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December Talking Meme: Citizen White or What Kind of Tragedy is Breaking Bad Anyway?
Having seduced abromeds into marathoning Breaking Bad in its entirety, I was delighted when she challenged me for meta around the subject of "Breaking Bad: Greek Tragedy? Shakespearean? Or WHAT?"
Now, I am a pedantic German who knows her Lessing who knew his Aristotle. Tragedy, as defined by the master of Greek meta: a tale wherein the main character is brought down by a combination of external circumstance and his/her own flaws. Which isn't how the word is mostly used today by the media - wherein "tragedy" usually means "calamity which befalls innocent people" - or in in pop culture understanding, where the hero of a tragedy is usually supposed to be character not only sympathetic but upstanding, with the flawed variety referred to as antiheroes. (Which would have been confusing to the Greeks, because their heroes, well, if they don't get mad and slaughter their families, or kill family members without any madness involved and instead good old fashioned revenge, they let their wives die for them, or cheat their comrades in arms out of armour and life, or, well, you get the picture. Mind you, I'm always a bit bewildered that Aristotle picked Sophocles' Oedipus, out of all Greek tragedies, as an example for a perfect combination of circumstance and internal flaws, because I can't see that. Oedipus, for a Greek hero, is actually among the more upstanding characters. His one genuine flaw is his hot temper and it contributes to his fate in as much as it's the cause why he gets into an argument with a stranger on the street which ends in him killing the stranger. This is not a habit with him, and he certainly didn't know that the stranger in question was actually his biological father. Otherwise, Oedipus' tragedy is all triggered by external circumstance and because the gods truly have it in for him. First his father gets the prophecy that Oedipus will one day kill his father and marry his mother and promptly has the baby exposed. (If that had not happened, nothing else would have.) Then Oedipus, when grown up after the usual myth elements of kind shepherds and friendly childless couples in adoption mode, , hears the same prophecy, naturally assumes this means his adopted parents, the only ones he knows, and leaves them in horror, determined to stay away so that he never, ever can fulfill that prophecy. (Oedipus, out of all the Greek mythological characters, did not have an Oedipus complex.) Cue stranger on the road, later encounter with the sphinx and marrying the widowed queen of Thebes, where he spends some happy years as a ruler with sons and daughters before the plague strikes and the whole truth is discovered. In conclusion: there is a reason why a French version of this is called The Infernal Machinery. Not nearly enough of these events are caused by Oedipus himself because of his own flaws. But then, a catastrophe out of all proportion as a net result is very Greek.
The problem with defining something as "Shakespearean tragedy" is that Will S. himself by no means wrote all his tragedies following the same rules or categories. Romeo and Juliet, until Mercutio gets killed, might just as well be a comedy. The Merchant of Venice, which is supposed to be a comedy, almost never gets performed as one today, and that's not all due to the Holocaust having happened; even in the nineteenth century, Shylock was often called a tragic character caught in the wrong type of play. King Lear, otoh, admirably qualifies as far as Lear himself is concerned - his flaws lead directly to his fate, and this is more or less true of Gloucester as well - but what about Cordelia, and the Fool? Whose tragedy is Julius Caesar anyway - Brutus', Caesar's, Antony's? And while we're talking history: the two dramas about ursurpers, Richard III and Macbeth, have main characters who are heroes in the traditional dramatic sense (main characters), but not in the modern pop culture one. Shakespeare's Richard III laughs at all the current popular villains and their fans because he did that "ruthless villain charms audience by being smarter and more eloquent than anyone else, gets UST scene with good person and seduces same" centuries ago. Ditto Macbeth with the whole "character starts out heroic, gets darker and darker, is, however, capable of intense affection towards partner" arc. However, both Richard and the Macbeths live in a dramatic universe where their very act of ursurpation means they cannot, in the end, remain successful. Their eventual failure isn't solely due to inherent character flaws, bad planning or the efforts of their antagonists, who in another drama would be the protagonists: it is pre-ordained because their assumption of power goes directly against the divine right of kingship.
You can see why I'm hesitant to call Breaking Bad either Greek or Shakespearean, though it certainly has elements of both. One sense in which people today use the term "Shakesperean" is to signify dramatic events on an epic scale and the mixture of humor into the bloodshed instead of unrelentic gloom and doom. (My teacher, back when I was an impressionable teenager, used Shakespeare to illustrate what "comic relief" means in classic drama, because who else? This description certainly fits Breaking Bad, but it is awfully general.
