What's the Matter with Walter? The Privatization of Everything in Breaking Bad

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Citation Lee, David. 2016. What's the Matter with Walter? The Privatization of Everything in Breaking Bad. Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School.

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What’s the Matter with Walter?

The Privatization of Everything in Breaking Bad

David R. Lee

A Thesis in the Field of History for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University

November 2016

© 2016 David R. Lee

Abstract

Television is the quintessential medium of popular culture. As such, its content can provide an important window into the cultural dynamics in a given period for a given society. Vince Gilligan’s award-winning Breaking Bad is one of those shows that powerfully engaged with its moment. Gilligan created a compelling protagonist in the deeply flawed yet charismatic genius Walter White. He had Walter build an illegal drug business at which he had savant-like skills, and situated Walt in a family characterized by dysfunction. In showing how and why Walter traded a quiet but economically marginal existence as a high school chemistry teacher for a violent but wealthy life as a drug lord,

Breaking Bad offered a compelling critique of one of the most insidious economic policy initiatives of late-20th/early-21st century America: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez- faire economic liberalism. These ideas include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, reductions in non-defense government spending, and dismantling of the welfare state in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy. The insidiousness of the policy initiative lies in the manner in which neoliberalism has influenced behavior in almost every facet of life. This thesis locates and analyzes three spaces in society where Breaking Bad offers its critique of neoliberalism: gender roles, law enforcement, and business. The thesis examines how the show reveals neoliberalism to be ineffectual and destructive in the domains in which it claims to be most efficient.

Dedication

for ryan

iv

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research advisor Dr. Donald Ostrowski. His support at various phases throughout this process has been much appreciated.

A very special thanks to my Thesis Director, Dr. Steven Biel, to whom I am deeply grateful. Steve agreed to take on my unique project and to say his stewardship has been invaluable is a gross understatement. He has shown me what kindness, wisdom, patience and intellect look like. I’m happy to call him mentor and friend.

I’d also like to thank my family: my wife Anne and son Nick. Their individual successes in life have been truly inspiring. I hope I’ve done you both proud.

v

Table of Contents

Dedication…………………………………………………….………………...... iv

Acknowledgements………………………………………….………………………...... v

I. Introduction...……………………..…….……………………….………….…...…..1

II. “Cancer Man”…….……………………..….……………………....…..…...... …...9

III. “I See You”………………………………...….……………...……..……..…...…..32

IV. “Blood Money”…………….……….………………………...……..………...……58

V. Epilogue…………………..…………………...……………………..……………..81

Bibliography……………………...……………………………………………………...89

vi

Chapter I

Introduction

A pair of khaki pants floats in suspended animation against a painfully bright blue sky before landing on a desolate desert road, only to be run over by a speeding recreation vehicle. The RV’s driver appears to be a middle-aged man wearing a gas mask and dressed only in white briefs. In the passenger seat a younger man, either passed out or dead, also wears a gas mask. As the Winnebago hurtles down the dirt road two bodies slide lifelessly across the floor of the RV—which, along with the two bodies, is covered with liquid and broken glass—until it crashes into a ditch. The driver, a somewhat disturbing figure in his underwear, stumbles out of the Winnebago, which is apparently thick with noxious fumes. He hastily puts on a dress shirt, then goes back in the RV to retrieve a video camera and a gun. He records a brief, emotional farewell message to his family, then stands defiantly as he prepares himself for oncoming sirens with a gun in his hand. The pilot episode of Breaking Bad begins with this surreal sequence. We soon discover through a series of flashbacks how three weeks earlier the man, Walter White, came to be in this comically dangerous situation.1

Walter, played by Bryan Cranston, is a fifty-year-old, mild-mannered, highly intelligent, economically marginalized New Mexico high school chemistry teacher, who begins producing and selling crystal methamphetamine, or meth. He enlists the help of former student Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul, to help him sell his high-end

1 Breaking Bad, “Pilot,” Written and directed by Vince Gilligan, Sony Pictures Television, Inc., January 20, 2008.

1 product to large illegal drug distributors in Albuquerque. We soon find out that Walter is suffering from lung cancer and has been given only a few months to live. He takes stock of his life and realizes he has very little to show for his many years as a teacher. He also discovers that his City of Albuquerque medical insurance does not provide adequate coverage to properly treat his illness. Caught unaware by his cancer diagnosis, Walter decides that the best way to make lots of money quickly is to take his experience as a chemist and apply it to making high-grade meth. While this may seem like an odd choice for a man who is a seemingly well-respected member of his community, it is actually a rational decision given his skill set and grim diagnosis.

Walter White personifies the central organizing principle of American economic and political life in late-20th/early-21st century America: neoliberalism. This project contends that nearly forty years of neoliberal economic and political policy-making has resulted in a society rife with Walter Whites. Whether it be at the corporate, governmental, or individual level, neoliberalism, and its attendant proclivity toward privatization, has permeated American society. Breaking Bad, through the vision of its creator Vince Gilligan, confronts the expression of nearly forty years of neoliberal policy-making at several crucial points: the evolution of gender roles, crime prevention, and contemporary business and the workplace. Gilligan engages neoliberalism as a capitalist catastrophe that penetrates nearly every aspect of modern life. The show’s arc examines failed economic initiatives, governmental policies, and individual enterprise culminating in a monopolization of prosperity for an exceedingly small part of society, and in misery for the rest.

2 As recently as 2009 American President Barack Obama regarded the 2008 financial crisis as neoliberalism run amok.2 The object of the President’s criticism—the neoliberal ideal of a “self-regulating market” as the main engine powering the “wealth of nations”—has been a core tenet of classical liberal economists since the late 18th century.3 The historical background of neoliberalism grew from liberal opposition “to the mercantilism of monarchs who exercised almost total control over the economy in their efforts to amass large quantities of gold for largely bellicose purposes.”4 Adam Smith is credited with creating the Scottish Enlightenment concept of homo economicus— economic man: the idea that people are isolated, rational individuals whose actions reflect mostly their financial self-interests.5 According to this view, economic and political matters occupy separate spheres of influence, “with economics claiming a superior status because it operates best without government interference under a harmonious system of natural laws.”6 The main tenet of the neoliberal world view is that “the state is to refrain from interfering with the economic activities of self-interested citizens and instead use its power to guarantee open economic exchange.”7

2 Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), location 388, Kindle Edition.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., loc. 390, Kindle Edition.

5 "Homo economicus, n,". OED Online, New York: Oxford University Press, accessed November28,2015,http://www.oed.com.ezpprod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/Entry/33678755?redirect edFrom=homo+economicus.

6 Steger and Roy, Neoliberalism, loc. 390, Kindle Edition.

7 Ibid.

3 After World War II the U.S. witnessed nearly forty years of activist government intervention in social and economic matters, defying the tenets of liberal economic dogma. Two massive government initiatives—the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great

Society of the 1960s—expanded the welfare state and greatly contributed to the growth of middle-class America. These programs expanded the welfare state to the dismay of parts of the business community as each program mandated quality of life initiatives such as safe workplaces and minimum wages, while increasing taxes in order to support growing government social programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. By the late

1960s/early-1970s powerful business interests began to fight back by reintroducing classical liberalism to the American economic policy lexicon as neoliberalism, or a resurgence of the laissez-faire economic policies of pre-World War II America. It was during this period that the process of converting the U.S. to a neoliberal state began to take shape.

The first great experiment with neoliberal state formation was conducted in Chile after the ouster of Salvador Allende. On September 11, 1973, a Chilean military coup— backed by the CIA and supported by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—was launched against the democratically elected and social democratic government of Allende and replaced him with Augusto Pinochet. Economists from the U.S., known as the

Chicago Boys because of their attachment to the neoliberal theories of the University of

Chicago’s Milton Friedman, were summoned to help Pinochet.8 They carried out their mission along free-market lines, “privatizing public assets, opening up natural resources

8 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7.

4 to private exploitation, and facilitating foreign direct investment and free trade.”9 The right of foreign companies to repatriate profits from their Chilean operations was guaranteed. Export-led growth was favored over import substitution. The subsequent revival of the Chilean economy in terms of growth, capital accumulation, and high rates of return on foreign investments provided evidence upon which the subsequent turn to more open neoliberal policies in both Britain—under Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher—and the United States—under President Ronald Reagan—could be modeled.

In 1973, as governor of California, Reagan was already engaging in his own neoliberal experiment by supporting Proposition 1, the tax-limitation initiative for which he had won a spot on the California ballot.10 In Chile, a brutal experiment in creative destruction carried out in the aftermath of a CIA-sponsored coup became a model for the formulation of policies in the U.S.

Social theorist and political economist David Harvey succinctly lays out the formula for neoliberalism’s creative destruction. The development of the neoliberal economic system has “entailed much destruction, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers (such as the supposed prior state sovereignty over political- economic affairs) but also of divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of

9 David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, (2007): 26, accessed November 25, 2015, http://www.jstor.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/stable/25097888.

10 Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 160.

5 thought, and the like.”11 The first move was to get the business community to act aggressively in bringing about change.

In the early-to-mid 1970s corporate leaders were feeling a growing sense that the anti-business and anti-imperialist climate that had emerged toward the end of the 1960s had gone too far. In a 1971 memo, soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell urged the American Chamber of Commerce to begin a campaign to demonstrate that what was good for business was good for America.12 Corporate political action committees began to assert their influence. With the Supreme Court setting the precedent of protecting unlimited campaign contributions from political action committees under the First

Amendment as a form of free speech in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, “the systematic capture of the Republican Party as a class instrument of collective (rather than particular or individual) corporate and financial power began.”13

With the courts legally blurring the lines between individual and corporate free speech political and business leaders needed a conservative business-minded constituency to carry out its objectives. The Republican party convinced “a large segment of a disaffected, insecure, and largely white working class…to vote consistently against its own material interests on cultural (antiliberal, antiblack, antifeminist and antigay),

11 Ibid, 23.

12 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 116-118.

13 Valerie A. Earle and Chester B. Earle, “The Supreme Court and the Electoral Process.” World Affairs 140, no. 1 (1977): 38, accessed November 27, 2015, http://www.jstor.org.ezp- prod1.hul.harvard.edu/stable/20671709.

6 nationalist and religious grounds.”14 This group would come to represent a reliable source of donations for business-minded politicians as well as the votes to help them gain and hold elected office. By the mid-1990s the Republican Party had shed the vast majority of its liberal constituency. Long gone was the idea of a liberal Republican. The party had become an like-minded, well-funded conservative machine combining the significant financial resources of large corporate capital with a populist base, the Moral Majority, that was exceptionally strong in the U.S. South.15

Another component in the U.S. transition to neoliberalism was fiscal discipline.

“The recession of 1973 to 1975 diminished tax revenues at all levels at a time of rising demand for social expenditures,” Harvey explains. “Deficits emerged everywhere as a key problem. Something had to be done about the fiscal crisis of the state; the restoration of monetary discipline was essential.”16 This idea allowed financial institutions that controlled the lines of credit to government to decrease their largesse. In 1975 “they refused to roll over New York's debt and forced that city to the edge of bankruptcy. A powerful cabal of bankers joined together with the state to tighten control over the city.

This meant curbing the aspirations of municipal unions, layoffs in public employment, wage freezes, cutbacks in social provision (education, public health, and transport services), and the imposition of user fees (tuition was introduced in the CUNY university system for the first time).”17

14 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 26-27.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

7 Many of these policy initiatives insinuate their way into the lives of Breaking

Bad’s cast of characters. Using the show and the characters as a heuristic, this thesis will examine neoliberal policy initiatives in depth, and endeavor to understand how the actions of Walter and other characters on the show personify the catastrophic damage wrought by the effort to privatize many aspects of American life with the goal of controlling the strain on governmental resources thereby reducing the scope of the

American welfare state. The show strives to explain to the viewer that the shrinking of government intervention in the social and economic realm has not resulted in a utopian society of rational economic actors successfully working toward a liberated, prosperous existence. Instead, Gilligan depicts a dystopian America struggling to make ends meet.

8

Chapter II

“Cancer Man”

Neoliberalism, with its celebration of vigorous and successful entrepreneurs, is inextricably linked with late 20th and early-21st century concepts of masculinity. A large part of Walter’s metamorphosis from Mr. Chips to Scarface is centered on recapturing his manhood, and with that, his dignity.18 The first few scenes of the pilot episode address the depth of his emasculation. From the opening scene, in which Walt crashes a recreational vehicle into a mound of sand, to the scene at the White family breakfast table, Walter White is portrayed as a man defeated by the circumstances of his life and deeply affected by a changing family dynamic that began in the 1970s. While Walt is a highly intelligent chemist, as well as a man of high moral principles, changing gender roles over the past forty-plus years have left him uncertain of what is expected of him as a man. Walt’s gender-based anxiety is not exclusive to him: historian Robert O. Self explains the origin of male gender angst beginning in the 1970s as a reactionary response to what he calls “breadwinner liberalism,” federal government assistance of various kinds to bolster the ideal nuclear family. Self terms this response “breadwinner conservatism,” where conservatives won back the power to define the ideal American family—white, nuclear, heterosexual—as needing protection rather than support from the government.

During this process, one that spans forty years, “the Great Society pledge to assist

18 Vince Gilligan has stated in several interviews that his goal was to transform Walter White from Mr. Chips to Scarface; from an effete middle-aged school teacher to ruthless drug kingpin.

9 families became the New Right pledge to protect them.”19 For Walt, his attempt to confront his vulnerability, and in the process recover his dignity and manhood, begins with the feeling of empowerment he experiences when he begins to manufacture methamphetamine and is fully realized over the span of the series as Walt eliminates all that threatens his newly discovered sense of empowerment and agency.

Walter White is introduced to the viewer in the first scene of the pilot episode as the quiet of the beautiful New Mexico landscape is violently interrupted by a speeding

RV careening out of control down a dirt road until it flies off the road and into a mound of sand. The serenity of the first few frames of the scene lulls the viewer into a sort of reverie which is disrupted by the mobile home. We are immediately captivated by what unfolds before us through the words and actions of Walter. This cinematic technique, known as a cold open, in a television program or movie is a method of jumping directly into a story at the beginning of the show before the opening credits are shown. On television, this is often done on the theory that involving the audience in the plot as soon as possible will reduce the likelihood of their switching away from a show during the opening commercial.20 This does not represent the limit of the scene’s goal but rather the necessary grounds for its achievement. As critic Elliot Logan observes:

That achievement is to tighten our sympathetic involvement in Walt’s fear of exposure so that we are somewhat blinded to or distant from more moral concerns that Walt’s actions are at odds with, while making those alternative moral perspectives available all the while, so that we might retrospectively come to see how easily we slipped from alignment with the “right and proper” position we

19 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 4.

20 “What Is a Cold Open?” wisegeek.com, accessed December 9, 2015, http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-cold-open.htm#didyouknowout.

10 would wish to take if we were less powerfully compelled by desires such as Walt’s.21

This opening sequence pulls us into Walt’s present consciousness and specifically allows us to observe Walt’s vulnerability as he is exposed, not only in terms of his partial nudity, but in comparison to the vastness of the desert: Walt appears in a subsequent long shot as small and impotent against the expansive mesas and deep blue sky. This sense of vulnerability, born from the uncertainty of what it means to be a man in turn-of-the- century America, has defined the challenges and expectations of masculinity in early-21st century America.

It is important to point out that in this early scene Walt establishes for the first time his rationale for wrongdoing, which he couches in terms of good-hearted love for his family. In a moment of sheer panic, after he crashes the RV containing two—potentially three—dead bodies, he hears sirens heading his way and rushes back into the mobile home to retrieve a video recorder. He is clearly shaken emotionally and, fearing he is going to be arrested, he records a message for his family: “Skyler, you are the love of my life. I hope you know that. Walter Jr., you’re my big man. There, there are going to be some . . . things . . . things that you’ll come to learn about me in the next few days. I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.”22 While at first he may actually believe his impetus is to make enough money to support his family once he dies from lung cancer, this self-understanding is eventually belied by more sinister motives for his actions.

