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So, I’m stepping aside my usual purpose here to consider the finale of Breaking Bad, of which I am a fan.

For weeks I’ve been watching the opening sequence of Breaking Bad which showed images of a burnt stuffed animal floating in the White family swimming pool and body bags being loaded into a vehicle.  My mind wriggled about trying to figure out what this meant for the finale and the White family, as well as his ambitious enterprise (which, admittedly, has seen setbacks come to his front door before: most notably Tuco).  But the finale here reached well beyond the expectations that I had and projected some interesting problems onto both Walt and the audience–some of which are valid and some not so much.

The finale winds up with Jane’s father, Donald, losing his concentration in the aftermath of her death (by a drug overdose–choking on her vomit) leading to a mid-air collision between two airplanes.  (Donald is an air-traffic controller.)  The debris falling from the planes explains the stuffed animal, body bags, etc.  My initial reaction was, not to be insensitive here, ‘so what?’  I mean, the implication is that Walter watched as Jane choked on vomit, he did nothing, so she died. Her death caused her father to go into a mental tailspin which leads to a mid-air collision killing lots of people including the most innocent and helpless members of our society: children.  I watched this and thought, “What’s this got to do with the show? What does this have to do with anything? This is not Walt’s fault.”  That is, it is not Walt’s fault that Donald could not do his job, keep his concentration, or know when to return two work, or when to admit he couldn’t focus, etc.  But then, I realized the writers were going for something much broader than this.  The writers are throwing a bit of Chaos theory at the audience–the whole “a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas.” And the airplane is a harsh metaphor for the implications on society of what Walt is doing.  Throughout the show, for the most part, only the guilty have been getting hurt–if you make exception for the White family, Jesse’s family, and the one show (Peekaboo) where we see a little boy living in filth with his junky parents.  And these hurts are emotional, psychological, etc., which are discounted for the most part by American society anyway; i.e. the only thing that counts to practical Americans is a REAL hurt–one you can see; that is, violence.  For most of America, if you can’t see it, it ain’t real–and this is certainly the case with psychological or emotional problems.

Stepping off my pedestal now… As far as the show goes, I have mixed feelings about this statement by the writers (if that is indeed their point).  First, it has to be hard for a show like Breaking Bad which is, in some ways, glorifying the drug trade and drug manufacture.  I will not get into an analysis of portrayals here, as I can’t speak well enough to such things: i.e. how law-enforcement is portrayed, how drug dealing is portrayed, etc.  But it seems real enough to me, and in no way desirable.  But you just know some executive somewhere at AMC has an itch, and he or she is saying, “But isn’t this putting drugs in a good light?”  So, perhaps there is pressure to demonstrate broader consequences–and exploding two planes and having a child’s toy drop is pretty damn dramatic.  As well, who can forget the statement by Flynn (Walter Jr.) to the press?  That one hurt.  The irony there was crushing, of course, as it was intended to be.  As well, there is Skyler taking off. So, I think we’re seeing a direction that this thing will go.  We’re seeing the macro and micro environments shattering all around Walt.  While I’m on directions, of course, it was no accident that Ted was there by Skyler’s side when the baby was born.  I digressed there, but the point is, I understand that there is probably some pressure to make the message less drug-glorious and more community-harming.  But this should not spin too far away from what is fundamental: we all have choices.  I don’t want to get into a discussion about personal responsibility or libertarianism or existentialism or whatever on a grand scale, but will consider it mundanely with these characters.

Did Walt kill Jane? No.  Jane kill self. Jane stupid that way.  (Sorry, couldn’t resist the Tarzan shot.)  Jane made the choice that killed her when she a) could have walked out the door as Jesse had asked; or b) go back to get high with Jesse (which is what she did).  As soon as Jane made that choice, she was dead.  At some point a person has to accept responsibility for her life and do what is right.  And I don’t mean morally right, or whatever, but right for that person’s life–make a choice that moves her forward and not one that regresses.  Donald did everything that he could as a parent barring putting Jane in a cage.  That kind of oversight is possible, but not practical for too many reasons.  I have a daughter who is nearly four, and it kills me to contemplate that she would end up doing something like what Jane did or that she would ever devalue a life which I hold as greater in value than anything I have achieved personally or will ever achieve.  But even I know that a painful day will come when I have to let my daughter make choices for herself, and worse yet, I know some of them will be painful choices.  I cannot think that Donald could have done more than showing up every morning to go with her to meetings and to give her a place to live and to support her as much as he could.  In the end, Jane had to make a choice for herself.  That choice should have been to give tough love and not do what Jesse was doing; not choose to be co-dependent and get high with him.  That choice was her death warrant.  Walt was there to see the climax, but her death is not on his hands.

