Davis Aurini - Generational Themes in Breaking Bad

Nov. 9, 2012 - Davis Aurini

18:27

Generational Themes in Breaking Bad

I guess this isn't a review; the show's awesome, go watch it. This is more of an analysis on how it relates to modern culture.

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	This is a video I've been made to get to for a while now, and somebody just reminded me of that, so thank you.
	It's a review of Breaking Bad and what it means for us, us men alive today in this world, the ones that have woken up or are waking up, whose eyes aren't screwed shut to what's going on.
	But before I get to the show itself, I want to talk about the book The Fourth Turning.
	Now, I'm currently still reading The Fourth Turning.
	I will probably review it when I'm done, but I can confidently tell you that this book is absolutely amazing.
	It's ahead of the curve.
	It's ahead of history.
	This is a book that in the 90s predicted the economic collapse almost to the year, not even based upon economics.
	It's a book of generational dynamics.
	It argues that there's four cycles of generations that occur.
	One that creates a civilization, one that excels a civilization, one that tears it down, and one that wanders through the broken ruins of the old civilization.
	And they, on the surface, this seems like such a pseudo-theory.
	It's one of those things that you could easily plug anything, any set of data into to prove it.
	And yet they predicted the 2007 collapse.
	And it makes a lot of sense on top of that.
	It's a great heuristic to use.
	So far, its predictions have been pretty bang on.
	And it helps explain so much of the frustration we see in the world.
	So if we're going to try and jump ahead of history, this is a great tool to be using.
	If we're going to try and plan for the future, the future that's actually going to happen, not the future that the guy selling you RRSPs says is going to happen.
	And that's a dynamic I'm going to be using to review this book, or sorry, this book, this TV series, which is a phenomenal, phenomenal series.
	Because the characters in it are baby boomers and millennials.
	No Gen X present whatsoever.
	And it's absolutely fascinating how broken and narcissistic these baby boomers are.
	Let's start with Schuyler, Walt's wife.
	Here's a woman married to a good man that loves her.
	And she's just not happy.
	She's living in paradise.
	They have a beautiful home.
	They have great automobiles.
	They have an easy life.
	You know, their son is disabled, but he's coping extremely well with it.
	They have an enviable life for most people throughout history.
	And yet she's just not happy with it.
	And so what does she do?
	Does she try and create a constructive solution?
	No, she shits all over tradition and cheats on her husband, disrespects him, treats him like garbage.
	Then the series starts to move forward and Walt becomes the badass.
	He goes through that transformation.
	There's even words on TV tropes for it.
	The bald head of evil or the important haircut, because he loses his hair due to cancer, but then keeps it that way, signifying his character growth.
	And second of all, growing the beard, which is a reference to Star Trek The Next Generation, stopped sucking at the same time that Will Riker grew a beard.
	So Walt goes from this meek, timid man to this badass alpha, signified by the baldness and the excellent, excellent goatee.
	And Skylar, now instead of supporting him, turns against him because of the drug trade that she's benefiting from.
	Meanwhile, she's helping the guys she was cheating on him with cook the books.
	She does not seek constructive solutions.
	She seeks selfish, bitchy solutions, excuses to tear Walt down, not to try and help build him into a better man.
	But then you've got Walt himself, and he is the classic, the classic baby boomer.
	So as a young man, he was a great inventor.
	And supposedly his friends stole his patent and they made a billion dollars for this company while he got kicked out.
	But more to the point, this is the narrative of the baby boomer thinking they have all the ideas back in the 60s with their stupid counterculture lovings, their tear down the society movement.
	They had all the solutions.
	Life was just golden.
	Their parents had handed them wealth and civilization and happiness on a golden platter.
	And the baby boomers completely screwed the whole thing up.
	So you have Walt becoming a high school teacher.
	Here's this man, an absolute genius, and he's stuck as a high school teacher.
	Now, how is that possible?
	When you have this much education in chemistry, this much raw natural talent, and yet you're stuck as a high school teacher.
	And he blames the world, he blames the Jews, he blames his friends that stole his business.
	He blames others for his own failings.
	And the series begins when he finally gets the kick in the ass he needs to go do something about improving himself and improving the world.
	But does he try and create a positive contribution?
	Absolutely not.
	He decides to start selling meth.
	And I'm sure you guys all know my stance on legalization of drugs, but as things currently stand, meth is not sold or used responsibly.
	It's sold to create addictions.
	It's sold regardless of the human cost.
	It's sold to make a blind, immoral profit, even if drugs via V drugs are morally neutral.
	So he starts selling meth.
	And he becomes the badass and the family man.
	But ultimately, it's about his own ego.
	It's not about that he's working out, for instance, to be really strong.
	He's working out to have really big muscles and impress everybody else.
	To be the king, to be in charge, the owner of everything.
	And he doesn't care how many people have to get crushed on his way there.
	Him and Schuyler have the most disgustingly dysfunctional relationship I've ever seen.
	And it is a credit to the writers of this show that they do such a good job describing this.
	Here are these two people that have shared a life together.
	They have a wonderful home.
	They have very opulent wealth compared to most people in most times.
	But their own need to satiate their ego caused them to destroy everything beautiful that they have.
	Schuyler is a complete bitch.
	And Walt?
	Well, Walt doesn't care about his family so much as he cares about having a family, if you see the difference.
