It’s literally not my fault that the themes of Breaking Bad become that much stronger if you read Walter as a closeted gay man… like where to even start okay it’s 2008 and this guy is so, so insecure in his masculinity and so, so resentful of his picket fence family life. He’s done what he was “supposed” to do by societal standards and he still doesn’t feel like enough of a man compared to his brodude brother-in-law specifically. He can’t escape the feeling that something is missing, that it’s all a charade, and he finds it hard to believe the rest of the people in his life really are content with this lifestyle. Nobody seems to understand, and he hates them all for not seeing how unhappy he is. He gets his cancer diagnosis and is suddenly acutely aware that he feels burdened and unfulfilled by the life he’s built for himself, and that time is running out to change things.
It’s when he sees Jesse Pinkman fall half naked out of a window that everything changes. He’s pretty, and young, and floundering without guidance or a support system. He desperately craves human connection and lacks the self-esteem to take his life in any particular direction without someone instructing him. He’s grieving his aunt, the only person he had looking out for him, who died of cancer. He already views Walter as an authority figure. He’s alone.
And with Jesse around, Walter doesn’t have to come to terms with anything about himself that might challenge his masculinity, because it isn’t an equal relationship. Because he’s still “the man” in this dynamic, the one with the power, the one calling the shots, the dominant one, the firm hand. Moreso than in his relationship with Skyler, who refuses to be bullied into the role he would assign her, that of the submissive, subservient little wife who looks to him for guidance and permission. As a criminal, Walt can express care for another man in the only way that traditional masculinity would deem acceptable; through violence. His love language is violence. Violence toward Jesse and violence on Jesse’s behalf. He runs over two men with a car for Jesse. He kills Jane and Mike, a romantic and paternal threat respectively, because they were going to take Jesse away from him. He tries on occasion to verbalize their relationship into something more traditionally familial, as if saying it might make it true, but it never quite fits the mold exactly. He reasserts, over and over again in what he later admits is a lie, that he is doing this for his family, that everything he does is an extension of his masculine role rather than deviant from it. He would kill and die for Jesse, he does kill and die for Jesse. In fact, in a story of self-actualization that still has Walt cling to his delusions of grandeur up until the very end (almost as though becoming Heisenberg wasn’t actually self-actualization so much as an escapist fantasy) his arc concludes with him actually self-actualizing by committing one last act of violence on Jesse’s behalf. In Ozymandias, he tells Jesse about Jane as a way of playing into Jesse’s worst fear that Walter never cared about him, that everything they did to and for each other meant nothing. Walter’s last act on Earth is a refutation of that; it’s an admission of care. His last act of self-actualization was a confession of love for another man.
areudirty
andulkaphoto
romaincrisis
annaxmalina
