Criminal Elements James Bowman

Reviews & Reconsiderations

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.

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.... was always a Bad Guy.” but until then, who’s in charge? Me! I think the big secret is, rather, that That’s how I live my life.” Walter has found the way into view- Control is so important to Walt ers’ sympathies, pioneered by cow- that initially he rejects treatment, boys and gangsters in the American feeling that he’s being pressured into entertainment industry of past gen- it while the outcome will be the erations, by exempting himself (in his same regardless. “What I want,” he case with the help of his diagnosis) plaintively tells his family, “what I from enlightened ideas of Good and need — is a choice.” Eventually, how- Bad and returning to that frontier ever, he bows to pressure and the can- state of nature where the only thing cer implausibly goes into remission, that matters is the skill to survive. liberating him from what seemed Or that and a sense of honor. The like certain doom to live entirely by fact that Walt realizes this before his own lights. When his son, upset others in the series is what gives him and baffled by changes at home, his big advantage over those who is given the explanation that Walt still imagine that he, like themselves, suffers from a gambling addiction, must owe something to the moral Walt rejects this medical determin- and legal codes the rest of society ism even as an exoneration from his supposes itself to be living by. weird behavior: “What is going on with me is not about some disease. he point of inflection between It’s about choices. Choices I have TWalt’s civilized and frontier selves made. Choices I stand by.”

This ethic of autonomy is even continues to do it. In particular, more pronounced in Walt’s sometime alone among the drug traffickers and assistant, Gale Boetticher (David to some extent the cast at large, he Costabile), a true creature of the shows real concern for children. The Enlightenment, entranced with sci- unexpected presence of a small boy ence as a beautiful ideal. A charming, in a junkie household throws Jesse cultured libertarian, he believes abso- for a loop; what was supposed to be lutely in the self-determination of a quick and firm intimidation (the rational beings, even towards grave boy’s parents had ripped Jesse off) harm. “Consenting adults want what turns into a nightmare as he tries to they want,” he says, explaining how get his business done without endan- he happens to be in the meth trade. gering the child. The way Jesse’s “And if I’m not supplying it, they’ll heart palpably breaks across his face get it from someone else. At least when he realizes that the kid, raised with me they get exactly what they in this mess, does not even know pay for — no added toxins or adul- how to play pat-a-cake almost sug- terants.” (As a vegan, he is actively gests some long-buried trauma of his opposed to harms inflicted on ani- own — although from everything we mals — subrational beings which do know Jesse had a perfectly safe and not enter into this kind of analysis.) respectable upbringing. Later, he is By contrast, Walt’s original and appalled to learn of the drug gang’s more permanent assistant, Jesse, is conscription of children as young as human weakness itself. We first meet ten years old and — to the conster- him climbing naked out a second- nation of his colleagues — takes a story window to evade the police in militant stand against it. This ends a routine drug bust. His entire life horribly for everyone, but in these since at least high school, when he and other incidents, it becomes clear was Walt’s uninspired student, has that Jesse, at least, has a heart. been characterized by minor trouble- These two alternate and oppo- making, to the point where he is no site assistants cancel each other out longer welcome in his family’s home. when Walt has Jesse shoot Gale to He cannot be entrusted with any save Walt’s own life, but in a deeper amount of money without blowing figurative sense before that. For good it in some asinine way, and there is and ill, everything that Jesse stands seemingly no addiction in which he for puts the lie to the cult of auton- fails to indulge. omy represented in Gale and Walt’s But if Jesse is unfit for polite soci- professed beliefs. Children, after all, ety, he makes a lousy criminal too, are the invisible quirks to social never becoming hardened to the real- contract theory, being not yet ratio- ity of what he’s doing even as he nal and able to consent but (unlike

