Romancing the ice: The problematic poetry of Breaking Bad

Breakdowns and one-manning-up

Breaking Bad’s first three shots are of the desert sublime. In 15 seconds, the desert reveals its awesome, wondrous beauty: a brownish cactus, a blue sky behind; the brown rocks of a butte, a shadow falling across its face; a far more austere, craggy butte in all its glory, an extraordinarily blue sky beyond, wisps of cloud curling through. Jump cut to billowing brown trousers, in slo-mo, parachuting through the air. We are off and running away, in a fleeing RV steered by a panicking, middle-aged man in his underwear; a young, gas-masked man is unconscious in the passenger seat. Along with its set-up of the series’ genre-splicing—a Western (afire with stand-offs and showdowns, whether in the Whites’ home or out in the desert) cut with dark, often odd-couple, comedy and laced with gangster-drama and crime-thriller elements—this sequence establishes the most dominant aesthetic and structural pattern of Gilligan’s show: lulling visuals, idealising language or main characters’ hopes are rapidly subverted by the faintly absurd, dully prosaic, dingily dismal, grotesquely gruesome or a combination thereof; good intentions and human decency are corrupted and contaminated. This opening also establishes that, for all its male triad’s romantically naïve beliefs in science (Walt) or arts and crafts (Jesse) or law and order (Hank), none can escape nature, its growth-and-decay cycle ruling over all: Tuco Salamanca is killed in the desert by Hank (2: 2); Marco and Leonel Salamanca, after belly-crawling through a dusty desert town to a Santa Muerte shrine, die in their pursuit of death-radiating ‘Heisenberg’/Walt; Hank (Dean Norris), along with partner Steve Gomez, is killed in the desert and dumped in a pit there; Walt is plagued by a ‘Stage III adenocarcinoma’ (2: 9), uses a plant (Lily of the Valley) to poison young Brock Cantillo, and is driven to his final scheme after holing up in a winter-bound New Hampshire cabin; and Jesse becomes a slave cook, caged like an animal by Jack Welker’s White-supremacist gang in their desert compound.

In its first four episodes (written by Gilligan), Breaking Bad’s chemistry-like process of quickly building up and then steadily breaking down men’s criminal ideals and financial expectations comes fast and furious. Such breaking-down is made explicit at the plot level in a flashback in ‘…And The Bag’s In The River’ (1: 3), where Walt tells Gretchen, ‘Let’s break it down’, as they consider the composition of elements in the body; soon, Walt realises that Krazy-8 will try to kill him and escape when he reassembles the pieces of the plate he broke in the basement and a long shard is missing. Emilio, Krazy-8, Victor, another of Gus’s underlings, Drew Sharp and Mike are broken down in death, dissolved in acid by Walt, with Jesse or another accomplice. In the pilot episode, in a flash-forward, sirens approach Walt as he stands on the road, near-suicidal, then brandishes his gun, haplessly preparing for a showdown; in the return to this moment, later, the sirens turn out to be fire trucks, coming to extinguish the blaze in the brush where the RV had been parked, so Walt, only tighty-Whiteyed, sheepishly hides his weapon behind his bare back. (RVs are associated with the American (Western) romance of the open road, a myth undercut not only by Walt’s wild careening away from the cook-scene with two bodies in the back and Jesse unconscious in the passenger seat—veering the series’ genre from Western thriller to surreal comedy—but by the RV’s meth-lab function and Jesse’s crass explanation of it: ‘You can drive way out to the boonies. Be all evasive’ (1: 1). Later, as Walt romanticises the RV, Jesse bursts in, having unknowingly led Hank to what is now their trap, prison and virtual tomb (3: 6).) Walt’s showy attempt—changing the colours of a flame—to capture his class’s interest is snuffed out by one student’s sullen inattentiveness and chair-scraping, so Walt deflates the poetic into the prosaic: ‘Ionic bonds. Chapter Six [in your textbooks]’. Scuffing more shine from romantic notions about teaching, Walt moonlights at a car wash where his ‘wipe-downs’ are comedowns: the same student mocks him there, the mild-mannered teacher now the bullied geek. In one long tug—a business-like handjob that wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) gives Walt for his birthday while she excitedly watches an eBay bid for a garage-sale purchase she is trying to flip for a profit (this moment is drearily reworked, in bruise-blue light, in ‘Madrigal’ (5: 1))—the twin package of ideal birthday gift and sex-in-marriage comes undone. Walt’s manhood is pedestalised only to be toppled: the opening sequence, as Brian Cowlishaw notes, has Walt desperately trying to be in the ‘driver’s seat’ and turns ‘Will he wear the pants?’ into a surreal metaphor (Cowlishaw, 2015: 68); at Walt’s birthday party, when son and namesake Walter Jr hands him Hank’s gun, Walt says, ‘It’s heavy’, and his brother-in-law cracks, ‘That’s why they hire men’. Hank has already turned people’s attention to himself on the TV news, talking about a drug bust; that spotlight-stealing is undercut by Walt’s interest in how much can be made from meth, profitically tying his criminal rise to his Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) brother-in-law—meek, cancer-stricken father Walt conceiving of himself as meth-maker further undercuts the narcissism of macho, healthy, childless Hank romanticising himself as a heroic cop. Walt ogles a woman in a green dress at the car wash (the colour foreshadowing the greenbacks that Walt and Jesse will rake in and Skyler later launders there), only to collapse and be taken to hospital. In the ambulance, his masculine confidence, teaching benefits and the health-care system itself are de-romanticised when he tells the paramedic, ‘I don’t have the greatest insurance’, wishing to be dropped off ‘at a corner somewhere’. The cancer diagnosis soon licences Walt to feel reckless, even nasty, but the episode ends with Walt refusing to disclose his diagnosis to his wife, turning (non-)talk into action by forcefully having sex with Skyler, thus adopting an aggressive, dominant masculine role (‘Oh, Walt, is that you?’). And so begins the series’ character-study in anti-hero masculinity. As Jason Landrum notes, ‘Anti-hero narratives have been a crucial stage for Golden Age television and its fantasies of masculinity as a state of emergency’ (Landrum, 2015: 95). (See Martin (2013) for more on the ‘anti-hero principle’; Walt belongs to ‘a species you might call Man Beset or Man Harried’ (Martin, 2013: 5)). The path for such anti-hero male characters was trailblazed by the anti-heroes of post-war American cinema, when ‘[w]ork, family, and society itself seem to overwhelm the man’ (Trice and Holland, 2001: 110). The post-war Western is particularly influential, with the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s 1960s films becoming, in Vince Gilligan’s series, a Walt/Heisenberg who declares, ‘Say my name’.

