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Walter White’s Sickness Mirrors America - David Sirota/Salon
Walter White’s sickness mirrors America"Breaking Bad" strikes such a nerve because Walt's ills of body and soul are also those of our country
BY DAVID SIROTA - Salon
SATURDAY, SEP 28, 2013 09:00 AM PDT
Heisenberg, in other words, reminds us that America’s unique brand of capitalism delivers exceptional productivity – but not necessarily in ways that we might want.
Still, economic desperation cannot fully explain Walter’s process of breaking bad. After all, while he does have cancer, he faces no more economic stress than most people in his economic situation who also face the illness — and most middle-class cancer victims don’t opt to cook meth. So what sets him apart and makes his story so representative of this moment’s zeitgeist? The answer is his total embrace of the most pernicious aspects of the American Dream mythology.
Unlike so many Americans, Walter White actually has a safety net. As a public school teacher, he actually has decent health insurance (even though as noted above, it may not be completely adequate for his illness, and may not prevent a medical bankruptcy). That is more than millions of his fellow countrymen can say. Also unlike most Americans, he has friends from his past who are willing to pay to get him the world’s most cutting-edge cancer treatments. But even with all that, Walter still chooses what he calls “the empire business” in an effort to live out the dominant mythology. More specifically, he rejects his friends’ offer of help and embarks on a flamboyant journey to live out the archetypal up-from-the-bootstraps story — the American Dream narrative on which our society bases its very definition of manhood. In the process, he also tries to live out the Aggrieved American White Guy Fantasy of thwarting his dark-skinned foreign competitors and claiming a market that he believes to be rightfully his.
Ultimately, all of these themes converge to raise the most harrowing questions of all — the taboo questions about whether we should really cherish the desperation, the greed and the every-man-for-himself ideologies that drive Walter White and that make American the industrialized world’s exception. It is the kind of question “Wall Street” asked back in 1987 when a badly broken Bud Fox dared to ask Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko: “How much is enough?” It is the same question that “Breaking Bad’s” psychopathic murderer Todd recently posed to his neo-Nazi uncle when he asked: “No matter how much you got, how do you turn your back on more?”
In America, our culture too often offers up the same response as Gekko and Heisenberg. We too often say there is no such thing as “enough” and therefore you don’t ever turn your back on more.
Still, economic desperation cannot fully explain Walter’s process of breaking bad. After all, while he does have cancer, he faces no more economic stress than most people in his economic situation who also face the illness — and most middle-class cancer victims don’t opt to cook meth. So what sets him apart and makes his story so representative of this moment’s zeitgeist? The answer is his total embrace of the most pernicious aspects of the American Dream mythology.
Unlike so many Americans, Walter White actually has a safety net. As a public school teacher, he actually has decent health insurance (even though as noted above, it may not be completely adequate for his illness, and may not prevent a medical bankruptcy). That is more than millions of his fellow countrymen can say. Also unlike most Americans, he has friends from his past who are willing to pay to get him the world’s most cutting-edge cancer treatments. But even with all that, Walter still chooses what he calls “the empire business” in an effort to live out the dominant mythology. More specifically, he rejects his friends’ offer of help and embarks on a flamboyant journey to live out the archetypal up-from-the-bootstraps story — the American Dream narrative on which our society bases its very definition of manhood. In the process, he also tries to live out the Aggrieved American White Guy Fantasy of thwarting his dark-skinned foreign competitors and claiming a market that he believes to be rightfully his.
Ultimately, all of these themes converge to raise the most harrowing questions of all — the taboo questions about whether we should really cherish the desperation, the greed and the every-man-for-himself ideologies that drive Walter White and that make American the industrialized world’s exception. It is the kind of question “Wall Street” asked back in 1987 when a badly broken Bud Fox dared to ask Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko: “How much is enough?” It is the same question that “Breaking Bad’s” psychopathic murderer Todd recently posed to his neo-Nazi uncle when he asked: “No matter how much you got, how do you turn your back on more?”
In America, our culture too often offers up the same response as Gekko and Heisenberg. We too often say there is no such thing as “enough” and therefore you don’t ever turn your back on more.
More: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/28/walter_whites_sickness_mirrors_america/
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