Winter/Spring 2013 ~ 167 Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. James Bowman animals) presumably growing into gets clean without much apparent these things with time. Jesse values effort and thereafter despicably uses their vulnerability in a way that his his group-therapy sessions to find more powerful and intelligent peers new buyers for his crystal meth. do not. There is a good joke when a couple Regrettably, Jesse’s concern does of his dimwitted friends do the like not extend to others who are victims and get caught up in the Twelve Step of these vaunted choices — that is, program. But they experience a rare people just like himself, the weak, moment of moral feeling when they, stupid, and self-destructive. Not only and then Jesse, begin to feel pangs Walt and Jesse but the series as a of conscience about taking advan- whole seems to regard with con- tage of such vulnerable people. It is tempt the people who actually use one of the hazards of drug retailing the chemical product of their labors, that any human contact with one’s casualties of a form of social break- customers is likely to interfere with down increasingly common in civi- one’s ability to see them as custom- lized society. Walt and Jesse’s meth ers, but soon Jesse and Walt are sales thrive on account of the weak- both relieved to acquire a mostly nesses of those who have dropped invisible network of dealers and are out of that society and become lesser thus spared from any necessity of criminals than themselves. If every- witnessing the human devastation one were as diligent as Walt is in caused by the drugs themselves — as providing for his family, there would opposed to the competition to make be no market for his product and he and market them. wouldn’t be able to provide for them. Such detachment from the conse- But this reminder of the Kantian quences of their actions threatens at categorical imperative on which so times to become an excuse for the much of Enlightenment morality is series to emulate the less serious founded has almost no part to play in manifestations of popular culture by Breaking Bad. treating crime as fun and criminals There is a brief flirtation with as heroes, but we are never very far the question of drug use and its away from some new reminder of its effects on the users when at the tragic, real-world consequences, as end of Season Two and the begin- when children become innocent (or ning of Season Three, Jesse is dev- not so innocent) victims. Apart from astated by the accidental death of Hank and his fellow DEA agents, Jane (Krysten Ritter), his girlfriend the points of Walt’s contact with and fellow heroin addict, and goes the world outside the drug trade are into rehab. But Jesse, suffering much mostly limited to those for whom more from grief than from heroin, it might as well be taking place in

168 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Criminal Elements another country — as, in some epi- acid, and twice in the series Walt sodes set in Mexico, it is. For the synthesizes the lethal toxin ricin to show to produce the effects it does, assassinate adversaries. Although his it has to keep always before our eyes ricin schemes do not actually work Walt’s continued existence in the out, he does manage to eliminate his workaday, bourgeois world which chief rival at the end of Season Four the show’s audience may also be pre- using a cleverly improvised home- sumed to inhabit. Thus Jesse almost made explosive. And of course there never calls Walt anything but “Mr. is his trademark “Blue Sky” meth, White,” as if Jesse still sat in the back the blue-tinged product that earns row of his high school chemistry Walt his fortune, and also his fame class and was jerked awake on being as the notorious Heisenberg — the called on unexpectedly. criminal alias inspired by science that Walt uses for himself throughout the n the midst of all his forays into series. Ithe primitive honor culture of the While Walt does participate to criminal underworld, Walt remains some extent in the honor culture that at heart a man of science. And it is permeates the criminal world, the indeed Walt’s scientific knowledge power that his scientific knowledge and skill as a chemist that enable him gives him means that he can afford to succeed so prodigiously in his new to ignore the precepts of honor and life of crime. Even as an untutored loyalty that guide those more sea- amateur in the violent ways of the soned criminals who are steeped in drug trade, Walt proves adept at that culture’s traditions and customs. transforming knowledge into power. Walt’s arrogance and troublemak- As early as the first episode, when ing tendency to ignore what the he and Jesse are being forced at honor culture demands bring him gunpoint to cook meth for a pair of into frequent conflict with these small-time thugs, Walt manages to more experienced criminals, perhaps use the chemicals he is working with best exemplified by the hard-boiled to create a deadly cloud of phosphine Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), gas that incapacitates his captors. who never sees eye-to-eye with Walt. A few episodes later, Walt intimi- Mike, who serves as the go-to guy dates and impresses a mid-level drug for the mysterious drug kingpin (and boss by detonating a small crystal owner of the fast-food fried-chicken of fulminated mercury, saying it was chain Pollos Hermanos) Gus Fring just “a little tweak of chemistry.” (Giancarlo Esposito), rightly per- More than once he neatly — or not so ceives Walt as a capricious and dan- neatly — disposes of the bodies of his gerous interloper, unwilling to play or others’ victims using hydrofluoric by the rules of honor, loyalty, and

