The Three Questions That Divide ‘Breaking Bad’ Fans and What They Tell Us About Masculinity

Written by Katherine Murray as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

Breaking Bad is one of those well-written, well-acted shows that somehow inspires people to scream at each other in CAPSLOCK. The debate about Walter White and his wife and their drug-trade boils down to your answers to three deceptively simple questions that act as a rorschach test on masculinity in American culture.

 

Is Walter selfish or is he looking out for his family?

Walter starts cooking meth after he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his stated reason for doing it is to provide for his family after he’s gone. In fact, for five seasons, his stated reason for doing most of what he does is to protect or provide for his family. Traditionally, we’ve seen this as part of husband and father’s job, and it’s understandable that Walter doesn’t want his wife and kids to be poor or to depend on the generosity of strangers when he’s gone.

On the other hand, Walter’s cancer goes into remission after a while, and he keeps cooking meth. He also keeps cooking meth even after it becomes clear that he’s endangering his family by getting involved with drug cartels, and after he he and his wife have a whole storage unit full of dirty money (the Internet says $50 million). By the end of the series, his increasingly antisocial behaviour has also alienated him from his wife, son, and sister in law, and his dealings with the cartels have led his brother in law to get killed. So, if his stated mission is to do a good thing for his family, it’s not entirely clear that he succeeds.

With that in mind, is Walter basically an all-right guy who tried to do a good thing with mixed results, or does he have a darker motivation? Breaking Bad seems to tell us it’s a little bit of both.

It seems like Walter’s initial motivation is to help his family, but we quickly learn that there are other things going on, too. He feels like he’s been cheated out of the wealth and status he should have had. He’s a brilliant scientist, but he somehow ended up as a high school chemistry teacher. He was pushed out of his share in a company that went on to make billions of dollars. As someone who played by the rules and feels he was penalized for it, Walter gets a sense of power from being a drug dealer – his biggest grievance, for most of the series, is that he can’t brag to anyone about how good he is at organized crime.

Although it’s probably true when he says he loves his family and that he’s trying to do (what he sees as) his job by providing for them, he loses sight of what that means in the process of trying to feed his own ego. He doesn’t just want to be the provider because it means his wife and children will have more resources – he wants to be the provider because it makes him feel better about himself. To Walter, it’s emasculating to be a normal school teacher – and whether or not you agree with him will colour how you see the show. Is it reasonable for Walter to feel that he’s a failure because he isn’t rich and powerful? Is it reasonable for him to feel like he’s a failure because he and his wife live in a dual-income household – because he can’t cover all of their expenses on his own?

The question of whether there’s actually something wrong with Walter’s life in episode one, and whether he’s motivated to change it by altruism or ego is the first fork in the road where we end up watching different shows.

 

Is Heisenberg cool or is he a loser?

This question follows pretty closely from the first one. When Walter starts selling drugs, he invents an alter-ego for himself – Heisenberg, named after a Nazi. Walter feels pretty good about being Heisenberg, and, at least some of the time, the show feels pretty good about it, too. In season five, there’s even an episode called “Say My Name” in which the pivotal scene is a hell-yeah moment (pictured above) where Walter confronts a group of drug dealers and brags about how great he is before demanding that they call him Heisenberg as a way of acknowledging his legend.

There’s an element of escapism to Walter’s story, where the audience is encouraged to identify with him and imagine what it would be like to be this total bad-ass. He gets to give these big speeches about the amazing things he’s done, like murdering people, and blowing shit up, and he sounds really confident when he does it. The most confident speech he gives, and probably the most important one in the show, is in the episode “Cornered” where he screams, “I am the one who knocks!”

That scene encompasses everything about who Walter is and who he wants to believe he is – as well as the distance between those two points. The context is that Walter’s wife, Skyler, has just heard that another meth cook Walter works with was murdered, and she’s worried that the cartel will come after him next. What she doesn’t know, and what he tells her in this scene, is that he was the one who ordered the murder. In his selective account of what happened, he builds himself up, expressing his disgust at her worry for him – as if she sees him as weak and helpless, when really he’s the one calling the shots. He makes it sound like the situation was totally under control and he was nothing but strong and capable – willing to make the hard calls, willing to do this terrible thing and live with the consequences. He even makes it sound – when he says, “I am the one who knocks” – like he was the one who went to the door and murdered this person.

The audience knows, though, because we saw what happened, that this knocking stuff isn’t entirely accurate. Walter realized almost too late that the cartel was planning to replace him with another cook because he and his business partner, Jesse Pinkman, were unreliable and hard to work with. His motivation for taking this other guy out – this other, relatively innocent, perfectly nice guy – was completely driven by fear. The cartel picked him up in the middle of the night and took him to a secluded place to kill him, at which point he screamed into his phone for Jesse to run to the other cook’s house and murder him instead. Jesse did it, out of loyalty to Walter and concern that he’d be next, and it was something so hard to live with that it basically destroyed him.

