If a man without a soul falls in the desert, will anyone hear?
Walter White fell tonight in the New Mexico desert. But this was not the fall that took our breath away, that left us stunned and without words. Probably we knew already the fate of this story’s greatest hero. As Uncle Jack said, “Sorry, Man. There’s no scenario where this guy lives.”
We didn’t hear the fall of Walter White. We didn’t see it, we didn’t acknowledge or understand it, so consuming and utterly unthinkable was the murder of Assistant Special Agent in Charge Henry R. “Hank” Schrader.
But it is Walter’s fall that caused Hank’s assassination, that destroyed Jesse, that severed every bond he used to have with his wife, his son, and his daughter. “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings! Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and despair.” Ozymandias, of course, is a grand fiction, a self-deception to which all tyrants succumb. Twenty-two years ago we saw the statues of Stalin fall to the ground. Sixty-eight years ago, amidst the bombed out ruins of Berlin, the statues of Hitler came tumbling down. Tonight a man with stone-cold heart fell in the desert, and we did not hear.
Sociopathic Professionals
The Shootout scene last week was the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the greatest-ever episode of Breaking Bad. Masters theses will be written on this scene. I will take a close look at the Shootout in Breaking Blue, but for now I want to point out a few aspects of the segment that support the idea that the fall of stone-cold Walter White was the cause of every instant of misery and death we experienced over the past two episodes.
Review the Shootout and take a good look at the face of Todd Alquist. He shows practically no emotion. “Yeah, but, Pearson, Todd is played by this new, inexperienced actor: Jesse Plemons. He’s just not a good actor yet, that’s all.” Maybe. But take a look at the other Nazis now, too. What do you see?
We expect gunfights to be emotional, so the passionless nature of the Shootout is disorienting. But cold, systematic killing is nothing new to Uncle Jack and his fellow sociopaths. Recall the scene from Episode 5.10 when Jack took a puff on his cigarette just before putting a bullet in Declan’s head.
Tonight, when Jack stood behind Jesse and pointed a gun to his head, he looked over at Walter and asked, “Good to go?” He might as well have been asking about the placement of a potted plant—though such an inquiry likely would have carried greater emotional content than the matter-of-fact request to blow Jesse’s brains out.
The emotional sterility of the Shootout and aftermath is not the only disorienting aspect of the scene. We saw Kenny pump several dozen rounds in the general direction of Hank and Gomez. Then Hank stood up and got off a dozen rounds. All the while machine guns, rifles, and handguns were pointed at Hank, getting off round after round. He just kept on firing, as if alone on the shooting range, not a care in the world. What was up with that?
Several commentators on last week’s episode thought the inordinate length of the gunfight—without a single casualty—was a mistake on the part of director and editors. Some counted the gun battle a major flaw in an otherwise well-executed episode. They rushed it in editing, showed too many bullet dings, prolonged the shootout to ramp up suspense, and so on.
No. Sorry. The scene was not rushed in editing, nor was it artificially prolonged. It depicted exactly what it had to show, which was the true identity of Jack and his goons and their true relation to Walter.
If we didn’t have the mechanical rat-a-tat-tat of pistols, machine guns, rifles, and handguns in this scene, if could not call upon a half dozen other important visual clues, we could simply shrug our shoulders and say, “They’re neo-Nazis. Sociopaths. They don’t show emotion when they’re killing because they’re heartless white supremacists. It’s kind of like they’re just doing their job. They’re professionals.”
But accompanying the passionless expressions of these hired thugs we have the mechanical action of several hundred bullets fired one after another. There are a lot of other things going on, but we don’t even need to discuss those to figure out what’s really going on in the gun battle scene.
Jack is not Walter’s hired gun. It seemed like he was. When Walter called Todd and said, “I think I might have another job for your uncle,” Todd said, “Oh, okay…which jail, how many targets?” It was like Todd was taking Walter’s breakfast order. It was just another routine request for mercenary work, and Jack was Walter’s man for the job. Jack had done this before, after all, and we had no reason to believe he wouldn’t do it again. So Walter’s request to kill Jesse fit perfectly into Jack’s position as hired assassin. When Walter called Jack from the desert, the goons didn’t waste any time. While Jack spoke they were putting on bulletproof vests, grabbing rifles and checking cartridges. They were ready to jump at Walter’s command, as they always had been.
Seconds later, when Walter told Jack to stand down, we had no reason to believe Jack would disobey. Jack’s only connection to Walter was weak. Lydia wanted blue meth, which Jack was willing to supply. “We’ll just throw in some food coloring.” Problem solved. Even if the solution was not to Lydia’s liking, it didn’t really matter to Jack.
So why did Jack disobey? If he wasn’t a slave to Lydia’s desire for blue product of higher percentage quality, why did he act on his own initiative to come out to the desert even after Walter told him to stand down?