21 Elliot Logan, Breaking Bad and Dignity: Unity and Fragmentation in the Serial Television Drama (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), loc. 676, Kindle Edition.

22 Breaking Bad, “Pilot.”

11 These early scenes also serve as an introduction to an important trope that will recur throughout the series: the rugged individualism associated with the American West.

After Walt finishes the video for his family he places the recorder on the ground and stands, contemplates his situation, and buttons the bottom buttons of the shirt he is wearing as if he is fastening his exterior armor in order to steel himself for whatever is coming his way. He then straightens up, takes a deep breath, and appears somewhat larger. This small action indicates a transition in Walt’s mindset. Upon hearing sirens earlier, Walt was in a state of panic. He then breathed deeply and stifled the panic- inducing threat of the oncoming emergency vehicles. His newly defiant stance makes him appear stronger and, in Logan’s words, “less susceptible to being moved by the world around him. It is in this stance he is able to effect the most complete cleavage between his prior state of humiliating vulnerability and his emerging one of more dignified toughness.”23

Additionally, these early scenes convey an aspect of Walt that becomes apparent as the show progresses: an ability to shed parts of himself when needed. The camera shot that presents Walt in a “gunslinger stance as a cardboard cut-out of heroic individual responsibility”24 temporarily conceals, but does not fully erase, what are to him the ordinary human frailties that lie just beneath the surface. These ordinary aspects of Walt’s image that he seeks to disguise are still somewhat out in the open. Walt is portrayed throughout the series as a chameleon-like character, able to adapt to changing situations with both guile and shocking brutality. This flexibility in his personality is what makes

23 Logan, Breaking Bad and Dignity, loc. 713, Kindle Edition.

24 Ibid., loc. 688, Kindle Edition.

12 Walt such a compelling character on the screen, but, more importantly, it serves as a reminder throughout the series of the inner conflict driving him as he tries to figure out his place in the world. These opening scenes are crucial in explaining the psychological basis for Walt’s hyper-masculine transformation that plays out as the show develops.

After the short introduction the show resumes with a shot that is quite different from the cold opening in the desert. The first thing the viewer sees is a narrow view of a modest home situated in either a city or suburban neighborhood. It is just before sunrise and we see Walt on a small, cheap exercise step machine. He is in a room of the house that appears to be in the process of becoming a nursery. Walt is going through the motions detached from what he is doing at the moment as he is from his life. Compared to the suddenness and dynamism that the opening scene in the desert, in this domestic space he embodies a sense of lost or surrendered vitality. It feels as if it is his lethargic actions, and not the limited light offered by the early morning sun, that suffuses his home with the claustrophobic shadows of depression. The choice of routine and its presentation here is suggestive in that Walt’s static exercise represents his stalled life. Portraying him on the unvarying, cheap step exerciser, exerting effort while staying in place, is an apt metaphor for his life until that point.25

This notion of running in place is further explored as the camera pans around the soon-to-be-nursery and we see a series of awards on the wall. The image of a lethargic

Walt on the stepper is not easily reconciled with that of the awards, which suggest the efforts of a much more impressive man. The filming sequence of this scene both confronts and tries to make sense of these conflicting ideas of Walt. He coughs, and, as if

25 Ibid., loc. 845, Kindle Edition.

13 on cue, and the camera pans to a plaque hanging on the wall. It is an award from the Los

Alamos Science Research Center recognizing Walt for his contribution to Nobel Prize- winning research. An extreme close-up focuses our attention on its date: 1985.26 Also in the shot is an award from the New Mexico Public School System. The manner in which the two awards are shown, “places Walt’s more remarkable, prestigious achievement as long past, as having passed, decades ago. It also suggests a weighting of value, in which a modest yet vital public contribution as an educator feels like wasted potential below the rarefied heights of Nobel recognition.”27

The scene inside the frame—a rundown, seemingly defeated Walt juxtaposed with a Nobel citation—shows the room in a way that places Walt’s past accomplishments of his early career in science against his present, more private achievement of creating a new human being with his wife as well as creating a happy home in which to care for it.28 The scene informs the viewer of Walt’s extraordinary past achievements and places them next to his current sense of stagnation. One gets the sense that fathering another child, at age 50, is to Walter not nearly as rewarding as his contributions to science many years ago. Being in that room, in the presence of his long past accomplishment, appears to drain whatever strength he may have. He could very well be equally as proud of both contributing to Nobel Prize-winning scientific research and being a father for the second time; however, the framing of the scene suggests that this not the case with Walt. His

26 Breaking Bad, “Pilot.”

27 Ibid.

28 Logan, Breaking Bad and Dignity, loc. 860, Kindle Edition.

14 repetitive exercise in the room suggests that he is stuck, no longer a vigorous man of science but a husband and father trapped in an unfulfilling domestic routine.29

While the sections of the pilot covered so far explain Walt’s current state of mind, it is the scene of Walt’s birthday breakfast that exemplifies how his masculinity has been subverted by the arc of his life, specifically represented here by his wife. The idea conveyed in this scene is that Skyler’s arranging bacon in the shape of Walt’s age, in this case 50, is a tradition in the White household. This year Skyler informs Walt the strips arranged over his eggs are veggie bacon, an unmanly low-fat, low-cholesterol version of the real thing. Skyler comes off as domineering in this scene as she dictates to Walt, and

Walt, Jr., exactly what they will be eating for breakfast, even though it is Walt’s birthday.

She then reminds Walt not to be home late from his second job at a carwash by warning him to not let his boss “dick [him] around.”30 Walt, Jr. then joins them at the breakfast table and states he will not eat the veggie bacon and that it smells like Band-Aids, to which Skyler replies, “Eat. It.”31 She follows up this order with a stern look. Her statement shows her concern for the family but also indicates that in effect Skyler is the person who is in charge in the home, which is a situation that, as the series moves forward, is destabilized as Walt attempts to recover his lost masculinity, and with that, control of his destiny.

Early scenes also examine Walt in a struggle to maintain his dignity outside of the domestic space. Gilligan accomplishes this through two revealing sequences. The first

29 Ibid.

30 Breaking Bad, “Pilot.”

31 Ibid.

15 shows Walt in his classroom lecturing on the topic of matter; the second shows him at his second job in a carwash. The fact that he must hold down two low-paying jobs reveals his precarious financial situation. His sense that he has failed as a male breadwinner proves to be part of his motivation to take back control of his life. In the classroom, Walt is interrupted by a male and female student carrying on in the back row of the classroom as if they are flirting at a party. The male student is not in his assigned seat and when Walt confronts the young man, Chad, by asking him if there is something wrong with his seat the boy replies with a dismissive head shake and stands up as if Walt’s intervention in his conversation with the girl is a great inconvenience. He then drags his chair across the floor, pulling it back to where his assigned place is in such a manner as to create a terribly loud and obnoxious squeaking sound. His action usurps Walt’s authority in the classroom by disrupting his lesson and showing clear disrespect.

The next scene has Walt at the car wash. It is later in the day and he is working the cash register when his boss informs him that he must assist in wiping down the cars.

Walt objects meekly, reminding his boss that they had discussed Walt’s responsibilities at some point earlier in their relationship and Walt made it clear that he would no longer assist in the menial duties of the carwash. His boss insists and Walt is next shown wiping down the tires of a late model sports car belonging to Chad, the student he had earlier admonished. Walt is forced to swallow his pride as Chad again disrespects him and takes his picture with his cell phone to, one may assume, send to other students as to further mortify Walt. Additionally, Chad’s girlfriend tells whoever she is talking to on her cell phone “you’ll never guess who’s wiping down Chad’s car. Mr. White.”32 In the course of

32 Ibid.

16 two scenes spanning one day in Walt’s life he is disrespected once by his boss and twice by his students.

These pilot episode scenes fully establish the major themes and problems that

Walter faces as he struggles with the feeling that neither his family nor his students respect him and that as a man he is inadequate as a provider for his family. His lack of income appears to be the result of his desire to play by the rules and be a law-abiding citizen, good husband, and father. The episode suggests that Walt’s economic difficulties are understood by himself and others in gendered terms; his mild-mannered response to his situation comes across as emasculation. In truth, Walter is potentially a genius; his obnoxious, aggressive, manly brother-in-law Hank, who is a DEA agent, jokes about

Walter’s big brain when he toasts him at his fiftieth birthday party, “Walt, you got a brain the size of Wisconsin, but we won’t hold that against ya. But your heart’s in the right place.”33

The idea of a man being associated with emotions, having a good heart, is celebrated and ridiculed by Hank in the scene when Hank shows off his service weapon to the other men attending the party, including Walt’s disabled son. The look of adulation makes clear that Walt Jr. idolizes his uncle and the status his job affords him. The other men around Hank seem to be equally enamored with him. At this point, Walt can be seen just behind Hank, outside of the circle or admirers, both men and women. Hank does attempt to make Walt feel included—ironically revealing his good-heartedness—by inviting Walt to handle his weapon. Even this gesture of inclusion is couched in sarcasm as Hank remarks that Walt is so obviously uneasy with the gun that he looks like “Keith

33 Ibid.

17 Richards with a warm glass of milk.”34 Walt, also holding a beer in his hand that looks as equally out of place as the gun, is clearly not comfortable with the firearm in his hand and comments on the weight of it, to which Hank replies “that’s why they hire men,” indicating that only manly men like himself should carry guns.35 Hank looks the part of a manly man with his shaved head, big beer belly, and the way in which he holds his arms in a ‘tough-guy” manner, out from his sides. The scene’s juxtaposition of Hank’s body language with Walt’s hunched shoulders and limited eye contact shows the terrain of masculinity in which Breaking Bad’s subsequent action will unfold. As critic Brian

Faucette writes, Walt “shows the first signs of dissatisfaction with his status as a man when his brother-in- law, son, and the other men laugh at him. In that moment he comes to realize that his family sees him as effeminate because he does not measure up to a man like Hank.”36

Hank’s bluster and masculine bravado that overshadows Walt’s birthday celebration is an example of the problems with hegemonic masculinity as it is most often based around the representation of men as boorish and violent.37 To further illustrate this idea, Hank not only shows off his weapon but also further infringes on Walt’s party by stealing the attention of the attendees by shifting the group’s focus to the television in

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Brian Faucette, “Taking Control: Male Angst and the Re-Emergence of Hegemonic Masculinity in Breaking Bad,” in Breaking Bad Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, ed. David P. Pierson, (New York: Lexington Books, 2014), Kindle Edition, loc. 1532.

37 In gender studies, hegemonic masculinity is a concept popularized by sociologist R.W. Connell of practices that promote the dominant social position of men and the subordinate social position of women. Give a citation for Connell here?

18 order to ensure everyone sees his appearance on the local news from earlier in the day when he was interviewed during a meth bust. A close reading of this particular scene offers a glimpse into Hank’s insecurities. He is not the pillar of masculinity he wants the world to think he is. The Pilot episode presents a stark distinction between Hank’s bluster and Walt’s emasculation only to gradually undermine it in the episodes that follow. As

Walt comes to reclaim his masculinity, the series challenges its characters’ gendered understandings of the neoliberal order that they inhabit.

The bedroom scene with Walt and Skyler on the evening of his birthday party represents another example of the balance of power in their relationship. This is a disturbingly creepy moment in the trajectory of the show. The camera cuts from Walt’s party to Skylar and Walt in bed together. They are both sitting up and Skylar is on her laptop checking on an item she is trying to buy on the Internet. This is the extent of her financial contribution to the household, but one gets the feeling that her being home with

Walt Jr. is Walt’s idea as he views himself as the sole breadwinner. Self’s idea of breadwinner conservatism is manifest in Walt as he has been conditioned to believe that the male role in the family is that of provider. He refuses any help in paying for his cancer treatments as a demeaning kind of charity.

Skylar, while cheering on her bid, reaches under the covers for Walt’s penis, offering to manually satisfy him as part of his birthday celebration. At first, Walt seems to be taken aback as if to say “you can’t even take a minute to concentrate on me,” and they continue to have a conversation while Skylar’s hand works back and forth under the covers. The mood is mundane, and the action perfunctory, with Walter talking about an exhibit he wants to go see and both of them getting testy about painting the nursery,

19 which Skylar wants him to take care of. He even yawns, indicating that he finds their sex life wearisome. At one point, with Walt not readily responding to Skylar’s erotic manipulation, she lifts up the covers and asks Walt “what is going on down there? Is he asleep?”38 Walt mumbles and almost cringes, “nothing, it’s just…”39 Eventually Walt gets going but the moment is suddenly interrupted as Skylar is watching her item on the laptop almost moaning “yes, yes, YES” as her bid is accepted, ruining the moment for

Walt.40

This scene represents the hold Skylar has on Walt—not just the obvious hold she had at that moment, but the control she has over him generally. Her supplanting his sexual gratification with her Internet shopping victory speaks to a deeper issue.

Metaphorically, the show is saying that Skyler has Walt in the palm of her hand and is indeed content with controlling his access to happiness. The importance of Walt’s sexuality and its link to his own understanding of his masculinity is addressed in the last scene of the pilot when, after his early meth cooks, he climbs into bed, begins to passionately kiss Skyler and then takes her from behind, indicating that he is now the person in control in the bedroom. Where in the previous bedroom scene Skyler was in charge of the Walt’s sexual satisfaction, Walt shows that he is beginning to transform into a more dominant male figure. This change shocks and thrills Skyler as she inquiries if her partner is Walt.41

38 Breaking Bad, “Pilot.”

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

20 There is a certain irony to this notion that meshes nicely with the voyeuristic nature of television viewing: the viewer knows the secrets and true nature of the characters, even while the characters themselves may not. This mettlesome viewer quality allows access to vital information such as Walter’s cancer diagnosis and how very detached Walt is becoming in light of that diagnosis. It also allows the viewer a sense of how unaware Skylar is regarding the signals her husband is sending—signals that he is becoming disengaged with his surroundings to the point of alienation from the rational world. It is obvious to the viewer that Walt is beginning to unravel, but Skylar is oblivious to this.

Walter and Skylar, as well as other characters in the show, are representative of an ongoing trend since the 1970s that has seen a drastic change in the outward manifestation of an individual’s internalized expectations and strictures of gender roles. This phenomenon is closely connected to the rise of neoliberalism. The series allows viewers to see how the characters’ conformity to these norms represents their failure to comprehend their real plight: the economic and social costs of neoliberalism. Walt sees his inability to provide adequately for his family as a failure on his part to forcefully secure a better job—or his failure to stay on with Gray Matter, the business that he co- founded—instead of the culmination of years of neoliberal policy making that has resulted in institutional failure on the part of the state.

Self argues that a fundamental transformation of American democracy occurred during the second half of the twentieth century, and he focuses on family dynamics to make this transformation most visible. During the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great

21 Society operated on the assumption of breadwinner liberalism.42 Its programs, such as job training, were intended to prop up the male heterosexual breadwinner of the traditional family, in which the husband worked while the wife remained at home with the kids.

Such programs were supposed to ease entry of the traditional family into the middle class. However, the idea of traditional gender roles, specifically within the family dynamic, were beginning to change, and policy making around these changing gender- based roles was struggling to keep up with the blurring lines of intra-familial responsibilities.

The political left presented evidence that this version of the family did not match reality. Feminists were encouraging women to realize their potential in the workplace, including equal treatment in earning a living, as an alternative to the housewife role.

Meanwhile, many women were already heads of households. As such, they were already working—often at low-paying jobs. Many of these women needed state-supported day- care centers and supplemental welfare payments to make ends meet. Feminists challenged the view of the traditional family in other ways. They fought for the ability of women to control their reproductive lives, such as the right to an abortion. For those who could not exercise that right because of a lack of money, feminists believed the state ought to provide financial assistance.

