Taking what you want is not glamorous. It is not sexy. Giving in to your own worst impulses does not somehow make you more of a “badass,” more of a figure to be respected. It makes you awful. In some circumstances, it makes you evil. It is not the sort of thing most people do lightly, unless they’re sociopaths. Stepping off the path—breaking bad, if you will—requires extreme circumstances, usually, just the right combination of elements that results in a cataclysmic transformation and flowering into something new.
Yet you wouldn’t know this to look at most stories about anti-heroes, about gangsters and crime lords and men (it’s almost always men) who do the wrong things. There’s something dark and mysterious and sexy to this idea, particularly on television, where even someone as unlikely as James Gandolfini can become a sex symbol because of the role he plays. There’s nothing more alluring than power, and the modern anti-hero drama has played off this association all the way to the bank.
Except for
Breaking Bad. There is very little about Walter White that is alluring. There is very little about him that is, God forbid, sexy. When he threatens his wife or emotionally abuses her, it’s treated as a gross violation of who she is. Even if the series finale seemed to push too far toward redeeming the character in the eyes of the audience—more about that in a bit—that may have been because the preceding 61 episodes had stripped away so much of the myth that surrounds the great American cable-drama anti-hero. Walter wasn’t some icon to look up to; he was a man who made excuses to indulge his own worst impulses, then selfishly insisted everybody else get on board with what he was doing. Creator Vince Gilligan and his writers set up several opportunities for Walter to back off his plan of cooking crystal meth—even as early as season one—and he always said no. Walter is the ne plus ultra of anti-heroes. There is no further to go. He is the logical conclusion of the whole movement, the point beyond which only bleak nihilism exists.
A few weeks ago, in the wake of the tremendous, towering episode “
Ozymandias,” NPR’s Linda Holmes
argued that
Breaking Bad had become a series about watching evil. Although some subset of the show’s audience always viewed it as the tale of Walter White vanquishing all his foes—actual and perceived—for the most part,
Breaking Bad depicted with very clear vision just how dark this man had become in his pursuit of power. In Holmes’ estimation, this transcended badness, past even wickedness, and into the full belly of Walter’s own evil. The blackness in his soul seeped out until he was ranting at his wife over the phone, a ploy to get the police off her back that conveniently also let him yell about how everyone around him had failed to recognize his greatness. That darkness manifested itself as a band of neo-Nazis who could break into homes at will, simply because it’s impossible for the police to stop evil. Evil isn’t a thing that can be shot with a gun. It simply is.
There was a good reason for
Breaking Bad to be able to do this: It is, fundamentally, a religious show. I don’t mean that Walter White needs to find Jesus or Buddha or Allah (though he probably would have been better off if he turned to anything that wasn’t his own hubris). I mean that this show occupies a world with the concepts of good and evil, where “the right thing” and “the wrong thing” exist. When David Chase put
The Sopranos on the air, he famously argued that Tony Soprano should be allowed to kill a former mob snitch in episode five because if he didn’t, the audience would never respect him again. He would have broken his code and would be uninteresting as a protagonist forever after. There were things like “the right thing” and “the wrong thing” on
The Sopranos, but they more often broke down as “the hard thing” and “the easy thing.” The series’ argument was always that the vast majority of us choose “the easy thing” every day of our lives, even if that’s as basic as eating a burger instead of a salad for lunch. Tony Soprano’s easy things may have been many degrees of latitude worse than our own, but we were at least somewhat in concert with who he was. In contrast, choosing the hard thing is ultimately rewarding but rarely so in the moment. The only way a human being can truly change is to do so, but few of us want to engage with the work necessary.
For the most part, the anti-hero TV shows that followed in
The Sopranos’ wake engaged on this playing field. There were twists here and there;
The Shield had some of
Breaking Bad’s weird, Biblical morality, but it also suggested that Vic Mackey might be worth having on the streets, protecting the citizenry. But for the most part, these series played out in worlds where “right” and “wrong” were determined via a kind of moral relativity, where a sliding scale suggested that these people were just like you, only with much, much larger problems. Even
Breaking Bad’s closest cousin, Matt Weiner’s brilliant
Mad Men, in the midst of planning its own ending, mostly plays on
The Sopranos’ turf, with cycles of misbehavior and the need for true disruption to ever make a positive change.
Gilligan took this framework and tossed in an element of the Pentecostal preacher. When
Breaking Bad began, it sometimes seemed to push too hard to suggest that everybody was a sinner, where the difference between Marie’s kleptomania and Walt’s meth cooking and murder was largely a matter of degree. Yet the show quickly disabused itself of this notion. Everybody’s a sinner, yes, but that matter of degree is important. Walter White isn’t just a sinner. He’s a man who pushes further and further into his dark heart, who unleashes all manner of destruction upon the world, both at large and in his own home. He is a murderer, many times over; he is a man who abuses his wife; and he is a force of fear for everyone who sees his true face. He is, for lack of a better word, Satan.
There have been shows about Satan before, where the devil consorts with humanity and reveals how similar he is to us. (
The Sopranos could be one of these, coding its read of Lucifer in a very Catholic notion of what is unseen.) Most of these series separate the devil from those he interacts with, whether through dream imagery or arch sensibility or just putting him in a sphere most of us wouldn’t enter. But Gilligan didn’t do this with Walter. He started out as a weak-willed science teacher, beaten down at home and at his job. He had a banal life-threatening illness, lung cancer. He dressed in earth tones and lived in a sort of nice house that had clearly faded from the one he bought. He was, in other words, every
Breaking Bad viewer: a normal person who wanted to live out what life he had left and still be happy.
The genius of the series, then, is that Walter White is at once every viewer and the Prince Of Darkness. When the series begins to reveal that he’s carried deep reservoirs of anger and resentment for years prior to the pilot, it not only suggests that this is true of Walter, it suggests it’s true of anyone watching. Given the chance, aren’t there old slights you would viciously repay, money or power you would grab? Recognize me, Walter cries at every turn, with every brazen action he takes, and it might as well be the cry of a modern American, ground down by a system that seems designed to keep things rigged.
Breaking Bad first aired in 2008, on the cusp of the Great Recession, and its story progressed very little beyond that point. It is steeped in a world where some people were getting lots and lots and lots, and other people were continually getting stiffed. And in those circumstances, is it any wonder that somebody might reach out and take what he felt was rightfully his?
The problem that
Breaking Bad recognized is that once you start taking, it’s difficult to stop. Even Skyler, who so loathed her husband and what he’d become, started to get used to the trappings of luxury, to the comfort of wealth. This made the final season—both halves of it—at times punishingly difficult to watch. Sure, there were highs—like that train robbery in
episode five—but they were always balanced out with ever-deeper lows, with moments that existed seemingly just to gut-punch the audience whenever it might start rooting for Walt again. The final season asked viewers to locate the place in themselves where they once connected to Walt, then realize just how far he had fallen, then realize that every person has this sort of darkness within them. In practice, it resembled the concept of original sin. All fall short, not just of the glory of God, but of a better, more loving world.
by Todd VanDerWerff, A.V. Club |
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Image: AMC