The reason that our calculations don’t add up is that they can’t. If we assume that Jack was demonstrating extraordinary care about the wellbeing of Walter, or immediately thought Walter’s coordinates indicated the X on a treasure map, we’re left feeling cheated. We feel there must be more to it. In fact, there was more to this than Jack’s sudden ability to think for himself. He wasn’t acting on his own at all.
Jack was an agent.
He put a bullet in Hank’s head, but Hank cannot die, as we discussed last week. The most significant result of Jack’s appearance at To’hajiilee was not Hank’s death but Walter’s fall. But really, it was the fall that caused Jack’s appearance, which is counter-intuitive because any such connection violates the rules of cause and effect. But that’s okay in this instance, because Jack’s boss—the entity for which he was agent—was not Walter, but the most important entity in Breaking Bad: Jack was the agent of the Universe.
For now I’m just throwing out the idea. But it’s more than just an idea. We have a lot more evidence to support Jack’s true identity, as those who’ve read the last several essays know. I’ve been indicating for several weeks now that Jack would become the gruesome agent of the Breaking Bad Universe. The Shootout scene was rich with proofs of Jack’s appointment as dark angel, but connecting all the pieces will be the work of many essays.
The Fall of Ozymandias
You’ve already seen the above image. Walter had to fall just so. I would not be surprised to learn that Vince Gilligan himself was present for the execution of this scene, because it was essential that Walter not fall as a human being, but as a statue.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:--
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
Yes, the sculptor well those passions read, and we see them, stamped on this lifeless, soulless thing—on this colossal wreck that used to be a man. Shelly’s 1818 poem will never be forgotten, and our grandchildren’s grandchildren will know of two television programs from the early 21st century that changed the world of cinematic entertainment. I have been privileged to offer essays on both of them.
We know of many recent instances of Ozymandias, the King of Kings who thought himself mightier than mighty.
Many will question the placement of Jesús Malverde with the likes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Muammar Gaddafi, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin. After all, millions of people in Mexico literally worship Jesús Malverde, the so-called ‘Saint of Drug Lords’. But he is no less an image of Ozymandias than any of the others in this family portrait of demons of the 20th century. Many millions in 1930s Germany worshipped Hitler, too. That fact doesn’t make him any less of a monster.
But the roots of Heisenberg extend back much earlier than Jesús Malverde, earlier still than Shelley’s 200-year-old poem. We don’t even need to make historical associations at all. We know in our gut that someone like Heisenberg is antithetical to our humanity. But examining the social, cultural, and historical place of Ozymandias is essential to our deeper enjoyment of Breaking Bad. The best place to begin our inquiry is 3400 years ago, in ancient Egypt.
My Name is Agamemnon, King of Kings
The two statues above depict Agamemnon, King of Mycenae (Greece) in the 12th century B.C. Since these two enormous statues stand not in Greece but in Thebes, Egypt, you may wonder how I can make such a strange statement. Well, I have it on good authority. We can be certain of the statues’ identity because when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. he told us whom the statues commemorated. In fact, to this day they’re called the Colossi of Memnon.
They were constructed around 1300 B.C., right about the time that Agamemnon ruled in Mycenae. The most careful modern dating techniques have confirmed the statues’ age. So Alexander the Great had to be right about the statues. Right?
It probably never occurred to Alexander or his men that 12th century Egyptian masons would not have spent 15 years constructing beautifully carved statues in tribute to figures from Greek mythology. In fact, the statues were commissioned in memory of Amenhotep III, Pharaoh of Egypt from 1391 to 1353 B.C., the ninth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty.
We can probably forgive Alexander his cultural hubris. Many in modern times are so ignorant of other cultures and histories and so enamored of their own that they make blunders no less sweeping and ludicrous than Alexander’s. I feel the awful truth of this, having made a fool of myself on several occasions.
But the larger issue, and the one that relates to Breaking Bad, is the fact that Alexander was ignorant of his own culture. You see, Homer didn’t uphold King Agamemnon as a paragon of virtue. If anyone had said, in response to Homer’s nearly month-long recitation of his tale of the Trojan War, “Hey, I’m going to erect a statue in memory of Agamemnon,” Homer may well have shed tears at the unbelievable stupidity of his listeners. “Agamemnon was King of the Mycenaeans,” Homer might have said, “but he was the worst tyrant we have ever suffered.” It was the kind of stupidity and arrogance that Alexander showed in Egypt that Homer had fought valiantly to prevent when he strung together several tales of the Trojan War into the epic poem known as Iliad.
