Antiheroes and America's Drug Crisis

What Walter White wants us to know about popular depiction of addiction.

Drug abuse in the United States is a widespread societal ill. More than 10% of all US residents older than 12 have used an “illicit drug” in the past month, and more than 15% of the US has battled a substance use disorder in the past year. (American Addiction Centers, 2021) The fact that a cultural touchstone such as Breaking Bad — a defining piece of quality tv and a flagship program for a new-look network — represents drug trafficking, abuse, and addiction, in a subjective and personally based frame, is largely problematic for the general public’s understanding of this evidently important national issue. Not only does this personal depiction, driven by a need to serve Walt and Jesse’s antihero narratives, misinform the audience on the systemic violence that underlies addiction and abuse in the United States, but it also circumvents informing the audience about potential systems of care in place to alleviate those more systemic forms of violence. As such, Walt’s antihero narrative in Breaking Bad, aided by the moral disengagement and depictions of subjective violence that are necessitated by its portrayal, leave an indelible and harmful impact on the viewer’s understanding of the American addiction epidemic and its structural foundations and implications.

A camera pans through an alien desert landscape. Cacti stand solid in white sand. Ancient stone arches carve a blue sky. Pants fly through the air. An RV full of bullet holes, dead bodies, and a high school chemistry teacher fly down an unused road. In an introduction that foreshadows the rest of its vice-filled narrative, Breaking Bad (2008-2013) begins with an adrenaline-filled flourish. Quickly after this opening scene, however, the show settles into its characteristic tone, and begins to tell the slow-burn story of a high school chemistry teacher, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The show dips into many genres: telling a story of familial strife, making more than one dark joke, and, as is obvious from the first scene, bringing its fair share of high adrenaline action as well. Mainly, though, the story is driven by Walt’s business — meth making. To help pay for his medical bills and support his family in his death, Walter, the expert chemist, partners with an old student of his, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) — a less than expert drug salesman. Walt finds huge success in his venture, making product of a notably high purity, and finds himself wading into arena of narcotics trafficking. This path leads him away from his family, Skyler (Anna Gunn) and Walt Jr. (R.J Mitte), and into trouble with the DEA, which, notably, employs his brother-in-law, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris). These relationship dynamics, along with the story of the birth of Walt’s criminal empire, define this critically acclaimed drug drama.

AMC premiered Breaking Bad amidst a complete overhaul of their programming. Previously known for their classic movie reruns, the American Movie Channel (AMC) was undergoing a transition into character driven dramas, such as the hit that defined their transition — Mad Men (2007-2015). After seeing the network adopt Mad Men, a period piece and drama, as their flagship piece in ushering in AMC’s new wave of content writers flooded the channel’s producers with scripts for similar shows. As a nascent network, AMC tried to avoid falling into the trap of being defined solely by one genre. Consequently, the network took chances on several pitches that fell outside the realm of traditional television narratives. One of these pitches turned out to be the show Breaking Bad, a creation that several other networks had deemed, simply “too damn crazy” for TV. Thus, for the first time, a “teacher cooking crystal meth” became a hero on an ad supported network. (Dibdin, 2018) Despite the departure from the established realm of dramatic narratives, Breaking Bad was adopted into AMC’s catalogue explicitly because it would fit well with their existing library of contemporary anti-hero action films and match their male- skewed demographic. The same considerations were taken into account when the network adopted Mad Men as their flagship program after their revitalization — the main character of that show plays a serial adulterer, fitting well into the same antihero archetype that Breaking Bad’s main character, Walt, inhabits as a meth cook. (Pierson, 2015)

