The
junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer. He sells the consumer
to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades
and simplifies the client.
-William S.
Burroughs, Naked Lunch [1]
Western
civilization’s social, man-made, and natural environments are dysfunctional,
decaying and polluted. This dystopia is familiar to everyone because we see it
in the mass media and we see it reflected in popular entertainment. It is
common for film and television writers to choose the decline of empire as a
central theme of their work. Disaster movies are all too familiar, and high
quality cable television dramas such as The Sopranos, Mad
Men, and Breaking Bad come to mind as examples of
long-form fiction that cover the topic better than any two-hour movie could.
Yet, in spite of the apparent interest in the grand theme of the rise and fall
of empire, these works reveal the extent to which both the producers of mass
entertainment and its audience are unconscious of the fact that their stories
are tales of the nuclear age.
 |
"Radioactive
nation building: … the long-term effects of participating in national-cultural
logics that mobilize resources in the name of security and community, but that
do so in ways that are unsustainable and that create both social and material
toxicity." (p. 213) (Review of the book here.)
|
Noam
Chomsky wrote, “If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of
Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before
nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era).” [2] As significant as this
break in history was, it is seldom portrayed in popular entertainment. Nuclear
weapons appear occasionally in disaster movies as terrorist threats or other
such plot devices, but the real stories of the nuclear age, of the victims and
veterans of nuclear testing, for example, remain hidden. Films such as Coming
Home and Born on the Fourth of July told the
fictional stories of Vietnam veterans, but there is yet to be a Hollywood film
about a veteran who came back from the Nevada Test Site, or a story told about
the hibakusha of the Bikini Islands.
The
generation that lived through the rupture between these eras was much more
aware of how the atom bomb had transformed society. In the book American
Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, Jonah
Raskin wrote:
“Nineteen
forty-eight was the crucial postwar year,” Ginsberg explained. “It was the
turning point. Of course the atom bomb had already gone off in 1945, and
Kerouac and Burroughs and I had talked about it, but the psychological fallout
from the bomb—the consciousness—didn’t really hit until 1948. There was the
splitting of the atom and the splitting of the old structures of society and
also a sense of the inner world splitting up and coming apart.” Like many other
writers around the world, Ginsberg turned the atom bomb into an all-inclusive
metaphor. Everywhere he looked he saw apocalypse and atomization. [3]
In Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road, there is no mention of the atom bomb until the final pages of the
story, set in Mexico, yet it delivers the explanatory punch of the tale. The
refusal of the characters to take part in the post-war economic boom, and all
the preceding delinquency and mad wanderings of these “best minds of a
generation” now seem to be explained by this painful consciousness of how the
world had changed:
Strange
crossroad towns on top of the world rolled by, with shawled Indians watching us
from under hatbrims and rebozos. All had their hands outstretched. They had
come down from the backmountains and higher places to hold forth their hands
for something they thought civilization could offer and they never dreamed the
sadness and poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come
that could crack all our bridges and banks and reduce them to jumbles like the
avalanche heap, and we would be as poor as them someday and stretching out our
hands in the samesame way.” [4]
What I
seek to illustrate here is the decline of nuclear consciousness in popular art,
using the masterpiece TV drama Breaking
Bad [5] as a prime example. The nuclear age is implicit in nearly every
frame of the series, even though the story never explicitly touches upon any
aspect of America’s nuclear past. Centered on a high school chemistry teacher
who embarks on a criminal career as a manufacturer of crystal methamphetamine, Breaking Bad is set in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, a state which was ground zero for much of America’s nuclear program. In The Inconceivable
Atomic Legacy of New Mexico, Sam Gilbert
wrote:
A former
Los Alamos scientist, who requested anonymity, told me, “The US nuclear complex
is either unacknowledged or considered antiquated Cold War stuff. But look at
the world today—Iran and North Korea, the global investment in nuclear energy,
and the meltdown in Japan. It’s coming full circle, with New Mexico at the
center.” … in his book The Nuclear Borderlands, author Joseph Masco
describes New Mexico as “the only state in the US supporting the entire