In Walt’s rejection of ‘Cancer Man’ as his identity, fusing on the more fearsome ‘Heisenberg’ persona (the German physicist’s atomic research is alluded to in the reputation-focused episode ‘Negro y Azul’ (2: 7)), he starts a process of self-sublimation (the chemical process—C₁₀H₁₅N, seen in the title-credits—for Walt’s ‘baby blue’ also involves sublimation). He increasingly, haughtily conceives of himself in necessary-evil yet noble, superior-refined-into-supreme terms, menacingly lecturing his wife in the truth—‘I am the danger…I am the one who knocks’ (4: 6)—and demanding rival-turned-distributor Declan ‘say my name [Heisenberg]’ (5: 7). Concomitantly, ‘Mr White’s’ rising Godfatherliness to Jesse—‘So you must be Daddy,’ Tuco sneers when Walt-turned-Heisenberg comes demanding payment for stolen meth and his partner’s ‘pain and suffering’ (1: 6)—becomes more malevolently intertwined with Jesse’s faintly needy, sinking son-ness. Walt, condescending and lying to Jesse, abuses their relationship because of his money-making addiction, need to prove his male worth and efforts to expiate his guilt, as much as Jesse lies to himself and abuses his body because of his drug addiction, self-loathing and efforts to escape his guilt. Walt plays up his superiority and fatherliness to Jesse, but their connection flirts with the sympathetic, even fond, before dissolving into rancour.

Beginning bad—Walt extorts his ex-student into their joint venture, declaring, ‘you got nothing’ (1: 1)—the pair’s start-up, setting up the ‘partnership’ that Walt will preserve and the kind of lab equipment that he will caress fondly in the finale, also marks the onset of Walt’s self-romanticisation. It is a self-deluding process, entailing his arrogant domination of or dominion over another, that the show usually undercuts in ways small (after sexually dominating Skyler at the end of ‘Pilot’, they have just finished as ‘Cat’s in the Bag…’ (1: 2) opens and Walt is wracked by a cancer-related cough) and large (Walt’s diseased character reveals its full-force malevolence at the end of Season 2—he kills Jesse’s girlfriend Jane—and Season 4: he poisons Jesse’s girlfriend’s son Brock)…until its self-contradictory ending. Walt exalts a ‘round-bottom boiling flask’ (1: 1), but it will be used to make a highly addictive product that he will profit from and Jesse will stay hooked on. Walt professes concern, only to reveal that fatherliness as paternalism: justifying withholding an addicted Jesse’s profits (‘If I gave you that money, you would be dead inside of a week’, he snarls in the school lab where they first met (2: 12)); counting on the strength of their bond to push Jesse into killing Gale Boetticher (3: 13); and using Brock’s life to regain Jesse’s trust and redirect his anger so that he helps Walt kill Gus Fring (4: 12). Walt never sees Jesse as a pseudo-son but as a wilful, pathetic, childish lesser to be directed: ‘he does what I say…I can trust him’ (2: 11); ‘Jesse was [only] capable of working under my supervision’ (3: 5).

