Breaking Bad spoilers below.
I’m a tangential watcher of Breaking Bad. We don’t have cable so I’ve watched via Netflix, and usually while doing something else. Jim fills me in. I did get a chance to see last week’s episode and watched with fascinated horror at The Phone Call. Many people have apparently been talking about The Phone Call, trying so hard to whitewash Walt into remaining a hero, doing things for his family, how he said things to try to throw the blame off Skyler, and how Skyler is a bitch and deserved it anyway, etc. This article says why that’s stupid, why that’s making the show as stupider than it is. (also because sexism, but that’s not the point of this post.) Like real people, Walt is neither Good nor Evil. He loves his family and hates his wife and does horrible things for what he thinks is a good reason and has killed and rescued and poisoned and caused the death of his brother-in-law and mourned that death. He is capable of many things, good and evil. He’s complex.
So why, asks the article writer, do some people so desperately want Walt to be the “good guy” – why do they justify his actions? Part of it, yes, is the fact that we liked Walt in the beginning, and we are good people (in our own eyes), so we can’t be evil, so Walt isn’t evil.
This is the same justification people use when they say racist things. “Racists are bad. I’m not bad. So what I said wasn’t racist.”
But the real reason we can root for bad guys is point of view.
Several years ago I was watching a nature program and suddenly saw through the careful emotional manipulation – in a freaking NATURE program – that they plunge the viewer into. They’ll talk about the migrating bird that flies thousands of miles and gets maybe a mouthful of food along the way but OH NO HERE IS A HUNGRY EAGLE, RUN MIGRATING BIRD!!!
In another scene we’ll get a view of the mama cheetah who has been kicked in the face by a zebra and will soon die, as will her cubs. Fuckin zebras, man. Poor cheetah family.
Even though the nature shows show the prey’s POV a majority of the time, and therefore we find ourselves rooting for the antelope to get away, sometimes we see it from the predators’ point of view, and suddenly we feel for the wolf who hasn’t eaten in days during the lean winter months, and the hungry babies, poor puppies!
While in the scene above we easily felt for the poor migrating bird who was nearly starving and wouldn’t eat until it reached its destination a billion miles away, like a dad who won’t stop to pee on a long trip to grandma’s in Kalamazoo, the scene could have been told from the POV of the hungry eagle, who perhaps had an injured wing and had chicks to feed, and maybe one had fallen out of the nest or been eaten by a snake, and the narrator would have been all GO, EAGLE, GO! EAT THAT BIRD!
We have seen most of Breaking Bad from Walt’s POV. We have seen his professional despair, his cancer diagnosis, his denial of coverage, his controlling wife. Then we see him take control of his life and his money and then do that thing that always makes us like a character- he does something well. He does something better than anyone else, and that’s cook. We see him start to try to help his family by doing horrible things. We know he loves his family. We know he even loves Hank. We know he goes into every horrible thing he does with, if not reluctance, with a grim sense of “this is the only choice I have.” All of these things can make people believe “it’s not his fault.”
MINOR spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire series:
George RR Martin has masterfully used POV in A Song of Ice and Fire. He sets up Jamie Lannister to be reprehensible early on. We don’t start getting Jamie’s point of view until a few books in when he begins to look sympathetic, and we see his change from inside him. We can even start liking him a little, or at least rooting for him, even when we’re reminded that he’s a complex character who is not embracing the “good” way of life by any stretch of the imagination. (Remember the threat he made against an infant in the Tully family? Yeah, he’s still a Lannister.)
Back to Breaking Bad, imagine the story from Skyler’s POV. A woman whose husband is getting screwed in his job and then diagnosed with cancer and then denied treatment, and bam, unexpectedly she turns up pregnant. That’s a lot of shit to deal with. Then her husband begins to cook, and she has no idea, but knows that Something is Up. When she finds out, she is forced to decide whether to keep her family together or high tail it out of there. She becomes his accomplice, still not knowing the depth of the shit he’s gotten into, until enough people die that she starts to notice. She’s seeming pretty sympathetic to me right now.
While we never want the Lannisters to win in ASoIaF, we do want Tyrion Lannister to succeed, because we see his sympathetic POV – this made the Blackwater battle a complex one because we hated something to happen to Tyrion but wanted Joffrey’s city to fall. A lot of people complain that Sansa is a bitch for not liking Tyrion even though he did the very nice thing of not raping her, but they forget that Sansa thinks the Imp is evil, still believes he tried to kill her brother, he fights for the Lannisters, hell, he IS a Lannister, etc. We want her to see the good in him that WE see, because we’ve seen his POV, but we forget that a) he hasn’t told her the truth of anything because b) he (rightly) thinks she will never believe him. Sansa can’t have Tyrion’s POV, so she hates him. When we see him through her eyes, he’s a horrible, ugly man who is an attempted murderer, part of a family who has nothing but horrible people in it, a drunk, a frequent visitor of brothels, incapable of decency or love.
Anyway, the way to get people to like or sympathize with a character is to show the character doing something well (Remember Italians said that Mussolini made the trains run on time?), or doing a kindness to someone, or see them mistreated. But also give them a POV so we can see their different layers, the shades of gray that make up everybody’s soul, and remember, like Walt, like Jamie, we all do what we do because we believe it’s the right thing, or the only thing to do.