How Walter White and Doctor Who Saved My Life

Strange bedfellows, right?  Or maybe not, reflected in this article title from Variety: “‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Doctor Who’ Top Home Media Magazine Awards.”  Apparently they share a bed more frequently than would be expected. 

They probably also have more of an overlapping fandom than a first glance would suggest.  This is not the first time I’ve discussed something of which I am a fan, but I should explain that I am not a proper fan in any sort of modern sense.  I am not really interested in knowing every detail of something – if I happen to find out a few details accidentally, I might be mildly interested, but I have never had any interest in buying books and finding out everything there is to know about something.  Nor do I belong to any websites or discussion boards. Nor do I ever check social media, nor even look for anything in a search engine to find out what others think.  Nor do I listen to DVD commentaries (not these days, anyway).  Nor do I ever leave my house to go to a concert, nor to any conventions.  Nor do I most of the time have any interest in commenting on anything or even speaking of it.  Nor do I have the sort of encyclopedic mind capable of memorizing fictitious languages or recalling fascinating trivia.  There are some things of which I am more than a passing fan, based on the impact they’ve had on me.  But I’ve never bothered to keep my finger on a pulse.  I find the vast glut of opinion and obsessiveness and the need to keep up with it all exhausting and overwhelming.  As a woman of limited energies, I have to choose my battles, and that just can’t be one of them. Unlike for most people, for better or for worse, art for me is not a social experience – it’s a personal experience.  And speaking of “for better or for worse,” it’s what I happen to be married to, rather than to any flesh and blood social creature.  It’s my partner in life, and I’m in bed with it, and not with others.  I do not share with other fans, and to end on a particularly rude note, do not really care what they think. 

I am content to experience something.  My qualifications are that I have been deeply moved by certain things.  That’s it.

Forgive me some of my disaffection, which partly comes from isolation.  I would probably be friendlier than the current impression I’m making, if I ever had occasion to be.

My friend Rob Stilwell has a quote, which I will set off to make it look as pretty as it should: “Art really only has one great work: to heal the sick and to raise the dead.  It has other work to be sure, but that is the one great work.” 

Where Rob identifies this business of dead-raising as art’s one great work, for me, it’s a bare minimum necessity.  If it doesn’t have the potential to re-animate me, I will just have to stay lifeless in my tomb. I acknowledge that it’s unreasonable to demand work to do nothing less than bring you back to life. But that’s what I have to ask.

For many years, I didn’t watch much TV.  People tried to tell me that it was a good medium for me – that if I gave it a chance, its style of storytelling would appeal to me.  Still, I resisted and refused to believe them. (Sorry about that.  You were right, I was wrong.) 

Breaking Bad and Doctor Who are, of course, both TV shows.  I used to like movies more than I do now.  I’m not making an original observation when I say that structurally and emotionally speaking, movies are commensurate with short stories; meanwhile, TV and novels share a similar kinship.  By design, and dictated by temporal factors and spatial factors and other fancy-sound factors, both short stories and movies tend to be a bit intense – they are meant to be a lot of power tucked into a tight space. TV and the novel, in contrast, are forms that you can unpack in and stretch out – move in for a while, waste a little time.  I like that and I need that.  It takes me a while to process things.  I also just really like and need the structure of the longer forms, because it’s something I can trust not to shift out from under me.  It’s like praying in a cathedral versus the terror of being on a runaway train hurtling down the tracks. 

When I was in undergrad, I wrote a creative nonfiction piece about the fact that I found movies to be a difficult experience, though without much self-insight at the time. I think I was partly talking about the fact that all storytelling media can take us through scary and unexpected emotional experiences.  That’s part of its power – and more power to it.   

But for me, the complications that come with this are apparently more pronounced.  My emotions as well as my senses are hyper-tuned.  I have mentioned before that I need my art to come with a buffer, and in general, I find that I am so susceptible, so over-receptive, so responsive, that many modern art forms are too much for me.  Furthermore, they just keep getting louder, faster, brighter, flashier, and more invasive.  For me, going to a movie is like intentionally choosing to leave a perfect shelter – warm, quiet, and safe from the wind – to walk out into a hurricane.

I recall (with quite some hilarity, actually) trying to watch Christopher Nolan’s first two Batman films in the theatre years ago.  I have respect for these films as art, but whatever it is about their aural design, they registered for me as actual physical pain, much as an extended torture session might for another person.  I’m going to assume that for the “normal” person, experiences such as these Batman films register as thrilling, interesting, stimulating, pleasant, and exciting, rather than as painful.

