One of the interesting things that Breaking Bad does is to make a wish fulfillment fantasy completely horrible seeming. The “whole nice guy who’s been pushed too far and now becomes the badass he always secretly wanted to be” angle is so intoxicating that it would be difficult not to indulge in that. Plus antiheroes are inherently appealing, at least on a superficial level. Think of how a ton of people like Mad Men or The Sopranos because they want to watch Tony Soprano or Don Draper be awesome, even though both shows are unrelenting in showcasing their awfulness. But for a lot of people that doesn’t matter — both characters’ monstrosity is tied to an illicit, overcharged masculinity that is near impossible to make unappealing. So the premise — meek chemistry teacher becomes drug lord — would seem like it could only lead to a gross revenge story that would appeal to our self-pity and narcissism and bloodlust.
It doesn’t, somehow. There are certainly moments where Walt commits evil acts that still code as awesome (or just monologues). But Breaking Bad mainly foregrounds the traits that make him pathetic — the traits that made him a failure in the first place. He becomes more arrogant and more overbearing. He’s cruel to the one person who respects him. His self-pity ramps up to toxic levels, and he feels most sorry for himself when he destroys other people. He whines when he doesn’t get what he wants and he clings to life, and life on his own terms, even as he has eradicated any good reason he had to live. He’s irritating, of all things. Evil in a petty, annoying way. His effectiveness when cornered lets him survive, but the rest of the time he’s a sniveling husk.
The narcissism of those other two antiheroes are bought into a little bit by their shows — they get lots of women, they win at the end a lot of the time, they do have some humanity that gives them a tragic dimension. Not Walter White. His naked desire for respect makes his insecurity obvious, and the only trapping of power that he wants is money. Even when he wins he worsens the situation. His sins of pride and greed and anger are sterile, and only appealing to himself. Instead of turning him into a grand, tragic figure, desperation has whittled him down.
I suspect that Vince Gilligan et al didn’t do this for a didactic or thoughtful reason. Unlike the other universally accepted as great dramas, Breaking Bad doesn’t really try to say anything in particular. The Wire is blatant about doing that, and Mad Men and the Sopranos and everything else are pretty obvious too in wanting to comment on important topics like feminism or the American dream or violence or whatever. I’ve seen people try to argue that Breaking Bad is trying to say something about the war on drugs or masculinity or whatever, but that doesn’t seem convincing to me. The drug business on the show is way too hallucinatory to be topical. And it doesn’t seem to say anything coherent about masculinity, either. At most, the show is interested in evil in an almost gothic way, but it doesn’t say anything about evil. It just likes to watch what it looks like.
No, Breaking Bad is unique among these great shows in that its ambitions are all based on form and structure. It has the most startling imagery, whether that takes the shape of weird camera tricks or straightforwardly striking and bizarre images. Its plotting is intricate and clever, not just complex. Like, The Wire had a complicated plot because there were a lot of things going on. Breaking Bad’s plotting is complicated because of how things happen. Our ideas of how suspense is normally built in a TV show are messed with constantly. Some plot devices get blown through way quicker than a normal show, some get stretched out way longer, and either way they ratchet up tension to an incredible level. There are little things, too. For instance, a gun is introduced early in season 4 and fired in the very last episode, which is a funny nod to Chekhov’s gun.
The creators of Breaking Bad are interested less in philosophy or morality than in craft, I think. So Walt’s loserdom is less a comment on anything and more a challenge they gave themselves of seeing how irredeemable they could make a character while still making him compelling. They wanted to make an epic of venial sins, a saga of pettiness.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing to at all to say about Walt’s character. (I mean, I hope not considering the last however many words I’ve written.) The show doesn’t care to make a statement about him, and that lack of a set meaning keeps him eternally unresolved and eternally fascinating. He’s interesting in a way that makes me want him to mean something, that forces me to make him mean something. But no, there’s nothing I can ever nail down entirely. He’s just a stunted bogeyman, a compilation of all my worst fears about what I am. Because no one really worries they’ll become evil with capital letters. No one is afraid of becoming a supervillain. Our worst traits don’t have a literary dimension. They’re small and mean and characterized by a lack rather than an active desire to do harm. It’s so easy not to think about the consequences, so easy not to care. Monsters are incapable of being anything other than evil, but we’re much more contemptible. We know what the right thing to do is. It’s just less of a pain to do the wrong one. Empathy takes a lot of work. Walt is much less than a symbol, and that’s what makes him terrifying. He’s a mundane nightmare: what we turn into when we’re not trying to be better.
