Breaking Bad, like AMC’s other flagship series Mad Men, has always been about the cost of the American Dream. Bryan Cranston plays Walter White, a man who will do anything to provide for his family. The twist is that he will literally do anything, including but not limited to cooking crystal meth, murdering rival dealers and lying to the family he’s protecting. What motivates him is not love of his family – he’s fond of them but not exactly devoted – but the pride that comes from being paterfamilias. But so long as he can cling to ostensibly noble motives, he can justify anything he does. This is what makes him an anti-hero rather than a hero.
(A hero is someone who does the right thing in the right way for the right reason. For an anti-hero, pick two out of three)
The American Dream is that anyone can make it, provided they work hard, stick up for themselves and do the right thing. Breaking Bad tests that myth by picking apart the cost of Walter White’s hard work and pride. We’ve seen that play out already in Seasons 1 through 3, as Walter goes from shock at what he’s capable of (“Heisenberg”) to a grim, pathetic self-destruction (grabbing his junk and screaming at his wife’s message on the answering machine). But these could be written off as minor quirks in character, or at worst the tragic flaws of our hero. Sure, he’s a little nasty and can come off as cold, but he’s clawing his way to the top. Once he reaches the head of the table, his past can be forgiven, right?
Season 4 has been about proving one thing: Walter White can never reach the head of the table. He will never advance from labor to management.
Every work of art is a product of its time. While contemporary themes can’t be read into every story, an obvious parallel should be pointed out when it appears. In that light, it’s no accident that Season 4 was produced (and aired) during a period that’s been pretty rough for American labor. Growing unemployment, the Wisconsin teacher’s strikes, and the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” marches are all signs and symptoms of labor unrest in this country.
The labor connection in S4 becomes clear starting with the first episode. It starts minutes after the explosive climax of S3, with Jesse Pinkman being dragged into the meth superlab. Walter’s already there. The two of them wait, helpless, while Victor begins the day’s cooking. Their one marketable skill is no longer unique. They’ve been outsourced. A younger go-getter, someone who embraces the organization’s values wholeheartedly, has replaced them.
When Gus shows up, Walter begins negotiating with him.
All right, let’s talk about Gale Boetticher. He was a good man, and a good chemist, and I cared about him. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. He didn’t deserve it at all. But I’d shoot him again tomorrow, and the next day and the day after that. When you make it Gale vs. me, or Gale vs. Jesse, Gale loses, simple as that. This is on you, Gus. Not me, not Jesse. Gale’s death is on you.
[…]
Gus, we’re here. C’mon. Let us work. […] Gus, you do this … all you have left is an eight million dollar hole in the ground. This lab, this equipment is useless without us, without Jesse and myself. You have no new product, you have no income. Your people up there will not be paid. Your distribution chain collapses. Without us, you have nothing. You kill me, you have nothing! You kill Jesse, you don’t have me.
You won’t do this. You’re too smart. You can’t afford to do this. Please … let us just go back to work. We’re here. Let us work. We’re ready to go to work! We’ll just pick up right where we left off.
Walter is, like about 20% of the American working population at the time of this writing, temporarily unemployed. It’s not because he’s lazy or a bad worker. He genuinely wants to work. He’s pleading with Gus to come back to work. In fact, he has engineered circumstances such that Gus is compelled to rehire him.
Gus’s response?
Get back to work.
As a bit of dramatic television, it’s brutal and stunning. But let’s reframe it as a negotiation between labor and management.
When Gus slits Victor’s throat, he’s pursuing a commitment strategy. Commitment is the key to achieving credibility, which in turn makes you a more effective negotiator. Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, in their classic Thinking Strategically, describe the importance of commitment:
Credibility is a problem with all strategic moves. If your unconditional move, or threat or promise, is purely oral, why should you carry it out if it turns out not to be in your interest to do so? […] An action that can be changed loses strategic effect against a rival who thinks strategically. He knows that your utterances may not match your actions and so is on the lookout for tactical bluffing.
[…]
[One method] is to change the game to limit your ability to back out of a commitment. […] The most radical [method] is simply to deny yourself any opportunity to back down, either by cutting yourself off from the situation or by destroying any avenues of retreat.
– Thinking Strategically, Chap. 6: “Credible Commitments”
Gus murders Victor to demonstrate his commitment. He and Walter are in a negotiation: will Walter keep working for Gus or will Gus kill Walter? Or at least that’s what Walter thinks the terms of the discussion are, hence his efforts to prove both how valuable and how reasonable he is.