I did sit through both films, the first time out of loyalty to a friend, the second time because I was in a completely sold out theatre, was there with a date and, faced with the dilemma of choosing between pain or the humiliation and uncoolness of leaving the theatre because I couldn’t “take it,” I chose the pain. I now kind of wish that I’d had some integrity toward myself and chosen to leave.  The date certainly wasn’t worth it.  (Heath Ledger’s performance was, though.)  

Maybe all of this just sounds like someone “getting old,” except that I am currently in my 30s, which isn’t yet ancient, and I was born this way.  In fact, it was even worse for me in childhood than it is now.  Back then, I just accepted all the pain of movies and other similar experiences because I thought that’s how it was for everyone.  That’s what we do in childhood: accept.  For a long time during our first years, we just suppose that this is the way life must be, and if it so for us, then it must be so for others.  I thought that was what all people did – endured it.  At points when I did break, I just thought that everyone else was very brave while I was a contemptible coward. 

When I was 13 years old, my brother and his girlfriend at the time took me to my first rock concert, an experience that most adolescents at that age would exult in – indeed, a great indulgence and luxury that most adolescents would know how to run with and would not waste.  But not I.  No, I had to be taken out shortly after the concert began because the lights – and especially the sound – were too much.  It’s not as though I cried.  Not at 13.  I just caved in, collapsed in on myself.  I cannot recall any moment of my life that I experienced a more terrible shame than that night. I pretended to be asleep in the back seat on the ride home.  In many ways, the mortification and depression of this experience (and many others like it) never passed.  Even from earliest childhood I understood that I was “no fun” – that I stood as some monumental failure to the values of the rest of the human race.            

All modern movies (in the theatre) are like Nolan’s Batman films for me; those films are just the most notable example.  One of the things I’ve always most loved are comic book films and the like – but this is exactly the kind of movie that keeps getting bigger, louder, and flashier.  And I know that part of the overall strategy and belief of the film industry is that they must keep making their product bigger, louder, and more intense in order to compete with other media and keep people consuming films.  But this is the type of strategy, and these are the types of films, that have most effectively excluded me. (I am told they are really only marketed to and intended for 13-year-old boys anyway; my dollar is not the one studios are looking for.)  But if I try to go to something fairly harmless-seeming that lacks the bombast of a superhero film, like a comedy, even this sensory experience is too much. 

I will still go to a film in the theatre if it is something I desperately want to see, but I know that it will hollow me out, that I will leave the theatre with a headache, and that I will have to plan to be unable to function for the rest of the day – not from the headache, but from a sense of complete exhaustion and overwhelm, as though I had been sucked into the film as one of its characters, forced to actually run through the gauntlet of whatever trials and travails the absurdly over-dramatic plot demanded of them. 

I’m not very good at boundaries, so maybe I really have been invaded by the film in these instances.  I have trouble locating where the line is between myself and the work, or myself and another person.  I’m either too near or too far.  I either keep my distance or close in too fast.

So I can only risk all of this when the commensurate gain is going to be a very, very big deal – when there’s a good bet the experience is going to save my very life.  And there have been very few movies that have come along to do this for me in recent years – to my knowledge.  Buffeted as I am, I haven’t been in theatres much, nor have I even invited movies into my living room – because even there, though not quite as overwhelming to the senses, movies still strive to be as intense as they can in a very short amount of time, and to buffet and punch you emotionally with no intention of being gentle about it.  My emotions are already heightened 24/7, and I’m already far too intense without needing any more of this.

So I’m choosy about films because, unlike in childhood, I feel a stronger sense of control over my life and my experiences.  There are countless difficult experiences in life that I have no choice but to weather, and I have to choose my battles.  It isn’t even a choice, really.  If it’s between steeling myself to teach a class or steeling myself to watch a movie, I must steel myself for the class, because that’s my paycheck.

It does make me sad, because there was always much I loved about going to movies, and certainly I love movies very much as a storytelling medium.  I’m glad if it is a pleasurable experience for others, but it’s necessary that I stay home with my TV where I’m in control of the sound and the images and everything else. One great benefit to this is that I don’t need the expense of a home theatre system – that would be far more invasive than anything I would ever need.  So a simple device that emanates a tiny bit of sound is more than sufficient for me. 

Because of these bizarre extenuating circumstances, it is the gentler and more patient medium of TV that saves my life far more often these days than film.  But even in that medium, when I am complete seduced by something, it is only because it has done nothing less than save my life.  Just because it’s gentler and more patient doesn’t make it easy.