cradle-to-grave nuclear economy.” This includes uranium mining, nuclear weapons
design and testing, the largest single arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the
country’s only permanent depository for US military industrial nuclear waste. [6][7]
New
Mexico is home to Los Alamos National Laboratories, the primary site of the
Manhattan Project and still a leading nuclear technology center and waste
storage facility. Sandia Labs in Albuquerque “strives to enhance the nation’s security and
prosperity through sustainable, transformative approaches to the world’s most
difficult nuclear energy challenges.” [8] In the south of the state, there is
Alamogordo, site of Trinity, the world’s first nuclear test in 1945. In the
southeast corner of the state is Carlsbad, site of the Waste Isolation Pilot
Project (WIPP), the nation’s only nuclear waste repository. It functioned for
fifteen years before recent failures and
radiation leaks
raised serious questions about the viability of all
such plans to bury nuclear waste. [9] Finally, in the northwest corner of the
state there is Church Rock, the site of the July 16, 1979 uranium mine tailings
breach (occurring to the hour on the 34th anniversary of the
Trinity test) that went into the forgotten history books as America’s worst case
of environmental radiological contamination—worse even than the famous Three
Mile Island disaster, which occurred just three months earlier. [10]
All of
these nuclear sites have made New Mexico a nuclear state, a state that has
grown and benefited over the last seventy years thanks to infusions of federal
spending on defense, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy. In all this time, New
Mexico has received more federal funds than it contributes back to the federal
government.
Thus the
broken society depicted in Breaking Bad is the product of the
nuclear technocratic economy that dominated the state in the late 20th century.
New Mexico is an extreme case, but if other states and other nations look
similar it is because they too have been affected in the same way by defense
and security spending.
Breaking
Bad was, however, not consciously created as a story about the
nuclear legacy. The show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, had originally chosen
southern California as its backdrop, but he was asked to film in New Mexico
strictly for the financial incentives offered by the state. For a while he
considered how to set up his shots to look like California, but then he decided
it would be simpler just to set the whole story in Albuquerque.
The
central character of Breaking Bad is Walter White, a teacher
and a chemist. The fact that he has never done any work related to American
defense or nuclear programs is another indication that the writers of the series
had no intention to write a “nuclear” story. It’s implausible that someone with
his skills wouldn’t be working at one of the national laboratories if he had
become dissatisfied with teaching high school.
By the
second season of the series the producers seemed to become aware of the nuclear
backdrop to their story. They staged one scene (season 2, episode 7) in The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque
(depicted by its name at the time, The National
Atomic Museum). The scene is crucial, as it is a turning point at which Walt
decides to go from being a minor producer of meth to running a large-scale
operation, instructing his distributors to build the network exponentially and conquer
new territory. The metaphor of the nuclear chain reaction is well placed in the
story. It essentially represents Walt's decision to “go nuclear” in the scale
of his drug empire. He explicitly tells Jesse, his young partner responsible
for distribution, to go for exponential growth, with the nuclear chain reaction
serving as one of the many science metaphors Walt uses when instructing the
young men under his care. In one scene Jesse is shown wearing a T-shirt with a
pumpkin face doubling as a radiation symbol.
 | |||
| "Those three I met? They should each have three, six, nine sub-dealers working for them. Exponential growth. That's the key here." (22:46-25:36) Jesse's pumpkin face T-shirt bears more resemblance to the symbol for radiation. |
Whether
the creators of Breaking Bad were aware of it or not, the
setting seems to portray what Joseph Masco meant when he wrote of New Mexico’s
“nuclear uncanny”—an anxious “new cognitive orientation toward everyday life”
and “reconfigured concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship.” New Mexico
is a “home to both the hyperwealthy and the poorest of the poor, one that is
simultaneously sacred space, US experimental laboratory, tourist fantasy land
and national sacrifice zone.” [11] Vince Gilligan was probably quick to realize
that it was a stroke of luck to have his story’s location moved to New Mexico,
for the setting itself seems to be a central character or even a creative force
in the narrative. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine it would have struck such
a chord with its audience if it had been set elsewhere.
