Why I'm Not Watching Breaking Bad

by Charity Erickson

Sunday night was explosive. It was just nuts! Walter White, can you believe it, amiright?

Okaaay, no, I did not actually watch the latest episode of Breaking Bad. The Twitters tell me a line of some sort has been crossed…again. This is the draw of the show—the shocking and strange twists that are the mark of good storytelling—this is also why I stopped watching when I was only a few episodes into the first season. When a main character dissolved a human body in a bathtub, turning both the body and the bathtub into a sloshy, sinewy red soup, a line was crossed. I couldn’t watch any more. I mean, my god—that scene was supposed to be comic relief.

The vast majority of people I have talked to about my Breaking Bad aversion have said I should give it another chance, that if I stick with it I will discover its addictive qualities to be irresistible. And maybe someday I will find myself in a state of mind where I feel I can handle taking the plunge into Walter White’s dark world. But right now, the prospect of getting lost in one more piece of dark media sounds exhausting, overwhelming, and horrifying—and not the fun kind of horror. The panicky, get-me-out-of-here kind, and I really don’t need any more of that.

News and social media spit stories at us all day, speaking the evil of human existence into our coffee breaks and lunch hours in spurts of bloody electronic scrawl. “We shouldn’t look away,” we reason to ourselves; this evil is reality. To shut our eyes to it would be to refuse to see humanity as it is; it would be dishonest, it would be denial, it would be unethical. For, if we refuse to look upon the gross reality of life in this world, how could we effectively address ourselves to its improvement?

So it is a matter of ethics to refuse to look away from that which holds the clearest mirror up to nature; but as we can see in the growing trend of “dark” media production and consumption, it is also a matter of taste. If this year’s Emmy nominations are any indication (with nods to such unsettling series as Netflix’s House of Cards, FX’s American Horror Story: Asylum, and HBO’s Game of Thrones), a sophisticated consumer is one willing to look upon the angst of a complicated hero, or a villain with justifiable motivations, the mess of poverty, the sting of public humiliation, or nauseating episodes of uncanny violence and injury. This is the stuff that makes for “good TV.”

So, on the one hand, I’m embarrassed by my need to look away from “gritty” media like Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, and Orange is the New Black. Not only does looking away imply a refusal to acknowledge social, ethical, and existential questions and realities, but it also means I don’t have access to certain cultural conversations. Being conversant in this kind of media is a status marker—not watching hurts my popular culture street cred.

On the other hand, I don’t want to force myself to consume media that makes me crazy—it triggers my anxiety, so I mean that in a literal sense—just so that I might achieve a level of social enlightenment. Watching these kinds of programs can be an exercise in self-flagellation, the “don’t look away” principle feeding into a brooding preoccupation with the evils of this world and the burden of existing within it, only serving to reinforce our view of society as inherently sick and unsafe. Yet this isn’t exactly a “kingdom” mindset, which sees in humanity the potential for renewal and expects to see the love of Christ bring healing and redemption to all situations.

This is not to say that this media trend isn’t valuable; I do believe that in many ways, shows like Breaking Bad and Orange is the New Black are bringing darkness into light, exposing the myths our society believes about upward mobility and “the American Dream,” and revealing the dehumanizing effect of violence on the ones who perpetrate it. Most days (except for the days I need to dose up on happy with single-camera friendcore sitcoms) I would still rather spend time with these programs—even if they are almost unwatchably gruesome—than ones that celebrate an unthoughtful or too-easy optimism, and especially more than programs that try to develop moral complexity into an entertainment commodity, producing lame social commentary as in the film Elysium or the droopy existential metaphors of The Walking Dead (which, like many new programs, uses characters’ capacity for violence to create a token element of depth and complexity, but doesn’t have anything actually interesting to say about anything. At all.)

But for now, as much as I love good entertainment, I have to take a step back. It’s for the sake of my soul; not out of some legalistic focus on “edification,” “setting my mind on things above,” or “garbage in, garbage out,” but because self-care is a spiritual discipline, too. For now, I’m going to be patient. For now, I’m going to say, “Maybe someday, Walter White.”

