Ask Breaking Bad

Professor Man or Lady writes:

Today I had a meeting with a student. When he sat down across from me and smiled, I suddenly realized he was cute. Really cute. I hadn’t noticed it before because he doesn’t sit in my direct line of vision, but wow. Green eyes, chin stubble and a great smile. He’s also smart. However, he’s like 18. And my student. Is this wrong, or is it only wrong if I act on it? Or would that be OK too…

I’m really happy you asked this, Prof. because it gives me a chance to talk about Walt and Jesse some more. Coincidentally, Jesse was Walt’s high school student, back in the day. Then, one day, Walt sees Jesse drop out of some skank lady’s window, pantsless, and decides he is the guy to partner up with.

The next thing we know, Walt gets Jesse in a secluded space (RV out in the middle of the desert) and immediately drops trou:

OK, so supposedly this is to protect his “good clothes” but come one, have you looked at those clothes? Kohl’s all the way.

The next thing we know, Walt and Skylar’s love life suddenly picks up. HARD CORE. Walt just can not get enough. Someone might argue that it’s the whole power-libido connection, like when people say the Greeks weren’t actually gay when they were fucking much younger men, it was just the power trip! I’m going to propose a different theory, however: Walt has the hots for Jesse. AND doesn’t realize it. Because, you know, Walt is somewhat self-delusional. Once you start to think about it, the pieces all add up:

• The constant nudity thing.

• After a brief upsurge in the sex, Walt loses interest in Skylar (some projections just don’t have staying power).

• Walt kills Jane, and WHILE she’s in bed with Jesse! Come on, could it be more obvious? He’s basically saying: “That should be ME spooning Jesse. Bitch!”

• Still not convinced? How about when Walt poisons Brock? If that’s not Walt lashing out in anger over Jesse and Andrea’s relationship,  I don’t know what it is. He’s all, “Jesus, I JUST finished killing one bitch and now there’s another?!?! Already?!?!”

Clearly Walt has the hots for Jesse. Like you have the hots for your student. The difference is that you’re self-aware and Walt is not, which hopefully means you won’t murder/poison quite so many people.

There’s another issue to consider, however, which is how your student feels about you. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: consensuality is important. Especially in a relationship formed by a constitutive power imbalance, as in the teacher-student relationship.

Does Jesse have the hots for Walt, too? I don’t know, it’s sooo hard to admit when you like someone! Like, like-like them!

Honestly, it’s hard to say. Most signs would point to “NO” particularly given Jesse’s tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve (wouldn’t he have said something by now?) and the parade of girlfriends. But, as we all know, desire does not always make sense or match up with what seems to be people’s sexual orientation. And desire makes people act funny.

Remember when Jesse “accidentally” left the keys in the RV, and he and Walt were “trapped” out in the desert together and had to just laze around on those cots pulled up RIGHT NEXT TO each other all the time?

And Jesse sure does get angry with Walt a lot, especially towards the end of Season 4. Lot of emotion there. And physical contact. He kicks his ass, figuratively. He kicks Walt in the butt, literally (cough, cough).

The fact that Jesse feels so strongly about Walt, for the most part in an angry/betrayed way, makes me think Jesse has a thing for Walt, too. He’s not so obvious about it as Walt is, but something’s going on there. At the end of the Season 4 finale, when they were up on the roof, I felt some major sexual tension. It was electric! Can you imagine the currents going through this hand shake?

Pretty hot.

So, Lesson from Breaking Bad on desiring after/hooking up with your student: Be self-aware: don’t just start flinging your clothes off and killing their other suitors indiscriminately. And for god’s sake, make sure it’s consensual! If it’s not completely obvious, look for signs as in the person makes excuses to touch you, such as shaking hands or riding you while punching your face.

A would-be entrepreneur asks:

I’ve made a lot of vague plans with different friends for our future businesses. But how do you know when it’s the right time and the right person to go into business with?

It’s good you’re thinking about these kinds of things now, Would-Be. Businesses involve a lot of decisions. Your answer will depend on what kind of business-person you’d like to be. Your question leads me to believe you are interested in a partnership model. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But first I’d like to suggest you consider the Kingpin model and save yourself a lot of misery.

