All Hail the King: Walter White as Tragic Hero

"This is the first day of the rest of your life, but what kind of life will it be, huh? Will it be a life of fear, of 'Oh, no no no I can't do this'? Of never once believing in yourself?"
-Walter White, Breaking Bad, Season 1, Episode 7: A No-Rough-Stuff Type Deal

For as long as I can remember,

Hamlet

has been my favorite classical play. At times, it has been my favorite all-around play. I have a personal theory (which I have absolutely no interest in proving) that a significant factor in

Hamlet

's continuing popularity is that it hits so many young men at just the right time in their lives for identifying with angst, indecision, patricide, and so much else. It is a truly great work of literature, and it's a great play - though that latter is as much for flaunting the rules as for any decent playcraft.

What I find extremely interesting about people's responses to the play, however, is something that I believe they tend to neglect in their interpretation of it. That is, the concept of divine order (or justice) that permeated Shakespeare's life at the time he wrote it. Very few people question the morality of Hamlet's actions in the course of avenging his father's death, apart from perhaps having some qualms about how it all works out for poor Ophelia. Yet the play is mercilessly just. In his pursuit of a murderer, Hamlet becomes a murderer, and is thus killed himself.

When

Breaking Bad

first premiered, the concept was so bizarre I and Wife Megan felt we had to give it a shot. AMC was just transitioning into its phase of incredible original programming, and that as much as the critical buzz and series conceit was so strange we just had to see what it was all about. Embarrassingly, I don't believe we made it through the first episode. I found it too bleak by half. Maybe if I had lasted the 45 minutes or so, I would've clued in to what makes the show so amazing but - as it is - I chose to leave it to the critics and cynics.

I'll admit I was wrong. I enjoy knowing when I'm wrong, even when admitting it is difficult. In this case, the admission is easy as pie.

Breaking Bad

is an exceptional example of drama and cinema, even outside of its television milieu, and I was a fool to wait as long as I have to catch up on its four seasons available to me. I'm now contemplating renting the first half of season 5, just to get caught up and experience the final episodes in real time - something I have never been compelled to do before.

I have another theory, one specific to

Breaking Bad

and its writers, and one that I've been debating a bit with a few people lately. This theory represents my personal hook into the series, which means I have a ready bias about it. If I'm wrong, I lose interest in the series or - worse yet - whenever the series finale rolls its way around I am bound for horrific disappointment in its story-telling. My bias is of course what leads me into debate about it. I need to test my theory against others' perceptions, to learn if I'm fooling myself.

It is so easy to fool oneself. You need only pay attention to yourself above all others.

My theory is this: Walter White is a character cast in the mould of the classic tragic hero. Furthermore, the writers know it, and use tragedy as their guiding principle for their tremendous, unified story arcs.

Boring as it may be for a way to begin, I feel the urge (rising, UNSTOPPABLE) to define some terms. Many of the disagreements I have had with people on this theory have I believe sprung from one word: Villain. People seem very invested in the idea of Walter as a gradually developing villain, and when I call him a "hero," they take umbrage. They take it all the way to Mexico and back.

My use of the term "hero" in this sense is not strictly speaking the inverse of "villain." I mean a hero in the sense of a "protagonist." I'm not sure why the term "tragic protagonist" has never caught on - it has lovely consonance. Perhaps it's a preference for the inferred irony of some of literature's most villainous tragic heroes. And therein is the crux of the semantic difficulty - a tragic hero can be a real dickhead.

(Perhaps it's for another post, but I take umbrage [all the way to Umbria and back] with the misuse of the term "anti-hero." People seem to think they understand what an anti-hero is based on the concept of a hero as a swell, stand-up guy. Ergo, to them an "anti-hero" is someone imperfect or not nice. But that's rather missing the point, or at least beside it. Grrr. Anyway...)

So why is the definition of hero-protagonist (

Snow Crash

fans, amirite? Hello? Is this thing on...?) so critical? Well, to begin with, the dramaturgical definition of a hero is simply more useful than "a righteous dude." And to conclude: That definition supports my argument.