Homer understood well the human tendency to accept and even celebrate the foibles of others, especially if those others enjoy positions of power, wealth, or social standing. So he began the Iliad with the striking image of a lowly soldier, Achilles, reading the riot act to the exalted king, Agamemnon:
Then looking darkly at [Agamemnon] Achilleus of the swift feet spoke: ‘O wrapped in shamelessness, with your mind forever on profit, How shall any one of the Achaians readily obey you?
By the beginning of Odyssey, Agamemnon had been murdered (Odyssey, Book 3) but Achilles, as we discussed last week, lived forever. Agamemnon was assassinated, at least in part, for dragging the Greek world into a war against the Trojans—all to satisfy his own lust for power and to allow his brother to save face over having lost beautiful Helen to the Trojans.
The revolutionary idea of the Iliad is that everyone in society is called to a life of virtue and honor. When a leader strays into dishonor, it is up to us—even the least powerful among us—to stand up to that leader and correct him. In Homer’s view there really are no ‘lowly’ citizens, for everyone who lives honorably is as worthy of poem and song as the most exalted king.
The flip side of the Iliad is the seductive power of lust for personal wealth and glory—‘shamelessness’ and a ‘mind forever on profit’, as Achilles put it. Achilles, not Agamemnon, represented the Greek ideal of honor. Achilles is the perfection of Greece.
My Name is Heisenberg, King of Kings
Walter: I’m the Cook. I’m the man who killed Gus Fring.
Declan: That’s bullshit. The cartel got Fring.
Walter: You sure?
Declan: [No response]
Walter: That’s right. Now: Say my name.
Declan: You’re Heisenberg.
Walter: You’re goddam right.
—Breaking Bad, Episode 5.07, “Say My Name”
Flagrant dishonor committed by those of wealth or authority is not something we can ignore or consider outside our sphere of consciousness. We cannot relegate the acts of dishonorable women and men to the periphery of our awareness because their putrid thoughts contaminate our lives. When Walter White goes down he takes dozens of people down with him. Because he is a nexus of wealth, power, and influence, he corrupts as surely as Agamemnon and Hitler and Pol Pot. Breaking Bad is not an episode of Law and Order, where there’s just one bad guy and everyone else is untainted and perfect in every way, smelling of lilacs and roses. No, Breaking Bad took great pains to show the myriad of Walter White’s intimate connections and now we see the day of reckoning affects everyone around him. Why did Hank feel the urge to gloat, to take precious seconds to express to Walter his glee in surpassing him? Why did he call Marie to brag? Why didn’t he contact the Navajo Tribal Police first?
Why was Skyler seduced by 80 million dollars? Why didn’t she report Walter to the police?
Why did Jesse succumb to dreams of luxury and wealth? Why didn’t he do what he knew to be right?
We could ask the same types of questions of everyone who has fallen under Heisenberg’s spell. The answer is the same for each inquiry. Those closest to Heisenberg saw in him someone to be bested, emulated, or adored. Heisenberg is not an independent entity, he affects and brings into his unholy web everyone around him. As Homer feared of those under Agamemnon’s sway, Heisenberg corrupted everyone with whom he came into contact.
My Name is ASAC Schrader
He is no king, but he is without question the noblest of warriors. His name will outlive Walter’s. If Hank’s statue should fall, it will be repaired, restored to its place of honor.
Walter offered Jack 80 million dollars in exchange for his brother-in-law’s life.
Jack: What do you think, Fed? Would you take that deal?
Walt: It’s Hank. His name is Hank.
Jack: How about it, Hank? Should I let you go?
Hank: My name is ASAC Schrader. And you can go fuck yourself.
Walter thought 80 million dollars was enough, that it was something for which Jack would accept any risk. More importantly, it was such a vast amount of money that it surpassed the value of a man’s dignity and human worth. Hank would beg, Walter knew. Hank was no ‘Fed’, after all. He was just a man, like any of us. Achilles is the perfection of Greece. Jack referred to Hank as ‘Fed’—agent of the Federal Government of the United States of America. “No, you have that wrong,” Walter said. “He’s not ‘Fed’, he’s family first. He’s Hank.” He’s just like any of us.
But Walter was the one who had it all wrong. Hank was not his brother-in-law first. Jack knew Hank better than anyone else: He is Fed. He is the federal agent any of us would like to believe we’d have the courage to be. He’s no ordinary man, but he is the man any of us could be. Hank was not perfect. Like Achilles, he struggled with virtue and vice, honor and disgrace. He flirted with taking that which was not his—in days of inner conflict and turmoil, symbolized in his appropriation of Marie’s purple and violet shirts. But he died perfectly, heroically, vested in orange, an exemplar not only of the DEA, but of all of us. In his death, Hank Schrader is the perfection of America.
