Post wanted out

[chani]

I am not sure this is exactly the post I had in mind but this is the one that got written.

Breaking Bad comes back in three days so there are many interviews and articles showing up here and there. Yesterday I read an interview in which Bryan Cranston talked about Water White and said interesting things about the way he saw him and decided to play him at first, physically. Cranston echoed once more the infamous "from Mr Chips to Scarface" journey but also said that he thought of his own father and decided to make Walt look older through his posture, the way he carried himself. Little details like that are indeed meaningful.

I also read this article, in which Gilligan said, about Walter, that he "pretty much lost sympathy for him long ago. He’s a damaged individual.” before adding “More than ever, we can let Walter White get as dark as he could possibly get”.

Me? I love Walter White and I probably love him more now than I did when the series began. I think he's the perfect tv character. It works in my opinion because of the paradoxical mix of hyper-realism and pure fantasy that the show provides and that Walt, himself, embodies.

Let's start with the pure fantasy side.

The usual rules of fiction dictate that to be compelling, a character or his journey must be "bigger than life". It applies here, in three ways:

1) First it's all about the man himself: Walter White is not an ordinary man. We met a highschool teacher in season 1 who could be every man, but soon we discovered that he was more than that, he was a kind of chemistry genius.

Not only Walter could have won the Nobel Prize but it becomes more and more obvious that he understands chemistry better than anyone...hence Gale, a brilliant chemist himself, fangirling Walter like crazy both in season 3 or in the flashbacks we saw in season 4. Mr White is not superman but he is Super Chemist...or shall I say, Dr Chemistry as Jesse named him in his TEAM S.C.I.E.N.C.E vid!
His brain, his scientific knowledge and his ability to think fast under pressure, are what makes him special, what makes him a hero, in the Greek sense of the world, that is a bit of a demi-god. BTW his hubris is worthy of Greek tragedies.

Of course Walter is himself a constant chemical reaction in progress for our eyes to study, changing on screen either morally (because of his choices) or physically (because of cancer and the treatment to fight it). He is toxic for the people around him, kind of addictive too (at least Jesse is addicted to his Mr White), sometimes volatile, and lethal. A dangerous product.

There's less CGI than in films about comic books/manga heroes or mutants, but Breaking Bad still tells the story of a mortal man's transformation into some kind of monster.


2) Secondly, it's all about the context. The extreme situations Walter find himself in, the formidable opponents he has to fight and defeat, are everything but realistic. It's like the forces of Fate or the gods of old are playing with this mortal. At the end of season 2 even the sky fell onto Walter.
The premise was already unrealistic. What are the odds that a man, who's struggling with two jobs to make enough money – while his former partner in crime chemistry , Eliott, became a billionaire – so he can "provide" to his pregnant wife and handicapped son, finds out both that he has inoperable lung cancer and that a former student of his has turned meth dealer?

When Walter broke bad, blackmailing Jesse Pinkman into partnership, his journey among the freaks began...and it went from bad (Emilio, Crazy-8) to worse, with over-the-top and memorable villains like mad Tuco, badass Uncle Tio (aka Bell-Man, aka Don Salamanca), or the scary and Terminator-like Cousins...and finally Gus Fring, who seemed pretty invicible for a while. I remember viewers saying that it was too much, the way Gus seemed to walk through bullets or had a sixth sense (the famous scene in which he looked like he could feel that Walt was watching and knew he'd better not go to his car!) . I think it was pretty much the point to make this guy a little bit super human.

Walter's journey is not realitstic, it's epic, so the consequences of his actions can be titanic...like two planes colliding in the sky, killing 167 people.

3) Thirdly, it's all about the icon. A great fictional character must be iconic, and here his name is Heisenberg. Walter's alter ego is like a character within the character, a fiction fictional Walter forged. Heisenberg is nothing but one of Walter's many lies, the tough guy he created according to his idea of what a meth boss should be. First off the bald man in the black hat was a cover to hide behind.
Heisenberg was made up as pure fantasy to deceive the likes of Tuco (an equivalent to the blowfish strategy) and stay alive, a mere screen of smoke, but the character began to have a life of its own, becoming also the legend cartel singers sing about, the drawn portrait Tuco's Cousins cursed when they swore to kill him, the ghost of a drug lord whom Hank chased and was haunted by..., the badass certain BrBa fans adore

Walter who is good at lying and better even at lying to himself, seems to have started believing in his own lie "I'm the danger, Skylar, I am the one who knocks", he said in season4. At some point Walt needed to believe it was true, because Skylar had emasculated him, because his new boss has humiliated him.
I think that Walter fancies himself as a true Heisenberg now that he has "won". In a way, Walter is right. He has been contaminated by the character he started to play in season 1, because of the choices he made. There's no way back now.

It reminds me of that wonderful play written by Alfred de Musset, Lorenzaccio, in which Lorenzo de Medici who was once noble and pure embraces vices and debaucheries to get close to the duke and commit a tyrannicide, becoming Lorenzaccio in the process. His transformation was an act at first, but by the end of the story Lorenzo realises that it's too late for him. The tragediy lies precisely in the fact that his mask is no longer a mask but his own face:

« Il est trop tard. Je me suis fait à mon métier. Le vice a été pour moi un vêtement ; maintenant il est collé à ma peau. »

If Walter cannot be back to the man he once was (or thought he was), he should become the super badass he made up. The king.

