When reflecting on movies and television shows that have been part of my past, like many of us do from time to time, it is not hard for me to arrive at my number one choice. It is the series Breaking Bad, produced from 2008 through 2013. It had five seasons, six segments, and approximately 56 hours of viewing time. I don’t feel it a risky choice as I have encountered a number of ordinary individuals who have felt the same.
It was superior on many levels of film production, none of which I want to discuss here…except one. It portrayed violence not as we commonly see it in movies and television, with high volume weaponry, extreme bloodletting, and gratuitous death. In Breaking Bad the violence was so selective that its impact was magnified to the viewer, feeling like something possibly real.
Here I want to describe one violent event that occurred in Season 5 and one that haunts me as I also reflect on the impact of this coming National election.
The main character, Walter White, who runs a gamut back and forth between being a hero and anti-hero, is in need of methylamine, a raw material to be used in the production of Crystal Meth. He and others plan a theft from a stopped freight train in the middle of the day in the New Mexico desert.
One of the others with him is a younger man named Todd (well played by Jesse Plemons) who belongs to a local crime family. He is simple minded and totally void of empathy. He doesn’t perceive acts of violence as violent because such events are uncomplicated means to an end.
As Walter, Todd and the others are in the process of stealing the chemical, a young boy, maybe 9 or 10, comes upon them while riding his bicycle on a trail. Everything stops. The men and the boy stare at each other for a long couple of seconds. Then Todd, showing no expression and with the ease of flipping a light switch, pulls out his handgun and shoots the boy, killing him. Though all the others shout “NO” at the sound of the shot, Todd remained only baffled why any of them would protest his action. I wrenched when I watched the cold nature of that scene.
The lack of empathy that Donald Trump publicly displays in his actions and in his character is obvious beyond question. Anyone who views Trump as another human being cannot avoid that conclusion. Those that see him primarily as a symbol and bulwark against “creeping liberalism” appear to have the ability to ignore what he says and what he does. Empathy be damned.
Yet it is empathy, the ability to embrace the trials, sacrifices, and suffering of other people as if those experiences were your own, that direct us toward an ethical existence.
When Donald Trump announced in 2016 that he could walk down the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone and never lose a single voter I viewed that suggestion just as Trump wanted me to. I thought he believed the loyalty of his minions so great that he could perform a heinous crime without retribution from them. It similarly held true for those that love what he represents, that no crime could surpass the protection he might provide them.
It was only when I thought about that scene in Breaking Bad , of someone able to kill with virtually no empathy that I realized my misjudgment. It wasn’t the imagined crime of him shooting someone that was so heinous; it was about the person to whom he was killing. What he was actually communicating, perhaps unconsciously, was that the person he was shooting was totally meaningless to him, a means to an end.
He didn’t present a description of himself robbing a bank or vandalizing a work of art. He presented himself as someone without compassion or empathy, and his “people”, by his count, would also be unmoved. He should have been considered totally believable. In a real sense, he did, in fact, shoot someone on 5th Avenue.
The inability to exhibit empathy is an integral part of those that aspire to authoritarian rule. Pick whatever crime against humanity history provides and at the forefront is someone who feels no empathy to many or all affected people. These “leaders” did not break bad, they came broken. The fears of their followers were the only emotions they needed.
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