According to literature both literate and dramatic, a hero is:

  • Chosen, rather than choosing of his fate.
  • Reactionary, usually reacting to antagonist characters, but sometimes just to such forces.
  • On a journey, in which he will learn and gain things and eventually apply these winnings to the world from which he comes.

And that's about it, as far as commonalities go. Mythological heroes may be transformed, comicbook heroes may operate from super-natural abilities, and Scoob and the gang may always catch their criminal, but none of those factors define them as heroes. Heroes are our connection to a story of learning and change, our guides, and there are no promises either the story or the hero will end happily.

Enter tragedy. It's another much-maligned term, in that people tend to take the colloquial usage and apply it to fiction. It is of course tragic when six nuns die in a horrific and sudden bus accident, and still more tragic when sixteen newly ordained nuns on their way to give cookies to quadriplegic blind orphans die in a horrific and sudden bus accident, one that could've been prevented by the driver simply using Google Maps instead of Apple ones. But it is a travesty rather than a tragedy, in the dramaturgical sense.

In fiction, a tragedy has a specific form. It is not enough for things to end badly for all involved. If it were, you could have a hysterically funny play that in its last ten minutes kills every character you care for (Paging Martin McDonagh [Just kidding! {Really kidding - you don't care for his characters one bit!}]). Much as we might enjoy such a play or movie now, it doesn't qualify as a tragedy, because a tragedy has to do with inevitability. In a tragedy, we feel the end coming, and know 1) nothing will ever be the same afterward, and 2) there is

nothing

we can do about it.

So when I call Walter White a tragic hero, here's what I'm saying:

He is on a journey through strange territory, from which he is returning with things he applies to his origins.

Hardly anyone would argue with this, I think. A good portion of the humor in the show has to do with Walter applying skills associated with his hard-earned "street cred" to his increasingly shaky suburban life. Whether it's carrying a second cell phone or learning how to get the drop on a thug, Mr. White has been on one darkly heroic cycle.

He reacts to antagonists.

This is an easy one to get tripped up on. After all, Walt expends so much of his effort in maintaining or regaining control, and in the long run (to date) he's been very successful. He adopts little pretense by the end of season 4 - he is IN CHARGE, and "the one who knocks." It's also difficult to cite an antagonist to Walt when we first meet him. Who's got it out for him when he's a mild-mannered chemistry teacher? Certainly not his overbearing boss at the car wash? Nope.

No, it's cancer.

An antagonist isn't defined solely by being in opposition to the protagonist. Something very important is accomplished by the antagonist - the inciting action. The thing that gets the ball rolling on the plot, for the hero to react off of. It can seem counter-intuitive at first; we'd like to believe that we are good, and that good is active, but consider for a moment some incredibly heroic story (in the "heroism" sense). Odds are you'll see Superman doesn't appear until some schmuck falls off a skyscraper, and Beowulf can't get decisive until Grendel rends a few limbs himself.

Cancer incites Walter to his new lifestyle, and is what threatens to prevent him from achieving his aim of providing enough support for his family once he's gone. It does so directly, by occasionally crippling him when he has to cook meth or kill a dealer, and indirectly, by threatening to end his life before he can pull through enough business to make his gamble worthwhile. The antagonism passes hands (not to Tuco - that's a period during which the plot frankly frays) to Gus just about as systematically as possible. In the beginning, Gus is literally impelling Walt to return to cooking, and Walt's cancer even abates in conjunction with his increasing fear for his life under the threat of Gus's rule.

He has a fatal flaw that will prove his downfall.

This is some of that inevitability I referred to earlier. Beyond the vague sense that this series of events can't possibly work out in Walter's favor, he has to evince some seed of failure or lack of insight that will eventually destroy him. Oedipus had his figurative (eventually literal) blindness about his parents, Macbeth his ambition, Lear his prideful vanity. Pride is a classic.