Winter/Spring 2013 ~ 169 Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. James Bowman deference to the strict hierarchy of his secret life in spite of his efforts to a criminal organization. However, keep it from her, makes up her mind Walt’s meth-cooking skills make to divorce him, Walt remains devoted him an indispensably profitable part to her. In Season Three, at a crucial of Gus’s criminal empire. Walt and juncture in his criminal career when Mike grudgingly cooperate, but the Skyler’s decision to leave him makes canny Mike is uneasy with Walt’s Walt decide to get out of the meth arrogance. business for good, he tries to explain Even though Walt’s scientific to the crime-lord Gus Fring, who knowledge and skill are enough for is trying to put Walt in charge of a him eventually to dominate the crim- new, state-of-the-art meth lab, why inal world, there are hints that this he doesn’t want to go back to “cook- pragmatic success is not enough to ing” again. He made some “very bad satisfy him. During Season Three, decisions,” he tells Gus, and now Walt reflects on how he has been he means to reverse them. “Why unable to make his wife “understand” did you make these decisions?” Gus why he has done what he has done, asks. For his family, replies Walt. recognizing that he wants his family “Then they weren’t bad decisions.” to miss him when he is gone, and that But, Walt objects, they have cost him the wealth he is amassing only made his wife. Gus responds: Walt still has sense as a way to provide security for his children, doesn’t he, including a them. Acknowledging that he wants newborn daughter? Then, conclud- to be remembered well by his wife and ing, Gus gets to the heart of the children, he even imagines that “there matter: must exist certain words in a certain specific order” that could explain his What does a man do, Walter? A criminality to Skyler — some scien- man provides for his family.... And a man, a man provides. And tifically valid proof that would justify he does it even when he is not him before his family and secure their appreciated or respected or even love, respect, and esteem. He does loved. He simply bears up and he not seem to recognize that there is no does it, because he’s a man. formula for understanding between people, and still less for love. Here Gus, who appears to have no Walt’s deepening alienation from family of his own, makes explicit his wife and children as a result of what has been implicit in the series his life of crime is one of the show’s from the beginning: that there is a tragic ironies, since the family plays point at which even ordinarily decent such a paramount role in Walt’s ver- civilized men, qua men, can be made sion of the frontier honor culture. to revert to their traditional role Even when Skyler, having learned of in tribal, patriarchal society, a role

170 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Criminal Elements which everything in our culture for peachable moral rectitude in Seasons two generations has been geared One and Two is suggested by a con- to representing to us as hopelessly frontation with her shoplifting sister outmoded and obsolete. That role is Marie (Betsy Brandt). At this point, bound up with an equally obsolete Skyler knows nothing of Walt’s consciousness that the only thing secret criminal life. She confides in that really matters, or ought to mat- Walt, who takes the opportunity to ter to a man, is the honor of his say that people sometimes do these manhood — something that express- things for the sake of their families. es itself in the ability to “provide” for “Is that supposed to justify steal- one’s family as well as to brave and ing?” asks Skyler. overcome the dangers posed to that “What would you do if it were family by one’s enemies and rivals me?” asks Walt boldly. “Would you without recourse to the law. divorce me? Would you turn me in Despite Walt’s misgivings about to the police?” whether his patriarchal honor is worth “You don’t want to find out,” she losing the love and respect of his wife says to him, as if teasingly. for, it seems for a while as if the new But of course he does find out. She social contract will keep his little fam- decides to initiate divorce proceed- ily together. Yet in Season Five, we ings but, crucially, not to turn him see Skyler begin to treat Walt with in to the police — or to Hank, who fear as, increasingly, the equivalent of has learned to wink at his wife’s the old-fashioned Mafia don who may “addiction,” as he professes to see be presumed to visit transgressions it, to thievery. Skyler, therefore, at against his absolute authority with first takes a high moral line regard- lethal punishments, even for family ing Walt’s material solicitude for her members. In Season Five, Skyler finds and her children — by rejecting, in Walt and the kids watching Scarface effect, the bride price of money he is (the Al Pacino version) on TV, and now able to offer her. Yet, like Walt it immediately suggests to her her himself but in reverse, she wants to greatest fear about Walt’s criminal reserve to herself a bit of the alter- career. The idea seems to be that there native to the life she feels forced to is no middle way, no easy compromise choose. Her unreconstructed sense between tribal chieftain and ordinary, of what is due to wifely loyalty pre- law-abiding suburban dad: when you vents her from reporting Walt to the stop being the one, then you must authorities, and gradually she finds start being the other. herself learning to accept a part, and An interesting and underappreci- eventually a partnership, in his crimi- ated character development in the nal life for the sake of the financial series belongs to Skyler, whose unim- security it offers the family.

