#TeamWalt, Fictional Heroes and Villains, and Interpreting Morality in Breaking Bad

I am not on #TeamWalt. Walter White should go to jail, for all the morally reprehensibly things he has done for morally dubious reasons. Many people, though, proudly label themselves members of Team Walt, and actively cheer for the Breaking Bad protagonist, and they'll even have justifications for all of Walt's actions; they say Walt's always been doing everything for his family, to provide for them, to keep them safe, and that includes his surrogate son, Jesse. Others don't deny that Walt's done bad things, but they say it's fun to cheer for Walt, to see him succeed, and he is the protagonist, after all. This is his story, and those viewers want him to keep going, keep outsmarting people, keep doing terrible things in order to survive, because that's what keeps the show moving forward. There are people that are fervent in their defence of Walt's actions, and I want to take a closer look at that viewpoint here.

In my mind, the "correct" way to watch Breaking Bad at this point, almost at the end now, is to see Walt as evil, as someone who long lost sight of any moral grounding and is now headed straight towards the sun. This is after allwhat is clearly intended by the Breaking Bad writers as well. Maybe you're not actively cheering for Walt's to repent for his sins whether it be through arrest or death or some other fitting end, but you're anticipating it and realize it's what's right for the story. Which is, to be fair, also what even most of the people cheering for Walt would acknowledge. That's the concept of the entire show; we're following the story of a "normal" family man as circumstances push him to do increasingly immoral acts and he slowly transforms into a monster. Some people, it feels like, are having trouble recalibrating their viewpoints of the characters, even as those characters have changed. So Skyler White, for example, is still the killjoy wife, the harpy, the ball and chain that drags WaltWhitman down, which to be fair, was her character to some extent in the beginning; her role was partly to represent the dead end that Walt's life had ended up at in the first season, and to demonstrate how even as Walt was finally becoming empowered as Heisenberg he still couldn't manage to get his family life in order later on. But it ignores her role in more recent seasons, that of a wife trying to keep her son safe and her family together, a woman who has at times felt trapped and powerless in a relationship with a sociopath. I'm not going to go into her character much more here, because that could take a whole other essay, but some of the vitriol thrown at Skyler's way has made Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) realize, I think, that the female characters in Breaking Bad tend to be more plot device-y and foil-y, and that some more sympathetic and stronger dimensionality especially in the first couple seasons could help to lessen some of the more misogynistic undercurrents of some people's reactions to Skyler. And some people still view Walt Whitman as the family man who was working two jobs, who got diagnosed with cancer, who was shafted by life and the American Dream and who only wanted to provide for his family above all else, even as he has delved into the drug business, lied, murdered, and betrayed the trust of everyone he knows.

This Team Walt thing might be, to some extent, an issue with how we expect our stories to be told. We're used to good guys and bad guys; we're used to black and white. We might watch anti-hero stories, but they're still heroes to some extent. They'll have a moral code of some sort, they'll be criminals but refuse to harm security guards, they'll murder serial killers but not innocents, they'll hurt people's feelings but still cure their disease, etc. Walt Whitman is an anti-hero, and he'll be a sort of hero to the end, because we sympathize with him in the beginning, because his intentions started off well enough. The main character of a show is always a good guy, because we find it hard to become invested in a story about a bad person, and to commit a half-hour or an hour every week to spend with people that are morally dubious. But Breaking Bad is a show whose very concept was to challenge the dichotomy or good and bad. Gilligan wanted viewers to become invested in a story about a good guy even as that good guy slowly became a bad one. And he succeeded. Oh, did he ever.

Throughout the series, even as his actions have become morally questionable, Walt has self-righteously justified himself to others several times, told them that all he's done has been for his family, or for Jesse, sometimes with so much conviction that you believe that he believes it too. The show never has Walt do anything that he can't justify in some way. But the show also takes lengths to demonstrate how Walt's action stopped being propelled by desperate circumstances and providing for his family, and became about stoking his ego and being in control. We learned more about Walt, watched him transform from the everyman suddenly strapped with a ticking time bomb of a disease, a man anyone could sympathize with, and as the series went along we saw him let his ego make his decisions for him, we saw him choose pride over charity, we saw him lie and steal and make drugs and kill for purely selfish reasons. We see this. We see Walt clearly cross past the shades of grey into darkness. Fans may debate what the point of no return was for Walt: was it poisoning Brock? Letting Jane die? Coercing Jessie into killing Gale? Whatever the case, he's clearly passed it. But we still see the grey back there, still see hints of it mixed into everything Walt's done. We've spent time with Walt, seen the desperate measures borne of desperate circumstances, the unfairness of his life, seen him being looked down on and trod on, seen him forced into true dilemmas, rocks, hard places, and all, and we cheer him, for overcoming odds. It's not his fault: Jessie is like family, and Walt was only trying to protect him from himself. He's gotten his hands dirty, but it's all in the service of his ungrateful wife and his clueless innocent son. He's done what he's had to to survive. It's not his fault, right? That's the crux of the Team Walt argument. Here's what that reminds me of: Ender Wiggin.

