Breaking Down Breaking Bad
Mere days after Ben Affleck was announced as the next A-lister to don the Batman suit in the upcoming sequel to Man of Steel, another rumor hit the blogosphere: Bryan Cranston was set to play billionaire industrialist and G.O.A.T. villain Lex Luthor. And where the Internet lost its collective shit at the (verified and completely true) idea of Affleck as Batman, it sent up a rousing, passionate cheer at the (totally speculative and unsubstantiated) idea of Cranston as Luthor.
To anyone who has seen so much as a commercial for later seasons of Breaking Bad, it’s not hard to see why.
As of right now, Cranston is not signed up for any Superman movies. It wouldn’t surprise me if the casting rumors do come true somewhere down the line: After all, the man plays bald, self-obsessed and calculating better than anyone else on screens today (give or take maybe a Kanye).
But whether or not Cranston steps into Lex Luthor’s expensive, megalomaniacal shoes, he’s already had the chance to play one of the greatest comic book villains of all time.
Because make no mistake: Walter White is a supervillain.
For all its real-world trappings and stabs (or gunshots) at gritty verisimilitude, Breaking Bad is deeply rooted in the pulpy conventions of comic books and superheroes.
Start at the top, with the character of Walter White: mild-mannered family man by day, badass drug lord Heisenberg by night. Even his alliterative name puts him in the great tradition of comic book alter egos: Peter Parker, Clark Kent, Reed Richards.
And what is Breaking Bad if not one long superhero origin story? Compare the structure of Breaking Bad to, say, Sam Raimi’s seminal Spider-Man trilogy (and every subsequent superhero story): We get a glimpse of pre-cancer Walt, but then we get the inciting incident (diagnosis) and the superpowers (science, lying), and we watch as one man adopts a persona and becomes someone else for the sake of protecting his family. He even has a “great power, great responsibility” moral code: No matter what, he doesn’t go after relatives. He’s doing this for love.
Along the way, we’ve gotten the requisite giving-up-powers story (Season 5), the requisite villains (Hank, Gus, those redneck neo-Nazis), the requisite catchphrases (“Wanna cook?”), the requisite sidekicks (Jesse, Saul). But where comic books clearly define good from evil, Breaking Bad is far less clear-cut, and showrunner Vince Gilligan, who cut his teeth on sci-fi as a producer for The X-Files, seems to relish in exploding our expectations of the genre. Though he fills out the superhero template, Walter White is villainous; though she’s hard and unlovable, Skyler is often the voice of morality and reason.
We see all of this — the conflation of heroism and villainy, the playful winks at superheroes past — in the complex, still-evolving relationship between Walt and Jesse. At first glance, they’re a classic team-up: small-time dealer Jesse is the wide-eyed, exclamation-spouting (“Yeah, bitch! Magnets, oh!” is this generation’s “Leaping lizards”) Robin to White’s Batman.
But rather than coasting on recognition of the trope, Gilligan forces his audience to confront all of its real-world implications: the complex paternal relationship, the necessary psychosocial manipulation, the desperation of knowing that the only person who really knows you has to shun you in public and can turn on you at any moment.
That is to say: In comic books, Robin seemingly never has to grow up. In Breaking Bad, we see what happens when the Boy Wonder is forced to become a man.
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel films — the franchise Cranston may or may not be joining — try to add grit to comic books by darkening the color palette and destroying whole cities. Breaking Bad takes the opposite approach, bathing everything in overripe New Mexico sunlight and honing in on the personal, moral complexities of living a masked double life.
But regardless of their source material, Gilligan’s Breaking Bad is the better, truer example of what a superhero tale should look like in the new millennium. Morally ambiguous and consistently awe-inspiring, respecting conventions while constantly deconstructing them, Breaking Bad is the serialized superhero comic redone for the Netflix generation.
Walter White isn’t the meth dealer America deserves, but he’s the meth dealer we need right now.