Let me draw another show in. The Wire has its share of personal tragedies - has it ever! - and several of these certainly come about by a mixture of circumstance and personal flaws, but most of all it strikes me as a tragedy of systems. In fact, the very point of the show, hammered in again and again, in season after season, is that every single system that gets focused on is so inherently corrupted and destructive that failure of the individuals sooner or later is inevitable. The Game, to quote one character, is rigged. For everyone - criminals, cops, teachers, students, politicians, the media. The Wire is far more Shakesperean in that sense, only with reverse trajectory. Richard III and Macbeth cannot stay on top because they are ursurpers and live in a dramatic world where ursurpation is against nature and ALWAYS gets punished; the various attempts at reform in The Wire cannot prevail for long because all the systems are too inherently destructive. You can, at best, help some individuals and salvage a few friendships, and even that is by no means granted; you cannot beat the system you're in.
In Breaking Bad, the only system which doesn't work is the health care one - which is an initial plot point, granted, and then one in mid season 3 -; but capitalism itself works, and so does criminal enterprise. So, for that matter, does the police. Walter White goes from nobody in two ill paid jobs to drug kingpin by a combination of lucky (well, for him, not for anyone else) circumstance, hard work and skills. Jesse Pinkman goes from small time crook and (bad) meth cook to brilliant meth cook and multiple millionaire. Hank Schrader has his share of set backs, but he steadily rises through the DEA ranks because of, again, hard work and smarts. Of course, none of these career highs are the end of the show, but the fact of the matter remains: there is no system in the Breaking Bad verse that inherently is set up to bring you down. Not even the American health care system, sucking as it does; it's important that as of episode 4 in the first season, Walter White gets presented with an alternative to his meth producing scheme. He gets offered not only enough money to pay for all medical expenses he and his family will have in the course of his cancer treatment but also a job opportunity that would end his need to teach chemistry to apathetic students who don't care. He could do the chemistry he loves, legally, and without hurting anyone. All he has to do is swallow his pride, as the offer comes from his former partners whom he still feels betrayed by. But Walt, displaying for the first time in full force that all time favourite attribute of Greek heroes, hubris, is not capable of this and rather chooses crime.
By the way, this isn't just true for Walt. What happens to Jesse in the course of the show is Greek (or Shakespeare in King Lear mode) in its beyond all proportion darkness, but during the course of the show, he gets several chances to avoid his fate. For example, in early s3 Jesse is financially secure, and Walt isn't in any way pressuring him or manipulating him into resuming their partnership. On the contrary; this is when Walt himself (briefly, and mostly due to the fact he's been found out by Skyler) tries to live a non-criminal life again. It's Jesse's choice to resume meth producing on his own; it's the fastest way of making money he knows and something he actually by then is good at, but Jesse isn't, like the Corner Boys in The Wire, living in a system where everyone tells him this is the only way for him, on the contrary.
Skyler, too. After her discovery of the truth about Walt and her initial attempt to make him leave without their son finding out the truth don't work, she could, before eventually becoming actively involved by laundering Walt's money (which limits her options, but doesn't eliminate them), have at different points made other choices, all of whom would have extricated her of the unfolding tragedy. (Notably: going through with the divorce after Walt is finally willing to give it to her, telling Junior/Flynn the truth at any point, then leaving with her children. There are others.)
Even Hank: granted, his career would have been over, but his life would not have been if he hadn't put his need to bring down and arrest Walt in person, himself, above notifying the agency of the truth once he'd put it together. Now Jesse, Skyler and Hank all have their choices also determined by Walt's original choice (not to mention Walt's ongoing behaviour towards all of them), plus they're supporting characters which means the story is never going to focus around their decisions to the same degree it does around Walt's. But still, their decisions contribute to the overall narrative, and some of Walt's actions are only possible because of them. And while each of them experiences situations where the choices are taken out of their hands, and where they cannot change their fate, this is never true for them all the time through the five seasons of the show. In all cases, their own character traits drive those of their choices which contribute to the eventual conclusion. Jesse's mixture of neediness and passivity, Skyler's pragmatism, control issues and own streak of ruthlessness, Hank's pride - all qualities that aren't all these characters are, I hasten to add, and some of their key choices are driven by their other traits: Jesse walking away from Walt without money mid s5, for example, Hank knowing that beating up Jesse was wrong and telling his superiors as much, accepting the blame, Skyler going into the pool and giving her children to Marie, for example - all these flaws are co-responsible for their individual tragedies.