The Kingpin: Gus Fring

Kingpins run businesses EXACTLY how they want. They don’t have to worry about anyone else’s annoying ideas or objectives or emotional baggage. They keep all the money. They only have to take care of themselves. They develop the five year plan. In Gus’s case, we’re talking more about a twenty-five year plan, which includes the following objectives:

1) Monopolize the Southwest US meth market; become part of the 0.1% of the top 1% but don’t be a douche about it like the bankers: be generous with employees and local charities/government organizations.

2) Successfully launder drug money via a (wait for it) LAUNDRY business. Laugh on the inside at the delicious irony. Maintain a perfectly straight face.

3) Make sure something delicious is always cooking at the other front business. Americans love to eat; it distracts them from anything untoward possibly happening down the road at the laundry.

4) Murder cartel members who rebuffed business advances twenty-five years ago. Make sure it happens at the exact same spot where they murdered your former business partner/lover, Max. Feel a certain amount of closure.

5) Torture old guy in a wheelchair in his nursing home (see item 4). Keep trying for that closure.

Gus is a very successful business man and a big reason is because he does it solo. In fact, not only does he not have a partner in business, he also doesn’t seem to have any partners in life. People just mess businesses up. People and their feelings, and your feelings for them.

As good as Gus is at business, and he is really fucking good, ultimately he fails because of his feelings for his dead gay lover partner. In fact, even though he didn’t have a partner anymore, his partner is pretty much what killed him.

THIS:

Led to THIS:

PARTNERSHIPS. Pretty much the worst, right?

But, let’s say this cautionary tale is not enough to convince you. There’s always Walt and Jesse.

PARTNERS

If you’re not going to go the Kingpin route, you have the partnership model to follow. This one is messy. First of all, you have to find that right person. Things to consider:

• Is this person age appropriate? Do we get each others cultural references and lingo? Fashion sense?

• Do I respect this person? How comfortable would I be emotionally abusing him/her?

• Do I trust this person? If I ask him/her to kill someone for me, and I REALLY REALLY need them to, will they do it?

Even given all of the above are a go, there still can be problems. What if one of you is the type to constantly fuck up, not intentionally, but it just happens that way like, every day, yo? What if one of you turns out to have a really dark, evil, self-delusional side? What if one of you is supposed to die of cancer in a few months but then goes into remission? What does that do to the long-term plan?

These are all hypothetical questions, of course. Let’s get real for a minute. Walt and Jesse are HORRIBLE partners. There’s lots of reasons for this. But the most important are these two: first, their partnership was coerced. Jesse didn’t want to do it. In the premiere, Walt proposed they partner up to sell meth and Jesse said NO. No means no, Walt. But what did Walt do? He blackmailed Jesse, threatening to go to the police and tell them that Jesse was in fact the “Capn’ Cook” they were looking for. Second: they have no business plan. Gus Fring has a twenty-five year plan. Walt and Jesse have a 25 second plan. Basically it’s about instinctual reactions in the heat of the moment. The most pronounced planning I’ve seen was when they had to decide who was going to hydrochloric acid the dead guy, and who was going to kill Crazy 8. They FLIPPED A COIN, that’s as deliberative as they could get.

Lesson from Breaking Bad on starting a business: Have some plans going into it, maybe make a list of goals? Consider a few worst-case scenarios and how you would respond. NO COIN TOSSING. And for god’s sake, avoid partners. If you MUST have a partner, at least make it an equal (students and teachers, I’m looking at you) and make sure it’s consensual: don’t business-rape your partner.

A long-time reader asks:

How do you tell a dude, “You’ve lost my friendship and loyalty” so that he really knows it? I COULD steal all his friends, except they suck.

Good question. There’s a lot of loyalty on Breaking Bad; friendships, not so much. The show gives us many, many models for what happens when loyalty is lost. Let’s look at a few of them.

