On Breaking Bad

What is it about breaking bad which resonates with the heart of me?  Is it that it is a story which  makes me think more deeply about the nature of good and bad?  Is it that at its core it is about existential crisis, transformation and connection?  Is it that I identify with the main character, Walt, who having lived his life according to other’s rules and doing what is expected has lived a canned life and yearns to break free?  Yes, yes and yes.

Walt, in facing his death to lung cancer, is freed to do what he previously feared, live life on his own terms, according to his own values.  It freed him to embrace himself.  The journey begins when Walt leaves his job as a high school chemistry teacher and part time car wash attendant to become a methamphetamine cook, a profession which will allow him to leave behind the legacy of having been a good provider for his wife and children.  He “breaks bad”.  Three of the primary, but not only, complex relationships Walt has are with his wife, his DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank, and his assistant cook and former degenerate high school student, Jessie.  It is through these relationships that we witness Walt’s transformation and the blossoming of his authentic self.  

Through the course of the show, Walt changed from a man claiming to do what he did out of self-sacrifice for his family, into a man who acknowledged to his wife what few of us can - that his deeds were done to fulfill his own needs.  This makes Walt for me, not only sympathetic, but a hero.  In contrast, Hank’s shallowness of insight and affection left me ambivalent towards his demise.  It was Walt’s grief at Hank’s death which moved my sympathies more than the death itself.  

Walt had been a hero to his teenaged son when living a life of pretense.  This was shattered in the end and never mended.  However, Walt gained a son in Jessie, someone who saw, accepted and I believe loved Walt for who he was. We see in the final scene of the last episode that Jessie, who could never do anything right in the beginning, became for Walt a beloved son that he was proud of.  In the end, Walt achieved that which I desire - an authentic life fully lived.