top of page
Television's Breaking Bad: Criminal Pedagogy,
Change Isn't Always Good
Breaking Bad is a show about many things but I want to focus on the paternal relationship between chemistry teacher and family man Walter White and his failed ex-student, small time drug dealer Jesse Pinkman, a tough yet fragile young man rejected by his own parents.
It is their relationship – their friendship – that is the chemical reaction at the base of this story: their shared movement of transversality beyond the norms, their shared transgression and change. They disincorporate and are set to become something other through their mixing.
Walter White experiences “the recoding of his belief systems through the agency of urgency” since he is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Freed from the sentence of having to live an unfulfilled life, his prescribed death leads to behaviour that bursts as he embarks on a mission to pay off his debts and leave his family money, and he takes pleasure in his transformation from mild mannered subdued and oppressed high school chemistry teacher into highly skilled and thus powerful illegal drug creator. Even when his cancer is in remission, even after his debts are paid, he continues to cook meth as the mad scientist he names Heisenberg and descends into the criminal world of drug dealing, continuing to rely on surrogate son Jesse to sell his product. What of consequences?
In working with Breaking Bad as a cinematic text, quoting Felicity Colman, “we can discern the possibility of self-subjects that are coded through their gestures, yet, through bursts of subjectivity undermining the firm kneading of social roles, are producers of undetermined and boundless thought”… the unthought.
With subjects that go through transformations and who transgress institutional expectations - who become someone other - we can theorize through Guattari/Deleuze's concept that “Becoming is a vibratory possibility, and produces a reality that provides a transversal point that ruptures subjectivity."
But what if the changes that someone goes through have painful and traumatic effects on others? What if what is “undetermined and boundless” involves becoming a monster? What if Becoming is a dark dank descent? Yes, a transformative passage, but one that drags others down with you. Does not a “vibratory possibility” contain within it the potential for repetitive movement that, with each turn, engenders more and more deceit and duplicity? If one’s subjectivity is ruptured in this way, what/who takes its place?
“The subjective pluralism of identity” involves the murderer inside, the addict, the liar; “the liberation of desire” involves the desire for power over others, for the power of penetration and control, to both withhold and to dispense, to take and to give, to be the father figure – the man – that creates and destroys, a success… and a failure, who knows but never knows enough.
Walt’s been able to provide for his family in a way that has made him, as he claimed, “awake” while using Jesse, not only to sell his drugs, but as a punching bag for his explosive libidinal bursts that have no expression in the confines of his marriage or in his relationship with Walter Junior, his crippled son. Jesse, crippled by his own parental abandonment and failures, is sent on missions of violence that Walt/Heisenberg would never send his own biological son, who thinks of him as a hero, to do such deeds. Walt Junior is part of the censorial space of domesticity and repression, where Walt is perpetually performing retributive resignations for the satisfaction of the family in his second career as a high school teacher, a man who was once a brilliant chemist: his failures compel him to deny his true nature of multiplicities. Meanwhile, Jesse continues to escape the burden of these dirty deeds in his stupored drug addiction and only finds love in the form of another heroin addict who he can escape with. He is Walter White’s most severe consequence to his criminal transgressions and malicious becoming, the escaping of his id.
And if Walt is just chemistry, as he claims, than how is he - Walter White - being reconfigured through this new territorialization from teacher family man to criminal underlord? His management model has been ineffective. It is indeed the chemistry between him and Jesse, this maligned stand-in figure whose relationship with Mr. White elicits the range of humanity that Walter has been trying to extinguish in himself - from rage to empathy, control to freedom - that keeps this life propelling forward. The resultant concoction is a Becoming with no exits, no stopping points, no rest stops, and produces meaning at a rate beyond what the heart can bear.
Felix Guattari, Psychoanalysis and Transversality
Felicity Colman, Deleuze & Cinema: The FIlm Concepts, "Hit Me Harder: The Transversality of Becoming Adolescent."
for educational purposes only.
© Gayle Gorman, all rights reserved.
Television's Breaking Bad: Criminal Pedagogy, Change Isn't Always Good.
Multimedia presentation at National Art Education Association conference, Seattle.
bottom of page