 |
In Breaking Bad, radioactive hazards never play an explicit
part in the plot lines, yet the season three DVD cover features
barrels of nuclear waste. Was this an error, or a subtle reference
to the New Mexican techno-scientific landscape?
|
It’s also worth noting, before discussing Breaking Bad further, that the creators
of the show seemed interested in the radioactive background of their story
after it had concluded. In the “prequel” series Better Call Saul, which chronicles the early years of Walter
White’s “criminal” criminal lawyer, Saul (then known by his actual name of
Jimmy McGill) experiences a “meltdown” while calling bingo numbers at a
seniors' residence. Here's how he expresses his New Mexico state of mind:
None of us is ever
leaving this godforsaken wasteland… I mean what is it with this place? It's
like living inside an Easy-Bake oven. Look out that window. It's like a soulless, radioactive Georgia O'Keeffe hellscape out there,
crawling with coral snakes and scorpions. Did you ever see the movie The Hills Have Eyes? It’s a documentary!
God forbid your car breaks down and you have to walk ten steps. You've got a
melanoma the size of a pineapple where your head used to be. So you ask why, if
that's how I feel, why do I live here... why? [12]
The Hills Have Eyes (1977, with a re-make in 2006) is a horror film
set in New Mexico, in which a family is lost in the
desert and tormented by mutant humans born from a nuclear testing site.
As Breaking Bad begins, our non-smoking
hero is diagnosed with lung cancer, while the aunt of his young partner in
crime has been stricken the same way. Cancer is the affliction that has made
them “break bad.” The nuclear economy has not given rise to any form of
equitable social system with health care and death benefits for the widow of a
high school teacher. The money flowed for nuclear weapons, but not for those
now suffering from the plutonium blowing in the wind. On the Western frontier
it is still every man for himself, so in the face of death Walt concludes life
as an upstanding citizen is for suckers.
Besides
these cases of cancer, Walter Jr. has cerebral palsy, adding to the pall cast
over the technological landscape. Many people accept such afflictions as
naturally occurring, but at the same time we have the uneasy feeling that
something is amiss. Formerly rare conditions seem to touch every family on
every street. Walter’s radiation treatment burn is recognized by his
scientifically illiterate partner because it is such a common sight.
While the
story portrays these physical diseases, Breaking Bad is mainly
about the social disease of addiction and the war on drugs, and thus it follows
in the literary tradition of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in
portraying drug addiction as a metaphor for the organizing principle of modern
life: addiction to power and control, to consumption, to machines, to oil and
uranium, and addiction to making others addicted. As Cold War spending declined
in the 1990s, New Mexico was primed to turn from one kind of fix to another.
Into the
breach comes Walter White like a latter day Robert Oppenheimer, a man of
science reluctantly tempted into an evil scientific endeavor that will happen
with or without his participation. Oppenheimer made an atom bomb, whereas
Walter White makes a neurochemical weapon of mass destruction--one which its users find so superb that they refer to as "the bomb." Incidentally, we
can note that the criminal undertaking involves the same toxic secrecy and
insecurity that nuclear-weapon states require. Walter comes to his life of
crime first telling himself that his motives are pure. He will take just enough
to save his family. If he doesn’t do it, someone with lower motives will do it
anyway, with an inferior product. Eventually, he declares that he is no longer just in the meth business. He is now in the "empire business."