42 In the 1960s, New Frontier and Great Society liberals such as Lyndon Johnson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Sargent Shriver crafted social and economic policies they believed would make the idealized nuclear family, which had been the object of liberal concern since the New Deal, attainable for more Americans than ever before. Self refers to this as breadwinner liberalism.

22 Additionally, gays and lesbians called for increased rights, which further upset the traditional family model. For example, they advocated gay marriage and the right to be heads of households, raising children as part of a family. Meanwhile, gays and lesbians sought equality in a work place that discriminated against them. As a result, new conceptions of the family emerged, from gay and lesbian heads of households to single, working mothers demanding support from the state. Conservatives saw a moral threat to the traditional family model. State-supported abortions, gay marriage, and welfare payments to single mothers only encouraged nontraditional families, in their view, all too often leading to what they perceived as more unnecessary state spending. According to

Self, Ronald Reagan was able to combine this alleged threat to moral stability within the traditional concept of family with unnecessary government spending to gain the presidency by combining two seemingly disparate ideas: “One was that liberalism had precipitated a revolution in gender, sexuality, and the family that had damaged the nation.

The second was that government based on regulatory and social welfare principles impeded the ‘natural’ functioning of the market and was responsible for any economic downturn or sluggish growth.”43

Reagan’s conflation of disparate ideas allowed for two phenomena: increased resentment directed toward minority groups perceived as threats to the economic and social status quo, and a catalyst for the establishment of neoliberal policy initiatives. Self argues that the political culture transformed from breadwinner liberalism—calling for state intervention in supporting a traditional view of the family—to breadwinner conservatism, which mandated a return to the traditional family model—white,

43 Self, All in theFamily, 399.

23 heterosexual—without the state intervention that encouraged alternative family arrangements, further emboldening a proactive conservative policy agenda.44

Breadwinner conservatism dovetailed with neoliberalism, resulting in vast changes at the international, national, and individual levels. At the individual level, “neoliberalism insists that rationality, individuality, and self-interest guide all actions.”45 Crucially, neoliberalism “often views itself as a global social science capable of explaining all human behavior since all behavior is thought to be directed by logical, individualistic, and selfish goals.”46 Neoliberalism’s focus on individual characteristics regards ideals such as the public good and community as obsolete components of a welfare state.

Following this philosophy, “unemployment, inequality, and poverty have become increasingly blamed on individuals rather than on structural constraints.”47 The appeal of individual freedom and prosperity, the fact that rugged individualism is a prevalent trope of the American dream, makes it challenging for many to realize that neoliberalism is intended to benefit only a very small class of people. Such a perception also makes it easier to justify the thought that certain people are deserving of much more than others because, in keeping with the American dream motif, it is a common belief that we are all responsible for our own destinies.48

44 Ibid.

45 Candace Smith, “A Brief Examination of Neoliberalism and Its Consequences,” The Society Pages, last modified October 2, 2012, http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2012/10/02/a-brief-examination-of-neoliberalism-and- its-consequences/.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

24 Vince Gilligan’s use of the vast expanse of the New Mexican desert in many shots speaks to this ideal. In many scenes throughout the series time-lapse filming is used to show the passing of an entire day, from sunrise to sunset, in rapid sequence. It also represents one of the central myths of Americanism, and when Gilligan uses the desert as a backdrop for these shots, he is expressing the romanticism of the American West and the ideal of self-reliance as internalized by Walter White. The individual fortitude needed to survive in this environment lies in hyper-masculine attributes, the type of hyper- masculinity that critic Henry A. Giroux claims has spread out from the military to other aspects of American society.49

In tracking the hyper-masculine rise of Walter White through the five seasons of the show, a particularly pernicious aspect of neoliberal philosophy emerges: the notion of a zero-sum paradigm that interprets one’s gain as another’s loss. The show’s arc incorporates this zero-sum mentality in that as Walt recovers his dignity, his masculinity, other characters are robbed of theirs to the point of their actual or emotional demise. For such a seemingly mild-mannered man, Walt easily resorts to violence when faced with danger. We see this in the pilot when two of Jesse’s former meth partners, Emilio and

Crazy-8, show up in the desert while Walt and Jesse are cooking in the RV. The scene immediately takes a threatening turn when Emilio recognized Walt and believes him to be a police officer. Emilio and Crazy-8 attempt to eliminate Walt and Jesse, but Walt intervenes with the promise of teaching the two interlopers how to cook meth using his recipe. After Jesse is beaten and tied up Emilio joins Walt and Crazy-8 in the RV. Walt has already decided on his course of action: he releases deadly phosphine gas by

49 Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2008), 44.

25 throwing a bit of red phosphorus into boiling water. Once the poisonous gas is released,

Walt scurries from the RV holding the door closed, trapping Emilio and Crazy-8 in the

RV, with the intent of killing them. Emilio is killed, but Crazy-8 survives. Walt’s instinctive action saves both him and Jesse, but it also reveals to the viewer an early glimpse of the extent Walt will go to protect himself and his business.

This scene represents an example of the zero-sum world Walt is about to enter.

Ironically, he already inhabits that neoliberal milieu, and even though he is not aware of that fact he has unknowingly been conditioned to respond violently to outside threats.

The next two episodes, “The Cat’s in the Bag” and “And the Bag’s in the River,” bear this notion out. These two episodes show Walt as he works through the pros and cons of killing Crazy-8, who is now secured to a pole in the basement of Jesse’s house with a U- shaped bicycle lock around his neck. Walt knows that if he were to let Crazy-8 go free chances are he would kill him and his family. True to his persona early in the series, he feeds and takes care of Crazy-8. He even tries to get to know him with the intention of finding some reason to let him go. In the end however, both men realize they are in a kill- or-be-killed, zero-sum, situation. Crazy-8 accepts this and arms himself with a broken piece of a plate, a plate that Walt provided for him along with a sandwich (the plate was broken when Walt passed out while bringing the sandwich to Crazy-8). Walt ultimately understands that he must kill Crazy-8 when he discovers he was concealing a shard of the broken plate. Walt ends up using the bicycle lock to strangle Crazy-8 while, in the throes of death, he stabs wildly at Walt with the makeshift weapon.50

50 Breaking Bad, “And the Bag’s in the River.”

26 Giroux’s notion of hyper-masculinity is played out in this scene; however, the show presents this idea in an ironic fashion. Both men are intelligent, rational actors

(Crazy-8 has a degree in business from the University of New Mexico) who have been let down by the neoliberal marketplace, but the show portrays Crazy-8 as the one who truly understands his place in the neoliberal environment they both inhabit. He immediately deduces that after what has transpired it is either him or Walt; they cannot co-exist. He understands that each man presents an existential threat to the other, and his decision making and strategy proceed along these lines. He attempts to smooth talk Walt into letting him go by appealing to what he perceives as Walt’s weakness, his natural kindness, telling him he was not suited for the meth business and trying to convince him that Jesse is his real problem.

Cinematically, Gilligan portrays the essence of the hyper-masculine, zero-sum, individualistic world he has created through what appears in the frame of each scene. The protracted cat-and-mouse game between Walt and Crazy-8 is tightly framed, intensely focusing on the two men as played out in the scene in Jesse’s basement. This set-up allows the viewer to experience the extreme nature of the situation as there is little else to focus on except for the two adversaries. Throughout the entirety of the scene, there are also solo shots of Walt and Crazy-8 as they are contemplating their fates. This allows the viewer a glimpse into how they process their situation, which offers an understanding of their character traits. Walt is clearly rattled by what is happening while Crazy-8 is under control and calculating. Initially, one would think that it is Crazy-8 who will connive his way out of danger; however, it is Walter who emerges the victor, yet the viewer is still not quite convinced that he has fully adapted to his new found venture as Walt is clearly

27 shaken by the ordeal and, staying true to his chameleon-like personality, he apologizes to

Crazy-8 after killing him.51 As Walt regains his dignity the remorse, as well as his conflicted moral sensibilities, eventually vanish.

Walt’s metamorphosis from Mr. Chips to Scarface is linked to his tacit acceptance of the neoliberal milieu he has inhabited for the past forty years. He personifies Self’s idea of breadwinner conservatism as he repeatedly insists he is cooking meth to provide for and financially protect his family in order to stave off the intrusion of government agencies designed to assist them in his absence. Although he may not realize it, Walt is hoping to project his hegemonic masculinity from the grave. Self describes how since the

1960s, debates over sex, gender, and the meaning of family have become inextricably linked with battles over the role of government, fostering a trend to constrain government interference in an idealized private family sphere by paving the way for breadwinner conservatism to ultimately place strict limits on government interference in the private market.52

Walt abides by the idea of limited outside interference in family matters by refusing assistance from others as a form of charity. Most notably, he turns down a job offer from Elliot Schwartz—co-founder, along with his wife Gretchen and Walter, of

Gray Matter Technologies—as a hand out, and admonishes his son for setting up an on- line fund drive to help pay for his medical bills.53 This mindset is reinforced throughout the series as even his adversaries have advice for him as to how a “real man” behaves,

51 Ibid.

52 Self, All in the Family, 6.

53 Breaking Bad, “Gray Matter,” & “Phoenix.’

28 and each bit of advice is imbued with a hyper-masculine ethos. Gustavo Fring, while trying to convince Walt to continue to cook for him, asks, “What does a man do Walter?

A man provides for his family… 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.”54 This hyper-masculine, individualistic mindset, fused with a growing zero- sum approach to life in general, becomes central in Walt’s ascendancy in the meth business, and the show marks this rise, and his recovery of lost dignity and manhood, with a body count.

By the end of the series, Walter has damaged the lives of all those around him. In this zero-sum, neoliberal world all of his success comes at the expense of others. After dispatching with Emilio and Crazy-8, Walt and Jesse are forced to find a new distributor for their product. Jesse’s friend, Skinny Pete, puts them in contact with a person he knew from prison named Tuco, a local wholesaler with connections to a Mexican meth cartel.

Tuco is hyper-masculinity personified. An avid user of the product he sells, he responds to all of life’s challenges violently and poses the most imminent threat to Walt and Jesse due to his unpredictability. Jesse meets with Tuco and gets beaten and hospitalized because he asked the wrong questions. Walter then meets with Tuco and detonates a piece of fulminated mercury in Tuco’s office, destroying everything and dazing the occupants, in order to send a message. Tuco is killed by Hank, but it was Walt’s actions that caused Tuco’s death. As evidenced by the violent acts committed by Walter, directly and indirectly, he has clearly started to understand the level of aggression needed to be

54 Breaking Bad, “Mas.”

29 successful in the meth business and appears to have lost any apprehension when it comes to acting violently.

Walt ultimately kills everyone in his way, male and female. As he eerily informs

Skyler, “I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger…a guy opens the door and gets shot…I am the one who knocks.”55 By this point Walt has greatly improved, in his mind, his status in life. To him, all of the bad decisions of his past are mitigated by the fact that he has taken back his manhood. He has not yet killed Gus, Mike, Hank, or Uncle Jack and his clan, but he has established himself as a threat to the stability of his environment.

The elimination of these key characters later in the series solidifies Walt’s role as short- lived alpha-male; however, a year or so after eliminating his perceived enemies he is killed—not by the cancer he feared early on, but by his own hubris, which has ironically left him alone and with a mere fraction of the wealth he accumulated from his business.

The episode in which Hank is killed by Uncle Jack, “Ozymandias,” encapsulates

Walt’s fall. The title of the episode is taken from a Shelley poem of the same name:

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”56

55 Ibid., “Cornered.”

56 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2011), Kindle Edition, loc. 11342.

30

Shelley’s poem sums up what five years of attempting to take back his manhood actually did for Walt. It is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and an egotistical inscription: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”57 The once-great man’s proud boast has been ironically disproved as Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his world is gone, all has been ruined by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history.

The destroyed statue is now merely a decrepit monument to one man’s conceit and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings in the passage of time.

Gilligan’s use of this poem for the title of the episode that sees Walt’s newly created, hyper-aggressive world destroyed is a poignant reminder of the ruinous nature of neoliberal policy, serving as a warning about what such actions may result in: unmitigated disaster.

Walter White is a man defined by his times. If Breaking Bad was set in the 1960s

Walt would most likely have had the comprehensive health insurance through his

employer needed to effectively treat his lung cancer. He would have also most likely

been able to afford life insurance to support his family in his absence. But Walt’s pessimistic world view in the early-21st century has been shaped by years of downsizing

and privatization of essential services and of tightening bottom lines limiting potential avenues of assistance. The limited access to essential services has produced a social and

political landscape that has shifted focus from the benefits of community to a survival-

ofthe-fittest paradigm that encourages a hyper-aggressive approach to life’s challenges

57 Ibid.

31

Chapter III

“I See You”

Breaking Bad engages the criminal justice system by placing Walter at the center of America’s decades-long war on drugs. In neoliberal terms, his decision to cook meth is not the desperate choice of a deviant criminal, but instead a well thought-out course of action by an individual actor looking to maximize his professional skill set in the marketplace. According to critic David Pierson, crime in the neoliberal arena is viewed as a routine event committed by persons who make a particular choice among many potential choices.58 In choosing to manufacture meth, Walt has ditched his previously inadequate approach to making ends meet by working two jobs in favor of the highly profitable illegal drug business. Unlike with his low-paying teaching position and his part-time car wash job, Walt is able to profit substantially from his chemistry knowledge by producing high quality, potent crystal meth, which becomes the most sought-after product in the American Southwest. The business of selling meth is criminal in nature, and the show cleverly examines neoliberal business practices through the meth trade. By examining neoliberal business policy in terms of the criminal activity associated with meth manufacturing and distribution side-by-side, Chapters 3 and 4 will shed light on the pernicious practices both share. Gilligan links the criminal practices of neoliberal business and crime policy by situating Walt in the middle of his brother-in-law Hank

58 David Pierson, “Breaking Neoliberal? Contemporary Neoliberal Discourses and Policies in Breaking Bad,” in Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, ed. David Pierson (New York: Lexington Books, 2014), Kindle Edition, loc. 294.

32 Schrader, a DEA agent, and Gustavo Fring, a local restaurateur and meth kingpin, in a cat-and-mouse game that offers a critical rendering of the American criminal justice system in the early 21st century.

The welfare state era conceived of crime as an aberrant event that can only be resolved through the proper functioning and direct intervention of such social institutions as family, education, and employment: the criminal was a deviant who diverged from established social norms. Additionally, the welfare state posited that crime can only be reduced through state intervention and that the criminal can be socially rehabilitated to fit back into normal society. In contrast, neoliberal criminology disassociates itself from any social and psychological explanations of crime and criminal behavior.59 Neoliberal criminologists believe that crime can occur anywhere and can never be completely eliminated. This idea is highlighted in Breaking Bad as Walt and Jesse conduct their business everywhere—from inside a recreational vehicle to Jesse’s basement to a lab constructed beneath an industrial laundry—and further validated by Hank in the Season

Two finale when he compares stopping the sale of meth to the arcade game Whack-a-

Mole: for every drug dealer eliminated, another pops right up.60 To the neoliberal criminologist, the most effective way to reduce crime is through aggressive policing, surveillance, penal disincentives, and proper zoning in potential high crime areas.61 These policy initiatives aim to incentivize positive character traits such as hard work while at

59 Ibid., loc. 306.

60 Breaking Bad, “ABQ.”

61 Ibid.

33 the same time using the deterrents of arrest and prison as a warning to those who may gravitate to a life of crime.

