This is my first post. It’s really long. It’s not any kind of introduction. And it contains all kinds of spoilers. Apologies all around.
I’ve been talking a lot about Breaking Bad lately, for obvious reasons. I love to talk BB, and can go on for hours. And there’s one particular part that I’m pretty obnoxious about. No matter whom I’m talking to about the show, I always find a way to work in the fact that Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, was raised Catholic. I’m shameless. It’s like claiming a prize. He’s my winning lotto ticket…and the numbers are my GPS coordinates to AWESOME. There’s some kind of redemption for me in knowing that my favorite writer/director/show creator was raised in the same faith as I was, and claims that his upbringing bears upon the moral universe of Walter White and all the folks unfortunate enough to know him. I feel validated. Yes, I know that Gilligan no longer calls himself a Catholic, but I don’t even care. After having to field a ton of criticism levied at the Catholic Church for its questionable morality, I am thrilled to share the moral roots of what is not only the best show on TV, but the most moral.
Some might question the description of Breaking Bad as a moral show, given the fact that it depicts some of the most immoral acts ever to hit your television screen. Poisoning a little boy? Killing a kid on a dirt bike? Letting a woman choke on her own vomit? These are not the acts of moral people, and they rival the darkest deeds of anyone on Dexter or The Sopranos. Yet I believe that Breaking Bad as a show makes a far more impressive statement about humanity than either of those shows, or any other show on premium cable. Gilligan and his all-star writing staff have gone where Homeland and Mad Men and all the other antihero-centric dramas have refused to go; they have taken the now-standard antihero, and placed him in a thoroughly moral universe.
The action-reaction theme of chemistry is the ground from which all aspects of Breaking Bad grow and develop; even as Walt and Jesse are mixing the chemicals that will form the molecular structure of methamphetamine, the world surrounding Walt reacts in equal measure to the actions he inflicts upon it. The reactions themselves are dispassionate: the plane crash at the end of season 2 is a natural (albeit all-but-unbelievably coincidental) outcome of the events that have preceded it. Yet, unlike aluminum sulfate or methylamine, the reactions are personal, because they involve people. Walt’s responses to the tragic and deadly events that transpire in response to his choices vary as the seasons progress. He weeps even as he allows Jane to die in season 2, and later in season 3, he expresses his remorse over that choice to Jesse. Yet by the time we get to the end of season 4, he poisons a child and apparently doesn’t give it a second thought. “When we do what we do for good reasons,” he says coaxingly to his terrified wife Skylar in season 5, “we don’t have to feel bad about it. And there’s no better reason than family.”
Walt is able to justify his actions. However, we the audience are not. Vince Gilligan differs greatly from his contemporaries in his refusal to pull any punches as to the morality of Walt’s actions. At the very start of the show, the audience can certainly feel the pain of Walt’s plight, and see how he could enter into the meth business. But by the time we meet encounter Gilligan’s deus ex machina in the shape of Walt’s friends Gretchen and Elliot, and watch him refuse their offer to pay for his treatment, we know that the financial security and safety of his family is not his first priority. And it’s all downhill from there; by the end of the series, Walt’s gone to the ultimate limits of evil actions. One of the perverse pleasures of watching Breaking Bad is the way we brace ourselves for the next atrocity. He poisoned a child…how could you top that in terms of evildoing? They’re not gonna actually kill a kid, are they? Oh, my God, they totally did!
Gilligan’s moral world is brought into sharper focus by the characters that surround Walt, particularly Hank and Jesse. Both serve as foils, as both represent integrity and conscience. At the start of the show, Hank comes off full of swagger and hot air, yet he actually has a lot of integrity. In one of the show’s most intimate scenes, Hank acknowledges his failings and admits to his wife that he’s not capable of doing what the job requires. “I’m not the man I thought I was,” he says. This moral honesty, this ability to see himself for who he is, stands in stark contrast to Walt’s consistent pattern of self-deception. When he tells Hank in season five, “I’m just a dying man who runs a car wash,” you can tell he really believes it. But Hank is really the man that Walt claims to be. He cares for his family; he is a good provider; he will do what it takes to make sure the people he loves are okay. Walt claims these same motivations, but he consistently acts in direct contradiction, and therefore deprives his family of security and safety. We the viewers are privy to both, and recognize the moral superiority of Hank.
