I’m tempted to call this document an essay, an elaborate dictation from my deepest thoughts etc etera blah, and since to call it an ‘essay’ would be demeaning in any sense, I simply choose to call it a Scribble. So Scribble #1 here will be about the reasons why Breaking Bad is one of the few decent shows left on television.
It was sometime in the spring or summer of last year that I initially sat down with wife Ashley, and friends Brett and George to watch the first pilot episode of Breaking Bad, a show I had only heard about and hadn’t taken the time or effort to see beings how television had ceased to be a part of my daily life. Television hasn’t been completely lost on me. I admit to downloading old Mission Impossible episodes, The Twilight Zone and just for the sick fun of watching horrible actors flub up their lines, a healthy diet of Dark Shadows - this was (and for the most part, is) the extent of my media watching.
I saw Breaking Bad the first time in what used to be our study and has since been turned into a recording studio since we are all songwriting musicians. At the time it was a study we had set up the room for lounging, smoking, drinking tea, listening to music, watching movies and at times recording, which is all we do in that room now. We had set up the big screen laptop on a small table hooked up to a pair of reliable speakers for the benefit of theatrically thundering through. It was a deep twilight evening and by the end of the first episode the sky outside was darkened down completely and I was left pacing the floors that night wondering about my artistic life.
Every now and then I believe that we as human beings are reminded of who we are, I mean exactly who we are, a realization profound enough leading ultimately (or hopefully) to acceptance, the idea of who we are becoming so finite and so clear that very little if any thought is put into changing who we are. I had come to a point in December of 2010 where I finally, after 30 years of writing songs, decided that once and for all, I was and am a songster (or songwriter if the reader prefers, but songster sounds bad ass whilst ‘songwriter’ is an overdone term like ‘recording artist’).
It all happened Christmas night, December 25th, 2010 I would be staring up at the ceiling of Jeremy Holan’s basement where I was living with my son Max realizing it was fruitless studying to be a nurse, that I needed to stick to day job work and pursue the muse to it’s ‘what-have-you’ ending. There was no other way. Whether I fully accepted this fact or not, a songster is what I am, and it was entirely too late to start on anything else and besides, there’s nothing in this world I do better than write songs.
By the spring/summer of 2012 I had altogether accepted this fact with the help of my wife Ashley and the enduring support of my friends in the Omaha area. I was enjoying my life a day at a time but always a bit restless when it came to the art of songs and playing out. I had my day job as a CNA at Brookstone Nursing Home, a rewarding but often times grueling job and while it was becoming clear to me that I needed to step in more to this acceptance having dawned on me two years prior, I had very little if any clue as to how to start. Maybe it was simply that I needed to pursue things differently, ‘with extreme prejudice’, as the saying goes, but this hadn’t occurred to me as of yet until I saw the pilot episode of Breaking Bad.
It was Brett Vovk who strongly urged me to watch the show, claiming that it was one of the best shows on television. Brett is one of the more brilliant songsters I know who was living with us at the time up on the third story. He was rarely ever in his room for all that. For some reason I think Brett already knew before I watched the show that Breaking Bad would appeal to me. I was fairly reluctant to watch the show. The last thing I needed with my busy schedule was to engage myself in a television show where the only relief would be to show up the following week and dumbly stare at the screen to ‘see what happens next’.
So it was a surprise to me when we finally sat down to watch it, me feeling like I was partly indulging Brett, that the very first scene is a pair of middle aged man slacks floating gracefully through the air until hitting the ground to be run over by an old 1970-80’s RV. The scene flips to the interior of the vehicle showing Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) with a younger man sitting passenger, unconscious, (Jesse, played by Aaron Paul) both of them having gas masks on. As the the vehicle swerved violently back and forth from one side of the dirt road to the next, it becomes apparent that there are two dead bodies in the back of the RV swaying with the motion of the vehicle in ankle deep chemicals and floating garbage. The whole scene captured me right away.
I found out later that the show was written by Vince Gilligan, writer and producer for at least 26 episodes of The X Files, many of those X Files episodes including RV’s in the plot of the show. It would take an entirely new essay (or scribble) to elaborate on how this television writer/producer went from space aliens, vampires and dark menacing government conspiracies to writing about a chemistry teacher who takes up cooking meth after he finds out he’s dying of cancer. In less than twenty years, we’ve gone from quotes like ‘the truth is out there’ to ‘say my name’ as sort of a parting volley to the old ways of perceiving the country and times we live in.
