The wolf's perspective: The Good Wife is what Breaking Bad would look like if it had been done honestly

The Good Wife started and ended with a slap. Seven seasons ago, Alicia Florrick slapped her husband across the face in the moment she realized that her life was not what she thought it was. And in the series finale, Diane slapped Alicia across the face in the moment she realized Alicia was always going to put her family, and herself, first. Both moments signified a turning point for Alicia Florrick. Only this time, we won’t get to see what comes next.

I would think you shouldn't need to know what's going to happen next to understand this ending. Others feel differently. A Google search for "Good Wife Ending" and "ambiguous" gets 215,000 hits. But if you watch this carefully, I think you'll see that there is no ambiguity at all.



Pay particular attention to how she pulls herself together and goes on. That's exactly how she responded to the virtual slap life gave her in the first episode. In a sense, what we see here is an incredible kind of strength to keep going. But the something about this strength feels empty. And that's a problem because a lot of people wanted a happy ending for Alicia. Now in denial, all they see ambiguity where they should see emptiness.

The question we are naturally inclined to ask is whether she "deserved" that slap. That's a ridiculous question however. Of course she deserved it! What matters is whether it will have any effect on her. It won't. Alicia's life is exactly what always happens to people like her. That's a plain and simple, and utterly unambiguous, fact. Which makes it rather difficult to accept if you identify with Alicia and, if online comments are anything to go by, a lot of women identify with Alicia.

"The moment she realized her life was not what she thought it was."

For Walter White and Alicia Florrick the moment comes when, even though they both had tried very hard to be a good decent person, they discover that the most important people in their lives don't really respect them. They make a show of respecting them but this show, which was convincing until now, is suddenly shown to be the sham it is. That's the believable part. The unbelievable part is that Walt then goes into the business of making and selling meth. People who've been respectable middle class citizens all their lives don't do that. And they don't do that because it's terribly important to them that they are able to continue to see themselves as good and decent people. "Meth dealer" doesn't go with that.

Getting on with life does. Most of the evil most of us will be responsible in our lives goes under the heading of "getting along with life". And that is what Alicia does. We jump forward six months and we see her going back to work at a law firm. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Where there is potential for evil is the trap of moral narcissism and that's the trap that Alicia Florrick walks into. She, like all of us, is already part way there for we all want to think of ourselves as good. When your moral life comes to be primarily about preserving that sense of yourself as good, you're a moral narcissist. You stop doing things in order to bring about good for yourself and others and start doing them to avoid shame.

The crucial moment to borrow a line from Wittgenstein, is when "the decisive move in the conjuring trick is made, and it was the very one that seemed to us quite innocent." The decisive move is to think, "I'm a good person, I didn't deserve that." As if it would be okay to brutally betray a bad person! We make that move because it guarantees us our victim status. Thereafter, we have to remain a good person in order to maintain our moral authority. And that's why it's a conjuring trick: because we assume we know what moral authority looks and feels like. We don't for the simple reason that we don't have any moral authority simply by virtue of being a victim. Truth is not a feeling! We are convinced we need that moral authority, however, because, otherwise, how would we know that we are innocent?

From there, we slowly evolve into morally callous human beings, which is precisely what Alicia does over the next seven seasons. Whether you see it or not will depend on how susceptible you are to moral narcissists. For most of us, the answer to that question is, pretty damn susceptible!

There are early hints of trouble. In the fifth episode of the first season, Alicia is about to put another woman through hell by exposing her affair. There is a good case to be made for doing this. The problem is that Alicia is not concerned about the pros and cons for other people. What concerns her is what this says about her. She needs to know if this makes her a bad person. As if that wasn't bad enough, she goes to her daughter to get this reassurance. A morally serious adult does not go to children when looking for a moral assessment and they especially don't go to children who are completely dependent on them.

Darkness at Noon

Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.