Walt furthers his self-romanticisation with self-deceiving, self-justifying language steeped in amorality or emotional detachment; he professes that a pseudo-sublime nobility, grandeur or superiority underlies his actions. In reply to Jesse’s befuddlement—‘[You’re] just gonna break bad?’—Walt declares, in New Age-speak, ‘I am awake’ (1: 1). Faced with killing Krazy-8 and getting rid of his and Emilio’s bodies, Walt hides behind clinical phrasing—‘course of action’; ‘this isn’t even the issue that demands immediate attention’ (1: 2)—that he comes to rely on more and more to both deny the wrongness of his acts and rationalise them, thus pedestalising himself as a man of necessary evil-genius. Walt envisions an ideal linguistic chain-reaction: ‘I truly believe there exists some combination of words…in a certain, specific order that would explain all of this’ (3: 10). Skyler later rejects his White-washing: ‘Just stop…I don’t need to hear any of your bullshit rationales’ (5: 4); Jesse says of Walt’s assurances that no one will get hurt: ‘You keep saying that and it’s bullshit every time! Always’ (5: 7); Jesse also tells Walt to ‘stop working me’ (5: 11). And Walt’s repeated rationale for meth-making, his family, is undercut from the start, for it is Krazy-8, his neck bike-padlocked to a basement post as if he is an animal, shortly before Walt garrottes him, who first voices it: ‘That’s why you’re cooking…You’re leaving money for your family’ (1: 3). Walt’s re-masculating concern about leaving a financial legacy becomes an ego and empire expansion at the expense of others whom he will not acknowledge: in ‘Buyout’ (5: 6), offered a paid-off retirement from meth-making, he talks to Jesse about how ‘I have–we have suffered and bled’ and no-one else. After angrily shooting Mike, Walt’s apology is detached to the point of sociopathy: ‘I’m sorry, Mike. This whole thing [emphasis added] could have been avoided’ (5.7); disposing of Drew Sharp’s body, Walt says, ‘It [emphasis added] had to be done’ (5: 8). But in the finale, Walt exacts his revenge on former partners Elliott and Gretchen Schwartz and wholly realises his legacy aspirations, cowing the couple into passing off his US$9.72-million for his son as their charity-money (5: 16). The show fails by the terms of its own framework; Walt’s evil-Godliness is re-romanticised as a flawed goodness via a tragic, elegiac death, and such distortion is heightened by the series’ sometimes self-indulgent visual style.

Blue-skying it

With Walt and Jesse’s first cook in the RV (1: 1) comes the first of Breaking Bad’s lyrical cook sequences. Lushly shot, this session jags along thrillingly in jittery, time-lapse cuts, much like a music video (it is edited and scored to Working for a Nuclear Free City’s ‘Dead Fingers Talking’, a song that Jesse might listen to while cooking or smoking meth); Walt’s disciple declares afterwards, ‘You’re a goddamn artist…This is art!…Every jibhead from here to Timbuktu’s gonna want a taste’. The ‘jibhead’ remark recalls the pair’s basely commercial and addiction goals, but this sequence, unlike the sublime-turned-surreal runaway opening, remains a romanticisation of meth-making, from its flashy editing and cool music to its simplified, slick compression of the time and effort to make this ‘product’. When Jesse attempts Walt’s standards but with slack-off buddy Badger, jittery, shallow focus shots of the cook (edited and scored to Fujiya and Miyagi’s ‘Uh,’ its lyrics and refrain—‘I thought that space and time went back and forth and sideways…/ She make me go uh uh uh’—suggesting that meth is the love object) are broken up by one wide-shot time-lapse sequence, the cloud-striated New Mexico sky (‘blue sky’ is the street name for Walt’s product and evokes his nickname for Skyler, ‘Sky’) sprawled above as the sun moves through it. A later wide-shot time lapse, of the sun rising above the RV, brings us to the end of the cook. The desert sublime remains—not despite but because of time lapse (a technique increasingly used, even when it is self-evident that a day or more has passed)—a Romantic canvas, laid out in all its beauty for viewers to behold, wide-eyed; the camera is the true drug, blowing our mind with nature’s grandeur. Here, James Parker (2013: 46) argues, is the show’s ‘aesthetic rush.…Above [the violence] rolls the glassy panorama of the New Mexico sky, a moral void, from which no lightning bolt of judgment will fall’. No God looks on; only the amoral camera’s glinting, approving eye gazes at Walt and Jesse’s work.