More specifically, it reminds me of this essay I read, called Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality by John Kessel (http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm ). I'm not going to regurgitate the essay in its entirety, but basically it boils down to this: (SPOILER) in the Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, which is a very popular children's sci-fi novel, the titular character Ender is a kid with pacifistic ideals who commits terrible acts of violence. He breaks another kid's arm. He kills a bully. And at the end, he commits genocide, killing an alien species that Earth is at war with by blowing up their home planet. Ender is not portrayed as a villain for any of this, but as a victim. He feels tremendous guilt, but Card goes to lengths to make clear that Ender shouldn't, that's he's a victim of circumstances, the machinations of the adults that are supposed to be protecting and guiding him, and the shortcomings of his peers. The bully corners him with a group of kids in the shower, with full intention of killing Ender, essentially forcing Ender to fight. Ender manages to outsmart the bully by goading him into fighting one on one, and he doesn't even know he killed the bully until much later; all he was trying to do at the time was send a message. The genocide, same thing. How does one commit genocide without knowing it? Because Ender thinks he is merely playing a battle simulator for training purposes when he issues the final command. In other words, it's not his fault. He is forced to commit acts that most all of us would consider immoral on their own, stripped of context (violence, murder, genocide), but the book tells us that Ender is not just innocent, but a saint, a savior. He saves humankind, he shoulders the sins of his peers without complaint, he is completely selfless, with an almost omnipresent perception of those around him. Card's book is putting forth the argument that it isn't the actions that define a person's morality, but their intent. Just like Walt, Ender's actions can be justified. They aren't committing immoral acts for immoral reasons (for Walt, it can be argued), so these characters are not immoral beings at their core. Society is to blame, circumstances are all to blame. We're all just trying to survive here.

Several things about that, starting with the most obvious one: most bad guys, oddly enough, don't consider themselves bad guys. Mao Zedong (am I getting into dangerous territory with real world examples?) didn't mean to starve to death millions of his own people during the Great Leap Forward. I'll bet he felt pretty bad about it afterwards too. Hitler, to use an even more controversial figure, almost certainly felt he was doing Germany and probably the entire world a great favour by irradiating Jewish people. Can we use intent as the sole determinant to someone's morality? If pressed Walt would be able to justify every single heinous thing he's every done, and by the end he'd have convinced himself as well. We see, though, the outs the Walt has had, we do see the decisions in the moment, and that makes them more real, but that also makes Walt's revisionism easier to spot. Heroes and villains exist because of our apparent need for clearly defined rooting interests in so many of our narratives, whether it be journalistic, historical, or fictional. What Breaking Bad does is start its protagonist clearly on one side of the spectrum, and slowly push him to the other end. We've seen heroes forced to perform immoral acts before, and we've seen villains with clearly defined motives for doing what they're doing. But rarer are characters that swing between the two, that are the primary character of the story, and not an auxiliary one.

Speaking about intent, let's talk about authorial intent. Card clearly intended for Ender to be a sympathetic figure. Ender is absolved of any blame for his actions by the story, and during the story we are told what Ender is thinking, so we know how pure his intentions are. In Breaking Bad, Walt's intentions are slightly harder to read, because we aren't privy to his exact thought process. Still, though, through Bryan Cranston's acting and the choices we see Walt make, we see that Walt clearly isn't the paragon of virtue that Ender is, even if we can sympathize with him. Gilligan and the rest of the Breaking Bad writing staff have revealed enough about Walt that we understand the character's motives and driving forces, and we see that the character isn't good. But some viewers don't agree with what those people intended with their work; they want to see Walt as a hero.

One other thing, contrasting Walt and Ender: why are they so popular? Some people are ready to consider Breaking Bad the best TV show of all time. Ender's Game is perhaps the most popular science fiction novel ever, and a beloved children's book that many adults fondly remember. And they are both for the most part empowerment fantasies.

