With the final episode of one of the most viewed and talked about shows
in television history having aired on September 29, 2013, Breaking Bad brought an end to its captivating,
haunting, brutally stark story. It is
the story of a man named Walter White - a high school chemistry teacher who,
when he discovers that he has inoperable lung cancer and perhaps a year to
live, makes the horrible choice of putting his chemist’s skills to use by
making crystal-meth in the hopes of earning a large sum of money fast enough to
beat the clock on his own mortality so that his family is provided for after he
is gone. But, the choice to take a step
over the line and into the darkness proves fateful as he is drawn deeper and
deeper into the death-drenched underworld that crawls out of its pit and tears
his own normal world apart.
I must admit, the subject is quite dark and disturbing, but it is also
such an honest look at reality that it deserves notice, even if it is a notice
that is accompanied by a warning. I was
first alerted to the show at a “Story Seminar” by renowned screenplay writer
Robert McKee, who lamented at one point in his lectures about the lack of good
storytelling in the current slate of movies.
The bright side, according to McKee, was that good story-telling was
making a comeback on TV and that the best-told, best-acted story out there was Breaking Bad. So I watched the first four or five episodes
from Season One on DVD. Pardon the pun,
but soon I was addicted, despite the fact that I found myself quite upset at
the graphic nature of this morbid saga.
But, then again, the story-teller, Vince Gilligan, refused to make it
pretty. This business of drugs and
addiction-for-profit is an ugly, dangerous world and tragic things happen often
in such a place. Indeed, the premise of
the show, according to Gilligan, was that not everyone goes to heaven. Some people are so bad, they deserve to go to
Hell.
There is so much to say about a show with such depth of characters and
plot and reality, that one post will not do it justice. Nevertheless, I would like to pose a few
gleanings from this story that, despite the anti-hero plot, falls somewhere
within the larger story of God.
·
Gleaning #1: Sin cannot be toyed with! Like many of the Coen Brothers
movies (e.g. Fargo, True Grit), once the main character begins entering into
the world of darkness and sin, he or she finds that you do not simply step back
out without being in some way marred…or killed.
Walt’s ultimate motives do not make his choices any less ignoble
(indeed, he admits that his motives changed and were quite selfish by the end). To help his family, he ends up destroying his
family and even getting his brother-in-law killed. By the time it is over, Walt has so much
blood on his hands that he is inescapably condemned by even the most loyal of
viewers who find sympathy for his character.
Every time Walt tries to walk away, he is pulled back in by some loose
end. Such is the sinister trap of sinful
choices. We think we can control it, but that is a naïve and foolish estimation
on our part. Like an insect struggling
to get free from a spider’s web, sin will always entangle us more troublingly
and complexly than we can imagine.
·
Gleaning #2: All of us have that darkness in us! One of the striking
features in Breaking Bad is that
almost none of the characters were wholly good.
With the exception of his infant daughter Holly and his son, Flynn (Walt
Jr.), Walt’s sin begins to turn those around him as well. His wife, Skyler, becomes involved in money
laundering. Walt’s impact on his
assistant “cook”, Jesse - a former student of his - is to draw him even deeper
into this horrible pit. Hank is a
relentless pursuer of crime, but he has an edge of arrogance to him. And the baby-faced sociopath, Todd, tells us
that evil sometimes has the most innocent of faces. This is a hard reality to confront, but we
tend to avoid looking at the ugly underbelly of our souls because sometimes it
is too painful to see just how selfish, how thoughtless, how vindictive we can
be.
·
Gleaning #3: There are glimpses of a world that once was juxtaposed
with the present prison of awful choices!
In the last episode, we have a tragically tender
scene involving Jesse as he flashes back to a time before drugs and murder and
the crushing weight of guilt that lies across his slim shoulders. Before the “fall”, we see Jesse doing what he
once loved - working with wood. We see
him skillfully and carefully sanding and staining a box that he had alluded to
in one of the early seasons of the show.
