To pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul.1
—Hubert Selby Jr.
One of the worst developments of contemporary storytelling is the extinguishing of tragedy from the lexicon of genres. The official “drama” label is slapped on almost any story without a punchline, effectively omitting the rich history of tragedy from which many present day masterpieces derive.
For the Greeks, tragedy followed protagonists who resisted divine prophecy or the will of the gods. Their resistance is always their downfall. In the early modern era, Shakespeare moved away from divine ordinance and focused on the character flaws and personal choices leading to the downfall of his characters. This emphasis on the individual over the celestial is one of the hallmarks of capitalist modernity. Shakespeare represented the dividing line between the feudal and capitalist eras and his protagonists are often nobles or wealthy merchants. Later bourgeois tragedy expelled the nobility and focused instead on everyday businessmen, apprentices or lawyers.
A Capitalist Tragedy
It must be a calling card of late capitalism that sees its tragic protagonists slip from the airs of respectability and into the depraved depths of criminal insanity and violence. Breaking Bad, Joker, The Sopranos and Requiem for a Dream are all tragedies where criminal enterprise is the principal narrative device elevating and destroying characters. In Žižekian terms, the reason for this is simple: capitalism has already become a system that is “effectively ready to put everything, including the survival of humanity at stake simply for the reproduction of the system as an end-in-itself…this is of course weird, if not downright evil.”2
Unlike previous decades and centuries, the liberal capitalist society is now disintegrating under the weight of heavy contradictions. Since we are daily confronted by a barren spiritual landscape populated with corrupt politicians, omnicidal Big Oil CEOs and avaricious tech bros, it has become increasingly difficult to portray ethical dilemmas on-screen. The last recognizable moral frontier of our age is the technical boundary of the law. This is why Breaking Bad resonates so strongly with audiences.
Breaking Bad builds off of a fantastical premise. Walter White is a brilliant chemist resigned to teaching in a high school after opting out of a potentially lucrative career at a chemical research company that he co-founded. His son has cerebral palsy, he has another baby on the way and he is diagnosed with Stage 3A lung cancer when the series opens. He has a Drug Enforcement Agency brother-in-law and becomes inspired to cook meth as a means to raise a cash stockpile for his family to spend after he passes.
As events unfold, we learn that Walter White is not exactly the innocent family man pulled in over his head by forces outside his control. He is deeply resentful of the success his former company had achieved after his departure. He takes on a second job at the car wash which subjects him to the humiliation of cleaning the cars of his high school students. His DEA brother-in-law Hank is full of machismo and routinely demeans Walt as something of a boring egghead. In early episodes Walter Jr. appears to hold his Uncle Hank in higher esteem than his father.
Every tragic protagonist has a character flaw leading to their unravelling. For Walter White it is his pride. He could be psychoanalyzed to reveal a latent narcissism and anti-social personality disorder. The origins of his neuroses are not explained and they pre-date the events of the series. For example, we learn that he walked out on his Gray Matter co-founders when he discovered that his ex-fiancee belonged to a wealthy family, diminishing his own sense of self-worth. There is certainly nothing wrong with a career in education, but for Walt it can be inferred that this job sheltered him from any challenges to his intellect—as did his complex partnership with Jesse Pinkman.
Getting Even
If there is one common thread among tragic characters, it is their clash with the prevailing social order. Because the ancient Greeks believed that the material world was governed by the gods of nature, defying their plans could only lead to demise. Likewise, in Romeo and Juliet, it is the passion of the young couple that breaks upon the immovable ancient feud between their families. In Hamlet, the understandable desire for vengeance is confronted by the royal authority of the Danish kingdom. And in Breaking Bad, Walter White’s pride clashes with the class relations he is enmeshed in.