While Breaking Bad finished as a hit, the show didn’t originally draw a large viewership. Partly due to AMC’s transition from showing classic movies and partly because of the slow-burn narrative of the show, the first season only averaged 1 million viewers per episode over a week- long stretch. These numbers slowly grew throughout the show’s tenure, reaching 1.9 million viewers by the finale of the fourth season. (Hibberd, 2013) At its conclusion, however, is when the show truly hit its stride in terms of viewership. Garnering 10.3 million viewers for its’ series finale, and close to 4 million per episode for the season, Breaking Bad became one of the highest rated cable programs of the year. In addition to its’ impressive viewership numbers, the finale generated nearly 25,000 tweets per minute relating to the content, and totaled over 5 million related posts and comments on Facebook during the episode alone. (Boorstin, 2013) The shows creators credited its’ impressive late surge partially to this social media driven word of mouth, but also emphasized the importance of streaming services. Beyond simply driving interest for the show, the creators actually credited Netflix for “saving” Breaking Bad, and credited the streaming service accordingly in their award show speeches after its final season. (Boorstin) These impressive numbers proved to be extremely meaningful for the show itself, and also for the landscape of cable television on the whole. Just weeks after the Breaking Bad finale, Facebook announced a data-sharing partnership with major network stations which would allow them to capture the sentiments of viewers engaging in online interactions about their shows. This partnership was one of the first of its kind, and signified an important step forward in the integration of social media and traditional forms of media. (Boorstin)

Not only does Breaking Bad contribute an important early addition to a lexicon of multi- platform media phenomena, it also fits well into the eruption of a meta-genre known as “quality tv”. This genre, previously “best defined by [being different than normal television]”, began to surge in popularity in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, after experiencing modest success in the 70’s and 80’s with shows such as Twin Peaks. (McCabe, 2007) Shows like Murder, She Wrote, the type of ‘normal tv’ that ‘quality television’ was evaluated against, began to disappear off the air. These traditionally formatted shows began to be replaced with shows following a new framework — high production cost, rich narrative content, and an expanded time format. Previously a rarity, the production of shows such as The Sopranos, CSI, and The West Wing made ‘quality television’ a cultural staple. Incidentally, one of the shows that rose to popularity in this initial boom of this ‘super-genre’ was X-Files — the work which sparked the career of Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad’s creator. It is worth noting that the term ‘quality television’ has been the source of much contention since “any interrogation of what is, and could be, meant by ‘quality’ in a discussion of television involves discourses of judgement ... there are always issues of power at stake in notions of quality and judgement — Quality for whom? Judgement by whom? On whose behalf?” (Brundson, 1990) As such, analyzing the ‘quality’ of Breaking Bad would offer a polemical imposition of qualitative judgements — for our purposes here, it is enough to identify that the show, and its creator, find their genesis alongside an industry-wide paradigm shift in the fundamental understanding of what defined TV itself.

In discussing his show Vince Gilligan focuses almost exclusively on Walt’s character and the relationship dynamics of the chamber of supporting characters in his narrative. As a middle- aged white man himself, the creator identifies with Walter White, the show’s antihero, because he “is a man who's suffering from, perhaps, the world's worst midlife crisis.” — a crisis which unlocks Walter’s “potential of totally changing [his] life and [his] personality and doing things [he] never would have dreamed of doing before.” This dramatic shift prompts the question that the creators say drives the show: “if you got a diagnosis like Walt gets at the beginning [of the show], of lung cancer, ... would [you] become a different person?” (Gross, 2019) Even the title of the show itself implicates the character focused lens of its content — “breaking bad” is “a southern colloquialism [describing] someone taking a turn off of the straight and narrow”. This creative directive, coupled with AMC’s overt marketing for the show as an extension of their Neo-western library, place the show’s focus directly on Walt’s antihero journey. As a result, the harrowing societal and personal implications of drug sale and abuse are relegated to a prop in Walt’s narrative. This relegation is typical of drug dramas, which, as Breaking Bad does with Walt’s story, often cater to a white, middle-aged male demographic by using an antihero narrative — a story focused on a character that inhabits all the same demographics. In addition to placing these morally flawed characters at their centers, drug dramas often rely at least partially on the allure of the depictions of sex and violence that accompany those figures to captivate their audience. This ultimate emphasis within the genre on the antihero narrative, paired with the show’s demographic incentive to glamorize depictions of vice, which often come in the form of drug sale and abuse, leads to the construction of a dangerous popular narrative about the state of drug abuse and addiction in the US. Especially given the cultural prevalence of Breaking Bad in the dawn of social media and quality tv, this is a precedent that warrants investigation and critique.