1) When Juan Bolsa the cartel guy figures out that Tortuga is ratting him out to the DEA. How exactly did Juan tell Tortuga, “Hey buddy, you’ve lost my loyalty” ? Well, by  telling Toruga, hey, I’ve got a present for you! Yeah, it’s in back here! Tortuga of course, as anyone would, went to the back room with his boss to collect his birthday present. Then those crazy cousins chopped his head off, and then put it on the back of a tortoise, which then blew up, killing a bunch of DEA agents and causing some major PTSD in Hank. You don’t want to go that far. Too much carnage and innocent bystanders.

2) I.F.T. Walt loses Skylar’s loyalty, as in their marriage relationship. She was very hurt to discover that he was hiding an entire side of his life from her. The fact that this hidden life involved the manufacture and sale of meth seemed like a side note to me; really he could have been doing anything. Fucking one of his high school students. Getting extra chemo sessions. Working the register at Dairy Queen. Skylar likes to be boss and Walt having a life that a) doesn’t involve her, and b) more importantly, she is not in charge of, well, that lost Walt her loyalty. So she fucked Ted. That didn’t end so well, either.

Both of these examples, however, do not involve the loss of friendship. Obviously the drug lord/drug runner relationship is more business-y than bro-y. And we all know that once hetero couples romantic up and get married, reproduce, etc, they are no longer friends. In fact they are really more like mortal enemies who put up with each other because of the mortgage and occasional sexual release. So while they may be loyal to each other (or disloyal, as in Skylar F-ing Ted), there’s not really a friendship lost.

Where are the friendships on this show? There aren’t many. Either you’re a business man (Gus) or professional (Mike) or chemist (Gale) who seems to only exist to supply drugs and dead bodies to the greater Southwest area, with little to no time for personal relationships. Or you’re part of a hetero couple (Walt and Skylar; Hank and Marie) who never talk to anyone other than each other or work colleagues. Seriously, have you noticed that none of these four EVER has a friends night out? Or even talks on the phone to a friend? Or REFERENCES a friend?

There’s two characters on this show who actually have friendships: Walt Jr has that kid who always drives him to school.

And Jesse.

Let’s think about Jesse, since he gives us something to work with on the problem at hand. He has quite a few friends: Skinny Pete, Badger, Combo, Jane for a while, his aunt before she died. Friends being defined as relationships with people that include socializing and caring; that are voluntary; that are enjoyable, that involve sacrifice. Jesse never breaks up with any of those friends, so they’re no good for this issue.

But what about Walt? Are Walt and Jesse friends?

I’m going to go ahead and say that Jesse comes to believe that Walt is his friend. He tries to socialize with him (go carts). He cares for him, offering advice on how to help with his cancer side effects, offering moral support when he finds out Walt has cancer, then is in remission (“Yo Mr. White, that’s great!). He sacrifices his emotional and mental well being by killing people for Walt.

But Walt is not a very good friend. And so eventually Jesse decides that he has to tell Walt, not in so many words of course, that he has lost Jesse’s loyalty and friendship. How is Walt going to “really know” this? Jesse can’t steal all his friends to get the message across, not because they suck but because Walt doesn’t have any. So he goes the direct route; when Walt shows up at his house and interrupts the pleasant time he is having with (more friends) Andrea and Brock, Jesse literally kicks him out of the house. Kicks him in the ass, repeatedly. Tells him never to come back, to stay away from him, etc etc. Then a car pulls up and some thugs abduct Walt, they take him out to the desert, put a bag over his head, and then Gus threatens to kill Walt’s entire family if he ever goes near Jesse again. I’m not saying this is necessarily the route you should go, maybe not whole hog anyway. You will also want to make sure this friend you are dumping doesn’t have access to any small children you care about, or any Lily of the Valley.

Lesson from Breaking Bad on breaking up with a friend: Be direct. Use verbal and physical cues. Watch out for tricks your ex-friend might try to pull to reinsert himself into your life (these include trying to make your other friends look bad). And remember, even if that friend seems to want to be your friend again, seems vulnerable and sad about the demise of the friendship, tries to convince you that you need his help to get revenge on someone: don’t fall for it. Because maybe that person was never actually your friend to begin with. And because then you’re just going to be back in the loop all over again when Season 5 starts.