Breaking Bad, Dostoevsky, Nihilism, and Marketplace Morality

ABSTRACT

From the perspective of the television series Breaking Bad (2008–2013), Walter White, its antihero, is not just an “angry middle-aged white guy”. He represents the repressed rage of countless ill-used Ph.Ds. This is why “he is the danger.” The cultural moment of Breaking Bad may serve for us in Siegfried Kracauer’s term as a “close-up shot or establishing shot.” The series is an index of Kracauer’s “law of levels.” White has lived his life according to what he thought was standard and decent conduct. His life has been adequate. He echoes Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich whose life “was most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” White also recalls Stavrogin from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Stavrogin condemns himself because he can only have been satisfied by himself (in both senses). He is more Mephistopheles than Faust; he is never out of hell because he will not accept the possibility of anything outside himself. Breaking Bad also reifies Carlo Ginzburg’s “estrangement.” The screens that we carry with us transmit endless meaninglessness. We are consumed by consumerism. Therefore, Walter White is not an antihero: He is the perfect hero for a world in which the marketplace alone determines value.

KEYWORDS:

• Dostoevsky
• Siegfried Kracauer
• Carlo Ginzburg
• estrangement
• rage
• media
• TV series
• Walter White
• morality
• Faust
• hero/antihero
• character and performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Kracauer, History, 134.

² Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 208, 189.

³ Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange,” 21.

⁴ Ibid., 19, 20, 21.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange,” passim.

⁷ Tolstoy, Death of Ivan Ilyich, 104.

⁸ Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange,” 9. He quotes from Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 10.18.

⁹ Minow, “Television and the Public Interest.”

¹⁰ The works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Fyodor Dostoevsky are indexes of anti-utilitarianism. See also Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs (1927); Jacques Ellul, La Technique: L’enjeu du siècle (1964); Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932); Granville Hicks, “Literary Opposition to Utilitarianism” (1937), or Friedrich Georg Jünger, Die Perfektion der Technik (1946), among many others.

¹¹ McGee, “Ethical Analysis of Corporate Bailouts.” An anti-utilitarian analysis.

¹² Visconti, The Damned.

¹³ Kafka, “Report to an Academy,” 177–90.

¹⁴ Nussbaum, “The Closure-Happy Breaking Bad Finale.”

¹⁵ Wagner, “Capitalist Nightmare.”

¹⁶ Gunn, “I Have a Character Issue.” Sentimental meditation over “real” issues in Breaking Bad’s popularity seems particularly disingenuous. See Bowlby, “Drugs, Death, Denial and Cancer Care.”

¹⁷ García-Martínez, Castrillo-Maortua, and Echart-Orús, “Moral Sympathy and the ‘Lucifer Effect’,” 388–402. Dozens of popular culture articles on the subject may be found by searching such online sites as The Huffpost, Vulture, and Salon.

¹⁸ Kracauer “The Mass Ornament,” 326.

¹⁹ Ibid., 327.

²⁰ Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 3–5.

²¹ Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama, 185–89. This passage from a later work than Mimesis is perhaps more accessible.

²² Balzac, Le Père Goriot, 250–51.

²³ Steiner, “Talent and Technology,” 32.

²⁴ Ibid., 30.

²⁵ Dostoevsky, The Possessed, 426.

²⁶ Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 3.

²⁷ Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.246.

²⁸ Kracauer, American Writings, 45.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was made possible by a grant from the Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd Center for Futuristic Studies at Prince Mohammad Bin University and the World Futures Studies Federation.

Notes on contributors

Thomas F. Connolly

Thomas F. Connolly is University Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University and a Fellow of the Center for Futuristic Studies, Saudi Arabia. He is the author of three books of cultural history and criticism and dozens of articles. A former Fulbright Senior Scholar, his book Good-bye Good Ol’ USA: What America Lost in World War II is forthcoming from McGraw-Hill/PMU Press.