But it is the very fact that for all the characters - and Walt, too - you can imagine other roads taken which makes Breaking Bad, to me, in the end neither Shakesperean nor Greek. Asking what would have become of Oedipus if he had not killed his father and married his mother is pointless; that is his story. He hasn't got an existence out of it. Shakespearean heroes are a bit more flexible (Hamlet killing Claudius in act 1 makes for a different story, but you can imagine him doing it; you can equally imagine Claudius being a bit more ruthless and successfully getting Hamlet killed early instead of delegating the job, Gertrude's son or no), but they still live in a narrative universe where the kind of options they can take are limited, and where a certain type of order is eventually restored. To the degree that Breaking Bad's ending was controversial, it was about Walter White not being punished enough; whether the story allowing him to die with a sense of accomplishment (i.e. having tricked Elliot and Gretchen into laundering his money so it will end up with his son after all, having defeated and killed the people who took the rest of his drug millions, having as peaceful a goodbye from Skyler and Holly as he was likely to get) was validating Walt's hubris about himself instead of properly punishing it the way, say, his lonely death in New Hampshire would have done. This to me is beside the point as far as the tragedy question is concerned. Macbeth, even in the process of losing his kingdom and after already having lost his wife, is certainly not in a repentant mode (what with "lay on, Macduff, and dammed be he who first cries hold, enough!" as last lines) and wants to go out fighting, which he does. (Unless it's a production that stages a silent execution kneeling in front of Malcolm after some running away, which I've seen done, but as far as the text is concerned, Macbeth dies in his duel with Macduff.) This does not retrospectively justify Macbeth's actions. And not only can't Walt know whether or not scaring Elliot and Gretchen will survive his own death, either way, the last words he'll ever hear from his son will still be hate and rejection, which was entirely his fault, and he knows it. The relatively peaceful goodbye from Skyler is possible because he at last gives up on his longest held and most cherished self justification, of having done it all for the family; because he admits to her that he did it for himself. And the last word he hears from Jesse, the most important relationship he formed in the last two years, are a refusal. Walter White dies on his own terms, yes, but also with the awareness of all those terms lost him.
"But then", to misquote one of the most famous movies of all time, "those are the only terms anyone ever knows. Their own." Because in the end, I think the type of tragedy Breaking Bad is a very American one, resembling nothing as much as the one of Charles Foster Kane. On one level, it's a "A man gains the world, loses his human connections" tale, but that's far from all there is to either story. There is the fact the "state of innocence" the main characters start out from is questionable. If "Rosebud" signals Kane's childhood before becoming rich, well, what glimpse we get at his dysfunctional parents hardly makes that childhood look warm. (Walt certainly starts out with a loving family, but also with one job that endlessly frustrates him and that he's overqualified for, and another which is mindless slavery.) There is the constant question of how much or little the main character actually believes his own propaganda. (Bernstein and Jed Leland certainly have opposite views on how sincere Charlie Kane ever was, while the proportion between hubris and the need to provide for Walter White early on are just as debatable.) There's the main character at his most compelling when he goes up against the establishment (young Kane taking over the Inquirer and pissing off his guardian, Walt versus various crazed drug lords in s1 and at the start of s2) and most unmasked and appallling when terrorizing someone within his social power (Kane making Susan sing again and again until she tries to commit suicide, Walt's creepy "I forgive you" embrace for Skyler followed by the even creepier scene the next episode of him getting into bed with her while the camera is focused on her horrified face). There's the moment between former extremely close men where brutal truth telling strikes - "you want this; YOU" says Jesse to Walt in the desert (and later in the finale) after Walt has given him another I'm-doing-this-all-for-you speech, "it's all about you; you want people to think you love them so much they ought to love you back" says Leland to Kane in their final meeting. And yet, there's the question of how much the viewer agrees with Leland and Jesse in their assessments, and how much the viewer hopes/thinks they're overlooking some genuine emotion on the main character's part also factoring in. Kane, dying in Xanadu alone (except for servants) but for a moment caught up in a childhood dream; Walt, dying in a meth lab alone (except for approaching cops) but with the sense of having chosen this ending - is either of it just? I don't know. But it seems to me fitting for these particular stories. What kind of tragedy is Breaking Bad? A Wellesian one.