Still, most cook-sublime and desert-sublime sequences are offered up in order to be shot down: the time lapse of the cloud-scudded sky over the RV just before Jesse and Badger fight, then Jesse screeches off, abandoning his angry friend; the surreal, picturesque shot of what seems to be snow, then is revealed as motes of light streaming through bullet holes in the side door of the RV, trashed after Jesse and Badger’s melee (1: 6); the cinematic, wide shots of big blue sky and open field (scored by Blue Mink’s ‘Good Morning Freedom’) melding into a time-lapse montage of cook shots before Walt and Jesse get stuck in the wild, bickering and struggling and losing hope as Walt ails (2: 9); a flashback to Walt and Jesse first cooking in the arroyo, with Walt calling Skyler to talk about a family trip that weekend, only to return to the present, where Hank and Steve are killed by Todd’s uncle Jack and his white-supremacism crew in that very spot (5: 14). The show even has meta-fun with its romantic imagery when Walt lies to his wife and son at a support-group session about walks outdoors: ‘I really enjoy the nature…the cacti, vegetation, that kind of thing. It’s really very therapeutic’ (1: 6); cut to some desert-sublime shots of cacti, vegetation and the RV lab in the foothills, green smoke pouring out of its hatch. And so the series’ romantic-nature sequences are distilled down, corrupted even, by Walt into a therapy-speak alibi. But as amusing and self-referential as this moment is, it also presages an ending where it is Walt who dictates the show’s direction, narrowing the show’s gaze and focus into a lasting romanticisation of his final moments rather than one last de-romanticisation of his hubristic, self-aggrandising, idealising, self-sublimating sense of the world.

That greater lapse into romanticisation for its own sake recurs with the indulgent time-lapse sequence in ‘A No-Rough-Stuff-Type [sic] Deal’ (1: 7). After Walt and Jesse have stolen a tank of methylamine and just before they intend to drive away from Jesse’s dead aunt’s home in the RV, there is a shot of clouds moving over a mountainside. It is not an establishing shot, does not add to the atmosphere (buddy comedy) and does not presage where they will cook (the basement). Such wilderness sublime is there simply to continue the romance aesthetic of the show, now taking on a rosy life of its own. The desert-sublime returns in ‘No Más’ (3: 1) when the Salamancas crawl ahead of other pilgrims to pay their respects to Santa Muerte: the mustard-yellow sky, dusty small towns and reverentially silent onlookers turn Mexico into a strange land of ominousness and death—a Gothic-Romance Other-world (later and cross-border, in ‘Sunset’ (3: 6), a Navajo reservation is not shown as otherworldly).

The show’s signature ‘object-POV’ shot often only deepens its self-indulgent romance-aesthetic. In the first shot of ‘Bit by a Dead Bee’ (2: 3), the camera looks up at Walt and Jesse as they scrape dirt from a Plexiglas-like surface; they are scooping out a burying hole, but the surface is there for the camera, breaking the scene’s verisimilitude and spatial logic for the sake of a cool shot (a similar shot is used in the pre-credits sequence for ‘…and the Bag’s in the River’ (1: 3) to show Walt and Jesse cleaning the sludge from a dissolved body off a floor). The indulgence here is partly born of early efforts at the object-POV (the disruptiveness of the Plexiglas-like surface was soon avoided). The show’s many shots from within vats, vents, dryers and other containers or from the skewed, in-motion perspective of a shovel, gas can or vacuum whet a sense of not only claustrophobia but impersonality and detachment (most emphasised by Walt’s language). But in combination with the many desert-sublime shots, these shots—most excessive in ‘Thirty-Eight Snub’ (4: 2), with POVs from beneath a cocaine-lined tray, behind an array of minerals, a Roomba, within a locker, inside a pizza box and behind a car window going through a wash—develop, as if in kinship with Walt, a sense of ‘self-romanticism’; the show grows fond of its own burnished, self-consciously cool aesthetic. The pre-credits sequence for ‘Negro y Azul’ (2: 7)—a Narcocorrido band’s ‘The Ballad of Heisenberg’—is also self-indulgent and self-mythologising, rupturing the show’s verisimilitude and imagined time period (Heisenberg’s blue meth could not, in mere weeks, have become so widely, cross-border notorious as to inspire a song and video). And the jittery, adrenalised, show-off pre-credits sequence for ‘Fifty-One’ (5: 4) is indulgent and product-placing, tracking Walt’s new Chrysler 300 and Walter Jr’s new Dodge Challenger as they zoom into the driveway (the camera itself revs, panning excitedly between these two branded, new cars). Such flagrant self-admiration was echoed by critics extolling the series so hyperbolically that they waxed romantic about the medium itself or compared binge-watching the show to drug addiction: ‘I inhaled the first three episodes like a junkie’ (Lowry, 2009). And when the show’s cinematographic romanticism is re-framed by its ultimate, unnecessary sympathy for its anti-hero, it seems all the more overweening. Thus, the long-standing frame of de-romanticisation collapses and we are left not with breaking-down but dying-away as good, goodly and godly as possible.