Developing an understanding of Walter White is essential in understanding and analyzing the importance of Breaking Bad. Both in his capacity as a narrative centerpiece, as well as in his construction as an antihero, Walt’s role in the show drives a large portion of its meaning. As such, understanding his antiheroic construction is prerequisite to understanding the show itself.

The antihero is a well studied component of the current epoch of ‘quality tv’. These leading men have been the focus of many of the most memorable television shows of the past thirty years, and are defined by their unique coupling of virtuous character traits and personal mission-driven violation of moral norms. In popular narratives, the antihero often inhabits the narrative role of a hero while possessing the characteristics of a villain. These leading men are often characterized as frontiermen — individuals with the strength, independence and virility to push traditional moral bounds in their struggle to survive in a setting that is often portrayed as a modern wilderness. These characters play on a deep running American conceptualization of our own historical heroes and folk legends — and, like “Samuel Adams, John Brown, Andrew Jackson, James Butler, ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok and Jesse James ... often blur the lines between hero and villain, outlaw and marshal, [taking] the reins because the law and societal norms could not do what they needed to accomplish.” This archetype is tied to Whiteness in many instances as well with the antihero, who is predominantly white and male, often serving as an indirect depiction of a man who can bring the modern-day United States to glory in its Manifest Destiny, eschewing societal norms and laws inn the process. As such, the setting of the American West is no accident for many anti-heroes, but is instead directly tied to the frontier mythology which powers these characters’ ethos, implicitly endorses the idea of a Manifest Destiny for the United States, and enshrines the ideals of individual liberty. (Newsom, 2020) In addition to their more sinister ideological tie-ins, however, these characters often play the role of a reluctant savior. Audiences find themselves not only investing in the narratives of these flawed characters, but even going so far as to hold them in adoration because of their flaws. The fallible, human depiction of the anti-hero often reminds the viewer of themselves, reminding them of their own fundamentally flawed human nature — and, as a result, emphasizing both the ambiguous morality of the human experience, but also the possibility of redemption or transcendence in that ambiguity. (Fitch 2005) As such, the cultural footprint of this archetype proves nearly as complex as their typical morality — these characters are often emblematic of extremely problematic ideals and codes of conduct, and yet, audiences consistently identify with and enjoy narratives which center and glorify their perspectives. (Eden, 2017)

Film and television have found great success in narratives which center the antihero archetype. Using a wide range of cinematic and narrative techniques, the producers of these characters have proven particularly successful at drawing viewers into making long-term emotional and moral investments in their stories — leading viewers into identifying with the leading men in these antihero series, even when their behavior is less than relatable. Antiheroes often achieve this sense of personal identification by evoking the sympathies of their viewers — eschewing societal boundaries, usually portrayed in their universes as artificial and restrictive, and appealing to a more ‘natural’ moral code. Since these leading men are almost always bound by a personal code centered around loyalty to kin, they can be portrayed as moral in one of the most fundamentally relatable senses. (Vaage, 2015) While these leading men are often tied to this basic, easily understood and communicated, moral code, their actions otherwise carry a consistent and distinctly amoral quality. This quality, however, is often revealed after the watcher has been led to develop sympathy and empathy for the antihero in question — connections established with depictions of their adherence to this ‘natural’ family based moral code. Viewers’ sympathetic feelings for antiheroes are often pre-rational — drawing upon normative social cues of morality to establish identification between the viewer and the antihero himself, and only later allowing for a more reflective, rational view of the consequences of their actions. In addition to this positive framing, antiheroes also carry the benefit of the fact that, instead of knowingly evaluating every action during narratives, and deliberately weighing the right or wrongness of each behavior, viewers tend to use heuristic tools or schemas to make quick evaluative character judgments (Raney, 2004; Sanders, 2010). Beyond the psychological basis of empathy that the viewer’s relationship with the antihero rests upon, there are frequently additional narrative structures that build a framework of empathy. In addition to the antihero’s normative personhood in the form of their typical middle aged, white identity, the antihero is often introduced as a character struggling with everyday problems. In the ideation of Adam Morton, the fact that these characters have reprehensible solutions to their relatable problems proves to be no impediment in the process of building empathy. The fact that viewers might not relate to the talent or general attitude of the antihero, and therefore might not find themselves in a position to empathize with that character poses no issue because, like the antihero, it is easy for the viewer to imagine breaking laws and pushing boundaries in order to defend their kin and ensure their own survival. Because “a partial grasp of motivation is all one ever has ... if there is any empathy at all, it rests on partial imagination.” It is because empathy necessitates this partial imagination that the viewer finds themselves able to relate to, and invest in, the narratives of certainly evil men. Empathy itself — one party must self-construct meaning and feeling for the objects of their empathy — and, especially with the aid of narrative structures, this bias construes antiheroes in a favorable light, and encourages audiences to empathize with characters who should, by all accounts, be morally offensive. (Morton, 2014; Bentham, 2017)