The most pathetically obvious hint ever dropped in a TV series is the name of the series, "Darkness at Noon"  that Alicia watches over the last few seasons. Setting matters and it matters a whole lot that The Good Wife is set in Cook County. Cook County is not only the most corrupt jurisdiction in the USA, it's been or been in the running for most-corrupt-jurisdiction every year sine 1921. If you can make it there, you're probably evil. It ought to bother Alicia's fans a lot more than it does that she succeeds so well in this environment.

The second thing that ought to trouble us is that Alicia, right from episode #1, she is clearly good at manipulating people. She starts with people she barely knows and slowly builds up to her closest friends. Her epitaph might well read, "She could always use a friend." Once she convinces herself that the end is justified, that it will not hurt her status as the good person wronged, Alicia goes to work with a lack of remorse that is chilling. If you notice it.

If we don't, we're on her side because we've all had a moment when we realized that our life was not what we thought it was. And the story, this is where it gets brilliant, is told from her perspective. Alicia struggles but succeeds and we root for her the same way you root for a jewel thief or an assassin when the story is told from their perspective.

"No one is what they seem to be." Alicia says that in the first season. And she's right. Funny thing is, that should be obvious. We don't see it because we're so busy hiding our own secrets. If you think you're the only one improvising and that everyone else has a script and is sticking to it, you don't notice anything unusual. Alicia has the advantage, if you can call it that, of having been rudely awakened to all this lying. Remember the old song by The Who? "I can see for miles and miles and miles ..." Well, Alicia can.

Moral character and moral acts

The issue for those of us watching at home is, "When do we get off this merry-go-round?"

I believe that if a story is truthful about the human moral landscape, it will probably not lead people too far astray. It’s the stories that do a fabulous job of presenting a false moral world that I worry about. I found Eat, Pray, Love and Sex and the City to be far more problematic than The Kite Runner and Breaking Bad, even though the latter two stories contain horrific violence and the former don’t. Eat, Pray, Love and Sex and the City present a beautifully alluring world in which selfishness leads to a glamorous, fulfilling life, whereas The Kite Runner and Breaking Bad speak truth about what is good and what is bad, and accurately show what tends to happen when we choose selfishness over love.

That's Jennifer Fulwiler explaining why she liked Breaking Bad. Of course, neither Eat, Pray and Love nor Sex and the City were meant to be portrayals of evil. Their creators thought they were creating a vision of the good life. The creators of The Good Wife, on the other hand, set out to create an account of a badly lived life in a beautifully alluring world where selfishness tends to pay off. That comes at a risk but it also has the advantage of being much closer to the world we live in that Breaking Bad was. Which brings me to this:

One of the main themes the series explores is the truth that “if you do evil things, you will bring evil into your life, even if you were attempting to achieve a greater good.” In this episode, the main character once again thought he’d do one small bad thing, because he had all these elaborate ideas about why it would ultimately make his life better. I watched with the character as his plans crumbled and his one bad action triggered a chain reaction of evil that spread even into his loved one’s lives, and I felt his pain as he found himself burdened with new and more painful problems.

If you're a Catholic, you may recognize the logic here. Some acts are bad because of their effects. We call them extrinsically evil. There is nothing wrong with lighting a charcoal fire but if you light it in the house you will kill everyone inside with carbon monoxide poisoning and, if you do this knowingly, you are a murderer. That is very different from an intrinsically evil act which is an act that, by its very nature, is evil. There is no context—no equivalent of lighting the barbecue outside in a well-ventilated space—where it could be a good act. Some people don't believe in intrinsically evil acts. I'm not one of them and I have no trouble putting dealing meth on the list.

That said, I also suspect that the list of intrinsically evil acts is a relatively short one. Most of our moral lives will be lived without our having to avoid such acts. Our moral lives will, however, involve hundreds of acts that might be either good or evil depending on the context. Alicia Florrick (I love the Lil Abner feeling that comes with that name) is a woman who tries to choose good acts but does so for the wrong reason.

And that wrong reason really hits home for she, like me and probably like you, acts to maintain her sense of herself as a good and decent person. That may seem relatively anodyne but it isn't but it can be really hard to see why it's a problem. And that is the way it should be presented in fiction.

There will be much more to say about this in the future.