Skyler is helped to this acceptance winnings. By a further irony, the by a defiant affair with her boss, Ted leisure afforded Hank by his months Beneke (Christopher Cousins). She in bed enables him to pursue a pri- hopes that the affair will force Walt vate obsession with the capture of to agree to a divorce, but in any such the mysterious drug boss known situation she has to be aware of the as Heisenberg without realizing contrast between the two men, and that Heisenberg is his brother-in- to look to Ted for the moral prin- law — until the cliffhanger that ends ciple she has found lacking in Walt. the first half of Season Five. Insofar Instead, she finds that Ted has been as the first fifty-four episodes of the cooking not crystal meth but the series have followed Skyler’s conver- books at his failing business and is sion from law-abiding wife and moth- in serious tax trouble likely to result er in a modern, partnership-style in his being sent to jail. When Ted marriage to a subservient criminal attempts to justify his actions by consort, an inevitable theme of the appealing to his own family obliga- final eight episodes must be Hank’s tions, Skyler must begin to feel, as forced response to the sudden discov- Walt does, that there is no escape ery of his own unavoidable conflict of from the life of crime. Soon she heartfelt loyalties, those to the family has joined with Walt in running an versus those to society and the law. elaborate money-laundering scheme What brings about Hank’s discov- through a carwash — which she her- ery is, of all things, a copy of Walt self comes up with the underhand- Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that Walt ed means of acquiring. Skyler also has left sitting out almost as if wait- invents the serviceable lie of Walt’s ing to be found. Walt’s former assis- fake gambling addiction to explain tant Gale had given and inscribed to Hank and Marie how the Whites the book to Walt — “my other favor- have come by their recent good for- ite W. W.” The gift commemorated tune. Impressed by her quick think- their collaboration in the lab, where, ing, Walt asks, “How did you come when it was instantly obvious that up with that?” they shared a personal chemistry, “I learned from the best,” Skyler Gale had recited for Walt a favorite replies. Whitman poem: She is also learning to value the money for what it enables her to When I heard the learn’d astronomer; do for the family. When Hank is When the proofs, the figures, seriously wounded by a couple of were ranged in columns before me; drug cartel killers, Skyler is able to When I was shown the charts and pay for his expensive rehabilitation the diagrams, to add, divide, out of Walt’s supposed gambling and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, in the show’s first episode — that where he lectured with much breaks him bad. That a confronta- applause in the lecture-room, tion with mortality should lead a man How soon, unaccountable, I became of science to abandon the world of tired and sick; Enlightenment values for the honor Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d culture of the criminal lifestyle is off by myself, strangely fitting. For although mod- In the mystical moist night-air, ern philosophy, politics, and everyday and from time to time, life are largely oriented toward the Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. defeat or delay of death, the rational man of science can ultimately only It is a strange poem for Gale, who think of his own death as the disincor- says “I love the lab,” to cherish, since poration of his material self, followed it sounds a note of something more by incomprehensible void. than skepticism about science. If any- Death, if not any better understood thing, Whitman hints at the mys- in the honor culture, at least has a teries of the infinite that so often clear place carved out for it there: it stymie the scientific mind’s attempts is something that there are uses for, at description. there are consolations from, and there That theme is shared by another are things worse than. Enlightenment Whitman poem never quoted on science can account for so much of Breaking Bad but used as the inspi- what we see in the natural and social ration for the title of the show’s world, but as Walt learns, there are final mid-season cliffhanger, “Gliding mysteries that still defy the rational Over All”: mind. Living with these mysteries, Gliding o’er all, through all, not least the mystery posed by our Through Nature, Time, and Space, own confrontation with nothingness, As a ship on the waters advancing, means looking beyond the rational- The voyage of the soul — not life alone, istic Enlightenment vision of the Death, many deaths I’ll sing. world arrayed in its proofs and figures, charts and diagrams, to other, The many deaths that weigh on more primitive sources of wisdom. Walt’s soul may have their due in the end, but the one Death, that which was James Bowman, resident scholar at always ahead of him, certainly will. It the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was his encounter with the reality of is the author of Honor: A History his own death — his cancer diagnosis (Encounter, 2006).