Gus, with one vicious slash, completely changes the terms. Implicit in Walter’s offer to keep working for Gus is the idea of working freely: entering an employment contract, exchanging labor for payment, and leaving once the term is up or if conditions grow unsatisfactory. By killing the only other person who can cook Walter’s recipe, Gus has rejected Walter’s offer. Walter can’t leave. The only person who can cook meth to Gus’s standards, now that both Gale and Victor are dead, is Walter. And Walter knows that Gus won’t let his business go without meth. So leaving is no longer an option. Walter is no longer working as a free agent.
The question isn’t can Walter work? but can Walter quit? Gus has burned his bridges. He is denying himself any other potential employees but Walter. Gus doesn’t want the meth. Gus wants Walter.
This is the relationship between labor and management as depicted in S4 of Breaking Bad. They’re not two parties who negotiate freely and as equals. Labor works for as long as management wants them and is then cast aside. If fired, labor can’t simply find employment elsewhere, because labor has too refined of a skill set to change careers. Management owns the capital, has the contacts and controls the purse strings. Management is in charge.
Walter engineered the desperate gambit at the end of S3 (“Full Measures”) as an attempt to put himself in charge. He spends most of S4 trying to convince himself that he’s in charge, or that he could be. But every time he tries to act like he’s in charge, he’s reminded – either through visual cues or the machinations of others – that he’s not.
In S4E2 (“Thirty-Eight Snub”), Walter steels himself to kill Gus. He buys an illegal .38, practices with it, then drives to Gus’s house. He takes a moment in the car to psych himself up, signified in the show by the music mounting to a terrifying pitch. But then everything cools down as soon as Walter dons the black hat, becoming Heisenberg again.
Walter gets out of the car and walks toward Gus’s modest suburban home. The camera tracks tight on his head throughout. As the audience, we’re ready for some quirky cinematography from our favorite drama. Maybe the camera will stick with Walter throughout, until …
His phone rings. It’s Tyrus. “Go home, Walter.”
Okay, bad example. Walter was never really the shooter type. But he’s smart and cocky. Cocky enough to deliver (S4E6, “Cornered”) a dramatic monologue!
Who are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see? Do you know how much I make a year? I mean, even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going in to work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the NASDAQ goes belly-up. Disappears! It ceases to exist without me. No, you clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skylar. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks.
After delivering this speech, Walter does what every criminal mastermind would: stammers a bit, wanders to the bathroom, peels off his shirt and takes a shower. The speech, please note, has the exact opposite effect of what’s intended. Instead of reassuring Skylar that Walter is in complete control and that she has nothing to fear, it provokes a fresh wave of fear in her and nearly drives her to another state.
All right, forget actions, forget words. What about an empty gesture? Can Walter prove he’s in charge by doing something every action movie hero does: walking away from an explosion? (S4E7, “Problem Dog”)
By the way, you look fantastic
Well, no.
In your boots of Chinese plastic.
This entire season has been about Walter coming to grips with the fact that he can not be in charge. He can’t take a seat at the head of the table. He isn’t a badass or a natural leader or a businessman. He only gets Jesse to do what he wants by haranguing Jesse with pedantic verbal abuse until the boy caves. And Jesse goes along with it because that’s what he was born to do. He’s a natural pawn.
Jesse got into his current mental state by being manipulated into doing Walter’s dirty work for him at the end of S3 (“Full Measures”). The plan was always for Walter to kill Gale, not Jesse, but that plan fell through when Mike got the drop on them. So Jesse had to kill Gale to save Walter’s life.
Throughout S4, Jesse lives up to the same role. He becomes a pawn in Gus’s plan to free himself of Walter. Gus uses Mike to build up Jesse’s confidence (S4E5, “Shotgun”). Soon, Jesse becomes a trusted member of the organization (S4E6, “Cornered”) and later, a key part of Gus’s revenge on the cartel (S4E10, “Salud”). Jesse is rising through the ranks, but it’s as a skilled worker, never as management or even owner. His skills are valued; his opinions, never.
We get this visually reinforced in the front half of the season through something I like to call “ToolCam.” ToolCam was first introduced in the bottle episode “Fly” in S3. A small camera (probably a GoPro HD), mounted on the end of a brush, gave a jarring view of a lab implement being cleaned.
ToolCam returns in two episodes in S4. First, in S4E2, “Thirty-Eight Snub,” the camera is mounted on a Roomba as it crawls through Jesse’s debauched apartment. The Roomba bumps and whirs through stacks of sleeping druggies until it reaches one conscious spaz. He promptly picks it up and starts trying to disassemble it.
