Author: Gu Wenyan
The first time I was talking about Faust in class, I put a poster of Breaking Bad on a slide.
When I first started chasing dramas more than a decade ago, I bought a physical poster at a stall on the college campus and pasted it on my bedside. On the poster, 50-year-old chemistry teacher Walter White (old white) stands in the center of the picture, with a light grass shirt and white pants, holding a gun in one hand, and facing forward with the classic momentum of the protagonist of the American drama poster. Behind him was the desert and blue sky of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a motorhome used to develop methamphetamine was billowing red smoke. Fans of the drama know that this moment is the pure and good old Bai just found that he is a genius in drug making, just came to the bud point of the protagonist "becoming bad" in a growth novel. On this day, the middle school teacher with a peaceful personality and suffering from cancer wakes up from ordinary life and plunges into a crime black comedy that competes for the tyrant.
The story of growing up is inspiring because change is always fascinating. A plant, a newborn, any organism or inorganic. Especially when time begins to announce the end of change, the stagnation of life, aging and even the demise, our protagonist still breaks through the limits of existence and creates a chemical explosion for himself. Of course, this change did not come out of thin air. Someone had to hand the old white mask and the medicine bottle. Someone had to tell him, "You have to change your life"! But this man was not Jesse Pinkman, the student who had driven him to make drugs by chance (or the screenwriter). This person is still the old white himself, a self (ego) that gradually expands in the series. So, when The fallen Lao Bai honestly says to his wife for the first time at the end of the play, "I'm not doing all this for you, I'm for myself," we see another soul that has inhabited the body of the middle school teacher Lao Bai from the beginning, a self that is absolutely true and absolutely free. Desire for change, desire to transcend; Defy the law, and at the same time arrogantly seize and squander power. This powerful self makes a deal with the devil, gains the aura of superman, and dies at the end of the story in the ideal kingdom he built with his own hands.
Such a poisoner, such a self, such a standard Faustian hero. In class, I just need to say a plot synopsis in three words, and students who have not seen the play will immediately know why Lao Bai is a Faustian anti-hero character. The most obvious Faust archetype in "Breaking Bad" is of course the basic narrative framework of Lao Bai who sold his soul for money and power, signed the "Devil's Contract" (Teufelspakt), and embarked on the road to making drugs. The screenwriters' success, though, lies not in the age-old motif of reshaping Western literature with contemporary American border crime themes, but in how step by step they reveal how their self-transcendence—nietzsche's "superman" aura—inevitably stores demonic energy. Old White's initial motivation for making drugs was money, but he soon found himself out of the criminal world, omnipotent, and he soon began to be unable to satisfy. He became Goethe's Faust, who appeared in the night study, full of money, but unable to be satisfied with limited knowledge and experience: "Why is your heart tightening in your chest with trepidation? Why is an unspeakable pain blocking all your life activities? Faust, seeing the boundary between personal knowledge and survival, fell into despair and decided to commit suicide that night, but happened to hear the chorus of easter angels and chose to survive. The next day, outside the city gates, under the sun, Faust began to long to fly, but could only stand on the ground lyrically, witnessing the slow rise of the "other soul" in his heart:
There are two souls that dwell in my chest,
They always want to part ways with each other;
One with a strong lust,
With its tendrils clinging to the present world;
The other is desperately trying to get out of the world,
Fly high to the dwelling places of the noble ancestors.
(Qian Chunqi translation)
The "other soul" itself does not belong to the devil. If this impulse of the soul to fly high is to be fulfilled, the power of the devil is the best boost. The Devil Mephistopheles visits that night, promising to use his mana to help Faust return to his old age, open his cloak, and fly into a free night sky where the stars shine. The devil's contract is simple, as long as Faust remains enterprising, as long as he does not want to "lie flat", never use words to appeal to a moment of fatal stagnation and nostalgia. As long as he keeps moving forward, Faust can enjoy the power and luck of the devil to the fullest, and experience the ecstasy of love, the splendor of life, the small world and the big world. Faustus, who believed in transcendence, was of course willing to sign a contract. Even in his deathbed moments of "stagnation," he firmly believed that "only those who strive for freedom and survival every day have the right to both."
But Faust's life, the pursuit of the soul clinging to the present world, had been stalled as early as the night of the study. The courage to fight and never be satisfied is always another, more noble soul. It is also the other soul that flashes around the "superman" aura coveted by the devil. Similarly, the life of the poisoner Lao Bai was over the day he found out he had cancer. What remains is his other soul, the Heisenberg who is transcending every day, fighting for new freedom and survival every day—the name of the poisoner that Lao Bai gave himself, the pseudonym of the devil Mephistopheles. From the moment when the decision was made to make poison, the energy of the devil had begun to pour out the entire pursuit of Lao Bai's "other soul".
