Breaking Bad
I am fifteen years behind in finally watching Breaking Bad, but I have now done it over the past few weeks and I see what all the fuss was about since it was a riveting series. I am a big fan of strong titling and I must admit that this title always intrigued me because it was never clear form the outside exactly what it meant. The implication was that someone (presumably Walter White) was being forced by circumstances to become less and less a good person as he sunk into the world of producing Methamphetamine and becoming a drug dealer. It was such a great series for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was far more multi-dimensional than that simple progression into darkness, something that is developed n many stories ranging from crime stories to addiction stories. People do sink into despair to be sure, but it is rarely a straight line down and Walter White showed us one very important element in this sort of struggle.
Walter was a model citizen. He was well-educated and very much a mainstream Middle Class American. He was a school teacher who was perhaps overqualified, but nonetheless dedicated to uplifting his students. There was a dark side to all of that because his past showed us that he was perhaps destined for greater heights based on his intellect, but like so many in life, the circumstances of life overtook his ambition and he had settled into a pretty mundane existence. Then, his apple cart got overturned by the demon Cancer and he began thinking about his family and their needs in the future. It is that imperative that seems to drive Walter to start cooking Meth, but then the nature of the drug commerce beast quickly drives him into a realm of conflicting moral dilemmas. It may be noble to provide for one’s family, but it is highly questionable if that is at the expense of society in the form of providing drugs that debilitate whole swaths of the population. You can make several arguments about that (note that I don’t feel the show tried to go into this controversial arena), most notably that cooking high-grade Meth is better for drug users than low-grade Meth or Meth that has really bad kickers like Fentanyl. There is also the rather perverse argument that providing product to a market of the most vulnerable in society has not only a libertarian angle to it, but also a bit of a Darwinian angle. But Walter sticks to his mantra of providing for his family and he even sets a bar of some $750,000 as the threshold he needs to achieve to satisfy that presumably justifiable goal.
By contrast there is Jesse, his sidekick who is a Meth user and general gad-about the drug business since he is a minor league dealer. Jesse had been a chemistry student of Walter’s so there we already see the undermining of one of Walter’s pillars of respectability. Is a teacher good if what he teaches can be used for bad? That was my first recognition of the genius of the title Breaking Bad. This reality implies that Walter’s good is being broken into a bad thing as Walter goes from the good side of society into the bad side, despite his rationalization that it was being done for a good cause (his family) to combat something known to be universally bad (Cancer). Jesse, on the other hand shows us very little about his reasons for involvement that are good. He has no family other than his estranged parents, who he seeks to further alienate by cheating them out of their inherited property. He also treats his earnings from the drug trade the way you expect drug dealers to, he throws it around and enables other drug users to the point of despondency. But a funny thing happens to Jesse. He actually starts to grow a conscience somewhat in parallel of Walter’s abandonment of his conscience. As Walter has to jump out of the lab and into the commercial side of this sordid trade, he seems to embrace the challenge and excel at it while Jesse has more and more trouble with the deeds he must perform. Jesse is forever getting beaten up and looking bedraggled by the trade while Walter is getting toughened up by it. He seems to actually get better and better at taking a beating where Jesse seems to get more and more deeply scared, both physically and emotionally.
I am told that Jesse’s character was originally slated for an early demise in the series, but that in the making the producers and directors realized that the contrast and, dare I say it, chemistry between Walter and Jesse was an important element of the theme which should not be lost. Jesse stays with the series for the whole five year run and even escapes at the end to places unknown while Walter does not. Everything Jesse loves gets destroyed in the process and everything Walter loves stays more or less in tact (other than, perhaps, Hank, his DEA brother-in-law, who takes a bullet to the head from the vilest of the vile with a swastika on his neck). This is an interesting twist since as Jesse breaks from bad to good (or at least better) he loses those he loves. By contrast, as Walter breaks from good to bad, he does so to the detriment of everyone else, including several rounds of Mexican cartel drug lords, but manages to bring salvation to his wife and son and even adds a child in the form of his infant daughter, all of whom stay unharmed though a bit worse for wear from the journey. It is this sort of complexity in such a primal arena as good versus evil, made very contemporary by use of the drug trade at the border, that makes for great storytelling. You end up embracing all of these characters with all of their multiple sides to them. You can sense when one is breaking bad or breaking good and that may affect your feelings about them, but you want to see them come through it nonetheless. You want Hank to survive although he doesn’t. You want Jesse to find love although he keeps losing it to violence (notably he is more the victim of violence than Walter even though he eschews it where Walter embraces it).
In the end, we sort of find good triumphing over evil, but not without a realistic and harsh cost to all. Life’s a bitch and then you die. It all leaves us wondering where the lines are since their blurring confuses us throughout the series. Who are we supposed to admire and root for? The most poignant moment to me is when Walter admits to his wife that he did not do this all for his family, he did this all for himself because he excelled at it and revealed in his success, a success that had eluded him in mainstream life, but which he achieved once he broke bad.
On a ridiculously comparable note, my newest pal, Buddy (the 5-pound brown toy poodle), has a distinct case of breaking bad. He is the cutest and sweetest thing to look at, but he is one feisty little guy. From what I can tell he has a sweet and cuddly good side that makes you want to snuggle with him. But when he’s had enough of that, he wants to play and play hard. All dogs like to play tug-o-war with their toys, but Buddy also like to play fight with your hand. He is the size and length of my forearm so my arm is a good match for him and my hand is the foil against which he bites. He is adept enough to only play bite, but with his sharp teeth, this play is right on the edge and when he gets worked up it feels like it will cascade over into a real fight with broken skin. So far, so good, but when that will break bad is hard to say. Buddy also has a third level which I will call the “leave me the fuck alone” level. When he is in that mood (while eating or napping mostly from what I can tell), his snapping seems very un-play-like. So, it seems Buddy is not so different from Walter. He did not grow big and strong like German Sheppard Rex, so he has to grow tough and feisty and must practice his marshal arts on my arm to keep himself poised to attack and is thus always on the verge of breaking bad.