That, and, “NO SPOILERS.” 

Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
 
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Prayers to a Dark God

Rilke

by Sebastian Faust

-A conversation with Rainer Maria Rilke-

I’ve been reading Rilke. Actually, I’ve been doing something more than reading; I’ve been praying with Rilke, meditating beside him, searching with him. 

I’d bumped into him before in undergrad: some correspondence of his, Letters to a Young Poet, was tucked inside the pages of one of my textbooks. But reading his mail was really all I knew of him. Now though, we’ve been talking for a few weeks. It’s nice.

 I met him after Prague. I went to Prague, years back, and somehow it changed me. I’m not exactly sure how; it has something to do with the light there – it’s a different sort of light than I’ve ever felt anywhere else; a shadowed light. Prague slipped into my soul and took up residence, carved out a little space in me, and has become my favorite city. (This is no small feat, because people who know me know that I don’t choose favorites, that my answers are always “yes and no” or “both/and” or “it depends; it’s all contextual”, but Prague, of all the cities through which I’ve walked, is easily my favorite.) 

So, sometimes, I’m just in the mood for something Prague-ish, and I’ll fall into a book, or sink into a painting, or take up some tangible trinket and run my fingers over it again and again like a holy relic. It was in the midst of one of these moods that now take me, when searching for Prague writers, that I met Rilke again; we started talking over tea. We kept talking long after the tea was gone, walking out into a chilly afternoon, beneath the dark trees that sleep by the springs behind my house.

Prague

It was Candlemas; we talked about the shifting seasons, the change in light, the lives of trees existing as one single breath, about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. We talked of darkness and daylight, of love, and sadness, and loss. We talked of Prague, of poetry, of God. We kept returning to God. 

“God is so perfect,” one of us said to the other, “in Aquinas and in Augustine. God has such clarity in Michelangelo, in Titian. It doesn’t seem like God at all.”

I’ve been thinking about that. So has Rilke. Somewhere around Ash Wednesday, our prayers, our meditations, comingled. Rilke began. I followed. We prayed to a different God than so many of the people round about us. We prayed to a dark God.

Oh, I’ll admit, at times, my God is bright – is the sun-god, wrapped in shining raiment, riding a fiery chariot across the azure sky; is, at times, the harnesser of fiery steeds, the luminous bringer of light. But this, only in flashes. My God goes walking in a garden by starlight, in the cool of the evenings; in the dimness of night, my God moves from shadow to shadow. My God is dark.

But when I said this, the artists departed from me, saying, “We cannot paint a dark God.”

A hundred roots that drink in silence

Yet still it is – my God is not impassive, unyielding, unmoved.  My God is in pain – mourns every sorrow, weeps over sadness, tends to every cry.  My God has been broken, knows remorse, regret, despair.  My God is dark.

But when I said this, the philosophers departed from me, saying, “We cannot postulate a dark God.”

Yet still it is – my God is not fulfilled, not finished, not complete.  My God longs to create beauty, feels the need to redeem creation, yearns for the day when all shall be put right.  My God is even now still growing, spreading deep beneath the surface of things – pushing down beneath the darkness, the roots of all creation encompassing the black, still soil.  My God is dark.

But when I said this, the theologians departed from me, saying, “We cannot systematize a dark God.”

Yet Rilke, Rilke stayed with me. I said, “Will you depart from me also?” He said:

I have many brothers robed in cassocks

in southern cloisters sheltered by bay trees.

I know the Madonnas they make – so human;

            And often I dream

of early Titians

where God

is bright as an ardent flame.

But when I peer down,

into the chasm of myself:

My God is dark,

like a knot of

a hundred roots that drink in silence.

I know that I rise out of this activity,

but more

I do not know, because my branches

are stilled by silence, stirred but faintly

by the wind.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Prayers (The Book of Hours)

Sebastian Faust is an avowed heretic, armchair theologian, and a self-styled canary in the coal mine of pop culture. He lives in Nashville with his dog Watson, a service animal trained in sniffing out hipsters. You can't follow Sebastian on Twitter because he doesn't understand technology.

You can, however, follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.