Oppenheimer,
the lead scientist of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, described his
participation in the same way as Walter White. If not he, someone else would do it. He said famously about the first nuclear
detonation:
I
remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is
trying to persuade the Prince [Arjuna] that he should do his duty and, to
impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death,
the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. [13]
The historian Alex Wellerstein explained in his interpretation of this quote that Oppenheimer was
not claiming god-like powers, as many people have understood his words. [14] The
story from Hindu scripture shows that the prince did not want to serve in the
war, but here the god stood before him and proved his divine power by taking
multi-armed form, and convinced the prince that it was in his interest to submit
to the fate that was demanded of him, as Vishnu would carry on with his plans
with or without the prince’s participation. The destruction was ordained to happen—someone
more evil might have made the bomb first, or conventional bombing would have
ruined Hiroshima and Nagasaki anyway. To put it in the simpler language of the
contemporary Dionysian gods Jagger and Richards, Vishnu was saying, “I’m simply
dying for some thrills and spills. If you can’t rock me, somebody will.” [15]
It may
seem odd that these rational men of science justified their participation in
the nuclear weapons program by comparing their necessary obedience to the US
government with the superstitions of an ancient belief system, but that
system was just a portrayal of a dilemma inherent in the exercise of political
power. They had to participate because the train was leaving the station with
or without them. Some of the scientists might have felt morally off the hook at
the time, but it is well known that Oppenheimer was more remorseful and
tormented as time passed. He told President Truman, speaking for himself but
implicating Truman as well, that he had “blood on his hands.” He favored
putting the atomic bomb under international control and was against the development
of the hydrogen bomb. Unlike Einstein and scientists who left the nuclear
weapons program, Oppenheimer stayed on in the hope of changing the system from
within. However, his dissenting opinions became less welcome as American
anti-communism became extreme, and he eventually lost his security clearance.
As the
story of Breaking Bad progresses, Walter’s hands get bloodier
as his motives become darker. When he obtains more than enough to provide for
his family, he still wades in deeper, like Macbeth trapped by the “insane root that
takes the reason prisoner” (Macbeth I.III.83). He is in a place he
never intended to be at the outset, in the same way every junkie never set out
with a plan to become an addict. Breaking Bad has been called a
great modern tragedy, and the parallels to Macbeth run deep. Some
of Macbeth’s lines would fit right into the mouth of Walter White: “It will
have blood; they say blood will have blood” (III.IV.122), or “I am in blood
stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go
o’er” (III.IV.136-138).
As Walter
White succumbs to his addiction to power, he takes on the pseudonym Heisenberg,
which is perhaps the story’s only explicit reference to nuclear physics. The
name serves as a metaphor for the moral enigma that is Walter White. Werner
Heisenberg was famous for formulating the uncertainty principle, which states
that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less
precisely its momentum can be known. Heisenberg’s life itself contained many
uncertainties, as it was known that he conducted research into nuclear fission
in Germany during the early 1940s, but the extent of his enthusiasm for
building an atom bomb for Hitler remained a mystery.
 |
| graphic from www.infobytes.tv/breakingbad |
Walter
White is an enigma in the same manner. Can we observe at which point he loses
our sympathy and becomes loathsome? While we observe, we can measure one aspect
of his nature, but not others. Is his addiction to power any different than the
addiction of a meth addict, or any different than that which we see in our
institutions and corporations and in global politics? To the police he is like
a subatomic particle: the meth kingpin Heisenberg’s existence may be known but
his meth-making cannot been observed. When his actions are observed, his mind
and his nature are unfathomable. Robert Oppenheimer alluded to this when he
said, “There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about
the thoughts and intentions of men.” [16]
Walter
White uses science in one other way to hint at duality and ambiguity. In his
mundane role as a chemistry teacher, he tells his students about chirality, the
property of asymmetry derived from the Greek word for “hand,” a familiar chiral
object. An object is chiral if it is, like a hand, not identical to its mirror
image. As a metaphor for moral agency, Walter is hinting that people too are
chiral opposites with Jekyll-and-Hyde like properties, just as a molecule’s
potential is changed when its orientation is reversed. Walter may appear to
others as a benign teacher and family man, but when he is flipped he is capable
of things which no one expects of him.
In the
finale, Walter White admits to his wife that he didn’t really do it for the
family. He did it because he was “good at it.” He knows he will die soon, by
cancer or violence. He knows he has lost his family, that his son will despise
him forever, but he has not come to his wife one last time in order to
apologize. He wanted to admit to all past excuses and speak the truth, but what
he says falls short of showing contrition. Later, when he is dying of a
gunshot, he staggers to his lab equipment and dies caressing his precious
creation. He bears a great resemblance to other men of science who gave up
their lives and scruples for the chance to express their genius. No regrets,
and sorry, not sorry. As Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that
is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and argue about what to do about
it only after you’ve had your technical success.” [17] For Oppenheimer,
that later argument was ruinous, both personally for himself and for the world
he tried to warn about the necessity of eliminating nuclear arms. [18] Breaking
Bad is a work of art that has much to contribute to discussions over what
should be done in the aftermath of the many “technical successes” of the 20th
century.
