Breaking Bad

After watching the first three episodes of “Breaking Bad” on the AMC cable station, I can recommend it as the best crime show on television since “The Sopranos” and that’s high praise. Not that it is any big deal to make such a discovery, but the plot seems borrowed from Patricia Highsmith’s novel “Ripley’s Game”, the source of the screenplays for the movie of the same name and Wim Wenders’s “The American Friend”. As you may be aware, the character Tom Ripley, featured in a series of Highsmith’s novels, is a professional art forger who recruits an art-frame shop proprietor named Jonathan Trevanny, who has never committed a crime in his life, to carry out a series of hits on the Italian mafia who are rivals of his long-time partner in the art forgery business. Ripley reasons that the handsome cash payments received for the murders will provide an irresistible incentive to the ailing man insofar as it will allow his wife and child to live decently after he is gone. He also assumes that the Trevanny’s impending death will make him less fearful of being caught by the cops. What does the death penalty mean when you are already facing a death sentence by disease?

The counterpart of Jonathan Trevanny in “Breaking Bad” is Walter White, a high school teacher in Albuquerque with a nag of a pregnant wife and a teen-aged son with cerebral palsy. Since his salary does not cover expenses, White moonlights at a car-wash. In episode one, a prolonged and nasty cough causes him to faint one day. When goes in for an examination, he learns that he has lung cancer.

Around that time, his brother-in-law Hank, who works for the DEA, has dragged him along for a raid on a meth lab in Alburquerque in order to show him what “real life” is about. Inside the raided apartment, White notices hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money lying about. When he asks Hank if the meth business is always that lucrative, he is assured that it is. The only problem, of course, is that it is illegal and the cash always ends up being seized by sharp DEA agents like him. From that moment on, the chemistry professor begins to consider producing meth in order to help his wife, son and expected child to get by after he is gone.

What cinches the deal for him is seeing Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), one of his more underachieving students, fleeing the meth lab unnoticed by the cops. The next day Walter White looks him up and convinces him to take him on as a partner. Since Pinkman’s business partners have been busted, it would make sense to work with Walter White, even if he seems an unlikely accomplice in crime. Whatever White lacks in criminal know-how is made up for by his technical proficiency. The first batch of crystal meth is a purer and cheaper product to produce than anything Jesse Pinkman has ever seen and guaranteed to generate buckets of cash on the drug market.

The story moves forward with one huge mishap after another, evoking the dark comedy of “The Sopranos”. Walter White instructs Pinkman to dissolve the body of a Chicano drug-dealer that they have killed in self-defense in acid. But he adds that it must be done in a plastic tub. Pinkman, something of a slacker, decides to take a short-cut and carry out the job in his upstairs bathtub. It turns out that the acid will eat through practically anything except plastic and the liquefied body parts and tub crash through the bathroom floor and end up in a bloody mess on the ground floor. Glaring at his incompetent partner, White says that if he had paid attention in class, he would have known not to put acid in the bathtub.

The fundamental dramatic conflict in “Breaking Bad” is the same as it is in “Ripley’s Game”: a man’s obligation to his family versus society’s expectations not to engage in criminal activity. Ultimately, this is an existential choice of the kind that Sartre described in “Existentialism is a Humanism”:

As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He fully realised that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his death – would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose.

Beyond the moral contradictions, there is another compelling, almost ontological dimension to “Breaking Bad”, which revolves around the question of “what is man”. As a chemist, Walter White tends to look at everything in a very materialist way even though his approaching demise has forced him to consider deeper questions about life and death. In a flashback, you see him as a young chemistry instructor adding up the percentages of all the chemicals in a human body while his future wife sits in a classroom chair. At the blackboard, he admits to her that he is stymied. He can only come up with 98 percent of the chemical composition of the body. What happened to the other 2 percent? She tells him that it might be the soul that he is missing.

You can watch episodes of “Breaking Bad” online from here.