Poe-try and Walt Whit(e)man

Breaking Bad’s swoon into elegy for Walt as a quasi-hero—not offering a sober end for an anti-hero—follows from a romantic, Western storyline (outsider returns to town to wreak vengeance on a nefarious gang), with shots not only aligned with Walt’s POV but ultimately exalting it, and a closing sequence that simply rhymes off a long-running, poetic sense of Walt as chemist-genius.

The series’ aural reworking of Gothic-Romance literature and romantic poetry is most obvious in its lurid, gruesome moments of horror, provoking a sublime terror. Given TV’s serial format and Breaking Bad’s self-contained, short story-like stretches in claustrophobic or subterranean American spaces, these moments are often Poe-like, especially sonically (think of the rap-rap-rapping in ‘The Raven’ or the pulse pounding in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’): Krazy-8’s creaks and wheezy, rasping moans in the basement, Walt and Jesse’s coin toss (repeated in ‘Better Call Saul’ (2: 8) and by Skyler in ‘Cornered’ (4:6)) for who will dissolve Emilio’s corpse, Walt’s Gothic Expressionism-like shadow on the basement wall as he descends the stairs and then Emilio’s dissolved sludge of a body, dropping through the bathtub and turning Jesse’s dead aunt’s home into a charnel house (1: 2). There are the metal-pipe sounds just before Walt’s garroting of Krazy-8, trying to stab him with a plate shard, with a clink-clinking bike-lock in the dim basement (1: 3). There is the wheelchair-bound Tio Salamanca ringing his antiquated bell, most ominously in ‘Grilled’ (2: 2) but re-ding!ed over the end-credits of ‘Caballo Sin Nombre’ (3: 2), after Tio used the bell in conjunction with an Ouija board to spell Walter White’s name. Eerie, too, is the sound of the sledgehammer which opened the cash machine that crushed Spooge’s head echoing through the end-credits of ‘Peekaboo’ (2: 6). Victor’s blood runs along the super-lab’s red floor and into a sluice-way before his cadaver is dissolved in ‘Box Cutter’ (4: 1). Along thuds Dave Porter’s heartbeat-like score at the end of ‘Crawl Space’ (4: 11), just before Walt cackles maniacally when he realises, there beneath the house, that he does not have the money to disappear. And there is Walt’s birthday gift (from Jesse) of a luxury watch tick-tick-tick!ing closer to midnight—implying borrowed time and, doomsday clock-like (a nuclear reference to Heisenberg?), a nearing catastrophe—as it sits atop the Leaves of Grass edition which Gale gave to Walt (5: 4). However, that Whitman collection is de-romanticised when it gives away Walt as Heisenberg to Hank (5: 8). Otherwise, Walt’s poetry-genius namesake, reflecting his father-son concerns (Walter Whitman’s father was Walter, so Whitman was called ‘Walt’), is mostly used to amp up the series’ and viewers’ idealising of Walt as a chemist-genius.

Whitman’s poetry (heavily influenced by Romanticism), building to Walt’s emotional homecoming (to the purity of his passion for chemistry) at show’s end, is introduced in the super-lab. In the glow of ‘Sunset’ (3: 6), after Walt and disciple Gale’s first cook-day—scored to ‘Ginza Samba’ as though they are dancing in perfect two-step—they wax rhapsodically about their science: ‘It is magic. It still is’, agrees Walt; Gale: ‘I kept thinking about that great old Whitman poem, “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer”’. Walt urges him to recite it; he does, but the libertarian Gale distorts and reduces the poem—about a speaker who prefers gazing at stars’ beauty to an astronomer’s representation of them with calculations; about a poet contending that poetry, ‘from time to time’ (l. 7) and line to line, can look up and out at the world, better articulating nature’s beauty than science—into a romance of lab work as the freest way to conjure up chemistry’s magic. Walt is next seen reading a leather-bound edition of Leaves of Grass in his apartment. Later, in flashback, while setting up the super-lab, Gale praises Walt’s meth to Gus: ‘I know you want the best’ (4: 1); the scene’s retrospectiveness makes it all the more romantic and mythologising, with Walt’s ‘blue sky’ the ne plus ultra for Gale, admiring and cowed by this awesome sample of chemistry-genius. His adulation is echoed both by his lab notes’ romantic dedication—‘to w.w.[:] my star ,[ sic ] my perfect silence’ ((4: 4); he is quoting the poem he had recited to Walt after their first cook)—and by his dedication in his Leaves of Grass present to Walt: ‘to my other favorite W.W. it’s an honour [sic] working with you. fondly [sic] g.b.’ (5: 9). Miguel EH Santos-Neves (2015: 70–71) argues that Walt is attracted to Whitman’s poetry because it is about self-realisation, so Walt may be simplifying his namesake’s verse to romantically justify his lab work and so elevate himself, through neoliberal profit-making, into a transcendent force—Heisenberg. Gale’s gift only adds to such grandiose self-justification, but his faux-poetic admiration (in ink in a print book that is the ‘150th anniversary edition’) proves Walt’s undoing, for his vain holding-on to Gale’s tribute leads to Hank finding it, reading the dedication and realising who his own long-sought ‘W.W.’ is (in ‘Gliding Over All’ (5: 8)—the title is from a Whitman poem), turning a male-obsession triangle into a straight-and-narrow line from him to his brother-in-law, dead in his sights. But as Whitman’s verse here, Santos-Neves (2015: 74) notes, becomes mostly ‘foreshadowing’ and ‘motif’, there is no grotesque refracting or ironic reworking of the poet’s neo-Romantic notions of self-realisation in the 21st-century Walt. The Whitman allusions mainly gild Walt/Heisenberg with the aura of romantic-genius. This glow is cast by Gale’s first words to his idol: ‘Mr White, I presume?’ (3: 6), playing earnestly off Stanley’s greeting to Livingstone on November 10, 1871, the most famous words in the West’s 19th-century epic romance with colonial and scientific exploration.