My Name is Skyler Heisenberg
This is visual poetry of such breathtaking majesty we could spend hours contemplating the meaning of the five simple elements perfectly arranged in this chilling tableau. Was there a viewer anyone in the country who at this moment in the episode was not shouting, “Pick up the phone, Skyler! Call the police!” This scene will be known as Skyler’s Choice in film theory texts. But the significance of the scene extends far beyond the question of Knife or Phone. The knife here is not a symbol of power, it is a symbol of personal vanity. It is the physical expression of the Heisenberg ideal of mastering a situation without assistance.
The phone is a symbol of surrender of self to a greater good. It is the instrument of surrender of personal vanity. It is the instrument of personal salvation. In drawing the knife from the block, Skyler was asserting her belief that she could control the situation herself. It’s hard to tell in the melee that followed, but Junior implored first his mother and then his father to “Stop it!” By shouting the same command to both parents he was proclaiming his understanding that each of them had succumbed to evil. It was finally Junior, the only non-Heisenberg in the house, who took the responsible action of calling the police.
Just a year ago, Skyler would not have seen the knives. She would have seen only the telephone. More than likely, Mrs. Heisenberg tonight didn’t see the telephone, so deep was the poisoning of her soul by the monster with whom she shared a house.
Old Skyler in the portrait on the wall and New Skyler walking toward the Choice define an apposition of life (blue) and death (red) reflected in the parallel but reverse juxtaposition of knives (death) and fruit (life). From our perspective as observers we see Knife v. Phone as a Choice. But from within the context of Sky Blue (Old) Skyler, there are no knives on the countertop, there’s only a telephone, because the knives are off-limits—‘forbidden fruit’, if you will. If Old Skyler knew a murderer was in her house she would not even think of the knives, she would grab the phone.
From within the context of White (New, infused with Heisenberg pride) Skyler, there is no telephone on the countertop, there are only knives, and the best one is the deadliest one. The phone is as useless to her in the present emergency as the bowl of fruit.
The Lone and Level Sands
How could it have come to this? How could Heisenberg have severed every connection to the family for which he was willing to sacrifice the last dollar of his ill-gotten wealth? The answer is difficult to understand, but we saw the truth of it play out in the life of Walter’s adopted son, Jesse. The answer is simple and very sad: Walter White never had a family.
Many commentators have noted the seemingly strange fact that Walter gave Jesse far more attention and ‘love’ than he showed his biological son. That Walter thought of Jesse as his son was clear as early as the first episodes of Season One. The strangeness of his adoption came to light in Episode 4.10. Junior, speaking of his new car, said, “It drives great.” Walter, on the edge of sleep, replied, “That’s good, Jesse.”
But Jesse was Walter’s surrogate son only as long as he blindly carried out Walter’s will. As soon as he demonstrated the ability to think on his own, Walter rejected him utterly, calling Uncle Jack to order Jesse’s murder.
Walter was, indeed, closer to Jesse than he was to his biological son. So estranged was he from his own daughter that she didn’t recognize him as her father. “Mama,” she cried at the rest room changing station. In Holly, Walter thought he had the one person in the world who could never betray him. But her calls for “Mama” were the most powerful indicators of the extremity of Walter’s fall. He has no brother-in-law, no sister-in-law, no wife, no son. At one time or another he created false connections to all of them, but he never even bothered to create connections with his biological daughter. By the end of the episode he had lost every connection he ever had.
Pathos
He stands on the outside looking in, isolated from the world of human beings. He wishes he could enter, but his nature forbids it. He is in every sense hideous to us.
There is deep pathos in the second to last scene of tonight’s episode. Walter used every fiber of his intellect to design the perfect alibi for Skyler. He knew the police were standing right next to her, listening and recording. So he parodied a Skyler that never was, a Skyler who rejected Heisenberg at every turn, a Skyler who was completely innocent. “What the hell do you know about [my illegal work] anyway? Nothing! I built this. Me. Me alone. Nobody else.” But the last bit was ingenious. Walter knew his crimes were so great that the entire weight of United States law enforcement would be mobilized against him. But a greater enemy remained: Uncle Jack. So Walter added this critical line to his recorded message: “Toe the line. Or you will end up like Hank.” The intention was to divert DEA and FBI attention away from Uncle Jack so that the neo-Nazi goons would not seek out and murder Skyler.
There is some small part of Walter that shares in our humanity. Even on the run, when he could be felled by FBI or Nazi bullets coming at him from any direction, he tries to keep his family out of harm’s way. I don’t know that I’ve ever read in a novel or witnessed on film such a twisted, profound, utterly compelling portrait of a self-made Frankenstein’s Monster. We wish to reach out to the compassionate, loving part of him, but he has so utterly divorced himself from everything human that his redemption is impossible.
Gazing on the colossal wreck that was once a man, we see with sad eyes the lone and level sands that stretch far away. Somehow, wrapped as he is in shamelessness, we look on Ozymandias, and we mourn.
