Breaking Bad's Slow Roll-Out

BREAKING BAD’S SLOW ROLLOUT

By Thomas Burchfield

[SPOILERS AHEAD!]

(Bits of this appear on Slate TV Club’s Breaking Bad page)

Here’s another thing I’d never want to hear from Walter White:

“I forgive you.” Right up there: “I’m not going to cheat you” and “This gun isn’t loaded.”

Breaking Bad’s fifth season has gotten off to a relatively low-key, but still pleasing, start. After last season’s explosive finish, trying to top itself right out of the gate would have been a bad idea. Start leisurely, let the fires burn slow. The best way to create great suspense.

I like the stop-and-start tension in the scene early on where Walter’s wandering through his house, trying to clean up the leftovers from the bomb he used to blow up Gus Fring: how he stops, relaxes, pours a drink, then realizes he’s forgotten something else, and hurries on, until Walter Jr.--still sweetly oblivious--Skyler and Baby return home. Why, I wonder, won’t he watch the coverage of Gus’s death with his son? Afraid he’ll be caught gloating, that he’ll let something slip . . . or is this there some feeble puddle of conscience left shining in him?

Ominous portents rose throughout this episode, starting with the traditional opening enigma—Walter, his hair fully returned, sprouting a full beard, purchasing an automatic rifle, in a town far away from New Mexico, maybe in New Hampshire (whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” the episode’s title. He looks about finished. A showdown looms. I’ll need a few more episodes in my brain before I start laying wagers. Too many equal possibilities, for now.

Big reveal: Hapless Ted is still alive and termbles before Skyler’s apparent awesome power. Whether he’ll keep his promise not to talk . . . eh. He’s still in shock from his “accident.” Inevitably, anger, rage, resentment will boil to the surface, where he realizes he has nothing to lose by spilling.

Jesse seems to be a junior partner again, a bit in the background this time. This is pointed up amusingly in the scene where Walter and Mike argue what to do about Gus’s laptop, now in police custody. The solution of the powerful magnet is ingenious, constituting the episode’s big action scene and once again allowing to Walter to reveal his towering hubris: “Because I say so!” Man speaks as God. (One possible slip-up: why didn’t the magnetic force rip away any of the metal on the evidence room guard’s uniform? Don’t cops wear any metal at all anymore? I also wondered if the bottom would be torn out of that truck)

A curious thought: I read recently that a group of Ayn Randroid libertarians threw a shindig in tribute to Don Draper of Mad Men, celebrating him as an upright libertarian hero (!?). On top of that, both Alec Baldwin and Michael Douglas recently commiserated on how the outright villains they portrayed in in Glengarry Glen Ross and Wall Street are also seen as cool heroes. (This is an old story, unfortunately.)

So, outside of the professional criminal class of drug dealers etc., are there any Idiot-logues out there running in circles, waving the hero flag for Walter White? This superb essay in Salon (via the L.A. Times) discusses how Walter White is, in part, an expression of that libertarian, every-man-for-himself ideology. (It’s a great essay on Breaking Bad for other reasons. Go read it. I now regret I haven’t read Paradise Lost.)

I shuddered at the closing scene: Walter and Skylar in the bedroom, Walter embracing her: “I forgive you”; the look of fear on her face; how his eyes shift in darkness. Would Walter murder Skylar? After all he’s done up to now, why not? Will he? That also remains to be seen.

As we followed Hank and the investigators, it struck me that I didn’t want them to close in on Walter too soon. Not because I think Walter’s a hero and want him to escape, but because I will be sorry when this show ends. I can’t think of a higher compliment to pay to this remarkable series.

(re-edited 7/17/12)

(Photo from AMC webpage)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

This Man Must Die

You’d all better get out of the way and take to your couches Sunday night (or the next day if you DVR) because here comes Walter White. You don’t want to be in his way.

And if you happen to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you might want to leave. Now.

Make no mistake—Walter White, Breaking Bad’s hero-schmo cum arch villain, geeky wallflower turned vicious criminal—has only 16 episodes to live. He is doomed. (“Doomed DOOMED to die!” as I sometimes boom, my finger pointing at whatever pathetic lug is about to take the Big Dirt Nap).

