Andrew Sullivan is among the best journalists writing today. I've been a reader and subscriber to his blog, The Dish, for many years. Today, this analysis of Breaking Bad appeared on The Dish.
I have to admit I only watched the first episode of Breaking Bad, and have not yet downloaded any others. But this intriguing analysis makes me much more likely to do so.
Andrew writes:
In some ways, Breaking Bad was, for me, a hymn to Machiavelli. Walter White – in order to secure his honor as well as his survival – leaves traditional morality and virtues in the desert to seek power and money and respect. And he does so with such brilliance and fortitude and elan that Old Nick himself would have marveled at the spectacle of untrammeled evil and empire building.
If a man is truly a man through force and fraud and nerve, then Walter becomes the man he always wanted to be. He trounces every foe; he gains a huge fortune; he dies a natural death. Compared with being a high school chemistry teacher? Niccolo would scoff at the comparison. “I did it for me.”
Like Richard III or Richard Nixon, Walt is consumed all along by justified resentment of the success others stole from him, and by a rage that his superior mind was out-foxed by unscrupulous colleagues. He therefore lived and died his final years for human honor – for what
Machiavelli calls virtu, a caustic, brutal inversion of Christian virtue. And there is some worldly justice in this – he was cheated, he was diminished, his skills were
eventually proven beyond any measure in ways that would never have
happened if he had never broken bad. And breaking bad cannot mean
putting a limit on what you are capable of doing. What Machiavelli
insisted upon was that a successful power-broker know how to be
“altogether bad.” You have to leave a woman choking on her own vomit to
her death. You have to murder a child on a toy scooter.But the script cheats. Why? Because Walter is already dying. The calculations you make about your future do depend very much on how far you can see ahead. And the cost-benefit analysis of “breaking bad” when the alternative is imminently “dying alone” is rigged in favor of the very short term, i.e. zero-sum evil. If Walt had had to weigh a long, unpredictable lifetime of unending fear and constant danger for his family and himself, he would have stopped cooking meth. As, indeed, he did, when finally given the chance – only to be yanked back into the life of a mobster by his brother-in-law, bored, sitting on a john. Nice Shakespearean touch that, I thought.
And was he happy? Yes, but in a way that never really reflects any inner peace. He is happy in a way that all millionaires and tyrants are happy. His will is done. But we know that this does not lead to actual, enduring happiness. Which is why, for me, Machiavelli’s great flaw is that the life of such a brutally powerful figure, ruling by force and fraud, is a mug’s game. Isn’t the consequence of his proud immorality a never-ending insecurity? Do not most mob bosses live in fear every day and die by the same methods they employ? Did we not see that happen to Gus? Even to Mike? Did Saddam have a happy ending? Or Richard III? These are lives mesmerizing in action but miserably, existentially insecure. Remember Mike’s face as he took a last look at his grand-daughter. You call that happiness?
So for me, Breaking Bad should be taught alongside Machiavelli – as a riveting companion piece.
Andrew Sullivan from The Dish
Link to The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/
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