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by justdrew » Thu Oct 03, 2013 6:58 pm
by smiths » Thu Oct 03, 2013 8:16 pm
by Carol Newquist » Mon Oct 07, 2013 7:32 am
Walter White: Jesus Christ, Superstar
In this last run of episodes, the smart set of critics have basically competed with each other over how much they hate Walter White—and how stupid anyone who doesn’t hate Walter White is. “How dare you silly people on the Internet defend Walt? He’s evil!” “He’s irredeemably evil!” “He’s super-duper monstrous!” “He’s going to kill all the characters and rape their corpses because he’s EVIL EVIL EVIL.” You get the idea.
So how did Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad’s showrunner, close it out? He trolled them all as hard as he possibly could.
He made Walter White Jesus Christ.
Four points:
1. Walter, while checking out the massive manse of his billionaire buddies—who the smart set all kind of thought Walt was on the path to murder—looks out the a massive window and notes that they must have a great view of the Sangre de Cristo, a mountain chain whose name translates to “The Blood of Christ”;
2. Walter, while setting up the gun with which he ruins the Aryan Brotherhood’s business, hurts his hand and grasps his palm in pain;
3. Walter, while saving Jesse’s life, suffers a mortal wound on his side, right under his right breast;
4. Walter, while dying, collapses to the ground, arms spread to the side, in the figure of the cross.*
Walter White spent the entirety of that episode sacrificing himself to save the people he loved: his wife, his kids, his surrogate son Jesse. He rid himself of his earthly possessions and made peace with those who had wronged him and those he had wronged (one way or another) so as to prepare himself for the afterlife. His business complete, he was ready to ascend.
I wonder if Gilligan was sitting there laughing to himself, watching all the critics talk about how irredeemably awful Walter White is. I wonder if he was sitting there, laughing, because of his Catholic sensibility. I wonder if he was sitting there, laughing, because he feels everyone is redeemable.
I’m sure there will be much said tonight and tomorrow about Breaking Bad’s finale. For my part, it’s the best conclusion of a great TV show since The Shield, another show deeply concerned with original sin and the way in which it informs the behavior, and redemption (or lack thereof), of its main character. But I’ll let others handle that.
For now, all I want to leave you with is this: Walter White redeemed himself. And it’s going to drive a ton of people nuts.
*I also think Vince Gilligan and company were trolling the hell out of the creators of Lost, who ended their show on a much less satisfying note by doing essentially the same thing that Breaking Bad did. The camera, resting above Walt, pulls back and up as he dies. It’s the exact same shot that Lost used to end that show, with Dr. Jack in the position of Walt.
by Col Quisp » Mon Oct 07, 2013 2:39 pm
by justdrew » Mon Oct 07, 2013 10:42 pm
by waugs » Tue Oct 08, 2013 12:16 am
justdrew » Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:42 pm wrote:it's interesting, but there's absolutely ZERO talk in the show about WHY it's wrong to make meth. ZERO. No one even gives a shit. How many end-users lives were ruined or lost? Obviously they didn't want to get preachy and be all "drugs are bad em'kay?" but it wouldn't have ruined things to somehow work in some of the end-users of the product. Well, I guess there was one in season 1 or 2 briefly..
by smiths » Tue Oct 08, 2013 3:37 am
by justdrew » Tue Oct 08, 2013 4:00 am
by Carol Newquist » Tue Oct 08, 2013 7:08 am
Once upon a time and not that long ago, Walt would have been working on an orbital colony or moon base or undersea city, or bringing better living through chemistry to the developing world, quite plausibly in the year 2013.
by Carol Newquist » Tue Oct 08, 2013 7:23 am
Cold Evil: Technology and Modern Ethics
II. The Enigma of Modern Evil
For many of us during the Vietnam War era there was little confusion about ethics or evil. “Evil” was no enigma or dilemma; it seemed easy to recognize. We saw as evil the greed of Wall Street and its neo-colonialist drive to maintain control of Third World resources. Evil was clearly represented in what we regarded as the rapacious U.S. military from General Westmoreland (whose name we always pronounced “west-more-land”) to the Commander-in-Chief himself, the reviled President Johnson. Vietnam era “villains” such as these fit a familiar ethical scenario for us. Driven by greed, power, or ambition they were led to corruption, crime, and violence. We protested, were arrested, and eventually contributed to ending the war.