That being said, however, Walt is guilty of an immoral choice.  As far as I’m concerned, Walt had a moral responsibility to act to save Jane.  Call it religious, call it moral, call it ethical, call it basic human decency, call it whatever you want: Walt failed at that moment.  It is morally worse because he made a conscious choice to withhold help because it was to his advantage to do so.  This makes his choice very morally corrupt and possibly evil.  If this were a video game like Neverwinter Nights, Walt’s alignment would have suffered some negative shifting there.  The broader question, of course, is does everything that Walt is doing constitute evil or moral failing on this level?  That is, is the manufacture of drugs a moral failure with repercussions on one’s soul–an act that makes one an evil or wrong for society?  What about cigarettes?  I don’t mean to cloud the issue, but it’s a fair question.  Cigarette companies intentionally manipulated the levels of nicotine to make their product more desirable–more necessary: more addictive.  And they knew that a majority of people who used their product would die from cancer, heart failure, or suffer emphysema, heart disease, throat or lip cancer, etc.  Here we are seeing the ultimate corruption of Walt’s soul.  He has moved from that “decent guy” that Flynn/Walter Jr. names; the guy who “always does the right thing,” to the guy who does not: who lies to his wife and people closest to him, who advocates killing the junkies who robbed a dealer, who lets a young woman choke to death.  The tragedy is the reason Walt did what he did: to save his family.  Of course, now he is destroying it utterly–and, ironically (comically for the writers, no doubt) improving in physical health.  He is becoming a “hollow man.”  However, Walt is also becoming empowered.  He is defining himself and overcoming obstacles on his own terms and NOT DYING.  There is something to be admired in this, too.  I don’t want to side-step a difficult question.  In terms of drug use, like Jane, people make choices. 

Is Walt selling an immoral product?  Most products, in and of themselves, are not moral or immoral.  How moral or immoral is a Bud Light? How moral or immoral is a can of paint?  What if it has lead in it? I think a product is immoral if the effects of its use are broadly damaging, the product has little redeeming value to society, and the fact of its damaging effects are known at the time of production.  I would say the sale of “nicotine-enhanced” cigarettes is immoral–but not the sale of tobacco, in general.  I would say Pacific Gas and Electric dumping chromium VI into the ground water was immoral and evil–when the knowledge was there and it was intentionally covered-up.  The original purpose for using it was not evil–to stop corrosion in tanks.  Is Meth immoral? Take a look at Faces of Meth and tell me: or take a look at this video on YouTube. Based on the definition I offered above, I would say Meth most definitely is immoral.

Is Walt forcing people to use it?  No.  Is that an excuse?  I would say not really; but the reality remains: someone will make it, someone will use it, someone will pay for it.  The fault may lie at every step in the process, but no one is alone in guilt.  The person who uses drugs is just as morally implicated in their own outcome as the dealer and producer.  One cannot point to a willing junky and say, “this person is a victim.”  There may be instances in which an addict is not complicit in his or her predicament; but I’d wager those instances are rare in the broad scheme of things.

I’ll have to think about this question more.  The writers, I think, hit a tough note in that last show; one that will wrestle in me for a while.  What do you think: did Walt bring down that plane? Or is that plane Walt’s life?

Recently a debate came up and I was asked two different questions: are there ethical limits on the public expression of art; is there nothing that is unethical in art.

**(Note, the response below is my initial response.  I’ve since read of some things that have very much shaken my notion, which I explain at the end.)