This foundation of empathy and a sense of moral normativity remains a present facet in the antihero’s character throughout his character’s existence — viewers will continue to excuse amoral behavior by fitting it into their schema of the antihero’s natural moral code, even long after there has been rationality introduced to our analysis of their actions. (Martínez, 2019) These viewer-antihero relationships mirror mental mechanisms similar to those of real-life friendships. One party, in this case the viewer, will turn a blind eye to the moral shortcomings of a friend — the antihero — as they become blinded to amoral behavior by familiarity with that character. (Vaage, 2015) This sense of familiarity, coupled with our natural empathy for the antihero as they navigate the suspense of their narrative, fuel a sense of identification which allows for a continued personal connection to the character, even throughout sometimes gruesome and graphic depictions of the results of their amorality. Thus, ‘quality tv’, and Breaking Bad in particular, has become a ‘structure of sympathy’ which allows supportive scaffolding for audiences to form personal attachments with these morally ambiguous characters. These shows become a place where amoral behavior can be dimmed by the narrative, and the audience can be led to use “moral disengagement” (the process of excusing behavior by construing it to fit within an existing narrative), as a necessary mechanism to continue to justify their emotional investment in a morally bankrupt character. (Raney, Janicke, 2013)

This moral disengagement is a cornerstone of Breaking Bad. Featuring a typical antihero lead, the audience is quickly led to adopt a disengaged viewpoint on their actions and overall narratives. This disengagement enables the shows’ depictions of the violence suffered by characters suffering from addiction. Violence, in the ideation of political theorist Slavoj Žižek, can be categorized as either subjective or objective. Subjective violence is the product of identifiable actors — terrorist attacks, homicides, and assaults are subjectively violent. When observing objective violence, however, there is no single entity that can be culpable for a violent outcome. For example, in Žižek’s ideation, even if one finds financial elites culpable for the existence of global poverty, they are exonerated by the fact that their wealth is generated and maintained by our global capitalist system, within which it is inevitable that there will be inequitable distribution of wealth. Žižek continues to differentiate ‘objective’, or, alternatively, ‘systemic’, violence, but, for our purposes, the general definition will suffice. This distinction between subjective and systemic violence has important implications for depictions of violence in the media, generally. Because of their nebulous nature, true depictions of systemic violence are difficult to construct in popular media. The fact that instances of systemic violence lack an identifiable perpetrator around which to create a narrative allow these instances to be drowned out in a sea of sudden, shocking, and identifiable acts of subjective violence. In these depictions of subjective violence the personal aspect which is absent in systemic violence becomes central. Since these instances of subjective violence have a personal narrative at their center — whether that be the narrative of the perpetrator, or the more easily identifiable victim, these instances of violence are readily adopted into the expansive personal narratives which are typical and expected in our era of ‘quality tv’. (Žižek, 2007)