From the start, Breaking Bad embodies the neoliberal theory that the criminal is not a product of a psychological disorder or social disadvantage but rather is a typical person. The second episode of Season One begins with Hank addressing his agents at the

DEA offices in Albuquerque. He is briefing them about the 99.1% pure meth they found in Crazy-8’s abandoned car and he informs his team he believes there is a new drug kingpin in town. As he is speaking these words the scene shifts from the DEA offices to a close shot of a shirtless Walt brushing his teeth in front of his bathroom mirror. The scene ironically, and poignantly, illustrates the idea that a criminal does not have to look like a criminal, in the traditional, welfare-state characterization. Instead, the offender is a rational economic actor who contemplates and calculates the risks and the rewards of his/her actions. Crime is no longer a deviant activity outside the mainstream market, but is rather one market among others. Walter is one manifestation of this theory; another is

Jesse Pinkman.

The viewer is introduced to Jesse in the pilot as he is escaping a DEA drug raid on a house where he and his associate Emilio are cooking up a batch of meth. After Walt kills Crazy-8, Jesse feels he needs to get away from the drug trade and attempts to find legitimate employment. In the Season One episode “Gray Matter,” Jesse is shown sitting down in an office at a mortgage company for a job interview. The scene alternates between a tight shot of Jesse in suit and tie and a wider shot of him, the interviewer, and a large picture window with vertical shades open just enough so the viewer can detect movement on the other side. After Jesse hands the interviewer his resume, he is told that

34 the opening he is applying for is not in sales, as Jesse thought, but a job that “is really a no experience necessary kind of thing.”62 The manager then informs Jesse that what he has in mind for him is more of an advertising position. He stands, walks to the picture window and opens the shades to reveal a young man in a dollar bill costume spinning a red arrow over his head. Without experience, this is this type of menial, low-wage position that Jesse qualifies for. As Jesse sits in his car after the interview reviewing the want ads, the camera focuses on the folded newspaper he is holding, and in the background, the guy in the dollar bill outfit—who is Jesse’s friend Badger—comes into focus. The juxtaposition of the want ads and Badger in his “money suit” acts as a reality check for Jesse. As a high school dropout,63 he is again reminded that his employment potential is clearly limited by choices he has made in the past; however, his range of options is also limited by the predominance of neoliberal policy-making that resulted in deindustrialization, outsourcing, and the shrinking of public resources associated with job training and job creation. While Jesse has made questionable decisions in his life that certainly affected his earning potential in the “legitimate” workplace, the shift to a service economy and the frayed social safety net have undoubtedly reduced his opportunities.

Jesse has been conditioned by the neoliberal paradigm in which he finds himself, and if his goal is “mad stacks,” he cannot conceive of financially viable employment options outside of the criminal world.64

62 Breaking Bad, “Gray Matter.”

63 At the Breaking Bad Season 4 premiere Bryan Cranston refers to Jesse as a high school dropout. Accessed February 6, 2016 from http://htbthomas.tumblr.com/post/7120397740/bryan- cranston-hes-a-sweet-kid-you-look-at-this.

64 Jesse and his friends refer to large sums of money as “mad stacks” throughout the series.

35 Breaking Bad portrays Jesse’s place in society as a result of his socialization process. He is a product of forces unknown to him: years of political consent resulting from powerful neoliberal influences in politics, big business, education, media, and popular culture. French philosopher Michel Foucault posits that this confluence of politically powerful entities have since the 1970s redefined the social sphere to incorporate a neoliberal paradigm that served to justify the curtailing of governmental regulation and provision outside the penal sphere.65 Ultimately, the show confirms

Foucault’s assertion that “[n]eoliberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking.”66 The idea of a pervasive neoliberal mindset is exemplified in a 1991 interview with the man many consider the father of neoliberalism in America, Milton Friedman.

Speaking about the evils of governmental intervention in the economy, Friedman suggested that the role of government in the drug business is essential to its existence: “If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.”67 Friedman believed that governmental drug prohibition enabled illegal drug dealers to charge exceedingly high prices for their product. In this context, government becomes an enterprise whose task is to make competition a universal quality by encouraging market-based systems of action for individuals, groups, and institutions.68 The meth business is one of these market-based

65 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-- 1979 (Lectures at the College de France) (New York: Picador, 2010), 216.

66 Ibid., 218.

67 Milton Friedman and Thomas S. Szasz, Friedman and Szasz on Liberty and Drugs: Essays on the Free Market and Prohibition, ed. Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin B. Zeese (New York: Drug Policy Foundation, 1992), 44.

68 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 78-9.

36 systems of action. Operating within the strictures of this neoliberal framework, Walt— like Jesse, unaware of how neoliberalism has shaped his worldview—becomes the hyper- masculine Heisenberg, an ultra-competitive rational actor out to maximize his vast knowledge of chemistry in an illegal market-based system. While neoliberal drug policy in general is unclear on the topic of drug legalization, and Friedman was not necessarily advocating the legalization of drugs, his comments illuminate just how ubiquitous the neoliberal mindset has become and offers an opportunity to examine how the drug trade and law enforcement display the fecklessness of neoliberal crime policy in general, and drug policy specifically.

A key dynamic, and the most poignant example of the good-guy/bad-guy dichotomy, in Breaking Bad is Walt’s relationship with his brother-in-law, DEA agent

Hank Schrader. Ironically, it is Hank who, in the pilot, first introduces Walter to the idea that selling methamphetamine can pay handsomely when, asked by Walt how much money he took in a meth bust earlier in the day, he replies “It's about 700 grand.”69

Further prodded by Walt, Hank offers, “It's not the most we ever took. It's easy money until we catch you.”70 A close-up of Walt reveals him in deep thought. This is the crucial moment when the idea of cooking meth occurs to Walt—when he decides to capitalize on his extensive experience teaching chemistry in a manner he could not have imagined in a high school classroom. Additionally, it is Hank who takes Walt out on the DEA raid where he first sees his former student Jesse getting away just as the DEA agents are breaking in the door of his meth lab. As Walt’s famously pure blue methamphetamine

69 Breaking Bad, “Pilot.”

70 Ibid.

37 grows in popularity, Hank becomes increasingly obsessed with its prevalence in the U.S.

Southwest, yet spends the course of nearly the entire series unaware that its source is his own brother-in-law.

There is another layer of irony, however: while Hank draws Walt into the drug trade by informing him of its lucrativeness and taking him out on a drug raid, he—along with several law enforcement agencies—are responsible for the highly lucrative and violent nature of the drug business. In economic terms, Walter White’s illicit drug empire—and all its ensuing mayhem and killing—is dependent upon the participation of

DEA agents like Hank. This is what Friedman was referring to when he said that the governmental prohibition of drugs is propping up the cartels: the more the state interdicts the illegal drug trade the more the product will cost, thereby lining the pockets of entrepreneurs like Walt.71 Dawn Paley, in her book Drug War Capitalism, offers a scathing critic of how free trade agreements and neoliberal restructuring have determined the shape and violent nature of drug markets today. According to Paley, the North

American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) contributed to driving down the price of legal commodities such as maize to a point where Mexican farmers were drawn to planting illegal drug crops in order to offset the loses incurred by NAFTA’s price structuring of legal goods and services.72 Strikingly similar circumstances have led Walt into the meth business. Breaking Bad is very much a parable of the failed drug war and focuses on

Walt and Hank’s relationship not only to portray this aspect of a failed crime policy, but

71 Friedman and Szasz, Friedman and Szasz on Liberty and Drugs, 45.

72 Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2014), 48.

38 to emphasize how flawed the system is by having Walt conduct his criminal activity right under Hank’s nose.

The series frequently mocks the law enforcement community. At the beginning of

Season Two, Walt disappears and Skyler calls on Hank to help find him. Unknown to

Hank and the rest of Walt’s family, Walt and Jesse have been kidnapped by Tuco and taken to his remote desert hideout, a rundown house near the Mexican border. This scene represents the beginning of the show’s critique of the law enforcement community in its war on drugs. Season One offered a glimpse into what becomes a full-scale derision of

Hank’s efforts to bring down what he believes to be an industrial-sized meth manufacturing operation in Albuquerque; however, in the Season Two episode “Grilled,”

Gilligan begins to depict Hank and Walt engaged in a satirical game of cat-and-mouse.

The beginning of the episode is set in the DEA’s Albuquerque office and the viewer finds

Hank firing up his agents in the manner of a football coach giving a speech before the big game. They have gathered evidence revealing Tuco as a major player in the Albuquerque meth trade, and Hank asks the agents if they want to catch Tuco. When his question is met with a smattering of “yeah,” “sure” and an “of course,” Hank, feeding off the uninspired retorts of his fellow crime fighters, inquires again, “Do you wanna find this guy?... Are you gonna find this guy?”73 The agents then respond with a bit more enthusiasm and begin to loudly chant “Hell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah!”74 Hank exits the office area with his partner Steve Gomez to this chant, and as soon as they get beyond the

73 Breaking Bad, “Grilled.”

74 Ibid.

39 closing door Hank dejectedly says, “Ain’t gonna find this guy, he’s in Mexico by now.

Gotta keep up appearances, Gomey. It’s all about appearances”75

Keeping up appearances has a deeper meaning here. On the surface, Hank is portraying himself as an effective leader, and by extension, portraying the drug war as an effective policy initiative. The show addresses this notion in the pivotal scene from the pilot episode where Hank takes Walt on a ride-along as the DEA takes down a meth lab.

The visceral sensory assault this scene provides—DEA agents in military gear employing shock-and-awe tactics while raiding a suburban home in a quiet neighborhood—would, at first blush, allay concerns of the efficacy of the drug war. The troops put on a show to make it appear they are actually having an impact on the meth trade. In reality, they take down a small-time manufacturer. As it turns out Walt becomes the guy that the DEA would love to bring down, and Walt’s elusiveness is central metaphor for the inefficacy of the war on drugs.

This metaphor is played out at the end of “Grilled,” and continues into the next episode, “Bit by a Dead Bee.” “Grilled” closes with Hank approaching a rundown house in the desert. In front of the house, he sees a man next to a car he identifies as belonging to Jesse Pinkman and assumes it’s Jesse; however, it’s Tuco. Hank draws his weapon and engages in a shootout with Tuco in which Tuco is shot and killed. While this is happening, the camera cuts quickly to Walt and Jesse running away from Tuco’s house.

All the viewer sees is the back of both men as they escape. The next episode begins with a shot of Walt and Jesse walking through the desert and planning how to get back to town. The two episodes combine to tell an ironic tale: while looking for Walt, Hank

75 Ibid.

40 stumbles upon Tuco, who is wanted for questioning in the death of one of his associates—the same Tuco whom Hank had written off as long gone earlier in “Grilled.”

That is one bit of irony. Another is how Hank happens upon Tuco. He is looking for

Walt, whom his family thinks suddenly disappeared. Hank is off the clock, so to speak; looking for Walt on his own time. He has no clue about Walt and Tuco’s joint business venture, yet there he is right in the middle of it, far away from the cover—and back-up support—of the DEA. He is ultimately commended by the DEA for taking down a major drug player, but he is clueless about Walt’s being there, and equally ignorant of Walt’s alter-ego Heisenberg, the best meth cook in New Mexico. Furthermore, Gilligan mocks

Hank’s ignorance by placing Walt and Hank in the same shot with Walt fully able to see

Hank, but Hank unable to see Walt.76 This scene serves as a metaphor for the ineffectiveness of law enforcement as it mocks the one thing neoliberalism is supposed to be proficient at: fighting crime.

A pivotal scene in the Season Four episode “Bullet Points” portrays the ineptitude of police as a bulwark protecting innocent Americans from the evils of the drug trade.

Here, Hank comes face-to-face with Heisenberg but does not realize it because, while

Walt and Jesse cannot conceive of legitimate methods of amassing great wealth, Hank is equally incapable of pushing beyond his preconception of the criminal element. The scene takes place in Hank and Marie’s bedroom where Hank is convalescing after an attempt on his life. His spinal cord is damaged during the attack and he is now confined to a wheelchair. Hank has been asked by an Albuquerque PD colleague who has a difficult murder case on his hands to help out. In the case file is a DVD of the murder

76 Ibid.

41 victim, Gale Boetticher—Walt’s one-time partner in Fring’s meth mega-lab who was killed by Jesse at Walt’s behest—singing karaoke, as well as notebook entitled “Lab

Notes.” Walt is clearly shaken when Hank plays the DVD for him. Hank—oblivious to

Walt’s mood change—says, “I'd say he's my guy…There's this, uh, mystery man I've been, uh, chasing for the better part of a year. Cooks the purest meth that, uh, me or anyone else has ever seen. Goes by the name of Heisenberg.”77 Heisenberg is sitting right in front of him; Heisenberg is Walt. Walt is visibly shaken but manages to stifle a gasp while asking, “Really?” The scene is a tight shot, with both men in the frame, in the

Schraders’ dimly lit bedroom. The low lighting forces the viewer to concentrate; the tight shot conveys closeness: the emotional closeness of the two men, and more importantly, the closeness of hunter to prey. The shot gets tighter still as Hank moves in. Walt reappears in the frame in a close-up on his glasses as he is reading the notebook. The reflection of the notebook, all that he is implicated in, in Walt’s s glasses—the idea of being faced with his crime—adds to the tension. Hank then points something out: “Here, let me—Let me—Let me show you something. Give it—Give it.”78 Walt hands the case file to Hank, placing the evidence of his illegal activities in the hands of the DEA. “Right here at the, uh—hear at the top. It says, uh, ‘To W.W. My star, my perfect silence…

W.W. I mean, who do you figure that is, huh? Woodrow Wilson? Willy Wonka? Walter

White?”79 Walter is visibly fighting back fear, and when he begins to speak we can discern a slight quiver as he first exhales, then puts up his hands in surrender, “You got

77 Breaking Bad, “Bullet Points.”

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

42 me.”80 Walt then points out that W. W. is Walt Whitman, whose poem “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer” is transcribed in the notebook. Walt knows this is Gale

Boetticher’s favorite poem, and when he sees the poem it serves as a way out of this very tense situation. Hank feels it is a reasonable enough explanation and stops his line of questioning.

The show is clearly questioning the competence of the U.S. law enforcement community. On the surface this may seem a bit heavy-handed, and a closer look at how law enforcement practices have evolved since the late-1970s might support the idea of well-equipped, well-trained, effective police departments; however, data indicate that training and equipment alone do not make a competent police force. The drastic metamorphosis of general police tactics from a cop-on-the-beat approach to many departments now resembling deployed military cadres is a result of the drug war.

According to attorney and author Michelle Alexander “the drug war created something of a dilemma for the Reagan administration. In order for the war to actually work— that is, in order for it to succeed in achieving its political goals— it was necessary to build a consensus among state and local law enforcement agencies that the drug war should be a top priority in their hometowns. The solution: cash.”81 Massive cash grants were made to law enforcement agencies willing to make enforcement of illegal drug activity a top priority.82

In 1988, to assist state and local police agencies, the Reagan administration

80 Ibid.

81 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 72.

82 Ibid.

43 requested that Congress revise the method in which federal aid is made to law enforcement. The new funding plan, named “the Edward Byrne Memorial State and

Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program after a New York City police officer who was shot to death while guarding the home of a drug-case witness, . . . was designed to encourage every federal grant recipient to help fight the War on Drugs.”83 Almost immediately the federal money began to flow. By the late 1990s, the vast majority of

U.S. state and local police departments had taken advantage of the newly available resources to add a significant amount of military equipment to their drug-war operations.

According to the Cato Institute, in 1997 alone, the Pentagon made available to local police more than 1.2 million pieces of military equipment.84 The National Defense

Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 1997 created the 1033 Program as part of the U. S.

Government’s Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services (DLA) to transfer excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies. As of 2014, 8,000 local law enforcement agencies participated in the reutilization program that has transferred $5.1 billion in military hardware from the Department of Defense to local American law enforcement agencies since 1997.85 According to the DLA, material worth $449 million was transferred in 2013 alone. Commonly requested items include “grenade launchers and vehicles such as aircraft, watercraft and armored vehicles.”86

Although the militarization of state and local police departments expanded

83 Ibid, 73.

84 Ibid.

85 Aaron Poynton, “Military & Civilian Resources: Doing More with Less,” Domestic Preparedness 10, no. 9 (2014) 25.

86 Ibid.

44 exponentially in the 1980s, historian Elizabeth Hinton identifies the genesis of this unprecedented phenomenon in the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965.