I think the only proper sphere for determining what is unethical in art is the public sphere.  I believe, as well, it is the only place where art should be limited.  I think this is the exact role that the public sphere performs.  I am inclined to agree with Supreme Court rulings on obscenity, which state that the object in question must be obscene by community standards.  I think putting up a piece of art of the Virgin Mother that uses as a part of its medium elephant dung will find a different reception in New York City than in my home town (village, really) of Fredericktown, OH.  The community standards are very different.  I believe very much that a community has the right to make decisions regarding what is acceptable for it and what is not—part of this is my Libertarian streak.  In politics, I’m very much a libertarian and believe in personal responsibility and respect for an individual’s decisions.  An individual has a personal stake in his or her own affairs and his or her judgment should not be overthrown unless very serious circumstances demand such an overthrow.  I feel this same way about communities—after all, the people making the decisions are the ones living in the community.  Caveat: this, so long as the community decision does not alter or infringe, fundamentally, the rights of another group of people (i.e. Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, etc.).  Thus, again, the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit in Fredericktown, OH, would not be acceptable.  I am unsure the ratio of gays or lesbians as a percentage of the population there (probably much the same as anywhere else), but most people I know are Joe-average, beer drinking, Sunday church-going rural Americans who overwhelmingly voted for John McCain and George W. and Bob Dole.  They are not likely proponents of homo-erotic photography—at least not publicly.

With regard to art itself, my response is that ethics/morality and art cannot and should not co-exist.  They should not be concerned with one another.  Art that concerns itself with morality is journalism—or worse, propaganda.  The 20th century has well proven how art can be used as a “moral” tool to bludgeon people.  In my opinion, at the deepest moment of creation there is a spirit that enters the artist—some have referred to it as being possessed, other as having voices speak through them (muses in essence)—but there is a connection made between the artist and something very deep and inexpressible by words—the unconscious, perhaps?  This “voice” for lack of a better word, should come through pure and untouched.  It is an afterthought by the artist to deal with what this voice has said and any activity in this regard is a shaping, a filtering, and a censorship—it is also the work of a writer.  (Which brings up the very funny quip made by Truman Capote about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”)  The problem of how to “craft” a work from the unfiltered stream that just poured through is a great problem and greater minds than mine have struggled with it. (For instance, Wallace Shawn mentions this in a recent American Theatre article—April 2008.)  To filter your voice as it comes through results in crappy art; crappy art is incapable of striking people—it’s a bland paste that’s met with indifference.  Paintings become those of Thomas Kinkade.

I think, really, this is an argument about ‘what is art’.  I remember reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which I probably should read again—for here you have the character (Roark) that embodies true and uncompromising artistic integrity—integrity to a “personal vision”—but note, not to a societal vision, as that is corrupt.  I am reminded of Ellsworth Toohey, the art critic in The Fountainhead, who was a failed artist so his admitted goal was to glorify, through his criticism, mediocrity, so as to confuse the general public with regard to what great art really is. This to me is where the true question lies—whether something is art or not—not whether it is ethical or moral.  Another piece that came to mind is Neil LaBute’s play The Shape of Things, there is an excellent review that draws out what LaBute was saying—but it deals with the same problem: is there such a thing as immoral art?  LaBute’s piece is interesting because the art object in this case is another human being, which certainly raises ethical/moral questions—and certainly he uses the physical re-shaping of a person as a metaphor for the intellectual re-shaping that happens through art as well.  But what cannot be left out, here, is the role of the artist, which in LaBute’s play is intentional—that returns me to the whole art as journalism/propaganda.  One example that LaBute raises in his play, no doubt from personal experience, is an argument two characters have about a performance art piece they go and see. In the art piece a woman uses her finger as a paintbrush and her vagina as an ink well and finger paints a portrait of her father in her own menstrual blood.  Is this art?  Is this just disgusting?  Is it a form of mental depravity?  Is it foisting your own psychological problems on the public?  Truly it depends on who you are.  For some women—feminist, outraged, etc., this might be a compelling statement regarding a patriarchal society, as it might be for victims of sexual abuse, perhaps.  To a person like Jesse Helms, this would be absolute trash, depraved, and nothing more than filth.  Who’s right depends on who is looking.  And this is a debate of our own making.  But beyond the intellectual reaction, there is also the sensory reaction—does it strike you, affect you?  This matters too, but again, depending upon your sensitization or desensitization individuals will be affected differently.