Speaking of moral superiority…poor, poor Jesse Pinkman. Jesse may not be so much a foil to Walt as he is a scapegoat, the whipping boy who absorbs all the punishment meted out for Walt’s crimes. By the final episodes of the show, he’s literally a slave to the meth trade, chained up in a lab and forced to work for Nazis. But Jesse has been the moral compass all along. Where Walt’s morality and interpersonal relationships steadily erode over the course of the show, Jesse develops greater capacity for relationship and moral discernment. He loves Jane; he loves Brock; he loves Mike. In a weird way he even loves Walter; he tries to talk him out of the business near the end of the show, and is a true voice of reason amidst Walter’s prideful, resentful rants about Gray Matter. Jesse becomes increasingly connected to the world, while Walt grows more and more removed, until he’s all alone in a cabin in the woods, paying some criminal $10,000 to spend an hour with him.
One could make the argument that being a moral force in the world of Breaking Bad is actually a hazardous trait. After all, Hank winds up killed by the Nazis just as he’s slapping the cuffs on Walt, and Jesse is enslaved for six months. Hey, maybe crime really does pay! Still, Hank and Jesse have an edge on Walt, in that they have something to live for. Marie may be crazy, but she and Hank sure do love each other and support one another; their marriage is diametrically opposed to Walt and Skylar’s. And Hank’s death, though devastating, has a dignity to it. He dies doing what he does best, and faces his killer with a clear conscience.
As for Jesse, the case for redemption may seem harder to make, especially in the wake of Andrea’s murder. By the final episode he’s really been to hell and back, and looks like it. He’ll be PTSD-ing for a long time. Yet there’s something about the last episode, and Jesse’s role in it, that leaves room for hope for him. When Walt gives the gun to Jesse and tells him to shoot him, Jesse declines, and says, “Do it yourself.” In that moment, he does what he wants, instead of what Walt tells him to do. Jesse’s flaw throughout the show has been his susceptibility to be swayed and victimized by those around him, to do what he’s told and pay terrible consequences. In that moment, he chooses not to follow that pattern. Jesse’s final shot shows him driving off to God knows where, laughing and crying and screaming all at the same time. He’s the only one who’s got a chance of escaping. And in the world of Breaking Bad, that’s actually quite a feat.
So is Walter White completely without morality? Is he just dead inside? A case could be made. In the final season, he has become a conglomerate of Shakespeare’s four greatest tragic heroes: he has Macbeth’s ambition, Othello’s envy, Hamlet’s indecision, and Lear’s terror of death. He’s a mess by the last episode, haggard and grizzled and hacking up the last of his lungs. And his actions aren’t any less threatening than they have been. He jerryrigs a machine gun to kill a dozen Nazis, and poisons Lydia with the notorious ricin that’s been hanging around forever. He threatens Gretchen and Elliot into laundering his drug money and getting it to Walt, Jr. (Although I have to admit, after that gross interview they gave on Charlie Rose, I was pretty thrilled to see Walt get back at the Lord and Lady of Gray Matter.)
Yet there is a monumental moment amid all of Walt’s apocalyptic plans. His visit to Skylar is a reconciliation of sorts; he acknowledges how awful their last phone call was, and offers her the GPS coordinates to find Hank and Gomie’s bodies. Obviously he is to blame for their deaths in the first place, but that’s pretty much all he can offer at this point. Most surprisingly, though, at least to me, is his acknowledgment of his true self and his real motivation. He tells Skylar, “All the things I did…I did for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I felt alive.”