This legislation was designed to improve the current training programs of local and state law enforcement personnel. Its objective was to bolster the weaponry available to police personnel through the granting of federal funding to relevant public or private organizations for the beefing up of professional police training programs, resulting in an upgrade in police armament.87 Hinton views this extreme rearming of police departments as ironic. It is on par with the many inconsistencies in crime policy identified in Breaking

Bad.88 Taxpayers provide the funding to introduce a hyper-weaponized police presence to many of the communities where they live. The militarization of police departments has resulted in the paradox that it now suppresses the very citizens who have for years unwittingly funded the initiative. While Hinton’s treatment of the rise of the Robocop reflects the reality of living in depressed urban neighborhoods, especially for African

Americans, her conclusions are easily extrapolated to the story Gilligan is telling in

Breaking Bad. What the show bears out is that in any marginalized community—African

American, Hispanic, Asian, or white—the potential for overzealous and unwanted intervention from law enforcement is much greater than in more prosperous areas. While police departments enjoy seemingly unlimited funding for weaponry and training, the show is telling us there does not seem to be a commensurate increase in efficacy.

87 Paul M. Whisenand, “Equipping Men for Professional Development in the Police Service: The Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 57, no. 2 (1966): 223, DOI: 10.2307/1141305.

88 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), Kindle loc. 6101.

4 5 Furthermore, neoliberalism siphons untold amounts of money from social programs that directly affect individual lives.

Breaking Bad features several scenes where DEA agents or Albuquerque police conduct raids on suspected meth labs. Two such scenes almost bookend the series: the initial DEA raid in the pilot episode, and the final scene of the series when Walt is killed.

The scene in the pilot episode has Walt in Hank’s DEA vehicle. Also in the truck is Steve

Gomez, Hank’s partner. As they prepare to raid a suspected meth lab, another DEA vehicle, a black Suburban with dark tinted windows, rolls into view. Hanging on the outside of the ominous-looking SUV—like infantry troops hanging from the side of an assault helicopter heading into battle—are four DEA agents dressed head-to-toe in black.

They are wearing black military-style helmets with black protective armor covering the majority of their bodies. They are armed with pistols and military assault rifles. The vehicle with Hank, Steve, and Walt falls in behind the Suburban as Hank begins to vocalize Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, evoking images of a scene from the Vietnam film Apocalypse Now where Wagner’s piece plays loudly as an attack formation of helicopters bears down on a Vietnamese village, further reinforcing the military trope the scene suggests and hinting at the futility of the effort. The four DEA agents dismount from the Suburban and are joined by four others as they tactically maneuver into position near the sliding door of the very stylish townhouse containing the targeted lab. As they approach the slider, the scene switches to inside the house to show a lone individual sitting in a room in complete disarray listening to music through his earbuds. There is a sudden crash of glass and a loud explosion as one of the agents has discharged his/her shotgun at the base of the glass slider. The man is arrested without incident. This scene

46 shows the extent of militarization now present in everyday police work. Gilligan’s point here is to show the excesses of manpower and force used to subdue a relatively compliant suspect.

The scene also exposes a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy that manifests itself in a ratcheting-up of violence: the DEA equips itself with bigger and better weapons to match the weapons of the “bad guys.” In turn, the criminal element increases its firepower to match and exceed that of the DEA. The has resulted in the prevalence of SWAT teams, like the group paramilitary DEA operators mentioned above, executing drug warrants.

According to an American Civil Liberties Union report from 2014, even though paramilitary policing in the form of SWAT teams was created to deal with emergency scenarios such as hostage or barricade situations, the use of SWAT to execute search warrants in drug investigations has become commonplace and made up the majority of incidents.89 To better understand the implication of indiscriminate use of SWAT teams it is useful to understand that “[w]hen the police are executing a search warrant, there has been no formal accusation of a crime; rather, the police are simply acting on the basis of probable cause to believe that drugs will be present.”90 Critically, there is no specific criminal case, usually no formal suspects, and often little proof. Probable cause strictures mandate that proof of evidence of a criminal act must be present for a search warrant. In most cases, no actual crime has been committed; the search warrant is merely an investigatory tool. Thus, according to the ACLU, the use of a SWAT team to execute a

89 “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” aclu.org, last modified June 2014, https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/jus14-warcomeshome- report-web-rel1.pdf.

90 Ibid.

47 search warrant essentially amounts to the use of paramilitary tactics to conduct domestic drug investigations in people’s homes:

The majority (79 percent) of SWAT deployments the ACLU studied were for the purpose of executing a search warrant, most commonly in drug investigations. Only a small handful of deployments (7 percent) were for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios. The remaining deployments were for other purposes such as protecting visiting dignitaries, capturing fleeing suspects, and responding to emergencies. Our investigation found that in the majority of deployments the police did not face genuine threats to their safety and security.91

The result of this excessive use of force creates a siege mentality in many U.S. communities. Breaking Bad addresses this phenomenon in a subtle yet important scene in the Season Three episode “Sunset.” Ever since Jesse was taken in for questioning by

Hank in Season Two, Hank has been out to get him. Hank senses Jesse is somehow connected to his theory that there is a major meth manufacturer operating in

Albuquerque. Hank’s dogged perusal of his hunch has resulted in a promising lead.

Acting on information he has gathered, Hank finds himself tracking down old recreational vehicles as he has come to believe the meth cook he is after has been operating out of a Winnebago, cleverly moving around the New Mexican desert to evade detection. A tip from the county sheriff takes Hank to a gas station on the outskirts of town where he interviews a young lady who informs him that a customer paid for gas with blue meth. The customer was Jesse; the gas he paid for was for the Winnebago.

Hank tracks the RV to Combo, the dealer friend of Jesse’s who was shot dead while slinging meth in Season Two. Hank’s attention is now fully focused on Jesse. The siege mentality aspect is played out as Hank stakes out Jesse’s house. Jesse knows that the

DEA is on him and he is afraid to leave his house, essentially blockading himself within

91 Ibid.

48 the walls of his home, for fear of being nabbed. In this scene, Gilligan places Hank— sitting in his SUV and looking into his side view mirror—in the foreground of a long camera shot with Jesse’s residence reflected, out of focus, in the mirror. This foggy depiction of Jesse’s house encompasses more than just one single, targeted home: it envelops the entire neighborhood.

Gilligan’s depiction of Hank and Jesse represents the seemingly limitless scope of neoliberal crime policy. The neoliberal image of crime and the criminal renders all susceptible to the draw of illegal activities if the situation benefits them. The understated nature of the scene described above buttresses the insidiousness at the heart of such a policy: anyone, anytime could fall into the wide sweep of the justice system. While

Hank’s main objective is to surveil Jesse, he is also observing the other homes in the neighborhood. This scene of surveillance and siege mentality conjures up the evils of other policies of similar scope. David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire and for fifteen years the police reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, is a vocal opponent of such policing methods, going as far as to regard the war on drugs as “a Holocaust in slow- motion.”92 He explains this rationale in terms of increased police presence and weaponry in the documentary The House I Live In: “[T]he war on drugs has given law enforcement all of these tools, all of this authority, to pursue criminality and gangsters, but what it actually did was it destroyed the police deterrent in a very subtle and unintended way.”93

92 Jeff Jurgens, “The House We All Live In,” hannaharendtcenter.org, last modified January 22, 2013, http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/the-house-we-all-live-in/2013.

93 David Simon, in Eugene Jarecki, The House I Live In (New York: Cinetic, 2012) Netflix.

49 One of the unintended consequences Simon speaks of is the production of a siege mentality. Sociologist Daniel Bar-Tal has written extensively on this phenomenon in relation to nation-states; however, the idea is equally germane to the subject at hand. Bar-

Tal explains that “the siege beliefs may be maintained because of the imprint left by past collective experiences, something that greatly affects the present perception of the world.

In these cases, societal channels, cultural institutions and the educational system, often support the siege mentality and therefore it is extremely difficult to change.”94

“Collective experience” is this sense evokes Foucault’s assertion of neoliberalism’s ubiquity. It sums up not only the effect of neoliberal crime policy on society, but the influence neoliberalism in general has had on Americans since the 1970s. The insidiousness of many detrimental policy initiatives has adversely affected the way the

U.S. educates and socializes its citizenry. This process of education and socialization has resulted in a trickling down of a uniquely negative world view that is portrayed in the actions of Walt, Jesse, and others as they are acting in response to an invisible hand, gloved in neoliberal dogma, at once denying them access to legitimate means of self- sufficiency and directing them into a zero-sum realm regulated by the assumption that having been left to their own cunning, anything goes.

In “Sunset,” Hank now knows the Winnebago he has been looking for definitely belongs to Jesse. He tracks the vehicle down in a junk yard, and as Hank is snooping around the exterior the owner of the junk yard approaches him questioning his interest in the RV.

[Owner] Got a warrant?

94 Daniel Bal-Ter, “Siege Mentality,” beyondintractability.org, September 2004, accessed June 16, 2016, http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/siege-mentality.

50 [Hank] Who are you? Who are you? What do you know about this RV? [Owner] Well, I'm the owner of this lot, which means you're trespassing on private property. As far as the RV goes, seems to me it's locked, which means you're trying to break and enter, so I say again, you got a warrant? [Hank] Well, I don't need one if I've got probable cause, counselor. [Owner] Probable cause usually relates to vehicles, is my understanding, you know, traffic stops and whatnot. [Hank] See these round rubber things? Wheels. This is a vehicle. [Owner] This is a domicile, a residence, and thus protected by the Fourth Amendment from unlawful search and seizure. [Hank] Look buddy, why don't you just go out and… [Owner] Did you see this drive in here? How do you know it runs? Did you actually witness any wrongdoing? It seems to me you're just out here fishing. Don't see that holding up in a court of law.95

The imperative to survive, and thrive, in such a besieged environment requires one to be acutely aware of the milieu he/she occupies. In this case, the owner’s deep knowledge of the intricacies of the legal system speaks to his understanding of the neoliberal world he inhabits.

Breaking Bad saves its most damning critique of law enforcement for the Season

Five episode “Gliding All Over.” In the aftermath of Gus’s murder, Walter is keenly aware of the vulnerability of his meth operation without Gus’s business to provide a legitimate cover. More importantly, Walt is concerned about the fact that key players in

Gus’s operation, ten trusted associates, are now in jail or prison just sitting there contemplating their fate. This presents a loose end that Walt is not comfortable with. He proposes to eliminate Gus’s men while they are in prison by having them all “hit” at the same time. Walt tasks his new associate Uncle Jack with the detail. What follows next is a well-executed mass murder of the ten men, at three different correctional facilities, within a two-minute time-frame. A phenomenon of neoliberal crime policy has been the

95 Breaking Bad, “Sunset.”

51 acute rise in America’s prison population since the 1970s. In 1970 the U.S. combined state and federal prison population was roughly 200,000; by 2014 it had risen to

1,508,636.96 This increase in prison population coincides with a massive proliferation of prison construction. According to Bryan Stevenson, “Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days.”97 Prison growth has created what

Stevenson and others refer to as the prison-industrial complex—business interests that capitalize on prison construction. Massive amounts of money were made available for prison construction in the late-20th/early-21st centuries making “imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem.”98 Again we see the insidiousness of the neoliberal way of thinking as mass incarceration evidently provides the answer for everything policy-makers felt the welfare state inadequately addressed: health care issues like drug addiction; poverty that forced someone to write a bad check; managing the mentally handicapped; even immigration control.99 This rationale would indicate the best course of action for Walter after thirty years of neoliberal cuts to the public education system—leaving him without adequate health insurance—would be to go to prison. He would get all the medical care he needed there. If Jesse wants to go to college or find job training, he should go to prison as well. In this context, one comes to

96 “U.S. State and Federal Prison Population, 1925-2014,” The Sentencing Project, accessed June 22, 2016, http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-.- Corrections.pdf.

97 Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Random House, 2014), 260.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

52 the conclusion that the prison-industrial complex has essentially replaced a comprehensive social safety net eroded over the years by neoliberal policy making.

The prison hit is carried out with great precision: the objective is attained quickly and without incident. Ironically, this horrific scene, along with Gus and Walt’s very efficient meth operation, are represented by the show as effective and well-organized while the DEA, police, and corrections officers are portrayed as inept. In the prison scene, Gilligan does not have correctional staff save the day. There are very few correction staff in the sequence. Prison management remains largely unaware of what is going on. That fact that Uncle Jack’s crew had prison guards inside to help facilitate the hits further chides the criminal justice infrastructure under neoliberal direction. Prison staff who accept money and favors from the criminal element are usually doing so because they need to augment their income or because they have come to realize crime actually does pay better than the jobs they have. The show supports this perception as for the majority of the series Gilligan depicts policing as impotent. Conversely, the criminal element is portrayed as effective.

The prison scene completes Gilligan’s critique of the neoliberal crime prevention apparatus. By portraying the New Mexican prison system as inept, Gilligan has made clear the most glaring irony regarding the effectiveness of neoliberalism when it comes to fighting crime: viewers are left with the impression that after the billions of tax payer dollars spent on training and equipping law enforcement agencies at every level to protect society from the criminal element, the neoliberal approach to policing has produced nothing less than a community of thriving law breakers. The ease with which Walter manufactures and sells meth while carrying on a reasonable, rational relationship with his

53 DEA brother-in-law stands at the center of this critique. Hank and his DEA cronies are portrayed in scenes dominated by a sense of failure.

Gilligan reveals institutions other than business that have been permanently altered by the neoliberalism’s devastating undoing of the state-sponsored social safety net established by the New Deal and The Great Society. The manner in which Breaking Bad emphasizes how neoliberal policy has directly affected the characters in the show reveals neoliberalism’s punitive ethos: its relentless punishment of individuals who have not maximized their ability, as Walt has, to thrive in an ultra-competitive business environment. Loïc Wacquant addresses the idea of disciplining the less fortunate. He asserts that the neoliberal turn in penal theory, with its emphasis on strict punishment practices and policies, has led to the formation of a “grand penal state” in America. This phenomenon has succeeded in conflating wrongdoing with the absence of personal initiative or specialized skill set and has contributed to a fivefold increase in the prison population that now encompasses seven million Americans, which corresponds to one adult male in twenty and one black man in three.100 He further argues that the rise of a penal state in the United States is not a response to the rise of crime, which remained constant in the time period, but rather is a response to the social dislocations caused by the decline of the welfare state and the insecurities associated with low wage labor for citizens trapped at the bottom of a polarizing class structure. Many of the show’s characters are on parole, probation, or otherwise controlled by the criminal justice system.

100 Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), page or location?

54 A closer examination of Wacquant reveals that the skewing of state activity from the social to the penal arm and the emergent penalization of welfare, in turn, result in a remasculinization of the state in reaction to the wide-reaching changes provoked by the women’s movement and by the institutionalization of social rights in conflict with the idea of male dominance.101 The neoliberal state interprets the welfare state as destructive to personal achievement so much so that the welfare state has been recast as implicit in devaluing the individual as a commodity to be traded on the market. This observation ties in to Chapter 1’s exploration of gender roles and Walt’s quest to recapture his masculinity as well as discussions concerning the nature of crime. Philosophically, the tenets of neoliberal crime policy play a critical role in explaining his transformation from milquetoast to hyper-aggressiveness as a large portion of Walt’s metamorphosis is based on rebelling against his perceived place in the world according to his relationship with his wife and society at large. Wacquant goes on to say, “The new priority given to duties over rights, sanction over support, the stern rhetoric of the ‘obligations of citizenship,’ and the martial reaffirmation of the capacity of the state to lock the troublemaking poor

(welfare recipients and criminals) ‘in a subordinate relation of dependence and obedience’ toward state managers portrayed as virile protectors of the society against its wayward members”102

Legal scholar Bernard Harcourt explores the paradoxical relationship between laissez faire economic policy and mass incarceration. According to him, since the 18th century, when French Physiocrats defined economics and crime as distinctly separate

101 Loïc Wacquant, “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity,” Sociological Forum 25, no. 2 (2010): 201, DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2010.01173.x.