This obviously isn’t really a piece about Breaking Bad or Doctor Who.  I don’t know what it’s about, really.  Maybe about the intersection between an individual’s inner emotional life and that very private, sacred relationship with what great art can do.  About our limitations and what can reach us in our limitations.  About isolation.  About what in this world has enough compassion and generosity to reach us, like stopping to say a few gentle words to a child alone and crying on the playground. 

When you have failed all companions, when all plans have been defeated, when you are alone, when all bridges have washed out and no one will dare an approach, the work is all that is left and willing to come to you.  

Now that I’ve reached this point, I’ve realized I don’t want to talk about this.  This hasn’t turned out as I thought it would, and I’m not sure what to say below. What heals us and raises us from the dead is a highly personal matter.  For some people, it’s Chris Nolan’s Batman films. 

I’ve had a couple of dark summers.  Circumstances are not important.  Dark summer #1 was the summer of 2012.  Enter Walter White. 

I can’t speak to why the rest of the world found Breaking Bad seductive, but I can say that from my own perspective, it’s probably because the humiliation and underachievement and failure and desperation of Walter White’s life mirror my own life, and the way it plays out is the darkest – and because of that, somehow funniest – possible expression of that.  The tone of the show is the tone of my life, if not, obviously, the plot points. 

Strangely, I jumped on the bandwagon without knowing I jumped on the bandwagon; apparently, I started binge-watching Breaking Bad around the same time that everyone else started binge-watching it.  I had happened on the pilot purely by accident while switching idly through channels, and knew absolutely nothing about others’ preoccupation with it.  All I knew was that the pilot knocked me on my ass. 

I’m often attracted to work that is entirely unlike my own, and Breaking Bad suited me because it’s my antithesis.  My own work is comic in nature, and the inner life and emotions I portray in it are not realistic, nor meant to be.  Or rather, those emotions are the “truth” of our inner world and inner desires, rather than those of the outer world. Outside of my own writing, I often yearn for work that feels emotionally tied to the outer world.  And in terms of what I consume, sometimes I need unmitigated darkness.   

Darkness and seriousness are not the same thing.  Breaking Bad spoke to the darkest part of myself because it spoke with the darkest of humor.  That pitch black absurdist sensibility never left the show entirely, though the tone definitely developed a more straightforward dramatic or tragic sensibility toward the end of the series.  The first half to three-quarters of the show spoke to me more fully because it spoke my language – the language of absurdity. 

Much has been said in recent years about the phenomenon of binge-watching.  I can say that being able virtually to live inside that tone, hour after hour, gave me solace.  My father always used to say that the darkness is our friend.  It certainly can be.

Perhaps nothing else in the world other than Breaking Bad in all its blackly disturbing (and entertaining) aspects would have spoken to me at that time in my life. I feel as though it were somehow the only thing left in the world that might have reached me and stirred my interest – in anything.  In living, in continuing with my own writing.  Whatever night that was that the pilot was re-aired, I’m grateful to AMC for making the scheduling decision.  I acknowledge they weren’t thinking about me.  They had no intention of saving my life. They were thinking about demographics, and money, and marketing, and who would have the TV on at that time, and new viewers they might hook on the show.  I probably wasn’t even the person they wanted to reach.  If they knew I was one of the people who had tuned in, they would probably sigh and say, “Well, that was a bad decision.”

Even so.

That was the beginning of Breaking Bad for me, and now I find my thoughts turning to the end of it, perhaps because when a show has ended, there appears to be some customary obligation to obsess on that final episode and to nitpick. A permanent cloud of controversy forms around the final episode and moves with it forever throughout time.  Though I understand why this happens, I’m not sure I entirely agree with it. As a storyteller, I know well enough that at any given time, you have a myriad of choices – a myriad of directions in terms of what scenes to execute, what ways to send the plot and the characters. Sometimes perhaps you make the best choices, sometimes perhaps there were better choices.  But you make the best choices you can with the time, resources, and faculties you have, and as long as the storytelling is of a high enough overall quality, you will have something meaningful and perhaps even powerful for the right audience. Vince Gilligan and company delivered on that count. 

Further, I will always argue that it is the imperfections in any work that are part of what make it truly great – perfection doesn’t exist, and the choices that might have been somehow better are intrinsic to a work just as its greatnesses are, and they give it character; sometimes they are even the most interesting aspects.  The reasons those possibly inferior choices were made is something you can love and understand about the work.  In all of my favorite stories, there are parts I don’t like quite as well – but without those parts, they would not be that story.  If I am to love the story, then I am to love those parts. 

