El Camino del Medio: Jesse Pinkman's Virtue.

The proper function of art is to inspire sympathy; the proper function of propaganda is to invoke judgement. Art achieves sympathy (as well as empathy, which in some senses is more important) by two routes: one is by portraying a character with whom the viewer wishes to identify, reminding the viewer of the difficulties of the heroic (virtuous) life under adverse circumstances, and the other is by portraying a villain whom the viewer despises, but while propaganda seeks to uphold a prejudice by demonizing this villain, art toes the line, inspiring sympathy for the villain’s victims.

In Breaking Bad, foremost of the victims was Jesse Pinkman. Initially presented as an aimless junkie with a deviant occupation, he quickly becomes the puppet of a man whose station we are all taught to trust, even in America: his high school teacher. One can only begin to imagine the response that Breaking Bad must have received in Japan or in India (countries which actually value education) when the revered sensei resorts to petty blackmail in order to coerce the young Pinkman into pushing the limits of an initially harmless business.


It may be true that Jesse’s associates were not so kind, but further backstory (especially in the seminal spinoff Better Call Saul) reveals that they were all corrupted by their employers. As for the product itself, whatever moral errors young Pinkman commits in selling an incredibly depraving drug are absolved to some considerable extent by the fact that, unlike Mr. White, Jesse is not exploiting an addiction which he does not himself have, and unlike other dealer-users like Tuco Salamanca, he never allows the drug to corrupt his character, only clouding his judgement. It is safe to guess that, in Pinkman’s case, he was his own first victim, a user long before he was a pusher. While that may seem to corroborate a judgement made against him later, casting doubt upon his identity as a victim of forces beyond his control, two facts remain apparent: that, explicitly at least, he is the only TRUE victim of his own actions at the start of the story, so that still sets him apart from his associates, and that even this affront to his health pales before the tragic losses and traumas that his oppressors impose upon him and one another.


Furthermore, it is his ability to take action against these injustices when OTHERS are the victims, even when he is himself an accessory or even a puppet to these crimes, at great personal risk, and often to an extent that he would not go to in his own defense, that sets Jesse Pinkman apart from his associates. By the end of the series, he has had plenty of opportunities to become as corrupt as his initial employers, yet instead he GROWS in fortitude and virtue while everyone about him, on both sides of the law, descends into depravity and sociopathy. Truly, his name is neither red nor white, neither bloody or pure, but in between. 

Viewers naturally fell in love with Jesse, citing him as a Soul too pure to survive a world of sociopaths. Perhaps, of course, I am confusing him for Gale Boetticher, whose death is directly overseen by Jesse, though only once Walter’s influence and Gustavo’s presence have become foreboding, and only on behalf of Walter and his family, and only in the wake of a child who was murdered after also being used to commit murder. Yet Gale’s eulogy is Jesse’s defense; Jesse was also, in practice, a civil libertarian who simply gave consenting adults what they would have gotten otherwise. It was not until Walter came along, with his existential crisis, that Jesse “broke bad”, and his conscience made this a process of character growth that, by the end of the series, molded him into the only consistently heroic character. When Jesse DOES survive, viewers are relieved to see some justice in a broken world.

By contrast with his middle-class parents, whose influence upon his early life can be inferred by the infuriating, narcissistic prejudice with which they treat him when he needs them most, Jesse truly exhibits the Judeo-Christian virtues, even as they are defined by contemporary secular thinkers such as Zizek. Slavoj Zizek contrasts Christianity with Buddhism, for instance, by describing it is a religion of the Fall: an expression of love attained not by rising above the base qualities of life but rather by falling into them. Like Christ, Jesse keeps the company of prostitutes, drinkers and gamblers, becoming one with them but never surrendering his innocence. Any pragmatic error that endangers him is the result of either compassion or righteous indignation, often in defense of the innocent and even, sometimes, out of forgiveness for the evil. He rushes into battle with no thought for the morrow, and he even acts as the family scapegoat for his brother, who only maintains the appearance of a perfect child but who, like all other characters in the Breaking Bad universe, indulges in a contradiction, though it’s one that Jesse makes no attempt to engender and, in fact, helps to abate, without any overt hypocrisy.