Hubris - overbearing pride or presumption. Mr. White has it in spades. It could be argued to be his characteristic trait. It prevents him from getting out of his dangerous business, from accepting financial help from an old colleague and flame, and drives him to improve and protect his product. So prideful is he, in fact, that Walt may have allowed Hank to find him out as "Heisenberg" rather than allow someone otherwise uninvolved in his affairs to believe he

wasn't

responsible for that magically pure meth. It remains to be seen if that moment of pure hubris will prove his tragic flaw. Walt's ever-shifting momentum and position make for some taut suspense on that count.

He is a noble/every-man, brought low for the gratification of the masses.

With

Death of a Salesman

, Arthur Miller very specifically made a tragedy of someone who was

not

a king, thereby implanting the idea of a tragic everyman as something of a contemporary American take on tragedy. We can certainly argue for Walter being an everyman like Willy Loman - an imperfect working man simultaneously sacrificing all for, yet undermining his family - but I'd also argue he can be perceived as something of the knighted class. He represents white, middle-class America, and though he's hardly well-off he also stands in stark contrast of benefit to the meth addicts and pushers with whom he comes to consort.

For a time, at least.

Walter White is chosen.

This may be the toughest point to argue, and brings us back around to the beginning of the story of

Breaking Bad

. Walt proving a predominantly reactive character does not of itself indicate that he is chosen, merely that he is subject to much circumstance (which is of itself a rather Shakespearean tragic-hero trait; but never mind). No amount of strange conjunction (like the grief-addled father of his partner's deceased girlfriend crashing a couple of planes over his house at just the right time) or unique portents (such as a roving stuffed bear's eye) or elaborate subsurface camera angles proves W.W. to be the chosen one. The question to answer is, "Why must it be him?"

This is where kings have it all worked out. They are ordained by God, generally speaking, and the land suffers as they do. It's hard to get more chosen than that. It's difficult to say whether or not there is a God in the world in which

Breaking Bad

's story is told (and here again we have a whole other dissertation) but if there is, he or she seems to be pretty far from the crime scene, so to speak. Still, there's another divine factor that we contemporary audiences are somehow less reticent to accept as a part of our stories. I'm speaking of course of fate.

If you rewatch the first episode of

Breaking Bad

, it's hard not to feel as though forces are aligning to send Walt down his eventual path. Every incident gives a subtle, necessary nudge to him, from how his diagnosis is delivered to his being along for a scouting mission on a meth lab a former student happens to be involved in. In the hands of lesser talent, this would read simply as weak writing, but the trend of

Breaking Bad

 has been to continue to make excellent use of far-reaching and interwoven influences. In fact, the structure of whole episodes and even seasons involves setting up a quixotic moment ahead of the story, in the future, making the action of the story a steady march to that inevitable conclusion. As though it's delivered to us by a soothsayer - we don't know what to make of the brief portent of what's to come when we receive it and once it becomes clear ... it's too late.

Walter White was destined to his fate, and it could be none other than him. All that remains is to see where that fate ultimately lands him.

How I Will Know That I'm Right:

  • There will be an antagonist in season 5.
  • Walt will die - preferably as a direct result of his hubris.
  • There is a God. Or at least a sense of divine order.
  • You'll tell me.

I have plans (SECRET WAYS) to see what's been aired of season 5 soon enough, though I frankly expect it to seem to refute my argument. At least, if I were the writers breaking (har har) a fresh season at the midway point, I would probably raise my protagonist up pretty high. All in preparation for one very tragic fall.

Bang! Pow! Zwounds!: Richard III as "Graphic Novel"

Editor's Note: Once again, I'm adapting personal email into 'blog posts. I shall mutlti-task, and you shall dig it. This comes out of a discussion with a director friend of mine who was tasked with considering a production of Richard III based on a graphic-novel approach.

