Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer

Abstract

As the online reference in Wikipedia has it, ‘To Break Bad’ means ‘to go wrong; to go downhill; to go bad; to turn toward immorality or crime’. And it is just such a transition—the movement from middle-aged affable chemistry teacher Walter White to the ruthless, dead-eyed drug lord Heisenberg—which underpins the narrative of the award-winning series Breaking Bad. Walter White is a good man, and it is only the imposition of an indifferent and remorseless fate which inflicts his body with an equally interminable cancer; it is the crushing cosmological injustice visited upon him—the piling medical bills and the suffocating worry for the future of his family—which finally causes Walter to break bad.