102 Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, loc. 6366, Kindle Edition.

55 entities, to the Chicago School-influenced neoliberal Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, there has been a slow but persistent flow of ideas that have reinforced the line between free-market economics and penal policy. The line is forged, according to Harcourt, by a misconception: the myth of natural order. Accordingly, market relations are orderly and efficient because they are essentially a reflection of human nature itself, hence “natural.”

The unfettered commerce of self-interested economic actors produces efficient, if not equal, market outcomes; however, market efficiency born of natural order is maximized only when external interference, crime, is kept to a minimum.103

Conversely, the state, specifically the criminal law, should stay out of the market; however, criminal law has an important protective role to play by punishing criminals who violate the natural order by “bypassing” the market.104 In this way, Harcourt argues, the myth of natural order both condemns state interference in market relations and mandates punishment for those who bypass the market. According to this explication, the notion of natural order has led to what today is an understanding that closely resembles

“the legal despotism of the eighteenth century: the legitimate sphere for state intervention is the space outside the market, the zone of market bypassing.”105 Wacquant’s concept of

“prisonfare”—replacing traditional ideas of welfare with state support contingent on low- wage employment—describes “the stream of policies that responds to urban ills by rolling out the police, the courts, jails and prisons, and their extensions.” Those include probation and parole, which today supervise five million individuals, but also the

103 Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 38.

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid.

56 computerized diffusion of criminal databases, which cover some 30 million, and the schemes of profiling and surveillance they undergird (like “background checks” by employers and realtors).106

In Breaking Bad, this schema is exemplified by Jesse, Skinny Pete, Badger, and

Combo, four young men whom the system has left to their own devices in order to make ends meet. Gilligan captures perfectly the marginalized nature of their existence as each is on parole for meth-related offenses but chooses to remain in the meth business with

Jesse. So while, according to Wacquant, crime has not risen commensurate to the increase in rates of incarceration, the show explains through these four disenfranchised men how a certain segment of society has essentially given up on legitimate forms of employment in return for a life as quasi-criminals, small-time dealers who are continuously going to jail on small-time convictions, causing a precipitous rise in the prison population since the 1970s. Their place in the criminal justice system is secured when they leave jail or prison by placing them on parole, ensuring easy capture in the future as they are essentially marked men. Even worse, strict sentencing policies virtually guarantee a cycle of arrest and incarceration until the neoliberal state requires a lifetime sentence. Jesse and his accomplices are vulnerable to this pattern of oppression as they have been stripped of any legitimate way to earn a living wage .

106 Karen J. Winkler, “When Workfare Meets Prisonfare: A Q&A With Loïc Wacquant,” Chronicle of Higher Education, last modified July 13, 2009, https://kruso.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/11/

57

Chapter IV

“Blood Money”

As a series that is centrally concerned with the manufacture and distribution of a highly prized commodity, Breaking Bad addresses contemporary discourses about neoliberal business practices and their effects on society. The show represents neoliberalism as an economic, social, cultural, and political nexus. In his 1999 book

Profit over People, Noam Chomsky advanced the idea that neoliberalism operates as an ideological system relying on each of these components.107 Its moral assumptions shape not just large-scale policy-making and political platforms, but also the decisions and values of individuals like Walter White. Neoliberalism’s ideological aims were captured by Margaret Thatcher’s unsettling late-20th century rhetoric. “Economics are the method,” she said, “but the object is to change the soul.”108 Thatcher’s reference to the soul serves as an apt description of Gilligan’s depiction of an ongoing battle for Walt’s spirit. Thatcher’s idea of changing society’s and the individual’s compass to incorporate heartless greed over sentimental largess illuminates Walt’s internal struggle as the series progresses. Walt’s changing conscience, from a caring family man working two jobs to support his family to ruthless and wealthy drug dealer, personifies Thatcher’s neoliberal vision. Walt also embodies the Horatio Alger myth at the heart of the American Dream: the entrepreneur who builds an empire from the ground up. The fact that he is a

107 Noam Chomsky, Profit over People (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 54.

108 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 23.

58 successful criminal capitalist in no way diminishes the show’s indictment of neoliberalism in that the same ideology that drives illegitimate business enterprises also shapes legitimate capitalist endeavors. Breaking Bad portrays Walt as a nefarious entrepreneur who fulfills the fantasy of American capitalism.

The show reveals the integration of neoliberal business theory with the tenets of economic-rational individualism. The aggressive, hyper-masculine behavior that permeates the series is a product of that integration and allows Gilligan to explore the nature and actions of the criminal entrepreneur as a product of neoliberal conditioning over the past forty years. Critical to explaining the insidiousness of neoliberalism,

Breaking Bad explores the subjective nature of neoliberalism as the characters internalize and normalize behaviors associated with that phenomenon. The actions of various characters in the show exhibit a major element of neoliberalism’s conception of subjectivity: the idea of personal responsibility. According to neoliberalism’s market logic, individuals are rational economic actors oriented toward maximizing their self- interest and are therefore responsible for their own successes or failures.109 Gilligan strongly presents the internalization of the ethos of personal responsibility through Walter as he epitomizes neoliberal self-reliance. When offered assistance, he refuses the help of wealthy friends.110 He also balks at the idea of having his illegal drug money funneled through a website set up by his son, Walter, Jr., and controlled by his lawyer, Saul

Goodman.

109 Pierson, “Breaking Neoliberal?” loc. 420, Kindle Edition.

110 In the Season One episode “Gray Matter” Walt refuses help from friends Elliot and Gretchen Schwartz, owners of Gray Matter, an extremely successful bio-tech company, because he perceives any help as charity and anathema to his beliefs.

59 In the Season Two episode “Phoenix” Walt is made aware of the website his son created, SaveWalterWhite.com. We initially see pride on his face as he watches his son scroll down the website filled with family photos and short entries about Walt’s life as husband, father, and teacher. He is so moved by what he is seeing that he begins to tear up and, after clearing his throat, says “My God, son, that’s wonderful.”111 As Walt, Jr. continues to scroll down the page the scene switches to a tight shot of the computer screen that now reads, “Click Here to Donate.” Walter’s demeanor immediately changes and the look on his face shifts from fatherly delight to concern. The pride he has for his son is quickly replaced by his own narcissistic pride. This change in demeanor reflects years of internalizing neoliberal subjectivity. He is so imbued with the belief in self- reliance that it prevents him from accepting any help whatsoever. Rather quickly, Walt’s look of concern turns to one of repressed anger. He is clearly distressed by what he sees.

He then says, “Wait a minute. You’re not asking for money, are you son?”112 Walt, Jr. tells him that the whole point of creating the website was to solicit donations to help pay for his cancer treatment. Walter begins to shake his head, “But we can’t ask for money.

No.”113 Skylar and Marie are also in the scene, and as Walt gently admonishes his son for asking for money Skyler, Marie and Walt, Jr. all become upset. Walt senses the tension and thanks his son for his effort and leaves the room with Skyler. Once they are out of earshot of Walter, Jr. Skyler points out that it was all his son’s idea and that he just wanted to help. Walt counters with, “Skyler, it’s charity” with a dismissive emphasis on

111 Breaking Bad, “Phoenix.”

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid.

60 the word “charity.”114 Skyler asks, “Why do you say that as if it’s some kind of dirty word?”115 As Skyler walks away Walter answers with a look that asks “Well, isn’t it?” It is this kind of stubborn self-reliance that informs Walt’s decision-making throughout the series, especially decisions involving the nature of his business.

In analyzing the show’s depiction of neoliberal business practices we must remember that neoliberalism, as David Harvey encapsulates, is “in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”116 In Walt’s case, neoliberalism has eroded the benefits attendant to his public sector job as a high school chemistry teacher. But neoliberalism also enables his illegal venture into producing meth by provided him with a growing market for able chemists willing to take on the risk and exposure a criminal enterprise engenders. In the previous chapter we considered how, according to neoliberal criminology, the criminal is not a product of a psychological disorder or a genetic defect or social conditions but rather is a typical person. The criminal is a rational economic actor who contemplates and calculates the risks and the rewards of his actions. Crime is no longer a deviant activity outside the mainstream market, but is rather one market among others. So the neoliberal model offers

Walt the opportunity for financial compensation that he never experienced as a teacher.

Additionally, the illegal drug business presents him with a free market alternative to the

114 Ibid.

115 Ibid.

116 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2.

61 depressed state of the public sector after years of neoliberal downsizing. In contrast to his low-paying teaching position, Walt profits handsomely from his chemistry knowledge by producing high quality, potent crystal meth, which becomes the most sought after product in the American Southwest. As a successful gangster businessman, Walt exemplifies the tenets of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. He considers his limited legitimate options carefully, weighs the attendant risks and benefits of his business plan, and enters a world dominated by a marketplace that rewards his specific skill set.

Yet the show reveals that marketplace to be—quite literally—a site of cutthroat practices that lead not to the benefit of many but to the monopolization of power by the few. Breaking Bad acknowledges the vexed nature of neoliberal business dealings through the relationship between Walt and Gus, whose double identity as restaurateur and meth kingpin embodies the slippage between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism. The dynamic between Walt and Gus offers a glimpse into the character of each man when a given situation becomes troubling. Just such a situation occurs in the Season Four episode, “Box Cutter.” Tension has been growing between Gus and Walt over Walt’s present and future role in their illegal drug venture. Walt has deduced that Gus wants him killed once his three-month contract expires. Gus plans to replace Walt with Gale

Boetticher, a well-trained chemist and fellow meth cook and Walt’s current assistant.

Gale designed the enormous, well-equipped meth lab that Gus built under an industrial cleaning business he owns. Walt launches a Machiavellian scheme in hopes to delay

Gus’s plan. Walt’s idea is to have Jesse kill Gale so Gus will continue to need Walt’s unique skills. Jesse kills Gale, and this arouses the ruthless drug kingpin that Gus has worked hard to keep under wraps. Gus sends his henchman Victor to find Jesse and bring

62 him to the lab. He also sends Mike to do the same with Walter. Once the four men are in the lab, Gus makes his appearance. He eerily descends the spiral steel stairs into the dimly lit lab. He stops in front of Walt and Jesse and glares at them for a few long seconds before walking slowly to the locker area of the lab. He slowly and meticulously removes his tie, dress shirt, and shoes and puts on an orange hazmat suit and tall rubber boots. One gets the feeling that he is going to cook a quality batch of meth himself to show Walt and Jesse the ultimate futility of Jesse’s homicidal action. As Gus is zipping up the chem suit, Gilligan frames him and Walt in a long, narrow shot. Walt is in focus, closest to the viewer; Gus is out of focus and in the background of the frame. Walt’s back is to Gus and tension builds as Gus slowly makes his way to Walt. Gus is looking for something in a tool chest and pulls out a green box cutter. The shot zooms in on the box cutter as Gus slides the blade out with his thumb. Gus walks menacingly behind Jesse and

Walt as Walt makes a reasoned plea for his life. Gus then suddenly grabs Victor and runs the box cutter across his associate’s throat. It is a startling turn of events as Gus holds

Victor up so the blood from his carotid artery spurts freely at the feet of Walt and Jesse.

Gus then calmly and quietly washes his face and hands, cleans his glasses, and ascends the spiral stairs.

This scene presents the viewer with the most violent portrayal of Gus to date. He is in this moment anything but the mild-mannered fast food restaurant owner as he shows his ability to adopt a persona that embraces extreme violence. This is an example of the duplicitous nature of neoliberal business practice. But why the duplicitousness? “Box

Cutter” portrays Gus’s outwardly altruistic actions as necessary in advancing the rational self-interest component of neoliberal business orthodoxy. His public-spiritedness both

63 conceals and enables the ruthless, self-interested desire to advance his economic interests.

Gus seamlessly moves between legitimate and illegitimate business ventures, all the while carefully cultivating his public profile in order to maintain an air of respectability.

Gus embodies the Janus face of neoliberalism: he is a respected supporter of many local charities, notably a DEA-sponsored road race that leads to a personal relationship with the agent-in-charge of the DEA field office in Albuquerque, and he never hesitates to give his money and time to worthy social causes; however, we ultimately see what lies behind his double identity.117 Breaking Bad portrays Gus’s altruism as a shady method of appearing legitimate while he distributes high-octane meth under the noses of the very agencies and organizations he purports to admire and respect.

Gilligan brilliantly conveys Gus’s criminal double-dealing from the moment he is introduced in the series. We first meet Gus in the second season through Saul Goodman,

Walt and Jesse’s lawyer. Saul suggests Walt and Jesse merge their business with Gus, and he describes Gus as “an honest-to-God businessman: a businessman who treats your product like the simple high-margin commodity that it is; who ships out of town, deals only in bulk; who has been doing this for twenty years and never been caught.”118 A meeting is set up at one of his restaurants and Gus is every bit the cautious man Saul described. Gus takes notice of Jesse’s late arrival to the meeting, and the fact that he is high, and decides to pass on introducing himself. It requires Walt’s return to the restaurant the following day, and a large amount of convincing on Walt’s part, to get Gus

117 In her article “The Capitalist Nightmare at the Heart of Breaking Bad,” Erica Wagner refers to Gus’s dual roles of respected businessman and meth trafficker as a Janus-faced representation of neoliberal business practices, newstatesman.com, last modified December 22, 2014, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/12/capitalist-nightmare-heart-breaking-bad.

118 Breaking Bad, “Mandala.”

64 on his side. He is, after all, a cautious man. Yet he is also audacious in the extent he will go to maintain his cover. In the episode “ABQ,” Gus, along with other businessmen sponsoring a DEA charity event, is given a private tour of the Albuquerque DEA offices by the agent-in-charge, with whom he is close friends. In this scene, Hank meets Gus and explains to him and two other men the duties of the Albuquerque field office. The atmosphere is congenial as Hank tells Gus about his duties, including meth interdiction.

Gus, the meth kingpin of the Southwest United States, is so convincing with his feigned concern about the scourge of meth use that he responds with an apparently heartfelt

“terrible” when Hank is done with his spiel.119 The scene ends with Hank telling the visitors that sponsoring events such as the DEA fun run is one of the best ways to help in the fight against meth distribution and usage. Gus emphatically agrees with this and further ingratiates himself with Hank by contributing to a fundraising effort for Walt and his battle with cancer.120

Gilligan further develops the idea of Gus’s split personality as it relates to neoliberalism in an episode entitled “I See You.” In this installment, Hank has been shot during a hit put on him by Gus, and the hospital is filled with law enforcement agents from various agencies in Albuquerque. A concerned-looking Gus arrives with Los Polos

Hermanos chicken to feed the throngs of police and federal agents sitting vigil for Hank as he undergoes surgery. As a show of solidarity with the police, Gus offers to feed all of the law enforcement officers at the hospital. Walt, who is among those waiting, is informed by Steve Gomez—Hank’s partner—of this gracious offer: “He’s a big supporter

119 Breaking Bad, “ABQ.”

120 Ibid.

65 of the DEA and he’s going to feed every cop in the building.”121 In this scene Gus is actually serving three purposes: he is maintaining his cover as DEA supporter and concerned, law-abiding citizen; he is keeping tabs on Walter; and he’s helping his henchman, Mike Ehrmantraut, sneak into the hospital to eliminate the surviving assassin from the hit he ordered on Hank. As mentioned earlier, Gus is a cautious man. This scene exemplifies his prudence by portraying him as in control of the direction and continued prosperity of his meth operation. By keeping a close, cordial relationship he maintains the advantage he has over the ability of law enforcement agencies to detect his secret life. He betrays nothing incriminating as to his true identity while staying involved with, and informed of, the activity of the DEA and the Albuquerque PD. His generosity serves as a cover for the rapaciousness and violence of his primary business activities. The series suggestions, by implication, that philanthropy masks the rapaciousness and violence of neoliberal capitalism.

