Truth and Consequences: Breaking Bad

So many times when I've talked about Breaking Bad around friends who don't watch the show, they've given me some kind of look or comment. The message I've gotten from them, both real and perceived? "You watch a show about crystal meth? And a guy who makes it?" Oh, how judgment burns sometimes.

For a while I felt a little guilty that I loved the show as much as I did--I mean, it was, after all, a show about crystal meth and a guy who makes it. Every week I was watching someone cook it, deal it, smoke it, snort it, lie about it, and/or kill because of it.

Frankly, isn't this the kind of show I should be boycotting? I'm on staff at a church. And I'm a teacher. How many times have I talked to my kids about avoiding drug culture at all costs? How many times have I lamented that movies and television glorify issues like drug use, senseless violence, gang culture, and the abuse of sexuality? How can I sit here with a clean conscience and love a show that does all that?

Here's the thing, though:

Breaking Bad doesn't glorify any of that.

I have a friend named Denny--he's the one who pushed me to watch the show in the first place, and then pushed me again when I almost stopped watching late in Season 2--who explained  to me late one night at his place why this show is so great. It's also explains how Breaking Bad is a show about meth and a guy who makes it but doesn't glorify it. As soon as he said it, I knew it was true:

Consequences.

Bad behavior in the show produces real, gritty, heart-wrenching consequences.

Not like in every superhero movie where Ironman or another tights-clad protagonist grapples with some combination of demi-god, monster, or experiment-gone-wrong jumbo villain and brings buildings crumbling down around them and blowing up just about everything in sight. After said villain is vanquished, our hero is triumphant and the world goes back to normal. Oh, except half of New York City is in ruins. What about that? What about the ensuing economic crash? What about the slow, painstaking rebuilding process?

Oh, we could go down the list of TV shows, even the gritty ones, where little consequence takes place. On the other hand, you know what I love about the show Arrested Development? That a seal bites off Buster's hand in Season 2--and the show commits to it. I fully expected them to have his hand magically sewn back on, but it never happened. And that hand, or lack thereof, has become an incredibly hilarious part of the show.

Really, consequences are what make Breaking Bad so terrible and so amazing to watch at the same time .

As Walter White and Jesse Pinkman delve deeper and deeper into the meth business, as they make more and more money, they end up paying dear costs. They lose their families, their friends, their morals, and really, themselves. As we watch Walt lose more and more of the trust of his family, more and more of his humanity, we cringe. We drop our jaws in disbelief. We yell, "What are you doing??" We shake our heads in disgust. As we watch Jesse, we do much of the same we do with Walt, but then we also start to feel pity, then sympathy, then heartbreak.

At the end of the day, anyone who thinks that watching Breaking Bad is glorifying meth and drug culture hasn't watched the show. It does exactly the opposite. Breaking Bad is much closer to Intervention than it is to Half Baked in its portrayal of drugs.

More than it excuses drugs, it shows us, in a way no show has ever done before, just how dangerous, how tragic, how devastating drugs can be. And that danger is only elevated because Walter White isn't some at-risk youth who grew up in the ghetto with no real parents, probably destined to life on the street. He's a middle-aged, educated, white, boring chemistry teacher. A husband. A father. A man who found himself in a desperate situation, having to provide for his family with a terminal cancer diagnosis staring him in the face. And in his case, doing the wrong thing with good intentions led him down a slippery slope to destruction.

(Little aside: more Christian artists, producers, and publishers should take notes. You don't have to have a sterile, safe story with a heavy-handed moral message to express a worthy theme.)

We get the message loud and clear. We squirmed and screamed and sighed with each subsequent lie, each murder, each twist. We wanted it to stop, but we wanted it to keep going.

Please, no more. But then please, more. So, yeah--you know how I feel about this up-and-down, stomach-twisting, roller coaster ride that had me hooked on it like blue sky?

Best. Show. Ever.

The Best Halftime Show Ever.

No matter what you thought of Beyoncé's halftime performance yesterday, no Super Bowl performance can top U2's from 2002. Five months after 9/11, U2 played a great show that gave tribute to the victims of the tragedy. And unlike the pop performers at Super Bowl halftime shows, U2 didn't jump from song to song to song every 45 seconds. You can read more about the performance, their 2006 halftime performance, and the story of how they happened here. Here's the last song--"Where the Streets Have No Name"--with the tribute:

Here's the full performance:

The Indulgence of Anger

I watched "Django Unchained" the other night. As with many Quentin Tarantino films, I really enjoyed certain aspects of this one--the dialogue, the characterization, the nod to other genres and eras of film. But there's one element of the movie that I can't get behind. It's this glorification-of-vengeance-and-violence theme that Tarentino seems to love. "Inglorious Basterds" was much the same way. In that movie, the protagonists are a band of Jewish-American soldiers who violently kill Nazis and try to kill Adolf Hitler. In "Django," Jamie Foxx plays a liberated slave in pre-Civil War America who joins a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) in killing fugitives from the law, who are conveniently all also white and racist.

And it feels good to watch these characters shoot and pulverize, maim and dismember the type of people that make our blood boil, the type of people that mostly got away with horrible things. It is fake, after all, so no harm done.

Right?

I hesitate to dismiss so easily this indulgence of anger and blood lust. And really, that's what's going on--indulgence. It sounds silly in our culture to suggest we not indulge, especially because this is fictitious anger and vengeance. I have to pause, though.

Because anger's a really sneaky creature.

It dwells underneath the surface, usually undetectable by anyone on the outside, and then it suddenly comes out and erupts in ways for all of us to see. I've heard people use the biblical saying, "In your anger, do not sin," to justify being angry as long as you physically and externally don't lash out. I have a bit of a problem with that. I do think anger to an extent is unavoidable, and there are times for righteous anger. But if we give ourselves excuses to continue to dwell with our anger, entertain it, and feed it, that's when it becomes this growing creature that is more and more in control of itself than we are in control of it.

I recently found out another female I know has been physically abused by a significant male in her life. I've always wondered how a person could come to a place like that, where they would lose control and physically assault the person they hold most dear. I suspect it's because he let his anger lie around. He fed his anger and indulged it and never suspected it could grow beyond his control. That's when you get a guy who can say emphatically, "I would never her!" to actually hit his girlfriend. Or fiancée. Or wife. He, like many of us, underestimated how stealthily anger grows under our noses.

I think about the times I wrestle with anger. It's funny. Each and every time I give in to or indulge my anger, i don't feel vindicated, or empowered, or whatever Hollywood would like me to feel. More than often, I feel embarrassment and regret. Every time I turn on the TV or put on a movie, though, the message is loud and clear: Get angry, blow up, go nuts--it's great fun for everybody.

And it's funny when I watch a guy go to town on a p.o.s. printer à la Michael Bolton in "Office Space." It's significantly less entertaining when I find out that people close to me are being assaulted by people they trusted.

Anger too often rips apart. It tears at seams instead of mending them. It seeks to burn down bridges instead of building them. It grows like cancer under our skin and takes over before we're able to stop it.

That's why I'm not okay with fully embracing the intoxication of violent, angry revenge. It feels too good, and it's so far from what anger actually produces. I respect the power of anger too much, and I've seen it sink its teeth into so many people I know. Including me.