So: "a pre-1700's graphic novel story," eh? First of all: Do we mean a graphic novel written and drawn in the "pre-1700s"? A graphic novel setin the "pre-1700s"? And why the "pre-1700s"? Do we set Richard the Three in 1699, or Roman-occupied Ireland, or dare we make it 1485? {Ed.: I've since learned that the particular audience in discussion rejects any Shakespeare set later than that as being too much a departure from historical accuracy. Hilarious.} But my greater confusion here is what on earth we mean by "graphic novel." That's a little bit like saying, "Let's produce a Richard the Third like a pre-1700s movie story." Graphic novels are a medium about as varied as cinema.

But not everyone knows that, and were I to assume (thereby making an ass out of you and ume) a thing or two, I might assume we mean a sort of highbrow comicbook approach. Somehow. Which is still about as clear as the mud from which one might need a horse in order to extricate oneself.

My assumption however is based on the following facts:

  • The most commercially viable and well-known printed graphical storytelling of the prior and current centuries has been "comic books"; and
  • "Graphic novels" is a popular term for comic books when you're trying to lend them prestige, or raise people's opinions of them from out of the pulp.

The term "graphic novels" also frequently refers to works that have a little more length or over-arcing story to them than some, but that usage is a little reductive as it implies all "graphic novels" were written in one go (like a novel) when in fact the majority were originally published in a serial manner. Comic books, in other words, then collected into the so-called graphic novel.

So what are we to do with a concept based on highbrow comicbooks? In short (HA HA HA) there are too many different kinds of graphic novels to know what we mean when we use that ill-defined term, and the differences traverse everything from art to layout to content. A few varietals:

  • Maus - seminal in raising the reputation of comicbooks; it casts mice as Jews and cats as Nazis in a true story of one family's experience of the Holocaust
  • The Dark Knight Returnsand Watchmen - in a fit of zeitgeist, Frank Miller and Alan Moore both eschew/satirize the bubblegum aesthetic of superhero comics; Miller by taking a classic hero and giving him hard-boiled moral ambiguity, and Moore by taking superhero archetypes and subjecting them to a dystopian environment and socio-political realities
  • From Hell - Alan Moore here again, this time writing an exhaustively long "graphic novel" that delves into one possible explanation for the identity of Jack the Ripper
  • Sandman - what began as a pitch by Neil Gaiman to revitalize some of DC Comics' forgotten characters evolved into an epic story with a beginning, middle and end that chronicles the king of dreams (and his family: Death, Desire, Despair, Destiny, Destruction and Delirium [formerly Delight]) whilst tying in extensive details from the world's mythology, literature and religion

And those are fairly conventional examples, as far as just form goes.

I suppose the thing I can't quite wrap my mind around yet is why exactly to apply this concept to this particular work of Shakespeare's. As I see it, there are other plays of his - even other Histories - that might be better fits.

Henry V is a pretty good Superman/superhero analogue. Hell, the Henry VIs have those constant turn-overs that would make pretty interesting structure for exploring "serialized" storytelling on stage. Richard III may be episodic enough for serialized storytelling, if that's the angle, but I can't quite make it work without adding layers.

Recently it has been tremendously popular to adapt graphic novels into movies and, even more recently, television. The Walking Dead, for example, is an on-going serialized story that's perfect for television. But they also adapted Watchmen into a film, which tried to do too much and with so much flash that the vital humanity of the story was lost. Even Ang Lee made a superhero movie with the first Hulk Hollywood blockbuster, which in my opinion is practically a lesson in what elements NOT to take from graphic storytelling when adapting from it.

When they go wrong, what many adaptions have done is adhered too closely either to the content or the form of graphic storytelling (or both). When a graphic-novel story is transported cross-media, it's an injustice not to re-conceive at least a little. Two Frank Miller comics have been adapted into what most consider to be quite successful movies - his Sin City and 300 - and both with a keen eye on staying loyal to the aesthetic of the source material. I would argue, however, that as graphically similar as these movies are to the artwork from which they came, they are in fact very thoroughly re-imagined into a cinematic landscape. Miller went on to direct his version of The Spirit, which copped Sin City's look and failed miserably, lacking the originality of the other two adaptations.