Walt-as-idol raises the last major Romantic allusion—to Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ in that eponymous episode. In an over-stylised promotional teaser for the second half of Season 5, Bryan Cranston, as Walt, recites the poem as time-lapse images of the show’s settings, especially its desert locations, pass by; a Poe-like heartbeat throbs in the background. In the episode, though, the poem is used to suggest—much as ‘Gliding Over All’ implies that the imperious, God-like Heisenberg has risen above all problems even as he brings death (‘Gliding o’er all, through all…Death, many deaths I’ll sing’ (ll. 1, 5)) to assert supreme control over his meth empire, remaining loftily out of reach of the law until Hank tweaks to the Whitman-revealing truth—Walt’s tyranny and arrogance crumbling apart. He is brought down to earth with a crash in the arroyo by Jesse’s deception and Hank’s death (whereupon Walt’s face falls, then his body). When Walt buried his money, he dug away as the sun dipped beneath a butte’s impassive face (5: 10); immediately after Hank’s body is dragged off to be dumped in that money-pit, we see this stony face again, reflecting the savage indifference of nature once more (5: 14). Shelley’s poem, set in a desert, is about the inevitable dissolution of tyrannies by nature and time, but it buries the once-great king beneath two more textual layers, offered by two humble, mundane speakers: a ‘traveller’ tells ‘I’ of the sunken statue in far-away sands. (Ice—both the ‘ice’ of meth and water in its solid state—is also referred to in Romantic ways. Hank’s reasoning for his DEA operation code name, ‘Icebreaker’—‘How we liking that?…Gonna be thinking about some big ass ship in the North Pole, breaking ice’ (1: 4)—suggests the Arctic sublime in its idealised sense of majesty and power. And Walt’s flight to a cabin in snowbound New Hampshire, becoming a recluse amid New England nature, is Thoreauvian, with Ed the disappearer observing, ‘It’s just the spot for a man to rest up and think on things. If you look around, it’s kinda beautiful’ (5: 15).) And in Breaking Bad’s ultimate refusal to similarly distance itself from Walt, instead aligning itself with his grandiose, ingenious, action-hero ending—though he is still driven by petty vengeance, overweening pride and an obsession with patrilineage—thus remaking him as legacy-fulfilling patriarch and tragic hero, the show goes against its usual de-romanticism, indulges its occasional visual excesses again and thoroughly gratifies its poetic glorification of chemistry-genius.

Finale moments

In the TV drama era of male anti-heroes when Breaking Bad emerged, the viewer identification of old, now with mad, bad men, remained a disturbing problem. David Chase challenged sympathies for mob-father Tony throughout The Sopranos, especially with his ambiguous ending: ‘[people] had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat…cheered him on…then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished…I thought that was disgusting, frankly’ (Martin, 2007: 184). The dangers of viewer identification with Walt became obvious online. What seemed to be a vocal minority’s excessive sympathy for, and overidentification with, Walt led some to post vicious, even hateful comments about Skyler’s character, as actress Anna Gunn noted:

As the hatred of Skyler blurred into loathing for me as a person, I saw glimpses of an anger that, at first, simply bewildered me…[t]he consensus among the haters was clear: Skyler was a ball-and-chain, a drag, a shrew, an ‘annoying bitch wife’. (Gunn, 2013)

