Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

Tony McKenna

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349553785, 9781137526601
• eBook ISBN: 9781137526618
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title offers a Marxist take on a selection of artistic and cultural achievements from the rap music of Tupac Shakur to the painting of Van Gogh, from HBO's Breaking Bad to Balzac's Cousin Bette, from the magical realm of Harry Potter to the apocalyptic landscape of The Walking Dead, from The Hunger Games to Game of Thrones.

1

Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer

As the online reference in Wikipedia has it, ‘To Break Bad’ means ‘to go wrong; to go downhill; to go bad; to turn toward immorality or crime’. And it is just such a transition – the movement from middle-aged affable chemistry teacher Walter White to the ruthless, dead-eyed drug lord Heisenberg – which underpins the narrative of the award-winning series Breaking Bad. Walter White is a good man, and it is only the imposition of an indifferent and remorseless fate which inflicts his body with an equally interminable cancer; it is the crushing cosmological injustice visited upon him – the piling medical bills and the suffocating worry for the future of his family – which finally causes Walter to break bad.

Or is it? This is the question which has fascinated critics and viewers across the spectrum. How much is Walter the helpless victim of an implacable fate? How much is he the agent of his own eventual monstrousness? When we see Walter at the start of the series, he feels like a fundamentally sympathetic character. There we watch him in the classroom, fervently holding forth on the mysterious laws of chemical composition – the infinite, infinitesimal possibilities of atoms and compounds – and yet, despite the sublimity of his convictions, and despite the genuine enthusiasm which they inspire in him, he is rarely able to rouse his students from their apathy. The most he can hope to merit is an acquiescent grunt of adolescent acknowledgement. There is, then, something fundamentally lonely about this middle-aged man, standing out there at the front of the classroom, lost in the void of his own esoteric interest.

And yet, every now and again, we sense something else: a shadow falls across his gaze, a darkness flickers in his eyes, a glimmer of contempt. Only it is more than that, for some of the students Walter is teaching are also the cruel, carefree debutantes who – wealthy and with time on their hands – mock Walter as he polishes their cars during the second job he works in order to make ends meet. Every now and then, we, the audience, glimpse something in the nondescript chemistry teacher’s eyes which is beyond contempt; his well-worn, weather beaten and gentle countenance transfigured into a violent grimace of loathing, and it is then, from deep inside, we feel Heisenberg – his dark alter ego – begin to stir.

As the series progresses, we learn more about Walter’s back story; we learn that he felt cheated and frustrated long before the cancer ever set in. Rather, he was subject to another sickness, the corrosive spread of thwarted ambition and resentment. As a young man, Walter had founded a company with two friends, a company which utilised his scientific prowess and became hugely profitable. Walter, however, was compelled to sell his share at a bargain-basement price early on in the endeavour. So, as he retreated into a life of nondescript anonymity, teaching at a local school, and as the years rolled by, Walter was reduced to a helpless slow burn of resentment and frustration, rendered as a passive bystander and forced to watch as his onetime colleagues and friends surpass all expectations and step into the limelight to become billionaires. There is a sense, then, in which the arrival of his cancer lets the genie out of the bottle. All that thwarted ambition and resentment and smouldering sense of frustrated superiority finally crystallises into something palpable: a ruthless, Nietzschean will to power. Enter from stage left – Heisenberg.

And so, critics have been divided; on the one hand, Walter has been regarded as a good person whose corruption was the tragic result of something foisted upon him by terminal illness – the need to provide for his family in the aftermath of his demise. Tom Shales writes for The Washington Post, ‘as absurdly risky as Walt’s solution seems to be, he really doesn’t have all that many options’.¹ But others have argued that the exigencies of fate play far less of a role; instead, Heisenberg was in Walter all the time, just waiting to be called into being. As Scott Meslow, writing in The Atlantic, has it – ‘all the elements that have since turned him into a monster were already in place’.²

The true nature of Walter White, however, is fundamentally dialectical; it is not either/or – but rather both. Yes, Walter was driven by the external and tragic necessity of fate; the cancer threw into relief the vulnerability of his family, and his love for them drove him to do the unthinkable in order to provide for them after he had died. This aspect of him, this reaction to circumstance, was selfless and genuinely heroic. At the same time, his ability to harness Heisenberg was as well a product of his frustrated ambition, his precious, petulant resentment – the long-simmering rage against a world which has failed to adequately reward someone of Walter’s gifts and abilities. This aspect of his personality generates from its smallness and pettiness, a corresponding monstrousness, a vast black annihilating force which is increasingly insensible to all forms and considerations beyond its object and its ambition.