The business dynamic between Walter and Gus changes dramatically after “Box

Cutter” as Gus institutes a new security protocol: nonstop surveillance of Walt and Jesse.

He does this by installing cameras in the lab as well as assigning one of his subordinates to follow his prized meth cook and his assistant while off duty. These measures are in line with a component of neoliberal policy that journalist and critic Naomi Klein explains in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein argues that free market philosophy professed by Milton Friedman and incorporated by neoliberal entrepreneurs at many levels of the business world was difficult to put into practice.

Accordingly, crises were used, sometimes manufactured, to provide a situation in which

121 Breaking Bad, “I See You.”

66 unpopular reforms could be carried through.122 Gus employs the same methods. He uses

Gale’s murder and manufactures the scene in “Box Cutter” as the shock needed to reign in Walt and Jesse. This series of events exemplifies the extent of cold-bloodedness needed to succeed in capitalist society at the end of the 20th/beginning of the 21st century.

The couching of capitalist business practices in the context of the ongoing U.S. drug war allows Breaking Bad to examine the nature of each within the same frame of reference: ruthlessness. Ruthless ambition characterizes both illegal drug entrepreneurship and capitalist business practices. It also provides a point to examine the place of labor within the neoliberal state.

Neoliberalism understands labor not as “an abstract element purchased on the market and attached to the production of a specific commodity, but rather as ‘human capital’ that is inextricably tied to the individual worker.”123 To the neoliberal mind, labor is a subjective choice among many other activities for people to choose from in their daily lives. In choosing labor, “a person is conceived as an entrepreneur who invests his human capital to produce an income to finance his interest in other activities for his personal development and pleasure.”124 Neoliberal conceptions of the role of labor are apparent throughout the series. “Box Cutter” presents the viewer with one perception, albeit an extreme one. Gus addresses the death of Gale Boetticher by slitting the throat of one of his most trusted associates, Victor, to send a message to Walt and Jesse. That message encompasses ideas of labor discipline. While neoliberalism encourages

122 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), 21.

123 Pierson, “Breaking Neoliberal?” loc. 440, Kindle Edition.

124 Ibid.

67 entrepreneurship, the capitalist with the most assets does not want to lose the wealth and influence he/she has accumulated. In neoliberalism’s zero-sum milieu there is a limited amount of wealth to go around. Logically, capitalists like Gus maintain a stranglehold on their power and their fortunes. Walter represents a threat to the control Gus has over the meth market in the American Southwest because he understands the business and has the ability to undermine, and potentially take over, Gus’s operation. In order to control his riches Gus must send a strong message. In the illegal drug world, the preferred method of labor control is murder. Gilligan makes reference to controlling labor gone astray in the illicit drug world in the episode “I. F. T.”125 The murder of Victor sheds light on the disagreement between neoliberal ideology and neoliberalism in action. Theoretically, neoliberalism encourages all rational actors to maximize their entrepreneurial talents to create wealth; in practice, those who have wealth want to keep it. Therefore, the capitalist imperative for those in power is to stay in power by disciplining workers to prevent them from becoming entrepreneurial competitors.

“Box Cutter” also illustrates that labor is disposable. Although Victor was one of

Gus’s closest assistants—he was put in charge of Gus’s huge meth lab—Gus casually eliminates him. While the scene conveys the ruthlessness of neoliberalism business-in- action, it also portrays a core belief of capitalism: while labor is necessary to build an enterprise, it is also expendable. Gilligan addresses the institution most at odds with neoliberal capitalism: the labor union. The idea of well-trained workers organizing in order to increase bargaining power is anathema to neoliberal business endeavors as it

125 In the Season Three episode “I. F. T.” a DEA informant, a Mexican national named Tortuga, is assassinated by the Mexican drug cartel he works for when it is discovered he has been providing information to U.S. authorities. His head is cut off and placed on a large tortoise with a message reading “HOLA DEA.” An extreme example of labor discipline.

68 directly affects a business’s bottom line. Rumblings of union-busting began in the 1950s and 1960s, but a sustained challenge to union power began in earnest in the 1980s.126

Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain each provoked a showdown with powerful labor unions: Reagan took on the Professional Air Traffic

Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981 and Thatcher took on Britain’s mining unions in 1984. Strikes provided the pretext for both leaders to enact union-busting measures that still resonate today. According to economist Richard Hurd, “the 1981 strike by over

11,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) stands out as a symbol of union decline.”127 The outcome for PATCO was devastating.

Air traffic has increased 20% since 1978, while the number of controllers and the level of control tower equipment has remained the same.128 When air traffic backs up at any airport, “a control tower supervisor will often demand that the controllers ‘get more tin

[planes] on the ground’ and then turn his back. The unspoken order is that the controllers are supposed to violate federal safety rules by allowing planes to land too close together.

If this results in an accident, it is the controllers, not the supervisors, who are held responsible.”129

This exact scenario is played out in the Season Two episode “ABQ.” Jesse has just lost his girlfriend, Jane Margolis, to a heroin overdose. After a hiatus, Jane’s father

126 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 58.

127 Richard W. Hurd, Reactions on PATCO’s Legacy: Labor’s Strategic Challenges Persist, accessed on July 6, 2016,http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? article=1300&context=articles, 2.

128 Ibid., 6.

129 “The Economics of the Air Controllers’ Strike,” dollarsandsense.org, accessed July 6, 2016, http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/1981/1081patco.html.

69 Donald goes back to work despite still being distraught over his daughter's death. He makes a fatal error that causes a 737, Wayfarer 515, to collide with another plane in the skies over Albuquerque.130 According to a CNN report, during the time period covered in

“ABQ,” the FAA was experiencing a 27-year-long decline in the number of qualified air traffic controllers.131 Donald offers confirmation of the shortage of controllers when he responds to Jane’s question about how his work is going: “Same old, same old. I’m doing backup training on my days off.”132 He’s working his assigned shifts and his days off.

His appearance confirms the fact that he’s working a lot: he appears tired, run-down, and ill. He’s clearly overworked. Upon returning to work after taking bereavement leave he responds to a question asked of him by one of his co-workers, who also appears overworked: “After a period of time, time off doesn’t work. I’d rather be here. Focus on work.”133 He returns too early. The next scene shows a sweaty, stressed-out Donald vectoring two planes into each other over the Albuquerque sky. The show does not claim he was mandated to return because of any shortage in manpower, but the implication is clear. The idea of neoliberal subjectivity presents itself here as well. Donald has been conditioned to work hard no matter what. Furthermore, he is not relying on any grief counseling, as it is either not readily available to him or, as an individual conditioned by neoliberal ideology, he makes a subjective choice and returns to work as it represents a

130 Breaking Bad, “ABQ.”

131 Aaron Smith, “America's Air Traffic Controller Shortage,” money.cnn.com, last modified October 14, 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/14/news/economy/air-traffic- controllers/.

132 Breaking Bad, “Phoenix.”

133 Ibid, “ABQ.”

70 place of comfort and achievement away from the emotional chaos surrounding the loss of his daughter.

Donald Margolis provides a poignant example of how one is subjectively conditioned in the neoliberal mindset as he responds to Jane’s death in a controlled and calculated manner. He is obviously distraught, yet his behavior is cool and measured from his decision of what Jane will wear at her funeral to returning to work sooner than expected. As an unwitting adherent to a neoliberal construction of self-worth, he hopes that hard work will provide a distraction in order to help salve his broken heart. This behavior, as much as Walter’s series-long metamorphosis, speaks to neoliberalism’s internalized conception of manhood: the self-possessed individual engaging the world on his terms. Donald’s stoic demeanor conforms to the rugged individualist archetype associated with the overarching theme of the show. It also connects with the opening scene of the pilot episode where Walt stands defiantly against the sound of on-coming danger in the form of emergency sirens in the distant New Mexican desert. In juxtaposing the two scenes—Walt in the pilot episode and Donald in “ABQ”—the viewer is made aware of the insidiousness of neoliberalism’s influence on one’s behavior in the face of adversity. Both men confront feelings of inadequacy by trying to ameliorate their sense of helplessness through actions that are counterproductive to their long-term wellbeing.

In addition to providing the Western backdrop to the rugged individualism at the heart of neoliberalism, Gilligan’s choice of New Mexico as the show’s principle setting enables a nuanced exploration of business and labor relationships in places where legal and illegal commerce intersect. Situated in the American Southwest, one of the nation’s fastest growing regions, Breaking Bad captures and expresses both the region’s dramatic

71 physical beauty and its dark socio-economic undercurrents.134 Since the passage of

NAFTA, the area’s long border with Mexico has been the hub of huge commerce and trade, both legal and illegal. According to David Pierson: “The modern Southwest is on the cusp of an expanding neoliberal economy promoting global trade, increased corporate profits and entrepreneurial initiatives, along with minimizing the government’s role in business and everyday life.”135 With the exception of California, it is a region with low taxes, few labor unions, poor farming conditions, and limited government-supported social programs; therefore, it is a place with great disparities of wealth between the rich and the poor. Working and middle-class Americans often must work multiple jobs to support their families. Remember, Walter’s initial foray into the meth business was influenced by his career as an underpaid public school teacher forced to work another job after school and on the weekends to support his pregnant wife and his disabled son. The

Southwest also contains the nation’s largest concentration of Latinos.136 The powerful dynamic of race and immigration collides with business and labor in a manner unique to the area. At the same time the American Southwest serves as an ideal model of neoliberal market supremacy, local, national, and international.

Mexico has a long trade history with the U.S.; however, World War II saw an increase in U.S. imports of Mexican oil as well as labor to augment the war effort. After the war the relationship continued with the rise of maquiladoras, factories along the

134 Pierson, Kindle loc. 164.

135 Ibid.

136 Anna Brown and Mark Hugo Lopez, “Mapping the Latino Population by State, County and City,” pewhispanic.org, last modified August 29, 2013, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/08/29/mapping-the-latino-population-by-state-county-and-city/

72 Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexican border, designed to employ low-wage Mexican workers to assemble goods for sale in America.137 The relationship was further cemented in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. NAFTA’s reliance on free-trade mechanisms has yielded an unintended consequence: combined with the war on drugs, neoliberal free- trade policies, like NAFTA, have only strengthened the positions of the cartels by allowing them to use the millions of border truck crossings to effectively smuggle and distribute their drugs throughout the continental United States.138 The show describes the ease with which individuals cross the border through the actions of two minor yet very dangerous and destructive characters: Leonel and Marco Salamanca, or The Cousins.

Gilligan depicts how easy it is to cross the border through what is portrayed on the screen as much as what is missing: there are no scenes depicting lines of cars waiting to cross the border at designated checkpoints. Nor are there scenes where any of the characters must show a passport when entering or exiting the U.S. Instead, the show uses The

Cousins to explain the porous border.

While Breaking Bad reflects this dynamic through the depiction of human capital moving easily across the border, Gilligan further develops the idea of an international marketplace as the meth empire Gus runs extends into Mexico by virtue of his connection to a Mexican cartel. It is not only Mexican business connections that Gus exploits. He is also affiliated with a multinational conglomerate, Madrigal Electromotive GmbH, based in Germany, which is the parent company of Los Polos Hermanos and Gus’s source for methylamine, the key raw material in his, as well as Walt’s, meth cooks. Economist Dilip

137 “U.S.-Mexico Relations (1810-Present),” cfr.org, http://www.cfr.org/mexico/us- mexico-relations-1810-present/p19092.

138 Pierson, loc. 554, Kindle Edition.

73 K. Das explains: “One characteristic of contemporary globalization is increased intra- firm, cross-border collaborations in the form of joint ventures, non-equity agreements and minority participations, enabling firms to engage in producing products or services that are beyond their technical and financial resources or capabilities.”139 Walt and Jesse need methylamine to cook. Through his international associations Gus has been able to obtain whatever amount of methylamine his operation needs. He uses his legal connections at

Madrigal to divert large quantities of methylamine from Germany—purchased from a company in China—to his meth lab in Albuquerque. The manner in which Gus procures the various chemicals needed to produce his product reveals his duplicitous mastery of global supply chains.

A scene that brings together the concept of self-reliance and the practicality of procuring materials needed to sustain production occurs in the Season Five episode,

“Dead Freight.” Again, Gilligan deftly incorporates the New Mexican desert to help tell the story. The first shot finds Jesse, Mike, and Walter, wearing the pork pie hat synonymous with his alter ego Heisenberg, on a set of train tracks in the New Mexican desert. The shot is from the ground up and the three men appear larger-than-life against a beautiful sunset, giving the appearance of men in control of their destiny. Walt’s pork pie hat recalls Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, notorious late-1880s outlaw train robbers. They are measuring out the distance from a railroad crossing down the tracks in order to determine where they should set up in order to steal methylamine from a freight train. Gus is now dead, and they are left to their own wiles to continue the flow of this essential ingredient for their cooks. They are alerted to the existence of a load of

139 Philip K. Das, The Two Faces of Globalization, Munificent and Malevolent (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2009), 14.

74 methylamine as well as the train schedule and the best place along the train’s route from

California to Houston to commit their robbery from a contact inside Madrigal who worked closely with Gus in the past.

The scene immediately changes to a distant side shot of the three men walking down the tracks. At first, it is difficult the see them as they are so small on the screen.

This extreme change in perspective indicates that while they initially appear quite confident, reality quickly sets in as the long side shot depicts the three men against the enormity of vast desert wasteland. The shot serves as a harbinger of what is to come as viewer now gets the sense that Walt and company are up against something much larger than they anticipated. While the heist goes as planned, in the end a young boy is shot dead by newcomer Todd, whom Walt, Jesse and Mike have taken on to help with the robbery. The boy’s death is certainly tragic; however, it is an unintended consequence of the train robbery.

This idea of unintended consequences is rife throughout the series and is manifest in the death of several characters as well as the dissolution of Walt’s family and many other relationships and institutional structures in the show. Events spinning out of control are central to Breaking Bad. Many unintended consequences throughout the series can be termed as cases of creative destruction, a byproduct of neoliberal theory. The idea of neoliberalism as “creative destruction” originates with Austrian economist Joseph E.

Schumpeter. According to Schumpeter, the idea of creative destruction lies in the

“process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”140 David

140 Joseph E. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 84.

75 Harvey observes that the “process of neoliberalization has… entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional forms of state sovereignty) but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart.”141 Schumpeter’s description of the creative destruction associated with neoliberalism is accurate, but the show is wary of the idea of neoliberal destruction as necessary to progress. Instead, Gilligan depicts neoliberalism as destructive destruction. Destruction in this case does not result in the emergence of something better, it just leaves a void where there was once something tangible. The character that best exemplifies the destructive feature of the show is Jesse.

He serves as a metaphor for neoliberalism’s destructive nature as his physical and mental decline corresponds with the violent events in the show. Jesse’s decline also appears proportional to Walt’s ascendance. When the show begins, Jesse is portrayed as an underachiever who is seemingly content with his life. He is by no means the picture of rationality or stability, yet he seems to accept his place in society; however, from the moment he reunites with Walter, his former high school chemistry teacher, his contentment is in peril. The drastic decline in Jesse’s wellbeing from the pilot episode to the series finale is unsettling at the very least. When we first meet Jesse he is already in the meth business, but he appears to be a healthy, somewhat stable young man, although he at times samples his product. Almost immediately after he joins up with Walter he begins to crack at the edges. As the mayhem that comes to define the series begins,

Jesse’s discomfort with Walt’s approach to making and selling meth becomes evident and

141 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 3.

