I’m picking out this one line from your excellent post to highlight, because I believe that the “evil” that is dissected and displayed in this series–more effectively than in any other, I think–is the human propensity to rationalize.
Walter White was clearly a prideful and cold self-justifier from the beginning of the series (in other words, he didn’t become one–he never really had any empathetic connection with other people. Look at his paternalistic early-in-the-series interactions with both his son and his wife, for example). What he did become was someone who could justify conduct that, increasingly, was seriously harmful to others.
From his first decision to cook meth, he could justify producing a substance that ruined lives–on the basis that people have a right to decide to ruin their own lives by becoming meth users. It wasn’t Walter’s responsibility, if that’s what those people wanted!
Then he moved on to murders in immediate defense of his own or his partner’s lives, then to murder to avoid detection, then to murder to make more money. Murder-for-profit isn’t easy to rationalize, but Walt managed it–he was Doing it For His Family.
For all the death and destruction he caused, he still managed to die with a smile on his face—because he genuinely felt righteous about his choices. His choices made him feel “alive.” He liked doing what he did and he was good at it–so to his mind, that made him right.
*Breaking Bad *is an amazing achievement in shining a harsh light on this talent for self-justification…that we all possess, to one degree or another.
Vince Gilligan has said that one of the two points to Breaking Bad was that actions have consequences.
I always felt that portraying Walter’s Scarface-Chips transformation as such a gradual slide into hell was intended to underscore this point. Maybe, that actions have consequences beyond what we can know? FWIW, Gilligan’s other point was the judgment of God.
Walter could rationalize his decision to go into the meth biz until the cows come home - “I’m only selling a product people want”, etc. - but once the decision was made, Walter was forced into associating with people who would inevitably do truly horrific things to protect their interests. This forced him to sink or swim in that shark cage.
So by implication, the message (again, as expressed by Gilligan) was that once Walter broke bad, it was inevitable that he either end up a monster or a bullet-riddled corpse. So kids, don’t mess with meth.
In long-winded reply to the OP, it’s possible that there’s no single act signifying Walter as a monster.
Walt is a silver tongue snake, Mike prefers to cut through the bullshit. Walt isn’t saying he wants to back out of the plan, but rather he’s rebuking Mike for stating the plain truth before he’s had a chance to come up with a persuasive rationalization. I’m confident that had Jesse not come up with a non-murderous plan, Walt would have done his damnedest to convince Jesse that either the engineers were fair game or that they had no choice for some reason or another.
What a brilliant discussion - my compliments to all.
I was shocked when Walter watched Jane die. Understood it but…a chilling moment.
The event which finally persuaded me Walter had really broken bad was when the young boy was killed by Todd at the train heist. That was horrible. Yet Walter seemed to shrug and move ahead. I thought he and Jesse would kill Todd very soon after but nope…
Some of you are forgetting something about Jane’s death that, to me, is a KEY point.
At the start of that scene, Jane is actually on her side…it’s WALT’S FAULT that she falls onto her back. When he shakes Jesse (he does this first), Jane falls away from her side position onto her back.
That clinches it for me. Sure, Jane might have still puked, but she would have been on her side, had it not been for Walt. He’s the one that put Jane on her back and then he did nothing to help when she started choking because of it.
His actions DID lead to her death, there was no “standing back and not doing a thing”, which I agree could be argued as doing nothing wrong, technically. That wasn’t the case here, though. His actions lead to her death.
And don’t start with the “She may still have died anyway”. She knew the risks (She even told Jesse to sleep on his side earlier) and she was safeguarding against them,…at least until Walt came along.
I agree with this. One of the things I love about the antihero genre is what is says about our own capability of rationalizing our own violations of the Golden Rule. We are all the Good Guys in our own play, and the things we want are our justification for our actions.
The Walter Whites and the Stringer Bells and the Don Drapers and the Vic Mackeys should remind us that, at any given point, we all lie somewhere on the line between good and evil – And it is* at our peril* that we try to define evil or good as what a person is, rather than as what that person does.
Although it is true that Walt caused Jane to roll onto her back (and portraying this was a very deliberate decision made by Gilligan and the writers), you can see the moment on his face the moment she begins to choke – he instinctively tenses as if he is about to act, then you can see his muscles relax as he realizes what her death means for himself and for his relationship with Jesse. Jane dying will mean that he never has to worry that she will come back at him looking for more money. It will mean that Jesse is free from Jane’s influence (in WW’s own mind, he cares about Jesse like a son, though not enough to spare him the emotional devastation of waking up in the morning next to his dead lover). A couple of frames and it is over. Walter has, for the first time (and just for a moment), completely become Heisenberg, rather than just putting on a mask for appearances.
