Recently I’ve been listening to a podcast called “The Sci-Fi Christian.” The two hosts are Matt Anderson and Ben De Bono. They talked about the series Breaking Bad. The discussion made me ask myself whether the transformation of Walter White—the “breaking bad” and what followed, was actually a transformation or a revelation. Did Walter White change when he found he had cancer? Or did something that was always there just come out?
Originally I thought that Walter White actually changed. He seemed like such a milquetoast, such a nonentity. Everything about him seemed “normal” and mediocre.
But there are hints that there is more to him. The scene with Gretchen when he was in Grad School and they were talking about the chemical composition of the human body showed a confident, passionate man, far different from the wooden, awkward but impulsive person he had become. As details emerge one finds that Walter White was a genius, but also an embittered man.
The threat of death did not change him. I believe it revealed the bitterness that had become the dominating factor of his life—his resentment in having his work and fame—and love—stolen. That bitterness turned him into a psychopath, someone who thought the rules were for others because he had been treated so unfairly.
Apart from bitterness, Walt sought life in will to power. He characterized his drive as trying to provide for his family, but ultimately the fallacy underlying that characterization became clear. He was talking with Skyler, his wife. He was explaining himself and he said, “I did it because…” and Skyler interrupted him: “Don’t say you did it for your family!” He said, “I did it because I wanted to. I did it because it made me feel alive!”
The problem was that in the face of his death all other life became relativized. No life counted except, ultimately, his own. In seeking life in the face of death, nothing mattered except the feeling of being alive.
He destroyed all lives he touched, or at least put them in danger. He killed Jesse’s girlfriend—by standing by while she died—so that his agenda for Jesse would not be obstructed. He killed the other chemist, Gail—or in the extremity of circumstance had Jesse do it—so that he could live. Hank, his brother-in-law, was crippled, and eventually died, because of his involvement with Tuco. And this is only part of it. Death followed him wherever he went.
And, of course, the entire story was based on his decision to manufacture crystal meth, an addictive substance that destroyed those who used it. And he knew it. When Walt gave up his obsessive attempts to kill a fly that he feared would contaminate their product, Jesse asked, “What about contamination?” He replied, “It’s all contamination.”
In the end, of course, there was a strange kind of redemption; those who mattered to Walt were provided for. But the real point was that Walt got what he wanted. Nothing else really mattered: not truth, not life, not his relationships with anyone.
This series can be compared to a classic Japanese movie, Ikiru (To Live). The story has many elements in common with Breaking Bad. In this movie death became a creative force as a man has his life upended by a diagnosis of cancer.
To that point he had been a bureaucrat in a mind-numbing job. An early scene shows him slowly taking a piece of paper from one pile, gazing at for a moment, stamping it, then placing it in another pile.
But when he finds out he has cancer, he is desperate to find something to make his life meaningful. He meets a young woman and finds inspiration in her—though she finds him creepy at first. They are sitting at a restaurant and he decides to do something, and just at that moment a group celebrating someone’s birthday start singing “Happy Birthday.”
And he finds something to do when some women come to his office to complain about a dirty, crime infested area of their neighborhood. He decides to turn it into a playground for children.
He finds the fact of his quickly approaching death empowering. He simply refuses to take “no” for an answer when he is getting approval for the project. When gangsters try to intimidate him, he simply walks around them. (What can they do to him?)
Near the end, he is shown swinging on a swing in the park in the snow, singing a song called “The Snow Song.” This is an incredibly poignant scene that everyone should see.
The scene fades into his funeral, where his co-workers remember him and vow to emulate him. Then a while later, there is an office scene where someone comes in to ask for help with something and one of the bureaucrats tells the person to go to another department. A co-worker stands up angrily. They all look at him. And he sits back down. After all, they are not dying…they have not been re-born….
Both these works seem to have been inspired by Tolstoy’s famous novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In this story Ivan Ilyich, who is a well-to-do official, falls off a ladder and suffers an internal injury. At first he doesn’t think it is too serious, but as time goes on he feels worse and worse.
However, nobody will tell him the truth about his condition, and he finds that falsehood intolerable. He becomes alienated from everyone except one servant, Gerasim, who will talk to him about the fact that he is going to die. Everyone else, by their refusal to talk about his coming death, distanced themselves from him. Death was something that happened to someone else. Death was not part of the human condition, and though Ivan Ilyich gave the lie to that notion, they could still hold it at bay by denying his death. But because death was the most important fact about Ivan Ilyich, by denying the reality of his coming death they denied him, denied his existence.
The theme of falsehood is central to the story. Everything about everything is false. The position Ivan Ilyich’s father has is false—one given to him to keep him out of trouble because they can’t get rid of him. Ivan himself finds himself trapped in conventionality—going through the motions of working when what he wanted most was to be pitied. He hates the falseness of everyone who is close to him—especially his wife, whose touch becomes loathsome to him. Only the cheerfulness and authenticity of Gerasim comforts him.
At times he considers his life. At one point he asks himself why he was dying the way he was. “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” he thinks. But he discards that thought: “How could that be, when I did everything properly.” He remains trapped in the falsehood of the social conventions by which he lived.
As his torment increases, he is finally forced to the conclusion that he had lived wrongly. Soon after that he dies. (No spoilers here!)
In these three works of art we see three different approaches to death. In Walt’s case, death can only be faced by focusing on his own will. He hopes to live long enough to accomplish everything he wants—though at one point he recognizes that he had already passed “that perfect moment” when it would have been best to die. He fights the universe in a Nietzschian attempt to be the superman. He wins every battle but finally death does him in.
With Ikiru the triumph is one of service to others. His life had been frittered away in meaningless time-serving, but at last he is able to do something worth-while for those around him. And yet the implication seems to be that it will have no lasting effect.
In Ivan Ilyich the webs of falsehood are so thick and ensnaring that Ivan cannot escape them until the very end. Until that moment he is tormented by his inability to come to terms with reality. He struggles fruitlessly, becoming more entangled and tormented, but he finds consolation in the truth brought by love, until he himself is able to embrace it.
“Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more.”