Walter White is a thoroughly Nietzschean hero, one of the few compelling examples of such figures that American culture has ever produced. It was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who foresaw the predicament of Walter White, and of modern society, with uncanny clarity: We who inhabit modern societies are prone to a characteristic weakness, a pusillanimity in the face of the petty conventions and preoccupations of bourgeois existence. The fundamental challenge is to fashion a life that overcomes this debased condition, to rise from “last man” to “overman.” Some think that Nietzsche’s overman is an immoral, power-driven tyrant, who overcomes conventional morality by asserting a nihilistic will to power. But this is a misreading. Nietzsche’s overman rises above conventional morality not by embracing nihilism but by forging a narrative coherence to his life that issues in a kind of empowerment, or self-possession. The appeal of such empowerment, and of a hero who strives for it, is especially strong at this moment. In postrecession America, there is a mounting desire to throw off the straitjacket of a self-serving upper-middle-class morality that valorizes the sanctity of law and of “playing by the rules.” In many circles, there is a growing sense that the system is rigged, that the rules and conventions in place, defended in the name of fairness, efficiency, safety, or “win-win” economic arrangements, serve to empower some at the expense of others. Many find themselves enmeshed in absurd bureaucratic hierarchies—in work and in everyday life—that afford scant grounds for self-possession or self-respect. At the same time, there is a widespread sense that the “legitimate” economy fails to reward the effort and talents that ordinary people devote to their jobs. Instead, it heaps benefits on those who are simply lucky, or who manipulate the system, or who have a knack for getting rich off other people’s work (sometimes ruthlessly) while operating within the bounds of the law. People find themselves increasingly in the condition of Walter White—mired in routines of work that do not call forth their potential or accord them much dignity. Like Walt, many find themselves struggling to be recognized for the work they do, on the job or at home. It is against this cultural backdrop, I believe, that Breaking Bad still captivates public attention and illuminates the anxieties of our time. Nietzsche helps us interpret the improbable life story of Walter White and understand how Walt came to represent a kind of hero for this moment. Walt’s turn to crime is not simply a desperate move that spirals out of control—rather, it is a story of empowerment. In “breaking bad,” Walt rises to self-possession from a contemporary form of malaise and despair. Nietzsche also helps us understand the kind of self-possession Walt gains. On the surface, Walt’s trajectory might seem to suggest a grim, nihilistic drive to self-assertion through conquest: the way to truly live is to reject the social order in which you find yourself stifled and adopt a self-serving “live your own way” ethic. But this reading of Walter White is misguided. Walt does not simply despair of humanity and become a scornful manipulator of society who only enjoys domination over others. He is not the archetypal nihilist—like Roskolnikov from Crime and Punishment or Malvo from the recent TV series Fargo—who seeks destruction for its own sake. What makes Walt a complex protagonist, and what makes his trajectory moving, is that his “breaking bad” constitutes an attempt to forge a narrative coherence to his fractured and nearly expired life. Walt’s rise to power in the meth business can be understood, in Nietzschean terms, as an attempt to “redeem the past,” to reclaim a coherent whole out of the disparate parts of his life: his role as chemist, entrepreneur, husband, father, and even teacher. The self-possession for which he strives is thus bound up with a totality of commitments that cannot be captured by simple notions of egoism, selfishness, and conquest.
Nietzsche helps us diagnose the initial predicament of Walter White as the condition of the “last man,” a degenerate state of existence that Nietzsche identifies as pervasive in modern life. The last man, writes Nietzsche, enjoys “a little pleasure by day, and a little pleasure by night,” but always “with a regard to health.” The last man “has left the regions where it was hard to live” and ekes out an easy but hollow existence aimed at an ever-receding vision of repose. Absent from his life is any risk, adventure, or ambition: “‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing?’ Thus asks the last man, and he blinks.”1 Walter White is the last man, or very close to it. He is confined to a “little pleasure by day”—the breakfast of eggs, veggie bacon, and echinacea that his wife Skyler prepares for his fiftieth birthday—“a little pleasure by night”—the dispassionate, almost clinical hand job that she administers like medicine before bed—and all “with a regard to health.” Nietzsche’s “last man” captures a condition to which every life is susceptible. As we sympathize with Walter White, we acknowledge the possibility of the last man in ourselves. In one way or another, we’ve all been there before—in moments of enervation, lack of gumption, obsession with health, safety, and a long life, or earnest submission to the so-called necessities of a bourgeois existence. One of the brilliant conceits of Breaking Bad is its relentless exposure of the petty officiousness and stifling moralism of middle-class suburban life. The show constantly juxtaposes Walt’s harrowing travails and frank self-assertion in the underworld with the quotidian concerns and vapid, impersonal niceties of the law-abiding community. In extricating himself from the condition of the last man, Walt does not merely oppose his oppressive world with an angry “No!” He finds direction and rises to a kind of virtue that comes to light in Nietzsche’s conceptions of the “overman” and the “will to power.” Unfortunately, these key concepts are as liable to misinterpretation as Walter White himself. Due to misleading ideological appropriations of Nietzsche, and careless readings of his provocative aphorisms, we have a caricature of the “overman” as a kind of nihilistic lover of conquest who is above all ethics. But even a cursory reading of Nietzsche reveals a different conception. Even in his most “polemical” treatments of morality, as Nietzsche calls them, he makes clear that he seeks to promote one ethical framework over another, not to reject ethics in favor of “might makes right.” He seeks to replace a morality of weakness, timidity, and resentment with a morality of self-command. A first approximation of what Nietzsche means by “overman” is the passionate pursuit of life as an unfolding story: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”2 “Overman” is meant to point away from the “end,” the goal, the accomplishment, and toward the way. Life, Nietzsche suggests, is a ceaseless process of self-overcoming. “Overman” can thus be seen as a corrective to our “results-oriented” culture that interprets power as the capacity to get things done, to attain a certain standard of living, and to “make the world a better place.” To this extent, Nietzsche’s notion of overman is radical and perhaps unsettling. Nietzsche sees in our obsession with accomplishment and progress a certain folly. He takes aim at the Enlightenment view of providence that comes to paradigmatic expression in Marx: the notion that humanity, through the technological mastery of nature, can solve the problem of scarcity and, through the attainment of a universal consciousness free of class difference and exploitation, bring about the perfectly just world. |