76 is manifested in his declining physical appearance. It is quite understandable, even expected, that his involvement to this point in the show in the deaths of Krazy-8, Tuco,

Combo, Jane, the passengers on Wayfarer 151, as well as other peripheral characters, has resulted in his physical and mental deterioration. In the meantime, as pandemonium ensues, Walter becomes stronger, more self-assured. His cancer even goes into remission; however, his ultimate death serves as a reminder that Walt is also negatively affected in the end by neoliberalism’s all-consuming nature. Through this storyline, Gilligan is suggesting that Schumpeter’s doctrine of creative destruction has unintended consequences for all involved. In fact, Breaking Bad suggests Jesse was better off as a low-end meth dealer than he was as an entrepreneurial drug co-kingpin. The show successfully debunks the capitalist belief that neoliberalism is a form of creative destruction and instead depicts its benefits as elusive. Gilligan subtly addresses this elusiveness in the Season Three episode, “Fly.”

After the cold open, “Fly” presents the viewer with a shot of Walter sitting in his car outside of the laundry that houses the meth super-lab Gus had built in its basement.

The look on Walt’s face reveals a man deep in thought over the many changes and challenges he’s encountered over the past year. He’s 51-years-old and his wife Skyler just had a baby. That would be enough to tire even the healthiest of middle-aged men. Walt is not healthy; he has lung cancer that, while in remission, has sapped him of some of his vitality. That said, the show portrays Walt’s fatigue differently from that of Jesse’s. Jesse is clearly not cut out for the rough stuff associated with the illegal drug business and his appearance and mannerisms after Jane’s death betray his inner turmoil. After Jane’s death he begins to regularly shoot up heroin to the point where he is living in an abandoned,

77 dilapidated housing project and has to be rescued and taken to rehab by Walt.142 Walt’s overall lethargy is located in his greed for more money. Part of him is invigorated by his work and newfound wealth, but the cost of his sudden riches is a seemingly endless drive for more. Since going into business with Gus, and expanding their meth sphere to include the majority of the American Southwest, Walt and Jesse have increased production to where they are cooking two hundred pounds of meth each week for Gus. This increase in production has netted each of them $1.5 million for three months of work. More money ultimately does not make Walter more content, but unlike Jesse’s torpor, Walter’s greed is the source of his weariness—more so than the side effects of his lung cancer and the chemotherapy treatment he has been receiving. This depiction of a dog-tired Walt is one manner in which the show refutes the notion of neoliberalism as a force for progress.

Jesse’s physical decline offers another example. As the episode continues, Gilligan expertly depicts the elusiveness of the neoliberal fantasy as he pits Walt against a slippery house pest.

“Fly” centers around eliminating a contaminant that has infiltrated the meth lab: a fly. The emergence of early neoliberal thought grew from the desire of its supporters to eliminate what they believed to be a pestilence keen on destroying the economic vitality of the American Dream: the welfare state.143 This project has already addressed the negative manner in which neoliberalism regards the American welfare establishment.

From Robert O. Self’s explanation of breadwinner liberalism and conservatism to Loïc

Waqcuant’s condemnation of the rise of neoliberal’s punishment of the poor, this thesis

142 Breaking Bad, “ABQ.”

143 Steger and Roy, loc. 924-925, Kindle Edition.

78 has expressed the antagonistic stance of neoliberalism toward welfare statism. In this episode, Gilligan provides commentary on this inimical view through the fly as a symbol of the elusiveness of the neoliberal idea of market supremacy.

Back in the lab, Walt and Jesse begin the cook process by scouring every surface of the lab. A pristine lab is essential to keeping out the adulterants that may mar the efficacy of their meth. From the beginning of the series, Walter has been adamant about cooking properly. A clean cooking environment is essential to a superior product. Once they finish cleaning, they begin the fifteen-hour long process of synthesizing various ingredients into the blue meth they are famous for. After Jesse leaves for the day, Walt stays behind to do paperwork. As he is writing down some figures an audible buzzing sound is heard in the quiet of the lab. A fly alights on the clipboard he is holding.144 Walt immediately becomes concerned and goes about trying to kill the fly. When Jesse returns to work the next morning, Walt, who has not left the lab or slept since the last time Jesse saw him, tells Jesse there’s a fly in the lab and they cannot continue until this adulterant is eliminated. Jesse is incredulous. Walt recognizes Jesse’s skepticism and replies, “A fly,

I know, may seem insignificant, but trust me, in a highly controlled environment, any contaminant, no matter how small could completely….”145 Walt stops mid-sentence as he hears the fly again, but he has made his point: any contaminant, no matter how seemingly unimportant, can completely destroy the batch of meth they are cooking. The fly has symbolized many things: elusiveness, pestilence, conceptions of evil in the form of the

Devil, death, and transformation. In this case the fly represents the elusiveness of the

144 Breaking Bad, “Fly.”

145 Ibid.

79 neoliberal fantasy. As they skulk around the lab looking in every conceivable location we find Walter hanging off of the top tier of the lab, swinging a homemade, industrial-sized fly swatter. He falls from this position and bounces off one of the large, stainless steel vats, landing on the floor. Later, Jesse balances precipitously on a shaky step ladder that is sitting on two roll-away cabinets. As he reaches to swat the fly, which is now buzzing around in the rafters, he nearly falls. This depiction of Jesse also engages the precariousness of a free-market ideology that shuns ideas of a social safety net. Walt and

Jesse, at once eager and reluctant capitalists, stumble around their workplace trying and failing to eliminate an evasive contaminant. In this insect—this tiny yet powerful threat to the fantasy of self-reliance and rational control—Breaking Bad brilliantly conveys the unrealistic yet relentless nature of the neoliberal delusion.

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Chapter V

Epilogue

From the perspective of looking back over the five seasons of Breaking Bad, its opening image—a pair of pants in a brilliant blue sky fluttering gently to the ground— conveys a sense of foreboding. The khakis falling to earth become an omen of neoliberalism’s destructiveness. The show’s main protagonist Walter White embodies the neoliberal fantasy of a lone individual, set lose from debilitating governmental restraints, achieving his full potential. By the end of the series, Gilligan has confronted us with this fantasy bringing Walter down. At the center of the ruinous neoliberal mindset is the idea that the market is the best vehicle for individual success. What the series has shown instead is that a market-driven economic model, buoyed by the privatization of just about everything, does not result in a free-market utopia. Breaking Bad depicts a neoliberal dystopia that is at once deeply unsettling and dehumanizing.

Fear is the show’s pervasive emotion. Walter is initially frightened by his cancer diagnosis and his inability to provide for his family going forward. Skyler fears losing her husband, son, daughter, and home. Hank, beneath the macho façade, is at some level uneasy about his DEA position. Gus is concerned with staying one step ahead of the law.

Jesse’s apprehension lies in the fact that he realizes he is part of society’s disenfranchised and has accepted that there is little he can do about it. The artistic beauty of the show, as well as the irony, lies in how Walter and company unwittingly adapt the tenets of neoliberalism to overcome their trepidation. This mindset is not surprising considering

81 the neoliberal imperative of fearing the truncheon of governmental interference. The pervasive anxiety Gilligan brilliantly works into the show’s fabric is not exclusively for entertainment purposes. The unease felt by the characters in the series mirrors the sense of apprehension felt by many Americans over the past forty-plus years as opportunities for success continue to dwindle due to neoliberal policy-making.146

The show deftly chronicles the insinuation of neoliberalism into the lives of everyday people. Through Gilligan’s carefully crafted characters, we see that neoliberalism is not just an economic theory but a systemic method of conditioning individuals into a reconfigured political unconscious. This pedagogy of mistrust, and ultimately greed, manifests itself in a collective attack on organizations such as labor unions and the drive to redefine the primacy of the market over the needs of society by deeming public goods and services as unnecessary extravagances. We observe the mechanisms of this mindset from the onset of the show when Walter is faced with the reality of paying out of pocket for the cancer treatments that his benefits as a public employee cannot cover. His decision to supplement his income by entering the illegal business of producing and selling meth conforms to the neoliberal idea of maximizing one’s unique talents in order to increase earning potential. This is exactly the type of subjective conditioning that neoliberalism fosters. The imperative of entrepreneurial individualism, which today dominates the public narrative, accompanies a reconfigured and diminished state that fails to provide an adequate safety net for its diverse population, particularly those who are poor, young, marginalized, or disenfranchised.147 The move to

146 Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism, 112.

147 Ibid, 122-113.

82 privatize former public services such as health care, child care, public assistance, education, and transportation has created a private welfare system subject to market volatility. Yet the most devastating aspect of privatization lies in the fact that services formally subsidized by taxpayers have been converted to for-profit enterprises rendering many benefits unaffordable to the poor and working class. The manner in which Breaking

Bad portrays the lives of Jesse, Badger, Skinny Pete, Combo, Jane, and others conforms to this dictum. Two characters, Jesse’s Season Four/Five girlfriend Andrea and her six- year-old son Brock, are particularly affected by the shrinkage of state-sponsored social services such as daycare, job training, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. She is a recovering meth addict, which likely disqualifies her for some forms of public assistance, and must rely on her mother to take care of Brock and to help out by buying food and other household necessities.

In Chapter 2, this project examined the effects of neoliberal crime policy. It explained the militarization of police forces and touched on the war on drugs through the actions of DEA agent Hank Schrader. Another aspect of the criminal justice system altered by neoliberal crime policy is the nation’s prison apparatus. Neoliberal initiatives have changed public perception of the utility of the prison system. Wacquant’s assertion that the neoliberal turn in penal theory, with its emphasis on strict punishment practices and policies, provides a logical corollary to addressing the problem of the disenfranchised in relation to a depleted social safety network. Wacquant further argues that the rise of a penal state in the United States is not a response to the rise of crime, which remained constant in the time period he examined, but rather is a response to the social dislocations caused by the decline of the welfare state and the insecurities associated with low-wage

83 labor for citizens trapped at the bottom of a polarizing class structure. He sums up the drastic rise in incarceration rates over the past thirty years as an intentional “social vacuum cleaner”148 that sucks up into the penal system the poor, the petty delinquents, undocumented immigrants, the unemployed, handicapped, and mentally ill who have been displaced by the neoliberal state.149 This mass removal of America’s untouchables has normalized large-scale incarceration.

Wacquant’s assessment of the criminal justice system—a system that not only incarcerates criminals, but also society’s most vulnerable—exemplifies the threat neoliberalism poses to all who fall within its reach. Walter’s initial angst over his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer mirrors the apprehension that drives the actions of many of the show’s characters, and speaks to the subjective aspect of neoliberalism. This apprehension is addressed subliminally throughout the series, and directly in the Season

One episode “Gray Matter.” The scene revolves around an intervention of sorts that

Skyler has arranged to confront Walter’s behavior since his cancer diagnosis. Walter,

Skyler, Marie, Hank, and Walter Jr. are seated around the coffee table in Walt and

Skyler’s home. The mood is understandably somber as Skyler explains that they are all there because they love Walt and want to better understand what he is going through.

Walt begins talking haltingly with tears in his eyes: “Sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own choices. I mean, my entire life it just seems I never had a real say about any of it. This last one, cancer, all I have left is how I choose to approach

148 Ibid, 273.

149 Ibid.

84 this.”150 Walt’s fear in this scene is manifested in regret that he had been harboring for quite some time. He is disappointed, perhaps bitter, that he has always conformed to societal and familial demands and is now afraid he will never get the chance to make his own choices in life before he dies. He is dismayed, regretful, and angry at himself for yielding to outside dictates.

This stew of regret, anger, and fear resembles the impetus behind the neoliberal movement that began in the 1960s-70s as a reaction to the threat to the traditional male- dominated U.S. power structure. Historian Robert O. Self explains the reaction to what he terms “breadwinner liberalism”—a welfare state oriented toward shoring up families ideally led by male breadwinners. According to Self, breadwinner liberalism was vulnerable “to appropriation by the right. Stripped of its social welfare and government support components, breadwinner liberalism could fast become breadwinner conservatism: a defense of white male breadwinners and their nuclear families against the claims of nonwhites, women, and ultimately gay men and lesbians.”151 That mindset continues today as neoliberals continue to base their policy-making on two assumptions:

“that liberalism had precipitated a revolution in gender, sexuality, and the family that had damaged the nation…[and] that government based on regulatory and social welfare principles impeded the ‘natural’ functioning of the market and was responsible for any economic downturn or sluggish growth.”152 Neoliberals continue to believe that the only way to save America is by the continued freeing of markets from governmental

150 Breaking Bad, “Gray Matter.”

151 Self, 46.

152 Ibid., 399-400.

85 regulation, remaining diligent in the quest to diminish onerous tax burdens, and by maintaining the moral center of national life around the heterosexual, male breadwinner ideal of the nuclear family.

The latter speaks to the vitriolic public reaction toward Skyler, played by actress

Anna Gunn. Teasing out this animosity reveals the extent to which neoliberal sexism has been normalized in American culture and is in this case manifested in a phenomenon known as The Skyler White Effect. The Skyler White Effect occurs when “a female character judges the male protagonist’s bad behavior in a completely rational way, and the audience hates her for it.”153 Walt is a murderous meth dealer whose ultimate goal is to dominate the illegal drug market. There is nothing noble about Walt’s immoral ambition, but when Skyler offers criticism fans labeled her a “bitch.” This cognitive dissonance became apparent when Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms went into a meltdown during and after the series’ five-year run with derogatory, often vile, messages about Skyler directed at Gunn.154 The nastiness became so prevalent that

Gunn took to the New York Times Op-Ed page to relate her dismay over “the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her [Skyler], [which] has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women.”155 The relative anonymity of cyber space allowed for uncensored criticisms of

153 Marion Johnson, “Mad Men, Megan Draper and the Skyler White Effect,” last modified June 3, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marion-johnson/mad-men- feminism_b_3005489.html.

154 There are Facebook pages called “Fuck Skyler White,” “Fuck Skyler White in the Face,” and “I Hate Skyler White” that contain degrading comments directed at Skyler and Anna Gunn as well as Twitter tweets that are equally offensive.

155 Anna Gunn, “I Have a Character Issue,” New York Times, August 23, 2013.

86 Gunn’s character, from both men and women. This outpouring of hate speaks to the depth of fear and unease generated by the effort to empower women beginning in the

1960s.

It also says, at the very least, that Gilligan’s well-crafted critique of neoliberalism in the early 21st century was lost on part of the massive viewership the show enjoyed. The social media hatred directed at Skyler reflects the extent of internalized values encouraged by neoliberalism that are revealed through Walt and Skyler’s relationship. In place of acknowledging the critique of neoliberal ideology and policy-making that

Breaking Bad offered, many of the show’s devotees instead betrayed a complicity in the revival of traditional gender roles and, most importantly, in how this narrative of revitalized masculinity encourages the self-actualization of the patriarch at the expense of other family members. Nevertheless, Gilligan’s brilliant commentary on neoliberal

America ultimately succeeds by explicating the subtle beast of neoliberalism through the actions of his well-wrought characters, sharp dialogue, suspenseful plot, and stunning location in the desert Southwest. Gilligan’s ultimate message is delivered by Walter, of course, in the Season Five episode, “Felina,” where he finally admits the motive behind his destructive journey: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive.”156 Walt’s metamorphosis from Mr. Chips to Scarface provided trenchant commentary on neoliberal family dynamics, law enforcement policy, and business strategy—three of the areas where neoliberalism is understood as being successful—by explaining how neoliberalism does not perform well in these domains. Instead of

156 Breaking Bad, “Felina.”

87 functioning as an effectual way of remaking policy and “souls,” Breaking Bad shows neoliberalism to be an agent of destruction enriching the few at the expense of the many.

88

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