 Heisenberg, of course is the ultimate monster in Walter's journey. He is the metaphorical cancer that eats into him, his worst enemy; the one he created.


But my love for Walter White also comes from his uniqueness in the world television and the realistic portrait that both the writers and Bryan Cranston keep painting for us.

The portrait of this man is simply the most honest one I have ever seen on television. Walter is just so very human it hurts. He is us, and it isn't always pretty.

When I say that he is human, I don't mean that he is capable of doing good things or having feelings still, as opposed to a cold hearted monster who would seem no longer human. I mean that everything he is and does, is human. His flaws and weaknesses that have been revealed over four seasons to make him so unlikeable, are also what make him so human. His pride, his anger, his pettiness and selfishness, his manipulative ways make him just as human as his love for his family and his moments of distress, of kindness, of tenderness or of empathy do.

I love Walter, in spite of him not being likeable, and perhaps because he is not likeable. Jesse is more likeable, and Hank is probably the "best man" on the show, but I find Walter much more intriguing than the others. Yet Walter is not even cool – while Heisenberg would be – unlike other characters (Gus or Mike, or even Saul in a funny kind of way); he is rather weird and calculating, and so morally challenged that, in contrast Jesse looks like a moral compass. I don't like the person he is, I condemn his actions, I loathe his ways, but I relate to him. He touches me; he fascinates me; he saddens me too. And once in a while he fulfils my expectations (usually when acknowledging Jesse as his surrogate son).

Study character is not a new thing on television, especially since the anti-heroes have become the norm when it comes to protagonists, but in the case of Walter White it's a study of change which is quite refreshing.

Usually tv characters are rather "stable" once they have been defined; they go on a journey that is revealing for the audience and they might grow up and mature but they don't deeply change, and the passing of time (episodes, seasons) serves to show or enhance new facets of their personality.

If the character is a "bad guy"(criminal, crooked cop, corrupted politician, business man à la JR Ewing or serial killer Dexter-style), the character study – if there is one, because many bad guys are just antagonists that are less likely to be studied than protagonists – is a way to explore the dark...and usually to push the character into the grey area because there are always "human qualities" or redeeming moments of grace that tell the audience that "it is more complicated" than a black vs. white view of the world. Vick Mackey was a good example of that, on The Shield, and I've been told that so was Tony Soprano. Another example would be Boyd Crowder on Justified but he is an antagonist not the main character. And the list goes on because modern television likes its bad-but-not-completely-bad-and-even-possibly-kinda-good guys. Al Swearengen from Deadwood, of course, is also one of those. More recently we have the example of Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire.

If the character is already labelled as "grey" he/she will remain "grey" and the character study is there to explore the greyness. Here enters Mr Don Draper who is still the same man after several seasons of Mad Men...but we know him better now, we saw the good, the bad, the ugly, we understand how he works and can guess where he will go. Same with most of the characters from Battlestar Galactica, and many many tv characters who often are screwed-up or "have demons", even though they tend to be "on the angels' side" (yes Sherlock, tu quoque).

If the tv character is rather a "white hat", he will be a hero to the end, yet flaws, slip-ins and moments of doubts will be part of the journey. He/she might cross a few lines, but nothing that would be a true fall from grace. There are things they would just never do. Buffy was one of those, and Raylan Givens is our resident white hat nowadays.

Breaking Bad gives us a lot of bad guys and grey characters, although I would say that Hank's greyness is very very light compared to Jesse's or Skylar's or Saul's or even Marie's. Anyway, all those characters were morally and psychologically established pretty soon (by the end of season 1), following the usual rules of series.

Walter is one of a kind. Firstly I cannot think of another example of tv character being the lead and starting as seemingly a decent man (and it was not an act, Walter was a decent human being to begin with) to become darker and darker, less and less likeable, despicable even, season after season. It's usually the other way round, bad guys who have major roles tend to be humanized on screen, even though truly bad guys remain bad guys per se because of their lifestyle.

Also, Walter's journey tells us that people change, that you make your bed and some choices can lead you very far, and that we all have the potential for the most despicable things. It hands us a looking-glass et tells that a highschool teacher, like me, can become a criminal, commit murder (with his bare hands or by shooting a bullet in the head of a henchman) or have people kill for him. 

Of course it takes a combination of personality features and special circumstances to get that result, to do what Walter did, to be what he has become, and, as I said above, what happens on screen is often highly unrealistic. And yet, Walter's change is credible no matter how much it goes against our desire to keep him not being capable of certain things.


At last, Walter White and his raw humanity, tells us things about love that fiction rarely does and are yet very realistic. And again Breaking Bad manages to paradoxically demystify love while sublimating the idea of love. It shows us how much selfishness is involved when it comes to love, deromanticizing it and revealing the pettiness instead of praising abnegation –by the way I have no doubts that Walter truly loves his family –, even regarding the relationship between parents and children (the way both Walter and Skyler use their kids or expect love from them is very significant). Also every time Walter mistreats or hurts Jesse, it feels real. But there's something sublime about the love between those two, a love that transcends blood, sex attraction or spiritual kin, and there's something sublime about the fact that Walter was ready to lose everything, put everything at risk at the end of "Half-Measures", to save Jesse.

I will miss Walter White after Breaking Bad's swan song in 2013. Bryan Cranston has done an incredible job so far. I wish him the best for his movie career but it's difficult to think that he will ever get a part allowing him to shine the way he does when playing Mr White.