Now, I am a pedantic German who knows her Lessing who knew his Aristotle. Tragedy, as defined by the master of Greek meta: a tale wherein the main character is brought down by a combination of external circumstance and his/her own flaws. Which isn't how the word is mostly used today by the media - wherein "tragedy" usually means "calamity which befalls innocent people" - or in in pop culture understanding, where the hero of a tragedy is usually supposed to be character not only sympathetic but upstanding, with the flawed variety referred to as antiheroes. (Which would have been confusing to the Greeks, because their heroes, well, if they don't get mad and slaughter their families, or kill family members without any madness involved and instead good old fashioned revenge, they let their wives die for them, or cheat their comrades in arms out of armour and life, or, well, you get the picture. Mind you, I'm always a bit bewildered that Aristotle picked Sophocles' Oedipus, out of all Greek tragedies, as an example for a perfect combination of circumstance and internal flaws, because I can't see that. Oedipus, for a Greek hero, is actually among the more upstanding characters. His one genuine flaw is his hot temper and it contributes to his fate in as much as it's the cause why he gets into an argument with a stranger on the street which ends in him killing the stranger. This is not a habit with him, and he certainly didn't know that the stranger in question was actually his biological father. Otherwise, Oedipus' tragedy is all triggered by external circumstance and because the gods truly have it in for him. First his father gets the prophecy that Oedipus will one day kill his father and marry his mother and promptly has the baby exposed. (If that had not happened, nothing else would have.) Then Oedipus, when grown up after the usual myth elements of kind shepherds and friendly childless couples in adoption mode, , hears the same prophecy, naturally assumes this means his adopted parents, the only ones he knows, and leaves them in horror, determined to stay away so that he never, ever can fulfill that prophecy. (Oedipus, out of all the Greek mythological characters, did not have an Oedipus complex.) Cue stranger on the road, later encounter with the sphinx and marrying the widowed queen of Thebes, where he spends some happy years as a ruler with sons and daughters before the plague strikes and the whole truth is discovered. In conclusion: there is a reason why a French version of this is called The Infernal Machinery. Not nearly enough of these events are caused by Oedipus himself because of his own flaws. But then, a catastrophe out of all proportion as a net result is very Greek.
The problem with defining something as "Shakespearean tragedy" is that Will S. himself by no means wrote all his tragedies following the same rules or categories. Romeo and Juliet, until Mercutio gets killed, might just as well be a comedy. The Merchant of Venice, which is supposed to be a comedy, almost never gets performed as one today, and that's not all due to the Holocaust having happened; even in the nineteenth century, Shylock was often called a tragic character caught in the wrong type of play. King Lear, otoh, admirably qualifies as far as Lear himself is concerned - his flaws lead directly to his fate, and this is more or less true of Gloucester as well - but what about Cordelia, and the Fool? Whose tragedy is Julius Caesar anyway - Brutus', Caesar's, Antony's? And while we're talking history: the two dramas about ursurpers, Richard III and Macbeth, have main characters who are heroes in the traditional dramatic sense (main characters), but not in the modern pop culture one. Shakespeare's Richard III laughs at all the current popular villains and their fans because he did that "ruthless villain charms audience by being smarter and more eloquent than anyone else, gets UST scene with good person and seduces same" centuries ago. Ditto Macbeth with the whole "character starts out heroic, gets darker and darker, is, however, capable of intense affection towards partner" arc. However, both Richard and the Macbeths live in a dramatic universe where their very act of ursurpation means they cannot, in the end, remain successful. Their eventual failure isn't solely due to inherent character flaws, bad planning or the efforts of their antagonists, who in another drama would be the protagonists: it is pre-ordained because their assumption of power goes directly against the divine right of kingship.
You can see why I'm hesitant to call Breaking Bad either Greek or Shakespearean, though it certainly has elements of both. One sense in which people today use the term "Shakesperean" is to signify dramatic events on an epic scale and the mixture of humor into the bloodshed instead of unrelentic gloom and doom. (My teacher, back when I was an impressionable teenager, used Shakespeare to illustrate what "comic relief" means in classic drama, because who else? This description certainly fits Breaking Bad, but it is awfully general.
