I get how someone who doesn't really think much about the media they consume could watch Breaking Bad and think Walter White is doing what he does for moral reasons. If someone who just watched the show casually while relaxing after work doesn't get it, there's no reason to be snobbish about it. It's easy to get caught up in the male power fantasy if you're an alienated Western male.
But the fact that this clown calls this "analysis" is making me yell at my screen. Letting Jane die was "morally justifiable" because she was a "bad influence on Jesse"? He "overcame his fears" by killing Tuco and Gus? Rejecting the money from Gretchen was good because he's "nobody's charity case"? Holy fucking shit imagine missing the point this badly.
And then this nonsense about "humans follow incentives that provide positive rewards in the brain" as if it was profound psychology and not just a comically verbose way to say "humans do what they like & want". It's a completely meaningless sentence, the point is to analyze what Walter values most at different points throughout the show, and if you look at that you'll find that he values his ego over money & his family's safety from episode 1, when he rejects even asking Gretchen for money and chooses to cook meth instead, greatly putting himself and his family at risk right from the start because his ego doesn't allow him to ask others for help. He becomes more ruthless and more megalomaniacal as the show progresses, sure, but this clown thinks he was still perfectly justified in everything he did up until the point he poisoned the kid.
If I ever put out media analysis like that, I want you all to put me out of my misery because clearly I must have been lobotomized.
There's no subtlety by the last episode. He basically tells the reader he's a monster and why he did the things he did. He says 'I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it and I was alive.'
That's literally one of the last things he said. This isn't even 'the curtains are blue' it's refusing to admit the curtains are even there in the first place.
The guy acknowledges this but basically says it's a good thing because he's "realizing his potential" or something
If you read any self-help or 'entrepernurial' mindset books, this line of thinking is pervasive. It is difficult to say where the epistemology of the ideology comes from, some combination of Protestant Christian ethics, settler-colonial rationalizations, and American revivalist mystic traditions. Most of which culminates into Objectivist style morality drivel.
There is never a thought that 'Maybe what I like isn't really the potential I should realize.', 'Existence is likely too absurd to have a meaningful measure of what potential is.' or 'How is this practice replicable and sustainable past myself and my own experiences? (Is this developing a culture or just neuroticism)', it is simply 'What makes me feel good is right because it makes me feel good.'
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I think this is closely related to the recent trend of nurses and to some extent doctors calling patients "clients" and airlines calling passengers "customers". UlyssesT, you're good at finding words/phrases to describe things, name this specific type of alienation for me :>
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