Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill Psychopath?

Confessions of a Sociopath author M.E. Thomas talks with WeiWei, T Pocket, and RT about whether Saul Goodman is a psychopath.

Breaking Bad: Is Walter White a Sociopath?

AMC's hit show, "Breaking Bad" returns this Sunday and some are asking "How Walter White Found His Inner Sociopath".  The show details the exploits of a chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin who finds his hands getting dirtier and dirtier until he seems to lose most of his humanity. Or does he? A.O. Scott writes for the NY Times:

In truth, though, his development over five seasons has been less a shocking transformation than a series of confirmations. Mr. Gilligan’s busy and inventive narrative machinery has provided plenty of cleverly executed surprises, but these have all served to reveal the Walter White who was there all along. The sides of his personality — sociopath and family man, scientist and killer, rational being and creature of impulse, entrepreneur and loser — are not necessarily as contradictory as we might have supposed.
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Walter may have wanted us to believe — and may, at moments, have convinced himself — that he was a decent man driven by desperate circumstances to do terrible things, but that notion was either wishful thinking or tactical deceit. Viewed as a whole, in optimal binge conditions, with the blinds pulled down and the pizza boxes and chicken wrappers piling up around the couch, “Breaking Bad” reveals itself as the story of a man mastering his vocation and fighting to claim his rightful place in the world. 

But is he really a sociopath? He is great at lying. That's probably one of the most entertaining parts about the show. He is amazing at coming up with an answer that fits the facts, like a sort of WebMD for excuses that fit the symptoms perfectly yet innocuously. Where did all of this cash come from? He has a gambling problem. Why did his wife just have an emotional breakdown? She was having an affair and her lover is in the hospital. He is the master of deflection and playing upon not just people's emotions, but especially their expectations about him (as a loser, but ultimately harmless) and the world (that bad people are not your friends, relatives, and neighbors but people who seem "off" to you).

However, I don't think he is a sociopath. He may act like how one expects a sociopath to act (ruthless, disloyal, power hungry), but his motivations seem all wrong. If he was a sociopath, why does he constantly cling to an image that he's a good dad/husband/friend making the most of a bad situation? From the NY Times:

Walter is almost as good at self-justification as he is at cooking meth, and over the course of the series, he has not hesitated to give high-minded reasons for his lowest actions. In his own mind, he remains a righteous figure, an apostle of family values, free enterprise and scientific progress. 

For instance:

Walt: "When we do what we do for good reasons, then we've got nothing to worry about. And there's no better reason than family."

Here he extends his typical self-justification to his wife:

Walt: Skyler, you can't beat yourself up over this thing. Please. You didn't set out to hurt anybody. You made a mistake and things got out of control. But you did what you had to do to protect your family. And I'm sorry, but that doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a human being. 

Skyler: Stop it, Walt. Just stop. I don't need to hear any of your bullshit rationales.

And an incredibly insensitive and oblivious moment of self-absorption:

Walt: So how are you feeling? 

Jesse: Okay, I guess. Broke it off with Andrea. I had to. She's gonna tell Brock. I'm still gonna take care of the rent and stuff. It's the right thing to do, but, you know-- 

Walt: (interrupting) I meant this. (gestures behind) How are you feeling about the money?

And finally the over the top but insincere display of emotions and taking huge offense when the sincerity is questioned:

Walt: I am just as upset as you are. 

Jesse: Are you? 

Walt: Really? How can you say that to me? Jesus! I mean, I'm the one who's the father here. What, do I have to curl up in a ball in tears in front of you? 

Walt in all of his self-centeredness clearly thinks that not only do his ends justify any means he chooses, but it's clear that this process of justification is important to him. If he were a sociopath, why he would care at all? As a corporate executive put it upon seeing Walt and his team balk at killing two innocent witnesses, "I thought you guys were professionals." But there's hardly anything professional about them. Despite being extremely clever and calculating (he fakes an emotional breakdown in his brother-in-law's DEA office to tap his phone), he seems like a prototypical narcissist who lets his emotions rule him, particularly his feeling that his talents were never truly appreciated and so he is finally going to make them realize that he is a force to be reckoned with. A sociopath would not care what people thought of him, as long as he was getting and doing what he wanted to get/do.

Walter White is also a great example of why I don't value people's "good" intentions--because they're incredibly subjective, often misplaced, and sometimes used to justify horrible atrocities. People never feel that they have done anything wrong as long as their intentions were not malicious. It reminds me of this recent comment from a reader:

Intentions don't matter. Hitler's intentions were good. What are good intentions? It depends who you're talking to. If you talk to the chicken just before you kill it and tell it "Hey chicken, my intentions are good, I don't want to be misunderstood, I'm just gonna eat you and share you with my family."

And also from this NY Times review of Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:

Traits we evolved in a dispersed world, like tribalism and righteousness, have become dangerously maladaptive in an era of rapid globalization. A pure scientist would let us purge these traits from the gene pool by fighting and killing one another. But Haidt wants to spare us this fate. He seeks a world in which “fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.” To achieve this goal, he asks us to understand and overcome our instincts. He appeals to a power capable of circumspection, reflection and reform.

Sociopaths on television: Breaking Bad

Our time is now (!), as suggested by this review of "Breaking Bad":

When, and why, did American television and cinema viewers first fall in love with the Sociopath protagonist? Perhaps the audience was always there, nascent and ready to be born. My current favorite Sociopath television show is AMC’s Breaking Bad, the story of an ordinary, albeit resentful and self-loathing, married man who breaks out of his bourgeois cocoon to become a Methamphetamine dealer. His bourgeois name is the aptly constructed “Walter White,” representing the plain vanilla nature of his high school Chemistry teacher life in small town New Mexico. His alter ego name is “Heisenberg” (after Nobel winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg), chosen by White, to represent his genius in making the purest and best “Meth” ever seen in the Southwest and Mexico.

I think Coppola’s Godfather series created the modern heroic Sociopath. We rooted for Brando’s and Pacino’s characters, although Michael Corleone became unlikable by the end of Godfather II. Coppola was the first to romanticize the familiar character of the gangster in movies. But Quentin Tarantino perfected the generalized concept of the protagonist Sociopath. His breakout film was, of course, Pulp Fiction, a so-called dark comedy with such a wide variety of watchable sociopaths one could probably make a television series around virtually every major character in the film. In fact, the two strands of modern Sociopathic television and films can be plausibly traced to either Coppola or Tarantino. In the organized crime motif, for example, there is of course The Sopranos and the unfortunately canceled series Brotherhood. But shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad are in the dark comedy mode consistent with Tarantino’s sensibility.

Breaking Bad has 2 million viewers. Stuck on AMC (I have 150 HD channels but AMC is not one of them) this is a pretty big audience. Going back to my opening question, why are these shows appealing? For me, the theme was repulsive. Then I watched it. I root for Heisenberg/White, even though he has been directly and indirectly responsible for many deaths. In real life I would want him dead yesterday. But in my sometimes fantasy life, I somehow identify with him. What’s that all about? Maybe “between the dust and love that hangs on everybody, there is a dead man trying to get out.” Or a Sociopath.