In season four of AMC's Breaking Bad, fast food store manager-drug kingpin Gus Fring smoothly offers a first and only piece of personal
history in response to DEA agent Hank’s probing questions: there is no record
of him in his home country of Chile because he escaped during the dictatorship
of Augusto Pinochet, whose regime kept notoriously bad records. This detail and
Gus’s (real or invented) history is never mentioned again, and by the season
finale, Gus is dead anyway. But this quick and easily dismissed reference to
Pinochet’s Chile may just have everything to do with the entire plot and
trajectory of the series—not so much in Gus’s story, however, as in Walt’s.
In her brilliant book Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explains how
proponents of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School economics took advantage of natural
or man-made disasters to institute otherwise unwelcome free market policies. The
aggressive privatization schemes quickly implemented in the aftermath of 9/11
or Katrina offer recent examples of this strategy, but for Klein it was Chile that
was the ground zero for this practice of disaster capitalism, the Trinity testing site, if you will, for radical free market economics. Pinochet’s
U.S.-backed coup d’état of then-President Allende brought Chicago School
economic ideas to Chile, resulting in substantial economic growth for the
country and a vast personal fortune for Pinochet himself. It also brought a brutal regime of repression, torture, and violence that resulted in thousands of
murders and tens of thousands of tortures.
These two faces of disaster
capitalism are exactly the two faces of Walter White, and Breaking Bad plays out a version of the shock doctrine in the dry
suburbs of the American southwest (where the Trinity testing site is literally
on the road from Albuquerque to the border of Juárez, Mexico, a gorgeously
harsh landscape that visually defines the show). Walt’s unexpected diagnosis of
terminal lung cancer (surely a nod to the region’s radioactive history,
especially given his explicitly non-smoker status) sends him into a domestic
financial panic which is relieved only by the entrance of the absolutely
unregulated market of the illegal drug trade. By season four we learn, along
with his accountant wife (once employed by the clueless, free-spending, and tax-evading
businessman, Ted Berneke, whose name is easily confused with that of Federal
Reserve chief Bob Bernanke), that Walt is now pulling in the equivalent of $7
million/year as a crystal meth chef, a considerable improvement over the public
school teacher salary he once supplemented with a demeaning part-time job at a
car wash. The problem is that Walt’s sudden ascent from the 99% to the 1% comes,
just as it did in Chile, with unavoidable and terrifying bloodshed.
When Walt’s bomb explodes under
Hector Salamanca’s wheelchair, it leaves Gus with half of his body burnt to a
crisp, his right face sheared off and raw, his eye socket a dark gaping hole, even
as from his left side he continues to look his respectable businessman best,
tie straight, composed, calm. This gothic Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde
image—exposing the menacing and violent criminal beneath the calm and
dependable businessman—is a dramatic visual representation of what Walt, too, has
become: the struggling middle-class suburban family guy whose desperate participation
in free market economics implicates him in a brutal criminality from which he
first can’t, and then doesn’t even want to, escape.
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