Miley Cyrus isn’t a fan of Breaking Bad, AMC’s much-discussed Emmy winner that wrapped up this past weekend. For one, she thinks Walter White, the show’s cancer-riddled protagonist, coughs too much. But—irony alert—she also thinks the show teaches Americans the wrong sorts of lessons.
“America is just so weird in what they think is right and wrong,” she told Rolling Stone. “Like, I was watching Breaking Bad the other day, and they were cooking meth. I could literally cook meth because of that show.”
Now, I’d not suggest that Cyrus is off base with her criticism here. Breaking Bad has lots of content issues (not the least of which is that whole methamphetamine fixation), and if someone at Plugged In ever suggested that this is fine family entertainment, that someone would be fired faster than a .22 and their work expunged with the thoroughness of an acid bath.
But all that said, there’s a pretty huge difference in my mind with Cyrus singing and talking about all the “happy drugs” she takes and what Breaking Bad has tried to do.
Cyrus appears to be out for a good time. Breaking Bad wasn’t, as most viewers can attest, about having a good time at all. It was often painful to watch, and there’s a reason for that: It was nothing short of an exploration of the human soul, its desire to do good and its predilection for evil.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote might’ve been the show’s mission statement:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Through Breaking Bad’s five seasons, Walter White lived out the results of making a bad career move for, what would seem, the best of reasons: to provide for his family after he died from cancer. Knowing his time was limited, Walt began to cook meth, squirreling his ill-gotten gains for the impending rainy day which he’ll never see.
But the show, from the beginning, bought into what I see as a Christian sense of sin: It invariably corrupts. What you do matters. Why you do it is, in the end, rationalization.
Each moral compromise that Walt made led to another. And another. And another. The show’s supposed hero became its villain. He broke bad and could never fix himself. As Jared Lafitte wrote for relevant.com, “In the first season, America was on Team Walt. By ‘Felina’ [the show’s final episode], if you were still on Team Walt you were a sociopath.”
But Walt, in the context of Breaking Bad, could not rely on Christ’s saving mercy to rescue him from his evil deeds. He had to try to save himself. And, in the end, he fell short—as we all do. He tried to correct some of the harm he’d done, but he couldn’t fine redemption. The closest he came was something like a confession.
“If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family—” Walt’s wife, Skyler, begins.
“I did it for me,” Walt tells her. “I liked it. I was good at it. I was alive.”
And that is, of course, why most of us sin—and why most of us rationalize it in the aftermath. If sin held no appeal, we’d all be able to rise above and be the people who God would love for us to be. But the temptations are great and we are, like Walt, sinful creatures. We like to sin. We do it for us.
The irony is that such sin, even when it makes us “feel alive,” as Walt says, leads us to death—as it did for Walt. Sure, the cancer was killing him anyway. But most of his hopes and dreams also died. The good father he wanted to be. The good husband he could’ve been. Everything was washed away.
Writes Time’s James Poniewozik:
In the “Talking Bad” interview after the finale, Vince Gilligan alludes to Walt at the end as being like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, in the meth lab, reunited with “his Precious.” It’s an interesting comparison: Smeagol/Gollum was a dual character like Walt/Heisenberg, and he too ended The Lord of the Rings not redeemed—indeed, villainous—yet instrumental in defeating a larger evil nonetheless. Here, likewise, Walt is alone at the end of all things with a beloved, cold thing. He takes a moment to himself, considers his life’s work, and the last things he sees are himself, his machine, and a smear of blood. One more time, he is caressing his baby. He’s alone with what he loves, and what he deserves.
Throughout the series, we saw what Walt wanted to be and who Walt was. We saw the division of the soul in him—the God-given goodness and possibility each of us carry as His creations, and the misshapen characters that we become, fashioned by this twisted world and by our own twisted selves.
Breaking Bad is not a show I could or would ever recommend. But it tells a powerful story with an ultimate message that we, nevertheless, should heed. Because deep down, there’s a Walter White in each of us.
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