Walter White(ness) lashes out: Breaking Bad and male victimage

ABSTRACT

This essay situates the television show Breaking Bad (BB) and its critical reception in the context of American politics following the economic and political events of 2008. Reading the show as an allegory, I demonstrate that it offered a pathway for viewers to maintain investments and commitments to a toxic, white masculinity threatened by 2008’s economic and political dislocations. Taking the show up for its capacity to allegorize the human experience, Breaking Bad’s critically acclaimed status among viewers from widely divergent political positions suggests that the investment in raced and gendered ideas of individual freedom crosses partisan lines, indicating that American national identity and white masculinity share a mutually sustaining incoherence. Understanding the cultural roots of American victimage evident in post-2008 America helps explain how BB distinguished itself from similar masculine “anti-hero” dramas.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• masculinity
• victimage
• financial crisis
• Breaking Bad

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America conference in Philadelphia. Thanks to editors Robert Brookey, Peter Decherney, and Katherine Sender, to their editorial assistants Piotr Szpunar and Zeyu Zhang, and two very helpful anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to comments on earlier versions of this essay from Caitlin Bruce, Johanna Hartelius, Calum Matheson, Peter Odell Campbell, Ian Hill, and Olga Kuchinskaya. Finally, thanks to Amber Kelsie and Shanara Reid-Brinkley for pushing me to think more about the relationship between race and American national identity.

Notes on contributor

Paul Elliott Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Deliberation and Civic Life in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh.

ORCiD

Paul Elliott Johnson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2989-5939