And what makes Walter White a truly great character is that, throughout the series, these conflicting elements of his personality are constantly at war. It is worth bringing Tolstoy to mind, who knew something about character development and whose words are prescient apropos of Walter and Heisenberg:

One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own specific definite qualities: that he is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. But men are not like that at all. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse. ... Men are like rivers: the water is the same in all of them, but every river is narrow and rapid in some places, and broader and slower in others, sometimes clear, sometimes troubled, sometimes cold and sometimes warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, but sometimes it is one quality that manifests itself and sometimes another.³

In Breaking Bad, the same sense of elemental, internal conflict is heightened. Jesse Pinkman, Walter’s partner in crime, is also riven by contradiction. On the one hand, Jesse represents the living heart of the piece. Although he was ostensibly introduced as a means to connect the lower-middle class Walter with the sprawling underbelly of the subterranean drug scene, nevertheless, Jesse is naive and soulful, a raw wound of vulnerability and conscience set against the darkness of a world whose cruelty he remains unable to fathom. At the same time, we feel that he is teetering on the edge of losing his humanity: of either being sucked into a bleak, drug induced apathy, or worse, developing the same kind of brutality which is so alien to him. His soul is in a perpetual state of contention; a quasi-religious friction which forever falters between damnation and grace.

With Walter’s nemesis – brother-in-law and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent Hank Schrader – something similar is achieved. Hank’s character is, in many ways, an ennobling one, and as Walter’s megalomania becomes ever more pronounced, our sympathies begin to shift to the law enforcement agent. But at the same time, the feelings which are elicited from the characters are always interrupted and distorted by countervailing tendencies. Yes, Hank is strong, bold and robust; but these very qualities which underpin his heroism and a commitment to a social good greater than himself are also the very things which – while recuperating after being shot – make him such a tormenting and effective bully to his wife Marie. His humanity is a powerful impetus to his drive to battle drug crime, for sure, but at the same time, so is his class prejudice and his racism: a provincial sense of us and them which leads to a more effective dehumanisation of those he needs to interrogate and terrify. In the final season, Hank has taken to manipulating a distraught and emotionally vulnerable Jesse in order to get the goods on Walter; Hank’s partner, Steve Gomez, questions the ethics of this, wondering if the ‘kid’ is in any danger. Hank turns to him, his eyes glazed and lifeless, and mutters, ‘The kid? Oh, you mean the junkie murderer who is dribbling all over my bathroom floor?’⁴ Hank then reveals he is glibly prepared to sacrifice Jesse’s rights and even Jesse’s life: ‘Pinkman gets killed?’ he shrugs. ‘We get it all on tape.’⁵

Hank and Walter are depicted as opposing forces, their conflict set into motion from the outset, and its trajectory providing the overall sweep and raison d’être of the plotline. But on another level the two men are very similar. Hank’s need to bring Walter to justice becomes more about a sense of unreconstructed masculine identity – the feeling of damaged pride that Hank’s brother-in-law has been able to deceive him for so long and with such ruthless efficacy. In the same vein, as the series grows older, Heisenberg takes control of the wheel from Walter White – precisely because Walter is no longer behaving in accordance with the best interests of his family. Rather, he too is acting from the remit of a wounded masculinity, the need to assert himself against a lingering and malignant sleight, to prove himself to be dominant and to stomp out his inadequacy. Towards the end of the series, both characters – Hank and Walter – have allowed the suffering of innocents to become part and parcel of their career arsenals.

But it is also the case that both men remain at least partially redeemable. And this is necessary. It is integral to the power of the series because it allows us to remain invested in them. However much the forces of darkness, of atavistic masculinity, of violent protean individualism intrude, they never completely overwhelm the protagonists. Hank – having prosecuted his obsession with Heisenberg to its very limits, breaching the threshold of legality and ethics in the process – finally puts the cuffs on Walter. Moments later, he is confronted by a gang of neo-Nazis, who will release Walter and murder him (Hank). In the few seconds before his death, Walter begs the gang not to execute his brother-in-law, emphasising that Hank is not simply an agent but a man: Hank Schrader, a member of Walter’s own family. He remonstrates with Hank to plead for his (Hank’s) life – to abdicate his duty in favour of his personhood. And yet, Hank does the reverse. Wounded and helpless, he looks up at his assassin and emphasises his identity as a cop: ‘My name is ASAC Schrader, and you can go fuck yourself.’⁶

In one way, the culmination of this powerful scene is reminiscent of the denouement in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In that play, the protagonist has been brought low and has compromised himself, and it is only by emphasising his name – that is, his subjectivity and inward ethical conviction – at the cost of his life that he is rendered morally whole again: ‘Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!’⁷ In the case of Hank, we find a take on the same theme, but with a neat reversal. For it is Hank’s subjectivity that has caused him to be compromised in the first place. His obsession with Walter has become increasingly subjective and personal – a by-product of his own humiliation and aggravated pride – and it is that which has allowed him to become ever more brutal and unjust. When Hank looks his killer in the eye and says, ‘My name is ASAC Schrader’ – he emphasises the moment of universality once more. He emphasises his role as a facilitator of a higher objectivity, one which transcends his personal peccadilloes and particularities – the objectivity of justice in the guise of law. But just like John Proctor, Hank is redeemed in the very moments before his death, as the prospect of his immanent execution has thrown into relief his better nature.

