Archive | October, 2013

In Defense of Walter White (Kind Of)

4 Oct

Walter White / Heisenberg

I’ll have my belated post about the finale and the final season soon enough but here I’m going to combine a couple of other Breaking Bad-related topics I’ve been thinking about into one entry.  Bear with me.  I want to address two separate issues here. First, I want to touch on the is-Walt-evil debate, and second, after hopefully I’ve least convinced you I’m not one of those terrible Walt apologists everyone keeps complaining about, I want to explain the aspects of Walt that I respect, in spite of the more obvious aspects that I don’t.

Walter White is definitely a bad guy, not in the sense of villain or antagonist, but in the sense of the moral antecedent to good.  He does things throughout the show that are bad things by just about all but the most relativist standard.  If I had to choose, the worst was poisoning a child, but of course it’s silly to choose.  He’s done bad shit, There’s no doubting that, and there’s no getting around.  Is he evil though?

The definition of evil is obviously largely a matter of semantics (don’t worry, I’m not going to bust out a whole Websters-defines-evil-as here).  Still to me, evil is such a damning word that to use it when it’s not warranted is to lessen Its power. Some people throw about the word evil while talking about Walter White in ways that I I think undermine what evil truly is.

Many people, people I know, and people who seriously care about television consider Walter White evil.  Walter White, the Onion AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff describes Walter White, in an article about good and evil in Breaking Bad as a “very evil man.”

I don’t see it.  Part of this is semantics. In my admittedly stiff definition evil consists of causing harm for absolutely no reason. Walt commits several horrific acts during the course of Breaking Bad, but he never commits the act because he enjoys it or because it’s fun or because people should just die. Every horrific act has internal logic behind it. Even the poisoning of Brock was done for a reason, as it started the events in motion which led to the death of Gus Fring. Fring’s eventual demise likely would never have happened without Brock’s poisoning. It doesn’t make Walt’s act any less vile or wrong, but it does make him not necessarily evil for doing it.

I am currently reading the excellent “The Storm of War” by Andrew Roberts about World War II.  I read chapters about the holocaust and the no less despicable Japanese brutality that occurred in the Eastern war.  I’ve read these stories time and again, but the enormity of the acts never fails to strike me emotionally every time I do.  The deliberate killing of people because you don’t like them.  That’s fucking evil.  Killing people because they pose a threat to your criminal empire?  It’s terrible, it’s morally wrong, and it’s criminal. But it isn’t evil to me.  I admit I’m cheating here by using Nazism as a counter-example, which is just about as evil as evil gets; but the point stands.

Still, let’s move on from the extremes and the semantics, VanDerWerff compares Walter White unfavorably evil-wise to Tony Soprano.  I’d list out the terrible acts both have committed and try to compare and contrast but that’s really beyond the point, and his argument is admittedly less about the acts each of the characters commit than how they are viewed in the context of the show. It’s an intelligently written and worthwhile piece but it’s far too extreme in its reading of Breaking Bad. More than that, it shortchanges Breaking Bad.  There’s an internal logic to almost everything that Walt does that we can follow along with even when we don’t agree with him.  We know why he’s doing it, or at least why he thinks he’s doing it.  The beauty of the show is that each act takes him a little farther from home, moving him away from a moral compass a little more, but because it’s step-by-step, it seems to make a little bit of sense each time.

The genius of Breaking Bad is more than this though. Mr. Chips to Scarface, is the line Vince Gilligan has used to describe his goal for Breaking Bad from day one, and the show was almost there by the start of the final season. Walt was finally going to turn on the only couple of beliefs he had ever claimed to really care about.  Except he doesn’t and that’s part of what makes all the internally consistent but externally terrible choices he made over the past few seasons really hold up in hindsight.

Walt’s actions led to Hank’s death but after events in the final season there’s no question he actually cares about Hank. Walt may not have acted like he cared but he made several decisions in the final season which showed he did.  He actually cared about Jesse as well.  Their relationship may have gone to shit eventually and Walt often didn’t act in Jesse’s best interest, but if you really don’t think Jesse meant anything to Walt you weren’t watching the same show.  Walt has some tiny, little semblance of a moral compass.  It’s broken and perverse but Walt did have something he believed in, something he cared about, even when he didn’t actually act in the way that bettered that belief, and that adds a dimension to the show that VanDerWerff shortchanges.