	And then you get Jesse involved in this whole mix.
	So here's Jesse, a millennial, with a couple of boomer parents that never really cared about him, never really reached out to him, probably just had him as an ornament.
	As Captain Capitalism has pointed out, a lot of these breeders have kids for the sake of having saying they have kids rather than actually wanting to raise a person.
	Jesse is cast directionless into life despite the fact that he is a man with a lot of potential.
	He has no guidance.
	He has no motivation to do anything with himself.
	But he's got a fair bit of intelligence with him.
	He managed to learn how to cook this meth up to the same standards as Walt, but with nobody to influence him.
	He turns into a degenerate.
	He turns into a loser.
	For him, it's cooking methan and drug dealing.
	For a lot of millennials, it becomes getting hammered, playing video games 24-7, having no goals or life ambition, just treading water and mainlining heroin.
	Then Walt comes along.
	And while Walt teaches him a lot about the world, Walt does not have his best interests at heart.
	Walt manipulates Jesse to serve himself, even when it's not in Jesse's best interest.
	Walt is fundamentally selfish, but he's the only guiding influence that Jesse can find.
	But despite all of this, Jesse manages to find some catharsis, some hope.
	Even though Walt certainly doesn't give him any good advice about relationships, Jesse manages to find a warm household with his girlfriend and her kid, something to give some meaning to his life beyond getting the top score in Halo.
	Walt proceeds to completely destroy this.
	And then you've got the other baby boomers.
	Got Fring, of course, another narcissistic, violent baby boomer that doesn't care about anybody but himself, is completely unable.
	The inability of Fring and Walt to come to an agreement in the last couple seasons is because they're both narcissistic baby boomers.
	Thing is, their interests align.
	They make far better friends and partners than they do enemies.
	But each of them has this knee-jerk desire to put the other one down.
	You can see this when the video cameras are installed in the cookhouse, how Walt takes this as a personal insult, as anybody would.
	And it's actually that camera system that really drives him to go kill Frank.
	Then you've got the ex-cop, who's a bit older.
	He's possibly even one of the GI generations, given his personality, or an early baby boomer, where his whole life went to hell.
	He's divorced.
	He's not happy.
	He got kicked off the department for corruption, but at least he acknowledges his sins.
	He tries to give Jesse good advice, but he can't speak Jesse's language.
	He doesn't know how to give Jesse good advice.
	And ultimately, he's just as screwed up as Walt is.
	That both he and Walt feel a need to achieve victory over the other person and are completely unable to work together.
	And the element that's missing is Generation X in all of this.
	As I've said before, Generation X, we remember the GI generation right before the ex-cop, when the ex-cop without getting divorced.
	Because overall, he's pretty GI, but he's screwed up the way that baby boomers always are.
	We remember what that used to be like.
	We got to touch and see and smell that society before it completely vanished.
	And we are the wanderer generation that have seen our parents get divorced, usually for stupid reasons, and seen how most divorces end in misery for all parties and bitterness and hatred.
	And ironically, the generation that coined the term don't trust anyone over 30 is the generation we absolutely cannot trust.
	We know that they're Walt, that they're fringe, that they use people, and they're not going to care about anything after their deaths.
	Look at how the GI generation invested in their children versus how the baby boomers are investing in their children.
	Their main goal is to eat up all their money and leave family heirlooms to their children who don't have the same economic opportunities that they did.
	Millennials are hopeful.
	The millennials are accustomed to growing up in this shitty, broken environment.
	They didn't see it breaking in front of them.
	And so they're overly optimistic.
	When you see something beautiful fall apart, it creates the Gen X cynicism.
	When it's already fallen apart and it's what you're used to, you get a more natural sort of hope for the future, which is what we see in the millennials.
	And yet to understand how everything went wrong, to understand that the BS you see in Disney movies, in Hollywood, the constant stream of baby boomer advice, even though this advice destroyed them, to see through that, that's where the Gen X perspective comes from.
	Guys like myself and Captain Capitalism, and we're on the far cusp of Gen X, we're the ones that it's our, what we need to do, people in our situation, rather than try and subscribe to this baby boomer mythos, to try and enter that corporate, you know, rat race world where we're all out for ourselves to have the biggest cookie cutter house in a cookie cutter neighborhood.
	It's up to us to understand what went wrong, to document it, and we might seem cynical, but to explain it to the millennials.
	Because it's going to be the millennials that one way or another create the next society.
	I've seen some indications of a very nasty police state coming soon.
	I'll link you down below.
	The Americans have their own Hitler Youth now, Department of Homeland Security.
	Lovely.
	These kids, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, are going to create a wonderful baby boomer dystopia.
	Then we've got the alt-right, the counterculture, the counter-counterculture movement.
	The social critics who are the opposite of the postmodernists, the post-postmodernists.
	Those are the good guys.
	And if we wind up being successful, it'll be a pretty cool future.
	But it's a hard road to tread.
	So that's my review of Breaking Bad, amazing show.
	I can't.
	As much as I hate all the characters except Jesse, I can't get enough of the bloody thing.
	And that's sort of a little mini review of a book I haven't finished reading, The Fourth Turning, which, yes, I heartily recommend that you read that book.

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