A METH-od to his Madness

Sunday, July 17th, marks the return of television's greatest crime drama. And if you consider yourself a fan of episodic TV crime drama, then you are undoubtedly aware that the above reference is to the darkly brilliant and wholly engrossing AMC show "Breaking Bad," a tour de force of desperate characters and unbelievable events that has only gained considerable momentum with the passing of each of its three seasons.

I shouldn't have to break you off with the "spoiler alert" warning if you're already this far in, but let's make it official. If you haven't peeped the manuscript, avert your eyes, because lots of plot points from past episodes need to be revealed here.

First of all, it would be boring and a waste of time for you to read some lengthy fan-boy dissertation about how fantastic this show is, how solid the acting is, or how much it sucks you in and convinces you to root for characters you would rather not piss on if they were set ablaze.

If you're a fan of the show you already know all about what makes BB great, and have your own well-formed (or perhaps not so well-formed) opinions. If you're not a fan of the show and haven't seen it, you're likely either scrolling past this section, or more realistically, muttering to yourself "Who the hell is the Player President and why does he call himself that" while hitting the 'back' button on your web page and looking for someone who you may actually have heard of before.

Either way, I would prefer to delve into something a tad juicier. Perhaps a topic not so easily dissected - much like that first frog in freshman Biology (or something you did in Chemistry - cue Mr. Walter White in ugly smock and safety goggles!)

I would love to explore for a bit, if I may, the much-debated aspect of how the show forces us to consider morality, how easily skewed our sense of right and wrong can become by mitigating circumstances, and perhaps most importantly, whether the show's central character Walter White - portrayed flawlessly these past three seasons by the uber-talented Bryan Cranston - orchestrated his manifestation into "a bad guy."

I use the "quotes" because I'm not entirely sure if I would even classify Mr. White as such, crazy as though that may sound to both casual and hardcore viewers of the show alike.

Pop culture philosopher extraordinaire Chuck Klosterman has constructed an intriguing take on Breaking Bad, comparing it to three other highly acclaimed TV dramas from the past decade (Mad Men, The Sopranos and The Wire). As riveting a read as this is, I find myself to be in at least mild disagreement with the viewpoint that Walter White at some point "changed himself" and decided "to become bad."

I'm not even sure what this means, really. Are we to believe that anyone wakes up one day and consciously wills himself/herself to begin committing morally questionable actions from that point onward? Even if the argument is such that this is a gradual transformation, it seems a questionable theory at best. Behaving "bad" or "good" isn't any more of a choice within us than whatever it is that exists in our brains and causes us to decide we might prefer mozzarella cheese over American, or that we may rather blue over green. It's all hard-wired within us before we can even ponder the question.

When I view Walter White, I see a man who opened a series of doors over the course of the show with a noble initial goal - to provide for his family after what appeared at the time to be his imminent demise. It is this choice, coupled with White's backstory, that has placed him into the position we find him during the gripping conclusion of Season 3 - hastily ordering the murder of an innocent man to save his own hide. (And if you think you wouldn't ever do the same thing if your own ass was on the line, you may not know yourself as well as you think you do).

My point is this -- folks like Walter White who color inside the lines for their whole lives cannot become something they aren't any more so than Marlo Stanfield from The Wire can put on a business suit, hobnob with city officials and stay off the streets. But what they can do is awaken something within themselves they didn't know was there when desperate times call for desperate measures. This isn't so much a reflection of a conscious decision to change as it is letting your body and brain take over naturally to accomplish goals that you see as needing to be realized, without any other option.

To give you a microcosmic example, I've observed behavior in New York City from people who would never otherwise need to exhibit such actions to get ahead, or even 'tread water', just about anywhere else in the country, geographically speaking. But because they are in New York and are subject to the unwritten rules and laws of such a hyper, Type-A mentality and culture, they do what they have to do or else they'll never get anywhere. And I'm not just talking about in the corporate world either. It can be as innocuous as getting the spot you want on a crowded subway car, or using just the right blend of assertiveness and politeness to get a table at the crowded restaurant with amazing food but horrible customer service skills.

Walter White finding out that a terminal disease was about to claim him from a meekly-lived, routine existence was the catalyst to awaken within him that which was always present, but just lying there dormant.

Does anyone think he took some crazy pills one day to transform himself into somebody that willingly allows young female drug addicts to choke to death on their own vomit with nobody else around to stop it, or the guy who barrels his modest middle-class automobile into a pair of wasteoid drug dealers before planting some liquid steel into their heads to finish the job with the no-doubt-about-it killshot?

Let's look back on just a few examples of some of the more heinous acts Walt has committed, and we will soon realize he only did so out of self-preservation.

