Greed is Good, But also Bad: Walter White vs. Gordon Gekko

Last week, I drew comparisons between Breaking Bad’s protagonist Walter White, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Albert Camus’ Meursault. This week, to touch on a different theme present in AMC’s hit drama, I want to examine Walt in relation to another one of my favorite fictional characters: Gordon Gekko.

Gekko is the antagonist of the film Wall Street, a vicious stockbroker known for his famous quote, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” In a manner similar to Walter White, Gordon Gekko instills fear in his enemies through his wealth, power, and confidence.

Both Gekko and White began their careers with some sort of setback- nothing was given to them; they had little money and little experience in the craft they would soon master. However, both through spurious and questionable morals, they became kings of their respective domains: White as a meth drug lord through robbery and murder, Gekko as a Wall Street king through insider trading.

Both men, once at the top, were never satisfied. They always wanted more. In one episode, Walt tells his assistant Jesse, “You asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I’m in the empire business.” Similarly, Gekko tells his assistant, Bud Fox, “It’s all about bucks, kid.”

Yes, both alpha males are struck by man’s two biggest curses: greed and the need for power. In the beginning of Breaking Bad, Walt justifies his meth cooking as a way to pay for his cancer treatment- a comparably petty sum of 700,000 dollars. By the fifth season, with fifty million dollars stored away in a safe house, Walt wants more, and more, and more. He acknowledges that there is no way to either spend or launder so much money, and thus the cash is rendered essentially useless. Still, the sense of power and control that money brings Walt is too much to turn down.

In one pivotal scene, he drives a truck full of millions of dollars into the desert- seemingly to be buried. The cinematography of Walt covering his money with dirt in the middle of nowhere suggests this act is comparable to a funeral. As such, the symbolism asserts that by burying his money, Walt is in fact throwing away his life, or saying goodbye to one he once had. While the truth of that statement is debatable, it effectively demonstrates the extent to which greed controls one’s life.

One thought on “Greed is Good, But also Bad: Walter White vs. Gordon Gekko

  1. Watching the greed of characters lead them onwards and onwards is comparable to watching a train wreck–you see where it’s going, you know how it has to end, but you just can’t look away because you have to see how it happens. While none of us are Walter White (hopefully), this is a bit of a reminder to us as students looking for a profitable career–beyond a certain point, no matter how much we have, the money won’t satisfy us. It’s so easy to forget that, so perhaps the reason our culture keeps playing these similar stories is because we need the reminder.

Leave a Reply