I’m not a Walt apologist.  He’s a bad dude.  He makes many, many bad decisions, and he absolutely deserved everything that came to him.  He’s committed many crimes and some unforgivable acts. Still, I declaring him out and out evil lacks the nuance with which Vince Gilligan and his writers due such a brilliant job of imbuing Breaking Bad.

Okay, second half where I talk about what I admire about Walter White.  This is a vastly more polarizing viewpoint, I think, and I hope I’ve convinced you that I’m not a total Walt is number one awesome badass supporter to follow along.

Here’s what I actually admire about Walter White.  I’ll again repeat how terrible a person he’s been to Jesse and his family, and how many morally repulsive and criminal acts he’s committed along the way as I disclaimer to my not thinking Walt is the coolest drug lord eva.  Moving forward.

Over the course of the series, Walter White makes something out of himself.  What he achieves is certainly a sordid twist on the American Dream, but it’s not that hard to see the dream in there.  As a man, at a time of desperation, beaten down at age 50, having learned he has a deadly disease, it would be easy to pack it in.  Instead, largely through his own ingenuity, ambition, and genius, he finds a market with an opening, creates a product that’s vastly superior to whatever’s available currently and slowly begins to take over levels of distribution through vertical integration.  Is it an illegal product, a highly addictive substance.  But essentially it’s still a American definition of economic success, capitalism 101.

Walter White doesn’t have a gift.  He wasn’t born with this.  He’s smart, but he could never figure out how to use his particular abilities, and the one time he did, ended up not working out.  He settled into a groove, and that was fine.  He lived a satisfying life.  But he, in a way that I think is very relatable, craved something more.  He felt like he had never really done all he could with his skills, achieved his potential. While most people might have that feeling, he actually went out and did something about it.

I understand this is maybe an extreme way to feel. Walt clearly hurt a lot of people in his path, and it hasn’t been smooth, easy, or legitimate.  But Walter White, at the same time he was doing all these awful things, started showing off an array of skills that I wish I had, albeit it not to use the same way.  The confidence, the braggadocio that causes many of Walt’s problems are an integral part of the reason he’s able to be so successful in the first place.  That confidence when, it wasn’t a hindrance, was a huge asset. Walter White, at a more advanced age than most, changed in his life. While these changes eventually led to his downfall, even his most ardent critics couldn’t say what he did wasn’t impressive or that anybody could do it.

Walt is not an admirable person on the whole, and it’s obviously important to note that.  But biographies are written about controversial and infamous figures because studying people isn’t that easy.  Under all unabashed ego and reprehensible acts are some admirable qualities and I think it’s worth taking a second to point them out.

Tags: ,

Fall 2013 Review: Masters of Sex

2 Oct

Johnson and Masters, of Sex

Showtime is absolutely delivering on a frequent complaint of mine towards so many new television shows and I want them to know it’s appreciated.  How about a show, I ask so often, about something new?  There are so many lawyer and doctor and police shows and numerous variations on those core three.  There aren’t a lot of new shows about a bajilllion other areas that could be fascinating.  Well, Showtime decided to order one.  Sure, like any new show, it has elements and influences from many other shows, but its subject matter is fresh.  Well, in terms of fiction anyways, as it’s actually based on real events, but they’re real events that haven’t been covered over and over on movies and television.

In particular, the events consist of the pioneering sex research of Masters and Johnson, the second most famous sex researchers of all time behind Alfred Kinsey. Michael Sheen, who I have a hard time not thinking of as British (he played super-Brit Wesley Snipes in 30 Rock, come on), plays incredibly well-respected gynecologist Williams Masters.  He likes his job well enough, is proud of his work, and is the pride of and biggest money maker at his hospital in St. Louis.  Still, he’s unsatisfied. He wants to move into sex research, which he sees as a more innovative area that he thinks has never been property studied before because of the taboos surrounding it. Masters is initially unable to get formal backing for his research because serious scientists and hospital funders’ opinion about sex research ranges from  inappropriate to ick. Thus, he starts investigating on his own, paying a prostitute to have sex with dudes and let him watch so that he can record facts and take notes. The prostitute, while unable to truly gather the greater purposes of his research, makes an intuitive suggestion: in order for his work to be a true success, he’s going to need the help of a female.

