemicals and of people, could have learned from the son he likely deemed a burden, he would have learned that living with brokenness is the only hope any of us have of beating back chaos and the dark.

Yes. In Walt we see a traditional model of masculinity - the only real values are strength, power, courage, and family, not necessarily in that order. In Flynn, we see a more complete human being, a young man who has strong feelings about the chaos he lives with and who stands up for what he believes is true.

Why Flynn is the real hero of “Breaking Bad”

Unlike Walt, Flynn understands that neither his life nor his body will ever be "perfect"

By Anna Mae Duane
Sunday, Sep 29, 2013


RJ Mitte as Walter White, Jr. in "Breaking Bad" (Credit: AMC/Frank Ockenfels 3)
As Walter White squares off against Todd and his crew of white supremacists in the final season of “Breaking Bad,” much has been made of Walt’s hubris as a symptom of white male privilege — his sense that he is owed a certain degree of power and adulation, and his anger that he has somehow been denied his due. Thus Walt’s showdown with neo-Nazis — who are really invested in the idea of superior bodies — offers a certain sort of poetic closure. I’ll take your white male privilege and raise you a reich.

There’s an even deeper sense of entitlement that shapes Walt’s world — and likely the world of the viewers. It’s the deeply entrenched, and deeply American sense that we are entitled to bodies that function perfectly. Walter may well have been seething with resentment for most of his life, but it’s not until his cancer diagnosis that he makes his long descent into crime. Because it fades into the background for so much of the series, it’s easy to forget that it is illness, with its attendant specters of disability and death, that flips the switch that breaks Walter White bad.

Cancer, we tell ourselves with irrepressible American optimism, is what you make of it. As Skyler’s nightstand full of self-help books attest, cancer comes with its own to-do list, its own requirement that you take control of your endangered asset and regain a healthy body. Medical practitioners rightly applaud this sort of take-charge attitude. Self-efficacy, as it’s called, is a prime indicator of a how well a patient will do. If patients can imagine useful steps, envision themselves taking them and then follow through, the odds of recovery are substantially higher. In the face of the uncontrollable chaos that cancer threatens, a plan and a cool head can, doctors often tell us, prevail.

Walt is far from the model patient. He is, however, a model of self-efficacy. He has a plan. Hoo boy, does he ever. The cancer, like all the other forces in “Breaking Bad,” is brought to heel by Walt’s formidable will and intellect. Just a matter of showing that cancer who’s boss, it seems. And while Walter’s haughty dismissal of the killer disease might be a satisfying narrative (particularly for Walt), disability studies scholars have pointed out the flaws in the mind-over-matter model that Walter’s story seems to tell.

While being empowered is certainly important, insisting that we can apply a can-do attitude to all the body’s vagaries and ailments implies that living with less than perfection is just not an option. The implication is that if something is broken, it absolutely must be fixed. If you can’t fix it, then you just must not be trying hard enough. Walt’s decisions stem from a fundamental desire to be the one doing the breaking, rather than the one who has to live with the uncertainty of being perceived as broken. Until his family pressures him to get medical help, he seems to prefer death to the dependency that he associates with chronic illness and disability.

Walter’s disdain for the weakness he associates with illness seems to insulate him as everyone around him deals with bodies that don’t do what they are told. Skyler’s surprise pregnancy, Flynn’s cerebral palsy, Hank’s life-altering injury, and Jane’s misbehaving gag reflex all render them vulnerable to the man whose control over his environment is so complete that stage 3 non-operable lung cancer is no match for his badassery.

In the face of such superhuman control, Flynn’s disability in particular has likely always felt to Walt like one of the unfair strikes against the perfection he seems to think he’s due. Indeed one of Walt’s first transformative moments — often considered the birth of his alter ego Heisenberg — comes as he strikes out in rage against bullies who had been mocking Flynn’s need for assistance in a clothes store.

It is an undeniably satisfying moment when the nebbishy Walter White takes down the biggest of the bullies. With his newfound power, he can master his son’s disability, or at the very least the painful social responses to it. “What’s the matter, chief,” he asks the bully as he grinds his heel into his leg, “having trouble walking?” The scene brings with it a sense of vigilante empathy. By impairing the bully’s leg, Walter gives him a taste of his son’s disability: He might as well be asking, “Do you want to feel what’s it’s like, punk?”

But Walter White’s flat-out run into the arms of Heisenberg is powerful testimony to just how badly he doesn’t want to feel what it’s like. His successful “battle” against cancer, his canny entrepreneurship, his ruthless empire-building, all reinforce the idea that a real man, a real American, makes it all himself, his body just one more tool in the arsenal he controls. Like the meth addicts his empire creates and destroys, he cannot tolerate the discomfort of living in an often-painful reality. Like an addict chasing that high that won’t crash, he convinces himself that after just one more scheme, one more death, he will have fixed everything perfectly.