When I read Ender's Game, I was in my mid-to-late teens, which I'm guessing might be older than the age most people read it, and I was also aware that Orson Scott Card had made some controversial statements about homosexuality and that he had some fairly extreme views, so as I was going through the book it was hard not to locate politicalized subtext throughout, even though I was mostly hyper-alert for a pro-war subcontext more than any of it's moral philosophizing at the time. I can see the appeal, though. Ender is a character that many kids around his age are able to relate to, because it serves as a reassurance, especially to social outcasts that consider themselves smarter than their peers. They can relate to Ender, feel better about feeling different, live out their fantasies about fighting back against their bullies perhaps, and not feel guilty about that fantasy. The useless authority figures in the book can also be used to channel any misery that authority figures are causing in their own lives. And of course, the book is all about Ender's training for war and war strategy, which is an appealing war fantasy, even (or especially) for those that are physically weaker but consider themselves smart. I'm unsure how the demographics across gender lines go, whether girls also find Ender's Game as appealing; the story includes girls, but most of the characters are still boys, and it does deal with war and violence quite a bit, so I'm unsure if Ender's Game is more of just an empowerment fantasy for kids or for young males in particular.

Breaking Bad is, in many ways, also an empowerment fantasy, a fairly male-centric one, with Walt breaking free of the mundanity of modern suburban life for a life of danger and crime, as he takes down rival drug dealers and kingpins and builds an empire. But it's also a show that is supposed to follow a man as he crosses the full spectrum of narrative morality. On the edges, throughout the eight seasons, we've seen cracks, we've seen fragments of Walt's morality chip away, and the empowered alter-ego of Heisenberg emerge, and with it this empowerment fantasy. Heisenberg is ruthless, Heisenberg lets nothing get in the way of getting what he wants, Heisenberg is a badass, Heisenberg is a winner. Breaking Bad starts off as a story of regular guy making bad choices trying to provide for his family. In season three, though, with the introduction of the Salamaca hitmen cousins, we started to see a shift from reality into a more stylized world.  

I remember during the middle seasons of Breaking Bad, there were sometimes slower, less action-packed, perhaps more character-driven episodes, and there would always be complaints, some viewers who felt bored, who wanted to get back to the action. Such complaints have lessened as we get into latter seasons and draw towards the series finale. The action has ramped up, the tension is high, Walt's web of deceit is starting to unravel; it's riveting TV. Breaking Bad might be a show that critics and fans point to as a modern, intelligent, storytelling triumph, with depth and meaning not found in today's films, but the show can also function much of the time as basically an action thriller. You can turn off your brain, you don't have to engage with any of the show's themes at all, and you can still enjoy the show. The show clearly establishes Walt's ego and selfishness and the destructive decisions they lead to, but we've also seen more than our share of external antagonistic forces, people that we can more easily cheer for Walt against, characters like Gus and Tuco, and we've also seen Walt have to deal with messy situations, like the Cartel, and Mike, and Gale, and we can get wrapped up in the mechanics of Walt's skin-of-his-teeth dealings with those issues. The show has focused, in later seasons, so much more on action movie mode with Heisenberg the calculating bad-ass, and so much less on the starting premise of Walt the family man who lost his way, that it's easy to just put that premise aside and cheer for more Heisenberg, and it sometimes feels like the Breaking Bad writers feel the same way.  The show slid more into the entertainment side of things perhaps, and less on the "art" side of challenging its viewers, to massive ratings and honestly, it's made for more riveting television.  Perhaps the point furthest into fantasy was the train heist, which was fantastical, and kind of ludicrous, and maybe both the most awesome and the least connected to reality the show ever got.  The kid getting shot at the end was a great shot to the gut, a rebuke, a reminder that this show still has something to say about reality and morality. I haven't seen the last two episodes yet as of this writing, and there are some people that are hoping for Walt to go out in full Heisenberg mode, guns a-blazin' , but I'm hoping and expecting to see at least one more reminder like that. 

Part of me thinks that those people still cheering for Walter White are watching the show “wrong,” that they're devaluing the show and Gilligan in a way, by refusing to see what they're obviously trying to say, but that's a pretty elitist point of view, and it honestly doesn't actually bother me that much. Part of me thinks that the show has partly obfuscated what is was trying to say in recent seasons in favour of being cool and stylish, although I can still greatly enjoy the show for what it is and not for what I want it to be. Perhaps the issue is that as the show has delved into the Heisenberg empowerment fantasy more, the connection to reality has become increasingly tenuous, and it's harder to draw lines of morality in the sand. 

A recent post I read a discussion on Reddit that said that in the Harry Potter series, Dolores Umbridge (the strict headmaster in the fifth book/movie) was a greater villain than Voldemort, because the former was a relatably hate-able presence while Voldemort was simply a force of nature. Perhaps judging the morality of the grounded, desperate, Walt versus the mythic, larger than life Heisenberg is similar.  And it still says something in the way its audience has engaged with the show, in our struggles to redefine a hero as a villain, in the way we try to justify our initial readings of a character's morality, and what this all says about the connections between heroes and villains, fiction and fantasy, and sympathy and morality.