In Walter’s version of the story, that all comes out as, “I was a total bad-ass.”

I would be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes buy into this idea that Walter is awesome. It would be disingenuous to pretend that I was always coldly analytical while I was watching, or that I sat there saying, “Nay, he is a criminal who treats his friends and family poorly, and lies to himself about his motivations – I cannot cheer for him.” There are moments where you’re really like, “Hell yeah!” when you’re watching this show, even if what Walter’s doing is categorically wrong, or the legend he’s telling about it doesn’t quite make sense.

I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t have critical thoughts about it. Walter gets pushier with his wife in direct proportion to how much she threatens his image as bad ass. The other important thing about “I am the one who knocks!” is that the reason he’s angry with her is that she makes him feel uncool. She keeps trying to insert herself into the drug dealing business, and have a say in what’s happening, and she keeps reminding him – intentionally and unintentionally – that she doesn’t see him as this mysterious, amazing, hyper-competent hero he wants to be. To her, he’s still the fallible science teacher she married. He hates that and he lashes out whenever she does it (and so do a lot of the fans).

Breaking Bad seems divided on how much it buys into Walter’s legend. Is he an insecure loser who’s making up a tough persona for himself, or is he, like, an action hero, criminal mastermind, super amazing gangster? The show seems to be giving us a different answer at different moments, and how much you buy into The Legend of Heisenberg, as a viewer, will colour your interpretation of the story.

 

Is it better to be Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

This is the most fundamental question that drives Breaking Bad, and it’s one we’ve been struggling with for over a hundred years. To recap, The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, is a story about a civilized man who invents an alter-ego for himself so that he can act on his base, violent, savage desires with impunity. In the end, he likes it too much and can’t go back to civilized life; the only way to protect the people he cares about and innocent bystanders from the destruction he leaves in his wake is for him to end his own life.

One of the underlying assumptions of that story is that Mr. Hyde represents our basic human nature – that without the civilizing influence of society (specifically, British society, since it was written in a more xenophobic time), without education and the rule of law, we’d all be barbarians, hitting each other with sticks, doing whatever we felt like, whenever we wanted to, without any regard for whether it’s right or wrong. That’s an assumption that might be right – much of human history is just a long list of horrible things that powerful people did  because they wanted to, without any regard for whether it was right or wrong. Even in countries where we have human rights legislation and relatively low levels of violent crime, this isn’t something that’s totally stopped.

The idea of being Mr. Hyde appeals to people who feel constrained by society. Those of us who feel we don’t have power over our lives, that all of the rules are holding us down – those of us who can at least entertain the idea that we’d do better in a system where we could just stab people we didn’t like – we all have days where we want to be Mr. Hyde, and some of us want it a lot.

The fantasy that Breaking Bad trades on is the fantasy of a man who’s been emasculated by the modern world – who’s hen-pecked by his wife, who has a crappy job, who’s never received all the things he thinks he deserves – who turns things around by ignoring society’s rules, getting rich from selling illegal substances, and solving his problems with violence. It’s the fantasy that says, “Everything would be OK, if you could just Hulk-out like a caveman. That’s what you’re supposed to do, as a man, and they’ve taken it away from you, my friend.”

Of course, the series is more complicated than that, and Walter creates six new problems for himself for every one that he solves with violence and drug-trade – he makes a choice to live and die by an outdated form of masculinity that ultimately wrecks his life – but it looks like he’s having fun. It looks like he’s at least in charge of what happens to him. Breaking Bad ultimately doesn’t seem to believe that Walter made the right choice when he started selling meth, but it speaks to a very real dilemma that American men have to wrestle with in life. They’re being measured against a vision of masculinity that comes out of the dark ages, but they’re living in a society that discourages them from doing any of the things that vision says to do.

We’re living at a time when the idea of what it means to do a good job at being a person – or being a man or being a woman – is changing, and just like in all times of change, there are some people who still see things the old way, some people who see things the new way, and an awful lot of people who are confused and believe a little of both. Breaking Bad is an insanely relevant story about masculinity precisely because it seems to be confused about what it believes. Is Walter’s life an emasculating horror show before he starts dealing drugs, or is it actually all right and he just loses sight of that? Is he really cool when he starts being Heisenberg, or is he grasping at straws to try to save his self esteem? Do we actually wish we could be like him, or is his behaviour deplorable? There are times when any of the answers to those questions could be true.

Breaking Bad lets viewers explore the fantasy of this return to a type of masculine identity and pride that’s based on shooting people in the face (or taking credit for the time your business partner shot someone in the face), but it doesn’t present that fantasy as an unqualified success. It leaves us on our own to decide what we think of Walter’s decisions, and whether we think he’s being an awesome dude or a total asshole. Your opinion of Walter, and your reading of his story arc on Breaking Bad ultimately depends on How you think a man should Be. You’re watching a totally different show, based on you’re answer to that.

 

---

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.