I can’t help feeling that Walter White’s story — or at least the one he likes to tell himself — owes as much to the transcendentalists as to Tarantino. While Walter’s cabin in the woods evokes Thoreau’s Walden, and his initials disastrously evoke those of Walt Whitman, Heisenberg’s philosophy is perhaps best summed up by yet another of the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson. His famous essay “Self Reliance” explicitly divides the realms of self-made men from both children and the disabled:

And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

For Walter White, manhood means not just being a redeemer and benefactor (after all, he’s doing it for his family, right?) but a conqueror of the chaos and darkness that comes with being embodied, with being human. Walter’s sense of entitlement, which undeniably finds its purchase in having a white male body, also resides in the belief that only an able body is worth having. He, unlike those trapped within the realm of “minors and invalids,” will accept only a body that doesn’t require thinking about at all.

So it is particularly fitting that Heisenberg is taken down by a crew of invalids and minors. Hank, still recovering from profound injury, undoes the meth kingpin by finding a book by the “other W.W.,” Walter Whitman. Within Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” — the title itself a reference to the reality that we’re all going to wind up pushing up daisies someday — is the famous poem “Song of Myself,” a title that would likely appeal to a character who has had narco corridos sung in his honor, and who demands that even business associates sing his praises, or at least say his name. But anyone who knows Walt Whitman, and in particular his “Song of Myself,” knows that Heisenberg couldn’t find a less complementary counterpoint. As a white man in the 19th century, Whitman revels in finding connection with those whose bodies render them subjects of disdain, of powerlessness, and exclusion:

Through me many long dumb voices;
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves;
Voices of prostitutes, of deform’d persons;
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs;
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars--and of wombs, and of the father stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon;
Of the trivial flat, foolish, despised
Fog, in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Walt, rolling his barrel full of dumb, useless cash through the desert, would have done well to listen to the other “W.W.” He is undone by the relics of man who wrote that the only “song of myself” that’s worth telling, the only one that has a hope of lasting, is the one that is about something other than yourself.

If Walt Whitman’s giddy embrace of the body’s imperfections set the scene for Heisenberg’s discovery, it is Walt Jr. who brings his career to a definitive end. In Emerson’s terms, both a minor and an invalid, Flynn is the only character who never gets sucked into Heisenberg’s justifications, never becomes complicit in Heisenberg’s assurance that he can work it all out, never decides to keep the secret to himself to come out looking better in the end. In one of the show’s most wrenching moments, Flynn ends the mad chase begun with Hank’s discovery of Walt Whitman’s poems by doing what Walter White was never able to do — he calls for help.

Flynn’s choice to ask for help is what dismantles Heisenberg’s plan to beat both death and the law. And it’s Flynn, whose disability has taught him that neither his life nor his body will ever be perfect, who squashes his father’s last-ditch scheme to send some money home. “Why aren’t you dead already?” he screams at his sick and desperate would-be benefactor. Flynn’s brutal question asks out loud what he suspects strangers, bullies and likely his father have silently asked themselves about him. In a world that demands perfection, it’s better to be a criminal than to be a supplicant, and for Heisenberg, it’s better to be dead than disabled. If Walter White, the great manipulator both of chemicals and of people, could have learned from the son he likely deemed a burden, he would have learned that living with brokenness is the only hope any of us have of beating back chaos and the dark.

Masculine Identity in Breaking Bad

When Breaking Bad began its story, Walter White was a meek, under-achieving everyman who teaches high school chemistry to uninterested kids and who is diagnosed with lung cancer. We sympathize and we like him. Even when discovers a way to leave some money for his family (he assumes the cancer will kill him sooner or later) by cooking methamphetamine, we still like him because we sense a man pushed to the brink who is desperate to be a good husband and a good father, and that means, in part, taking care of his family financially.

As a fan of the show, I was horrified (for lack of better word) when Walt stood by and did nothing while Jesse’s girlfriend Jane died (end of the second season). Jesse is Walt's partner in cooking the meth, and until Walt decides to go big with his pure blue meth, Jesse handled the street side of things, setting up a ring of dealers to peddle their chemistry project.

Hank and Walt

Jesse is a former student of Walt's and for most of the now five seasons he still calls him Mr. White, and this simple act serves to support and reinforce the power differential between the two men. In large part, Walt (and later Mike) are surrogate fathers for Jesse. We learn a while into the show that Jesse comes from a well-off family where he has been the scapegoat or the exile - the one who holds most of the pain and raw emotions and often acts out as a form of rebellion against being exiled.

And Jesse is literally exiled from his family, who appear to have put him in rehab a couple of times, but have largely asked him not to come around. Which is why he looks to "Mr. White" as a kind of father figure, and also why he is the one of the two men who is capable of feelings and feels horrified by some the things they have done (especially the killing).