Specifically, antihero narratives in drug dramas often feature depictions of subjective violence which, as discussed previously, are contextualized and permitted by the audience because they are within the scope of the antihero’s established moral code. Even when subjectively violent acts seem to spring from a well of objective violence, such as depictions of addicts committing crimes in Breaking Bad, subjective, personal facets of the violence still receive the narrative emphasis. This is, in part, because of the narrative appeal of those subjective depictions, but also stems from the fact that the state of moral disengagement required by the centering of the antihero’s personal narrative supports the dismissal of this violence.

These scene-setting moments of moral disengagement, and their corresponding depictions of subjective violence, are especially prevalent in the first two seasons of Breaking Bad. Walt and Jesse work together in the first seasons to combine Walt’s second-to-none chemistry and meth making knowledge with Jesse’s knowledge of the drug market and, as a result, come to dominate the Albuquerque, New Mexico amphetamine scene. The majority of the interactions between Walt, Jesse, and their everyday consumers take place in the first two seasons of the show. In this stage of the text, Walt and Jesse’s criminal enterprise has yet to truly be established. As such, they spend a significant amount of time depicting the logistics, relationships, and systems that serve as foundational pieces of exposition and allow for the establishment of their grandiose criminal operation as it exists in the latter seasons of the series. As such, the rhetorical objects which will be the locus of this discussion will all be sourced from the first two seasons of Breaking Bad.

One scene, named The Peanut Vendor, provides an important piece of exposition for the first season plot of Breaking Bad. In this scene the viewer can see Jesse, one of the protagonists of the show, along with his friends Badger and Skinny Pete, side characters and friends of Jesse’s, distributing large quantities of methamphetamines. This sales montage is backed by an upbeat, Cuban son pregón, which is titled El Manisero — the Peanut Vendor in English. This scene establishes the high quality and demand for Walt and Jesse’s meth, and consequently sets the stage for the rest of the series. Without the successes in sale and production quality established in this scene, none of the main plot points of the series could be successfully executed, as Walt and Jesse would not have been established as a successful chemist and salesman, respectively. This scene also proves to be one of the only points in the entire six season series in which the main characters interact with street-level drug users who, by all other accounts, seem to be ordinary people. These two facts make this scene extremely important to the audience’s understanding of the universe in this show — the criticality of this scene to the plot, as well as the expositional heavy lifting that this scene does in showcasing the supporting universe of the show make it possibly the most important piece of exposition in the first season.

The importance of this scene prompts close textual analysis of its constituent parts. As mentioned, the most prominent feature in this montage scene is the soundtrack — a song named El Manisero. This song is a Cuban son pregón, which is a genre characterized by its upbeat guitar and afro-cuban rhythm structure, and was a genre commonly used in street markets as a way to signal that a vendor was selling a particular type of good . This song in particular is meant to be emblematic of a song that a peanut vendor would use at the market, hence the name. The montage itself is also a prominent feature of the scene, and shows fast cuts between the dealers and their customers. The customers can be seen hugging, flirting with, and otherwise showing camaraderie with their dealers after making their purchases. They can also mostly be seen smiling and accompanied by friends when making their purchases, establishing these foundational parts of the show’s universe as happy-go-lucky individuals for the most part. There are also quite a variety of people that can be seen buying Jesse’s drugs in this montage — everyone from truck drivers, to weight lifters at the gym, to employees at a pet store are depicted buying drugs from his network. These depictions depict a wide user base that stretches beyond stereotypical representations of drug users in popular media. The dealers themselves are largely preoccupied with the logistics and the monetary outcome of their enterprise, and each clip in the montage which solely features the dealers is focused on one of these two facets of their job. The fruits of their labor seem to be plentiful, as the supporting dealers hand over huge wads of cash to Jesse whenever they meet up. All in all, the montage is a comprehensive look into the work of buying and selling meth within the Breaking Bad universe. The customers are depicted as carefree characters, mostly seeming just to be having a good time with their friends, or occasionally trying to make it through a tough day at work. The dealers themselves are represented as friendly peanut dealers at the market, raking up wads of cash from an enterprise which, if the depiction in the scene is to be believed, is facilitating a good time without any negative consequences. The upbeat music, fast cuts, and warm glowing neon signs all paint a very appealing picture into the birth of Jesse’s dealing ring and the establishment of his loyal consumer base, and provide a foundation which is essential to the viewers understanding of the everyday user in the Breaking Bad universe moving forward.