Walter admires Jesse for having done something “special” at a young age, yet it is Walter’s own station in the middle class, against which Pinkman has rebelled, that allows him to exploit Jesse early on. Pinkman’s rebellion is only justified once we see the extreme impersonality of his family, a group of people who seem as base as their pretensions are lofty, severed from the World in a state of complacency that is either shameless or delusional. Unlike his parents, Jesse goes straight down into the pits of Hell, at first only to make a living by doing that upon which his own happiness, however chemically contrived, depends, though eventually to protect all of the people that he meets and gives his word to along the way. The hero of old always did precisely this, though more powerful forces mocked him for defying his fate. Yet it is ultimately Jesse’s ability to chart his own course that creator Vince Gilligan, who seems nonetheless to misunderstand Jesse, considers Pinkman’s final achievement.

The only question that remains is this: if Jesse is truly a self-made man, is he responsible for his condition? Does a man who has to decide only between the two basest of human instincts, which are greed and fear, have the right to charge him thousands of dollars for those risks which Jesse never benefited from, (for he had refused to run away from unfinished business and bad karma) only to deny him his freedom over less than two grand? Such a gatekeeper is certainly not the pinnacle of morality that Jesse imagines him to be, and as much as he may preach that Pinkman made his own luck, his insistence that “tugging on heartstrings” is of no consequence, an echo of Jesse’s mother, is easy for him to say, for apparently not only does the miser have no heartstrings (nor values, outside of a hypocrite’s feelings of monetary entitlement, like Anakin Skywalker’s owner), but were HE the “snitch” that the Nazis had captured, he might certainly be more left-leaning in his personal politics.

Jesse is not responsible for what happens to him, because, by definition, that which happens to us is NOT what we do, and the value of what we do rests upon what we ALLOW to happen to other people. Jesse neither allows harm to come to others nor imposes it, except in those situations where less conscientious men and women present him with a dilemma wherein it would be a lie to say that he had had a better choice. “Better”, in Jesse’s worldview, is not so simple as that which benefits and preserves him. If Walter demonstrates that the root cause of misery is the pursuit of happiness, then Jesse’s refusal to prioritize his own happiness over the well-being of others is not to be regarded as the cause for his own misery. As for Jesse’s initial attempts to pursue his own happiness, it is fair to say that he had no way of knowing that a legal course of action would be the best course of action. Mike teaches us that there are good criminals and bad cops; the McGill brothers remind us that the law is imperfect. Walter teaches us that it is quite easy to build a criminal empire whilst sheltered in the comfort and reputation of the suburban middle class. Jesse’s parents demonstrate the extreme naivete, narcissism and hypocrisy of this group of people, which both educated liberals and meth heads will despise in equal measure, though Jesse forgives them, however diplomatically. The entire Breaking Bad universe is set up to call our notions of propriety into question, and only Pinkman and his friends remain to provide moral guidance, often through their defiance of what is given, whether the dogma is legal, spiritual or psychotherapeutic. Jesse cannot put things right, but he alone battles wrong.

Why, then, are we inclined to blame him? It is simply because we all have the predisposition to break bad and to rationalize it. When we defend the actions of evil men and women by treating them as though they were the consequence of actions by good men and women, we seek to protect ourselves. We avail ourselves of our felt omniscience as an audience, as though we might learn from the mistakes of the heroes. Yet life has but one overlying tragedy, and that is the absence of compassion. As actors in our own life dramas, we have no way of knowing what our fate will be. Whether we adhere to an idealized notion of legality, such as Skyler and Jesse’s parents do, a romantic conception of the American Dream, a libertarian doctrine or a vendetta, our choices are more or less arbitrary and their consequences impossible to predict; hence the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is irrefutable in contemporary drama. All that we have is what we do, and the truly heroic characters are those who act out of spontaneous compassion, whose self-interest never crosses the line of depravity until it is pushed. Jesse Pinkman, in BOTH incarnations, remains pure.

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