Let me draw another show in. The Wire has its share of personal tragedies - has it ever! - and several of these certainly come about by a mixture of circumstance and personal flaws, but most of all it strikes me as a tragedy of systems. In fact, the very point of the show, hammered in again and again, in season after season, is that every single system that gets focused on is so inherently corrupted and destructive that failure of the individuals sooner or later is inevitable. The Game, to quote one character, is rigged. For everyone - criminals, cops, teachers, students, politicians, the media. The Wire is far more Shakesperean in that sense, only with reverse trajectory. Richard III and Macbeth cannot stay on top because they are ursurpers and live in a dramatic world where ursurpation is against nature and ALWAYS gets punished; the various attempts at reform in The Wire cannot prevail for long because all the systems are too inherently destructive. You can, at best, help some individuals and salvage a few friendships, and even that is by no means granted; you cannot beat the system you're in.
In Breaking Bad, the only system which doesn't work is the health care one - which is an initial plot point, granted, and then one in mid season 3 -; but capitalism itself works, and so does criminal enterprise. So, for that matter, does the police. Walter White goes from nobody in two ill paid jobs to drug kingpin by a combination of lucky (well, for him, not for anyone else) circumstance, hard work and skills. Jesse Pinkman goes from small time crook and (bad) meth cook to brilliant meth cook and multiple millionaire. Hank Schrader has his share of set backs, but he steadily rises through the DEA ranks because of, again, hard work and smarts. Of course, none of these career highs are the end of the show, but the fact of the matter remains: there is no system in the Breaking Bad verse that inherently is set up to bring you down. Not even the American health care system, sucking as it does; it's important that as of episode 4 in the first season, Walter White gets presented with an alternative to his meth producing scheme. He gets offered not only enough money to pay for all medical expenses he and his family will have in the course of his cancer treatment but also a job opportunity that would end his need to teach chemistry to apathetic students who don't care. He could do the chemistry he loves, legally, and without hurting anyone. All he has to do is swallow his pride, as the offer comes from his former partners whom he still feels betrayed by. But Walt, displaying for the first time in full force that all time favourite attribute of Greek heroes, hubris, is not capable of this and rather chooses crime.
By the way, this isn't just true for Walt. What happens to Jesse in the course of the show is Greek (or Shakespeare in King Lear mode) in its beyond all proportion darkness, but during the course of the show, he gets several chances to avoid his fate. For example, in early s3 Jesse is financially secure, and Walt isn't in any way pressuring him or manipulating him into resuming their partnership. On the contrary; this is when Walt himself (briefly, and mostly due to the fact he's been found out by Skyler) tries to live a non-criminal life again. It's Jesse's choice to resume meth producing on his own; it's the fastest way of making money he knows and something he actually by then is good at, but Jesse isn't, like the Corner Boys in The Wire, living in a system where everyone tells him this is the only way for him, on the contrary.
Skyler, too. After her discovery of the truth about Walt and her initial attempt to make him leave without their son finding out the truth don't work, she could, before eventually becoming actively involved by laundering Walt's money (which limits her options, but doesn't eliminate them), have at different points made other choices, all of whom would have extricated her of the unfolding tragedy. (Notably: going through with the divorce after Walt is finally willing to give it to her, telling Junior/Flynn the truth at any point, then leaving with her children. There are others.)
Even Hank: granted, his career would have been over, but his life would not have been if he hadn't put his need to bring down and arrest Walt in person, himself, above notifying the agency of the truth once he'd put it together. Now Jesse, Skyler and Hank all have their choices also determined by Walt's original choice (not to mention Walt's ongoing behaviour towards all of them), plus they're supporting characters which means the story is never going to focus around their decisions to the same degree it does around Walt's. But still, their decisions contribute to the overall narrative, and some of Walt's actions are only possible because of them. And while each of them experiences situations where the choices are taken out of their hands, and where they cannot change their fate, this is never true for them all the time through the five seasons of the show. In all cases, their own character traits drive those of their choices which contribute to the eventual conclusion. Jesse's mixture of neediness and passivity, Skyler's pragmatism, control issues and own streak of ruthlessness, Hank's pride - all qualities that aren't all these characters are, I hasten to add, and some of their key choices are driven by their other traits: Jesse walking away from Walt without money mid s5, for example, Hank knowing that beating up Jesse was wrong and telling his superiors as much, accepting the blame, Skyler going into the pool and giving her children to Marie, for example - all these flaws are co-responsible for their individual tragedies.