This scene is particularly important because it establishes a look into the systemic underpinnings of Walt and Jesse’s business. This overwhelmingly positive look into Breaking Bad’s meth business serves several purposes. Firstly, it establishes audience identification and sympathy for both the dealers and users within Jesse and Walt’s sphere. The upbeat music, quick jump cuts, and visuals of happy customers all serve to engender positive feelings for the meth business and its outcomes. Additionally, the wide range of depictions of customers, business protocols, and interactions between dealers provide what seems to be a comprehensive sample of the facets of Walt and Jesse’s business. This comprehensive sampling, coupled with the positive narrative framing, cements both sympathy for the antiheroes, as well as a sort of sympathy for the seemingly non-violent system of drug trafficking in this universe in the mind of the viewer.

This positive systemic and personal view provides the audience’s basic understanding of Walt and Jesse’s business for the rest of the series, and begins to elicit empathy and connection for those characters from the viewer as well.

Viewers are introduced to the circumstances of two specific consumers of Walt’s product in the second season episode, ‘Peekaboo’. While The Peanut Vendor montage provided a wide ranging, but shallow, look into the lives of the full range of Walt and Jesse’s customers, ‘Peekaboo’ is a more intimate look into the lives of a single couple addicted to Walt’s product. The couple is introduced after one of Jesse’s dealers is robbed by two people with knives. Looking to establish a reputation of harsh retribution and ensure that there aren’t more robberies in the future, Jesse decides to kill the couple and retrieve his stolen money. Instead of immediately finding the couple when he breaks into their house, Jesse finds a living room covered in drug paraphernalia, dirt, and holes. As he searches, gun drawn, for his targets, a child walks out of his room and sits down to watch an old TV that can only access one infomercial channel. Jesse first tries to interrogate the child about his parents’ whereabouts, but, after seeing his catatonic and grimy state, decides to try and bond with him instead. After the child uses his only line of the episode to tell Jesse: “I’m hungry,” Jesse finds him some food and bonds with him over a game of peekaboo, after which Jesse leans back in relief and smiles for the first time in the episode. Shortly afterwards, the couple returns home. Jesse quickly hides the child in his room, and then assaults the couple, holding them at gunpoint and forcing them to retrieve the stolen drugs from their anuses. The couple argues with each other the entire time they are being held hostage, only acknowledging Jesse when he mentions drugs, and only responding to his demands for money after he threatens to cut them off from their dealers permanently. When the child walks back into the living room, where his parents are being held hostage, Jesse immediately berates the mother for her negligence and moves to hide his gun. After finally moving to respond to Jesse’s demands, the man takes him out to an ATM in his backyard, which he claims he stole in a “victimless crime,” because the FDIC insures the bank. When the camera cuts to the scene of the crime, we can see a dead man covered in blood behind a cash register. The man tries for hours to open the safe, and eventually props it up and gets underneath it in an effort to drill it open from the bottom — arguing with his partner the entire time. Eventually, high on heroin and tired of the verbal abuse from her partner, the woman pushes the safe over on the man’s head, killing him, and popping open the safe’s front. Jesse scrambles to grab the cash and wipe away his fingerprints before calling 911. After grabbing the money and making the call, Jesse grabs the oblivious child, and runs through the hellish scene while playing peekaboo with the child in an effort to make sure he keeps his eyes closed. The episode ends with the child sitting out on the front porch, alone, wrapped up in a blanket that Jesse gave him, as Jesse runs off from the house with cash in his hands and tears in his eyes.

