The transition in Walt’s character is not sudden but builds through the rest of the second season, beginning when, during a party to celebrate his remission, Walt feeds his son a few quick shots of tequila, leading to his getting sick and vomiting in the pool. Giving his son a few shots does not vilify Walt, but his anger toward the more ostensibly masculine Hank presents itself when he declares, “My son. My bottle. My house.” The scene is brief but signals an uprising of subconscious feelings, as if the private world of Heisenberg begins to emerge in the public world of Walter. This newly blended persona coincides with Walt’s prognosis and can be seen as a form of reinventing himself and creating a new time line that publicly deviates from his former one as school teacher and cancer patient. Throughout this same episode, Walt’s second chance at a new identity is mirrored through Jesse and Jane’s discussion of superheroes, particularly Rewindo, a hero that Jesse drew. Rewindo’s superpower is simply the ability to turn back time. For Jesse, it’s clear that his relationship with his mother and father was lost in the transgressions of his past, and his creation of the fictional Rewindo signifies his desire to place his own persona into a remission of sorts. Perhaps Jane and their ventures to museums to look at Georgia O’Keefe paintings will allow him to recoup lost time and begin anew. Regardless, both Walt and Jesse begin to lament their past decisions and strive for new time lines.
A clash between Walt’s previous time line and his Heisenberg time line presents itself in “Phoenix” (5/24/09). Earlier, the significance of this episode has been discussed in its relation to twelve-step programs, but here we can look at Walt’s binary existence as both father and Heisenberg. Walt, having negotiated an exchange worth $1.2 million for his duffel bag of methamphetamine, speeds through New Mexico to make the drop. At the same time, Skyler goes into labor, thus positioning Walt at a crossroads. He is able to simultaneous exist momentarily by using a cell phone to communicate with his family—lying that he is stuck in traffic— and maneuver through New Mexico in order to fulfill his part of the meth deal. However, his dedication to one ultimately elides his presence in the other. Here, Walt positions money and his role as Heisenberg above the birth of his child. We could certainly castigate him for misplaced values, but it is more important to think of this moment as the moment he veers away from his former life. Yes, the Whites still exist, but he is no longer treading the same path that they do. Instead, he has elected to pursue his role as Heisenberg, even though his mortality is no longer directly in front of him.
What might be the most damning part of his transition occurs prior to his delivery when he attempts to contact Jesse in order to obtain the bag of cash under Jesse’s sink. When Walt arrives, Jesse and Jane are both passed out. As Walt recovers the money, Jane begins to vomit and, as Walter watches, asphyxiates. Walt’s refusal to tilt Jane’s head to the side is additionally symbolic of his transformation. Granted, she was blackmailing him for the money he owed Jesse, but this isn’t Walt’s motive. Rather, I would suggest that her influence on Jesse threatened to impede their business together and Walt’s overall view of his own potential success. Jane’s presence threatened to remove Jesse from the picture, thereby removing Walt’s partner and potentially reverting Walt to his previous time line. It seems apparent that Walt could function without Jesse, though there always feels like an underlying desire for Jesse to be present. In part, this might be because Jesse functions as the doppelgänger-son of Heisenberg. Walt Jr. is a sixteen-year-old with cerebral palsy who prefers to be called Flynn to elide any similarity to his father. Jesse is, however, essentially, without family and an empty vessel into which Walt-as-Heisenberg can impart knowledge that he’s unable to pass to his biological son—not on account of intelligence, but because of its illicit nature. I admit that this dynamic creates a contradiction, one that blends fatherhood (an element of Walt’s previous time line) with Heisenberg (his current and future time line). This potential discrepancy, however, can be remedied if we consider that the desire to be a father was present in Walter White, chemist, before he became Walter White, high school chemistry teacher. To echo Deleuze’s thoughts, the desire to be a father exists in both passing presents that now persist on different levels in the future (83).
