I loved this show so much that it inspired me to write a blog post about every episode in the epic series and how Walter’s well-meaning but dysfunctional actions reflect the subtle dangers and pitfalls of an oversized ego, which I wrote about in “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, by Understanding Your Ego” — https://www.amazon.com/Overcome-Personal-including-Alcoholism-understanding/dp/1300000309.
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CHAPTER AND SEASON ONE
THE BEGINNING OF THE BADNESS
Pilot
In the mega-hit cable TV series, “Breaking Bad” — http://sharetv.org/shows/breaking_bad — Walter’s ego-generated pride shows when his transformation from high-school chemistry teacher to meth cook begins. Embarrassed by the photos taken by one of his students and sick of his demeaning job at the car wash, and knowing he needs to make a lot more money to pay for his cancer and to make his family financially secure after he dies, Walter quits his job at car wash in dramatic fashion, yells at owner while grabbing his own crotch: “Wipe down this.”
He goes on a drug bust with brother-in-law Hank, and sees former student Jesse Pinkman escape through a window. He later confronts Jesse, says Jesse can either let Walter be his partner or he’ll turn Jesse into the police.
After Walter makes a batch of meth, Jesse samples it, exclaims, “You’re a damn artist.” This statement goes to Walter’s head, specifically, to his ego-generated pride. Walter thinks he’s really something special. This feeling that he’s so great and talented at cooking meth, an illegal but vastly more exciting and lucrative activity than teaching high-school chemistry, is a thread that shows up throughout the series.
But before I comment further on the misery and delusions that the egocentric mind, or Malignant Egophrenia, as Paul Levy (http://realitysandwich.com/) calls it, let’s review the major events from the pilot:
• A man (Walter White) dressed only in plain white underwear (tighty whities) drives a RV wildly down a desolate highway in the New Mexico desert. An unconscious man (Jesse Pinkman) sits in the passenger’s seat with a gas mask on, his head on the dashboard. Two more unconscious men slide across the RV’s floor until the vehicle veers into a ditch.
• The hyperventilating Walter climbs out of vehicle, puts on shirt that hangs from side-view mirror, re-enters RV and retrieves video camera, wallet and a gun. He records a cryptic, hand-held farewell to his wife and son. “I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.” That said, he faces the oncoming sirens, gun in hand.
• Flashback to his birthday three weeks earlier: Wife Skyler hands Walt a plate of eggs topped by veggie bacon that spells “50”, then banters with handicapped son Walter, Jr. Afterward, Walt drops Junior off at same high school where Senior teaches chemistry.
• Later that day, one of Walt’s more disrespectful students witnesses him moonlighting at a car wash for additional income. The encounter is especially belittling since the student laughingly photographs his teacher as Walt wipes down tires on a customer’s vehicle.
• A now publicly humiliated Walt returns home where Skyler has organized a surprise birthday party for him. Among the guests is Walt’s gregarious brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, a DEA agent on the local news for busting a methamphetamine lab. Walt asks Hank how much money was recovered at the crime scene. Hank: “$700,000. Not a bad haul.”
• Hank then invites Walt to accompany him on a bust. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, a woman fusses over Skyler’s pregnancy and notes that she’s “hardly even showing.”
• Another day at the car wash and the financially strapped Walt collapses and is taken away by ambulance. At the hospital, a doctor verifies the worst. The non-smoking Walter has inoperable lung cancer.
• The detached Walter says, “Best case scenario, I’ll live maybe another couple years.”
Walt returns home from doctor’s office but says nothing of his diagnosis to Skyler.
At the car wash, he explodes when his boss asks him to wipe down cars again. Walter assaults the display racks. “Wipe down this!” he shouts grabbing his crotch. AND SO THE TRANSFORMATION OF WALTER WHITE BEGINS.
Walter joins brother-in-law Hank at drug bust. As Hank and other agents make arrest inside, the chemistry teacher sees ex-student Jesse Pinkman escape through a window. That night, Walt confronts the baffled meth dealer. Walt tells Jesse they can either become partners or Walt will turn him in. “You know the business, I know chemistry,” says Walt.
And thus begins Walter White-Jesse Pinkman Meth Inc.
Walt goes to school, steals beakers, flasks and protective aprons. Jesse arranges to buy a used RV so they have a mobile, hard-to-detect meth lab.