However, the power of the devil always comes at a cost. Mephistopheles' indulgence began as a trick to make wine and set fire to the underground cellars in Leipzig, and no one was particularly harmed. However, when Faust falls in love and asks Mephistopheles to help him please his beloved Gretchen, the damage begins to spread: Gretchen's mother is "accidentally" poisoned by Mephistopheles with sleeping pills, Gretchen's brother is "inadvertently" killed by Faust during a decisive battle with Faust, and Gretchen eventually drowns her and Faust's children in a frenzied whisper, and is executed on trial. These tragedies appear to be "accidents" and not from Faust's intentions. To borrow a phrase derived from the context of modern U.S. military operations, these are so-called "collateral damages," innocent civilians killed by the actors by mistake, some inadvertently additional injuries. By the end of the second part, collateral damage was further expanded. If Faust wanted to benefit mankind and reclaim the sea to make land, he had to get rid of the old couple who lived by the sea. Mephistopheles made a decision, setting fire to the house and the couple, and incidentally killing the travelers passing by the seashore. Faust wanted to complete the great cause of "Superman", thinking that he had built a prosperous and beautiful world, and finally because he could not stop the impulse to stay for a moment, he said to the world he built by himself, "Stop, you are so beautiful", and lost the bet. But the ideal kingdom in his heart, his freedom and transcendence, are clearly made up of countless and inexplicable "collateral damage" stacked together.
In this way, Faust bids farewell to the "so beautiful" world in an idealized nostalgia. If "Breaking Bad" were juxtaposed at this time, it would be hard not to associate this scene with lao Bai's ending. At the end of the play, the old white who has nothing has completed his final revenge and lies flat in the laboratory where the methamphetamine is made. The camera slowly elongates upwards, expanding little by little from Lao Bai's gradually dead body to his surroundings, incorporating his beloved drug-making equipment into the frame. The old white body, the soul clinging to the present world, and the "other soul" attached to those instruments and equipment are perfectly integrated in this shot. The background music, Baby Blue (Badfinger, 1971), cuts in at this point, perfectly falling to the first lyrics of the rock drums, "I think I got everything I deserved." At this moment, we can finally trace back to the end of Faust, full of attachment to the "stop and stop", to a memorable shocking ending in the history of TV drama culture.
Because, like Faust, Lao Bai did eventually get the power, freedom, and punishment he deserved. Because Lao Bai's determination to achieve personal transcendence was the devil's weapon from the very beginning, he was also like Faust in the process of enterprising transcendence and pursuing personal freedom and survival, constantly bringing various kinds of "collateral damage" to the people and environment around him. For example, in the fourth season, Lao Bai used a trick to blow up the big drug lord, destroying an entire drug empire, but also touching everyone in the chain of interests, causing a chain reaction murder, and finally leading to the death of Hans, who was his brother-in-law who was a drug policeman. However, the most obvious damage to this unintentional, incidental, and indirect damage in the whole series is that at the end of the second season, Old White's partner Jesse and his girlfriend smoke heroin together and then fall unconsciously on the bed. The girl foamed at the mouth, lao Bai instinctively wanted first aid, and suddenly thought that the girl was a major threat to him to continue to secretly make drugs, so he chose to watch the young life die. This was originally just the death of a girl, and Lao Bai's responsibility was only for personal gain. But the screenwriters spread the "collateral damage" of this personal choice to the entire city of Albuquerque: the girl's father, who was in charge of aviation flight command, made a mistake in his work due to heartbreak, and eventually led to a major air disaster that shocked the city.
Of course, this story that emphasizes "collateral damage" is not perfect. The screenwriter is really a bit of a rip-off. But here we see a question that the producer Vince Gilligan focused on in laying out the play, a Faustian question: When another soul is "desperately trying to get out of the world", desperate to spread his wings and fly high, even if he never intends to cause harm to anyone, will his "superman" aura inevitably burn his beloved world? Or, to put it another way: Is man destined to ally himself with the devil in order to attain transcendence? Or, to go a step further: is the "Superman" aura and collateral damage the ultimate fate of humanity, the ultimate answer to human nature?
Ten years after Breaking Bad ended, I'm still terrified by these speculations that don't have a definite answer. Especially in a world that is still full of all kinds of "collateral damage" but no longer has so many "superman" auras – after all, the dangers of "superman" have long been re-examined in the experience of the last world war. Over the past decade, though, gilligan's team hasn't stopped digging into this Faustian problem. They took a supporting role with the same "superhuman" potential from the story of the drug dealer Lao Bai, and Thor, a lawyer who fights for criminals, completed a new spin-off drama "Better Call Saul".
So, again, we were fascinated by the change of the protagonist in front of the screen. The two months of the epidemic in Shanghai coincided with the final season of "Wind Lawyer". Once again, I was deeply immersed in another Faustian hero, the coming-of-age story of "Another Soul," and the propositional speculation about "Superman" and collateral damage. In this complex legal world where good and evil are unknown and crime and justice are not mutually exclusive, the lawyer Saul and several other major supporting characters in the play show extraordinary energy, Faustian endeavor and transcendence. At the same time, the demonic shadow of collateral damage naturally casts a glittering "superman" aura: at the fork in the road between two souls, on the road to freedom and survival every day. (Gu Wenyan)
Source: Wen Wei Po