Gus, Jesse, Walt, Mike

I could go on and on - and one day I might. The relationships between the men on the show is interesting and worth exploration. The main dyads are Walt and Jesse, Walt and Junior (his son, Walter, Jr.), Walt and Hank (Walt's hyper-masculine, DEA agent brother-in-law), Jesse and Hank (enemies, who find common ground as the show draws to a close), and Jesse and Mike, (an enforcer for Gus, who was a major player in the drug trade, and who Walt eventually kills in his first power-grab - he also kills Mike, which is devastating to Jesse). Even the relationship between Gus and Walt is interesting for what it says about men and power.

For those who are interested in this topic, the below article was first published at Huffington Post and then at the Good Men Project. Also check out this article from NPR on Death and Walter White.

‘Breaking Bad’ and the Foolishness of Masculinity‏

September 20, 2013 by Pete Strauss

The male characters of AMC’s hit series deconstructed. Is male pride a destructive influence?

Breaking Bad is but a few episodes from completion and it’s hard to say anything about it that has not been said, but I bravely intend to do so anyhow. In recent weeks, there has been much discussion of the lack of strong female characters (which I personally think does the show a bit of a disservice), but not enough has been made of the show’s persistent and fierce criticism of masculinity that has permeated the show throughout the five-season run.

Walter White’s descent (or ascent depending on how you view it) from a justifiable anti-hero to a loathsome villain has been gradual. Vince Gilligan described the character’s transformation as “protagonist to antagonist,” and when we first meet Walter as the protagonist, he has lived a life forever repressed and stripped of the limited power available to him. His family affairs up until this point have been predominantly controlled by Skyler, he teaches chemistry to a largely indifferent group of teenagers and his brother-in-law Hank represents a cliched hyper-masculinity that serves to diminish Walt’s already lowly status further.

So when he finds an area in which he can assert dominance and power, his ego grows exponentially. The decreased empathy that we feel for Walt runs in tandem with his acts being less about selflessness or basic self-preservation and infinitely more to do with retaining power in an industry in which callousness and violence are prerequisites. Walt becomes obsessed with his manhood, even going as far as to purchase a car wash in order to spite the owner for a perceived slight that occurred sometime beforehand. The zenith of Walt’s egomania is perhaps typified with the memorable “say my name” scene. This scene exemplifies the transformation from the timidity and nervousness of Walter White into the arrogance and ruthlessness of Heisenberg; the conversion from protagonist to antagonist is complete.

Hank’s character starts life as a stereotype of masculinity, a jock. He subscribes to a largely outmoded but still prevalent criteria of what it means to be a man. At family gatherings, he frequently takes the time to emasculate Walt and assert a dominance within the family that had previously gone unchallenged in Walt’s pre-Heisenberg days. However, as the show develops, the characters develop as well, and before long, Hank becomes much more than a caricature, but rather a rounded, three-dimensional character. Perhaps more than any other character in the show, Hank is obsessed with the projection of masculinity; from his home-brewed Schraderbrau to his job at the DEA, he seeks to emanate a brashness and confidence. However, rooted in his masculinity are deep-seated insecurities and anxiety attacks that impede his judgement.

Hank’s sense of himself is almost completely based around basic tenants of what he views to be essential to being a male. His own masculinity is perhaps at its most destructive when refusing money for treatment that would enable him to walk again, which echoes Walt’s own refusal of monetary help for his cancer treatment from his former business partner. Masculinity in these instances is associated with a detrimental desire to be self-sufficient. Indeed, had Walt swallowed his pride at this early stage, then he would have saved everyone a lot of bother.

Jesse is by far the most tragic character in Breaking Bad. The initial projection of youthful overconfidence and independence gives way to a lost boy desperately in need of the father-figure that has been sorely absent in his turbulent life. At different stages of the plot, he comes to see Walt and Mike as paternal figures, but it’s his persistent reference to Walt as Mr. White that gives an indication of the perverse and manipulative relationship between the two. It is no coincidence that the character that seems most troubled with the morality of his actions is also the character that has long eschewed the facade of masculinity. Jesse is also one of the few male characters that seems willing to discuss his feelings and not act with the apparent indifference or stoicism of which Hank and Walt are both guilty.

As the series hurtles to a close, it is becoming very apparent that its creators seek to portray male pride as a destructive influence. The large yet fragile egos of all of the male characters at some point or another leads to miscalculations or seemingly needlessly vindictive acts. Time and again, the damaged pride and vanity of the male characters cause them to act without logic and—at their most destructive—extreme violence. Between Walt’s angry desire to be a “pursuer rather than pursued” and Hank’s desperate need to create the illusion of self-sufficiency, it becomes clear that masculinity is twinned with the wholly negative traits of the male characters within the show.

Originally published at The Huffington Post

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?

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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.