After continuing to expand his studies by himself, he sets out to find this secretary who won’t be squeamish about the subject matter (his current secretary (a tiny guest spot by the always great Margo Martindale) most certainly is).. He discovers his partner-in-crime in Virginia Masters (Lizzie Kaplan), who finds Masters’ work fascinating and wants in.  She lies about her resume to get the job, He hires her at first as a secretary/assistant, but soon she becomes much more important than that.

The first episode speeds through a little bit of the time of her getting acquainted with him and the research, allowing her to grow to nearly partner status within the hour. They’re a particularly good match because she has all the personality traits and abilities that he lacks. Masters is a stern humorless doctor who knows his science down cold but is sorely lacking in people skills, which are particularly valuable when you need to convince subjects to be comfortable with masturbating in your office for science.  Masters has these skills in spades, persuading young women to participate and be vulnerable in very sterile and uncomfortable spaces.

Eventually, Masters needs to secure funding for his project and bring it out into the open, and to do so he asks for money from the hospital.  He attempts to pull a power play, threatening to quit if he doesn’t get the money, and gets his way at the last minute. Research proceeds, with Masters and Johnson watching women masturbate and studying their physiological reactions until they both realize they need to convince a man and women to have sex and let them study to move on to the next stage.  They blackmail a male doctor, which wasn’t that hard once he saw what the female subject he’d be having intercourse with looked like. After this research is a success, Masters ends the episode with a proposal.  While they engage with people having sex, watching and monitoring them, Masters is concerned, or at least says he is, that him or Johnson will experience transference, wanting to have sex with the subjects.  For science, then, to avoid these feelings, he decides, in his hyper-clinical fashion, that he and Johnson should have sex. Realizing, even with his lack of appreciation for social signals and norms, that this is a big ask, he allows her the weekend to think about it.

The distinctive St. Louis mid-western, mid-50s look is quite distinct, and the direction is beautiful.  We’re not that far removed from a time when talking about sex was considered taboo, and it still is in a lot of places and a lot of ways.  The look of the show and choice of palate emphasize the staid location and time where Masters and Johnson are attempting their groundbreaking work, far more revolutionary there than it would have been ten years later even in New York or San Francisco. .Lizzie Kaplan is a gem (I have a soft spot for anyone who starred in Party Down) and Michael Sheen is more than up to the task of playing her counterpart.

I’m not sure exactly where the writers are going to go other than simply a whole lot more sex research. The relationship between Masters and Johnson is the crucial one at the heart of the series as their contrasts best suit their research. They’re much more productive together than either would be apart. The show has an extremely interesting vantage point from which to explore love, sex, and relationships, and the intersecting lines that connect all three. This all plays out in the environment of blatant sexism and male-female double standards of the time period.  All the doctors we’ve seen are men, which is particularly notable in a field like gynecology where all the patients are women. All of these issues come to the fore in the first episode in the relationship between Johnson and Masters’ assistant, Ethan.  In a reverse of the typical male-female stereotypes of the time, Johnson is only interested in casual sex, while Ethan thinks he’s in love and demands more, eventually breaking down and turning drunkenly violent towards Johnson at a party.

The writing is sharp, and while hardly comedic, has just enough of a light touch to avoid seeming over serious, which would hurt a show whose first episode includes something as visually hilarious as a glass dildo with a light at the end. Often the pilot emphasizes the miscommunications exchanged by the characters who, with their moral, psychological, and personal biases are occasionally unable to comprehend the other side’s point of view.  Masters has trouble communicating with his own wife. He loves her but their inability to procreate is damaging their relationship and he appears less at ease with his wife than Johnson does in five minutes of meeting her. For someone as passionate about groundbreaking sex research, he’s mentally stuck in some very of-the-time gender role points of view that are preventing his research from going forward.

Will I watch it again?  Yes. It’s new, it’s interesting, it hasn’t been done before, it’s artful, and I want to see more. It’s way too early to make as a bold a statement as I’m about to make, but depending on how they go, Masters of Sex could eclipse Homeland as the premiere Showtime drama before too long.

Tags: , ,

Newer Entries →