I’ll return to the floating pants image by pointing out that the kind of pants a man wears says a lot about him. The pants in this scene were bland work-a-day slacks any business professional in the white collar world would wear, perhaps leaning more towards ‘teacher’ pants or ‘computer programmer’ pants, khakis that were at one time cool to wear in America when Clark Gable or Jack Kerouac wore them now reduced to signify dull everyday comfort work pants. The reader must remember that I was 42 when I witnessed this scene and while the times in my life of having to wear pants like that have been few, I’ve had to occasionally slip my legs into such pants. Every man from my generation has had to wear those fucking things at one time or another and to see the pants utterly destroyed by the RV at the beginning of the show told me and anyone else watching exactly to what extremes this show was about to take the audience.
The show begins by getting to know Walter White, a man married to an overtly willful woman, father to a young man in high school with MS, having to help his son pull up his own pants in a public dressing room by the second episode of the first season. White is a man entrenched in the crude dynamics of normal ‘every-guy’ kind of life. I liked him right off because of the twinkle in his eye when lecturing chemistry to his students but watching his other daily habits quite frankly made me judge White as being ineffectual and even a smidge pathetic. Me, being a 40 something songwriter only recently having signed some of my songs to a music publisher, and my own job as CNA (certified nurse’s assistant) a rewarding job that only pays about as much as Walter White’s second job working at a carwash to implement his income, I realized right off that while I found Walter White to be pathetic, I could scarcely tell the difference between him and I. Reason being, if he had such a passion for chemistry as was obviously apparent, what was he doing working a car wash and living at home under the insistent thumb of his wife Skyler? I have to wonder if other people watching this show around the world, particularly men between the ages of 40 and 60 were relating to White the same way I was. How many people out there have an incredible talent and passion for one thing and that one thing only leads them to a mundane spineless life of day jobs and meager expectations? I don’t know. I didn’t see myself as being pathetic or spineless until I watched the first 30 minutes of the show, and then something happened that to this day changed my entire course of action towards the lifestyle I accepted back in 2010.
There’s a scene in the pilot episode where we see a close up of Walter White’s face with the paneling of the RV in back of him and bullets rip from the inside of the vehicle next to his head and he yelps. It was at this split second right as Bryan Cranston yelps a truly academy / emmy award winning yelp of pure ragged out of control fear that I thought to myself ‘Oh my God, I’m 42 and I need to start making decisions with my art as though it will profit me someday, whether it profits or not’. If it’s a songster I am, then I best start taking some risks, even crazy risks to make the artistic part of my life happen before it’s too late.
In months to come my family would come into enough money from a haphazard car accident after the insurance pay-off for me to take some time off of work altogether and at the time, the idea was to write a novel during my free time, which I started. But not only did I start writing a serious novel, I recorded my ass off on the new Doneofits album and somehow managed to land my first and only music publishing deal. By the end of 2012 even more money came in from a pension I had filled out for ----------, the good old boy company I slaved at for 13 years. They made a deal with me to give up the rest of my retirement now rather than wait until I’m 65 to receive a meager pointless $250 dollars a month for the rest of my natural life. They cut me a check for 6,000 dollars and I extended my novel writing time from 6 months to almost a year. During that whole time I watched the rest of Breaking Bad seasons 1-5 whenever I had the time. And like the rest of the country, when all seasons were watched I waited anxiously for the second half of season five, the grand finale, to arrive.
During the whole crazy period of time I took writing a novel and recording an album, I always remembered that scene from the first episode, the gunshots exploding from the inside of the RV and Cranston’s yelp as the bullets missed him by inches. I've now learned to take some crazy risks, risks very few other 40 something year olds are taking. It has benefitted me greatly and my kids too, for that matter, not that my personal life is the reader's business.
What might be the readers beeswax are the other less personal implications and comparisons that stem from this show, for example, what the show says about villains throughout literature and consequences of actions within our daily lives. I'll start with a Shakespeare comparison - obviously (at least to me anyway) the perfect comparison is Richard III.
Walter White starts an almost admirable attempt to make extra money for his family through cooking and selling meth but what he ends up doing is falling into the Machiavellian trap of not only having to attain the money itself, but having to maintain the power that he's accumulated in order to keep his money. There is no place where the buck stops at the happy sunset rosy hued ending. Once your in, your in to stay and if not realized soon enough, the consequences can be deadly.
Before I make a grand comparison between Richard III and Breaking Bad I need to point out that I never believed for one second, even during the pilot episode, that Walter White was cooking meth to leave a financial legacy for his family before he dies. In seasons to come it is revealed by Walter himself that he's not in the meth business, "I'm in the empire business" to quote him directly. And perhaps what makes White so pathetic before he visits the doctor to find out he's dying leading to all the monstrous events to come is that once reminded of his mortality White is left staring at his hands with only one answer to "What have I done with my life?" and the answer is the worst of all answers - "I've done nothing." Walter White has to have an empire to fill the giant hole of "I should have ..." just as Shakespeare's character Richard III needs an empire to fill up holes in his own life by constantly missing his chance for the crown. It is a deep hole to fall in and breeds an evil in the conflict of self versus self. It brings characters to lonely spots that few human beings ever realize or understand. On with the comparison ...
