It's a really good show, needless to say, I guess, since it is all I've been watching the last month. I haven't even missed The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, which I usually watch religiously. The central theme of the show seems to be fate and whether we are in control of our fate and whether the decisions we make influence our fate or if life is random and senseless.
Spoilers Ahead:
Walter, the central character of the show is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He has been a perfect guy for his entire life, but suddenly he sees that life is random and despite that he has always been good, he is going to die young, with nothing to leave for his family and nothing to show for it.
So he decides to start cooking meth. He ends up having to kill a man. His partner, Jesse begins to date a girl who is in rehab and she goes back to using a dangerous combination of heroin and meth. Because he is making so much money with Walter, when her dad tries to force her back to rehab they decide to skip town, but to have one last bender the night before they leave. That night, she dies of a drug overdose. Distraught, her father, an air traffic controller goes back to work and causes an accident on his first day back. Two planes collide in midair and hundreds of people die. Walter gives a speech at the school where he works and it is clear he is denial about his part in what happened.
Walter thought life was random, but it isn't. Things seem to be coincidence, but they aren't. Debris from the plane crash falls down all over Walter's neighborhood and body parts fall all over. An eye ball from a teddy bear falls in Walter's pool, the all seeing eye of God. He picks it up and keeps it with him. He wishes that he would die, life now to him seems like a punishment.
Although he is in denial, Walter is beginning to learn about the consequences of choices. While you don't necessarily ever get rewarded for the good things you do, there are consequences to the bad things that you do. While sometimes bad things do happen to us, this is a test of our resilience and faith. Walter is not a man of faith, he is a man of science. The other man of science, Gale, is killed by Jesse to save Walter's life. Gale is a libertarian and believes people are entitled to do whatever they choose. He does not believe that his actions have moral consequences and feels no remorse for selling an addictive drug. The others that are bad, and know what they are doing is wrong, seem protected. Walter claims Gale did not deserve to die, though he is responsible for his death.
Walter claims that he does what he does for his family, but morally, no matter how much he cares for his family, the decisions that he has made to care for them can never be defended. The family is just an idea or justification he has created to do terrible things.
Jesse kills for revenge or to save people's lives or for heroic purposes. He makes moral decisions about what is right and what is wrong in each circumstance. He feels guilt about the mistakes that he's made. Walter doesn't show any guilt, when he kills, it is because he is a coward and doesn't want to get caught.
At his heart, Walter is a coward. Jesse is the real hero of the show. My guess is Walter will end up dead by the end of the series and Jesse will get away and be able to start his life over. My guess is Hank, Walter's brother, who is in the DEA will eventually find out that Walter is responsible.
This show has been really interesting to me because I love to think about the effects of the choices we make and the way that coincidence builds our lives. Also, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, a book that is mentioned in Infinite Jest, the one that I wrote about a while back figures prominently into the narrative. It is a book that Gale quotes to Walter, here is something really interesting I found online about the whole Walt Whitman element:
I just watched all the seasons in the last few weeks, and I am stunned by the complexity of this show. As the show tells us, "the devil is in the details."
I love the way you guys have analyzed the show. I was especially interested in enocaster's thoughts on the use of color. Along those lines, I always notice Walt visibly wears tighty-whiteis when he's feeling particularly vulnerable.
However, I'm really surprised none of you (maybe I missed it) discuss the show's connection to the poet Walt Whitman. Maybe I'm reaching, but....
1. Start with the obvious. Walt White = Walt Whit(man).
2. If you go to the wiki page on Walt Whitman, and you look that the picture of him from the frontispiece of the "Leaves of Grass", age 37, it looks just like Walt White from the show. Their facial hair is the same, with a mustache and goatee, and he wears the Heisenberg hat. Weird.
3. I couldn't tell you what episode it was, but at one point, Walt and Walt Jr. are watching Jeopardy, and the "answer" is something like, "A four letter word for barbaric expression of emotion." The "question" being yawp. In "Leaves of Grass," Whitman writes, "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable/ I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world." Yawp is a word Whitman made up, and the quote sounds like Walt, or anyone "breaking bad".
4. Along those same lines, Gale seems to have an affinity for Walt Whitman, and quoted from "The Learn'd Astronomer". To me, the poem is about going to see a smart professor talk, but his explanations seem like nonsense, and you have to get the hell out of the lecture hall because he's so full of himself. Not only that, but he's ruining the simple beauty and awe that the night sky has over you. There have been many occasions on the show when Walt is talking and I want to punch him in the head. He has a habit of talking to others in an effort to control the situation, or to convince himself of something he doesn't really believe in, and I find it annoying.
5. Upon his birth, the poet Walt Whitman "was immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father Walter Whitman Sr." So just like in the show, there is a Walt Sr., and a Walt Jr. Also, the poet had a brother named Jesse. BOOM! I think the writers took the 'man' from Walt Whitman and put it onto the end of Jesse Pink(man), to make it complete.
Sometimes I think there is no Walt Whitman in the show, sometimes all the characters are an amalgam of him, but mostly I think it's Walter, Jr. Jr. seems to see through the bullshit that Walt brings, much like poets are thought to do. In the episode where Jesse beat up Walt, Jr. calls Walt out for lying for the past year and calls him fake. Also, when Jr. put Walt to bed, Walt called Jr. Jesse, further solidifying that he thinks of Jesse like his own child, a brother to Jr., like Walt Whitman was a Jr and had a brother named Jesse. According to Wiki, the poet "Whitman committed his brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum" in 1864. Committed = rehab?
6. Also according to wiki, Whitman died as a result of lung problems: "An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia, and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs." Walt has lung cancer.
The show continues to say that "The Devil is in the Details". I think this show means that quite literally. Walter is completely consumed by details, he is possessed by them. From what I know about Leaves of Grass, Whitman is often writing about the sublime and how direct experience of nature transcends all other experience and brings you closer to your true nature. Walter is consumed by minutia, this is what makes him a great meth cook, it is also what never allows him to take in what is around him. He could have being diagnosed with cancer as an opportunity for a new lease on life, his wealthy friend was willing to provide him with money for treatment. Walter denied that money because of a detail, that they used to be business partners and Walter felt like his friend took Walter's ideas and made millions off of him. Walter never once sits back and enjoys or appreciates what he has, except for one moment he talks about when he listening to his wife and his newborn through a baby monitor in another room. He says he wishes he had died at this moment. He says this during an episode called Fly, where he becomes obsessed with killing a single fly that he thinks will contaminate his lab equipment. The fly's presence is random. Walter's reaction to it is not. He kills the fly.
Here is the quote Gale recites to Walter:
| WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; | |
| When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; | |
| When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; | |
| When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, | |
| How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; | 5 |
| Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, | |
| In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, | |
| Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. |
I think this adds to my case.
Well, a little too sloppy to be an essay on the show, but those are my thoughts about it, more or less. Today I lost the key to the cold storage unit we have. The only location I can possibly think of for the key is in our regular storage unit. I was searching around in there today and needed to open a box that was all taped up, I pulled my keys out of my pocket and heard and saw something drop into a box. It was kind of dark and couldn't really see, so I decided not to worry about it. Hours later I noticed the key was missing. I hope it is in there. Meanwhile, I was missing one of the more beautiful sunsets LA has had recently. The devil is in the details. I don't want to turn out like Walter White, I want to turn out like Walt Whitman.
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