This episode marks the first time that the viewer is introduced in any personal capacity to Walt and Jesse’s customers. This is notable both in of itself, and additionally because these characters are present only in this episode. Never named, and ostensibly either dead or taken by the state in one capacity or the other, the mother, father, and son represented in the episode are contained entirely within their 30 minutes of screen time. During their time on screen, the family is depicted as depraved and destitute, without any reasoning as to why. The circumstances that led to their current situation are never discussed. The couple’s interactions with the justice and welfare systems are never discussed. The cycles of addiction and their impact on both the lives of the couple, and on their child, are never discussed. This first, defining, personal encounter with a family of Walt and Jesse’s customers is characterized almost entirely by interpersonal violence, and Jesse’s reactions to encountering that violence. Both Jesse’s distressed emotional state and the graphic depictions of violence in ‘Peekaboo’ stand in sharp contrast to the upbeat tone of the Peanut Vendor montage. The instances of violence in ‘Peekaboo’ should certainly be categorized as depictions of subjective violence — there is neither discussion nor visualization of any systemic support for the gruesome events of the episode. The fact that this expositional scene casts the violence so distinctly as subjective, using imagery of an abused child’s plight, cements that reality as universal in the mind of the viewer. These scenes carry another load as well. While they establish drug-related violence in Breaking Bad’s universe as subjective, they additionally help to establish Jesse’s antihero narrative by showing him struggle emotionally with the introduction of a child into his amoral activity. This display of Jesse’s inner conflict, as well as the portrayal of his care for the child, help to establish the ‘natural moral code’ which will be so helpful in facilitating audience empathy as his character continues to develop. While the Peanut Vendor montage introduces the audience’s view of the systemic support for Jesse’s drug dealing ring and his customer’s interactions with his product — establishing a norm by showing a full sampling of customers, interactions, and facets of Jesse’s business — ‘Peekaboo’, meanwhile, uses depictions of subjective violence to further Jesse’s character development. As a viewer, this instance of subjective violence in Peekaboo stands as an anomaly within the amicable system of drug trade and use enshrined by the Peanut Vendor. The neglect, disarray, and violence which characterizes cast and setting of ‘Peekaboo’ provides an interrogation of Jesse’s character and of the circumstances of a singular family, while leaving the structural supports of those circumstances entirely unquestioned.

The trauma that Jesse witnesses in ‘Peekaboo’ leads directly into another defining sequence of events in Breaking Bad’s second season. After witnessing the death of the father and the plight of his son, Jesse moves into a new apartment as a part of an effort to build more stability in his own life. The landlady of the apartment complex, Jane, is a recovering drug addict herself, and becomes a love interest of Jesse’s throughout the second season. Significant time is spent in the second season developing Jesse and Jane’s romance, with Jesse originally making an effort to curb his own drug use, intending help Jane with her recovery, and then eventually joining her in a descending spiral of heroin abuse after exposure to the drugs that inevitably appear as a product of his business. Walt, meanwhile, spends a large portion of season two either preparing for the upcoming birth of his daughter, or being treated for cancer and losing sleep over the hospital bills accompanying his chemotherapy and surgery. Walt and Jane go for nearly the entirety of season two without meaningfully interacting. This changes, however, when Walt decides to withhold Jesse’s share of profits from a particularly profitable sale in an effort to dissuade Jesse from continuing to use heroin with Jane. Jane, upset that her heroin money is being stolen from her, blackmails Walt by calling him at his house — using a phone number given to her by Walt’s trusted partner, Jesse. Walt initially acquiesces to Jane’s demands and brings Jesse back his money, with the intention of abandoning their joint venture after his betrayal. After sitting down in a bar with a stranger who, unbeknownst to Walt, happens to be Jane’s father, Walt decides to return to Jesse’s house, ostensibly to try and follow the fatherly advice that the stranger in the bar gave him — to have your family’s back no matter what — and help Jesse kick his heroin addiction. When Walt arrives back at the house, he finds the door locked. He knocks, asking for Jesse, before going around to the back and letting himself in through a hole in the door. When Walt finally enters the house, he finds Jesse and Jane unconscious, with a used needle and a spoon on their bedside table. As he surveys the scene in anguish, Walt notices Jane choking on her own vomit. He leaves her to die. The next day, a plane crashes over Albuquerque, the stage for Walt’s drama. Jane’s father, the stranger that Walt met in the bar, is revealed to be the air traffic controller responsible for the downed flight.