While gifted, Walter White had never been able to productively channel his talents or receive monetary validation of his self-worth. Put another way:
Under capitalism, individuals become socially integrated in a manner that is at its core indifferent to their needs and aspirations; they are abstract, alienated individuals, subsumed under antagonistic class relations, the imperatives of competition, and an alienated division of labour, all of which thwart their self-realization as social beings.3
Walter White’s struggle for self-realization is undeniably relatable even if his solution is not. We share a world of monopolized capital, an alienated global division of labour, of constant, unexpected financial demands and unspoken competition between peers. In his own words, Walter sums up his situation thus: “I am an extremely overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When I can work, I make $43,700 per year. I have watched all of my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable. And within eighteen months, I will be dead.”
It is clear that Walter White had been deeply scarred by the hidden injuries of class. The agonizing reminders of his missed opportunity with Gray Matter Technologies only rubbed salt in his wounds. In On Contradiction, Mao Zedong wrote: “Before it explodes, a bomb is a single entity in which opposites coexist in given conditions. The explosion takes place only when a new condition, ignition, is present.”4
Walter White was the human embodiment of these conditions: an extraordinary chemist in sub-ordinary work at the high school and car wash, crippling financial pressure and a superiority complex lodged beneath a mountain of belittling relationships. His cancer diagnosis pushed him over a cliff, into impossible economic circumstances and certain death. This was the ignition.
Becoming a meth cook in response to his diagnosis verges on the extreme but it can be rationalized by the immense resentment that White had repressed for years. Here was his chance to transform his chemistry knowledge into monetary validation; to pull one over on his smug brother-in-law; to reclaim his masculinity in the eyes of his family; to feel alive before he died; to lash out at a society that had unjustly left him behind.5
Walter White was far too self-absorbed to be any kind of revolutionary. He retaliated against the authorities governing his life but he did not seek to overthrow them. He did not walk away from his teaching position, his marriage or his relationship with Hank. While he quit the car wash, he returned to purchase the business in order to launder money. Walter White did not want to rebel against the system so much as he wanted to conquer it—to collect his due—and by any means necessary. His descent into depravity escaped him so long as economic validation arrived in tidy bundles of cash.
Shortcut to the American Dream
The drug trade is too ubiquitous in capitalist societies to be any kind of scourge to the system—it is a function of the system. The drug trade nourishes the lumpenproletariat, reproducing a vast underclass that helps to discipline the productive classes overhead. Owing to the high risk of violence and arrest, stepping into this world obviously provokes feelings of defiance even though it is not rebellious in any systemic sense. Rather, it is a shortcut to all the extremities found on the capitalist menu.
Extreme drug-induced highs and crushing lows, extreme exploitation in a void of authority, extremely lucrative commodities sold into a market of grinding poverty. Walter White quickly adjusted to this world, of course, given the extreme circumstances of his life already in existence. The cancer diagnosis in a country of private health care was his final push from the ledge of productivity and into the realm of the lumpen.
Every tragedy ends with the re-assertion of the social order after a period of disturbance. Breaking Bad is no exception. By the end of the series, almost all of the drug traffickers and manufacturers are wiped out, including Walter White. Like most tragedies, social control is operational in the finale of Breaking Bad. The illicit drug trade is a hyper-capitalist endeavour but it circumvents institutional power and therefore, paradoxically, it must be both ostracized and tolerated. Its visibility is a visceral reminder to any disgruntled worker, struggling shop owner or frustrated civil servant struggling with bills and thinking that their situation cannot get worse. It can get worse. Just look at what happened to Walter White.
Thanks for reading!
From Requiem for a Dream (Da Capo Press, 2000): v. ↩︎
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010): 335. ↩︎
Oscar A. Ralda, “The Ethics and Dialectics of Freedom and Universality: The Sources of Materialist Moral Judgements,” Monthly Review, Vol. 77, No. 5: 59. ↩︎
Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, On Practice (Midnight Press, 2023): 53. ↩︎
Byung Chul-Han echoes the Marxian notion of living for dead labour when he describes capitalism as producing undead existences—it “deprives life of life.” Capitalism and the Death Drive (Polity Press, 2019): 8. ↩︎