Although it appears that the crimes Walter has committed as Heisenberg place him beyond redemption, as the series comes to a conclusion, Walter too is in some way redeemed. This might seem a bizarre claim for Walter has become so deeply immersed in darkness. He has murdered innocents, and even poisoned a child, in the pursuit and prosecution of his underworld empire. And his final act entails a shootout in which he massacres a gang of his criminal associates. But beyond the fact that he rescues Jesse – the person upon whom Walter has inflicted the most pain – and beyond the fact that the gang comprises the same people who were responsible for Hank’s murder, there is a set of more telling details in the ultimate episode of Breaking Bad that speak to Walter’s redemption.

Firstly, one is struck by his appearance. As he purchases the machine gun with which he will carry out his final act, Walter appears dishevelled: his hair has grown back in a lumpy shaggy matt, and he is unshaved and forlorn. On top of it all, he isn’t wearing his hat. What may seem like a small and arbitrary detail is far from unimportant; donning the hat has come to represent the shift to the alter ego – Heisenberg. What is fundamentally tragic about the final scene, and about the violence that Walter is perpetrating, is that it no longer involves the aspect of sadism which the Heisenberg persona more and more inculcated. Rather – having realised that he has lost his family as a result of the terrible ambition which had claimed him – now Walter’s actions are a haggard and last-ditch attempt to try to at least set a few things right. The tragedy is that the attempt is doomed to fail: Walter knows that he is running against the clock, that he won’t live to see the day out.

But nevertheless, that final day does in some way represent a triumph for Walter because he lives it as Walter White – and not as Heisenberg. He has reclaimed himself for the short period of time that he has left. And the strongest evidence of this comes from the fact that when ‘Uncle Jack’ – the leader of the neo-Nazi gang whose destruction Walter has engendered – lies wounded on the floor, he offers Walter the possibility of reclaiming the cash fortune the gang stole from him. Walter responds by shooting ‘Uncle Jack’ without hesitation. The action in its brutality, its brevity, shows also that the thing which was most real and fundamental to Heisenberg – the formation of a business empire through the never-ending cycle of financial accumulation – has ceased to resonate within Walter. In those moments, as he bleeds to death, Walter has met with the best, most humane aspect of himself once again. And despite everything he has done, all the horror he has unleashed, we, the audience, pity him. Herein lies the greatness of the writers’ achievement.

Of course, the greatness does not lie in this alone – in the sublimity of the individual characterisation. Rather, the characters and events are conduits for broader tendencies which criss-cross the panorama of the social world. It is, for example, no coincidence that the catalyst for Walter’s swarthy metamorphosis into a drug lord occurs in and through cancer. The image of the dark shadow on the x-ray, the black mass of tissue lodged deep within healthy pliant flesh, the consumptive power of an alien entity working invisibly from behind the scenes – is one which can be applied more broadly to the social landscape...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer
• 2  In Time: The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era
• 3  The Walking Dead: The Archetype of the Zombie in the Modern Epoch
• 4  Let Me In: The Figure of the Vampire as Kantian Noumenal
• 5  True Detective and Capitalist Development in Its Twilight Phase
• 6  Tupac Shakur: Historys Poet
• 7  Vincent van Gogh
• 8  The Song of Achilles: How the Future Transforms the Past
• 9  Barbara Kingsolvers The Lacuna and the Nature of the Historical Novel
• 10  Balzacs Women and the Impossibility of Redemption in Cousin Bette
• 11  The Wife: A Study in Patriarchy
• 12  The Vigilante in Film: The Movement from Death Wish, to Batman, to Taxi Driver
• 13  A Mirror into Our World: The Radical Politics of Game of Thrones
• 14  Harry Potter and the Modern Age
• 15  The Hunger Games Trilogy Art for the Occupy Era
• 16  The Politics of Deduction: Why Has Sherlock Holmes Proven So Durable?
• 17  Literary Love as Kantian Sublime: Wuthering Heights and The Sea, The Sea
• 18  Brief Loves That Live Forever: The Historical Melancholy of Andre Makine
• 19  John Williams Novel Stoner and the Dialectic of the Infinite and Finite
• 20  From Tragedy to Farce: The Comedy of Ricky Gervais as Capitalist Critique
• Bibliography
• Index