His gentle smile, as he enjoys the simple pleasure of beauty, is
suddenly scrubbed away as he jumps back to the present by the cable that keeps
him in the lab, slavishly cooking meth for Todd and the Aryan Brotherhood. As the cable goes taut and jerks him backwards,
he is yanked back to reality, cruelly reminded that he no longer lives in that
one-time world of shalom. That world is
gone now. His choices have violently thrown
him down, literally, into a pit from which there is no escape. Sometimes, our busyness distracts us from
this similar reality, though admittedly, most do not live in a dungeon so
stark. Yet, we do carry the pain of a
thousand little choices that sink us deeper into the hole of sorrow and regrets
and brokenness. But then we have those
momentary glimpses of a world that once was, and a cruel reminder that such a
world no longer exists. It too is gone
and now we live here - in the midst of broken relationships and cancer diagnoses
and betrayal and innocent childhoods stolen.
·
Gleaning #4: Gilligan is wrong.
It’s not that some deserve Hell.
It’s that all deserve Hell! The end of the show comes when the bullet that Walt took while
shielding Jesse from a remote-control gatling gun in the trunk of his car
finally takes his life. Everyone is
dead. Jesse has fled. And Walt stands for a moment alone in the
shadowy, empty meth lab in the Aryan Brotherhood’s compound, kindly patting the
stainless steel of one of the vats when the loss of blood finally catches up to
his state of consciousness and he falls to the floor dead while Badfinger’s
song, “Baby Blue” intones the very first lyrics of the song - “I guess I got
what I deserved…”. Gilligan
apparently assumes that God grades on a curve and that if you are REALLY bad,
then you go to Hell. The truth is, we
are all much badder than we think and God’s laws do not allow for mulligans and
bad deeds with good intentions. All have
sinned, say the Psalms and the letter to the Romans, and all (me and you) deserve
punishment, not just the Walter Whites of the world. Clint Eastwood’s character (Will Munny) in Unforgiven had it closer when one of his
fellow assassins declared that the men they killed for a bounty at least “got
what they had comin’”. “We all got it
comin’, kid”, Munny grumbles between swigs of whiskey.
· Gleaning #5: Even in this dark story, there is redemption and salvation! All great hero
stories end with the hero either offering his (or her) life for another’s life
or actually making the ultimate sacrifice.
And even in this anti-hero movie, in the end, Walter White brings a
certain measure of justice and salvation to those who would threaten his family
and even Jesse, whom he saves at the cost of his own life. Splintered as the story of Christ is in such
a macabre tale, there it is - one man giving his life to save others. Jesse is pulled out from the pit and freed. Skyler, Flynn, and Holly will no longer have to
look over their shoulders in fear because Walt has sacrificially removed all
danger from those who would do them harm.
Those are the basics of the cross, after all - that Jesus removed the
fear of death, disarmed the enemies which would threaten us, pulling us out of
our dark pits and into the light and into freedom!! Walter White was a very fractured picture of
Jesus, but in the end, even the anti-hero displays for us the ultimate Hero.
What I found missing in this tale was the potential for
forgiveness. Walt neither asked for it, nor
did anyone offer it. Skyler likewise
struggles to ask for her sister’s forgiveness, though the sister offers a truce
at the end despite Skyler’s participation in activities that led to her
husband’s murder. Sadly, such an
omission is the gaping hole in the story, for just as all deserve Hell, all are
offered forgiveness. We can never be
good enough to make God love us anymore, but we cannot ever be bad enough to
escape His grace.
Despite this missing
piece, I am grateful that Breaking Bad spoke truth about how bad “bad” really
is while opening the door for those who know God’s over-arching story of
redemption to fill in the blanks of God’s love and a world of shalom that will
one day be restored through Jesus Christ, His self-sacrifice on the cross and
His death-defying resurrection! Such a
story invokes a turnaround of sorts for those who are pulled from the pit of
their own destructive decisions. Maybe
we could call it, “Breaking Good”.