I have always been proud of my years in the anti-war movement. Not many generations can say that they helped stop a war by means of acts of conscience. However, we certainly did not halt “evil.” And evil still seems easy to recognize. Wars have proliferated over the decades, as have terrorism and fanaticism of all sorts. Everywhere we still see the drive for power and the lure of greed. Moreover, our media are inundated with reports of individuals in the heat of hatred, prejudice, lust, neurosis, or misplaced religious fervor committing heinous crimes and causing enormous suffering. Each day, it seems, there is a media melange of murders, rapes, kidnappings, hate and sex crimes, domestic violence. As we become exposed to these daily horrors I, like many others, often wonder with a shiver, “What could have possessed the people who committed those acts?” At other times, feeling the potential “heat” of such evil-doing in myself, I think, “There but for the grace of God . . . .”
Yet the poignancy of the pilot’s dilemma has continued to prod me into a more difficult and subtle exploration of "evil," the kind that is not so easily recognizable. When reviewing so many events of the last century (dubbed “the ruthless century” by poet Czeslaw Milosz) I was confronted again and again with a different and more enigmatic ethical problem than the obvious “hot” evil scenarios of violence, greed, crime, prejudice, and hatred that have become so familiar. It is certainly true that untold billions of human beings died terrible deaths in the wars of the past century, but a huge percentage of these victims were not killed face to face, accompanied by shouts of passion or hate, but rather from great distances in anonymous slaughter. Almost one-and-a-half million young men (shockingly, their average age was 17 years) were cut down in the battle of the Sommes in World War I. The vast majority were killed by machine-gun and mortar fire. They did not see their killers face to face.
Less than thirty years later hundreds of thousands of non-combatants —mostly women, children, and old men—were incinerated in the span of just a few minutes in the atomic “flashes” over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, death delivered coldly and anonymously from 20,000 feet above. For much of the last half of the twentieth century a nuclear arms race pushed the world to the brink of Armageddon—the unimaginable final destruction of all society and nature by missiles and planes poised on a computer trip line. More recently, the public has been jolted by revelations of a whole new genre of global environmental threats to the biosphere itself, almost unthinkable perils to life on earth that we had not even suspected existed: ozone depletion, global warming, species extinction, acid rain, desertification, deforestation. Which evil people are responsible for these eco-catastrophes? And even as we produce ever more food, hunger increases at an astounding rate so that close to one billion people are starving every day. Who is starving these people?
Here we arrive at a central problem for modern ethics. Evil has never been so omnipresent as it has been over the past century, so perilous to the earth and the very future of humanity. Yet there seem to be very few evil people. It would be difficult for many of us to name any evil people we know personally. The very idea of our society being characterized by masses of evil people seems somewhat comical. All in all, there is a striking paucity of modern Mephistopheleses. And virtually no one identifies oneself as evil. Obviously, few of us relish the thought that our automobile is causing pollution and global warming or laugh fiendishly because refrigerants in our air conditioners are depleting the ozone layer. I have been in many corporate law firms and boardrooms and have yet to see any “high fives” or hear shouts of satisfaction at the deaths, injuries, or crimes against nature these organizations often perpetrate. And as noted, bomber pilots tend to be viewed as heroes, not as mass murderers. We are confronted with an ethical enigma; far from the simple idea of evil we harbored in the past, we now have an evil that apparently does not require evil people to purvey it.
by smiths » Tue Oct 08, 2013 8:00 pm
by Carol Newquist » Tue Oct 08, 2013 8:14 pm
by Allegro » Tue Oct 08, 2013 11:18 pm
by smiths » Wed Oct 09, 2013 2:12 am
by Project Willow » Wed Oct 09, 2013 2:20 am
Carol Newquist » 08 Oct 2013 03:23 wrote:We all take part in destroying lives every day, even our own lives. We contribute to the Cold Evil of the technological cocoon in everything we do, up to and including discussing it here and all it entails for us to be able to do that. This Cold Evil is distinct from Hot Evil where harm and trauma are inflicted in person, hand to hand, or mano y mano, in a very personal and up-close way.
Walt journeyed from the inoculated and insular Cold Evil existence where he sleepwalked through life as a long-distance killer like all the rest of us, to the tumultuous, up close and personal Hot Evil existence of adrenaline pumping, primal brutality. Each existence is immoral, but I would argue the former is vastly more dangerous, and exacts much more pain and suffering than Walt's Hot Evil existence, as dramatic and theatrical as it was.
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