Criminal Elements James Bowman
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REVIEWS & RECONSIDERATIONS Criminal Elements James Bowman et’s break it down.” A man debuted on AMC in 2008 and is this and a woman in a darkened summer heading into the second half Lclassroom, flirting, are taking of its fifth and final season. Walter an elemental inventory of the human White, the antihero played by Bryan body. Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon Cranston, is a high school chemistry alone come to 98 percent, nitrogen teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and calcium tick up to 99.5, and half who receives an unexpected diagno- a dozen more trace elements only sis of inoperable lung cancer the day bring them to 99.888042 — where after his fiftieth birthday. With his is the other 0.111958? Supposedly corpus of 99.888042 percent traceable that’s everything, the woman insists, elements breaking down, he breaks but the man is sure there must be bad — applying his scientific expertise something missing. “There’s got to to the manufacture of methamphet- be more to a human being than that.” amine so he can make enough money What about the soul, the woman sug- to provide for his pregnant wife and gests? “Ha, there’s no soul. There’s disabled son after his impending just chemistry here.” death. Guided by his ne’er-do-well This calculation is overcut with a former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron montage of the same man, twenty- Paul), Walt plunges into a criminal odd years later, cleaning up after the underworld of ruthless rival drug “chemical disincorporation” of his kingpins governed by little more than inaugural murder victim (the first Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes. of a long line). The victim’s soul, While fighting to survive in this if there ever was one, is long since crowd he must also stay out of sight departed, leaving gallons of bloody of what remains of the law, as near slosh behind, while the killer’s soul, to him as his own drug enforcement if he ever had one, has just crossed a agent brother-in-law, Hank Schrader threshold of its own. (Dean Norris), as, with dread turning Thus begins the third episode of to relish, Walt contributes to the dis- Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, which incorporation of civil society. Winter/Spring 2013 ~ 163 Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. James Bowman All of us are uneasily aware that modernity and pre-Enlightenment beneath the good civilizational order honor culture. The Sopranos treat- in which most readers of these pages ed it playfully, imagining the crimi- and viewers of the show continue nal classes as aspiring to suburban to live their lives there is a dark respectability while still hoping to alternative where old rules dominate, inhabit, out of sight of their New the Enlightenment’s recurring bad Jersey neighbors, the same Sicilian dream just waiting for the opportu- underworld where their fathers and nity to reassert itself. Ironically, it is grandfathers had lived. The sense Walt’s Enlightenment credentials as of the threat posed by that under- a man of science that are his entrance world to the dominant culture was ticket to this new state of nature. less in mind than the threat — or Chemistry, as Walt rapturously tells promise — that the dominant culture, his less-than-rapt students, is a cycle with its therapeutic and liberal stan- of “growth, then decay, then trans- dards, would swamp the already eva- formation”; and while Enlightenment nescent honor culture of the Mafia. notions of moral progress are implic- In The Wire, the state of nature was itly connected to material progress also circumscribed and limited to the in the advance of science and ratio- streets of Baltimore where the domi- nality, the lesson of the science itself nant culture with sometimes greater is that moral and social transforma- and sometimes less success has man- tion is as likely to be cyclical as it is aged to contain it by its own legally progressive. dubious methods. But in Breaking Bad, the state of pre-Enlightenment tudents of history or anthropol- nature is seen as thrusting its way up Sogy are more likely to see the from its subterranean hiding places alternative to Western civilization and reasserting itself anew. and the rule of law not as the twi- As in The Sopranos, the violent, fre- light struggle of individual savagery quently deadly criminal world exists but as the tribal, family-oriented soci- alongside the more recognizable ety and the honor culture that actu- one of the show’s intended audience, ally did precede the Enlightenment’s and its main characters live in both, commitment to universal values and moving with greater or lesser ease that is still predominant in most between them. In both shows there is parts of the world where those lib- a plainly implausible absence or inef- eral and progressive standards have fectiveness of the forces of law and a more precarious hold. order at crucial moments throughout. Some of the best television of the The difference is that Tony Soprano last decade or so has explored the ten- has a criminal culture, albeit a rapidly sion between Enlightenment liberal changing and increasingly outmoded 164 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Criminal Elements one, to guide and inform his actions • Won’t be able to live with yourself and Walter White does not. • Murder is wrong! My favorite example of the many tragicomic ironies Mr. Gilligan Under “Kill Him” there is just one draws from the clash of these two entry: “He’ll kill your entire family parallel worlds comes in Season One if you let him go.” It is presumably when Walt and Jesse have outwit- the remains of Walt’s self-respect as ted but not succeeded in killing a a decent, law-abiding citizen of an murderous drug dealer (Maximino enlightened country that force him Arciniega), now confined in Jesse’s to weigh what he regards as the cer- basement and there shackled by the tainty of his family’s murder more or neck to a pole with a bike lock. What less equally against the moral tenets are they to do with this person? to which he still feels the necessity to Walt is still a suburban chemistry think himself bound. Yet we are also teacher and imagines that his dab- meant to suppose that he would actu- bling in the crystal meth trade can ally have “let him live,” but that, at be conducted on a strictly part-time the last minute before releasing him, basis. He recognizes that the prudent he finds incontrovertible evidence course would be to kill the dealer, that Krazy-8’s friendly and anodyne who goes by the name of Krazy-8 conversation has been only a cover but is actually the son of a local fur- for the fact that he is awaiting this niture store owner with whom Walt opportunity to kill Walt. has done business in the past. The The key objection on the “Let Him two of them engage in an amicable Live” side of the ledger is “You are chat about mutual acquaintances as not a murderer,” and Walt’s need if they were — as indeed they are — to think well of himself becomes Albuquerque neighbors. something of a running joke in the Seeking a rational solution to his series. Thus, as he strangles Krazy-8 dilemma, Walt, sitting on the toilet, with the bike lock he keeps saying: draws up a list in two columns, one “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.” In Season headed “Let Him Live” and the other Three, we find Walt saying to his “Kill Him.” Under “Let Him Live” we sleazy lawyer, Saul Goodman (the are able to read: effervescent Bob Odenkirk), “I can’t be the bad guy.” • It’s the moral thing to do Later in the series, however, while • Judeo/Christian principles Walt still has to maintain a façade of • You are not a murderer conventional morality to mask his • Sanctity of life criminal activities from the commu- • He may listen to reason nity, his increasing pride in his role as • Post-traumatic stress a drug-empire-building mastermind Winter/Spring 2013 ~ 165 Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. James Bowman leads him to abandon any genuine is his glorification of autonomy — scruples regarding his lawlessness. an ideal that, in the world of By the middle of Season Four, he tells Enlightened civilization is formally his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn), who is constructed from choices and consent, frantic with worry that he might but in the world of the frontier, be in danger from violent criminal devolves into raw power. Either associates who will one day come might be aptly described by Walt’s knocking on their door: “I am not pronouncement to a fellow patient, in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. “Never give up control; live life on A guy opens his door and gets shot, your own terms.” As the patient and you think that of me? No. I am points out, this is something of an the one who knocks.” Some critics have illusion: “cancer is cancer,” after all. argued that Walt’s apparent descent “The hell with your cancer,” Walt into evil is something of an illu- snaps. “Right from the start it’s a sion; as Scott Meslow of The Atlantic death sentence. That’s what they keep website writes, “The Big Secret of telling me. Well, guess what? Every Breaking Bad [is that] Walter White life comes with a death sentence...