Breaking Bad: The Character Development of Walter White and the connection to ideology in the show

Sarah Spellman

TV Criticism Blog #1

Topic: The character development of Walter White in Breaking Bad. How does this help us make sense of Breaking Bad? How are heroes and villains created? What values or ideologies do these characters embody?

Breaking. Bad. A show that is almost too painful to watch but at the same time I can’t look away. Interestingly enough, I never felt like it was “too painful” to watch until this last season. The gory deaths throughout the series were nothing compared to my favorite character’s slow but sure decent into the villain. The fact that the creators of the show were able to make me feel so many different emotions towards one character is nothing short of impressive.

Walter White’s character development through the five seasons of the show went through many stages. At the beginning, I found myself feeling terrible for this lower middle class, seemingly unhappy, cancer ridden man who’s brilliant mind seemed trapped inside a middle aged man’s body. When he started cooking Meth, I found myself constantly rationalizing his actions. “Well I mean, come ON guys…he does have cancer and just wants to pay for treatment…” When he watched Jesse’s girlfriend Jane die, I cringed, and then when he hired men to have Jesse killed, I lost it, but THEN when he told Jesse about Jane and made that gruesome call to Skylar berating her as a human in the last episode, I was irate. (I even screamed, “ I HATE YOU WALTER WHITE!” at the TV screen.) In that moment I saw a villain. I kept asking myself, was it worth it Walter? Doesn’t all of this defeat the purpose of why he did it in the first place? But Walter was way past this point. He was in too deep. His character had developed to the point where it wasn’t about his family anymore.

The New York Times explains his character development well stating, “In truth, though, his development over five seasons has been less a shocking transformation than a series of confirmations. Mr. Gilligan’s busy and inventive narrative machinery has provided plenty of cleverly executed surprises, but these have all served to reveal the Walter White who was there all along. The sides of his personality — sociopath and family man, scientist and killer, rational being and creature of impulse, entrepreneur and loser — are not necessarily as contradictory as we might have supposed.” (Scott) The thought of Walt being a villain all along is a hard pill to swallow for the viewers.

As he Walter puts it, He was in “the empire business”, and the money had gotten to his ego in this worst way possible. This was extremely evident when he hired men to kill his beloved partner Jesse, who was the one person he would never betray. It was also shown when Jesse was working with DEA agent (aka Walt’s brother-in-law) Hank, and he knew the one thing Walter would die to protect- his money. The Atlantic, explains his decent into a money crazed villain well, saying, “Currency certainly defines each of Walter's relationships, from the hypothetical $130 million with which he attempts to bribe Jesse, to the money laundering that has turned his marriage with Skyler into an unpleasant business partnership, and even his problematic relationship with Walter Jr., which Walter attempted to fix by buying him a car.” (Meslow)

How confusing of a show is Breaking Bad in reference to values and ideologies? Let me tell you, extremely confusing. His value he had for his family was the reason he started cooking Meth in the first place, but viewers everywhere saw those family values slowly diminish as the series went on. Walt was no longer in it to make money for his family and cancer treatment, he was a bonafide drug lord in it to win it all. But then as we get closer to the last episode we see some of his values return to his family.

When Walt offers up his 80 million to the Nazi’s so that they don’t kill Hank, I ask myself “so is he a bad guy after all?!” If he is willing to give up his money for his family, then is his moral compass suddenly aligned again? And then, when I find out in the latest episode that his berating phone call to Skylar was actually all staged on his part to get Skylar sympathy with the courts since he knew the cops were listening in, I am once again thrown into a daze of confusion on if Walter White is a villain or not. He has murdered partners, cheated friends and family, watched innocent people die, and sold out his one true partner Jesse. Yet, in this last episode, his only dying mission is to find a way to get his money to family before he dies. Currently doing chemotherapy in an abandoned shack in middle-of-nowhere New Hampshire for the sole reason to stay alive to get money to Skylar and his family. If he was a money-hungry villain, wouldn’t he have just taken his money and ran? If he were a villain, would he have left the daughter he loves at a fire station to be returned to her mother? This is what makes Breaking Bad the most brilliant TV show currently on television. Walter White’s character development may confuse us but it brings out a whole new angle and perspective that, in my opinion, a show has never done before.

Breaking Bad’s ideological basis my consist of many different angles including the family man ideology and villain ideology, but The Atlantic explains a new ideological angle I had not thought of previously. “But the series is nonetheless a sustained and stringent critique of entrepreneurial ideology in the form of an unsparing character study. Walter is almost as good at self-justification as he is at cooking meth, and over the course of the series, he has not hesitated to give high-minded reasons for his lowest actions.” (Meslow) I had never heard of “entrepreneurial ideology” until I read this article, which made me wonder how differently the viewers see Walter White and ideology within the show. How do we explain the infamous Walter White- an entrepreneur, a villain, a hero, a murderer, a family man, a scientist, a sociopath? I guess we will only find out on the upcoming season finale this Sunday.

Works Cited

Meslow, Scott. "The Big Secret of 'Breaking Bad': Walter White  

Was Always a Bad Guy." The Atlantic. N.p., 31 Aug. 2013. Web. 20 Sept. 2013.

Scott, A. O. "Bad in the Bones: How Walter White Found His

Inner Sociopath." The New York Times. Http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/arts/television/how-walter-white-found-his-inner-sociopath.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, 24 July 2013. Web. 20 Sept. 2013.

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