#GeekRant: The Winter of Walter White
"I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!"
Such assurance is a calling card of one that knows their worth. Understands that he is of a higher class than the masses he regularly serves - such as parents of snooty students and scrubbing people's filthy cars. A testament uttered by one possessing a complete grasp of power, knowing they are rightful owners of authority; though tinged with bitterness that only decades of mediocrity nurtures. Such is the discontented tale of Walter White.
In the final season of Breaking Bad, Walter informs Jesse that he is in the empire building business. This desire comes from earlier recollections of how he sold his shares in Grey Matter Technologies - a company he co-founded - for several months' worth of rent. Grey Matter was worth more than $2 billion in the modern day, meaning Walter would have been exceedingly wealthy had he retained his stake (probably a fortune at least nine-figures long). Once his highest figures earned through cooking meth were toted up, his personal fortune came close to the potential riches from Grey Matter (close to $90 million).
In the Breaking Bad finale, Walter finally admits to Skyler that he did the meth cooking because he enjoyed it; he excelled at making the drug - equalled perhaps only by Jesse Pinkman and the murdered protege of Gus Fring. In making this confession, we see the unfettered entrepreneurial spirit deadened by noxious bile of self-defeat and self-destruction wrecked by Walt the day he departed Grey Matter, seemingly on a whim. He implies his departure came from his perception that Gretchen's (his girlfriend at the time, who later married second Grey Matter founder, Elliot Schwartz) family looked down on him for being of a lower class.
This is the major flaw in Walter's character; letting things fester and exploding. Married with a defeatist undertone allowed him to squander his life in a job he was vastly overqualified for. Having obtained a doctorate in chemistry from Caltech, his credentials exceeded that of being a high-school chemistry teacher. Which also speaks to the fact that Walter may wallow in self-pity at his severing with Grey Matter. Personality traits described above also hint at a reason why Walter White adopted the nickname: "Heisenberg."
Werner Heisenberg's famous contribution to physics is the Uncertainty Principle. The theory that the position or momentum of a particle cannot be known without observation and that both position and momentum differs when one or the other is measured. A precise and often painful dichotomy that sums up Walter White in stark precision - much like the clarity of Blue Sky meth crystals. His growing double life; his unparalleled genius, hidden by a mundane job puts White's life in glaring contrasts with each assumed identity.
Is Walter a victim of his own malaise? There is some truth in that. Why settle for being a high-school teacher with a doctorate, while being a co-founder of a Fortune 500 company? At the very least he could have attained tenure as a professor, perhaps eventually at an Ivy League school? A career that would have offered a very beneficial health insurance package that may have detected his cancer before it reached Stage 4? Then there is Elliot Schwartz offering Walter the chance of returning to Grey Matter Technologies. His position of being one of the reasons the company exists, generous health insurance and proximity to Elliot Schwartz may have produced generous financial dividends. His potential to contribute more to the world of science; publishing award-winning papers as a professor, having a salary well in excess of $100,000, were all in reach for him. Perhaps even a Nobel Prize (worth $1 million)? But pride was his prize and although it allowed Walter White to attain infamy as one of the most prominent drug lords and murderers; it shortened his lifespan too.
#minds, #art.