Richard III is a deformed hunchback in Shakespeare's play, a villain from the second he mutters the words 'Tis the winter of our discontent turned glorious summer with this _______' I see Walter White's pathetic bland existence before cooking meth as being exactly the same thing as Richard's deformity. He (White) never wears the working class hero mask very well. We hate to see him cower under the Nixon eye browed boss at the carwash when the boss insists White clean car tires when there were no customers at the register. There is potential for an audience to feel compassion for Richard when seeing his deformity as much as there is a kind of empathy for Walt at the car wash, but empathy is over ridden with a sense of low-dog pity, the beginning of seeing someone or something as being pathetic and low, even cowardly versus heroic or having any attributes to feel empathy for. Both men start out by feeling cheated out of a legacy they believed should've been theirs, the most obvious fact being who really deserves an empire anyway? Their patheticness turns into a rouse, their mask and camouflage to hide the moment they choose to strike.
There are obvious comparisons between the two - Richard III has his nephew killed in the tower so no one will take his crown. White poisons the child of Jesse's girlfriend in order to deceive Jesse into supporting him against Gus Frank. When White kills Frank it feels no different than Richard III killing Hastings or Clarence.
It is just as important to note how White is nothing like Macbeth. When I used to work stuffing envelopes and scanning documents for _____ I had plenty of time to listen to audio books and taped lectures of professors going on and on as to how Richard III is a different villain altogether from Macbeth. The illusions and comparisons were obvious, even trivial. I find it hard to believe that a professor can make as much money as they willingly do to merely point out the obvious - that Macbeth's tragedy is one based on a Crime and Punishment regret, and Richard's tragedy is in his greed for power and the lengths he goes to maintain it become the instruments of his undoing. But when was the last time it came easy to compare a 20th century villain to any Shakespeare character? I can't remember.
White is nothing like Macbeth because White is never really a victim. Macbeth is a victim of his shitty choices from the onset, a prisoner of his own nightmarish guilts and fears resulting from his wife's greed-addled advice and Macbeth kills Duncan the king even though the man had sincere reservations about murdering Duncan. Richard III nor Walter White have room in their hearts for a monologue like 'is this a dagger I see before me' I get the idea that were Richard or White in need of a dagger they would willingly kill woman or child just to have one. You get the feeling that at one time, Macbeth would have had nothing to do with murdering Duncan, so while he is a villain, he is a villain an audience can empathize with to a degree much the same way a reader of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment can relate to the murderer ________ _______.
There is something of Melville's Captain Ahab monomania going on with Richard and White, that is to say they are men turned to mechanisms whose sole purpose is to appease a single minded fruitless obsession.
Vince Gilligan has given the American public a story so tight and fantastically arranged that it could only be an immense success given the right actors and film crew to take on the subject. But what Gilligan has also given the public is a moral tale about consequences. In fact Gilligan has even stated to the public that the plot and character development are strictly based on the idea that for every action we take there are consequences that affect others, therefore leaving no doubt of Breaking Bad's obvious moral ramifications. However as all great tragedies tend to do in both English and American literature, the writing leaves open the idea that it is up to the individual in a mass audience to decide for themselves what consequences they can or cannot live with and that while Richard III was given an extra hellish amount of evil to make the reign of Elizabeth I seem better than what it was, it was also the most popular play in England and Richard the most talked of villain in Shakespeare's time. Hence it is no wonder that Breaking Bad has been lauded as one of the best television programs ever, certainly dwarfing the current sludge programs we have running on television at all hours. And for me, Breaking Bad has proven to be a motivator, a fire under my ass and reminder that in life there are times when consequences of inaction can be far worse than those consequences resulting from action at the right time.
After all, if Walter White only dabbled with the idea of cooking meth and never did anything to appease his monomania, you'd have a pathetic man and no story at all whereas the tragedy of Breaking Bad as it was with Richard III is that we all respect the villain behind their atrocities and evil doings more than we'll ever respect that which we pity and find pathetic. We are beings capable of elevating even the very worst in our characters and I think this says something magnificent about us as human creatures waiting for the chance to definitely question 'say my name' and when it is said, to reply 'your god damn right!'
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(written before the second half of the 5th season started running - I still hold to the opinions after watching the majority of the final season)