The other time is in S4E6, “Cornered,” where Jesse helps Mike track down some hijacked meth. To lure a tweaking addict out of his house, Jesse grabs a shovel from Mike’s car and goes to dig in the lawn. The ToolCam is mounted on the blade of the shovel. It bobs along behind Jesse’s head as he carries it across the street, reversing toward Jesse’s face as he prepares to dig.
(We also get a reverse perspective, mounted on the video game gun Jesse uses, in S4E4, “Bullet Points”)
Both these images give us a perspective on what it’s like to be a tool: an implement in the hands of a skilled user. It’s no coincidence that both times the tool is in Jesse’s possession: once in his house, once in his hands. Jesse is a tool himself. He’s a pawn of the men around him. That’s the saddest part of the Jesse Pinkman tragedy: that Jesse is going to be used, then cast aside, for no crime other than being conveniently at hand.
Jesse is a tool and Walter is a laborer. Or rather, Jesse is a precision lathe and Walter is a skilled lathe operator. Both are essential parts of a competitive manufacturing process. But they’re disposable if the bottom line gets in the way.
S4 has been about both Walter and Jesse realizing their status in that way. Jesse makes the realization first, and the revulsion that grips him throughout the season is the result. He tries to drown his despair in gross sensation – lights, noise and touch in high quantities – but gets nowhere. He returns to his counseling group but can’t get the judgment he wants. He’s rusting away until someone picks him up, polishes him off and starts putting him to use again: first Mike, then Gus, then, by S4E12, Walter once more.
Walter denies his status for longer than Jesse does. He tries to make a deal with Mike, appealing to his fear of Gus, but to no avail. He tries outsourcing his cleaning work to a few laundromat employees, but ends up costing them their jobs. It’s not until he’s in the desert with a bag over his head that he realizes he isn’t the boss. He’s never going to be the boss. He’s the one on his knees, not the one standing.
So what’s his solution? To bring down the company entirely.
Any second thoughts? Then let's get to work.
Walter engineers his strike on Gus in S4E12 and E13 not because he wants to sit at the head of the table. Those days are beyond him. Walter no longer wants to become management. He wants to live in a world without management. Whether this means he wants to produce and distribute meth on a local scale again – a sort of anarcho-syndicalist co-op – or whether it means he wants to quit the industry entirely, we can’t say yet. We’ll have to wait until S5 to find out.
But Walter clearly does not mean to take over Gus’s operation. He not only kills Gus and his bodyguard Tyrus, but he kills them in a public manner that links Gus, and his entire business, to the Mexican drug cartels. He then shoots Gus’s last two remaining henchmen and, with Jesse’s help, burns down the entire drug lab. Gus’s operation is now torched, scattered and under a DEA microscope. Walter’s days of taking charge of the operation are over.
Could have picked a different screencap. Didn't. You're welcome.
The crises and story arcs of the earlier seasons of Breaking Bad were personal and familial. They depicted people grappling with inner demons, or balancing their duty to their families against their own desires. S4 takes this a step farther out and depicts the battle between the worker and the owner: labor vs. management. Does it pick sides or pass judgment? At the end of S4E13 (“Face/Off”), labor is the only side left standing. But labor has had to do some pretty despicable things, including poisoning a child, to get to that point. And given the number of deaths involved, you might not call the outcome a victory, even if Walter does.
So where does that leave us for S5, the final season?
Hank’s theories about Gus Fring have been vindicated by Gus dying with the last surviving member of a Mexican drug cartel. The connection between Fring and the meth trade is now indisputable. Given Hank’s tenacity when he had only a hint to go on, we can be sure that Hank is now going to cling to this investigation until every possible question – including the identity of Heisenberg – has been answered.
Gus’s death takes the threat off of Walter’s head, but only for the time being. There’s a reason the cartel assassin didn’t shoot when he had Gus in his sights and it’s probably the same reason the cartel killed Gus’s partner, instead of him, thirty years ago. Gus’s still undocumented past in Chile has been protecting him. Unfortunately, neither Walter nor Jesse know anything about it. So any repercussions that bowl them over will come as a surprise.
And oh yeah, Mike’s still out there.
The first few seasons have been about man vs. his internal demons. Man vs. his family. Man vs. his masters, here in S4. The scale has gradually grown wider, encompassing more and more of the world. Each season, Walter and Jesse have triumphed, but at an ever-increasing cost.
Given the forces in play, S5 will be about man vs. fate. And this is a battle that Walter might not win.