Here, once again, the systematic components of addiction and drug abuse are conspicuously absent from the viewer’s scope. Although Jane receives considerably more development than her unnamed counterparts in ‘Peekaboo’ — she makes a living as a tattoo artist, has a strained relationship with her father, and is a recovering addict — there is still no mention of societal or structural impact on her struggle with heroin abuse and addiction. Even in her death, Jane ends up as a part of Walt’s character development — a casualty that Breaking Bad’s typical antihero feels justified in allowing in order to uphold his natural moral code and protect his (adoptive) family in Jesse. This depiction of violence against Jane is certainly a subjective one as well. Instead of depicting or discussing the systemic factors that led Jane to the point of addiction and abuse, her death is depicted as the result of a simple decision by Walt. Even before any intervention from Walt himself, Jane’s relapse into drug use is a direct result of her relationship with another antihero figure in the narrative, Jesse — further reducing her cycle of addiction and struggle with substance use into a result of personal, subjective factors, rather than addressing it from any systemic point of view. This, once again, equates violence stemming from drug abuse and addiction with subjective violence within Breaking Bad’s narrative. Additionally, this depiction of Jane’s death as a decision made by the antihero helps to code future depictions of violence in the series as subjective as well. Because this death contributes to establishing the viewer’s sense of ‘moral disengagement’ by providing a narrative excuse for amoral behavior, the audience will be more likely to attribute violence in the future to similar narrative origins — in this case, Walt’s typical antihero’s moral code.

This sense of moral disengagement allows for Breaking Bad’s narrative to lie to its audience by omission. Consumption of drugs in the United States is a widespread societal ill. More than 10% of all US residents older than 12 have used an “illicit drug” in the past month, and and more than 15% of the US has battled a substance use disorder in the past year. (American Addiction Centers, 2021) Our obsession with substance consumption has spawned a number of symbiotic corruptions as well. In our home country, the birth of the carceral state can be directly correlated with the beginning of the war on drugs. Abroad, our neighbors in Latin America have been devastated by the US outsourcing of violence inherent in illegal drug trafficking. Both in of itself, and through the problems that it has created, the prolific rate of American drug consumption should make for a significant stain on our national identity. This stain seems to be washed away, however, by many cultural representations of the drug problem in the United States — not the least of which is Breaking Bad itself. Audiences are fascinated by stories of about the drug trade, but these stories consistently omit or gloss over the fiendish American demand that provides the necessary foundation for the violence, money, and sex that is so alluring to audiences of these shows. This fact is explicitly evidenced by Breaking Bad’s insistence on painting the drug trade as the picture of a smooth running, copacetic system, and relegating its depictions of violence to entirely personal, subjective instances which seem to stand in contrast to that system. The fact that a cultural touchstone such as Breaking Bad — a defining piece of quality tv and a flagship program for a new-look network — represents drug trafficking, abuse, and addiction, in such a subjective, personally based frame, is largely problematic for the general public’s understanding of this evidently important national issue. Not only does this personal depiction, driven by a need to serve Walt and Jesse’s antihero narratives, misinform the audience on the systemic violence that underlies addiction and abuse in the United States, but it also circumvents informing the audience about potential systems of care in place to alleviate those more systemic forms of violence. As such, Walt’s antihero narrative in Breaking Bad, aided by the moral disengagement and depictions of subjective violence that are necessitated by its portrayal, leave an indelible and harmful impact on the viewer’s understanding of the American addiction epidemic and its structural foundations and implications.

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