1) Putting in a fake call for DEA agent Hank about his wife Marie being involved in an auto accident to throw the investigation off the scent and buy Walt and Jesse more time when they were about to get busted in the RV? Self-preservation.

2) Allowing Jane to choke on her puke? Self-preservation. Remember, she threatened to expose Walt if he and Jesse wouldn't agree to cut her in on their profits, even though she was doing nothing to deserve any of those funds (other than being the subject of Jesse's unwavering love and affection).

3) Barrelling into those lowlifes and then caving in their brains with some hot lead when they were about to waste Jesse? Okay, not completely an act of self-preservation, but you could extrapolate that it actually was just that since Jesse is as important to Walt's current position as anyone else, and he needs him as a No. 2.

4) Phoning Jesse and imploring him to rush over to Gabe's house and "do the deed" is the ultimate act of self-preservation, and it was about as calculated as what you do when a line drive is screaming at your dome. It was the ONLY option for Walt to survive that situation, and he definitely wasn't thinking about it on his way over to the laundry facility to meet up with Hitman Mike, you best believe that shit.

There are certainly other examples. And look, let's not fool ourselves into believing that Walt doesn't make less hasty but still conscious choices that harm others on a daily basis (cooking meth that destroys lives and no doubt causes an untold myriad of individuals to overdose on his intoxicating brand of crystal heaven). But it's much easier to rationalize actions that harm others when the negative consequences and suffering of nameless, faceless individuals isn't presented before us as a direct result of the dark choices that we make. If anyone reading this can honestly say they've never performed an action - whether minor or major - that hurt someone else knowing that nobody could trace it directly back to them, then I can point you to a polygraph waiting impatiently to strike said person with a closed fist of skepticism.

Finally, I've seen others posit that the show builds itself around the concept that the main character, or "protagonist," transforms from a likeable to an unlikeable character, and that to do this is a crazy move on the part of the writers/show creators.

For me, quite the contrary. I think Walt has become more likeable since the show has started. In season one, when we see Walt working a shitty second job in a car wash and being berated by some of his obnoxious students, or when we later find out how he was once such a brilliant, promising scientist who should have made more of himself but was screwed over by more opportunistic "colleagues," we just feel bad for him.

It's with careful examination that we learn that Walt doesn't so much as "become bad" as he decides to stop letting life kick him in the balls time after time when it becomes apparent that the fuse that is his life is about to be snuffed out anyway by a terminal illness.

How can you not root for him when he leg-bombs that dickhead jock making fun of his kid that has Cerebral Palsy? How can you not identify with him when he flips out at the asshole car wash boss and quits in a fit of self-satisfied but somewhat justifiable rage? How could you possibly not want Walt to come out on top against these lowlifes around him who would be selling meth and jacking people up for a high regardless of what was happening around them?

The difference between Walt and someone who is "bad" is that Walt wouldn't fuck with a regular citizen under any circumstance. If you didn't already have it coming, you weren't going to get yours from Walt. Well, unless you become hooked on meth and send yourself into an irreversible downward spiral as a result of your addiction to Walt's blue-powdered candy. But even then, you can't blame your choices or addictions on an individual you never met before. Are we really so naive as to believe that someone else's meth wouldn't be killing people if Walt's product wasn't on the street?

We continue to root for Walt and his morally ambiguous choices not just because Cranston does such a wonderful job at evoking sympathy for his character's plight (that's part of it).

I would like to believe that we continue to root for Walt because he embodies what we all would love to believe is right and just in the world - and that is the story of a man who gets kicked to the ground by a gang of cowardly bitches (i.e. life pushing you around), picked back up, and then kicked back down again for some more abuse before saying "fuck it" and unleashing a holy hell's worth of vengeance on everything around you that's trying to stop your progress.

Breaking Bad is the story of a lot of different things, and a lot of different philosophical and morally debatable questions.

But above all else, I like to think that it's the story of a man who was always capable of anything, but behaved like a good citizen until being a good citizen just wasn't cutting it anymore.

Love or hate what Walt is becoming, what you should love is the fact that his "taking shit from people" days are long behind him.

The true brilliance of Breaking Bad is how we can find ourselves hoping that characters like Walt and Jesse can keep this ridiculous streak going. If heading into Season 4 we were supposed to be starting to hate Walt right about now, mission failed. I hate Pollos and Hitman Mike 10 times more than I hate Walt at the moment, and I don't even really hate those guys.

The only way I could hope that Walt actually fails or gets taken down is if he were to start sacrificing the citizenry who have no real place in all this ugliness. That's when someone has lost all control of their faculties (see the story about Pablo Escobar taking down a commercial airliner full of innocent people because he wanted to kill one guy who was found to not even have been ON THE PLANE!).

But who knows, this show is so unbelievably good that maybe even that wouldn't be enough for me to jump off the U.S.S. Walter White.