Frederich Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals goes at great lengths to show that the original definitions of the words for “good” and “evil” were associated strongly with the nobility and the powerful: the kings, queens, ruling class, etc.  All definitions of beauty and strength and health and wisdom, in short, all that was moral.  Then he describes how Christianity—a revolution sponsored by the Jews, he notes (and though not an anti-Semite purely, Nietzsche’s writings did find use by Nazis for this emphasis)—led to an inversion of the moral system: such that in the New Testament one reads that the meek shall inherit the earth, the poor and the diseased—these are the good.  The wealthy are the bad and cannot get through the eye of a needle.  Here in two strokes one can see how utterly opposite views on morality can be.  I am reminded of Joseph Campbell who quotes Heraclitus as saying, “To God all things are beautiful, good, and right; human beings, on the other hand, deem some things right and others wrong…”  God is beyond good and evil; God is beyond duality.  God is unity.  It is only to people that things are either right or wrong—and even that can vary in a person’s life time.  I know there are many people who yearn for absolutes, but to my mind there are none.  Each person is ruled by his own beliefs and these are imparted by parents, family, churches, community, etc.  To prove how far a foul these things can go, one need but only look at slavery, or the Ku Klux Klan, or Nazis, or any number of societies where certain forms of belief and behavior are perfectly acceptable but morally repugnant to many others—or in retrospect.  And no more timely point can be made than our struggle with some over-zealous Islamic groups today, which view the United States as the “great Satan.”  Are we?  I think not, but to their moral system we certainly are for a host of reasons.  Nietzsche said “God is dead.” A quote that has become a mantra for many atheists and exuberant left wing types, but as Alan Bloom notes in his book The Closing of the American Mind, Nietzsche was not happy about this.  He just observed it.  To Nietzsche the death of God meant the death of Good and Evil and with it the definitions that all people use to establish what in life is the highest, noblest, and best achievements to which a person can aspire—and those which are debased and foul and repulsive.  Instead, Nietzsche observed, we have replaced Good and Evil with Values.  And as Alan Bloom notes, Nietzsche was the first to use the term—and that in the 1860s.  To see how right his vision was, we need only look at code words in our cultural system: we have different values; his values are not mine; we don’t share the same values; family values.  What are values?  To think about it is almost absurd.  Saying it enough times makes the word disappear and become silly.  What are we saying when we say, “I value this” or “this thing I value”?  “I value honesty.”  One thing is certain; it has not the ring of “that action is evil.”  William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, said somewhere that evil is when something is out of harmony with itself.  Others might say that evil is something that destroys the fabric of a culture—is toxic to it—unwinds the web that the Fates weave.  Can art be evil?  Can it have a toxic effect on the mind, the psyche, or undermine the morals of a people?  It is odd that Plato answered yes, given what happened to his mentor.  At what point does “art that challenges our perception of society” become “art that is dangerous to society”?  And what’s more, who is endangered?  Whose moral system are we to use in evaluating art?  The President?  The Congress?  Religious leaders? (Which ones?) A mayor? A mob?

Speaking of Plato…not only did Plato want to throw out all the poets, but Plato’s vision was fascist and very offensive—don’t forget, he felt that there should be no family and that all children should be raised by the state—expressly so there would be no emotional attachments, the bedrock of family and, in my opinion, human life—which to him were no more that threats to the political success of his ideal.  Interestingly, he is also the first to propose women as leaders, remarkable in a society that was terribly misogynistic. There is one conservative radio commentator, Michael Savage, who always quotes The Republic, which I find fascinating, considering much of what The Republic stands for is antithetical to “conservative values” in America.

In terms of ethics and morality, I think America is at a place where these are or have been legislated.  Top to bottom.  America has overthrown the religious basis of its moral beliefs, despite media statistics demonstrating a high percentage of belief in God.  (And there are arguments regarding whether religion and morality align anyway.) We have become a country that legislates morality.  Robert Bly, in his book Iron John, asserts that America has become a society of adolescents.  For the most part, there is no more a strong religious or moral character.  There is no more a “ritual” of “rebirth” for young men into manhood.  There is no clear indication that the great percentage of males even have an idea of what it means to be a “man” in society.  I often hear men my age (38) talk about playing their X-Boxes or Playstations and it makes me think of myself at age 13.  I wonder how it is that 38 year-old men can do nothing more with hours out of their day than play video games.  These are the same people who have 2-dimensional world views and who, when I discuss political issues, have little concern, empathy, or understanding of others and focus almost exclusively on generalizations and broad statements, knowing specifics only about political issues that touch their take-home pay.  I don’t know to what extent this has always been true, but I feel that we as a society are much less literate, much less thoughtful, much less concerned with each other, and much more isolated.  Going back to the opening discussion, I think ethics and morality are community values.  And with community withering, so too is any sense of those accompanying values. 

