Brief essay on empathy re: Walter White (Patreon)

This was a reply I typed up yesterday to a comment that was critical of how I discussed Walter, and a few other points. I posted it because I thought some viewers would be interested in my take on this, but then I decided that a comment reply wasn't the right form to express this. Anyway, here are my thoughts about the idea that I didn't express sufficient empathy for Walter:

I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to have empathy for Walter all of the time. There’s times when I had empathy, like when he talked about his experience with his dad, or when he really did momentarily feel guilt and shame opening up to Jesse about the pain he’d caused his loved ones. If I didn't express this point clearly I apologize, there are lots of things that get lost when live streaming, and even when writing a script for months. I think his behavior was an extreme response to extreme circumstances, and I can have some amount of empathy for those circumstances, but that gets sucked away pretty quick as the negativity in his circumstances becomes more and more a result of his own deliberate, calculated, and repeated actions. I don’t need constant empathy for him to enjoy the show, and I have said many times I'm almost never suggesting that the shows be an iota different.

Another point I want to respond to is the idea that my perspective is informed by the reception of the show, and it is of course, to a significant extent, it would be impossible to watch Breaking Bad in 2023 without taking that into account. Does it warp my perspective, or inform it? When I reference and make fun of viewers who took/take uncritical perspectives on Walter, I'm not suggesting that this is the majority of viewers, or that viewers who feel this way are bad people. The show brings out a lot of different feelings in people, and if many people empathized with Walter to a degree more than I did (because I think it's a spectrum), that’s a fact we want to consider and take into account. He committed violence intentionally and repeatedly, and I am going to reflexively struggle to empathize consistently with someone like that, at least at this time in my life.

This might be a personal thing to me, but there’s a degree of relatability that the idea of “empathy” implies that I find goes beyond the “understanding and acknowledging” level that I intuitively feel limited to when I reflect on Walter. I can explain but I can't justify.

Since one or two comments critiquing my degree of empathy for Walter noted that I'm a therapist, with the implication that this means I'm always only empathetic to people and characters, I want to respond to this point. The fact that I’m a therapist isn’t super relevant here, because while it informs how I look at people and characters, it’s not going to make watching Walter in any way similar to engaging with him as a client. As a professional I always strive to have unconditional positive regard for clients, and I would indeed provide therapy to someone who had committed murder in the past. Who knows, maybe I have. Ethically I am not allowed to discontinue working with someone just because they reveal that they have committed murder in the past, or assault, or manipulation, or the other things I criticize Walter for. Of course this is the case because we all want to live in a world where people who have done bad things have opportunities to improve as people and outgrow harmful patterns, it's for the good of everyone. I would try to help them because it’s the right thing to do, not because I empathize with them, but I would certainly work to emphasize to myself every aspect of empathy for them I can find. I wouldn’t have to empathize with him lying to his family and Jesse and so on, but it would be helpful to remember that empathy in supporting him and compartmentalizing my feelings about the past harm he would have also reported to me.

Empathy seems to me less useful in understanding him as a character. What good would my empathy do? Because I could imagine easily going overboard with empathy, and I tried to just express the natural feelings that came up for me in watching the show, in the natural proportions that I felt them.  If my net view of Walter is rooting against him or neutral about his fate rather than rooting for him, is that really a less good interpretation of the art? Am I more obsessed with my negative interpretation than others have been with positive interpretations? Why does empathy have to be the primary overarching motivator in understanding him as a character? Do people who critique me on this point use empathy as a primary motivator when analyzing all the other characters, like Skyler, Victor, Lydia, whoever? I guess I’m interested in what types of statements would constitute the type of empathy that these folks are looking for in a video about this.

Thanks for reading my more full thoughts on this point! Have a great day/night/whatever.