I watched a few of the interviews with the cast and crew of this show and it makes me want to scream a bit. The director, obviously a high IQ human being, says that when you watch it it is your interpretation and him and the cast only have their interpretation. Their interpretations are often quite pedestrian and don't feel correct to me. Which is bizarre. They are more likely to be right than me with their familiarity with the material.
It also brings me to a point about story writing in general. One of the early philosophers, when he wanted to find out the meaning of life. The first place he went was to writers of fiction of the day. He said after hanging out with them that they were morons. He theorised, that the reason their stories were so layered and insightful, is because that kind of creative work is a kind of channeling.
The director made reference to different writers writing scenes so it is obviously a collaborative effort. There is no single vision for Walters character.
The road already travelled.
My previous two articles on the subject have said this. Article one: That a lot of the drives that make up Walters life are adequately explained by a suppressed individual with high intelligence. Two: Three things impacting his behaviour. One is that he is more comfortable with violence than a normal person. Two is that he is obviously taking on a narcissistic mask in pretence for various agendas. Which I feel dismisses narcissism as an accurate consideration of his psychology. Three, the show makes reference to, and philosophy itself might bring light to, the idea that what Walt is doing isn't actually explicitly unethical, or at least not less unethical with a lot of common business practice.
On the narcissism aspect, I think the show tries to make us think that in some ways, but I don't think it is true. It is part of the general psychology of society I think, to try and explain normal relationship drama as "narcissism".
The theory that I come back to with Walter, or the observation I make. Is that there are two strong parts of his psychology. I want to first state that it is just not part of how I think to believe that he went through some sort of mystical journey of accessing his shadow self, and desensitising to violence from being a normal person. I just don't go for that. Genetically, psychologically speaking, we do not go through a lot of those journeys in real life. Someone that is comfortable with a great deal of violence a year into a business like that, was always comfortable with it.
It seems to me, and I think this might be shown symbolically by the choice of name given to the company that he originally started. "Grey matter technology". What is grey matter? Grey matter is the part of the brain that is responsible for empathy.
I wonder, if Walter is a psychopath. Or at least has a lot of psychopathic traits and a few ways that his character was less than perfect written in.
Like I said in the last example. Things come to a head at the end of season 3 and to save Jessie, who is upset and wanting to take on truly hard individuals on a moral point. I.e. going to get himself killed. Walter simply runs down a couple of rival drug dealers and shoots one of them in the head. This scene is unbelievably violent. This combined with the other violent things he does throughout the show and very early in the show. Might mean that he simply doesn't have a conscience, and that he conforms to a psychopathic psychology in a lot of ways.
We see for instance, he is uncomfortable killing Krazy - 8. But this is his first foray into (deliberate) violence. He might not have insight into himself that he is this unusual and he might have a sense of dread doing violent things because he does not yet know that it is not an issue for him. After that scene, where he kills Krazy - 8, he simply cleans up all the issues and leaves a pristine basement for Jessie. Walt is obviously comfortable with violence in a way Jessie isn't. He experiences none of the internal strife that lead to Jessie screwing up the dissolving of the other body. Where Walt would simply have sawed the body in half so it fits in the correct containers.
This opens more questions.
One scene that I think shows this well, and indicates that the writers must have had some idea that this was a possible explanation from Walter. Is the scene where the students were having grief over the plane crash and Walter comes in with loads of technical information. Firstly, the technical information he expresses is ONLY accessible in that way for someone with very high IQ.
High IQ and psychopathy seems to fit most of the boxes.
But next lets go to morality. Because something incorrectly believed about psychopaths is that they are inherently, genetically, driven to be amoral - not just amoral but anti- moral. They have amoral tendencies sure, because of a lack of fear. But being amoral is a malfunctioning strategy. The higher IQ someone has more often, the less violence they will use. This is very true on a societal level.
So how does lack of fear explain his other behaviours? Well, what is the moral argument against cooking? Is it the worst criminal undertaking in the world? It is, after all, consentual trade. Illegal and immoral is not the same thing (a statement definitely true as the UK government walks around jailing people for social media posts!) It is also not terrible in comparison to a lot of other standard industry practices. I.e. putting poison in food. Raising the prices of pharmaceutical drugs, and many other things.
I don't have a good answer to this question I am just talking here. Let's say that cooking is NOT that amoral. Does that change our understanding of the situation?
Well, perhaps. His relationship with Skylar basically became she did not like him engaging with an illegal and dangerous business. But perhaps he does not respect that motivation. There are times in a mans life where he feels that a woman, women or general, and/ or his wife, has engaged in irrelevant neuroticism and he just kind of ignore and routes around it.
This outlook might be relevant to a lot of the things that happened in the show. Hank didn't get the best deal when coming into conflict with Walter. But we see no real cruelty of Walter to Hank. Hank was just getting in his way in a sense. Hanks morality is very simple. If it is illegal then it is immoral. So Walt simply finds his way around Hank (remember Hanks eventual end - the killing of Heisenberg, was not Walters doing!)
Manipulation.
We do have to come to Jessie. Something that cannot be jettisoned from any understanding of Walt. To this I will admit that Walts behaviour towards Jessie was extremely unethical.
But at the same time, if we take down the mythology of a super criminal mastermind away from his other behaviours. If we compare him to other normal behaviours in the world it might bring some light.
Two things that have influenced Walters behaviours. Maybe three. One is that Jessie is very skilled and has been trained by Walt. Remember that Todd was not able to pick up cooking like Jessie was, and Todd was eager and not specifically tagged as not intelligent. Jessie is probably quite intelligent as well, and that's probably what drew him and Walt together subconsciously. So Jessie represents a very valuable employee of sorts.
How are valuable employees actually treated in the workforce in general? Are they exploited? Are they given false promises so they work hard for no reward? Are they sometimes tricked into staying in non preferential situations by managers who don't want to lose their working capabilities?
Second. Walters worst manipulation of Jessie, the poisoning of Brock, happened when he believed his family could be killed by Gus. A lot of us don't know what level we will stoop to if we were threatened with that kind of violence.
Third, some of the last scenes with Walt and Jessie specifically when Walt hands Jessie over to Todds uncle. Well, that is because Jessie "snitched". It is not right, but Walt is now involved in a culture that sees things like that. Also, Jessie if allowed to live would have gone straight back to the DEA; and Jessie has caught Walt once before.
Jessie was involved in this line of work before Walt came along.
No excuses.
I am not saying that any of these things excuse Walts behaviour. The fact that high value employees are often exploited, does not make it suddenly moral to exploit them. But we can see a cause and effect here that does not take in some of the more ridiculous ideas floating around about Walters psychology. It does not mythologise his manipulative capabilities as the "narcissist" (i.e. Devil incarnate), or add in some irrelevant mythology about a normal person becoming a drug kingpin.
That's probably it for Walts psychology. There might be some other interesting things to not about other aspects of the show. I've been thinking of doing a youtube video with the actors human design talking about their characters. That is interesting. The human design shows heavily because... what else is there? If you are familiar Hal, the same actors character from another show, Malcolm in the Middle, had other very similar traits as Walter White. Which was used to explain why the kids in that show were such terrors.
But I can't see anything that needs additional explanation from Walter White himself per sey.
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