Running Between the Raindrops

Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013) had concluded its run by the time I saw it on disc.  My response on viewing the first season largely echoes the many critical praises already given the show.  Breaking Bad is very strong, provocative television drama.

II.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) once had the scientific talent to study chemistry at the graduate level. Despite that talent, he has not pursued an academic or research career. Instead, we get the feeling that he has underachieved, in becoming a high-school chemistry teacher.  At his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives with his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and their teenage son, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte).  Throughout this expository phase of the show, Cranston plays White to be a vaguely timid man, quietly living out the hand that life has dealt him.

The orderly pattern of White's existence is suddenly shattered when he receives the diagnosis around his 50th birthday that he has inoperable lung cancer.  As might be expected, fear and panic seize White.  But once the shock starts to wear off, White's sense of duty to his family asserts itself.  How are they going to survive financially after the cancer kills White?  White needs money, lots of it, and he needs it fast.  He settles on a criminal plan:  to make and sell methamphetamine with a former student of his, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).  Complications follow of course, and these are often related with a dark comic tone by the show.

III.

As Walter and Jesse begin their meth operation, our sympathies have been skillfully played by the show to be on White's side.  After all, his actions are being motivated by a commendable duty to care for his family - no?

But before White knows it, the moral math turns exponential.  He and Pinkman are forced to kill a couple of greedy meth-distributors. (The scene in which White has to kill the one distributor is especially powerful, with its pathetic and wrenching dramatization.) As the chemist of the team, White had envisioned keeping his hands clean of additional criminality. All of that is shown as having been naive in the extreme, for now White has very real blood on his hands.  Curiously though, as White's situational criminality increases and he keeps getting away with it, it lends him an unsettling vigour.  When his wife asks him, for example, why their public-indecency sex in their car is so good, he replies, "because it's illegal".

IV.

The narrative of Breaking Bad is very much in the noir tradition. And in noir, immoral means, even for a moral end, usually lead to ruin or doom.  I have four seasons of the show still to watch, but already I can see the outlines of a bleak destiny for Walter White.  Call it a bad feeling.