Graphic novels, or comicbooks, work because of the spaces between the panels and how our minds fill those in. They give you some of the interpretive freedom of books or radio, with more of the visual fireworks of TV or film. It takes a certain amount of mental coding to read them, but that can be learned intuitively, and when a good unity between the words, layout and illustrations can be achieved, the story-telling is enhanced.

Simply sliding that on top of a film, the languages do not converse. Movies are all about seeing change, seeing it very closely. Just because one of the steps to creating them involves story-boarding doesn't mean that a medium that utilizes frames and composition will automatically translate. You're still filling in the white spaces. You're still animating the iconic.

When it comes to adapting a live show into a "graphic novel" context, there are a few examples from which to pull, but most of them take a fairly satirical (or lightly tongue-in-cheek) slant and have more to do with traditional superhero comics than more varied graphic storytelling. I was in a production of Stand-Up Tragedy in college for which the director brought the main character's comicbook imagination somewhat to life on stage with enormous puppet cut-outs, but that was for one sequence only and functioned rather more as a simple staging element than as anything functional.

Vampire Cowboys here in New York have done many a popular show using comicbook tropes, but these are largely original productions and focus on the combat elements (not a bad notion at least by the end of Richard III). I don't know of any examples specific to only the medium itself - not the characters within them, for example.

So anyway: why Richard III in this context? Perhaps we are thinking of him as a character similar to superheroes like Marvel's X-Men mutants, who are ostracized and persecuted for being different, said difference being what makes them special and powerful? Perhaps Richard's story is episodic enough to remind of serialized story-telling - there is a strong procession of scenes of mounting ambition and stakes. Perhaps we're thinking aesthetically of something that utilizes iconography, or stained-glass windows, both of which comic books owe something to.

Yet in discussing all this, what I'm struck by is a very different idea. Richard III reminds me of nothing so much as the trend in television over the last five years or so for highly successful, critically acclaimed shows to feature a main character who is morally flawed. Don Draper of Mad Men is a philanderer, Walter White of Breaking Bad is someone we've watched become (or simply come into being) a ruthless criminal, Dexter is a fracking serial killer, and a host of other shows have followed suit - Damages, Boss, etc. In other words, tragedy makes for great television. In terms of a contemporary hook for RIII, that's where my mind goes. Those shows are incredibly effective, and we root for some of the worst characters in them the hardest. Did this begin with Tony Soprano, or Richard the III?

I have no ideas, however, about how to invite those influences on a production. That's an entirely other conversation. One we should have soon!

One-Set Wonders

The wife and I have become fans of the sitcom

Community

.  We weren't from the start.  In fact, we very specifically gave its premiere and first few episodes a shot because we liked so many of the people involved, and were very specifically disappointed.  I believe I said something along the lines of, "It's what I was afraid of - unsympathetic protagonist and trite set-ups."  These are my least favorite aspects, after all, of Joel McHale's version of

The Soup

 (formerly

Talk Soup

).  There's very little TV Wife Megan and I can agree on, but

The Soup

 combines stuff she likes (the [ahem]

best

 of talk shows and reality TV) with stuff I like (some smart writing and unabashed silliness) at a time when we're both groggy and couch-bound.  So we tried

Community

, didn't like it, stopped watching.

That was then, this is now.

There are several things about the show that have since won me over (not the least of which was a couple of friends forcing me to watch the Halloween episode in which the character Abed

impersonates Christian Bale's Batman

) but one is especially unique.  That is, the use of a single set.

I'm stirring controversy here (my DOZEN of readers will revolt in the comments) because, of course, the original formula for a sitcom is a single set.  That's how they started, for practical and budgetary reasons, and by-and-large that's how the sitcom has stayed.  In fact, looking at the overall picture,

Community

 has a much broader canvas than most sitcoms.  It gets to take its characters all over, and sometimes off of, a college campus.  In a sense, their setting has more in common with a science fiction one (not the only link to that genre - see

this article

by Chris Greenland) in that it takes place in this huge idea of a building (or ship) with recyclable corridors and archetypal rooms.  Compared to

The Honeymooners

' apartment, this is an elaborate structure.