In the finale, after seeing Skyler one last time, Walt returns to his first, truest love—chemistry, poetically personified by the laboratory. Walt regains his lab and sense of scientific freedom and power after being controlled and surveilled in Gus’s super-lab and feeling so scorned by the Schwartzes. The lab had been where Walt was once so imperious, self-mythologising and supercilious (his mocking of Victor cooking (4: 1) or his sneering at Jesse among lab equipment (5: 7)). The final sequence of ‘Felina’ (5: 16) imperiously identifies—demanding we identify, too—with Walt. Such overidentification may have been sparked in the scene that the finale echoes to the verge of repetition—the destruction of Gus’s super-lab in ‘Face Off’ (4: 13). There, super-Walt/sublime Heisenberg returns triumphant, entering the lab, killing two thugs and rescuing Jesse to announce, blood-spattered yet restored to his self-romanticised drug lordliness, that ‘Gus is dead’; they then destroy the lab that had become contaminated—by a fly, Victor’s corpse and Gus’s control—and was no longer Walt’s realm for ‘magic’-making. In ‘Felina’, when Walt rides in, rescuing Jesse (unintentionally) from his captors, and dies in the lab, it is re-romanticised as his reclaimed, rightful kingdom and natural resting place. If, before, ‘we seem[ed] to share the surveilling gaze of some cold and capricious intelligence’ (Parker, 2013: 46), the series’ ‘second-degree style’, reflective of an auteur’s point of view (Barrette and Picard, 2014: 124, 126), vanishes, the once-surveilled lab is now Walt’s, and we share Walt’s gaze—that overarching ‘cold and capricious intelligence’ all along?—as we accompany him on his final moments in that space that is usually the only one ‘where Walt ever feels completely at home…and completely self-confident’ (Guffey, 2014: 164). The lab is pure again now beneath Walt’s hand and eye, reframing its beautiful symmetry for us. The lab as heaven for such a chemistry-genius, a sacred sanctum where Walt ‘enters a fine artistic frenzy…transmuted…touched now with creative fire…he is Mozart in the land of meth’ (Parker, 2013: 44), was established in ‘Sunset’ (2010: 3, 6). And in ‘Hazard Pay’ (5: 3), when Walt and Jesse first use their mobile lab in a Vamonos Pest tented-off home (a true smokescreen for their chemistry collaboration) and The Peddlers’ ‘On A Clear Day You Can See Forever’ plays, emphasising the harmonic dance of the pair, working in sync in this cool, almost-unearthly lab, the scene intercuts with close-ups of fantastic chemical processes. Now, as if recalling such idylls, Walt taps a Weiss (German for ‘White’) pressure-gauge, walks among his equipment, holds a mask in his hands, and Badfinger’s ‘Baby Blue’ kicks in, its lyric ‘kept you waiting there too long, my love’ emphasising Walt’s return to his amour fou. He pats a boiler—his reflection in its metal seeming to distort him into the past, where he is bald and has a goatee—and we hear the lyric ‘the special love I had for you’ as his hand runs down the side and falls away, leaving a W-like bloody smear; he has made his mark. There is a smile on his face and tear in his eye as the camera pulls up from Walt, lying dead in the pose of a snow angel, as the chorus—’My baby blue’—comes and we ascend towards the blue sky while the police move in, too late.

If Gilligan envisioned ‘a radical extension of the anti-hero trend’ that was ‘the signature of the decade’s TV’ (Martin, 2013: 267), with ‘Walt’s journey a grotesque magnification of the American ethos of self-actualization’ (Martin, 2013: 268), the show ultimately alchemises him into a tragic-romantic hero on a noble suicide mission, so that Walt un-ironically gets ‘a death of his own making…[he has] an active hand in his mortality’ (Thomson, 2015: 62). The final look, of understanding, between Walt and Jesse even grants Walt, in his Christ-like return from exile in the New Hampshire wilderness, quasi-redemption in his rescue of his lapsed disciple. Thus, the typical tension in the Western between its Romantic vision of the male drifter and the hold of home and family life is resolved even as Walt’s ‘rugged individualism’, promoted by that sense of ‘romantic destiny’ so associated with the American West (Lehan, 2014: 179), is lauded. The series gratifies his final vows—to give money to his children, kill Jack and his crew, ‘and only then am I through’ (5: 15). He grandly reframes his cause to Skyler in their last meeting—‘They murdered Hank. They stole my life’s work’ (5: 16)—and then fulfils it; though the ‘work’ stolen is his money, he kills Jack as he offers to tell him where that is and Walt returns to the lab for his grand and now well-deserved goodbye, retreating into the nostalgic purity of his love for chemistry, before the science was reduced (by him!) to money. It is all a dreamily long way from the brutal, in-no-way-poetic reality of the meth-trade, most emphasised early on. The de-romanticisation of Walt’s meth-making is starkest at the end of Season 1 and then—the scene replayed and extended—at the start of Season 2, when new partner Tuco savagely, fatally beats No-Doze after he samples Walt’s product. The brutally prosaic reality of meth-use hits home in ‘Peekaboo’ (2: 6) when Jesse, breaking into the hovel of two users to kill them, finds their neglected, grubby boy amid detritus- and trash-filled rooms. Jesse and the boy’s brief, quasi-father-and-son relationship there, juxtaposed with Walt’s day, makes meth-manufacturing and meth-distribution all the more of a scuzzy, venal, destructive, filthy-money business, bloodily skeining together addicts’ broken lives and the Whites’ middle-class world. That entanglement is briefly re-echoed in ‘Hazard Pay’ (5: 3) when we see, via Skyler’s point of view, Walt and Walter Jr enjoying Scarface on TV, its gunfire then becoming the sound of drug-money as bills whir and riffle through a currency-counting machine at Mike’s office before Walt, Jesse and Mike divvy-up their profits. Far removed from such complex deromanticising and, instead, much too self-aware of its finale-ness, ‘Felina’ still attempts, in too-neat visual rhymes with the pilot episode, to come full-circle—Walt wears the same outfit, flirts with suicide, sirens head towards him—even as it lionises Walt, draws out the best, action-packed ending possible for this long-doomed man and restores ‘moral order’ (Echart and García, 2015: 91).

