Bryan Cranston as Walter White in 'Breaking Bad'.
Overabundance can lead to creative vacuum crises.
It happens in recent years in part with the television series.
We were badly used to the first decade of the 21st century, the golden age of the genre.
Excess desquajaringa originality.
Ideas are sold cheap.
The risk boils over.
That makes you take refuge in the pleasure of reviewing, of revising (what a pedant affected by chronic anglicism would say revisit).
Go back to the titles that are already classics.
And hence this comparison between
The Sopranos
and
Breaking Bad
through its protagonists.
You don't need a doctorate in psychology to come to the following conclusion: Walter White is a much worse person than Tony Soprano.
From far…
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Let's start with the mobster from New Jersey.
The codes, the environment, Livia, her mother, the bastard of Uncle Junior, the burden of being a father of a family who wants to cut the ties of destiny towards the future of his children with some prestige and the studies that he did not have... The guilt and devotion he feels for Carmela, his wife, the pressure of the leadership, the troubles of the gang and the confrontation with other families, his boastful nephew, his psychopathic brothers-in-law and his ball-busting sister.
Don Juanism as another obligation of an alpha male, that measuring up to the opposite sex, leads to depression, causes fainting, anxiety attacks.
He discreetly denies his alleged manhood and decides to visit a psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi.
He doesn't understand, he doesn't understand.
Tony is a puppet in a world he doesn't fit into.
A universe that he tries to unravel in a t-shirt and tailored suits, eating pasta and halfway between the mysteries in his fridge or the historical documentaries that he swallows, sweetening the battles with ice cream on television.
That is his safe haven, his indoor base, he can no longer trust even going out to the pool or lighting the barbecue.
Beyond that interior world decorated with Lladró, he is lost.
He decides to unravel, to improve, to understand, but he is too subservient to his instincts and his own laws.
Because yes, because that is how it has always been, although something tells him that he must stop, transform, know himself beyond the very commandments that harass him and free himself from himself to transcend towards a figure that allows him to look at himself in the mirror.
James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in 'The Sopranos'.Anthony Neste (AP)
Walter White undertakes the opposite journey.
He starts from the dignity and respect that others profess him and with which he is not satisfied to lose himself in hell.
He is Faust.
Full.
Just like Jekyll and Hyde.
It seems that Vince Gilligan, its creator (who comes from the immense pool of visionary screenwriters who created
The Sopranos
, with David Chase at the helm and Matthew Weiner or Terence Winter, among other enormous talents on the team), knows perfectly well that the pact with the devil of the mythical character did it not in pursuit of eternal youth, but not to put ethical or moral barriers to science.
Chemistry moves from the ideal by which Walter White is able to explain the nobility and beauty of the world with the help of Walt Whitman and his
Leaves of Grass
to the element by which Heisenberg corrupts himself and destroys everything around him for avenge his own frustration.
The transcript of the creator of the uncertainty principle, the scientist who laid the foundations of quantum physics is the name chosen by the protagonist for his metamorphosis.
With it, he does nothing but dirty his initials, WW, nailed not by chance to that of the greatest American poet.
He is a masterful yin and yang that drives much of the series.
That descent is made by White based on two characteristics that increase his miserable capacity: his own ego and the pleasure he derives from inflicting damage.
Both variants multiply his poison.
All this drags him down and gives him a satisfaction that he loses.
Because he is the joy of perversion, of power, of revenge towards a world that denied him success and that he has decided to contaminate through trafficking before the disease defeats him.
When he crosses the line he would rather leave an evil mark than a happy memory.
Because the goodness in him is diluted on the basis of his own formula for making drugs, cooked between protective masks and aprons, but in underpants.
Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman and Bryan Cranston as Walter White in a scene from 'Breaking Bad'. Promotion photo
For that abounds in greed, but above all in lies.
They are two impulses that he does not intend to separate from himself, but rather to take them to the grotesque limit of their own possibilities.
The character is so powerful that he drags the first vision from the hand of Bryan Cranston.
Going through it he loses everything in the eyes of the beholder, while Tony Soprano in the body of the great James Gandolfini is so genuinely carnal, so paradoxically human, that he wins.
Brutality in the case of the mobster is, to a large extent, a conviction, a determinism, a marked destiny, while in the case of the professor it is a choice.
Aware.
Walter does not deserve in our eyes a second chance: you condemn him.
He is absolutely despicable.
Tony, on the other hand, yes.
More so if the second time you let yourself be carried away in the stark universe of Albuquerque by the fragility and helplessness of Jesse Pinkman, the moral codes and cunning of his brother-in-law Hank, even by the juggling of Saul Goodman and the finally redeemed temptations of Skyler, his wife.
To him, to the great sorcerer, to the sinister demon of Walter White, on the other hand, you come to completely detest him.
That is if you resist the review again.
Because
Breaking Bad,
like
The Sopranos,
is a masterpiece, of course, but it is perhaps the most stark and hopeless series with the human condition that has been conceived so far.
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