But it is the very fact that for all the characters - and Walt, too - you can imagine other roads taken which makes Breaking Bad, to me, in the end neither Shakesperean nor Greek. Asking what would have become of Oedipus if he had not killed his father and married his mother is pointless; that is his story. He hasn't got an existence out of it. Shakespearean heroes are a bit more flexible (Hamlet killing Claudius in act 1 makes for a different story, but you can imagine him doing it; you can equally imagine Claudius being a bit more ruthless and successfully getting Hamlet killed early instead of delegating the job, Gertrude's son or no), but they still live in a narrative universe where the kind of options they can take are limited, and where a certain type of order is eventually restored. To the degree that Breaking Bad's ending was controversial, it was about Walter White not being punished enough; whether the story allowing him to die with a sense of accomplishment (i.e. having tricked Elliot and Gretchen into laundering his money so it will end up with his son after all, having defeated and killed the people who took the rest of his drug millions, having as peaceful a goodbye from Skyler and Holly as he was likely to get) was validating Walt's hubris about himself instead of properly punishing it the way, say, his lonely death in New Hampshire would have done. This to me is beside the point as far as the tragedy question is concerned. Macbeth, even in the process of losing his kingdom and after already having lost his wife, is certainly not in a repentant mode (what with "lay on, Macduff, and dammed be he who first cries hold, enough!" as last lines) and wants to go out fighting, which he does. (Unless it's a production that stages a silent execution kneeling in front of Malcolm after some running away, which I've seen done, but as far as the text is concerned, Macbeth dies in his duel with Macduff.) This does not retrospectively justify Macbeth's actions. And not only can't Walt know whether or not scaring Elliot and Gretchen will survive his own death, either way, the last words he'll ever hear from his son will still be hate and rejection, which was entirely his fault, and he knows it. The relatively peaceful goodbye from Skyler is possible because he at last gives up on his longest held and most cherished self justification, of having done it all for the family; because he admits to her that he did it for himself. And the last word he hears from Jesse, the most important relationship he formed in the last two years, are a refusal. Walter White dies on his own terms, yes, but also with the awareness of all those terms lost him.
"But then", to misquote one of the most famous movies of all time, "those are the only terms anyone ever knows. Their own." Because in the end, I think the type of tragedy Breaking Bad is a very American one, resembling nothing as much as the one of Charles Foster Kane. On one level, it's a "A man gains the world, loses his human connections" tale, but that's far from all there is to either story. There is the fact the "state of innocence" the main characters start out from is questionable. If "Rosebud" signals Kane's childhood before becoming rich, well, what glimpse we get at his dysfunctional parents hardly makes that childhood look warm. (Walt certainly starts out with a loving family, but also with one job that endlessly frustrates him and that he's overqualified for, and another which is mindless slavery.) There is the constant question of how much or little the main character actually believes his own propaganda. (Bernstein and Jed Leland certainly have opposite views on how sincere Charlie Kane ever was, while the proportion between hubris and the need to provide for Walter White early on are just as debatable.) There's the main character at his most compelling when he goes up against the establishment (young Kane taking over the Inquirer and pissing off his guardian, Walt versus various crazed drug lords in s1 and at the start of s2) and most unmasked and appallling when terrorizing someone within his social power (Kane making Susan sing again and again until she tries to commit suicide, Walt's creepy "I forgive you" embrace for Skyler followed by the even creepier scene the next episode of him getting into bed with her while the camera is focused on her horrified face). There's the moment between former extremely close men where brutal truth telling strikes - "you want this; YOU" says Jesse to Walt in the desert (and later in the finale) after Walt has given him another I'm-doing-this-all-for-you speech, "it's all about you; you want people to think you love them so much they ought to love you back" says Leland to Kane in their final meeting. And yet, there's the question of how much the viewer agrees with Leland and Jesse in their assessments, and how much the viewer hopes/thinks they're overlooking some genuine emotion on the main character's part also factoring in. Kane, dying in Xanadu alone (except for servants) but for a moment caught up in a childhood dream; Walt, dying in a meth lab alone (except for approaching cops) but with the sense of having chosen this ending - is either of it just? I don't know. But it seems to me fitting for these particular stories. What kind of tragedy is Breaking Bad? A Wellesian one.
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