Two large questions remain in this rightfully classic series. Who will take him down and who will he take down with him?

Partner Jesse, wife Skylar, son Walter Jr., brother-in-law Hank, Cleaner Doug, uproariously sleazy Saul, even Hank’s wife, Marie?

It could be any of his many victims and enemies who have crossed his orbit. He’s become a tornado now, plowing a blackly violent path across the gorgeously bleak New Mexican landscape, sucking the guilty and the innocent into his funnel.

“I’ve won,” he whispered, his voice a sand-choked, triumphant whisper after Gus Fring straightened his tie for the last time. Such a beast does not retire from the field he’s conquered. Doom and death are coming down on him.

Walter White, of course, is the one ultimately responsible. Walter is the one finally taking Walter down.

Not since Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen have serious TV viewers been presented with such a riveting character, both a distinct individual and a picture of larger forces of decadence in our society. Once a normal guy, now an evil madman, with only a thin patina of pathos left, Walter White is a creature I no longer worry for. I tore up the paper on him when he let Jesse’s girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit in Season 2. The final nail came when we learned the secret behind the floating eye in Walter’s swimming pool. What started out as an understandable act of desperation had made a hard irrevocable turn. Walter White was no longer an Everyman—he had turned into a deadly alien Other.

This man has to die.

If I didn’t take such pleasure in how Breaking Bad is made, how precisely, elegantly and ingeniously it is plotted and written, acted and directed, photographed and edited to deliver maximum power, I might have hit the off button much earlier. Without some precise, well-located and portrayed sense of decency to pose against Walter—Jesse, Walter Jr., even annoyingly goofy Hank,  Walter could have become a monotonous presence and Breaking Bad an exercise of faux nihilistic droning ‘tude, another arch, ersatz Tarantino imitation. Whatever it takes from the great genre movies of the past, those steals are not its reason for being. Breaking Bad is a series truly interested in the world, not just its own gestures.

The Walter Whites of this world, whatever their IQs, are empty vessels. A big brain, no matter how capacious, can’t save the souls. His last name suggests a newly painted bleached wall, a lack of depth: someone you don’t see and when you look, it may be neatly done, but there’s not much there. The “legacy” he so violently claims he wants to leave his family is purely materialistic, constructed of transient things, not gifts of character and soul. He protests his virtue far past the bounds of virtue. He has fallen beyond the reach of grace.

While compelling in the gory havoc they wreak and the way they wreak it, sociopaths become hollow and boring if the world around them, the people, the characters aren’t there to stand in opposition somehow (this includes hapless Jesse, who, more than anyone seems, set to become the show’s oddball moral center).

I even feel pity for Saul Goodman. But Walter . . . he has to go.

Like many of my favorite genre works, in both literature and film, Breaking Bad is about unintended consequences. It presents a colorfully conservative outlook (in the old best sense), where duty and loyalty to ideas larger than ourselves exist to counteract our greedy selfish selves. Vince Gilligan, its creator, is said to have attended a Catholic seminary and while he may not be of the cloth anymore, the kind of questions that get asked there resonate here: in gaining the world, Walter White has lost his small soul.

To me, materialism, and its accompanying greed, are Breaking Bad’s true villains and Walter White is their avatar. Even Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen would shudder. Even after confronting the worst of what he’s done, Walter paints another layer of whitewash on the wall of his self. Like a psychopath, he’s a genius in the moment only, improvising one crime on top of another.

Breaking Bad prides itself on its unpredictability (though it sometimes plays its cards a little obviously (Sorry, I saw Gus’s end coming a little earlier than maybe some of you, once Walter visited Hector Salamanca at the rest home. The term “rig explosions” leapt to mind). Still, it plays narrative cards so deftly, with such grace and unbuttoned imagination that knowing Walter will fall in no way compromises the fundamental pleasures of Breaking Bad.

There are many paths to death. When we fans sit down Sunday night, we’ll know there’s so much more to happen on Breaking Bad.

 

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.