But I'm not just talking about constructed sets here.  One of the things I've come to love about live theatre is the way in which shows that use only a single set put a particular emphasis on character.  Take that even further - again, often as a result of budget issues - into the realm of minimalistic sets, and you're really putting emphasis on the people who occupy the space.  The last show I performed in,

Speaking to the Dead

, was set up in this way and performed in a completely white room.

It came about as a result of a combination of factors, but I found it strangely apt for a somewhat absurd comedy dealing with the afterlife.  It reminded me of a quiz I learned when I was a kid in which one of the questions was, "You find yourself in a completely white room with no doors or windows, and the only other thing in the room is an enormous white armadillo.  How do you feel?"  Your answer, it would later be revealed to you, was meant to be indicative about how you felt about death and/or heaven.

Community

 has had a few episodes - and one especially so - that have hinged on what I think of as the

Twelve Angry Men

 scenario.  That is, for one reason or another, a scenario in which people in deep conflict have to stay in a single room together and work something out.  Normally, the single set in

Community

is a study room on campus where their particular clique has a habit of gathering.  The especially singular episode is #8 in season 2, entitled "Cooperative Calligraphy." In it, one of the character's pens goes missing and the group is forced to stay in the study room until the mystery is solved.

That of course is a device, albeit one that few television comedies would attempt (apart from set-up for a flashback episode).  But throughout the series, much time is spent in the group's homebase, and several other episodes strand most of the group into a single setting together.  (More recently, they had an episode about the group playing a tabletop roleplaying game, and though they of course cut away to in-game imagery, the fact remains that it was an episode about people sitting around being themselves [and other people...?].)  In particular, the study room and its ubiquitous rectangular table highlight the single-set choice for the series.  Each character has their place at the table, and a standard shot presents them as having a sort of stage made from the table surface leading up to a 3/4 bust.  It's simple, theatrical, and puts emphasis on what the actor is doing.

In general, film and television are mediums in which the viewer's attention is rigorously directed, sometimes to better effect than others.  One of the things I love about theatre is that free will has a bigger role in it in almost every respect, making it more unpredictable and frankly dangerous.  In my opinion, be it ever so humble, film and television actually have an obligation to direct our attention.  Without that direction, I can't help but feel abandoned, as I do when I see sloppily directed play.  I don't begrudge them that control at all but, God, do I love it when that control is practiced with moderation, and shared with the performers.

I heard recently that our spatial understanding, particularly as it applies to travel and personal orientation, can be described as a symphony of coded signals in our brains.  Codes like: me walking corridor, me walking corridor, me walking corridor, me turned left, me arrival at doorway, me in new place - room.  Wherever you go, there you are.  Many better writers before me have written about the "empty space" of the theatre, and the significance of theatre being a shared act or storytelling in the same room, but it makes especial sense to me when I think of it in terms of those "me" orientation codes.  

I

 am in the story room.  

We

 are going places together.  In fact, part of what theatre allows us to do is orient ourselves, just for a little while, in tandem with others.  Perhaps it's that the simpler the setting, the more inner-orientation there is potential for.  I don't know.

(Shameless tangent: How much better is a fight scene when the director has done just a little bit of work setting up the space in which it takes place?  Makes it more like an arena, and lends more unity to the whole thing.  [My favorite example of this is the stairway to the roof in

Die Hard

. We go up and down it and through the room several times before McClane gets into his final hand-to-hand brawl in there.])

Now, I'm not saying that

Community

 pretends to this kind of ambition.  (How about that title though, eh?)  What I am saying, though, is that this is something the show gets right.  It's a situation comedy that's more about the characters than the situation.  Just about every dramatic presentation is aiming to have its audience identify with one or more of its characters, but not all of them do a good job of inviting the audience to join them in the room.