The two drive out to the desert where Walt strips down to his skivvies, hangs his pants and shirt on the side view mirror, then gets to cooking the purest crystal Jesse’s ever seen. “You’re a damn artist,” he says.
Jesse takes a sample to Krazy-8, a drug dealer who happens to be his former partner’s cousin. Cousin Emilio, out on bail, believes Jesse ratted him out so the three drive out to the desert where Krazy-8 asks Walt if he wants to switch allegiances. Before he can answer, Emilio recognizes Walt from the police bust. Death threats ensue.
Jesse runs but trips, knocks himself on a rock. Walt barters for his life by promising to reveal his cooking artistry so Emilio ties up Jesse and then goes to watch Walt work his magic. In the Winnebago, as Walt prepares the ingredients, Emilio throws a cigarette out the window, thereby starting a brush fire.
Inside, Walt mixes chemicals that produce a deadly smoke. He dashes out, escapes the two drug dealers and avoids the bullets that flies through the RV wall. The smoke eventually kills or at least severely injures Krazy-8 and Emelio.
Walt unties and puts gas mask on Jesse, then drags and drops him on passenger’s seat in RV.
Flash-forward ends. Back to opening scene: Sound of sirens close in, Walt stands in the middle of the road. He tries to shoot himself. To his dismay, the safety is on. His efforts to unlock it simply result in a pointless misfire. Suddenly, fire trucks, not police cars, appear. Walter stashes the gun in the back of his underwear. Jesse, sporting a black eye, comes out to join him. Walt’s first day as a meth cook leaves him spent, shaken, but also invigorated.
At home, Walt meets his wife’s troubled queries with atypical sexual aggression. A stunned Skyler asks,”Walter, is that you?”
The compulsion to seek self-identity is one of the banes of the human condition. People have this need to know who they are, what their essence is. There is an assumption that they need to set themselves apart from everyone else by finding themselves. Walter is tired of being an inconsequential high-school chemistry teacher. And although he tries to convince himself and others that the sole reason he cooks meth is to provide for his family’s financial security, that’s not the whole truth. Walter seeks a new identity and as he grows more proficient in making meth, he grows more firmly entrenched in his new identity; master meth cooker, and then later on, drug kingpin. Eventually he uses Heisenberg to encapsulate his criminal persona.
As I point out in my first book, “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, By Understanding Your Ego” – www.lulu.com/spotight/leewriter — your true self isn’t a limited, narrow, laundry list of traits and demographic facts, or your career or who you’re married to or how good you are at some activity. There is no fixed, magic pill, neat little label that defines the real you. The true you is the consciousness that’s aware of you and the world around you. In other words, it’s that being that looks on as you live your life, not the things you do. As Eckhart Tolle notes in “Silence Speaks”, many people mistake the form and content of their lives for their identity. Your self is the spirit, the awareness that’s deeply connected to all other life in the universe, the mystical energy that keeps your body and mind alive until physical death, and then your spirit, which is immortal, continues on in some form, forever.
For alcoholics and addicts, on a subconscious level, they come to identify themselves as an alcoholic or addict. They don’t say that to other people or consciously think that but in their unconscious mind, they’re thinking that. When recovering alcoholics say they have an urge to drink, that’s really their ego trying to pull them back into their old, dysfunctional lifestyle. Their ego is all about putting people in boxes, narrowly defining who everyone is. For the recovering alcoholic or addict, the ego looks to the past for cues to define the self.
Obviously the addict/alcoholic used to abuse drugs or alcohol (or both) so the urge isn’t only to alter the individual’s state of mind, it’s also the ego’s way of maintaining a safe, secure, albeit dysfunctional, self-identity.
So remember you don’t have to drink – or take drugs, or gamble, or overeat, etc. — to be happy. Your legacy is the effects you had on other people as a result of your actions. But your actions aren’t you. They are the result of your ever-shifting, fluid self.
So today, if you don’t drink, then you’re not acting like a drunk or an alcoholic. Our self-identity is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. Walter White comes to think of himself as meth cook so that’s how he behaves. I told myself for about seven or eight years that “I drink, therefore I am”. So that’s what I did every day and/or night: drink, drink, drink. I thought I had to create a specific, narrowly defined identity for myself. Mine was drinking. Now I realize that every human beings’ true nature transcends the personal. We’re all capable of much more than what we’ve done in the past. But you can’t convince Walter of that.
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