Yeah, I remember that at first Walt instinctively starts to help Jane. But then you can see his mind working and realizing that all he has to do is nothing and a major problem is eliminated. And since everything is all about him in his world, I doubt he ever considered the effect it would have on Jesse.
Thanks for that. I searched in vain for the interview (or interviews) from which the two purported Gilligan quotes might have come.
Anyone have anything? The New Statesman piece doesn’t offer any sourcing of the quotes, and all other appearances of the quotes online seem to refer to this very same New Statesman piece (the one to which F. U. linked). Closed loop.
Surely the New Statesman writer didn’t simply make these up—but from where do they come?
You might be joking, but this is pretty much how I feel about it.
If Walt was a responsible and moral individual, he’d have spent the $100/month that a million-dollar term life policy would have cost him. Son and wife cared for, problem solved.
But he’s lived his life with his head up his ass and instead of living with the consequences of his bad decisions, he makes more bad decisions that result in everyone else paying the price.
I can’t find a source googling. I am almost certain that I heard Vince Gilligan say these things in an interview on one of the BB DVD’s, either in an audio commentary or a “making of” piece. I will keep looking.
The “judgement of God” quote comes from this interview Gilligan did with Alan Sepinwall after the S2 finale. Note that it is Sepinwall who uses the term “judgement” referring to the plane crash, and Gilligan runs with the metaphor in his answer:
Walter White was a villain the moment he decided to cook methamphetamine to provide for his family. It isn’t due to the morality of dealing - you can take a libertarian stance on that like Gale did. The problem is that it was illegal and whether or not you agree it should be illegal it put his family in bad position. He risked his family. This whole show he tries selling us this idea that he is doing this for his family. In the end isn’t that what he lost? His family is provided for (those that survive) but how can you call that a family anymore? He was a smart enough man to know things couldn’t end well. He was gambling with his family. Villain.
I think one of the main points of the show is that Walt was making poor decisions right from the very beginning, and the entire arc was him narrowly escaping the deserved punishment for those decisions right up to the very end.
It became crystal clear when he let Jane die, but after that you could see it all the way back to the start. Letting/making your son drink till he pukes? Refusing a cush job with benefits because of pride?
Like dracoi said, what a truly responsible person does, one who loves and cares for the well-being of their family, is buy a fucking life insurance policy. The moment he turned down the job/money and went back for a second cook he was lost, IMO.
Murdering Gale did it for me, while I was watching it. Before, even if he didn’t have to kill people, they were always characters I didn’t like. Even Jane was an annoying manipulative character, though not evil per se.
But Gale was an awesome, loveable character I wanted to see more of, and I was pissed at Walt for killing him after he had so little screen time. Also, it was at the end of the 3rd season, which for symmetrical reasons made me think “this is the beginning of the downhill slide”.
But looking back after watching the show, yeah, Walt was evil all along. The show was less of a “transformation” show and more of a “realization”. Circumstances and choices can reveal how a person fundamentally was all along.
Walt was always a pride-filled, arrogant ass. However, it could be argued that these traits, while unpleasant, do not translate into evil until he actually does evil stuff. It is in the doing that one is “transformed”.
The genius of the show is in demonstrating how one guy, through rationalizing one bad decision after another, slides into the abyss. He was always an asshole, but it is through his acts that he becomes evil.
Edit: I realize I didn’t answer the question. To me, a turning point was when he intimidated those other meth dudes in the parking lot - it was then that you could really see he was reveling in his role as a badass, and that his rationalizations were just that.
This is a good point. I said earlier that the moment Jane began to choke, when he realized that it would be to his advantage *not *to save her, was the first moment that Walter White actually *became *Heisenberg, rather than just putting on the mask.
But this moment in the parking lot of the home improvement store was similar to that – when he approached those two and told them to stay out of his territory, it didn’t come across as WW affecting a persona in order to intimidate them – to me that was the same guy we saw throughout the first half of season 5, the guy who killed Gus Fring, the “say my name” guy.
Of course I still say that the guy who decided to go on the ride-along to see what a meth lab looks like, and the guy who blackmailed Jesse to partner with him by threatening to finger him as Cap’n Cook, *that *guy was already a bad guy.