I love that scene. It’s so…sacramental. Walt never says “I’m sorry” to Skylar in this scene, and yet it feels like confession to me. It’s the first time Walt has admitted that he wasn’t cooking meth and building his empire for the sake of his family. There’s something about admitting something out loud that makes it more real, more tangible. It’s a moment of integration, when what’s really going on inside Walt matches up with the face he shows the world. It’s too late for that to actually change anything; he goes on to kill the Nazis and accidentally shoot himself in the process, an ironic twist. Is a final moment of honesty enough for real redemption? I don’t think we’re really supposed to know.
Breaking Bad is a tragedy, no doubt about it. I have rewatched the entire series recently, and find myself looking back to certain points in the first and second season, and I actually feel really sad. There’s this one moment where Walt is in the bathroom taking his many medications, one at a time, and he realizes that he’s losing his hair because of his chemo. It’s a really sad moment. After that he shaves his head, which becomes a trademark look for Heisenberg. But I was most moved by that moment of Walt, being a cancer patient, losing his hair, taking his meds, scared they won’t work. In between all the murder and mahem, Breaking Bad is really good at capturing those small moments of people being human. When Walt encounters Jesse for the last time, and sees him in chains, literally enslaved, he meets Jesse’s eyes. You can see a spectrum of emotions in both men in that look: shock, anger, sadness, and finally a connection. And in that moment, Walt decides to save Jesse’s life, when just a minute earlier he’d been ready to kill him.
That’s the trademark of Breaking Bad’s moral code, the part that makes it a morality tale, rather than simply another show about the ambiguity of human life. Most of these shows focus on the notion that people are complicated, no one is all good or all bad, there is no absolute right and wrong, etc. In the end you’re on your own, and you have to figure it out as you go while “Don’t Stop Believing” plays in the background. But in this world of Breaking Bad, there is a right and a wrong, and it’s as clear cut as it can be—it’s Kant’s categorical imperative. You shouldn’t see people as means to ends, but as ends in themselves. That’s the kicker in Breaking Bad. When people connect, when they see each other as real people, there’s hope. When people dehumanize, when they see each other in purely utilitarian terms, there’s despair. Walt’s long dark journey into Heisenberg-ness is not primarily about a good person becoming a bad person. Rather, it’s about humanity, and what happens when you deny it. In “becoming Heisenberg,” Walt dehumanizes himself, denying the reality of what really drives him and why he makes the choices he makes. He dis-integrates his true self from the self he projects, and becomes less than human in the process. With regard to others, as he dehumanizes those around him, he destroys them. He lets Jane die because she’s not a person, she’s a threat. The same goes for Gale, Brock, Gus, Mike…in the end he even puts a hit out on Jesse, and threatens his own wife and son. Conversely, his honesty during his final exchange with Skylar leads to a form of reconciliation, and in offering Jesse the option to kill him (or not), he gives Jesse the opportunity to take agency and assert himself, to make himself feel free.
So Vince Gilligan has become a prophet of personalism, albeit in an unconventional way. When Breaking Bad first came out, Gilligan and the cast and crew were really worried that no one would watch. It’s a strange concept, possibly alienating, and decidedly unglamorous. The show’s popularity was slow coming, but by its end it has become a monumental success with a huge viewership, and people can’t stop talking about it. Could this be something that contemporary audiences were craving? Is it possible that the American public actually wanted a morality tale? I think it’s very possible. We love The Sopranos and The Wire and Mad Men, and enjoy the sojourn into the morally ambiguous lives and worlds of their protagonists. But at the end of the day, which resonates more with us as people? Is it the nihilistic shape-shifting of Don Draper? The sociopathy of Tony Soprano? Or is it the pride that ultimately undoes Walter White? Maybe we’re looking for a morality tale, one that affirms us in our struggles to be human, even as it cautions us that we too carry an inner Heisenberg. I suppose people’s responses vary, and some things resonate more than others. For me, though, with my Catholic heart and my obsession with morality, I find that Breaking Bad is the truest story on TV, maybe ever.
God Shuffled His Feet 