In its macho, Western, self-realised, tough-guy-goes-out-in-a-blaze-of-bullets-and-glory ending—the showrunner proudly noted as much: ‘he went out on his own terms; he went out like a man’ (Dixon, 2013); ‘I tell ya, you guys [Jesse/Aaron Paul and Walt/Bryan Cranston], you go out like men…there needed to be a feeling of triumph…he went out on his own terms’ (Gilligan, 2013)—‘Felina’ runs entirely counter to the series’ questioning and de-romanticising of Walt’s masculinity. This closing endorsement and redemption of breaking-bad man Walt is foreshadowed in ‘Gliding Over All’ (5: 8), where Hank, despondent about ever nabbing Heisenberg, recalls to Walt an earlier job, marking trees for felling: ‘Maybe I should have enjoyed it more. Tagging trees is a lot better than chasing monsters.’ Walt, the monster he seeks, replies, ‘I used to love to go camping,’ as if thinking of the RV and cooking in it out in the desert; cut to Walt suiting up to enter the Vamonos plastic tent (camping, again, but more artificial and rote than it used to be) with Todd (not his old partner). And so Walt has lost his love of and romance for the chemistry work that led him to meth-making—now a grind. By the time he returns to New Mexico, in ‘Felina’, ‘the lab is a final trip home…the reflection of his smiling face the last thing he ever sees’ (Guffey and Koontz, 2014: 308). So the death of Walt is made sublime, opportunistic and escapist because Walt is given and seizes the chance, as a tribute to his character and reward for those viewers so sympathetic to him, to re-acquaint and re-romance himself with the work, the chemistry and the lab (so recently a prison for Jesse). This falling-in-love again, with a dying swoon, reverses the show’s typical romanticising-only-to-deromanticise (plans going good and then breaking down, bad) process. ‘He’s not getting off that easy,’ declares Hank after Marie says Walt should ‘just go ahead and die’ (5: 11), but Walt does get away and go gently into that good night, drifting off among his lab equipment and full of the knowledge of his chemistry-genius, basking, with the show’s approval, in the ‘scientific narcissism’ (Brodesco, 2014: 58) that Breaking Bad had so often de-glamourised (a narcissism that won out in practice, too, with Walt’s re-engineering of a machine gun to mow down all enemies save Todd—a moment decidedly ‘hokey, or James Bondish’ (Thomson, 2015: 15)). No longer de-romanticised by his arrogant, corrupt acts as drug lord Heisenberg but re-imagining and re-romanticising himself as a scientific mastermind in the lab that he built, Walt is gilded overall by the show with this closing revision and re-envisioning of himself; script, camerawork and soundtrack all endorse his self-sacrificing, deathbed transformation amid his gleaming, buffed-up, sanitised life’s work. Rather than ‘see[ing] this man for what he really is’ (5: 11), as he wished of Hank in his fake video-confession, we see Walt re-framed on our small screens as the larger-than-life man he wanted to be; if ‘the spectator is intended to feel conflicted about the anti-hero at the end of the anti-hero series’ (Vaage, 2016: 153), the aftermath of Walt’s conflict with the vile neo-Nazi gang ensures that the viewer can feel comfortably and satisfyingly unconflicted. Walt gets and goes out his way, at his most tragic-heroically moral—a doomed (by cancer, all along) but noble, genius chemist-poet who has authored his own soaring coda, returning to a nostalgic, pure love of his scientific work after realising his elaborate revenge plot, saving his supposed surrogate son, and ensuring his millions go to the son who has rejected him. And so he drifts up, up and away, White-heaven-bound, his body enfolded by the camera, the series dissolving Walt in the warm glow of its self-love.