Then, too, life has its seasons.  I engaged in abundant nitpicking up until my early thirties, and I believe this is part of the process of learning craft.  But in my late thirties, my tendency is to regard the gestalt. 

That said, something important that I took from the final moments of Breaking Bad, as Walter White caresses all that equipment that represents what he loves, is that when you die, this is the last you will be left with.  Even if we are loved and surrounded by people, we all die alone.  Our last conscious moments will be spent with whatever was our greatest love affair on an internal, intellectual, or creative level during our life.  For Walter White, that was chemistry.  For me, it would be, purely, story, and my internal world of story where I spend most of my time and that I started constructing from my first conscious moments.  For others, it might be music, or dance, or architecture, or certain memories from the past.  But whatever it is, this true lover and companion of our mind and soul is worth thinking about now, while we’re still able. Chances are, it will be our last honest companion at the very end. 

I thank Breaking Bad, and I thank it for being so far outside my own sensibilities, which is why it was so kind to me.  In truth, I almost never seek out anything that is close to my own sensibilities.  Most of the time, I’ve had enough of myself, and the last thing I need is any more of it. 

And so, Doctor Who is the great exception to the rule for me.  It may be the closest to my own sensibilities of anything I have ever encountered (though it is not my sensibilities entirely).  I have somewhat less to say about Doctor Who than about Breaking Bad (at this time, anyway).  This may be because I feel slightly ornery towards it. The sort of close relationship I have with Doctor Who, sharing so much creative temperament, can be as fraught with difficulties as it can be rewarding.  Inevitably, there will be not only deep respect and affection, but envy and melancholy and other unseemly feelings.  The show is actually difficult for me to watch because I wish I had written all of it.  I wish it were mine instead of my own work – and Doctor Who is actually the first and only time in my life that I have ever felt that way.  Of course, above all, I wish the Doctor would arrive in the Tardis and take me away with him as his companion. 

And yet, I guess he sort of did.  I think the Doctor came along for me at just the right time.  I think that if I had spent another summer immersed in the darkness I’d been immersed in the previous summer…well, I’m not sure what would have happened.   Doctor Who came along and reminded me of who I was, as works can sometimes do for us.  Dark summer #2 for me was the summer of 2013. 

Whereas Breaking Bad was love at first sight, I had for years channel-surfed and come across Doctor Who and flipped immediately onwards.  In fact, any time I was watching BBC America and Doctor Who came on, my reaction was deep disappointment, and I would immediately start looking for something else.  (This especially breaks my heart now, as these would have been the David Tennant years.)  If I did leave it on for a time because I was doing the dishes or some other activity that I couldn’t get to the TV remote right away, my impression was that the show was annoying and alienating and overly arch.  Being an Anglophile, I watch BBC America and other Britishy things all the time, and I often seem to understand British sensibilities better than I do American sensibilities (as one might expect from someone who has been a Monty Python fan since the age of 11).  But I admit, shame-faced, that I had no luck with Doctor Who for the longest time.  I think this can partly be ascribed to the need with this particular show to get a solid grip on its mythology in order to be able to follow it.  Others may differ, but I am of the opinion that you need to start from the very beginning (of the modern incarnation) and go straight through chronologically. 

I think also that with some shows, you need to be brought in with particular episodes that happen to speak to you. There were two Stephen Moffat/Matt Smith-era episodes that finally brought me to the show just prior to the summer of 2013, when I started my binge-watch proper.  I experienced them as reruns on BBC America, probably on some desolate weekday afternoon.  One was “The Beast Below.”  I just loved the sad, lonely old beast with the weight of the world on its shoulders and the metaphor of the Doctor as a sad, lonely old beast. The other was “The Girl Who Waited,” and specifically the moment when Amy proclaims she will break time apart for Rory.  From these episodes, I understood that I had been deeply mistaken in my first impressions of the show.  I understood that it was all heart and innocence and everything good in this world and inside of us – the best of us.  I started at the beginning and never looked back.

More on the Doctor again one of these days.

The point has been that I need work to do no less of a task than save my life.   It isn’t that I don’t care about other work.  I have so much gratitude for all that exists out there.  But I can’t consume it or it would destroy me.  I will crawl out of my hidey-hole for the greatest miracles in all of humanity.  Otherwise, I will need to keep myself tidily tucked away in the quiets of Muller’s Mile.

Nothing has come along to save my life in this summer of 2014, and I kind of don’t expect it to.  But that’s ok.  I’ll save my own life.