So this is where Art becomes important.  It confronts.  It challenges.  It asks questions that many people don’t care to ask, or points to things that people would rather not look at.  So I agree with the comment of my ethics professor, Steve Feldman, that art is important to a civil society, and the above statement, I feel, is why.  Art asks questions  because the artist is himself/herself asking questions.  It is true art if it has power, and, as Joseph Campbell points out in Primitive Mythology, acts as a “sign stimulus” to release emotions and repressed psychic truths or experiences.  Kitsch cannot do this. Knowing truths and having meaningful experiences is central to identity: core identity, not just trivialities: “I’m Tom Hayes, I live in Cleveland, I have a house, a car, etc.”  I’m not suggesting Art is the only venue for the formation of core identity, but it is a part of it.  Dr. Feldman formed a question in terms of Kafka‘s In the Penal Colony, where “one character is the Explorer, a man who goes around the world seeking new meaning. We are all explorers now. The penal colony (a metaphor for culture) is run down and falling apart.” So, what is more important, “exploring” versus “identity?”  In playwriting one question that recurs is that of which is more important: character or plot.  One unique answer that I’ve found is that character is plot and plot is character.  They cannot exist independently of each other.  The choice a character makes reveals much about him, and it moves plot in a different direction.  The action of a plot causes a character to make a choice.  I think exploration and identity are equally bound.  For example, for me, the question of dung on the Virgin was more about the artist’s value of dung.  What you learn if you bother to dig below the surface (i.e. shit on the Virgin Mother), is that Chris Ofili used dung all the time as a media form in his art and came from a culture that valued it highly. Now, he also used cut outs of women’s sexual organs in the piece, but the irony should be plain: sex organs and virginity—the sex organs lead to birth—and yet here is this woman (re-branded by Holy Mother Church) as bearing a child without a good romp for her effort!  My interpretation of his use of dung is that it was not done with the intent to offend or infuriate, nor was it done as an act of sacrilege.  Further, perhaps it caused some people to think about the mortality and humanness of Mary; after all, wasn’t that the point of Christ being made man?  To demonstrate his knowledge and experience of this human, mortal body? (Which has some rather unsavory ‘administrative’ duties attendant on it.)

Having two small children it’s amazing to me how active, aware, and interested they are.  How everything is new and fresh and an object of curiosity.  I contrast this with the depressing awareness of how asleep many people I know seem to be.  How asleep many in our nation seem to be…world perhaps?  It is no accident that films like Night of the Living Dead (1968) are critiques of American society that portray the mass of the population as zombies.  My temporary depression at this observation deepens at the thought that my children may grow up to be equally as asleep, passive, and disinterested.  At the very least, I think, Art wakes people up: even if the effect is only temporary.  To Plato I say, ‘your Republic is filled with cowards.’  What good are philosopher kings who cannot confront or sound the depths of human exploration/creation?  The Republic is the first Utopia, filled with mindless children and a few supervising adults; one can ask, I think, if they are truly out of the cave or still staring at shadows.  Art, I feel, confronts shadows and makes them real or dispels them.  In this way it has a sort of transubstantiational quality. 

Perhaps the great question here is: do we (as a collective culture) have an identity anymore?  And maybe this is what frightens people.  Should we have a collective identity—that is, isn’t pluralism more exciting with greater opportunities, perspectives, etc.?  I think this is not only a central challenge we face.  Some might ask if we aren’t out of harmony with ourselves and so Yeats might consider us evil, and thus validate the accusations of fundamentalist Islamists.  Of course, a more whimsical Joseph Campbell might say that we’re in a transitional phase and are searching for a new mythology, which will confer upon us a new identity, one that will be acceptable to us all?

**Follow-up note. 

I was recently watching a Clockwork Orange and somehow got off on a tangent that included the aestheticization of violence.  This also included a conversation about Kill Bill and how Tarantino achieved what some consider to be the highest form of an aesthetic of violence—one which our Humble Narrator envisioned in his gulliver in said Clockwork.  In that same Wikipedia article there is the following:

Laurent Tailhade is reputed to have stated, after Auguste Vaillant bombed the Chamber of Deputies in 1893: "Qu’importent les victimes, si le geste est beau? [What do the victims matter, so long as the gesture is beautiful]."

This is where my notion of art and morality really stumbles… as if the LaButian notion of art with the intent of reshaping a person isn’t enough…the outright killing of people for an aesthetic is terrible.  I mean, I can see what is meant on a highly visceral level—of pure or raw experience; but the sociopathic objectification of people such that their lives are meaningful only in one vain act of art is, to my mind, evil.