BUYING TIME
These climactic moments lead us to “ABQ” (5/31/09), in which Walt has surgery and his doctor notes that he has acquired more time for himself. Here, the time in question is still borrowed and will be funneled into Walt’s work at the new super lab and for his boss, Gus Fring. While Walt is once again the chemist earning more than the money he was due from Gray Matter Technologies and positioning himself at the forefront of his newly found field, there is a sad irony within Walt’s ascension to this new position. As the series progresses, the borrowed time and new time line that Walt receives via Heisenberg circuitously becomes time remaining when the super lab becomes a metaphorical form of cancer, wherein Walt’s time is subsumed into Gus’s industrialized time and operation. Basically, each moment that Walt spends making meth for Gus brings him closer to his own death. In part, this is illustrated in Gus’s growing unpredictability, often shown in shifts from sedate, organized manager, to box cutter wielding murderer.[11] Prior to this, Walt hits a ceiling; he can’t improve on the ninety-nine-percent, and the unbelievable amount of money he earns no longer provides him with security. Rather, the time that he spends generating this money actually depletes time from his future life, primarily because of Gale Boetticher and Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s de facto protégés, who are, at different times, groomed to take his place. Walt-as-Heisenberg echoes his former self: the high school chemistry teacher widget replaced by someone able to follow a lesson plan, or, in this case, a formula. Here, Walt, too, is trapped in a circuit of failure from which he cannot escape. The episode that best exemplifies his recognition of his own endeavors is “Fly” (5/23/10). Walt’s insomnia begins to rattle his brain, and he searches feverishly and futilely for a single fly that has infiltrated the super lab. His venture could certainly be seen as the precursor —if not the moments of—a nervous breakdown, but there’s a sardonic significance in the fact that Walt, who no longer has to worry about money, spends (nee wastes) part of his depleting time trying to evict a housefly, a creature whose very existence exemplifies temporality.
And here, perhaps we can draw from Nietzsche’s (2012) when he says “the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.” Whether Gilligan intentionally lifted the theme from Nietzsche, I’m unsure; however, there is a philosophical connection here about self-importance within both insects and man: it exists in both, despite temporality and futility. Within the episode, the fly seems to have no apparent purpose other than to bother Walt and to eventually die. Similarly, Walt often aggravates Gus, his family, Jesse, and his death comes sooner as the hours tick away. In the game of cat and mouse both are caught in a circuit of uselessness: the fly is trapped in the lab; Walt is not making any product. Both see their timelines growing shorter and shorter—and we watch both do so as well.
THE AUTEUR’S MANIPULATION OF TIME
It is apparent that our cultural obsession with time has bled into the characters and thematic elements of Breaking Bad. Moreover, it is apparent that Gilligan plays with time as a narrative device throughout the series. To begin, television (and film) might be the perfect medium in which to examine the push-pull of time, particularly, if we consider J. M. E. McTaggart’s argument that there is no such thing as time. Rather, that there are only two descriptions of time: the A-Series and the B-Series (Gallagher, 1998, 112). The A-Series consists of what we consider past, present, and future in a historical time line: World War II happened in the past; I am typing a paper in the present; January 17, 2124 will occur in the future. The B-Series is our recognition of events that happen earlier, currently, and later: earlier, I brushed my teeth; now, I am typing a paper; later, I will eat dinner. Breaking Bad and other television shows follow these series to construct their narratives. The narrative of each episode is comprised of events that happen earlier (the beginning of the episode) and later (the end of the episode). At the same time, Breaking Bad, through flashbacks or flash-forwards that begin each episode, simultaneously manipulates our perception of time and injects moments that constituted the past, present, or future. As Spencer Shaw (2008) suggests, “Our sense of immanence and consciousness is intrinsically bound up with the continuity of objects, in the continuum of experience” (82). Simply put, our awareness and interaction with the present narrative derives from our previous experiences with past narratives. This might seem obvious, but Gilligan throws off this continuum by offering glimpses of moments that infect the narrative that has been established through the preceding episodes (A-Series) as well as what we will see during the current episode (B-Series). The inclusion of these brief snippets of past and future are not simply to keep us on the hook, but to create an uncanny recognition of our viewing past within the series. In a sense, Gilligan is playing with our memories of events much in the same way that Walt’s memories play with his perception of the present.
11
Gus demonstrates to Walt and Jesse his penchant for cold-blooded murder in the episode “Box Cutter” (7/17/11).