__________
The
promotional trailer for the
final season of Breaking Bad features
Bryan Cranston reciting the famous poem Ozymandias
that provided the title of one of the episodes.
Ozymandias
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
I met a traveller
from an antique land
Who said:`Two vast
and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the
desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a
shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip,
and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its
sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive,
stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that
mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal
these words appear --
"My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works,
ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside
remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal
wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level
sands stretch far away.'
__________
This post was revised on August 24, 2014
Notes
[1] William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch,
(New York: Grove Press, 1959), in footnotes. See also Word Virus: The
William S. Burroughs Reader (Grove Press, 2000), which notes the irony
in Burroughs having attended the Los Alamos Ranch School before it became the
birthplace of the atom bomb. The school was purchased by the United States
Army’s Manhattan Engineering District in 1942.
[2] Noam Chomsky, “How Many Minutes to
Midnight?” Chomsky.info,
the official website of Noam Chomsky, August 5, 2014. https://chomsky.info/20140805/
[3] Johnah Raskin, American Scream:
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), preface. Ginsberg's concern with the
nuclear threat continued throughout his life as he participated in protests in
the 1970s at the Rocky Flats plutonium pit factory, and wrote a poem titled Plutonian
Ode.
[4] Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original
Scroll (New York: Viking Books,
2007). The original draft of On
The Road was typed in 1951, and later published in a much-revised format in
1957.
[5] Vince Gilligan, creator, Breaking Bad, Sony Pictures Television
(2008-2013).
[6] Sam Gilbert, “The Inconceivable
Atomic Legacy of New Mexico,” Vice, February 24, 2014. http://www.vice.com/read/the-atomic-legacy-of-new-mexico
[7] Joseph Masco, The
Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006). The publisher’s synopsis
on the back cover states: “The atomic bomb… is not just the engine of American
techno-scientific modernity; it has produced a new cognitive orientation toward
everyday life, provoking cross-cultural experiences of what Masco calls a
‘nuclear uncanny,’ revealing how the bomb has reconfigured concepts of time,
nature, race, and citizenship.”
[8] Sandia National Laboratories, TechnologyDeployment Centers, http://www.sandia.gov/research/facilities/technology_deployment_centers/
[9] Sasha Pyle and Joni Arends, “Reader View:WIPP accident reveals serious problems,” Santa
Fe New Mexican, June 14, 2014. http://www.santafenewmexican.com/opinion/my_view/reader-view-wipp-accident-reveals-serious-problems/article_e9ff9758-a4fc-5c8e-b949-7326bc776522.html
[10] Linda M. Richards, “On Poisoned Ground,” Chemical
Heritage (now known as
Distillations), Spring 2013. https://www.chemheritage.org/distillations/magazine/on-poisoned-ground
[11] Joseph Masco, 35.
[12] Better
Call Saul, Sony Pictures Television, Season 1, Episode 10, “Marco,” written
by Peter Gould. Original air date April 6, 2015, AMC Television.
[13] Robert Oppenheimer as interviewed for “The
Decision to Drop the Bomb” an episode in the semi-regular NBC television
program NBC White Paper, 1965.
[14] Alex Wellerstein, “Oppenheimer and the
Gita,” Restricted
Data: Nuclear Secrecy Blog, May 23, 2014. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/05/23/oppenheimer-gita/
[15] Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “If You
Can’t Rock Me,” It’s Only Rock and Roll Universal International
Music, 1974.
[16] Robert Oppenheimer as interviewed by Edward
R. Murrow for “A Conversation with J. Robert Oppenheimer,” an episode in the
semi-regular CBS television program See
it Now, January 4, 1955.
[17] Robert Oppenheimer
testifying in his defense at the April 13, 1954 security hearings, United States Atomic Commission, Volume II,
266.
[18] Kai Bird and
Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus:
The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage, 2006).
Most of the biographical information on Oppenheimer comes from the preface of
this book.
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