When Heisenberg Wins, Campbell and the Greeks Lose Sam Stecklow and Peter McCracken Columbia College Chicago, Class of 2017 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Class of 2016
Breaking Bad, more than anything, invented a new genre of TV: the novel. It was the first nonminiseries show to have a clear open-and-closed story—more than The Sopranos (which David Chase kept trying to end, only to have HBO back truckloads of money into his front yard until he agreed to another season), more than Deadwood (which never had a proper ending), and more than any one-season wonders like Freaks & Geeks or Firefly (I’ve never seen The Wire, to my continuing shame, so I can’t speak to it here). Vince Gilligan’s magnum opus is objectively influential and a great achievement, to be sure. Too bad it’s not very good.
A hypothetical: if you read a fascinating, deeply raw, emotional book about good and evil, morality, and all that, but it didn’t quite stick the ending, would it be a good book or a noble Watercooler Journal
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failure? The ending is one of the hardest things to write for anything, but if a book I loved had an ending that compromised everything before it, I wouldn’t consider that book a success. This is exactly how I view Breaking Bad. That puts it in good company—Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, and Huckleberry Finn are all classic books whose endings can’t cut it against their earlier chapters. Let me back up. Before the series finale, I was a huge Breaking Bad fan. It was all I thought about. It was all I could think about. It was an endlessly intricate portrait of human greed, neuroses, insecurities, love—emotion. It was a show about raw emotion and morality dressed up as a simple good vs. evil tale. It still is all of those things. It’s just not intellectually or thematically honest.
“Vince Gilligan said from the beginning that he loved all of the characters, including Walter—I guess I just didn’t take him seriously.” The series finale is Breaking Bad’s undoing: very simply, Walter White gets everything he wants. He cuts all his loose ends. He takes care of everything and everyone, from Jesse to Skyler to... Lydia (that the show descended into Todd and Lydia vs. Walter in the end is a different issue for a different piece). Walter even died the way he wanted to; he got to choose his own death. Here is one of the greatest fictional monsters, and he got to go out his way. I guess it’s really my fault for misreading the show. Vince Gilligan said from the beginning that he loved all of the characters, including Walter—I guess I just didn’t take him seriously. Breaking Bad, for all its intricacies, is a fairly straightforward story. Like another one of the best shows of the 2010s, Community, Breaking Bad follows Joseph Campbell’s writings to a very deep extent. Walter White is Campbell’s idea of a hero, or at least Walter believes himself to be. He exists in a society he sees as imbalanced, and his pride prevents him from accepting financial help even though he needs it. This begins his road to becoming Heisenberg. Through a series of traumatic events and awful decisions that Walter makes, he gains what Campbell called “supernatural powers,” embodied by his drug-dealing alter ego, Heisenberg. As Heisenberg, he believes he exists separately from the regular rules of human morality. Watercooler Journal
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Heisenberg is Walter’s super-ego—his dark morals and values tainted by self-exclusion from society—manifested in a personality. All this is good and well for the run of the show until the finale. Campbell’s hero formula requires order to be shoved back into place at the end by the hero killing his alter ego. Thus, the main conflict in the latter half of Breaking Bad isn’t between Walter and Skyler or Walter and Jesse, it’s between Walter and Heisenberg. But by the last shot of the finale, order hasn’t been put back into place—or rather, Walter’s order hasn’t. Heisenberg’s altered perception of reality and what constituted imbalance of order took over completely, not only for Walter but for Gilligan himself.
Walter White, the man with two children, died along with his brother-in-law in “Ozymandias.” The last two episodes of the series after “Ozymandias,” “Granite State” and “Felina,” feel like a very abrupt shift, no doubt in part AMC’s fault for cutting Gilligan’s episode order some years ago, and they don’t go over well. With Walter dying before Heisenberg in “Ozymandias,” the Campbell formula couldn’t have possibly extended itself in order to encompass the final two episodes. The show therefore took a turn towards a much more ancient story structure— Watercooler Journal
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tragedy by way of playwrights such as Sophocles. In Greek tragedy, catharsis is the goal, and a happy ending is decidedly not. The scene is set with upheaval, and the story is there to provide the main character’s death. The protagonist’s sacrifice restores balance in an imbalanced world and brings about pity and fear in the audience. Most importantly, audience members need to pity the hero so fully that they cannot rationalize his actions, while also fearing their consequences so that order can be preserved beyond theater doors. In a sense, Gilligan used Walter to incite pity and fear in the audience for years, as evidenced by the throngs of Breaking Bad fans defending “badass” Walter to the death on Twitter—they were justifying the pity and fear in their minds planted by Gilligan. Obviously, a show doesn’t need to fit into any one narrative formula to be creatively successful. More shows should try to break the rules like Breaking Bad, and I’m sure many more will. But due to either Gilligan’s unwillingness to stick to his guns and follow through with the Walter/Heisenberg showdown he’d been setting up or AMC’s cut to the episode order, Breaking Bad just missed being a truly brilliant novelistic show. I can’t wait to watch whatever Gilligan has coming up, and I’m sure he’ll surpass Breaking Bad in the future. For the time, it is a great example of how to create one of the best artistic endeavors in any medium and just miss sticking the ending.
image credits, in order: ©AMC/Lionsgate, via http://themoviemash.com ©AMC/Lionsgate, via http://breakingbad.wikia.com Watercooler Journal
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