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Ethics and Morality
Breaking Bad and Morality
What do the parallels between Milton's Satan and Walter White mean?
Posted October 18, 2013
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
The character of Tony Soprano is sooo Platonic. The character of Walter White is sooo Miltonic. Maybe this has been obvious to anyone who has watched these shows and read Plato and Milton, but, having grown up on re-runs of Three’s Company, I’m still rather astounded by how sophisticated our TV programming has gotten.
I had the occasion to read Milton’s Paradise Lost just recently, and every time Satan came on the scene, I could only think of Walter White. That the Breaking Bad writers and Milton think so similarly just seems uncanny.
...who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe.
Milton's devil does not, like Tony Soprano would, punch his opponents in the face. He instead convinces them, with his manipulative stories and flattering words, to rebel in ways they had not previously considered. When Walter White has a final showdown with his wife, she does not beg him to not hit her. Instead, she demands he not "say one more word."
This is peculiar, I think. From most bad guys, you fear something physical. It might, after all, seem a great relief that the bad guy in your kitchen is only try to talk you into something.
How might this type of persuasion personify evil?
A “bad person” in the Platonic mode might be spectacularly so. I’ve likened Tony Soprano to Medea. Tony and Medea make errors the way we all do, but they do it on a much larger-than-average scale. So we might watch them, in awe of the scale of their bad acts. Yet the Platonic depiction of bad behavior makes the motives of such a person almost completely uninteresting. Why do people do bad things? Plato has a pretty straightforward answer: because they are not thinking clearly, and certainly not long term, and they get some pleasure out of it. (Imagine him saying "duh" after that.) Why did Tony Soprano snap? Lashing out feels good. It can even work. His motives weren’t mysterious. He even recognized that his anger helped him control people. He got what he wanted by being out of control.
Walter White on the other hand is represented as having motives so complex that viewers are left to puzzle over them. He’s out for vengeance, to prove something, but what? To whom? For what? He's rebelling (and maybe we admire that somewhat?) but again, from what? He’s always said he did what he did for his family- even when that was no longer making any sense.
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n.
Before the explanation Walt provides himself, in the finale, Daniel Rodriguez wrote that “Walt has felt like a failure since before the show started. He's a high school teacher who has little control over his home, and has lost billions of dollars by selling out his share of Grey Matter. I don't think this was ever really a means to an end of providing for his family; it was the substituted end for all he thinks he's lost.”
The more I see / Pleasures about me, so much more I feel / Torment within me…
Milton’s Satan is in a parallel situation. He is aggrieved by the promotion of others in just the same way. Like Walt, Satan too knows he can never really manage to “get away with” what he’s doing, but he somehow decides all the effort is worth it anyway.
Walt’s relationship to the money is too odd to explain just in terms of it being security for his family. Not only does he regularly risk the money and put his family’s life at risk for it (risking the point), but they don’t even end up wanting the money.
It’s not about the money. No straightforward (Platonic) explanation works.
Ned Swan has explained, “Psychologically, I imagine that the great big pile of money helps soothe the cognitive dissonance that the happy couple naturally feels when confronting the drastic gap between the people they’ve become and the people they want to be. I think the deeper they plunge into the moral abyss- or the sharper they break bad- the more important the money becomes to justify what they’ve done to their integrity. At this point, the harm they’ve cause is drastically disproportionate, no matter how you slice it, to the “enjoyment” the family can experience by using the money. Thus it seems like they’ve seized on a quantitative measure of gain to justify the deep moral loss. I don’t think it’s working very well.”
Is this what Milton was trying to get at, as he personified evil in his epic poem? That when we busily act in our own self-interests, it’s possibly- at worst- a way to justify deep moral loss?
In the finale, Walt finally admits to his wife that “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really—I was alive.”
The show is so careful, so artful, that at first I, like many viewers, just wondered how Walt liked all of it so much. He didn’t seem to be enjoying it. It seemed like he was going through one nightmare after another. What a strange type of enjoyment that must have been, I thought.
Then I read Milton’s Satan, at long last, talking of joy. "In misery," he says "such joy ambition finds." Again, I wondered at this. Joy? That’s joy?
Finally these lines of Walt’s were explained to me. Of course he didn’t like it. He experienced it just as we saw. It was, basically, misery. Walt, to the very end, is lying to himself. Just like Satan must have been.
Is there no place left for repentance? None for parden left? None left but by submission; And that word Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Where Plato warns us to think through our lives thoroughly, so that we can figure out why the easy route to what we want isn’t worth it, Milton is giving a different moral lesson. He seems to suggest that we can think ourselves silly. And a risk to us, greater than violence, is what we get talked into, or, what we talk ourselves into.
I really don’t remember anything like this ever coming up at the Regal Beagle.
For some very sophisticated analyses of the Miltonic nature of Breaking Bad, see the essays originally published in the L.A. Review of Books by Andrew Lanham, and Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu.
Jennifer Baker, Ph.D. is an associate professor of philosophy at College of Charleston, who studies virtue and ethics. Follow her on Twitter for updates on morality and everyday life. Read more articles by Dr. Baker on For The Love of Wisdom.
